Demonic, page 12
“Nope,” said Vic. “All they care about is vengeance.”
“Shut up. I wasn’t asking you.” I looked at Quinn. “Let’s say we held a hacksaw to his throat. Would the threat of cutting off his head be enough to hold them back?”
“I have no idea.”
“That’s not the same as saying no. They call each other brothers and sisters. There’s a bond. They don’t want to see him suffer a fate worse than death. Maybe—and I may be totally wrong about this—they’ll stay away long enough for us to get to the car.”
“I doubt it.”
“Again, ‘I doubt it’ doesn’t mean you know for sure. Do they even know what happened in here? Maybe those demons all think Vic is in one piece. That could also work to our advantage. We get a few seconds of them being shocked at seeing Vic as just a torso. This could work.”
“So you’re saying that we should bring him with us?” Quinn asked.
“Right.”
“You want us to carry Vic’s limbless body out to the car?”
“Exactly. It shouldn’t be that heavy. I mean, I guess it’ll be heavy even without his arms and legs, but the cop will help us carry him. We can do this.”
I waited for Quinn to tell me I was an idiot. Instead, she sighed. “You know what? It’s the best idea we’ve got. But we have to get a head start. No pun intended.”
“I don’t get the pun.”
“It’s not important. You stabbed him in the throat a bunch of times, and he’s fine. So we can’t go outside and start trying to cut off his head. Otherwise we’ll just be standing there, sawing away and hoping that they wait politely for us to finish. We have to get most of the way through first.”
“Oh,” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense.”
“I’ll get a hacksaw from the garage.”
“Okay. Be quick. I mean, as quick as you can be with an arrow in your leg.”
Quinn limped down the hallway and into the kitchen.
“It’s not too late,” I told Vic.
“It was too late as soon as you shoved that knife into my throat,” he said. “That was your point of no return. Not now.”
“We’re talking about your point of no return. Call it off. Send them away.”
“You talk a lot.”
“I don’t think I talk more than any normal person,” I said. “Right now I’m trying to solve this problem through words instead of violence. As the recipient of the violence, I’d think you’d want to work with me.”
“Nah.”
“Fine. Hopefully your brothers and sisters will be more reasonable.”
Officer Tichy stepped out of the living room. “Did you poke out his other eye?”
“You didn’t hear him screaming?”
“I guess I did.”
“I’m going to need you to help me carry him. I’ll take the top, you take the bottom, and Quinn will hold the saw that we’re going to put in his neck. If we’re lucky, the demons won’t come too close as we get in your car.”
“They’re already close. They’re on the front porch. I think they’re planning to break in any minute now.”
“Then we need to move fast. Are you on board with the plan?”
“Yeah, all right,” said Tichy, as if I’d asked him if he wanted fries with his burger. This guy’s therapy bill was going to be immense, unless the psychological evaluators just went straight for a padded cell.
Quinn returned with a hacksaw.
“He says they’re on the front porch,” I told her.
Quinn nodded. “Then let’s get started.”
She crouched down and held the blade of the saw against Vic’s neck. He flinched.
“Don’t cut through his vocal cords,” I said. “We want him to be able to talk.”
“Where are the vocal cords located?”
“Ummm…” I looked over at Tichy. “Do you know where vocal cords are?”
The traumatized police officer shook his head.
“I think they’re in the front. So start in the back.”
“Lean him forward.”
I leaned Vic forward. His torso was a lot heavier than I’d expected. I guess I’d assumed that his arms and legs were a larger percentage of his body weight.
“This is your last chance,” I told Vic. I’m not sure why I kept trying to converse with him, but it felt like a moral imperative that I offer him one last opportunity to not have his head cut off.
His response, predictably, was “Fuck you.” I thought he might have sounded a bit nervous when he said it, although that could also have been wishful thinking on my part.
Quinn placed the blade against the back of his neck and began to rapidly saw back and forth.
Vic winced. Gritted his teeth. And then cried out in pain.
I watched the saw blade dig into his neck. When it was in deep enough that the saw would remain embedded in his neck without Quinn holding it there, I said, “Stop. That’s good.”
“Are you sure? I think I should go in another half-inch.”
“We’ve wasted a lot of time already. We should get going.”
“All right. So how are we going to do this?”
I gestured to Tichy. “He and I will pick him up. You keep your hand on the saw and do a slice on my signal. Let me do the talking.”
Tichy, still looking like a zombie, helped me pick up Vic. Because his stumps had mostly scabbed over, we didn’t get as much blood on our clothes as I would’ve expected. But he was heavy as crap, and because we couldn’t hold him by the extremities, it was hard to get leverage. As we struggled to carry him toward the front door, I was starting to believe that we were going to lose our intimidation factor by accidentally dropping him.
The front window shattered.
Shit.
Vic was already slipping out of my hands. Quinn opened the door, and, yeah, the front porch was filled with people in devil masks. I suspected that things were about to get very interesting.
Chapter Fifteen
“Get the fuck out of the way!” I shouted, trying to sound angry instead of terrified. “Back the fuck up now!”
