by Greg Dragon
The woman in the house had let Tracy in and they could hear her talking loudly, trying to get answers from Angelica.
“Let her worry about finding the kid and all of that,” Jaime said to Alysia. “We need to rejoin your father in hunting the demon. He went up that road, so what say we take this one over here?”
They ran up the road without attempting to hide between the buildings like they had done for their few hours of searching. Then the lights cut out completely, and Alysia stopped in her tracks, her hand finding Jaime’s as they backed into a wall. There were screams and the temperature all around them dropped as people went into a panic over the loss of lights. A few floodlights came on, but they were low and red, so the houses became mere silhouettes against a backdrop of crimson.
All around them were glowing eyes, and the sounds of gunshots picked back up.
“LET’S SEE THEM TRY AND HIDE NOW!” a loud voice yelled, followed by a fit of maniacal laughter. Then there came a chorus of cheers as the soldiers began to track the eyes down to kill them.
“I can’t believe someone killed the lights on purpose,” Jaime said as Alysia held her sword up, paranoid that a set of those glowing eyes would pop up on them and beat them to death.
“Oh, no you don’t!” Jimmy said suddenly, and fired two shots into the back of a figure that ran in front of them. The demon he shot was using the body of a soldier, so he was dressed in the armor they wore. Jimmy’s shots didn’t do much damage but the impact of the bullets caused the demon to stumble and Alysia leapt forward and brought her sword down, removing his head.
“Whoa, ninja!” Jaime said, his voice a mixture of admiration and surprise at Alysia’s speed. The blood splattered on them and all over the street, and Alysia looked down at the head with a look of disgust across her face.
“It’s not funny or amusing that we have to do this,” she said, facing him. She pulled out a piece of cloth from her waist and wiped the blood from off her sword.
“See, we make a good team,” Jaime said, and Alysia looked at him as if she couldn’t believe it.
“I figured that out since the beginning,” she finally said. “Why do you think I always come and get you when there’s trouble?” Jaime laughed when he thought about how she said it. Her tone reminded him of people who were caught red-handed but still acted as if they were innocent.
“You know, I always thought it was because you liked me or something,” he said, and she rolled her eyes and sheathed the sword.
~ * ~ * ~
When James Knight left the company of Tracy and his daughter, he had seen a little girl running behind the buildings and had decided to track her down. He didn’t know who she was and wasn’t sure if his mind was playing tricks on him, but he wanted to stop the demon and save as many lives as he could. A child would not be able to handle the cold or the attacks of the demon so he had to make sure she was okay.
He had tracked her for about fifteen minutes when he came upon the woman that had attacked him in the woods, and in her arms was Angelica’s Maria. It was so sudden and unexpected that he literally rubbed his eyes, and as she looked at him with what seemed like lust, he raised his gun and aimed at her head.
“You don’t want to do that,” she said to him, her voice sounding like a multitude of voices instead of the sultry, feminine one that he expected to hear.
He noticed that he didn’t feel cold, and that her eyes were no longer glowing. It was frightening and mysterious, this female demon that talked, and he wondered if the entire time she had simply blended in with the civilians that now locked themselves inside their homes.
“Put the baby down and step away from her,” James ordered the woman, but she simply smiled at him and stood where she was. There was something odd about Maria: she didn’t seem to recognize James, and she looked extremely comfortable in the demon’s arms.
“Shooting me will not end us. We will not die,” she said, and she flashed him a wicked smile. “You have tried to kill us before. Why do you think you can do it now? We are beyond death, but you must listen, or this one will be turned and made to join our legion.” She followed the threat by using a hand to touch Maria’s nose and the tiny girl started to laugh as if she was with a loving aunt.
James lowered his gun and considered his options; he had not expected to run into the demon alone. If he had Tracy with him, or a few of the soldiers that knew him, he would have opened up on her because she would not have an easy escape. He stood with his feet slightly apart, and watched the demon as she bounced Maria in her arms and smiled at him.
“Maria, hide!” James shouted as he reached behind him for the E11 Sultan Magnum he kept tucked away in the small of his back. The little girl buried her face into the demon’s shoulder and hugged her close, just like she and James had practiced when they traveled to the bunker.
He brought the gun around and pulled the trigger, ripping a hole into the face of the demon, causing her to leave her feet and fall on her back with Maria still holding on for dear life. James sprinted to the fallen demon and grabbed Maria with one motion. He swung her around to his back, and she locked her legs around his body and held on tightly to his neck.
“Good job, baby girl. You remembered. I’m so proud of you!”
“I’m your little soldier,” Maria said proudly, and she hugged him close as he slipped between the buildings and made his way back to Tracy.
The demon huntress, blinded and disoriented, tried to regain her vision. The shot from the powerful handgun had blown a hole in her face and the bullet flew through as if unobstructed and lodged itself within the bunker wall. The wound was taking too long to heal, so she summoned the darkness from her minions to collect itself around her body and heal the wound from James’s bullet.
