by Sam Best
“What’s the rule that protects Annabelle?”
“She is innocent. Not by choice, but because she has not yet been corrupted by this world.”
Ben frowned. “She’s told a fib or two.”
Moses shook his head. “Not with the intention of harming another. The lies of a young child like Annabelle are unpracticed and harmless. She has not stolen, she has not willingly harmed another—”
“Well, hang on, now. Before we came to Falling Rock she was getting in trouble at school for lashing out at her classmates.”
“Do you honestly believe your daughter has full control of her emotions?”
“Do any of us?”
“To an extent, yes. Much more so than a young girl. Until she realizes the black and white difference between right and wrong—until she is presented with a choice and willfully ignores the moral answer—the demon cannot touch her.”
Ben walked next to him in silence and stared down at his feet. Moses scratched a flake of crusted blood from his forehead, frowned at it, then flicked it aside. He brushed his hand against his shirt and realized how sloppy he must appear to Ben. Here he was attempting to lead a lost soul against a creature from Hell and he looked like Hell himself.
Moses grinned with irony at how things did not change, even in the face of impending death. He stuffed the bottom of his shirt into his pants and tightened his belt buckle.
They passed the Salty Dog Tavern. Its wooden sign hung stoic and still in the warm night air, and Moses thought of Karen. He could not forget the hesitation in her eyes when the rest of her colleagues belittled him when he tried to warn them of the coming danger. He still struggled with the knowledge that his not telling the complete truth may have led to the deaths of most of the people in Falling Rock. The only thing stopping the guilt from overwhelming his mind and paralyzing him with remorse was the fact that the beast was still out there—still lurking in the valley, waiting to finish off the last few survivors so it could move on to the next city—and the next, and the next.
“What’s the book?” asked Ben.
Moses was shaken from his thinking. “Hmm?” he said.
“The book in your bag. What is it? Some kind of bible?”
“In a way. It’s an encyclopedia of demons, but also much more. My mentor passed it on to me, as his mentor passed it on to him. I must admit that I thought it little more than a novelty until quite recently.”
“You didn’t believe in demons?”
“Quite the contrary. I have seen first-hand the effects of demonic possession, but a physical manifestation such as the one that now plagues Falling Rock seemed more like an unimaginable fantasy. I realized my mistake after visiting the black pit for a second time.”
“Is that what’s causing the smoke? The pit you’re talking about?”
“Yes. I began my preparations after revisiting that dark place, but it wasn’t until I was certain of the demon’s identity that I continued in earnest.” He smiled. “Huxberg was right.”
“Who?”
“My mentor. He knew a day like this would come. He tried to warn me. It was my arrogance that allowed the demon to flourish in the woods—my indefatigable belief that I could handle any problem, no matter how deadly. And now look,” said Moses, gesturing to the dark, empty street. “Look at the devastation my ‘superiority’ has caused.”
Moses stopped in front of Hank Buckley’s hardware store. The inside of the building was a black void. He cupped his hands around his eyes and looked through the large glass window next to the front door. Ben stood next to him, his back to the store, scanning the street.
“Do you mind?” said Moses as he took a step back from the window.
“Mind what?” said Ben.
Moses nodded at the shotgun, then toward the front door.
“Oh. Right.”
Ben took a wide stance and gripped his shotgun as if it were a shovel he was preparing to stab down into the earth. He pulled it back and slammed the butt of the stock into the glass next to the door’s handle. The gun bounced off harmlessly.
“Come, now, Benjamin,” said Moses in a scolding tone.
Ben hauled back and slammed the stock into the glass again, this time shattering it loudly. Several large panes of fractured glass clattered to the concrete sidewalk as Ben cleared away the area around the handle. He reached through the hole and unlatched the deadbolt inside the door. He grunted as he pulled it open, the bottom scraping across concrete and broken glass.
Moses stepped past him into the store.
