Blood Demons

by Richard Jeffries

  He swung his arm along the windshield as Varanasi proper began to appear on the horizon. Even though they were prepared, the Cerberus agents had a tough time taking it all in.

  “It looks like spoiled kids tried to out-do each other with multi-colored religious Lego sets,” Nichols marveled, “and didn’t stop.”

  “Do they have cement docks and forts in Lego sets?” Daniels asked her without taking his eyes off the visual chaos out the windshield. “Add boats and bikes, and a rainbow mob of people, and I think we’re just about there.”

  “Your Mark Twain,” Peters told them, “once wrote that this city is ‘older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.’ And that was in 1897.”

  “Joe,” Daniels complained. “How the living milkshake are we going to be able to find the bastard in this mess? Talk about a needle in a haystack—”

  Key didn’t bother answering. Instead he simply looked over to the driver, who sported a grim grin. Peters took a moment to knowingly return Key’s gaze, then answered the master sergeant.

  “It’s a lot easier to find the pin if it’s painted bright red,” he said. He glanced back at the others as he took an exit far away from the center of the city. “Charles told me you’re looking for a body snatcher, a corpse stealer, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Key.

  “Well, you were sent to the right chauffeur,” he continued as the car began to wind through increasingly restricted streets, hemmed in by structures that looked even older, and uglier, than what Mark Twain was referring to. “Over the decades I’ve become something of an expert in what you might call ‘corpsploitation.’”

  That elicited raised eyebrows from virtually everyone in the vehicle as it began to crawl into a part of town that always seemed in shadow.

  “Charles described your monster to me as you described it to him.” Peters continued as the car grew ever slower on the dusty bricks and dirt of the narrowing roads. “No way he’s hanging out with the holies—not someone like that.”

  Peters pulled onto a small cement platform that was wedged between a grove of gnarled trees and a crumbling maze of rundown buildings. “We’ll have to walk from here,” he advised them. He glanced down at layers of cracked slate. “The roads have been covered by squatters’ shanty towns.”

  They followed where he led them. None had to ask, nor did he feel compelled to explain, that more than a hundred thousand citizens lived in slums spread throughout Varanasi. The interloper and his guests were all pragmatic people who were not prone to figurative bleeding hearts—or even literal ones, if they could help it.

  As they walked, the cracked cement gave way to broken bricks and pulverized plastic, separated by strings of tattered clothing. Anything that could be fashioned into makeshift walls and roofs was—all using ancient stone and rotting wood as skeletons. The only people brave enough to stare back at them were the aged banmas and banpas Peters had referred to before. They were not angry or resentful. They seemed too hungry and resigned for that.

  “Where are the children?” Nichols whispered. “Has our guy been stealing them all?”

  Peters shook his head curtly. “Other monsters are giving him a literal run for the money,” he explained acerbically. “You remember the silk I mentioned in the same breath as the stiffs?” Nichols nodded. “Each piece,” Peters continued, “can cost up to a thousand pounds, because of the tightness of the weave.” He looked directly at the redhead with a slightly sickened smile. “Guess who does that—for slave wages?” He took a moment to scour the area for what he was looking for. “Some say this is the world capital for that sort of thing,” he murmured absently. “One more missing, exploited child, more or less?” He shrugged, seemingly diffidently. “Who notices that sort of thing anymore? Ah.”

  He had spotted the person he wanted. Key looked in the same direction, and immediately picked up on the energy coming from an old woman—seemingly the oldest woman in the immediate area, who squatted on an unseen seat or rock or wall—both hands atop a knobby branch. She practically screamed “village elder.”

  Once again Key was impressed by Lancaster’s contacts and reach, as Peters approached the old woman, waving the others closer.

  She obviously recognized the Englishman—either because or despite his local clothing. He said something urgent to her in one of the many Indian languages. Then she looked at the others, one by one, and started babbling through toothless gums.

  “She says she’s been waiting for you,” Peters translated. “She’s been waiting to tell what she knows, what her family knows, what everyone in this slum knows, what everyone in every slum knows, but no one outside the slums will listen.”

