by Greg Dragon
The lights came on, bright and painful to her eyes as the ceiling reflected the sky outside and the darkness wrapped itself around her like a shield. She slid out into the streets, looking like everyone else out there running about screaming or lost, the soldiers and guards pushing them to get back into their temporary homes.
She didn’t run, but simply walked, terrible and beautiful, the old military suit accentuating her every curve as she moved with determination to the area where James Knight had run. The only way that people around her could tell that she didn’t belong was by the black, misty shadow that seemed to move with her. It whipped around her legs as if it was a living thing and unlike her, it was sinister and unnatural to witness.
She set her gaze forward and kept on walking until she got to the area where James, Tracy, Jaime and Alysia were waiting in anticipation of her attack. They were ready for her and their weapons were drawn but she paid them very little attention. Her focus was on killing James, and she would not let them distract her from her goal. She saw the minion that she sent, dead on the ground, and when she got near him, a few soldiers encircled the square and had their weapons pointing at her.
“You’re not going to get the baby,” James said to her. He pointed the Sultan Magnum at her, the same weapon that had done so much damage to her earlier. It made her hesitate, the pain still fresh in her mind. Next to him was the girl, his daughter, Alysia who brandished a more ancient weapon that she had used to hurt her badly when she was in the forest.
She looked around desperately but there was nowhere to run, so she screamed at the lot of them and sent the darkness out, spinning it like a tornado into their midst. For every man and woman it touched, there were screams of agony. The cold was so intense and painful that some of them dropped their weapons and fell to their knees. The soldiers started shooting at her, but even though she was getting hit, she kept the shadow spinning and focused it on each member, freezing them to the bone and killing them before moving it to the next.
Alysia saw what the demon was doing, and that the bullets of the weapons the soldiers used were not enough to stop her. James could not shoot the magnum, even if he wanted to. It was too close for that sort of weapon, and the risk of shooting one of his men was too great for him to do it. His hesitation did not go unnoticed by the demon, and she broke a part of the shadow off to send it at him as she continued to kill the soldiers one by one.
More ran into the square to fight her, but the darkness only grew to accommodate them. Jaime was on the ground, unmoving and Alysia couldn’t believe that she hadn’t seen him go down. Tracy was back by a house with Angelica and Maria, sticking to her promise to keep them safe, and though she wanted to join the fight, she stood with them just in case the demon switched focus.
The carnage continued, and the road was littered with the bodies of the men and women who had fought bravely against the demon huntress. Alysia saw her father rolling around, trying to fight the shadow that engulfed him, and it was in this instance that she realized that she was alone. Her only family member was dying, and her friend was in terrible shape. The stress of the situation overtook her actions and she teetered on the precipice of inaction and suicide. It was the type of choice her father had always reminded her would come to a warrior. Fight or flight … there was no third choice.
The demon threw more darkness to engulf her as she stood, and though it hurt—a sort of burning sensation instead of cold—she dashed in and swung the sword in an upward arc, catching the top of the demon’s abdomen and leaving a bloody gash where it struck. The shadows felt like hundreds of tiny razor blades, threatening to cut her to bits, but she refused to succumb to the pain and the weakness, spinning a back fist into the demon’s jaw and bringing the blade down onto her shoulder.
Shadows left the soldiers and rushed in to help their master, spinning like a maelstrom of black around the two fighting women. Alysia was all rage as she fought through the pain, whipping the blade this way and that, catching parts of the demon’s body whenever she would swing. The demon brought all the cold she could muster to stop Alysia, but she couldn’t control the shadows, not while the strange blade of that crude weapon distracted her with sudden pangs of pain. In one desperate move she grabbed it. The naked blade cut into her hand but she held it still. She came face to face with Alysia as she held it, but the young girl was not stopping her attack.
