Fic: The Second-Best Rank (6/?)
The rain stopped. Heavy downpour became nothing at all and brutal winds died to a breeze. Shouts made to be heard over the noise faded into silence. The thirty people crammed into the armory looked around, some surprised, some tense. Without the excuse of the storm to keep everyone indoors, it suddenly seemed not just crowded in there but oppressive and hot, too.
Dean shoved his way past elbows and guns to the closest window, which was to the left of the door. The road outside was covered by a whole lot of fallen debris, but that was it. No demons wandered into view, neither smoke nor possessed humans.
He turned back to face the people crammed into the room. Everyone looked soaked and some people were shivering, but no one looked scared or tired, just determined and angry. That was good.
Vince stood at a window that faced the store house. He met Dean’s eyes and raised his thumb high enough to be seen over Thomas gigantic shoulder. The signal meant everyone in the other who’d been ushered into the store house was all right.
Dean nodded his thanks. “Okay, everyone. Let’s go.”
He led the way out the armory and down the steps onto the road. Behind him, men and women pushed aside chairs or pushed off of walls, grabbed and cocked shotguns or checked .45’s and other guns one last time. A puddle splashed under Dean’s boots. The store house door opened and twenty-two more people poured out of it, Jahanyar among them.
As his people took their positions, Dean stopped in the middle of the road and assessed the damage. It didn’t look good.
Storm clouds lingered overhead, dark and heavy with more water as if none had fallen at all. They blotted out any sunlight and dimmed the colors down in camp, if there was even a camp anymore. The dirt road was a sea of mud, puddles and clusters of branches. On the other side, the roof of one of the tin shacks had collapsed under a toppled pine tree. So much for their bullet molds; at least they’d had the sense to keep the salt in the store house, away from any tall trees. The grass that had been allowed to grow wild around the practice range was flattened. The grass usually hid the remains of the Impala, but not now. Dean caught sight of its rusted body and tore his eyes away. Its frame hadn’t caved in the storm, not that it mattered; not anymore.
Dean pushed aside a large branch and dashed across the road. His shoes squished and stuck in mud for a moment before he pulled them free. Two trucks were parked in front of the ruined shack, just beside the entrance to the camp. The entrance and the wall to either side of it had been torn to shreds. The rest of the wall around camp was probably the same. The gates and the wall had been stripped down to their frames and support beams. A few boards hung on by a nail or two, decorating the frames with abstract graffiti, incomplete bits of sigils that were useless now. Other boards lay in haphazard piles in the mud both inside and outside of camp. The wind had probably carried away the rest. Dean had an almost unobstructed view of the forest outside the camp.
He glanced back across the road at the cabin row he’d just left. He couldn’t see the other rows, but this first row looked alright, except for the cabin closest to the wall. A few boards from the fence had smashed a hole through its side. The other five cabins were missing some shingles, and the glass in a couple windows had burst, but that was all. He hoped the kids, Giddy Thompson and anyone else who couldn’t fight were all right. Chuck, Risa and Yasmine had gathered them together in Jahanyar and Gretta’s cabin, which was more or less in the center of the cabin rows.
Dean wished they’d buried more iron in the ground. He wished they’d had enough iron to surround the entire camp. The walls had been the best idea they’d ever had, for all the good it would do them now. He rounded the side of the truck closest to the now useless wall and dropped to a crouch. The truck and the partly collapsed shack would give him some cover from the ground, though not from above. There were better places to go, but his people were quickly filling those spots.
Jahanyar and Gretta, darted off between two of the cabins, headed for their cabin. Four others followed after them, stepping over or around debris. They’d join Chuck and protect the kids the best they could, though hopefully the sigils on the underside of the cabin’s roof would hold and they wouldn’t have to do much.
About forty-five men and women spread out. Gun barrels appeared in broken or open windows of the cabins. Others would be peering out the windows in the other walls of the cabins, scanning the skies in all directions. A few people, including Yasmine and Barbara, crouched low behind the railings of stair landings. Vince joined Dean behind the truck, and Nate and a couple others crouched behind the second truck. Ten more people joined the people already in the cabins, each carrying boxes of extra ammo and bags of salt. A young man juggling salt and ammo in his arms joined Dean and Vince. Dean was pretty sure the kid’s name was Zack.
A megaphone stuck out a window in the storeroom. Grace stood behind it with Risa beside her.
They were missing 30 people, way too many. Only Nate, Jackie and a couple others had returned from watch duty on the wall. Some of the guards who’d been walking around camp hadn’t shown up, either.
“Look alive, people!” Dean called, and got answering shouts from the area. He didn’t know for sure where the demons would show up, but they’d always had a flare for drama; if they were going to infiltrate camp, it would be right through the now useless entrance. Still, just to be sure, guns pointed in all directions; some toward the lake and the other cabins, some at the gates, and the rest at the sky. They were as ready as they were going to be.
“I wonder why they stopped the storm,” Vince said quietly. “We can shout exorcisms now; we couldn’t before.”
It was a good question.
“Demon clouds!” someone-it sounded like Darren-called.
Dean started to shout, “Where?” when he heard them. A single demon cloud was like a wind storm, but the noise that rumbled across the sky was like a hundred helicopter propellers.
The gray storm clouds high up in the atmosphere provided the backdrop. A swarm of coiling, bodiless black demons cut paths through the air. They came from all directions, streaking the sky and rapidly closing the gap in the middle, the empty space directly above camp.
Guns cocked and shifted. “Hold your positions!” Dean called. This wouldn’t be all of it; he just had that feeling.
