by Hunter Shea
Two boys, Aaron and Billy Carron, ages fourteen and twelve, were now more beast than boys. Completely naked, they had covered themselves in blood and excrement. They halted their advance just several feet from him. One of them held the trident, jabbing it in the air with quick, jerky movements, anxious to plunge it into his heart.
They too had become demons, which meant there was no hope of finding human survivors at the farmhouse. Their very bone structure had been altered by their possession. Bony ridges had broken out haphazardly across their faces, shoulders and legs. Their arms had become elongated, with fingertips that now ended around their lower calves. Thick clots of red-and-black blood cascaded from their fuchsia eyes. They snarled at him like cornered hyenas. Their stench was overpowering.
Father Michael straightened up to his full height, his hands gripping the deadly crucifixes.
One of them, the one with the trident who Father Michael believed to be Aaron, the oldest, spoke in a tongue that had been shredded by the extra rows of teeth that had grown in his mouth.
“You die, Father fucker! Die like a cow like a sow like a pig like a bitch like a leech like a baby like a mother like…” He paused for a moment and smiled. “Like your wife.”
It was meant to shatter his composure but it was a feeble attempt. He had seen and heard too much in his service of God to become unhinged from those words.
He merely replied, “God bless you and may He pity your soul.”
They attacked as one, all claws and teeth, the trident a lance of certain death.
Father Michael jumped above their heads as they passed through the now-vacant space. He landed with a loud thud, facing the naked backs of the charging demon-children. With a quick snap of his wrist, a crucifix-dagger sliced through the air and directly into the spine of the demon holding his trident.
It dropped face-first into the snow, dead before it hit the ground. A golden light spilled from the wound in its back, arching into the sky and disappearing into the snow squall. The demon’s skin turned a grayish color before shriveling up, bones popping from the pressure, until its carcass resembled a five-foot log of spoiled beef jerky. The casual passerby wouldn’t even give it a second glance, assuming it was a rotted hunk of tree limb.
The remaining demon wailed in anger at his fallen brother.
Father Michael quickly retrieved his trident while keeping his eyes on the demon. It rocked back and forth, its heavy breath cascading like smoke from its open mouth.
Without warning, it rushed Father Michael again, arms outstretched, deadly talons ending from its fingertips. Father Michael sidestepped its charge like a veteran bullfighter, taking the opportunity to smash the butt of the trident into the demon’s face, crushing its left cheekbone. The demon swiped at thin air and whirled from the pain in its head.
Father Michael was acting on pure instinct, his mind impervious to any thoughts that the demon he was about to kill had just recently been a small boy. In his time, he had killed thousands of demons, some of them even babies, transformed by the great evil into pure monstrosities. Even God’s will had its savage solutions. To be His servant meant to be good as well as unmerciful.
“Come,” Father Michael shouted at the beast. “Let us be done with this and let me deliver you to your true Father.”
The demon feebly tried to keep its left eye from falling out of the socket. It ignored the priest’s call to action.
Sleet stung Father Michael’s face as he hurled the trident into the demon’s chest. The force of the trident flipped the demon on its back, kicking up an explosion of snow as it hit the ground. Three shafts of gold light spilled into the night. There was a brief rush of electricity, then the boy-demon, his body and soul, was silent.
They had been easy, despite the ribs they had managed to break. Most newly transformed demons were. That left three members of the Carron family, plus their transient, if he had decided to stay for Father Michael’s arrival.
Of that, Father Michael was certain.
As he continued to the house, he contemplated the names of the remaining family members: Joseph, Mary and the girl, Jesse. The irony was not lost on him.
Just beyond the wooden fence leading to the Carron’s property, the snow was covered in blood and animal carcasses. Pigs and cows lay frozen, their bodies ripped to shreds as if by a pack of rabid lions. Discarded entrails hung from the withered limbs of trees, rivulets of blood frozen in mid-drip. The house was dark and deserted.
