The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) (16 page)

I tried to wriggle away, but I was trapped. I’d wrapped myself in a demon wing burrito of doom. I squeezed my eyes tight, waiting for the death blow.

It didn’t come. When I opened my eyes, the demon was bent over me, it’s golden eyes a few inches away.

“
Kargla funimee nickto
,” it said.

“Sorry, I don’t speak asshole,” I said.

The monster turned my head with one clawed hand. He raised a fist. I shut my eyes again.

When I peeked again, he was gone. The monster was playing with me. I rolled out of the demon wing to my hands and knees and threw up. It was like being in a blanket made of giant dead bat. Sweating and shaking, I took off my parka and shoved my face in some fresh snow.
 

I still shook as I staggered to my feet and ran into the town hall. I didn’t have a plan in mind, but the Sheriff’s office was in there. I hoped to contact someone in authority directly to close off all roads to Medicament.

Then a chill shot down my spine. What if this was it? Not an attack on a single town but D-Day. Maybe they were everywhere.

As soon as I got to the Sheriff’s office, I was reassured. The power was still on here and CNN was on a TV on the wall. The sound was off, but Wolf Blitzer was talking to a grinning weatherman.

Lesson 136: When Armageddon is really here, nobody will care to listen to a guy in a suit talk endlessly about the weather. That’s what looking out a window is for.

The attack was only in Medicament and, somehow, word had not reached the wider world yet. Panting, I put my hands on my knees. My adrenaline was still working hard but the Advil had worn off. My forearm ached.
 

Lesson 137: That which does not kill you can still annoy the living shit out of you.

When I straightened, I discovered a Sheriff’s Deputy pointing his weapon an inch from my forehead.

He looked me up and down. “Do not move or I
will
kill you. I know you, don’t I? You look familiar.”

“Do I?”

“You’re the Smythe girl who went crazy and went upstate to the bughouse.”

“I prefer the term insane asylum.”

“And why are you wearing armor, huh?”

“Ephesians, chapter six: Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.”

“I asked you a question.”

“I answered, but I don’t think you’ll believe the truth.”

“You are wearing armor!”

“So are you, sir, and for the same reasons. We’re on the same side. But Kevlar alone won’t help you much with monsters. Please take that gun out of my face so we can talk. You really don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“You carry a sword, too, huh?”

“What? This? Nah. I’m a big knitter.”

“Put the pig sticker down or I swear to God I will make you scream like a little girl.” His hand shook. “What are those things? Some kind of military experiment gone wrong? Some genetic…
thing
?”

“No. How about I’ll put my sword down and you put your weapon down and we talk before those things come in here?”

Sweat popped on his forehead and ran into his eyes. His voice began to shake as much as his hand. “Are you with them?”

I was reminded of what Key said back at Castille. Humans: no patience or appreciation for nuance.

“How many of those things are out there?” he asked.

“Calm down and worry about the one in here.”

“What the f — ”

Lesson 138: It’s a gun. Bullets come out the business end. It works at a distance. If it’s a pistol it works at a short distance but stay outside of reach. If it’s a rifle, you can kill someone at a great distance. Don’t put a pistol up to someone’s head if that someone knows what they’re doing.

A little over a second later, the officer’s wrist hurt, his gun was in my hand and the point of my sword was through the top of his right boot, through his foot and into the floor.

Lesson 139: Sure, it’s
possible
I
might
have disarmed him without throwing my sword through his foot. But anyone who takes half measures in a life and death situation is risking too much. Anyone so confident they think they can disarm any gunman without hurting him is a smug, deluded braggart bound to get herself shot.

In the last few minutes, I’d had a lot of confidence knocked out of me. I felt a little of my mojo coming back when I told the Deputy to shut up and stop screaming like a little girl.

I had warned him he didn’t know what he was dealing with.

But I didn’t know, either. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’d write that as a lesson, but ignorance isn’t helpful.

Chapter 28

I pushed the cop in the town’s one cell. I locked the door and slipped the office’s first aid kit through the bars.

