The Dark Communion (The Midnight Defenders)

by Joey Ruff

  34

  The priest drew his Colts in the swift, smooth motion of a Wild West gunfighter, and held them akimbo, sending out short, quick bursts of rapid fire as a quiet smirk played over his eyes.

  I wasn’t about to let the priest outdo me and hefted Glory to my shoulder, taking aim. The cops followed. I had the advantage, using Glory’s beam to reveal my targets, and could only guess that Finnegan was relying on the heat signatures displayed on his glasses while the officers shot blindly.

  Ape spun to us and yelled, “Come on! We need to get through this door!”

  Chuck already had Anderson on his feet and between him and Ape, they managed to get him up on to the other walkway. Ape helped him hobble through the doorway while Chuck threw himself up on the walk, rolled on to his stomach and quickly got his knees under him. Vaughn and Peters followed. As Ape ushered Anderson through the door, the detective stopped and turned to his fallen partner, yelling, “What about Barnes?!?!”

  “We have to leave him,” I heard Ape yell. “We’ll come back for him later.” He had to yell to be heard between the barking of Finnegan’s pistols, the intermittent roar of the shotgun, and the heavy, rhythmic drum roll of Glory on automatic.

  “No!!” Anderson shouted, furiously, struggling against Ape’s grip. “You saw those things. There won’t be anything left to come back for!”

  He was right. They’d be on the body like carrion birds.

  “Nadia,” I said. “Cover us.” She was halfway across to the other side, standing calf-deep in piss. She nodded and pulled her shotgun up to fire.

  I nudged Peters on the shoulder and said into her ear, “Help me with the body.”

  Her first instinct, according to the whites of her eyes and the curl of her lips, was not cooperation. I think it was more the thought of getting her hands dirty with the sticky warmth and heady, metallic smell. She glanced at Barnes, back to me, and her expression changed. She nodded.

  I took the brunt of the gore, getting under his shoulders, letting Peters take the feet, and we hopped into the ravine, carrying him as though on a stretcher. As we neared the other side, Chuck leapt into the water to help, grabbed the man’s arse and held up the middle. Ape and Anderson knelt to pull him up.

  “Hurry,” Finnegan called over his shoulder. “I’m gonna need to reload, I can’t hold them much longer.”

  I helped Chuck and Peters to the platform and called to Nadia. She glanced back at me, nodded, took a few steps backward and fired two more times. As one of the shapes dropped into a splash, Nadia catapulted herself up to the walk.

  “Get Barnes through the door,” I yelled, and Anderson grabbed one end while Vaughn grabbed the other.

  The only light came from two flashlights that sat on the walkway, their beams illuminating the wall beside us. Ape threw his hand to me and hoisted me with little effort.

  The splashing became more agitated, more frenzied. As Finnegan backed up toward the doorway, nearly bumping in to my shoulder, I could just make out the skeletal features, the grave, sunken eyes of the childfuckers getting ever closer.

  “Come on!” Ape roared and tapped Finnegan on the shoulder.

  Officer Dotson screamed and was pulled in to the water.

  Chuck tried to leap for the officer, but I stopped him. It was too late.

  Dotson’s screams echoed against the stone as the creatures descended upon him, their taloned fingers rending his flesh, the blood trickling into the water, flowing like red ribbons in the current, his arms wrenched from his shoulders.

  “Swyftt!” Ape called, “Come on.”

  I stole a glance over my shoulder at him, felt something on my foot, and pulled it up on instinct. It grabbed my other ankle and tugged. My feet came out from under me. With a breathless “Fuck,” my arse hit the edge of the concrete.

  I spun Glory around, and the light caught a haggard, bearded face, the eyes wild, the teeth bared and gaping, the tongue flailing streamers of yellowish-white mucus. Part zombie, part fucking insane clown and ugly as shit, it lowered its head to my leg, hungry and pulled me closer to its jaws.

  I squeezed the trigger and heard the click. No boom. Fuck.

  A quick, echoing peal of thunder as the thing’s head exploded.

