Demon Core: Part 4

[heya_baru]

Part 1

The Infection of Our Ontologies

God beamed an eight-hundred milligram excursus on the writhing of shadows directly into Leander’s brain, between the eyes, and he was suffering. His mouth was as dry as New Mexico itself, his skin no less hot, and he laid spread out on a ratty, dog-eaten couch while he waited for the spectral insectoids outside his window to come in and spear him on their tusks. Grasped by a powerful and silent horror, he wondered what rotting seas could have begot the crawling phantasms that vermiculated from his walls, filling the dark spaces of his rented suburban home normally ruled by ants and cardboard boxes. With great effort he leaned forward, grasping for his vape pen.

“Once I’m sober I’m going to pull the teeth out of your mouth with a hammer, Sestos.” A long drag. Let the THC work its magic. This was worse than the bad batch of 2C from last year—Sestos had found him the next day, curled up atop boxes in the garage and babbling to himself, like a crepuscular animal nesting among human refuse.

Sestos was riding the same wave that dragged Leander under. He paced a gouge into the ratty carpet, twisting his fingers together. “I’m sure you’ll make a great dentist. Where’s Hero?” His eyes wheeled freely inside their sockets; the house’s interior landscape, currently dominated by boxes of stolen credit card readers from a shuttered Hobby Lobby, was drowning under a flux of beast-like shapes that offered themselves up for the awe and torment of mortal observers.

Leander seemed to sink deeper into the sofa. “Outside. She said she was burning up.” Another fruitless hit of the vape. “She walked by you like, five minutes ago.”

Sestos made a exaggerated turn on a single socked foot before running into the screen door, backing up, tearing open the door, and stumbling outside. Hero leaned against a veranda beam, arms hanging loosely at her sides, stripped down to a tank top and shorts despite the cool January night. Her eyes were fixed on something in the dark, beyond the unlit murk of the gravel backyard.

“I saw something.”

“Yeah. Anticholinergics will do that.” Sestos took in great gulps of air between every other word.

She waved her arm limply in front of her. “No. There’s something out there.”

“What, like, the hat man? Or the spiders? Mechanical elves? Give it a few hours, it should wear off. I think.” He scanned the backyard in spite of himself; seas of cool moonlight spilled over the decaying suburban landscape, steel fencing and worn rooftops standing weakly against the passage of decades. A coyote called to the sky.

Hero stumbled forward into the yard and spun around, as though whatever she was looking for might pop out behind one of the dying yucca plants. Nothing revealed itself. “Christ, the shit you make gets worse every year.”

“Yeah, you’ve never done DPH or anything, have you? It’s weird, trust me you’re handling it a lot better than your—”

Sestos froze, his throat constricting around the words as they left his airway. He saw it.

It drifted through the moonlight as an oil sheen swirls in water, an uncanny anomaly whose shape and ambulation did not imply a biology that conformed to the norms of any tellurian clade—a million knotted cilia, all the color of dusky sorrow, given shape by will.

Sestos felt the blood drain from his limbs, the dormant instincts of a long-extinct mammal howled to life in his brain, the kind that burrowed in filth and waited for the jaws of a tiger in the underbrush. Hero frowned for the briefest moment, her face tilting into confusion as she realized that Sestos was looking just past her, right over her shoulder. The prey-animal in his brain wailed.

Hero turned around to witness the thing looming over her, and before she could react Sestos grabbed her hand and tried to pull her towards the patio door. It was too late. He did not know how—it did not have any visible limbs, no fingers or claws with with to grasp—but it seized her by the shoulder and drew her towards the darkness. Hero screamed, her body twisting in pain.

Sestos hugged her forearm and stumbled backwards as Leander, alerted by the welter, ran outside. Too high to make sense of what he was seeing, he dove towards Hero and wrapped his arm around her midsection, feet hopelessly skidding against the dirt.

Sestos managed to plant his foot on the other side of the door frame, giving him enough leverage to kick his leg out and force the three of them inside. Leander slammed his head into the table on the way down, releasing Hero as he brought his hands to the bleeding welt above his ear. Hero, momentarily free from men and monster, scrambled to her feet and slammed the rolling patio door shut with enough force to send a crack ripping through the laminated glass.

Just as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.

Sestos crawled away from the door, wordlessly mouthing like a beached fish.

“I told you.” Hero shivered, stumbling aimlessly. “I fucking told you. I fucking told you.”

Leander ran over to the kitchen sink and vomited, blood pouring down the side of his face.

Sestos darted down the hallway to his room. Before the other two could ask him of his plans, he returned with his pistol, the 20-something college drop-out adopting a wobbly simulacrum of Jon Wick swagger before cycling the Beretta and marching towards the patio door.

“Sestos!” Hero growled, attempting to regain control of her limbs lest her roommate exacerbate the situation.

He threw open the ruined back door and uselessly fired a shot into the night. The violent rapport alerted a chorus of barking dogs and elicited a similar anguished howl from Leander, who was attempting to stem the bleeding from his head while his concussion attempted to introduce him to the floor. Hero limply wrapped her arm around Sestos’s neck and threw him inside, where he collided with the cardboard boxes and tumbled pathetically onto the floor.

After what felt like an hour of confused silence, Sestos found words and sense, dropping the gun. “I’ll get—I’ll get the phy—physostigmine.”

“The what?” Hero could barely feel her legs, the world blurring around her, the thumping of blood in her temples drowning out Sestos’s voice.

“Red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter, hot as a hare, full as a flask.” Sestos mumbled as he pulled himself to his feet, one hand desperately pressed to the wall to stabilize his ambulation as he reached for his emergency bag.

“Hey Ses.” Leander still had his head in the sink.

“What?”

“No more brainfuck drugs for a while. Just. Just stick to selling Ritalin to the datacenter guys, okay?”

Sestos upturned the bag onto the sofa, rummaging through the medical gear until he pulled out a 5mL vial and the corresponding injection gear. “Fuck you.”

“I’m serious.”

Sestos held a syringe between between his teeth while he splashed a plastic jar of isopropyl alcohol over Hero’s shoulder. “Wildest fuckin’ trip I’ve ever had.”

“I don’t think that was a trip, Ses.”

He plunged the syringe into her shoulder before chucking it in the trash. “Not to like, mansplain or whatever, but I’ve had more bad trips than you.”

“Then what the fuck is this?”

Hero turned around, pulling tight the skin on her opposite shoulder, where the thing had grabbed her. The meat of her arm was pocked with a dozen bleeding cuts, each no larger than a needle prick, all perfectly spaced, as though something had sunk a hundred teeth into her flesh.