by Greg Dragon
“You’re worried about the demons with the smell. We’re required to keep wearing these suits, remember? Imagine how we’re going to smell in a few days,” Jaime said as he played with his gloves, looking as if he wanted to remove them. “Like, how do we even know that anything is in the air? There’s no indicator to tell me how toxic the air is. And besides the giant that attacked you, everything else seems to still be intact and healthy.”
Alysia had been thinking the same thing, but she didn’t want to be the one risking everything to prove a theory like before. “We’ll be back in the bunker sooner than you think. So don’t do anything crazy that could get you killed. Okay?”
“Yeah, I’m not, don’t worry about it. But I can’t promise that tomorrow, if we’re still stuck here, I won’t pull these gloves off. This bunker thing was a dumb idea, CeeCee, and I still think that wasn’t really the President on the intercom.”
Alysia shook her head and leaned back, hoping to get tired so that she could fall asleep. “So you’re back on that topic, huh? The conspiracy theory about our President. Come on, Jaime, even if that wasn’t really him, we’re screwed. Just look around you. It’s only a matter of time before we are overrun.”
“Not if I can help it. And look at you now, throwing the towel in and being a Debbie Downer. What if I were to go over there and tell your dad what you said? How do you think he’d like it?”
“He wouldn’t, so keep it to yourself. Look, I get it, and I’m not giving up, okay? It’s just depressing, and I’m tired and can’t even bring myself to close my eyes.” She sat up out of frustration and checked the watch attached to her glove. It read 4:30 a.m. “It’s gonna be light soon. Once the sun is up, things will settle down. Those demons are quite nocturnal.”
“How do you know this, Cee?” Jaime asked as he struggled with the sudden urge to remove his mask and light up a cigarette.
“Spent a couple nights with them, remember? They get pretty cranky in the day.” She rubbed her head in remembrance of the demon that had punched her in the face for fighting back. “You know, I found a body when I was on the way to this camp.”
“So what? There’s bodies all over the place nowadays.”
“This one was different. They had done something to it, the same thing they were going to do to me. She—the body, I mean—was pale, like really, really pale, and there were demon corpses all around her.”
“That’s some freaky stuff. What if they awakened some sort of evil spirit in her, and the spirit—upset that they brought her into our lame world—wiped them out, drifting back to hell where there’s beds, cigarettes, and the ability to fall asleep,” Jaime said. He was enjoying his sarcastic retort and the reaction he was getting from Alysia, who stared daggers into him.
“Joke all you want, jerk face, but I’m being honest.”
“Okay, but so what?” Jaime said, suddenly sitting up to look directly at her. “So what if they drained some poor girl and died while attempting it? They’re after us to kill us — all of us! I think that their rituals is the least of our problems right now, don’t you?”
“Jaime, I think that it’s important. With them running into our gunfire, there is a chance they will die out, but what if this is all a ruse and there is something bigger going on?”
Jaime stopped and thought about it for a second and then went back to his brooding. “You’re tired, Alysia. Why don’t we try to get some sleep so we’re able to function in the next few hours?”
~ * ~ * ~
Alysia hadn’t realized that she had passed out, but when she woke up, it was eerily quiet in the barracks and the sun was coming through the windows. It sounded as if the rain had picked up, but it was now light outside and the creatures had slowed down their assault on the barracks.
“Wake everybody up and get them back to the bunker,” Alysia could hear her father saying. The first team of soldiers had never shown up and he took easy command of their tiny army of volunteers. She looked over at Jaime, who was curled up on the ground like a baby. It made her smile, considering how hard he tried to be a classic male.
“Get your friend up, CeeCee, we’re moving out,” her father said, and she looked up at him with surprise.
“Dad, can we talk?” Alysia said, and James walked over and sat down next to her.
Alysia told her father about the girl she found, the details of her own capture, and her concern with their motives. James sat quietly for a long time afterwards, running the details over and over in his head.
