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The kiddie parks at dusk were always good hunting
grounds, especially in the lower income sections where safety, and
especially good lighting, were not considered high priorities. Whether
humans couldn’t afford to care or simply didn’t mind if a poor child
here or there ended up dead or missing was none of the demon’s concern.
Either way revealed the dark soul of humanity, something he was quite
familiar with. There was nothing as satisfying as bringing a brother or
sister to the right side of the playing board.
Even better than the children were the
old people, the stragglers who perhaps stayed in the park later than
most to feed the cats as they emerged from their hiding places to
reclaim the night. It loved to make the old biddies cry or the doddering
men shit their adult diapers.
Tonight was a lucky night.
A daily double, so to speak.
Still shooting hoops into a warped
metal basked was a young boy, no more than twelve years old. It was so
dark he could barely see where he was shooting, but that didn’t deter
him. In all likelihood, shooting hoops in the dark was preferable to
going back to a home of poverty, despair and possibly abuse.
Watching the boy from a nearby bench
sat a very old man wearing a rumpled suit that must have once fit his
now shrunken frame. A newspaper lay by his hip and a cane was propped
across his lap.
“Mmmmm,” the demon whispered from his
dark hiding place. “Fresh meat and aged wine. Tasty.”
Anyone passing by the demon would have
been wise to keep their stares to themselves at the muscular, hardened
man sitting just outside the rusted fence. Just your average gang banger
obviously looking for a place to get high.
How were they to know it was only a
disguise, the lifeless flesh of what had once been an ordinary man? In a
similar late night setting, that man had been attacked and turned by one
of the thousands of hellspawn that had been given free reign on earth
several years earlier. Now his soul was trapped in a nowhere realm while
his body, inhabited by one of the denizens of hell, was free to destroy
everything it touched.
A woman’s irritated voice shouted,
“Khalid, get your butt inside! You still have homework to finish!”
The boy tucked the ball under his arm
and walked oh-so-slowly back to his house.
“Ooo, you stink. Take a shower first,”
the woman scolded before closing the door.
That left the old man who didn’t seem
to be in a rush to go anywhere.
Not than an old man could rush
anywhere, even if he wanted to, the demon thought with a chuckle. It
checked the nearby houses to make sure no one was in sight.
True, a new age had dawned for all
demon kind, but there were still enemies about. One still had to use
caution. The demon had heard tales from its brethren; stories of a
killer in priest’s clothing, more deadly and vicious than anything
Lucifer could conjure from his demented mind.
The demon’s eyes darted back to the old
man whose chin was now resting in quiet repose upon his chest.
Like lightning, the demon rushed
towards the man. Bloody talons burst through the flesh of its costumed
hands while its face fell away to reveal a maw of puckering holes, each
jammed with rotating, pointed teeth.
It approached soundlessly, as if
gliding on air.
When it was only inches away from the
old man, it felt the fiery jab of steel as a golden crucifix with a
dagger for a base was planted directly into the center of its hideous
mouth.
The fires of hell couldn’t touch the
agonizing searing of flesh as the crucifix dagger obliterated the foul
essence of the stunned shapeshifter.
Dear Lucifer it burned!
“Asmodai, save me!” it shouted.
The old man rose from his seat and
smiled.
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” he
said in a voice far too young to have come from such a dilapidated old
wretch. “The truth is, you never had a chance.”
The man took a step towards the wounded
demon. It skittered back two feet, the way opposing magnets sought
distant corners from one another.
The demon could do nothing as the man
retrieved another blade tipped crucifix from his overcoat. The pain was
unbearable. What in the name of all that’s unholy was in that dagger?
With each passing second, the demon felt its centuries old soul
disintegrating into pure nothingness that made it long for the confines
of Hades.
“And one more for the road,” the man
said before launching the second crucifix between its fiery eyes.
The demon felt, and was, no more.
The door to a dingy apartment in an
equally depressing neighborhood swung open with a loud crash. The old
man from the park bench hopped across the threshold and slammed the door
shut.
“Why don’t you make some more noise
while you’re at it?” said a much younger man sitting at a battered
kitchen table. “I think there are some people in the building across the
street who didn’t hear you come in.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the old man
muttered with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Did you get it?”
“Of course. Can of corn.”
“Good. At this rate we can probably
pick up stakes by this time next week.”
“And just move on to the next place.
