Between Heaven and Hell

by Jeff Kirvin

  Jeff opened the door and began to walk out. “I hope,” he added before the door swung shut behind him.

  Daniel lurked outside Zagam’s house in the hot midday sun. He’d made half a dozen pipe bombs before he arrived and carried them in a backpack slung over his left shoulder. He’d listened closely as Susan recounted her story of being inside the demon’s house, and he thought he had a pretty good mental picture of the layout.

  He didn’t know if the demon would be home during the day, but Daniel was determined to plant the bombs one way or another. If Zagam wasn’t home, Daniel would just have to wait until the demon arrived to detonate them. He just hoped he’d have the chance to kill the bastard face to face.

  Daniel crept through the bushes to the back of the house. The dog he and Susan had met before was nowhere to be seen. He walked uncontested to the glass patio door.

  It was locked, of course. Daniel was in no mood to be subtle. He grabbed a rock and hurled it through the glass.

  No alarm.

  Daniel was beginning to get suspicious. This was too easy. He carefully walked through the living room to the first short flight of stairs by the foyer.

  Daniel walked forward into the den. It was vacant, so he hung a right at the far end and into the dining room and adjoining kitchen (which showed the telltale demonic trait of disuse; however the demons sustained themselves, they apparently didn’t eat), finally exiting the kitchen back where he started, at the stairs of the split-level house, one staircase leading up, the other back down to the foyer. He still saw no sign of anyone else in the house.

  The only place left to check was the top floor. Daniel carefully climbed the stairs and walked down a hallway with two doors on either side, just as Susan described. The last door on the right, the computer room, was open, and Daniel headed straight for it.

  No sooner had he passed the first two doors than a demon appeared out of each. They said nothing, but ushered him ahead into the computer room. When Daniel crossed the threshold, he discovered why.

  “Welcome, Mister Cho, to my humble abode, though I believe you have been here before,” Zagam said, reclining comfortably in front of the computer’s main console. “These are my associates, Moloc and Sariel. You’re going to tell me everything you know about your little friends’ plans, including what they plan to do with the data they stole from me.

  “And then, if you’re lucky, you will die.”

  Retribution

  Jeff sat in the car outside Zagam’s house. As he drove up, he could have sworn he saw Daniel lurking in the bushes, but the kid was nowhere to be seen now. “Screw it,” he said to himself. “No time like the present.”

  Jeff got out of the car and opened the trunk. Inside was an antique bazooka, the last remnant of his once extensive gun collection. When he sold his house and moved into the camper, he had to sell most of his guns to make room for more essential possessions, but he couldn’t bear to give up the bazooka. Somewhere else along the line he’d picked up some shells for it. He hoped they still worked.

  Thusly armed, Jeff trotted across the street as fast as his steel leg would carry him and headed around back.

  He noticed immediately that the patio door was shattered. Either this was a tougher neighborhood than he thought, or he was on the right track; Daniel had been here. Avoiding loose shards of glass, he stepped inside.

  He heard voices upstairs, and one of them sounded vaguely like Daniel. After making sure the bazooka was ready to fire, he climbed the first flight of stairs. In the den between the first and second flights, the voices were clearer. He stopped to listen.

  “Come now, Cho. I know you can tell me how to retrieve my files, and the sooner you do so, the sooner this will all be over. You can’t be very comfortable,” said someone, probably Zagam.

  “No?” the voice continued. “Very well. Right ring finger.”

  “Yes, Zagam,” another voice answered.

  Jeff heard a sickening crack followed by Daniel’s scream of pain. The sick bastards were torturing him!

  Jeff momentarily aimed the bazooka up the second flight of stairs, only to realize he’d get Daniel too. Well, he thought, if not all together, one at a time. He shifted his aim down the first flight of stairs, the way he came, and pulled the trigger.

  With a whoosh of air the shell flew down the stairs and into the floor of the foyer, where it promptly exploded. Jeff ran backwards and took cover in the dining room.

