by Hunter Shea
Shane reached for it and downed a shot straight from the bottle. Manners were never his strong suit. “What are the odds that you would even hook up with me?” he said, turning to Father Michael.
“There are no odds,” the undead priest said, suddenly rushing to the window. “There is only divine intervention.”
And then he started screaming.
The radio in the mayor’s office was blasting a pop tune, some insipid song about crying ‘’cause the phone won’t ring’. The assembled staff, just ten minutes earlier running in vain for their lives, had formed a pulsating pile of nude bodies in the center of the room. Cain wiped the blood and tissue on his penis off in the hair of the nearest woman who was currently taking on two men at once while another woman urinated on her.
Cain stepped back to admire his latest converts.
“That’s much better,” he announced. He was answered by moans, sucking noises and the slap of skin against skin. “You all will serve me well on Tuesday. And with that bitch Aimee as bait, we should have a special visitor not on the guest list. Or, better yet…”
Cain strode towards the pile of bodies, pushing people aside like toys until he found Rose, the former mayor’s secretary. Rose, a once benevolent woman just shy of sixty whom others in the office had always regarded as the kind grandmother they wished they had, was hungrily gnawing on a woman’s breast while plunging a stapler into her own vagina.
“Rose!” Cain snapped. She immediately stopped.
“When you’re done, dear, please add Father Michael to the Javits Center guest list. Just in case he decides to come through the front door. I don’t want him having any trouble getting in for the big show.”
Rose snarled like a rabid wolf and resumed impaling herself with the stapler.
“My special twelve. If Jesus had only had apostles as loyal as you will be to me, instead of the chickenshit flock he gathered like so much flotsam, he could have really been something.”
He skipped over to the still body of the police commissioner. Nelson, stirred from his faint, tried to extricate himself from Cain’s grasp. Cain lifted Nelson over his head with one hand.
“Put me down! Put me down!”
With his free hand, Cain broke the wooden leg off of a nearby chair and tossed it into the pile of bodies.
“Oh, apostles, what party is complete without a piñata? Here, take a whack!”
Commissioner Nelson looked down at his executioner. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because you are strong and good and just,” Cain sneered. “I fucking hate that in a man. Plus, if I added you to my party that would make thirteen. Such an unlucky number.”
Nelson was smashed across his spine with superhuman strength by a woman who then passed the chair leg on to the next demon. They had formed a single line, each one smeared with semen, blood and other waste, all of them wearing sadistic smiles.
“Aaggghhhh!”
The next blow shattered the right side of Nelson’s head, popping his eye from its socket and then, still clinging to a string of pulp, swinging it into the commissioner’s open mouth in midscream.
Each newly converted demon took turns striking the commissioner while Cain cackled and sang “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush”.
“Keep going, kiddies. We’re almost there!”
It was Muriel, or the husk that had once been Muriel, who drove home the winning shot. Commissioner Nelson’s body ruptured like an overripe pumpkin, showering all of them in human viscera. They danced underneath the storm like children on a rainy day and even threw larger bits of his body around in a nightmarish snowball fight.
“Just think, Michael my boy,” Cain shouted. “All of this is for you! Oh, and that delicious Aimee. I know her secret too. I am so going to piss on your picnic basket!”
Monsignor Stanton and Shane crouched near Father Michael who had dropped to a knee and was holding his head like it was about to explode. The screaming had stopped but the ice it had produced in Shane’s veins was far from thawing.
“Is he all right?”
The monsignor brushed aside Shane’s question with a quick wave of his hand.
Just as quickly as Father Michael’s outburst had begun, he straightened up, grabbed Shane by the shoulder and forced him back into his chair.
“I felt their souls,” he rumbled to Monsignor Stanton. “Cain is near and at work. I must leave to consult with the newly dead. They will tell me where to find him.”
Father Michael rummaged through his gunnysack, retrieving something long and gold, but pocketing it before Shane could tell what it was. He then tossed the sack to Shane who let out a loud grunt as a hundred pounds of holy-battle gear knocked the wind out of him.
“Watch this and wait for my return at Aimee’s.”
“Watch this, man, I can’t even lift it.”
The otherworldly priest was gone before Shane finished his protest.
“Where the heck is he going?”
The monsignor looked out the window with rheumy eyes. It was snowing again, coating the city in a blanket of white that looked so pristine, so heavenly. But he knew that heaven on earth was a fleeting thing, something to be glimpsed but never attained, as penance for Adam and Eve’s sin. A night as beautiful as this, tainted by the blood of Cain so many centuries after he murdered his brother in the field, and when asked by God for Abel’s whereabouts, Cain answered, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
To which God replied, “The blood of your brother cries out from the very ground!”
Cain was cursed by God to be the bearer of death wherever he trod upon the earth and was forever marked by God. Cain would bring death but no living thing was to bring death to Cain. And now here he was, preserved by God and chosen by Satan, his anger at the perceived injustice of the Father stoked until it had become an eternal flame of carnal desire and stinking death.
Shane cleared his throat to get the monsignor’s attention.
“Excuse me, but did he say he was going to talk to the newly dead?”
