When Gary Demonio first experienced the glacial kiss of Death all those years ago, the Grim Reaper’s bony hand presented him with his first-class ticket, and he was off. Sent flying on a metaphorical belt of ramshackle train tracks, utterly devoured by rust and grim. Squeezed with wild vigor by the cruel, unforgiving hand of time and indifference to its state. Where that stygian locomotive dumped him was somewhere smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, everywhere, nothing, and everything.
That was the answer presented to the nefarious God of Chaos the previous early morn. That internal, sometimes infernal, voice trapped within the demarcations of his skull until further notice had posed the question. Gary’s eyelids were securely sealed shut. Lethargy and unrivaled drowsiness being the unbreakable glue latching them together. His bulging, veiny pythons and jungly forearms were bare. His soon-to-be infamous aquamarine button-down free from his ironclad frame. In coalition with his stone-grey, tattered pants, war-torn boots, shockingly spotless socks, and battered belt. All of them resided in a small puddle of linen, threadbare textile, and a singular glimmering buckle at his bedside. Directly in front of his oak bedside table. His left hand rested soundly between the decently groomed back of his head and the lush pillow. His right limb was tucked neatly beneath his welcoming seafoam-green blanket, calloused manus lazing on his thigh.
Gary was primed for respite. Most likely the champion of every nap or slumber he’s ever bore the fortune of having in his four decades of life. Undeserved life, that is. His radically, incomprehensibly wrung-out frame and pulsating legs were devoured by the mattress. And Gary, for the first time since his brain began to hoard memories, relented to an opposing force’s advances. Surrendered every minuscule fiber of every cell of his being into the limitless inky ocean of drowse. Its ebony maw reared its ugly head from its murky, incalculable fathoms. Ready and eager to devour the man whole haphazardly, without a hair of uncertainty behind it.
And the yawning set of titanic jaws was mere centimeters from his sin-stained flesh when Discord’s incarcerated voice erupted from the bowels of his psyche. Inquiring about sacred, never-before-disclosed information that a God, a supposedly undying one at that, shouldn’t bear any concern about. Why would an immortal Draconequus, hellbent on pummeling and hammering the world into his beautiful chaotic vision, fret over death. It didn’t make sense to the bastard. Hell, nothing made sense in this world. Talking horses, unicorns, and pegasi governing these ceaseless lands? A tried and true government being fully implemented, no hitches or cancers plaguing it? No rationale or sliver of denotation could be uttered to paint his state of affairs with any hue of clarity.
Gary knew full-well that giving Discord a long, irritated bout of silence as an answer would only fan the flames of his sweltering curiosity. Perhaps even fear. Discord, a creature that could easily be mistaken for a barbaric guardian of Hell, cowering in the face of anything? Being fearful towards any mortal concept or action? It was impossible. Not feasible no matter what way you twist and interpret it. But so was his miraculous resurrection. As far as so-called unattainable marvels were considered, the sky was undoubtedly the limit.
Gary obliged his brain’s badgersome-slash-insightful roommate with his wretched tale. It was simply, in every definition or meaning of the word, null. Nothing was able to pierce the horizon and liberate his vision from the endless, soupy darkness. If he could even call it darkness. Dark is the absence of the light. It’s expelled either by the herculean sun assuming his throne in the grand cyan mantle above, or the effortless flick of a switch. But there, after that searing hunk of metal tore his ribcage asunder, there wasn’t any time left to appreciate how fortunate he was to have light. In there, calling it darkness would be nothing short of a luxury. A luxury that, in spite of his years ruling Roseville atop his throne of blood money, failed to afford. A shapeless void, boundless and naked. A field of impossibly smooth obsidian, free of anything bearing any semblance to a divot or gouge. Just an incessant, glassy terrain, rambling on into more nothingness as far as his amber orbs could process. Could he even call it a void? Referring to it as such would classify it as a thing. All things considered, a void is a thing, after all. Yet this realm wasn’t anything at all. No word in the mountainous English language could begin to assist anyone in understanding the severity of the emptiness. The absolute occupation of no physical thing, tangible thought, or hopeful prospect. Just him, the satisfaction of every life he slew clasping his racing heart, and his mind. His twisted, aberrant, beyond debauched mind, still swimming and roiling infinitely. Urges and lusts more dire than any sane being could begin to comprehend assaulting the walls of his skull. Pounding with wild, unchained vigor, fighting for liberation in a world that, unbeknownst to them, provided nothing. They clashed tooth and nail with their restraints and bindings, with all of their laborious efforts bearing no light at the end.
The noirette was once in that same boat. Hell, he practically lived in that boat. If time bore any sort of meaning in that eternal, formless chunk of oblivion, he would’ve lived countless lifetimes there. Stuck. Trapped. Imprisoned. Dead. That was the word that rang a manifold of bells in the hearts of many. A chime that summoned a blitzkrieg of joy, relief, and pleasure at the death of the humanized demon. Only he escaped. Somehow, someway, by some bout of incomprehensible luck, he made it out. Alive. His heart beat. His lungs swelled and deflated. His veins flowed feverishly. His grotesque, loathsome antics could continue. Will continue. The luster at the end of his lengthy, stygian tunnel was reignited. Gary was given a purpose to live once more. A goal to reach for. All anyone could do was hope and pray that a bullet finds its way into his nucleus for the final time. Rid this sugar-coated, innocent world of a devil that sought to destroy it. Eliminate the barbarian that was willing to burn the planet to the ground as long his arch-adversary’s death was assured. Nothing else mattered. No one else harbored any importance. Any existence sans his own could end at any moment, and no hole would be chewed from his heart by the ravenous jaws of shame.
