To Beat the Devil

by M. K. Gibson

  And so on and so on.

  Father Grimm kept popping up over and over at the worst points of human history. I would not be surprised if he had been vodka pals with Rasputin. Grimm seemed to have positioned himself alongside of history’s worst while never taking a real position of authority. He made Iago and Cassius look like chumps. This gave me a lot to think about. I mean, I was no saint and I had done many questionable things. But if Jensen’s information was accurate, then Father Grimm was about as close to being the Devil as you could get. That got me wondering.

  Could Grimm be the actual Devil?

  I have had many personas myself. Constant reinvention is essential for an immortal. And right after the first Hell War, post G-Day, Lucifer had never been spotted. Some believed he was dead. Could that be what Grimm wanted? A reinstatement as the leader of Hell, and by position, the ruler of the world? What did that mean from me? How did I play into this? And who was his tech guy, the Slavic voice at the other end of the communicator? This “T”?

  “So, if I am reading this right, it seems ol’ Grimm has been kicking it for a long damn time. What do you think he was doing?”

  “Bad things?” Jensen answered, taking another of my smokes.

  “God, you’re such a dick.”

  “I don’t know this God you speak of. So, what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. Questions, questions, and more questions. I was beginning to think my life was simpler just a day and half ago. I reached over and lit a smoke from Jensen’s pack. He cocked his head to one side in disapproval. I gave him the finger.

  “Last night, I was attacked by some mechanized ants,” I began.

  “Ants?” Jensen asked. His tone seemed to resonate, “Are you freaking serious?”

  “Yes, asshole, ants. Big ones! Size of dogs. Oh, don’t glare at me like that. Even with your visor I get your eye-rolling vibe. Ants. Mechanized ants. Anyway, after I fought off the swarm, Grimm came to my home.”

  “Oh, he gets an invite. We’ve been friends for how long now?”

  “Jesus man, I didn’t invite him. Prick just materialized. Literally. Zero invite. Now listen to my damn story.” I proceeded to fill Jensen in on the previous night’s events. I left out the bits of my cybernetics. Jensen didn’t need to know that. He didn’t need to know that he would die in a few years because of his implants while I was an anomaly who would continue living long after he was gone.

  I told Jensen we fought a bit, and essentially settled our differences. I told him that Grimm basically wanted an assistant. I finished with the Slavic voice, and that I guessed he was Grimm’s tech guy.

  “So, thoughts?” I asked.

  “You never cooked me a steak.”

  I took a few deep, soothing breaths. Then I lit up another smoke. Jensen helped himself from my pack. “Any other thoughts, asshole?”

  “Well, I will dig some more and see what I come up with. A mechanized man in control of an army of mechanical ants shouldn’t be too hard to track down. However, that raises more questions. Ergo, how has a player like that stayed off the grid for so long? I would have heard something for sure,” Jensen pondered.

  “Also, who the hell hired the Cyberai? Kitsune’s clan was connected to the larger Techkuza. They are not going to be happy when word gets back them. They are out half their payment, I am guessing, and a bunch of guys. Kitsune had to have been at least a local lieutenant.”

  “I don’t know, and I couldn’t even hazard a guess. I will run a diagnostic on his faceplate. If it had any kind of recording device I will see what’s on there. Provided it isn’t too badly damaged from the head-butt you gave him,” Jensen said to me accusingly.

  Shit.

  I knew I had lost my temper when I got stabbed. I didn’t think Jensen saw that. He sat back in the booth and crossed his arms, his stolen smoke dangling from his mouth. He was waiting for an explanation.

  “What can I say? I am stronger than I look,” I said weakly.

  “Uh-huh. How’s the gaping sword wound through your chest?” he asked.

  Double shit.

  “Fine,” I said flatly. The blade had missed my density jacket and punctured my synth replica of a black cotton Social Distortion t-shirt underneath the coat. The bloodstain was apparent. And so was the lack of a wound.

