by Tim Marquitz
A second soulless streaked toward me before I could re-kill the first one. I swung my gun about and put an extra hole in its lobotomized brain. It screamed and toppled forward, landing face first at my feet, growling. Right about then, the first one managed to find its motor skills. It leapt forward only to meet the grip of my gun across its ruined jaw, stopping it in mid-leap. I grabbed it and flipped it over onto its buddy, my hand flaring up with energy. The moment it landed, both vampires erupted with red-orange flames. I put a couple bullets through their heads to keep them immobile and stepped away from the dead flesh as it boiled and hissed, bubbles of stinky pus erupting like mini-volcanoes.
“Impressive,” a steely voice said on the other side of the undead BBQ.
Three vampires emerged from a door not thirty feet from where I stood. It was instantly clear what kind they were. I would have known even if the one hadn’t spoken.
“Hobbs, I presume?”
The vamp in the center smiled, eyeteeth glistening. “And you must be Baalth’s third string replacement.” His two companions laughed.
“Ooh, sports humor.” I felt pretty good about trashing their satellite dish right then.
The two vamps to Hobbs’ sides must have been twins before they’d been turned. While the one on the right was female, there was no mistaking the almost mirror-like resemblance to the other, but it wasn’t that she was ugly; far from it, in fact. They were both beautiful.
Their narrow faces were sleek, with tiny noses and thin lips framed by perfectly coiffed blond hair, but both stared at me with huge—almost cartoony—blue eyes, giant frosty lakes peering out of dark sockets. Both were thin, as were most vampires, but they stood with confidence, wiry strength belied by their host forms, shapely figures enhanced by the skintight outfits they wore.
Hobbs, on the other hand, had gone twelve rounds with an ugly stick and had lost all of them. His nose was a nub of gristle as though it had been broken so many times before he vamped out that the virus couldn’t heal it back to normal. His eyes were deep pits, black dots squirming against a deeper darkness. His hair was long and straight, black as a raven’s ass. It hung halfway down his back. He was dressed like a Jehovah’s Witness, sparkling dress shoes, crisp black slacks, and a pressed, long sleeve, white shirt with a black vest overtop, buttoned all the way up to his neck. Just looking at his outfit made me uncomfortable.
“You’re not pitching salvation, are you?”
Hobbs’ grin widened. “Only if death is the deliverance you seek.” His tie fighters buzzed off, moving slowly toward my flanks.
I put my gun away as the two vamps circled. “Not quite the threesome I normally go for, but if I flip you both over onto your stomachs it’d be like having two runway models at once.”
That must have pissed off Mr. Twin because he growled deep in his throat and came at me. He was much faster than the soulless, but that didn’t make him fast enough. I imagined three sharp blades of energy protruding from my hand, magic making them a reality as he closed.
“Snikt!”
A quick slash and the air filled with severed fingers. The vampire yanked his wounded hand back, staring at the blackened goo that oozed from the tiny nubs protruding from his stumpy palm. His bright blue eyes filled with red, tracers blurring in my vision as I spun around to meet his sister. She’d come in fast, looking to tear me a new asshole but there would be no salad tossing today. My Wolverine claws slashed through her neck and sent her head spinning free. Her surprised face bounced off me as I kicked her body aside. I heard her head hit the floor with a wet splat, but didn’t see it as I’d already turned back around to her brother and shoved my magical blades up under his chin. I peeled his face away in vertical strips, and then sliced a couple horizontal lines before looking to Hobbs.
“You want to be Xs or Os?”
Clearly he wasn’t in the mood for Tic-Tac-Toe. He roared and charged. Now he was a real vampire. He crashed into my stomach before I could stop him, driving the air from my lungs as he slammed me into the wall. Dust and stars exploded on impact, the wall doing nothing to stop us. We toppled through the sheetrock and fell into another room, the vamp slathering overtop of me. Teeth flashed as he went for my eyes, and I barely managed to get my forearm under his chin to keep him at bay. Sharp points gnashed inches from my face, the abyss of his eyes staring through me as his claws tore at my arms and chest, pinning me in a warm froth of my own blood.
