by Michael Todd
Ravi growled. You look here, you piece of shit. I will make it a point that when my body dies, I come back and beat the living fuck out of you.
He needed her to calm down. Chill. He’s an idiot, so ignore him. I need you focused. I can’t have both of you off in some other world.
She took a deep breath and huffed it out. Okay. I’m calm, but I’ll revisit this later.
Damian shook his head at his companion. “I trust her, and that’s all that should matter to you. Get your shit. Let’s get this over with and get Elizabeth back so she can deal with your dumb ass.”
He grabbed his bible and patted his pocket to make sure he had his cross. Regardless of Abraham’s feelings on the issue, he was determined to exorcise as many of the demons as he could. He shut the door quietly, nodded at the other man, and let him lead the way to the front row of shrubbery. They crouched and stared at the two infected at the entrance. Neither of them appeared to be armed, but the red in their eyes glowed brightly in the early evening dark.
Abraham leaned closer and whispered, “I’ll take the one on the right. You go left. Quick, fast, and over with.”
The priest grabbed his shirt to hold him back for a moment. “Remember what I’m doing.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Saving their souls. Whatever. Let’s go.”
They squatted there for a moment, then jumped simultaneously from cover. Damian used his increased speed to get there first. The older man ground out an expletive, having forgotten that he didn’t have any help from his demon. “Damn, I need to get this fool operating again.”
The priest leapt and tackled a demon to the ground. He smacked its large paws away and pinned them down with his legs. His hand flew into his pocket to pull out the cross and he held it directly in his target’s face. The beast hissed and turned its head. It tried to buck free, but Damian was stronger.
He dropped his bible to the side since he now knew the prayer by heart. “Ejicio dæmones circa nos, Domine. Civitas nostra expellam eos de populis familiis nos. Tu es salus animarum, Domine. Tuere adiumentique tentationibus nostris repugnantem tenebrarum. Amen.”
The demon hissed wildly and thrashed before rising from the human’s chest and hanging momentarily in the air. It disappeared in a vivid flash. Damian reached down and checked the pulse of the host, who was still alive but unconscious. He stood and looked at Abraham with raised eyebrows.
“Hold the fuck still, you piece of scaled shit,” the man grunted as he wrestled to hold his demon down.
After a few moments, he gave up out of sheer frustration, grabbed the demon’s head, and snapped its neck. Damian sighed heavily and lowered his head as he shook it in open disapproval. The rogue fighter stood, dusted his hands off, and shrugged his shoulders. “Too tough, man. I won’t get bitten so you can perform your magic.”
While he didn’t like this in the least, at the same time, he knew it was the name of the game when fighting alongside Abraham. He would have to come to terms with little assistance from him that night—for exorcisms, at least.
The priest grabbed his bible and stood behind his companion. Abraham steadied himself and glanced over his shoulder. “You ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Damian said as he drew one of his pistols.
The older man kicked the door open and entered, his pistols ready. For the first few seconds, everything was silent before half a dozen demons screeched into the entryway. Damian went left and held his cross up as the beasts sped toward him. He used his arm to knock one of them in the face. As another charged, he leapt into the air and shoved it into the other one’s head. They both fell to the floor, and he landed with a boot on each chest.
He thrust the cross at them and started the prayer, but stopped, raised his weapon, and shot a third in the face as it approached with sharp claws extended. He couldn’t handle so many of them at one time. “Ejicio dæmones circa nos, Domine. Civitas nostra expellam eos de populis familiis nos. Tu es salus animarum, Domine. Tuere adiumentique tentationibus nostris repugnantem tenebrarum. Amen.”
His captives barked and screamed as their demons hung on for dear life. The one on the right gave up, and the body went limp as the creature rose out of it. There was nothing Damian could do. The one on the left was still alive, though, and lay unconscious on the floor as its demon spiraled back to hell.
On the other side of the room, Abraham used a roundhouse kick to knock a demon in the head. It teetered for a moment before it fell to the floor. He yelled, “Here’s one for you.”
