Orgy of Souls

20

Requiem was in an older industrial section of town. Historically preserved and then reclaimed by the young, its thin streets congested at all hours of the night. Samuel had only a vague sense of where he was going. Dark alleys veined the city blocks. Shops stacked upon shops, night clubs piled upon night clubs, cramped and claustrophobic. At well past midnight, there were more people out than he would have imagined. Usually in bed by nine o’clock and fast asleep no later than ten, he had led a rather sheltered life. College students tumbled out of one bar, staggered to an alley to puke and piss, then stumbled into the next. The party never stopped.

Samuel focused his thoughts on his brother. He wondered if this was how his brother lived. This bizarre nocturnal existence of night clubs, alcohol, drugs, and sex. Everyone around him carried a quiet desperation, an insatiable longing—all appetite and lust—so powerful that it pained even him. Suddenly, something moved in his spirit, a whispered alarm that warned him that he was in danger. A scream was forming at the base of his throat even before he started to turn, and two pairs of hands grabbed him from behind and pulled him into a narrow alley between two warehouse buildings.

“What are you doing?” Samuel cried out.

Two men dressed in expensive silk shirts and with hair perfectly coiffed, stinking of hair spray and expensive colognes, seized him and dragged him further into the sunless gloom of the alleyway. Despite their frail, effeminate appearance, he struggled in vain within their tremendous grip. A wave of nausea, like an attack of dizziness, hit him. His mind reeled. Their faces began to warp, melting and reshaping, running like wax, layers of reality peeled back for his inspection; the pretty feminine beauty masked an ugliness that rattled the young priest. He had seen their faces before in the old non-canonical texts he used to read in the church library back when he was first ordained—the ones that described demons and other fallen creatures. Truth be told, part of him considered them a myth, nothing more than fairy tales to terrify children.

Samuel had consulted with deliverance ministries, huddled old men telling what amounted to spiritual ghost stories in hushed voices, as if sharing secrets kept even from themselves, because to give voice to them too loudly would be like dragging a nightmare into waking reality.

“Help! Somebody help me! They’re trying to kill me!” Samuel struggled to break free from the two hell-spawned GQ models. He knew it had to have something to do with Samson. What the hell have you gotten yourself into, my brother?

“Scream all you want, they can’t hear you. They won’t hear you. The sheep have to maintain their illusions.”

Samuel had known why those old men whispered. He knew it was for the same reason he pushed those stories to the back of his mind. There came a point where faith shouldn’t confront, no, be confirmed by, reality. There needed to be a buffer between the spiritual and the physical. He needed the platitudes of “God moves in mysterious ways” and “life is full of mystery” to explain the reality he was comfortable with. He needed the protecting shade of mystery from the reality of demons, of spiritual forces.

He wondered what he must look like to the passers-by, a black priest fighting two metrosexual male fashion models. They couldn’t see the evil and sinful corruption in his two attackers or else their terror would have mirrored his.

“You can’t save him. He’s ours!”

“What do you want with my brother?”

“He has something that belongs to us.”

“What? I’ll pay it back for him!”

“Yes. You’ll pay. And so will he.”

Their fingers squeezed the soft meat of his throat. Samuel saw the delight in their eyes at his slow torture, enjoying the dance of fear in his eyes. The crushing pressure would soon rob him of his voice. The final darkness called to him, but before he gave into its embrace a whisper nudged the desperate bid of an exorcism.

“I bind you in the name of Jesus Christ.”

The creatures paused as if contemplating a joke they didn’t quite get. In every book he’d read, for a true exorcism he had to speak to the possessed person directly. But he didn’t know anything about the two strangers. No ground had been prepared nor was he sure he could depend on any formulas, even for such obviously minor demons. He wasn’t even sure these two were possessed. They might have just been demons disguised as humans. He wasn’t sure what to do and his options were running out. If he didn’t figure something out quick he’d be in Jesus’ loving arms sooner than he ever imagined. In the moments his prayer command bought him, he wondered “What would Jesus do?”

Samuel kicked one of his attackers in the balls.

