by Jake Bible
“Guys? No?” Morty sighed. “All right, I’ll come to you.”
He moved his half-ton body with the speed and agility of a creature a fraction of his weight. Morty had already picked his targets and knew exactly where to strike the first blow. He didn’t count the body on the ground as the first blow, but as more of a warm-up.
Two possessed women, each holding fire axes, stood to the left of the mob. Morty lunged at them, tearing the head off the first woman with a single motion then slamming that head into the second woman’s face before she could raise her axe. He plucked the weapon from her hands, flipped it around, and impaled her with the handle before she knew she’d been attacked.
With two down, Morty moved swiftly through the mob. The next target, a young man with a long, hipster beard, went down hard. Morty held what remained of the beard in his hands then let the bloody hair fall from his palm as he sent a knee into the midsection of a middle-aged man with more tattoos covering his possessed body than Morty could count.
Tattoo man held a length of pipe. Then he didn’t. The pipe disappeared from the man’s grasp then reappeared inserted into one orifice and coming down out of another. Morty twisted the pipe laterally and it shredded the man from the inside out, cracking open his midsection and sending ribs and guts flying this way and that.
Six of the possessed finally recovered their wits and threw themselves at Morty with a fury and intensity that made him raise a stony eyebrow. He took two hits from an aluminum bat before he tore it away from the possessed attacking him. A severed hand came with the bat and Morty flicked it off then used the weapon to crack open three of the six skulls before him.
The remaining skulls stayed intact, but their owners not so much. Morty impaled the last two, one of which had already suffered the indignity of losing his hand and the very bat that was sticking out from his belly. Morty almost laughed at the look on the man’s face as he glanced over his shoulder at the woman also impaled with him like a skewer of human for the barbeque. It was such a pitiful look.
Blobs of black smoke screeched and were sucked into the ground as Morty continued to dismantle the possessed mob.
He tore out a rib cage and used it to bludgeon a woman as she swung a pickaxe at his head. Taking the pickaxe, Morty swung it underhand, leaving it embedded in the crotch of a man that came at him with what looked like a broadsword. Morty shook his head, wondering where the hell the man had gotten a broadsword in Bryson City.
A sledgehammer nailed Morty in his right shoulder, and he stumbled to the side half a foot. His right arm shot out and he grabbed the attacker by the neck and lifted him off his feet. While the move looked good in superhero movies, it was far from anatomically accurate. Instead of the attacker dangling helpless, hands grasping at the grip that slowly choked him, he gagged and spat, his eyes bulging until the body’s weight tore the muscles and tendons that held head to neck and neck to shoulders.
With nature’s scaffolding shredded, the vertebrae in the upper spine could no longer stay intact. Crack, snap, dead.
Morty tossed the dead man away and focused on the last remnants of the mob. Five possessed men stood in a semi-circle, all looking terrified of the stone monster before them. Morty winked and two of the men flinched. They nearly turned and ran, but the three others hissed and they stayed in place.
“You can’t beat me,” Morty said. It was said not in a bragging tone, but stated as a mere fact. “Look around, guys. Took me all of one minute to rip your friends to shreds. One minute. I was made for this stuff. I mean, I wasn’t carved this size with these muscles and these claws and these teeth so I could play peacemaker. I was carved to kill, pure and simple.”
“There are billions more of us,” one of the possessed men said after his entire body shuddered then stilled.
Morty knew exactly what that meant.
“Who am I talking to?” he asked. “Someone new has joined the party.”
“Hello, Mordecai,” the possessed man said. “You have done a lot of damage here.”
“Valac? Again?” Morty asked. The possessed man nodded. “Not pulling bar duty today? I’d ask if you ever get tired of slumming it, but now you’re here.”
Morty held out his hands to indicate the dirty, grungy surroundings they stood in.
“Why are you hanging around?” Morty asked. “Don’t you have something better to do?”
“I was on my way to do just that,” Valac replied, “when I caught notice that you had gone on a field trip and were busy killing some of the staff.” Valac nodded at the bodies. “Impressive, but I expect nothing less from a grotesque of your caliber.”
“Thanks?” Morty said.
“What I am gathering from the lesser entity inside this vessel is you are on a mission and very busy,” Valac said. “So, I won’t keep you. Go ahead and fetch your supplies, Mordecai. I’ll send a memo for you to be left alone.”
“Why?” Morty asked.
“Why not?” Valac responded with a shrug. “These lesser demons can’t defeat you. All that will result from these kinds of confrontations is the waste of perfectly good vessels. And, Hell knows we are in short supply of vessels these days, Mordecai.” He grinned so wide it almost tore the vessel’s cheeks open. “Some might say we have completely run out and there is only one place left with fresh vessels to be harvested.”
“You’re joking, right?” Morty asked, knowing he’d never get a straight answer. Not from a demon. “You’re saying that the wards at our sanctuary are the last unpossessed humans left on Earth?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Valac said. “Except for you to have a nice day. Pile up all the supplies you want and do that back-and-forth thing you do. In the end, none of it will make a bit of difference.”
