Demonic, page 11
Somebody let out a high-pitched shriek. It was one of the cops, who may or may not have used up all his ammunition before the demons reached him. Either way, he would not be firing that gun anymore. He took a spiked mace to the face and then dropped out of view.
Another cop screamed as well.
I heard a car door open, which may have been one of the other cops getting the hell back into his vehicle, but I didn’t look over to see. I may also have heard wrong—there was a lot of noise out here.
I stabbed a demon in the chest, and with that I’d mostly cleared out the fuckers who were in my immediate path. Quinn and I rushed for her front porch. I wondered how much of our survival over the past couple of minutes was due to my exemplary machete skills versus them simply wanting to keep us alive.
The front door was closed. Hopefully this would not be a problem. Most likely, it would.
Quinn stopped for a moment to crack her bat into the skull of one of the demons, so hard that one of its glowing eyes popped through the eyehole in its devil mask. The demon began to scream in Spanish. I remembered some of my high school Spanish but couldn’t understand what he was saying. I suspected that the basic gist was “You fucking bitch!”
An arrow swished right past me. That wasn’t good.
I’d say that I picked up my pace, but I was already running at full speed, so I kept running at the same speed but with more urgency.
Quinn let out a yelp. I glanced back at her and saw an arrow protruding from her upper leg. I couldn’t tell who was shooting at us, but he was apparently confident enough in his archery skills to know that he wouldn’t inadvertently accidentally shoot us through the ear canal.
Though Quinn didn’t fall, she stumbled badly.
Yes, we’d had our differences. Still, of course I wasn’t going to just leave her behind. She put her arm over my shoulder and I kept her from toppling over as we ran over to the front porch.
An arrow struck the front door.
We went up the three wooden stairs, Quinn wincing in pain with each step, and made it to the door. I tested the doorknob. Locked.
I pounded on the door. “Let us in!” I shouted. “Let us in!”
Vic would obviously not be opening the door for us, but unless I’d lost track of the participants, Officer Tichy was still in there.
The door opened. Quinn and I rushed inside, and Tichy slammed the door behind us, locking it again.
“What the hell is going on out there?” he demanded.
Quinn ignored him and limped over to Vic.
I noticed that there was some overturned furniture blocking the living room window. “I’ve been barricading the place,” said Tichy, “but there are still ways they can get in.”
I was glad he’d been working to secure the house, although it also would have been nice if he’d tried to help Quinn and I escape our little pickle. Tichy looked kind of stunned, which I supposed was fair considering that he was in the same house as a glowing-eyed dismembered torso.
I hurried into the living room and peeked out the window. Now that I was very temporarily safe, I might be able to see just how bad our situation was.
We’d put a hurting on plenty of the demons, but I didn’t think we’d taken any of them fully out of commission. Maybe the woman with the broken neck was fairly harmless—at least until her neck healed—but the wide array of gunshot wounds and machete slashes didn’t seem to put us in less danger. I guess if that weren’t the case, the demons would have made a greater effort not to get shot or stabbed.
Credit where it’s due: I’m not saying that I felt any genuine admiration for these monsters. I’m simply saying that, in their position, I’m not sure I would’ve been devoted enough to the cause to let people shoot me, even if the wounds would heal.
I tried to count the demons. It wasn’t easy, because they weren’t staying still, some were busy murdering police officers behind automobiles, and the living room window didn’t give me a full view. Though Quinn had said there were a dozen demons, or as many as twenty, I was counting twenty of just the ones I could see.
“More backup’s on the way,” said Tichy.
“Tell them that these things can’t be killed,” I told him. “You’ll sound insane, and they won’t believe you, but they need to know this, or we’ll have another bunch of dead cops.”
“I sent some video.”
“Oh. Good.”
I returned to the hallway. Vic’s good eye was open, but not glowing. His stumps looked like they’d already scabbed over. The best I could say was that my palm had mostly stopped bleeding.
“Please,” said Quinn.
Vic smiled. “Why the fuck would I want to call them off?”
“Because I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to die, much less die the way they’re intending.”
“I don’t agree with that.”
“Vic, I didn’t do anything!”
“You had your boyfriend chop me up.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, and I didn’t tell him to do anything.” She looked over at me. “Corey, tell him what happened. You did it all yourself.”
I’d sort of hoped that Quinn would try to talk Vic out of calling off the holy mission on behalf of us both. Maybe I was misunderstanding her intention right now, and she wasn’t necessarily trying to make the point that I should be dragged to Hell by myself. “Yes,” I said. “It was all me. If I’m being honest, she was a complete asshole about it.”
“See?” asked Quinn. “It was him.”
“Maybe,” said Vic.
“No, not maybe! It was! He decided that he was going to be Mr. Hero and rid the world of the Toledo Trasher, and he didn’t say a word about it to me.” Quinn sounded almost hysterical. Sweat poured down her face. Vic’s refusal to play along was making her frantic, but I was also sure that the arrow in her leg really hurt, and she was trying her best to fight through the pain.
