The Demon Senders

by T Patrick Phelps

  I probably ended up putting away five beers by the time Rachel cleaned up the wrappers, paper plates and napkins from lunch. "I think we better get going," she said.

  I had just enough beer to pump up my beer-muscles. "Let's do this!" I said, way more enthusiastically than I should have. I guess my beer-muscles were accompanied by a beer-brain.

  Rachel drove my van, which was a good thing, since I would have had a challenging time if asked to drive a tricycle. Except for having to pull over to pee (once at a gas station and twice on the side of the road) we arrived at the parking area for the town of New Hartford's Public Park without incident. I'd been there a few times before. Nice place, but it didn't look all that welcoming when we got out of the car.

  “We have to walk a little over a mile, I think,” Rachel said, looking far from pleased at the prospect of trudging through foot-high snow, over God-knows-what type of terrain.

  I smiled looking at her. She had a winter coat on and a pair of gloves but one look at her pants told me she was going to have a tough time. “Those jeans you’re wearing?”

  She said, “What about them?”

  “They look absolutely fantastic, let me start there. But, they’re wonderfully tight, which means you’re going to get damn cold before long.”

  “I can handle it,” she replied. “And if I get too cold, we can start another fire after you finish what you’re here to do.”

  She tossed me the keys to my van. “But I do need you to carry these. They poke me if I keep them in my pants pocket and may fall out if I carry them in my coat pocket. I don’t want to lose them, which, as you would say, would suck.”

  “It would suck. Well said.”

  I could tell that Rachel was doing her best to keep the mood light. She knew I was pretty darn nervous about meeting Hazy Face. She certainly sensed that back at my apartment, which was why she supplemented my lunch with a beer. But she did something else, something that gave me an added sense of determination and of calm. She smiled at me. Those smiles were probably constructed to ease my mind but had the added benefit of strengthening whatever feelings I had for her. Spending the night with her was far from expected. I saw it as a gift. What that night meant for me, and what each of her smiles reminded me of as we started off towards the trails, was there was something beautiful in this world and I wanted to protect it.

  "Still lots of snow on the ground," I mused. "Not going to be easy to get to where we have to get to." I felt I was stringing together my thoughts and words pretty well but I also began to feel my fifth beer starting to sneak up on me. It's weird how beer can do that to you. You think you're doing just fine, then thirty minutes after your last drink and you turn into a puddle of stupid. I really hoped that Rachel was right and that the beer would vanish from my bloodstream as soon as I saw Hazy Face. She had been right about everything else so far, so even in my beer-brained condition, I was feeling confident.

  Truth be told, as we started walking towards the woods at the far end of the parking lot, I was feeling pretty damn thankful that Rachel popped that first Bud open for me. Behind the alcohol numb, I was a basket of quivering nerves. Way more nervous than my first (and to that point, only) demon send off. Maybe it was because I was no longer only half-believing all the stuff about being a sender, demons, and my role in the never-ending battle between good and evil, or maybe it was how Rachel was acting the previous night. She was pretty shaken when she believed she had lost her spotter position on the team and the whole "Henry Winchester's back for another round" thing.

  As we started walking down the snow covered path, I had one of those nagging thoughts bouncing around in my brain. The type of thought you know is important but you can't quite get it to stop whipping around your brain long enough to figure it out. My grandmother used to call those thoughts "wise-naggers." She believed wise-naggers would keep sending you little clues here and there until you were ready to get the whole message.

  I had been having a wise-nagger fluttering around for a while and as Rachel and I moved closer to my assumed date with Hazy Face, the nagging upped its game.

  Like I said, I was pretty thankful for the Bud and how it had caused a delightful and calming mixture with my blood, but I wasn't enamored with its effects. That wise-nagger was having a difficult time getting through to me and I was pretty sure the nagger thought I was finally ready to get the full message. A few times during our hike, a thought struck me out of the blue, and made me stop dead in my tracks. But as soon as I focused my mind's eye on the thought, it slipped away.

  I was getting kind of agitated with not being able to lock on to whatever the wise-nagger was trying to tell me, I assumed, because of the beer in my system, so I tried an old trick I learned from a buddy of mine. This buddy was a world-class beer drinker. I'm not talking about a guy who can pound down a twelve-pack here, impressive as that may be. This guy tossed around twelve-packs like a bodybuilder tosses around ten pound dumbbells.

  "Getting my liver all warmed up for the night ahead," he used to say. I say "used to say" since he died before reaching the ripe old age of twenty-four. Wrapped his pickup truck around one of the oldest oak trees in the town he grew up in. I wasn't there, but I heard from friends that he had polished off a case of beer and seven or eights shots of Tequila in the bar before driving home. You may wonder why no one stopped him from getting behind the wheel, and you'd be right in questioning the judgement of everyone in that bar drinking with him that night. But, like I started to say, he had this trick that, at least for him, worked like a charm every time. Well, almost every time.