However, light poured out from underneath the barn door just twenty yards from the house. With his trident in one hand and a crucifix-dagger in the other, Father Michael made his way to the true eye of the storm.
Peering into the barn through a small crack in one of the rotted walls, Father Michael was greeted by an obscene vision of hell.
The remaining Carrons, father, mother and daughter, had been transformed into ghoulish creatures that had no place in this world. What had once been Joseph Carron was on a throne of blood-soaked hay, thrusting his hips into the buttocks of a corpse that had lost the top half of its body. He suspected it was the body of the sheriff who had not returned from his visit to the farm. Joseph Carron had sprouted hundreds of dark, elongated nipples along his chest and legs. They wept with a foul, green discharge. Even his eyes had been replaced by seeping nipples. His mouth overflowed with a milky froth that audibly fizzed as it dripped.
Mary Carron, now a green-skinned demon with horny ridges protruding from every corner of her body, was slobbering over a pile of entrails on the floor next to the hay throne. Her back had twisted upon itself, so her head faced behind her. As she knelt over her feast, her breasts flopped over her ears.
Worst of all was the little girl, Jesse, whose only outward sign of transformation was a deathly white pallor and very long, jagged teeth. She was using those teeth to gnaw on the leg of a horse they had obviously slaughtered days before. Maggots flowed freely from its gutted bowels, inching along the tender flesh of the young girl-demon.
Anger rose in Father Michael’s throat like bile. No wonder the priest had fled screaming. What he had seen was just a preview, a show put on to lure Father Michael to this place. The evil that had come to this town knew no boundaries.
But it knew him.
What had started out as a little girl possibly possessed, as determined by her fundamentalist parents, had turned into a vision of madness. When Jesse began talking in foreign tongues and levitating, Joseph and Mary immediately called Father Rooney. A minor metamorphosis had confirmed the worst and scared the life out of the priest.
What Father Michael hadn’t counted on was the extent of the carnage. This was something not seen in more years than he could remember. A medieval nightmare of hell unleashed in the civilized world. The handiwork of hell had been dormant for some time, especially over the past century. Man and his mastery of weapons of mass destruction did all the work the dark lord could handle. Even when demons had gained entry into this plane, it hadn’t been like this.
He wondered why it had been taken to such an extent. What purpose, what grand scheme lay behind this macabre show? There would be time for contemplation later.
Father Michael swung one of the large, heavy barn doors open. The three demons froze for an instant before shrieking and rising to the rafters like a family of bats. He braced himself for their attack, and it wasn’t long in coming.
They swept down on him from the ceiling, rows of long, pointed teeth poking from jaws that had been cracked and distorted to accommodate their sheer number and size. Their cries filled his ears while their claws tore at his skin.
He was driven into the far wall with a loud crack and a shattering of bone. With a massive kick, he sent the Joseph demon sprawling across the floor. With a swipe of his trident, the female demons were knocked to the ground. The larger beast was back on its feet in a split second. He grabbed it by the throat and with one thrust sent it across the barn where it was impaled on a series of metal hooks used to hang horse reins and equipment. The d
emon wailed and flapped about while black-and- veridian blood spewed out of its numerous dark nipples in every direction, showering the barn in gore.
The girl demon had taken that moment to grasp Father Michael’s leg, sinking its teeth through the muscle of his left calf. Without even a grunt of pain, he brought the trident down on its head, killing it instantly.
He was grievously injured, for a normal man. One more to go.
He zipped a crucifix at the remaining demon, what was once Mary Carron, who had just recovered from his kick. It jumped sideways, avoiding the dagger. Flicking his wrist, he shot another crucifix, again missing its mark.
The demon leapt into the air, mouth and arms wide open, attempting to land on the priest and tear him to shreds. Father Michael rolled to his left, yanked the trident from the dried husk of the girl-beast, and hurled it at the demon. One of the trio of blades caught it in the base of its neck, shattering it to bits of ragged flesh and bone. An orb of gold light exploded from its skull before it dropped onto the floor, lifeless.