As the darkness left the bodies of the possessed, it released the control she had over their minds, leaving them petrified and moronic. They became easy targets for the soldiers, who took full advantage to cut them down. The darkness, freezing and vicious in its form, came to her quickly, and before long, she was healed and whole again.
She threw all caution to the wind and made to pursue James, determined to punish him for what he had done. She cut through the buildings and grabbed a soldier, freezing him where he stood, and pouring one of the many demons that lived within her into his helpless form. He was instantly changed and ready to protect her, and she sent him ahead of her to find James Knight.
The lights came on, bright and painful to her eyes as the ceiling reflected the sky outside and the darkness wrapped itself around her like a shield. She slid out into the streets, looking like everyone else out there running about screaming or lost, the soldiers and guards pushing them to get back into their temporary homes.
She didn’t run, but simply walked, terrible and beautiful, as she moved with determination to the area where James Knight had run. The only way that people around her could tell that she didn’t belong was by the black, misty shadow that seemed to move with her. It whipped around her legs as if it was a living thing and unlike her, it was sinister and unnatural to witness.
She set her gaze forward and kept on walking until she got to the area where James, Tracy, Jaime and Alysia were waiting in anticipation of her attack. They were ready for her and their weapons were drawn but she paid them very little attention. Her focus was on killing James, and she would not let them distract her from her goal. She saw the minion that she sent, dead on the ground, and when she got near him, a few soldiers encircled the square and had their weapons pointing at her.
“You’re not going to get the baby,” James said to her. He pointed the Sultan Magnum at her, the same weapon that had done so much damage to her earlier. It made her hesitate, the pain still fresh in her mind. Next to him was the girl, his daughter, Alysia who brandished a more ancient weapon that she had used to hurt her badly when she was in the forest.
She looked around desperately but there was nowhere to run, so she screamed at the lot of them and sent the darkn
ess out, spinning it like a tornado into their midst. For every man and woman it touched, there were screams of agony. The cold was so intense and painful that some of them dropped their weapons and fell to their knees. The soldiers started shooting at her, but even though she was getting hit, she kept the shadow spinning and focused it on each member, freezing them to the bone and killing them before moving it to the next.
Alysia saw what the demon was doing, and that the bullets of the weapons the soldiers used were not enough to stop her. James could not shoot the magnum, even if he wanted to. It was too close for that sort of weapon, and the risk of shooting one of his men was too great for him to do it. His hesitation did not go unnoticed by the demon, and she broke a part of the shadow off to send it at him as she continued to kill the soldiers one by one.
More ran into the square to fight her, but the darkness only grew to accommodate them. Jaime was on the ground, unmoving and Alysia couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen him go down. Tracy was back by a house with Angelica and Maria, sticking to her promise to keep them safe, and though she wanted to join the fight, she stood with them just in case the demon switched focus.
The carnage continued, and the road was littered with the bodies of the men and women who had fought bravely against the demon huntress. Alysia saw her father rolling around, trying to fight the shadow that engulfed him, and it was in this instance that she realized that she was alone.
Her only family member was dying, and her friend was in terrible shape. The stress of the situation overtook her actions and she teetered on the precipice of inaction and suicide. It was the type of choice her father had always reminded her would come to a warrior. Fight or flight … there was no third choice.
The demon threw more darkness to engulf her as she stood, and though it hurt—a sort of burning sensation instead of cold—she dashed in and swung the sword in an upward arc, catching the top of the demon’s abdomen and leaving a bloody gash where it struck. The shadows felt like hundreds of tiny razor blades, threatening to cut her to bits, but she refused to succumb to the pain and the weakness, spinning a back fist into the demon’s jaw and bringing the blade down onto her shoulder.
Shadows left the soldiers and rushed in to help their master, spinning like a maelstrom of black around the two fighting women. Alysia was all rage as she fought through the pain, whipping the blade this way and that, catching parts of the demon’s body whenever she would swing.
The demon brought all the cold she could muster to stop Alysia, but she couldn’t control the shadows, not while the strange blade of that crude weapon distracted her with sudden pangs of pain. In one desperate move she grabbed it. The naked blade cut into her hand but she held it still. She came face to face with Alysia as she held it, but the young girl was not stopping her attack.
With her sword held, Alysia brought a leg up and snapped three quick roundhouses into the demon’s jaw. She loosened the blade to let the shadows heal her hands, but Alysia was back at it again, cutting this way and that. The panicked demon retreated from the girl, pulling the shadows into her so that she appeared as a pillar of blackness, with glowing eyes piercing through to stare at them.
James Knight saw an opportunity, stood up with the magnum, and fired a single shot into the black mass. The bullet ripped through the chest of the demon and plastered her against a building, where she began to shake, and the shadows moved in, trying to heal her as fast as they could.
“Light her up, now!” James yelled, and the remaining soldiers began to fire on her fallen body. It was loud and terrible, this murder of the demon, and she screamed so loudly that Alysia thought it would damage her eardrums. The shadows gave up on healing their host, and faded into nothingness after ten minutes of continued shooting. The demon was dying and in her last breath, she screamed out.
“ALYSIA KNIGHT!”
