Devil's Hand

by M. E. Patterson

  Celia spit at him, a sound that echoed weirdly in the concrete tunnel.

  Trent used the distraction. He charged. His fist came forward quickly, a right hook aimed squarely for the old man’s nose. He had caught him off-guard before; maybe he could do it again.

  But instead of connecting with flesh, Trent’s fist passed through empty air as Salvatore moved. It was as if the old man had poured himself out of the way, appearing in the same position and stance, only one foot to the right. He roared and pushed both palms forward and water sprung up from the tunnel floor around his feet. The wave hit Trent hard and knocked him off his feet and he slammed back first onto the concrete. Salvatore, a few feet away from them both, stared down at the fallen man and the trembling teenager.

  “You will not win this fight. My powers are stronger now than they have been in ten thousand years. God gave us all such wonderful gifts. But like many of my kind, I was stupid. I gave them away.”

  He gestured at Celia.

  “And then I was nothing for so long. But when my children began coming back to me, I felt it again–the power, the gifts that God had bestowed. I’ve learned much over the years, and I intend now to retake what is mine. It is time for all of this to change, Mr. Hawkins. For the Glory of God. To save this world from a far worse fate.”

  “What are you?” Trent moaned, the pain in his back burning like he had fallen into the fire barrel.

  “I was a Watcher, once. Sent by God to help you. We gave your kind everything.” Salvatore’s face twisted into a pained grimace. “And how did you repay us?” he screamed. “Your women spurned us! Your men hunted us, like beasts! Even our children–your children–became pigs for the slaughter!”

  He looked at Celia. “Do you think, if your kind knew what she was–truly knew–that they would protect her?” He lifted one eyebrow and looked at Trent again with a questioning glare. “Or do you think they would hunt her down, lock her away, hide her powers and her secrets? Do you think that she would be treated like a human?”

  He sighed in mock exasperation.

  “You have the opportunity to end this. Turn her over to me. She is my child. Let me deal with her, as it should be under the eyes of God. Go back to your lovely wife, before she is lost in all of this. Leave the city and start a life anew somewhere else. Before all of this–” He raised his arms, as if to indicate the entire city. “Before all is destroyed and reborn.”

  Trent’s entire body trembled, but not with fear. He had transcended fear at Susan’s mention. Now he trembled with rage.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “My wife is already dead.” Slowly, he climbed to his feet and stood amidst the freezing muck, facing down the old main in the black coat. “This ends now.”

  Salvatore growled and thrust out his right hand, palm-forward. Trent staggered back a step and clutched as his throat. He felt like he had back at the hospital, as if the old man were somehow drowning him from within. It felt like his lungs and chest were filling with ice-cold water and he began to tremble violently. He steeled himself and tried a deep breath. He found that the breath came easier than he had expected. He closed his eyes and focused.

  When he opened his eyes again, the drowning sensation had subsided and he knew that Salvatore could no longer try that trick on him. He shook his head from side to side and glowered at the old man.

  “Whose child are you, gibborim? Baraqel? Maybe Azaziel? How have you inherited such a wealth of power?”

  “No powers,” said Trent. “I’m just lucky.” He shouted then and sprinted past Celia, coming on fast as he closed with Salvatore.

  The old man sneered and gestured with his free hand and a curtain of icy fluid lifted from the floor of the tunnel. Gleaming in the firelight, the fluid tensed and seemed ready for Trent’s oncoming charge.

  He barreled into the spray and lost his footing as tendrils of water slipped around his ankles and slid beneath his feet. The curtain of spray had more solidity than he expected. He pulled up short, not quite reaching Salvatore.

  The old man winked and flicked a single finger forward. The wave rushed away from him, carrying Trent with it. He tumbled through the air, slipped and slid on the wet concrete floor, and finally lost his balance, tumbling head over heels into the muck at the bend in the tunnel. He crashed into a pile of debris there: chunks of broken concrete, spray-painted pieces of wood, sticky mats of soaked paper and plastic. For a second, his face went beneath the shallow water and he could taste filth as it poured into his lungs. He splashed back up, gasping for air.