  No matter how much he drank, he'd be able to get himself sober (or at least sober enough in his mind) by doing what he called his "machine-gun breathing technique." Pretty self-descriptive, but he would, as fast as he could, breathe in and out as deeply as he could. He'd say that eighty-five percent of alcohol is expelled through the breath. If he was right, it stood to reason that if you got busy breathing a whole lot then the alcohol in your system would be sucked out.

  As Rachel and I continued walking, I started some machine-gun breathing of my own. At first, all it did was get me so dizzy that I lost my balance and fell into a tree. But after a few minutes, I really think my brain started clicking into gear. I didn't get any more stop-me-in-my-tracks thought-bombs, but I did get something else.

  Something pretty damn weird. And since this is coming from a guy who sends back demons, me saying something was weird is really saying something.

  Since the trail we were walking on was on public land, the town or state (I have no idea which) put up trail marker signs every hundred feet or so. I guess they didn't want someone wandering off a poorly marked trail, getting lost, then suing their collective asses for negligence. Whoever marked that trail will go down in the Trail Markers Hall of Fame. This guy didn't settle for some brightly colored ribbon tied around trees or even a highly reflective, neon colored round piece of metal nailed into the trees; this guy put up machine carved, wooden signs. Plenty of them.

  Most of the signs read the same thing:

  Trail Marker. For Your Safety and The Safety of Others, Please Keep on Marked Paths.

  The hall of fame trail marker adding the Latin name of a silver birch tree (which happens to be Betula pendula) is what put him in a class all his own. There were also a bunch of signs near other trees that stated both the Latin and English names of the marked trees.

  We had walked for at least ten minutes when I started noticing something strange about the signs. Like I said, most read the same thing but I started noticing that, though the words on the signs were the same, some of the letters looked different from the others. Not sure if the hall of fame sign maker used a different font or sizing on purpose, but I could clearly see that some letters stood out. And as I continued my machine-gun breathing, I started putting words together out of those unique letters.

  The first words came pretty easily once I started keeping track of which letters on each sign were different. Onc
e I strung the first few words together, I knew with absolute certainty, that my wise-nagger was telling me something I needed to know.

  A Demon Walks…

  Those were the first three words. The inclusion of "demon" stiffened my spine. I picked up the pace, wanting to get to the next sign and the sign after that so I could finish reading my wise-nagger's message.

  "You all of a sudden in a hurry?" Rachel said. "I think we need to get there at a very specific time."

  I was about to blurt out the whole "message in the signs" thing I was working out, but just before I started to say something, I saw a sign nailed to an Alnus glutinosa (that's an alder tree for common folk). It read:

  Please Respect Others and Keep Conversations QUIET

  I liked that sign. I hate it when people don't respect others and feel like they own whatever place they happen to be in and make as much noise as they possibly can. It was a good sign indeed, but what stopped my gums from flapping was that the word “QUIET” was bolded and in all caps. I took that as a sign and just told Rachel I was getting cold and needed to move a bit faster to warm up.

  I felt an uneasiness wash over me. Couldn't put my finger on it, but my brain was working overtime and my body was tensing up. I was getting ready for something but I wasn't sure if it was for my expected battle with Hazy Face or something else. Something unexpected.

  We kept walking, keeping mostly quiet. I was eager to get to each trail marker sign to find out the rest of the message but I hid my excitement well. I ripped out another few rounds of machine-gun breathing as I passed another trail sign. I added the uniquely scribed batch of letters to the growing message from my wise-nagger.

  " …Beside…"

  After about another twenty minutes of walking (during which I noticed no special words in any of the trail signs), Rachel stopped walking, reached out her arm and gripped my shoulder. "He's just ahead. Down this hill there's a pond. He's sitting on the ground, his back will be to you."

  "Will Hazy still be hazy?" I asked. I was still a little woozy from the beer. That concerned me a whole lot.

  "No," she said as if I was the most sober man in the world. "He made his full transition. He may be in the pond still, or he may be just on the shoreline. I'm not sure."

  "Same process as the other time? Rock to head, drown, repeat as necessary?"

  "Yes, sure," Rachel said. "I'll be close behind this time. Just in case."

  "Just in case, what?" I stammered.

  "In case you run out of rocks."

  Just as I started down the slight hill, my eye noticed a sign a few yards ahead. This one read:

  This Land Was Made for You and Me. Respect it.

  Clever use of an American classic, I thought, then realized that the word "You" was twice the size of any other word. I strung everything together.

  "A Demon Walks Beside You."

  Damn.

  <<<<>>>>

  Novak sensed that the sender was getting close. He walked over to the pond, got on all fours and acted like he had just walked out of the frigid water. "Get your ass into the woods," he snarled at O'Keefe. "If he sees you, he may take off running. Don't show your face till I got him where I want him."

  "And how am I to know where it is that you want him?" O'Keefe asked.

  "Figure it out, asshole. If you see Flannigan before I'm done, make sure she doesn't take off running. She's probably scared as shit right now and will be even more scared if she sees me doing what I'm planning to do to this sender."