The crickets’ arresting swan song Gary was lulled into slumber by had long since met its timely cessation. Equestria’s mighty, herculean sun rose from the bowels of the horizon to claim its righteous throne hours ago. Casting the stars into temporary oblivion, secreting them behind a veil of a brilliant cyan, cloud-spangled sky. Baby Blue declared war against the deep indigo painting the Equus atmosphere. A slender shaft of golden radiance breached the slim crack between old-timey, antique drapes, the color of sanded oak. Arrested to a polished golden rod bolted into the nigh-naked mahogany wall. Beyond the square glass window, roughly a half-foot in diameter, wearisome and unwelcomed weather was culminating. A palisade of sooty, ashen clouds reigned supreme over the, mere hours before, crystalline Equestrian sky. The smoky thunderheads were akin to the silver underbelly of a titanic airship. Blotches of grime blighted the glass like rogue cancer cells, somewhat souring the otherwise, at least to the bastard, galvanizing spectacle. To any normal equine trotting down the streets of this ramshackle clot of homes and businesses, this sight wasn’t unique in any way shape or form. But when you spend the latter half of…how long had it been? Years? Decades? Whatever the length of his hellish tenure truly was, anything that didn’t resemble an infinite void of nothingness was unbelievably treasured.
A comber of thunder splashed over the nation far off in the distance.
“Gorgeous, isn’t it?”
Gary was a trifling handful of seconds away from allowing the penned Draconequus to slip into the recesses of his memory. Part of him desired peace and quiet in a time such as this, but given his impossibly grim circumstances, company was always welcome. Even a God of Chaos lounging inside of his skull rent-free, bereft of a care in the world.
A grunt of agreement scaled the arid walls of his throat.
“Something we can agree on.”
Discord scoffed.
“Please, Gary, can we forget that travesty last night? Forgive me for believing the most sociable pony in all of Equestria didn’t have what we sought.”
“I’m sure she did,” Gary replied, the sun’s muted glory breaching through the pinpricks in the titanium dyke, glimmering in his tree sap irises. “She was just too damn hyper to focus her thoughts on anything.”
“Let’s not judge too harshly, my friend. We’ve all had our moments.”
“I guess so, Discord.” Gary rubbed his fatigued, bone-tired eyes with his two calloused fingers and gritty thumb at the memory.
“Wish she didn’t have her moment right when I fucking needed something.”
“I’m almost positive she’s like that all the time.”
“How do you know?”
“It seemed too natural to be a one-time thing. It’s in her blood, I guarantee it.”
Gary sighed. A deep, bottomless ocean of air fleeing his heaving lungs.
“Maybe.”
There was something so unusual about this interaction. Something so unusual about every interaction the worthless sod had with the grotesque, otherworldly beast providing his brain with much-desired company. For as long as he could remember, there wasn’t a single mortal soul with a sane mind in Roseville whom he could call his friend. His brother was the closest he ever had. When he perished and his icy cadaver was lowered six feet under all those years ago, Gary was, in all senses of the word, alone. Deserted by unseen forces to live the rest of his pitiful existence in dreadful, perpetual isolation. Left to roam the fissure-ridden streets and splintered sidewalks in unmitigated purdah. Walking up and down the cobweb-littered hallways of his sub-par, half-rotten house. Putrescent floorboards wailing beneath his wet. Stone-grey carpet bedeviled by viscous gunge and haphazardly scattered coffee stains. Whatever miscellaneous cheesy TV show or vintage Western he put on being the only background noise the town had to offer. Seconded only by lone thunderous gunshots reverberating down the pummeled, carless roads. The occasional howl of agony or ecstasy, depending on the event and time of day. And silence. Deafening, blaring, nerve-wracking silence.
Then there was Gary. All by his lonesome. Lazing deep into his golden throne overlooking his mammoth, unrivaled empire. The building blocks of angst and ceaseless suffering it sat on wobbling with the breeze. His drug mules bowed to his every command, no matter how sinister or outright fatal they proved to be. Money was tossed at his feet as he ordered. Tearing open the moth-devoured duffel bags and locking eyes with Benjamin Franklin was the highlight of his week. The only outlet of joy or relief to be found in that dying, decomposing town. Every junkie or hapless hobo roaming the streets like writhing larvae.
In Ponyville, staring out at a land soon to be ravaged by a storm of herculean magnitude, Gary found himself feeling like a man. Like a person. For the first time before he took matters into his own hands and conquered that moldering wasteland. Beneath the elephantine layers of sin, unrivaled guilt, and deathly regret, a fragment of who he was remained. A chunk carelessly torn from his soul and chucked into the blackened, murky depths of his frame. With every bullet fired and life claimed, the fathoms only got darker. But now, with nobody around to bow to his every whim and commandment he barked, it was just…him.
Gary blinked hard. He managed to wrench his blissful stare, brimming with whimsical exhilaration and child-like wonder, from the soon-to-be downpour.
