by Richard Hein
The tendrils exploded in a flash of black. Ichor pattered down like a diseased rain, drenching my chest and face, burning at the cuts I’d suffered. The ragged ends withdrew, and the creature’s tortured scream was like a punch from a heavyweight boxer. I felt it like thunder, like a low bass note that resonated my bowels. The old woman in the now-stained robe thrashed in Kate’s sleeper hold, its strength far beyond any mortal. Kate held on like it was a mechanical bull, bouncing and flailing. The possessed woman thrashed, slamming back with her head and battering Kate in the face, snapping her glasses, and sending the dark frames tumbling to the ground.
My hand snapped up and closed around its throat. Despite the inhuman strength I locked it solid and twisted its eyes to face mine.
“Get the fuck out of my universe.”
I unloaded all of the sweet agony pumping through my veins. My scream echoed around us as I pushed, throwing every ounce of will I had left. The creature shuddered in my iron grip, hissing and shrieking. My will was unbreakable stone, the very rocks the ocean itself breaks upon. I pressed up to my knees, fingers clutching its throat, feeling at the shifting mass of tentacles in its throat trying to burst forth.
The green light flared once and went silent. Pale blue eyes blinked in the rain and sagged closed. An elderly woman took a shuddering, sobbing breath, slumped to the side, and fell unconscious.
The world spun. Lights danced at the edges of my vision as the city twirled. It was only when Kate rushed forward to catch me that I realized I’d started to collapse. She was impossibly warm. Trembling arms reached around me, but I couldn’t tell if she was shaking, or if I was.
“Is it gone?” she asked. Her breath whispered in my ear. I was so keenly aware of her presence against me as the night rain fell on us. There wasn’t anything behind my thoughts. It just felt good to be that close to another person. My heart ached from the exertion it had just gone through, but I felt spent. Whatever anger I’d awoken was spent. I felt like I could sleep a week and felt as docile as a kitten.
I nodded against her hair as she hugged me. “Yeah. I had to wound it first, but we did it, Kate.” I smiled. “We make a good team.”
She pulled back, supporting me by my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length. Studying me. The smile that blossomed on her face… I reached up with one unsteady hand and pushed her hair back behind one ear.
“I don’t do anything,” she said.
I blinked. “You put the strangle on Ghoulish Granny there,” I said. “Gave me the time to blast her face noodles clean off. Don’t sell yourself—”
Her cheeks flushed, and her eyes flicked away. “No,” she said. She rubbed at her head as she spoke in slow, whispered words. Rain drew lines down her face. “I mean I don’t have a job or anything. You keep guessing, but the truth is… That car accident I was in? I was twenty. My parents both died, and I wound up in a pretty bad way. I lost a few years of my memory. Pretty much everything after high school, and fragments of stuff before.”
Dieter’s words came back to me light a flash of lightning out of the rain. Trauma could scrape her mind clean, and it seemed it had.
“Afterward, my brother helped me get back on my feet, but I never went to college or got a job. It’s hard, losing years of your life. An entire chunk of your existence just removed. I suppose that’s why I’m always hounding you about wanting to know more. When you lose part of your past, you want to fill up with as much as you can, just cram as much information in there as possible so you don’t feel so empty. Probably where my love of books came from.
“That’s when the headaches started as well. I spent a long time feeling sorry for myself, feeling broken and useless.”
“I think I can sympathize.”
Her smile was knowing. “I just never found what I wanted to do with my life, you know? I’d forgotten part of my life, and wound up feeling so depressed that I never bothered to do anything and just lived on the inheritance I got. And, well, it was hard to talk about it to you because I don’t want people thinking less of me.”
I snorted. It took a lot to admit your fears and pains. I should know. I’d kept them bottled up until I’d needed her to trust me. “Kate, you’re talking to the king of underachievers here. You know my professional record for the last few years. You could have sat on a couch for the last half decade until your skin grafted to the fabric and still accomplished more than me. I’ve never understood the idea we have to strive to something amazing and epic. Life is...” I rolled a hand in the cold rain, looking for words that slipped from my mind. “It’s enough to survive. To be and exist. No one holds up a measuring stick and weighs your life in some cosmic scale. If you’re happy, well, great. If you’re not, fix it.”
