AFTERTASTE

by Scott, Kyle M.

  Corruption. Complete and with no need of outside influence.

  Perhaps the Devil, if such a being or beings existed, already resided within him.

  “Almost there, Johnny Hardon,” Rod mocked.

  John said nothing. Silently, he prayed, with no bias to any religion or deity.

  Jesus, Allah, Buddha...if you’re out there, please fill me up with light. Help me find my way back to who I was. Who I want to be.

  No god, Christian, Muslim or otherwise, heeded his feeble call, half-hearted call.

  Together, John, Rod and Beth turned the corner off Main Street, straight into the heart of town. The mom and pop stores on either side of the street fell away, and there it was...

  Their destination.

  Just as he’d known it would be.

  Waldo’s Burger Emporium.

  The lights from inside illuminated the streets outwith, and as John took in the scene in all its terrible majesty, his silent prayers fell still, died in a dark pit inside him, and the last vestige of humanity shredded.

  God was nowhere to be found.

  He looked upon the madness that welcomed him.

  Fuck god, he thought, grinning now like one gone wild.

  CHAPTER 25

  The tall man watched from his office, his array of cameras circling him, as he glared with dark, baleful eyes at the procession gathering outside.

  So many left.

  So many souls still to feast on.

  They had been coming for almost an hour now. The survivors...battle-damaged remnants of a once peaceful and jubilant township. A people decimated by their own carnality and bloodlust.

  A dark vapour swirled around his form, as he allowed the black energies to fill him. He revelled in the bestial, murderous power, contained in those fragile, flesh and blood bodies, below.

  So easily corruptible.

  So easily led away from the light.

  All it had taken was one little push.

  He groaned in delight, a bestial, guttural growl, from deep with the bowels of his abysmal heart, as he watched the gathering mob push together at the threshold of the restaurant.

  Many were already naked, painted from head to toe in the blood of their loved ones, their neighbours and their friends.

  He laughed as he spotted one man, swinging around a severed head before dropping it into the hundred strong crowd.

  He clapped his cold, bloodless hands together as the area around the man cleared a little, and a number of the townsfolk began an impromptu game of soccer. The head leaked fluid, burst open by increments, as the wild group took turns kicking it back and forth.

  The tall man leaned forward towards the console before him, hit the zoom button, and took his fill of the sight.

  One eye had been kicked free of the bloody battered head and stomped into the parking lot’s cement like a rotten egg, before his attention was drawn left of the charming little game.

  There, amidst the squalor of the masses, he caught sight of something even more delightful.

  It seemed that a few of the towns ‘untainted’ had survived the initial sowing of the fields.

  Two young girls and an elderly gentleman, it seemed, had somehow made it this far into the evening.

  He could tell immediately that they were not part of the larger group.

  The stark terror that spewed from their disgusting souls in waves as they huddled together, was testament to that.

  The older man, decent and chivalrous to the end, was attempting to shelter the two teenage girls from the braying, salivating mob.

  It was useless, of course.

  The laughing, teasing mob soon lost interest in toying with their prey, and pulled the man loose from the screaming girls.

  As one, they grabbed his arms and legs, hoisted him from the ground, and began pulling. Cheers and clapping drowned out the brave old gent’s wails of pain, as his muscles tore and his bones snapped. His ligaments ruptured, almost simultaneously, as the crowd tore him limb from limb. His questioning eyes searched the clouded skies above, before finally, the lights went out. The crowd dropped the various pieces of the pensioner to the ground, and began stomping.

  Then they fell on the two girls.

  Pride swelled in the tall man’s putrid soul.

  What a day it had been.

  Still, the best was yet to come.

  With a contented sigh, he wrapped his spiderlike fingers around the microphone. Smoke billowed from his rancid gullet and drifted up to meet the shadows circling him as he addressed his staff.

  “Well done, everyone. You’ve done exceptional work, and will be well rewarded. Time to let in our hungry and eager clientele.”

  As he lent back in his chair, taking pride in his accomplishments, his eyes caught sight of something else.

  Something infinitely more interesting that the capering, intoxicated crowd below.

  The camera that patrolled the far reaches of the car park had been empty only moments ago, but now, three figures filled its lens.

  A man and woman, naked and ravaged, lost in the wonders they beheld.

  And a teenage boy.

  The tall man’s eyes clouded over, his pupils choked out by shadow till his orbs were black as the pit.

  The naked couple were his.

  It was written in the counters of their expressions, it’s perfect stink pulsated from them.

  But the boy.

  The boy looked terrified.

  And excited.

  He wasn’t one of the tainted.

  Yet here he was, led here perhaps, yes, but here he was.

  And he wanted to be here.

  The Tall Man smiled, his black gums excreting a malodorous drool that coated his cracked lips.

  Just when he thought he’d seen it all.

  As the doors to Waldo’s swung open, and the eager, frenzied crowd poured in, he roared in laughter.

  Outside, the trees that lined the roadside withered and died, at the sound of him.

  CHAPTER 26

  “So can we kill it?” Meg asked.

  Tim had no easy answer.