With her sword held, Alysia brought a leg up and snapped three quick roundhouses into the demon’s jaw. She loosened the blade to let the shadows heal her hands, but Alysia was back at it again, cutting this way and that. The panicked demon retreated from the girl, pulling the shadows into her so that she appeared as a pillar of blackness, with glowing eyes piercing through to stare at them. James Knight saw an opportunity, stood up with the magnum, and fired a single shot into the black mass. The bullet ripped through the chest of the demon and plastered her against a building, where she began to shake, and the shadows moved in, trying to heal her as fast as they could.
“Light her up, now!” James yelled, and the remaining soldiers began to fire on her fallen body. It was loud and terrible, this murder of the demon, and she screamed so loudly that Alysia thought it would damage her eardrums. The shadows gave up on healing their host, and faded into nothingness after ten minutes of continued shooting. The demon was dying and in her last breath, she screamed out.
“ALYSIA KNIGHT!”
It was frightening to hear her voice with its multiple tones, and Alysia knew she was in trouble. She crawled over to Jaime’s body, who hadn’t moved during the entire ordeal, and though she felt as if she had been in a car accident, she wanted to make sure that he was okay.
“Jaime?” she whispered, touching his face.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m alive,” he said and reached down to feel for a cigarette. “It felt like a million icicles hit me. But you, you took it like a champ and kicked her collective ass,” he said. “Good job. I’ll be damned if I didn’t lose my box of cigarettes.”
Alysia laughed at his words and then lay down next to him. She held the sword above her head and examined the blood that stained its blade. It was an odd contrast to the bright blue sky reflected on the ceiling of the bunker and she wondered if the demon was truly dead.
“CeeCee, Jaime, can you all move?” Tracy asked as she and Angelica walked over to them and helped them up.
“I’m alright for now,” Alysia said. “But I can’t stay here.”
“What do you mean you can’t stay here?” her father said as he walked over to them.
“Did you hear what she said, Dad?”
“Yeah, she screamed your name. I would scream your name too if you put a whooping on me the way you just did to her.”
“No, she threatened my name. I told you they want me. They’ve wanted me since the very beginning and it’s the reason why they kept capturing me and not killing me like everyone else. Dad, that giant lifted me up as gently as he could before we killed him, and the demons took me into their camp to make me into something like her. Now I’m a threat. Just think about the way she said my name.”
“So they no longer want you,” her father said as he began to check her arms and legs for any wounds from the demon.
“I am a threat, and so are you. I think that they use female hosts for whatever reason, but if they cannot have me, they will send more to try to take me out. Just look how much damage just one of them is able to do. I cannot honestly stay here and allow more people to get killed over me.”
“So, we’re leaving then,” James said, and he looked around at the crowd of people that gathered to stare at his daughter in awe.
“They got Debdan, and I freaking hate this place,” Jaime said as he walked over to stand next to Alysia. “I’m leaving with you guys.”
“Are you sure, Jaime?” Alysia asked.
“Shut up,” he said, shaking his head at her as if what she asked was so ridiculous.
“Need some police back up?” Tracy asked, and Ja
mes looked as if he wanted to object. “Don’t you dare, James Knight,” she said to him and then shot him a glance that could probably cut a diamond. Alysia saw the exchange as confirmation for what she believed: Tracy and her father had become more than friends and it probably happened while he was in the clinic. She wanted to tell Tracy that she wasn’t invited, but that would be her acting like a child. She saw the way her father looked at her, and as much as it stung, she decided to let them be.
“So that settles it,” she said. “We go to the surface and try to see if we can get help.”
“I don’t think that it’s gonna be so bad,” Jaime said, and he pushed his way out of the square to walk back towards his bunker house. Alysia followed behind him, and James stood back to brief the remaining soldiers on what their plan was.
~ * ~ * ~
Jaime and Alysia opened the door to his bathroom and kept their weapons ready for the possessed Debdan. What they found was red gook smeared all over the walls, and evidence of an escape out of the building. They ran outside to track it, and it led back towards the entrance. They followed the bloody footsteps as they moved onto the road and up the ramp towards the bunker’s entrance.
