by Matt Wallace
It’s long enough for Lena to press the right button on the touchscreen. The doors close with half a dozen hooded faces inches from it, and the elevator begins to descend.
“What now, Chef?” Lena asks.
Bronko crouches down and, gently as possible, sets Darren’s still unconscious form in the corner of the car, breathing easier now that he’s unburdened. He stands with a groan, stretching out his spine and pressing both hands into his back.
“I don’t know, Tarr. I just don’t know. I guess we see where the doors open and go from there.”
“Is he dead, at least? Did I kill him?”
“Allensworth? If he can die, he’s dead, yeah.”
“You’d think I’d learn not to take anything for granted by now,” Lena says, attempting a joke, but neither of them has a laugh left in them.
The elevator dings gently, almost delicately. It seems an absurdly benign sound under the circumstances. Both Bronko and Lena tense at the ready for whatever comes, Lena pressing both hands tightly around the handle of her large knife in preparation to swing it like a sword at the first brute through the doors.
When they finally part and she sees the faces waiting for them on the other side, Lena instead winds up dropping her knife altogether. It hits the elevator floor lengthwise, clattering loudly.
“Ritter?” Bronko says in utter disbelief.
Marcus lowers his shotgun as the rest of the team stares into the car in an equal amount of surprise.
Lena rushes forward, almost throwing herself at Ritter. She clings to him, all forgotten, and presses her face into his neck. She cries there, openly, ignoring the eyes on them when she normally would be horrified by so many people, especially those she knows, seeing her break down in such a way.
Ritter doesn’t protest. He holds her against him gratefully, letting her exorcise the last few days in the only way she can.
“It’s real good to see y’all,” Bronko tells the rest of them.
“It’s good to see you too, boss,” Cindy says. “We need to move.”
“Back the way you came?”
She shakes her head. “Too many hostiles.”
“Then how’re we getting out?”
“We’ve got a glamoured chopper,” Ritter informs him, still holding Lena. “We’ll blow out another set of those bay-facing windows and I’ll call it down.”
Bronko nods thoughtfully. “I can accommodate ya on that score. Climb on in.”
GO
In clear defiance of the EMPLOYEES ONLY painted on the wall, Bronko, Lena, and Ritter’s team rushes into the same corridor through which Luciana Monrovio escorted Lena what seems like an eternity ago to her now. Hara has placed Darren’s still unconscious form easily over one of the giant’s extra-wide shoulders. Ritter tucks a two-way communicator back inside his fatigues after summoning Ruby from the rooftop.
Cindy runs ahead, to what she judges to be the center point of the corridor. She unzips her black bag and begins setting a large expanse of the picture window pane with charges.
The rest of them catch up with her just as she’s finished securing the last one. Outside the windows, a dense flock of seagulls descends into view. They all hover there unnaturally, flapping their wings but not going anywhere, simply waiting several yards from the outside of the glass.
“That’s our ride!” Ritter informs them all. “Cindy, blow it!”
“Shit,” they hear Marcus utter.
Everyone stops, looking up and down the corridor.
At both ends, deep swells of hooded brutes brandishing their large butchering blades have appeared. There must be at least sixty men and women between them, and they’ve completely cut off both ends of the corridor.
Both sides begin to advance.
“Everybody down!” Cindy yells.
Bronko, Lena, and the rest of the team drop to the floor as she detonates her charges. The glass explodes, blasting them with shards and the sudden harsh winds from the bay. The sudden impact momentarily halts the brute squads, even causing them to backpedal for a moment.
Marcus raises his shotgun and levels its muzzle at the group up the hall.
“I’ll cover!” he yells to Ritter.
A powerful hand completely encompasses the barrel and feeding tube of the shotgun, lowering it with ease.
Hara looks down at Marcus and shakes his head.
“Go,” he says to Ritter and the others.
Marcus looks to his brother, confused, and Ritter stares back at Hara.
“Are you sure?” he asks the giant.