  “We’re under attack!” he heard Zagam yell. Within moments, two demons he’d never seen leapt down the stairs. As soon as the first one was clear, Jeff let him have it with the bazooka. Body parts flew and the demon was gone.

  One down …, Jeff thought as he dodged the blast into the kitchen.

  “Zagam!” the second demon screamed. “He has a bazooka!”

  “What of it, coward?” There was a pause, then, “Hold your fire, human. I’m coming down.”

  Suddenly Jeff realized he was in something of an inopportune strategic location. As Zagam reached the bottom of the stairs and stood in the doorway to the kitchen, remarkably unconcerned that the two bazooka blasts had set his house afire, the other demon entered the dining room by way of the den. They were both carrying pistols, and they had him in a textbook crossfire.

  “My my my,” Zagam mused as the flames from the foyer climbed the lower staircase behind him. “Cho and his little playmates are just popping out of the woodwork, aren’t they? And this one, really. You’re nearly as old as I am. And threatening an immortal with that relic.”

  “Did a pretty good job on your buddy in there,” Jeff said, mustering all the bravado he could.

  “Yes, well, Sariel was caught unawares. He was always impetuous. Moloc and I are far more careful, and more than capable of dodging a shell we can see coming. Put down the weapon, old man, and we just might let you live.”

  “In a pig’s eye,” Jeff spat. “I’ve seen what your kind is capable of.”

  “Well we can’t let mere mortals get in the way of our mission, can we? It’s for your own good, you know. You need us.”

  “Fuck you,” Daniel said as he leapt down the stairs and tackled Zagam, bringing his cast down hard on the demon’s head.

  Jeff whirled and pulled the trigger on Moloc just as the demon opened fire. Moloc didn’t dodge after all, and burst apart in flames as Jeff sank to the floor, a bullet in his chest.

  “Jeff!” Daniel screamed as Zagam collected himself and pistol-whipped Daniel in the temple.

  Daniel didn’t crumple quite the way Zagam expected. He rolled off the demon immediately, kicking the gun out of his hand and into the fire.

  “Bad move, human. That was your only weapon.”

  “No,” Daniel said, pulling out the same detonator he’d used on Batarel. “This is.”

  Zagam looked down and noticed for the first time in all the commotion a pipe bomb in his waistband.

  Daniel pressed the button as he dove behind the minibar. The explosion shook the walls and when Daniel got up it took a second to see the results through all the smoke.

  Zagam wasn’t dead. His legs and lower torso were completely gone, but nonetheless he was clawing his way up the remains of the stairs. Daniel caught him and rolled him over.

  “That was for what you did to me, to my life.” He produced another bomb and armed it. “This is for my family, you son of a bitch.”

  Daniel shoved the bomb deep into the hot, slick mass of Zagam’s exposed entrails. Without another word, Daniel took cover in the kitchen and pressed the button.

  And Zagam was no more.

  As the flames crawled slowly into the kitchen, Daniel rushed to Jeff’s side. Silently he hoisted Jeff up onto his shoulder and rushed away from the flames, into the dining room. A sliding glass patio door opened out from there onto an elevated wooden deck, and Daniel was soon resting Jeff on that deck and examining the wound.

  “Daniel?” Jeff croaked.

  “Don’t speak, Jeff. You need to conserve your
strength.”

  “Bullshit,” the old man replied. “I’m dying and I know it. And I’m going to have my last words whether you like it or not.”

  Daniel already had a tear in his eye because he knew Jeff was right, but he smiled anyway.

  “Thank you,” Jeff continued.

  “For what?” Daniel heard the sounds of sirens in the distance, police or ambulances or firemen.

  “I told you that first day, right before we got that cast on your arm, that I was looking for something to do with my life. I didn’t do too well in the army, and the chance to be a good husband and father was taken away from me before I really got the hang of it, but I could help you and Susan do this. You’re going to change the world, Daniel. And I wanted to thank you for letting me have a hand in it.”

