by Riley Mason
At the end of the hall Gabriel stood there, Nasir at his side and four more men stood there. All of them armed and all of them training those automatic weapons slung on their shoulders at the two of them. “Get us the fuck out of here,” I said to the demon.
I didn’t like the silence that came back to me.
Chapter 102
“It’s Pagan,” Gabriel screamed from across the hall, I had to put my fingers into my ears the second that I heard his voice cut across the hall. The only thing that I could hear was Syllis spilling words into my head without using his voice. It’s designed to hold demonic presences and cast them away.
A black light flashed and I was alone in the hall, the flames were still alive and the guns were still aimed at me. I couldn't hear a word they were saying aside from the loud muffle that had made it passed the blockade of my fingers and made it into my hearing. I could see Gabriel pointing his finger down to the ground. It wasn’t going to work, whatever his power was, whatever hold it had on me only worked with his voice. It’s how I got away last time, at least that bit of information made it passed what Syllis took from me. When I nearly ripped out Gabriel’s vocal cords with my bare hands.
I turned, I moved faster than my own head could agree or disagree with the action. The bullets started immediately the second I turned and they started to chew up the floor around my feet, the floor throwing up chips and shreds of itself that were being cut out when the bullets collided with it.
There was another door at the end of the hall, I didn't’ know if it was another sub-basement or it went to the apartments that were above the library. I made it to the end of the hall, a bullet cut through the muscle in my left arm taking a streak of skin with it, another one passed by my ribcage.
By the time I go to the door the adrenaline inside my body was doing well to coat the pain and it held out long enough for me to throw my knee into the steel of the door and shatter whatever lock was holding it shut and I ran up the stairs that were there, taking two at a time until I got at least three levels above the guns.
I threw my body into another door and it let me off at the third level, I needed to find some cover, I needed to find something that would shield me so that I could protect the ricochet’s they had carved into me.
I took the nearest door and didn’t bother to wait that long. I threw my leg into it, it took four tries to get the door unhinged from the lock and the door to slide open. Immediately the gun was out and aimed and training to find the people that lived inside the apartment.
When I got into their house and stood in the foyer, I turned and locked the door again sliding the chain out onto it. There was an old woman in there, she went to scream when she saw me and saw the gun and saw the blood. I moved out her and threw her mouth inside of my hand and stopped the scream before it made a single noise.
“I’m being chased, do that again and I’ll shoot you right in your head, is there anyone else in the house?” I ask.
I can feel tears falling on my hand and I hold her tighter until she shakes her head so hard that the sagging skin under her neck trembles too. “I'm going to take the gun down; do you have a first aid kit in here?”
I remove my hand and wait. “Do you have a first aid kit?” I ask again, put the gun back to her forehead. “Yes or no?”
“Yes,” she says frantically. “Right in here.”
She leads me to a bathroom and I force her into the tub.
I grab the first aid kit that in the medicine cabinet, haphazardly I rip it open and dump the contents into the sink. I pull out gauze and hydrogen peroxide and some of the medical tape that’s in there.
Spinning the bottle, I remove the parts of my skin that are torn through and dump the clear liquid on them and wait for the bubbles to wash out the infection and the dirt that’s already moving through my bloodstream. The skin around the gash is hot, I can see it spinning up blisters already from the cooked metal that cut through me. I grit my teeth as the peroxide falls so deep into my bloodstream that it adds a new pain to the mix.
I do the same to my side and then prop the gauze to it and tape it up until there’s almost nothing left. It takes me a second before I realize that I’m bleeding from my temple too. I check it with the palm of my hand and realize that I have no idea how that happened. It’s taking the vision from my eyes and I aim the gun at the woman. It’s not a woman’s face anymore. It’s moving and changing. Her eyes go cold and dark and her skin looks like it's being peeled off her face and part of her jaw falls and hangs and I can see the tendrils that’s holding it together. I want to shoot but my finger isn’t responding. I tackle her into the tub and quickly dealing with the small struggle that she’s putting up fire three shots into her stomach.
Chapter 103
I lean back reimagining the sound that I just heard and trying to decide how loud it really was and how worried I should be. When I back off I realize that the dead face that I saw wasn’t on the woman anymore. It was the same panic look that I had seen from the side of her when I had my hand on her mouth, it was the same one I had seen when I asked her for a first aid kit.
I check my head again, there’s no blood, not any that I can find either. The gauze is still on me so it wasn’t entirely imagined. The wraith was here too, it was controlling something on the building.
The smell of the fired gun moves into my nose and it dumps more adrenaline into my blood. I get up and move out of the bathroom and into the living room that's covered in plastic, rug, and more than fifty pictures of family that’s hung all over the old woman's’ walls. I look outside to the street below me and have to double blink to make sure that I’m seeing what I think I am.
The creature is outside, I can see it standing there in the middle of a street painted with the darkness of the night above. There are twenty dead bodies with it, all of them standing there at its side. The regular people, the people that should be wandering the streets of Manhattan at this time are frozen in place, none of them moving a single muscle. A fire was burning around the building as well, the wraith and the army with it were just outside the ring of the flames.