“I’ll cut his fucking head off!” said Quinn. She, like me, seemed to believe that the word “fuck” conveyed the proper sense of rage.
“Now! All of you! I won’t tell you again!” Technically, I would tell them again if necessary, but there was no reason to share that.
“I’ll cut his fucking head off!” Quinn repeated.
The demons on the porch just stood there. I couldn’t see their faces, so I couldn’t gauge their expressions. I liked to think that when the door opened, they hadn’t expected to see me and a cop carrying the dismembered torso of Vic while Quinn held a hacksaw that was deep in his neck. If we were lucky, their current state of mind was “What the hell am I looking at right now?” instead of “Devour them all!”
“Do it,” I told Quinn.
She pulled the saw toward her.
The three of us took a step forward. The demons didn’t move.
Quinn pushed the saw away from her, cutting even deeper into Vic’s neck.
“Listen to them!” Vic shouted. “Get out of the way!”
So he was scared of having his head cut off. Good.
The demons continued standing there.
Instead of the slow strokes, Quinn began to frantically saw at Vic’s neck.
“Get off the goddamn porch!” Vic screamed.
The demons began to carefully back away. Quinn stopped sawing as we moved forward. Vic’s body came very close to slipping away from me, but I kept my grip on it and hoped that nobody noticed.
“Completely off the porch!” I shouted. “This is your last warning!”
“Do it,” one of them said. His devil mask looked like it was made out of gold.
The demons stepped off the front porch. There were a lot of them. I didn’t have time to do a head count, but there were at least twenty-five of them in the front yard.
The three of us walked out the door. A couple of demons were standing by the broken living room window, probably disappointed that they didn’t get to drag any screaming victims through it.
“Keep backing up!” I shouted.
“Listen to him!” Vic shouted.
The demons backed up, but only a little. They clearly had no intention of giving us much personal space. We walked across the porch. There were only three steps, but maneuvering them while carrying Vic’s heavy-ass torso was going to be a challenge.
“I’m losing him,” said Tichy.
So was I. We should’ve been wearing gloves or something.
Also, Quinn had an arrow in her leg, and I worried what would happen if she let go of the saw so that she could go down the steps ahead of us, instead of beside us. Would the demons seize that opportunity to pounce?
I was pretty sure they would. So we were going to have to get his body down the steps with Quinn staying right next to us. This had the potential for some slapstick with deadly repercussions.
“Go fast,” I whispered. “Don’t even think—just go.”
I heard sirens in the distance. More prey for the demons.
I was in the lead and was going to have to go down the steps backwards. I stepped down, landed with solid footing, and realized to my relief that I’d successfully navigated the first step without catastrophe. Yay me.
The second step. No problem. Quinn was keeping pace. She hadn’t slipped, and her hand remained firmly on the handle of the saw.
The third step somehow managed to also go fine. This was going far better than I’d expected. All I had to do now was step down onto the cement driveway, and then I’d be on level ground again. Simple.
“Shit!” said Tichy.
Vic’s body popped out of his hands. The stumps of Vic’s legs struck the second step, landing hard, causing him to let out a scream of pain that he probably wished he hadn’t emitted in front of his fellow demons. I, in turn, lost my grip on him, so he pitched forward and bashed his face onto the stairs. The hacksaw Quinn was holding slipped out of his neck.
You may think I’m making this up as a dramatic beat, but it’s absolutely true: For three full seconds, everybody just stood there staring at what had happened.
Then Tichy and I dove back down and frantically tried to pick Vic up again. After what I’d estimate was another two seconds, I decided that we should get him off the stairs first. We dragged him down the remaining steps, leaving a thick red streak, and onto the driveway. When we rolled him over, he spat out several broken teeth and resumed screaming.
Quinn grabbed the saw and waved it at the demons. “Stay back!” she shouted, as if twenty-five demons would be scared of a hacksaw. I was too focused on trying to pick up Vic to see what they were doing. I assumed they were seconds away from dragging the three of us away to our doom.
Somehow, most likely the result of the adrenaline blasting through my veins, Tichy and I were able to pick Vic back up again. The police cars weren’t many steps away. I couldn’t remember which one Tichy had arrived in, but we wouldn’t have to hold off the demons much longer to reach it.
The cop flinched.
Blood sprayed.
The arrow did not go in one ear and out the other, though I believe that’s what the shooter was going for. It struck his head about an inch above his left ear and did not emerge from the other side.
Tichy let go of Vic’s body, which, again, landed leg-stumps first.
The cop stood there for a moment, looking vaguely confused by the arrow in his skull. He reached up and touched it like it was a mysterious object. Then he grabbed it and gave it a gentle tug. The arrow didn’t budge. Tichy fell to the ground, dead.
Quinn wasted no time. She got down beside her husband’s body and slammed the blade of the saw against his throat. “We’re back to this!” she shouted. “Don’t make me cut his head off!”
Honestly, Quinn would have to have incredible lumberjack skills in order to saw off his head before the demons pulled her away. If somebody shouted, “Kill them!” we’d be dead in seconds.
“Tell them to back off,” I told Vic.