“If you say so,” Morty said. “But, I’m not going to take my safety for granted because you’re feeling gracious. I’ll still be watching for the knife in my back.”
“As if anyone could pierce that stone body of yours with a simple knife,” Valac said.
“Figure of speech,” Morty said.
The two watched each other for several seconds before Valac reached up and wiped at the blood that started to pour from his nose in a steady stream.
“Time is up,” Valac said, flicking the blood from the back of his hand. “I stay too much longer and this vessel will fall right apart.”
The possessed body shuddered and Valac was gone. The demon left wiped and wiped at his nose, but he couldn’t stanch the flow of blood.
“Well, shit,” the possessed man said before collapsing to the ground. The black smoke blob of evil leaked out from the body’s mouth then screeched and was lost from sight as it wormed down through a crack filled by scraggly dandelions.
“You guys gonna listen to your boss or stick around for more fun?” Morty asked the remaining possessed.
They actually looked like they wanted to fight it out, but one of them finally broke the standoff by turning and walking away. No words of goodbye or taunts, a simple about-face and gone. The others followed quickly and Morty was once again left alone at the back of the pharmacy.
He turned to the open back door and sighed as he saw the duffel bag there. It had a couple of pounds of offal covering it. Morty walked over and picked up the bag, wiping the guts and blood from it the best he could. He slung the duffel over one shoulder and looked up into the sky.
Storm clouds were brewing. The threat of a rainstorm was on the air, but there was no way to tell if it would open up over Bryson City or wait and dump its contents on a nearby area. The weather in that part of the world was as unpredictable as human emotions as far as Morty was concerned.
Morty thought about launching himself back up into the air, but he hated flying in a thunderstorm. Not that he attracted lightning or anything, but if an errant bolt hit him, it would put him dow
n fast. He was strong and made of magic, but lightning beat rock any day.
Making sure the duffel bag was secure on his shoulder, Morty set off at a brisk walk, ready to be gone from the pharmacy and the corpses he left behind.
7
THE TWO SUPERMARKETS Morty passed, set across the street from each other, were empty. Completely stripped. He’d scavenged the last useful items over a year before. Not even what he’d left behind remained on the shelves. So he kept on walking, ignoring the stares of the possessed who sat on the curbs outside the parking lots of both supermarkets.
The possessed men and women held the usual assortment of weapons, but none made a move to put them to use. Morty kept his eyes forward, looking down the road for a very specific shop he hoped still held what he needed. When he reached it, and saw what was written on the cement sidewalk out front, Morty couldn’t help but let his shoulders slump slightly in defeat.
“Really?” he asked aloud then turned and shouted, “Really? You guys suck!”
“ALL GONE STONER,” the spray-painted words read outside Nick’s Discount Smokes.
“We’ll see,” Morty said as he stepped over the words, superstitiously worried if he set foot on the lettering he’d make them true.
The front door and windows of the smoke shop had long been shattered. When the world began to crumble, those who needed their nicotine fix had hit the town hard. Luckily for Morty, the local smokers were far from the tobacco elite. Every carton of cigarettes was quickly pilfered, but the vast majority of the cigars in the back room humidor were left untouched. The clientele for those had probably decided to stay in their retirement mansions or vacation homes that were dappled across the hillsides in the general area.
The words on the sidewalk had proved to be authentic. Morty hurried through the shop to find the humidor empty. Well, not entirely empty. Someone had the decency to leave a large pile of feces right in the center of the humidor floor. Corn and all.
“Doesn’t matter,” Morty muttered. “I have more.”
He left the store and stalked his way through Bryson City until he came to an unassuming neighborhood filled with small brick ranch houses. He paused outside his destination, looked around to make sure he wasn’t being watched, then crossed the dead lawn and entered the house, shutting the door behind him quickly.
Morty knew without searching the house that his stash of cigars was gone. The smell that hit him said as much.
HAHA was written on the entryway wall in two-foot-high letters made of crap.
Four stash houses, and two tobacco shops later, and Morty was ready to tear some more heads off.
Instead of head tearing, Morty went back to his true mission and began gathering supplies needed for the sanctuary. It took him close to four hours to get together almost everything on the list. He had six neat piles of supplies set up at the edge of town, only a few feet from where he’d first landed earlier in the day.
Morty looked up at the sky as he rolled his head on his neck, easing the tension from his stone muscles. He had about four more hours of daylight before he could effectively retrieve the supplies without fear of being hassled by the possessed. Although, after his interaction with Valac, Morty had a feeling he could start hauling right then and not be bothered at all.
But he had a system and he liked to stick to his system.
To kill some time, Morty decided he’d fly a few miles away and see if he couldn’t try to wrangle up some cigars from the casino. The building didn’t hold a lick of food any longer, but it seemed to have a never-ending supply of cigars and booze. The trick was retrieving them from a casino completely surrounded by the possessed. Demons didn’t play craps or blackjack, but they were attracted to the aura of misery that hung over the building.
