Demon Jack (9 page)

“What the fuck are you two waiting for? Go!” I yelled.

“Oy, c’mon poppet,” Maggie said and brushed by me. She had Lucy by the wrist and the two of them bolted towards the door, going up and over the bed. Chad lunged for them. I put myself in between him and them, sending him staggering back with a hard shove. I didn’t watch them go, just kept them in my peripheral.

I heard the door open and shut a second after the first klaxon call of the alarm went up. Despite the noise, which was damn disorienting, I could hear the electric snap of the door’s lock slamming shut. I focused on Chad, letting Maggie and Lucy fall from my mind. I couldn’t afford to worry about them at the moment. They’d have to find a way out of the hospital on their own.

“You should have given them to us,” Chad snarled.

“Yeah probably,” I admitted.

“You’ll die for them,” it said.

“Not today.”

I slapped his next punch away, sending it out wide, throwing him off balance. My foot connected with the side of his knee in a hard, stomping kick and I was rewarded with a dry cracking sound. He staggered, the joint twisted to a sickening, unnatural angle. He dropped to his knees, his leg unable to hold his weight. I grabbed a handful of hair, driving another knee into his temple. His head snapped to the side and I could feel the tearing in my fingertips as the hair in my hand ripped free of his scalp. He hit the floor and rolled in a tangle of limbs, coming to rest at the base of the wall.

I took a step back, breathing heavily, and shook the hair from my fingers. I could taste adrenaline, heavy and coppery on my tongue. It felt like minutes had passed, but it had been maybe thirty seconds tops since Maggie and Lucy had made a break for it.

Chad barely gave me a chance to brace myself before he lunged, pushing off with his still working leg and hitting me with the entirety of his mass, slamming me back into the wall with just the force of his body. He hit me twice, two shattering sledgehammer like blows that connected with my ribs. I heard a crack and lances of pain shot through my chest and shoulder, making each breath an exercise in pure white-hot agony.

Shoving him away from me, I sucked in a deep, gulping breath of air and was rewarded with another sharp stab of agony from my ribs. The entire side of my chest where he had hit me felt tight, like a massive rubber band hand been stretched around my chest and was compressing my lungs. Each inhalation was like being hit, just as hard, all over again. We stood there for a half a second, each of us watching for a tell, something that would show a weakness or give an opening. Despite his injured leg, Chad seemed to be moving just fine now. The only sound came from the malignant call of the alarm and my wheezing breath.

I saw the door open over Chad’s shoulder. Another nurse was doing room checks, using one of those key cards to open the doors and taking stock of the patients, ensuring they were still in their assigned rooms. The alarm got louder with the door open, becoming a literal grinding of sheer volume against my eardrums. Chad heard it too, his head snapping around and leveling her with a green-eyed gaze. I think she screamed, I couldn't be sure though. The alarm was just so damned loud.

It was the opening I needed.

I grabbed a handful of Chad’s scrubs and jerked him backwards, hard enough to bounce him off the window. His knee buckled again. He took a staggering, falling step forward on the rebound. I drove my shoulder into his chest, driving him backwards and into the window again, pushing with every bit of muscle and ounce of pissed-off I could muster.

The windows they use in a psychiatric hospital aren’t really glass at all. They’re made of a heavy-duty ballistic plastic, the same type of stuff they use to make the bullet proof partitions in banks. The point is, they are damn near impossible to break. That said, damn near impossible isn’t the same thing as impossible. The fake glass behind us flexed outwards before it broke with a loud popping sound. There was a fleeting sense of weightlessness as we hit the empty space of open air before gravity kicked in and the ground started to rush up towards us. I held onto Chad’s scrubs with one hand as we fell, throwing wild rabbit punches with the other and trying to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable end result of gravity.