The creature, all too flesh and blood, released him. Samuel kicked his companion as well. They both curled up into fetal positions, moaning and cursing. Samuel had a moment to wonder if he might be able to exorcise them both with a few more well-placed kicks. Instead, he ran. Abandoned on the sidewalk, spat back into what passed for reality, Samuel wandered through the concrete intestines of the city. The wind sighed a mournful dirge to an intermittent rain, like a woman fighting back her tears. The buildings loomed and canted, reflecting the hypocrisy around them in the metallic sheen of their dark windows. The night lights burned bright, blurring, like the exaggerated makeup of a whore. Women with no modesty offered up their bodies. Teens staggered about, mollified by drugs. The homeless begged for change, chased away from the club doors. Samuel staggered in an out of focus haze, cold biting deep into his heart.

On the verge of collapsing, a renewed vigor washed over him when he spied the dull lights of a sign.

Requiem.

Dropping Samson’s name to the bouncers, Samuel entered with ease though he felt every bit the alien. This wasn’t his world: the drugs, the music, the dancing, the awkwardness of approaching the dance floor. The rest of the night club remained shrouded in darkness, the neon and black light giving the patrons the appearance of glow-in-the-dark zombies. Locked in masks of drugs and tortured beauty, passing off sex as need or a bartered commodity, the clubbers were sad clowns on preening display for one another. They smelled of pot, sweat, and melancholy desperation. A woman with a spider web tattooed on her face ran up and kissed him.

A maroon light flickered and swathed the DJ in flashing crimson shadows as he spun records that blurred into industrial white noise. The effect disoriented Samuel as he lost his equilibrium in a sudden vertigo of sensory overload.

The cloying incense barely covered the body odor. There was an allure to the scene, though his spirit recoiled at the idea. All the designer clothes and high fashion makeup, the couples openly groping each other as they tottered on the edge of the stage, visibly intoxicated. Amidst the madness, a woman wearing a wedding dress with a black sweater and black gloves danced toward him, her arms out in a helicopter twirl. She called to him with a siren’s seductive voice.

“I am entropy, the ending chaos that consumes all.”

It sounded like a line from a Gothic novel he ought to remember but couldn’t, something with angst-ridden vampires contemplating their existence. She grasped his head between her hands, pulling it close to her. Her hot breath steamed across his neck, her tongue caressed him beneath his ear, before tracing a circle into his neck. He felt his manhood swell. She kissed him on the lips before dismissing him.

The crowd thickened, but through it Samuel spied his brother talking to a woman at the rear of the club. Dancers flailed their arms like burning windmills. Samuel pushed his way through the throng, not taking his eyes from the two of them. Two somnambulant wanderers lost in a dream of reality, the reality that began on the other side of the club’s doors.

“Samson!” he called out.

That was when the screams started.

One moment, Samson was taking her right there in the middle of the crowd, her face contorted in approaching ecstasy. The next, Samson’s body rippled as if a tidal wave rushed over his flesh. Hunching over, his body swelled, his muscles engorged; perhaps he even grew taller. The woman’s bliss interrupted, fractured into a rictus of frozen terror and suddenly splayed apart as if split by some unseen scythe. Then Samuel saw the blade, gripped by his brother, blood raining down from a knife in a long liquid red film. It was the tanto knife from the sword rack on Samson’s mantle, the one that sat next to the picture of the two of them.

Blood splattered the walls around them. Samson was awash in it.

He didn’t mean to kill her. Lord, I have to believe that he didn’t mean to kill her.

The erupting screams turned to blind panic. Bodies pressed past Samuel, threatening to carry him off in the undertow of their fear. He struggled to make his way to his brother, determined not to believe what his heart already knew.

“Samson, what have you done?”

“Samuel, you—you weren’t supposed to see this. But I’m glad you came. I was going to tell you everything in the confessional. Now I don’t have to. Don’t look at me like that, Samuel. You don’t understand, but you will. You’ll see. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you.”

Samson took off his shirt and knelt over the strewn remains of the woman, sifting through her flesh. He divided her organs in a pattern that made sense only to him. He dipped his fingers in her blood and painted a series of symbols on his skin.

“My God, Samson! What the hell are you doing? We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get you some…some help.”

Deep down Samuel knew that whatever was wrong with his brother was far beyond the help of a psychiatrist. His face betrayed a stoic determination that didn’t seem so much insane as possessed. Anti-psychotics weren’t going to do anything for him.

