Tales from the Crypt - Demon Knight (20 page)

How long do you stay conscious while your head rolls away?
she wondered, and blacked out.

14

I
t was an instinctive motion. Brayker was walking beside Roach when he heard Jeryline scream; he spun to the side and jerked the shotgun cleanly out of Roach’s hands. Turning swiftly in the suddenly crazy light from the big orange flashlight, he knocked Martel out of the way, ran a step and plowed chest first into Irene’s ample bazooms, careened against the wall, and rebounded into Uncle Willie’s drunken path. Cursing, he disentangled himself and made it back to the fork of the tunnel, cut a hard left with the echoes of his footfalls pounding back and forth, and homed in on the unmistakeable gurgles and grunts of someone being either choked or smothered to death. It was a sound he had heard often enough.

Dark shapes were bent over Jeryline, whose blue-jeaned legs were jerking and twisting as she fought. Brayker put on the brakes, tripped against a rail, and fell to his knees, still skidding along. Sharp rocks cut through his pants, through his skin, grated across the bones of his kneecaps. One of the figures jerked upright. Brayker aimed the flashlight its way: just some average Joe whose hair stuck up like bunches of weeds, whose eyes glowed an unhealthy red, and whose face had been drained of all color. This was no demon, Brayker knew. This was a man possessed.

He fired while the shotgun was still at his hip. The top right quadrant of the man’s head blew apart in a shower of blood and bone. The man staggered backward, then bared his teeth. “You there,” he said while blood bubbled up to the lip of his exploded skull and began to sheet down his face. “Tried to steal my Bronco, eh? Tried to tried to tried to . . .”

The other figure became erect. This was a woman in similar shape. One of her arms dead-ended in Jeryline’s mouth. As for Jeryline, not too good. Her eyes were open and rolling, twin circles of pure terror.

Brayker pumped the shotgun and fired. The woman’s shoulder blew apart and splashed against the wall. Jeryline shuddered up to a sitting position and jerked the severed arm away from her mouth. An ugly blue necklace of ruptured blood vessels indicated the line where her neck would have split from her body.

Something else moved. Brayker cycled the gun with one hand, saw one more shape, trained the barrel on it.

“No!” Jeryline coughed out. She rocked to her feet, grabbed at the figure, and lurched toward Brayker with it. A little boy, Brayker saw. Pale as white wine, tear-stains on his cheeks, dirt scuffed on his clothes. Brayker got a twinge of surprise: it was the kid from that cafe, the little shit who had foiled the attempted car thievery.

“I know this kid,” Jeryline gasped. She fell against Brayker, clutching at his clothes, coughing a fine mist of blood against his shirt. “It’s Danny Long. Local boy.”

Brayker urged them both aside. The man he had shot was wobbling all over the place but the woman, unconcerned about her missing arm, had picked up a rock and was shambling toward him.

“Not in front of Danny!” Jeryline rasped. “It’s his mom!”

Brayker hesitated. It was a tough old world sometimes, but to see your parents gunned down? Not that tough.

He tossed the flashlight at Jeryline and snatched the boy up by the back of his shirt.
“Go!”
he shouted at her, but the flashlight had smacked her on the knee and fallen to the floor of the shaft. She dropped down, madly scrabbling for it while the beam skittered across the walls and ceiling. Then she was up and running. Danny’s parents gobbled unhappy things as Brayker sprinted away carrying his unusual luggage.

“Hold up!” Brayker shouted at Jeryline as she ran through the fork. She stopped and turned in a wash of fresh dust. He slowed enough to put Danny Long on his feet before dropping to his haunches to recover his breath. Damn those cigarettes, he thought. Haven’t smoked since 1938, and still I get winded.

He emitted a miserable chuckle. What a zany life he had led. It would be nothing but pure relief to get rid of the key; there were times when being dead sounded so much better than being alive.

“They’re still coming,” Jeryline panted. Blood was running from the corners of her lips and her upper teeth had acquired some odd new angles and spaces. To cap this unfortunate beauty treatment, large clumps of her hair had been pulled out by the roots, which were not bleeding but oozing a watery, pinkish fluid. If she were to be the next keeper of the key, Brayker knew, she’d better get used to looking like shit most of the time.