Also, I want to point out that though I’m not constantly describing my mental state, I was not used to the fact that there was a dismembered torso lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. I was not coping well at all. Believe me.
“But how did he know who I was?” asked Vic.
“He figured it out,” said Quinn. “I had to go into work the morning after your last kill. I didn’t want to. I didn’t have any PTO left. I was distraught, and he figured it out. I didn’t say anything.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m serious!”
“Your platonic co-worker decided, entirely on his own, to stab me in the throat?”
I suppose I could have taken this opportunity to confess that I’d been in love with Quinn at the time, but I wasn’t sure how well that would help us plead our case.
“Yes!” Quinn insisted. “Corey, tell him.”
“Yeah, her story is accurate,” I said. “I figured out who you really were and decided that I didn’t want you to kill any more women. Sue me.”
“All right,” said Vic. “I believe you.”
“Good,” said Quinn. “Because it’s the truth.”
“And do you want to take a guess what this big bold new revelation has changed? Go on, take a guess. Actually, I’ll give you three guesses. Three guesses to tell me what has changed now. I bet you can do it.”
“Please, Vic.”
“Look at me. Take a good long look. In what universe do you think I’m going to help you?”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
“You sucked my cock to distract me!”
He was right. She had. This morning had been eventful enough that I’d forgotten about that.
I was very interested in how this conversation was going to continue, but I also needed to check on the whole “demons outside” issue. I returned to the living room to take another peek out the window.
They were still out there, of course. The cops were, as far as I could tell, all dead. A few of the demons were mangling their corpses. I suppose I should’ve been relieved that they weren’t defiling the bodies even worse.
The rest of the demons were standing on Quinn’s front lawn, facing the house.
If their goal was to scare the shit out of me, they were supremely successful. I wondered what the neighbors—and there had to be neighbors home and aware of the commotion, right?—were thinking as they saw these people in devil masks with glowing red eyes staring at the house.
A couple of them had lost their masks. Their faces were doing the same ever-shifting trick as the first one. I guess that explained why these people, who did in theory have private lives, friends, families, and co-workers, were able to perform their holy mission. If Albert J. Walton, a plumber from Texas, went through a portal and slaughtered some cops in Ohio, the shifting face would keep him from being identified. The devil masks, presumably, were to keep people from immediately realizing they were having an encounter with the supernatural. Also, the masks looked scary.
What about fingerprints? DNA?
Not my problem. I’m sure Satan had it figured out.
I returned to the hallway. Officer Tichy walked from the other end, looking more than a little shellshocked.
“Can they get in?” I asked.
“There are a lot of them out there,” he said. “If they really want to get in, they will.”
“Okay, great, thanks.”
“What are they doing?” Quinn asked me.
“Just standing there, looking creepy.”
She nodded, as if that answer didn’t surprise her.
“There are fewer in the back,” said Tichy.
“They’re in the back?” I asked. Of course they were. They wouldn’t leave the back door unprotected so that we could simply sneak out like Herschell had.
“Yeah. Not as many, but we’re better off staying barricaded in here until reinforcements arrive.”
“Reinforcements have already arrived,” I said. “They’re all dead.”
“They know how bad it is. They’ll send in the army if they have to.”
“So, Quinn,” I said. “Remember that time when you said there could be as many as twenty of them? There are more than twenty in the front yard alone. I thought we were accountants. How did you miscount so badly?”
Vic laughed. “We’ve expanded.”
Chapter Fourteen
I supposed it didn’t matter that much. Whether there were twenty demons in the yard or thirty, we were all still totally boned.
Well, okay, maybe if the army did show up in the next few minutes, things might work out all right. Surely these demons couldn’t reconstruct themselves if they were blown apart by a tank.
“I guess we just need to make a run for it,” said Quinn. “Grab anything in the house that we can use as a weapon and try to make it to the car.”
I stared at her for a moment, trying to give her the same look she’d given me earlier when she looked at me like I was the single dumbest human being on the planet. We weren’t going to make it past all of them, get into her automobile, and drive away safely, no matter how many household items we used as makeshift weapons. The opportunity to speed off would’ve been during the chaos, but Quinn had thought she could talk her dear serial killer hubby into showing us a little mercy. I decided not to bother stating this observation out loud, hoping that my look was sufficient to convey it.
“Go fuck yourself,” Quinn told me, in response to my look.
“I have a way better idea,” I said.
“Let’s hear it.”
I hesitated. I didn’t actually have a way better idea—all I had was an alternate idea, and it was the same idea I’d pitched earlier. We should take Vic’s keys, make a run for his car, and try to drive out of here.
Or, even better than that idea, we could convince Tichy to make a run for it with us, take his car, and speed out of here, siren blaring.
“Why don’t we make a run for your car?” I asked him.
“We’d never make it.”
“No, we probably wouldn’t make it. Not the same thing.”
“It’s safer here.”
“For now. But they’re not going to stand out there all day.”
“You have no say in this,” Tichy informed me.
