The Demon Deception

by Mark Harritt

  Despite her resistance, Lilith had been pulled within striking distance of the otherworldly creature. The gigantic curved sword swept up through the air, and cut down to slash Lilith, “Your sacrifice is accepted.”

  The great sword picked up speed as it swept back down. For the first time, Lilith feared death. The sword was her doom. She screamed as she faced her mortality.

  Steel rang. The twin swords Faith and Mercy pealed like church bells in bright resonance. The sword that Dargonth held shrieked in agony against the Angel forged swords. The demonic blade was held motionless as the great giant pushed against Lazarus. Lazarus had Faith and Mercy turned so that the quilons bound the blade. Dargonth couldn’t push the blade forward, or pull it back. Lazarus tried to apply force and torsion to shatter the demon blade. The hell blade wouldn’t break. They were at an impasse. Dargonth focused his tremendous strength. Lazarus’ feet slid across the loose dirt against the might of the giant.

  Behind them, Mephistopheles watched for weaknesses, both in his allies, and in the alien threat. He weighed strengths against weaknesses, and came to a decision. He made his move, and a bolt of hellfire shot out at Darcy. She caught most of the blast on one of her force shields, but some managed to get through. Darcy flinched against the power of his magic, and the bond that held Lilith loosened.

  “Kill her!” Lilith screamed.

  That woke all of the possessed. The bikers and the FBI flooded forward. Violence intensified around Darcy as she was swarmed, fighting both demons and their possessed.

  Dargonth was too strong for Lazarus. He had to move away from the alien creature, go on the offense. He did this with a quick move to one side, twisting his swords in the other direction. The demon blade shifted and arched down to the ground as Dargonth cut down, trying to drive the blade towards Lazarus. It missed, and Lazarus muttered praise as he danced away. He didn’t think he would survive so much as a small cut from the demon blade. Dargonth pulled the blade back. Since Lazarus no longer had to keep it from splitting him or Lilith, he went on the offensive. He was smaller, and hopefully, much faster than the creature before him. His blades moved in an intense, furious pattern. The alien was forced to defend against the twin swords. The fury of the onslaught made Dargonth retreat.

  The fight truly began in that instant. Now the skills of the swordsmen were displayed as they tested each other’s capabilities. Lazarus had been wrong in his assessment of Dargonth’s speed. With such a large creature, and such a large sword, he should be able to dance in and out of the alien’s guard, but it just wasn’t possible. The pattern of the defense kept his own offense away from the giant blue alien. Plus, he had to work to keep the alien’s strikes away from him. Still, Lazarus was able to use his size and speed to prance away from contact. He wove a pattern of steel that kept the creature from moving forward to attack Lilith. It was a stalemate, again.

  This stalemate couldn’t continue, though. One would tire sooner than the other. Once that happened, mistakes would be made. Lazarus knew that, if the demon blade didn’t kill him outright, blood would flow, and it would be just a matter of time before he faltered. Lazarus prayed fervently that it wouldn’t be him that drew the first cut.

  The thud-thud-thud of the M60 machinegun opened up, and bullets hit the alien. Sam to the rescue. Dargonth held up his hands, trying to use magic to ward off the bullets. His magic flared through the air, creating a shield, but it couldn’t stop the blessed bullets. The bullets chewed into Dargonth. Lazarus watched the wounds heal instantly, bullets dropping to the ground. Dargonth changed his stance, and shifted to put Lazarus between him and Sam. Sam stopped firing so that he wouldn’t hit Lazarus.

  Lazarus used the distraction to his advantage. As Dargonth moved from one position to another, his guard dropped, the distraction of the machinegun fire throwing him off balance. The swords flashed, and the alien cried out, a deep cut across one thigh, and a slash across the abdomen. The cuts from the angel forged swords didn’t heal like the wounds from the bullets did.

  “No such thing as a fair fight,” Lazarus thought as he pressed his advantage.

