BLOGS

Die Demon Die!

By Ronald T. Jones

The Vrondak have no concept of revenge. Highly charged emotions fuel revenge and the Vrondak are not motivated by emotion. They do however understand reaction. If someone Fs with you, you F with them back meaner and harder, so hard it deters. And if your opponent is not deterred, he’s at least crippled or dead.

            Contact told me how an occupied world under Vrondak rule launched a rebellion that resulted in little more than a thousand Vrondak casualties. Less than a third fatal. Well, the Vrondak reacted. They deployed their capitol ships above a randomly chosen continent and opened fire. When their bombardment ceased, the continent had been irradiated, and a half billion inhabitants (60 percent of the planet’s population) no longer existed. Message sent. Message received. That planet remains a passive, compliant member of the Vrondak’s star spanning domain to this day.

            A cold reaction can be as effective as hot vengeance. The only difference is, a cold reaction is stale, but vengeance is sweet. I happen to have a sweet tooth.

            The abandoned warehouse was nestled on the outskirts of Midtown’s industrial district. No street lights shone, but the presence of a full moon compensated, bathing the structure’s dilapidation in a powdery glow. I drove up to the warehouse, my headlights off, parked and waited. A minute later, another car pulled up stealthily beside mine. I got out of my car and grabbed a black suitcase from the trunk. Two women emerged from the other car. Each retrieved a similar suitcase from their vehicle.

            “Good to see you, Adeline, Felecia,” I greeted the women. “Thanks for coming.”

            Adeline Stevens, a stout ex-marine with a strong jaw regarded me with obvious sympathy. “No need to thank us, Darren. We’d be here whether you invited us or not.”

            Felecia Conway nodded in vigorous agreement. A SWAT officer and helicopter pilot, Felecia possessed a razor sharp mind wedded to a sharper wit…qualities that attracted me to her. We used to date, but that’s a tale for another day.

Smack! Jeff Brenner succumbed to my stinging slap like a collapsing house of cards. He toppled off the folding chair in spite of the fact that I didn’t really hit him that hard, and crumbled to the floor, whimpering like a wounded dog.

            I thought about propping him back on the chair, but quailed at the idea of touching him. Hell, I didn’t want to be in the same room with this derelict. He stank of alcohol, marijuana, crack and a sordid medley of mind-altering garbage.

            He lived in a studio apartment overrun with dirt and clutter. I didn’t know how he managed on his own given his ravenous zest for self medication.

            I gave him a solid kick to the gut.

            Jeff yelped in pain and curled into a twitching ball.

            “I’m just getting warmed up,” I reminded him coldly.

            “Please…I didn’t betray anyone!”

            Now that really set me off. Contact had identified Jeff Brenner as the person who informed the demons about a demon slayer meeting. Time, location, all the relevant details the demons needed to launch an assault that killed thirty of my comrades. Aiding an enemy of humanity was bad enough. Lying about it just added insult to injury as far as I was concerned.

            I took out my Shiva blade and placed its razor edge against his throat.

            Jeff’s eyes bulged with terror, his breathing coming out in rapid spurts.

            “I’m not in the mood for lies. I have it on good authority that you tipped a demon off. Who did you inform and where can I find him?”

            There comes that critical moment in one’s life when everything hinges on a single choice. I could almost see those rusted gears working in Jeff’s head as he calculated the costs and benefits of the choices before him.

            I let my Shiva bite just enough into his flesh to encourage him in the right direction.

            He flinched. “All right…I…I’ll talk…”

            I drew the knife away and stepped back.

            Jeff rose to a sitting position. With a delicate finger, he dabbed at the minor scrape my blade left on his neck. “Baal.”

            I leaned forward, squinting. “What?”

            “Baal…that’s the demon I spoke to. I told him what I knew.”

            My gaze narrowed in contempt at this pathetic excuse for a human being. Jeff could shoot off at the mouth because his cousin, Ray, was a demon slayer. Unfortunately, Ray made the mistake of telling Jeff what he did on the side. As slayers, we’re not supposed to divulge our activities to anyone, not even close relatives. Now, as a result of Ray’s flawed decision, he and well over two dozen slayers were dead. The tragedy of it made my head swim.

            “Baal,” I mouthed skeptically. “The Baal?”

            Jeff nodded. “That’s him.”

            “The Babylonian deity? The one children were sacrificed to?”

            “The one and only.”

            Wow. He was real. I shook off my fascination and focused on the interrogation. “How long were you feeding information to…Baal?”

