Running With the Demon

by Terry Brooks

  He is standing with Tyler in front of the trapdoor when his father reaches them, ushering his mother and sister into place. “Stay together,” he tells them, glancing from face to face. “Look out for each other.”

  He carries a short-barreled Tyson 33 Flechette, a wicked black metal weapon that when fired can tear a hole through a stone wall a foot thick. Logan has seen it fired only once, years ago, when his father was testing it. The sound of its discharge was deafening. There was a burning smell in his nose and a ringing in his ears afterward. The memory stays with him to this day. He is afraid of the weapon. If his father carries it, things are as bad as they can possibly be.

  “Jack.” His mother speaks his father’s name softly, and she turns and takes him in her arms, burying her face in his shoulder. The shouts and screams and firing are right outside their door.

  His father lets her hold him for a moment, then eases her away, reaches down, and flings back the trapdoor. “Go!” he snaps, motioning them in.

  Tyler doesn’t hesitate; carrying the second of the two flashlights, he goes down through the opening. Megan follows him, her green eyes huge and damp with tears.

  “Logan,” his father calls when he sees his youngest hesitate.

  In the next instant the front door blows apart in a fiery explosion that engulfs both his mother and his father and sends him tumbling head-over-heels down the stairway to land in a twisted heap on top of his sister. She screams, and something heavy falls on the dirt floor next to him, barely missing his head. In the waver of Tyler’s flashlight he looks down and sees the Tyson Flechette. He stares at it until his brother jerks him to his feet and snatches up the weapon himself.

  Their eyes meet and they both know. “Run!” Tyler grunts.

  Together the three children hurry down the long dark corridor, following the beam of the flashlight. In the darkness ahead, other flashlight beams and flickering candles appear out of other tunnels that join this one, and the sound of voices grows louder. He knows they all come from homes close to his own. The tunnel was the joint project of many families, spearheaded by his father and a few other men, a bolt-hole in case of the unspeakable. Quickly the tunnels are packed, and people are pushing and shoving. Tyler, fighting to keep Megan in tow with one hand while wielding his flashlight with the other, shouts his name and shoves the Tyson Flechette at him.

  Logan takes it without thinking. His hands close over the cool, smooth metal of the barrel and work down to the leather-bound grip. Curiously, the weapon feels right in his hands; it feels like it belongs there. His fear of it dissipates as he cradles it to his chest.

  Ahead, there is a convergence of lights, and a wooden stairway leads upward. People are pouring out of the tunnel and up the steps into a night filled with flashes and explosions and the sounds of death and dying. He can feel the heat of an intense fire as he gains the opening. As he breathes in the night air, he can smell the acrid stench of smoke and charred timbers.

  He has just paused to look around, not three steps back from Tyler and Megan, when an explosion rips the earth beneath him, flinging him backward into the night. An eerie silence descends over his immediate surroundings. Everything he hears now is distant and strangely muffled. He cannot see at first, cannot even move, lying on the ground clutching the flechette as if it were a lifeline.

  He rises with difficulty, dazed and in shock. He sees bodies strewn everywhere on the ground in front of him, all around the tunnel opening, dozens and dozens of crumpled forms. He climbs to his feet and staggers over to where Tyler and Megan lie still and bleeding, their eyes wide and staring. He feels his chest tighten and his strength drain away. They are gone. His whole family is gone. It happened so fast.

  Sudden movement catches his eye as a knot of dark forms converges on him from out of the darkness. Once-men, wild-eyed and feral, their faces the faces of animals. Without thinking, without even knowing how he remembers what to do, he snaps off the safety on the Tyson Flechette, whips up the barrel, and fires into their midst. Dozens of them disappear, blown backward into the night. He swings the barrel to the right and fires again. Dozens more fly apart. He is exhilarated, become as maddened as they are, as consumed by bloodlust. He hates them for what they have done. He wants to destroy them all.

  Then he sees another figure, an old man standing off to one side, tall and stooped and ghost-gray in a cloak that hangs almost to the ground. His eyes are fixed on Logan, peering out from beneath a slouch-brimmed hat, and in those eyes is a cold approval that terrifies the boy. He does not understand what it is the old man approves of, but he does understand one thing. Without ever having come face-to-face with one before, he knows instinctively that this is a demon.

  The demon smiles at him and nods.

  A hand jerks him about sharply and whips the flechette out of his hands. Eyes as hard and black as obsidian stare out of a face streaked with grease and sweat. “Good enough, boy, but it’s time to leave now. Let’s live to fight another day!”

  He takes Logan’s arm and begins to run with him into the darkness. Others with faces painted in the same way join with him, shepherding the strays they have gathered from the ruins of the compound. A rear guard forms up to protect their retreat, weapons firing into the waves of once-men that seek to reach them.

  “Run, boy.” The man who holds him shoves him away.

  Fighting down the pain he feels in his gut, struggling to hold back his tears, he does. He does not look back.