  The chaos of the battlefield had changed the positions of the antagonists. The two fights had shifted, and the fight between Darcy, Lilith and Mephistopheles raged behind the alien now. The only way that Lazarus could protect Lilith was to press on and keep the alien busy defending from his attacks. He increased the intensity of his assault.

  Dargonth was dying. He knew it. Dargonth never imagined he could fall in battle. He knew that he would not leave this fight alive. The cuts on his thigh and stomach felt like fire, a purifying poison. He had never experienced power that felt like those twin swords before. He was weak from the strike of the bullets as well. He could feel the poison working its way through his body. Incrementally, he felt the weakness start to take him. Failure was something that he could not allow. He had never failed his master, and he wasn’t going to do so now. There was only one thing that he could do. He turned his back on the diminutive swordsman in front of him, and shifted his attack.

  During the heat of the battle between the two demons and Darcy, positions had shifted. Mephistopheles stared stupidly as the point of the demon blade ripped out of his chest. The blade went in through his back, and came out through his sternum. He screamed as he felt his destruction. His being was shredding, becoming undone. His metaphysical being was being destroyed. His physical, corporeal form had been destroyed before, but his soul, as tarnished and soiled as it was, was immortal. Mephistopheles thought that he couldn’t die. It turned out, though, that he was wrong in this belief. He could feel his soul dissolving, turning into something different. He wondered if this pain was what judgment felt like. Then he was gone.

  Lazarus ran the creature through, Faith striking where the heart on a human being would be. Mercy cut through the spine, at the small of the back. The alien dropped to its knees. Lazarus pulled the twin blades back, and they met as he cut through Dargonth’s neck. The head of the alien landed with a thud, dark purple blood spilling across the sand, the body falling forward. Lazarus knew that he had failed, though. The sound of the M60 sounded again, as Sam pumped rounds into the horrors that surged through the portal. The portal was open, but it didn’t widen. The portal stopped expanding with the death of Dargonth, though it did stabilize with the sacrifice of Mephistopheles.

  With the death of Dargonth, something happened to Darcy. Her eyes rolled into the back of her head, and she crumpled to the ground. Lilith, in her rage, started forward to kill her.

  Lazarus ran forward, “We have more pressing business right now.” He pointed towards the portal, Mercy stretched forward.

  Lilith spit the words, “Kill them, Kill them all.”

  She began shooting hellfire towards the opening, slaughtering the alien demons as they slithered, crawled, ran, and pounced through the portal. Behind her, all of the bikers changed as they ran forward. The FBI possessed, seeing Mephistopheles killed, howled, and changing, surged forward. Rifles, pistols, and shotguns sounded, the mass of lead driving into the horde pouring from the opening. The wall of lead stopped the horde in its tracks. The mass of possessed slammed into the horde. Life was short and brutal on that front line as talons, blades, and bullets ripped into the aliens. The alien tide wouldn’t stop, though. They fought back with as great a ferocity. The possessed were able to stop the horde, momentarily. They were the cork in the bottle.

  Lilith took a stance and shot precise bolts of hellfire into the areas where the possessed were being pressed hardest. Shots rang out as the shooters on the rim took advantage of the sudden visibility and the press of bodies. Precision was impossible, but there were so many, they couldn’t miss. The dead piled up.

  Sam, and Lazarus stepped back to watch the carnage, hoping that they wouldn’t have to get further involved, but it was beginning to look like a lost cause. More of the possessed were falling, and the waves of the aliens were still pressing forward.

  Lazarus looked into t
he portal. He saw something glowing in the distance. He pointed, and asked Sam, “Do you see it?”

  “What, you mean that gigantic figure in the back?”

  “Yeah, that thing. See the way the portal pulses?”

  “Yeah. Oh yeah, I see what you mean. The big gem, and the colored lines on its body. They pulse with the portal.”

  “Do you think we can pop a rocket through the portal and hit that damn thing?”

  Sam looked carefully, then shook his head, “No, not enough clearance. Plus, it’s too far. I think we need to be closer.”

  Lazarus looked at Sam, then looked at the van. Sam followed his gaze, “Crap.”