“Go!”
Even at full volume, Hara’s voice is surprisingly quiet for a creature of his immense power and size.
They watch as Hara passes off Darren’s body to Bronko. He then strips off his sweater and the tank top beneath. His expansive torso is covered in tattoos: not ink, but deliberate scars raised to form concentric circular patterns in his flesh, like a sea of mazes that all lead to one center point.
Hara turns to face the nearest group of brutes. If the blast gave them pause, the sight of him stripped to the waist and ready for battle actually has them reconsidering. It lasts only a moment, regardless, and then the first wave begins surging forward again.
With a deep, guttural cry of war, Hara balls up his fist and springs forward with shocking speed, rushing them headlong. He collides with the first three, knocking them over with the ease of bowling pins.
Outside, the seagulls edge ever closer to the open section of window.
“Everybody go!” Ritter orders the others.
Marcus is the first to leap through, disappearing into the flock. Cindy follows him with a nod to Ritter. Lena hesitates, not wanting to leave Bronko and Darren, but Ritter takes her by the arm and practically tosses her out through the window.
“Can you make it with him?” he asks Bronko.
“Let’s find out,” Bronko says, clasping both arms around Darren’s body and leaping out of the window.
They both disappear into the glamour of birds.
The second brigade of brutes has reached their exit point, and Ritter turns just in time to duck an incoming swipe of a meat cleaver. He launches a kick into the face of the hood that swung it, knocking him back into two other brutes.
Ritter turns back to the blasted windows. His eye catches one final glimpse of Hara mowing down hoods and taking blades to his broad and scarred back before Ritter is forced to leap away from the mob behind him, sailing out the window and landing inside the cabin of the chopper.
“Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!” Moon greets them happily. “Hey, where’s Hara?”
“Are we all aboard?” Ruby calls to Ritter from the cockpit in his frog-throated gremlin’s voice.
Cindy looks at Ritter desperately, her eyes insisting they can’t leave Hara behind.
He’s staring right back into her eyes, his own as hard as stone, when he answers their pilot.
“We’re full up! Take her out of here!”
Ruby nods, pulling back on the stick and climbing the chopper into the air.
Twenty feet up, the helicopter suddenly stalls with a violent jerk. More than that, it feels as though they’ve been pulled down.
“What the fuck?” Marcus swears.
“Ruby, what’s happening?” Ritter calls to the gremlin. “Are we hung up? Did they hook us?”
“I don’t know! I’ve got no warnin’ lights!”
Ruby wrestles with the controls, and a moment later, they’re climbing smoothly again.
“I guess not,” Ritter says.
They all fall silent, which is how they’re all able to hear it when Hara’s hand appears above the edge of the open cabin and slams down on the floor.
No one can believe it as he pulls his giant, dripping-red frame inside the cabin. Ritter and Marcus and Cindy all rush to help drag him the rest of the way aboard. He’s slashed and punctured in dozens of places, almost every inch of his body covered and his remaining clothing soaked in blood, most
of it his.
“Jesus Harold fucking Christ,” Marcus rants, “he jumped all the way onto the landing skids like this? That’s fucking inhuman.”
“Well, he is, and he’s bleeding out!” Ritter yells at his brother.
“What do we do?” Cindy asks Ritter, helplessly. “I can’t . . . Where do we even start?”
“Moon!” Ritter calls across the cabin. “Get that alchemist’s kit and get over here!”
Moon stares back at him from his seat with wide, vacant eyes.
“Move, boy!” Cindy barks at him. “Now, dammit!”
Moon nervously unbuckles himself and practically flops onto the cabin deck, crawling over to them, small bag slung around his head.
“What . . . what can I do, man?” he asks Ritter. “I’m not really—”
“This is one-oh-one transference shit,” Ritter insists. “I’ve seen that Irish lush do it a million times. It’s just a lot of cuts instead of one. You can use me. Take my life and give it to him.”
“Ritt, no!” Cindy insists.
