It’s like being splashed in the face with cold water. An intrinsic fear, taking up your entire lens. There’s that moment where you know you’ll die, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you just…Look, you look at the danger that’s barreling towards you. In that moment, that’s exactly what I did.
There was hardly anything that I could do. That tendril of flesh had wrapped itself around my ankle, and now I was catapulting forwards with no control. No control. It seemed eerily familiar to that moment, the one where my mom had nearly died, the one where I’d taken control. Only, this thing wasn’t human, and this thing had killed an entire diner’s worth of people.
In a moment of almost complete detachment, I started to wonder what it was doing with their organs. All of them were still pulsing, still…Functioning, and some of the tendrils almost seemed to be interweaving through them. Was it using them to bolster itself? As I looked at it, I noticed that half of its body was decayed, burnt, and the smell of rotting flesh seemed rather obvious when you looked at that.
When you’re in imminent danger, you forget that you’re not alone. All I knew was that I was going to die, and I needed to do something about it, anything. So, as it started to lift me, and its fleshy orifice started to part, revealing an impossible amount of sharp, fang-like teeth, I lifted my hand, the very same one I’d been summoning the tentacle through.
I held it back for as long as I could, and prayed to all of hell that it would work. With hardly even a whisper, I let the inky veins travel forwards, slamming towards the demon. The tentacle amassed itself, slamming outwards from my palm, and straight into the mouth of the monster.
The tentacle holding my ankle lashed to the side, and the grip of the monster loosened. I went flying towards the glass of the restaurant, and tried to brace myself. Nothing quite prepares you for slamming through glass.
In the movies, it’s seen as painless, an endeavor that the heroes go through quite jovially. In life, it feels like slamming into a brick wall, only to have the brick wall shatter into millions of cutting pieces, all of which embed themselves forcefully into your arms. In the moment, as I flew through the glass, it felt as if I had broken my back, and when I landed, the air in my lungs collapsed, escaping in a large rush.
For what felt like a second, I blacked out. When my vision restored itself, Vincent had somehow scuttled along the side of the monster, and Alyssa was throwing kitchen knives through the air. It wasn’t dead. I watched in contained horror and fascination, as the thing writhed upon the ground, body forcibly squelching its way along the floor, leaving gigantic puddles of blood in its wake.
Vince finally managed to jump the window, and ended up at my side, “It’s okay, you’re going to be alright. I’m going to administer a light illusion, it’ll take the pain away, but don’t try to straighten your back,”
I nodded; eyes still transfixed upon the monstrosity in the diner. Some of the tentacles were detaching themselves from the strewn organs, and carefully taping upon the ground.
“Oh god,” I whispered, knowing exactly what would happen next.
The tentacles bolted themselves into the floor, and the demon lifted itself upwards. Towering eyes stared down from every direction, and the skin of the monster physically sagged, with blood dripping in violent rivulets along its side. A jaw opened from some unknown pile of burnt skin, and teeth like razors stared down towards the two of us.
“Vince, get the kid the hell out of here!” I could hear Carter yell, as he lifted part of the diner with his mind, vaulting it towards the demon.
Chunks of wall started to collapse as Carter desperately attempted to distract the thing. All I could notice were the eyes, small little things numbering in what appeared to be the thousands, dilated almost completely, staring directly at me. I felt certain that we’d die, but in an instant the pain disappeared.
Trying to follow Vincent’s orders, I kept my spine at a curve as I pulled myself up. A minor pop could be heard along my back, but I carefully backed away from the demon. Those eyes swiveled as it kept us within its line of sight. All my mind could dare to wonder about was why it was obsessed with me. It didn’t make any sense for a demon to be selective. Unless it somehow knew that I was new.
Slowly, I backed away. It started moving forwards, fleshy strands slamming into the ground, lifting itself over the broken window. Shards of glass got stuck upon the body, and blood began to pour from its sides. I couldn’t help but notice that, the fact that it didn’t even seem effected by the jagged cuts running alongside it. The thing should be dead, for all intents and purposes. Something like that, bleeding as much as it had, should not be alive.
Then I glanced towards its skin, and something clicked. The only visible injury it had had when we walked in on it, was the burn along half of its body, the charred and almost sticky-looking flesh. Now, almost all of that was gone, merely a quarter of its features burned, with oozing pus of what might’ve once been eyes.
“Fire!” I practically shouted, “You need to use fire!”
Within an instant of my shout, Carter threw a ball of flame through the window. The thing screamed. An unholy screech that sounded like five voices at once, and caused Vincent to physically collapse beside me. I felt my vision wavering as the last of those horrifying vocals cut off, but the thing had finally looked away from me, and back into the restaurant.
