After Adena’s grim pronouncement, no one had anything to say for a while, as they forced themselves to eat. It was Raquel who broke the uncomfortable silence. “Glad we’re getting out of here, at least. Now we can go kill some demons. Didn’t feel right being cooped up in here while they’re out there screwing everything up, anyway. Besides...now we can go look for Mom.”
“We’re not doing that,” Rodrigo said, irritated that Adena’s words seemed to have gone in one of his sister’s ears and out the other. He didn’t want his mother to be dead, though he wasn’t eager to be holed up in a confined space with her, either. If Miriam was still alive and cared about the safety of her children at all, she had their phone numbers. Realizing the others were all staring at him, he tried to soften the harshness of his words. “Jett’s house was the only place we knew she might have been. You’ve been calling her since you got your phone back, right? Until we hear from her, I don’t know what else we can do.”
“Don’t know or don’t care?” Raquel snapped. Then she pushed away from the table, letting her chair clatter to the floor, and stormed up the steps before he could respond.
“I wish this would end already,” Carlito said wearily.
Leila hooked him in for a hug. “We all do, sweetie.”
“Let’s get going,” Rodrigo said, heading for the right staircase.
Back in the room, he grabbed his and Carlito’s bags, then made his way to the metallic door opposite the gym downstairs. It was wide open and led to a garage with bikes hanging from the wall and six vehicles. Although half as many as in the garage at Adena’s house, these all had a much more menacing appearance. The one that caught his eye was a massive red one that had small ladders attached to either side to let you reach the doors. It was probably close to four times the length of Rodrigo’s body. Adena was waiting past that by a slightly shorter, but equally long, black armored SUV.
“Now that we don’t have to worry about being inconspicuous, the Knight XV should serve us best.” Adena noticed Rodrigo’s eyes glued to the red one and said, “This has the edge in speed and comfort which we need more. After all, there’s no man-made vehicle that will provide sufficient protection from the demons.”
“Then why bother with armor? Shouldn’t we just take the fastest you’ve got?”
“Wow, you don’t get it, do you? This is to protect us from humans.”
Soon, the others were in the garage with their gear. From the faces drained of color to the quivering expressions, none of them, not even Raquel for all her earlier boldness, looked committed to going back out into the land of death.
“Good. So if you’re all ready, get in,” Adena said, either not picking up on, or disregarding how everyone was on the brink of panic. She unlocked this car with a key instead of her phone. Inside, the leather seats were red and the rest of the interior was a mix of gray and dark brown. In the back, Raquel and Carlito sat on a bench, while Jett and Leila sat in front of them, in two individual seats that faced backward, conference style. Rodrigo took a seat next to Adena as the garage door rolled up. She pulled out of the back of the warehouse and onto the street.
Everything beyond a one-block radius of the warehouse was beginning to resemble the apocalypse Adena had prophesied. So much smoke billowed up from burning buildings, which no one in sight was trying to extinguish, that it coalesced into a dark cloud the sun failed to penetrate. Overturned vehicles, some of which contained bodies, littered the road, making driving complicated.
Adena drove carefully for some time, avoiding collision with anything until she saw a blond woman lying in the middle of the street, her clothes stained with blood.
“Help me,” the woman said, her voice faint. Because of the various abandoned vehicles and the width of their own, driving around her didn’t seem possible. The other immediate routes forward had worse blockages. “Please, help me.”
“There’re no demons around. Why won’t you help her?” Raquel asked.
“We just talked about this,” Adena said, examining two small screens that displayed footage from the car’s front and rear cameras.
“But this is different. She’s right in the way. What are you gonna do, run her over?”
From the apathy on Adena’s face as her foot rested on the accelerator pedal, Rodrigo could tell she was considering it, so he opened the door and hopped out before she decided. He made his way to the woman slowly, checking for any demons in his immediate surroundings that the car’s cameras might have missed.
“Hey, how bad is it?” Rodrigo asked gently, kneeling at her side. She wasn’t much older than him. If the wound wasn’t fatal, maybe they could drop her off at a hospital...if those were even still open.
By the time Rodrigo realized something was off about the blood, his face hit the ground. He hadn’t been prepared for the blow to the back of his head in the slightest, so he couldn’t even use his hands to break his fall. He was crawling along the ground, his vision blurring as he tried to put space between him and his attacker.
Someone’s knee dug into his back, pressing his torso down and pinning him under the person’s weight. “Nothing personal, kiddo, but yours is the first ride come by in more than an hour, and it looks like a damn good one.”
Rodrigo glanced over his shoulder and saw a large man with a shaved head looming there. He was twirling an aluminum baseball bat in his hand.
