J King - Angel of Death

You kick back the door into the storage room. The stench in there is incredible. Your john gets a lungful and gags. Puke shoots out in a column from him. It hits you. This is better than I had hoped. You kick him in the crotch. He’s still puking as he crumples. You shove him into the room.

The other ones are watching. Those that still have eyes are watching. The ones on the left shelves are just skulls now. The ones in the back of the pantry have maggots beneath their pinned eyelids. The rats scurry away from them. The ones on the right, though, they watch you. It is fitting. They should see your last kill.

You slide off your coat and hang it on a peg on the doorjamb. You reach into your pants and pull out your pistol. A gun in your pocket, and you are happy to see him.

The john is done heaving. Wiping his mouth, he looks up to you. “Please. Please. Do whatever you want. Just don’t-”

Your muzzle touches his forehead, and he begins to shy. The bullet cracks through him. He sprays as he rolls to the floor.

Ah, and now for the hard work of cutting that head off. You put the hot pistol back in your pants, just beside its partner in crime. A knife is in your grip, and you begin to cut. If only you can hold off until the head is free in your hands, the kill will be about perfect. Of course, it all would be done in a second if you only used the ax I’ve hidden behind that bin of hands you’ve got over there. In fact, I think I’ll go get it.

“A gunshot. It’s going down,” hissed Detective Leland as she bolted around the corner. “Get in here! Everybody!”

Blake followed her for the first ten paces but stopped behind a waist-high crate and flung out the legs of his tripod.

Detective Leland rushed onward. The shot had come from that open storage closet ahead. There was movement just within the doorway, but no way of telling who was who.

“Freeze!” shouted Leland, “Police!” She fetched up behind a crate fifteen feet from the black doorway. Open cement stretched from her to the dark space where the killer worked. “Come out, now, or we’ll fire!”

Don’t listen to them, Keith. You’ve almost got that head off. Yes. Cut, cut, cut.

“You have until the count of ten!”

Don’t listen. They always-Good! Now, pick it up, slide it on.

“Nine… eight… seven… six…”

You like it, don’t you?

“… four… three… two…”

The ax comes down violently.

It is an extraordinary measure, I know. It is more than I am supposed to do in orchestrating a death, but Keith’s death needs to be extraordinary. Your hands are severed at the wrists, and they fall with the blond head atop the corpse.

“… one!”

Good boy, Keith. Now, jam those wrist stumps in your pockets – that’ll slow the bleeding. Good. And go after the lady cop. She was supposed to die tonight, but instead she’ll get a promotion. Go on ahead. I’ll stay here and clean up for you.

The short one staggered out the door. His hands were deep in his pockets. He drew forth double pistols.

“Fire!”

The blasts from Leland’s Colt were drowned out by the roar of other weapons emptying their magazines into the man. His head was gone in the first heartbeat, only a dark cloud above his shoulders. His body jiggled as entry wounds sprouted all across his abdomen. He seemed yet alive, his gun-toting hands clearing the pockets.

Except there were no guns – and no hands. His wrists ended in grisly stumps, like those of the other victims. Other victims?“Cease fire!” Leland shouted into the mike as the bullet-riddled body went down, a heap of meat.

The reports crackled to silence. Leland paused a breath, slid a new set of bullets into her Colt, drew her flashlight, and stood up behind the crate. She leveled the smoking barrel of her gun toward the wedge of darkness and held her flashlight far out to one side to keep from getting shot. The light shone into the storage closet.

Color suddenly came to the black space. Blood, mostly. A body -

“Mother of God, no, don’t let it be Azra,” Leland gasped out beneath her breath. She staggered forward. But it wasn’t he. The body was wrapped in a bulky coat. It lay, headless and handless, across the threshold. If that isn’t Azra, then where -?

A pair of hunched shoulders moved in the shadows beyond.

“Stop what you’re doing, raise your hands above your head, and come out!”

The man did not respond. He continued whatever work he was doing.

Slow and nervous, Leland advanced to the door. Her flashlight caught patches of the man’s shirt, blood draining from at least two bullet wounds. He was oblivious. He seemed to be churning something. Leland knew those shoulders. She knew this man…

Twelve years ago, she had walked to a different door, but the cell beyond it had already been emptied. There hadn’t been even a body swinging from the lamp grate. Kerry had already been pulled down, already lay in the sanitarium morgue, cold on steel. She had been too late twelve years ago.

Perhaps she was too late now.

Between gritted teeth, Leland growled, “Come out, Azra. You’re surrounded.”

There was still movement, but no sound. Leland strode steadily toward the space, finger curled around the hot trigger.

Keith’s hands will end up on the bottom of this bin. By the time they sort through all the others – Keith’s hand collection – his will be stale, too.

She’s almost to the door. I’d better stop before she sees motion in the crate.

“Sergeant Michaels, is that you?”

What? How can she see me?

I straighten. My body is casting a shadow against the shelves of maggoty skulls.

She can see me? What’s gone wrong?

This is a cardinal sin – to fall in love with a human. I raise my bloody hands over my head and turn around. Just before her gasp, I hear the click, click, click of photographs being taken.

“Down on your face. You have the right to remain silent…”

My power had been waning ever since that night in January, but now my descent was complete. My shadow told the story. I was unable to dissolve away into nothing, to slough off the body of Sergeant Michaels.

“I said, lie down on your face, hands above your head,” Detective Leland shouted.

I dropped, incredulously, to the cold concrete and felt the warm wicking of blood into my pant legs and the keen, hot jab of a spent bullet under my right knee. It was only then that I knew I had become completely mortal – flesh and bone, descendant of the mudman. The union of angels and humans brings only abomination.

“Down! All the way!” barked Detective Leland. She kicked away shell casings as she approached. The little brass cylinders made a tinkling bell sound on the cement. The camera answered with cricket calls. I lay down, across the blond man’s legs. His corpse shifted. A sputtering moan came up through the sawed neck. Keith’s body lay face down nearby, except that he no longer had a face. One of Donna’s boots dropped smoothly between McFarland and me, and I lay there, hands laced behind my head.

Her other boot descended beside the first. With it, I heard shouts from behind her to watch for a trick.

“Azra, what the hell is this…?”

“You shouldn’t be able to see me,” I said, trying to explain. “This was supposed to fix everything.”

“Mother of God, don’t say it. Don’t say it,” she whispered. “But how could it be anything else? How could I be so stupid?”

She was beside me, now, gun trained on me. I held still. Some impulse of my new flesh knew to do that much. Hold still, and live.

The boot beside me shifted. I felt her knee pressing into the small of my back. She pulled one of my bloody hands down, behind my back, and then the other, and clamped the handcuffs so tight that my fingers began to swell.