When first opened, the casino had been a symbol of frivolity and mindless entertainment. But beneath the surface was the ever-oppressive feeling of life being sucked straight from the customers who walked the smoky floors and played the games of chance. With every pull of a slot machine’s handle, another piece of humanity was lost. The psychic residue from desperation was like demon crack.
But, the possessed didn’t go inside; rather, they hung out on the grounds, soaking up the bad mojo that seeped out from the edges of the doorways.
Surprisingly, the glass doors and windows that fronted the casino hadn’t been broken. Morty never quite figured out why. Yes, they were made of bulletproof glass, but plenty of high-security and “unbreakable” buildings had been destroyed by the possessed.
Not the casino. The doors were intact. The windows were intact. Dirty and filthy with grime, but intact. Morty hadn’t ever even seen a footprint within a meter of the front doors. The dust that coated the walkway always remained undisturbed. The lack of demon interest in the building itself was puzzling, but fine by Morty. One less building to clear.
The grounds were so packed that the skinniest of Gs couldn’t squeeze through the crowd, which stood a hundred deep on all sides, even in the back by the stage doors where performers like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Toto, and others would exit to get back on their tour buses. A hundred deep all around.
Good thing Morty had wings and magic to power them.
He didn’t bother looking down at the horde of possessed. He knew they were there; he knew what they looked like, and they didn’t make much difference to him. He wasn’t planning on sticking around for very long. He had work to do and needed to get to it, so a quick snatch and grab was his only agenda.
Landing on the roof, Morty stretched his wings wide before folding them in on his back. He rolled his shoulders and cracked his neck, always a little tense after a flight. The stairwell access door stood like an obelisk, a monolith in the middle of the roof, surrounded by a sea of tar paper and air vents.
Morty made his way to the door, but was forced to stop as his left leg broke through a patch of tarpaper. He frowned down at the mishap, surprised that the roof was already weakening. Sure, it had gone years without maintenance, but it was still surprising.
He plucked his leg free of the hole and stood for a second as he scanned the rest of the roof, hoping to see other weak spots. But he wasn’t a builder, a roofer, or a person who knew a damn thing about construction, so the scan only lasted a few seconds before he realized he was wasting time. So what if the roof caved in and he fell through? Not like the fall would break him or anything.
Morty made it to the obelisk of the access door without any further trouble. He opened the door and was struck by the stale smell of cigarettes. Even when the state had outlawed smoking in public places, the casino, situated on Cherokee lands, legally continued as a pro-smoke environment to the irritation of the state. Gamblers liked their nicotine, especially those who haunted the slot machines. Decades of cigarette stink assaulted Morty as he stepped into the dark stairwell.
Since he’d had his cigar stash safe in his many caches, he hadn’t been to the casino in a while. As he made his way down to the top-floor penthouse, he couldn’t quite remember if he’d emptied the suite of all of its smokeables. He decided he’d give it a quick peek before descending to the first floor where he knew there would still be some hand-rolled treasures.
“Jim,” Morty said as he stepped from the stairwell into the foyer of the penthouse. A corpse lay propped up with its back against the elevator doors. “Staying busy, I see.”
The corpse was so dried-out that it was hard to tell if it had been a man or woman just by looking at it. The name tag on the vest that covered its fake tuxedo shirt said “Jim”, so Morty took the name at face value and assumed the corpse was male.
“Here to check my stash,” Morty said, nodding to Jim as he stepped past the dead man and entered the penthouse.
The suite was a mess. Whoever had stayed there when the Gates of Hell had opened, really did a number on their guests. There wa
s arterial spray and the remains of long-dried intestines everywhere. It was as if someone had tossed the guts like party streamers here and there. No bodies were left in the penthouse, not even bodies of those who had obviously been eviscerated, but evidence of death was plain as the day that filtered in through the closed drapes that covered one entire wall.
Morty opened those drapes, oblivious to the dust that exploded from the material. It had been a while since he’d come to the casino. He looked out at the landscape and sighed at the beauty of the mountains. They were gorgeous, but sad, a jewel in a dead landscape. Morty knew there was no real life out there except for on Margaret’s Patch. The sanctuary wasn’t visible from his vantage point.
He sighed again as he moved to the ornate bar, which sat opposite the grand windows. Booze he didn’t care about, but the five-foot humidor under the bar he did. That was where the good stuff sat.
Except it didn’t. Instead of boxes of fine cigars, there was a note that he had left for himself. Morty almost smacked his forehead with his fist when the memory of leaving the note rushed back to him.
“Sorry, pal,” it read, “but you smoked most of these and then took the rest to your third stash house in Bryson City. Head there for some tasty smoky treats.”
“Too late for that,” Morty said to the note before crumpling it up and tossing it out into the middle of the room.
Morty stood there with his granite palms facedown on the bar top. His eyes narrowed as he tried to remember if he’d find the same note on the three floors below. Directly under him was another luxurious, full-floor suite, but it couldn’t be called the penthouse since it didn’t occupy the top floor. Below that were two floors of quarter suites. None of the floors had ever been advertised by the casino back when it was open. The rooms were strictly for high-rollers and special guests.