I move to the front door mindful of how my steps send ashes through the old wood. There were five of them, that’s how many I can be sure that I saw. I don't know how Gabriel could split them up. I also know that I need to control how much that I hear and how much that I can trust the sounds that I allow in. I turn, see a dish towel hanging from a stove and walk over to it. I move my staff free and cut off a sheet into two small slivers and ball them up and tuck them into my ears. For now, I can’t rely on anything with my hearing.
I go back to the door and stretch out the peephole with enough time to see one of the men passing the doors view and I close the viewer and slide backwards. That’s when I feel it. It's not a sound that alerts me, my ears are well muffled. It's a vibration that I can feel in my fingertips. Every single person occupying an apartment is banging on the inside of their door that’s how I know. Shit.
I turn and I see the old woman, spilling blood on her carpeted floor, her eyes now truly glazed over, it's no longer some figment of my imagination. She’s been risen to do what they want her to do. Again, I cut my blade free and stare at her. She’s walking but slow, unbalanced, and still bleeding all over the place.
As she gets close to me I know I have to move fast. I spring one of the blades free and cut her throat so deep that her head hangs on by a slim strip of tendon and I catch her body before all the weight to her has a chance to hit the floor.
As I lay her down I cut that last strip of her head that’s still moving and put a few more inches between it and the body.
I have to go outside. I have no choice now. I slide open the locks that I put back in place, take my gun out of my back and make sure it fits well in my hand while my other hand holds onto the blade. As I open the door I creep out slow, I don’t want to chance the gun until I’m sure that I have no choice but to use it. The sound in a hallway that echo’s is going to be
like putting a spotlight on my position.
I’m lucky. The soldier has his back to me and he’s not too far. I creep up behind him and drive my blade into the side of his neck so deep that the tip of the blade cuts through the meat of his skin and comes out the other side as I adjust my grip and lower the body and the blade to the floor.
Chapter 104
A bullet plunges into my shoulder this time it's not a ricochet, I can feel it carve through skin and bone as it flies out of the other side. The grip that I have on my blade and the body suddenly are way too heavy for me to hold.
I jump and turn, the momentum is more than enough to twist the blade and carry the body a little more as I unplug the knife from his neck and use my good arm to plunge it into the man’s stomach and rip it up, it cut through the Kevlar, cut through his skin and I step back as parts of his insides splatter out onto the floor.
The pain is quick to send signals to all parts of my body and sweat is suddenly covering me like it leaked out of every pore I have all at once. I go through their gear and take one of their bullet proof vest. I use my foot and slam both walkies on the ground hard enough to shatter them. I don’t want to hear what communications they have. I’ll have to figure out a way out of this without that but I know with Gabriel in the building, he’s not going to make it easy for me.
I grab three more magazines, my gun will fire with them but the ammo is for flesh and blood, the one in my gun wasn’t. They also have adrenaline shots in their leg kits, I take one of those as well and put it in my boot.
Blood is moving down my arm and dripping from my hand. Even with me cutting a piece of my jacket off and tying off my shoulder small pellets still fall down and hit the flooring. It’s leaving a trace and the Kevlar added a lot of weight to me. I’m losing a lot of blood and with that I know I’m losing some of my strength. Even the gun and the blades are getting heavy in my hands and their like extensions of my own arms.
I keep telling myself, two down three to go, two down three to go. It replays over and over again inside my head and it's keeping me calm.
The sounds of the banging on the doors are getting harder, I can hear them now through the stuffed dish towel in my ear. It’s making it difficult to hear or feel out if someone is walking towards me.
I look up and see the stairwell ahead of me and start counting the steps, it's what I do because I'm not entirely sure that I have the strength that it's going to take to get myself up those steps.
I do it anyway, grabbing the railing and pushing down what weight I can on it and then hosting myself up steps that feel like their moving out of the direction of my own balance.
I see another one coming down the steps and I’m standing right below him, I turn and fire five shots, it's enough to pierce the metal of the stairs and cut through his ankles and shins as I catch the vibration of him falling down the steps.
I move to the body, bloodied already at the face and the neck from the fall and put five more shots into his face. I can't risk the turn, anything dead can come back now, I have to make sure that the body can’t be allowed to form into something else.
When Nasir found me next, I almost didn't know what to do. I went to lift the gun but it was kicked out of my hand and then another kick threw me hard into the railing that I was pushing my weight down on.
I went to lift my staff but he already had the gun out on me, I knew he wanted me alive, it was the only reason that the other soldier put one in my shoulder instead of the back of my head.
“Let’s go,” he said to me.
Then a light cut through the room and Bash stood there, his blue eyes looked down at me studying the wounds in my body. He turned and faced Nasir who went to lift the gun in his hand but had it kicked out of his grip.