“Help? I don’t need any help. I’m helping you.”

“Helping? Helping me? This…this is not helping. Whatever you’ve done, you didn’t do it for me, you did it for you!”

“No, Samuel. I’m trying to save you. I love you, man. Don’t you see? I’m just following the rules of your God. He demands sacrifice, doesn’t He? Blood? Life exchanged for life?”

“Samson, this…my disease, it’s my test. My faith…” The words failed him. He didn’t want to fall back on tired clichés; he’d come too far for that.

“If inflicting pain and suffering is how your God tests faith, He’s a vindictive son of a bitch ain’t he? Why would you want anything to do with a motherfucker like that? I’m the only one who can help you now, Samuel. Me! Just like I always have.”

“No, Samson. God will help me if it’s His will. Either way, there’s no justification for this. You used to believe, you wanted to believe, that’s why you hurt so much. The question isn’t how you can keep believing in God, but how you can keep believing in yourself.”

Samuel stepped forward and a face appeared under the skin of his brother’s chest, distending his flesh as it writhed to the surface. It gnashed its teeth at Samuel. Other mouths opened and closed, screaming from beneath the skin; hands pressed against the flesh prison.

Samuel backed away, shaking his head in disbelief. A dozen different faces pressed to the surface of Samson’s flesh like bubbles boiling up to the top of a roiling cauldron before disappearing back down inside. Most of them were women. Tears streamed from Samuel’s eyes as he began to comprehend the amount of destruction his brother had done in his name.

“You can’t save yourself, and then you turn your back on me when I can save you? After all that I’ve done for you?”

“But there are things after you. I’ve seen them. They tried to get me, too. They’re coming. We’ve got to get you out of here. Whatever you’ve done, you’ve unleashed something, something evil, and it wants you.”

Samson’s hands still dripped blood, the woman’s gutted body at his feet. He wore the defeated face of a child who knew he was about to be punished. His eyes scanned the club, now almost empty, then glanced back over at his brother.

“You can’t save me, Samuel. Why are you still trying? I was lost a long time ago. There’s no salvation for me. It’s you we have to save. You’re the good one. I don’t matter. Saving you will be the one thing I ever do that really matters.”

“It’s never too late, Samson. I’m not near as good as you think I am. I cling to Christ, I hang onto Him for dear life, as long as I have to.” Samuel studied the woman lying at Samson’s feet, her empty eyes staring back at him. “She didn’t have to die. Not for me. None of them did.”

“You dying won’t bring her back. It’s done now. He’s coming.”

“Who? Who’s coming, Samson?”

Samuel sensed the presence of another.

“God is coming. Or one of His angels. The angel of death. I’ve been talking to him. I’ve been bargaining with 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 some kind within the black smoldering miasma. A dinosaur, but not like any dinosaur either of them had ever read about. This one had six heads.

“Faster! Drive faster!”

In the rearview mirror, the cabbie’s thick eyebrows rose high on his forehead. The taxi lurched as the accelerator went to the floor.

“We’ve got to find a church! If that thing is Satan then maybe he won’t be able to enter.” Samuel looked down at his hand. His fist was covered in blood as he continued to squeeze the crucifix in his palm. He opened his fingers and studied the tiny effigy of the crucified Christ. Instead of the rapturous expression he normally wore, Jesus, saturated in Samuel’s blood, writhed in agony.

“There’s a church about four blocks away! The-the big one! St. Christopher’s!” the cabbie stammered.

Samson’s body was a riot of activity. The souls within him seemed to be struggling to break free, to flee his flesh before whatever evil Samson had brought to earth could claim them. His body stretched and morphed as more than a dozen souls fought their way to the surface, their hands and faces pressing against his skin, clawing and biting in their effort to escape. Samuel watched in mute horror, wondering if the beast outside was the only thing he had to worry about.

Sparks flew from the taxi’s rear fender as it rounded the corner on two wheels. A surge of heat blasted the cab and the windows exploded, showering them all in bits of tempered safety glass.

“It’s getting closer!” Samuel yelled.

“I’m doing eighty! I can’t go any faster with all of these turns. I’ll flip the car and kill all of us. Where did that thing come from and why the hell is it chasing us?” The cab driver was having a harder time dealing with everything that was going on than the two brothers. His panic actually relaxed them. Samuel grew dizzy, his chest burned with each breath.

