Chapter 1: Emergency Exorcism
I had been at the side of my wife’s hospital bed when I caught the smell of evil.
I didn’t know where it was or who generated it. But it shouldn’t be in a hospital.
I looked at Mariel. My wife was asleep after another hard day of chemotherapy. It hadn’t been fun, but she’d been fighting the cancer in her head for the past three years. There hadn’t been any improvement, and she wasn’t getting worse, so win-win. But the chemotherapy still knocked the wind out of her. That was with a mystical artifact propping her up and healing her constantly—it didn’t shrink the tumor, but by all accounts, it kept the thing at bay.
When I concluded she would stay asleep if I left the room, I rose and strode into the empty hallway. At that hour, the hospital might as well have been deserted. The lights were either dim or off. While I had never badged anyone, something about my manner had convinced the hospital staff that “visiting hours” didn’t apply to me.
In my experience, the average hospital was laid out like the average battleship—go up or down to cross over, to take the stairs to that deck, which is only accessible via one entrance.
Thankfully, I didn’t need to travel far.
The creature was in the form of a human being. It was as tall as I was, blonde and lithe. I kept coming for it, not breaking stride.
“Yo, Doctor,” I barked.
The thing stopped and turned to face me. I say “thing” because its eyes glowed a sickly yellow, the pupils vertical reptilian slits.
That was enough confirmation for me. I didn’t hesitate when I drew my gun and fired three rounds into its face. One went down its throat, and it made a motion like it had choked on something. The second round caught it in the eye. The first struck it in the forehead, snapping its head back.
It staggered back and gave me an evil look. I didn’t care. I slid away my pistol and grabbed the grip of the tactical baton on my belt. I drew it and brought it to my side like a sword.
With a thought, I turned on the hard-light kendo blade my son, the comic book fan, called the angelblade.
The creature leaped for me. In midair, it grew and expanded. The fingers grew into claws, the talons two feet long and razor sharp. The arms grew black and spindly. The face twisted and elongated into a muzzle with long teeth.
I stepped into the middle of the arc and swung the angelblade over my head. The blade slammed into the creature’s face. The arc carried it down the blade, bisecting the beast lengthwise.
It fell to the ground in two pieces.
The blade snapped closed at my thought. I slipped it away and started back to Mariel’s room.
Except the smell hadn’t gone away.
I glanced at the body. It was in the process of melting away, like most monsters I’d encountered in the last seventeen years. I had figured that they weren’t bodies, but matter held together by the will of the creatures in question. Kill the creature, the body melted.
The smell usually went with it.
I swiveled, clearing the immediate area, and even looked up. Nothing was there. Not even hospital staff. That part didn’t surprise me. Most New Yorkers I knew ran away from the sound of gunfire. It was loud and off-putting.
I considered checking the service access in the ceiling, but I didn’t feel like walking into a situation where I could be within swinging distance before I even saw what was coming.
I stood and swept the floor three times in an effort to get a lock on the threat. I frowned, thinking how to go about this. If I scared it enough, it could escape into the rest of the hospital and be impossible to hunt down.
I frowned, thinking it over. I pulled my blade handle and pointed it at the ceiling. I focused on what I wanted to do and how it should act. The nurses’ station was far down the hallway. None of them would dare come close until the situation was resolved. There would be plenty of time for me to tend to this before security showed up. Because if I didn’t solve the problem by then, I would probably be dead, and it would no longer be my problem.
I thought at the angelblade and fired off a ball of light, like a grenade. It punched into the ceiling and detonated, flooding the service access pathways with light so bright, it lit up the entire hospital floor.
Something screamed and fell out of the ceiling. It crashed down so hard, it felt like a bomb had hit the building.
Then another crash followed on the heels of the first.
And then a third.
Aw hell.
I charged for the main hall and looked both ways.
There was a creature down both ends of the hall. Without their camouflage, they looked like something created by HR Geiger. They were eight feet tall, black armored, spiny and spiky, with needle-like tails almost as long as they were tall. The only difference between them and Geiger’s famous monster was that their heads were that of big black goats. Goats with three-inch razor-sharp teeth, but goats.
I squinted down the hall at the nurse’s desk, where I had expected screams. The nurse was there, but her head wasn’t. Her white nurse uniform was red with fresh blood. But the desk itself was undisturbed, from what I could tell.
I charged away from the monster near the desk, heading for the one at the other end of the hall. It was closer to me than the other. Not to mention that the nurse’s desk was where the hallway’s T-junction met... I figured that the third thump was down that hall. I only wanted to face one creature at a time, especially where civilians might be at risk.
I charged for the thrashing monster. My joints ached as I pounded down the hallway, heading for the beast at full speed.
Before I had closed the space to fifty paces, the monster was on all fours and ready for me. It charged at me like a rhinoceros.
When we closed to thirty paces, it leapt for me.
I immediately stopped dead, then burst backward.
The monster didn’t have time to correct. It was already in mid-arc when I changed direction. When it made the leap, it had aimed for where I would be at my current rate of speed.
The beast tried to correct by extending its arms so the talons would rend me apart.
With a quick clockwise swing, the angelblade went from nine o’clock to three—taking off the creature’s right hand at the upswing—then came down on the left hand.
Without any hands to land on, the beast crashed face-first into the floor tiles.
It was at the perfect height for me to thrust the blade straight into its mouth. The blade came out the back of its neck, cutting the spine. With a final flourish, I sliced through the top of the creature’s head and swung it down to lop at the neck.
As its bulk collapsed into pieces and thumped to the ground, I spun around.
The next beast charged down the hall, teeth bared. It walked on two feet, its hulk bent over as it closed with me.
I switched the angelblade from one hand to the other and drew my gun. I willed the blade to add another touch to the format. From the tip of the blade, a light flared and bloomed out like an umbrella.
Yes, the effect was like an umbrella. Don’t laugh. The beast slammed into the shield and bounced off, the impact triggering a blast that knocked it back.
The impact also slammed me backwards. I skidded down the tiles and into the mess that was the last creature I had killed. The slime continued to destabilize, but it felt like I had landed in an oil slick. I landed on my back, unable to roll away.
The living creature bounced back and loomed over me.
Without thinking, I raised the angelblade so the tip pointed right at the thing’s chest, and fired.
The entire length of the blade shot forth, spearing the monster in the chest.
It gaped, the goat mouth hanging open as it staggered back.
The creature didn’t get a chance to die from its wounds. The final beast slammed into the dying monster and threw it aside.
Without hesitation, I fired energy bursts from the angelblade hilt as well as bullets from my handgun. The energy blasts softened up the armor enough for the bullets to punch through and kill it.
I lay on the floor for a moment, sliding away my weapons. The melted monster puddle had evaporated, but I didn’t feel like getting up until my heart settled to a comfortable rate somewhere below “beating out Morse code.”
By the time I sat up, all the creatures had melted away. One or two people were brave enough to stick their heads out into the hallway, seeing if the coast was clear.
I made it to my feet, and headed back to my wife’s hospital room. I made sure the havoc was contained to in the hallway. Normally, I would have called in the cops. We would have done our due diligence on the dead nurse at the desk. It would have to be reclassified an FBI matter with the Joint Supernatural Taskforce (mine was officially labeled a Joint Terrorism Task Force, but no one asked me to clarify). At a later date, we could honestly close the file with the conclusion that the perps were dead.
But at that moment, I just wanted to be with my wife.
My name is Lieutenant Thomas Nolan. And I am a saint.