The Glooming (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 1) (6 page)

Jennifer grabbed at her curly bleach blonde hair and screamed as Sandra frantically looked around. From the proximity of the sound, the voice came from within the living room, in fact, it seemed like it was right next to them.

Sandra looked at Jennifer with a growing fear in her eyes. “Who’s saying that?”

Jennifer said nothing as her mouth was agape, drops of saliva drooling down from it. Her shaking index finger was pointed near the edge of the rug.

Sandra turned and looked down, but all she could see was Jennifer’s pet carrier on the carpet and her dog sitting on its hind legs right beside it. “Where?”

Jennifer was stammering. It was clear she was starting to lose it. “I-it’s your dog!”

Sandra looked at her in disbelief before facing Bibsy again. “Are you crazy? Dogs can’t talk. He’s just an animal. God decreed that only mankind can talk.”

“Wrong again, you big stupid, white hairless monkey. Why don’t you stick another sandwich in your big fat mouth and just shut up,” the dog said to them.

It was all just too much for them. Jennifer started to wail, grabbed a small throw pillow on the couch, and tried to shield her face with it. Sandra took a small ceramic leprechaun that was adorning the coffee table and got ready to throw it at Bibsy. The dog tilted its head slightly to the side.

“You wanna play catch now?” the dog said while Jennifer kept on screaming.

Sandra’s hand was shaking. She couldn’t believe what was happening. “Get out of my house, you spawn of Satan! The Lord is my shepherd and I shall not want, let him deliver me from your evil!”

“Oh come now,” Bibsy said. “You didn’t even get half of that verse right, you bimbo. By the way, you’re definitely not a Christian. You can call yourself one, but that doesn’t make it true.”

Jennifer’s screams continued. Sandra tried throwing the ornament at her dog but missed wildly as it shattered on the living room floor. Then she remembered that Donald had a gun in the bedroom. There was an unholy thing in her house and it was her Christian duty to destroy it.

“Hang on, Jennifer, I’m going to get Donald’s gun!” Sandra said as she started to make her way towards the master bedroom.

“Aah, don’t leave me with that thing!” Jennifer bawled as she got up and sprinted after her.

Both women ran into the master bedroom. Jennifer was crying her eyes out, her tears were streaming down her cheeks and had melted her makeup, making her look like some grotesque cabaret performer with raccoon eyes. Sandra desperately opened Donald’s nightstand drawer and began to frantically rummage through the piles of papers, pens, and assorted bric-a-brac until her fingers felt the cold, bluish steel of Donald’s .38 caliber snub-nosed revolver.

Her husband had taught her how to use it years before when she went with him to a gun range for the first time. Sandra was hesitant at first but realized she needed to know how to use it in case the blacks or the Latinos ever attempted to rob them in their house so she would have a credible means of defense. She never realized that she would now have to use it to kill her demon-possessed pet Chihuahua, but it needed to be done.

As she held the gun in her hands, Sandra pulled back the revolver’s hammer with both thumbs and started to walk slowly out into the corridor towards the living room. Jennifer followed close behind, still sobbing with fear.

When both women got to the living room, Bibsy was still there, sitting quietly on his hind legs. The two of them slowly walked to the edge of the living room, right beside the stone mantelpiece of the fireplace.

Sandra’s hands were shaking as she aimed the gun at the dog. “I’m sending you back to Hell, Satan!”

Bibsy looked at them with wide-eyed curiosity. “My friend that’s sitting on top of the fireplace might have something to say about that.”

Both women turned. Jennifer’s pet cat was sitting on top of the mantelpiece just a few feet above them. Oodles instantly leapt onto Jennifer’s face and began to bite and claw at her as they both fell on the carpeted floor. Jennifer screamed while trying to grab her cat, but Oodles kept at it, raking its claws on her face with the ferocity of a small tiger.

Sandra screamed as well and aimed at the cat before pulling the trigger. The sound of the gunshot was louder than she had anticipated, and the revolver flew out of her hands and landed on the carpet as she panicked. Oodles had somehow leapt away just as she fired and Jennifer took the bullet right between her eyes. Sandra started to sob as she knelt down beside her dying best friend.

