Highley stopped shouting as a few more people stepped out from behind the house. All of them were wearing devil masks. They were all different, as if they’d followed instructions that said “wear a devil mask” without a purchase link to the specific item. The quality of masks ranged from a shitty one that looked like a drawing on a paper plate, to a Hollywood-level one that could’ve been Satan himself for all I knew.

  Each of them held a weapon. I could see a machete, a spiked mace, an aluminum baseball bat, a meat cleaver, and a couple of very long knives.

  Highley glanced back at Green and Penter, as if to check to see what his fellow cops thought he should do.

  The demons’ eyes all began to glow red.

  Again, this would’ve had more impact at night, but I assure you, it scared the absolute living shit out of me in broad daylight.

  They all ran forward.

  The three cops opened fire. Highley’s next two shots hit their mark, but his aim faltered as the first man slashed the sickle across his face. The screaming cop fell to the ground, and four of the demons pounced upon him, hacking and bashing him with their weapons as he tried to fight back.

  I know they weren’t technically demons, but I’m using that term instead of “humans who were sort-of possessed by demons.”

  Green quickly backed away as he fired over and over. He brought down two of the demons, and ruined one of the cheap plastic masks, before one of them flung a meat cleaver at him. It struck him in the face, blade-first. This in itself wasn’t fatal—it was a ghastly, deep cut, but he would’ve been fine with a few stitches—but having a meat cleaver protruding from his face kept him from aiming the gun properly. His next few shots missed entirely. Then a machete blade went straight through his throat.

  He fell. Unlike Vic, I didn’t think he’d recover.

  I prayed that the back door to the police car would be unlocked. I turned around and pulled on the handle with my bound hands. It was indeed unlocked. I threw open the door, and, even though she’d tried to sell me out to the cops, I ushered Quinn inside before hurriedly scooting in next to her. She leaned across me and pulled the door shut.

  “Turn around,” she told me. “Give me your hands.”

  I did, and after a few moments of sawing she cut the zip-tie handcuffs away. She snapped closed the blade of the pocketknife she’d been carrying. Not every tool had to be effective at dismembering demons to come in handy.

  The demons had almost reached him, but Penter fired until his gun was empty. Then he rushed over to the car, kicked a female demon out of the way with an impressive bit of foot action, and opened the driver’s door. He got inside and pulled the door closed, smashing the fingers of a demon who let out a howl of pain.

  I looked over at the house. There were now at least a dozen demons on Quinn’s lawn, and that was if you only counted the standing ones. A few were on the ground, having been taken down by bullets, yet they were all moving.

  I had plenty of questions, but they could wait.

  The demon with the baseball bat was standing right next to the police car. He smashed the bat upon the front windshield. He didn’t shatter it on his first try, or even his second, but on the third attempt the entire windshield crashed onto the dashboard.

  Penter pointed his gun at him and pulled the trigger. The gun, which he’d already known was empty, clicked and clicked as he continued to fruitlessly try to shoot. Complete panic had set in.

  The demon climbed onto the front hood. He swung the bat, knocking the gun out of Penter’s hand and—from the sound of it—shattering a few bones in the process. He adjusted his grip on the bat, this time using it like a javelin to bash Penter in the face. Then he crouched down, reached inside, and unlocked the door.

  A couple of other demons opened the door and pulled Penter out. Though I couldn’t see what happened next, I could hear it, and it was awful.

  Sometimes, in extreme situations, you find yourself saying incredibly stupid things. I could’ve left this out of the narrative, but no, I will confess that as Quinn and I sat in the back seat of the police car, the question that emerged from my lips was: “Are these the other demons?”

  And, to show just how terrified Quinn was, her answer, without a trace of sarcasm, was: “Yes, they are.”

  One of the demons knocked on our window, then waved to me with a severed hand. More and more of them gathered around the vehicle.

  “I wasn’t expecting them all at once,” I said. I spoke softly, even though nobody outside seemed particularly interested in our conversation.

