Sacrifices

by Jamie Schultz

  She stood in the street now, staring at a smoking storefront. Had the ball of snakes gone in there? Or down the street next to it? She couldn’t remember, and she was having a hard time thinking clearly over the weird chord that hummed in the air. She scratched at an itch on the side of her head and wasn’t too surprised to discover that the burning hair smell had been coming from her. She wondered whether it was self-inflicted. Now that she looked, part of her shirt was soaked with blood, and she had no idea whether that was hers or somebody else’s.

  She kept turning. It looked like the apocalypse out here. A row of houses near the church was burning, and smoke choked the streets. Distant shouts and screams sounded through the murk, barely audible over the constantly increasing hum from behind her.

  Something was happening. She was supposed to . . . What? Killing that snake thing was part of it, wasn’t it? Or was that the whole thing?

  She heard footsteps running toward her, and a blazing fury filled her body. She turned, ready to take them with tooth and claw, if that was what was necessary, only to see Freak and another three Locos come rushing toward her from over by the church.

  “What’s happening?” Freak asked, voice cracking with terror. “Where’s my dad?”

  With no other idea what to say, Anna pretended she hadn’t heard. “What?”

  “They’re coming. They’re coming here! What the fuck is going on? We need my dad!”

  Anna tried to concentrate through the noise and the desire to do murder. Her dad. Moreno. That had something to do with why she was here, she was pretty sure. “He’s . . . busy. Who’s coming?”

  A weird roar sounded, something like a heavy cough, subdued beneath the endless chord that hung in the air, but loud enough. Freak waved her hands helplessly. “That.”

  “Your dad’s . . .” Anna looked around, and some of the details filled themselves in. She hadn’t gone far. The burned storefront was just a couple of doors down from a waterlogged mess of a grocery store with blown-out front windows. From here, she could see the door to the back, the one she’d been guarding. Blue light blazed from every crack around the jamb. A single Loco with a gun stood in front of it, the terror on his face so evident from even this distance that she judged it a miracle he hadn’t run. “He’s helping the priest. How many are on the way? And . . . what are they?”

  “I don’t know! A bunch. With a—”

  “Oh, shit,” Anna said. A monster lumbered around the side of the church. It looked like a truck-sized leathery garbage bag with elephant legs. It had helpers, at least three people who skirted around it as it walked.

  Something else moved in her peripheral vision, and she turned her head to see. More of Belial’s goons, coming out of the alley she’d thought the snake thing had gone down. A bald guy with a limp gave her the finger.

  She started backing up.

  “What’s happening?” Freak asked.

  “We gotta stop them, right here, or we are all fucked.”

  “But—”

  “Get in the grocery store—now—and do not let anything come through that door.”

  The bald guy pulled a gun and squeezed off a couple of shots. The rage swelled in Anna again, and her hands twisted into claws, but before she could rush the guy, Freak fired back. She missed, but the interruption was enough to break Anna’s momentum.

  “Come on!” Anna said. She dragged Freak back into the store with the others following. Shouts went up from behind them, followed by another heavy cough. Anna pressed her back to the door. The glyphs had faded to unintelligibility, mere suggestions on the wall that could have been crazy patterns of shadow. The last of the power she’d drawn on there was still crackling in her body. Beyond that, she’d need time to prepare.

  She turned to face the front door, Freak and three scared kids by her side. If she’d had any doubt where the coughing monster was headed, they were gone now. It stomped straight toward them.

  “We got this,” she told Freak. “I just took out something way worse than that dumb fucking elephant. We got this.” Repeating it seemed to make it just a little more real.

  The bald guy poked his head around the corner and Freak damn near shot it off. He flinched as a bullet knocked off a chip of stucco an inch from his scalp and disappeared behind the corner again. This time, Freak shot the corner. Whether she got him, Anna had no way of knowing.