“CeeCee, you and the boy pack up and head back to the bunker. Tell Tracy and Donald I need to talk to them,” he said.
“Which one is Donald?”
“The skinny guy with the sword on his back.”
“You’re going to investigate this without me, aren’t you?” she asked, ready to argue with him if he confirmed.
But he merely looked at her and shrugged. “Baby girl, are you trained for reconnaissance?”
“Well, no Dad, I’m not, but—”
“Have you had any real-time experience sneaking into enemy territory?”
“No.”
“Then let me do this, CeeCee. Let me go see what you’re talking about with these things. I need you to get these people back to the bunker and keep them ready. There ain’t no telling what our future is here with the Army guys missing in action. The three of us are going to look for them and rescue them if we can. Once we do that, we’re going to find this campsite you told me about and figure out what they have planned for us.”
Chapter Two
A gloved fist was thrust up into the air and the party of three froze amidst the tall trees of the forest. Tracy could see everything through her night vision goggles, but she couldn’t make out what it was that made James give the signal to stop. The light rain continued to play tiny drumbeats on the leaves as it had been doing the entire day that they tracked the demon party. She closed her eyes to try and enhance her hearing and then opened them quickly when Donald shot forward and impaled a kreple on his sword.
“Good, we’re still undetected,” Donald whispered and they made to keep moving towards the camp.
Donald, from what Tracy had learned about him during the day, was a man of many talents. His origins were Japanese and he had come from a long line of military people. He had a rich history and had served in the Marine Corps as a sniper. After his service he had become homeless but managed to live off the land through hunting wild animals and camping out in various parks. His skills for tracking were even better than James, and he was an accomplished master of the sword. A skill he had honed since childhood when he was a competitor in Kendo.
They walked for a time, sliding this way and that to mask their footsteps with the rain. Then the fist came up again, followed by a finger jabbing in the direction of a light. Tracy turned off the night vision to see if she could see and was quite surprised by the large bonfire that peeked through the trees about one hundred yards ahead of them. They worked their way through until they were close to it with James and Donald leading the way with their guns out, ready for action. She pulled out her handgun and did the same thing, ready for any kreples or demons that might hop out.
When they closed in on the campsite they could hear the whimpering of a girl that the demons had captured. Tracy wanted to bolt in and rescue her but James held her back, cautioning her to remain quiet as they listened. She forced herself to comply as they crept forward through the trees to see what was going on. There was a large bonfire with demons swaying rhythmically around it. A tall, beautiful, brown-skinned girl was bound and levitating near the fire; she looked extremely frightened but seemed unable to get free of her binds. She wore a purple dress and there were dark stains of blood spattered on it. She floated around the fire—as if being swung by an invisible line from the heavens—and the demons kept dancing as if she wasn’t there.
“We need to stop this!” Tracy whispered, and James nodded his head at her.
Suddenly the flames expl
oded, and the demons were consumed in its fire. Tracy, James and Donald were forced to shield their eyes as the explosion produced a blindingly bright light. When it was finished, the campsite was dark so they put on their night vision goggles to see the aftermath of the explosion. There were demon corpses all over the ground along with the girl in the purple dress who looked as if she had been drained of all color.
Tracy didn’t know what to think about the entire ritual but she was too focused to try and apply logic. Above the corpse of the girl floated a shadowy figure. This silhouette held a blackness that was incredibly dense. Even with the goggles, the only thing she could see was a slightly feminine shape to it along with two angry, glowing eyes.
“I think we found our answer,” Donald said as he stared at the apparition in disbelief.
The shadow looked this way and that for a time and then when it thought it was alone, it scooped up some of the flesh from the demons and consumed it. It continued doing this for the next half hour and by the time it was done, it had taken on the form of an actual human being. The form was that of the girl they sacrificed and she reached down, removed the clothes from the corpse, dressed herself, and adjusted her hair. The shadows around her were dense and moved unnaturally and the three warriors who witnessed this ritual stayed frozen as they saw the demon disguise itself as one of them. When the girl was dressed and ready, she made to leave but then looked suddenly at the area where James and company stood.