Breathing an almost physically sigh of relief, I keeled over onto the ground, and desperately leaned against the wall. I was safe, I wasn’t going to die by some horror that should not exist. Taking another deep breath in, my hands fell onto the concrete, and I pulled myself up. I wouldn’t allow myself to just lay down when there were only two of them. I could…I could command eldritch energies, whatever that meant, and even if I wasn’t completely sure of the specifics, I would at least try to make something that used fire.
Desperately, I tried extending the tentacle, but wrapped in unholy ghost-like flames. When that didn’t work, I tried imagining it with runic scribbles, nonsense, that might put flames on it. Nothing. Finally, I’d walked back up to the window, and saw the two still desperately fighting against the monster, only reasserting half of the decay, and the thing wrapping itself back up in the organs.
Fire burns, quenching life as it grows upon the dead. So, it had to be something that grew within flames, that practically fed off of them. Which meant it would die in water. All I needed to do was summon something that could consume the thing, and then we could kill it with water.
In hope, I did the first thing I could think of. I clenched my hands together, and ripped them apart. Nothing happened. In the next moment, I attempted to raise my hand, as I had earlier; still nothing. Finally, as I saw one of the tentacles whiplashing across the air towards myself, I practically pushed with my skull.
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An amazing, blinding pain, greater than anything I’d ever felt, wrought itself throughout my entire head. It felt as if my eyes were exploding, and the universe around me was going out in stars. But something, a small meatball like mass, appeared right before my eyes. Somehow, the hook of meat, bone, and skin-tissue missed. Holding onto my prayers, I threw the weird meatball, melting with some strange sort of grease, and threw it at the monster.
“Light it!” I shouted, as the strange thing opened up…An orifice, of sorts.
Carter threw a flame at it, and slammed it dead-on. In an instant, the thing grew five inches longer, encompassing a small patch on the demon’s body.
“Keep throwing flames on it until it encompasses that fucking thing,” I shouted, stepping away from the window, “When that’s done, throw water at…Whatever that is,” I finished lamely.
Carter did as I had ordered, luckily, and when the thing was consumed by the stench of rotting meat, and opened mouths that burped blue flames, he reached into the restaurant around them, and slammed the thing with water. It curdled and screeched, like water boiling on a kettle. When it disappeared, so too had the demon. All that was left were those small tendrils of flesh, and the bodies they were intertwined within.
I was breathing heavily, only now realizing just how much energy that had taken. The adrenaline started to cool from my system, and I started shaking. That was…That was a demon. Any notions I’d had a night before, or a week before, were vanished. This wasn’t, it wasn’t heroic work, it was desperate, and bloody, and you didn’t even save anybody. All you did was clean up the mess, the horrifying, awful mess.
That was what we did right after, in-fact. When Vincent woke up, we got to cleaning up the blood on the floor. We didn’t clean up all of it, as Vince explained we still had to switch everything around, move the bodies enough so that the police could make-up a likely story. When all of that was done, we grabbed the tentacles and hauled them outback, dumping them in a pile.
“Fuck that thing,” Alyssa said after a moment of silence.
As smoke rose up from the tendrils, I couldn’t agree more. If the other demons were like this, I wouldn’t…I would force myself to handle it.
-7
The sun rose steadily, I hadn’t slept at all last night. Every time I closed my eyes, all I could see were those eyes, and the tendrils slamming into my body. So I laid there, and stared up towards the ceiling. The fan moved as a constant, keeping cold air above me.
Last night, I’d come home somewhere near the evening. Vincent had said that he liked to get coffee and pizza for everyone after a stressful hunt like that. It had been…Nice. Mom had tried to talk when we got home, but I just hadn’t been able to. As soon as I’d walked through the door, the thing that I’d helped kill, and the horrifying monster born from my own hands, it had finally, truly, struck.
After my alarm went off, I steadily pulled myself out of bed. Somehow, the world kept spinning. Twelfth grade was nearing an end, but I still had to be there. My limbs felt mechanical, as I went about my morning chores. When I finally made it outside, with the back against my back, all I could do was stare towards the other students.
None of them knew. Hell, they’d probably never know. All of their lives would be spent within some blissful comfort, this ideal that the most dangerous thing was a man with a gun. I walked towards them, and tried to keep myself amongst them. Eventually, I got inserted into a conversation over something stupid, and started talking. I still felt like I was a mile away, struck in some other universe, with everything just happening, automatically, without my input.
