DEMONS

 

by Graham Swanson

DEMONS fluttered from tipped-over garbage canisters and crawled over spilled water cans and smashed HUGGIES boxes. The crooked brickwork glowed over the foggy street lamps and the clouds finally blew away and a few planets shined like holes in the sky. Their bruises and bullet scars on their hands and necks scabbed over. Every night they jump right from bed and get to work. While their women stuffed powder into bags in closed garages, they wasted no time shipping it across town armed with silver daggers.

The liars they intended to kill hid from the war ballads dropping from a heavy bass stereo by waiting in the dark apartments of their elders. They already stepped out and immediately met a spy walking tall with his hands in his pockets. While they wore diamond rings and brand new Nikes, no furniture decorated the living room and no silverware lay divided up in the plastic tray in the kitchen drawer. Boards covered up the windows, but they still watched out the slots towards a street of fools and johns. In the magnificence of the city light, their fake jewels shined brighter.

The new kid drove sweating over the four bodies in his trunk. His gas needle wavered below E. He still had to cross Central to reach the chemical bath of the Bike Shop. If the Cat knew that he took his keys from his pocket to take the Cutlass, then he could count a finger for every corpse that night. He had no money to get more gas, and the frauds of the darkened apartment already spent his treasures in the foggy alleys between wooden faces of lathwork fences. With New Central street in view, the night lit up with ultra-blue and manganese red.

To the new kid’s relief, the lights passed on to speed away after racing vehicles screeching out of the wind mist of the gas station. On Old Central, his phone rang, and on the other end, a voice hissed for him to reveal himself to a posse of lowlifes. He almost hung up, but he saw his reflection lit up by the phone light in all darkened windows. They called him names, they mocked his family, and they threatened to be there in his nightmares. He stayed on the line, “I have the sharpest teeth, I don't even sleep, and your four men learned it tonight.”

The demons on the other line hung up first, and they huddled in the pink warm light of their mother’s basement. She packed bullets into their clips to take with them to stroll for the next morning. She did this with death ringing her eyes and a cigar drooping from her lip every night. She wore the best clothes and drove the car to get lobster to eat and brought them back a to-go platter of calamari. They wanted to storm out to feud but her knife outweighed each of theirs.

Their mistress broke the nose of stronger men who ganged up on her and attempt to wrestle her away. She cracked each of their heads with a knife sharpener from under her bed and told them to get real before they marched into the darkness. Too many of her children left behind rings and she still wore them on her fingers. She never forgot their sweet names or their beautiful faces. They became men under her motherhood shortly before drowning in pools of their own blood.

The man who executed them knew exactly how to shoot them so their spines would separate from their brains, leaving them alive but paralyzed, so that their mothers would stay awake at night in horror knowing how they died. He danced among the potholes and sinking ledges, slept in the trash of abandoned halls, listened to the music of crows singing of the delicate pleasures, the candy-sweet taste of manflesh. He carried no ID because he was older than his driver’s licenses. His heart stopped beating a long time ago, yet he still walked the brick paths smiling at the smell of blood tracking behind him because rain clouds gathered around the moon.

The killer possessed two gods. They rubbed on his hips from the pockets of his raincoat. He took out the Glock to fend off punk muggers from disappointing their mother, and he used the carbine to destroy vehicles and break down stronghold doors. Each time before he delivered mercy of shattering sparks, he took a moment to hold the weapons against his dead heart and held them up to the spirit lights of the sky to be blessed by the souls of fallen demons. Then he spent the ammunition buying souls from the street.

This silent lord spent the night cumming on the face of a girl who until she met him, was on a full scholarship to become a doctor back home. She needed the crack he dosed her with. He took his pubic hair and made her look like a cat with long whiskers. He still had a water wrinkled and color drained copy of CAT IN THE HAT on a shelf. All his books contained brightly colored animations, cartoons, and few words.

The silent lord possessed phenomenal writing skills, and his text messages pounded phones louder than any voice command. With one message, all demons in the neighborhood moved crack. With one more, it all paused. He learned it from leaving love notes behind for the crushes he had in the schoolyard before those girls got pimped. In this Garden of Eden, he was the top cat.