New York City

Instead of checking her phone, Detective Valerie “Val” Mendoza looked at her watch. Cell signals had been erratic in the past few days due to storms and floods. Rolling power blackouts had begun to sweep many parts of the country. Huge slowdowns of the internet had begun to occur as major gateways across countries were rapidly being lost, while service providers were doing their best to reroute data on the few still functioning servers still out there. It didn’t help matters much that there were two more airline crashes that were reported as evening fell, and that the FAA was ordering a ban on all commercial flights by midnight until they could find the true causes. The media and conspiracy websites were rife with all sorts of rumors, ranging from Muslim terrorist groups having developed a new kind of EMP weapon system that could disrupt everything, to religious zealots on the news proclaiming that the Apocalypse was about to begin, and for everyone to repent all their sins to the true god before all hell broke loose.

Valerie sighed as she leaned back and stretched her arms upwards. She sat in the front seat of the unmarked police cruiser. The only sounds inside the car came from the two-way police radio and the pitter patter of water droplets on the windshield from the rain outside. It was only her third year as an NYPD detective and already she found the job to be too monotonous. She was short and compact, with dark brown hair and olive skin. Valerie’s dad was a Puerto Rican mestizo who came over from San Juan back in the Groovy Seventies, met her mother Josefina, a young Mexican girl who worked as a nanny, and after their marriage she gave birth to almost a dozen children. Valerie was the second youngest and the only one to finish high school. The two eldest brothers in the family were dead, one from getting knifed in jail and the other from AIDS complications because he used dirty needles for his heroin habit. Three other brothers were languishing in prison. Mama Josefina endured those painful losses with a quiet stoicism she was able to instill in Valerie and her sisters. While her sisters eventually ended up in menial jobs like seamstresses and fast food workers before they got their own husbands and became traditional wives, Valerie had higher ambitions as she willed her way to finish school and get accepted into the police academy. Even though her mother had hoped she would find a husband and bear her some grandchildren, Valerie refused to get into relationships with men who were interested in her, preferring instead to single-mindedly focus on her job as a cop. Her dedication paid off after she was finally promoted to full detective. But at this point in her life, Valerie had begun to experience the slight pangs of regret. She had turned down numerous opportunities for love and a relationship. In these past few months, she had begun to realize just how empty her life was outside of her job.

The driver’s side door opened and Myron Jones sat down behind the wheel. “Here you go, Val,” he said as he placed a cardboard tray with two Styrofoam cups between them before closing the car door so the rain wouldn’t keep hitting him. “The one with the letter S is yours. No cream, only sugar.”

Valerie took one of the cups and sniffed at the brewed coffee aroma. “Thanks.”

Myron took the remaining cup, tore off the plastic lid and started sipping. “This situation is getting worse by the day.”

“Which one? The non-stop rain, all the rioting in the city as well the rest of the world? Or the one where no planes can fly and we’re about to lose all our phones and the internet?”

“All of them,” Myron said. He was almost six feet three inches when standing fully upright and was a former all-star defensive end back in his high school days, before he tore up his knee. Myron Jones came from a God-fearing, traditional black family. Brooklyn born and bred, he was a twenty-year veteran and detective first-grade, a position that belonged to the most experienced and best paid investigators the city had to offer. They had been partners ever since Valerie made it to detective. Myron was both a mentor and second father to her.

Valerie sipped at her coffee. The squawk on the police radio was incessant. Riots continued to flare up all over the city and the entire New York Police Department was working double shifts. Many of them hadn’t even been paid overtime yet because the city was already in a cash crunch when the disruptions started happening. And it was getting worse by the day. Thousands were now being detained in overcrowded holding cells, police and city psychologists could not identify the cause of the rioting other than to say there was a mass hysteria occurring. A few days ago, thousands of seemingly normal people, both the old and the young, inexplicably began to rampage through the streets and would start fires and physically attack anyone who attempted to intervene. Even when under lock and key, many of them continued their bizarre behavior and would only speak in gibberish when questioned. Firefighters and emergency crews were at their breaking point. The city was ready to explode.