  The priest helped me to my feet. He motioned to the open door behind us, and we threw ourselves through the opening as several of the creatures charged. I landed hard on the concrete as the heavy, metal door slammed shut.

  I sat up. Ape leaned against the door and Vaughn spun the steering-wheel lock. A small window in the top of the door flashed quick images of bone-talons scratching and heads bobbing back and forth, all backlit by the two flashlights we’d left behind.

  From somewhere near, Finnegan called out, “Ape, we can’t leave them. Eventually, they’ll find more victims.”

  Ape nodded. “What can we do?”

  “Goddammit,” Peters said.

  “What?” Ape asked.

  She didn’t say anything. It was Chuck who spoke. “Dotson had the only grenades.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where the fuck is Dotson?”

  “Jono,” Ape said quietly, and then I realized.

  “Fuck,” I said.

  It was quiet for a moment, and the rapid beating fists on the metal door droned as loud as thunder, then melded into one long, loud explosion that shook the bricks in the wall, blew out the little glass window in the door – which was also blown mostly off its hinges and sat crookedly in its frame – and sent up a cloud of dust that triggered a series of violent coughing and sneezing.

  As the ringing in my ears began to fade, I let my head fall back against the ground and rolled it to the side to see Finnegan. “Was that…?”

  “I think so,” he said. He breathed heavily.

  “Thank fucking God for small favors.”

  “Jono,” the priest said. “A man just gave his life.”

  “Two,” Nadia said, motioning to Barnes.

  I nodded, but said nothing.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Glory sat idly on the ground at my feet, her light illuminating half-way up the nearest wall, and Stone and Anderson still held their flashlights, the beams sweeping back and forth curiously.

  “Where are we?” someone said.

  I staggered to my feet, popped Glory’s clip, and chambered another magazine.

  “I dropped my flashlight,” Chuck said.

  “I did too,” Finnegan admitted.

  I unholstered my Glock and held it out to Finnegan. “I’m good,” he said. “I don’t need it. When they start coming, the glasses work well enough.”

  I nodded to him and turned to Chuck. He took it, clicked the light on, and nodded at me.

  Anderson leaned against the wall, his face sagging with worry and pain. I crossed to him, took a spot on the wall beside him. With a little effort, he looked up at me. He flashed me an awkward look. “He’s dead,” he said in a cold, detached voice.

  I nodded at him.

  “I…”

  “What happened in there,” I said. “That wasn’t your fault.”

  He took a deep breath, and even with his head down, in the dim light, I saw the glimmer in the corner of his eye. He was trying to hold it together, and I was proud of him for that. I didn’t know what his relationship with his partner had been like, but knew the pain he felt.

  Maybe I didn’t do so well with bloody sentiments and cuddly feelings, but I knew pain intimately – knew the way it tasted when it spread its legs, knew the perfume it wore when it hosted fancy parties. I knew the empty, aching burning as it wrapped its mighty, all-consuming arms around in empty comfort and swallowed light like a black hole.

  “Anderson,” I said and waited until his eyes met mine. I had to take a look around to make sure no one else was listening. “I know what you’re feeling right now. Believe me, I do. But I need you to keep it together. Not forever, just until we can do what we came to do and get out of here. Do that for yourself, and do that for
the rest of us. Alright, mate?” I clapped him on the shoulder. “There will be time to grieve later, I promise you that.” He nodded, and I added, “I’m sorry.”

  He was silent for a moment before he said, “What I just saw in there ….”

  “I know. If you need to take a minute…”

  He took a deep breath.

  “When we find more of those things, remember what they did,” I told him. “Then take what you feel right now and set it on fire and throw it back at them.”

  He nodded, but didn’t look at me.

  “Kids are counting on us,” I told him. “Don’t fucking let me down now.”

  He nodded at me and stood from the wall. He didn’t have to say anything more, and I didn’t want him to.

  As I walked back to the others, I saw a flash of light and saw Ape coming out of the shadows. “This place is pretty big,” he said. “I followed the wall a few hundred feet. It just goes on.”

