Robert Richards
Chapter 1
The night is cool and calm, a light mist hangs low catching the bright glow of the sodium arc lamps spaced throughout the parking lot that surrounds the old red brick building housing the court house and sheriff’s department. The blacktop is a lifeless inky wasteland, the only cars sitting snug in the chain link fenced motor pool. A softly lyrical sound breaks the silence as the pretty young woman hums a light tune as she steps out of the tree line and starts across the asphalt.
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Inside the depths of the building in a large white tiled room sit two men. One looking comically small in his tan uniform sitting across from the huge man on the opposite side of the table. His fore arms, hands, and neck heavily scarred. The parts that aren’t scarred are mostly tattooed, his name is Jackson Biegarth. The voice that creaks out from behind the hair in his face resonates deeply in the small room.
“When someone asks you if you believe in the devil what or who do you picture first?” Jackson waits for a reply.
“Umm I guess I think big red guy with horns and hooves.” The officer says after a few awkwardly silent moments, causing the big prisoner to erupt into laughter in turn causing the cop to turn red with a mix of anger and embarrassment. “What is so damn funny?”
“What’s so funny? Well you are just so wrong, whatever or whoever you see when you think Satan is woefully inaccurate. Everyone seems to think the devil is a He. That is wrong too. The devil is a she. A blonde. A pretty little 5’5” blonde that couldn’t weigh more than 100 lbs named Lucy. don’t believe me? I can’t blame you I used to think red guy, horns and split hooves too. But when you live through the kind of shit I have, you get let in on the biggest little secret there ever was.”
The man closes his eyes for a moment and laughs to himself.
“Turns out she is the one who spread the fucking myths about being a huge, crimson winged goat monster with a pitch fork. Made it so much easier to get away with shit when she is literally the exact opposite of what you expect. She is kind of sweet sometimes too. If she likes you. She sure took a liking to me.”
The lights of the Morrigan County Sheriff’s Department interrogation room flicker casting strange shapes in the darker corners for a moment. Deputy Grange doesn’t seem to notice and lights a cigarette, offering one across the table, the prisoner takes one with shaking fingers and leans in to the offered match to light it. He wears one of the faded orange jumpsuits the jail issues and is shackled at the wrists, his restraints chained to the table. He has to scrunch down to pull the cigarette from his lips and exhale the acrid blue smoke from his cracked lips.
“You ever feel like there was someone or something pushing you Deputy? Manipulating you towards some inexorable end? Like there is always something guiding the events to make you make the decisions that will send you down their path, forcing you to run into them sooner or later?”
Deputy Grange shakes his head. “Nope can’t say I ever felt that way. I got what I wanted, wife I love, good kids, and I get to be a hero when the bad guy shows up.”
The shackled man laughs again this time at the Deputy. “I never said it was always the bad pushing you…”
“Fair enough, but I don’t mind God giving me a shove when I need it.” Grange smiles around a puff of smoke. “Now, why don’t you tell me why Deputy Corliss found you naked covered in blood in the middle of the town square park?”
“That’s one long story you are asking for… how long you got to listen?”
“All night friend, lay it on me.”
“Fair enough I don’t guess you guys are letting me go any time soon…”
Grange shrugs and motions for him to continue. Stubbing out his cigarette and nodding to the men who are undoubtedly behind the one way glass. The man in orange sighs and chuckles.
“I guess you could say I am a habitual fuck up. You can see from my rap sheet I have held some less than legal jobs over the years. I don’t want you to think it was my parents fault. They did everything they could to give me the best childhood that they could. Ok so the night of my 21st birthday was the first time I met… her…” as if punctuating his trailed off statement the building shakes ever so slightly and dust sifts down from the acoustic tile. The deputy looks up at the ceiling.
“Don’t worry this building is old…does that when the furnace kicks on.” He looks less than convinced but raises his eyebrows at Jackson as if to urge him to go on.
“I really don’t think that’s the furnace.” Jackson looks up at the ceiling and swallows hard. “Yeah she is really pissed. You think you could help a brother out and un-cuff me? You know so we can have at least a chance of getting out of here.”