Grace’s voice rose up to clash with the drone of the clouds. The exorcism had no affect; the demons were several thousand feet aboveground, too far away to hear her. She kept on anyway. Her words would affect the demons as soon as they dared fly down. Dean decided right then and there that he liked her.
The gates buckled. The road visible through the gates was empty. Something invisible slammed again into the gates. The frame creaked from the strain. A few more boards fell off and splattered in the mud. Vince tensed, and Dean shifted until he had a better line of sight on the road.
The gates burst open and slammed against the wall to either side before the hinges gave up and the gates’ remains collapsed. The gap was wide enough to pass two cars through.
Silence returned, interrupted only by Grace’s voice. No birds called; they were probably still in hiding after the storm. Someone scuffed a boot across a floor. Someone else cleared their throat.
Come on, you pieces of shit, Dean thought.
The road outside of camp was made of broken concrete and mud-filled potholes. It disappeared around a bend of trees, where it was swallowed by the forest. A pine tree and some broken-off branches lay in the road. There were too many places to hide out there, too many spots where Camp Chitaqua could be observed by attackers. As if to prove his point, shadows shifted within the trees, lots of them. Men, women and even kids stepped from the tree cover and converged on the road. They wore old clothing, some of it ripped in places, but that was no different from the campers. More and more possessed people filed out of the woods and joined their friends. It looked like sixty people, and more were coming.
They were too far away to shoot at. They wouldn’t be close enough until they were almost in camp.
The demons marched forward, crunching over branches and tossing the bigger ones aside. Twenty feet from the destroyed gates, Grace’s voice finally reached them. Spasms shook the front row, driving them to their knees. The rest of the foot soldiers paused just outside of the range of Grace’s voice and watched. The front row screamed, and smoke shot from their mouths into the sky. The worst was the cry of a girl who could have been eleven. Her eyes bulged in shock as the smoke was forced from her body. She collapsed with the others. Her eyes turned glossy and dead.
The exorcised demons twisted in the air, flailing in pain or trying to force their way back to the camp. The words did their work, though, and sent all ten of them on the same path westward, away from camp and toward a devil’s gate somewhere over the horizon.
The demon fog in the sky that had been there already didn’t follow their exorcised friends. Instead, they closed the gap in the sky just over camp. With a collective roar, they shot down like birds of prey.
Letting out their own war cries, the possessed people rushed the entrance. They stepped over the dead hosts of their colleagues as if the bodies were no better than the fallen pine branches. They climbed over boards and followed into the camp.
There was no time to wait for Grace’s next exorcism. Forty guns fired. Rock salt and blessed bullets rent the fog spiraling down toward camp. More rounds tore into demon chests. Their bodies jerked and spattered blood. Some of them stumbled but kept going, while others vomited demon smoke, their stolen bodies too destroyed to stay in them.
One SOB’s shirt was ripped to shreds, but he met Dean’s gaze and stepped slowly toward the truck.
Dean ran out of bullets and grabbed the rounds Zack held out. Vince kept on shooting and finally sent the demon to his knees. He hit the truck on the other side and made it bounce.
Dean pushed the fresh rounds into the barrel of the shotgun, took aim at the demons still standing and pulled the trigger.
The road inside the camp, between the cabins and the trucks, was a mess of fallen and upright bodies. Blood mingled and swirled in puddles. A quarter of the possessed demons had been taken down, but the demons who’d been forced by rock salt from their bodies hadn’t been exorcised. They shot into the clouds, twisted around and arched back down with their friends, picked up speeds as they descended.
Bullets tore holes into the demon smoke, making the smoke roar in fury and agony. Other bits of demon fog twisted around their injured friends dodged around their injured friends and kept on coming.
Dean helped take out more of the demons with bodies. The gun retorted in his grip as he counted down rock salt-loaded bullet casings.
A human scream reached his ears. A demon riding in a middle-aged woman had grabbed a hold of Darren’s arm and squeezed. Darren sagged from the pain. The demon pulled and dragged him through the wooden railing around the armory’s porch. Darren hit the ground hard. The demon brought down her heel hard into his skull.
Thomas appeared in the armory’s doorway. He unloaded bullet after bullet into the bitch and screamed an exorcism while he was at it. Dean would have loved to help, but not at this distance with so fifty more demons in the space between them.
A roar of wind overrode gunshots. A single coil of demon smoke spiraled toward them. It was only feet away and so loud it soon drowned out all other sounds.
The fog descended so fast the air shrieked. The breeze it kicked up pressed against Dean, Vince and Zack. Dean grabbed their shoulders and pushed them down. The fog closed in and spread between the cabins, across the road and around the trucks. It surrounded Dean at all sides. His arms plunged into it, gripping onto arms he couldn’t see.
The fog passed by, leaving Dean, Vince and the kid crouched in the mud behind the truck. The kid was trembling in Dean’s grip. Dean squeezed his arm, let go and grabbed the shotgun still in his lap.
The demons were gone. The sky was clear of demon fog, though not of storm clouds. The demons who still had bodies had vanished.
All the fog had done was act as a distraction. It hadn’t knocked anything over or done any other damage. Men and women peaked out of the cabins or peered from behind their cover.
Yasmine, Barbara and Darren lay on the ground, unmoving, along with twenty-six demon corpses. Blood was everywhere, on cabin walls, on the ground, even splattered on Dean’s cheeks.
“Where did they go? We didn’t even take out half of them!” Vince looked as bewildered and suspicious as Dean felt.
“Does anyone else hear that?” Zack asked.
The drone of helicopters was still there, but it was faint now. The demon fog hadn’t left; they’d just retreated. Dean scanned the skies but saw nothing.
This couldn’t be good. The demons must have been planning something different. He shot to his feet. “Everyone, get the fuck back indoors! Now!”