“I’ll stay here and watch the street,” said Ben.
Moses walked into the shadows of the center aisle inside the store. Dim moonlight lit the floor for a few feet, then slowly faded as Moses approached the back wall. A sign marked “Keep Out! That Means YOU!” hung crookedly from a door next to a rack of garden rakes. Moses reached for the knob but it was locked.
He stepped back and kicked hard against the wood next to the knob. The door flew inward and banged against a crate of mechanical parts on the floor.
“Everything okay in there?” called Ben from outside.
“Fine,” said Moses.
Hank’s office stretched back twenty feet before terminating at the wall that lined the back of all the stores on that side of Main Street. A door set into the back wall was closed and locked. To Moses’s right, a cluttered work bench stretched the length of the side wall, piled high with tools and half-finished repair projects.
Moses ducked beneath the bench and pushed aside a pile of wood scraps. A long object with a heavy head wrapped in cloth lay on a wood shelf beneath the workbench. Moses pulled back the cloth and a glint of etched metal caught the moonlight that spilled through the window in the back door.
He smiled and tossed the cloth aside. A block of polished steel rested atop a strong oak handle. Moses gripped the handle in both hands and tested the sledgehammer’s weight. The raw steel at the bottom of the scratches that formed glyphic etchings on the head sparked with moonlight as he slowly twisted the handle.
* * *
“A sledgehammer?” said Ben.
He walked next to Moses as they made their way toward the intersection of Dawn Avenue and Main Street. Dawn led down into the valley and broke once on the way to Ben’s house, then again on the way to the church.
“I thought you said the weapon would pierce the demon’s flesh. How is a sledgehammer going to do anything more than piss it off?”
“You’ll see,” said Moses. He held up the weapon’s steel head toward Ben for closer inspection.
“What are those markings? Did your book tell you those would kill it?”
Moses hesitated a moment too long and Ben picked up on his uncertainty.
“You’re just guessing,” said Ben. “You have no idea how to kill it.”
“The book tells me how to kill other demons using weapons etched with these particular markings.”
“Other lesser demons?” said Ben. “I thought so.”
“It’s the best chance we have,” said Moses.
“Why doesn’t the book tell you how to kill this one?”
“It’s an Apocalypse Demon, Benjamin. Anyone that knows how to kill it wouldn’t be around long enough to write it down, now would they?”
“So how do you know about them in the first place?”
“Now that,” said Moses, “is an excellent question. And I wish I had the answer.”
A single street light leaned slightly over the road at Main Street’s intersection with Dawn Avenue. Its light barely reached the ground and cast a soft-edged circle at Moses’s feet. He squinted as he looked over the valley. The white crucifix jutting from the steeple of his church was barely visible in the distance. The presence of the black smoke was noticeable only because it occluded the night sky behind its slowly-rising mass.
Ben stopped and looked up at the dim street light. “Did I do the right thing?” he said. “Sending away Heidi and Tommy?”
Moses regard
ed him carefully. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a good chance the demon will be…occupied…for some time.”
Ben’s eyes drifted down from the light to the pastor.
“Let’s go,” said Moses.
He turned onto Dawn Avenue and led Ben into the shadow of the valley.
23
Karen’s head bounced over a root as the thing dragging her through the woods shuffled past a massive tree. Her vision cleared enough to show her that she was in a dark part of the forest; the thick canopy overhead did not part enough to reveal even a sliver of the moonlit sky.
A monster held on to her left foot. Its raw, wet, hairless flesh glistened as it carelessly hauled Karen’s body behind it like a forgotten ragdoll.
It was much, much bigger than the small creatures that had invaded Ben’s home.
Two long, thin legs rose up to a torso of red-black, burnt flesh that was stretched too thinly over cracked bones and deep hollows. Two eyes burrowed out of the flesh in the back of the thing’s neckless head and glared down menacingly at Karen. She could feel them looking at her even though they were just barely visible in the darkness. A moment later, the eyes sunk back into its head with a wheezing squish and disappeared.