  “You ever going to tell me what you are exactly? People wonder, and I keep them at bay. But why keep it from me?” Jensen asked. In fairness, he had a point.

  “I don’t want to go into this, man. Not now, and maybe not ever. Let’s just leave it at ‘I’m complicated.’” I knew the answer would not satisfy my friend.

  Jensen just stared at me with that cold visor. It looked like he was trying to make up his mind. He reached out and took another of my smokes, thought about it for a second, then took the whole pack.

  “I have to get back on the door. I will let you know if I come up with more. I am a good friend.” His voice didn’t hide the venom at all. “If you are going to track this guy down, take Maz; he’s off duty soon.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Whatever.” He got up, took the dossier and went back to his post at the front door, leaving me there with the rest of my drink, a half-eaten synthetic steak, and a head full of shame and questions.

  ********

  A few hours later I was standing outside the district’s police station. The brownstone building’s exterior was lit by two powerful lights and was a few levels up from street level. It was a remnant of a world passed by. Demons walked in and out for shift change. Various hellions and humans of all walks went in and out. Some conducting business and bribes. Others being sentenced to crimes. And others just wanting their murder permits for the night.

  I watched some succubae whores make the rounds, begging for a chance to be brought out of perdition. They swore they corrupted men and women alike. They were turned away as usual. Rising in the ranks of demon culture took more than coercing a bored spouse into some cheap extramarital fucking.

  I kept to the shadows, watching for Maz to get off his shift. Sometimes I am welcomed, sometimes I am hunted. Always depends on the time of day, whose palms I have greased, and who I have and have not done work for recently.

  Some of my human associates have spurned me for doing work for demons. Some of the demons I know show their hatred for the humans I associate with. Over the last century and half I have learned a few immutable truths. First, God isn’t coming back. Second, demons are the ruling party; I don’t care what accords have been drawn up. And third, and most important, only you can take care of you. Extending your trust in another too deeply will get you killed. Everyone is out for themselves, everyone wants a cut, and everyone has a metaphorical, and sometimes literal, knife poised at the back of the person ahead of them. Even those I consider friends are just really acquaintances or future enemies.

  I spotted Maz a little while later. He came out without his mantel of office, officially off duty. He was wearing the demonic equivalent of a t-shirt and jeans, specially designed to accommodate his wings and reverse jointed legs. He was saying goodnight to some of his underlings in his own way. A few backhanded slaps and a right cross to one of the more needy whores. Demons.

  Maz sniffed the air, and his eyes trained to me in the shadows nearby. I took a peanut butter Tastykake out of my pocket and unwrapped it. I had brought it with me this evening in case I ran into him. It was pretty badly smashed from my fight with the Cyberai, but the Gluttony demon didn’t care. He made a line for me and I walked back deeper into the shadows down an alleyway. I didn’t know what my current status was, so it might not be best for him to be seen with me.

  “Come on out, Salem,” Maz said. “You are off the hot list for now.”

  I trusted Maz only to a point, but he had never directly lied to me about my notoriety level. Sure, he had tried to corrupt me, but that’s what demons do.

  “So, what got me exonerated?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t
call it exoneration. Simply neutral. I led Archbishop Pazuzu to believe you assisted me in terminating rebellious hellions allied with another district’s bishop, and they were involved in a power play to replace him. Plus your LL was current, so that helped.”

  “So, you lied to him,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at me like I was an idiot. “Besides, it wasn’t much of a lie. That type of thing is always happening. I am actually currently trying to undermine him myself. If successful, I am in line to become Ars Goetia’s new archbishop, and then everyone will try and depose me. Circle of life, my friend.”

  “That’s a pretty messed-up life you lead, man,” I said.

