by Ryland Thorn
More than a dozen people surge through the doorway in a matter of seconds and hurry as best they can away from the restaurant. In moments, they are gone, and Jack and Lennox can enter.
“Finally,” Jack grumbles as he steps through with Lennox at his side.
Inside, the restaurant is surprisingly modern. Jack had been expecting lots of wood on the walls and a decor made of rich reds and yellows. He had been expecting a design that conveys warmth and comfort. But Mario’s Pizzeria and Bar is as far from that as it is possible to get. It is made of sharp lines, artificial materials and pastel shades, and wouldn’t look out of place as a set for a 70s science fiction show. Even the bar in the middle is a single slab of white plastic, and there are pale blue and green cubes resting on it that might be decorations or drinking vessels.
The whole place looks like it should be a picture of peacefulness, of orderly neatness under lights that hint at various colors. But because of the tar man, it is in chaos. Tables and chairs have been tipped onto their sides, and the floor is littered with broken plates and glasses and wasted food.
“You take me to the nicest places,” Lennox quips.
Jack just grunts in reply. As well as a more conservative decor, he had also expected to see the tar man laughing his maniacal laugh in the middle of the room as demon spawn drips from his fingers. Jack’s gun is not aimed, but he has both hands wrapped around the grip and he is ready to bring it to bear in instant.
Surprisingly, there is nobody in sight. But that doesn’t mean the restaurant is empty. It cannot be empty. They watched the tar man enter and he has not come back out.
And, just like in the alley, there is an odor of sulfur and rot in the air. It smells like the gangrene ward of a hospital might have smelled in the late eighteen hundreds.
“There!” Lennox shouts. She is pointing toward the far wall. At first, Jack sees nothing but shadows, but then the shadows start to ooze and shift. He realizes he is looking at more demon spawn.
Lennox once more draws her blades. Her expression becomes one of determination mixed with glee. But Jack’s response is different. He swears under his breath. Demon spawn are fast becoming one of his least favorite Hell creatures to deal with. And where there are demon spawn, their master cannot be far away.
“Where is he?” Jack grates.
As if in answer, a terrified scream rings out through the restaurant. Somewhere, a woman is afraid for her life. At first, all Jack can do is look around in confusion. He cannot see where the scream might have come from. Is there a hidden door to the kitchen somewhere?
“The stairs,” Lennox says, and he finally sees them. They are tucked away in the corner behind the bar.
Jack looks at Lennox closely, assessing her. They need to find the tar man urgently, but there are risks. Jack is aware that the demon blood in Lennox’s veins is close to the surface and itching to get out. He saw the demon in her face when they were battling the demon spawn in the alley. In a perfect world, Jack would not risk her in a second confrontation so soon after the first.
Sadly, the world is far from perfect. And Lennox is sensible, despite her often playful nature. She takes her suppressant regularly. Jack has never yet had to offer her the backup dose that he carries.
“Are you ready for this?” Jack asks her.
“Always ready,” she replies. Then she gives him a wry grin. “What’s the matter? You getting a bit long in the tooth for this kind of thing?” Despite her tone, her stance speaks loudly of determination and strength. Her grin quickly fades. “How do you want to play this, old man?” she says, her voice calm and direct.
Jack can’t help but approve of her resolve, even if her flippancy irritates him on occasion. “You deal with these,” he says. “I’ll go upstairs and see to the tar man.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lennox says brightly, and Jack stalks toward the stairs with a slight limp, grimly aware of the danger of what they must do. “Be careful,” she adds, much more seriously.
Jack just grunts in response. There is rage singing in his veins. He wants to finish this and return to their original task. But despite this, despite the growing urgency, he hesitates as he reaches the bar. His gun is not exactly useless against the demon spawn, but he has only a limited number of bullets and he is saving them for the tar man himself. Jack also still has his knives, but it is the holy water that had proved most effective against the demon spawn in the alley.