            Jeff shrugged. “Three weeks…a month maybe. Whatever Ray told me about missions, other slayers…stuff like that…I passed on to Baal.”

            “Let me guess,” I said, a fresh wave of anger building up inside me. “Baal didn’t act on anything you fed him until you told him about the meeting, right? That’s where he seized on an opportunity to eliminate a gathering of slayers.”

            At that point, Jeff dropped his eyes. The magnitude of what he’d done clearly, heavily dawned on him. The massive guilt I suspected he felt manifested itself in a cascade of tears.

            I watched his convulsions unmoved. “How did you get in contact with Baal?”

            “Through…his agent on Earth…” Jeff managed between sobs. “A guy named Ricker…he’s one of those devil worshipers…he works at a bar on Lake Street called the Rose Petal.”

            I committed this Ricker’s name and location to memory. “In exchange for your betrayal what did Baal offer you?”

            Jeff quieted down. He looked up at me through a tear stained gaze. “I didn’t want to do this…I mean Ray was trying to help me…he was trying to get me off this…stuff, recruit me…he wanted me to be a slayer…he figured it would end my addiction.”

            “What did Baal offer you?” I repeated. I wasn’t interested in hearing this man’s contrite rambling.

            Fresh tears ran down his face. “Any drug of choice.”

            I tightened my grip on my Shiva. It was a reflex motion. Slitting this snake’s throat would have been a nice follow-up on that reflex. “So that’s how much the lives of good men and women are worth to you, a fix.”

            Jeff looked away. “Ricker has one of those Hell portal things. I saw him use it once to bring Baal over to this side.”

            My eyes narrowed at that extra tidbit of information. It was potentially useful.

            “Are you going to kill me?” The addict asked in a low, pleading voice.

            I glared at him. “I don’t know.”

            I left Jeff’s apartment building ten minutes later, pausing to call an ambulance. The poor fellow was overdosing. He might have lived. He might have died. Part of me hoped he pulled through so he could be tortured by guilt.

            Later that evening I took a trip to the Rose Petal bar…

******

            The ladies and I ducked inside the warehouse. We opened our suitcases and removed our combat gear. Flexible, temperature-controlled armor, thinner than silk, harder than carbon.  Multi-spectrum optical masks, and diverse-terrain traction shoes. All rounded off by feather light flak vests made of a durable reactive material to supplement the armor.

            My scanner doubled as a beacon. I adjusted it accordingly and placed it on the floor. We were about to go to Hell. The beacon’s signal was our tether to home. Without it…well the idea of being stranded in Hell almost gave me pause.

            Contact opposed this mission. Despite being a renegade among his people, he still thought like them. He considered any operation conducted out of vengeance to be a wasteful exercise. I didn’t play down the vengeance part, but I convinced him that taking out a top demon was an opportunity that we simply could not pass up. It would deny the enemy leadership and foment disarray in his ranks. Any damage to a demon fell within mission parameters. Contact relented. After all, he couldn’t deny the logic.

            I took a red, crystalline device out of the suitcase and hooked it to my ordnance belt. It was a Hell portal activator. Its previous owner had disappeared. I estimate it’ll be a few years before his body is discovered. I’m thorough like that.

            Felecia stared at the activator. “You sure you know how to use that thing?”

            I hefted my combat assault blaster, peering through its sight to test the targeter. “I’ve had experience.”

            “But have you used one?” Felicia always did know when I was being evasive.

            “I studied a demonstration model,” I admitted somewhat meekly.

            Adeline cut an amused eye my way as she attached a blaster pistol to her hip harness.

            “Your faith in me is endearing,” I scoffed. “Stand back.” I tapped a sequence on the activator. Seconds later a beautiful blue glow pushed back the surrounding darkness like the parting of a curtain.

            The three of us stood before that glow until Adeline nudged me with her elbow and extended a hand toward the portal. “Gentlemen first.”

            I nodded, swallowed my trepidation and stepped forward.

******

            I didn’t know what to expect when we stepped through the portal. The popular view of Hell is a sweltering vista roiling with lakes of fire and brimstone, punctuated by the screams of ill fortuned souls destined to burn for all eternity.

            We actually found ourselves in what looked like the interior of a castle. It was a vast space with a polished marble floor and spiral etched columns supporting a high ceiling. Images covered the walls of this strange room. Ghoulish, frightening images straight out of human nightmares but undoubtedly suited to demon tastes. We walked past column after column until we entered another room, this one smaller, its walls covered with less terrifying motifs, mostly geometric shapes. I saw a few pentagrams embedded in the patterns.

