The Dark Messenger

by Milo Spires

  Ducking fast to avoid the lethal weapon, Ziuf lost control of the machine gun. Uncontrolled, the ammo sprayed upwards. The bullets bounced off the ceiling and ricocheted everywhere.

  Realizing his magazine was all but empty, he dashed behind the doorframe for cover and began fumbling in his pocket for another magazine whilst negative telepathic messages from Vius were screaming round inside his brain. Then just as he slammed the new magazine in, ignoring Vius as his utmost concern was self-preservation at this point, suddenly there was a thud behind him and he knew what it was too.

  Swallowing as he turned to verify it, Ziuf never got to see the grenade explode, because everything went black.

  And then he was dead.

  Seeing his warrior get blown apart from the explosion of another grenade, Ognian reacted. He charged, swinging both of his swords wildly, their blades seeking Vius’ face.

  Vius jumped backwards, laughing. ‘You have to use two swords?’

  Throwing the shorter one down so that it buried itself deep into the soil, Ognian began to circle him with just the one sword as he prepared to attack.

  Vius grinned as he drew out both of his swords and lunged for him.

  Ognian twisted his sword so that the widest part of his blade hit first. Vius’ left sword twanged out of tune as it flew out of his grip. Then it vanished into the dark field behind him.

  ‘Can’t have you cheating, can we?’ Ognian sneered.

  ‘Fine, then I’m going to kill you with just one sword!’ Vius screamed as he lunged forwards and swung for him.

  Ognian slipped in the mud, narrowly missing a devastatingly deep throat slash as he brought his own blade up to bear, blocking the attack.

  The swords produced sparks similar to extremely expensive fireworks as they violently clashed together, exploding into a glorious array of colors.

  For a moment between strikes, the ground all around the two warriors was lit up. Shadows were casting in all directions; the leaves on the bushes in the distance became just dark silhouettes whilst others, closer, leapt out at the assembled watchers, brightly lit in different shades of emerald green.

  Both warriors had several deep slashes across them, but only Ognian was suffering. With blood pouring out of a wound across his back, the giant realized he was not winning this one.

  As a group of gathering clouds ambled past the moon, sending the land into complete darkness, there was the whoosh of a vicious swipe, and Ognian screamed.

  As the clouds passed and the eerie luminescent glow was restored to the wintry hillsides, Ognian saw that his left forearm was now lying on the ground in front of him, still twitching.

  Vius looked the giant in the eye and smiled before saying, ‘I seem to be winning here, my friend.’

  Looking down at his stump as it sprayed blood out of his severed sleeve, Ognian growled, ‘That it may be true, but now I’m going to fucking kill you.’

  Suddenly there was a huge explosion from the garage. A massively bright, super-garish flash tore out of it, as if a star had just exploded into a supernova. As the force shook the ground violently all around them, it was clear the explosion was easily fifty times bigger than the grenades had been. It was like an earthquake, reaching an unbelievable 9 on the Richter scale.

  The trees all around them shook from the tremendous power. Their leafless branches thrashed backwards and forwards like they were whips in the hands of demon chariot riders trying to make their soulless horses gallop faster through the night.

  The bushes that had been gently rustling missed the middle stage of flapping, as they were suddenly immersed in a frantic dance. It was as if they were in the height of a rush on some crazy dance floor.

  Ognian and Vius stopped crashing their archaic swords at one another, and for a brief moment spun round to look. This immediate urgency forced a temporary truce as they indulged like gentlemen before a duel, in a transient abeyance.

  Crouching and taking in the almost-historic moment, they couldn’t believe the power of the blast. Those assembled, who survived, compared it to when the atom bomb had exploded for the first time. At least ten more warriors died, whilst others were picked up like pieces of paper and thrown violently, spinning through the air, straight out into the field and beyond.

  Coming from the entrance was a huge channel of dark toxic fumes already beginning to plume up high into the moonlit sky above them, as it took the shape of a gigantic mushroom.

  Ognian, mesmerized by what he was seeing, didn’t hear Vius creeping up behind him until it was too late. Vius spun round in a whirlwind death strike, keeping the blade at forehead height, and chopped his head off in one clean swipe.

  As it hit the grassy bank, it suddenly rolled backwards and with a frozen look of horror across the face, it disappeared into the bushes below.

  Vius cursed inwardly because he knew he had to find the head.

  Looking back briefly he could see that all the vampires that had been blown into the field by the explosion, were now back up by the garage entrance. Realizing he hadn’t much time left to find the head, he knew he had to double his efforts. He wondered if maybe it had actually gone right through the bush and out into the field on the other side.