Yeah . . .
if.

A strange, windy rustling began in the darkness of the left passageway, as if Roach and crew had decided to fan themselves with newspaper. Jeryline looked at Brayker; at that moment Danny tottered to her and collapsed in her arms. She hugged him tight and stood, simultaneously offering Brayker the flashlight that now hung from her little finger.

“Wait,” he said, rising, and dug the key out.

She glared at him. “He’s just a little kid.”

Brayker awkwardly took the flashlight in the same hand that held the shotgun, aimed the beam at Danny’s face, and touched the key between his eyes.

No reaction. He put the key away and took the flashlight in a firmer grip. “This tunnel thing just isn’t going to work,” he said. “There are too many blind spots, too many branches, and it’s already been invaded. We have to go back to the basement.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Duh. What was your first clue, Sherlock?”

He ignored her, cocking his head, listening. “Wings,” he whispered. “If I’m right, we are in deep shit.”

“Bats,” Jeryline shot back. “I think I heard them before.”

He aimed the flashlight at her feet. “See those?” he said.

She looked down. “Salvation Army retreads. You got a problem with that?”

He shook his head. “Your feet, Jeryline. If you have ever run fast in all your life, run faster now.” He pumped the shotgun. “I’ll cover you to the basement.”

“What? How come? How about the others?”

He aimed the light at the other tunnel. “We should be expecting them about now.”

A new noise arose: the panting and squealing of humans on the run. In a few seconds Roach and Martel, then Irene and Uncle Willie, scrambled past on a mad rush back to the basement, tripping, falling, stumbling into the walls, climbing over each other. “Wings!” Irene wailed in passing. “Some of them got wings!”

Brayker hooked the gun across one elbow and worked the key out of its pouch once more. “Seal the hole as soon as you get in,” he said, and pushed it toward her. “You’ve seen me do it.”

She hesitated, then took it without a word.

“Go,” Brayker said, and she went.

From behind, questing fingers touched his hair, his shoulders. He spun, extending the butt of the shotgun, and smashed it across the man’s bloody face. The man staggered back, his hands still pawing at the air. Blood spiked with broken teeth drooled down his chin. The woman was faster, able to get a firm purchase in Brayker’s hair. He turned the shotgun in his hands, took it by the barrel, and with a short prayer that it would not go off by itself, plowed the butt of it against her throat. Her tongue popped out like a fat blue popsickle, and her head lolled all the way back between her shoulder blades, her broken neckbones grating against each other as she fell away. But she would live, he knew. The parents of that kid Danny would bumble about like robots down here until their muscles began to rot from the bones, and only when their eyes had decayed sufficiently for the poison to leak out, would they find rest. The Salesman was powerful, but even he could not deny the mastery of death itself.

Brayker sprinted down the tunnel toward the basement. The whirring of wings approaching from behind was loud, punctuated now by the flopping of oversize feet against rock. The Salesman had been busy outside, very busy making these things. Perhaps every single mineshaft under this town was loaded with them. To Brayker it would be no surprise: like any good salesman, you have to keep knocking on doors to find the right buyer. And maybe that was why Harrison, whose blood was running dry in the key, had dubbed the Evil One just that: the Salesman. The guy just never knew when to give up. For two thousand years he had tracked the last key of the seven, yet here he was in Wormwood with his bag of samples and his hearty handshake, knocking on doors until people got weary of the pitch and finally start buying his wares. Cordelia had been the first customer tonight; any of the others could be next.

The beating of wings became like the roar of a hive full of gigantic bees, all of them mad and full of venom. Brayker had been under fire from these before, but never in such a small space. The first time he had heard them, in the year 1917, they sounded like the furious buzz of the French daisy-cutters, the artillery shells that exploded on the ground to release a hundred whirring pieces of shrapnel that would chew off your legs at the ankles if you couldn’t find a hole to dive into or a tree that wasn’t already shattered by bombs. It was the winged demons that killed Harrison, demons cut from the same satanic mold as the ones pursuing Brayker now.

Actually, upon Brayker now.

From pure instinct he turned as he ran and fired nearly straight upward. The demon’s wings were only a thin green membrane stretched across skeletal arms that would go flapping like a runaway window shade when pierced; Brayker heard wings snap after the shot, and two demons thumped against the walls of the tunnel. Not quite like Danny’s parents, these would drag about on their shriveled wings and brittle claws until they rotted into a form of ash.