Every inch of the motel was plunged into unexcelled silence. The town was alive, without a shadow of a doubt. With the early morning hours being a memory drifting further into obscurity, every thrill and buzz Ponyville rendered was on full bold display. The sickly-sweet air was occupied solely by delightful, light-hearted banter. Colonies of birds living their best life, unbothered and oblivious to the horrors of everyday life, sang blithely. The muted thump of a soccer ball impacting the vibrant, lively grass was a soothing backdrop to the legion of giggles and howls of laughter. Blissfully unaware children engaged in a match-up of Homeric proportions. Old wagon wheels squealed up and down the trodden streets, surely belonging to the manifold of businesses temporarily abandoned in the night.
With two massive, calloused hands, Gary tore the drapes apart. The rungs squealed against the spotless bar. A tsunami of radiance and gleam assaulted his senses. Luster declared war against his bare pythons, sliced in two by his chiseled, picturesque chin. One would be forgiven for mistaking the begrimed pane of glass for a world-renowned painting. The titanium sheet deadening the sun’s marvelous influence. A space of expertly trimmed grass, melting into a gargantuan expanse of trees, stretching for miles far beyond the point of comprehension. The human residing within the blackness of his soul labeled it as beauty, the devil did not. It was only a setback, it claimed. A blight among their grandiose plan of domination and unforeseen anarchy upon this mortal world.
Gary lumbered with the finesse of a Greek statue, life breathed into his veins meager minutes before. Bare feet threatening to bond with the lush carpet on a subatomic level. Brain yearning for the sanctity of the mattress once more. For his responsibilities to materialize into a heap of ash and dust. For Discord to abruptly burst from the demarcations of his cranium. Destroying not only his mountainous, heaven-scraping expectations but also the need to depart from this euphoric building. Lying down and rejoicing in a measly five more minutes and slumber would quell all of his ailments. His pulsating calves. Head screaming for mercy and respite. Eyelids hasped by hulking dumbbells. Let a singular blink be one second longer than the quota they strictly adhered to, he’d be gone. Gone to that realm of infinite and interminable tenebrosity. His heart quaked at the prospect. His human heart.
Discord shifted uncomfortably inside the man’s head, in spite of his disembodied disposition.
“Gary?”
“What?”
“You’re memories…they’re a dark place, my friend.”
“They are. What about it?”
The Draconequus paused. Seconds were hours now.
Gary slipped one shank into his tattered work pants, his belt buckle jingling with every jerk like bullet casings striking the concrete.
“I’m certain that these…what should I call them? These ‘choices’ of yours don’t tell the full story.”
He fastened the elderly, crinkled belt around his slim waist.
“They don’t.”
“So, assuming I’ll be in here for a while, when are you going to humor me?”
“Huh?”
“When are you going to tell me your story, Gary.” Discord clarified. “We’re partners now, correct?”
“If that’s what you wanna call it, sure.”
“So if I’m going to be trapped in your mind for the foreseeable future, it would make sense if we knew each other. Make sure we’re not total strangers.”
Gary clasped the button right underneath his chest. The dried blood marring his top, a permanent reminder of his ghastly escapade in Alabama, was as grizzly as ever. He couldn’t bear to amuse it with his gaze a second longer.
“I’m the one saving you from being a statue, Discord,” Gary replied. “I don’t think we’ll ever be ‘total strangers’.”
“You know what I-”
“If I don’t wanna tell you, then I won’t.” Gary hissed, tying the dirt-encrusted laces of his left boot into a duo of neat rabbit ears.
For the second time, the noirette managed to interrupt a voice in his head. A voice he still wasn’t entirely sure was rooted within the partitions of reality. Maybe it wasn’t as odd as he believed it to be.
“If I wanna fucking tell, then I will. But it’s not a happy tale.”
“Well, I figured that,” Discord remarked.
“What I wanna know is why it was so unhappy. You piqued my curiosity, Gary Demonio. That’s something you can never come back from.”
“Aren’t I just the luckiest man on Earth?”
“Indeed you are.”
Gary swallowed hard. Saliva tumbled down the arid interior of his desiccated esophagus. If he was honest, ingesting a mouthful of pulverized, sun-baked asphalt would’ve been highly espoused in its stead. Gary swiveled his skull, two pools of fatigue and elation at the upcoming journey clashing for dominance. A brutal fight with no concise victor in sight, just violent, callous splashing fueled by wild bloodlust The chronic taste of sand walloped his taste buds. Somewhere in there, hidden deep within the manifold of cells of his tongue, the tart of his last drink haunted him. Sharp, acrid cinnamon. A hearty cup of Scotch on the rocks, a beverage he vividly remembered downing without a second thought years ago. Standing in his high-top work boots on his marred, scuffed kitchen tiles, pouring the liquid amber into a polished shot glass. He ogled at it for mere seconds before it disappeared down his eager gullet, leaving a bitter trail of flames and charred flesh in its brutish wake.
Out of the multiplex of regrets of yesteryear he began to mourn in Equestria, none dared to rival the harsh bite of that fiery alcohol. A failed attempt at sending his muted sorrows and smothered misery to Davy Jones' locker. The anguish he stranded and left to the elements in that sullied, befouled crab trap he somehow managed to call home for so long. A term he came to use extremely loosely. Gary’s smoky quartz flicked to his bedside table. A tall wooden box with two regular-sized drawers, fit with a twain of stygian metal handles like bougie door knockers, elevated above the mahogany floor by a squad of slender legs. Next to a smudged golden lamp harboring an hourglass frame, the object of the male’s indivisible attention sat. His matte-black utensil of boundless carnage and ravaging. The foreboding contraption of ceaseless death basked in unwarranted respite, sheltered by a small umbrella of soft golden gleam, courtesy of the Victorian-era lamp at its side. Unease and angst were discharged from the murderous apparatus, like a sable, addled heart pumping blackened blood into the atmosphere. Wails from the ever-stretching laundry list of lost souls rocketed from the lightless barrel.
