The Devil's Gunman

by Philip S Bolger

  Lotus hopped ahead, toward the station. She slammed through the glass door, knocking it off its hinges and scattering debris.

  A soccer mom getting gas screamed, and the clerk’s eyes widened. The few customers inside headed rapidly for the door, and Lotus and I obliged them—modern people aren’t wired well for violence.

  Lotus leapt at the clerk, her arms outstretched, and threw him to the ground. I could hear a crack as he landed. He didn’t have time to worry about his broken back, though, as Lotus was already on top of him. She opened her mouth wide and with a disgusting, gargling warble, a source of energy built in her throat. The clerk screamed as the white-hot energy leapt from Lotus’ mouth and eyes, absorbing his life force. The young man aged rapidly, then turned into little more than flappy skin on a skeleton. Lotus picked up the skeleton and tossed it, sending the body toppling over the counter, knocking off a display of chewing gum.

  A pair of security guards, both armed, rounded the corner—Anders had beefed up defenses since our last visit. The two guards had their guns drawn, and they began firing when they saw us. They must not have been well trained, as they were barely aiming, just blazing away.

  I shot the first one without a problem, but the second one ducked behind cover. My accuracy rune glowed. The guard awkwardly returned fire, blind-firing with his 9mm. A round hit Lotus as she bounced behind a row of car supplies. She shouted curses in Chinese.

  I took the opportunity to drop my half-full magazine and lock in a fresh one, then stood up, looking over a display of potato chips to see if I could spot my target.

  I heard an odd noise and saw Lotus rapidly hopping toward the guard. He fired, clumsily, with his handgun, to no effect. He ran out of ammo, and the slide on his handgun locked back. His eyes widened with fear as Lotus advanced. The ancient vampire intoned something in Chinese. The guard fell over, clutching his chest, his gun toppling aside. I wasn’t sure what she was doing. It didn’t look like the thing with the clerk, so I rushed forward and put a round in his head. She looked up at me, disturbed.

  “Rude! I was preparing a meal, young man!”

  “Sorry, Lotus,” I said as I looked toward the manager’s office in the back, “but your clerk snack will have to suffice. We’ve got business. The target’s still back there, and he knows we’re coming. We’ve got a minute to deal with him before this gets a lot more complicated.”

  She nodded, and we moved toward the door. Lotus reached for the handle, then pulled the door off its hinges. A salvo of bullets flew through the doorway, chewing up an OSHA notice and a cheap corkboard with employee announcements. I felt the heat and heard the deafening sound of the bullets speeding past my head as I leaned against the wall. I loaded my last full magazine, mentally noting that my two spares were down to at least half. My stopwatch showed 40 seconds until police response.

  “You know who you’re fucking with?” a voice, not Anders’, came from inside the door. This voice was full of bravado; it belonged to someone who didn’t realize they were out of their depth.

  I wasn’t going to answer, but I heard the sound of a magazine dropping to the floor. I let the VHS hit the sling and pulled my VP9. A low sound, like a voice whispering, was suddenly all around me as my rune hand gripped the enchanted pistol. I ducked my head and brought my handgun around, and my accuracy rune hummed as I fired. The aether energies coursing through my veins told me I’d scored a hit on a target I couldn’t see.

  More rounds poured out of the door. Lotus shrugged. She grinned and held up four fingers. I nodded.

  Lotus made a hand signal asking if I was ready, and I nodded again.

  “Watch this,” she said.

  She hopped through the doorway, and bullets raked her body, causing her to jerk spastically. She threw herself back toward the wall and slumped dramatically. I wasn’t fooled—bullets don’t knock people back like they do in the movies. But, if our opponents were high on adrenaline or inexperienced, they wouldn’t know that. As she lay against the wall, I saw her green-tinged, porcelain skin rapidly healing.

  “Did we get her?” a voice asked.

  “I dunno man,” another, shakier voice, responded.

  “What about her friend?” The first asked.