  The rage he had felt upon hearing Susan’s name had grown. He now felt an almost alien fury, a wrath that bordered on insanity. He coughed and sputtered and thrashed around for something to use as a weapon. His hand came up from the freezing water holding a lump of concrete. He stood and reared back and threw it, as hard as he could muster.

  And as the piece sailed across the room, Trent blinked, saw the black world, and then opened his eyes again, chest aching with a sudden battery of juddering pains.

  Salvatore stood next to Celia and the fire barrel, arms hanging limp at his sides, waiting patiently as the projectile rushed toward him. His face was impassive and he seemed unconcerned. That impassive look changed to one of shock when the jagged chunk cracked against his forehead, drawing blood.

  The old man screamed in pain and surprise and brought a hand to his face. He stumbled around for a moment, as the blood ran down over his fingers. Finally, he reset his gaze upon Trent.

  “Lucky indeed,” he growled. “No more games.” Salvatore slammed a foot down into the running water and disappeared.

  But Trent knew that the old man had gone nowhere. He watched the shimmering ripples in the water as they moved against the flow, advancing on him. He waited, waited, and then timed his attack perfectly.

  Salvatore’s form shot up out of the water, but his eyes went wide as he saw Trent’s open hand coming on fast. Trent grabbed the old man’s shirt collar, pulled him momentarily off his feet, and then slugged him in the face with his free hand. He could feel cartilage snapping as his fist shattered Salvatore’s nose. The man soared backward and splashed into the muck, a trail of blood shimmering in the air for a moment as a crimson arc.

  Trent stomped through the water to the fallen figure and began to rain down blow after blow, each hit sending up an echoing thwack and clipped shrieks as Salvatore tried in vain to twist away from the punishment.

  “This is all your fault!” Trent screamed. “My wife is dead, goddamn you! Dead!”

  As the punches crashed against his face, Salvatore reached out beside him with a trembling arm and placed his fingers in the icy water. The old man closed his eyes.

  Trent paused when the rumbling began. The walls of the dank tunnel started to shake and groan, and the water’s flow was broken by sudden disturbances. Trent pulled back a little further, fist still cocked. He looked around and saw cracks forming on the walls, ragged vertical lines stretching from floor to ice-encrusted ceiling.

  “What the–?”

  The concrete exploded as metal pipes burst through, writhing and shrieking with metal stress. They lunged at him from every direction, from every wall, and Trent dove backwards, away from Salvatore, desperate to escape the seeking, waving, thrashing metal tentacles. But he was too slow.

  The metal pipes struck him and knocked him down and, like living things, curled around his limbs, creaking and groaning with every change of shape. In an instant, the pipes had him off the ground, spread-eagled, struggling wildly. He barely had time to yell before the pipes sent him hurtling backwards across the tunnel. He hit the cement wall back first. He felt his ribs crack. The pipes pulled him off the wall again, and then sent him hurtling back. He twisted desperately to keep his head from striking first. Each time he hit the wall, he felt another part of his body go numb. The pipes continued their assault upon him, unrelenting.

  “No!” Celia shrieked. “Stop it!”

  But the pipes would not list
en. They had squeezed Trent so tight that he could barely breathe. He stopped struggling, sure that this was the end. He watched Celia, helpless against the assault.

  The teenager had leapt to her feet and her eyes held a strange intensity that Trent had not seen before. Her lips moved and from her throat came a strange language, spoken in a creepy monotone, as though she had descended into some manner of trance. With each spoken word, her voice grew lower and louder and a discordant buzzing began to issue from behind her dulcet tones.

  Black smoke burst suddenly from the tunnel floor at her feet and coiled into the air in front of Celia’s chest. The smoke became solid then, resolving itself as an array of gray-green limbs, arms anchored impossibly to the smoke itself; arms that flailed at her, clawed fingers grasping, sinewy muscles tensing and relaxing as they reached for the girl.

  “Oh God!” she screamed, and the strange, trancelike look dropped from her visage. “That not what I–!”