The building trembles again then shakes so violently that both men are nearly thrown from their chairs. At the end of the tremor the distinct pop of small arms fire can be heard clearly on the floor above. Grange stands, crossing the room to the door as more dust and pieces fall from the ceiling panels, opening it and poking his head out before grabbing a uniformed officer as he passes and the door closes behind him leaving Jackson alone, chained to the table at ankles and wrists.
“Stupid bastard…” Jackson slumps in the seat as much as the shackles will let him, watching the door with an expectant apprehension. Waiting for the inevitable scream and splashing sound as the opaque glass of the door gets a splatter of what were seconds before that police officer’s insides. “Tried to warn you.”
The building shakes violently above him and there is more gunfire down the hall, followed by a muffled scream and what might have been a body hitting a wall really hard. At this point Jackson is pretty much resigned to the fact there will be no escape from what is coming.
Several minutes earlier…
The Blondes long easy strides bring her quickly to the double glass doors of the precinct house which begin to creak and strain; bowing inwards for a moment as immense pressure and heat act upon their structure before exploding inward with the force of a medium size bomb. The molten safety glass rains on the 4 police officers in the entryway. The fair haired woman jumps lightly over the metal frames of the doors and stops in the foyer facing 4 drawn service pistols.
“Get down on the ground! Now!” A 17 year veteran that she knows has three dirty kills and a $40 a day heroin habit yells hoarsely, one eye clouded red with blood pouring from the open wound in his forehead. “We will drop you lady!”
The woman just smiles and points her left forefinger at him like a child playing guns might, winks with a mocking grin, and begins to slowly move her extended arm in a sidelong arc. The veteran officer mirrors her against his will until he is aiming at one of his fellow cops, a rookie named Jensen. In a flurry of movement she points her finger gun side to side dropping her thumb like a hammer and each time she does the helpless man kills one of his 3 co-workers before she puts her sharp nail under her own chin and drops her thumb one last time and her puppet drops to the ground missing most of his bald head now. The blonde daintily steps over the corpses at her feet and around the front desk to step into the bull pen where 4 more men wait behind cover wearing riot gear and holding much bigger guns. They don’t warn her this time before opening fire, the bullets seem to melt several inches from her body, hitting her then sliding across her skin like water beads on a duck’s back. The bullets criss cross each other on their journey around her slim toned torso as she moans and writhes eyes closed as if the molten metal tendrils were a lovers touch. The molten bullets continue up and over her smallish breasts burning singed lines on her white shirt, slipping down her arms to collect like water droplets suspended in the air, swirling and growing hotter and hotter. Her eyes open but are not green any more, now they are like spheres of ruby, the molten copper drifts in a lazy swirl coalescing in front of her forming a jagged clump of what look to the policemen like razor blades. She leans forward gently kissing the still forming ball of semi molten blades, bright electricity arcs from her red lips to the metal ball speaking soft and fast she whispers to it and the clump begins to shift. The electricity spits reaching fingers out to dance across anything metal around as it moves; the thing uncurls into a vaguely animal shape she cradles it in her arms for a moment before raising her eyes to the men standing in awe before her. The razor creature slithers around her right shoulder and across her narrow back to the left. She raises her left arm pointing in the direction of the cops, speaking in the same foreign tongue she sic’s her monster on them. It leaps, seeming to stretch into a long strand of metal, spearing the first officer through the badge and then in the heart. Seeming to draw to it and absorb the loose metal along the way before growing and springing to the next victim eating all the metal on him, growing. It repeats its act until there is no more loose metal in the room and the beast is the size of a man now, solid but always shifting in shape, a vibrating shudder and crackling forks of lightening across it’s surface preceding the shifting of form.
It tears through the building from room to room on the first floor then the second, killing any humans it encounters and absorbing the loose metal hungrily throughout the building getting bigger with each piece. Hunting its prey with no mercy, reaching the hunted no matter where they hide, its near liquid, ever changing body letting the monster fit anywhere. Filling up their hiding places with its razor sharp electrical storm of a body, tearing everything apart in a mad search for the one its master wants.