Adena got out of the car and slammed the heavy bullet-proof door, exasperated with the entire situation. In hindsight, Rodrigo felt like an idiot. The improvised roadblock and the injured woman’s convenient position had screamed trap, but after being unable to save the couple in the park, those people Sonneillon ate, and his aunt, he was just so determined to do something right.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking, doll,” the man said, not even tensing as Adena strode closer. “‘Why’s the handsome man trying to take my car when there’s plenty throughout the streets?’ But those junkers didn’t help the people in ‘em escape these freaks, did they? So, if you’d just leave us the key for that beast, you and anyone else inside can—”
Adena exploded into action, lunging at the man and jabbing her gloved thumbs deep into his eye sockets. He cried out and fell off Rodrigo, scurrying back as he blindly lashed out at the air with his bat. The woman, covered in the odorless liquid masquerading as blood, rose and took a halfhearted swing at Adena. She dodged it and pivoted, smashing the point of her elbow into the blond’s jaw and knocking her unconscious with a crack.
“What are you assholes waiting for? Kill that bitch!” the man, now bleeding from his lower eyelids, yelled. Two guys stood up from behind the broken-down cars that had been blocking the road and vaulted over the hoods toward Adena.
Still dazed, Rodrigo got to his feet next to her, reaching for the hilt of his sword.
Stolen story; please report.
She waved him off. “Don’t bother. Just get back in the car.”
Adena danced around the two men with practiced ease, softening them up with a flurry of sharp knees and elbows, as she capitalized on every opening left by their telegraphed punches. It was like watching Bruce Lee dismantle a pair of lumbering drunks. But as the men were worn down from the blows, Adena’s fighting style grew even more vicious as she attacked their groins, throats, and eyes. It was then their grunts of pain became shrieks. Every move she made was executed with ruthless efficiency...to leave her opponents so maimed and broken that retaliation would be impossible.
“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” a manic voice urged from behind them.
Rodrigo whirled to see a dark-haired man with his arm barred across a writhing Raquel’s neck. He was pressing the barrel of a pistol to her temple, his knees bent to hide behind her like a human shield. On closer inspection, the gun was hers. One of the car’s windows was rolled down and Leila was aiming her shotgun at the man, her hands shaking. Making that shot without a stray pellet hitting Raquel would be challenging, even for a sharpshooter. He had been so mesmerized by Adena that he didn’t realize what was happening back there.
“Somebody better drop the keys and all of you start walking or I’ll blow her brains out. Swear to God, I will.”
Rodrigo’s blood roared in his ears, logic abandoning him. He materialized the nebulae in his left hand, formed a chain from them and snapped it around the wrist of the hand holding the gun. He made the nebulae crush it, breaking the bone, and then he yanked the wailing man forward as Raquel slipped out of his panicked grasp. Rodrigo caught him by the throat with his right hand and slammed him into the concrete, falling over him.
The man muttered something incoherent, but Rodrigo said nothing. He wasn’t worth the words. Still choking him with his right hand, Rodrigo hammered on the man’s face again and again and again with his left. People...no, animals like this, they were no different from the demons preying on the weak and innocent at every opportunity. The world didn’t need them.
Eventually, he felt a firm hand on his shoulder and Jett said, “Ruy, come on. You got him. He’s had enough.”
Rodrigo’s breath hitched as he looked down at the man’s disfigured, bloody face. He was missing a bunch of teeth and his facial bones were misshapen in several places. Then there were the red fingernail indentations on his throat, which looked like someone had tried to claw out his windpipe. The only sign that he was still alive was his uneven breathing.
Rodrigo stared at the torn knuckles on his left hand that were already healing, then at the bits of skin under the nails on his right. The evidence that this was his handiwork spoke for itself, and yet, just like that fateful day in fifth grade, he couldn’t remember a second of it. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Quite brutal, human. I commend you,” Resent said.
“You’ve been awake this whole time? Why didn’t you deal with this?”
“Obviously, because I was curious as to how you would handle it. I have to admit, I didn’t believe you would be as inclined to kill one of your own as you are with demons. I stand corrected.”
Rodrigo gave no response as he went to a horrified Raquel and looked her over. Besides a fresh bruise on her cheek, she seemed unharmed.
“I-I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have left the car, but...this was because of me,” Raquel said, her lower lip quivering as she fought back tears.
He embraced her before watching as she got back into the car. Returning his attention to Adena’s fight, he cringed at the sight of four corpses burned to a crisp. He walked over to her side, mouth agape.
“Don’t act shocked. On top of everything else, they saw what you could do,” Adena said.
Rodrigo shrugged. “So what? They wouldn’t have been the first.”
“If this world ever regains any sense of order, do you want enemies who can describe you and what you’re capable of, walking around?”