She opened her mouth and emitted an ear-piercing scream that was painful to hear and then the shadows moved towards them, like a living creature that no longer needed a host to survive. Tracy saw it coming and started to shoot at it, but it was a shadow and her bullets simply passed through it, some hitting the demon woman behind it.
The screaming intensified and when the shadow reached their party, James, Donald and Tracy added their own screams as the ice-cold chill that came from the shadow’s touch made them drop their weapons involuntarily. It was colder than anything any of them had ever felt and as they stood there, paralyzed by its touch, the woman walked over and began to tear Donald apart with her bare hands. It was hard for Tracy to watch it happen and even harder to hear his screams as she sat there helpless, frozen by the dark.
The torturing of Donald went on for a time and when he was dead, it moved on to James, slashing and clawing at him like a frenzied beast. The big man fought back as much as he could but the damage was too much and his legs buckled from beneath him. Tracy fought against the cold when she saw this and grabbed her phone to call Alysia. If she would be dying along with the men, she wanted people to know where they were so they could get some payback.
When the demon saw the phone, it swatted it out of her hands and pushed her back as if annoyed. What followed next was a bit of a standoff as Tracy stared down the demon and its glowing eyes as it stopped and stared back at her. It was as if it were looking deep within her soul for vulnerability, but Tracy had no weakness in this instance. She was still the tough cowgirl whose father had taught her how to shoot from the time she was able to walk, and no shadow, no mysterious demon conjured up from the bodies of fallen men, would get the better of her.
James lay on the ground, his wounds too much to bear. The cold made them feel like the least of his problems; the most he could do was look on. Tracy was all fire with her fists balled up and her face grim, and she stared at the screaming demon as if she didn’t care what it had in store for her. As soon as the demon made to get close to her, she swung a right cross into its jaw and the demon woman backed up, holding her cheek. The chilling darkness followed her as she retreated, surprised at Tracy’s actions, and seemingly hurt by the punch.
The police officer then pulled a pistol that was in a holster by her leg and began to shoot at the fleeing demon who now backed up and disappeared into the trees. She kept the gun high, waiting to see if the demon would reemerge but after a while when it stayed hidden, she assumed that it had given up and holstered her weapon to pick up her phone. She sent a text message to Alysia, asking her to send help. She sent a GPS beacon with the message and hoped that Alysia would receive it and be able to send a rescue party their way.
She thought about the ritual and the way it felt when her fist connected with the jaw of the demon woman. It felt no different than a human’s jaw—having punched out her share of bad guys on the job—and she remembered that when she stared at the demon, it looked very much like a woman with the only difference being that slight glow to her eyes. She let the thought pass and then knelt down to check on James since he was laughing hysterically, and she wondered if he was going through a bit of psychosis during the last hours of his life.
“Jimmy, are you okay? How you doing? Can you move?” she asked and James looked up at her nodded.
“I think I just need to catch my breath, Tracy,” he said, as he rolled to one side and tried to move his legs, happy when he realized that he actually could. “Sometimes it takes a good ass kicking to remember just how old you are,” he joked, then looked over at Donald and shook his head “I feel so bad for what happened just now,” he said. “Donald didn’t deserve to die like that. The man fought for his country, several tours actually, and did many good things when he came back. Man like that is supposed to be honored in his death, people are supposed to cry over him. But look at this.” And he motioned to his friend’s corpse with his open hand. “You know, I’ve always told CeeCee that life ain’t fair, but when it comes to stuff like this, it just seems like life likes to pick the wrong sides a whole hell of a lot.”