Gary reached a beaten, war-torn hand and smothered the coarse grip with his palm. The raven-haired male rose to his aching feet. Age-old floorboards mewled beneath his weight akin to a gutshot horse galloping ever-so-closer to heaven’s yawning maw. His labyrinthine rubber treads below his boots stabbed the red Christmas-esque design rug at his bedside. He shoved the weapon of mass destruction down the back of his pants. Its straightforward yet knotty skeleton bit into the flesh of his lower back, secreting it behind the bottom of his turquoise top. A curtain caching its horrific nature from the outside world. Concealing it from a vast race of individuals who most likely, based on the ramshackle pilgrimage he witnessed thus far, probably don’t have a slight grasp on what it's capable of. More importantly, what its vile wielder is capable of.
Thunder splashed over the country in the far-off, incomprehensible distance. A vibrant javelin of lightning surely impaling the earth by now. Rain was charging headlong. The hourglass was spewing sand faster than his mind, and the lawless soul accompanying his mind could’ve ever forecasted.
“The storm is gonna be here soon, my friend.”
Gary rolled his dog-tired eyes. A snide action he could only hope his comrade couldn’t detect. If scrounging through his memories like a starved raccoon in a trash can wasn’t absent from the realm of possibility, who’s to say anything was?
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
The male tugged his pants up ever-so-slightly. His repugnant friend slid up his lower back like a surgeon’s icy scalpel.
Oh, the things he’d do for a measly five seconds of target practice. For the opportunity to tear open his flesh and release his long-manacled demons from their icy dungeons. Invoke the unfathomable fury of his ravenous urges and hankerings. Levi resided somewhere within this town’s dilapidated demarcations. The only question that desperately required an answer was where. Where in the hell could the Man in Blue possibly be?
Gary could rest easy knowing that inquiry wouldn’t be abandoned in limbo for much longer.
“We gotta get moving.”
“I couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“What time is it?”
Gary’s parents weren’t the brightest pair on the tree, nor the sharpest duo of tools in the gimcrack shed. But if there was one thing they were semi-proficient at, rambling on and on about “meaningful” philosophies and ideals to live and die by was just that. The male was, at best, indifferent to their pleas for him to pursue a life of grandeur and elation. Bereft of the bloodshed and endless havoc they knew-slash-assumed was inevitable. Steering him clear from the gore-stained, ichor-caked highway to Hell that was leering at him from the future. Failed efforts and soured memories were all he barely remembered from his paunchy father and careless mother. Their words, however, were immortal. Perhaps invincibility to the bitter hand of time and decay ran in the Demonio’s blood. Only manifested differently for others. Appreciating what you had before it was gone indefinitely was one of the countless lessons drilled, hammered, and nailed into his brain. Plastered for good measure.
He never stopped to realize just how convenient a clock dangling from the crest of a wall or a watch was until this mockery of the Oregon Trail threw a lifetime of hardships his way. A feat he ne’er thought possible in the span of a day and a half. This was Equestria he was talking about, after all. Shattering expectations and rivaling standards was the staple of the calamitous experience.
“How do you expect me to know, Gary? You’re the one with a body. Find a way.”
Gary glared at no one. His vitriolic leer scorched the dead, lifeless air, trained on the guiltless doorway. Simply in the wrong place at the absolute wrong time, providing sanctuary for an awful man.
“If I had a way, I wouldn’t have fucking asked.”
“No need to get that defensive, friend.”
The raven-haired male sighed deeply, a lake of air vomiting from the pits of his lungs.
“For fuck’s sake.” Gary breathed. “I don’t know if ‘friend’ is the right thing I’d call you.”
“Do you have any better ideas?”
“Freeloader.” Gary quipped. “Brain cancer.”
“I think I’ve heard enough.”
Gary chuckled. The corners of his lips reeled to the sky, like unruly fish being tugged from a crystalline river. Decades-old planks caterwauled beneath the unsympathetic rubber of his begrimed boots. Two lingering strides brought his avid hand to the grubby golden knob. Gary gyrated the lock. A soft click of its maze-like internal structure adhering to his command. The raven-haired male pulled, ever-so-slightly. Just over three inches of space divided the freshly cracked door from its home.
Outside, something was coming.
Something was there.
The sonorous cacophony transformed his brows into a furrowed mess of shambolic confusion, and his psyche into a discordant war zone. Gary, in all of his four decades of unmerited time he spent extant, never had his ears tickled by this…whatever he could classify “this” as.
It sounded oddly similar to a train. Only take a hustling, hulking locomotive, eliminate its raucous screech and roar of an elephantine engine, and there it was. This bustling, roaring, chugging thing marring his hearing. Either soaring through the dead, soulless ocean of endless gray that could barely be called a sky. Or barreling down the endless rolling fields of Equestria. If he were to remove a much-needed censor from his thoughts, they would sound a little similar to this.
No Levi, then no care was needed.
Unless he peered out of the sullied window and bore witness to a royal blue flash zip across his overtaxed vision, his indifference would die on the spot. Its icy corpse collapsing onto the floor of his mind. Swiftly forgotten and uncared for, kicked under the rug like a loose penny dropped on a carpet. Whichever abnormal name this equally abnormal race conjured for the brawny machine would surely be discovered soon. Another nugget of information mined from the burly lump of raw fresh knowledge.