It wasn’t that he was stronger than me. I hadn’t been prepared for his ferocity. He tore and bit and snarled and pounded on me like he was Chael Sonnen trying to take out Anderson Silva, and he was doing a damn good job of it. One arm caught up defending, he was ripping me apart. I managed to slip my foot in under his hip and squirm backward a little, putting some small, but very appreciated, distance between his raging face and mine. He tried to close the gap again, which allowed me to shift my hips and get my other foot up against his crotch, my left arm slipping up under his armpit. A second later he was taking a ride.
A weird little hiss-gasp type sound slipped from his lips as I swept him. He landed on his back, the first hint of color coming to his eyes as he realized what had happened.
“Never underestimate the value of jui jitsu.” Or some good old fashioned gorilla ground and pound.
Blow after blow slammed into Hobbs’ face, inky black lines appearing where the point of my elbow sliced his skin apart. He grunted and squirmed but the surprise was over and leverage wasn’t on his side anymore. There was nothing he could do but take a beating, and I made sure to give him one. Then I gave him another before I eased off. Bloody tar spilled from his mouth and eyes, his face a gooey mess of malformed flesh. It was an improvement, I thought.
“Looks like the coup is over.”
He gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head. “Not…yet…demonspawn.” The words were thick with phlegm.
I stared down at Hobbs only to see a slight flicker of a smile spread across his lips. “What do you mean not yet?”
Something that sounded like a chuckle gushed from his throat, and I went back to hitting him. He didn’t say anything after that.
Fourteen
The trip back to the Gailbraith was frustrating. Unable to get any answers out of Hobbs as to why he’d gone after Old Town or what he meant by saying things weren’t done yet, I’d taken his slack ass with me. Battered into a torpid state, since you really can’t knock a vamp unconscious, Hobbs hung draped over my shoulder like a limp rag. I’d ripped out a chunk of the building’s wiring in the old office upstairs and had mummified him in electrical cords. He grunted now and again as I turned a corner too sharply and bounced his skull off the wall, but other than that, he held his tongue.
Once I was inside the asylum, I stomped through the surgery room and dropped down inside. The lights were on, filling the room with an amber brightness, but no one was there, not even Chatterbox. Rather than hunt them down, I loosed my senses to look for them. I found more than my missing companions.
“No fucking way.”
I pushed through the door at the far end of the room and stomped down the hallway to the gate room, the fluorescent lights humming above. The door was closed, but there was no mistaking the energy that prickled my skin from the other side. I yanked the door open and stomped inside. There, floating in the middle of the empowered gate Veronica set up, was a head-sized emerald portal.
“Uh, hi again,” Rala said.
My gaze snapped to her. She sat in the corner of the room, Lucifer’s tome spread across her lap, CB plopped down beside her. A thunderous boom went off inside my skull, and I felt flush. I dumped Hobbs into the corner and drew a deep breath but it did nothing to chase away the frustrated sickness that washed over me.
“I thought we’d agreed not to mess with that shit right now.”
“Bbbbuuuussssttteddd.”
Rala shushed CB with a finger across his lips. “You told me you wanted it translated, so make up your damn mind, would you?”<
br />
I stood there for a second waiting for an aneurysm to rescue me but it never came. “But I thought we’d—”
“That’s what you get for thinking, Frank.” There was no mistaking Veronica’s snide voice as she stepped into the room behind me. “Do you, or do you not want this book translated?”
“Of course I do, but didn’t we decide it wasn’t safe?”
Veronica smiled, her teeth flashing. “It is now.” She gestured to the gate.
It hung in the air perfectly aligned inside the pentagram, the gate’s energies acting like support beams. I could still feel the portal’s essence fluttering against my senses, but where it had been hazy and distorted the small opening was now crystal clear. My gaze was drawn down the rabbit hole.