  A hand shot out of the swirling gray and grabbed her throat and cut off her voice. She tried to back away, but was anchored in place by the grasping arms that had managed to get claws around her neck and wrists and into her shirt. The arms began to pull, drawing the teen closer and closer to the roiling smoke, her face now only inches from its mass.

  Trent heard a splash and looked to where Salvatore had fallen. He had gotten to his feet and stood looking at Trent and then Celia and then back at Trent again. He let out a frustrated growl and waved a hand dismissively. The pipes went limp and fell, broken, into a pile on the floor. Trent fell with them.

  In a wet, bloodied heap amidst the shattered metal, Trent watched as the old man strode over to the girl. Without hesitation, he reached out and grabbed at the arms, trying to pry them away from his prize.

  “She’s mine!” he shouted. “You cannot have her! Not until I’m done!”

  Salvatore trembled as he fought with the arms, and Trent could see that the struggle was wearing him down. He already had blood coursing down over his face, his nose and cheeks broken, hands bruised and soaked in red. For every arm he managed to break free of the girl, another shot out of the smoke and grabbed her again.

  Trent knew that he had to do something. This was his only chance. He grabbed a piece of broken metal pipe. It felt freezing cold in his hand. With pained, lurching steps, he moved behind Salvatore and raised the pipe, his arms weak and shaking. The motion made Trent’s vision spin and he could hear a tinny whine in his ears that was growing louder by the second; shock coming on. He knew he would pass out soon.

  He gritted his teeth and gathered his remaining strength, and then brought the pipe down on the back of Salvatore’s head. The impact rang out in the tunnel, audible above the old man’s yelling and Celia’s screams as she struggled with the arms. Salvatore’s fingers seized and he stumbled backward into Trent, slid off to one side and fell to his hands and knees on the floor.

  Trent kicked him in the side to roll him over and then dropped onto the old man like a wild animal, pipe swinging, clanging against Salvatore’s flesh. With every strike, Trent felt his own world spinning further out of control. His vision had begun to dim, and his hearing had gone quiet, almost silent. Not much time left...

  “Please,” gasped Salvatore, raising his hands in defense. Several of his fingers were bloody and broken. “Oh God, please stop!” he cried. “The Lord Almighty, please help me!”

  Trent looked into the old man’s eyes and saw real pain, real panic and turmoil, and he felt suddenly guilty. He faltered, pipe raised for a final killing blow. The tunnel seemed to be spinning, and every glance in the direction of the firelight made Trent’s eyes ache.

  He looked at Celia, still fighting against the tearing hands, though on her knees now. She had blood on her face, her neck, and her chest. The gray-green arms were straining, but succeeding. Part of her nose and much of her hair had already passed into the smoke, as though it were a doorway to someplace else. Blood dripped from her wide-open eyes onto the tunnel floor as she screamed and fought.

  Trent looked back down at Salvatore, who cringed and averted his face. Tears streamed down his cheeks. Trent took a deep breath and tried to calm the spinning sensation one last time. Then he got to his feet, turned his back on the fallen Salvatore, and charged Celia and the arms, throwing all of his strength and all of his weight into the effort.

  He collided with her and with the gray-green appendages that threatened her. He felt the claws digging into his flesh and then just as quickly recoiling, as if they had realized that he was not what they wanted. He brought the metal pipe down over and over on the gray-green limbs. Each strike brought to his muffled hearing the sounds of screaming, a cacophony of human voices buried deep inside the alien shrieks coming from within the smoke. He recognized the sounds as similar to those from the shadow-spider before, at the Cagill house. And then he heard Susan’s scream. He knew it immediately; it could not be anyone else. Somehow, she was there, inside that mass of tortured voices, inside that swirling cloud of ash. Her pained voice gave Trent a boost of strength.

  With a gut-wrenching, tremendous force, he yanked one last time and pulled Celia from the arms’ grasp. He tumbled and landed flat on his back, his head only inches from the hot fire barrel. He watched as the gray-green appendages snapped back into the smoke and then, after a moment, the entire cloud dissipated into nothing.