He left the creature there for the priest to take care of and chased after two others who attempted to make a break for it. When he caught up, he grabbed them by the backs of their necks and slammed them face-down on the floor in front of him. He pulled both guns and fired two shots into the backs of their heads. They whined loudly, and Abraham winced. “I forgot about that fucking sound. Like nails on a chalkboard.”
The demons turned to ash, and he stepped back to where Damian checked the pulse of the third person exorcised. “Okay, now we head into the cafeteria area. Remember, it’s a round room with a pit, so we gotta keep our eyes peeled.”
The priest stood, nodded, and clutched both his cross and his gun. “I’m ready. Whatever is in there, we got this.”
Abraham smiled with unrestrained excitement. He always reacted that way in a fight. “Time for the pain, motherfuckers.”
Chapter Eighteen
Damian didn’t think twice as he leapt over the half-wall into the pit. He landed on an old table and grabbed the demon in front of him to slam him hard onto the dusty surface. While he held him by the neck with one hand, he shoved the cross into his face with the other, almost touching his skin. The creature whimpered and writhed as it snarled and snapped its sharp teeth.
Damian took a deep breath and began the longer exorcism, because the other prayer didn’t seem quite strong enough. “Domine perpetua Divino Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti per unionem cum Divino, quod per Foederatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae, obsecro te perdere the Power of vestri maximum hostium—malis Angelis. Projiceret eos concatenata intima gehennae aeternum Ut possessio tua, quæ tu creatus est regnum tuum, et qui admodum est alicui licentiam. Pater caelestis det nobis divi Augusti temporibus Sacratissimi Cordis Iesu et Immaculatae Cordis Mariae dicatum. Amen.”
It worked much faster, expelling the demon almost instantly. The human body collapsed on the table. Damian turned as he heard claws scratch behind him. Another demon was too close. He pulled his gun and fired a bullet into its chest. It tumbled backward, and he stood and fired again, aiming right between the eyes. The beast grabbed its head and stumbled off the table onto the floor. It screamed and kicked and finally turned to dust.
Across the room, Abraham took no prisoners. When he’d emptied his clip, he pulled the swords he had strapped to his back instead of reloading. He jumped up on the half-wall, faced away from the pit, and swept one of the swords through the air. It found contact in the rough-scaled skin of a demon and severed its head cleanly from its shoulders. The body collapsed and turned to ash.
He looked over his shoulder at three adversaries who stood in the pit. With a smirk, he flipped backward off the wall and twisted in the air to land barely a foot away from them. They looked at each other for a second and lunged as one. The rogue fighter dropped to avoid their slashes and ran the sword across their legs. His blow severed the leg from the last one, and the beast lurched and fell to the floor, where it screamed in pain.
The other two grimaced and tried to fight the pain. They teetered, a little woozy. Abraham glanced quickly at the sword, nodded his approval, and sliced the blade across both their necks in one smooth motion. He stomped over to the other demon and stepped carefully over the black goo that had puddled on the floor from the amputated limb. “Looks like you might have missed out on this one, my friend.”
With a cold laugh, he raised the sword high and stabbed it straight down into the creature’s face. It pulled out easily, and
he felt a rush of excitement as he realized the power of his new weapon. The demon didn’t utter a sound, simply burst into ash in front of him. Before he could locate his companion, another adversary jumped from the wall. Abraham swung the blade to shear its head off, and the body slammed into the tables.
He drew his pistol and twirled it on his finger before calmly reloading.
“A little help over here, please,” Damian yelled, grabbing his attention.
He looked over his shoulder at the priest, who stood on a table with four demons on the floor in front of him. Abraham chuckled and sauntered toward him. “Put that damn cross away and use a real weapon for once.”
One of the demons lunged, and the older man watched as his companion grabbed it by the throat and slammed the cross into its skull. The beast screeched as its skin melted and ran down its face, then its brain bubbled and glopped onto the tabletop below. As it turned to ash Abraham muttered under his breath, shocked by what he’d seen.
Damian shook the blood off his hand and rubbed his forearm across his forehead. “Real enough weapon for you?”
He grinned. “I need to get me one of those, maybe in the shape of the anarchy symbol or something.”