One other old man, the Rat, knew the Cat from the playground swing set. They talked loudly about the girls he acquired back at his club. The Cat pressed one button, and those ladies left their bedrooms to come to his box under the alleyway then they went forth selling his rocks and returning the earnings in duffle bags. They feared him and merely admired the silky personality of their guardian. He was a real DEMON, not just a black goatee in a red cape.

The Rat left his club early after his phone went off with a photo of his car on fire. None of his frightened guards attended to his stifled orders so he left the club by himself to face his accuser. Outside in the empty lot, the car stood perfectly fine. A fresh downpour of rain washed it clean, but the bumpers grinded low against the pavement. He got down to check the tires. Each one completely drained of air but not a single cut of damage.

Naked demons from the club stepped out to see the Cat appear in a cloud of mist as the lot lights blew up and showed the pavement in crystal fragments. Foot patter echoed under the cover of darkness. The silk suit tried to hide in his car but the last thing he saw before the windshield shattered under a shower of red hot sparks was an antler being forced into his armpit and through his heart. He died there trying to murmur to the Cat under bubbles of blood and mucus. “We grew up together as kids, aren’t we are still friends?”

The Cat smiled with an unflinching eye and planted a coverless copy of Stuart Little in the Rat's lap, and turned the pages to that the face of the rat in overalls faced the cab light. The man tried to tear the antler free but his arm didn’t bend far enough to take it all the way out. He died after three more weeping breaths gasping to say something to the persecutor angels in black wings swarming his vehicle and pecking flesh from his bones. Under his club he kept young girls chained to radiators making cam videos for the dark int. The crowd whispered rumors of the dead man being an informant to the 13 Illuminati families, and so they left his body outside his dilapidated home to be eaten by starving dogs.

All the money the Rat obtained ended up in rubber bands on the Cat’s shelf on the pedestal he slept on under the catwalks and alleyways. He kept it out in the open but no thief dared to climb down the gutter to find it. He spent the money as fast as he made it and drove around in a brand new car with no plates, and flew from city to city. Each time he returned to find his home in the box entranced by invisible trespassers. He bought a new box of bullets and he poured them out. He stored his poems inside.

One influencer poet quit school and found himself squatting in the studio apartment of a crumbling tenement complex. He never met the Cat but tried to seduce several of his women, and even got one to come over to stay the night. She told him everything he wanted to know, but she didn’t want to leave with him to a new world. The poet opened the music studio in his laptop and recorded a scathing song swearing vengeance on the Cat and the streets he lived beneath. He put his frustrations aside and went back to pulling a red wagon to peddle albums to the lowlifes carrying paintings into the sewers. They ignored him because they thought if he hated the Cat so much, he’d be better off confronting him rather than singing about it.

The Cat really really really liked the song a lot. He even heard it playing from car windows and from apartment balconies. The more he listened to it, the more he admitted to himself that the young poet of the street possessed remarkable talent worthy of his envy. All the years around the stars of music, from the penthouse rockstars of the Midwest to the limousine trains in the West, he never took a liking to singing, but this kid made him feel the loss for his past. It’s just he wished the young man possessed the courage to sing it to his face on his dais on which his box lay, so he left the alley to be the boy’s number one fan.

The Cat saw the demon poet pass by several times but he never recognized the dirty coat of the Cat sitting on a park bench, standing in the street at night, or watching from rooftops. He watched the boy sleeping from the rickety fire escape and wanted to take his hand and hold it hard. He almost felt emotion thawing in his chest but after a shower of small needles passed in his chest, he choked and fell ever harder in love. He wrote a song with a salute of gunfire from the catwalk at the peasants below.