While Gary couldn’t muster a sliver of exertion towards anything sans his goals to save his life, Discord’s blithe, devil-may-care attitude towards the aggregate of Ponyville’s balderdash. After all, being hemmed inside the mellow skull of a deranged madman didn’t harbor any need for concern or fret. Quite frankly, it was the closest thing to a bougie life of luxury and grandeur a God of Chaos could ever earn. Being imprisoned in a casket of coarse granite for a long-forgotten number of decades was less than ideal.
Whatever the monstrous airborne or grounded fountain of sound was perturbed the Draconequus. Rammed a glacial sword of dread smack-dab in the center of his spectral, disembodied heart. His ribs torn asunder, laying waste to his ghostly frame.
Scratch that. Discord, the globally feared God of infinite and illimitable Chaos, was terrified of what had just arrived outside the hotel. Whether it was, somehow, frightened by the prospect he’d be banished back to his hellish repercussions. Or be kissed by the subzero lips of Death. Whatever the case may be, consternation deposed all else within the inhuman beast. In spite of how vehemently he’d deny it, it ever-so-slightly infected the raven-haired man alongside him.
“Oh, no!” The Draconequus cried, his pitiful wail echoing endlessly in the cavern of his skull.
“No, no, no! Why now? Of all times, now?! Why?”
“What the fuck is it, Discord?”
“Oh, no! No! How did they know?”
“Discord!”
“I recognize that sound anywhere! It’s the Royal Guard!”
Gary cocked a brow perplexed at thin air, fully separating the door from its humble abode.
“Alright? What’s the damn problem here?”
“The Royal Guard. The army responsible for defending all of Equestria. That doesn’t sound like a ‘damn problem’ to you?”
“Discord,” Gary stepped into the small hallway. The rows of ruthlessly monotonous dark oak assaulted his senses. “If these horses or whatever can barely use electricity, what are they gonna do to me? Cane me? Club me?”
“This isn’t a game, Gary. Why won’t you take me seriously?”
He shut the door behind him. A melodic click betrayed the thick silence drowning the once-tranquil establishment. Only that was a soon-to-be-forgotten memory of a time long lost. One that disappeared the instant Gary Demonio laid eyes on the building.
“I take you seriously ninety-ninety percent of the fucking time,” Gary replied.
“Problem is, this just sounds stupid. We have a job to do, remember? What is this ‘Royal Guard’ gonna do?”
On the male’s left and right, two doors adorned the caliginous, ill-lit walls, separated by a meager ten inches of space. Sullied gold knobs were the sole deviants to the calculating, cold command of the redundant color. At the end of the hall was a sharp right-turn, leading down to the bowels of this ramshackle place. The front double doors where not only his solitary escape lie, bedeviled by acute impatience, but the potential horrors that arrived in that nameless sound machine. Either chiseled warriors or poignant laughing stocks, destitute of an in-between.
Three long strides brought the noirette to the apex of the staircase. A belt of steps that spilled down into a small rectangular floor, with a trio of stairs granting access to the lobby. Beyond the mahogany rectangle was another tongue of steps reaching up to lick the right half of the building. The sorry excuse for a vestibule was brighter than Gary ever could’ve imagined that room was capable of. How a singular chandelier housing a multitude of halfway-dead candles enveloped every nook and cranny with gleam was a mystery. Mystery. That was a recurring theme in this living, breathing antique of a town. Enigmas around every corner and wandering down every street, bereft of deviations.
Gary lacked both the time and the energy to care about such trivial things. Like he vehemently stressed to the Draconequus occupying his tenebrous-dominated cranium, he had a job. A sworn duty to this alien world. Find Levi Cronell. Murder the man who tore his kingdom right from beneath his dirt-encrusted boots. If Alan Sizemore hadn’t already fallen prey to the elements and beasts of this realm, he would find him too. Perhaps he’d chuck them into the same shallow grave between everywhere and nowhere. Showering their pale vigorless visages with loose soil would be an unrivaled pleasure, to say the least.
“What are they all about anyways?”
“What do you mean?”
“Weapons. Guns. Shit like that. What the hell do they use?”
The impossibly illuminated entrance was a measly two steps away.
BOOM!
The Krakatoa of sound flared from the porthole-adorned double doors.
“Suppose you’ll find out soon enough, Gary.”
The male’s back was magnetized to the pin-striped wall. His calloused manus flung back, ripping down the aquamarine curtain shielding his artillery from Ponyville’s probing optics. The coarse grip sanded his palm. Fingertip lazing across the blemishless trigger. His home, his sanctuary. The key to his freedom.
Gary had heard that ear-splitting, mind-rattling crash before. In a long lost time, melted into the vast expanse of yesteryear’s terrors, that tumultuous clamor was Roseville’s staple. It’s vile, terrifyingly distinctive fundamental nigh-everyone was familiarized with. They were all accustomed, but the effects were far from deadened or suppressed. That in and of itself was a daunting, impossible task no-one could undertake.