He sat on the floor holding his wounded foot. “What are you going to do?”

“Lock you up and throw away the key,” I said. “They won’t get at you in there.”

“When you coming back?”

“I thought you didn’t like me,” I said over my shoulder as I searched the office.

The Deputy started swearing so I ignored him and kept looking for something useful. For some treasure hunts, it’s like perusing a bookstore. You don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it.

There were some long guns and a few pistols in a gun cabinet, but without sacred ammunition, I’d rather have my sword. (Not that I’d been all that effective with it so far that day.) I did scoop up three small canisters of mace and hooked them to my belt.

“You’ve got to get me out of here!” the Deputy said.

“What’s your name?”

“Johnson. Deputy Marion Johnson. I — ”

“Marion? Your name is Marion?”

“Yeah. So? It was John Wayne’s name.”

“Really? Never mind. I remember you.”

“See this badge? I am ordering you as an officer of the law to let me out of this cell immediately. This is forcible confinement, assaulting an officer, resisting arrest, kidnapping. You are in serious trouble, young lady.”

He was using the cop voice. Under normal circumstances, I might have been terrified. Instead, he sounded silly.

“Marion,” I said, “with all due respect, your voice of authority gets really hard to hear in the middle of the apocalypse. And I remember you. Not many guys named Marion. You dumped a friend’s older sister on Christmas Eve. Dick move, Marion.”

He swore at me some more, and added threats of recrimination both legal and illegal.
 

“You don’t hear the word no very often do you, Marion? You should put something on that wound and wrap it up.”

I tossed him the water bottle I found on his desk. “You really are safer where you are, especially in a few minutes.”

“When are you coming back?”

“I don’t expect to come back. I thought I was on vacation. Now I think I’m on a suicide mission. Only the demons don’t seem to want to kill me. I’m trying to figure out the details.”

“I tried the radio and I can’t raise the Sheriff or the other Deputy.”

“They’re on Goucher Avenue. I’m sorry. They didn’t make it.”

He looked so crestfallen I started to feel sorry for him.

“I tried my cell. I can’t get hold of anyone.”

“This is useful to know.” I stepped to his desk and picked up a phone.

“The landline is dead, too. We’re isolated.”

I slammed the phone down. After a moment’s thought, I pulled the landline over by the cell so he could reach it.

Marion felt the need to lunge through the bars and try to grab me. I stepped back at the last second and he banged his forehead on the bars of his cell. Well…I helped a little by grabbing his wrist and throwing myself backward with all my weight.

Marion stared at me, stunned for a full minute. A thin trickle of blood leaked into his left eye from a nick on his forehead. It wasn’t bad, but even a minor head wound bleeds a lot.

When he looked like he was fully present again (and wildly pissed off) I told him to keep trying the landline.

“Wait!” he said. “There are
kids
out there.
People
…. Those…those
things
…”

“See, this is the conversation I wanted to have before you got all angsty. You’ve only got two other cops, right?”

“Yes.”

“Where’s the siren button? For the town, I mean.”

“Next office down, in the fire chief’s office.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?”

Marion had already sucked too much of my time. I ran to the next office. I looked around, confused for a moment. Maps of the town lined the walls. Then I realized I stood in the zoning and land registry office.

Marion. You clod.

I tried the next door. It was the fire chief’s office. It belonged to Long John Beaudry. Everyone knew him because he was the tallest man in Medicament. Where he and the other volunteer firefighters might be today, I didn’t know. Far away, I hoped.

The fire hall sat directly behind the town hall. They had a ladder truck, a water tanker, an engine and a spilled materials truck. Every small town with a decent tax base has a volunteer fire department, but their garages are full of state of the art machinery worthy of a small city’s full time force. The firefighters work for free but the fire engines are funded by baked bean dinners, high taxes and Homeland Security.

Behind Mr. Beaudry’s desk was a small panel that housed two switches. One was labeled fire. The other was labelled civil defense. That siren was at the top of the town hall.

