If I was under the impression that eating a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts for breakfast this morning would wash away the bitter taste of victory last night, I was sorely mistaken. True to her word, Kelly had the donuts waiting for me at my case along with the requisite large cup of coffee, but all I tasted were the ashes and blood of an innocent little girl who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Besides feeling an overwhelming amount of guilt, I was exhausted and cranky as hell from lack of sleep. After swooping in last night and delivering the extra mail left over from Colleen’s accident, the other carriers were all eager to be chummy with me again. Besides the “Great job, bud!” and “Way to take one for the team!” along with, “Neither the forces of nature or acts of God, am I right bro?” I received a half dozen fist-bumps and high-fives. Forcing a smile, I responded to each with a noncommittal reply, nodding but avoiding eye contact or engaging in a protracted conversation. What a fickle pack of degenerates.
At least the volume of mail and packages for the day didn’t look too bad, I figured it would be an average eight-hour day. I needed to go home afterwards and decompress. Logically I knew that Grams was right, there wasn’t anything I could have done to save Cassidy, and her sacrifice ensured the safety of the greater good. Kragoon was banished back to Hell and wouldn’t be hurting anybody else for a long time. But how many more innocents would die? Each minor demon lord I had fought was stronger than its predecessor, and I can’t even wrap my brain around how tough it’s gonna be to put down #6. Kragoon was willing to use innocents as his pawns, and I’d be stupid to think that none of the other demon lords wouldn’t do the same.
Pushing all thoughts from my head regarding demons and Hell, I focused on casing up my mail, delivering it and getting done as quickly as possible. Casing the mail up only took an hour, and after pulling it down I headed out the door and loaded it all in my delivery vehicle along with a pile of packages.
Driving to my route, I noticed a few pedestrians waving to me which wasn’t strange. I usually try to wave to pedestrians, bike riders and sometimes other drivers to acknowledge that I see them and am aware of their location. What was sorta strange was that I pass by four bus stops before my first delivery stop, and at least three to four people at each of the bus stops either waved, threw me a head nod, or yelled something. I felt like I was driving around with my fly down or with broccoli stuck between my front teeth. Was there a sign taped to my LLV that someone put there as a joke? I always considered myself as ‘kind of a big deal’ streetside. I got along great with my customers, but this was something different. And not to profile, but almost every one of them looked Native American. What, did these people have some sort of network where they were keeping tabs on me? At least they weren’t flipping me the bird, and even though I couldn’t hear what they were yelling, it didn’t seem like they were shouting obscenities at me.
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to get the mail delivered and be done. With focused determination, I lit into my route with a fury, practically flying down each street, jamming mail in each box like I was going for gold at a turkey stuffing contest. Packages were torpedoed to the doors via my foot or my arm, I think one may have even knocked a bird out of a tree as the box rocketed to the porch. Death metal crunched out of the bluetooth speaker on the dashboard, the angry lyrics and frantic pace of the music helping to increase my already blazing speed.
And then, it had to happen. I was drumming my hands on the steering wheel to the beat of the music when I noticed the flame tattoos on my hands blaze to life for a couple of seconds before disappearing. Crap, that could only mean one thing. Quickly I grabbed my phone and dialed the station. Kelly picked up and in a hurried voice I told her, “Kelly, this is Joe. Listen up, I don’t have much time. I’m calling in a ‘Code 109’ repeat, a ‘Code 109. Give me 45 minutes to stabilize the region.”
Kelly responded, “Understood, dispatching carrier to collect in 45 minutes. What is your location?”
I told her where I was and hung up. Agents Franklin and Higgins had coordinated with Kelly after our discussion and told her that any time I called in a Code 109 it meant I was going to be involved in some sort of covert counterterrorist activity and would at that point would effectively cease to be under her authority, answering only to Project 109. Kelly had insisted that if such was the case, Ultra-Speedy was entitled to secure any mail I might be carrying at the time to protect the integrity of said mail.