  The reason he had to find the head was to restore the troop’s belief in him as their leader. It was a vampire’s way of proving he was triumphant and victorious in battle. The head had to be cut off his opponent and then it had to be held high for all to see. If this wasn’t done, then the hostile situation would not be appeased or placated. Vius knew that the only way this mission would stay under his command, and his warriors returned to his direction, was to show the head to them.

  Instead of crawling back out and then leaping over the bush, he decided to crawl forwards into the field. Seconds later, he regretted that decision and knew that the whole of the next day he would too.

  ‘Aaargh fuck!’ he screamed as he crawled backwards out of the bush. He was furious that he still hadn’t found the head, but even more furious now because two stingy nettle stems had stung him across the face and neck.

  Fucking bush, he thought. He could feel his face beginning to throb from the poisoned barbs that had just infected his skin. Refusing to rub it for fear of spreading the poison and therefore causing so much more pain later, he tried to ignore it as he got down to his knees again, concentrating on looking for the head instead. Only once did he slide his fingers gently across the surface of his skin--and cursed because there were already little bumps coming up everywhere.

  Then suddenly a flashback crossed his mind—an unwanted and deeply embarrassing one.

  It was when he was fighting another vampire from a different coven some hundreds of years before, and they were trying to kill one another. They had been battling and clashing their swords at the top of a hill, but then found themselves somehow hurtling down the steep escarpment and bashing their heads, somersaulting, and spinning violently as they crashed into various pain-inflicting objects. At the bottom, after finally bouncing off a tree stump, they became airborne.

  For the miniscule of a moment, time froze. Then with an extremely hard thump it restarted again, as they landed in the middle of a dark-green patch of stingy nettles. They had leapt back up and fought for a time, but then unavoidably, the irritating and extremely heinous itching began. Together, as if mutually agreeing to a transient abeyance, they dropped their swords and ripped off their chest armor. Then they began scratching everywhere, like monkeys in the jungle.

  He hadn’t known at that time that, by scratching, he was actually aggravating the poison and only helping to impregnate it even deeper into his flesh. The hours that passed afterwards were so unbelievably painful that even though he was an elite warrior, his threshold had been breached. Because of his anxious state of mind and with his sanity tested, whilst no one was looking, he dropped to the floor and tears ran down his cheeks.

  Finally as Vius was almost giving in suddenly he walked into Ognian’s head. Smiling to himself, he grabb
ed it and laughed at the expression on its face.

  With Ognian’s hair clamped between his fingers and using his wings for a split second, he flew over the evil possessed bush and landed back on the hillside twenty feet from the entrance. He grinned around at his warrior’s disgruntled looks and felt great relief; for a moment back there he had doubted finding it, but now he had they would listen to him again as their leader for sure.

  Vius reached up high and held Ognians terrified look of shock and horror for them all to see.

  Out of respect when they saw, they dropped to one knee and held their heads low as they stared at the ground beneath them.

  ‘Apology accepted,’ he said, appreciating that their loyalty had returned and that he was again their leader. ‘Now, we have three and a half hours till the sun comes up.’

  Looking at the entrance to the garage, the smoke still trickling out of it, he said, ‘They must be in there hiding and hoping that we think they blew themselves up. I highly doubt that a warrior with his immense skills would have just committed suicide and taken his family with him. No, they are in there somewhere, laughing at us.’

  The very idea turned his face black with fury. He spun back to his warriors. ‘Get in there and dig through the mess! Find them! I want their heads for this!’ he screamed.

  Then turning around, he sat down on the grass and began to sharpen his blade. His thoughts wandered to a place where Captain Ognian was still alive, and he immediately regretted taking his life. As his thoughts then reflected on Voitek too, his mind began to link other things of the past. He wondered if everything that the coven had been involved in recently was, in some twisted disturbed way, somehow strangely connected.

  Chapter 22 - Not Guilty

  After Regina and Becky had dragged the prisoner upstairs by his feet, they let go of him as Regina went to get some nylon zip ties from the drawer. She wasn’t concerned that he might try to escape, even though his injuries from downstairs were almost fully healed. The reason being is that he had new injuries, caused by her dragging him backwards up two flights of stairs.

  Every step they had passed, his head had crashed violently against it. Then when he tried to push his arms up underneath himself to ease the strikes, his right shoulder had almost dislocated as his sleeve got caught on a doorframe. His arm bent round completely underneath him, so far in fact that the shoulder was about to snap.

  Regina ignored his desperate screams of agonizing pain and like she was in a tug of war contest, gave his ankle a real hard pull. The bone in the shoulder snapped as the arm went right back, then the sleeve tore free again.