The Police would come late in the afternoon. A dyke of SWAT vans perched outside like a legion of malnourished vultures, skulking in the inky gloom for a beast to drop dead. Men poured from the rear’s clad in herculean stygian riot armor. Assault rifles primed and ready to unshackle a tsunami of callous slaughter. Some clutched fiercely in their gloved hands, others swung over their backs. A manifold of soldiers cascaded from the iron mouth of the steel-plated colossus. A battering ram laid waste to the flimsy oak door and silver knocker. The indigent innards within the ramshackle moldering abode were wrenched from their shambolic hive with extremities bound by handcuffs. Skinny arms like fleshy power lines just barely filling every inch of their restraints. Gaunt face aimed towards the canyon-littered asphalt and barren desert wasteland they somehow called a front yard. Their brittle hair spazzing and jerking in the ginger breeze, like a thatch of dead grass stapled to their scalp. It was always the men who were more accepting of their fates. No fuss, no fretting, no panic for the inexorable years behind ice-cold bars they’d be forced to endure. Just solemn catharsis. The women, however, the ones who awoke in oceans of sweat from nightmares about this specific day, were always turbulent. Hell, even that was a herculean understatement. Screaming. Howling. Wailing at the absolute crest of their nicotine-stained lungs. Charred black steaks trapped posterior to their ribs was a more accurate term.
Gary looked at the entire spectacle with undeniable glee. Seeing the cops, Roseville’s supposed lionhearted angels-in-disguise, hurling the wrong people into their blue-and-white Toyotas was euphoric. Heavenly, even. The truth that the true monster who orchestrated every sinister event in this decrepit town watched an arrest he planned was…joyous. He wouldn’t trade the feeling for the world. In fact, he practically already owned the world. His own twisted, disturbingly unique pocket of the world he ruled with a fist of pure iron. Sitting atop his bedazzled throne of gold and misery, overlooking the stormy horizon with shrewd amber globes.
But that wasn’t the feeling that booted Gary years into the past. It was the very sound that echoed down those crumbling streets and muddled husks of homes. That sound. That sickeningly gratifying, galvanizing sound. The deafening roar like a whip of thunder cracking as the colossal steel cylinder blew the door from its hinges. Jerry-built oak splintering into a multiplex of fragments and sharpened stakes. Culminating into an unsympathetic lake of obliterated wood and a singular deviation marring the termite feasting ground of a floor. The rusted aurate knob resting cock-eyed in the center of the discordant jumble.
Discord was right. Far beyond just being considered merely correct. There wasn’t a word in Gary’s spacious vocabulary to conjure a word to appropriately describe it. He was faultless in his remark. He would find out soon enough. The sheer ferocity of the blast. The way the air shifted and turned uncomfortably like a parting sea, making way for these pillars of unwavering authority. The menacing clanking of their armor against the scuffed wooden planks. In coalition with the way it shifted over their burly frames with every respect-demanding stride, it all came to a stomach-churning crescendo.
The unquestionable realization harrowed him like a gauntlet of wrathful bulls. Gary Demonio, the abhorred and fearsome monarch of Roseville, Alabama, had finally met his match. Here it was. Right at his fingertips. A potential clash to inundate his avid cells with enrapturing jubilation. The mighty, ravenous lion with an aching empty stomach. Only one procurable thing in this exotic land was able to quell his immeasurable appetite. The blood of his enemies staining his canines. Perhaps this laudable sect of gladiators hellbent on flogging him with the herculean hand of justice could provide the remedy for his ailments. For his every miserable longing.
When the double doors finally returned to their frames and Gary’s faux security was annexed, four beings were present in the lobby. A squad of the lionized, allegedly “Royal” Guardsmen demanded every last ounce of respect and awe they could wring out from…what was her name again? Was it Bonnie? Bon? It didn’t matter. Not to him, at least. Not now. All that mattered to him was assessing the situation. Or more accurately, coming to terms with the actions he was preparing to commit. Specifically the tidal wave of illimitable violence so high, the grand pearlescent gates of heaven confused it for a resident.
The male shifted his body ever-so-slightly, stabbing each and every one of them with his amber glunch bereft of a hint of ruth.
Far beyond the demarcations of his peripheral, a being spawned at the top of the stairs. Wrenching himself from the septic jaws of the slumber, only amplified by the murky depths of the corridor.
Four burly stallions savored the chandelier’s Elysian gleam. One of them, without a speck of doubt in Gary’s perverted mind, had assumed the stead of leader long ago. A robust pegasus stood at the receptionist's desk, filling the boot prints undoubtedly left in his dreadful wake the night before. His vivid gamboge skin was shielded by an expertly polished golden torso piece, its craftsmanship unrivaled and unquestionable. From the halfway point of his frame, a pair of groomed wings sprung from a hole in his armor folded neatly against his obliques like a stack of towels. Every individual feather highlighted the roaring illumination dangling high above him and his platoon of goons. An aurate helmet fortified his cranium and the majority of his face, a strip of gold crawling down the bridge of his nose. A royal blue mohawk crest blossomed from the peak of his headwear. The color was mirrored in his silky cobalt tail, the end hanging a measly two inches from the scarred floorboards. A half-foot behind him, the trio of his inferiors stood rigid and stock-still. Their bones devoured by bear traps of concrete. Blood metamorphosed into infrangible dales of obsidian. Their broad, bug-like peepers chiseled into a scorching glare. Somehow, in some way shape or form, their targetless glower was sharper than the silver spear clutched tightly in their right hoof. Its keen, glistening head pointed to the heavens above. Whetted tip like a macabre lighthouse, scanning for a hapless up-and-coming victim hiding in plain sight.
