by Michael Todd
“Stinks like rotten toe fungus in six-day-old socks.” He was bitching up a storm. He still didn’t understand how he had gotten roped into the whole thing.
Korbin hadn’t wanted the women to go to San Francisco by themselves, so he had sent Eric to watch their backs. So far that had meant he had sat in dark alley after dark alley.
“Oh, yeah, sure. ‘This won’t take long. Why don’t you just stay outside?’ they said.” Eric mumbled angrily to himself as he kicked an empty Mad Dog bottle toward the dumpster. “You forgot to mention it was fucking COLD in San Fran, Katie! And these alleys are goddamn dark.”
Eric looked around for someone to confirm his grievances, but then remembered he was alone.
There weren’t even any fucking cats back here, which said something. The rats were too ferocious for the cats to come after them for fucking dinner. He stared at the metal fire escape above him, which had water dripping from the railings.
There was a scream in the distance and Eric shook his head, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“This is pure and utter bullshit,” Eric grumbled, pulling his cell out of his pocket and flipping through the screens. “I don’t even have anyone to talk to. I thought this demon-hunting shit would be exciting.”
He sighed, closing his phone and leaning against the wall.
It wasn’t what he expected, sure, but it was a hell of a lot better than where he came from. At least he had a purpose now, even if it was being the lookout for a couple of wild demon hunters.
Just then another scream rang out, but this one was closer and louder. He straightened up.
The back door was flung open wildly and a man bolted out, screaming at the top of his lungs. Eric had parked the SUV at one end of the alley with the running lights on and he stood in the shadows of the other end—just in case. Whoever this was, he was heading straight for him.
Eric squinted down the dark alley to see more, but there was a shadow across the guy’s face from the lights of the SUV behind him. He figured it was worth the risk of harming an innocent; as the guy moved closer Eric stepped out of the shadows and cold-cocked him. The screaming stopped immediately and the guy hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. Eric winced as he shook his hand out.
“Damn, dude, you got a strong jaw,” he remarked, bending over the guy. “Let’s see who in the hell I just knocked the hell out.”
He rifled through his pockets, but he found nothing more than a comb, some gum, and two different pieces of paper with girl’s numbers on them. Eric chuckled, crumpling the notes and throwing them over his shoulder.
“Sorry, buddy. You won’t be using those to lure unsuspecting girls into your demon lair. What else you got in there? Huh…nothing? How you gonna call a girl without a cell phone?”
He reached into the guy’s inner jacket pocket and pulled out a business card, but unless the guy’s name was Cynthia and he worked at the Downtown Salon it wasn’t his. Eric straightened up for a moment, dumbfounded that in today’s day and age someone would go out without money, ID, or anything else, for that matter.
He bent over again to part the man’s eyelids and shined his flashlight into his eyes, but there was nothing; at least, nothing that would peg him as demon-infected. No red rings, just a passed-out dude in the alley behind a San Francisco bar.
“Well, sorry, fella,” Eric told the unconscious man. “Guess you were an innocent bystander. I have to say though, you got a set of lungs on you. I’m pretty sure they heard you screaming like an idiot all the way in Las Vegas.”
Eric stood back up and tossed the guy’s gum on his chest, looking around before grabbing his legs and pulling him behind the dumpster. The last thing he needed was someone looking down the alley and seeing a body.
What the girls were doing was already dangerous enough. He didn’t need extra attention because he’d knocked out some civilian who was probably taking cover from the girls inside.
The sound of glass breaking in the bar caught Eric’s attention and he thought about going in, but he really didn’t want attitude from the girls.
They had this. He knew it, but after knocking out an innocent person he felt the need to redeem himself by kicking demon ass. Still, he had promised to stay put. He knew one thing about Katie for sure: she had a reason for everything she did, even if it was to torture him and make him miserable.
After all, they were like brother and sister; it was her job to pick on his ass. He shrugged and walked to the SUV, reaching in and flipping off the lights. The moon was bright enough to see anyone coming out. He looked down at his watch and sighed.
“What the hell are they doing in there, anyway?”
“Come here, you rat bastard,” Stephanie shouted, grabbing one of the possessed by the collar and breaking a beer bottle over his head. “I didn’t come here for you, but I’ll take you nonetheless.”
Katie chuckled as she backed toward the bar. Two infected were eyeing her, and one took a step toward her. She wagged her finger at him.
“Nah ah ah,” she taunted. “You know the rules.”
“There are no rules,” the possessed growled.
“Exactly.” Katie coldcocked him as Stephanie ran up and knocked the other guy over the head with a bar stool. Katie winced. “That’s definitely going to leave a mark.”
Stephanie walked over and grabbed a cosmo off the bar.
“Sooo, how was your day?” Stephanie smiled.
“Well, I…” Katie frowned as Stephanie took off after a demon across the room. “Hey, I wasn’t done talking yet!” she called.
Katie shrugged and turned to the drinks on the bar. “Oh well, I’ll just do a little taste test.”
She moved down the bar, taking a sip of every drink along the way.
“Hmm, I give this one a seven out of ten. Good taste, terrible presentation,” she commented, looking at the bartender, who was cowering in the corner. “This one, though…” She tapped the rim of the glass. “I have to say, you hit the mark, my friend.”