  Lazarus nodded, “Crap indeed. But we need someone to clear the way for us.”

  They looked at Lilith at the same time. Lazarus ran forward, and clapped his hand on her shoulder. She snarled as she turned on him, hellfire ready to immolate him. He held up his hands in submission, and she saw who it was, and more importantly, recognized him, “I should go ahead and kill you. They’ll never know what happened.”

  Lazarus smiled, “Oh, my guys will know. They’ll make sure your boss finds out. I’m pretty sure he’s going to be very unhappy when he knows you let the alien demon horde in. Especially when he knows that you could have helped us stop this thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lazarus turned her and pointed out the gigantic creature that was directing the attack. He explained his plan. She stared at him as if he was out of his mind, “You trust me to do that for you?”

  Lazarus shook his head, “Oh no, I don’t trust you at all. You’re coming with us.”

  She shook her head, “Oh, hell no!”

  He pointed into the portal, “If you don’t, in about five minutes, you’re going to have to deal with that big bastard over here, trying to eat you.”

  She looked into the portal. She didn’t like anything she saw there, but she understood Lazarus’ logic. The wave wasn’t going to stop, there were way too many of them.

  “How do you want to do this?” she asked.

  Lazarus pointed at the side door to the van, “You’re going to take that side door off,” he pointed at the back of the van, “and then you’re going to take the back doors off as well.”

  “How?”

  “They’re metal, you like to use hellfire. I’m pretty sure you can figure it out from there.”

  Lilith was a quick study. The side and back doors came off with a liberal, though precise application of hellfire. They piled into the van, with Sam in the driver’s seat.

  Lazarus pointed at the portal, “Sam, you get up a good running start. Lilith, you clear a path for us.”

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “I’m going to be in the back of the van, making sure they don’t slow us down when we get to the other side.”

  Sam fired up the van, Lilith sat in the back passenger seat, and Lazarus sat in the back with the weapons. He had a carabineer attached to the back of his ballistic vest.

  “Lilith, hook me in.” He pointed at two seat belts, one on either side of the van. Lilith ran them both through the carabineer. Lazarus leaned forward, and felt the tension of the seat belts.

  He turned and yelled, “Hit it Sam!”

  Sam put the van into drive, and made a wide turn to get speed up before he hit the portal head on. Sam was doing fifty miles an hour when they hit the portal. Lilith leaned out of the side door, and hellfire flashed from her hand. One of the possessed was not fast enough to get out of the way, and disappeared in the conflagration. The hellfire hit and ripped through the mass of the invading alien horde.

  The horde flinched back from the massive death that took a thousand of their fellows. The van hit the portal right in time with the recoil of the horde. The van screamed as its wheels hit the plain of the alien world. The heavy bulk of the van hit the alien horde, causing even more confusion. The van rocked back and forth as screaming aliens fell beneath the wheels. Other aliens flew through the air as the van hit them and threw them to the side. Lazarus was glad he was hooked in. As it was, he almost launched out of the back of the van when they landed on this side of the portal.

  The van didn’t delay the horde for too long. The horde’s goal was to get through the portal and establish a bridge into the new world. Once the van was out of the way, they flowed back to the portal. Lilith, leaning from the side door of the van kept driving balls of hellfire into them, destroying them by the hundreds. In the back of the van, Lazarus picked up one of the M60s. It took longer than the five seconds that Sam had talked about, but he finally had the belt of bullets in the feed tray, and pulled the charging handle back. He put the weapon on fire, and pulled the trigger. Bullets ripped into the back of the horde, every bullet taking an alien life, sometimes more, the mass of flesh too closely packed for Lazarus to miss. This took some of the pressure off of possessed on the other side of the portal.

  The horde wasn’t just some mindless mass of flesh, though. Leaders saw the problems the van was causing, and a thousand of the horde turned to chase after them. Lazarus kept pumping rounds into alien bodies, causing major damage, requiring more of the horde to turn to deal with him. As groups surged towards him, he pulled pins from grenades and lobbed them. Aliens went down as the silver and gold particles scythed through the air. He wasn’t able to kill as many as Lilith, but he put down a lot of them.