“We need to wait for my father and Tracy,” Alysia said, and Jaime stopped and whipped around to look at her.
“What’s going on between you two?” he asked.
“Me and my dad?”
“No, you and Ginger Fury, the cop,” he said, making a motion with his hands to emulate Tracy’s wild, bushy hair.
“I think she and my dad are dating but hiding it from me,” she said to him.
“What’s the big deal? She’s pretty hot, and your dad isn’t old.”
“Of course you wouldn’t get it. How would you feel if you lost your mom and your dad was out and about loving on other women?”
Jaime put a finger on his lip and walked around as if he was in deep thought. Alysia could see that he was still in pain, but he didn’t want to show it.
“So, it’s the end of the world, Mom dies, Dad wants to get some action before he joins her. Is that what you’re saying? Well hell, I’d be like, hell yeah, Dad! Get you some!”
“You can be such an insensitive jerk when you want to be, you know that?” she said. “Why don’t you stay and spare me the annoyance of dealing with you out there.”
“I could kill for a cigarette right now,” Jaime said, ignoring her words, and ignoring the topic they were discussing. “Alysia, when things go crazy people act out of character and do things that are outside of the boundaries of what we would consider normal, okay?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying your dad probably cries himself to sleep every night because of your mom, but Tracy is the type of girl to help him through it. I see how you are and I know you’re not helping him. Let your old man be happy. If it were the other way around I’m sure he’d want you to be happy.”
Alysia bit her tongue on the objection she was about to make, and looked around to observe the bunker’s situation. People were leaving their homes to look at the aftermath of the demon’s terror, and a few of them stopped to thank her and Jaime. Tracy and Angelica walked up towards them, and Maria was sitting up on James’s shoulders, trailing behind the two women.
“Let’s get some things together and make a plan for the outside,” he said as he walked up and placed the skinny young girl on the ground.
“Will we see you again?” Angelica asked, a hint of sadness in her voice as she looked at Tracy and then at James.
“Hard to tell, but I will come visit once we’ve found a place,” Tracy said to her friend.
“I owe you my life, several times over,” Angelica said. “Plus Maria will want to see her Auntie Tracy and Uncle Jimmy.”
“What about her Auntie CeeCee?” Tracy said and smiled at Maria.
Maria twisted around to look at Alysia, and then her eyes fell on the sword and she got serious. She touched the scabbard and then looked up at her and in the most matter-of-fact, innocent way she proclaimed: “Auntie CeeCee is going to save us all from the monsters.”
And Then We Had Chaos
Chapter One
A week had passed since Alysia and her company left the bunker to take their chances in the woods. They had no directive as of yet but knew they could not stay around the citizens of the bunker city.
They camped out in one of the bathrooms inside of a park, since James decided that an open camp would have them too exposed. With the bathroom they could keep one person guarding the doorway at all times while the rest of them slept. It wasn’t ideal and due to issues with the plumbing, the smell was something that took some getting used to. Nevertheless, it was safe and so far, they had not seen any demons, giants, or flesh-eating kreples.
“So, what’s the plan, CeeCee?” Jaime asked Alysia as they sat on a bench on the outside of the bathroom.
“I dunno, why don’t you ask my dad?” she replied, too busy fiddling with her shoes to look up at him.
“Because this is your deal. We’re all out here for you, and you need to give us an objective or this will become one of those crazy expeditions where people just move around aimlessly while they get picked off, one by one. We need a point to being out here, and that one’s on you.”
Alysia knew he was right, and though it looked as if she could care less, she had spent the day before thinking about their objective.
“I do have an idea but it may be too ambitious,” she said. “I don’t want you to think I’m crazy.”
“It’s not like we’re doing anything better. Plus I know that you’re not crazy; crazy can actually be considered fun sometimes.”
