AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As Lauren?iu drives like he wants down the empty, cracked streets with dead streetlights, Daisy curls up in the backseat. They pass rows and rows of similar houses. A plastic bag rolls on the asphalt like a tumbleweed.
Soon, dusk becomes the beginning of night as stars spill across the sky.
Unfortunately, they come across a TTARP checkpoint with a steel gate and people clad in full military gear. Some hold assault rifles.
Lauren?iu tenses, and Paimon can’t blame him.
After all, this is an anti-reanimated persons unit, and he’s a reanimated person. Actually, Paimon isn’t entirely sure what these people would do with vampires. Be assholes as usual, probably. A simple conclusion. Like Occam’s Razor, but with assholes.
Daisy releases a low whine.
They have to go through here.
No worries. Paimon has this handled, likely with no deaths. Likely. Even if that would be more fun.
Eventually, they slow down at a series of high barbed wire fences—quite literally layers one after the other—surrounding the narrowing path. They approach a “safe zone”—to be honest, a metal gate with about two dozen armed guards doesn’t entirely give him comfort.
“Just act natural,” Paimon says lightly, as a woman comes through. On her dark green fatigues is a bright blue “T” beneath her left shoulder, over her heart. She carries an assault rifle as if she were born with it. The air reeks of metal and gunsmoke.
Truly, Hell on Earth.
Lauren?iu’s curt reply: “I’ll be sure to do that.”
The soldier bends to speak with them when the window is rolled down. Ever the sociable sort, Paimon leans over the center console.
“ID,” the woman tells them, not a request. The sides of her sand-blonde hair are shorn.
Paimon explains with a bright smile. “We’re just passing through. Let us in. Without a fight.”
A shift in her blue eyes. Like ice sloughing off into water. Or the fog of fatigue. She straightens.
“All right.” She waves at her companions by the gate. “Head on through.” The soldier looks from Paimon to Lauren?iu. “Have a good one, sirs.”
Once they’re past, Lauren?iu inquires, looking in the rearview mirror at Daisy, who lounges as if they aren’t entering a place that’s half-city, half-military compound, “Where do we go now?”
Paimon looks behind him. “How close are we, girl?”
Daisy ducks her head, brown eyes briefly glinting red.
Paimon tells his vampire, “Looks like we have a bit to go.”
The city of Terminus, as the darkening evening paints it purple and blue like a bruise, is an oxymoron. It is beautiful; it is grotesque.
The high towers are very high, but they don’t gleam like they used to; they are dark, others crumbled right beside them. Some of the pieces have dents from where, long ago, cannons hit them. There are pedestrians on the street in gray and black coats and scarves, holding black umbrellas, but they don’t look up as vehicles pass, and most have guns at their hips. They pass a beautiful, detailed mural of sea-greens and tiger-oranges, but at almost every block or gas station waits a hulking military vehicle, watching like Cerberus.
A place of rot.
Lauren?iu interrupts his thoughts, which is always good; Paimon doesn’t like sitting around too long in the Dark, and the streetlights are only just now flickering on, their coronas shuddering in rippling mud puddles and pools of shattered glass that are being swept up.
“Do you do that often? I’ve never seen you do that before.”
Paimon presses his hands against the cool, misting window. “Do what?”
“Compel someone.”
Shaking his head, Paimon lowers his palm and kicks his feet up on the airbag.
The radio crackles to life playing some song from a long ago time about rain. Fitting. He can almost remember the band name. “It doesn’t really work on a lot of fallen angels and demons. I don’t use it unless it’s necessary. Most of my legions don’t need to be compelled to do anything.”
