Demon Jack

by Patrick Donovan

  It was the opening I needed.

  I grabbed a handful of Chad’s scrubs and jerked him backwards, hard enough to bounce him off the window. His knee buckled again. He took a staggering, falling step forward on the rebound. I drove my shoulder into his chest, driving him backwards and into the window again, pushing with every bit of muscle and ounce of pissed-off I could muster.

  The windows they use in a psychiatric hospital aren’t really glass at all. They’re made of a heavy-duty ballistic plastic, the same type of stuff they use to make the bullet proof partitions in banks. The point is, they are damn near impossible to break. That said, damn near impossible isn’t the same thing as impossible. The fake glass behind us flexed outwards before it broke with a loud popping sound. There was a fleeting sense of weightlessness as we hit the empty space of open air before gravity kicked in and the ground started to rush up towards us. I held onto Chad’s scrubs with one hand as we fell, throwing wild rabbit punches with the other and trying to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable end result of gravity.

  The feeling of hitting the ground after a thirty-foot drop is damn near indescribable. There is a sudden stop followed by a brief moment of total blackness. Not unconsciousness mind you, you’re still completely aware of the fact that you just slammed into unyielding earth. It’s just a flash of nothingness behind your eyes and a quick instance of total, weightless comfort while your brain tries to catch up with the trauma that was just inflicted on the body. Then there’s the pain. It's a completely new, startlingly bright variety of pain. It raced across my nerves in tiny little bombing runs of agony. The taste of blood filled my mouth, pooling in the back of my throat and threatening to choke me. I bit back a scream as another, absolutely new breed of misery came to life in my arm, pulsing in rhythm with the now familiar pain in my chest. A piece of plastic roughly the size and shape of a pizza slice had pierced clean through the muscle in my upper arm when we’d hit the ground.

  Thankfully, Chad had taken the brunt of the fall, since well, I had landed on top of him. The green glow of his eyes radiated pure, clean, pristine hatred.

  Even with a demon riding your body, there’s only so much abuse it can take before it’s rendered useless. Granted, that damage is above and beyond what you could endure without a hell spawn as a co-pilot, but it has its limits. I could take a hell of a beating, but shoot me in the face and I was as dead as the next guy. I assumed the same was true of Chad.

  I didn’t have any intention of waiting to see if Chad had reached that threshold. I pushed up to my hands and knees, fighting to breath, to stop my vision from swimming and blurring. Looking up, I could see the faces of hospital staff peering out at us through the empty window.

  I stood and started moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between Chad, the hospital, and myself. I stumbled once, falling to my knees and fighting through an agonizing fit of coughing. Blood sprayed from my mouth, splattering against the grass. It took me a few seconds to make the world stop spinning long enough to brave a second attempt at flight.

  Behind me, I could hear Chad stirring, fighting to sit up. I chanced a quick glance over my shoulder. He was staring blankly at two sharp ends of bone jutting out of his skin just above the wrist. He tried to stand, the knee I had snapped folding underneath him, spilling him to the ground. He let out another of those weird modulating screams and began dragging himself across the ground towards me. It was damn freaky, using just his hands, he was pulling himself across the ground faster than most people could run and that was with one arm broken to tatters. I didn't want to think about what would happen, out here in the open, if he had been whole. He'd have run me down in a second.

  I didn’t bother to hang around and see how long it would take him to get to me. I forced myself to my feet, spitting out another mouthful of blood and started to haul as much ass as my battered body would allow. I went as hard as I could towards the parking lot, each agonizing step threatening to pull me into unconsciousness.

  I ducked down, getting as low to the ground as I could once I hit the rows of expensive luxury cars. I used them for cover, pausing only long enough to try and catch my breath before pushing on, peering around bumpers to make sure another psychotic, demon possessed citizen of Boston wasn’t waiting to rip my face off. I looked behind me and for a moment had to fight the urge to laugh. I had left more than a few bloodstains on gleaming, mirror like paint jobs and my inner anarchist was yipping with glee at the thought of the owner's faces. I could almost see the three piece suit types falling into epileptic fits at what had become of their precious cars.

  Maggie had the little sedan running when I got there. I tore open the back door and all but fell into the backseat. I curled up, taking a minute to orient myself, to try and get the pain under some sort of control. In the distance, I could hear approaching sirens.

  “We need to go,” I choked out.

  Maggie whipped the car out of the parking space, tearing through the lot. The alternating motions of braking and accelerating around corners set every wound I’d gotten in the past twenty-four hours -which were still in the process of healing- into a brilliant wash of misery. Spots flooded my vision and the world spun in a dizzying, carnival-like moment of vertigo. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to throw up, pass out, or both.

  Lucy said something. It didn’t register. I looked at my arm, the piece of plastic piercing the skin and the blood soaking me down to my wrist.

  “Give me something for the bleeding,” I said through clenched teeth.

  Lucy tossed something into the backseat. I grabbed the plastic shard that had ripped through my arm, took a deep breath, and braced myself and pulled. I bit down, stopping the scream before it could pour out of my mouth. A rush of endorphins hit my system and everything settled down into a sharp, constant ache. I grabbed whatever it was Lucy had tossed me, her shirt apparently, and wrapped it around the wound. Blood began to seep through it almost instantly, staining the light blue fabric a dark, blackish purple.