  “Stay al—” a third voice started as I rounded the corner. I held my VP9 high as the whispering in my head turned to chanting. I fired, trying to line up the dots on energies I could feel but couldn’t see. When I was out of ammunition, I ducked back behind the wall, bracing for counter fire that never came. I reloaded the pistol with my last spare magazine, then put it back in its holster. I hefted the VHS and entered the room, flicking on the light switch as I did. Four guards lay dead. They weren’t wearing uniforms like the two goons outside—just suits. The weapons they were using—Glocks with custom sights and a machine pistol—suggested they were professionals, or at least amateurs with affinities for professional weapons.

  Lotus had detected their life force and they’d been felled by plain, old hollow-points, so odds were they weren’t supernatural. They certainly hadn’t been enough to protect the place. The office had been converted for war.

  I didn’t see Anders, but I did see the decomposing corpses of four young women. The men had been using them as sandbags on top of the vampire’s desk. One of the suits lay draped over the corpses, his fresh blood dribbling over their pale features. My bullets had torn through them as well, scattering rotten flesh on the floor. Additional weapons sat on a table in the back, including a sizable amount of very illegal explosives. They were covered in gore, both from the security men and the remains of the women. The walls were otherwise bare, save for some bloodstains. The entire room smelled like shit and death.

  I resisted the urge to hurl as I moved forward, then I caught him—Anders was hiding in the corner, jumping and scrabbling wildly at a ceiling tile.

  I raised the rifle and shot him. Blue-white light coursed through the wound, and he screamed, falling to the ground, holding his arms up in protest as his eyes grew wide.

  “No!” He said. “No it can’t be! It can’t be! Father Sorensen! I fled you!”

  He devolved into Swedish gibberish as I walked toward him. I felt the presence of Lotus behind me. I turned and saw the fiendish grin in her eyes.

  “Well, pup,” she said. “Get on with it.”

  I pulled up the VHS, clicked the selector switch to full auto, and dumped the magazine into Anders’ torso, watching as the hideous vampire went from a shrieking coherent shape to little more than ashes and blue-white smoke. Lotus bent over, ancient bones creaking and cracking as she assumed the unfamiliar pose, and scraped Anders’ ashes into a ceremonial urn she’d produced from nowhere. I didn’t need to mag dump. But I’ve found, when you’re with someone you want to impress, brute force is as effective a method as any other.

  “You did well,” she said. “I am pleased. I’ll stay here for the authorities, you should leave.”

  We heard sirens outside, and I cursed. I walked over to the table and shoved a Claymore and a UMP submachine gun into my duffel bag. I paused to put a few rounds through the security console, knowing that if there were off-site back-ups, it would take the cops longer to access them. I picked up my duffel bag and hustled out the door.

  I looked at Lotus. She waved, then suddenly was clad in typical old woman’s clothing and lying on the ground in the middle of the hallway, shrieking in pain. She would be a good decoy.

  I dashed through the back door as I heard police breach the front. The cops swept the store and called out to each other. The two patrol officers would’ve been no match for me, but cops take it personally if you attack one of them, and I had no interest in being on their radar. Plus, Amalfi would have taken it personally. I liked her, but she liked protectors, and cops are protectors.

  I sprinted through alleyways and side streets, hurdled fences and ran through people’s yards. After a block, I stopped, pausing to put the VHS in my duffel bag. I discarded the ball cap and mask in a fast food du
mpster and pulled my hood down. I had a spot of blood on my shoes, but otherwise, I looked like another guy walking down a street in a busy city.

  I made it to the rendezvous point, and the panel van pulled up, a smiling Amalfi at the wheel.

  “How’d it go?” she asked.

  “It’s done,” I replied, noncommittally.

  Amalfi nodded and motioned for me to get in.

  I tore off the hoodie, poured the mags into the duffel, and then put the hoodie in a nearby garbage can. I took my work boots off, chucked them in the garbage with the hoodie, and hopped in the van.

  I still had some evidence to dispose of, but the guy on camera, the masked man in the Vikings gear? He’d never be found. If the Lyndale Coven did what they did best, they’d obscure the official investigation.

  Maybe they’d come looking for me again. In theory, they knew where I lived.

  I was ok with that. Maybe more than okay. It would save me some trouble searching.