  “Let’s light it up then,” I said and pulled out a few flare rounds, tossed one to Nadia, Peters and Chuck. They chambered them into their shotguns and three loud pfummps shot a scarlet glow into the blackness in three directions. The first landed a hundred yards ahead of us, evidently into a large, open space, as nothing was visible in the glow. The second veered off to the right, deflected from something about ten feet in the air, and landed a short ways off, faintly revealing a brick wall to the side of it and more nothingness all around. The third went to the left, struck a wall and bounced back and forth quickly in a small alley five or six feet across before it came to rest.

  Judging from the three flares burning red like buoys, the room was at least several hundred feet across and likely just as deep.

  “We’re back in the Underground,” Ape said, coming to stand beside me. “No sewer’s this large.”

  “Come on,” I said. “This Brom guy’s gotta be around here somewhere.”

  “Do you think he knows we’re here?” Nadia asked.

  “Oh, yeah. He knows.”

  “So he’ll be expecting us then?” she said. “Great.”

  The cavern was an old, buried street, with in-laid brick roads and spanning at least four or five intersections before disappearing into a cave mouth large enough to house a humpback whale. The opposite end of the room was a solid dirt wall, and in the expanse were at least two dozen buildings. A couple of the structures were small enough that you could see their roofs before the cavern’s ceiling swallowed them. Most of the buildings, however, disappeared over our heads, no doubt the foundations of current skyscrapers and office buildings.

  Chuck and Anderson carried Barnes into the nearest building, wrapped him in Anderson’s black police jacket, and stashed him in a corner where he would be out of the way until we could come back for him. I was just outside of the building with Finnegan as a nervous Chuck poked his head out and said, “Uhh…Swyftt. You…might want to see this.”

  The priest and I glanced at each other curiously and moved toward the building. I could see the cops with Ape and Nadia on the far side of the room, their lights playing across the old store fronts and facades of buildings long abandoned.

  Chuck led us into the front room, past Anderson as he positioned some crumbled wooden beams around Barnes. Anderson looked up at us weakly.

  “We were looking for a place to put Barnes, and we found this,” Chuck said and passed through another old door into some kind of storeroom. “Here.”

  The room itself wasn’t very large, but the unmoving bodies of the pre-Wendigo, frozen in various poses, lined the room like the wax figures in a HR Giger museum. “Holy…fuck,” I said.

  “There must be hundreds,” Finnegan said. “All just…deposited…in this little room.”

  Chuck appeared a little shaky, and as the priest and I walked further from the door, his voice quivered as he said, “Oh, good. You’re going to look around among the scary guys that tried to eat us. I’m, uh…gonna wait outside.”

  “C’mon, Chuck,” I said, and he whimpered like a wounded hound, but followed at our heels.

  The room gave me the impression of a slaughterhouse, huge slabs of cow hanging maliciously on crude chains, their haunches exposed, except these weren’t cow arses, they were…well, once people.

  I felt a cold chill sweep over me as dozens of eyes alerted to our presence but unable to do anything, to cry out, to attack.

  “They’re starving,” I said. “That’s why they can’t move. They’re too hungry, too weak.”

  “Then why aren’t they dead?” Chuck asked.

  “Starving, yes,” Finnegan said. “But it’s not like they couldn’t find food. Terry said Brom has the Ring of Solomon. If they were controlled, Brom would have used their own willpower against them, feeding off of it, draining them, and if Brom was done with them…”

  “They would have nothing left,” I said. “No will of their own, and they wouldn’t be able to move.” I got close to one, touched the side of its face, and its cold eyes stared into mine. “But he’d still be able to control them,” I said. “Like he did with Ape’s uncle.”

  “Sure,” Finnegan said. “But it takes more of his own energy to do so.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I’m not following,” Chuck said.

  “Ancient artifacts, like Solomon’s Ring, are basically archaic machines. They don’t operate without a power source. Brom uses his own lifeforce to power it.”

  “And rather than killing himself to power these guys, it’s easier to go out and get new ones,” I said.

  “So this room is like his trash can?” Chuck asked.

  “It’s sad,” Finnegan said. “To think that these people have been down here for all of this time, and nobody has even noticed they were missing.”

  From behind us, Chuck’s breath caught audibly in his throat, and he said quietly, “What the fuck is that?”