This created a huge problem; I couldn’t just stop in the middle of a life-or-death battle to drop the mail off with another carrier, so as a solution my vehicle was equipped with a large impact-resistant lockbox that I could stuff the mail and packages into, then dump by the side of the road for retrieval later by the USCS. It was equipped with a tracking device and clearly marked with the words “PROPERTY OF THE ULTRA-SPEEDY COURIER SERVICE” along with the lightning bolt logo and the penalty for theft, in case any riffraff decided to steal it. The crate was very large, and would normally have taken up too much room in the vehicle, so the engineers at Project 109 had come up with a smart solution. The crate slid right into the back of my LLV and was just slightly smaller than the cargo space itself. The two ends facing the front and back of the vehicle were open, so when I loaded my vehicle in the morning I was really just loading everything into the crate. A sliding latch was situated on the edge of the crate closest to the driver’s seat. Flipping the latch would cause the two open sides of the crate to close and lock. At that point, all I had to do was pull over, open the back door and haul the crate out to the side of the road which I did immediately.
My hand tattoos didn’t light up as I dumped the crate off the side of the road and closed the back door, but my nerves were on edge nonetheless. I slid back into the driver’s seat, started the engine and gunned it.
Pulling the spoon from my belt clip I said, “Grams, I think we’ve got an incoming hostile.” Playing out some of the cable the spoon was attached to, I placed Grams on the ledge to the left of my seat.
“I sense more than one entity!” she told me. “There are at least two or three, approaching quickly.”
Jamming the shift selector into gear, I floored the accelerator and tore down the street. The tattoos on my hands flamed to life and I could feel my chest throwing off heat as the tattoo ignited. The road was wooded on both sides and extremely curvy, which wouldn’t give me much room to maneuver or maintain my speed. I passed a couple of side streets until I found the one I was looking for.
“Saguaro Avenue, good to see you again! Nice straight stretch of road, nothing but dirt on either side with very few houses. Good visibility and plenty of room to open the old warbird up. Come at me bros!” I said trying to sound confident.
My bravado quickly disappeared like the twelve donuts I had eaten earlier. At the far end of the street ahead of me, something large lumbered out from behind one of the houses.
“What the--?” I started to say but Grams cut in.
“It’s a Slithering Chuffer. One of the creatures you saw in the fog the other night. Hell’s bloodhounds, usually run in packs of two or three, you remember that conversation?” she asked sarcastically.
All I could do was gawk at the thing. In the fog, I figured it to be about the size of a bear, but I was wrong. The creature walked on all fours and stood as tall as an elephant. The monster was shrouded in dirty, tattered cloth that completely covered its head and body. All I could see were four paws that belonged on a lion, a long hairless pinkish-brown tail that would easily be at home on a sewer rat, and a snout straight off of a T-Rex. Two beady red eyes stared across the distance at me from under the hood, and it roared defiantly, tail twitching and claws flexing. Through the tears in the cloth covering it I could see that the skin resembled an armadillo. Foamy saliva dripped from the dagger-lined maw of the devil dog as it made the odd ‘chuffing’ sound for which it was named.
“Okay Grams, as bad as this looks right now, I only see one of them. Let’s try to take it out quickly before the others get here. Divide and conquer, ya feel me babe?”
“Too late! It has summoned the others with its roar. I sense another one close by,” she replied.
I happened to glance into my side mirror when she was talking and saw another one of the hideous monstrosities about thirty yards behind me. It’s important for one to know what his or her particular strengths and weaknesses are to help better navigate life’s little ups and downs and to better adapt to unusual situations. Now, I don’t know if anybody would exactly call it one of my ‘strengths’ but I’m a fairly crappy driver and in my long illustrious career at the USCS it has become quite clear to both myself and all of the other employees I work with that ‘vehicular destruction of personal property’ is one of my specialties. Looking at the two demon hounds slowly loping toward me from the front and rear I felt it was an appropriate time to tap into that special skillset.
