With a gasp I open my eyes. I take in the dimness of the mart back room, and every fiber of my being cries out, I’m back! I’m back! I suck in actual air and shudder. But instantly I freeze when I take in my surroundings—I’m standing in a circle with the horsemen, each of us a dozen feet apart, to echo points on a compass. Their eyes are closed. But shimmering cords of energy are rushing out from their feet and flowing in the direction of aisle nine.
They’re expanding the portal.
How do I stop them?
The room is quivering faintly, the air bristling with current, and for a flash of a moment, it all seems as though everything could be hopeless. At least, until I realize that this feeling is coming from the depths of my subconsciousness. Specifically, from the abyssal of Hopelessness.
“No,” I breathe softly. “You cannot stop me.”
This is my last chance to defeat them. I reach into my pocket for the gun that is still where I left it. As I pull it out, I see a flutter of motion in front of me as Pete opens his eyes and startles.
Shit!
Pete lowers his gaze, and I realize I’m pointing a barrel at him. Logic tells me I need to take him out—pull the trigger—but my head fills with an image of Kyle, Pete, and me dressed up like Chipmunks. I think of how we laughed so hard. And I lower my weapon.
Pete, I mouth. It’s not too late.
Pete wavers, then slowly takes a couple of steps backward. His abyssal energy stops flowing out to the portal. He mouths the word hurry and darts off quietly into the shadows. Just like that, I sense that the portal is nearly finished expanding.
I’ve got to stop the other horsemen.
I’ve got to kill them.
I raise my gun to Lieutenant Shiner. My finger rests on the trigger, and I freeze for one heartbeat, then another, until Shiner’s eyes flutter open. Instantly, I know I have no choice anymore. I squeeze the trigger and the air fills with a pop as a bullet goes into his chest. Shiner crumples to the ground and I see blood pooling out fast from his side.
Quickly I spin around, raising my weapon at Gully.
But in that same motion, Gully opens his eyes and lunges to grab my arm. Energy pulses into my body as he yells out, “Freeze! I command you to stop!”
My body goes limp. Suddenly all I can do is sway and stare into Gully’s face as he grabs my gun and throws it aside.
Gully catches sight of Shiner, then yells out sharply and headbutts me. Suddenly I’m on the floor. Gully straddles me and tries to choke me out. My vision fills with a sudden constellation of gray stars. I can’t feel anything, can’t breathe.
Out of nowhere, a blur of white rushes over and slams into his head. Gully lets go of me. Tumbles to the side. It takes all my energy, but I manage to turn my head to the side, and that’s when I see Lara zinging around him. Gully grabs at thin air, until finally snagging her tail. Lara shrieks as he flings her to the floor. He raises a foot, ready to stomp on her.
Then he pauses.
My gaze shifts to take in Pete standing behind Gully, his hand pressed to the back of Gully’s neck. Abruptly Pete commands, “Okay! It’s time for a makeover! I want you to want to try on . . .” He points at a partially opened box of off-brand T-shirts. “Those!”
Gully tries to turn around and strike Pete, but soon he’s unable to fight a compulsion to stagger over to the T-shirts. He grabs a small canary-yellow shirt. Barely manages to pull it over his body. He looks like a vacuum-packed piece of meat. “Enough!” Gully says in a choke. “Stop!”
Pete simply touches his shoulder and says, “More!”
On and on, Gully puts on four more shirts in a matter of seconds. Pete is sweating profusely, and I sense that his power is going to fade soon. I need to help him. Now.
With Gully focused on the clothes, I feel my paralysis begin to weaken. I force myself to stagger to my feet. My limbs are shaky as hell, and I don’t have the strength to physically strike him. But I catch sight of a box of women’s athletic wear.
Supertight spandex garments.
I knock the box over and kick the items toward Gully. “Pete!” I call out.
Pete sees them and commands Gully, “Put them all on!”
“Do it! Do it!” Lara yells out as well.