The feeling of hitting the ground after a thirty-foot drop is damn near indescribable. There is a sudden stop followed by a brief moment of total blackness. Not unconsciousness mind you, you’re still completely aware of the fact that you just slammed into unyielding earth. It’s just a flash of nothingness behind your eyes and a quick instance of total, weightless comfort while your brain tries to catch up with the trauma that was just inflicted on the body. Then there’s the pain. It's a completely new, startlingly bright variety of pain. It raced across my nerves in tiny little bombing runs of agony. The taste of blood filled my mouth, pooling in the back of my throat and threatening to choke me. I bit back a scream as another, absolutely new breed of misery came to life in my arm, pulsing in rhythm with the now familiar pain in my chest. A piece of plastic roughly the size and shape of a pizza slice had pierced clean through the muscle in my upper arm when we’d hit the ground.

Thankfully, Chad had taken the brunt of the fall, since well, I had landed on top of him. The green glow of his eyes radiated pure, clean, pristine hatred.

Even with a demon riding your body, there’s only so much abuse it can take before it’s rendered useless. Granted, that damage is above and beyond what you could endure without a hell spawn as a co-pilot, but it has its limits. I could take a hell of a beating, but shoot me in the face and I was as dead as the next guy. I assumed the same was true of Chad.

I didn’t have any intention of waiting to see if Chad had reached that threshold. I pushed up to my hands and knees, fighting to breath, to stop my vision from swimming and blurring. Looking up, I could see the faces of hospital staff peering out at us through the empty window.

I stood and started moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between Chad, the hospital, and myself. I stumbled once, falling to my knees and fighting through an agonizing fit of coughing. Blood sprayed from my mouth, splattering against the grass. It took me a few seconds to make the world stop spinning long enough to brave a second attempt at flight.

Behind me, I could hear Chad stirring, fighting to sit up. I chanced a quick glance over my shoulder. He was staring blankly at two sharp ends of bone jutting out of his skin just above the wrist. He tried to stand, the knee I had snapped folding underneath him, spilling him to the ground. He let out another of those weird modulating screams and began dragging himself across the ground towards me. It was damn freaky, using just his hands, he was pulling himself across the ground faster than most people could run and that was with one arm broken to tatters. I didn't want to think about what would happen, out here in the open, if he had been whole. He'd have run me down in a second.

I didn’t bother to hang around and see how long it would take him to get to me. I forced myself to my feet, spitting out another mouthful of blood and started to haul as much ass as my battered body would allow. I went as hard as I could towards the parking lot, each agonizing step threatening to pull me into unconsciousness.

I ducked down, getting as low to the ground as I could once I hit the rows of expensive luxury cars. I used them for cover, pausing only long enough to try and catch my breath before pushing on, peering around bumpers to make sure another psychotic, demon possessed citizen of Boston wasn’t waiting to rip my face off. I looked behind me and for a moment had to fight the urge to laugh. I had left more than a few bloodstains on gleaming, mirror like paint jobs and my inner anarchist was yipping with glee at the thought of the owner's faces. I could almost see the three piece suit types falling into epileptic fits at what had become of their precious cars.

Maggie had the little sedan running when I got there. I tore open the back door and all but fell into the backseat. I curled up, taking a minute to orient myself, to try and get the pain under some sort of control. In the distance, I could hear approaching sirens.

“We need to go,” I choked out.

Maggie whipped the car out of the parking space, tearing through the lot. The alternating motions of braking and accelerating around corners set every wound I’d gotten in the past twenty-four hours -which were still in the process of healing- into a brilliant wash of misery. Spots flooded my vision and the world spun in a dizzying, carnival-like moment of vertigo. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to throw up, pass out, or both.

Lucy said something. It didn’t register. I looked at my arm, the piece of plastic piercing the skin and the blood soaking me down to my wrist.

“Give me something for the bleeding,” I said through clenched teeth.