  “Kill it? I don’t know. I don’t think you can kill something that’s never really lived, not as we know it ‘living’ anyway. But can we stop it? Yes, I think we can.”

  “You think?” Slim chipped in.

  Tim nodded his head sheepishly.

  Slim frowned, “What is this thing we’re going to ‘not kill’, exactly?”

  “It’s like I said...”

  “A demon,” Meg finished, staring at the small heap of freshly turned soil where the three had hastily buried the remains of the child. It seemed like the least they could do.

  It was something.

  A little humanity in the midst of an inhuman storm.

  “When I say it’s never really lived,” Tim continued. “I mean that it had no corporeal form. No real one. The man that’s running that restaurant is no man. He’s an emissary. A dark one. Something that had existed out of time and space as we understand them, for millennia.

  “There are realms and dimensions other than the one that we inhabit, and it’s from one of these dimensions that this creature has forced its way into our world.”

  “Hell.” Meg’s voice sounded flat, void of emotion.

  “Yes, I suppose it’s a place that you and I would call Hell.”

  “You suppose?” Slim countered. “You said it was a demon. Demons come from Hell, unless I totally misunderstood Sunday School.”

  “You did misunderstand Sunday School,” Meg quipped, a small smile reached her lips.

  “Screw you, babe,” Slim was smiling, too.

  Tim felt heartened that the two girls had found the strength to recover a little of their verve so quickly.

  They were adaptive, these two.

  Strong.

  Tim knelt beside the tiny burial mound, deep in thought.

  “I don’t believe in heaven and hell,” he said, bluntly.

  In unison, the girls huffed,
“What?”

  “Not in the Christian sense. Not in the sense of a place created by some white-bearded, all-loving spaceman. The old books don’t hold any weight with me. The Bible, the Koran...I have no time for either of them.”

  “But you’re a demon hunter...” He could feel Slim’s eyes on him, questioning.

  “It’s simply a term I use...an easily identifiable word for these fucking monstrosities. Are they pure evil? Yeah, they are. Are they emissaries of a higher, or lower, power in the universe? Sure. Do they spawn from a dimension that breaths cruelty and exists on torment...?”

  The question hung in the air, like poison, for an endless moment, before he went on.

  “Yes. They do. But don’t think of these beings in the Christian sense. This is far, far worse than being punished by an angry ‘sky daddy’. These things are older than anything mankind understands, and far more evil. They’ve been trying to break through to our realm for millennia, and believe me when I say they’re restless in their pursuit of our domain. They desire only to reap despair and torment all across the chasms of space.”

  “Isn’t that what the Bible claims them to be?” Meg asked, unsure of herself, and of her upbringing. She, like Slim, had been raised with only a vaguely Christian upbringing. Both sets of their parents being agnostic.

  In a town like Plainfield, the secular idealism that had spread across the globe, enlightening many, had not yet set root. The township, at least until this awful day, were garden variety Christian, so in many ways, the stories stuck.

  She knew very few who actually practiced their religion, and she doubted even less of them had studied the text, but there was no one - child or adult - in town, who didn’t know the stories of the Bible – Jesus, Moses, Satan, Heaven, Hell.

  Sin.

  Eternal torment.

  All that shit...

  Both girls, like their parents, saw themselves as agnostics, but to hear someone from Tim’s line of work state pretty much the same thing was both perplexing and terrifying.

  Sensing their confusion, Tim tried to explain.

  “The myths and scare-stories that we, and all societies, find in their religious texts are little more than that...myth.

  “They serve as cautionary tales and, in many cases, as systems of control, but they aren’t meant to be taken literally. Is it possible that therein lays a grain of truth in the writings of these scriptures? I think so. Like I said, the armies of the abyss are older than our Sun. There have been witnesses over the long centuries of man...men and women who have learned of the ancient enemy that seeks to break through to our world.

  “These people have endeavoured to illuminate the human race to the threat that claws at the very fabric of our reality, since we crawled out of the fucking oceans. Religious texts illustrate man’s attempts to express the truth about these beings. Sadly, in doing so, they only serve to widen the gap between reality and fantasy. The dark ones who wait on the other side...they don’t give a good fuck if you sin or otherwise...they simply wish to eat our souls and shit them out, over and over, forever.”

  “Nice,” Slim grimaced.

  “I’m not looking to be nice, kid. I'm looking to help you understand that, yes, these are what we would term ‘demons’ and the place that birthed them is what we would call ‘Hell’, but the important thing...the really important thing...that you must understand and take to heart, is that there is no God out there looking out for us. No protector that can save us. And if there is, then he or she is too fucking busy to show up.”

  “Fuck,” Meg sighed.

  “It’s a big universe...too big the likes of us to understand. All we can do is try to survive in it, on our little rock in the middle of endless space, surrounded by burning planets, countless dimensions and hidden realities. One of whom wants to claim us.”

  “You’re not making this sound fun, Tim,” Slim groaned.

  “I'm not trying to. Evil is real, and perhaps there is a God or Gods out there, but they have no truck with us. We’re fucking ants who learned how to shit in a bowl...apes who figured out how to surf free internet porn. We’re of no concern to the universe at large.”