Vic said something that I couldn’t understand. He turned his head and spat out a very large glob of congealed blood...or what I thought was congealed blood until I realized it was actually most of his tongue. Apparently he’d bitten it off when we dropped him.
“Louder,” I said.
Vic said something louder. He was completely incoherent.
“He’s telling you to back off!” I shouted.
Quinn began to saw Vic’s neck. I supposed it no longer mattered if she cut through his vocal cords.
Vic shrieked. Again, he seemed like the type of person who’d always want to be the toughest guy in the room, so letting loose with these kinds of shrieks meant that he was in serious distress.
“Enough!” shouted the demon in the golden mask.
“Tell them to stop moving first!” said Quinn, shouting to be heard over Vic.
“Nobody is moving.”
“Tell them to back up!”
“Everybody take two steps back,” said the demon. I wondered if he’d been appointed to a position of authority, or if the others listened to him because he had the most expensive-looking mask. “Give them room to breathe.”
Surprisingly, the demons—at least those who were almost upon us—each took two steps back.
Vic’s shrieking turned into more of a wailing.
“The next batch of cops will be here soon,” said the demon in the golden mask. “What is your goal?”
“We want to get into that car,” I said, pointing to the closest police car. I hoped it was the one Tichy had come from.
“So you’re saying that you want us to let you go?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll let you leave,” he said. “We won’t let you go.”
I wasn’t completely sure I understood the difference, but it didn’t matter right now. Any discussion that didn’t involve “We’re going to rip your bodies apart the first chance we get” was a productive one, in my opinion. I didn’t ask for any further details, I just hurriedly patted Tichy’s pockets, trying to locate his keys. Found them on the second try.
Vic continued to wail.
“Oh, shut the fuck up,” the demon in the golden mask told him. “Quit being such a pussy.”
Vic was immediately silent, save for a soft weeping.
I rushed over to the police car, desperately hoping to avoid the awkwardness of the keys not fitting and explaining that I actually meant that we wanted to get into a different car. The key fit.
“Help me carry him,” said Quinn.
“No,” said the demon. “He stays with us.”
“He’s our leverage.”
“I don’t care. I just gave you permission to leave. This offer expires as soon as those police cars show up, and from the sounds of the sirens, you’d better run.”
I opened the driver’s side door and got the hell into the police car. Yes, we were losing our leverage, but I also didn’t much want to be driving around with a dismembered body.
Quinn hesitated.
I honked the horn. “Get in the car!” I called out to her, as I started the engine.
She left Vic behind and got in the car with me.
I thought they might just be messing with us, and that the twenty-five demons would swarm the vehicle as soon as we got in. But they let us close the doors, and as I backed out of the driveway, nobody stood in our way.
Four police cars pulled onto the street, two from each direction.
I rolled down the window. As I passed the first car, I shouted “Don’t fight them!”
What else could I do? Tichy said he’d sent video showing what these demons were like, so if the reinforcements put themselves in danger, there wasn’t much I could do to save their lives. Hopefully they’d all stay in their cars.
I drove away from the carnage and breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“What was that?” Quinn asked.
“What?”
“That sigh.”
“It was a sigh of relief.”
“You’re relieved?”
“At this particular moment, briefly, yes.”
Quinn shrugged. “I wish I lived in your brain. It must be a blissful place.”
“Don’t act like that,” I said. “We should be dead now. There’s nothing wrong with taking five seconds to enjoy the moment. I was going to breathe a sigh of relief and then go right back to being stressed out.”
“All right.”
“Where to now?”
“Stay in the area.”
I frowned. “Why would I do that?”
“Because we can’t drive around in a stolen police car. We need to get my other car back. It’s not traceable to me. It’s our only way to get out of town.”
“Can’t you get another car from the other place?”
“I am not prepared to do what it would take to get another car without any money. You’re welcome to give it a shot, but in the best-case scenario, all you’ll earn us is a small discount.”
“But the car is only two houses away from yours,” I said. “They’ll see us get in, and we’ll be just as screwed as we would be in a police car.”
“Right. That’s why we have to wait for the cops to be distracted or dead.”
“I don’t like that idea.”
“I don’t like it, either. I literally don’t like anything that’s happened today. There has not been a single moment of this day that hasn’t completely sucked shit. So if you have some master plan for how we can get into the car and save the lives of those police officers, I’m ready to listen.”
As I’ve already said, I did not have a plan to save the officers. My plan was to let them know that they were up against unkillable demons, but apparently that message hadn’t been properly conveyed. If we were lucky, one of the cops would shoot a demon in the head and recognize the supernatural horror that they were confronting, but that was pretty much out of my hands.
“What are you thinking?” I asked. “Park around the corner and watch for our opportunity?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t like this as much as speeding off to freedom, but she was absolutely right that we wouldn’t get very far in a stolen police car. I wanted to believe that getting arrested and taken into custody would save us from the demons. However, twenty-five of them had miraculously appeared outside of Quinn’s house, so, in theory, there was no reason they couldn’t miraculously appear inside of a prison cell. Also, I didn’t actually want to go to prison if I could help it, though I wasn’t sure how much of an option it was at this point. I’d worry about being punished for my crimes later.