Stepping on both the brake and the gas pedals simultaneously, I spun the rear tires until they squealed and threw out a huge cloud of greyish black smoke. Hopefully it would blind the one behind me for a couple of minutes. Letting off the brake, I hammered the gas pedal and rocketed forward, quickly closing the distance between me and the Slithering Chuffer. The stupid thing didn’t even try to move out of the way as I prepared to plow into it at 75 mph.
“Ramming speed, motherchuffer!” I yelled out the window as I saw the creature rear up on its hind legs, paws outstretched and claws extended.
Instead of ramming the beast head on, at the last minute I slammed on the brakes and pulled the steering wheel hard to the right. My vehicle drifted sideways at the demon, and I could feel the LLV threatening to roll over as I slid on only two wheels tilted at a crazy angle. I was moving too fast and turning too sharply. Luck was with me though as I heard the ‘CRUNCH’ of metal contacting the behemoth.
Incredibly, the Chuffer absorbed the impact of the vehicle and stopped my sideways momentum. The body of the delivery truck buckled against the meaty torso, and with a tormented shriek of twisted, ripped steel, it tore open the side of my vehicle and thrust its snout in, spraying saliva and rotten chunks of meat as it vented a primal scream of rage. The second Slithering Chuffer had approached the other side of the vehicle, and leaping into the air with a “chuff-chuff”, it kamikazed down onto the top of my mail truck. I can’t even begin to imagine what these things weighed, but I do know it was enough to collapse the roof of my vehicle by a good three feet, blowing out the glass of the side windows and the windshield. All four tires popped and the frame of the truck groaned under the strain.
“We gotta move Grams!” I shouted as I stuffed the spoon in my pocket and scrambled out through the broken windshield.
“You cannot hope to outrun them, and do not mistake them for being stupid creatures. They are cunning and vicious. They will toy with you, picking you apart piece by piece. You must face them!” Grams yelled angrily as I sprinted away from the LLV trying to put as much distance between me and the hellhounds.
“You make them sound like Velociraptors,” I giggled as I ran even faster.
“This isn’t a joke idiot! Stop running, you’ll only die tired!” Grams retorted angrily.
Any reply I may have had died in my throat as a third Slithering Chuffer shambled into view ahead of me from behind a U-haul truck parked by the side of the road. Damn, for being so large, these things were actually kinda sneaky! I stopped running and bent forward with my hands on my knees to catch my breath. Three Slithering Chuffers now surrounded me, standing about thirty feet away.
Pulling the spoon from my pocket I pointed to one of the Chuffers and said “Tibi sunt praenotati.” Pointing to the remaining two, I loudly repeated, “Tibi sunt praenotati.” “You’ve been marked, all of you! Bad dogs! See this?” I pulled the spoon from my pocket and held it up in the air, turning slowly to show all of the demons. “This is my ‘pain-ladle’, and with it I’m gonna be serving up a heapin’ helping of whoop-ass. Hope you’re hungry boys, ‘cuz I brought enough for seconds!” I tried to sound more confident than I felt, which was not confident at all.
Playing out a few feet of cable I whirled the spoon around my head like a lasso and whispered “Grams, slap a little razzle-dazzle on this thing!”
A crimson aura engulfed the spoon, and as I whipped it around my head it left blazing trails of blood-red streaks in its wake.
“Get thee back to Hell filthy spawn of the Abyss, and tell your masters that I am El Cartero, Scourge of the ‘04, Destroyer of Routes, Slayer of Demons, and Deliverer of Justice and Primary Packages! Run cowering, and tell them that today is not my day to die!”
Hell doesn’t seem to have a good program for Slithering Chuffer obedience training. Instead of heeding what I regarded as perfectly sound advice, all three bellowed and charged simultaneously, thundering down on me like freight trains.
“I knew I shoulda called in sick today!” I stopped whirling the spoon and held it in my left hand.
“YAMNI!” flew from my lips, and the spoon fluidly assumed the shape of a spear. Driving the tip of the into the ground, I crouched slightly with my knees bent, and watched nervously as death swiftly approached from all sides.