He has just one vial of holy water left and no idea how many foes he will face. The tar man seems to be able to produce as many demon spawn as he wishes.
There is a pitcher of water sitting on the bar. To the tune of an increasing number of screams and shouts from above, Jack digs into his pocket for his last remaining vial. He is still holding his gun, so he pops the stopper with his teeth and empties the holy water into the pitcher.
Not knowing if he has diluted the holy water into uselessness or given himself more to work with, he spits the stopper onto the floor, tosses the vial aside, and snatches up the pitcher.
Then, with the demon-spawn starting to whine under Lennox’s blade, Jack runs to the stairs.
Chapter Eleven: Holy Water
Jack takes the stairs two at a time, and would take them by threes if it weren’t for the wound in his leg. He is gripping his gun in one hand and the pitcher of water in the other, and his face is twisted into a snarl of fury and hate. The lethargy induced by the last demon spawn attack is no more than a memory. His underlying anger toward all things Hellish is more than enough to give him new strength.
The stairway opens into a secondary dining area upstairs. Before Jack even makes it all the way to the top, he can sense that this is where the tar man has done the most damage. The screaming and yelling is reaching a crescendo, and through it all Jack can hear an echo of the tar man’s laughter.
It is enough to make him want to spit. If his hands had been empty, he would have clenched them into fists. The tar man had been an annoyance in the alley, where no one beyond Jack and Lennox had been at risk. Now, with all the diners in this busy restaurant, the tar man and his spawn are a legitimate threat.
Jack dodges past one of the diners, a woman who is wailing as she stumbles down the stairs, her expression a mixture of terror and relief. She barely looks at Jack as she passes, but when she does, she gapes in horror. It is as if she has mistaken Jack for the tar man, or maybe his clone.
It is an insult that Jack cannot bear. He lets out a snarl of pure rage and hurls himself up the final stairs in a rush.
A quick glance is enough to confirm his worst fears. This dining area is nearly as large as the one down below and designed to the same plastic standard. But the Pizzeria customers here have had less chance to escape. The chaos is complete. Tables and chairs have been shoved to the sides, leaving an open space in the middle and people whimpering in terror against the walls.
Not everyone has made it. What Jack can see of the flooring is made from a pale blue laminate with lines of fluorescence that give it an unearthly appearance. The open space in the middle is nearly half the size of a basketball court, and there are three corpses lying near the edges.
The corpses look mummified. Their flesh is withered and their skin is stretched tight. Who they had been before the tar man had struck, Jack will never know. Yet the sight of them is enough to turn up the dial on his rage even more.
Nor does he know if these three deaths are all that there have been. There may be more corpses in the very center of the dining area. Jack cannot tell, for that space is entirely covered by an undulating, viscous, oily mass of demon spawn the like of which Jack has never seen before.
Instead of there being individual spawn, like globs of black mucus as tall as Jack’s knee, these have coalesced into one. They have joined together into an amorphous blob that looks like a heaving, surging pool of thick tar and smells like the worst cesspool in Hell.
It is beyond repulsive. A semi-liquid, half-alive glob of odious vileness that make
s Jack want to vomit despite his long history of dealing with the most repellent beings from Hell. As he watches, the center of the loathsome mass rears up until it is more than Jack’s own height. He doesn’t know, can’t possibly know, but something tells him that it is still forming, that its consolidation is not yet complete.
What it will be capable of when it is, even Jack fears to imagine.
Behind the stinking black accumulation of mobile sludge, Jack can see the tar man. He is still laughing like a comic book villain as he stands against the far wall. His aura of confident triumph is palpable. And from Jack’s point of view, entirely misplaced.
Jack has no patience for this type of attack. He has no empathy for the tar man at all. All he wants is to rid the restaurant of the demon spawn blob and to introduce the tar man’s head to a silver bullet filled with salts.
And he has the tools with which to do so.
