The Devil's Woods

by Brian Moreland

  Kyle searched the fog. “Jessica!”

  “Kyle! Help!”

  He found Jessica and Lindsey lying on stone tables, their hands and wrists bound by vines. He ran toward Jessica.

  The giant beast rose in the smoke behind her. Six arms flexed from its torso. Enormous wings spread from its back. The Macâya roared.

  Kyle reeled and aimed his submachine gun, his arms shaking. His strobe light flashed across a thorn-covered head that constantly shifted with faces. The flickering light blinded its many eyes that appeared and disappeared in the dark pool of its face. A wing swooshed around, shielding its head and torso.

  Kyle charged the demigod, firing rapid shots into its body. A whip of its tail knocked him to the ground, dazing him. His vodka bottle rolled over a ledge, into the pit. The smoke drifted over him. Seconds passed as Kyle tried to stop his vision from spinning. All around him gunshots, explosions and animal cries echoed in the cavern. In the pulsating lights, Elkheart and Scarpetti fired a barrage of bullets into the pit below. Flames burned across a heap of dead creatures. The air stank of burning flesh. The horde surrounded Madu on the temple steps. He slashed with his machete, but the demons overtook him, dragging him down into the darkness.

  Somewhere in the smoky chaos, Jessica and Lindsey cried in terror.

  Elkheart turned his flamethrower on the Macâya. It screeched, flew upward and disappeared into the blackness above them. Then Kyle’s father lifted him to his feet. “Help me cut the girls loose.” Elkheart ran to Lindsey.

  Kyle found Jessica still tied to the stone slab. He pulled out his knife and sliced the vines binding her. She threw her arms around his neck.

  He hugged her shaking body. “Thank, God.”

  Jessica’s eyes were full of tears. “Kyle.”

  “Come on. We have to go.” Kyle pulled her up the steps. Elkheart and Lindsey followed with Scarpetti firing shots behind them.

  At the top of the stairs, Elkheart pressed a switch on a C-4 charge and a digital timer started counting down. “We got twenty minutes ’til this whole place blows. Let’s go!”

  The five of them raced between the pillars. Something screeched off to their left. Kyle stopped Jessica and aimed his strobe. Up in the catacombs demons were perched on ledges, growling, fangs exposed.

  Elkheart blasted a flame up the stone walls. The demons retreated into their holes. He pushed against Kyle and Jessica. “Keep mo—!” Something grabbed Elkheart and hurled him several feet. He rolled and smacked a wall.

  “Dad!” Kyle rushed to his father. He lay on the ground, unconscious. Blood soaked the back of his head.

  Twenty feet away, the girls screamed as the beast with large wings flew through the air. The Macâya’s many arms clawed for them, but missed as the girls ducked behind a pillar.

  Scarpetti yelled and kept shooting until his submachine-gun clip emptied. “We gotta get out of here! Go! Go!” He pushed the girls toward the exit. “Kyle, come on!”

  “I can’t leave my father! Take the girls out!”

  Scarpetti marched over. “Leave him. We have to go—”

  Blood splattered Kyle’s shirt.

  Scarpetti looked at him with shocked eyes. Claws jutted from his chest. Then he was pulled up into the darkness.

  Kyle stood, petrified. He didn’t want to leave his father behind.

  Jessica and Lindsey ran over to Kyle and clung to him, shivering. He had to get them out of here. He spotted the glow stick that marked the exit. “Come on.” As he hurried the girls toward the tunnel, he heard something breathing behind him. Tentacles wrapped around his legs and yanked him off his feet.

  “Kyle! No!” Jessica reached for his hand.

  He clawed the ground as something dragged him away from her.

  * * *

  The sun began its descent behind the mountains.

  In the Bronco, Shawna looked in the rearview mirror at the darkening forest. “Come on, guys.”

  “They’re not coming back,” Amy said.

  “Yes, they are.”

  “We should just go.”

  “No, it’s not nightfall yet.”