Something I’ve noticed about the nifty tattoos I was given--in addition to giving me advance warning of nearby evil and allowing me to withstand more punishment than any human body should normally be able to, they also increased my reaction times and athletic abilities beyond what I was born with. At best, I would rate myself ‘athletically average’, but since receiving the tattoos I noticed I was able to pull off some pretty gnarly moves.
Like right now, for instance. With three Slithering Chuffers racing toward me from different directions, I’m guessing that they were either going to crush me to pulp between their thick skulls or one of them would close in for the death bite while the other two stood watch. Neither scenario sounded pleasant, and my brain was feverishly working out a plan to maximize my survival. Pushing down on the spear to make sure it was firmly embedded in the earth, I played out some cable in the scant seconds I had left to live and leapt straight upward.
The Chuffers had all reached the spear at the same time and skidded to a stop, milling about in confusion as they saw their prey had disappeared. The spear planted in the earth measured about six feet in length. After leaping upward, I managed to balance on the end of the spear using only one foot, arms outstretched to either side and slightly bent upward, my other leg raised and bent at the knee, assuming the ‘Modified Crane Stance’ made popular by the movie Karate Kid. The cable was tightly clenched in my right hand. The Chuffers stood about ten feet high at the shoulders, but they had no real necks to speak of, so their T-rexy heads just kind of hung there. My height put me well clear of their crushing jaws, and as they looked first left and right and then finally up at where I was perched, I launched myself backward, scissoring my legs up and over my head into a back flip.
Rotating backward I gave the cable a swift jerk and the spear returned to my hand. I was now positioned to land in a seated position on top of one of the Chuffers, and as I descended from the back flip I drove the spear with all of my strength straight down into the spine of the abomination, burying two feet of the wooden shaft into its back. Blood spurted in a three foot geyser of crimson and a howl of pain-filled agony shattered the air. The creature’s legs collapsed from under it and a shudder rippled through the enormous body that inevitably succumbed to the throes of death.
With no time to spare I tore the spear out of the carcass in a spray of warm demon blood and faced my other two assailants. Growling, they slowly padded toward me, approaching from different sides. Clenching the spear parallel to the ground with both hands, I decided that the best defense was a good offense. I yelled at the top of my lungs and charged the Slithering Chuffer to the left, spear thrust out in front of me. My aggressive attack must have confused the hellhound, who was probably used to its prey cowering in fear or running from it. For a split second it just stood there watching me with its big dumb head cocked to one side, saliva dribbling from one corner of the fanged maw. I sprinted toward the demon yelling and brandishing the war spear, thinking to myself, Damn, I bet I look pretty badass right now, running at this thing with nothing but a pointy stick. This is all kindsa manly!
I was trying to calculate how many women witnessing this act of ultimate heroism and awesomeness would want to bear my children. I bet it would be a lot. No really, a lot. You weren’t there to see it, so you don’t even know the level of manliness that I achieved at that moment. If I had farted right then, a cloud of testosterone would have exploded from my butt and hovered over the neighborhood like a cloud layer, it was that epic.
Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge: a) no women witnessed my act of ultimate machismo, and b) after running five or six steps my foot slipped in a puddle of blood and I fell face forward onto the ground. On the way down my ruggedly chiseled features intercepted the shaft of the spear, snapping my glasses in two and breaking my nose yet again. Face down and bleeding, it began to dawn on me that this time I might not be standing up again.
Why do bad things always happen to people who try to do the right thing but sometimes make crappy choices? Look, I’m no angel, but I’m playing for the team that has them on the roster, right? Life--cut me some slack will ya? My shattered nose was streaming blood, and one eye was swollen shut courtesy of the fist-sized rock lying on the ground where my face had landed.
Pushing myself up I managed to get on my hands and knees before dozens of razor sharp teeth pierced my sides; I could feel the fangs grating on my ribs as one of the Chuffers grabbed my torso in its jaws and hoisted me up in the air over its head. Pain engulfed me and I’m not ashamed to say I screamed in agony as the Chuffer’s massive head swung side to side, savaging me like a chew toy before flinging my ravaged body across the street into the side of my crushed vehicle. With my one good eye, I could see the other Slithering Chuffer approaching me at a leisurely pace. Take your time there, big guy, I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, ran through my head.