The bus came, voices tapered off. One of the men in the diner, his eyes had been blue. One of them had been popped by a tentacle slamming through his stomach, probably splitting off like a vein throughout his body, and then moving straight through his eye. Another had been wearing a cheerleader’s outfit, probably preparing for some game later in the day, and her skirt had been covered in blood and vomit. An old man had been sitting off to the left, body held upright by force, his glasses knocked askew; his body was the meeting point for two of the tentacles, ramming into each side of his chest.
Each of them, all of them, just ordinary people, and they died because nobody could get to them on time. Nobody had saved them, because the only people that could got there too late. It’s not like we got a pinged message whenever a demon arrives. There’s hardly any way to predict a demon’s arrival, from what I understand. And this is happening all over the planet, and nobody knows. I was told that it doesn’t happen that often, but…It’s still happening.
The bus arrived at the school, and I walked off with all the rest. Chatter echoed around me, friends talking with one another, large smiles on their faces; some looking at phones, and others going to places unknown. I couldn’t think, couldn’t see all of this and think clearly. All of these people, and one run-in with the wrong old brick could lead to the end of their lives.
I mean, how is someone supposed to focus when they know something like that? It practically takes over your life, consumes you whole. For that moment, it did. I couldn’t see anything else, just that endless state of decay, death consuming and blooming over the stretched out and mangled bodies of those people in the diner.
I got lucky. My feet were leading me to the bathroom, and I probably would’ve locked myself in there for the rest of the day, but Alyssa found me. I don’t know how, I’d never seen her around the school. But one moment I was walking towards the bathroom, and in the next I was being shoved into an empty classroom.
“Snap the fuck out of it,” Her voice rang in my ears.
“W-what?” I could see her, but confusion and horrifying realizations clouded everything.
“Snap. The Fuck. Out Of It,” It was a growl, barely human, but it got my attention.
“I…”
“One of the main causes of Anti death is demons. The second? Nihilism. What happened yesterday could’ve been a lot worst, do you understand? We’re lucky that only a diner of people ended up dead; this entire city, or at least half of it, could’ve ended up being killed,”
“I don’t see how this could help,” I said with a nervous chuckle.
“You need perspective,” She replied harshly, but not unkindly, “What would you have done if you went where you were planning on going?”
I thought about for a second, realizing where my thoughts had been leading. This is hopeless, no matter what we do, we won’t save anybody. The natural conclusion to that was to stop trying, in some form or fashion.
I nodded slowly, admitting it to myself almost hurt, to realize how close I might’ve come to just…Killing myself in a bathroom stall.
“Okay,” I replied eventually, “I…Um, yeah,”
“Good,” She replied with a nod, “Now, if you every try to kill yourself, me, Vince, and Carter are going to drag you from hell, and kill you ourselves, do you understand?”
“I understand,” I replied in a half whisper.
I was about to say something else, but she walked from the room far faster than I could anticipate. I looked around the room for a moment before leaving myself.
-
That day passed quietly. After realizing that I’d been so close to killing myself, I did my best to keep my thoughts off of what had transpired that day. It wasn’t difficult, but I managed as well anyone could.
When that night came, though, I still couldn’t sleep. The ceiling stared back at me with intensity, and my mind kept circling back to that demon. In one moment, the eye almost looked like it had eyes, small little pinpricks staring towards me, and in another I could practically imagine the small little dots as stretching lines of flesh.
Taking a deep breath, I picked myself up, and walked out into the living room. As I walked in, I found a familiar man in a black suit sitting there. He looked up at me and smiled, and motioned for me to sit next to him. There was a slight moment of silence that followed, as he stared towards the coffee table, and seemed to be preparing to say something.
“The…Minimum has been breached,” His voice was quiet, words hardly above a whisper, but he sat deathly still, “I have been warning all of my children, that the apocalypse is dangerously close. If more demons aren’t killed, the apocalypse…It could happen at any moment. I need you to be prepared,”
It was as if he’d cut off my thoughts with those words. Silently, I nodded, capable of comprehending what he’d said yet stricken by his words regardless. As it would seem, we were close to an end, an end I didn’t want to think about. But it confirmed something to me. We, as Anti’s, weren’t doing enough. None of us had any warning about the breaching of demons. It almost seemed as if we were doomed to fail, maybe even destined to.
His breath was shaking, perhaps the only time I’d see the very devil himself in a moment of weakness. With what were most certainly measured steps, he picked himself up from the couch, and dusted off his suit. For a moment, he gave me a light smile.
“I saw what you did there, by the way. Creating a mutant monster that feeds off of fire, yet is weakened by rain? It was really clever. I wanted you to know that…As your father, I was quite proud,” He didn’t give me a moment to respond, body dissipating in a shroud of heat.