  Key locked eyes with her. Hers looked like sharp pieces of flint sank in watery aspic. She kept talking.

  “If anyone had come looking, or asking, they would have told,” Peters continued translating, “but no one did, and no one here would go out to find someone who would listen, because we need him to take the bodies away. Every day we die. Every morning and every night we die. We cannot eat them, and if we burned them, everything would burn. We would all burn. So we let him take them away. And, if now and again, more than just the dead are taken, who are we to say? Who are we to know? Who are we to count?”

  Key asked Peters, but kept staring at the woman. “Does she know where he is? Does she know where he lives?”

  He watched the Englishman ask, and saw the woman nod. Peters straightened and looked meaningfully at the others. “It is not far,” he informed them. “They even have a sobriquet for his abattoir.”

  Key looked up at Daniels, expecting and receiving his puzzled expression. “Nickname,” he defined.

  “Then why didn’t he just say that?” Daniels asked Key before looking back at Peters. “What is it?”

  “Fire Temple,” Peters told them.

  Chapter 14

  “I don’t like it.”

  Daniels’s hushed comment was an understatement. The sight of it was bad enough, and it had also been difficult to find. At first glance it looked like a combination junkyard and latrine that was just far enough away from the outskirts of the slum to protect what was left of the residents’ olfactory nerves. Upon closer inspection, what initially seemed to be a crumbling part of the refuse’s foundation turned out to be an overgrown, overwhelmed block house.

  Peters had to look especially carefully to find even its entrance—a small, squat opening covered only with what appeared to be a tattered, stained burial shroud, with the words Aag Mandir scratched and scrawled above it.

  “Fire Temple,” the elder Englishman softly translated for the others.

  “Fire temple my third eye,” Daniels muttered as he neared. “It’s a graveyard for garbage.” He glanced at Nichols to see how her enhanced senses were holding up. “This is the last place crap goes before it dies.”

  “I believe everything here is already dead,” Nichols commented.

  “Okay,” Key quietly interrupted, holding up what looked like a little, conical piece of wax between his thumb and forefinger. “Use the new tech.”

  Daniels and Nichols followed suit. They all placed it in their other ears, opposite their ear-comms. Peters was too polite and circumspect to ask the question he obviously wanted to, but the three Cerberus agents noted his expression.

  “We’re guinea pigs today, old boy,” Daniels whispered to him. “Something our tech wiz concocted.”

  Peters’s expression changed to sardonic skepticism.

  “Wish they had been working on ‘nasal-filters’ too.” Nichols gagged.

  “Not a bad idea,” Key murmured. “A little late, but good.” He looked to Peters. “Best to stay here. We know what this guy is capable of.”

  “Oh no, dear boy,” Peters quietly protested. “What if your earplugs malfunction? Or you need an impo
rtant translation?” Seeing Key’s resolute expression waver, he offered a compromise. “Tell you what. I’ll stay back, phone at the ready. First sign of trouble, I’ll scamper. I assure you.”

  Now it was Key’s turn to “not like it.” But he had unavoidable visions of the new tech somehow making them dizzy or off-balance. The tech was supposed to counter whatever these creatures threw at their mind’s chemistry, but he knew damn well that the brain was so complex it really couldn’t even understand itself. And Lancaster Labs got these prototypes to them faster than it took to create a new Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavor. And if the worst happened, being in constant touch with HQ and the airport Lawgiver via their ear-comms wouldn’t be good enough.

  So Key nodded curtly at Peters, then looked to the others, who were both holding what looked like black and silver fountain pens in one hand. With the other, they slipped on what looked to Peters like head-adhering sunglasses that all but sealed their eyes behind concave half-eggs. Key didn’t need to tell him they were equipped with the most advanced night vision Lancaster could acquire. Night-vision that made infrared look like blindfolds. Now even the darkest cave would appear lit by the summer sun.

  With a nod from Key, the three stepped inside.

