“I don’t… I don’t know what happened… I can’t remember…”
Tara had heard enough. Her heart bled for the girl. She walked around the gun-counter and moved gently toward her.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to remember. You can just come with us, okay?” She held out her hand. “You don’t have to be alone anymore.” The girl sniveled a bit and could hardly bring herself to move into plain sight. “What’s your name?”
“K-k-kitty…”
“Yur name’s Kitty?” Jimmy was in love.
She reached out for Tara’s hand and Tara put her arm round her.
“You’re gonna be okay, okay?” She hugged her, rubbing her back. “You can help us. Do you know your way around the stockroom?” She nodded. “Good. Then show me where they keep the keys for the gun-lockers. As soon as we get what we need, we’re gonna get you out of here.”
2
Marty’s newly acquired “hog” growled through its exhaust pipe with the same vigor and ferocity that fueled his own drive – he and the Harley went together like Tabasco Sauce and tequila. He’d made it a little over two miles from the graveyard when the only sound that could’ve gotten his attention over that of his bike’s exploded behind him. Four large plumes of fire and smoke rocked the city streets when the United States government attempted to make themselves a part of this new world by way of force… But Marty knew their efforts would be in vain. They might’ve gotten lucky and taken out a few random soldiers, but their attempt to hit the cemetery – the heart of the dark anarchy – undoubtedly would fail.
He slowed down and stopped the bike to look back at his City of Angels being enveloped in flames. He couldn’t help but be impressed with the sight of it. Its chaos was awe inspiring. …One frightfully despotic woman brought about all of this…
He sat and stared for a moment when he realized the changes in the city were feeding off the fresh destruction. He could feel Hell getting stronger with the burning of the missiles, and the city almost sounded as if it groaned sadistically in tune with the change. Something big was going to happen soon, something this world would never fully recover from. If someone didn’t do something to stop it, Hell was coming to Earth to claim its prize, and that prize would be all of humanity.
Out of the corner of his eye, a blurred figure interrupted his thoughts, and he turned his head to see what caught his attention. Someone had ran across the street behind him and ducked behind a bush on the sidewalk before he could make them out. It looked too small to be a man. It was either a kid or a woman, he wasn’t sure. He looked into the foliage with his monotone vision and spotted a white t-shirt behind gray leaves. He couldn’t distinguish the color of flesh, but heard the sound of breathing as easily as he would wind in a hurricane. When he focused his attention, he realized he could hear a heart beating as well, and could practically taste the aroma of her skin on his tongue. It was a girl. And by the smell of her, an attractive one.
He turned off the engine and slowly dismounted, turning toward the pounding heartbeat behind him. He realized he was probably scaring the crap out of the poor thing as he approached, so he tried defusing her fright by speaking up.
“You can come out. I’m not gonna hurt you. …I’m not…” He wanted to say, “I’m not one of them” but wasn’t sure if he’d be telling the truth. He decided to skip that part until he figured out what the hell he actually was. “I know you’re scared. I can hear yur heartbeat. And if I can hear it…so can they.” He stepped closer, then stopped, not wanting to spook her into running. He wasn’t sure how to go about this. He didn’t want to just leave her out here alone, but didn’t have time to babysit a random stranger. If she didn’t want his help, he’d have to move along.
“Look… I’m kind of in a hurry… I’m, uh…” he glanced back toward his bike, “…parked in the red. I’d hate to get a ticket on our first date. Wouldn’t want you thinkin’ I’m some kind of troublemaker.” He waited for her to pick up on the joke, but realized right away his humor would likely go unappreciated. “So, if you wanna get out of here, then let’s take a ride. I have to find my sister, and you can come if you want…but I can’t wait around for you to make up yur mind.” She didn’t respond, so he decided on trying something a little less threatening than towering over her in the middle of the street. “I’m gonna head back to my bike and wait for you. If you decide you don’t wanna walk over there on yur own, I’ll leave.”
He turned, heading back leisurely. When he got there, he straddled the hog and sat quietly before he spoke again. He gave her a few seconds, then figured he’d ease her mind with polite conversation.
“What’s yur name?”
The girl stayed behind the bush like it harnessed steel bars protecting her from a lion, peering nervously through the spaces between branches. Him not ripping the plant from the ground and tearing her arms off was a good sign as far as her judgment of his character was concerned, but even without him being a kill-crazed, red-eyed monster, he was still an alarming sight to see. His skin was dry and smeared with dirt and his hair and tattered clothes soiled with blood. She was pretty sure he wasn’t one of those things tearing through the city since his eyes weren’t glowing red, but she wasn’t sure if she could trust him. When she decided to speak, her voice didn’t fully cooperate, so she had to repeat herself to answer.
“Des… Desi.” She pronounced it like it was short for Desiree, with the “s” sounding more like a “z”.
“Hey, Desi. I’m Marty.” He tried spotting her face through the branches. “How old are you?” Her voice was so soft he couldn’t tell if she was a kid or not.