  “It’s a portal,” said Quinn.

  “Right. I just...I guess I thought they’d be driving separately, and that we’d be dealing with them one or two at a time. I didn’t realize it would be the whole cult.”

  “Sorry. I should’ve explained better. I didn’t think you assumed they’d be road tripping.”

  “My fault. It seemed reasonable at the time, but now it does seem kind of silly.” This would’ve been a good time to crawl into the front seat, start the engine, and try to speed off. Unfortunately, we were in a police car, which is not designed to allow its back-seat criminal passengers to crawl up there with their arresting officers.

  “It’s okay.”

  There were at least ten demons surrounding the car now. They began to shake it. A couple of them were whooping and hollering like frat boys.

  “I’m not sure what’s happening to me,” I said. “I feel weirdly calm. I don’t know if it’s because I am weirdly calm, or if it’s because I’m scared to the point of being numb.”

  “You’re definitely numb.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “We have an advantage over the cops,” said Quinn. “The demons want us to die a slow, torturous death.”

  “That doesn’t really sound like an advantage, but do continue.”

  “They don’t care about the cops. Don’t get me wrong, they enjoyed slaughtering them, but they were just in the way. They aren’t going to kill us. Not yet. So we might be able to make a run for it.”

  “You don’t think they’ll, like, slash our legs open with a meat cleaver?”

  “They might.”

  “Then I’m not sure getting out of the car and trying to outrun them is such a great plan. I mean, it beats my current plan, which is to sit here and die, but I’d like to believe we can come up with something better.”

  “Do you still have your gun?” Quinn asked.

  I reached into my inside jacket pocket. “Yeah. Since they can’t be killed, it’s not super helpful, though.”

  “They can be hurt. And we’ll have a distraction soon.”

  “What kind of distraction?”

  “Don’t you hear the sirens?”

  She was right! Sirens were approaching. I hadn’t heard them over the sounds of the devil-masked demons rocking the vehicle.

  “Wait for our chance,” Quinn said. “Run for the house.”

  “Why the hell would we go back to the house?”

  “Our only way out of this is to persuade Vic to call off the holy mission.”

  I couldn’t think of any conceivable reason that Vic would be willing to tell his demon buddies to leave us alone. But that was a problem for later. For now, the demons did seem to be trying to scare us more than actually kill us, so I supposed that their plan of subjecting us to endless torment did have a plus side.

  Two more police cars pulled onto the street.

  I suddenly had a major crisis of conscience. There were probably four new cops about to arrive, and all four of them were likely to die. This was all my fault. My attempt to rid the world of the Toledo Trasher had ended the lives of Darla and five police officers already.

  But what could I do? I was helpless. I couldn’t call dispatch and say, “Hey, you’ll want to ignore their requests for backup, because it’s going to be total carnage.” If I got out of the car and waved the other cops away, they weren’t going to take my suggestion.

  They were going to die because of me.

  I wasn’t a piece of shit. I mean, yeah, I’d behaved like a piece of shit when I decided to flee with Herschell. But in the overall scope of my experience as a human being, I hadn’t set a precedent of being the kind of scumbag who would celebrate the arrival of a few cops who were about to unknowingly sacrifice themselves to give me a better chance out of this mess.

  Still...what could I do?

  “I have an idea,” said Quinn.

  “I have one, too. I’m going to use mine.” If we’d had, say, fifteen extra seconds, I’d have listened to Quinn’s idea and decided which one was better. Since we didn’t, I was going to go with my own idea, which I thought was fairly decent considering how deeply screwed we were.

  I waited for the police cars to pull up to the house, or at least as close as they could get with all the other cars parked nearby.

  The demons stopped shaking the car and turned their attention to new prey.

  Four new cops got out of their cars and immediately drew their guns. These cops wouldn’t have known that it was essentially a riot at this point, and I assumed they didn’t conveniently have a cannister of tear gas in their car. Or maybe they did. I was no expert on what police kept in their car. It would be awesome if they did.

