The Trilogy of the Void: The Complete Boxed Set

by Peter Meredith

  The door to the deck came open just to his right. A dark man with very white eyes and bright teeth crouched in the opening, it was Timothy. Only his name wasn't Timothy. And he wasn't a quiet man as he seemed. His name was James and he loved to laugh. He was a real person. James stood up and fired a short burst of gunfire over the living room couches and into the kitchen. Suddenly his face contorted and blood sprayed from his chest coating Will. He had been shot in the back. One of Amy's thugs leaned, propped up and bleeding, firing through the master bedroom window from across the 'T'. The man had been thought to be dead, by everybody.

  This was about to happen. And it did far too quickly. Forgetting about any fear he had for himself, Will jumped to the door, which opened like magic in front of him and there was Timothy, or James rather, squatting down. Behind him, across the deck, a man popped up like a jack in the box, bringing a heavy black pistol to bear in a quick motion. There was no time for anything other than to grab James and yank him hard into the living room. Gunfire erupted and almost simultaneously, blood and gore drenched Will's face. James toppled over atop him with muscles that twitched and danced grotesquely for a few moments and then went still. Unfortunately, Will had saved him from being shot in the chest only to doom him to being shot in the head.

  Sickened by the feel of the man's dying spasms, Will struggled from beneath the corpse and as he did, he saw another Hispanic rise from behind the kitchen counter. It was maybe two seconds from happening and he knew he had the choice to jump behind the low wall again or to fire his weapon. The safety of the wall was too alluring and he turned in that direction, yet he was brought up short by what he saw in the living room.

  His once proud father, William Jern lay upon his back and stared up at the ceiling with eyes vacant of life. Across his chest, Gayle Jern laid, shielding him with her body as best she could, her eyes were terrifically red and swollen from crying, and they looked altogether desperate in her need to protect her husband.

  White-hot anger leapt in Will. His mother's face had been ill-used as evidenced by dark bruises that ran along the left side of her cheek and temple. Her hands were tied and bled freely where the rope had been cruelly bound. For a moment mother and son locked eyes. With his own countenance swollen and dreadfully bruised, she didn't recognize him, yet there was no time for reintroductions or explanations because at that moment, one of the gunmen in the kitchen popped up and began firing. Will had seen it coming and made up his mind.

  With the air ripping with sound of bullets tearing though it, Will calmly thumbed off the safety and fired back three times. Unfortunately, knowing the future and shooting straight were two different talents and he only possessed the one. Every one of his shots went high and to the right. He could see them causing little holes to appear in the cabinetry, but the man ducked down before he was able to correct his aim.

  "Cover fire!" Abe screamed behind him. Will took this to mean that he should fire and he did, sending bullets as low as he could across the counter top. From his right more gunfire erupted and Will returned fire in that direction. Then there was a loud ringing silence. Tense seconds slipped by where nothing happened.

  "Will?" It was a whisper. Without turning, Will knew Abe had been hit. He could picture the wound in his mind, Abe had been hit just above the right elbow. Unless the man was ambidextrous, the injury spelled trouble since Will had proved himself a poor shot. He glanced back to see the small soldier with a pistol in his left hand, gingerly hugging his right arm to his chest.

  He nodded at the soldier with a show of bravado, but the soldier only growled in stern quiet manner, "Get your ass out of that doorway before you get shot."

  It was a smart plan and Will scurried to the front of the couch that sat against the dividing wall and crouched there, looking back and forth from the door where James had been killed, to the kitchen where two gunmen remained. He kept his gun out swinging it back and forth in a short arc.

  "If you want to hit anything, use two hands," Abe hissed. In a flash Will complied and wondered if that would improve his aim any. He would find out quick. One of the gunmen hopped up and began firing through the doorway he had just vacated. Will came up slightly out of his crouch and squeezed off two quick rounds. He missed both times.

  A second later, the front door banged open.

  "Did one of them leave?" Abe whispered. The whisper sounded very tired as if the little man was almost asleep. Will risked another glance back and saw a great stain of blood covering half his chest. The arm wound was bleeding worse that he would have guessed, and it gave Abraham a pale grey appearance.

  Someone called out in Spanish from the front of the house, answering Abe's question. A return answer came from the person in the master bedroom and this was followed seconds later by the man in the kitchen. They were effectively boxed in.

  "What are we going to do?" Will turned to Abe with the question, but stopped as he saw that the man had slumped over, unconscious. "Oh my..."

  Surrounded by dead bodies and with the lives of at least four people dependent on him, it was no wonder that for just a second, panic swept across him like a wild fire in the wind. The gun began to jitter in his hands and just then a man with black hair and dark features poked his head up from the deck looking through the shattered window into the family room. He was there for but a second and Will wasted a bullet shooting and missing. The man called out and Will could guess that his exact location had just been announced.

  Crawling over broken glass, he hurried to the bar, which sat nestled in the corner. Facing out, he had ninety degrees of room to cover. It was too much for one man, especially if they came at him all at once, which they surely would. Back and forth, he tracked the gun while his breath came loud, and fast. In and out, faster and faster, he practically panted as he waited for the men to come at him.