  The sirens were getting closer. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Daniel said.

  “No, we don’t. I’m finished. And it’s okay, you know? With all the stuff we’ve seen, I don’t know anymore if there’s really a Saint Peter waiting for me at the Pearly Gates, but if there is, I can finally look him in the eye and say that Jeff Frankel meant something. That I made a difference, that I was important. I’ve waited my whole life to be able to say that.”

  Jeff paused for a moment, gathering the remains of his strength.

  “It’s time for you to go, Daniel.”

  Daniel started to cry in spite of himself. “I’m not leaving you like this.”

  “Yes, you are. I’m dying, quicker by the minute. Things will be different in a few days, once the story’s hit, but for today we just killed a highly placed government employee and destroyed his home. My prints are all over that bazooka, but you can still be long gone by the time they find my dead body.

  “Go, Daniel. Change the world. It’s all right. Say goodbye and walk away.”

  Choking back his tears, Daniel leaned forward and hugged the dying old man that had been his friend, advisor and companion during the darkest time Daniel had ever known.

  “Goodbye,” he whispered in Jeff’s ear, then he rose, vaulted the railing on his good arm and ran down the alleyway behind the house.

  Jeff watched Daniel run to safety, then relaxed, closed his eyes, and died.

  While Daniel and Jeff were still fighting their way out of Zagam’s house, Harold Preston met Susan in the lobby of the Post building, accompanied by two security guards.

  “Susan, what the Hell’s going on here?” he demanded. “Where have you been all this time? Why did you demand a security escort? Did you know Steve’s been accusing you of raiding his files? Since when have you had blonde hair?”

  Susan, looking much older than he remembered, merely smiled and produced and optical disk from her purse. “All here, chief. The biggest story the Post has ever printed.”

  Harold took the disk and looked at Susan. It wasn’t the smug posturing that he was used to seeing from Susan that he saw now. It was the calm self-assurance of a seasoned reporter.

  “Let’s take this upstairs,” he said.

  Revelation

  Susan and Harold went up to his office with two armed guards, one on either side, a scene not lost on Steve Dunbar. One guard stayed in front of the office door after they went in, the other walked away. Steve finished typing the sentence he was on, then got up and walked over to Harold’s office door.

  “John,” he said to the guard, a burly man he occasionally had a beer with, “what’s going on? Is Suzie in trouble?”

  The guard looked nervously up and down the newsroom, then said, “She’s got some big story brewing. I’m not supposed to tell you.”

  Steve was taken aback. “Me? Specifically? Come on, man, what the hell did I do to deserve this?”

  “For crying out loud, would you keep your voice down? I don’t know any more. She had a big story on computer disk, real hush-hush, and she didn’t want you, specifically, to be in on it. Now go away before you get me in trouble.”

  Steve went back to his desk, picked up the phone, and dialed a number from memory.

  “You have reached the residence of Richard Birchmere. I’m not in right now—”

  Damn, Steve thought. The voicemail picked up right away, meaning the line was in use. He didn’t have time to wait until he could get through. He had to act on his own. He had a pretty good idea what was going on, given the rumors he’d heard as of late.

  Steve got up and walked calmly over to the door. “Sorry to do this, John,” he said, “but you’re in my way.”

  Without further comment, Steve lifted the security guard, a man that outweighed him by at least a hundred pounds, and flung him effortlessly down the hall. He then twisted open the locked door and stepped into Harold’s office. “Knock, knock.”

  Susan was already up and standing near the window, hands behind her back. Harold sat off to the side, behind his desk, and though he looked surprised, it wasn’t the shock and fear Steve had seen so often before, but the surprise in confirmation of something he hadn’t really believed.

  “Suzie Q, what are you up to?” Steve sneered.

  “Your downfall, Steve. Or should I call you Nybras?”

  At the mention of his true name, the smile fell off the demon’s face. So the rumors were true; Susan had been working with Cho, and they had really discovered proof of the demons’ existence.