Dead leaves and broken branches bunched up at the base of her back and slid up toward her head. Twigs snapped and caught in her hair as the beast dragged her deeper into the valley. Groping, she found her holstered revolver and drew it out. She aimed for the creature’s head and pulled back the hammer until it clicked into place.
From the darkness to her left came a flash of movement as one of the smaller creatures lunged at her and sank its sharp teeth into the soft flesh of her forearm. Karen screamed and let go of the pistol; it fell to the ground and was left behind. The small monster skittered around her on all four limbs like a crab, keeping its twisted human face toward her the whole time. It snapped its jaw open and closed and its eyes rolled loosely in its sockets. Black drool oozed from the corners of its split mouth.
It spoke from the back of its throat as if it were choking on its own spit; violent, indecipherable words that turned into two quick shrieks. Then it was gone, tearing off into the wilderness ahead of her.
Karen screamed again as the monster holding on to her foot tightened its grip. The black flesh of its hand was a lumpy mass that formed around her foot and ankle as it were molding to the contours of her leg; it looked like she was slowly being swallowed up into the beast.
The thing stopped and stood erect. At full height the monster was about ten feet tall. Karen spit to get the fragment of a dead leaf out of her mouth. She kicked at the thing’s hand with her free foot, the heel of her shoe scraping against its flesh.
It squeezed her ankle until the bones snapped.
Karen gasped sharply as her foot broke at an unnatural angle. The monster made no indication that it noticed her pain; its head turned slowly back and forth as it scanned the woods.
With a huff, it dropped down onto all four limbs and ran through the forest. It quickly transferred Karen’s leg to one of its hind limbs and held her behind as it jumped over fallen logs and dodged low-hanging branches. Her body rose into the air and slammed back down to the ground. She covered the back of her head with her arms as she was tossed violently from side to side.
A loud splintering of wood; the thing crashed through the trunk of a fallen tree without slowing. Chunks of wood rained down on Karen as she was pulled over the jagged remains of the tree.
The monster skidded to a halt and swung Karen around, releasing her and sending her flying through the air. She saw stars above and caught a quick whiff of rotten eggs right before she crashed into the ground on her side and rolled to an abrupt stop at the base of a tree. She groaned and turned onto her back, wheezing sharp breaths because the pain of her lungs against her ribs was too painful for anything more.
She lay on one side of a clearing. Tall trees ringed the area, their long boughs reaching out over the space to form a sort of dome. In the center, a black pit streaked with glowing orange cracks belched dark sludge into the sky.
On the other side of the clearing where she had emerged from the woods stood the creature. Crouched on all fours it looked something like a gigantic wolf; jointed limbs bent backward as it sniffed the air near the pit. Its snout was at once elongated and stunted, depending on the angle at which it held its head. In the moonlight, Karen saw small patches of white, bloody fur dotting the thing’s wet, burnt flesh.
It stood erect and walked toward the pit on its hind legs in an entirely human fashion. The face, now flat and unprotruding, turned to Karen and smiled. The flesh covering its teeth audibly stretched as the corners of its mouth drew up toward it sparkling eyes.
Karen scooted back until she pressed against the base of the tree, then sat there, incapable of moving any farther. She couldn’t look away from the beast’s eyes even though she was internally screaming at herself to do so.
The lips of the monster parted and its torso shook as it laughed. As if the forest were lined with loudspeakers, the low, rolling percussion echoed among the trees. A thousand voices joined the first, turning the noise into a cacophony of laughter.
The woods next to her crunched loudly and another monster stepped out of the darkness. It walked upright like the first and was similar in every way except for several gaping bullet-wounds in the center of its chest. It joined the other with its own laughter and Karen shut her eyes and pressed her hands to her ears as hard as she could.