  I sat up, keeping pressure over the cut. Blearily, I looked at the hospital as we left the parking lot. Ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, the whole kit and caboodle were arriving, their lights making the hospital’s exterior into something that looked like an outdoor daylight rave. People in uniforms darted here and there, directing and pointing each other towards the building.

  They didn’t even notice us.

  I saw Chad for an instant, just a flash of movement across the grass.

  “Ya gonna make it?” Maggie asked, looking at me in the rear view. I turned around and did my best not to stare at Lucy’s bare stomach, the curves of flesh under the black lace of her bra.

  “Hope so,” I said through clenched teeth. “Where are we going?”

  “Church, it’s the only place that’s safe for ‘er right now.”

  “No,” I snapped.

  Lucy didn’t say a word. She sat, same as she had on her bed in her room, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, staring blankly out the windshield.

  Maggie chuckled, a low, melodious sound in the silence of the car.

  “The fuck are you laughing at?” I asked her.

  “You. It’s so cute ‘ow you think you ‘ave any say in this what-so-ever.”

  “It’ll take me longer to get whole there,” I said, wincing as I tied the shirt off around my arm. The bleeding had finally started to abate.

  She looked like she was thinking it over before she finally shrugged.

  “Tough,” she said.

  Chapter 7

  Maggie and Lucy had to all but carry me from the car. Once we’d gotten on church grounds the bond with Alice severed and my body was battered with what felt like a thousand new varieties of aches and pains. My arm started bleeding again. I could taste more blood rising in the back of my throat to settle thickly on the back of my tongue. I had managed to knit together a bit on the ride over, but now, without a healthy helping of demon mojo, I could barely stay conscious
.

  I saw Hernandez and Yavetta rushing towards us from a back room. There were words directed at the three of us, but I couldn’t follow the conversation. It all just coalesced into a mindless drone of noise. I remember being carried into the kitchen in the back, hefted onto one of the stainless steel tables, being washed away in another tidal wave of pain and nausea, and then blackness. A very warm and wonderfully comfortable blackness at that.

  I wasn’t sure how long it been before I came drifting back to reality. I woke up in my room stretched out on the bed, a bottle of Tylenol glaring like a beacon of hope from the desktop. I fought up to a sitting position and grabbed the bottle, dry swallowing six of the pills. It hurt, but it was at least a more manageable level now. By manageable, it meant I was capable of thought and consciousness at least, though moving anything sucked more than I care to mention. My wounds had been tended. A large compression bandage was wrapped around my chest and while it still hurt to breathe, it wasn’t complete agony. My arm was also bandaged. I could see penny size spots of dark red standing in stark contrast to the white gauze.

  I fought up to my feet and after a burst of dizziness, made my way to the church proper and sat in one of the back pews. I let my thoughts drift, thinking about nothing in particular, killing time until it was late and I could get out of the church and try and sort this out on my own. The slow gnawing of addiction had already started and I was doing my best to ignore it, to not feed it the attention that would make it grow into a rampaging force of destruction inside my psyche.

  “Want company?” I heard Lucy ask.

  I turned. She was standing in the center aisle. Her once bare torso now, much to my chagrin, covered by a sweater. More to my chagrin, the sweater was at least two sizes too big. She looked tiny, almost frail, floating in the massive swath of fabric. Her hair hung limp in her face, the different shades of blue, green and aqua playing in sharp contrast to the light bronze of her skin.

  I shrugged and slid over, offering her a place to sit.

  “I never was much for churches,” she said, settling down into the spot next to me. She sounded surprisingly together compared to earlier. Then again, there wasn’t some crazed lunatic trying to tear her apart with its bare hands, which probably did wonders for her composure.

  “Yeah, me either,” I said, leaning forward and resting my elbows on the back of the pew in front of me.

  She stared at me for a long time, a silence not entirely awkward settling between us.

  “I can’t hear the voices in here,” she said.

  “What’s the deal with that, the voices I mean?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “I don’t know... You’ll think I’m crazy or something,” she said.

  “I just broke you out of a psyche ward where a guy with glowing eyes wanted to kill you. I jumped out of a three story window. I’m pretty sure that qualifies me as crazy in some, if not all, books. You’re in good company.”

  She smiled. It was a simple, innocent gesture but it served to chase days of weariness from her face. It was probably the first time in days she’d been able to smile.

  “It started after I was struck by lightening,” she said.

  I raised a brow.

  “I’m serious. I was six, I lived on a horse farm. It was a hobby of my father’s, the horses I mean. He did something with the government and computers. Anyways... I was running around the fields, just... you know... being a kid, chasing bugs or something stupid like that. Next thing I know. Wham. Struck by lightening. It wasn’t even cloudy out.”

  “Damn,” I said.

  “So, I get struck by this lightening, and I wake up... I don’t know how much later it was but I start hearing these voices. Quiet at first, one or two, then the closer I got to the house there were more and more. Just... voices everywhere and they’re all telling me different things at the same time and it was so loud and distracting that I just couldn’t focus.”