  Hell, maybe there was tear gas in this car! Not that it would be in the back seat within reach of criminals.

  “Everybody on the ground!” one of the cops shouted. “Now!”

  None of the demons obeyed.

  Now it was time for my effort to save the lives of these police officers. It wasn’t much of an effort, but I had to do something to keep them from underestimating the danger they were in.

  “Bomb!” I shouted. “They have a bomb! Stay away!”

  My plan was to take this moment to fling the door open as hard as I could, bashing it into at least one of the demons, and giving me that ever-useful element of surprise. But, because I was stressed the hell out and not thinking clearly, I reached for a door handle that wasn’t there. I had literally just thought about how a cop car wouldn’t have tear gas in the back seat where the passengers could get at it, but I neglected to consider that I wouldn’t be able to open the door myself. Again, in my own defense, my stress level was off the charts.

  Though I wasn’t sure how seriously the cops were taking me, at least they weren’t approaching the crowd.

  One of the demons peered at me through the window. His sadistic smile was painted on the mask, but it still felt like he was smiling at me.

  He threw open the door.

  This demon was holding a knife. He wasn’t the demon that I wanted to go after first, but I had to make the best of it, so I shot him in the head.

  He stumbled against another demon, which was the one I wanted to go after first. I scrambled out of the car and shot that demon in the head as well.

  Neither of them even fell down, but all I wanted was for the demon to react poorly enough to getting shot through the skull to lessen his grip on the machete he was holding. The baseball bat also would’ve worked, but the machete demon was closer.

  The cops didn’t know that these people in devil masks were, in fact, supernatural creatures. So to them, I had just shot a pair of people who were celebrating Halloween in March. My hope was that the cops would take note of the fact that both of these mask-wearing individuals had taken bullets to the head at close range and remained standing.

  “You prick!” the one with the machete shouted at me, further conveying to witnesses that something not-of-this-world was going on.

  I shot him point-blank in the middle of the face. Blood sprayed from a hole in his mask, underneath which I hoped his nose was completely obliterated. He shouted something else at me, but it was unintelligible, and did sound very much like somebody might sound if their nose was bloody pulp.

  I grabbed the machete out of his hand.

  I had to grab it by the blade, which hurt, but then I spun it around and took it by the handle. I swung it at the nearest demon, slamming the blade into her shoulder. It didn’t chop her arm off, but there was blood.

  I could feel blood trickling down my wrist. Damn. I’d cut my palm. Oh well. Considering that I was going to try to fight my way through a horde of demons while also trying not to get shot by the police, if I died in the next minute or so, it wasn’t going to be the result of a cut on my hand.

  “Vic’s car. You both have keys to that, right?” I asked.

  “No.”

  Of course not. But they were inside, either conveniently on a key ring or inconveniently in Vic’s bloody pocket.

  His car had Darla’s dead body in the trunk, but that was a problem for later. The current problem was that Vic’s car was boxed into the driveway by the police cars. I could probably do a hard right swerve and speed across her front lawn, maybe running over a few demons in the process. On the other hand, I didn’t know how these portals worked, and perhaps we’d speed off, only to have the demons materialize on the front hood.

  I liked the “steal Vic’s car idea,” but still, Quinn knew what was going on better than I did. So after we got back into the house, we’d first see if we could make Vic listen to reason.

  I swung the machete at the nearest demon, ready to battle my way to the front porch.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I really hoped that the four new cops didn’t shoot me. From an objective standpoint, if you were trying to determine who the bad guys were, you’d go with the people wearing devil masks. Yet, I was the one who’d shot a couple of them, and I was about to start slashing my way through the crowd with a machete, so I had to make peace with the idea that I might take a bullet any second.

  Quinn got out of the car and stood behind me.