  Celia sat upon the concrete floor, her own hands gripping her hair now, face blotchy and red. She was crying, but alive. She looked at Trent and their eyes met.

  He breathed a sigh of relief, forced a pained smile, and then passed out. The orange glow from the firelight mingled with the warmth radiating from the barrel, and Trent slid into the dream world smelling smoke and tasting ash.

  15

  WITH A HEART-POUNDING SNAP, Trent opened his eyes to survey the scene around him. Fire climbed the walls of the cabin and the lights were on emergency mode. Passengers’ mouths hung open in silent screams while others mouthed “no” over and over and over again. Trent could only hear pleasant, classical music and the hiss of noise-canceling electronics in his headphones. He reached up, tore the headphones from his ears, and was assailed by the chaotic sounds of panic and despair. His gaze landed on a woman desperately clutching a small boy, screaming louder than the rest, eyes clenched shut as the child slipped further from her grasp toward the sucking, howling maw of a massive hole in the airplane’s flesh.

  Something had blown a hole in the cabin, and directly between Trent and it stood an old Mexican man with a gray cowboy hat, silhouetted against the blinking red lights, apparently indifferent to the plight of fellow passengers who were rapidly disappearing into the mad vortex of smoke and escaping cabin air. The old man faced the back of the plane with one hand pinned to the top of his hat in an attempt to keep it from being sucked off his head by the frantic winds. Trent looked at the screaming mother and the boy again and then sprung into action.

  He clawed his way back over his own seat and tumbled into the lap of an old man who lay dead. The little girl next to him, a granddaughter maybe, sat frozen in shock, silent and wide-eyed. The plane pitched suddenly, throwing Trent’s body against the dead man’s seatback tray, which ripped off the hinges. Then a pitch in the opposite direction and Trent landed at the shocked little girl’s feet. He looked up and couldn’t resist the urge to comfort her.

  “It’s gonna be okay, “ he shouted, while gasping for air. “It’s gonna be okay.” He felt awful for the lie.

  He contorted his body and landed with a thump in the aisle and then propelled himself forward, fighting against the rapidly shifting angle of the earthbound vessel. The Mexican stood firm against the cacophony, still holding onto his hat with one hand. Trent rushed past him, flailing to reach the child, whose grip on his mother’s hand had diminished to only one slipping finger. The hull breach swirled and snorted like a living thing and then there came a ferocious, ear-splitting howl that made the vortex seem momentarily inconsequential. Trent fal
tered for a moment, tore his eyes away from the child and looked up.

  The metal frame of the plunging jet rang out, either from the force of the howl or the metal stress, and then began to tear itself further apart. Sheets of metal ripped free, bolts shot out like bullets, and the plane trembled–a beast in its last throes. A rectangular sheet of hull whipped violently from its moorings and in a split-second the child vanished with it into the night maelstrom, mother still shrieking, still grasping, still clawing at nothing.

  Trent stood there, transfixed by the horror and the despair all around him and his gaze began to wander indiscriminately, until it fell upon the progenitor of all of this madness. Something impossible. Inhuman.

  A thing of black, with glistening reptilian hide and a coiling, smoke-like tail and maybe it had eyes and a mouth and maybe it didn’t, and Trent wondered if the creature had followed him from one of the many nightmares he’d had since he was a child. The screaming cacophony of human fear and anguish seemed to amplify around the creature’s form, and as it moved, Trent saw color and shape warping from the nearby passengers, connecting like translucent strands of aberrant light to the thing’s shadowy nothingness and it settled its gaze on him then and let out another monstrous roar. Jet-black teeth gleamed with shadowy, dripping ichor. Trent felt his heart stop. The reptilian beast was coming for him.

  It seemed to lose all interest in the Mexican as it barreled over a nearby passenger’s seat, trampling the screaming man’s face. It planted its legs against the far window and hurled itself forward, toward Trent, claws outstretched and jaw extending impossibly wide, wider even than the creature’s body, wide enough to engulf any man in a single motion and tear him to shreds and Trent stared down the razor-filled maw and terror hit him like a freight train.