Chapter 26: With a Red Light of Triumph in His Eyes, Part 2

“What is this?” said Mark, numb, unable to move from the spot despite everything that was happening.

In the blink of an eye, the city had descended into the deepest of hells. Mark himself, like everything else, was stained by a red rain. No. It made no sense, and he didn’t want to admit it, but somehow it was raining blood, and it wouldn’t stop.

His sanity told him, no, screamed at him that this had to be a bad dream and he would wake up soon back in his bed because he had never left it in the first place, and then he could turn to look at his wife if he hadn’t overslept and she had already left to tell her the absolute absurd stupidity he had dreamt without reason.

His sanity screamed that because he had lost it when the sky turned black.

It was natural.

In this space, there was no room for human rationality. The sky was like the blackness between the stars, the heavens cried blood, and the earth opened to swallow people and anything in between.

It was a disaster on a biblical scale.

“And what have I done to deserve this?”

What had any of them done? Of course, he couldn’t know, though undoubtedly some of the people who had died before his eyes were bad. It was a matter of statistics. There were more sinners than saints, simple human nature, but it didn’t make sense for everyone to be dragged into this hell for the sins of a few.

It didn’t make sense, and it wasn’t fair.

Speaking of unfairness, Mark was frozen in place by fear. However, nothing had happened to him yet, as if the disaster were avoiding him. On the contrary, countless people who had desperately fought for their lives were in pieces or crushed here and there.

“I don’t want to die.” He began to tremble, crying, but even so, his body was completely paralyzed, unable to take a single step.

Though he didn’t show it, he wanted to survive with all his might. Life was a race to escape death. Every living being had the instinct to fight against the approaching death with teeth and claws, no matter how cowardly they were, yet for some reason, he remained like a statue. Under the blood rain, surrounded by catastrophes that didn’t reach him.

Something finally managed to break the paralysis, but it wasn’t a sudden surge of courage or a demonstration of willpower, extracting it from where he would have sworn there was nothing at all. No sir, it was none of that, nothing to be proud of.

It was the eyes.

He saw the eyes of a beast shining behind the flames of a wrecked car. Eyes as red as blood, and by the time he noticed the gleam of its fangs, it was already upon him.

The creature knocked him to the ground with the impact and ended up on top of him on all fours, its mouth wide open, blood pouring from it copiously. Mark was convinced it wasn’t the creature’s own blood. Beyond the obvious, he thought there was no way the blood of that thing could be as red as any human’s.

I don’t want to die, he thought.

A second before the creature bit his neck, Mark grabbed the ripped-off door of a car and struck the thing on the head with all his might, causing it to roll to the side.

It wasn’t that he had suddenly found the courage to do so. He’d like to say it was that, but no. The truth was that his body had reacted instinctively. Simply because he didn’t want to die, and even less so in such a violent way. Screaming like an animal himself, he lunged at the vampire or whatever the hell it was, oh Lord, with the ripped-off car door ahead.

And he froze again before he could deliver a second blow. Because he had time to notice what he had done. He had cracked that bastard’s skull open, the brains hanging like meat in a slaughterhouse, but the vampire, it had to be a vampire, was perfectly fine despite that. Without even making a sound, it pushed its brains back where they belonged, acting as if nothing had happened.

Mark swung the door again after that, but by then it was too late.

The door fell to the ground, the glass shattering and flying everywhere.

Just like his blood.

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Even if he had survived the encounter with that vampire, there were hundreds and hundreds of monsters marching through the city for the feast. But, of course, he couldn’t have known that.

He died without thinking and knowing anything on the cracked and dirty ground with his blood while the vampire drank and moaned in his ear long after he had left this world, the consumption giving it almost sexual pleasure.

The flames of hell were reaching higher and higher.

The dense black smoke was nothing compared to the blackness of the sky.

——

Dracula’s consciousness tentacles didn’t only extend through the castle.