  “It’s you humans who lead the messed-up life. Toiling around in your little lives, afraid of success and sin. No wonder you all rolled over so easy in the wars.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  Maz was baiting me. He was a topside demon, born in this world and not Hell. The fact that he made bishop by age fifty was an amazing feat. He had known me for the last few years, but he had seen some of my skills and my rapid healing. Also, I think some of the things I’d said drinking with him had made him wonder about me. Idioms of a forgotten age that a mid-to-late-20s-appearing man should not know.

  I lived through the wars, fought a lot, and scavenged even more. But trust me, humans didn’t roll over. They would not have willingly stuck metal in their asses and guns in their chests for the shits and giggles of it. We fought hard, but we lost.

  Maz wanted me to drop some more knowledge on him, some clue to me. Between him and Jensen, I was beginning to rethink my hermit life. By not inviting them into my life, I’d make them begin to wonder. And that wonderment would lead to probing questions and eventual stories. Lord knows what the rumors would become. Should I just tell them?

  No. No, I shouldn’t. Word would get out. My father’s tech would be compromised. I would probably be bought in a bidding war between demon lords and dissected. That did not fit into my life plans.

  “So, are you going to give me those Tastykakes, or do I have to beat your ass again?”

  “Go ahead and try, lizard boy. When I kick the shit out of you in front of your pit brethren, what’re your chances for archbishop going to be? Maybe Ricky will be able to employ you to pimp your ass for rent money until you work your way back into the regime.”

  “I am so proud of you,” Maz said as he reached in for a huge bear hug and patted me on the back.

  “Thanks?” I said.

  “One day you will be purely corrupt,” he whispered in my ear as he grabbed my ass.

  I shook him off, and he laughed at my discomfort. I tossed him the Tastykake and gestured for him to follow me. He fell in alongside me, eating his treat.

  “So, where we going?” he asked.

  “We are going to go spy on the Devil.”

  “Sounds like fun,” Maz said, as we walked into the night together.

  Chapter Ten

  I Hated

  “So, the Devil lives in an old amusement park?” Maz asked me.

  “Apparently,” I responded.

  We had traveled south for four hours or so, all the way through the southern kingdom of Ars Amadel to the very border of New Golgotha. The radioactive isotope in Grimm’s system had led us to the location, and we stood outside an abandoned amusement park. I had filled Maz in on the bulk of the details of my encounter with Grimm after Dante’s the night before. He didn’t put up as much of a hassle as Jensen had. Perhaps he was just having fun on a night off.

  The park was in the outlying badlands, which were rife with scavengers from both human and demon cultures who had been chewed up and spat out of the city. Life here was beyond bleak. The itinerant bums in the high-rise from the night before in Black Marble were living the high life compared to this. These were the areas where the city dumped its human waste. Sea dumping was limited now. That type of sewage plan had caused too many reactions from the Deep Ones.

  “I didn’t even see a gate or guards as we left the city,” I commented.

  Maz shrugged. “What’s to guard? Scum from here wouldn’t make it into the city. Patrols would just kill them and toss the corpses back here anyway.”

  “Demon justice, jeez.”

  “Please. You don’t care for these people. They stink and beg and rob and steal and rape. They produce nothing but shit. Shit someone else has to clean. Anyone who lived out here, if you call it living, had their chance in the city and failed. Fuck ’em.”

  I just stared at Maz. I wish it had been a stare that conveyed disgust in his words. But it was just a stare that said I had nothing to say to counter his statement. When did I stop caring? Did I ever?

  We activated the cloakers on our bikes. They shimmered and blinked away as the devices bent light. We began walking into the amusement park with only the light of the half-moon overhead. It felt good to be out of the city and into fresh air. Living there was hell on your senses. With the buildings and leveled-layer construction, those on street level rarely saw the real sun. They lived in manufactured light and the farts of their betters above them.

  All that being said, walking through an ancient abandoned amusement park with a seven-foot demon is exactly as creepy as it sounds. I don’t think the Scooby gang would have made it this far.