He could see, in front of the wildly jiggling flashlight, that Jeryline and the kid were crouched together, waiting for Irene to crawl through to safety. Uncle Willie, holding himself upright by clinging to the wall, had not even begun the journey. And how many shells were left in the shotgun? There was no time to stop and check.

Jeryline turned her face to Brayker, her green eyes wide and afraid. “Hold them off,” she said, and turned away. “Irene,” she shouted, “if you don’t get your fat ass out of the way right now, there’s going to be a lot of dead people out here!”

Irene zipped out of sight. “Now you,” Jeryline said to the boy, but he clung to her, silently shaking his head. She motioned at Willie, who dropped like a sack of concrete and scampered through, no problemo,
señor,
worthless drunk or not.

“Now you,” she said, and peeled Danny away from herself. “Don’t worry about your mommy and daddy. We’ll save them too.”

He dropped on all fours and clawed through the rubble.

Brayker jerked as talons grabbed at the crown of his head, tweezing hair out, cutting ridges in his scalp. The stink of the flying ones was like damp and moldy rags, horrible. Again he hurled the flashlight at Jeryline; again she missed an impossible catch. Talons pricked his shoulders, jabbed his thighs. He lashed out with the shotgun but connected only with unimportant meaty parts. The noise of the things was one huge hum now. Wings, dozens of them, beat at his body as he was dragged to a stop. His feet were jerked apart, too far apart to maintain balance. With a grunt of effort, as he fell forward, he twisted himself over onto his back, jabbing the gun at the blur of wings. His shoulder blades slammed down hard on the floor of the shaft, no big deal, he assumed he would be dead soon. At least he had passed the key along.

Or had he?

He opened his mouth to shout. It wasn’t over, couldn’t be over, there was one thing left to do. The stampede of demons who had not come equipped with the optional flight package became a kind of thunder in its own right as they filled the tunnel. In response to his open mouth, Brayker got a cold, lumpy stalk of beak down his throat, making him gag. He crunched his teeth together and bit it off. The offending demon protested it with only a series of hisses while Brayker twisted his head to spit it out, but by then the demon had turned to ash and Brayker wound up swallowing most of it.

He heard Jeryline shout out. The weight on his chest and stomach and legs shifted, heavy here, light there, heavy here again. He realized that he was absolutely pinned to the ground by the weight of the things. It all shifted again, and he was miraculously able to sit up and shake the rest of it away.

“Your hand,” Jeryline said. “Pull on me.”

He gave her the requested hand; he pulled. Never, he recognized dazedly, never had the demons come so close to killing him. Jeryline pulled him to his feet; with the key in her other hand she continued to hack at the air and everything in it.

He found his voice. “Go on through, Jerry. Go on through.”

“You
go through, Brayker,” she said, and pushed him down onto his knees. “And don’t call me Jerry, either.”

He went, not really caring. How extraordinary it was, if just for a moment, to have someone else in charge. He shuttled through the hole and handed the flashlight to the first pair of hands he saw. The shotgun was snatched from him, no surprise in that, considering that Roach had decided it was his even before the whole tunnel fiasco came to pass. After he stood, Brayker dropped wearily again and leaned back through the hole. Martel had received the flashlight, and went down on his knees beside him.

“You know,” Martel whispered moistly into his ear, “Little Miss Jeryline is one tough young lady.”

Brayker jerked away. “Advice, Deputy,” he said. “Good friends always call her Jerry, She hates formality.”

Martel, his face still smeared green and brown from his stupid, lengthy excursion outside, winked at him. “I copy a roger to that one, Chief. And hey?”

Brayker raised his eyebrows. “Hey what?”

“When I write up my report on this, I’ll mention you in a good way. I know you’re from New York and all that, but I’ll make you look good anyway. For the papers and stuff.”

“Thank you,” Brayker said. “Thank you very much.”

Was he kidding? Not really. In the old war it had been simple, homespun kids like this who fought and died. Martel was a doofus who fancied himself to be a moderate-sized fish in a medium-sized pond. Great leaders had lived and died with bigger delusions than that.