Mountains that looked like jagged teeth dominated the horizon, but it was still hard to get a clear view, everything awash in a brilliant green glow. Darker shapes moved through, what I presumed, was the sky but there was no telling if they were clouds or critters or a trick of my imagination and tired eyes. Closer to where the portal hung, I could see some jungle-type terrain, though the weirdness of the trees made it hard to be certain. The foliage grew together thick, making it impossible to peer through it, the green tint only making it worse.
“No beasties?” I asked.
Rala shook her head. “I think the gate is keeping them from realizing the portal is open. A couple of shadows have moved right past it but nothing has so much as stuck a pinky through.”
I started toward the portal to take a closer look.
“Frank, I wouldn’t do that,” Veronica warned, a hand on my shoulder keeping me from breaking the plane of the pentagram. “We don’t know what will happen if you step inside. You might activate the gate and poof yourself into another dimension or, even worse, bring something here.”
I ignored her sarcasm but held my ground, regardless. My head was still killing me, and the last thing I wanted to do was play tag with yet another of the Squidbillies. The lights in the room fluttered as though sensing my mood, but I couldn’t help but be encouraged by Rala’s success. I wondered just how much progress she’d actually made.
“The gate actually makes it easier to maintain the portal as I decipher the spells,” she said as if reading my mind. “In Hell, there was some magical resistance that worked against my translation, my effort, but with the gate magic countering that, I’m finding it easier and easier to draw the power out of the pages.”
I glanced back at the portal, a pang of uncertainty and excitement mingling to send a chill down my spine. There was something on the other side that seemed to call to me, something that almost demanded I come closer, that I enter the portal. There was power on the other side, a magical realm of some kind but that still didn’t tell me what the hell Lucifer wanted from it.
Had he hidden something there?
But why do that if the only place in existence out of God’s line of sight was the God-proof room the Almighty had gifted Lucifer? Or was it?
“Aaugh!”
“What’s the matter, Charlie Brown?” Veronica asked.
“Stuff it, Lucy. You’re not yanking my ball this time.”
The girls snickered, their amusement cut short by a moist grunt from Hobbs. Chatterbox’s eyes snapped to the vampire as though he’d just realized he was there.
“Cccorrrpppsssee bbiitteerrr.” CB snorted in the vampire’s direction.
So much for the brotherhood of the undead. There was clearly no love lost between zombies and vampires. Maybe it was a class thing.
“I almost forgot.” I rolled Hobbs over so Veronica could see him. “I brought you a present.”
“Aw, Frank, it’s like our honeymoon where you brought me a dead mouse to play with. No, wait, that was the cat,” she told me. “You’ve never given me anything near as nice.”
“Can’t say that now.” I booted Hobbs over to her. “He’s all yours.”
She stared at his battered face in disgust. “What exactly am I supposed to do with it?”
Hobbs growled against the wire I’d wrapped around his head, the bundled knot stuffed into his mouth. I patted him on the head. “Don’t worry, buddy, our interrogation tactics are at the opposite ends of the spectrum. You’ll like this.”
“Are you…” Veronica stared at me, wide eyes stabbing holes in my face. “Oh, no fucking way, Frank.”
“I tried it my way, now it’s time to try it your way.”
She shook her head. “I’m not—”
My hand snapped out and clasped her throat, pulling her to me. Her colorful arms flashed in my peripheral vision as she grabbed at my wrist. “No, you will,” I told her. “He has information I need, and you’re gonna get it for me, end of story.”
Veronica held defiant for a moment before indulging me with a shallow nod, her chin bumping against my fingers. I released her and pushed her in the direction of the vampire.
“Find out what he’s holding back about his little invasion. I want to know everything.”
“Everything?” Veronica sneered as she said the word, her hand massaging her neck.
I nodded, dismissing her with a wave. She was spoiling for a fight, but I wasn’t gonna oblige her. We didn’t have to play that game anymore.
“Fine,” she said, snatching ahold of Hobbs’ pant leg. “I’ll get your answers.” Muttering something under her breath, she dragged the vampire out of the room, the door thumping him in the head as it slammed behind them.
“What’s that all about?” Rala asked.