“Heads up!” Stephanie shouted.
The bartender nervously nodded to Katie before jumping back as a demon-possessed flew over the bar, crashing into the wall and dropping to the floor.
Stephanie laughed and jumped onto the pool table, kicking a man in the face in mid-leap. She picked up the cue ball and chucked it across the room, nailing a red-eyed woman in the back of the head and wincing as she broke a table on her way to the floor.
“Whoops.”
Katie moved down to another drink and wiggled her eyebrows at the bartender. She stirred it with the straw and took a sip, but immediately spat it out and wiped her mouth.
“Holy hell, what was that?”
“G-g-gin,” the bartender stuttered.
“Oh, Christmas trees in a glass. Got it.” She glanced at someone crawling across the floor, trying to stay in the shadows. “And who do we have here?”
The man, who was wearing a dress shirt and pants, crawled rapidly toward the back door. Katie walked forward and stepped on his leg, tilting her head sideways. The man straightened and put his hands in the air.
“Please,” he whimpered.
That’s him, Pandora told her. And I can’t believe you don’t like gin. If you had the good kind, I promise it wouldn’t taste like Pine Sol.
I don’t really want to spend the money to find out. Katie leaned down and grabbed the guy’s collar. “Come here a minute, buddy, I want to ask you a few questions about the campaign contributions you’ve been taking over the last few months.”
The guy whimpered, his feet dangling as Katie lifted him into the air. He didn’t say a word, just choked on his own spit, terrified of what was going to happen. Katie sighed and shook her head, reaching into his jacket pocket and flipping open his wallet to see his ID.
“Yep, it’s you all right, and I have to say, you take a good driver’s license picture,” she said. “Good for you, I just look like I have seven chins and I walked through a hurricane to get there.”
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A loud crash behind her made her cringe and the politician’s eyes darted past her. Stephanie was still taking care of the riffraff—which was fun and all, but Katie’s stomach was growling. Katie smiled at the guy and looked at Stephanie, who was finishing up the last demon in the group.
“We got the rat,” Katie yelled to her. “Time to go.”
“I was just starting to have fun,” Stephanie responded, breaking a pool cue over a barely conscious demon. “Just five more minutes. Please, Mom?”
“Nope. Pull them together for a fast extraction, then time to hit the road.” Katie chuckled. “But first, me and this guy have a little bit to talk about.”
“I swear I don’t know what you are talking about,” he whined. “I didn’t take any contributions.”
“Really?” she replied, pulling a piece of paper out of her back pocket. “It says here you took over a million dollars from a fund for sick kids. Well, that’s just fucked up, but I don’t blame you.”
“You don’t?” he whimpered.
“No,” Katie replied, looking at him with red eyes. “I blame your demon.”
“You are so theatrical.” Stephanie laughed as Pandora’s demon arm came out of Katie’s chest.
Stephanie looked at the bartender to give her some backup, but all he did was pass out behind the bar. Stephanie pursed her lips and sighed, jumping down from the table.
The demon Pandora was sending back to hell screamed and begged. It really didn’t want to go. When the demon was gone the politician passed out cold and Katie let go, letting him fall to the floor.
“Hey, where’s my bartender?” Katie asked.
“He passed out.” Stephanie jerked a thumb at the space behind the bar as she sat down and started popping pretzels into her mouth. “I guess he couldn’t take anymore.”
“Too bad.” Katie sat next to her and sipped the drink in front of her. “Humans these days! Oh, wait, didn’t one run out of here earlier?”
“I got him.” Eric kicked a body out of the way as he looked around. “Damn, you took out the whole bar.”
“They wouldn’t give him up.” Stephanie shrugged and picked up a cherry. “You gotta do what you gotta do. How was alley duty?”
“Fine,” Eric wiped the blood off a barstool with a napkin. “I think I now have rabies and tetanus, but hey—at least I’m alive, right?”
“So, are we off to dinner before Pandora has a complete meltdown?” Katie asked.
“Yes, I’m starving!” Stephanie jumped up and headed for the door.
“You guys go grab the car. I’ll be out in a second,” Katie told them.
She went to each of the unconscious possessed and yanked their demons out. Why the hell they had all chosen this establishment, she wasn’t sure. Only two were merely human.
She walked back behind the bar and wrote a thank you on a napkin before shoving it into the bartender’s pocket. She propped him against a stepstool and put a balled-up coat behind his head, then stood back with her hands on her hips and nodded in approval.
“Sorry, buddy. You were really brave there for a second.”
Several cops busted through the front door with their guns drawn.
“Hey, hey!” Katie put her hands up. “I think you guys know me.”
“Guns down, boys,” the lead cop ordered. “It’s the D Squad.”
“Most of these people are just unconscious now; all the demons have been removed,” she told them, popping a cherry in her mouth. “This guy, though…he gets VIP treatment, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The cop chuckled.
“You boys have fun now, you hear?” She waved as she walked toward the back door. “Oh, and this one?” She nudged one comatose body. “He’s a politician. A big one, but he won’t be going back to the Hill for a while, most likely. I heard he voted against police raises anyway.”