  “Poor, misguided Susan,” he said. “You don’t really think I’m going to let you do this, do you?”

  “You don’t really think I’d come this far, knowing what you really are, without protection, do you?” she answered.

  Nybras stepped forward. “What do you have behind your back, there? A secret weapon? Come now, Susan, I expected better of you. What is it? Silver? Holy water? Not that it matters. Time to die.”

  “Come and get me, you sick bastard.”

  Nybras took another step forward, then his caution got the better of him. These upstart humans had killed Batarel, or so he’d heard. What did Susan have up her sleeve? As Harold nervously backed his chair to the wall, Nybras decided it didn’t matter. No mere human was going to get in his way. He lunged at Susan.

  Remembering what Daniel taught her, Susan stepped into his lunge and got her center of gravity underneath him. In one swift motion, before Nybras really knew what was going on, she flipped him towards the window.

  The glass shattered as Nybras hurtled through the pane, but he caught the edge on the way out and did not fall, instead hanging from the sill by his fingertips.

  “Clever, mortal,” he hissed through the already disappearing blood and pain, “but I fear only a momentary stay of execution.”

  Susan stood at the window and smiled down at the demon. “You know, ‘Steve’, I never really liked you. In fact, I always kinda wanted to do this in college.”

  In one hand, she held Jeff’s last Korean-era grenade. With the other hand, she pulled the pin. “So long, ‘Steve’,” she said as she stuffed the grenade down his shirt.

  “No!” Nybras shouted, and in his panic to remove the grenade, he let go of the ledge. He exploded halfway down, showering the cars below with gore.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Harold said.

  “That’s probably the last time it will,” Susan answered, turning away from the window. “We’ve been able to kill them so easily only because they’re arrogant and not used to being threatened. Soon they’ll stop underestimating us and taking them down will become orders of magnitude harder.”

  With a shrug of her shoulders, Susan put that thought behind her. “In the meantime,” she said, “we’ve got a story to put out.”

  Less than a week later, Susan’s story, along with all the corroborating evidence, was released to an unsuspecting public. The Post released a special edition devoted entirely to what they dubbed “the story of the millennium,” and nearly every major news service on the planet picked it up soon after.

  Like most major revelations, the news caused neither immediate nor dramatic reaction. It took a while f
or the full effect to sink in. The United Nations called a special session to determine what to do about “the demon problem”.

  For her part, Susan won the Pulitzer Prize, fulfilling a dream she’d had since childhood. She became a hot property in the news industry, and suddenly had more to do as a respected journalist than she knew what to do with.

  And life went on.

  Once Susan’s story cleared his name, Daniel returned to his old job and his old apartment. He was happy for Susan’s success (even though the only time she’d had to speak to him was at Jeff’s funeral), but he was happy mostly just to get his old, boring life back.

  And that’s when they found him.

  Daniel had just got off what was only his second day back on the job, and he was discovering that he wasn’t that happy after all. The cliché was right; you really couldn’t go home again. He’d gone out on only two calls in as many days. The rest of his time was spent answering questions about his ordeal. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Daniel was deep in thought over this topic when he opened the door to his apartment. Inside were three men in conservative dark suits.

  “Daniel Cho?” the lead one asked.

  Daniel should have been outraged, but he felt only resigned fatigue. Once you’ve fought demons and won, he mused, government spooks can’t intimidate you. “Yes. Can I help you gentlemen with something?”

  “My name is Paul Simonson, Mister Cho. I represent a new organization that needs your help.”

  Daniel walked over the sink and got a glass of water. “Is that a fact.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes, sir. As I’m sure you’re aware, the United Nations has finally come to a resolution on the demon issue.”

  Daniel plopped down on the couch. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Sir, we represent the UN Demon Task Force. The DTF’s charter is to seek out and destroy the demons that you, Mister Frankel and Miss Richardson uncovered.”

  “Sorry, boys, but I’m out of the demon hunting business.”