It’s never going to end, is it?”
“You should know,” the man at the table
sighed. “It never does.”
The old man dropped his coat and shirt
to the floor, revealing a wiry, toned body clad in a black, form-fitting
tee shirt. He pulled at the tufts of gray hair at his temples. The hair
was easily removed, like silver wads of spider web. He used his fingers
to pick off huge wads of wrinkled flesh on his face and neck. The fresh
skin underneath was tacky with glue.
“Good work on this one. It’s gonna take
me all night just to get it off.”
“I left some remover in the bathroom.
What that doesn’t take off will come out in the shower.” The man at the
table picked up a racing paper and perused the lines for tomorrow’s
races.
“This disguise thing is getting to be a
drag. You should try it yourself, you’ll see what I mean.”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch. That’s why I’ll
always knows it’s you, no matter what disguise you wear, Shane. Your
mouth always gives it away.”
Shane kicked his legs out of the old
man trousers and threw them onto the kitchen table.
“Then I guess it’s lucky for me that
demons aren’t as bright as you.”
“It’s lucky for you that they can’t get
close enough to know you.”
“Hey Tony, I brought something back for
you,” Shane said as he headed for the bathroom. He flipped Tony the
bird, which only resulted in disgusted, heavy rustling of the paper.
It took over an hour to fully scrub
every spot of makeup and latex from his body. When he was done, Shane’s
skin was pink and sore, like a newborn cat.
It was laughable. Demons couldn’t touch
him, but his traveling master of disguise could inflict heavy doses of
pain at will.
Another demon vanquished. An endless
parade of hellspawn and cities to go.
Things had gotten so bad that Shane
didn’t even know the name of the city they were in now. He was pretty
sure it was in the state of Michigan – it was damn cold enough for an
early fall night. Not that it mattered. At least it was nice to be in
the states for a while.
Two years of training his mind, body
and spirit, traveling the globe on a bottomless bank account. Not bad
for a homeless kid from New York. The pay and travel were unbeatable,
though the job left much to be desired.
The Vatican made sure he received
everything he needed so long as he operated in the shadows, much as the
demons had conducted their affairs to this point. His days of painting
were behind him, his artistic talent left to odd doodlings here and
there. Pope Pius XIII had promised him that if they managed to stem the
tide of evil flowing into this world since the debacle in New York City,
he would be given ample time to reacquaint himself with his brushes and
canvas, as well as a chance to study the master in every major art
gallery in the world, not to mention the Vatican’s own vast store of
artistic treasures.
Shane looked at his bare body in the
mirror. He was still thin but his muscles were now rock hard. His
Mohawk, once his pride, had been replaces by a military style buzz cut.
And despite his almost daily scrapes with the worst that hell had to
offer, there was nary a bruise on his body.
Father Michael had been right. His
gift, as he chose to look at it, was truly remarkable. Through the whim
of the Almighty, the citizens of hell could not lay a hand on him. There
were times early on when his confidence in his power was less than
solid. Now that it had been battle tested many times over, he was sure
to the point of cockiness.
Tony knocked on the bathroom door. “I
have some leftover Chinese. You want some?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
Tony was a good guy. He could be a
trifle righteous at times, an expected trait from a Vatican appointed
assistant. Yet he loved to watch the ponies, and occasionally gamble. It
made him human, which in turn gained Shane’s trust.
The smell of Chinese food made him
think of Aimee and their countless take out dinners.
He hadn’t seen Aimee in almost a year
and a half now. No one had seen Father Michael since the day he’d sent
them off to the Vatican – for protection for Aimee and training for him.
Wondering where either of them could be
made his stomach feel like it was filled with restless fire ants. If the
thought too much about them, and especially how much he missed Aimee, he
would be distracted. His job and the countless lives of others demanded
a near supernatural sense of focus and calm.
To just know that Aimee was all right.
He couldn’t put into words how much that would mean. And to have Father
Michael at his side, to learn from him, the benefits would be
immeasurable.
As long as Aimee remained sequestered
and Father Michael missing, he would worry. The trick was to know when
to bury his fears and when to dig them up for brief moments of quiet,
painful reflection.
Shane threw on fresh clothes, starving
and ready to eat.
“Smells good. I hope you got a little
of everything.”
He turned the corner into the kitchen
and gasped.