The impaled demon was still wriggling to get free and shrieking like a prehistoric swine. Only a blade with the exorcist’s engraving could free Joseph Carron from his demonic imprisonment. Slowly, he limped to him, retrieving a crucifix from the floor.
“God be with you, you are free,” he said before plunging it into his deformed chest.
He spent several moments staring at the desiccated corpse. Tonight had been proof that it had been too long since his last encounter with the likes of this mayhem. There was a time when he had an army behind him in the fight against such evil. Now, only madmen would believe such a thing truly existed. Evil had become a fairy tale, something you told the kids to scare them into doing the right thing. What was in this barn was the stuff of make-believe, the dementia of uncivilized man.
Turning to go back outside to his gunnysack with the necessary tools for his next task, Father Michael was caught square in the chest by a flying pitchfork. The force of it lifted him off his feet and nailed him to a wooden post.
He howled in agony. Syrupy rivers of blood seeped from the wounds. The pitchfork had hit him so hard his feet were inches off the ground. He was too weak to even grab the handle and free himself.
The sound of measured clapping distracted him from the extreme pain.
A man in his early forties with salt-and-pepper hair and a workman’s build descended slowly from the rafters like a feather. He smiled when he saw the impaled priest.
“An excellent performance, if I do say so myself, Father Michael.”
His voice had a distinguished lilt. He softly touched down on the ground and approached Father Michael.
Despite the white-hot agony that now rippled through his chest, Father Michael’s rage grew.
He was here. The dark master’s favorite minion, the cursed one banished to walk the earth for eternity, a carrier of blight and misery.
Cain had returned.
Chapter Five
Aimee DeCarlo waited anxiously at the booth by the window. Looking at her reflection, she fingered her long, black hair, deciding whether to keep it down or pull it back in a ponytail. Her right leg, crossed over her left, jumped up and down to the rhythm of her agitation. She managed an easygoing smile when the waitress asked her for the third time if she’d like to order. Brunch hours were coming to a close. The waitress eyed the empty seat across from her and flashed a look of sympathy.
“I’ll wait a few more minutes,” Aimee said. “But I will take another mimosa.”
“Coming right up. This one’s on the house.”
Aimee inhaled deeply through her nose, holding her breath for a count of five before slowly releasing through her mouth. She repeated it three times, feeling the muscles of her jaw relax. Her leg jounced a little slower.
Katie’s Gourmet Kitchen was filled to capacity with happy, talkative diners out for the brunch special on a cold Sunday afternoon. The hustle and bustle of New York City life was all around her, the lone girl at the window booth with no one to talk to. Because this was a café in the city, people didn’t give her a second look. Only the waitress, a middle-aged woman with dyed-blonde hair and legs that could only be the product of decades spent dashing between table and kitchen, seemed to notice that Aimee was the only one in the café dining alone.
Aimee held up her BlackBerry for the tenth time in the past half hour to see if she had received any new e-mails. It gave her something to do, besides drinking mimosas. Her finger touched the Internet icon and she selected one of her favorites. Might as well do some shopping, she thought.
She jumped at the sound of tapping on the window, dropping her Blackberry into an empty coffee cup.
Her boyfriend, Shane Baxter, stood outside, an apologetic smile on his face. He held out his hands in supplication, going so far as to kneel on the dirty sidewalk. His mohawk, which normally stood at spiky attention, drooped to one side of his head. He was wearing an old army jacket with gaping holes in the side pockets. She wondered what dumpster he had pulled it from.
As much as she wanted to be mad at him, to storm out and walk over him, maybe knee him in the back in the process, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He was a master of puppy dog eyes and he looked so goddamn pathetic, silently begging for her forgiveness while dozens of people walked around him in complete oblivion.
The corners of her mouth twitched in a suppressed smile and she motioned for him to come in. He jumped up and down several times, pumping his fists in the air, then danced, swiveling his hips and making one ridiculous face after another. By the time he had dashed to the front door, she was laughing.
This is why she loved him.
