Wrath James White and Maurice Broaddus (11 page)

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.”