V.J. Chambers - Jason&Azazel Apocalypse 01 (4 page)

After dinner, we sat around the smoldering coals of the grill as twilight set in. I listened to the chatter and laughter of Marlena, Hallam, and their group. They were one of the scouting units.

Their mission was to get west. They’d been on the move for months. While they were frustrated with the fact that Jason had halted their progress, I could tell they enjoyed the chance to wait it out here for a bit. The more permanent encampment seemed to suit them. It was a warm, spring day, but as the sun set, the air grew colder. I shivered in my t-shirt and shorts for a bit, but then I went back in to get some warmer clothing from my duffel.

As I was emerging from my little sleeping area, now in jeans and a sweatshirt, Kieran met me at the door. Scant light filtered in through the windows of the room, turning the guns into long, black shadows. I could barely see the features of Kieran’s face.

“Hey,” he said. “I just came to check on you.”

I gestured to my new outfit. “I was cold.”

“Right.”

I started to push past him, but he stopped me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I didn’t need Kieran to comfort me. I was glad he’d had my back when we were talking to Hallam and Marlena, but that didn’t mean we were best friends or something.

I started for the hallway.

“Look,” said Kieran, “I didn’t ask for them to assign me to come with you.”

I stopped and turned to him. His hair was catching the last bit of light from outside. It glowed, surrounding his head like a halo. “I know.”

“When we talked right before we left, you said we were cool.”

“We are cool.”

“Okay, so why the silent treatment? Why are you treating me like some asshole?”

I rolled my eyes in the darkness. I didn’t have time for this. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings.”

“That’s not what I mean. I just don’t see why we can’t be adults about this.”

“I don’t see how being adults means we have to be best friends.”

“You know, I was drunk too.”

“Oh thanks,” I said. “This has been real comforting, Kieran, but seriously.” I stepped into the hallway.

“Come on,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean, you’re gorgeous and smart and awesome.

I would have done it if I wasn’t drunk, but—”

I closed my eyes. “I just want to pretend it didn’t happen.” Which would be a lot easier, if I wasn’t still waiting for my—

“I don’t,” he said. “We were lonely. Both of us. The world exploded. It’s okay that we needed some comfort, some human contact. It can just be that. We can still be friends.”

“We have never been friends. And I’m sorry, but just because I got wasted and let you play hide the salami with me does not mean we’re a couple or buddies or that I have to tell you how I’m feeling.”

“Azazel.”

“Let’s just find the Key of Asher and get the hell out of here. Please?”

I started down the hallway.

“Fine,” he muttered. “Sure.” He paused, and then called after me, “Was it really bad or something?”

I stopped. Turned. It had been awesome. Really awesome. The best since Jason. But if I told him that… I opened my mouth.

And then I heard the screaming, outside of the church. Kieran and I exchanged a look of alarm and then we both scrambled towards the door.

Chapter Three

Everyone was outside, standing in a tight bunch. One of the women was still screaming. I ran forward, pulling people aside to see what was going on. They were standing around a bundle of cloth, stained red.

I swore.

“Don’t look at it, Azazel,” Hallam said. “We found it at the edge of the woods. There was a stirring like a deer or something, but we think someone left it there.”

But I had to. I knew what it was, but I had to see it and make sure. I knelt on the ground next to the bundle and pulled aside the edges. Some of the blood—I was sure it was blood—got on my fingers, but I didn’t bother wiping it off. I just opened the bundle, like it was a Christmas present.

The cloth was white. Maybe it was from a sheet. The edges were fraying. It was tough to see what was in it at first, because there was so much blood. But I stared at it and forced my mind to recognize what it was seeing. One toe. Several fingers—most were pinkies, but one was a thumb.

They’d come from more than one person, because the thumb was definitely male, and so was one of the pinkie fingers. The other belonged to a female. I couldn’t tell about the toe.

I rocked back so that I was sitting in the grass, my knees at my chest. “He did this for my benefit.”

“Who?” said Marlena.

“Who do you think?”

Hallam was rubbing his forehead with his hand. “It’s the scouting party. The ones who I sent out for fuel and food. The ring on that finger belongs to Lily.”

“Jason didn’t do this.” Marlena’s voice had gotten shrill.