“Just do it, Moon!”
“Ritter, I . . .”
“Don’t worry about me!” Ritter orders him. “Just do it! Now!”
Moon looks at him, at a complete loss.
It occurs to Ritter in that moment that Moon isn’t burdened by concern for Ritter’s well-being.
Ritter reaches up and tears the shoulder bag from around Moon’s neck. He practically rips it open, raining candy bars and canned sodas across the cabin floor.
They’re the sack’s sole contents.
“You told us you’ve been studying with Ryland,” Cindy says in disbelief.
“We mostly drank,” Moon admits. “Smoked weed. He told me stories with . . . with alchemy in them—”
“You piece of shit!” Cindy curses him. “You useless, lying little turd!”
“He didn’t teach you anything?” Ritter asks, evenly.
Moon shakes his head, staring down in shame.
“That’s that, then,” Ritter says without emotion. “Nothing to be done.”
He leans over Hara, who is barely conscious. Ritter takes one of the giant’s hands in both of his and holds it close to his chest.
Cindy watches him in disbelief. She opens her mouth to protest, but realizes there are no solutions to offer, only blame and reproach, and neither of those will help Hara now. Instead, she takes Hara’s other hand in hers, following Ritter’s lead.
No one else speaks. Bronko holds Lena while she cradles Darren’s swaddled form. Marcus sits back, watching his brother and Cindy console their dying friend. Moon stays splayed on all fours, head hung low. His tears begin to fall upon the deck.
Hara never speaks another word. His eyes, the color of sand touched by rain, hold Ritter’s until they close for the final time.
“Go,” Ritter urges him quietly, his voice barely a whisper.
Hara does.
After he’s gone, Ritter carefully places Hara’s hand against the valley of his still chest. He leans down and kisses the giant’s forehead.
Cindy follows his lead, returning Hara’s other hand to the fallen warrior’s body and gently pressing her palm over his eyes.
Ritter’s darkened gaze meets hers and he nods. Cindy turns away from Hara’s body and reaches inside her right boot, removing a small detonator no bigger than a cigarette lighter. The device is crowned with a single blue button covered by a safety cap. Cindy flips the cap open and smashes the tip of her thumb against that blue button.
In the steadily fading distance, the top of Gluttony Bay erupts in flame. It engulfs the entire roof, causing it to collapse through the rest of the structure. At the same time, a fiery tornado belches forth from the building’s center where the kitchen is located, further gutting the edifice from within. Gluttony Bay, its structure catastrophically weakened and its façade and many floors on fire, implodes with the fury of a dying neutron star, all four corners caving in spectacularly.
Gathered around Hara’s body, they all watch with hollow satisfaction from inside the chopper as the house of inhuman horror burns and topples into the bay. The notorious prison facing the explosion remains intact, its cold concrete and brittle-seeming fences silent and still on the other side of the water. Its barbed wire and high walls appear even more ominous cast in the fiery shadow of the steadily disintegrating cannibal cabal its tortured inmates will no longer feed.
Ruby speeds them away over the calm blue waters, and in minutes, the fire is little more than an amber memory sinking beyond the horizon.
WILLING DONOR
The Vig’nerash elder’s name is Sircus, but you won’t find it mentioned in any human literature or texts, no matter how arcane.
In traditional demon culture, one of the largest determining factors in one’s status is how loud their name rings out in human religious mythology and folklore (it matters little whether any of the human’s stories are true, mind you, as long as they got the demon’s name right). The farther back in human history a demon’s name can be found recorded, whether in language or image, the more status one has.
This is a primary reason the Vig’nerash clan shirks “traditional” demon culture at every turn.
Elder is also a relative term among the Vig’nerash clan, one held over from old-school demon clan practices. The Vig’nerash prefer to follow the strongest, savviest warrior among their ranks, not the most decrepit fossil still drawing breath on the mortal plane.