  Amy doubled over.

  “Another cramp?” Shawna asked.

  “It feels like the baby’s coming.”

  “Oh, shit. Not now.”

  “I need to get to a hospital.”

  “Okay, okay. Give me a few more minutes.” Shawna touched the girl’s shoulder. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Hurry…”Amy released a plaintive whimper.

  Carrying a shotgun, Shawna hiked through the thicket of trees that bordered the swamp. She walked down the pier that stretched over the black water. She listened, but the only sounds were croaking frogs. On the opposite shore, she could see the trees nailed with animal skulls, marking the entrance to Macâya Forest. The canoe was still lying on the bank.

  “Kyle?!” she called. “Dad?!”

  Amy screamed in the distance.

  Shawna hurried back through the clinging branches.

  The Bronco’s passenger door was ajar. The empty seat soaked.

  Amy’s water had broken.

  Shawna searched the woods, calling her name.

  * * *

  Kyle rolled across the brick floor. Whatever creature had dragged him deep into the temple, it had released him. His whole body ached. He lifted his head, dazed, the pillars spinning green. His night vision goggles hung crooked. As he sat up with a groan, something in the shadows growled. A hand shot into his viewfinder and ripped the goggles off Kyle’s face. His world went pitch-black, and every childhood fear came rushing in. He scooted backward against cold stone. It was with him in the darkness. The thing that had killed Scarpetti. Kyle could feel its presence nearby. Could hear its breath. Fingers brushed his cheek. Kyle gasped and kicked blindly at the air. He fumbled with his caving helmet and switched on his headlamp. The light caught movement as a body recoiled into the blackness.

  Kyle felt the floor around him. He had lost his submachine gun. “Shit!” He reached back and pulled off his short-barrel shotgun.

  A beeping sound echoed close to his ear. On a pillar beside him a C-4 charge timer was counting down. Less than fifteen minutes. Panic launched him to his feet. He had to find the girls and his father and get the hell out of this cave. He searched the gloom for the exit.

  “There’s no escape.” Mayor Thorpe’s voice reverberated in the cavern. “You belong to us now.”

  Howling echoed from the catacombs. Kyle jerked his head upward and his headlamp beamed across dozens of hands slapping the walls with a thundering cadence. Black faces with luminous white eyes gleamed down at him. The demons could easily pounce, but for some reason they remained in the pocked walls, chanting as one maddening cacophony.

  Then all at once they hushed.

  Kyle took a step back, turning his beam left and right. For several seconds, the only sounds were his heavy breathing and his boots scraping stone as he fumbled through the temple.

  Which way was the exit? He felt so disoriented in this warren of pillars.

  The bugle horns droned again, deep and menacing.

  He felt the air of wings flapping above him. Claws scraped his helmet. The Macâya was taunting him.

  Up ahead came the echo of dozens of feet padding through mud.

  A flame lit up a torch on the platform at the center of the temple. Once again, the bowl at the altar caught fire, illuminating the demon statue that overlooked the stone tables.

  At the top of the steps, Kyle raised his shotgun. Terror shook every fiber of his being, but his anger was stronger. He walked down the steps, blasting shots at the giant winged creature gliding over the stage. The Macâya flew high up to a balcony and sat on a throne that was mostly hidden in shadow.

  Off to Kyle’s right, Mayor Thorpe stepped into the fire glow. His naked body was painted from head to toe with red words and symbols. In his hands, he clutched the decapitated heads of Madu and Scarpetti. “Soon, you and your father wil
l join them.” Thorpe tossed the heads into the dark pit and Kyle heard the demons swarm, grunting like overzealous hogs in a feeding frenzy.

  Kyle pumped another round in the shotgun.

