Demon Mania (Demon Frenzy Series Book 2) Read online

  DEMON MANIA

  A NOVEL BY

  HARVEY CLICK

  Also by Harvey Click

  Demon Frenzy

  The House of Worms

  The Bad Box

  Text copyright © 2015 Harvey Click

  All rights reserved

  Original cover art by Keith Draws

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For my wife, Rose

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 1

  The sunset was a violent burst of fire and blood beneath deep turquoise blue, but that’s not what Bruce was watching as he stared out the window of the pickup truck. He was watching the hills, boulders, trees, and shrubs and wondering if anything was lurking behind them or in the long shadows they cast. Out here there were a thousand places to hide but no place to be safe.

  “Where’d you say you’s comin’ from?” the driver asked.

  He’d asked the same question at least once before, but Bruce had ignored him. This time he said, “Omaha.” Though he had never been there, for some reason it was the first city that popped into his mind.

  “Long way to be hitchin’ without no gear or nothin’,” the driver said.

  “I travel light.”

  The driver glanced again at Bruce’s dusty clothes and torn shirt. He scratched the heavy gray stubble on his sunburned face and said nothing.

  Something large and gray darted behind a rocky bluff, maybe a coyote or maybe not, and even though Bruce was sweating he wound up the window. The road was narrow and twisty, and the few houses on it were small and poor. Inside them, lights were switching on against the coming darkness.

  “The road’s up here just a mile or so,” Bruce said.

  It was easy to miss, narrow and unmarked except by the dying oak beside it, but someone apparently had cut down the tree during the year he’d been gone, and by the time he noticed the road and got the driver to stop they had already cruised twenty feet or more past it.

  The driver pulled away as soon as Bruce shut the door, and now as he felt the twilight and silence thickening around him he wanted to chase after the truck and get back in, where at least the face beside him would be human. It had taken him the whole day to travel less than thirty miles, and his feet were tired after hours of scrambling terrified through the desert early this morning and then the long hours of trudging dusty back roads before he scored his first ride. But he walked fast, nearly jogging.

  The heat of the day was fading fast from the dry air, and the sweat on his shirt was beginning to feel like cold fingers. His skin was still greasy with incense ointment, but he was afraid by now it had lost its effect. An owl cried in the distance, but otherwise the night was still, unnaturally so he thought.

  He hurried past two small houses with their lights on and finally saw the lights of his mother’s house in the distance. A sharp pebble had found its way into one of his tennis shoes, but he quickened his pace without stopping to remove it. There was a sudden noise in the field to his right, a quick scurrying followed by what sounded like a faint giggle, and he broke into a run.

  Not that running would do any good. The things he feared were following him could travel more swiftly than his feet.

  He was gasping for breath when he reached the front door of his mother’s house and pounded on it while pressing the doorbell button with his other hand.

  “Who is it?” his mother yelled.

  “Bruce.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  She opened the door and stared at him as he pushed his way past her. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and pink stretch pants, both of them so tight that her blobs of fat might as well have been naked. She appeared to have gained at least twenty pounds since he’d been away, as if she needed more blubber to carry around.

  “Lock the door,” he said.

  “What’s wrong, are the cops after you again?”

  “Never mind.”

  He hurried to his old bedroom, switched on the light and shut the door. His mother had piled a lot of her own trash on his bed and on the floor, but at least his clothes were still in the closet. He shoved some of her junk off the bed so he could put his suitcase there, and he began filling it with shirts, jeans, and underwear.

  The bedroom door burst open and his mother said, “What’re you doing? You’ve been away a whole year without a damn phone call and now you’re planning to run off again?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “I need to borrow some money.”

  “Money? What the fuck? Where’s all that money your father left you?”

  Bruce didn’t answer. He opened a dresser drawer and tossed some socks into the suitcase. Though she was several feet away he could smell the booze on her breath.

  “Did you give all your money to them assholes?” she asked. “The Church of Love and Sex or whatever they call themselves?”

  The name was the Church of Love and Serenity, but he didn’t feel like wasting his time correcting her.

  “The money’s gone,” he said. “I’ve got to have some more, I need it bad. I’ll pay you back right away, but I’ve got to have some.”

  “I don’t have no extra money,” she said. “You know damn well my Social Security checks don’t amount to nothing.”

  “I said I’d pay it back.”

  He got his .38 Special revolver from his top dresser drawer, made sure it was still loaded, and slipped it into a pocket of his cargo pants. He shoved the box of ammo into his suitcase, latched it shut, and grabbed his car keys and billfold from another drawer.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Denver,” he said.

  It was a lie, but he didn’t want her to know the truth in case somebody came here and tortured it out of her.

  “How do you plan to get there?” she asked. “Your car don’t work. I tried to start it a couple times, but it’s as dead as Abe Lincoln after the show.”