Katie disappeared out the back door, leaving the half a dozen cops shaking their heads as they stepped over unconscious bodies.
“All right, boys, spread out,” the lead cop said. “We got a lot of people to see to.”
“Damn!” one of the cops exclaimed. “This guy was punched in both eyes, and he is still holding onto his ‘nads.”
“Right, left, kick in the junk?” his partner asked, looking over his shoulder.
“Yeah, that’s definitely my favorite move,” the cop replied. “Poor guy is gonna be hurting when he wakes up.”
“Wait!” His partner looked at the pool table. “Is that guy wearing a tutu?”
Everybody chuckled, moving the furniture around to clear a way for the EMTs to get through when they got there. The captain walked into the place and looked at the guy in the tutu on the table, two pool balls placed right next to each other between his legs. He sighed and looked at the lead cop.
“Let me guess…the D squad was here.” He chuckled through his long curly mustache. “At least they have style when they break up a bar full of people. How many were there? Six or seven?”
“Uh, no,” the lead cop said. “It was just two of them. Maybe three, but we heard two female voices when we were coming in.”
The captain let out a long whistle. “I need these girls on the force. Whip you idiots into shape. All right, get this mess cleaned up, I’ll figure out a story, because I don’t think the guy holding his balls is going to believe a gas leak made them pass out when he wakes up.”
“Probably not,” the lead cop agreed, holding back a laugh. “But the truth isn’t very likely either.”
“Too true.” The captain looked around one last time before walking out the door. “None of this is believable anymore.”
3
General Brushwood looked out the window as his helicopter touched down on the landing pad.
A short skinny man with thick-rimmed glasses and a white coat stood next to two armed guards, waiting for the general to exit the helicopter. He sighed, grabbed his hat, and swung open the door. He hated dealing with the scientists; they were always so clingy and nerdy. Still, he was at Research Base 221 for a reason, and it wasn’t the vibrant nightlife in southern Louisiana.
It was the main research base for the demon-related research. Demons were rife in the area.
The general stepped out of the helicopter and shook the scientist’s hand as they hurried across the helipad. The general saluted the two guards at the entry to the building and was ushered inside, then into an elevator.
The activity that went on in the building was top secret, and most of it happened hundreds of feet below the surface. From the outside it looked like a normal office building, but that was just a façade.
“Doctor Dolt, it’s good to see you,” the general started as the elevator doors closed. “I expect you have been busy.”
“Oh, yes,” he replied excitedly. “Examining the demons’ blood has been very educational.”
“And what exactly are you looking for?” the general asked.
“Well, first we had to make sure that we understood the complexity of the human RBC, sir,” he began, then noticed at the general’s lifted eyebrows. “The human red blood cell, that is. Anyway, the RBC is biconcave, meaning that it has a disc shape to it; a discocyte, which can bend when going through our smaller capillaries. Now, we know our blood cells can be infected, and are subject to changes due to genetic deformations and the like. We started out by studying these with different testing devices and through controlled experiments. Then came the fun part: we redid all the trials and tests with demons’ blood.”
The elevator door opened and Dr. Dolt gestured the general into the hallway, walking quickly to catch up with him.
They took several turns through the long corridors and stopped outside a glass-fronted room. The general looked through the window at several scientists in all-white suits, who were doing various things including taking blood from possessed humans strapped to tables. These humans were the ones that couldn’t be saved; the ones who had lost their reason.
They were
starting to fully morph into their demon.
“Our specimens have been fantastic,” the doctor said. “They have provided us with some really great samples.”
“And what do you do with those samples?” The general asked as he squinted through the glass.
“Well, we run them through the atomic force microscope, we splice them with optical laser tweezers, and really, a whole slew of procedures. We subject them to normal twists and turns, and to abnormal external stress.”
“And?” the general asked.
“Well, did you ever make a homemade lava lamp with oil and water when you were a kid?”
“Yes,” the general answered.
“When the bubbles move up and down in the oil, they bend with the shape of the glass,” he explained. “They are oblong and transparent, and they look like if you held them in your hand they would be harder on the outside than on the inside.”
“Okay, sure,” the general replied, understanding what he was hearing for the first time since he arrived.
“If you were to pump one through a tube, the bubble would conform to the shape of the tube and bounce back when it came out the other side,” he explained. “That’s the human RBC, only red in color and very small. Now, a demon cell is more of a jelly-bean shape. It doesn’t conform as easily to a smaller space; it would stretch out. Over time, the human RBC, with the right pressure from the demon, starts to look like that.”
The scientist pointed to a woman strapped to a bed. She was fighting the cuffs on her arms and her face was distorted: her mouth wide, her eyes bulging, and her tongue almost black. The tips of her fingers were dark like they had been frostbitten, and on the end were talons.
“Her cells are morphing her body,” the scientist explained. “They will ultimately kill the human body.”
“And trap the soul,” the general muttered.
“Well, we don’t believe in the soul here.” The doctor chuckled. “But yes, in essence; it traps the human brain inside.”
“How do we kill it?” the general finally asked, turning to the doctor.