Her smile pulled at my heart. “I lost a lot of motivation to do anything after that. So, I never bothered. I don’t think it’s good enough to just exist, Samuel. I want something more out of life, I never figured out what that was after a car accident scooped out a large chunk of my memories.”
I laughed as I fell back with a little splash. The rain felt bracing after that little go around. Invigorating. “Jesus, Kate. I think you’ve found your calling.”
“You think I could do this? Isn’t it a little dangerous?” She bent and snapped up the two halves of her glasses with a look of disgust.
“So is using the toilet,” I said with a snort. “Ask Elvis. You could be struck by lightning any second here, or choke on a hot dog, or—”
“I get it. Jeeze, I get it.” I could hear her smile, though. “Work for the OFC. Kicking out a creepy tentacle Entity like that one probably looks good on the resume.”
My smile faded as the door slammed open and a dozen other residents of the Chateau Trash Heap poured out onto the roof, in various states of dress. Swirling green eyes lit the night, writhing masses of tentacles pulsing out of their mouths.
“That is so unfair,” I said to the sky above. Rain was my response. Typical.
Chapter 14
Kate wrenched me up to my feet. The little plastic gun came up in my hand, warm and feeling like it was full of writhing eels. My other hand smeared away cold rain from my eyes. So many of them. So damn many. It had taken all we had to survive one, and there was enough here to form a football team.
“The infection spread,” I said. Aiming with a hand shaking with fear is difficult, but I squeezed the plunger and watched as a thing wearing the form of a middle aged man in sweats and a hoodie was battered away. It slammed into the metal building that housed the stairwell and dented it. The figure slumped prone, the magic overwhelming the Entity riding shotgun in its mind for the moment. Heating and cooling units flashed by as Kate and I retreated, lumbering metal boxes that rumbled enough to drown out the piercing growls from behind. “Damn it all, it summoned more. The whole building could be full of these things.”
“How did the OFC miss this?” Kate asked. “It seems a pretty big oversight. A whole building of creepy tentacle-faced things.”
I leaned around a hulking metal box and fired again. An overweight woman went down in a flail of fleshy limbs, but the rest of the figures pressed forward. Glowing green eyes burned brighter with each step, tentacles tasting at the air as they closed. The next time I squeezed the magical kid’s toy, though, there was a smell of ozone and the thing crunched like a spent beer can in my hand, the conduit wired into it spent. I hurled it away in disgust.
“It has to be recent,” I said. My back bumped against cold and wet steel. “No one has reported them missing yet, or it would have worked through the channels to Christina.” Cobwebs fluttered free of my fog-addled brain, the haze of what I’d just gone through still sitting on me like a spring morning in Seattle. “Demon Granny was the longest, but these were probably today. Yesterday at the earliest. That means whoever clued the twins in had all their fingers in this.”
“Doesn’t help us now,” Kate growled. “Stay alive now. Point fingers later.”
Line up, single file,” I shouted.
“Nice and orderly. The ride home is one at a time, folks.”
The creatures stalked forward in the miserable rain, ignoring my orders. Kate spared me an incredulous glance. I wiped rain from my face and looked around. We were fast running out of options here. A few were still blocking the exit. The chances of us making a mad dash between them all and making it out were about my chances of getting a promotion at work tomorrow, but the possibility existed.
“They’re fresher,” I said. “Brand new. They’re not as agile as the first one.” My breath caught as I considered our only option. “We’re going to have to run,” I said, taking Kate by the shoulder. Rain matted her hair, pasting it to her pale skin. Her clothes hung wet and limp, and almost every trace of the fiery, aggressive woman I’d come to know had fled. She looked desperate and afraid right then. From the look in her eyes, I could tell I probably looked the same. The splashing steps of possessed feet drew closer. They might be slower, but they were still stronger than either of us. All it would take is one of those tentacles grasping a limb… I shivered. I didn’t see any alternatives.