  As we drove home, I stopped to examine the UMP. I’m a big Heckler and Koch fan. A lot of people aren’t—their guns tend to be overpriced and overrated, but I’ve had good experiences with them, and I avoided their handguns except for the VP9. The grips felt weird, and with my rune, I had to have a grip that was comfortable and could conduct arcane energies. But I’d never shot a UMP before. I was interested in the concept—subguns are easily concealed, particularly in a city where full-length coats are common for five or six months out of the year.

  Since my downtown cache was compromised, I decided to take it home. The vamps didn’t seem interested in hitting me again there. Maybe they didn’t like that the house was still tied to the Patron. Maybe they were just scared.

  I really didn’t know, really didn’t care. They hadn’t sent anyone after I killed their emissary, so when Amalfi dropped me off, my mind wasn’t on security.

  Bad form.

  It almost cost me my life.

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eight: Hounds on the Trail

  Night hadn’t quite hit, but twilight had erased most of the light from the sky as I approached my home. My house was quiet and still as secure as it could be with nothing more than locks and bars preventing access.

  The bushes rustled to the right of my front door. That should’ve been a giveaway. It should’ve been obvious. I was thinking about where I was going to store my UMP, and ironically, how I was going to keep the house secure. I’d been too comfortable to pay attention, and I paid for it, quickly.

  A mastiff the size of a motorcycle leapt out of the bushes, knocking me to the ground. I felt my knife wounds reopen when I hit the flagstones. My shirt became wet and pain arched through my spine. The duffel bag skittered across the walk, spilling guns and ammunition onto my immaculately-trimmed grass.

  I wasn’t worried about that.

  I was more concerned about what felt like 40,000 tons of infernal dog pinning me to the ground and the maw of teeth snapping at me.

  The big hound looked like most mortal bull mastiffs—box-shaped snout, bulky head, squat body ripped and corded with muscles, straining as they pinned my writhing form to the ground. The fur was ebony, dark as the maw of a cave. The resemblance ended with the eyes, which glowed a sinister orange, and the color of the flesh inside its mouth, which rippled, unnaturally, in the colors of a blazing bonfire.

  * * *

  I couldn’t tell if it was Trish or Tash, but since they were usually together, that meant there was another one lurking.

  I managed to land a lucky blow with my elbow, and for a split second, the Hellhound was thrown off balance. I used the time to roll away. I tried to stand up, but I was immediately tackled again, the Hellhound returning to a dominant position. I saw the other hound lurking on top of my roof, pacing back and forth, barking and growling aggressively as her pack mate readied for the kill.

  I heard a shout from the panel van and something like a thousand pieces of fabric ripping at once.

  I punched the Hellhound, but the satanic dog didn’t seem to notice. I struggled and squirmed, but the hound on my chest shifted its weight, a look of sadism in its orange eyes. I made my peace with going to Hell and prepared to die.

  As the hound’s jaws snapped closer and closer to my exposed throat, I risked looking in the direction of the strange sound and witnessed something I’d never forget.

  I saw a creature a bit smaller than a Hellhound, but much more imposing. It had two heads, a lion’s and a goat’s. When it lowered its lion’s head and roared, its goat head spat a gout of flame. The flame singed the Hellhound, which just snarled—fire didn’t hurt Hellhounds, but it could annoy them.

  The creature’s body was that of a lion, though the fur was an odd brown that for some reason reminded me vaguely of sunsets in the Mediterranean. The tail, whipping back and forth, was not a tail at all, but a diamondback rattlesnake, giving it a third head.

  The goat’s head spat fire again, and the Hellhound let go of me to address the new threat. The Hellhound leapt, but the creature was faster, dodging nimbly and scoring a nasty-looking slash with one of its claws. The hound yelped, then howled. The second Hellhound bounded down from my roof, knocking the tiling out of place as it slid, then jumped, landing on the monster’s back and brutally gouging the goat head’s neck.

  I can’t describe what I heard as a howl, a roar, or a whine. It was something altogether different, with elements of all of them—a cacophony of pained animal noises, just barely out of sync, echoing through my upper-class neighborhood.