  Old rides loomed over us, ripples of shadows and blacks blocking the night sky. Sleeping old things, they seemed like. Nearly fallen signs creaked in the night breeze. Graffiti of occult symbols and madman gibberish was everywhere. The place smelled of garbage and rust. As we moved through the park I picked up some heartbeats, saw movement here and there. We were not alone.

  “So, why would he pick here to live, do you think?” Maz asked.

  “Dunno. I would guess since it doesn’t fall in the city, he doesn’t pay tithes. Out here, there is no law. Plus, these old places were full of underground chambers, control rooms, generators. Plenty of places to hide and store goods. This is actually a pretty smart location.”

  “How do you know all this?” Maz asked.

  “I read stuff. Old books. Movies. You know.” I didn’t want to tell him I spent a couple of summers in my late teens working at an amusement park. In fact, before I annexed the underground military base I currently reside in, a place like this was on my list for potential lairs. None, however, were in the city, and I needed mobility to move goods.

  I checked the tracker on my tech bracer and we were almost on top of the signal. My guess was that he was underground. I told Maz to look for an access station, something that led down. We searched a bit but didn’t really find anything. When Maz looked ready to give up, I noticed an old-fashioned CCTV camera, the kind that predated wireless video signal. I followed the wires back to an old concrete bunker, which had been hidden in the moonlight behind plaster boulders and plastic trees. The bunker was narrow and its main door was locked. I let Maz flex his muscles and he pulled the door off the hinges.

  “Subtle.”

  “Fuck off. What did you expect, stealth? You brought a demon to hunt a guy.”

  We made our way down the stairs. Maz had to duck. The old passage was not built with someone of his dimensions in mind. The stairs led to an access tunnel, lit by periodic flood lamps. Someone had installed these semi-recently; there was little dust on them. The passage was tight, but we made our way down to an access room. The room was large, with transformers, emergency generators, and power regulators. But there was another access tunnel that looked to have been built or dug out in recent years. The workmanship didn’t match. I pointed it out to Maz.

  “What do you think? If someone was holding out here, would they have time to expand on the area?”

  “Definitely. But not by themselves. They would need help. So what’s your plan when we find this guy? If he is as badass as you say, then what are we going to do?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet,” I said. “I guess I am just making this up as we go along. But if he dropped in to my home
uninvited, I figured I could do the same to him.” We moved along the newly-constructed opening, toward another stairwell that led into a tunnel. Up ahead, lights flickered and shadows danced. This tunnel opened into an extremely large room that was circular and coliseum-like in its pattern, moving downward in intricate and deliberate levels; the chamber was lit by hundreds of candles atop bookshelves that lined the tiered levels. There were three other passages like the one we emerged from at the cardinal points. The building material of the room seemed to be hewn rock, carved from the earth itself. Within the rock, symbols were drawn and carved. The symbols seemed to resonate power. Maz took a keen interest in them, mumbling to himself. I studied them a bit myself, and I noticed that his tattoos were similar to the scrawl.

  “Maz, what is that?” I asked about the markings.

  “I am not completely sure. It seems to be Denochian, but an older, more primal and more beautiful version. It both intrigues and sickens me. I can’t explain.”

  “Can you read it?” I asked.

  “It really isn’t something you read, but rather, something you know. Like a perfect memory. No, this is beyond me. But there is something to this, something… ancient.”

  We continued our descent toward the center of the room. At the bottom of the sunken dais were three old-fashioned, metal-railed hospital beds with bodies under sheets. The bodies were connected to machines that beeped steadily and IVs. I could hear slow heartbeats, weak yet steady. The bodies were alive. By the bodies were metal trays with scalpels and surgical instruments. The scene was something from a Poe opium dream. If this was where Father Grimm called home, then it fell in line with the information Jensen had provided. God only knows what Grimm had done to the bodies.

  “Salem,” Maz whispered.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Something is coming. Something old. Something I never felt before.” Maz was visibly unnerved. I had never seen Maz like that.