Back when Jackson sits waiting for the inevitable bursting of the door off its hinges. Waiting to be dragged back to her place and punished for leaving without telling her where he was going or when he would be back. Relationships are the worst. Something hits the door hard enough to rattle it on its hinges. The impact is repeated and the door falls into the room with a cop but not the detective he had been talking to sprawled across it, unconscious or dead he couldn’t tell from his position. A split second later his attention is called to the doorway as the detective fires at something. From out of sight there is a small blast, then a much larger one and the cop ducks inside as what looks like a wave of screaming shrapnel and lightening fills the hallway buffeted by the explosion chasing it. The Detective stands shakily and begins reloading his gun while stumbling to the table Jackson is still cuffed to, seeming to lose focus for a moment as he wipes some blood from his right eye before producing the keys, tries to open the cuffs fails and just gives the key ring to the chained man.
“We gotta get out of here. Some… monster is out there killing all the other cops… I saw it before… Never mind, open those hand cuffs we gotta get the fuck out of this building. Pretty sure everything is on fire, I think a stray round hit the gas line in the wall down the hallway, the building is gonna come down on us.” He coughs on the growing smoke in the room.
Jackson doesn’t hesitate or ask questions. Instead he has himself free and helps the cop get steady on his feet. They run from the room, the detective directing the big man to the nearest exit through the choking smoke filling the basement level. Each room looks like a warzone, shrapnel and blood is everywhere. It seems to take unimaginably long for them to get to the stairs but finally they reach ground level, almost out. Jackson breaks into a full run pretty much carrying the policeman now as he makes for the white and yellow door with the red emergency exit sign above it, barely visible in the haze. He thinks he caught a glimpse of Her but puts it out of his mind. He is not going back with her. Not yet anyway. He has things to do, some things he needs to tell a couple people if he gets the chance. The door burst open as his shoulder digs into the hard flat surface and they are outside, in the clean cool air. The cop points to a car parked near them, an old blazer, Jackson loads him in the back seat so he can lay down before jumping in behind the wheel. He had never enjoyed driving but there was no other option. He starts it using a key from the ring he had held onto tightly in his hand as they fled the building and reverses all the way through the chainlink fence and across the grassy, gently sloped draw beyond. Only whipping around to put it in drive when they reach the road.
They are miles down the road when She figures out he isn’t at the police station any more. She finds her monstrous pet at the end of the hall where the explosion threw it; thousands of razor sharp blades buried deep in the wall from the force with which they were driven into the concrete. The metal shards twitch and vibrate straining to free themselves to reform, but it is too weak, barely a jumping spark is left of its once powerful electromagnetic force. She touches a piece gingerly and the spark goes out returning where it came from and the metal stops moving. An intense scowl distorts her face as she walks back to the interrogation room and catches her prey’s intoxicating scent and smiles. She steps daintily over the lacerated bodies of the officers as she winds her way through the halls and back out into the night following the smell of his sweat. Her grin widens as the building succumbs to its wounds and collapses in on itself behind her. Lifting her nose to catch the wind, she again catches traces of him and heads off laughing after her target.
Three hours later the Bronco slows back to below the speed limit as it hits the onramp for the interstate. The Detective stirs in the back seat then sits bolt upright in a panic at not knowing where he was immediately, then the pain from his multiple injuries catches up with his brain, body angry at the sudden pulling of sore muscles and torn skin. He looks at the man driving and for another split second panics before he remembers what happened to his friends and coworkers. The tears burn his left eye terribly and he reaches up to wipe them away but stops when his fingers find a ragged wound, swollen and blood crusted, instead of his eye. His stomach lurches and he knows he is going to throw up.
“Pull over Jackson… I am gonna puke man… pull off right here at the rest stop ahead of us…”
Jacksons slumps behind the wheel sighing and hits the turn signal exiting without saying a word. Parking in the back near a tall stand of eucalyptus trees and turns the engine off as the injured man nearly falls out of the door and throws up on the blacktop of the parking lot on his hands and knees.
“When you finish up losing your lunch, get back in the car and try to stay out of sight.” Jackson says over his shoulder as he searches the back of the vehicle coming up with a pair of overalls and a faded green t-shirt with what might have been an attractive woman on the front at one time but now it looked more like of a shapely pair of legs coming out of a fuzzy spot where the paint had flaked off that kind of looked like a green fart cloud in a cartoon. “I am going to grab some waters and paper towels so we can clean up. Some food and caffeine might be good if there is any in the vending machines here.”
