heya_baru | Demon Core: Part 13

Terminal Septicemia

Sestos yelled over the rattling drone of an engine approaching six-figure mileage. “Look, trust me, I think I killed it. You can shoot them. We just need to find them.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m saying this seems insane.” Hero pinched the bridge of her nose. In that moment she regretted everything, regretted letting Leander drag her across the country when she was eighteen, regretted ever meeting Sestos, regretted piling into the car in a literal monster hunt. The bad choices always piled on top of each other, every successive regret foreclosing a life where she hit middle age and opening an equal number of early graves. After a while, she had come to ignore the shrinking voice of reason as it tugged on her shoulder with every wasted day.

“We’re all going to see one. We’re going to kill one. And we’re going to tell everyone.” Sestos repeated, more to himself than to the other two. Thank god for that homemade felony of a silencer, otherwise the half-dozen shots that Sestos put through the backyard fence would have sent half the cops in Los Lunas to their door.

They had crossed the border into Nevada some hours ago, and it had been just as long since the pavement turned to dirt. Rocks and Yucca plants went under the Subaru’s wheels in loud thumps, suspension wailing in protest.

“Couldn’t you have just asked someone about this? On Reddit or something?” Anxious creases had started to crack through Leander’s grim neutrality.

“Yeah, I’m sure Hey Reddit, is there anyone in Nevada willing to drive out to the desert, take some drugs, and tell us what they see? would go over real well.” Hero retorted.

Sestos’s gaze darted between the desert and the survival GPS he picked up at the pawn shop. “I was banned from Reddit.”

Leander frowned. “Well I—wait, how?”

“I kept on brigading the incest subreddits and telling people on thought all their stories about fucking their sisters were fake. After the admin banned me I messaged him and threatened to show up on his lawn and blow my brains onto his front door with a shotgun.”

Leander doubled over in his seat and made a sound like a kicked dog.

Sestos hit the brakes, sending Hero’s head into the front seat. “Here!” He snatched his bolt cutters from the center console and stumbled out of the car, legs recalcitrant after hours on the road.

They had stopped a few feet from a decaying chain link fence, either end stretching into the Nevada night. The air was mournfully silent, and the three of them took a moment to gape at the starry expanse of the cosmos above, uncensored by light pollution. Something about the sight set Sestos on edge; billions of points of light, each one a roaring heart of plasma, its age and size extending beyond the horizon of human affairs. He remembered reading an article stating that at any moment, a gamma-ray burst from a distant supernova could hit the Earth and cook the planet in a flash of ultraviolet light; that’s what the cosmos was, Sestos thought, a hundred billion gods waiting to turn humanity to dust with an absent-minded flick of the wrist.

Leander pulled himself out of the car and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “At least there’s no sign saying trespassers will be shot and buried in unmarked graves next to the Roswell Aliens.”

Hero switched on her phone’s light and walked a few feet into the night, where a rusted yellow sign hung askew from the fence. “Warning. Area contains radioactive contamination. Do not enter.”

Sestos had already started clipping a hole in the fence. “Oh yeah, we’re definitely in the right place. Area 9 is only a few miles from here.”

Leander moaned. “Great, just what we need. Thyroid cancer.”

Sestos scoffed “You’ll be needing a new liver long before that.”

“The fuck did you say?”

Sestos kicked his foot through the hole in the fence. “No time to argue.”

After they were past the fence, he reached into his pocket and fished out a handful of pills. “One for each of you.” He swallowed his Aella with two Xanax, “plus a little extra for me, since I have to drive back.” No going back, Hero thought. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could hear another door closing.

Without the flashlights, the night would have consumed them like a trio of corpses thrown to sea. The pale glow of the milky way barely touched the oppressive murk, illuminating the faint edges of a hundred anonymous dunes in the Nevada sand. Never in her life had Hero felt as though she was truly nowhere, and it was terrifying.

Prodded forward by the halfhearted whip of obligation, Hero kicked her feet into the sand as she let her light sway in front of her, as though she was looking for a lost set of keys. The drugs didn’t help, every milligram of Aella in her blood carving a ladder into her veins before steeling its sword for the siege on her mind.

Someone’s light spun around in the dark. “I saw it!” Sestos. His light flailed around before focusing on a single point in night. “Right there!” For a moment the three of them stood still, squinting into the desert.

“There’s nothing there.” Leander’s voice spoke from the darkness.

“Just wait.” Sestos panned the light across the dune, stopping on a craggy section of rock. He pulled his Beretta from his jeans and cocked the hammer. “It’s there.”

A churning shadow drifted across the cone of light. Hero screamed. Sestos fired off a round, a rock edge exploding into dust. Startled by the shot, the other two hit the dirt, flashlights wheeling around in the darkness.

Hero felt her heart beating in her throat, ears ringing. “Alright. We saw it. Time to go.” She could barely hear her own voice, half the words choked down by the bile building in her esophagus.

“I knew it. I knew they’d be here. Where the bombs went off.” Sestos’s voice cracked as he fiddled with his gun. He cursed and stumbled over a rock, sending the light sweeping across the ground, where it briefly flashed across a darkened figure, just a few feet away. The three of them howled and scattered into the darkness, Sestos firing off another shot that whizzed by Leander’s ear before embedding in the sand.

The thought that she should return the car reached Hero through a haze of drugs and terror, but Sestos had the GPS, and the desert night offered up little in the way of landmarks. This, after all, was nowhere.

Hero ran over to the closest beam of light, her shoe catching under a rock and sending her into the sand. Her phone tumbled over the rocks, smashing itself into darkness. She felt blood sticking to the sleeves of her shirt, the pain in her limbs halted by a bulwark of fear. A moment later a hand grabbed her shoulder to help her up. Sestos.

He thrust his light into her hands. “Here. Take this. I can just shoot at whatever you point at.” She pointed the flashlight at him—the blood had drained from his face, eyes flicking wildly in their sockets.

“You alright?”

It took him a moment to answer. “I think the Aella and downers were a—a bad combo.” He put his gun on one of the rocks and rested his hands on his knees, as though he was about to pass out or vomit.

The night swirled behind him. Hero’s scream caught in her throat. The following events, no more than a dozen seconds, happened in a time apart from space. Leander, a few feet away, focused his light on the churning shape behind Sestos; It took him a few seconds to realize what was happening, his sweaty mop of hair fluttering in the wind. He stumbled backwards, mouth agape. Faint slivers of darkness crept over his shoulders. Hero snatched the gun, pointed at the figure behind him, and fired.

The xign exploded in a shimmering mist, and Sestos fell to the ground. Flashlights spun in the darkness. Someone screamed. There was blood everywhere; blood on the rocks, on Hero, on Sestos. It glittered under the light, a deep red sea spilling over the terrain. Hero dropped the gun and the flashlight, the latter hitting the sand and drawing a tangle of shadows across Sestos’s motionless face. She smelled blood, and vomit.