Infernus

metal cabinets. The wingspan was nearly sixteen feet. The thunderous sound made the little doctor cower, and expect. Expect and shiver and wait.

Its hatred, a living and dripping pre-ejaculate, spattered green on the floor, made the demon shiver at last with the excitement that would drive it for all eternity.

“BLACKEN! Blacken all hope and free your teeny soul, you futile mortal! Never has such hatred possessed and roiled me! Ne’er have ye seen such a visage as loathsome as mine!”

As if to emphasize its point, the wings, seeming to have a mind of their own, knuckled the roof above the ceiling and threatened to cave it in on top of them. Boom! was the sound. Crack! was the ceiling’s answer.

The little doctor unloaded a great bowel movement into his falling trousers. Urine stained his front.

Great drops of flowing red rained from the demon’s eyes, and splattered and hissed on its feet. It sobbed openly, its broad golden shoulders shaking with the effort. The little doctor, seeing this and not comprehending it, soiled himself anew.

“Know this, and despair, you self-destructive little morsel! We are wedded for three trillion infinities. Ye will know what it is like to be with your beloved now and forever — to be one with him, intimately!”

Boom! The wings jutted above them again and slammed into the failing ceiling.

The demon’s expansive chest rose and fell. No one spoke. The silence began circling the room. In the distant hall, the little doctor hoped that he heard the footsteps of help thundering and clacking this way. Then he realized that they would only be killed; he somehow instinctively knew no one could halt the purpose of this thing. The little man could not believe what he was seeing.

It spread its massive arms to invite the little man into its embrace. The great gray wings swept from behind, teasing. It smiled and opened its mouth. “Is this what you were hoping I would tell you, little man?”

The small, dark one looked at the body of his beloved covered with the shroud; thought he had heard those words ringing in his head recently; realized it was impossible, then shook his head and frowned at the thing. But it was suddenly standing directly in front of the man, having moved inaudibly. The little doctor jumped back, and the wall he collided with briefly knocked the air out of him.

The yellow tiger-eyes raked across the wall with immense heat, to follow the man as he sought along for the door he knew must surely be near, without taking his eyes from the demon, using only his hands. Gold’s face was frozen into an impossibly wide grin. The wall’s melting surface rippled, no match for the demon’s searing vision, and cracked with the high-pitched whine of a gun as holes popped into the plaster, and intermittent gray puffs of smoke escaped from the ever-widening seam.

“Where’s the damned door?” he pleaded, whined. Desperation leaking out of his sweaty brow, the little doctor heard something sizzling, smelling it before he heard it, perhaps.

When the hot eyes rested on the little man, he peeped briefly. His head was instantly engulfed in flames and he instinctively held his hands to his temples, and they caught fire.

“Flame on, my little Scream.”

Gold belched ashes. He burped a low laugh at the futile flagellations of the little doctor. Having failed to put out his hands and head by feeding oxygen to the flames, he was now trying to knock himself unconscious against a wall. Repeatedly.

Gold grabbed his inhumanly large organ, and shook it, spitting a sloppy yellow goop at the good doctor. “Or was more of this what you were looking for?”

Gold began again, watching the doctor’s head cook. “I will be the part of you that rules you for all time, little man. I will mount you and never stop ramming you through all the collected earths themselves. I have been told, by those in authority, that I must mount you through billions of earths. And the only thing you will be able to do is scream. You will do it for me so that I never have to scream again. It is your gift to me.”

One last Boom! The wing knuckles bashed the ceiling and receded within a second, and white powder fell on the flaming head of the little doctor.

Gold grabbed the man by one shoulder to turn him around and four razor talons easily punctured flesh, muscle and marrow, and welded there to become one bone and body. His head was still burning. The man began his endless scream. The demon, with absolutely no resistance, but with manifold purpose, punctured the other shoulder when he had turned him around. In one movement, instantly, with no shame or horror or regard, it ripped off all the man’s clothes, shearing great flaps of skin and muscle from his back in the process.

Its member throbbed and stood erect, large and long. The little man, in more pain than ever before, did the best he could to turn and look behind him. He saw the impossible thing again, and still could not believe it. His scream went on, unabated.

With the last vestiges of his conscience burned away, because of his father’s betrayal, the demon forced all of itself into the good doctor with a single thrust. There was no hesitation, no request, no pity, just solid activity.

The demon, by sheer will that was accomplished by a set purpose born in the eternities of Infernus’ blackest wisdom, opened its mouth wider and wider. And wider still. Its jaws shattered and found new form as it drew its face willfully to the back of the little man’s head. The vampire teeth ached for feeding, and bled furiously, freely. They sunk, like hot, razored knives in cold butter, without resistance, into the doctor’s brain. Oh, the warm, cooked brain! It felt so good that the demon groaned deeply. Its teeth met in the center of the cranium and shattered into one another, fusing, locked, eternal. It set its jaws and was done.

An elderly woman in a white lab coat burst into the room and tried to take into account what she was seeing. “Oh my God!”

“Guess again!” a voice burst inside her brain, instantly slamming her into a wall, unconscious before she fell heavily to the feces and blood-smeared floor. It kept laughing in her head, but she didn’t hear it, her brain having turned into something resembling soup. And would never hear anything again.

And they at last were one. The Scream. And the doctor’s brain (he knew this not when he saw it so many millions of millennia ago in the vision in Infernus) was his. The son had two brains and the doctor had none. Its brainless task was set to screaming, it was its only purpose.

As the little man began to cease to be human, he died, but never stopped screaming. For as he died and rose again, he never ceased becoming what he would be throughout all eternity — The Scream! No thoughts, no training, just dumb animal instinct. Being what he already was.

As The Scream exited through the hole in the floor, more girders were struck and shattered deliberately. Many of the staff had left the building minutes before, assuming an earthquake was tearing the confines apart. The entire structure, now stressed beyond its capacity to endure, fell inward to be swallowed by the great cavern below. It lay, sleeping, hiding its own mysteries in silence.

And when all the ruling demons in Infernus saw The Scream become a reality and coming their way, they rejoiced loudly, and hell burned much brighter for a while.

* * *

As our eyes sweep across the expanse that was a smoky pit that housed two sleeping, quavering bodies that could not awaken, now it was a part of a limitless ocean of burning sand. There were no bodies any longer quivering in their sleep. All had become one. There wasn’t even so much as a bump in the sands. All were one. All experienced all. Infernus was the flattest expanse where all were one. No more anything; only dreaming, unable to even shiver in their fright.

EPILOGUE

“What a freakin’ weird story that was,” said a thin young man with dyed white hair.

“I have others,” the old man said, putting his clothes on.

“I’m going to report you to the authorities for blasphemy,” said another student.

“Oh, goody,” was the nude man’s reply. “I could use the publicity. Maybe it will make me famous.”