  None of them thought that a thin, frayed shroud could contain the worst of the stench, but they were wrong. Key forged ahead as Daniels almost covered up his stunned stumble, but Nichols had to take a second to nearly retch before controlling her gag reflex.

  Definitely, Key thought. Definitely going to requisition enhanced nose-plugs. In fact, he hoped Lancaster had already ordered his labs to start creating them. He forced his mind to ignore the foul smells and concentrated on the sights and sounds.

  The abattoir was exactly like a morgue combined with a slaughterhouse that was never cleaned. The “floor” was much like the ground outside—dirt and rock and garbage all packed together, but in here it was also long soaked in skin, organ tissue, bone, muscle, cartilage, blood, excrement, urine, semen, mucous, saliva, and spinal fluid. Both Daniels and Nichols caught nauseating whiffs of even vaginal lubrication. For a moment, the master sergeant was blinded by rage, but he blinked himself out of it.

  Key tried to ignore what he was stepping in to concentrate on the things atop various platforms on the ground. Two were stone slabs, a few were wooden planks, one was sheet metal, and the one in the center was a marble wedge. On most were various pieces of dissected bodies, as if ravaged by starving cannibals. Daniels found himself flashing back to his family dinner table after Thanksgiving, simply as a way of staying sane. But on three platforms, in three different sections of the area, were more recent, less devastated, forms.

  Each agent gravitated to the one nearest them. Key stared down at an old man who appeared to be the corpse taker’s most recent “favor” for the nearby slum—in that the wretched cadaver only seemed a week old. Nichols stared at what initially looked like a child’s doll that had been left out in the sun too long, but she quickly realized it was the child itself—even more shriveled than the ones they had failed to save. Her only solace was that her shades didn’t fog up or dampen. If she was going to stay with Cerberus, it was no time to start tearing up.

  Daniels looked down at the one on the marble slab, wondering if the naked creature was taking up cannibalistic barbecue. This body was the most ravaged. It was so horribly burnt, most of its foot bones were exposed through ashen, flaking skin, and its lips were gone, as was most of its right arm. Daniels only looked away when they all heard Key’s voice.

  “Yeah,” he said to Lancaster more than anyone else. “Seems like he’s definitely still on the run. This place looks like it hasn’t been used for days, if not weeks.”

  “All right,” the retired general sighed, his tone obviously disappointed. “Ascertain what you can and get back here. Be thorough, but things are progressing more rapidly than I would like.”

  Key did not like the sound of that. Lancaster was not one for curbed complaints or pregnant proclamations. “Yes, sir,” he nodded, and turned to start scouring the place for any clues of the bastard’s present whereabouts.

  “I say,” he heard. He turned his head to see Peters in the doorway, daintily holding the shroud curtain wide. “May I?”

  “Might as well, if you can take it,” Key told him. “Anything you can find or figure out that’ll help us would be greatly appreciated.”

  “I know this is most unusual,” Peters replied as he stepped in, “but my sincere thanks. I’ve never seen a more extreme example of ‘corpsploitation’ in all my years of study.” He looked apologetically at Daniels, who had taken a moment to look at him with distasteful disbelief. “It started when my father’s own body was stolen from his grave,” Peters explained as he went from one set of remains to the other. “That was for political reasons, I suppose, but then I heard more stories of necrophilia, family infighting, medical testing, and the like from police, morticians, undertakers, and even private citizens. I have to admit I was disgusted at first, and then increasingly fascinated.”

  “How about more detecting, less sharing?” Daniels suggested.

  “Of course, of course,” Peters agreed. “I’m just nervous, I suppose. Sorry, sorry. My apologies.”

  There were some moments of blessed silence until Peters came to the charred corpse on the marble slab.

  “Now,” he softly mused, leaning down to study it closer, “would you look at this?”