The door banged open once more. A ragged man stepped through, as tattered as the building, his pace unhurried. He paused, leaning against the open doorway, eyes scoping the shambling hordes.
Michael’s gaze lifted as he fished out a cigarette and lit it with a flick of his lighter. He walked toward us, stepping over the prone and unconscious grandmother in her robe. Half the creatures turned and swarmed him, a tide of supernatural piranha washing over the Archangel and blocking him from view. Michael took a long drag as ethereal tentacles hammered against him and were rebuffed, as if sliding off of a transparent skin. The Archangel was unconcerned. Hands clawed and grabbed, attempting to rip at him, but the Archangel puffed away as he watched the two of us.
“You’re nine levels of fucked, Samuel,” Michael said. He tapped ash into the face of a young man. “I said I’d keep an eye out for you.” He glanced at the pile of writhing bodies attempting to drag him down. “My eye says you’re boned.”
“So do something damn it all,” I shouted. “Angel judo or whatever.”
The cherry on his cigarette burned brighter. “See, you know the rules I’m bound under. Not my job.”
“Fuck your job,” I screamed. A few of the possessed folk turned away, apparently deciding that their own strength was no match for Michael’s and looking for an easier meal. Shuffling steps took them closer to Kate and I.
“Just push them off the building, then,” said Kate suggested. “All accidental-like.”
“Come on.” The Archangel flicked his cigarette away and walked toward us. The clinging mass dragged forward with him and tore free, collapsing in a writhing mound. He dodged the few that had started stalking toward us, never bothering to look as hands and appendages sought his form, and leaned one arm against a heating unit. “You know better than that. Non-interference. This isn’t my gig. Your ticket is punched, Samuel. They’re going to tear the girl apart.”
“No,” I said. A stabbing ache filled my mind as my eyes fell closed. I’d failed. After everything, I’d screwed it all up. In the end, I was still nothing more than a drunk has-been.
“That demonic prick and his cronies are on the stairs,” Michael said. “I can sense them.”
“Samuel,” Kate said, voice weak. Her hands clutched at my arm, fingers digging into the wounds I’d suffered. I could barely feel it. Somewhere distant, I heard her hiss in pain, saw her head twitch as her eyes screwed closed. Another spike of her migraine pain. All of it was detached from me. Her pain, my own burning wounds, the cold and rain, and even the splashing steps as they drew inexorably closer. I was staring down, watching the way rain bounced in the little puddles. I’d fought so hard not to get dragged into this, and then when I’d decided to keep her safe, to keep her from suffering the same fate as Lauren, I’d just brought her right to the slaughter.
What the hell was wrong with me?
Kate dragged me backward. We stumbled another dozen yards away, toward the edge of the building, the last refuge. There was nowhere else to go. Michael strode forward, the worry lines in his face deep with sadness. “I’m sorry it has to end like this, Samuel. I truly am.”
“No,” I muttered. “This can’t be it. This… I can’t let her die like this. I won’t.”
“I made my own choices, Samuel,” Kate said. Her voice was very soft. “This isn’t on you.”
I spun. “This isn’t on me? I shouldn’t have been so eager to let you come along. I…” I sighed and stared up into the rain. “I guess I got so caught up in being a part of this world again. At having someone at my side that was as eager to throw everything they had at this too.” I waved a hand at the shambling figures and the glowing green eyes closing on us. “Look where it got me. I should have stayed at my job. I should have left you at Sanctuary. At least you would have been safe and…”
I froze. My mouth went dry. I didn’t dare breathe.
“Michael,” I whispered. “You gave us a ride before. Is that a violation of your job?”
“Well, not really,” he mused. One of the possessed figures made a swipe at him, which he sidestepped without a glance. They were just paces away now. “I’m not you’re damned chauffeur, but it’s not really breaking any—”
“Sanctuary,” I all but screamed at him. My hands were shaking. “She’d be safe at Sanctuary.”
“What the hell are you doing, Samuel?” Kate said. Her voice was weak, eyes glazed with pain. “Don’t you dare pawn me off here. Partner. Team. Remember?”