Monsignor Stanton nodded.
Shane thought for a moment, then waved his hand as if motioning for someone to stop what they were doing. “I was going to ask what that really means, but I’ve decided I’ve had more than I can handle today. If you need me, I’ll be the guy in the hospital having his hernia operated on.”
He winced as he hoisted the gunnysack over his shoulder and staggered backwards a step. He grunted a good-bye and left. Monsignor made the sign of the cross at his wake and prayed for the safety of his soul.
Chapter Fifteen
Shane trudged through the blackened slush on his way to Aimee’s apartment while fresh snow pelted his eyes like tiny darts. Monsignor Stanton’s aide, a super nice old lady who reminded him of Mrs. Butterworth come to life, had lent him a metal luggage carrier so he could transport Father Michael’s gunnysack. Shane would have preferred a cab but as usual he was broke and something about begging from an elderly woman just seemed wrong.
People weaved around him, anxious to get out of the snow as they headed to stores or homes or work. A very tall blonde, model-thin woman walking her dog, one of those pure-breed minidogs that spent more time being carried in purses than putting paw to pavement, bumped into him and he almost tipped over the gunnysack. While she apologized, the dog sniffed the bag and proceeded to go bonkers, growling and barking at the gunnysack as if it were filled with kittens. She picked the dog up and tucked it under her arm, now apologizing for her pup’s rude manners.
“Don’t worry, Benji,” he said, “I’m not so crazy about this bag either.” The woman was too far gone to hear him, but he thought he saw the dog’s ears perk up.
Still absorbing everything he had learned and what he had seen in the alley a week ago, he suddenly felt evil dwelling in every unlit doorway, around each corner and in every person that he passed. The fire-and-brimstone routine was a nice touch in religion class and church, but what rational person thought it could all pos
sibly be real? Wasn’t it supposed to just be a load of scary shit designed to keep people in line?
Now he was faced with the fact that evil was real, more real than he’d care to fathom, and currently roaming the streets of his home and, even worse, possibly stalking Aimee.
He walked, oblivious to the cold or the hot pain that flared up his arm from dragging Father Michael’s bag of weapons. Shane was lost in revelation and on the brink of being consumed by crippling fear.
A clouded wisp of hot gasses poured from the grate of a curbside sewer grate, the stench clinging to Father Michael’s clothes very much like the miasma of Cain’s work had befouled his existence since his mortal death.
He’d felt all dozen souls as they were ripped from their earthbound hosts and dispersed like ash from a smokestack. All of them were lost between heaven and hell, a journey begun that may take eons to complete. He needed to find them, even just one soul, and capture their final images before death. One soul, though doomed to be astray for what mortals would consider an eternity, could save millions.
Locating and conversing with these souls was difficult and painful—physically, emotionally and spiritually. For despite Father Michael’s divine purpose and skill in this world, he still grappled with his emotions, though they became duller with the passage of time and lives. It was yet another curse that he had been forced to bear by the Lord. It would have been so much easier to be reborn as a killing machine, efficient without the slightest trace of remorse, without memories of the past, of his life, of Ailis and his son, Kerwynn.
Ailis. She had returned, in Aimee, but why now? To torture him? To test him? Had her soul been claimed by the dark lord only to be recast to make him weak? They were all here for a purpose, but to what end? He shuddered at the thought of his beloved Ailis suffering in hell all these years, prayed that she had been spared both hell and the nothing where he was certain these newly detached souls now existed.
He ran up Fifth Avenue, a pale, mountain of a man clad in black so even jaded New Yorkers out for a stroll in the snow had to take a moment to stare. He skidded to a stop at the steps of his destination. A homeless man quickly approached him, crossing himself as he did so.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Do you have any change? I ain’t no Christian as such, but I swear allegiance to the flag of invisible under God.” He went on and on with his gibberish until the words lost all meaning. Father Michael placed his hand on the man’s head.
“Rest,” he murmured and the man grew silent, shuffling away with a contented smile on his face.
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral loomed before him, a majestic symbol of faith and the beacon he very much needed. The immense gothic cathedral, so large it took up an entire city block, had opened its massive doors to the faithful in 1879. With imperial spires rising over 300 feet, it was considered by many to be the centerpiece of Catholicism for not just New Yorkers but everyone in the country. A sacred edifice, the archbishops of New York were buried in a crypt under the altar. He would soon seek their strength to perform the task at hand.
“Oh my God, you look awful,” Aimee said the moment Shane walked in the door.
It was true. One glance in the hallway mirror revealed an exhausted, pale, haunted man. Great, he thought, it looks like I’ve aged ten years in one night. It wasn’t an aging process that left any physical traces, like crow’s feet, graying hair or liver spots. It was all in his eyes, as if a decade of solid despair had been poured into them like molten lead.
His hair hung like limp spaghetti over his face.
He let the luggage carrier go and it crashed to the floor with a resounding thud.
“What do you have in there, bricks?”
“Good question,” he said, shaking snow from his hair. “I wouldn’t know. You remember Father Michael?”
Aimee nodded.