When the laughter stopped, she opened her eyes to see the monsters walking toward each other. They ran to cover the last few steps, then slammed into each other with a horrible, wet slap.
Karen pushed herself up and moved to run, but the pain in her broken ankle forced her back to the ground.
The loud cracking of bones vibrated the earth under her hands. She turned back and saw a writhing mass of burnt flesh on the ground next to the pit. The body of each monster was melting into the other. Bones ripped out of the wet skin at obscene angles and disappeared back into the jerking, pulsing mound.
The two torsos fused together and with a loud explosion of cracked bones formed a new, more massive abdomen.
Karen turned and crawled away. Her brain stopped working, barricaded by the sole desire to escape.
Arm over arm and pushing with just her one good leg, she dragged herself out of the clearing and into the woods. The holes in her forearm where the small monster had bit her burned as if acid had dripped onto her skin. Sweat soaked her entire body and dirt became mud as it smeared her face and arms. Dead leaves blew away in front of her face as heavy breaths shot from her mouth with each movement she made.
She got used to the rhythm of the crawl and soon she moved faster, away from the black pit.
Movement ahead. Footsteps in the dark.
Karen froze.
One of the smaller monsters? She looked around but saw nothing. The footsteps grew louder—then passed her off to the left. Something crashed through the bushes just out of sight, too big to be one of the small beasts but too small to be one of the two large creatures.
“Help me!” she screamed.
The footsteps stopped suddenly, then came directly at her, crunching loudly.
Blake Halsey stepped out of the shadows, shotgun in hand.
“Karen?” he said. He sounded more surprised than she felt.
“Blake,” she said. “Help me! It’s back there.”
He dropped his shotgun and bent down. Karen wrapped her arms around his neck and he lifted her so she could stand on her good leg.
“I didn’t think I would find you,” he said.
“I thought I was dead.”
Blake turned so she could rest one arm over his shoulders. “Can you walk?”
“I think so, if you help me.”
“I’m not going anywh—”
Blake’s words turned into a scream as he was ripped away from Karen. She fell to the ground as his body disappeared into the sh
adow of the woods.
“Blake!” she shouted.
She reached for his shotgun and raised the barrel just as the outline of a giant emerged from the darkness.
Karen pulled the trigger and the shotgun barked orange fire. The monster’s flesh glowed briefly in the light and Karen caught a glimpse of the horror that stood above.
The gun shook in her hands and tears fell in streams from the corners of her eyes. The thing bent down and swatted the gun away, then hoisted her high into the air as if she were a twig.
Its footsteps thudded loudly into the earth as it walked to the clearing. It held Karen in the space between two towering pines and then it stood there, still and silent.
Black sludge leaked out through the wide line of its mouth, falling down over its body like lava rolling down a mountain. It wiped at the sludge on its chest with its free hand and slathered it over Karen’s left arm. She screamed as the sticky sludge burned her skin. The beast smeared a clot of the sludge over the trunk of one of the trees; a thick line of black gunk held her arm attached to the tree like heavy rope.
The monster belched and more sludge fell from its mouth. It covered Karen’s other arm, then let her go. She hung suspended in mid-air at the edge of the clearing. The black sludge coated her arms and ran to the trees on either side of her body, stretching her out as if she were being drawn and quartered.
In less than a minute the beast coated her legs with sludge and connected them to the base of the trees, completing her bindings. Her skin sizzled beneath the black gunk but she had lost the energy to scream. Her head hung down loosely; her short black hair spilled over her face.
Minutes later, she opened her eyes.
A foul odor hit her and she lifted her head in offense. The rotten egg smell that permeated the clearing had quickly faded but a more vile stench crept into the air. Vomit welled in the pit of her stomach when she noticed the source of the smell.
Next to her, at the base of a tree to her left, was a mountain of dead bodies. Bloody arms and legs glistened in the moonlight and more than one pair of dead eyes stared up at her, the mouths below them open and silently screaming for help.
