heya_baru | Demon Core: Part 10

Counter-Insurgency Against The Hyperreal

Sestos popped a tab of Aella and downed it with an open can of Red Bull jammed into the center console. He made a face that suggested the drink had spent more time in the car than he assumed.

Hero’s knuckles turned white as she gripped the wheel. “It’s your plug, man. Is that really necessary?”

“They’re everywhere.” He said with a tone that landed somewhere between childhood awe and addict paranoia. He handed another pill to Leander. Hero sighed heavily.

They pulled off of main street and into a decaying corner of Bosque occupied by chain-link fences and pre-recession era Ford pickups nesting in dirt lawns. Hero parked on the curb and cranked the parking brake. She made some comment about keeping the two in line but it was too late, Sestos was up in the stratosphere.

The man who greeted them at the door had the brow line of a military recruitment poster and a body that never kicked the cheeseburger habit post-discharge. He greeted Sestos with a halfhearted fist bump.

“Ses.” The name came out of his lips in a monosyllabic croak as he ushered the three of them inside.

“Jake.” Sestos returned the greeting, attempting an unhurried disposition that was otherwise foreign to him.

Leander, once again, had made a terrible mistake. He felt the Aella crawling between the folds of his brain, the vines of some thorny plant pricking at his neurons. A spider the size of a large cat oozed down the wall as Sestos and Jake lead them into living room cluttered with empty soda bottles. Fortnite lobby music thumped from a TV that rested precariously atop a pile of milk crates.

Jake took Sestos’s fifty and shoved a hand into the pocket of his biker jacket, extracting a bag of something that Leander assumed was Ketamine; he never never did the stuff—he tried it once in eleventh grade and pissed blood for a day. Sestos quickly pocketed it.

Jake turned to Hero. “Hey, were you that chick that was selling the Crown Zenith packs on Facebook a couple months back?”

Christ, Hero hated this whole fucking song and dance; everyone was as friendly as two pigs in a shithouse, but all it took was one bad vibe before the iron came out. And now it was the fucking stolen Pokémon cards that Sestos had dropped on her; if his dealing didn’t do the three of them in, it was going to be his kleptomania.

Hero leaned against the kitchen counter, hands wrapped around her midsection. “Yeah. Uh. Sestos found them. Fell out the back of a FedEx.” Just get this over with.

“Hold on,” Jake looked around the house, as if trying to remember where he had placed something among the towers of empty Monster cans and DoorDash bags. “I got something you might be into.” He left down a murky hallway while Hero felt her heart sink lower into her stomach.

When he returned a moment later, lumbering across the filthy carpet with something in his hands, he was not alone. Leander nearly screamed, bile roiling up towards the back of his throat.

It was there, under the ugly glow of the cheap LED light strips. A churning, oily mass of night. A Xign. Sestos saw it too, the blood draining from his face, his head violently whipping between Leander and the beast. It followed him like a shadow, utterly silent, the top of its body—it seemed presumptuous to describe such a part as a head—scraping the ceiling. Neither Hero nor Jake noticed it.

Hero was too distracted to notice the look of utter horror on their faces as she talked. From that angle, the two of them could see what they had missed during their last encounter with a Xign—a hundred thread-like appendages, weightless and as thin as silk, pouring out from its body to pierce its quarry. The first dozen hairs made contact with the back of his neck, tiny droplets of blood welling up from each of points where skin yielded to the invasion. Pain flashed across his face while he reached a grubby hand behind his head to swat away whatever he thought was there.

That hand only made it to his ear. Before either Hero or Leander could even react, Sestos picked up a fire extinguisher resting by the back door and felt its mass in his hands. Nice and heavy, all metal and liquid. He held it by the handle, ran forward, and swung. The Xign dissolved into shadow, and the extinguisher connected with Jake’s temple.

Hero had never seen what the inside of a man’s head looked like. Squishy and pink, she assumed, but in reality it was mostly blood—it’s easy to forget just how much of the human organism is the liquid red stuff. The thin cranial bone of the human temple was no match for one of the wonders of the industrial revolution. The extinguisher made contact with his head, skull caving in before the opposite temple slammed into the wall, spraying Hero and Sestos in blood before his face went through the drywall, pinning his corpse upright. He twitched for a moment, an almost comical fluttering of the appendages. It was a motion that Leander recognized from countless days on the farm, when his father made him use a .308 on the lame bulls. Blood and bits of pink poured out of his misshapen head and ran down his shoulder.

Complete bedlam, in an instant. Hero screamed, stumbling backwards as she desperately tried to wipe the fine spray of blood from her clothes. Sestos howled like an animal, brandishing the fire extinguisher while he waited for the Xign to reappear. Leander stood bolted to the carpet, slowly drifting away from the scene around him, the way one sails gently from the shores of a dream in the moments before waking.

Hero and Sestos started to argue, Sestos holding his weapon above his head like a feeble barbarian with an improvised ax. Hero’s words were more curses than not. Reason had completely fled the two of them.

“We need to get the fuck out of here.” Leander was not entirely sure his words came from his own lips. The other two did not turn to him until they had exhausted themselves of terror and rage.

“No shit.” Hero yelled, her voice cracking.

Sestos finally dropped the extinguisher, where it landed in a pool of blood. “Look, I know this guy! This place is fucking packed to the gills with everything from meth to GHB. When his roommates get home they’re not going to fucking call the cops! They are going to bury his ass out on the rez and no one will ever see him again!”

Hero frantically used the collar of her shirt to wipe the mix of blood and tears from her face. “Fucking great. Good to know we’re placing our trust in a bunch of fucking meth heads.”

“But that means we need to get out of here before they come back, or they’ll be burying us too.”

Leander stepped towards the door, the room visible through a receding tunnel of darkness. “Good. That settles that. Time to go.” His voice was mostly breath, the motions of his body coming to him through a haze of static.

Sestos ripped off a section of paper towel from the roll in the kitchen and used it to wipe his prints off the extinguisher. Hero stood lamely in the living room, a voice in her panicked thoughts urging her to cover the body, pray to god, kill herself, do something. Her eyes fell over his obliterated head, unable to look away.