  As the hound clung to the monster’s back, the creature’s snake-tail reached out and latched on to the hound’s rear, right leg. I heard fangs sink into flesh and crush bone, and the Hellhound let out a yelp as it let go of the goat head’s neck. The monster shook itself ferociously, and the Hellhound lost its mount. The monster, in one fluid movement, turned 90 degrees and slammed its front claws again and again into the prone hound. Blood the color of running lava spilled over the walkway. I heard a scream and looked up and saw the other Hellhound transform—its scream went from a dog’s howl to a woman’s battle cry as she transformed into her human form, sprinted along the walkway, and swept up the fallen UMP and started hip-firing, wildly, at the hideous monster carving up her pack mate.

  The bullets impacted the lion’s head, the goat’s head, and the body, but the monster kept slashing at her target, ignoring the bullets that smacked into her flesh.

  My VP9 had fallen near me and the magazine was still in it. Summoning my strength and ignoring my reopened wounds, I grabbed it with my right hand. The rune glowed hot as I pointed the gun at the Hellwoman firing madly with the submachine gun.

  I aimed for her head and squeezed the trigger, but I wasn’t quite focused. The round tore off her right ear and a good chunk of her face. Her animalistic cry had lost all the malice of her earlier battle cry. In a puff of smoke, she disappeared.

  The Hellhound lying on the ground turned back into her human form.

  “I yield, I yield, Chimera, please have mercy!” she said, tears and blood staining her Morticia Addams makeup.

  The monster paused and looked at me.

  I recognized Amalfi’s glittering, gray-green eyes staring at me from the two beast faces.

  “Let her live,” I wheezed.

  The lion head nodded, an oddly human gesture, and she withdrew her claws from the Hellhound’s throat. I heard the sound of tearing fabric again, then Amalfi was standing over the fallen Hellhound. Amalfi was wearing army fatigues. The shirt was open, revealing a tan undershirt stretched taught over her muscular frame and slight breasts. She held a nightstick in her hands.

  “Prisoner,” Amalfi growled. “You are now in the custody of Nicholas Soren. You will obey his orders or face death. You will answer his questions or face death. Should you attempt to escape, you face death. Do you understand?”

  The Hellhound nodded.

  “Good,” said Amalfi, as she picked up the creature. “I was concerned I might have t
o demonstrate.”

  I heard sirens from the end of the street. I motioned to Amalfi, then I gathered up the guns and headed inside. I hoped whatever charms the Patron had put on the place would prevent the cops from being too nosy. Amalfi duck-walked the Hellhound into the house, and we shut the door.

  “Where should I put the prisoner?” Amalfi asked.

  “Basement,” I said, heading to my bathroom. “I’ll be there shortly. I need some painkillers.”

  A few pills and a fresh shirt later, I headed down to my basement. I really didn’t have an area for detainees. My business for the Patron never included taking anyone alive, so Amalfi marched the Hellhound over to my secondary shower and locked her inside. The stall wasn’t anything too tough, and I briefly had a vision of the monster dog smashing through to get at my throat, but the Hellhound seemed too weakened to do anything other than bleed. It was, I suppose, a better choice than the armory. The shower door was barred with a Remington 700 I’d had since I liberated it from the St. Paul Police armory. Inside the stall, the Hellhound was still bleeding. A small orange puddle of magma-looking blood oozed and bubbled. The Hellhound looked pale and ashen, more so than usual, and her body was adorned with bleeding slashes, scratches, and scrapes. Amalfi stood outside the door, menacing the trapped Hellhound in a language I didn’t understand.

  “Let’s question her,” I said, interrupting the monster woman from the bullying she thought was necessary and/or fun.

  Amalfi turned to look at me. “Certainly. Would you like to lead the interrogation?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She’s well aware of what you can do.”

  Amalfi nodded and let me approach the shower. The Hellhound jumped up and slapped frantically at the door, and the rifle barring it bucked, but she was too weak to break through.

  “I’m not sure if you are Trish or Tash,” I said. She opened her mouth to speak, but I moved my hand to silence her. She flashed her eyes to Amalfi and reconsidered. “And to be completely honest, I really don’t care. To make things easier, I think I’m just going to combine your names and call you Trash. So, Trash, what were you doing outside my house?”