  Back at the airport and in the Chinese Versailles king’s apartment, Gonzales and Lancaster ripped their ear-comms out and threw them down from sheer, agonized instinct, as a screeching ice-pick of pain stabbed their heads. The only one who didn’t, from sheer will-power, was Faisal Safar in the jet’s rear section, who had been distracted by how the equilibrium earplug control panel had gone crazy.

  Key, Daniels, and Nichols would never remember if they heard the screech as their minds were suddenly crushed by confusion, nausea, and pain. Safar wasn’t aware that he had already bitten through his lower lip, and how blood was pouring down his chin as he stabbed and wrenched at the control panel’s buttons and dials, remembering what he had told Lancaster. “As this machine goes, so goes their brains.”

  As the machine’s readouts settled, the screech in Safar’s right ear grew louder and more painful until he, too, had to rip the ear-comm out. By then, however, Key had enough of his senses back to stop staggering. He twisted around to see Daniels hunched almost all the way over, clutching his head, and Nichols in a twitching ball on the squalid ground.

  Then he saw Peters. The burned body had rammed its exposed right arm bone deep in the Englishman’s left ear. The exposed finger bones of its left hand were hooked in Peter’s right ear, eye, and nostril—seemingly almost until the tips were touching inside the Englishman’s head. Key saw that the burned body’s face was tilted to the right, its lipless teeth wide open. From the way Peter’s throat was moving, somehow the burned body had a tongue that was bloating and pumping down the man’s gullet.

  That, horribly, was not the only thing that was pumping. From Key’s angle, he could see a jointed, boney, scimitar-shaped, flesh-covered pipe rammed all the way into Peter’s anus from between the burned body’s legs.

  Key inwardly screamed as pounding waves of disorientation still kept him from completely controlling his spasming limbs. He saw Peter’s facial muscles begin to distort and deflate, as the burned body’s head began to grow lips.

  Key’s scream was no longer inward. He didn’t dare use his Sig Sauer because both Daniels and Nichols were in the line of fire. The three agents made a triangle around the horrid feeding going on in the center of the abattoir—each one terrified, enraged, and seemingly fighting their own muscles to do something—anything.

  Gonzales had all but fallen into the cargo jet’s rear section, lurching over to help Safar at the brainwave device. Dr. Helen had done the same for a quaking Lancast
er, gripping his arms and whispering. “Too complex—testing too soon…”

  “Fuck this,” Key snarled, tearing the plugs out of both ears. As soon as he did, a flood of emotions crashed down on him, but he didn’t care. His hand was filled, as if by sheer instinct alone, with his own version of the fat black-silver pen. With a shriek he dove forward, ramming the barrel into the body’s ear.

  He wished the skull had exploded in his face, almost exactly the way his superior officer’s head had exploded back in Yemen, because this fucker’s head was a lot softer than his commander’s was, and had less brains. This time Key wouldn’t get knocked out by a piece of skull or have a concussion from it. This time he would make the body dance with the fifty million volts coming from the Lancaster Labs’s most recent, most powerful, and most compact stun-stick.

  The burned body made another sound as it twitched, its skeletal hand tearing from Peter’s yawing face. Everyone soon discovered that the right arm was stuck inside the Englishman’s skull because its arm and hand had started growing there. Then the burned body jerked as Nichols’s stun-stick stabbed it at the base of its spine and jerked again as Daniel’s stun-stick connected with its balls.

  It screeched, flailed, and bounced as all three agents stayed with it—seemingly trying to make all three stun-stick tips meet inside the creature’s body.

  “Dance, you bloodless fucker!” Daniels roared as the thing unavoidably began to dislodge itself from Peters’s body. The sounds that accompanied the movements were rancid, drawn-out splats, a waterfall of them, like a pig or steer being gutted, its entrails slopping out.

  First came the tongue, and Key saw something that looked like a boney needle sink into the main tongue as it did. Then that ugly, boney male member reluctantly retreated with Peters’s life essence dripping off it. Finally, the monstrosity yanked and twisted and shook until its right arm came ripping out the side of Peters’s head—with what looked like a fetal arm taking form where its hand should have been.