“Well I’m glad you’re alive,” Tracy said. “When I saw how that thing tore Donald apart, the only thing I could think about was that we need to do something or she’s going to tear us apart the same way. He got the short end of the stick when she attacked, and not even his fast reflexes could have helped him against that. It could’ve been any of us, and I think we need to make sure we kill that thing, not only for Donald, but for the people that she intends to hurt.”
James nodded at her and pulled up his legs. “If you don’t mind, Tracy, I need to stay here for a while. I just feel … tired, and it’s not so much because she attacked me, but well, as you know, we haven’t slept in about thirty six hours.”
Tracy knew James was right. When she saw the darkness moving, she had thought she was hallucinating from lack of sleep, but when the men saw the same thing she knew it was real. Until now, there had been no moment when they could afford to be sleepy. They had been fighting all night against the rushing demons, trying to keep them away from the bunker.
The three of them had forgone the luxury of going back to their bunker beds to fall asleep. Alysia’s revelation about the demon’s ritual was a top priority for them. So, they had set out to catch the demons in the act and here they were, reeling from the aftermath. It wasn’t as if they had much of a plan coming out there, but at the same time, they needed to see what the demons were doing. Tracy’s thoughts moved towards the bigger picture.
What could the demons do with a form that looked as human as the one that attacked us? So now, we have giants, flying creatures, kreples, demons, and now a version in the form of a beautiful woman. In this last thought, her mind took her to a scenario where the demon managed to get into the bunker. She thought about how most of the people would accept and defend her because they had not seen a demon like her before. What if she could stop her eyes from glowing? What if she could speak their language? Who would be there to show the others she wasn’t real? On top of that, she thought, what if there were already demons within the bunker, within the government, and within the military, making key decisions? How do you combat that?
She looked over at her friend and it suddenly dawned on her that he wasn’t wearing his helmet.
“James, your mask is off!” Tracy exclaimed, as the old Seal sat up and made himself more comfortable in the grass. The clearing seemed eerily serene and there was a light mist settling in around them. It felt strange having to wear a
mask as if she was on another planet. She looked down at Donald with the memory of his death fresh in her mind. That could have easily been me, she thought and then she looked over at James, who had suffered a portion of the shadow’s attack himself. The creature had shredded his mask and suit, and she could see the dark red wounds on his body that bled freely from the cuts.
Tracy removed her helmet and gloves, determined to suffer the same fate as her friend. She inhaled the stench of sulfur and death that was all around her, then turned her phone on, took a photo of herself with a forced smile, and sent it to Alysia, asking for an update. She wondered at the so-called chemicals in the air. Had they even deployed them to kill off the creatures?
“What do you think, Jimmy? This whole ‘bombing the creatures to save the country.’ Is it a crock of crap or what?” she asked and James looked over at her with the same expressionless glance he always had.
“Of course it is. There’s nothing in the air save for demon stink. Whoever was on that broadcast wasn’t the President. I’m starting to question everything about this operation too. The missing troops, giants popping in whenever they want. Now we have this foolishness. It’s like we’re in a horror movie now. Screaming ghosts?”
“You know, the whole premise of random monsters storming the coast with minimal military personnel to fight back is a little strange. Have you tried calling out to anyone beyond state lines?” Tracy asked.
“No, I don’t really know anybody that ain’t here. A few war buddies, and Kendra has some family in Florida, but I haven’t tried.”
“Kendra. Is that your wife’s name?”
“Yep, that is her name. I keep thinking she was the lucky one in that attack. She was a good, God-fearing woman. Not the way you’re thinking, bopping people over the head with her bible or throwing around scripture to trump out arguments, but really a genuinely good woman. For her to see the world turn into this, despite who or what is behind it … I don’t know, Tracy, this nonsense is enough to make someone lose their religion. I know how much her faith meant to her, so maybe she was spared all of this for a reason.” He chuckled and looked off to the side, and Tracy saw emotion come across his face for the first time since she met him. He looked as if he would cry but he dug deep and steeled himself against it.