“…Nine…nineteen…”
“Good… Then I won’t have to tell yur folks you were out this late.” He realized after he said it that it might’ve been a bad joke. For all he knew, she may’ve just barely escaped watching her parents getting murdered to death. He decided it was a bright idea to change the subject. “You’re just a few years younger than my sister. Her name’s Alex. She’s out there somewhere too. Alone, like you.” He could hear that the steady sound of his voice was easing her heartrate. By the sound of it, she may’ve been coming around. He figured now would be as good a time as any to seal the deal, so he asked her, “Will you help me find her?”
Desi peeked her head from the side of the bush and started to stand. She was wearing just a t-shirt and underwear – she must’ve been in bed when everything started happening. She stepped around the bush off the curb to reveal long legs and canary-yellow toenails, standing pigeon-toed and shy.
“You’re…you’re not gonna try’n eat me, are you?”
Marty looked the poor girl up and down and suddenly realized something: Something inside him was different. Even in spite of their situation, a girl as attractive as this one, half naked and asking if he was going to eat her would normally stir up some kind of hormonal tingling in his undercarriage… But this time…it didn’t. He didn’t feel…anything…
“Oddly enough, the thought never crossed my mind.” He gave her another quick onceover, examining her lips, the subtle curves of her breasts and hips teasing from under her shirt, the texture of the skin on her thighs, and still he felt nothing. He hadn’t had the time to think about it before, but standing there, looking at this girl, it finally occurred to him… He was dead. So dead, that for the first time in his life he was starring right at an attractive girl’s thighs and not imagining them wrapped tightly around his nether regions. The feeling – or lack thereof – was almost liberating. He could actually think clearly and stay goal-oriented without some sort of subconscious, underlying effort toward building a foundation for a possible future “lay”.
“C’mon.” He gave her a little heads-up nod, inviting her to join him on the bike. “Let’s get you out of here.”
She hesitated another second, then cautiously shuffled toward him.
“Are…are you…dea
d?”
A perfectly reasonable question, he figured. He now knew for sure he was…but found he had a hell of a time actually coming out and saying it.
He paused before answering, feeling-out the concept in the speech centers of his brain, then: “I think so…yeah… But…” He hesitated to even bother claiming he was different. He knew he wouldn’t be likely to believe him if he were in her…uh…panties. “Do you think I want to hurt you?”
She weighed his tone and the demeanor of his large form and shook her head. He smiled lightly then gave her another tilted heads-up toward the back of his bike so she continued on her approach.
“I… I don’t have any pants on…”
He almost laughed.
“I noticed.”
She stopped beside him before hopping on the back of the bike.
“I’m headed to my sister’s place. It’s about twenty minutes away. We’ll get you some pants when we get there, I swear.”
She decided she believed him – or that he was at least her best option for now – so she straddled the bike and latched her arms around his waist. She held on tight as he revved his ride, its roar vibrating her whole body so she squeezed for stability.
“Do you think your sister’s okay?!” She had to yell over the sound of the Harley.
He hadn’t had time to think about it before. He only just assumed he’d find her. But beyond that, he’d never allowed himself a moment to dwell.
He didn’t answer her. He kicked up the stand, released his grip on the brake and tore down the block with a renewed sense of urgency. He’d spent precious minutes of the few he felt he had on picking this girl up and wondered if the effort would make any difference in the end. There was a good chance she was better off dead; a rotting corpse dragging behind him, stuck to the tracks in the bottom of his shoe. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for him to keep a stranger so close, he thought. In the end, it may prove to be just him and Alex against the world. Everyone else would be unexceptional risks that weren’t worth taking the time to try to save…
But then again, now might be a more important time than any to hold on to what made him human. And no healthy human being would leave a defenseless girl to die in the streets if he could help it. He was doing the right thing. He was sure.
Alex was strong. Maybe even stronger than him. And she was still alive – he could feel her in his heart if he concentrated hard enough. He’d find her soon, and they’d both get the hell out of L.A. and head for some secluded, tropical island, far away from the overwhelming curses of their family’s bloodline. Once she was safe, he could concentrate on how to become whole again. Maybe there was more to the strength of his mother’s spirit that he kept around his neck than he knew. Maybe it could heal him; restore his life to something like what it was… Or at least allow him to find some peace in the midst of all this death. A nice, cool, hole in the ground for the rest of eternity didn’t sound so bad right about now. Anything would be better than the Hell he could see in Earth’s fateful future. If he couldn’t stop that crazy bitch with the demon teeth and devil-horns before she turned the States into a pan-fried, evil paradise, then he hoped to at least be able to put it all behind him someday.
But he was getting ahead of himself. As far as he knew, the future was not yet set. He knew he and his sister were somehow a bigger part of all this than maybe even the Demon Queen herself knew. And if that were the case, then they had the sharpened edge of surprise dangling over her wrists to exploit. Maybe the element of “she-has-no-idea-of-what-we-are-capable” would be enough to tip the scales. Maybe the Hell that he could see in the future was only there because he hadn’t fully discovered himself yet. …Maybe he could stop all of this before it ever got too far out of hand.