It was frightening to hear her voice with its multiple tones, and Alysia knew she was in trouble. She crawled over to Jaime’s body, who hadn’t moved during the entire ordeal, and though she felt as if she had been in a car accident, she wanted to make sure that he was okay.
“Jaime?” she whispered, touching his face.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m alive,” he said and reached down to feel for a cigarette. “It felt like a million icicles hit me. But you, you took it like a champ and kicked her collective ass,” he said. “Good job. I’ll be damned if I didn’t lose my box of cigarettes.”
Alysia laughed at his words and then lay down next to him. She held the sword above her head and examined the blood that stained its blade. It was an odd contrast to the bright blue sky reflected on the ceiling of the bunker and she wondered if the demon was truly dead.
“CeeCee, Jaime, can you all move?” Tracy asked as she and Angelica walked over to them and helped them up.
“I’m all right for now,” Alysia said. “But I can’t stay here.”
“What do you mean you can’t stay here?” her father said as he walked over to them.
“Did you hear what she said, Dad?”
“Yeah, she screamed your name. I would scream your name too if you put a whooping on me the way you just did to her.”
“No, she threatened my name. I told you they want me. They’ve wanted me since the very beginning and it’s the reason why they kept capturing me and not killing me like everyone else. Dad, that giant lifted me up as gently as he could before we killed him, and the demons took me into their camp to make me into something like her. Now I’m a threat. Just think about the way she said my name.”
“So they no longer want you,” her father said as he began to check her arms and legs for any wounds from the demon.
“I am a threat, and so are you. I think that they use female hosts for whatever reason, but if they cannot have me, they will send more to try to take me out. Just look how much damage just one of them is able to do. I cannot honestly stay here and allow more people to get killed over me.”
“So, we’re leaving then,” James said, and he looked around at the crowd of people that gathered to stare at his daughter in awe.
“They got Debdan, and I freaking hate this place,” Jaime said as he walked over to stand next to Alysia. “I’m leaving with you guys.”
“Are you sure, Jaime?” Alysia asked.
“Shut up,” he said, shaking his head at her as if what she asked was so ridiculous.
“Need some police back up?” Tracy asked, and James looked as if he wanted to object. “Don’t you dare, James Knight,” she said to him and then shot him a glance that could probably cut a diamond. Alysia saw the exchange as confirmation for what she believed: Tracy and her father had become more than friends and it probably happened while he was in the clinic. She wanted to tell Tracy that she wasn’t invited, but that would be her acting like a child. She saw the way her father looked at her, and as much as it stung, she decided to let them be.
“So that settles it,” she said. “We go to the surface and try to see if we can get help.”
“I don’t think that it’s gonna be so bad,” Jaime said, and he pushed his way out of the square to walk back towards his bunker house. Alysia followed behind him, and James stood back to brief the remaining soldiers on what their plan was.
~ * ~ * ~
Jaime and Alysia opened the door to his bathroom and kept their weapons ready for the possessed Debdan. What they found was red gook smeared all over the walls, and evidence of an escape out of the building. They ran outside to track it, and it led back towards the entrance. They followed the bloody footsteps as they moved onto the road and up the ramp towards the bunker’s entrance.
“We need to wait for my father and Tracy,” Alysia said, and Jaime stopped and whipped around to look at her.
“What’s going on between you two?” he asked.
“Me and my dad?”
“No, you and Ginger Fury, the cop,” he said, making a motion with his hands to emulate Tracy’s wild, bushy hair.
“I think she and my dad are da
ting but hiding it from me,” she said to him.
“What’s the big deal? She’s pretty hot, and your dad isn’t old.”
“Of course you wouldn’t get it. How would you feel if you lost your mom and your dad was out and about loving on other women?”
Jaime put a finger on his lip and walked around as if he was in deep thought. Alysia could see that he was still in pain, but he didn’t want to show it.
“So, it’s the end of the world, Mom dies, Dad wants to get some action before he joins her. Is that what you’re saying? Well hell, I’d be like, hell yeah, Dad! Get you some!”
“You can be such an insensitive jerk when you want to be, you know that?” she said. “Why don’t you stay and spare me the annoyance of dealing with you out there.”
“I could kill for a cigarette right now,” Jaime said, ignoring her words, and ignoring the topic they were discussing. “Alysia, when things go crazy people act out of character and do things that are outside of the boundaries of what we would consider normal, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying your dad probably cries himself to sleep every night because of your mom, but Tracy is the type of girl to help him through it. I see how you are and I know you’re not helping him. Let your old man be happy. If it were the other way around I’m sure he’d want you to be happy.”
Alysia bit her tongue on the objection she was about to make, and looked around to observe the bunker’s situation. People were leaving their homes to look at the aftermath of the demon’s terror, and a few of them stopped to thank her and Jaime. Tracy and Angelica walked up towards them, and Maria was sitting up on James’s shoulders, trailing behind the two women.
“Let’s get some things together and make a plan for the outside,” he said as he walked up and placed the skinny young girl on the ground.
“Will we see you again?” Angelica asked, a hint of sadness in her voice as she looked at Tracy and then at James.