Jack has barely slowed down. He has taken in all of the carnage in a timespan no longer than that of a single heartbeat. His heart is pounding in his ears from his dash up the stairs. The wound in Jack’s leg is burning like it did when he gained it. His rage is incandescent.
If the tar man could sense the scale of Jack’s hatred for him, he would no longer be laughing. His confidence would evaporate like a mist under the sun, and he would be shivering in fear for his very life.
Jack lets out an inarticulate roar of fury mixed with disgust. Without breaking stride, he swings the pitcher around in a low arc, flinging the water over as broad an area as possible. Most of it splashes down on the heaving mass of feculent goo that the tar man has conjured. But some splatters over the restaurant customers to the sides, and a droplet or two splash back over Jack himself.
Without waiting to see if the water remains holy enough to do any good, Jack casts the pitcher aside and takes a double-handed grip on his gun.
“Time to meet your maker!” Jack bellows at the tar man as he squeezes the trigger.
Bang!
With the edges of his trenchcoat swishing about behind him and his formidable stance, he looks like the hero from a fifties pulp fiction detective novel. But despite his determination and rage, a single shot is not enough to do the job. The tar man once more proves how agile he is. He is already gone by the time Jack’s bullet punches a hole the wall where he had been just an instant before, ducking and rolling and launching himself to the side.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Jack is adjusting his aim on the fly. Three more bullets rip through the restaurant dining area. Three more chances to score a hit.
The first bullet smashes into the wall in the tar man’s shadow.
The second bullet makes a hole in the tar man’s coat before passing through it completely.
The third bullet is better. Jack cannot see exactly, but he thinks he might have creased the tar man across his ribs at the side.
Jack knows that if he unleashes a fourth shot, likely he would score a direct hit. But the tar man is too nimble by far. He has already reached the first of the diners, a young woman of about Lennox’s age. As the vast, pulsating blob of inky putrescence in the middle of the room starts to give off a high-pitched shriek of agony, the tar man hauls the young woman to her feet and ducks down behind her.
The young woman had already been cowering in terror. Now, she is experiencing a threat beyond anything she ever imagined. She bursts into spontaneous tears at the same time as letting out a terrified wail to match that of the demon spawn mass.
Jack tries to aim around her. The tar man giggles like a madman and pops his head out to her left, then to her right, then stays hidden for a moment.
“To shoot, or not to shoot,” he says, his voice a pool of oily slime. “That is the question, is it not?”
Once more, he is taunting Jack.
Bang!
Jack fires again out of sheer frustration, but he deliberately shoots wide to avoid hitting the woman. The tar man lets out a cackle of true laughter, and the woman starts to hurl a string of vile abuse in Jack’s direction.
Jack is aware that the holy water is working. His hand where the holy water splashed is starting to burn, but that is nothing compared with what is happening to the demon spawn mass. Great clouds of steaming putrescence are filling the air, and the sticky black mass of demon spawn is no longer undulating, but is instead starting to vibrate. Soon it will begin to dissolve in on itself, Jack thinks with relief, and then turns his thoughts to the tar man.
It is the tar man that he has to stop now.
Before he can come up with a coherent plan of attack, the tar man acts. As well as being nimble, the tar man is unexpectedly strong. He picks up the woman as if she weighs next to nothing and charges directly at Jack using her as a shield.
There is nothing that Jack can do. The tar man flings the woman at him and they go down in a tangle of limbs. The woman is panicked. As Jack tries to extricate himself, she continues to swear at him, at the tar man, at everything, and she punctuates her swearing with punches and kicks.
Jack cannot blame her, but he is irritated beyond belief. It takes a convulsive effort, but he manages to heave her off him and then climbs back to his feet.
The tar man is gone and so is Jack’s gun. The collision with the woman knocked it out of his hand, and he doesn’t know where it went. The mass of demon spawn is going through its death throes, filling the air with an acrid, sulfurous stench that is making it hard to breathe.