“He’s done it before,” I said. I stood up. “He did it to his mother.”

“Listen to me,” Marlena said. “Listen. When that boy was five years old, he fell down outside on the sidewalk, and he scraped his knee, and I bandaged it for him. He is not capable of—”

Hallam drew Marlena into his chest. She quieted. Then she pushed him away and walked off, putting distance between herself and the body parts.

“He cut off body parts of his mother?” Kieran asked me in a low voice.

“She wasn’t a very nice lady,” I said. “Not that it makes it okay.”

Hallam’s face was pale. He stroked his beard nervously.

“This is a message,” I told Hallam. “He said he would make you leave. You need to do what I said. Break camp. Find a way around him.”

“I’m not leaving my scouting crew with him,” Hallam said. “They’re still alive, don’t you think?”

I nodded.

“The woman in the scouting crew had the Key of Asher, didn’t she?” Kieran said.

Hallam glared at him. “For God’s sake! What’s so important about the grimoire anyway? She’s lost a finger.”

Kieran was right. Damn it. I needed that book of magic. I’d come miles and miles for it. I took a deep breath. “We’ll get the scouting party back.”

“Oh, how do you propose to do that?” Hallam laughed wildly.

“You said it yourself,” I said. “If anyone can take Jason on, it’s me. We’ll get them back.” And the grimoire.

“We need to radio this in,” said Kieran. “I think I’ve almost got it fixed. Hallam, do you want to give me a hand?”

Hallam looked from Kieran to the bundle of body parts on the lawn. He threw his hands into the air.

In the distance, the crickets were chirping.

* * *

I was used to sleeping on hard floors and on the ground. Ever since I’d been recruited to work for the government, I’d been doing just that. There was no electricity, people were going crazy, and I was travelling all over the coast, trying to gather up as much gasoline, natural gas, and other fuels as I could. They needed me because I could influence people’s brains. Make them do things. I helped a lot. If we went into a community and started pumping out all the gasoline from the neighborhood gas station, people tended to get annoyed with us, whether we were the government or not. We could subdue them with the threat of force, usually. If that didn’t work, using some actual force usually did. But the government liked having me around so they didn’t have to shoot civilians. I could just convince everyone to walk away.

But I hated doing it. I hated using my power or magic or whatever you wanted to call it. I’d put my foot down about a month ago. “No more,” I’d said. The government might not understand the true nature of my magic, but I did. I didn’t know exactly why, but the power had a perverse sensibility. It liked to wreak havoc and cause destruction. If I tried to use it a different way, it would goad me and seduce me. There was a voice I always heard. It was raspy and ghostly. It liked blood. It always tricked me. No matter how I tried to keep people from getting hurt, it always made me do it.

I did not want to hurt people anymore. I hated it. Killing people had destroyed me. Maybe I’d done it in self-defense before, but I didn’t like the way it made me feel. Hard. Emotionless. And sometimes…oh God, sometimes, I even felt like I enjoyed it. That was what scared me the most about the power. The thought that maybe the voice didn’t come with the magic. Maybe it was just me. Maybe some part of me liked killing things. It made me nauseous even to consider it.

No matter how hard I tried to do good, I always managed to only do evil, awful things. Maybe the mobs of people didn’t get mowed down by army machine guns, because I convinced them to go home, but they all threw themselves off a bridge the following day because they were so depressed about the state of the world. (It happened in Tennessee.) Maybe they began shooting each other down like dogs in the street. (That was in Virginia.) The people in charge told me I was being paranoid. They said the events weren’t related. I tried to explain to them that my power had caused it, and that I’d felt it. They didn’t care.

They told me to come and get an ancient grimoire called the Key of Asher from a woman on a scouting party here in Kentucky. They thought the grimoire could help me learn to focus my magic, make it stronger. But I’d heard that the Key of Asher contained a ritual that would allow me to cleanse myself of all power. Get rid of magic entirely. That was what I planned to do.

Then the government couldn’t use me anymore. I’d have peace. It was all I wanted.

Also, cleansing myself of power would get rid of the dreams.

I might have gotten used to sleeping on hard floors, but I’d never gotten used to the dreams.