Nasir ran at him with a double kick, one hit the other was blocked out of the way. Nasir threw three punches, one of them broke his nose and one took his lip, the third was block with his elbow.
The two of them locked elbows before I watched Nasir kick Bash in his center and sent him hard against the wall of the stairwell. Bash hooked him to the jaw but Nasir took it and passed out another one knocking Bash back who caught the momentum and swung both his legs into the air and kicked Nasir in his jaw sending him backwards before Bash flipped out of it.
Bash threw a kick of his own and caught Nasir as he fell back on the stairwell. Bash quickly threw himself on top of the mercenary and laid down five punches that broke bone and brought blood out on his face before he stood and turned back to me. He put his hand out and took me by the forearm. “We need to get out of here.” I didn’t trust him but I wasn't stupid, if he had a way in and out that was better than the odds that I was facing.
Chapter 105
We were back in his trailer. The one that had been attacked by the wraith and his army. He put my down on the chair gently to make sure that he didn't’ instigate any of the wounds that I had on my body.
“How are you holding up?” he asked me.
“What do you mean?” I asked him. “How the hell did you find me?”
A smile streaked his face it was broken but it was there. “I had some help.”
“From who?” I ask the tone in my voice sharp.
“The one you exorcised from my body,” he said almost defiantly. “She’s playing for our side now. I showed her what her brother made you do. That’s not what she wants in all this.”
“And you believe her?” I hiss. “You believe a demon?”
“She’s not a demon,” Bash says back to me. “She never was, only her brother was one.”
“What do you mean?”
“They split. She got the pearly gates, he got eternal damnation. In their old life Azrael killed their entire family with a shotgun, she was the one who survived and forgave him. She gets a pass despite what it did to her head in the process.”
I sit up, easy not to aggravate the bullet hole in me. “I have no way to trust her,” I tell him. I'm not sure exactly what he knows or remembers about Syllis but I don't have him here and now. I don’t know where they sent him and I’m more skeptical and scared then I’ve been in a long time.
“She gave me this,” he said as he reached over and pulled out a curved black short sword curved with an almost bar style hilt. Bash handed it to me, with one hand cushioning my ribs I put my weight on my good shoulder and lean forward and take the blade. It’s light, lighter than I expected it to be. I dig it into my grip and like how it feels. “It can kill the wraith,” he says to me. “Babylonian steel, nine thousand years old.”
“How does she plan on getting us close enough to him. He’s building an army and there’s more than enough dead to fill it. That and Gabriel can convert anyone that he wants to it.”
“Then we need to get Syllis back,” Bash said, it surprises me.
“How do you know?”
“Because she knows and she’s giving me all the information that she has,” he adds. “She knows a lot more than I thought she did.”
“Does she know where he is?” I ask hopefully.
“She does. She knows where they’re keeping him.”
“Then what about me?” I look at him dead in the eye. “I’m not in the condition to rescue anyone.”
I watch as Bash stands up and walks over to me. His eyes are focused but strained at the same time. Chills are starting to reach into my body from the scolding hot skin that was left untreated in my shoulder.
He comes to me and places his hand on my forehead and I can instantly see pain slash his face. His eyes fold in and his face contorts and I can see his jaw pulsating. When I look at his forearm I can see why. Skin is being pulled back and fading from his forearm exposing the wet muscle tendons underneath before the skin stretched back out and clamps down on the form of the bone and muscle.
It’s mesmerizing to see and I want to pull him off of me I can hear the screams that he’s keeping behind his gritting teeth but what he’s doing is healing me. I can feel my own body touching up what
was broken mending the damage in my skin.
Finally, he lets me go, sweat is on his face. “I didn’t know you could draw,” he said weakly.
“What do you mean?”
“You took more than I could give.”
I stand and stretch out the tension in my joints now that I can finally move again. “Where are they keeping him?”
Chapter 106
The car parked about ten feet from the armory doorway. Bash got out first and I followed him. “This is where I keep it,” he said to me as we walked through the dark.
“How much is here?” I ask him.
“Enough to do what we need to,” he says back to me, shuffling his hands into his pocket and then pulling out a set of keys. I tucked one of the keys into a lock and then punched in a code and the lock separated.
“Fort Thomas shut down after the second world war. It was declared a historic site but it only holds that in status not in practice. As far as anyone knows, this place was removed from the books and wiped off the map a long time ago.”
“How did you make an entire fort disappear?” I ask as I walk through the darkness and light the flashlight in my hand.
“You did it before Gabriel,” he said and turned on his flashlight.
We walked down five levels of metal grating steps and into the closet that held his armory.
“The collection got to big for the trailer and I didn’t trust Gabriel enough to keep the weapons there. He’s already tried to kill me more than once and then to use me to kill you. I’m glad you and I took care of this place a long time ago.”
“Me too,” I add even though I have no memory of it whatsoever.
Despite the dust and the neglect, all the weapons look pristine in their appearance. They’re all freshly cleaned and gleaming with the light that we throw on them once we turn on the bulbs in the room which even struggle to stay lit.