Jack judges that the surviving diners will be okay and dismisses them from his thoughts.
Then, weaponless apart from the blades sheathed at his back, he curses under his breath and heads back to the stairs.
Chapter Twelve: Concrete and Rage
If Jack could have flown, he would have done so. As it is, he hurls himself down the stairs as fast as his wounded leg will allow. He has to get to the tar man. He has to find out what the tar man knows and stop him from doing more harm.
The tar man has already reached the restaurant floor. Jack can see Lennox finishing off the demon spawn down on this level. Once more, she appears lost in a fervor of maniacal glee. She is attacking the last of the vile black blobs with exuberance, deliberately slicing it up with her blades before pressing the runic symbols into its loathsome flesh.
She doesn’t appear to notice the tar man run by her.
Again, Jack fears that the demon blood in Lennox’s veins has become too close to the surface. He fears that it is close to taking control.
“Lex!” Jack bellows, and Lennox whirls about. Her expression is drawn into a rictus of madness, and she has fire in her eyes. For a moment she glares at Jack as if she is furious at the interruption. But then the fire in her eyes fades away and part of her humanity returns.
“What?” she yells back in reply.
“The tar man!” Jack shouts, and points.
It is all she needs. The tar man is nearly at the restaurant entrance. Lennox pronounces a word that makes Jack’s skin crawl even though he is still some distance away from her. It is the same spell she used against the wight and the Hell-beast earlier in the day, and it has a similar effect.
A blast of Hellfire magic arcs from Lennox’s hands even though she is still holding onto her knives. It is powerful and concussive and seems to shake the whole restaurant. The blast catches the tar man as he reaches the door. It picks him up and throws him out onto the pavement beyond, shattering the glass door around him at the same time.
Jack hasn’t paused. He is at the bottom of the stairs before the last echoes of Lennox’s blast have faded. Lennox herself is stalking after the tar man, but Jack has other ideas.
“Finish the demon spawn!” he shouts to her. “I will deal with the tar man!”
For a moment, it seems that Lennox might ignore him. Her face is a grimace of annoyance. But she knows as well as Jack does that they cannot leave any demon spawn alive. She gives a sharp, slightly resentful nod as Jack charges past.
Jack is not the fastest runner, and the
wound in his thigh has robbed him of some of his usual speed. Yet he is determined and powered by fury. He refuses to let the tar man escape, and throws himself across the restaurant floor as fast as he can.
The outdoor dining area is deserted. The tar man is no longer laughing, but Jack is surprised to find him already picking himself up off the concrete. Jack is not sure that he could have shrugged the force of Lennox’s blow off so easily. Nevertheless, Jack doesn’t slow down. Instead, he lets out a roar of primal fury and launches himself onto the tar man’s back.
The tar man collapses back onto the concrete. Jack doesn’t even think about his knives. Instead, he grips the back of the tar man’s coat in his fists and, still roaring, bashes him into the concrete again and again.
The wet slap that the tar man’s face makes as it connects with the pavement sounds like he is jumping into a puddle of mud. Jack doesn’t know if the wet sound is caused by the tar man’s blood or the black, sticky mucus that is dripping from his face splattering on the concrete.
Nor does he care. Jack is more than content to keep smashing him into the ground again and again, as hard and often as he needs to in order to appease his rage.
But as much as he wants to do so, Jack doesn’t kill the tar man. Once the harshest edge of his fury has been satisfied, he flips the tar man over onto his back and grips the front of his jacket.
“Was it You?” Jack demands. “Did you break into the Brotherhood’s Lair? Did you steal the Daemonicon?” Jack punctuates his questions by smashing the tar man into the concrete between each one. “Did you murder Samuel?”
The tar man has blood mixed in with the loathsome black tar on his face. His eyes are already swelling shut and it looks as if his nose is badly broken. And yet, as Jack asks his questions, the tar man breaks into a broad grin and starts to laugh.