With furrowed, unabated amethyst globes and a water-tight deadpan mug, the head honcho acutely studied a stark white piece of paper in his left hoof, spear in the other.
Gary retreated to the sanctity behind his wall. Well, more accurately, the only sanctity available outside of their vision.
“Are you absolutely sure this is what you saw?” The chief of the operation inquired. His voice shattered the expectations of Gary Demonio in a boundless loch of splinters and shards. A deep, sonorous blend of every element one would expect to locate in a commander’s timbre.
The boom of a guitarist’s plucked bass string, tethered to a speaker at maximum volume? Check.
The bark of a chained Rottweiler? Check.
The absolute dread-striking cadence of a mountain-sized trombone? Check.
The righteous fury at the male who desecrated the tranquility of this innocent, pitiable place? Check.
Gary tightened his grip on his pistol. The hilt was sandpaper against his palm.
“Shit. Shit, shit, shit!” Gary whisper-yelled through a rampart of gritted teeth.
“Whatever is the matter, Gary?” Discord quipped, half-taunting the rightfully panicked noirette, half-genuine in his question.
“Shut the fuck up!” Veins bulged from the base of his beefy neck, like vibrant serpents bathed in oil seeking refuge beneath his skin. “I can’t fight these pieces of shit!”
His back was swamped with perspiration. A pearl of sweat dawned on his forehead.
“Why not?”
“Do you see their armor? I don’t have enough bullets for that. There’s no way in Hell.”
The captain spoke once more, his tonality siphoning the attention from every mortal soul in a five-mile radius.
“What is he?”
The receptionist’s reply came out in hushed murmurs and breaths. One would be forgiven for crafting the assumption the soldier was having a conversation with the air around him. The air he forced to a boiling point with his trifling presence alone.
“What was that?”
Another billow of whispers, shorter this time.
“I doubt he’s from here, as well.”
Whispers. A council meeting of mice.
“Did you ever see him leave?”
Whispers. A jury of mice discussing a verdict.
“He’s still here?”
Gary’s mousy movements were far from the norm he briskly became accustomed to in Roseville. Back in Alabama, any movement or sight adjustment he made was practically thundered down those moldering, silent roads. If he ordered everyone in that spartan town to be awake with the pound of his boot, it would happen. If he fancied a concert of a hailstorm of gunshots in G minor at the first minute of dawn, it would happen. Hell, if he wanted that town burned to the ground and everyone trapped within to die, it would happen.
Controlling his sounds and monitoring his movements was a skill he’d yet to hone. And a skill he ne’er could’ve forecasted needing. Not ever, and especially not in a place like this.
The raven-haired male tentatively reached his right foot back. He eased it down onto the boisterous step. No moan or whimper. Perhaps this building was finally showing a sliver of clemency to the worthless bastard.
“Did he have any weapons? Objects? Contraband? Anything we need to worry about?”
Gary ebbed another step. No sound, no clamor. No fuss.
“Do you know what was in the back of his pants, Miss?”
Gary refluxed another step. His rubber treads stabbed the hair-shirted step, marked by deep ridges by its countless years alive. Was it alive? Could this brutalized cadaver of a deceased tree be considered alive? Could this building be alive? If it was, why wasn’t it doing more to expel the meritless sod from its bowels? Why did it continue to house him and provide him with stable shelter? Why did it keep him alive?
There were too many questions battling for dominance within the man’s skull, and there was little doubt projected at the notion that Discord saw it all. Witnessing his synapses firing, his neurons slamming together like an atom-sized pinball game. He could only wonder what the Draconequus saw within the mind of another. Especially a male with a psyche as aberrant and rotten as his. Was it darkness? Did he see out of his eyes?
“What room is he in?”
Gary’s heart floundered in a mammoth pond of dread. Who would've guessed? Gary Demonio, the disdained and ruthlessly efficient butcher from Alabama, scared of…talking spear-wielding horses in armor? Not just scared, seemingly petrified of what was about to come barreling up his flight of stairs in the next five seconds. After that, who knows what could happen? One thing was assured. A fight to please centuries worth of his pent-up sickening desires and entertain his muses was knocking on his door. It was all up to him to twist the lock and permit it access.
It seemed two choices were readily apparent now. Two gargantuan, world-altering decisions that required an immediate ruling. Time slowed around him, moving with the finesse of a slug of magma crawling down a hill. Minutes were hours now. Seconds stretched infinitely.
Gary stood, rigid and unfaltering. His nigh-toxic confidence and noisome hordes of arrogance setting the air alight. Tension bubbled. A hellish cauldron of unrighteous wrath and torrid adrenaline was boiling. Its gaping maw raring to guzzle him whole like the trembling beak of a malnourished pelican. His heart was dunked headlong into that roiling pot of scalding emotions, its frothing surface shattered by his corroded core. Every fiber of his wretched soul forever lost to the fathomless bowels.
Either the maniacal, barmy murderer of hundreds stood his grounds for one final glorious battle. Brave the gnarled, blackened hands of the damned reaching from the volcanic fathoms of Hell. His old friends. Acquaintances and companions, greeting him for a second time they never thought possible. Jubilated by the prospect of submerging his icy carcass into the boundless lake of fire once and for all.