  “I need some food,” he said. “I haven’t eaten all day. Fix me some sandwiches for the road.”

  “What road? You’re not going nowhere. I told you, your car don’t work.”

  “Shut up and fix me some sandwiches.”

  She left the room, and he heard her swearing under her breath in the kitchen. While she was doing that he sneaked into her bedroom and quietly opened her closet. She used to keep her spare cash in an old hatbox hidden on the top shelf behind some sweaters. It was still there; he put it on her bed, opened it, and counted the few bills. Just sixty-five dollars, but it was better than nothing. He was stuffing it in a pants pocket when he heard her call, “Where are you? I got your sandwiches ready.”

  He stuck his head out of her bedroom door and said, “I’m in the bathroom. I’ll be a minute.”

  He replaced the hatbox on the top shelf, tiptoed out of her room, got the suitcase from his room, and came to the kitchen. She was stuffing sandwiches into plastic bags, just four of them.

  “What are they?” he asked.

>   “Baloney.”

  “Don’t you have anything good, some ham or something?”

  “It’s all I have. I told you, my Social Security checks don’t amount to nothing. I been living on macaroni and tuna and dog crap.”

  And plenty of rotgut wine, he thought. He got a can of Coke from the fridge, stuck it in a plastic grocery sack with the sandwiches, and carried the sack and his suitcase to the attached garage. His mint ’92 bright blue Mustang, original paint and not a speck of rust, was parked there beside her sad-ass beat-up Kia. It was the only thing of value he owned that he hadn’t given to the church, his one intelligent decision amidst a multitude of stupid decisions that he now bitterly regretted.

  He tried his key in the ignition, and the starter replied with nothing more than a faint groan. He opened the hood and yelled through the open door into the house, “Bring out your keys.”

  “What for?” his mother yelled back. “You ain’t taking my car, don’t even think about it.”

  “I need to jump my battery,” he said with the exasperated tone he always used when she was being particularly dense.

  He found the jumper cables hanging from a hook in the wall and was attaching them to the Kia’s battery terminals when his mother appeared with her keys.

  “Start your car,” he said.

  “Just hold your horses, Bruce. First we gotta open the garage door.”

  “Leave that door shut,” he said. “Just start your car.”

  He had no idea what might be waiting to pounce outside that door, and he didn’t intend to open it until his car was running and ready to move.

  “We’ll both be suffocated.”

  “Shut up and start your fucking car,” he said.

  She made the kind of whimper she always made whenever he’d hurt her feelings, but she got into the Kia and started the engine. Bruce attached the red clamp to the Mustang’s positive terminal and the black clamp to a hunk of steel near the hood release. He got in and tried the ignition. The starter turned the motor over, but it didn’t start.

  He cursed. Probably the gas was stale from sitting too long. He could try siphoning some fresh gas from the Kia into his tank, if he could find a hose. Like he had all the time in the world to mess with this crap. He tried the ignition again, and again the big engine turned over slowly with no signs of life.

  “Damn!”

  He was getting out to look for a hose when he saw his mother pressing the button to open the garage door.

  “I told you not to do that, damn it!” he yelled.

  The door was about halfway up when something dashed in and grabbed his mother. It was about five feet tall and stood on two legs. It looked something like a slimy gray naked man with a fat hideous face, except instead of arms it had a writhing mass of tentacles sprouting from its shoulders and sides like a nest of poisonous snakes.

  It was a jabber-sucker; Bruce had seen plenty of them before. He knew that each tentacle was a sucking tube with a razor-sharp stinger at the end; the stinger jabbed deep into your flesh and the tentacle sucked out the broth of your blood and dissolving organs.

  His mother fell screaming to the floor with the thing squirming on top of her. For a moment Bruce stood beside the Mustang, not sure what to do, and watched his mother’s yellow T-shirt turn red with blood. There was a foul smell when one of the tentacles plunged into her gut and began sucking out their contents.

  He ran to the Kia, slammed the door and threw it in reverse. His mother was lying mostly behind his Mustang, but her head and shoulders were blocking the Kia, so he had to floor the accelerator to get over her. There were two hard wet bumps, but the car made it out of the garage.

  In the glare of his headlights, Bruce saw that even though her head was partly crushed her legs were still kicking as if she were swimming on her back, her yellow T-shirt and pink stretch pants riddled with holes with blood and other fluids bubbling out of them. The jabber-sucker had scooted safely out of the path of his tires but was still kneeling beside her with its tentacles implanted in her torso and guts, and even with his windows shut Bruce heard sucking noises that sounded like someone cleaning out a septic tank.

  He had backed about halfway out of the driveway when something fell out of the night sky and landed on his hood. A monstrous face stared in at him through the windshield, and for some reason Bruce stupidly hit the brakes instead of the accelerator. And then the things were all around him and all over his car, swooping down like huge kites out of the sky, scuttling out from behind shrubs, slithering out of the shadows, dozens of different grotesque shapes like nightmares made of malformed flesh.