Without waiting for confirmation or questions he turns and jogs across the abandoned lot and into the men’s side of the restrooms. While the Detective crawls into the passenger seat and promptly falls into a merciful half sleep. Inside the bathroom Jackson changes quickly and washes himself in the sink as much as possible, pisses for what seems like hours and washes up again. He is about to leave when he catches himself at the door and looks back at the clothes on the counter next to the sink, an idea forms and he grabs the smelly orange jump suit. A few minutes later he is back in the Bronco with the detective. He shakes the other man awake and hands him paper towels and 3 bottles of water to clean up with, then opens a bottle of cola and takes a long gulp before starting the car and heading back onto the interstate. They travel in silence, their pace just under the speed limit eating up the miles before stopping again, this time at a hotel. Jackson gets them a room and helps the detective inside, then locks the door behind him and heads into the smallish town they have found themselves in. The heat is oppressive and the air wet, even this late into the evening. For the first time Jackson has a moment to think as he looks for an open store to find a first aid kit and supplies. She won’t be that far behind. He realizes he has no idea what state he is even in. He thinks they crossed a border but he can’t be sure. He finds a 24 hour drug store and pulls into the back of the lot parking in the shadows. He locks the car and quickly crosses the lot with long strides, plucking a small hand basket on his way through the automatic door, the sudden drop in temperature nearly pulls the air from his lungs and makes him ultimately aware of how much he is sweating.
The store is all but deserted, an elderly couple grip the edges of their cart with white knuckled determination to beat time and get their frozen dinners before the reaper finds them. A young girl with too much cover up of the wrong skin tone, leaving a sharp line where it stops at her neck giving her a clown like quality, leans over a checkout counter talking to a zit faced boy a little older than her. Without wasting too much time finding the aisles he needs he picks out bandages and antibacterial creams. Low boring music plays over a hidden speaker system, Jackson doesn’t notice it until it stops. The sudden silence deafens him and his pulse quickens. Something bad is about to happen his brain screams at his body, move you fleshy pile of bones and goo! He drops the hand basket and makes for the cold cases in the back. Could Lucy have found him already?
Detective Grange stirs awake and eases to a sitting position looking around in the dark to see if Jackson was back yet but he sees and hears nothing. He finds the remote to the TV to turn it on so he can flip through all 10 channels that weren’t just static before he clicks it off again staggering across the room and dropping the controller on the vanity counter. He looks for a light switch but finds only the bathroom overhead light that stabs weakly at the darkness of the little kitchenette space and leaves the other half of the demi suite in almost total darkness with the blackout curtains drawn. He splashes water on his face and inspects his damaged eye, pulling open the nearly black tightly swollen lids wincing at the pain but continuing to open it hoping it would still function.
The television snaps on just as he exposes the spot his eye used to inhabit but has now been replaced by what looks like a piece of the monster that tore through the station. He lets the lids go and whips around to see the pretty blonde bitch who brought that beast around smiling icily from the flickering screen. He reaches for his gun and points it at her silvery image. She laughs at him and points her fingers back, mouthing a silent bang at him. She then glances at the door before the television flicks off, leaving him standing there weapon drawn alone. A long silence passes before a knock breaks the silence. Grange shifts his aim to the door and slowly crosses the room ignoring the pain in his legs and face. The knock sounds again more insistent now, the detective looks through the peephole with his good eye.
The portion of the parking lot that the fish eye lens lets him see is deserted. He is holding his breath he realizes and lets out a long sigh that is cut short as the door shakes with the impact of a mad pounding, Grange steps back his injured leg lets out under the sudden shift in weight bringing him to the ground where he stays, pistol trained at head height on the door. He keeps his breathing steady as he can, trying to concentrate through the lightning bolts of pain rocketing through his leg and back. The door continues to shake and rattle on its hinges for what feels like hours, just when it looks like it is about to explode into the room it stops. The room seems to come alive with electricity, lights and appliances sputter and come on as the room fills with light and suddenly Grange is not alone anymore.