  Now sitting slumped in a chair, the thought of escape one would think was foremost in his mind, only it wasn’t. The reason being is that although Regina wasn’t watching as she was rummaging through the drawer, Becky was still standing there and the dogs were present too. They were watching him as they paced backwards and forwards in front of him, like panthers in the jungle.

  Seconds later she grabbed his arms from behind and regardless of his bleeding head and agonizingly painful shoulder, she ripped his arms back mercilessly and zip tied his wrists to the chair. In doing so she pulled the narrow nylon strands so tight that they cut deep into his flesh. He did try to complain but after receiving her elbow extremely hard in the side of his face, he kept anymore complaints to himself.

  Then just as she was finishing his ankles off in the same gruesome manner, Kaine’s let’s be crazy and blow up a full canister of oxy acetylene with two grenades idea, nearly killed him.

  The force somersaulted him, complete with chair, straight up into the concrete ceiling. Then as the energy passed, he came crashing back down headfirst and was nocked out as he hit the concrete floor beneath him. Much to his disgust as his blurred sight began to clear he realized the damn chair had stayed intact behind him.

  Regina had bounced off the prisoner in the explosion, and was lucky that he had hit the ceiling and not her. As she came back down, somehow she landed face down on the sofa. The dogs seemed to be fine as well; they were whimpering but awake. Becky had the same severe impact as the prisoner though, and was laying unconscious in a crumpled mess with blood coming from her head. Regina would have rushed over to her, picked her up, and then laid her on the sofa, but in her mind there was no time. She had to find her husband.

  Charging down the stairs in a state of panic, she found herself in a situation that she hadn’t expected. It was like she had run into the eye of a sand storm, because the visibility on the floor below was zero.

  The first thing she realized was somehow her eyes had become full of the stuff. It was like a thick grinding paste; it was everywhere and seriously painful too. Then as she tried to breathe, she found her chest was incredibly tight and there was a burning sensation inside, like fire was racing across her lungs.

  She desperately messaged Kaine, but he didn’t answer. She knew she couldn’t scream his name for fear of breathing in too much dust and collapsing herself. As panic tore through her, she dropped to her knees and began to crawl towards the next flight of stairs, leading to the floor below.

  As she reached them, she suddenly felt something blocking the path in front of her. Blindly, she examined it and realized immediately it was her husband. Sliding her arms underneath his torso, she picked him up and ran him back to the stairs.

  Luckily Becky was now awake and was there to greet her. She clambered halfway down the stairs and took hold of him. Together they rushed him over to the sofa and laid him down on it. Regina then charged across to the kitchen sink and, between deep fits of coughing, she slammed her face underneath the running water. After washing her eyes out and drinking great mouthfuls, she was quickly back in front of him.

  Becky was already dealing with him though. She had his mouth open and crouched by his side, she was blowing in air and then pumping his chest.

  Kaine suddenly opened his eyes and smiled at her. Then he sat up on the sofa and started laughing. Becky just stared, agog.

  After telling Becky that vampires don’t need the kiss of life like humans do, Regina smiled at her and made a ‘move aside’ gesture. Becky shifted, and Regina pushed in to sling her arms around him.

  ‘Darling when I found your body downstairs, I thought you were dead,’ she said, her voice quavering. Now that the immediate danger was over, she found herself falling into a deeply panicked state.

  ‘Nope, but wow! I think that was the nearest, near death experience I have ever had. One second I was awake, then there was a blinding white flash, and that’s all I can remember.’ As he said this, he stood up and charged across to the sink to wash his eyes out.

  Regina took a moment to survey the damage to the room. She noticed that strangely enough, even though the door to the stairs was wide open, the dust really wasn’t a problem on their floor. OK there was some dust in the air but nothing as intense as the floor below.

  Then Jenny surprised everyone as she walked down the stairs from the next floor up. Although she looked unscathed, her hair was in a wild mess and she was shaking. All three paused to look at her. Then as she reached the bottom of the stairs, she turned to look at Kaine and smiled before saying lightheartedly, ‘Kaine that explosion was massive, once again you have saved our lives but you are a bloody fool.’

  ‘I have to agree with you, Jenny. My husband does have some wild ideas. I think that was the craziest of them all, though.’ Regina looked at him, then everyone burst out laughing.

  When they had stopped laughing, only then did they register the prisoner who was upside down with his face touching the ground and still bound to the chair. He was saying nothing for fear of receiving the same treatment from Regina that he had gotten from her before.

  Kaine walked over to him, and after he had lifted him and the chair back upright, he asked the prisoner if he was prepared to talk to them. The prisoner had said that he was, but because of how he was stuttering and looking about himself, it was clear to Kaine that he expected him to be violen
t and brutal with him.