  Midway up the wall, was another creature, this one bound to the wall in thick, white, fabric-like webbing. His skeletal face was frozen and haunted, his eyes gaping, his cheeks sunken. His clawed hands stretched out as though he were reaching for something, straining against the thin film that restrained him taut. The flesh on his arms and chest – if you could even still call it flesh – was covered in patches of what looked like small scales or thick, coarse black hair like the bristles of a hard brush. What wasn’t covered was translucent, like greasy wax paper with thin red, blue and purple veins visible beneath.

  “This one started to change,” Finnegan said. “But something pulled him out of it.”

  “Yeah, and it wasn’t fucking pleasant from the look of things,” I said.

  “What could do that?” Chuck asked.

  “Brom.”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” I said. “He controls them through will…. Wendigos are fucking wild and savage. Maybe harder to control.”

  “A beast like a Wendigo would take more of his energy, allow him to control fewer at a time,” Finnegan said. “He keeps them mostly human so he can control them.”

  The thing on the wall moaned, long and dry like the creaking of an old door, and his outstretched arm began to swing down, the webbing bending with him, and the eyes looked down at us. Its legs began to struggle, and the head cocked to the side as it spoke: “You. I thought I killed you.”

  “I’m a little harder to kill than that,” I scoffed.

  “I know why you have come, but you are too late. The boy is dead.”

  I brought Glory up to my shoulder and I said, “Fuck you, Brom.” I fired.

  The creature’s head shot backward then fell forward again, dangled limply, and was silent. Fluid and grey matter oozed from the hole in its forehead.

  Outside, a gun went off. Ape yelled something, and three more shots rang out.

  “Ah, dammit,” Chuck said. “Here we go again.”

  35

  All around us, the wax figures of the child-fuckers began to come alive, and we moved quickly back through the room. A skeleta
l hand grabbed at Chuck’s jacket, and he spun the Glock up and put two rounds between the creature’s eyes. It let go and staggered back before it toppled over, falling across the doorway to momentarily prevent others from trailing after us.

  The gunfire was louder in the main cave. Ape, Nadia, Anderson and the officers stood together in the middle of the room in a kind of cross-formation, their backs to each other, weapons in-hand sparking muzzle flares into the gloom, and almost every one of the two dozen buildings was issuing forth a small army of Brom’s children, distorted, waxy, and twisted by the dark ritual. All of them were still humanoid, but they were no longer human: the used up, discarded husks of a demigod with no willpower of their own, animated by the twisted will of their Korrigan “father.”

  As Finnegan, Chuck and I charged out of the door, the priest quick-drew his pistols and fired akimbo, a soupedup action hero exploding heads like watermelons at a fucking Gallagher show. The children of Brom began to take notice and charged us.

  I propped Glory against my shoulder and switched to semi-auto. Beside me, Chuck raised his shotgun at armlevel, ducked his head slightly, and we followed in-step with Finnegan.

  As we reached Ape, his sword-cane flashed before him, glowing a dim purple that looked like a beacon in the darkness. “I was going to tell you we found a room full of these bitches,” I called. “But it looks like you might already know that.”

  “Not now, Jono,” he spat, and his blade rent the head of an old woman into two clean pieces.

  Finnegan, Chuck and I fell into formation beside the others, and the throng of creatures swelled around us, pressed in on all sides until we were a lone island in a raging sea of flesh-eating, Brom-driven hobos and tramps.

  I turned Glory to automatic and emptied my clip. By the time I’d chambered my third, I’d dropped a dozen of the things, but everywhere I looked, the heat signatures in my glasses couldn’t have been more intense or intimidating if we were surrounded by wildfire. I flipped the glasses onto my forehead so I could see where one child-fucker ended and another began, using Glory’s light alone to see by.

  “Stay close!” I called out. “Stay together.”

  In the chaos, Nadia cried out, and I turned to her. An old man clung to her back, an arm around her neck. Two more came at her from the front. Before I could get to her, a bright red light threw the old man from her shoulders and she pumped her shotgun and splattered the others without missing a beat.