  The coughing monster approached, its footsteps heavy thuds that Anna felt in her gut. One of the kids shot at it. Anna couldn’t tell whether he’d missed or the bullets simply had no effect, but she suspected the latter. The damn thing was as big as a barn.

  Another of the men, barely visible at the side of the monster, fired his weapon. A jar of olives exploded, and Anna’s companions fired back.

  The monster reached the hole where the front door had been. Its eyeless, tattered head took up nearly the whole space. It coughed, blowing a stench of corpses into the store that made Anna gag even this far back. Gobs of slime spattered the floor and the checkout counter.

  Here it comes. The battle joy rose in her once more, her demon joining with her to sing songs of destruction. Had she thought she was out of options? The demon told her otherwise. There were spells to strip flesh and crack bone, to blast this abomination back to the hole it had crawled from, to burn this whole strip of miserable houses and impoverished shops to ash.

  The monster pushed forward. Its shoulders caught on the doorway, holding it back for a moment before it simply shrugged its way through. The walls on either side of the doorway buckled and cracked. The beast swung its head around and demolished the checkout stand.

  Anna screamed and brought forth the lightning. It leaped forth from her hands, blindingly bright, lighting up the entire inside of the store and leaving a searing purple afterimage across her vision. The thunderclap that came with it knocked two of the Locos down, and even one of the demon-possessed assailants threw himself to the ground, covering his ears and screaming.

  The lightning bolt pounded into the creature’s ragged, sagging maw.

  It stepped back, crouching, the onslaught driving it to its knees.

  Anna slashed her palm open, spat curses in an unrecognizable tongue, and slung her hand in an arc like a karate chop, throwing blood from her wound across the room. The droplets tumbled and swelled, growing to the size of baseballs and taking on an oily black sheen. Where they hit the ceiling, the walls, the shelves, great smoldering holes formed, sending up an acrid stench like fuel oil or jet fuel. A dozen splashed across the monster.

  It coughed and inched backward again.

  Once more, Anna threw blood at the creature. Once more, the droplets blasted the stock on the shelves and ate great holes in the floor. One hit the creature dead center in its shredded face. Anna screamed at it.

  It got up. It stepped forward, seeming to stretch languidly.

  It stomped forward. It let out another of its carrion breaths, this time in a long, hideous wheeze that threw streamers of what looked like toxic snot over the interior of the store. Anna ducked. The kid to her right didn’t. He went down screaming and clutching his face.

  The monster made a chuffing sound that seemed to Anna like nothing so much as laughter, and stepped forward again.

  It’s not even hurt, Anna realized, and the battle joy faltered.

  “Run!” she shouted. “Get in back now!”

  Two kids went immediately, dragging the screaming third. Freak looked wide-eyed from Anna to the monster and back, took one glance at her own useless gun, and ran after them.

  That’s it. We’re screwed, she thought as she followed Freak through the door.

  * * *

  Karyn turned off a side street, still at a run, her breath coming ragged through her lungs and throat. Amaimon’s latest gory signpost tipped its head down the street. Nail jogged behind her. If she didn’t reach the destination soon
, she was going to ask him to carry her.

  “Hey!”

  She slowed to a halt, looking for the source of the voice.

  Genevieve stepped from a nearby alley. Behind her stood a sweating Latino kid with one arm in a sling and still-wet blood covering the other, using the building to hold himself up.

  “What’s going on?” Genevieve asked. “Where’s Anna?”

  “She’s not here?”

  “No! What is happening? This place was crawling with monsters ten minutes ago. And—Jesus, that noise.”

  Karyn glanced back in the direction they’d come, where blue light had begun permeating the sky like a false sunrise. The weird sound that had been building in the air for the last twenty minutes or so was half a mile away on the other side of the church now, still rising in intensity, as though the noise alone would purge the demons from the earth.

  She whirled back to Genevieve, a horrible suspicion growing in her mind. “What about Elliot?”

  “Who?”

  “Elliot, Special Agent Elliot.”