Gully pales but shakily puts on a tiny spandex top, which gets stuck over his head, clinging tightly to his face and neck. His hands keep moving on their own, to add a second, then third layer, until Gully crashes down in a writhing heap. He struggles for air, until finally his huge limbs thud down at his sides.
The air shimmers as his abyssal spirit rises out of his body. And dissolves. My paralysis fully melts away and pain floods over my body. I collapse to my knees. But just as Pete helps me to my feet, asking me if I’m okay, the overhead lights flicker off.
“What happened?” Lara calls out.
My eyes adjust to the dimness, and I stare at the ground to realize Shiner’s body has vanished, replaced instead by a trail of blood that leads off into the shadows. My pulse is racing harder than ever. I’m about to call out to the others, until I realize everything has gone deathly silent. “Guys?” I hiss to Lara and Pete.
Motion ripples to the right, and I flinch when I see Lara running around in circles, trying to chase her tail. “Jasper! I . . . can’t . . . I . . .” Lara struggles to speak as she fights like hell against herself. And just to her right, Pete is an equally insane sight as his left hand tries to stop his right from punching his face.
Shiner’s berserker power.
I step backward, only to bump into a hard shape, and spin around to see the lieutenant. Shiner grabs me by the collar and hurls me through the air. My back crashes against a wall, and I crumple to my knees. I look up just as he holds a hand over my forehead, ready to possess me.
I flinch. But he pulls back and laughs.
“People don’t feel anything when I use my power,” he mutters, gesturing at Pete and Lara, before smirking faintly. “But I’m not gonna use my energy on you. I want you to feel everything.”
I rise up and try to flee. But Shiner lunges forward and sends me slamming back against the wall. He pulls out two daggers and pins the sides of my shirt and vest to the wall. I try to pull free but can’t.
Shiner stalks over to a nearby worktable, where he picks up a nail gun that one of the clerks left there. Before I know it, he’s a dozen feet in front of me, and he shakes his head as he studies the nail gun. “You know, I’m always shocked at the utter disregard that clerks have for workplace health and safety rules. Retail . . . man, it’s a fuckin’ deathtrap.”
Shiner fires a nail into his own palm. Takes in the blood and laughs. Doesn’t seem to feel a thing. Then his eyes line up with mine and he says, “We have already greatly expanded the portal. It will not take much for me to finish it off. But first . . .”
Shiner steps closer to me, aims the gun at my head, and I see a silver spike in the gun’s barrel. I turn away, but in doing so, I spot a dark shape on the ground a dozen feet away.
My gun.
Everything slows down as I pull away from the wall. My clothes rip free of the daggers. I throw myself toward the gun. Land on my belly. Grab the weapon. Spin around just as Shiner fires off a nail.
Metal grazes past my cheek as I lift the weapon and fire—over and over and over.
I keep punching holes in the dark.
Then finally, I hear a sudden thud as Shiner collapses to the floor, and I hold my breath until I see a shimmer of light escape his body.
I get to my feet and stumble toward the center of the room where Pete and Lara shake themselves out of their mania. They rush over and ask if I’m okay. But I just call out, “What’s happening out in the store? Is the portal already wide enough?” My next question crashes into the others: “And where’s Kyle?”
We rush out of the back room and into the store. Now that everything is soaked from the sprinklers, most of the shoppers have left, but there are several dozen people still milling about, trying to find a soggy bargain.
“Kyle!” I yell.
Pete shouts at the nearby shoppers to leave, but they just shove past him.
“Jasper—the portal!” Lara calls out, and I see her pointing at aisle nine, where the guards are nowhere to be seen. The gate has been opened, and the portal is glowing bloodred. It’s expanded to eight feet tall, which has caused the upper frame of the aisle quarantine to distort.
“It’s not wide enough yet!” Pete exclaims. “But . . . it’s getting larger! I don’t know how—”
Lara interrupts, “There must be someone nearby still powering it. Look!” She points at a thin thread of energy that is running directly into the portal. Feeding it.
