him for your life. Your life for these souls. He’s the one who told me to do this.”
“Oh my God, Samson! We’ve got to get the hell out of here! This isn’t God! God wouldn’t do this. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but it ain’t no angel. We’ve got to go! We’ve got go, now!”
The melancholy thrum of empty drumbeats pounded, the club grew humid with an almost palpable malevolence. Samuel grabbed his brother’s arm and tried to drag him across the floor. His heart sputtered in his chest. An overwhelming sensation of evil threatened to crush the air from the room.
“No! We’ve got to stay! I have to fulfill the bargain!” Samson struggled in his brother’s weak grasp.
“Samson! Don’t you feel that? There’s something really wrong here. Something bad is about to happen. Something really fucked up!”
Hearing Samuel snapped Samson out of his stupor. He turned to his brother in amazement. “Did you just curse?”
“We don’t have time for this!”
He dragged Samson toward the door with very little cooperation from his brother. Samuel feared he was in shock. If Samson hadn’t been so big, Samuel would have tried to carry him. Police sirens approached but they were background noise as the foul stench of a thousand corpses and the cries of the damned filled the club, suffocating his senses. Bile clogged his throat. The last of the club goers had exited the building. The GQ demons strode into the club and approached Samuel.
Samuel pulled out his cross. Again thoughts of Moses haunted him. He prayed that it wasn’t too late to take Samson’s punishment onto himself. “I know exactly what you are and I don’t fear you.”
“You think your fragile belief will do anything? It’s just a cross. Don’t endow it with special powers.” They spoke in unison, as if sharing a collective mind.
“May the almighty and merciful Lord grant unto you pardon and remission of all your sins, time for amendment of life, and the grace and comfort of the Holy Spirit.” Samuel clutched his cross as he prayed. “Into thy hands I commend my spirit—for thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, thou God of truth. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son—and to the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
“Fuck your prayers and your God! He abandoned you pitiful apes to us. Now we’ve come for what belongs to us.”
With the predatory rictus of hyenas approaching a sick animal, they smiled. Darkness came boiling into the club like storm clouds, concealing something enormous. Supernatural screams filled the room. Bones and blood struck the floor at Samuel’s feet, all that was left of the two demons that had attacked him. Bones and blood.
Within the bleeding piles of shattered, masticated bones, Samuel saw what approached from the shadows. His legs shook and the spit dried in his mouth; tears trickled from his eyes and his bottom lip trembled violently. He turned and ran, gripping the crucifix in his hand so tightly it cut into his palm and blood trailed down his arm. He was happy to see that Samson was right behind him. The glare of street lights slammed into them after the gloom of the night club; the smog-laden air of the city was bittersweet, the traffic the cacophony of life.
“What the hell is that thing?” Samuel asked.
“I don’t know! I don’t know! Oh, shit! What the hell did I do! What did I do?”
“Save it, just keep running!”
“I’m so sorry, Samuel. I’m so sorry. I was just trying to help.” Samson caught up to Samuel, who had stopped to catch his breath. “What the fuck was that back there?”
“That is what your dumb ass has been listening and praying to for the past few weeks. That’s your angel!”
Samson fell silent. They ran toward the subway station, noting the streetlights winking out behind them. The darkness advanced.
“Fuck the subway. We ain’t going to make it!”
“We can’t give up, Samson. Hail a taxi.”
“Are you kidding me? You don’t get out much do you? Ain’t no taxi stopping for us this time of night. Did you forget what color you were?”
“That thing is getting closer!”
“What about a church? There’re churches everywhere. You think we’d be safe in one?”
Seeing that thing come out of the darkness had robbed Samuel of all his resolve. The only hope they had at all was the thought that if hell existed—and that could be the only place that thing could have come from—then heaven had to exist as well. And if heaven existed then God existed. He clung to that promise as the stench of hell, of burning meat and boiling blood, pursued them through the dark streets along with the sound of screams, shredding flesh, and breaking bones. The beast killed everything in its path.
“I don’t know, Samson. I don’t know.”
Samson fell silent again, trying to remember anything he’d read in those old grimoires about sending a demon back to hell.
“I can’t keep running, Samson. I’m too sick. I feel like I’m dying.”
“You’re just out of shape.” Samson said, not wanting to acknowledge Samuel’s disease. Samson scooped him onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry and took off running again. “You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
“I’m dying, Samson.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s true. You’ve got to accept that. Look at the hell you’ve created trying to deny it. You’ve got to accept the fact that I’m dying.”
“I can’t. I can’t.”
Samson turned another corner and almost crashed into a line of party-goers lining up outside of Club Deviance, a gay club in the Castro district. Samson spotted Amon exiting a taxi, but he was so out of breath he could barely speak. He dropped Samuel from his shoulders and gestured toward him.
“Samson! You’re covered in blood!” Amon yelled.
“It’s my brother, he’s hurt. We need your taxi.”
“Oh, sure honey. I won’t be needing one for four or five hours.” Amon waved to the taxi driver, a portly dark- skinned Italian with thick curly hair and a face like a piece of tanned leather. “Wait. This is my dear friend Samson. He’s one of the sexiest men on earth and the highest paid male model in the industry. Take good care of him and take him wherever he wants to go.”
“Thanks, Amon. You’d better get inside the club quick!”
Amon heard the screams. “Gay bashers?”
“No…worse. Just get inside the club and stay there until it passes…and thanks for the ride!”
Samson helped his brother into the taxi and then dove in after him. “Get us the fuck out of here! That way! Fast! Just drive!”
Samuel sucked in shallow gasps of air, broad patches of sweat soaking through his shirt. His color was all wrong, his ashen skin cold and clammy to the touch.
“Don’t die on me, Samuel. You can make it!”
“Samson, what is that thing? You have to know what it is. Try to think. How did you summon it?”
Growing up, Samson always had a tell for when he’d been caught, his signature turn away, that betrayed his inability to hold a poker face. So when Samson turned his face away from his brother, Samuel already suspected what he was about to say.
“I knew.”
“What? You knew what?” Samuel pressed.
“I knew it wasn’t an angel. I knew exactly what it was.”
“How could you do this? Why? What is it? How do we stop it?”
“I tried to call God, I did, but he wasn’t listening. I prayed to every angel, every saint. I got nothing! What was I supposed to do? Let you die? I had to try everything, so…”
“So what? What did you do?”
“I think I really fucked up, Samuel. I think I brought Satan here!”
“It can’t be. One of his demons or some kind of dragon maybe? The Old Testament talks about all kinds of creatures…that…that can’t be Satan.”
Samson lowered his head and said nothing. They watched through the taxi’s rear window as clouds of darkness billowed through the streets. Flames flickered in the dark, a forest fire silhouetting a prehistoric lizard of