  They would come out of the darkness and they would bring it with them. That darkness was death. He had foreseen it and it was near upon him. His hands began to shake even worse and he had to prop them up on the bar so that he had any hope whatsoever of shooting straight. A picture on the bar fell with a small clatter that ended abruptly and for some reason it made him wonder about how many bullets were left in his gun.

  He had no idea and was too frazzled to even attempt to count the number of times he had pulled the trigger. Ducking down he slid the old magazine out of the pistol, and began to search about in his pockets for the second one. To his horror, the second magazine wasn't so quickly found and ten precious seconds slipped by where he was utterly vulnerable before he located it in his inner jacket pocket.

  Snick. The sound of the bolt sliding home calmed his nerves a bit and he breathed a great sigh of relief before peeking out from behind the bar. The man from the deck fired two quick shots and then ducked down. Both of the thug's shots hit the bar and both went right through it, the second grazing his arm at the shoulder. The slight wound didn't hurt a lick but the fact that the bar was so flimsy scared him badly. So badly that he decided that his only option was to go on the attack, but the idea of stepping out of hiding and exposing himself to gunfire from three directions kept him from budging.

  He prayed for a vision.

  It was likely the only thing that would save him. With seconds slipping by, his hands grew sweatier and when no vision came to him, he wondered if he should attempt to force a vision. Only, how would he get himself out of it again? He would be lucky if he had a minute left to him and sadly, he had to put the idea aside, fearing to be still in the vision when Amy's men came. Instead, he counted in a whisper, preparing to jump up and attack three men at once.

  "One...two..."

  Bamn! Bamn! He jerked in surprise. Someone was shooting from off in the desert. His first thought was that Talitha was out there. The idea sent a chill down his back. If she were out there, instead of tracking down Katie it meant that there was a better than even chance that the winner of this little battle wouldn't live long enough to enjoy the fruits of their victory.r />
  Bamn! This shot struck one of the east facing family room windows with a loud crack. She was shooting at the house? Will guessed that it wasn't his sister out there. A gun would be the last thing that she would use, her evil side preferred killing with her hands when possible.

  What about Tony? Perhaps he had regained consciousness and...

  "Mmmmmh! Mmmmmh!" It was his mom grunting out a warning; someone was moving through the living room. Who needed a vision when he had Tony and his mom?

  Will did. Knowing the attack was coming had frozen him in place for the barest second, but then he heard a thud and a groan from the living room. The man there had kicked his mom! His anger thankfully came roaring back and he sprang from behind the bar prepared to shoot the man in the living room. Only with the dark, it was quite hard to see and it took a moment to note the slinking shadow moving toward the doorway between the two rooms.

  Will fired four times and the shadow went down to the ground. Quick as a wink he turned and fired twice toward the deck and two more vaguely behind him, he then dove over the wall. Bullets seemed to chase him as he went and he fetched up hard against a chair, awkwardly he untangled himself and fired three times at the shadow that lay groaning in the corner. With that, he poked his head up just in time to see flashes from behind the wall of the family room and down he went, crawling for the kitchen.

  Behind him, his mother grunted out helplessly. It hurt to leave her like that, trussed up and entirely helpless, yet there was no choice. To stay meant death for both.

  More gunfire crashed throughout the house but it didn't seem to be directed at him and Will was able to scurry toward the wing of the house that was comprised of bedrooms. He took the first right into the master and went to the window and prayed not to miss. There was a man on the deck ducking up and down trying to look into the living room.

  Will steadied himself and fired three times purposely aiming low. The man appeared to jump as if stung and then he crumpled and lay unmoving. Will didn't dare to waste any more ammo and ducked down as bullets headed his way. He crawled toward the hall before jumping up and doubling back in the direction of the kitchen. A great part of him felt a growing excitement, there was just one man left, and a lucky shot could end this in a second. Thus, he hurried forward just as that very last man came around the corner from the living room. At twenty paces, the two men opened fire at the same time. Will threw himself violently to the right as his gun blasted once and then twice. Both men missed and in the space of a second were both out of ammo. Now there was an awful moment between them.

  The Hispanic had feverishly bright eyes and very quick hands. Will had dropped his only other clip and therefore he charged only to be brought up short when another gun flashed into his opponents hands. The darkness was coming. Will suddenly had the vision that he had prayed for, a piercing light and then darkness.

  And so it went. At the last moment, Will tried to dodge, but at twelve feet, there was little chance of the man missing. The light. A brief flash of pain shattering his skull. Then darkness, only darkness.

  Chapter 22

  Talitha

  There was no helping it, no possible way to stop the scream that tore from her throat. The scream was reflexive, born from an instantaneous terror that applied itself to her entire being and rode in a blaze across her nerves like cold dread lightning. But what was one more scream? It mingled with the millions of others and was lost in a second.