  The clan leader circled him. Thorpe’s eyes reflected the torchlight like a wolf to the moon. He spoke inside Kyle’s head in a dreamlike voice, “We knew the day would come when you would return.” He gestured to the calligraphy scrawled on his chest. “The prophecy foretold that one of Elkheart’s sons would one day rise against us. All this time I thought your brother was the gifted one.” He chuckled, as if amused by some irony. “He was no match for our sisters.” Thorpe pointed a long finger at Kyle. “Turns out you were the enigma. We’ve been trying to decipher you for years, but your grandfather was shielding you. Too bad he’s no longer around to protect you.”

  Kyle backed up to the edge of the pit, wary of the damnable audience below. The Macâya remained on his throne, like a king watching a show.

  Behind the mayor, two demons brought Jessica and Lindsey onto the stage.

  Kyle caught Jessica’s gaze and charged across the stage toward her.

  Thorpe raised his tattooed palms. His eyes rolled back to whites.

  Kyle was halted by a stabbing pain inside his head. He could feel Thorpe penetrating his thoughts, scouring his mind for weaknesses and fears. He drudged up childhood traumas…Kyle, five years old, almost drowning after falling through the ice covering a pond, seeing his first ghosts in the freezing black water…ten years old, hiding under the bed with his brother as their parents screamed at one another in a drunken rage…riding in the station wagon’s backseat with his crying siblings as their mother and new boyfriend Blake drove them away from the reservation…the turbulent teen years, being abused by his God-fearing stepfather, Blake’s leather belt whipping Kyle’s back.

  As each painful memory spiraled through his head, Thorpe’s features morphed in and out of faces. First he became Blake scowling at Kyle, then Eric, his eyes black holes, his mouth a rictus of tortured pain as he died. Seeing his dead brother stirred up grief alongside Kyle’s anger and fear. “Get out of my head!”

  Then the shape-shifting of Thorpe’s face quickened, resembling the nightmarish creatures that had ended up in Kyle’s books. One horror after another snarled and snapped at the air with fangs. When Thorpe found the memories of Stephanie fatally wounded from the car accident, his face shifted into her lacerated face. He spoke in her voice, “You should have killed yourself when you had the chance, Kyle. Now, he’s going to skin you alive and eat your soul.” Her wicked laugh turned into a man’s as she shifted back into Thorpe’s grinning face. “That’s just a glimpse of the suffering I’m going to put you through. But first, you’re going to watch.”

  He hissed at the demons holding Jessica and Lindsey. The creatures took them back to the stone slabs.

  “No!” Kyle’s rage sparked from his palms. He mentally pushed back, sending his own thoughts into the symbol-scrawled man who stood before him.

  Thorpe’s hands went to his temples, as Kyle invaded the chambers inside the Soul Eater’s head. Kyle drummed up visions of demons feasting upon men and women—Nina, Zack, Wynona and countless others—and Thorpe walking among the dying, sucking their souls into his body. The ghosts roamed Macâya Forest and the caves beneath, and Kyle saw where silver cords chained them to Thorpe like slaves. He was drawing power from them.

  Kyle raised his palms, but only a few sparks came out. “Ah, hell.” He aimed his shotgun and pulled the trigger.

  Thorpe stumbled backward as a bloody hole opened in his stomach. A second shot ripped open the center of his chest. The wounds sealed within seconds. Thorpe glared. Claws shot out of his fingertips like switchblades. His mouth split open wide, exposing rows of pointed teeth.

  The beast roared and charged Kyle, smacking him backward, into the pit.

  * * *

  Elkheart awoke with a massive headache. He felt the blood on the back of his head. “Christ.”

  His pain was forgotten as he realized Kyle and the others were gone.

  Elkheart jumped to his feet, his joints cricking. He stumbled against a wall, still woozy from the concussion.

  Up ahead, pillars were half-lit from a fire glowing in the nave. He could hear the demons chanting. The mating ceremony was back on.

  As he hurried through the temple, he came across Scarpetti’s headless body. “Shit.” There was no time to mourn. Elkheart checked one of the many explosives he’d stuck to the pillars. The timer was counting down.

  Under ten minutes now.