Perhaps Sircus never led a demonic army against an angelic battalion, or made a name for himself in some shit-smelling Old World country stealing babies from their cribs, but he did rip the spine from the backs of three of the finest warriors from his clutch to become the leader of the Vig’nerash.
He could crush the mandible of any dust-filled Oexial clan elder with one hand.
(He tells himself that every morning.)
Allensworth is lying on an ergonomic, biofeedback-responsive medical bed in a state-of-the-art infirmary. He’s awake, his color has returned to normal, and he’s currently taking delicate little sips from a children’s box of tropical fruit juice. The surgical gown he’s wearing is emblazoned with the Gluttony Bay logo and is one hundred percent Egyptian cotton.
Sircus stands over him, a smug grin on his reptilian face. He dabs at the corner of his mouth with a bloodred pocket square that matches his silk tie. The accessories stand out starkly against the dark Hugo Boss suit tailored to the bulky scales of his frame.
“You look well,” the demon remarks.
“Thank you,” Allensworth replies. “And as you are quite obviously aware, I owe you exclusively for that fact.”
“Technically, you owe Vrrgon here.”
Allensworth looks to his right. Lying on the bed neighboring his is a young Vig’nerash demon warrior. He’s unconscious and has been stripped of his finely tailored Italian suit. Two fresh surgical scars peek above the surface of the mattress, running along his left and right sides.
“Will he live?” Allensworth asks.
Sircus shrugs. “I doubt it, and even if he does, he’ll be useless as a warrior.”
“Did I really need both of his kidneys?”
“No, but I don’t believe in taking chances.”
“Then how did you get him to volunteer?”
Sircus scratches at the scale covering his temple with the thinly pointed tip of a talon.
“Well,” he begins, tentatively, “‘volunteer’ is what you humans call a subjective concept among demons.”
“Meaning you probably ripped his kidneys out yourself.”
“Are you complaining, my friend?”
“Oh, not at all. In fact, I must admit, I feel fantastic.”
“That’s because he did more than save you; he has improved you. You’re part Vig’nerash now, however small those parts may be. You’ll find the benefits . . . to your liking. Mostly, anyway.”
Allensworth raises an eyebrow. “Mostly?”
Sircus waves his clawed
hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that now. The point is you’re alive when you otherwise would not be, and you have promises to keep.”
Allensworth’s eyes darken. “You are correct. I do.”
“I meant to me,” Sircus says. “Revenge on those who did this to you does not concern me. It’s a petty matter held against our business.”
“I am aware of that,” Allensworth assures him. “I’ll settle the former matter on my own time. It’s of little consequence in the grand scheme of things.”
“You’ve promised me hell, my friend,” the demon elder reminds him. “And I intend to see you deliver.”
“I know what I’ve promised the Vig’nerash, and I know what I’ve promised myself. Don’t worry, my friend. Neither of us will be disappointed.”
There’s a faint pop and Allensworth looks down to find thin jets of artificial fruit juice spraying the front of his surgical gown. He examines the beverage in his hand, and then the hand itself. The nails of his index and middle fingers have become long, sharp talons that are currently piercing the wax-laden surface of the juice box through both sides.
“Well, now,” Allensworth passively muses, “that certainly is both unexpected and interesting.”
Sircus grins a jagged-toothed grin down at him.
“Trust me, my friend, that’s only the beginning.”
MOONLIGHTING
Bronko is rarely the kind of boss who makes house calls, but he finds himself at the helm of a rarefied company in times even more rarefied than normal (that most relative and fluid of concepts). He hikes the cracked brick steps of Moon’s Jamaica walk-up in Queens, his knees creaking like a device used by an overly enthusiastic sound effects artist in the earliest days of cinema. Having been reared in a land of ranch-style homes, he finds that ascending stairs to reach a front door never fails to elicit a barely audible stream of curses that crisscrosses several dialects. Even after living in New York City for so many years, he’s never come to appreciate the aesthetic appeal or architectural necessity of the stoop.