  Lucy paused, drifting for a moment in thought.

  “Long story short, I felt like I was crazy. Next few months were horrible. I tried to tell my parents what I was hearing and I was whisked off to every shrink and head doctor they could find. They marked it up as a psychosis and threw a bunch of pills at me, locked me up for a week here, a week there, so they could run tests.”

  I winced as I settled back, my ribs shouting in white hot protest.

  “So, I go to these shrinks, and they just keep medicating me or locking me up when the voices are getting worse right? But I’m starting to sort through ‘em, learning to ignore them a little. Enough that I’m able to actually spend more time at home than in hospitals. Then I started actually being able to hear them. I mean, I heard them all the time, but I mean I could sort them out of the noise and they tell me all kinds of things like where things I lost are, what happened to my cat Chippy. My dad ran it over. He told me it ran away, by the way. That my mom is sleeping with one of the horse trainers. Just, all kinds of things.”

  “Better the trainer than the horse I guess,” I said.

  She laughed and I could feel tiny shivers racing over my skin.

  “Yeah, well. Eventually, I started asking names from all these voices. I checked them. I wanted to know if I really was going out of my mind. I was probably twelve at the time and had been going through this for years. I started smoking pot, which calmed them down a lot. Anyways, they were people, real people. Dead people. Since I was smoking pot, my parents thought I was doing other stuff and threw me in a couple of rehabs. I think they sort of...started to like it, like it was something they could brag about. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess?” I said.

  “So, that’s it.”

  “So you’re a medium?”

  She looked down and shrugged.

  “Guess that’s one way to put it,” she said, staring at her feet. “What about you, what’s your story?” She looked back towards me, staring at my face.

  “No story.”

  “Well, I told you, you can tell me now.”

  “I saved your life, I think I’m fulfilled on the obligation scale.”

  “I still want to know,” she said.

  “I’m just some poor bastard who made some stupid decisions.”

  “That’s everyone. Stop being evasive.”

  I quirked a brow and looked at her. She was persistent, I had to give her that.

  “You don’t give up huh?”

  “Nope. It’s part of my charm. So c’mon. Out with it.”

  “There’s not a lot to say. Pops was a drunk, mom died when I was a kid, left home when I was around fourteen after getting my ass kicked one too many times. I ended up a ward of the state a few times, and that’s that.”

  “What are they? The scars I mean.”

  “You want the truth? Honest to god’s truth? It makes your story sound completely sane in comparison, fair warning.”

  She nodded.

  “Alright,” I said, thinking over where to start. I had never told anyone where I’d gotten the scars, or what they had meant. Apparently, with so many people being able to just read them now it didn’t seem like I needed to keep it a secret. Still, the thought of talking about it made me nervous. Lucy watched me in silence, here eyes settled on me, and I realized that I did want to tell her.

  ”I, uh, I died.”

  “You look pretty healthy, all things considered.”

  “I look like crap.”

  “Yeah. You do,” she admitted. “So how did you die?”

  “Drugs.”

  “So what happened then?”

  “That’s an even longer story. Long and short of it, I don’t have a soul. Well, I do, but I don't. It's complicated.”

  “You made a deal with the devil?” she said with a chuckle. I must have looked pretty serious. She caught a glance of my face and her smile vanished.

  “Close enough.”

  “And that’s how you were able to do what you did in the hospital? Fight like that?”

>   “Yeah. It’s got its up and downs. In here,” I made a motion to the church, “I’m frail and like everyone else. All the aches and pains, the addiction, it all comes back on Holy Ground. Oh, and there’s a demon riding piggy back on my soul. Well, she’s a part of it, I... It’s like I said, complicated.”

  “And that's it? You're only draw back is you can't go to church? Sign me up,” Lucy said.

  “That, the fact I'm going to Hell with no chance of redemption, and there's a lot of nasty things that are looking for me and Alice both.”

  “Like?”

  “Death.”

  “Death?” Lucy asked, quirking a brow.

  “Yeah, he doesn't take kindly to being cheated.”

  She put her hand over mine. Her fingers were cool, gentle. For a moment, I tensed. Affection isn’t something I do well. I slowly withdrew my hands sliding them into the front pocket of my sweatshirt.

  She looked down at the floor for a long, pensive moment before turning her attention towards the front of the church.

  “So why did you come to the hospital anyway?”

  “Honestly?”

  She nodded.

  “Because I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.”

  Lucy looked towards the front of the church, her eyes settling on the murals behind the pulpit. Jesus and the Last Supper stared back at her. For several minutes a silence hung between us.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said finally.

  I shrugged.

  “Were you really going to leave us there, earlier I mean?”

  “If I thought-” I paused. I wasn’t sure, in retrospect, why I didn’t. “I don’t know,” I said finally.

  She nodded slowly, her face tightened for a moment and she looked on the verge of tears. She sighed, and turned back to me.

  “I think I get it,” she said quietly. “What’re you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to get the hell out of here and track down our green eyed friend and have a long chat with him. See if maybe I can get myself unfucked.”

  “You think you can?”