Broken glass from the driver’s side window had cushioned the fall of my mutilated body, and luckily, they managed to pierce me in the dozen or so places that the Chuffer’s teeth had missed, so on the bright side the pain was more evenly distributed now from head to toe. Shards pin cushioned the back side of my body from shoulders to calves, and to my relief, I’m left handed, otherwise the six inch piece of broken glass that was protruding three inches from both sides of my right hand might have impaired my ability to write legibly.
The pain was so overwhelming that I wanted to curl up in fetal position and cry myself to death. It hurt too much to curl up though, so all I could do was lie there, hemorrhaging blood and tears in a grotesque parody of a lawn sprinkler. The second Slithering Chuffer had reached my body and grabbing my foot and ankle between its teeth proceeded to drag me away from the LLV. Fresh pain assaulted my senses as the glass shards jutting out of my back, legs and arms were dragged over the rocky ground, leaving a swath of red in my wake. Massive blood loss was threatening to relieve me of consciousness, but still I fumbled for the spear that I dimly recalled being attached to the cable on my belt. My hands could barely move, and when they did, I suspect they were just spasming with pain. Deep down I knew the physical trauma my body had endured was beyond the tattoos ability to mitigate. This was it. My arrogance and inability to take this whole stinking mess seriously had finally let me down. Good goin’, spaz.
“HOLD!” Barely conscious and bleeding from one ear, the sound of that voice still managed to send chills down my spine and make my limbs grow weaker than they already were. It was like hearing a million fingernails run across a chalkboard; that one spoken word made my teeth hurt and my guts churn. I could feel the hot, fetid breath of a Chuffer standing over me, panting a ‘chuff-chuff’ in my face, and then it backed off. The crushing grip on my foot and ankle gave way when the other Chuffer stopped dragging me and released my leg. A shadow fell over my prone, mangled form but without my glasses all I saw through my one eye was an indistinct, blurry figure. Apart from my ragged breathing and frequent moans of agony, silence fell over the area around me.
“I would tell you that I am Tolkash, son of Illgamyr, Lord of the Sixth Circle of the Abyss, and that to look upon my face is to look upon the face of Death, but it appears that you can see very little at this moment,” a booted foot pushed my head to one side.
“Normally, I would savor a moment such as this but truly, you were undone by a pack of brutish beasts. There is no glory, no sport for one as resplendent as myself. I simply cannot return to my father or my peers preening over a victory that I haven’t truly earned. As it stands, I’ll be defeating someone not even able to best a pack of my pets, which speaks volumes about your worth, or lack thereof. I was under the impression that you were going to be a challenging adversary. Hah! Look at you!” Tolkash crouched next to me and peered down into my face.
“Tell you what champ. Return here tomorrow at this time and I promise, no Slithering Chuffers. Feel free to bring this little toy if you’d like,” I screamed as Tolkash drove the point of the Sioux war spear through my thigh, pinning my leg to the ground beneath it. “Though I daresay it didn’t seem to help you at all today!”
I howled and wept as he twisted the spear, grinding it against the bone. I’m sure I was foaming at the mouth as I swore at his blurry retreating form. “By all the gods, I will mulch your body and flush it down the nastiest toilet I can find in a bus station. I will flay the skin from your putrid corpse and use it---”
I started choking as one of my broken teeth got lodged in my throat. Damn, that was the third or fourth tooth I’ve lost so far, my dentist is gonna love me! It didn’t matter anyway, Tolkash and his pets were gone, even the one I had killed. Bleeding and panting with pain and anger, I considered my options. I could try to get up, but why bother? Even if I lived through tonight, there’s no way I could beat Tolkash tomorrow at this time. I was all busted up inside. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. Oh wait--Tolkash already did that, it’s jutting from my thigh at this very moment. I closed my eyes. I was so very tired. I just needed to sleep, that would make it all better.