Bullets shattered the windows of widows and scared hustlers out of their hiding places. Playground pieces ricocheted with rapid bullets, empty clips fell to the ground far below, and a thunder of birds lifted from building tops into the moonlit clouds. The poet never saw the Cat before, but he never forget the shadow silhouetted against the brilliant strobes of white and red fireworks bleaching the walls of sinking ruins with dark coat tails unfurling in the wind. Like nothing he imagined before, his imagination went forever captured by the terror of this demon escaping into the fog of night without even touching the ground. Not even the universities had something so awe inspiring.

The Cat never saw his schemes as crimes but if the poet made songs, then he conducted operas. All the gunfire and no one died that night. Babies giggled in the arms of their mothers at the sparkles and firetruck blasts filled the night sky. The random attack became the talk of the street. The young champions of the school sports team looked up to the horrifying shadow lurking behind the curtains of the city.

Those young demons went home after game practice to play video games as the Cat smoked blunts of 9 POUND hammer. He watched every one of their games and cheered for the injuries they inflicted onto the opposing schools from the back of the bleachers. After the games and the triumph teams marched home, the Cat walked onto the field to anoint the victory with burning sage, or the defeats by crushing the bones of a rabbit. He never participated in the thrill of war games. He ran from the drifting Martin packed with masked warriors.

The Cat participated in his own ways. After academy bells chimed, he hung out in the parking lot by the fast cars paid for by bribes, and inside he told the athletes about weak spots in their opponent's armor. On game night they slaughtered the opposition to the shrieking approval of parents and cheerleaders standing up and throwing their voices out howling in celebration of broken bones. The team burned sage in dark basements to honor their guardian angel. The coaches never could kick the Cat out of the hearts and souls of their champions.

By graduation, these young demons entered the Cat’s service on the front lines of his war against the city. They marched in the middle of the windswept streets with heavy weapons under black robes. With one blow they crushed the spines of their enemies. Everyone came out to greet the death squadrons in the street with prizes and gifts, flowers, and wine bottles. The guardians of the street drove in luxury sedans like the oxcart of Charlemagne and every child adored them.

The Cat finally took total control of his side of the city he adored, and no living being in the city dared test his long awaited reward of mortal souls. His arm reached every phone, every cradle, and every car from the guy sleeping in the ditch to the human resources recruiter of the gleaming corporation towers. Bank vaults opened for him before the robberies commenced, detectives conducted raids only to find photos of their families pinned to the wall, and terrorists from foreign lands walked freely into smokey bars without passports or even a fake ID. The Cat just needed to press SEND. The dice rolled in his favor at last.

Daughters of wealthy publishers flew to the city to meet him and join his brotherhood of slayers in the dark channels under the city. He didn’t even need to seduce them on INSTAGRAM with photos of a palace or a sports car. They volunteered to join his army and use their family’s wealth to destroy his enemies. He sent them to be brides of the heroes strangling brigands on the street and shooting down helicopters over the peer. At all times a ring of all female bodyguards from across the world protected him from police snipers and he didn't need to bite a single neck.

One of the Cat’s trusted warriors yelled at him. Shielded by a phone screen, he accused the Cat of quitting the use of force out of weakness. His longest serving paladin, a follower since before puberty turned his skinny bones into gallant stature, told this to some stranger visiting from a place where the sea met the sky. He said it under the same street lights the Cat lost his heart. They tried to tell the Cat not to be alarmed by the betrayal, but he already knew. Someone was giving the identities of his drug traffickers away to the FBI.

The brave days of the FBI sending agents undercover to infiltrate organizations ended long ago, and now they recruit from within the ranks of their prey. They communicated online far from the front lines of danger. Instant communication means they can kill their enemies with a drone strike with a press of a button in a base fortified in TEXAS. They are experts in covert action. They are all nerds of the internet and they spend all their lives lurking behind computers in dark basements of government offices.

The traitor sat on his pedestal in a tower overlooking the brilliant barrel fires on one side of the city, and the glamorous theaters on the other side. Surrounded by actors, dancers, singers in his parlor, he talked like a Templar but didn’t claim spines. He never tortured a captive rival taken by the Cat nor sold a slave to workhouses down the coast. All because he knocked up one woman and she aborted it without his consent. The Cat knew that people sometimes appear harsh, but they don’t wish vendettas on anyone unless it's someone’s fault.