The priest simply shook his head as Abraham jumped on the table beside him. “Let’s send these bitches back where they belong.”
The remaining three demons hurtled forward and raked their long claws through the air. The rogue fighter leaned back, and his boot tipped over the edge of the table. Damian grabbed his shirt collar and pulled him up before he focused on the only infected out of the three attackers. He held his cross before the Damned’s shining eyes. “Domine perpetua Divino Patris...”
As the creature wailed and fought the inevitable, Damian lowered the person onto the table and drew his gun. He aimed it at the demon that snarled beside him. “You want this one, Abraham? It’s not human in the least.”
The older man chuckled as he ripped the head off the beast in front of him and threw it over the pit like a football. He pulled a knife from his side and walked toward the other one. “Don’t mind if I do.”
With a snarl, the demon turned and lunged at him, and the combatants tumbled onto the other table. Damian shook his head as the demon rose from the body of the man he had just exorcised. “Sure, take your sweet-ass time. You’re going back to hell in any case.”
The creature snarled and gnashed its teeth before it exploded in a ball of light. The screeching stopped. The table where Abraham and the demon wrestled creaked, and the sound seemed to echo off the walls. The priest tilted his head as the adversaries rolled back and forth. The table cracked and the legs collapsed, giving Abraham the advantage. He sliced the knife across the beast’s throat and stabbed it in the head.
Breathing heavily, he stood, and Damian jumped down beside him. “You okay, old man?”
He scowled. “Guess I should have taken the time to work out a little more.”
The demon below them turned to ash, and the older man looked around the cafeteria. “That wasn’t too bad, right?”
The priest nodded in agreement. “I would say we held our own.”
Ravi cleared her throat. Don’t get too cocky. I sense a lot of activity in the gym. Looks like that’s their favorite place to be. You know, play a little volleyball, shoot some hoops, sacrifice some humans. The usual.
He sighed and reloaded his gun. “Ravi says we have a lotta hell on our hands in the gym. Let’s get this over with. Elizabeth has to be close.”
Abraham clapped his hands. “Rocking, rolling, and fucking stabbing demons. It’s my lucky fucking day. Come on, where are you, fuckers?”
Damian raised an eyebrow and watched him bounce over the tables and leap onto the half-wall. The man was like a kid in a candy store. Shrugging at the exuberant display, he hurried over to his companion and they set off along the hallway, alert for any sign of movement. They stopped in front of the gym’s tall double doors.
Abraham drew both pistols and smiled. “You ready, priest?”
He gripped his cross tightly. “Ready for some damn scotch.”
Ravi agreed. A-fucking-men.
They each grabbed a handle and yanked the doors open wide. Their mouths dropped, and they froze. Over two dozen demons with perhaps a dozen infected between them ran across the walls, ceiling, and broken bleachers. There was no sign of an open gate, so Damian assumed they had arrived long before.
In the center of the gym floor, someone had drawn a symbol in what looked like blood. Abraham recognized it as the same symbol he’d seen during the abduction. The six cult members who circled it were all infected humans and all still intact. Lighted candles glowed around them, and a large book lay on a podium in the center. They chanted in a low voice, ignoring the two intruders completely.
The older man wrinkled his nose. “Can you imagine if this was how every basketball game started when you were in high school? First the national anthem and a cult chant, followed by a few incantations to honor the devil before tip-off.”
Damian focused intently on the ceremony. “The home team would have an advantage, that’s for sure.”
“You see Elizabeth anywhere?”
They both scanned the gym, but there were demons everywhere. The priest turned to Ravi for help. Ravi, do you sense her in here?
Ravi sniffed. I sense that she is somewhere in the building, but I can’t really pinpoint her location. The scent isn’t strong enough to indicate that she’s in here. Wherever she is, though…if you don’t take care of this, you’ll never reach her. They will run you down before you make it to the staircase. Your best choice is to go in with crosses and guns blazing, take out as many as you can, and look for her when you’re done. If I can sense her, she is still alive, and at least partly human.