            Yeah, I probably didn’t expect the fire and the suffering, but I definitely had not anticipated a place so antiseptic, so prosaic.

We strolled cautiously through the room, entering another room of approximately the same size with similar wall art. Except this room had a window with a view overlooking an immaculate garden. Trees and bushes lined pebbled walkways. Flowers of more varieties and colors than could be found on Earth highlighted sections of the garden.

            “Flowers in Hell?” Felecia muttered incredulously.

            “Must have bad been flowers,” I joked.

            No one laughed.

            The spirals of a distant city stretched across an orange-red horizon. A demon city. That was as much of an eye opener as being inside a demon castle.

            “Where do we even begin to look for Baal in this place?” Adeline wondered.

            As if in answer to her question, a procession of forty demons dressed in long white robes filed down one of the wider paths leading to an entrance into the castle. By my estimate, we were four floors up. We needed to get to the first level.

            I waved us toward the room’s exit. “Come on.”

            I was certain beyond a doubt that Baal was nearby. The portal wouldn’t have brought us to a place where he was out of reach.

            From the looks of that procession, the discipline of its formation, the in sync rhythm of its march, I had a feeling…

            We double-timed it through room after room until we came across a spiral staircase with gold colored steps. We dashed down the stairs, reaching a first floor that was considerably less cavernous than the upper levels. Shorter wider columns filled the first level. An arch-like opening fifty feet from our position led to the outside.

            The demon procession marched through that arch. I hid behind a column. Adeline and Felecia hid behind one across from me and we waited until the procession passed by us. We followed the demons, keeping out of sight, until they stopped before a pair of massive metal doors covered with pentagram engravings.

            Adeline detached a star shaped frag detonator from her belt. I knew what she had in mind.

            The doors opened up slowly with a low rumble that echoed through the room like a beastly growl.

            When the procession entered the room, the doors closed.

            “Your call,” Felecia said, pinning me with a steady gaze. “Do you think Baal is in there?”

            “What do you think?” I queried back.

            Felecia shook her head. “I have no friggin’ clue!”

            I shrugged. “Same here. Either way, we’ll be killing those creatures on their own turf.”

            Adeline held up her frag detonator. “Guess that’s my que.” The ex-Marine dashed from her cover. She slapped the detonator on the left door and scrambled for the nearest column.

            Within five seconds a bubble of flame, smoke and debris filled the entrance, leaving a gaping hole that the three of us rapidly exploited.

            High-pitched demon howls of pain and rage issued forth in the explosion’s wake.

            From her proximity, Adeline was first through the breached entrance. I followed close on her heels, leaping into a smoke filled chamber nearly the size of a basketball court.

            Demon bodies littered the floor and for a second, I thought the blast alone had debilitated everyone present. But just as many demons were either on their feet or rising. There must have been a good five hundred or more in the room.

            I flicked my assault blaster to auto, and sprayed neutron bursts wherever I saw a demon standing.

            Felecia and Adeline’s weapons spat death and the three of us inundated the chamber in a directed energy storm, riddling demons to shreds. I lowered my blaster and began targeting the wounded, pumping energy bolts into the dead and the living.

            An object zipped past my head, hit the wall and exploded. I ducked and spotted three more objects, long and arrow like sailing through the aperture from outside. Two of the arrows exploded against the wall like the first one. The third arrow hit Adeline in her gun arm. The subsequent blast sent her reeling head over foot a good twenty yards, where she crashed on her back.

            “We’ve got a response!” Felecia announced with admirable calm.

            A growing number of demons, some armed with bows, ran toward the room. The archers released combustible Hell arrows…the same arrows used in the attack on my fellow slayers. A biting sulfurous odor from arrow explosions filled the room. My mask’s filtration worked in overdrive to filter out most but not the entire stench.

            I ran to Adeline’s aid while Felecia fired on the demon archers. The ex-Marine barely stirred, testifying to the power of the Hell arrow that hit her.

            Something gripped my ankle, tripping me up. I torpedoed to the ground, but twisted about in time to see a huge demon looming over me. The thing bore a visage more bull like than serpentine. It was massively muscled with mottled gray leathery skin. Three horns, black as obsidian protruded from the sides and front of its head like twelve-inch sabers. Its small deep-set eyes emitted a dull red glow. The creature’s wide mouth stretched open in a snarl, made all the more frightful by teeth that looked like a hedge of daggers.

            “Baal!” I uttered, recognizing the demon from the description Jeff gave me.

            The demon moved in an eyeblink, swatting away my blaster before I could level it on him.