On the plus side, he was romantic, handsome in his own way, intelligent, artistic and funny as hell. On the downside, which is what everyone around her fixated on, he was impulsive, reckless, stubborn, penniless and, to top it all off, homeless. They had met a year ago when she was walking home from work and was accosted by three boys, all around seventeen, drunk on cheap beer and looking for trouble. Shane had come out of nowhere, wielding a metal garbage-can lid. He threw it at one kid and charged at the other two, howling like a madman. They ran like hell.
He was her hero then, and more so now. Everything he did, he did of his own volition and she was sure there was a grand purpose to it all. He had left his home in upstate New York the day after he graduated high school. His father was an alcoholic and his mother abused him on a regular basis, sometimes putting her cigarettes out on his back when he was too young to get away or fight back. According to him, living on the streets of New York was a cakewalk compared to living in the house in Glens Falls.
She just hoped that, as the weather got colder, he would get off the streets and move in with her rather than a shelter, where it was more dangerous than a prison without guards.
“I am soooo sorry, baby,” he said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “I was at the Y giving Mr. Peterson a painting lesson and I lost track of time.”
“Which one is Mr. Peterson?”
She didn’t even think to question him. Shane Baxter was many things, but a liar wasn’t one of them.
“He’s the retired machine shop guy. His hands are gnarled as hell from arthritis, but he can still make some pretty nice strokes with a brush. I told him we could continue tomorrow.” Shane pulled her hands into his, which were covered by black, fingerless gloves. “So, how is the most beautiful girl in the world?”
She squeezed his hands and he pulled them up to his lips to gently kiss her knuckles. “Well, up until a minute ago, I was pretty pissed. Before that, I was happy to have brunch with my insane boyfriend. And before that, I was freaked out by a weird dream I had last night.”
The waitress returned with her mimosa, looked at Shane, and smiled at her.
“Would you like to order something from the kitchen now? The only thing we’re out of is the salmon.”
“I’ll have the eggs benedict and a salad.”
“And you?” s
he said, turning to Shane.
He scanned the menu. “Hmmm, I think I’ll go for the crème brulee French toast and a cheeseburger, hold the pickles.”
The waitress raised an eyebrow, but left it at that.
“Now that Miss Nosy is gone, tell me about the dream.” He stroked her cheek and her heart melted at his touch. She couldn’t wait for brunch to be over so he could really make being late up to her.
“It was really freaky. You know how most dreams fade as the day goes on, so by lunchtime you can’t even recall a single detail, only the feeling, if you’re lucky?”
“I don’t consciously remember any of my dreams. I think they come out when I paint, but I have no control over it.”
Aimee tucked her hair over her ears and said, “Well, it’s been five hours and I can still see and feel everything in this dream. It’s more like a memory. I told you it was strange.”
She took a sip of her mimosa. Shane downed his glass of water, crunching on the ice.
He said, “Come on, you can’t leave me hanging like that.”
She ran her finger along the top of her glass, her gaze drifting, leaving the café.
“I was in it, but I couldn’t see myself. It looked like I was in some old place, like from a really long time ago. I had a family, a husband and a son. We lived in a kind of hut made of peat moss, I think. It was nice, peaceful, and even though I was in a strange place I had never seen before, I felt at home. I was sweeping the floor when it all changed.”
Shane made a nervous laugh. “Now I know it was a dream. I do all the sweeping for you.”
She gave him a light kick under the table and continued. “My husband left the house and I kissed him good-bye. My son was playing with some rocks and a rope in the corner of the kitchen. As I was sweeping, he looked up at me, called me ‘Mommy’, and disappeared into the floor. I screamed, and there was this huge red stain where he had just been. I was about to search the small house for him when I felt this sharp pain in my back. I looked down to see a knife sticking out of my stomach. My insides felt like they were on fire and I knew I was going to die. I fell to the floor, gasping for breath, feeling my blood pour out around me. I was so terrified, but all I could think of was my son, and I wished my husband would come back, not to save us, but to be the last thing I saw before I died. And then…”