Valerie hissed as she kept adjusting the controls of her handheld radio. “This stupid thing keeps losing the signal. I don’t think I can communicate with Central if I’m outside of the car.”

Myron checked his own handheld. “What about your cell phone?”

“Same thing, sometimes the signal goes out too. They’re saying we could lose the entire cell grid within the next few days if the situation doesn’t improve.”

Myron sighed. “We could lose more than just that, Val. They suspended trading on the NYSE this morning because the market couldn’t keep taking losses like it has in the past few days. All the other stock markets in the world will be doing the same thing. And they say the weird weather all over the country is killing the electrical grid. Looks like our Lord Jesus is on his way back and he’s gonna be here soon.”

Valerie smirked. She really wasn’t religious. She just didn’t have the time to even think about it. “You really believe that, Myron?”

“I dunno what to believe anymore, Val. I’m supposed to be two months from retirement and there’s still no word on Kevin either,” he said softly. Myron’s only son Kevin was in the US Army and he was stationed in Iraq. Then the unthinkable happened as a strange sandstorm had blanketed the entire region. The US military refused to admit on national TV they had lost communications with several thousand American troops in the region. Now people were starting to lose faith in the government’s ability to handle this new, terrifying crisis. Not even an hour-long appearance by the president on every single news outlet could assure everyone that the situation was under control.

Valerie turned away and looked down. “I’m so sorry, Myron. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Myron placed a reassuring hand on her left arm and smiled slightly. “Hey, I was the one who brought it up so don’t worry about it.”

The squawk on the police radio got louder. “Thirty-two Delta, two down, possible knife assault at seventy-two Baruch Drive.”

Valerie grabbed the microphone as Myron started the car. “Thirty-two Delta responding. Can we get backup?”

“Be advised, no backup available at this time,” Central said over the radio.

“Ten-four. En route to location,” Valerie said on the microphone before putting it back on the side of the radio.

“Shit,” Myron said as he activated the dashboard siren while pressing on the accelerator. The rain came down harder as it pelted the windshield of the speeding car.

Valerie grabbed the microphone again. “Thirty-two Delta to Central, any word on the victim’s conditions? Is a medical team on the way?”

“No other information, Thirty-two Delta. A civilian called it in. Said there were two men on the ground with stab wounds, both black. We’re trying to get emergency crews to you as soon as we can.”

“That means the paramedics will get there in a few hours,” Myron said as he made a left turn into West Houston Street and sped on. They would be in the Lower East Side in a few minutes and then make the final turn into Baruch Drive. There were very few cars left on the streets because people were fearfully staying in their homes as many businesses stayed closed earlier during the day, while schools were suspended indefinitely.

It was the largest low-income housing project in Manhattan. Baruch Houses covered almost thirty acres and the two thousand apartments that were spread out in seventeen seven-story high-rise apartments that were built in the tail end of the fifties. By the twenty-first century, most of the residents were comprised of Hispanics and blacks who needed government subsidies in order to live in Manhattan. Both Myron and Valerie knew the area well, they had been called over there numerous times back when they were still rank and file police officers.

Baruch Drive was a residential street that cut directly into the heart of the area. As the car slowed and made its way to the crime scene, the squawk on the police radio had begun to lose reception, as the constant updates from the dispatchers were interrupted by static white noise. Both detectives noticed that only one or two streetlights were working, huge parts of the street and the surrounding apartment buildings were covered in an eerie darkness. Unpicked trash and debris littered the sides of the lane. Myron cursed again.

As the car made its way to the scene, both detectives noticed that there were three of them. Two men on the ground and another man kneeling over them. Valerie couldn’t make out their faces, as the only illumination came from their car’s headlights. Myron maneuvered the car so that its front was facing the three men before coming to a full stop. Both detectives grabbed flashlights and buttoned up their coats as they got out of the vehicle.