  O'Keefe shuffled off and found cover behind three thickly branched pine trees. He positioned himself so he had a semi-clear view of Novak at the pond and of both trail entrances. Flannigan should be coming down the path closest to him and the sender should be waltzing down the path further away any second now.

  O'Keefe waited, his hot breath charging the cool, damp air. He was like a wolf, reading himself for the kill.

  <<<<>>>>

  Jen and Lisa left their Scranton area hotel by seven in the morning and made the six hour drive to Upstate New York beneath clear skies. Every half hour, Lisa's phone would vibrate, alerting her to an incoming text message. All the messages were from Jason. True to his word, he sent Flannigan's precise GPS location to Lisa's phone twice an hour.

  During the long drive, Jen wanted to tell Lisa about the strange message that she was sure was sent to her via her Kindle reader. It was a message and it was important, that Jen was sure of. But how to tell someone that she was receiving cryptic messages from her Kindle was an entirely different matter. She got close to telling Lisa one time, when she asked, "Ever hear of a 'sender' before?"

  "A sender of what?" Lisa asked.

  Jen said, "Not really sure. I read it in a book I was reading last night and wasn't sure what a sender might be." She wasn't lying. She did read "sender" in a book the previous night. She just didn't give all the details.

  "Use it in context," Lisa said.

  " ‘You are a sender.’ That's what the line in the book I was reading last night said."

  "I understand that you read it in a book last night," Lisa said, her brow crinkled and her voice a bit too condescending. "You told me that already. As far as what being a sender means, I'd have to read the book to understanding what the author means and you know I'm never going to read a book."

  Jen tabled further sender-related conversations.

  "Are you sure this is the right place? We're in the middle of a town park."

  "This is where Jason said Flannigan is," Lisa responded as she pulled into a parking space at New Hartford's Public Park. "Unless he's pulling a fast one on me, I have to believe him."

  There were two cars besides Lisa's parked in the snow covered parking lot. Both were clear of any snow. "Look," Lisa said, pointing at the parked cars, "No snow on them means they weren't parked here overnight. I bet one is Flannigan's and the other is the person she's meeting with."

  Jen and Lisa followed the footprints in the snow from one of the cars into the woods and onto a path. There was a final message that pinged Lisa's phone. It was from Jason.

  Lee,

  Target is moving towards pond, 1 mile from the parking lot. Losing her signal. Be careful.

  Remember r deal!

  Jason

  "Looks like we'll be without our eye in the sky from here," Lisa said.

  "I'm really thinking this isn't a good idea," Jen said. "We have no idea what we're walking into. Isn't it just a tad strange for Flannigan to be meeting someone in the middle of a forest?"

  "Flannigan is strange and if she's planning something involving that whole Unit 713…"

  "Unit 731."

  "Whatever. If she is planning some type of an attack, then meeting in the middle of the woods makes sense."

  Jen said, "But we're out of our league here. What do we do if we see her meeting with some nefarious looking people? We should have never come."

  "Relax, Jen," Lisa said. "All we're going to do is find out if Stacy Pants is in those woods," she pointed a strong arm and finger towards the woods ahead of them, "take some pictures of whomever she's meeting with, then get the hell out of here."

  "And if we can't do all that without being seen?"

  Lisa patted the right front pocket of her winter coat. "I got us covered. If something bad happens, you run and I'll take care of the bad guys."

  "You brought a gun? Jesus, Lisa. What are you expecting to walk into?"

  Lisa said, "Nothing, actually, but, as they say, 'I'd rather have a gun and not need one than need one and not have one.' "

  "This isn't going to turn out well."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  I took no more than two steps when the potential severity of the message I believed I was sent rammed into whatever part of my brain controls the rest of my brain. Now, I'm not sure how long it took for me to put everything together and I'm certainly not suggesting that it went the way I'm about to explain it to you. It may have been a split second or it may have been several seconds,
I can't say for sure. What I do know is that if my wise-nagger was right and it was a message that I had put together from unique letters off a bunch of those trail marking signs, and since the only person walking beside me was Rachel, then, you guessed it, Rachel wasn't what she told me she was. And I was probably walking (still slightly buzzed) into an ambush.

  I had been setup and when I turned to face Rachel and saw her charging down the hill towards me, both arms held stiffly in front of her, I understood who did the setting up.

  She rammed me hard, sending me charging backwards, losing my balance then crashing to the still frozen and snow covered ground. The hill was steeper than I first thought and I ended up sliding on my back for at least twenty feet after I hit the ground. I was way too shocked (and quite honestly, dazed by how hard Rachel had hit me) to even make an attempt to right myself. I simply waited for my slide to stop before scrambling to my feet.

  The first direction I looked was up the hill at Rachel. She was making her way down the hill, wearing a horrible snicker of a smile. I couldn't believe how something as simple as a smile could radically change someone's appearance. Towards Rachel was the first direction I looked after I got to my feet but I really wished I had chosen to look towards the pond first. Before I could swing my sights away from evil-faced Rachel and towards the pond, I was grabbed from behind.

  "We meet again, you little American Nostalgia prick fuck."