“Don’t worry about it. You’ve got other things to focus on.” I pointed at the portal. “Are you sure you can control it like this?”
“Pretty sure.”
There wasn’t a whole lot of confidence in her voice but it seemed it was all I was gonna get from her.
“I’ll get it figured out,” she promised, clearly seeing the disappointment on my face. “Now that we’ve gotten it stable, we should be good.”
Another glowing endorsement. I nodded, my eyes drifting back to the portal, my hesitance suddenly shoved aside. I needed to know what was so damn important to Lucifer he would send the key to this weird portal all the way back to Earth…to me. It was clearly important, but when did Daddy ever give me anything that was important?
A loud wail pulled me from my thoughts. Chatterbox perked up, his ears wiggling as Rala stared at me, one eyebrow raised. Another wail drifted through the air and CB and I recognized the sound at the same time. His maggots hugged his corneas en masse, a crooked smile spreading his cheeks nearly all the way to his eyes.
“Is that…?” Color flushed Rala’s furry cheeks, blurring her stripes.
A slow thump started to echo through the hallways, vibrations building in the walls as the tempo increased. Another voice joined the first in loosing a moan, this one clearly male. The sound was primal, the volume ratcheted up several notches before dropping, only to work back up. The floor trembled beneath my feet.
“Pppooooonnntttaaaannnggggg,” Chatterbox declared with a grin before he toppled forward and started rolling across the tiles toward the door. He thumped over my foot in his hurry, the zombie head bouncing down the hallway until he was out of sight. A wet trail of slobber glistened in his wake. I shook my head,
Rala covered her mouth as the banging and noise grew louder and louder. “They’re doing it!” she shouted between her fingers, the wisp of a giggle slipping out.
Veronica howled and the sound stabbed me in the ears. She was doing exactly what I’d asked of her—what I’d told her to do—but I hadn’t expected her to be so…loud. She was clearly going out of her way to be spiteful as she’d never screamed that loud in her life.
Rala started to get up, but I growled at her.
“Translate the damn book, girl.” I glared until she dropped back into a squat, tucking the tome into her lap again with a huff.
My skull resounded with a blast beat of double bass as I listened to Veronica sex up the vampire. I didn’
t know if I was jealous, angry, or disgusted but the sound was making my stomach roil.
“I’ll be back,” I told Rala as I stormed out the door, slamming it shut behind me. Half-tempted to lock the damn thing, I hoped Little Orphan Alien would do what I told her instead of running off to watch Veronica rut with a corpse.
My body chilled at the thought, and I hurried down the hall and into the surgical theater, jumping up through the broken window to put some distance between Veronica’s noise and my ears. It seemed as if the whole building shook with the sound. It wasn’t until I slipped up the stairs, the fire door closing at my back, that it faded from my ears. I stumbled out into the early morning air, the sky still dark, and dragged in a deep breath, hoping to chase the echoes out of my head. A dozen blocks had fallen behind me before the image of what Veronica was doing vacated my skull. It was disturbing.
That thought stopped me cold.
I went over to a nearby curb and dropped down, a strange sense of dislocation falling over me. It suddenly felt as if I was very, very drunk. My brain sloshed inside my head like a drowning goldfish. I pictured Veronica having sex and felt a wave of nausea boil up in my guts. That had never happened before. It was almost surreal.
“Are you all right, young Trigg?”
It took me a second to realize someone had even spoken, and a moment after that to recognize the voice. It did nothing to confirm my sobriety.
“Duke Forcalor? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Are you okay?” The duke asked again, coming over to stand before me, a hand settling on my shoulder.
I glanced up at him. As always, he was clothed in the finest of silk outfits, the paragon of comfort with shimmering sleeves and slip on sandals. His long white hair was tied back tight, lending him a youthful appearance. His clean-shaven, unlined face added to the illusion. His normally expressionless mask, however, seemed to have a few dings in it. He hadn’t come down from Heaven to catch up on old times.
“Define okay.”
The duke let out a weak chuckle but none of its amusement reached his eyes. “I had hoped we might talk.”