I flipped the switch. The civil defense siren ramped up to a howl above me, rising and falling and loud. I’d only heard it a few times in my life: two for testing that it still worked and once when the fire chief’s son, Derek, flipped both siren switches at once in the middle of the night.

It would have been cute if Derek Beaudry had been a curious six or seven-year-old visiting his dad’s office and getting into mischief. Instead, he was a classmate who got drunk on prom night and made the whole town think nuclear war had come to Iowa.

It was rumored the mayor found Derek and his prom date, Margaret Swinton, naked on his father’s desk. As soon as I remembered the story, I stepped away from the desk and pumped the hand sanitizer by the door on my way out.

Above the siren’s wail, I heard Marion screaming for me as I ran. The door banged behind me and I ran home.

Any civilians yet untouched by the attack might head down to their basements. Medicament was an old town with old people. There were undoubtedly still a few old-timers with bunkers and root cellars to retreat to. If they thought a hurricane or tornado had hit Medicament in the midst of the snowstorm, they’d stay home and tune their radios.

When all they heard was static, nervous glances might be exchanged and they’d lock their doors, find a flashlight and hide behind their furnaces. Maybe they could busy themselves counting canned goods in their pantries and sit out Armageddon with a game of Scrabble.

No matter. The point was to attract the demons to the center of town and keep them there.

Lesson 140: Demons are like high strung dogs with ADD. They gravitate to loud noises.
 

I ran for my life, still trying to figure out why the demons had left me alive.
 

Chapter 29

Five yellow demons stood outside Mama’s house. They were shorter than the red ones and had no wings. Their long faces made me think of rats. They cackled when they saw me, but they didn’t move.

As I approached, I lowered my sword. “What’s up, fellas? Or is it ladies? I can’t tell with you guys. It’s like trying to figure the gender of canaries.”

They said nothing and stared at me with big golden eyes. As I approached, Wil came running out of the front door of the house roaring a war cry. She held a long sword in each hand. The yellow demons turned on her and snarled.

I assumed they would ignore her, too. They attacked instead. The two yellows closest to her ran forward but gave her a wide berth to avoid the cutting arc of Wil’s twin katanas. The pair united again farther up the walk and barreled toward the front door.

Wil lopped off the heads of two yellows. I buried my blade in the back of one of the yellows. As the other turned to face Wil, I bashed it across the back of the head with my cast as I drew the short serrated blade concealed in my belt. I jumped on its back and pulled the edge of the blade across its throat in a savage sawing motion. A geyser of black blood made a Rorschach blot in the snow.
 

To me, it looked like two butterflies humping.

The two yellows charging for the house made it to the doorstep.

“Mama!” I screamed. “Close the front door!”

Mama opened the door wider and motioned the yellow monsters forward, into the house.

“Ma — ”

Two shotgun blasts boomed. The pair of yellow demons fell back and tumbled down the front steps.

Mama stepped out on the porch, the muzzle of her shotgun smoking. She looked down at the demons she’d slain. She looked more curious than alarmed.
 

“You okay, Mama?”

“What?”

I yelled louder. “You okay?”

I think she was reading my lips more than hearing me. “I’ve never shot a gun inside the house before!
Loud
, isn’t it?”

“Good work, Mama!”

“What?”

“Good — oh, never mind.” I gave her the thumbs up sign and she nodded. Still staring at the creatures at her feet, she reloaded.

Trick appeared behind my mother. “I can’t get a signal. The phones are out.”

“So,” Wil said. “D-Day has finally come and we aren’t in New York.”

“Don’t be pissed,” I said. “You aren’t missing any action. All the action is here. This is Medicament’s D-Day.”

“What do we do?” Trick asked. “I saw a lot of them running here. Your mother doesn’t have enough ammunition for them all and I doubt saying a prayer while chucking snowballs at them will do the job.”

“That’s good,” I said. “If you’re going to be the Xander to my Buffy, keep making jokes as we make our way through a frozen hellscape of death and destruction.”

“I’ll be the Willow,” Wil said. “Perfect.”

“Given my blonde hair, I was hoping I’d be Spike,” Trick said.