In the safety of his menagerie of performers, he dressed in the robes of the crusader and wore his dagger in full view across his chest sash. He stood and fired bolts at glass rings on the balcony overlooking the green sea tides. The guests borrowed his guns to fire the next rounds in the contest and he always provided them with spare rounds. In bed, he told a starlet all about the battles he won and the champions he slew with the weapon she undressed him with. As a person on the stage, he took the role of performer.

The stage became his bed, and the sheets sunk to the floor with each thrust of his rupturing hips. His guests didn’t notice the squadron of black robed fighters waiting in the shadows of the wall. After he rolled off her and they cuddled in each other's filth and sweat, the bishops of death drew their shining long swords. Shredded bedding snowed out the window in white ribbons. Hundreds of lost souls from all over the city were at risk, and now the lights fell, the curtain dropped, and a dozen armed men swarmed the stage.

The actors pleaded to be let out as the party ran out of wine to pour over the women and rails to snort off the prop guns. They pushed against the door, but they didn’t know about the dark clerics waiting in the hallway with their heavy weapons rested against their shoulders. Not a single one bowed gracefully before exiting stage left, stage right, and their heads rolled across the floor one by one into the Traitor’s bedroom as the warriors prayed to their weapons to bring the martyr compassion in the afterlife and to understand the sins they committed.

Blood soaked the walls, ran down the columns, and splattered against portraits of the Traitor’s now childless mother. Bloodstained the mattress black. Blood dripped from the ceiling, and blood drenched the laps of the all mighty slayers. One by one they passed each other's weapons around to take turns hacking at the bones, sawing out organs from ribs, taking off arms, legs, but they left the head and face intact for the funeral.

The mother of the traitor must pay the price for the misdeeds of her child. As the graveyard hole swallowed the casket with what could be recovered of the body, she heard two dozen capes hover in the fog. The Cat held an umbrella in one hand over her head as the rain began to filter from clouds of pollution. He braced his divine 9mm in the other against her racing heart. She used to be his favorite person in the whole world.

“I’ve been with you since you were in diapers. I’m not even trying to stop you.”

“So what’s up with you talking shit with him on the phone?” His throat ruptured.

“He was just playing.”

The Cat almost fell for it, but a fake person doesn’t look up to the sky when speaking with conviction with glassy drunken eyes, and rotten breath. Her posture slumped and instead of taking his hand when he offered it to her, she collapsed into the mud in the shadow of the tombstone. The Cat promised her a mausoleum to contain her body and the bodies of her family before he shot her in the temple. He kicked the body into the pit with her son and left to let the gravediggers plug the hole with clay. Crows assembled around the open grave, but they can’t eat fake meat.

The Cat pressed a button on his phone and watched hooded exiles scurry out of doorless vans and bullet riddled dumpsters. All over cars moved his supplies from the array of burning barrels to even the gated communities protected by cameras and Dobermans on the city outskirts. The rain poured harder as night fell and the green sea mist floated first onto the beach of dead crustaceans and capsized fish boats, then filled in the spaces between black towers. He held his weapons over dead and prayed to them to deliver him beyond this deranged and decrepit playground of ruins to an empire greater than Spain. Trappers worked hard knowing he watched them.

Anyone else claiming to be the main pusher deserved the blowtorch that took their eyes. Every time the Cat removed one, he found another in some dirty pit accompanied by lowlifes. They carried newer guns, a bigger arsenal of high powered gunfire capable of shattering the cannon of a battle tank or penetrating the armor of a security truck. The Cat offered them his embrace among the legion of black robed mutilators if they only stopped the lies and agreed to work for him. He even offered to pay their hospital bills, but the lies persisted.