  “Special . . . ? What the hell is going on? We’ve got evacuees here, Freak just took off running for that, and I haven’t seen Anna in hours.”

  “What the fuck?” Nail asked.

  Karyn’s suspicion flared. If, as she’d guessed, the priest’s summoning would wipe out all the demons in the area, including the one she carried, Amaimon would have wanted to get clear of the area even more than she did. It would have wanted to prevent her from getting any closer for any reason. What did it care if she wanted to help Anna? This was all a ruse, all bullshit to get her away from the epicenter.

  “I’ve been had,” Karyn said.

  In her mind, an image of a thin man with a white collared shirt and suspenders. He shrugged at her as if to say, What can you do?

  Sirens and flashing lights screamed down a nearby street.

  * * *

  Fear seized Sobell, embraced him, crushed his body and his soul in its many arms, and bore him into itself. His mind had given up, and only his body with its primal responses unbeholden to intent or direction was capable of reaction, dumping its entire payload of adrenaline into his system, urging his overtaxed body to run at top speed, setting his heart to a smashing jackhammer rhythm. Yet he couldn’t run, and he couldn’t fight. Running would imply a place to run to, and fighting was so far beyond hopeless it was laughable. He was a gnat, a speck, a dust mote drifting where the currents of air told him, and if he survived it would be because he was beneath notice, not because he was capable of any meaningful resistance.

  The noise had become a choir, not angelic or of the damned, but of the cosmos itself, subatomic particles dancing to the decree of forces beyond comprehension, and the light was a searing blue fireball sun. Moreno had lain down in it, and now it consumed him, spreading to his extremities, wrapping him in a cloak of fire, armoring him with the very heart of a star. Clarence had passed out at some point. Sobell didn’t even know when, just that he was no longer holding Belial, and that Sobell could see his open hand sticking out beyond one edge of the picnic table-cum-altar. It was possible that he hadn’t passed out at all and that he’d simply died.

  Was there a noise outside? Did it even matter?

  Moreno changed. His flesh bubbled and swelled, humping up from the center of his chest, rising to a grotesque column even as it pulled his arms and legs in.

  Abas screamed a high-pitched wavering note of such terror and intensity that it was, incredibly, audible over the godly godless goddamn choir, and he dropped to his knees.

  Sobell thought that was a pretty good idea. He did likewise. Something cracked on impact. He didn’t really care.

  The door behind him smashed open, and a bunch of kids rushed in. Local gang kids, probably Moreno’s. Anna followed close behind.

  They all came up short, staring in awe at the frightful thing forming before them.

  The picnic table collapsed under the growing weight of the angel. It thrust upward, growing to the ceiling, a roughly cylindrical pile of gray and undulating flesh covered with thousands of slits, like gills or something. Wings unfurled from the creature, and Sobell laughed hysterically. They were storybook angel wings, white and feathery, nine feet long. There were seven of them, at seemingly random spots on the angel’s body, and what purpose they served was beyond Sobell, as there was no way they could support the thing’s bulk.

  The door behind him blew off its hinges and another horror burst into the room. Why, it’s an elephant made out of refuse, Sobell thought, and it occurred to him that he had no idea what it was. Another angel, come to join the party? Or a demon? It opened a fearsome mouth and cut loose with a noise that was more emphysemic cough than roar. Sobell wondered if he’d gone deaf.

  The creature charged the column of flesh, and a dozen or more men, some bleeding, some snarling, all insane, ran in after it. Thirteen vultures circling a stone slab, Sobell thought. Of sorts.

  As the trash elephant leaped toward the angel, all the gill slits on the column of flesh opened wide, revealing them for what they were—eyes, thousands of eyes, brown and blue and green, some with misshapen pupils like those of goats or octopi, some clearly human. Sobell’s screams joined Abas’s, drowning out every sound in his head.

