“He’s my brother,” Samuel whispered.
The cabbie glared at Samuel, his eyes falling on the white collar barely hidden beneath his jacket, and began to relax again.
“Well, what the hell is wrong with him, Father?”
“It’s that thing out there. It’s doing something to him.”
“It damn sure is! It’s tearing him apart from the inside out!”
Throooom!
Something struck the church, shaking it to its foundations.
“Shit! It’s trying to get in here.” The cab driver lowered his voice. “What does it want? Why is it here?”
Both Samuel and the cabdriver faced Samson now.
“It wants what I promised it,” Samson said. “It wants these souls.”
“Fuck, then give them to him!” the cab driver shouted.
“It isn’t that simple.” A stranger’s voice that came out of Samson—a high-pitched, near-feminine voice exaggerated like that of a drag queen. Even Samson’s face had changed.
“Samson?”
“No, this is Jacque Willet. At least, that’s what I called myself when I was still human, before I sold my soul to a demon and became one myself. Before your brother here decided to try and take my soul back from Asmodeus.”
“Asmodeus? Is that what’s out there?”
“No. That’s who’s in here, what your brother invited in when he took my soul. What’s out there is far worse. That’s who you apes once named Mastema. Hostility. The Adversary. The Satan, if you will. He is the deceiver of man and the leader of fallen angels. He has come in the form of Leviathan to take what is his.”
“Bullshit! This is all bullshit! There’s no such thing as demons!” The cabbie spit out the words with as much venom as he could muster. He twitched, his face convulsing with ticks as if he were imitating the chaos in Samson’s flesh.
“Then what the hell is it then? What do you call that thing out there?” Samuel’s strength was slowly returning.
“It has to be some kind of genetic experiment. Something escaped from a science lab like Jurassic Park or some shit like that. Like one of those dinosaurs they cloned and grew in a lab.”
“FULFILL THE BARGAIN. BRING THE SOULS TO ME NOW!!!” the beast cried from outside the church.
The cabbie’s eyes widened, staring in bewilderment at Samson and Samuel. He held himself like a frightened child.
“A dinosaur that talks, huh?” Samuel shook his head and he rose from the floor. Dusting himself off, he reached for the Bible in his breast pocket. He knew he was the only one who could put an end to this madness.
The stained glass windows shattered as the beast exhaled; smoke billowed into the church. Candles melted, dripping wax onto the floors. Tapestries caught fire and burned to ash in an instant. Even the pews smoldered. The walls of the church cracked as if wounded, belching dust into the already polluted air. The floors quaked.
Samson, or whatever demonic presence now controlled him, stood gibbering madly in front of the church doors, his flesh still undulating as the souls clustered within him sought exodus before the coming holocaust. Samson turned and peered at Samuel, grinning wide like a lunatic, ropes of saliva drooling from his mouth, eyes burning like funeral pyres.
“He’ll rip the souls right out of your brother’s flesh. All of them!” The cabbie sucked in a quick breath and clutched his chest as if having a cardiac arrest, drawing Samson’s attention. “Then he’ll take yours as well.” Finally, he pointed at Samuel, “You, he’ll let live. He’ll let you live with the memory of your brother’s death, of his immortal essence being torn apart and consumed, then shat out into the inferno. Then, when you pass away in your bed, drink yourself to death, or succumb to your disease, he’ll come for your soul too.”
Samuel knew that his faith alone would not be strong enough to defeat the hellish abomination tearing through the church walls.
“FULFILL THE BARGAIN!”
“What was your bargain? What bargain did you strike with my brother?”
“YOUR LIFE FOR TWENTY SOULS.”
“I can’t let you take these innocent souls. I can’t. You can’t take my brother!”
Leviathan’s laughter drove Samuel to his knees. “THERE ARE NO INNOCENT SOULS!”
“I can’t let you take my brother!” The strength in his voice surprised him. The cabdriver stared at Samuel with renewed hope in his eyes. Samuel felt the weight of his expectations and wished he had an actual plan to save them.
“THEY ARE MINE!”
The front of the church crumbled to dust and the darkness rolled in. Leviathan emerged from the shadows. His presence stole the breath from Samuel’s lungs and burst the capillaries in his eyes, making him weep blood. Standing in the church entrance was a creature like an enormous crocodile with six snake-like heads, each filled with rows of dagger-sharp teeth like the jaws of a shark, and eyes that burned like exploding suns. Its mouths erupted like volcanoes, belching flame and ash and dripping molten lava-like drool onto the church floor, leaving steaming holes wherever it touched.
Samuel remembered the description of Leviathan in the Bible, which fell short of what stood before him now. It raised one of its taloned claws to rend Samson’s flesh into a steaming pile of meat, bone, and viscera. Samson or Jacque or Asmodeus, or whatever being that had control of his brother’s body, simply stood there with an idiot’s grin, arms outstretched in welcome.
“Take me home, Master.”
“Not if there is no bargain to make.” Samuel stepped in front of his brother and shoved him out of the way just as Leviathan’s claws struck.
“NOOOOOOOOoooo!”
The creature bellowed, crying out as if it had been the one disemboweled, its voice bringing the rest of the church down around them. Samuel’s body came apart as Leviathan’s claws sliced through his flesh and bone. He smiled as the life fled from him, his last sight the disappointment on the face of Satan and the sorrow in his brother’s eyes as the spirits vacated his flesh. Samuel fell to the floor in pieces, intestines tumbling out across the marble floors in thick oily coils, even his skull laid open to reveal the brain matter beneath.
“Samuel! Oh God! Samuel no!” Samson rushed over to hold his brother, gathering up the broken pieces of his corpse. He cradled his brother’s head in his lap and rocked back and forth, eyes squeezed shut, holding back hot tears. Clinging to the darkness of grief and regret, not giving voice to the pain that ached his soul. If the beast wanted to take him now, it was more than welcome to.
Like an enormous tidal wave of unrepentant fury, it crashed against his brother, its force abated. It slowly withdrew to whatever raging sea of chaos, whatever fearsome place it called home. Not that Samson cared. The sound of a vacuum being filled, the sounds of wet slithering retreat, the cursing howl of an enraged creature as if stabbed in the heart, nothing mattered to him. He clutched his brother, praying perhaps that sheer force of will might stitch him back together and bring him back.
“It’s gone, buddy,” the taxi driver said. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”
“Yes. Yes he is.”
His brother had died for him, died to keep Satan from getting the souls Samson had stolen, the souls he’d stolen to save Samuel’s life. None of it made sense. Everything he’d done to save his brother and now Samuel was dead anyway.