  In his horror and confusion he backed into a tree, and the things smashed the window of his door, pulled him out through shards of broken glass, and devoured him alive. He had grown thin from a year of asceticism and his flesh was tough and stringy, so they soon lost interest in him and turned their attention to the much juicier morsel that used to be his mother.

  ***

  James Hodson AKA Jeshua Godson sat on his gem-encrusted throne in the center of the big round room on the third story called the Full Moon Room. His twelve acolytes filed in first, striding solemnly two abreast and swinging their censers to fill the air with the pungent odor of frankincense. Each one in turn approached the throne, knelt, kissed Godson’s sandaled left foot, and then pressed his forehead against the floor so Godson could place the sole of his sandal on the back of his head. Having been thusly blessed, the disciple rose and moved to stand behind the throne.

  Godson’s first lieutenant Terra entered next, and after kneeling to kiss his foot and press her forehead against the floor for her blessing, she seated herself in the chair at his right hand, a place of great honor accorded to her because she was his favorite both in and out of bed.

  Then the rest of the disciples came filing in to kiss his foot, press their foreheads to the floor, and take their standing positions in a crowded circle around the throne.

  The final two disciples to enter bore between them a naked young man whose hands were tied behind his back. His beard and head had been shaved, and on the crown of his head the word infidel had been carved so deeply with a scalpel that the bare skull could be glimpsed.

  The young man’s name was Donald. Terra knew him well and had spent many pleasant afternoons in bed with him. He had been unusually handsome but didn’t look handsome now with his face bruised and cut, one blackened eye swollen shut, his nose broken, and all of his front teeth missing.

  Though she had always liked him, she felt no pity for him. All she felt was fear churning like acid in her gut, knowing what was going to happen to him and knowing the same thing could easily happen to her tomorrow.

  The escapee named Bruce had been chased down and killed by demons, but this one was less fortunate; he had been captured alive. The two disciples brought him to Godson’s left side, where a rope hung by a pulley from the ceiling. They tied his feet to the rope, and a disciple in the back of the room turned a crank on the wall to pull the infidel up by the feet until his shaved head hung several feet above the trapdoor in the floor.

  Godson raised his jeweled scepter, and everyone except Terra and the hanging man knelt. “I am the son of God, and I’m known to be merciful in my ways,” he said. “All who follow me shall be greatly rewarded in this world and the next, but those who betray me shall be sent to the lower regions where men weep and gnash their teeth. Watch then and behold the fate of those who stray from the path of the good shepherd.”

  A disciple opened the trapdoor and stepped aside while the man in the back of the room turned the crank and lowered the infidel head-first into the opening. Until now he’d been too weak and battered to struggle, but he screamed fiercely as he descended into the room below.

  Despite the screaming, Terra could hear the horrid slithering sounds down there, and then the sounds of chewing and slurping. The screaming stopped, and before long the rope became slack. The man in the back of the room cranked it back up, and all the
kneeling disciples gazed with wonder at the blood dripping from the chewed end of it.

  A disciple shut the trapdoor, and Godson said, “Now go back to your chores and solemnly ponder all you have seen.”

  The disciples stood and filed silently out of the room, but Godson and Terra remained seated.

  “Please send it back to hell,” she said after the others were gone.

  “Why would I want to do that?” Godson said. “It’s my most powerful servant.”

  “As a favor for me. Please dismiss it, and I’ll do anything you want.”

  Godson smiled and said, “But you already do anything I want.”

  “It’s not even locked in its room,” Terra said. “It could come out any time it wants and kill all of us.”

  “No, it can’t. It’s under my control.”

  “But what if something happened to you? Then it would run amuck, and I’m sure it would kill me first. It has a special hatred for me.”

  Godson smiled and said, “Yes. That’s why I keep him around.”

  Chapter 2

  Amy Malone was fastening her eight-month-old daughter into the baby seat in the backseat of her second-hand Dodge when she felt someone staring at her. A year and a half ago she’d lost the ability to spirit travel or lift objects by telekinesis, but some other skills had become sharper, such as knowing when someone was watching her. Her ears were humming faintly with a sound like distant locusts and she felt ice-cold bugs crawling down her spine.

  She believed she could tell if the person watching her was a friend or an enemy, and this one didn’t feel like a friend.

  She shut the rear car door and turned around to see. It was a tall, skinny old man with a walking stick standing across the street and making no effort to hide the fact that he was staring at her. He looked out of place in this small Western town, dressed as he was in a dark gray three-piece suit and a dark gray fedora. Maybe he was a banker or a lawyer, except the suit looked shabby and his elderly face was as white as bleached bones with the hollowed-out look of a junkie or a convict. His eyes were the color of tarnished nickel, and they chilled her as she looked at them.