He was also vaguely aware of what was happening outside, his monsters acting as his eyes and ears, having bent the knee, swearing to serve him. They didn’t provide a complete image, or images at all most of the time, that wasn’t how it worked, but it was still enough to get an idea.

In short, it was a feast.

A massacre with barely any resistance.

If there were any modern-day heroes waiting to stop him, they hadn’t arrived yet. Disappointing, as much as he had expected it.

Dracula sighed.

He had no choice but to accept it and manage to enjoy this...

Routine cleanup.

“I think I’m forgetting something.”

No one spoke, suggesting things he might have forgotten. Surely for fear of messing up.

Oh well, harsh discipline also had its drawbacks.

——

Daniela approached Alex, who was looking towards the nearest city.

Looking at the city itself was saying too much, her eyes were empty, like fogged glass. It wasn’t surprising. The end of times was approaching faster than their worst fears.

What they could see on the burning horizon was a demonstration of how all human beings would die if they failed.

It was a great responsibility, though they didn’t have much chance of success. The legends of ancient times spoke of heroes who rose to stop the Prince of Darkness, people larger than life. Those who could carry the weight of the world on their shoulders alone. Well, alone with a few friends.

“Hey.” Daniela placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing—“We have to get going, okay? The others have already left.”

She wasn’t sure they had what it took to stop the evil.

But if she had to die, at least she wanted to die trying.

She had toyed with the idea of running away with her tail between her legs, but she knew that wouldn’t accomplish anything. She had accepted it as quickly as she could. Things like pride and honor were useless, that wasn’t what worried her, just the desperate idea of living her last days merely prolonging the inevitable.

That wasn’t living.

So she would fight, and she would do it alongside her companion, as always.

Or so she hoped, because she couldn’t do it alone.

She could never have done it alone. If she hadn’t been paired with Alex so many years ago, her corpse would have been lying in some ditch, rotting under the sun long ago.

For a nauseatingly vivid moment, her mind’s eye drew an image of her corpse with empty sockets.

Except for the worms that had made them their nest.

“Alex, please...”

Her friend nodded slowly after a while.

——

“Oh, right.” Dracula snapped his fingers when he remembered, more for emphasis than anything else. Anyway, there was nothing else—“Bob, that’s what it was about.”

Now that he had returned to his throne, it was something he could easily fix. His army monsters were like his eyes and ears now, those hunting outside and those still in the castle, waiting for humans in their designated positions.

But it wasn’t just that.

Naturally, they were entirely under his power.

Dracula snapped his fingers again.

——

Miles and miles away, Bob, the slaughtering forest, began to writhe. He had been in the middle of devouring an entire building, of course, along with the people inside, though the branches had already taken care of transforming them into corpses. By then, there wasn’t even one left with the luck of having escaped, or the bad luck, depending on how you looked at it. All the corpses were ready for the feast moment, filled with branches inside, a perfect seedbed for worms and strange creatures that only existed in one forest in this world, feeding solely on human blood.

In any case, as if the building stuck halfway down its ‘throat’ had caused it terrible indigestion, Bob began to writhe. The sounds coming from the depths of the forest made it more than evident that the monster wasn’t simply furious. Those were its last cries, its agony.

Bob fell, and in its fall, it destroyed half a dozen more houses, crushing cars and roads and more than one unfortunate human still trying to escape, not to mention the animals.

This was just the last of twelve towns it had devoured without leaving a trace, all to feed a purposeless beast that lived to live.

An excess for which there were no words, a complete waste of human suffering and life.

A tragedy that was not only avoidable but meant nothing.

Nothing at all.

——

“That’ll teach you to fuck with me, Bob. Fuck you.”

——

The high-ranking officials of the Watchtower were quickly informed that one of the problems had disappeared, dying suddenly without any explanation.

It said a lot that a gigantic cannibal forest that had already devoured dozens of villages was the least of their problems, but they still celebrated.

Quietly and for a very short time.

They had a castle to storm and a lot to organize.

With a Red Light of Triumph in His Eyes, Part 2: END