“Is there a reason you’re pestering her? She did nothing I would not have done myself,” Resent said. But that was exactly the problem. Rodrigo never particularly considered himself the sensitive type, but was struggling to accept he had hurt another human being so severely, whereas Adena killed those people like it was nothing. Like they were nothing. Now, with the state of the world, was it him or her whose way of thinking was flawed?
Adena seemed to take Rodrigo’s lack of an answer as a concession and went back to the car. As he climbed into the seat next to her, he didn’t need to see the others’ faces to tell that their mood had taken another sharp drop.
“I hope you all learned from this,” Adena said. “These weren’t hardened criminals or lunatics. Just desperate people doing anything they could to survive. And the longer this goes on, the more like them we’ll see.” Although Rodrigo and Raquel were responsible for making her stop, she didn’t single them out. He would’ve loved to think she was being considerate, but it was more likely that she felt the rest of them judging her before.
They had been driving for a while, through light snow growing heavier by the minute, when a malformed dropped out of the sky and smashed into the windshield. Everyone except Adena screamed, but even she jumped, hitting the brakes and narrowly avoiding a crash. Rodrigo was sure they were under attack until the malformed rolled off the hood of the vehicle, clawing at an inky substance covering its eyes.
“Oh, no,” Resent said.
“Oh god. What now?”
“That webbing belongs to the festered. If they’re here, we don’t want to be.”
The malformed wrenched the webs off, along with a patch of its gray skin, then beat its wings and returned to the skies with haste.
“Let’s go down another street. Resent says something called the festered is close and I don’t want to find out more if we don’t have to,” Rodrigo said, looking through the window at his side. When there was no reply or movement for several seconds, he turned to Adena. She had a death grip on the leather-wrapped steering wheel and was sweating profusely. “H-hey, are you all right?”
It was a stupid question. He sat up on his knees in the seat to look back at the others. Raquel was shuddering and Carlito was wheezing hard. Jett was squeezing his eyes shut, mumbling prayers in Spanish, and clutching rosary beads he had pulled out from under his t-shirt. Leila had her shotgun in hand and was steadily bringing the barrel closer to her chin.
“Jesus, what are you doing?” Rodrigo yelled as he reached out and snatched the gun from her. Leila screeched and slapped at him repeatedly, as if he meant to harm her.
“The effect is inordinate. There must be many of them,” Resent said.
“What exactly is happening and how much worse is it going to get?”
“The mere presence of the festered induces panic to varying degrees, dependent on the individual. And at this rate, things will continue to deteriorate far more quickly than we can control them.”
Before Rodrigo could ask anything more, something with four blade-like legs and four thick arms slunk by his window. On the opposite side, one with six longer legs and two thinner arms rushed past. They were coming faster than he could count, heading toward something. With each glimpse of the festered, Rodrigo became more aware of his heart drumming against his rib cage. His breathing grew increasingly unsteady until it felt like he was suffocating.
Resent took over and used the nebulae to confiscate Raquel’s pistol to prevent a repeat of what they witnessed with Leila. He ignored her outburst, placing both guns underneath the glove box, and then stared through the cracked windshield. Up the road were three M1 Abrams tanks supported by a huge group of army soldiers. The festered were charging at them, spewing ebony webs from their mouths and being met with a deafening volley of machine-gun fire that seemed to be achieving little.
In the sanctuary of Rodrigo’s mind, his surge of anxiety was dying down. The festered were diverse in their features and clothing, but there were some consistencies. Most of them were fairly humanoid from the waist up, though less so than the diavoliks. The ones with six legs and longer lower bodies were female. And the ones with four legs and burlier upper bodies were male. Regardless of gender, arranged on each of their faces in distinct patterns, were multiple pairs of beady black eyes that showed no white.
It was fortunate Jett’s eyes were closed. Years back, on one of the rare occasions where Rodrigo’s cousins had come to his house for a sleepover instead of the other way around, a small spider crawled on Jett while he was sleeping. He woke up, freaked out, and made the rest of them sweep the room for spiders for close to an hour before letting them go back to bed. With the shape Jett was in now, Rodrigo could only hope that he didn’t get a good look at these things.
The three tanks fired their cannons, one after another, into the advancing horde of festered. Because of how tightly packed in against each other they were, this had far greater success than firearms as the ear-ringing explosions scattered them and more than one demon was blown to pieces.
The decrease in the festered’s numbers lessened the strain on Adena enough to snap her back to her senses. In the next instant, she put the car in reverse, outright ramming smaller cars out of her path. As they turned the corner at full-speed, the last thing they saw was the demons swarming the soldiers and binding the treads of their tanks with webs. The chorus of screams that followed, blending in with the various others throughout the city, signaled the worst.