“There’s the church! We’re going to be okay, Samuel!” Samson tried to sound positive even as his face contorted in agony while perspiration issued from him as he fought to contain the restless, panic-stricken spirits within him.

The cabbie turned the wheel sharply and jumped the curb, driving the taxi right up the steps of the church and bashing open the church doors with his front bumper. Samson grabbed his brother and hauled him out of the car, pulling him into the church. Samuel’s legs dragged behind him, his body limp in Samson’s arms.

“Come on little brother, you’ve got to fight. You cannot die on me now!” Samuel was still sweating profusely, wheezing as if he were having an asthma attack. His eyes rolled, focused on nothing. “Don’t die, Samuel. Stay with me little brother. Stay with me.”

The cab driver slammed the church doors shut and bolted them. He scurried about to barricade them as best he could. Samson set his brother down on the floor then joined the cabbie in snatching up pews and piling them in front of the door.

“I don’t think it could fit through those doors anyway.” Samuel whispered in between his labored breaths.

“He’s right. If that thing wants in here it’s going to come right through the wall.”

All three of them turned to look at the wall as if expecting it to implode at any moment. Returning his attention to Samson, the cabbie backed away, wild eyes staring at Samson’s undulating flesh. The souls inside of him bubbled his skin, preparing to mutiny. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You possessed or something? You’re what brought that thing here, aren’t you? What the fuck are you?”

“He’s my brother,” Samuel whispered.

The cabbie glared at Samuel, his eyes falling on the white collar barely hidden beneath his jacket, and began to relax again.

“Well, what the hell is wrong with him, Father?”

“It’s that thing out there. It’s doing something to him.”

“It damn sure is! It’s tearing him apart from the inside out!”

Throooom!

Something struck the church, shaking it to its foundations.

“Shit! It’s trying to get in here.” The cab driver lowered his voice. “What does it want? Why is it here?”

Both Samuel and the cabdriver faced Samson now.

“It wants what I promised it,” Samson said. “It wants these souls.”

“Fuck, then give them to him!” the cab driver shouted.

“It isn’t that simple.” A stranger’s voice that came out of Samson—a high-pitched, near-feminine voice exaggerated like that of a drag queen. Even Samson’s face had changed.

“Samson?”

“No, this is Jacque Willet. At least, that’s what I called myself when I was still human, before I sold my soul to a demon and became one myself. Before your brother here decided to try and take my soul back from Asmodeus.”

“Asmodeus? Is that what’s out there?”

“No. That’s who’s in here, what your brother invited in when he took my soul. What’s out there is far worse. That’s who you apes once named Mastema. Hostility. The Adversary. The Satan, if you will. He is the deceiver of man and the leader of fallen angels. He has come in the form of Leviathan to take what is his.”

“Bullshit! This is all bullshit! There’s no such thing as demons!” The cabbie spit out the words with as much venom as he could muster. He twitched, his face convulsing with ticks as if he were imitating the chaos in Samson’s flesh.

“Then what the hell is it then? What do you call that thing out there?” Samuel’s strength was slowly returning.

“It has to be some kind of genetic experiment. Something escaped from a science lab like Jurassic Park or some shit like that. Like one of those dinosaurs they cloned and grew in a lab.”

“FULFILL THE BARGAIN. BRING THE SOULS TO ME NOW!!!” the beast cried from outside the church.

The cabbie’s eyes widened, staring in bewilderment at Samson and Samuel. He held himself like a frightened child.

“A dinosaur that talks, huh?” Samuel shook his head and he rose from the floor. Dusting himself off, he reached for the Bible in his breast pocket. He knew he was the only one who could put an end to this madness.

The stained glass windows shattered as the beast exhaled; smoke billowed into the church. Candles melted, dripping wax onto the floors. Tapestries caught fire and burned to ash in an instant. Even the pews smoldered. The walls of the church cracked as if wounded, belching dust into the already polluted air. The floors quaked.

Samson, or whatever demonic presence now controlled him, stood gibbering madly in front of the church doors, his flesh still undulating as the souls clustered within him sought exodus before the coming holocaust. Samson turned and peered at Samuel, grinning wide like a lunatic, ropes of saliva drooling from his mouth, eyes burning like funeral pyres.