Or maybe that was just what was left of the little bit of human being still inside, straggling along, trying to cling to this world by way of blind passion and false hopes…
The sounds of four more explosions behind them shook the ground as the fire from the second barrage of tomahawks lit the sky. The dark clouds over the city came alive with the violent eruption, and what looked like dozens of titanic worms ruptured into existence, forming bulges where they entangled and slithering in clumps of disgusting masses throughout the clouds. The fierce explosions over the center of the graveyard gave birth to an element of Hell than no one had ever imagined: gigantic larvae that defied the Earth’s very gravity and all of reality itself. These things – whatever they were – were not supposed to exist in this world… And the fact that they did opened up doorways for possibilities that disturbed even Marty, and he, by design, felt no fear.
Desi never lifted her head from where it pressed against his back, his massive body a shield from the reality around her. He looked up into the serpent-clouds and his eyes flickered green in revolt of their swimming evil. Things weren’t looking so promising as far as him having hopes of stopping this madness before it spiraled into inevitability…
The sounds of jet-planes getting further and further away, retreating in their apparent failure caught his hear. If they were lucky, they made it far enough from the cemetery before the sky turned into something that looked like a goddamn Klingon delicacy, but he didn’t hold out much hope for that being the case. He imagined the look on the fighter pilots’ faces when the clouds in front of them turned into giant, jet-eating tapeworms with rows of teeth that went as far back as their sphincters. What a repulsive way to die: mauled into mulch then made into the droppings of colossal, man-eating maggots…
But he got the feeling the sky-worms weren’t the worst thing stirring about in the city. Everything looked alive under the blood-red glow of the clouds. Even the street they drove on had a different texture, like the scales of a piranha or some other disagreeable sea creature. The walls of the structures they passed were wet with perspiration, and their reflective surfaces devoured the surrounding images only to spit them back out mangled and disfigured…
But the shadows were the worst of all…
Anywhere devoid of light, the blackness stood so profound that if anyone got caught inside, they’d never find their way back. The black shawls of emptiness were frighteningly quiet. They watched as Marty and Desi passed and closed in on the path behind them as if to not allow them the option of looking back.
The dark had a presence; an insidious consciousness that was more than just a creepy feeling. Something…or someone was seeing through them, controlling their movements and consuming the lifeforce of any poor creature unfortunate enough to fall to them as prey. Rats and insects, possums and strays would slip into the black and disappear in the gut of it, feeding the nothingness that was Imala’s second demon Elite. This demon…was named Desolate, and his obscurity was relentless and without empathy.
He was once a young, Japanese-American with hopeful eyes and a friendly grin. But now where his eyes once gleamed, a void hollowed into his skull, and all that was once the young civilian – his name, thoughts, hopes, voice, and even his soul – was consumed by dark. As silent and deadly as the vacuum of space, it was his – or it’s – duty to stand guard around the new city of the dead. His power could subsume nearly ten square-miles around him at a time, and would prove instrumental in defeating the army of men who undoubtedly closed in.
The government of man would be no match for Imala’s Elite. All would fall to Desolate and Decadence, and the two of them weren’t a fourth of what the devil-queen had in store.
Another of her demons already moved to infiltrate her enemies and could be so deceiving that it carried out its work in plain sight. Deceit indeed marched among them…and in the end, it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume she might be their downfall.
Good and Buttered
“So, you’re married, I take it?”
Alex felt awkward enough as it was from her and the Cabby’s earlier misunderstanding. Sitting quietly in the backseat for twenty-five minut
es without a word between either of them was as uncomfortable a silence she’d ever wanted to be a part of. And to top it off, the rolling beads of sweat along with his occasional jumping at passing shadows continued to rouse suspicion, adding to the air of unease. She was hoping she could set her worries aside if she just talked to the guy and got a good measure of his character. After all, they had another twenty minutes left of their drive back to the city before she was rid of him and he could very well be driving her straight into the heart of Hell on Earth – this shot at conversation could be the last one he ever has…
He didn’t respond to her attempt at small-talk at first which just made the awkward silence between them that much more miserable.
“Umm…” She leaned forward and looked to the dash where his driver’s license was displayed. “…Todd, is it?”
“Huh? What?”
He jumped at the sound of his own name and looked even more uncomfortable than before she’d said a word. She watched his eyes bounce around in the mirror, never meeting hers for more than a fraction of a second.
“Todd? Is that your name?”
“How… Who told you that?”
Was this guy serious? Granted, the strange storm and red lightning was enough to put anyone on edge, but it just seemed like more than that with him. He was definitely freaked out about something… He must’ve been worried about that family he’d mentioned earlier, she thought. But she wasn’t entirely convinced that was it. There was a stink to his fear. She got the faint impression he’d been tainted somehow, but couldn’t put her finger on why it smelled so familiar.
“Your license… It says your name’s Todd.”
“Oh…yeah…no… I, uh… I go by my middle name…Steven.”
Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell Page 30