He breathed, not liking the sound of ‘partly’ in that sentence. “Ravi said she’s here in this building, but it doesn’t seem like she’s in this room. She said we need to take these guys down first, though, or we’ll end up run down by them before we can find Elizabeth.”
Abraham gritted his teeth. “What if we’re too late?”
He grabbed the man’s face and turned it toward him. “That’s not the mindset you need right now. Besides, Ravi said if she can sense her, she is still alive and has at least some human in her. That’s good news, and better than the worst-case scenario. Let’s lock and load, and when we’re done, we can find her. I need you to be on the right page, though, or you’ll get us both killed.”
Abraham pulled his face away and raised both guns in the air. “Oh, I’m in the right frame of mind, all right. The kind that kills fucking demons and doesn’t leave a calling card.”
With that, he took aim at two demons that crawled across the wall and pulled the trigger. They dropped, and everyone froze in place until they turned to dust. Damian shifted his stance nervously as all eyes turned slowly toward them. “All right then, I guess it’s a go. I’ll take the infected. You take the demons.”
The older man moved forward without a word. The priest rolled his eyes and headed directly for the cult members in the center of the floor. One of them stepped forward and pushed up the sleeves of his robes. Damian put his gun and cross away and prepared for the fight. The infected launched toward him feet-first. The priest waited until the last second and ducked to the side.
As his assailant sailed past him, he slammed his fist into the man’s chest and knocked him to the floor. The infected bounced hard, hit his head, and groaned. The priest knelt down and retrieved his cross. “Domine perpetua Divino Patris, Filii et Spiritus Sancti per unionem cum Divino, quod per Foederatio Immaculati Cordis Mariae, obsecro te perdere the Power of vestri maximum hostium—malis Angelis. Projiceret eos concatenata intima gehennae aeternum Ut possessio tua, quæ tu creatus est regnum tuum, et qui admodum est alicui licentiam. Pater caelestis det nobis divi Augusti temporibus Sacratissimi Cordis Iesu et Immaculatae Cordis Mariae dicatum.”
The man’s eyes widened, and he clutched his c
hest. “No! Fuck you, priest!”
As the demon struggled to stay inside, Damian punched the victim as hard as he could and knocked him out. With no leverage, the creature emerged and exploded. The priest stood and turned toward the others. He tilted the brim of his hat upward in a mocking gesture. “Who’s next? I got plenty of that to go around.”
Gunshots rang from the other side of the gym as Abraham raced across the bleachers and fired both weapons toward the ceiling. As he ran, bodies dropped behind him, slammed into the seats, and turned to dust. He pressed on and tried to force his demon to help. “Come on, fucker. If I die, you die too.”
Suddenly, his eyes flashed bright red, and he chuckled. “Welcome back. Now, let’s kill us some Nazi demons.”
He leapt, higher and stronger than before, and grabbed the shot clock hanging on the wall. With his arm around the metal support to hold himself in place, he turned and fired at the floor where a group of demons prepared to attack him. One by one, they fell into a pile before they burst almost simultaneously into dust, which settled lazily onto the floor.
Abraham chuckled to himself, released the magazines from his guns, and inserted replacements. It was a little awkward with one arm still looped around the clock, but he managed. He scanned the room to see where Damian was fighting. One of the cult members had him by the throat. The rogue fighter stuck out his tongue and aimed carefully. He squeezed the trigger and watched as the bullet struck the assailant between the eyes and blew him backward.
The priest put his hands on his knees and breathed heavily. His gaze darted to Abraham hanging from the shot clock, and he nodded. “Wake your demon up?”
The older man gave him a thumbs-up and yelled back, “Hell, yeah, I did. Back to my old self.”
Damian mumbled under his breath as he gave him a fake smile. “Oh, great.”
They fought their way through the crowd of demons, and he exorcised as many infected as he could. His colleague, of course, didn’t discriminate. Anyone who came his way met a bullet to the head. When his magazines were empty, he yanked out the short swords and simply swung at his assailants. Demon bodies fell everywhere, and their residual dust created a smoky haze around them. Screeches resounded throughout the entire building.