“He’ll rip the souls right out of your brother’s flesh. All of them!” The cabbie sucked in a quick breath and clutched his chest as if having a cardiac arrest, drawing Samson’s attention. “Then he’ll take yours as well.” Finally, he pointed at Samuel, “You, he’ll let live. He’ll let you live with the memory of your brother’s death, of his immortal essence being torn apart and consumed, then shat out into the inferno. Then, when you pass away in your bed, drink yourself to death, or succumb to your disease, he’ll come for your soul too.”

Samuel knew that his faith alone would not be strong enough to defeat the hellish abomination tearing through the church walls.

“FULFILL THE BARGAIN!”

“What was your bargain? What bargain did you strike with my brother?”

“YOUR LIFE FOR TWENTY SOULS.”

“I can’t let you take these innocent souls. I can’t. You can’t take my brother!”

Leviathan’s laughter drove Samuel to his knees. “THERE ARE NO INNOCENT SOULS!”

“I can’t let you take my brother!” The strength in his voice surprised him. The cabdriver stared at Samuel with renewed hope in his eyes. Samuel felt the weight of his expectations and wished he had an actual plan to save them.

“THEY ARE MINE!”

The front of the church crumbled to dust and the darkness rolled in. Leviathan emerged from the shadows. His presence stole the breath from Samuel’s lungs and burst the capillaries in his eyes, making him weep blood. Standing in the church entrance was a creature like an enormous crocodile with six snake-like heads, each filled with rows of dagger-sharp teeth like the jaws of a shark, and eyes that burned like exploding suns. Its mouths erupted like volcanoes, belching flame and ash and dripping molten lava-like drool onto the church floor, leaving steaming holes wherever it touched.

Samuel remembered the description of Leviathan in the Bible, which fell short of what stood before him now. It raised one of its taloned claws to rend Samson’s flesh into a steaming pile of meat, bone, and viscera. Samson or Jacque or Asmodeus, or whatever being that had control of his brother’s body, simply stood there with an idiot’s grin, arms outstretched in welcome.

“Take me home, Master.”

“Not if there is no bargain to make.” Samuel stepped in front of his brother and shoved him out of the way just as Leviathan’s claws struck.

“NOOOOOOOOoooo!”

The creature bellowed, crying out as if it had been the one disemboweled, its voice bringing the rest of the church down around them. Samuel’s body came apart as Leviathan’s claws sliced through his flesh and bone. He smiled as the life fled from him, his last sight the disappointment on the face of Satan and the sorrow in his brother’s eyes as the spirits vacated his flesh. Samuel fell to the floor in pieces, intestines tumbling out across the marble floors in thick oily coils, even his skull laid open to reveal the brain matter beneath.

“Samuel! Oh God! Samuel no!” Samson rushed over to hold his brother, gathering up the broken pieces of his corpse. He cradled his brother’s head in his lap and rocked back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, holding back hot tears. Clinging to the darkness of grief and regret, not giving voice to the pain that ached his soul. If the beast wanted to take him now, it was more than welcome to.

Like an enormous tidal wave of unrepentant fury, it crashed against his brother, its force abated. It slowly withdrew to whatever raging sea of chaos, whatever fearsome place it called home. Not that Samson cared. The sound of a vacuum being filled, the sounds of wet slithering retreat, the cursing howl of an enraged creature as if stabbed in the heart, nothing mattered to him. He clutched his brother, praying perhaps that sheer force of will might stitch him back together and bring him back.

“It’s gone, buddy,” the taxi driver said. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

“Yes. Yes he is.”

His brother had died for him, died to keep Satan from getting the souls Samson had stolen, the souls he’d stolen to save Samuel’s life. None of it made sense. Everything he’d done to save his brother and now Samuel was dead anyway.

“It should have been me, little brother. Why’d you do it? I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve it. You shouldn’t have done it for me. Not for me. I’m not worthy of this. All those people I killed. I’m not worthy of this.”

He knew what his brother would have said. With the cacophony of restless souls now gone he could hear his brother’s voice in his head as clearly as he had heard theirs.

“Then become worthy of it.”