New rivals arose from the ashes of every burned house, and every dead mother. They armed themselves in suits of Kevlar and chain links. The Cat wore rags, mites crawled in nests around his hair, and every woman who slept in his box on the dais under the alley spoke of glaucoma, of open sores and swelling bumps, rashes that he scratched until they bled, and pain that burned so hot that he preferred not to make love to his brides. He dug up the mother he killed and hung her body up in ropes under the cascading waterfalls of light and rain prominently above his home, and every night he asked her to show him a son to help him fight his enemies. Secret enclaves behind alleyway labyrinths echoed with voices of old world children barking the war songs of the lost poet threatening to devour a mangy tabby stray and leave its dead carcass on the doorstep of the Cat.

Bombs reduced secret dance clubs to heaps of crawling brick, matches dropped down fuel lines incinerated gas stations tagged by their vigil, corrupt judges washed ashore on the beach in trash bags, and so the demon knights in dark robes took to marching down the street sweating from the heat of torches in their hands and exhausted from carrying M4s straight from the locker. All down the lane twisted murals parodied them on the bullet torn face of every building from the open streets to the breadths of the narrowest alley path. They put down their hoods to look above at swaying damaged war helmets chained to balconies. Every fluttering shadow up high nearly drew concentrated fire from their weapons. The Cat watched from the highest bell tower warned them not to let these harmless taunts bring dishonor to their new empire before it even got a chance to free the oppressed.

Maidens braced the .44s of their dead boyfriends. They watched from windows. Dishonored policemen with night vision scopes monitored from closed causeways over the silent battlefield. Any homeless man who didn’t run away to find shelter elsewhere found speeding bullets dropping them into heaps of steaming refuse. Any demon unaware of the war declaration endangered themselves by hearing the shots. They swarmed church doors begging for sanctuary. Sisters barred the doors and stood over the palisade arch armed with anointed shotguns to chase the herd back into their hives.

The Cat spat liquor from the top of the bell tower, as one by one his champions found themselves alone shaking in the cold night. For the Cat never knew a son of his own, he always called his black robes executioners his children of the awakening world but a needle of pain showered his dead heart. He gasped as they stormed the brothels. They didn’t come out, and none of his messages pinged with *seen. Helicopters soared overhead and tanks crushed barricades to push their way into the downtrodden theater. Weakness left the burning city and only steel pillars remained in the white charcoal.

The Cat watched war machines tear down the playground of his first drug deal, and bury it in flaming wreckage. The pains in his heart grew. Missiles obliterated the stone porch he met his best friends on where they shared stories of first kisses and sips of stolen whiskey long ago. His black knights exited holes in the brothel wall and charged into wavering curtains of smoke to get decapitated by sniper fire. The survivors escaped to cover behind the walls of the church to be impaled by spiraling javelins, and the remains of his fearless, little army came face to face with halberds in the ranks of the fiercest, most heartless DEMONS- so toned by the horrors of the Cat that they appeared more beast than man with horns and claws, nails and outstretched wings, gleaming MG-42s freshly cleaned and calibrated. His heart vessels quivered in stifled bursts and a trickle of warmth pumped over corrosion in his veins.

Real demons ransacked the city. They pulled down every statue and broke open every fire hydrant. By sunrise, a pink haze glowed over the rebar strips and melted shoes sticking up from smoldering powder as ancient cannons fired into the ocean. The Cat vanished from the tower, but his phone landed in the grasp of a creature born from the kindness of suffering, and everlasting torment. In the dens of monsters, angels gnawed on bones of the dead knights, blood speckled robes looted from rubble and battlefields draped the fireplace, the guns and lances of the Cat's army melted into tiny silver statues worn around every neck in the new city. In a jar on the mantel floated a shriveled black heart. It rippled in a bath of oil.

Orange bags of medicine spilled on the floor but busy hands kept packing nylon until trailers tipped over. All phones across the nation warned of a new epidemic, but in a drafty back room cooled by the spinning blades of a frosty vent fan, the nephilum listening counted freshly minted c-notes. On the floor beneath the office brothers and sisters worked cheap not to build an empire but nor PUNISH the extinguished demons outside and beyond. They wore cave jewels on their belts and platinum crowns above the star on their foreheads.