  We weren’t quite surrounded, because several of the demons had turned their focus to the cops. The cops were yelling the same stuff we’d been hearing about dropping our weapons and getting down on the ground, or they’d shoot. Nobody listened.

  Then one of the demons, the one closest to the cops, did drop to his knees. After that, he leaned forward, lying flat on the sidewalk. I assumed that he simply didn’t feel like getting shot…until he started doing push-ups. The asshole was just trying to be funny.

  I slashed the machete back and forth as if I was trying to clear a path through the jungle. Quite a bit of blood sprayed, but no limbs or heads fell onto the lawn.

  “Cut off his arm!” Quinn told me, pointing to the demon who’d smashed the front windshield. He stepped on Penter’s body, which made a wet squishy sound as his foot sank into the dead cop’s mangled chest.

  I swung the machete at him, aiming for his elbow. Direct hit. I lopped the lower half of the demon’s arm off, and he threw his head back and bellowed in pain.

  “His other arm!” Quinn said. “The one with the bat!”

  Oh. She wanted his bat. Duh.

  The demon was so busy reacting to his spurting stump that he didn’t make any real effort to dodge my next swing. I hit his other arm at the elbow—I was getting good at this—and both his arm and the aluminum baseball bat fell onto the grass.

  Quinn picked up the bat. She didn’t thank me, but to be fair, there wasn’t really time for manners.

  Gunshots. The cops, realizing that the devil-masked maniacs had no intention of getting on the ground as requested, had opened fire. They were, for now, firing warning shots into the air, but that wouldn’t last.

  I swung the machete at a demon whose cheap plastic mask was the comic character Hot Stuff the Little Devil. I was trying to cut his head off, but he ducked, and my blade sailed harmlessly over his head. I swung it back, and this time it connected. It got him on the side of the head, and it wasn’t a very good hit. All it really did was sever the string that held the mask in place. The mask fell away.

  Underneath, his face was a blur.

  Or, maybe not quite a blur. More like it was shifting. The glowing eyes remained in place, but his other facial features were moving. Changing.

  “Ignore that!” Quinn shouted.

  I very much wanted to take her advice, but it was difficult to completely tune out the fact that this guy’s face looked like it was melting and reforming every split-second.

  Instead of making another attempt to chop his head off, I shoved him out of the way and ran.

  I didn’t get far. Not even three steps. That’s when the woman in the black jacket thrust her pitchfork at me. She was aiming for my leg, but I managed to block it with the machete, like we were sword fighting.

  Somebody tackled me from behind.

  We both landed on the grass. It knocked the wind out of me, and I rolled onto my back, gasping for breath. The demon who’d tackled me rolled onto his side, groaning with pain. He’d landed on the machete, and it cut deep into his belly.

  Even though I couldn’t draw a breath, there was enough fight in me to punch him in the jaw. I’d used my injured hand, so flecks of blood sprayed all over my face.

  The woman raised her pitchfork, ready to slam it down upon me. Again, she was aiming for my legs, because she didn’t want to rob me of my eternal torment. I moved, but, most likely, at least one of the metal tines would have skewered my flesh; fortunately, Quinn whacked the pitchfork out of the way with the bat before it could puncture me.

  Another gunshot. One of the demons shouted “Shit!” The cops were no longer firing warning shots.

  Quinn smacked the bat into the woman’s head. Her head flopped to the side, her neck broken. She made a grotesque choking sound and began to flail out with the pitchfork. She lunged with it once. Missed. Twice. Missed. The third time slammed the tines deep into the side of an overweight demon with a mask that was decorated with silver glitter.

  I forced myself to get up.

  More gunshots rang out. More demons cursed.

  One of the demons, presumably from a much warmer state than Ohio, wasn’t wearing a shirt. This may have been to show off his impressively muscular chest. I swung the machete diagonally, slashing him from his left nipple to the right side of his waist, creating a big red line. He cried out in rage. I think he was more upset about the aesthetic damage to his six-pack than the pain.

 

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