  The angel—the destroying angel—swept one of its terrible wings in front of it. A golden light crackled around the tip of the wing, and a keening sound piled on top of the cacophony.

  It touched nothing that Sobell could see, but the effects were immediate. The elephant disintegrated. Half the onrushing men collapsed. Anna fell to the floor. The angel moved a second wing, slashing invisibly through the other men. Sobell saw the tip of its wing as it described an arc that pointed straight through him, and by then it was too late to move, whether out of fear or otherwise. Pain and ecstasy cut a searing line through his chest. His cells exploded and reformed, foul, stinking bile boiled off from the spaces between constituent particles he had no name for or knowledge of, and his soul, if he had such a thing, was shredded and reconstituted before the tip of the wing had even passed his shoulder. He fell back on his ass and hit the wall.

  Something hit the ground near him. A wing, severed, blue-white blood sizzling from the wound.

  What the hell?

  He glanced up. Incredibly, Belial stood behind the awful angel thing, a seething black blade sprouting from the demon’s blackened left hand. Belial had cut off one of the wings before it could sweep through and destroy the demon, Sobell saw with horror. Another wing swung around, and Belial lurched forward, lunging with what had to be the very last of its body’s strength.

  Belial’s right arm went flying as the wing traced its path through the shoulder, but the demon’s left, the one holding the blade, plunged forward, impaling the angel.

  All sound stopped.

  The angel’s eyes closed in their thousands, the wings slumped. Blue blood, more light than fluid, shone through the room. Belial clung to the back of the angel, face buried in the wound, sucking and biting.

  Sound leaked back into the world. Sirens. Men and boys weeping. Abas wailing.

  Sobell collapsed.

  Chapter 29

  “Let me through, let me through, let me the fuck through!” Karyn yelled, shoving at FBI guys in black windbreakers. They’d descended on the neighborhood like—well, like a plague of locusts, and they were now blocking off the grocery store where everything had gone down. Karyn didn’t know if she’d bought enough time before getting distracted by that prick of a demon, if the slaughter had been averted, and, more important, what had happened to Anna, and these assholes weren’t letting her through, and she was going to start raising every kind of hell she could think of in about—

  “Hey!” she shouted. Elliot was walking in front of a stretcher, to which Enoch Sobell had been handcuffed. Instead of beaming with smug triumph, her face was drawn, a
shen. “Hey!” Karyn shouted again.

  Elliot looked over wearily. She had a bandage on her forehead, and it took her a moment to even recognize Karyn.

  “The prisoner transport got all fucked-up,” Elliot said.

  “Yeah. I noticed.” Karyn pointed at the wreckage in front of them. “Belial?”

  Elliot shook her head. She opened her mouth to speak, then shook her head again. She turned to one of the guys blocking Karyn’s path. “If she wants in so bad, let her in.”

  Karyn didn’t care for her tone. It reminded her of the old story about parents catching their kids smoking. Oh, you want a cigarette? Here’s a whole pack. Don’t come out until they’re gone. “Don’t let her touch anything. We’ll want a statement from her afterward.”

  The guy took Karyn’s elbow and escorted her in. The grocery store was a mess. Broken glass lay everywhere, boxes had been torn open and their contents scattered, and the place was full of water, high enough to come up past the soles of Karyn’s shoes and wet her feet. At the back, a door had been utterly destroyed. The FBI man took her back there.

  The back room was full of people, mostly lying on the floor, some hurt, some bleeding, most conscious but groaning with misery. Eight or so EMTs moved among them, checking for wounds, asking quiet questions like “Are you hurt? Can you move?” One had strapped an oxygen mask and some kind of nebulizer or something to a guy’s face and was talking to him in a soothing tone while he gasped for breath.

  A tarp had been hung like a curtain, partitioning off the last third of the room in a rather sloppy way. Karyn could see around the edges to the back wall. A guy in a white coat came out from around the curtain and braced himself against the wall, his mouth working soundlessly, his head shaking.