  “Except these demons want to overthrow us...” Slim held her head in her hands, as though this whole thing was too great a matter to manage.

  Tim knew how she felt.

  “With these things, it’s different. As far as I understand, there was never any place in any heaven for the being we think of as Satan. And there are no limitations on His power, other than the veil that separates our worlds. Forget what you’ve learned. The forces that are out there, they thrive on doubt, on misinformation, on the weakness of the human psyche. They only want what we have.”

  “Our world,” Meg whispered.

  “And our spirits,” Tim continued. “They’ve never existed. And for that, they despise us. They deal with us when it suits their agenda, and they coerce the lesser among us to their dark pursuits. Governments...leaders in the highest echelons of power...”

  “This is an invasion.” Slim wasn’t asking a question.

  Tim nodded, “An invasion that has been taking place since the moment we achieved sentience. They hated our world long before we arrived. Hated its vibrancy. It’s life. Its beauty. When we arrived, heralding ourselves as claimants to the throne, their hatred grew to infinity. For all their power, they can never have what we have, and their fury has burned away at their core out of time and into forever.

  “They are our ancient enemy. The monster under the bed. The Devil in the scriptures. The whisper in the minds of madmen. And they will never stop until they have devoured us all.”

  “So why haven’t they?” Slim asked. Her voice was barely audible, awed.

  “They have no way through. No way large enough to break the seal once and for all. There are rents...tears between the worlds though which they can find footing. They come to us in our dreams, in our nightmares, and every so often, they find a gateway...a way through to our world.

  “There are dark arts that can invoke them, and they often use our own religious texts against us, our need for power and for control. Blood sacrifices, hidden places where our own innate darkness has infected the fabric of reality. Places of atrocity, or of man’s wilful evil. My hometown was one such place. My ancestor, he understood the black arts...practiced them...and he was able to seek their countenance. It was a lie, of course, and in time, they found their way through.

  “An army of hell-spawn...a battalion of dark beings sent to claim their master’s prize. And they did so. Lucky for the rest of us, the gateway was closed...as was part of the bargain, but there are others...not just here in Plainfield.”

  Slim stood with a groan, stretching her legs, “How do you know all this?”

  “I’m not the only one out there who’s hunting these things.”

  “There are more of you?”

  “It’s like I said, we’ve known about these beings since our first moments of consciousness. I was sought out by others, who learned of the tragedy that occurred in my own home and saw it for what it was. I was one of a handful of survivors of the onslaught, and the only one directly linked to the cause of it all. They knew, I would make it my life’s work... finding and eliminating these things. So far, I’ve done a pretty good job, too. I’ve sent a number of these bastards back to the black pit, but never any that were even half as powerful as the creature that’s infected the soul of your town.”

  Meg ruffled her hair, as though trying to shake of the madness that clung to her brain like vapour, “So, how do we kill it?”

  Tim reached behind him, fumbling under the folds of his leather jacket, and produced a dagger.

  Slim recognised it as the same one that she herself had used to slay the girl-thing on the bed upstairs.

  Once again, she marvelled at the contours of the weapon; the intricate, dark carvings etched into its steel, the skulls that embellished its oak handle.

  Again, she sensed its dark power.
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  Were it not for the deadly intent that an object such as this could only wield, it would have struck her as beautiful.

  Tim held the blade up for both girls to see, understanding that Meg, in her earlier stupor, had little chance to take it in, in all its dark wonder.

  The power seemed to thrum from deep within the metal, and as it caught the waning moonlight in its steel, Slim felt sure she saw the face of her mother, long gone, ethereal, as formless as a loving thought, or a fading memory.

  Tim held the weapon out for the girls to see. “This is no ordinary blade. It’s one of only three in existence that we know of. Who forged it, and how they imbued it with its power has been lost through the fragments of the ages. What we do know...” Tim stared into the gleaming steel, seeming to look beyond the physical. “Is that it’s sharp.”

  Slim took a step closer, feeling the energy flow from the dagger. She noticed that Meg, too, seemed drawn to it. As one, they gazed at it.

  “How sharp?” she asked.

  “Sharp enough to cut through dimensions”, Tim whispered, in awe of the dagger himself

  Both girls were silent.

  “This blade,” he went on, “has the power to slice through the very tendrils of reality. To sever the ties that bind together what we think of as the infinite. In the right hands, it could perform great evil, allowing the dark ones to enter our realm in their hundreds and thousands, but in the right hands. In the hands of inherently good souls, it can be used to not only to tear between the worlds, but to cut these bastards down to size. Send ‘em back to daddy, with their fucking tails between their legs....

  “I like to think that when they get there, he’s none too happy with ‘em.”

  He spun the blade in his hand, seeming to enjoy its weight.

  “The foot soldiers. The black souled among us that allow corruption to take hold with a willing heart, they can be killed just like any other asshole. Same goes with the lesser demons like the ones my family encountered when I was a boy. But the higher demons...to put an end to them requires something a little more powerful.”