Before the lights went out, I took meds that got rid of them and made me sleep like a baby. But now I couldn’t find the pills anymore. They were prescription, and they weren’t common. By now, what little supply of them there had been seemed to be gone.

The dreams were prophetic. Sort of. They were always tangled up in symbols and imagery I couldn’t understand and interwoven with my own fears and personal demons. For a few months, I’d worked on trying to decipher them. Usually, I couldn’t. Now, I just suffered with them. I wished they were gone.

I’d inherited this lovely cocktail of powers from my late grandmother, who was a gypsy. She hadn’t used her power for anything other than destruction either, but at least her powers had limits. She’d only been able to influence impressionable minds. I’d never run into a mind I couldn’t manipulate. Maybe someday, I’d run into a block, but thus far, no.

Sometimes getting drunk made the dreams go way, sometimes not. And when I was drunk, I made great decisions, like sleeping with Kieran, which had made my life much more complicated than it needed to be. Getting drunk was never a good idea. I didn’t know why I still did it occasionally. Honestly, it was less and less of a problem these days, anyway. Alcohol was harder to find than food.

I didn’t have any problem going to sleep inside the church that night, despite the fact the floor was hard and flat and I didn’t have a pillow. None of the things I’d seen that day kept me awake—not Jason, not the bundle of body parts. I crawled into my little sleeping pallet, burrowed under the blankets they’d given me, and fell to sleep immediately.

Where the dreams were waiting.

In my dream, I was back in the mansion my grandmother had left me in her will. I was living there with my brother Chance, his girlfriend Mina, their little daughter Jenna, Jason, Hallam, and Marlena. The dream started out nice. Jason and I were cuddled in our bed, spooning. He was asleep, gently snoring at my neck, his arm curled possessively around my hip. I felt cocooned in his warmth.

Then the crying started. It was little Jenna, screaming her head off across the mansion. I snuggled closer to Jason, waiting for Mina or Chance to feed Jenna and stop her squalling.
You
do it
, rasped a voice inside me.
Shut that brat up.

I felt queasy. The voice bothered me. It always urged me to do things that scared me. But what was wrong with quieting Jenna so we could all get some rest? The screaming kept up, building into a frenzy, louder and louder. Finally, someone tapped on my door.

I slid out of bed, throwing on a robe. Mina was at my door. Her hair was frazzled and there were hollow dark circles under her eyes. “She won’t eat,” she said. “She won’t be quiet.”

I followed Mina to Jenna’s nursery, where Jenna was lying on her back, flailing her arms and legs and yelling her head off. Her little eyes were scrunched up in agony. Her face was turning red from the effort of it. I did what I always did. I picked her up and put her over my shoulder, walking and rocking with her. And as I did so, I reached out with a little bit of my magic and touched her tiny mind. I willed her to be quiet, to be calm.

And like she always did, she stopped screaming.

I handed her to Mina, who looked so grateful as she popped the bottle into Jenna’s mouth. Jenna sucked contentedly. “Thank you, Azazel,” said Mina. “You’re a miracle worker. She always gets quiet for you.”

I just shrugged, ready to go back to bed and sleep next to Jason. “Guess she just likes me.”

And all of this could have happened. It did happen, many times, on many nights. But this was a dream, not a memory, and that’s why, in the dream, the flies started crawling out of little Jenna’s ear.

At first it was just one. The tiny black bug made its way across Jenna’s soft forehead. I brushed it away, but there was soon another one, and another one. They began pouring out of her ears in a swarm, enveloping us.

Mina and I cowered, arms up against the whirlwind of flies, buzzing madly around us.

Little Jenna spit the bottle out of her mouth. “Mommy,” she said.

Never mind that she was too young to talk. In the dream, it seemed perfectly normal.

“Mommy, you shouldn’t let Aunt Azazel do magic on me anymore.”

“Magic?” whispered Mina.

“I thought it was harmless, Mina,” I told her, pleading. “I never thought…”

Flies started crawling out of little Jenna’s mouth, out of her eyes and nostrils. Her body was turning gray.

Mina held up her rotting child to me. “Azazel?” she whispered. “Azazel, what did you do to my baby?”

I woke up then. I sat straight up. It was dark and silent in the church in Columbus, Kentucky.