Alysia looked at him to see if he was joking; he was barely ever serious whenever they would talk but to her surprise, he looked as if he was ready to listen.
“Part of the reason the demons are able to keep killing us so easily is because we’re sitting around in a worthless state of disbelief. We need to accept that they are here, and that they are supernatural. In fact, there has to be a bigger reason for them coming here,” Alysia said.
“What makes you think there is a bigger reason?” Jaime asked.
“I told you about the ritual they held to turn me, and you saw what happens to women who undergo the full treatment. They become damn near gods, controlling freezing shadows, healing, and moving around so fast.”
“They can also turn us into human versions of themselves,” Jaime said.
“That’s not all,” a man’s voice said, and they both turned around to see James Knight standing with his shirt off in the doorway of the bathroom.
“Lose your shirt, dad?” Alysia said.
“Why don’t you let me be James Knight and you be Alysia the good daughter, huh, CeeCee?” he said to her and popped her playfully with his shirt. “Anyway, what I was saying is that the possessed humans evolve after some time. They turn into the red and black versions, the ones with some intelligence about them.”
“We never saw that. How did you find out about that?” Alysia asked.
“Well, your friend turned, as you all know, and we ran into him when we came looking for you. What I didn’t tell you is that he was full-on red and black when me and Tracy fought him off.”
Jaime shot a glance at Alysia and then back at James. “He was gone when we went back to my place to get ready to leave,” he said. “We tracked his steps to the entrance of the bunker, but I think he took off into the woods.”
“That’s not good,” James said to him. “If he has any part of Debdan left in him, he’ll know how to get inside the bunker. He could teach the others how to get the upper hand on the boys and girls protecting the place. Why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve tracked him down and killed him.”
“We didn’t know that they turned, Dad. Remember?” Alysia said to him, and he looked at the two of them and then sighed.
“I came out for some fresh air; I didn’t mean to interrupt your chat,” he said.
&
nbsp; “Oh yeah, you and Tracy putting in some work, huh, Mr. Knight?” Jaime joked, and James looked like he wanted to knock him out. Jaime started to laugh hysterically when he saw the uncomfortable look on James’s face, and Alysia proceeded to punch him in his arm.
“What?” he said to her and countered with a strong pinch to her forearm.
“Oh my god, that stings!” she exclaimed, and smacked him on his shoulder.
“You two are like kids.” James said to them, and then shook his head and walked back inside. He came back out with his undershirt on and sat down next to them on the bench. “Keep going on about your plan, baby girl. Let’s hear it; I’m sorry I interrupted.”
Alysia smiled at him, happy that he was involved. She tried to remember where she was on explaining her idea.
“So, the demons have a way to reproduce by using us as hosts,” she said. “We become their queens, we become their minions, and they seem to control the giants. I don’t know what the kreples are, but they seem to be animals from a different world. I’m not worried about them. The main thing we have to worry about is the demons. They’re tearing our world apart, and they are predatory.”
“Don’t forget the flying monster bats or whatever they are,” James weighed in. “I had a real up close and personal meeting with a few of them and they are just as intelligent and predatory as those demons. We have multiple problems going on; the demons and their possession games is merely one drop in a bucket full of drama.”
“We can at least focus on learning the demons though, Mr. Knight,” Jaime said to him.
“That’s a good point,” The big man replied. “What’s to say that finding out more about the demons won’t give us some insight into the other crazies? So where should we begin? How do we go about learning about the demons?”
“The queen talked,” Tracy said and they all looked up at her as she walked out into the cool night air. The confidence and beauty of her stature was not something anyone could ignore, and she tied her hair back effortlessly as she turned to face them. She was still in her tank top , cargo pants and boots, and Alysia wondered what it was that she had been doing since it was obvious she hadn’t been sleeping. “She talked, so that means she could answer questions. Why don’t we find another one, chain it up, and force it to talk to us?”