  Then fate shined down on them. A lightning bolt flew out of the darkness streaking from one horde member to another, destroying a hundred or more. Lazarus reloaded a fresh belt, and began shooting the M60 again. Belt after belt of ammunition disappeared as he ran out of bullets and reloaded. He pounded away, yelling, “Get some. Get some.” Lightening kept striking against the horde, as Lilith and he continued to kill as many as they could.

  The horde gave up on the van as more lightning strikes hit. The lightening was doing far more damage now. The van was able to pull away, and had a brief respite. They got far enough away, and Lazarus yelled at Sam to stop the van. The van came to a shuddering halt as wheels threw up a curtain of gravel.

  “Sam, I need you back here!”

  Lazarus couldn’t get unbuckled in time, so he pulled his Kabar and cut through the seat belts. Attaching his carabineer had been a stroke of genius. He had bounced around in the back, and had almost been thrown out time after time as the van bounced across shattered alien bodies and the broken landscape. As it was, he had a devil of a time keeping the weapons and munitions from falling out as he engaged the aliens with the M60. Sam came running back, and Lazarus pulled out one of the AT-4s. Sam stepped to the side so that the back blast wouldn’t hit the interior of the van. He sighted on the huge bulk in front of him, and pulled the trigger. The AT-4’s tail flame lit up the dark as the rocket shot towards the giant creature.

  Lazarus didn’t stop there. He threw another to Sam. Sam lined up, and fired again. The first rocket hit the giant creature, and it screamed its outrage as it took damage. One, two, three, four AT-4’s hit the creature. One of the creature’s arms hung by a thread. There was blood gushing down the side of the monstrosity.

  “I need the Javelins,” Sam screamed as the horde noticed what was happening to its master. They turned, and started running towards the van. Only a few were left at the portal. Lilith increased her salvoes of hellfire, immolating more of the horde aliens. More lighting strikes took out aliens as well.

  Sam raised the Javelin, sighted in, and pulled the trigger. At first, Ragosh thought that the strange magic arrow had missed as the rocket flew out, then shot straight up. Ragosh soon realized his mistake as he traced the arc of the missile. The Javelin arced up, then turned and flew straight down, the heat of the great bulk lighting up in infrared like the heart of a volcano, drawing the heat seeking missile directly to it. The first one punched straight through the top of the chest, and burned through, exploding deep inside. The second one couldn’t have been aimed any better, or any luckier. It arched straight down the
gigantic maw, following thousands of pulped corpses.

  Lazarus watched as the first Javelin punched into the chest. The great chest expand as the explosion ripped through whatever kind of vitals the great monster possessed. The second Javelin didn’t explode until it had gone deep into the monster. The gut seemed expand endlessly. The gut ripped, spilling the entrails across the front of the monster. The great bulk tilted as it died. This doomed the slaves under the great throne. The uneven weight of the carcass caused first one side of the great throne to crash down, and then the other side settled as well. Infinite screams sounded as the slaves were crushed.

  With Ragosh dead, the magic dissipated. The great horde died. They died hideous deaths as millennia of agelessness caught up instantaneously. Some of them turned to dust. Others exploded. One seemed to shatter. Different phenotypes died in different, equally hideous, unique ways as magical energies stilled. About a thousand of younger horde members survived. Lazarus opened up with the machinegun to rake the survivors.

  “Unexpected,” Sam said.

  Sam stopped, looked at Lazarus. Lazarus looked back at him. The sound of the machinegun stilled. They both turned to look at the portal. Lilith looked as well.

  Lilith didn’t even have to ask, she ran for the van. Sam and Lazarus were right on her heels. Sam had the van fired up before they even had their seats. Another curtain of gravel flew as they turned and drove as fast as possible towards the portal.

  On the great corpse, the gems cracked and the magic whorls of the tattoos faded. The great jewel tumbled to the ground.