  Talitha, high up on the rim of the Void, looked down into its vast stretches, and saw the multitudinous demons feigning to writhe in an ecstasy of sadistic pleasure. As well, she saw the countless souls in their self-enforced exile going through the motions, screeching and crying and begging, all for an audience consisting solely of their own little minds. Nothing had changed. The illusion of hell was as it had been, full of hate and misery and fear, but most of all, denial. After all, it was the key ingredient to self- deception and without it, where would these lost souls be?

  There was the illusion of hell and then there was the great Void. The Void was everywhere and endless, and as the name would suggest there was nothing to it but emptiness and more emptiness, and still the illusion of Hell with its horrors and pain was far preferable to that emptiness. The terror of the Void was indescribable and subtle. It unmade souls. It turned them into the shadows of finality.

  Talitha knew all of this, and because she had experienced the Void as no person had ever before, both from within and without, she understood it to a greater degree than any. Yet she was still subject to its horrors as much as the least soul and she trembled and cried in fearful misery. Her dual-mind split upon the idea of the Void, with the remnants of the demon that had been in her demanding to go down into the pits, demanding to be named, while the girl within her, Talitha Jern, terrified to the core, would deny the Void if she could. However, for her there was no other way and no other path, and far, far up above it all, she was monstrously afraid.

  Though there was nothing around her, it was as if she clung to the side of a mountain, and a great fall awaited her were she to slip from its precipice. She had no idea how it was that she held on, but the bitter cold of the Void smote her causing her weakening muscles to quiver, yet at the same time a warm howling wind struck her from the rear, threatening to cast her off the invisible peak and dash her among the vile atrocities below.

  She turned from the inevitable and looked back in the direction from which the wind coursed and was startled that she could actually see the world that she had just left. There was the Draugr, with the broken blade in its hand, the point of which was through the side of her neck. And there as well was her body, with her face contorted in an ugly portrait of misery. The scene appeared frozen, with nothing stirring as if all the world waited for the actuality of time to perform its appointed duty and move on to the next second.

  Unable to shift her eyes away, Talitha stared for an unknowable span of time. Every aspect of the scene she took in, including the somewhat mystifying and embarrassing realization that she wasn't wearing underwear. The little sundress, that the saleslady at the airport had looked down her nose upon, sat very high up on her hips exposing all, and this had her worrying what people would think when her body was discovered.

  The eternal scene of her last moment on earth was sad and depressing, yet what lay below her was infinitely worse so she ignored that as best she could and stared at herself and thought upon the things she might have done or at least should have done. Her mind drifted over her family, she should have loved them all more dearly, she thought of friends whom she should have treated more fairly. She had many regrets and it was these which began to spur on the stranger within her. Grief and guilt fed it so that after not too long it began demanding a return to the Void. It had a strident evil voice and it pecked and berated, incessantly. It would not be denied for long.

  Talitha had looked upon her coming time in the Void with the dispassionate logic that had always defined her and she had come to the difficult conclusion that it would not make sense to enter the Void as herself no matter her current readiness to confront its evils. The Void was eternal, and eventually it would wear her down as it had before. Evil begets evil. That was nowhere more true than in the Void and it was a certainty that her own evil side, what once had been an entirely separate entity but was now only a byproduct of its creation, would prevail over her and take control.

  That was a given, there was no alternative and no fighting it, that is unless she made what could only be a brief stand just to satisfy honor. But she wouldn't even do that. Common sense would prevail and instead she would hide herself away in the breast of the stranger, hoping against all reason that she would be saved a second time. Yet it would take more than a miracle to do it again, since no being in the universe would risk everything just to save a demon.

  In the guise of the stranger, Talitha would be a demon soon enough. She knew the demon world. She knew their weaknesses. Their lust for power. Their tendency to g
amble too much on false alliances and she knew, as well, how she would go about exploiting it. All it took was cunning and desire, both of which the stranger had in abundance.

  These thoughts transfixed her and caused the stranger to grow bolder in its attempt at possession. Its will had grown strong and she could feel her fingers peeling back against the nothingness that she gripped. Despite the great height and regardless of the horrendous pain the fall would inflict, the stranger prepared to hurl herself into the Void.

  "Not yet!" she pleaded, holding harder to the nothingness. The fear at the prospect of the fall, at entering again the Void, and at losing her identity, possibly forever, drove her near to hysterics. "Please, not yet!" she wailed.

  The stranger emboldened to a greater degree by the pitiful begging was able to pry Talitha's left hand fully away. She pin wheeled with it in a desperate attempt to keep herself from falling.

  The stranger laughed with her voice and then said with an air of casualness, "Let go. Don't waste anymore of our time. Let yourself go."

  It was an odd thing to say and Talitha's mind clung to the words. There was no such thing as time in the Void. It was a word without meaning. A thousand years was the same as a second, which equaled to a month. Time had no substance and no boundaries. There was no earth to spin, so that days were undefined. There was no sun to revolve around, which meant a year had no value. A second or an hour could be as long or as short as a demon wished it to be. Talitha allowed the concept of time to flourish within her and it trailed along the synapses of her mind and as contemplation took hold, the stranger receded. It was a creature of action and death, not one of cognition.