  * * *

  The short drop to a muddy floor knocked the wind out of Kyle. Bottle rockets of pain shot through his ribs. He stood, realizing he was now down inside the pit beneath the stage. The bodies of burnt demons were piled in smoking heaps.

  Up on the stage, Mayor Thorpe was going through some kind of metamorphosis, his bones growing longer. The iridescent green smoke swirled around him, drifted across the stage. Kyle lost sight of Jessica.

  He searched the mud floor for his shotgun, but he’d lost it in the fall. He pulled out the elk-horn knife and concentrated on his gift.

  I call in the manitou of the Elk Tribe. Grandfather, please help me.

  Kyle’s hands began to glow. A great power surged into the knife, as he felt the presence of Grandfather’s spirit channeling through him.

  The sound of feet squishing through mud made him jerk his light. Behind him demons were emerging from the blackness. Kyle sliced the air in a circle, keeping them at bay. They seemed to fear the light emanating from his hands.

  Thorpe leaped from the stage and kicked Kyle in the back. He tumbled across the muddy ground. He aimed a palm at the approaching beast, but the power wasn’t enough to stop it.

  Thorpe pressed a foot against Kyle’s chest, pinning him. He growled at the other demons and they slinked back into the shadows.

  Kyle twisted, shining his headlamp upward.

  Mayor Thorpe loomed seven feet tall now. His face, more devil than human, stared down with luminous red eyes. “Your soul belongs to me now.” Tentacles grew from Thorpe’s chest, snaking through the air toward Kyle. At the tip of each appendage, a parasitic mouth chomped. Feelers latched on to his legs and began sucking at his life force.

  Kyle yelled in agony. He stabbed the knife into Thorpe’s calf. The Soul Eater wailed and backed away. Its tentacles released and swooped wildly around its body as it circled Kyle with a limp.

  “Get the hell away from my son!” Ten feet away, Elkheart fired a pistol, blowing off Thorpe’s ear. The angry beast’s feelers shot through the air and attached to Elkheart’s chest. He arched his back, crying out in pain.

  Kyle’s hands flared up with cobalt-blue fire. He raised his palms and sent all his fury into the Thorpe-demon. The power knocked it loose from his father, who fell to the ground.

  Thorpe faced Kyle, his eyes full of shock.

  Kyle could hear the lost souls screaming inside Thorpe’s body. Kyle connected his mind to their spirits. “Fight back,” he commanded. Their faces and hands pushed from within Thorpe’s abdomen. An arm stretched outward from his cheek. More arms jutted from his chest. Thorpe growled, as if in pain, and shook his head. The mottled flesh began to bubble and tear open as the ghosts clawed their way out. Kyle called them into his body. The glow in his hands intensified. He channeled their rage. The Thorpe-creature shrieked as blue flames engulfed its torso. Fiery tentacles swooped through the air. His burning flesh opened with a thousand holes, and a thousand voices screamed.

  Kyle attacked with the knife and sliced open Thorpe’s belly. White light spilled out as more souls escaped their prison, their cries echoing in the temple. The demon that had been Mayor Thorpe fell to its knees inside the storm of swirling ghosts. They clawed at his face like angry birds.

  Kyle grabbed a knot of Thorpe’s hair. The wailing devil face shifted back to a man with scorched skin and eyes melting like wax. Kyle cut Thorpe’s throat, sawing through the f
lesh and bone until the head severed from the neck. The demon’s body collapsed, pumping out black blood. Yelling like a warrior, Kyle raised the head so the demons could see their leader had been slain. They backed away from him. He hurled Thorpe’s head in the direction of the Macâya and pointed his knife toward the balcony.

  As the ghosts swarmed the king demon, Kyle ran to his father. He was dazed, but alive. All around them, demons screeched, but kept their distance. Kyle and Elkheart hurried up the steps, into the haze that covered the stage. The Macâya glided over them, disappeared into the fog, and carried off one of the girls in its multiple arms. Flying up the stairs, it escaped with her through the glowing green archway.