Lucy tossed something into the backseat. I grabbed the plastic shard that had ripped through my arm, took a deep breath, and braced myself and pulled. I bit down, stopping the scream before it could pour out of my mouth. A rush of endorphins hit my system and everything settled down into a sharp, constant ache. I grabbed whatever it was Lucy had tossed me, her shirt apparently, and wrapped it around the wound. Blood began to seep through it almost instantly, staining the light blue fabric a dark, blackish purple.

I sat up, keeping pressure over the cut. Blearily, I looked at the hospital as we left the parking lot. Ambulances, police cars, fire trucks, the whole kit and caboodle were arriving, their lights making the hospital’s exterior into something that looked like an outdoor daylight rave. People in uniforms darted here and there, directing and pointing each other towards the building.

They didn’t even notice us.

I saw Chad for an instant, just a flash of movement across the grass.

“Ya gonna make it?” Maggie asked, looking at me in the rear view. I turned around and did my best not to stare at Lucy’s bare stomach, the curves of flesh under the black lace of her bra.

“Hope so,” I said through clenched teeth. “Where are we going?”

“Church, it’s the only place that’s safe for ‘er right now.”

“No,” I snapped.

Lucy didn’t say a word. She sat, same as she had on her bed in her room, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her legs, staring blankly out the windshield.

Maggie chuckled, a low, melodious sound in the silence of the car.

“The fuck are you laughing at?” I asked her.

“You. It’s so cute ‘ow you think you ‘ave any say in this what-so-ever.”

“It’ll take me longer to get whole there,” I said, wincing as I tied the shirt off around my arm. The bleeding had finally started to abate.

She looked like she was thinking it over before she finally shrugged.

“Tough,” she said.

Chapter 7

Maggie and Lucy had to all but carry me from the car. Once we’d gotten on church grounds the bond with Alice severed and my body was battered with what felt like a thousand new varieties of aches and pains. My arm started bleeding again. I could taste more blood rising in the back of my throat to settle thickly on the back of my tongue. I had managed to knit together a bit on the ride over, but now, without a healthy helping of demon mojo, I could barely stay conscious.

I saw Hernandez and Yavetta rushing towards us from a back room. There were words directed at the three of us, but I couldn’t follow the conversation. It all just coalesced into a mindless drone of noise. I remember being carried into the kitchen in the back, hefted onto one of the stainless steel tables, being washed away in another tidal wave of pain and nausea, and then blackness. A very warm and wonderfully comfortable blackness at that.

I wasn’t sure how long it been before I came drifting back to reality. I woke up in my room stretched out on the bed, a bottle of Tylenol glaring like a beacon of hope from the desktop. I fought up to a sitting position and grabbed the bottle, dry swallowing six of the pills. It hurt, but it was at least a more manageable level now. By manageable, it meant I was capable of thought and consciousness at least, though moving anything sucked more than I care to mention. My wounds had been tended. A large compression bandage was wrapped around my chest and while it still hurt to breathe, it wasn’t complete agony. My arm was also bandaged. I could see penny size spots of dark red standing in stark contrast to the white gauze.

I fought up to my feet and after a burst of dizziness, made my way to the church proper and sat in one of the back pews. I let my thoughts drift, thinking about nothing in particular, killing time until it was late and I could get out of the church and try and sort this out on my own. The slow gnawing of addiction had already started and I was doing my best to ignore it, to not feed it the attention that would make it grow into a rampaging force of destruction inside my psyche.

“Want company?” I heard Lucy ask.

I turned. She was standing in the center aisle. Her once bare torso now, much to my chagrin, covered by a sweater. More to my chagrin, the sweater was at least two sizes too big. She looked tiny, almost frail, floating in the massive swath of fabric. Her hair hung limp in her face, the different shades of blue, green and aqua playing in sharp contrast to the light bronze of her skin.

I shrugged and slid over, offering her a place to sit.

“I never was much for churches,” she said, settling down into the spot next to me. She sounded surprisingly together compared to earlier. Then again, there wasn’t some crazed lunatic trying to tear her apart with its bare hands, which probably did wonders for her composure.