“It’s his bag. He asked me to hold on to it for him. Something about his church not being safe because of a rash of burglaries.” It was a small white lie but one he was sure she’d forgive him should she ever learn the truth. “That’s a shame. What kind of person would rob a church?”
She grabbed his coat, which was quickly becoming wet from the melting snow, and placed it on the radiator.
“Honey, I’ve been on the streets long enough to know there is no shortage of guys who would mug a nun if they thought she had some cash. It ain’t pretty out there.”
And about to get uglier, he thought.
Aimee reached over and felt his forehead with the back of her hand.
“You don’t have a fever.”
“I’ll be all right. I’m just frozen and I haven’t eaten since breakfast. What time is it?”
“Almost eleven o’clock. Go sit on the couch. I’ll fix you some soup and leftover pasta.”
For the first time that night, Shane smiled. “Can you possibly be more beautiful?” Without waiting for a reply, he pulled her close and kissed her, savoring the warmth of her body pressed against his, the taste of her tongue, the fading scent of her perfume.
“Mmmmm,” she purred. “You want me to go fix the main course or would you like to start your meal with dessert?”
He replied by locking her in his embrace for another deep kiss, unhooking her bra with two fingers and carrying her into the bedroom. He placed her on the bed, gasping at her beauty when she removed the last stitch of her clothing. It was as if he were seeing her for the first time, his sense of mortality and the fragility of the future bringing the present into sharper contrast. The flawlessness of her soft, white skin, the fullness of her breasts as they parted to the side when she lay on her back, the sensuous crook between her thigh and hip, the wanton look in her eyes; it was almost too much to bear.
They made love for hours, alternating between absolute tenderness and total abandon, thoughts of the apocalypse momentarily pushed aside as he hungrily devoured every touch, taste and moan of the woman he loved and feared losing above anyone else in the world.
Father Michael had scaled his way to the top of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with the dexterity of a monkey. The only one to observe his ascension of the city’s holiest site was a lone businessman who had happened to glance up moments before Father Michael’s black coat vanished from sight into a recess of the roof. The man had just emerged from a bar two blocks away after spending a good five hours drinking his stress into a Wild Turkey semicoma. He would not remember come morning the bug-like figure that climbed the church, though the image would play prominently in his nightmares for years to come.
If there was anywhere in this city that Father Michael could commune with the dead, this was it. Still reverberating within its very structure were the ethereal silent prayers of millions of people, dead or alive. Their hushed whispers for guidance, deliverance, safety and thanks cloaked the holy church in a gauze of human spirituality so thick that it could even be seen by Father Michael as a kind of gel-like haze that softened every edge of the church itself. Each day, thousands and thousands of petitions were either conducted within or towards Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, making it a balefire for all souls as they passed from one plane of existence to the next. His only hope was to snatch a solitary soul before it was sucked into the wasteland that was Cain’s graveyard.
From atop the spire, he could see how the building itself was built to resemble an enormous cross, a beacon for God to see as He looked down from heaven.
The snow came down like a blizzard and the temperature was rapidly dropping into the teens. The wind hurled sheets of snow and ice in alternating directions. Had Father Michael been human, he would have either frozen to death atop the cathedral or been thrown by the biting breeze down to the unforgiving street below. He merely grunted as a hard gust slammed directly into the center of his chest. He was completely deafened by the howling winds but it wasn’t his ears that would do the listening for him.
Settling down into a crouch, Father Michael looked like a living gargoyle. He reached into his pocket to retrieve the
ten-inch-long shaft of gold he had placed there while in Monsignor Stanton’s office. He ran his fingers over its edges while offering up a prayer for his impending journey.
Encased within the gold was a shard of wood, rounded on one end with skillfully smooth edges. The other end was sharp and jagged, the result of having been snapped in half two millennia ago. It had once been the top half of a wooden chair, made almost two thousand years ago by a carpenter named Jesus. The church had several pieces of Jesus’s handiwork in a special safe deep within the Vatican vaults. His mother, Mary, had given them to the apostle and eventual first pope, Peter. These were some of the holiest and most secret relics in the entire world and many men had gladly given up their lives to keep them so. Tales of saved splinters from the crucifix upon which Jesus had been executed and the Ark of the Covenant being guarded in Africa were nothing more than fabrications designed to divert any attention away from the truest of all Christian vestiges.
This particular piece had been dipped in the purest gold by Father Michael himself hundreds of years ago under divine direction. He had emerged from a long, meditative state with a direct compulsion to preserve the shard of wood. The process had all been outlined in his mind, fully formed from somewhere beyond his own consciousness. Its purpose frightened even him, one who was not permitted by God the right to die. He had had very little cause to use it over the centuries.
His respite had ended.
Death would be a mercy. What he had to do now would be agony.
Chapter Sixteen
Cain had sent his newly created demonic apostles back to what had been their homes, ordering them to force down their unnatural impulses and to give the appearance of a normal life. All of the thoughts, memories and emotions of each person had been retained through death and now resided in the walking, nefarious corpses of Cain’s minions. They returned to homes in the suburbs, apartments in the city, bars that they regularly frequented. Just another night in the life of Paul or Muriel or John.