Tony’s body was draped across the
table, his throat cut, a ragged wound weeping torrents of crimson onto
the tiled floor. White boxes of steaming Chinese food had been placed
upon his chest. Bloody smears and half formed fingerprints painted the
sides of each box.
The apartment was completely silent,
save for Shane’s hollow breathing.
He instinctively reached for his pocket
for a weapon only to find his sweatpants had no pocket.
Shit.
Looking at Tony’s body again, he saw
raw, empty sockets where his eyes should have been.
Now what? He’d never been found before.
The demon in the park must have had a partner that had followed him
here.
“If you wanted my attention, you got
it,” Shane said to the hushed apartment. “Worst part for you is, you
also got me pissed. An angry me is only going to end with a dead you, so
there’s no sense in delaying the inevitable.”
Something hit him in the back.
He whirled around to face the demon at
the end of the hall. It looked mostly human, only with boil covered
flesh and luminescent, yellow eyes.
A quick glance at the ground confirmed
that he’d been pelted with one of Tony’s eyes.
“I’m right here, God fucker,” the demon
hissed, boils popping along its lips and leaking thick, green fluids.
Shane knew the trick was getting to his
room to grab a weapon of exorcism before the beast ran off into the
night. If it had witnessed the scene at the park, it must have known
attacking him was futile. Shane’s room was just behind the oozing beast.
He rushed down the hallway towards the
grinning demon.
“Make way, zit boy!” Shane shouted.
Something smashed across his chest. He
dropped to the floor. The pain of cracked ribs poking into his lungs
brought black specks to the corners of his vision.
“What…the…hell?” he wheezed.
The demon laughed. “Exactly.”
Standing above Shane was a young boy
holding a bat high above his head.
It was the boy from the park.
But if he had been turned by the demon,
how could he have connected with the bat?
Shane’s stomach convulsed, sending
fresh waves of agony as he tensed from retching.
“Better finish him off, kid,” the demon
ordered in a gurgling growl.
The boy was panting like a dog, on the
verge of hyperventilating. Tears streamed down his cheeks as the bat
wavered in his hand.
“But…but,” he stammered.
“Do it or I spend eternity raping your
mother in hell!”
The walls shook from the powerful blast
of the demon’s command. The boy jumped and dropped the bat. It glanced
off the back of Shane’s head.
So that’s how he did it, Shane thought
between the haze of pain. He couldn’t blame the boy.
He had to find a way to get to his feet
and reach the demon without hurting the boy.
“Pick up the bat or I’ll eat your
goddamn face off!”
This time the boy did as he was told
and took a half hearted swing at the side of Shane’s head, connecting
with his temple.
The world went black. Shane could no
longer see or take a full breath.
“Please kid…don’t…” he sputtered. “If
you kill…me, it’s going to…to kill you…next.”
Shane felt the world spin around him.
Every breath brought fire to his lungs.
He was as helpless as a baby.
“If you ever want to see your mommy
again, it’d be best not to listen to him.”
Shane tried to raise a hand over his
head and fell to his side. A splinter of rib pushed into the soft tissue
of his lung.
Time to go, he thought. Hopefully there
will be someone else to fight this war.
I love you Aimee, and I’ll wait for
you.
There was a crashing of glass, but it
sounded distant, followed by grunts and frantic thumping. To Shane, it
was all happening behind the gauze of a faintly remembered dream.
Muffled screaming, then another voice,
too low to discern individual words. A voice more felt in the pit of his
stomach than heard.
Was it real or just the last gasp of a
dying brain?
It didn’t matter, so Shane let the tide
of infinite black drag him under.
He awoke with instant clarity and
bolted upright as if warning bells were sounding around him. The pain in
his head and ribs was gone. The apartment was once again silent and
seemingly empty.
He scrabbled to his feet and ran to his
room, grabbing a crucifix dagger.
When he stepped back into the hallway,
his foot kicked up gray motes of ash from a pile by the doorway. A
similar, smaller mound of soot lay several feet away.
Kneeling, he ran his fingers through
the ash, glancing at the smaller mound across from him.
The boy. Dear God, the boy.
He took a deep, painless breath.
Sunlight trickled in through the half
closed blinds of his bedroom window.
“Father Michael?” he whispered.
Silence.
And again, only louder and filled with
as much hope as fear, “Father Michael? Father Michael!”
To Be Continued...
©K Sheehan, 2007
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