I spin around and chase the thread all the way to a crouched person in the next aisle: Kyle. Her shoulders are slumped forward, her head low as she remains lost in a horseman’s curse of hopelessness. At her feet, her emotional energy—her hopelessness magnified by her Doomie power—keeps rushing out toward the portal. She’s making the portal wider.
“We have to stop her!” Pete calls out. “Quickly, before the other abyssals can get through—”
His words are cut short as shapes emerge from the portal. Tendrils. Talons. Wings. Monsters tumble out. The three of us have no time to hesitate as Pete helps me lift Kyle, and we hurry away to seek refuge far beyond aisle one, in a corner next to the dairy space. Lara hops up onto a freezer to stare around, and she calls out, “They’re spreading through the store! Shit . . . some are headed this way!”
Pete gives me a look that says, We need to hurry!
While he grabs abandoned carts and boxes and tries to form a makeshift barricade, I kneel on the ground, holding Kyle in my arms, and I call out, “Kyle!”
I try to shake her, but her head just lolls back as her eyes soak up the flickering halogen light above us. She’s not even . . . here. Is she? The ground is shuddering; the aisles themselves are rattling wildly, telling me that we’re running out of time.
“Kyle, you need to wake up now! We can stop the abyssals! We can do this! But you need to get up—now.”
No response.
“Kyle!”
A nearby scream makes me look up. A dozen yards away, a shrieking old woman is trying to clamber over Pete’s barricade, but she gets pulled backward by a human-sized insect. A white parasitic tick. It jabs her spine with a proboscis and immediately begins sucking her blood, turning its translucent body dark red.
In mere seconds, the tick chucks her dry body to the floor. The insect barges through the barricade and ambles toward us. I shield Kyle with my body, then look over to see Pete roaring out, “Stop!”
Pete closes his eyes, places his hands on the ground, and casts out shimmering energy across the floor as he says, “Monster shoppers! You’ve come to the right place . . . to find a bargain! I want you to want to shop till you drop!”
While Pete needed to touch humans to affect them, the demons seem more susceptible as they halt their charge and face the shelves. The white tick grabs a red-sequin caftan and tries putting it on. “Quickly!” Lara calls out to me. “I don’t think Pete can spread his power like that for long! He—” She suddenly hops up and down. “Shit! The portal! It’s almost completely widened on our side!”
Barely seconds later, the energy leaving Kyle’s body finally ebbs, and the portal begins to rumble. A sound that tells me instantly, it’s done. The abyssals will be here in moments.
We failed.
I hold Kyle closer and plead with her to wake. I can feel her growing cold in my arms. I check her pulse: she’s fading away. At the same time, something crumbles in the depths of my mind, and Hopelessness begins to rise up from his prison.
“No,” I hiss. “You are not taking over my body! Not now!”
I can almost hear him laugh in my ears.
From inside my head, he says to me, I have no more interest in your body. There is a reason why I chose to stay inside you, despite finally being free—I was merely waiting for my new vessel to be ready.
The air shimmers as Hopelessness begins drifting out of me and into Kyle. I stagger away from her, but his abyssal spirit keeps flowing in her direction, and I hear him whisper, In a few moments, she will be the perfect hollow vessel . . . for me to finally incarnate within.
He knows she’s on the verge of dying.
No. I kneel again to pull Kyle into my arms, and that’s when I whisper, “Kyle. I know what it feels like to think you’re always gonna fuck things up. To feel like everything is always hopeless in this dumpster fire kingdom, and that it’d be easier to let everything go.”
My voice hitches in my throat as Hopelessness continues flowing into her body. In a matter of moments, he’ll be out of me entirely.