I shrugged. I couldn’t force him to go along with my plan. I mean, technically I could, since I had a gun in my pocket, but though I’d crossed a great many boundaries today, I wasn’t ready to go with “force a cop to do my bidding at gunpoint.”
“Why has this become an all-out slaughter?” I asked. “I thought at the last holy mission they just kidnapped the family?”
“Who are you asking, me or Vic?” asked Quinn.
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t know,” said Quinn.
“Then I’m asking Vic.”
“It’s pretty simple,” said Vic. “At the last holy mission, we were able to show up in the middle of the night and quietly do our work. My brother didn’t have somebody sneaking in and chopping him up with an axe.”
“Not his literal brother,” Quinn clarified. “The other people in the cult.”
“He knew that,” said Vic.
I nodded. “Right. I did.”
“If we could’ve dragged you away in secret, that’s how we would have done it. But when you make a ruckus and cops show up, it turns into a slaughter.”
“Understood,” I said. “The ruckus was unintentional.”
For a moment I expected Vic to quote The Breakfast Club (“Could you describe the ruckus, sir?”), because in my normal life people would throw related movie quotes into conversations all the time. But Vic did not quote The Breakfast Club and I doubt he was even thinking it. He probably hadn’t even seen the movie.
“When are they coming in?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Vic. “Why don’t you ask them?”
“Call them off. We can work this out.”
“You’ve confused me with somebody who wants to work this out.”
“Seriously. Call them off.”
“I don’t think you’re getting it,” said Vic. “I don’t want a happy ending. I want this shitshow to keep getting shittier and shittier.”
“Fine,” I said. “Well, since they haven’t come inside yet, I guess we’ve got time for some torture.”
Vic gave me a bloody smile. “You get that you chopped off both of my arms and both my legs, right? What exactly do you think torturing me is going to do?”
“I don’t know. Pass the time?”
“You’re not torturing anybody,” said Tichy. Then he walked into the living room, apparently not having any real intention of stopping me from engaging in torture. His glazed-eyed zombie look was that of a guy whose entire perception of the world has changed, and not for the better.
I wasn’t sure how, exactly, I would torture Vic. “What do you think we should do?” I asked Quinn. “It’s not like we can pull out his fingernails or toenails.” I wasn’t legitimately trying to solicit her input; I just thought it would be intimidating for Vic if we discussed his fate out loud.
“We could jam knives into his stumps,” Quinn suggested, crouching down beside him. Then she groaned in pain, apparently discovering that crouching down with an arrow in your leg really, really hurt.
“Yep, yep, we sure could.”
“Empty all of the kitchen drawers.”
“What do you think about that, Vic?” I asked.
Vic gave us a fake yawn.
“I don’t think you’re taking this seriously,” I told him. “Quinn, jab your fingernail into his other eye.”
Quinn shoved her fingernail deep into his eye. I’d been bluffing, figuring that we’d bring up the eyeball puncturing idea a couple of times before we actually did it, but nope, blood and eyeball goo spilled down Vic’s cheek as he screamed.
“How does it feel to be blind, asshole?” Quinn asked.
Vic called her a bitch a few times.
Tichy didn’t even bother to come into the hallway to investigate.
“Do you get now that we’re not playing around?” I asked. “We can do way worse. Call off the holy mission.”
“Fuck you!”
“Call it off, Vic. Your eyes might heal if we leave them in there, but they won’t heal if we scoop them out of the sockets.”
“Fuck you!”
“We’ll do it. I’ll find a grapefruit spoon and scoop those eyeballs right out of your head.”
“We don’t have a grapefruit spoon.”
“Then I’ll carve a hole around them with a knife and scoop them out with a regular spoon,” I said. I wasn’t sure this torture idea was going to work. A newly blind man should not have the presence of mind to inform me that he didn’t own a grapefruit spoon.
“Fuck you,” said Vic, though it was less energetic than the previous two fuck-yous.
“You’re leaving us with no choice but to cut your head off,” I said. “You understand this, right? I know you’re a big tough guy, but do you really want to just be a severed head? Wouldn’t that be unimaginably awful? We could bury you alive, like I said before, but we could also just keep your head around. Do you want to be a helpless severed head on the nightstand while I fuck your wife?”
To be clear, even if Quinn and I embarked upon a sexual relationship, which was extremely unlikely at this point, I would not do her with her husband’s severed head resting on the nightstand. It simply would not happen. This was all talk.
“I might enjoy it,” said Vic. “See how much fun you have with that frigid bitch. Hope you don’t mind icicles on your dick.”
“I’ll go get the knife,” said Quinn, standing up.
“Wait.” I wasn’t ready to take things that far yet. If we sawed off his head, and he could no longer speak, that was pretty much the end of the negotiation phase. It didn’t sound like Vic was willing to call off the holy mission, regardless of what we did to his body, but decapitating him removed the option to make him see reason.
“What?” asked Quinn.
“The other demons. What exactly do they want?”
“To subject us to excruciating pain.”
“Do they only care about vengeance? Is it possible that their top priority might be to save Vic?”