            “In the flesh, human!”

            Baal stomped hard on my midsection. Even through flak vest and armor, I felt that blow.

            The demon unsheathed a double-pronged sword, each blade longer and wider than my arm.

            I jumped to my feet, but was unable to avoid the bite of Baal’s sword as it came blurring in a downward arch. My left chest burned where double hell-forged blades actually penetrated the armor, cutting the flesh beneath. The sword’s impact threw me back to the floor as if a wrecking ball had hit me.

            Baal came at me again, sword raised high.

            I rolled just as his sword struck the spot I just occupied.

            By this time, a horde of demon reinforcements poured into the room.

            Felecia was mowing them down, but she couldn’t kill them fast enough. They just kept coming, surging over the bodies of their fallen brethren with savage, undisciplined fury.

            Baal swung his sword and I reared back. A blade tip nicked an area just below my neck.

            I leapt forward, my Shiva in hand. I meant to deliver a backhand slash, opening the demon’s throat. But Baal proved too damned quick. He crouched and instead my blade sheared through his left horn.

            Enraged, Baal blasted out an ear splitting roar. “You will suffer, human filth!”

            Suddenly he doubled over as an energy beam speared him in the gut. I turned to see Adeline rising, her blaster aimed at the demon leader. She managed a second shot, striking Baal in the chest. The demon stumbled backwards, losing his balance and falling.

            A mob of demons unscathed by our entry blast swarmed Adeline. She was clearly in bad shape. No way was she going to fend off that many attackers in her condition.

            I scooped up my assault blaster and pumped a spread of bolts into Baal’s body. Afterward, I ran toward Adeline, firing into a mass of demons surrounding her. Dozens dropped.

            “Felecia!” I called out. “Let’s go! I’m opening a portal!”

            Felecia back peddled toward me while maintaining a steady rate of fire in front of her. Hell arrows exploded at her feet or whisked past her. A few she shot out of the air.

            Every demon she targeted fell with sizzling fist sized holes in their heads and bodies.

I tapped my Hell portal activator and a familiar blue glow materialized behind us.

 Felecia unclipped a grenade and hurled it at the rushing demon wave. I did the same. Almost instantly a pair of fiery blasts shook the room. Demon bodies and body parts arched outward from the blasts in grisly spouts.

I grabbed Adeline, hauled her to her feet and headed for the portal. Felecia covered our withdrawal with deadly accurate shooting.

            I glanced back, thought I saw a larger than average demon with two horns coming to his feet amid a heaving throng of his fellows. But that couldn’t have been possible. I was sure I killed him!

            Too late to remedy the situation. The three of us had already fled into the portal.

******

            Felecia, Adeline and I recuperated in my house the next day. Adeline had suffered from a broken arm, shattered ribs and a mild concussion. I had a ragged incision across my chest. I tended Adeline’s injuries with a Vrondak medical kit. She was fully healed within three hours. A nanite rich salve closed my cut. After a few minutes I’d forgotten I had the wound.

            One thing I couldn’t forget…didn’t want to forget was failure. Baal was still alive. Of that I was certain. I failed to finish him off.

            “We struck him in the middle of his lair,” Felecia said as we sat on lawn chairs in my small backyard, drinking smoothies.  “We killed a bunch of his lackeys, shot him multiple times and don’t forget, you cut off his horn. You may not have iced him but you humiliated him. That’s payback.”

            “Not payback enough.” I appreciated Felecia’s efforts to show me a glass half full. But Baal’s continued existence clung to the back of my mind like a leech. I couldn’t let it go.

            Felecia leaned over and kissed me softly on the lips. All thoughts of Baal vanished instantly, displaced by the sight of a very attractive face. Needless to say Felecia had my full attention. “You need to stop punishing yourself. We just went to Hell, did some major damage and came back in one piece. That was our boldest strike. Celebrate it.”

            “You’re right,” I conceded, taking her hand and caressing it. “I’m doing too much moping. We should indeed be celebrating this victory.” I looked into her eyes, silently advertising what I had in mind.

            Felecia smiled, gently disengaged and stood. “Not that kind of celebration.”

“Come on,” I begged “For old times sake.”

“My flight leaves in two hours.”

“So does that mean that if you didn’t have a flight we’d spend quality time together?”

Felecia gave me a warm look, which didn’t answer my question. “It’s been good seeing you, Darren. Feel free to call us again when you need backup.”

             I watched her go into the house and sighed.

            Another failure. How much more could a man take?  I grinned and sipped my smoothie.