“I need to save you,” I said. I was almost pleading. My hands grabbed at her shoulders as I pulled her close. Why couldn’t she see? I could save her. I could redeem everything. This might work. It had to. “Michael, please. If there’s any fucking justice left in this universe, tell me you can get Kate to Christina at Sanctuary. Just… God, please.”
“Samuel Walker, art thou charging me with conveying Katherine to the realm of Sanctuary?” Michael intoned. I frowned up into gray eyes. What the hell was that all about? I nodded and waved a hand.
“Yes, just freaking do it. Save her and get her to Christina.”
“It is done,” Michael said, drawing himself up to full height. For the first time ever, the grizzled man that looked like the guy that had picked random clothes from the Salvation Army was gone, and I had a glimpse of Michael, the Right Hand of God. I might have flinched even as the lines smoothed from his face and his casual, negligent demeanor melted to crisp lines.
“Samuel, I swear you’d better not do this to me. Let me fight. We can do this. We can…” Kate said. Her words were ripped away as golden wings of light exploded from Michael’s back. For a heartbeat, the infected creatures paused as his radiance flooded the weathered apartment roof. Her hand reached out to me, eyes desperate. A nimbus of white enveloped the two of them, and without another word, he yanked Kate from my grasp and tumbled off the side of the building. I gasped.
A breath later a comet of white and gold swirled out over the city, and Kate was gone. Safe. Alive.
“God damn show off,” I muttered, and turned back to face my fate.
“Okay,” I said. My fingers curled into fists. “Let’s get this over with.”
The door banged open one more time.
“Come on already,” I yelled, throwing up my hands as Swim Trunks and Band Shirt exploded out onto the rooftop. They dashed forward, loping along on all fours. This was it. The demons and their spawn working side by side, cornering the soon-to-be-late Samuel Walker on a roof without any resources. Manic, victorious laughter bubbled up from within me. Kate was gone. There was little else to do but laugh as everything was wrenched from their grasp.
Right up until the two demons slammed into the back of the tenants and began tearing through them like kids into candy on Halloween. Bile burned at my throat as I choked back a violent urge to vomit. It was brutal. I stared in shock as black ichor splashed across the steel of the heating units.
The two Entities were swift and exacting, mowing through the dozen possessed men and women with vicious efficiency. My stomach roiled as I watched the carnage. Those were people in there. Trapped within themselves, their minds and souls boxed away. I could have saved them with the time and resources.
There was no coming back from what the demons had done. Viscous blackness swirled through the pools of rain-water collecting across the roof, like oil runoff from the freeway.
The silence when it was over was sickening. There was myself, and the two Entities. Twelve souls snuffed out. My muscles ached as my body tensed with a quaking fury, and my scream broke the quiet as I sprinted forward. My feet splashed through black pools as I threw myself at Band Shirt, hoping to get a grip on it. An inferno of hatred erupted within me, an anger unlike anything I’d ever felt before. I didn’t just want to banish it, to send it home.
I wanted to break it. It needed to suffer.
They must have been surprised. I flung myself at Band Shirt and got a hand around its arm. I sent the pulse of my will into it, aided by a freight train of anger. It shuddered, flailing like my touch was a live wire. Swim Trunks roared and made a swipe at me, but I snapped a foot up and planted a kick in its stomach. It tumbled away as I spun off, yanking the creature in my hand off balance. I was too lost to my rage to feel surprise that I’d managed to knock something so strong a few feet away.
Band Shirt recovered, slapped my hand away and grabbed me by the throat. The sky spun as he lifted me from my feet and hammered me down to the roof amid the broken and mangled bodies. Smells of rot and disease curled over me as the possession melted away, making me gag. One bare foot stomped down onto my chest, the lacerations I’d already gotten burned. I gasped as it ground down. Something in my spine popped.
“Well,” I managed to wheeze. “What the hell are you waiting for?” I grabbed at its ankle and tried to throw my will at it once more, but the pain was becoming unbearable. Swim Trunks rose, loped over to me, and leaned down, its all too human face pressing right against my cheek.