“Get up. Now!” Gram’s angry voice cut through the fog enveloping my brain. “Your carelessness has set events in motion that now threaten the very fabric of reality. How dare you! How selfish, to think it’s okay to just die and leave this mess that you’ve created for someone else to clean up! You should be ashamed of yourself, you lazy cur!”
I didn’t answer for a long time. “I am ashamed of myself. I can’t do it Grams. I’m not strong enough. At my best, those dogs made me their bitch--in this condition Tolkash won’t even break a sweat, he’ll make me his own personal colon-cleanse just by looking in my direction. There’s gotta be someone out there who’d be better at this than I am. Pick someone else and just let me die.”
I closed my good eye and waited for death. Grams snorted “You speak truth boy. There are people out there who would be better at this than you are. To be honest, I think just about anybody else would be. But you were the catalyst that Fate chose to precipitate these events. You must be the one to restore the balance. This isn’t like farting in class and blaming it on someone else. Own it. Sack up and grow a pair. If you can’t be a man, at least try to act like one.”
Wow, if Grams was this mean while I was hovering on Death’s door, I’d hate to see how nasty she’d be standing over my grave! Her acidic tone cut through my misery. “Now drop the pity party and get to the tattoo parlor, Inez can help fix some of this damage.”
I started to speak, “My ride is trashed, how the hell am I supposed to go anywhere?” and it was at that exact moment that another Ultra-Speedy delivery vehicle rolled up next to me. A pretty blonde head poked out of the driver side window.
“Oh my god, what happened to you?! Let me call an ambulance!” the woman fumbled for her phone. Looking around she saw my crushed LLV and copious amounts of blood congealing on numerous surfaces. “What happened out here? I need to call the police and the courier inspectors!” Her eyes were wide, and she looked scared.
“NO!!” I croaked through swollen, lacerated lips, pulling myself up to a seated position. “Please, there’s a card in my wallet. Take me to the address on the card. No hospital, no cops, nothing. Please!” I pleaded.
The young woman stared intently at my blood encrusted face. “Holy crap, is that you Joe? Oh man, you look like you’re almost dead, I can barely recognize you. I can’t just drive you somewhere in this thing, there’s only one seat in here and I’d get fired! Besides they sent me out to pick up some weird large mail crate that was dumped by the side of the road, it’s in the back now. Let me call Kelly, she’ll send a supervisor out to pick you up!” The woman knew my name, but my vision was blurring, and it was hard to make out her features.
“Listen to me!” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m dying. Call Kelly and tell her that the Code 109 has been compromised. Let her know my vehicle is inoperable, they’ll need to send out a tow truck to pick it up, and tell her that you need to run me in for medical attention so we’ll have to dump that crate you’re carrying and they can send someone else to pick it up. If she gives you any hassle, tell her to talk to agents Franklin and Higgins. She has their number and they’ll take care of this. I promise you won’t get fired.”
Using my one functional hand I pulled my wallet out of my back pocket and fished a business card out of it, handing it to the woman. “Dump the crate and help me get into the back of your vehicle. Call this number and tell Inez that you’re bringing me in. Then call Kelly and tell her what I told you to say. Can you do that? I don’t think I can hold on for much longer.”
“Fine, fine--I’ll call! Let me get the crate out of my vehicle and we’ll lay you down back there!” she said in an anxious voice.
I lay on the ground in a shattered heap while the young lady wrestled the large crate out of her LLV and then half dragged, half carried my body into the back of the vehicle. Velvety blackness enveloped my brain, and the last thing I recalled hearing as my mind shut down was the woman’s voice as she made the calls.
“Hello Kelly, look the Code 109, whatever that is has been compromised. Joe says to call some guys named Franklin and Higgins, and to tell you to send a tow truck to this location to get his LLV and someone to pick up the crate. I have to take him in for medical attention, he’s uh, kind of hurt. No, I don’t think he’ll be able to finish his route in time. Okay, I’ll keep you posted.” and then part of a second phone call.
“Hello, is this Inez? Hi, my name is Leah and I’ve got a situation….”