“Kyle, when I hung in the balance, your love reminded me not to give up. I held on because of you. And . . . I love you too.” I kiss her on the forehead. Hold her tighter. “Come back, Kyle. Not to the worst-ever places in this city, but to our own place. Our place where we make our own damn rules. Our place where it doesn’t matter what’s on fire in the city, or what’s blowing up, because we’ve got one another. Come back to us.”
I feel a pulsing inside me as once more, a lightness floods through my body. I feel it warm my chest, the air, the very space between Kyle and me. Abruptly my energy disrupts Hopelessness. It causes his spirit to stop flowing outward, and the part of him that remains within me is yanked, hard, back into the depths of my mind and into that prison.
I whisper to Kyle, “We’re not over. Not even close.”
Her eyes slowly focus on my face. Her gaze meets mine, and she takes in a sudden, sharp breath and shudders, reaching out to grab on to me. I hold her tightly and try to stop her shivering.
“My turn to say, ‘Welcome back to the world, baby’?” I whisper.
“You’re you?” she whispers into my shoulder.
“We both are . . . us.”
And something more. I hear a roar from the depths of my mind as Hopelessness rails within his prison, but he seems to be a smaller presence than before. Looking over at Kyle, I think I know why: Hopelessness has been split into two halves—one trapped in me and the other in her.
Kyle flinches as she too seems to sense this, but I keep holding her tightly and say, “You can keep him locked inside a corner of your mind. Use your hope, your joy . . . to make a prison. You got this.”
Kyle takes in a deep breath and calms.
“He’s . . . weakened. I’m holding him back, I think,” she explains.
“Good.” We get to our feet to discover that the abyssals have yet to emerge, and I call out, “It’s not over yet! We can still close the portal! We just need the right energy.”
“It’s . . . just us against hell?” Kyle whispers. “Do we have enough power?”
I dare not answer that.
“We’ll need to get closer to the portal, then.”
But how? Pete’s power is waning. Monsters are starting to take notice of us. The tick is heading our way—and it’s found a red cowboy hat to match its caftan.
Kyle and I swap a look, and my mind goes blank.
Then Lara yells, “Vanguard!”
Over in the distance, glass shatters as Vanguardians shoot the locked doors. Seconds later they march into the mart, and the monsters instantly shift their attention to the massing soldiers.
“Now!” says Kyle.
She leads me through the space behind the aisles, and our bodies line up with aisle nine, where monsters have now stopped emerging. The portal is larger than ever. Abyssal silhouettes have started filling up the circular shape, darkening the red glow as their ghostly limbs and claws try to pierce through the portal skin. They’ll only need moments to break through.
I turn to face Kyle and hold tightly to her hands. I gaze into her eyes and whisper, “We can do this. We can use our hope to light up this darkness.”
Kyle closes her eyes and so do I.
In my thoughts, I think of my fantasy of Kyle and me driving off into the desert in that VW van. But this time I see myself in that vision. I feel myself leaning forward in that driver’s seat. I hear Kyle laugh as we roll into the distance, the future, the world we’ve yet to make.
All that I’m feeling rushes out of my chest to flood out all around me. My eyes flutter open, and I see the abyssals writhe and hiss within the portal. The hell hole buckles violently. It twists into a swirling, jagged silhouette, then a wild blur, then finally . . .
A shockwave explodes out of aisle nine, throwing Kyle and me backward, and we slam against the freezer doors. Bulbs shatter; shelves collapse. We hold tightly to one another as the whole world seems to buckle underneath us. Then, as quickly as the energy struck us, all goes silent.
We stumble to our knees to stare into aisle nine . . . at nothing. We gaze around to see demons now motionless on the spot, stunned by the shockwave, and lit only by the flickering emergency lights; their grotesque bodies might as well be melted, distorted mannequins.
Then the stillness breaks. Vanguard soldiers charge forward in a wave of Kevlar and steel, and their rifle shots and flamethrower fire turn the aisles golden. First, the space at the checkouts clears, followed by the aisles around us, until at last, a lone soldier guides us through the ruins and out to the street.
Into the light.