Or he does the exact opposite. Gary surrenders. All his chances for righteous vengeance dashed. His opportunities for a new life of slaughter and bloodshed transformed to dust. Levi Cronell would roam these trodden streets a free man. An alive man. Levi Cronell would live with the sins and atrocities he’s committed against the bastard in turquoise. He’d walk around with a broad smile plastered on his features. Make new friends. Thrive with his newfound adoptive family, teeming with light and brilliance from each mind. He’d live. Gary would wallow in his shallow grave for decades to come. All up until the penultimate moment he reels in his final breath and the bitter kiss of Death greets him, as well. No second chances. No resurrections. No more smoke and mirrors. Just him, the bougie funeral he’d no doubt have, and his corpse lying in peaceful repose six feet beneath the vivacious grass and foliage.
Peace.
His veins were transmuted into incensed rivers of molten slag billowing from his irate, singed heart at the prospect.
Peace? Did Levi Cronell, the man who single-handedly toppled his regal kingdom constructed on strife and carnage, deserve to rest in perpetual peace? A bout of tranquility with no end, boundless and unceasing. Gary was alive. Gary was brought back for his, what he could only assume to be, grand overarching purpose. His sole objective. Bring death to the Man in Blue no matter the cost of the path or means he implemented. If he couldn’t live in unrivaled serenity in that barbaric theocracy he crafted from salt and sand, nobody could exist happily. Especially not the man who returned everything he lived and died for to the earth.
Gary straightened his arm, bone now confined within a coarse bracer of concrete. White-hot glowing wires of adrenaline slithered around his skeleton, strangling every cell of his marrow with unshackled disregard. His back dampened. Calves throbbing. Soreness rippled throughout every centimeter of his frame. An inclement brew of fatigue and lethargy clasped his head with its roaring hand of fire. His eyelids begged on their hands and knees for a fleeting moment of repose.
Yet, much like the hapless cannon fodder here for their spears to taste his blood, mercy would not be granted. Hell, anything bearing any remote semblances to it being accorded was a laughable concept.
His crosshairs were trained at the bottom of the steps. Finger adjoined with the slick stygian trigger. Hand trembling with anticipation. Irises honed sharper than any blade attainable by a mortal, gelid and insensate. The countless humans who fell to him were howling from the heavens high above his aching head. Screaming to the lionhearted, audacious warriors to turn around. Swivel their robust frames and march out of the front doors they burst open mere minutes prior. Saving lives from the cruel grasp of those who wished to end them was their job, after all. A sworn duty they promised to fulfill until their terminus arose to greet them. When an ill-fated being of any race, gender, age, or demographic no matter how small, their fate was sealed. No savior could rescue them from the purulent maw of peril. Or, more accurately in this case, the acidic jaws of certain unshakable doom.
A flurry of strikes against the scarred hardwood floor bedeviled the noirette’s ears. Fanning the flames of warranted torment actively devouring his cranium, leaving no crumbs for the ants and birds to feast on. A colony of sabatons battered the floor. Their owners charging headlong into a realm of possibilities they never deemed nor thought possible. A murky ancient forest of unfathomable proportions. Tenebrosity holding every form and variation of dominion over its diseased trees and ravenous fauna. To them, the roily tale of Gary Demonio would’ve been the equivalent to a Greek legend. A story of deception, heartbreak, and unimaginable bloodshed of mind-splitting quantities. Levels of violence incomprehensible to the forever rose-tinted optics of these sentient equines and unicorns. The meager thought of having that degree of infamy in this fresh alien world enraptured the raven-haired man.
“Don’t do what I think you’re about to do.” The Draconequus warned.
Anyone who wasn’t that repulsively colored commander with an arresting cadence had no business leading the bewildering charge toward the male. Yet, as luck would have it, that arrogant sod with a voice like a doomsday siren lagged behind the rest. Shucking off his responsibilities as spearhead of the operation, allowing this unfortunate soul to assume his stead. Whether intentional or not, the ruinous consequences would arrive all the same.
“Gary, don’t.”
A chestnut mustang was the hapless head of this soon-to-be-concluded hit against Gary Demonio. His slender stainless-steel spear whetted and sharpened to the absolute utmost was pointed at a forty-five-degree angle. His gruff, foolishness-be-damned visage was marked with a single curved line. His thin lips crimped into a sorry excuse for a smirk. While his face was painted by utter and complete stoicism, like a stone mask imitating a Greek god, his eyes were the textbook definition of Judases. Those hazel gemstones embedded into the small craters in his face told a wildly dissimilar tale. Deviating far and steering clear of the faux varnish of unflappability. Informing Gary of a different story. A turbulent fable of fear and terror for his oncoming, unshakable fate he was forced to endure. A sentence of inexorable doom he always knew was possible, yet never pondered the prospect until now.
Until the Grim Reaper clad in a suit of human flesh paid him a visit.
Hazel locked horns with amber. Unmistakable panic grappled tirelessly with pleasure. Undeniable, enthralling pleasure, its viscous tendrils wreathing every inch of his frame.
“Don’t!”
For any sane mortal being bearing a whiff of value towards their life, standing off against the second-highest form of authority in Equestria was an impossible match-up. Pitting a paralyzed cockroach against a wrathful elephant. It simply couldn’t be done. And throughout the vast majority of Equestria’s history, it hadn’t been accomplished. Hell, the sentient disembodied phantasm residing within his skull was living proof of this sentiment. Battling the Royal Guard had only two destinations lying patiently at the endgame. A brutish, callous demise. Or the rest of your days withering away in the bowels of a castle. Shackled to a gritty stone wall penned by rust-peppered bars.
Only Gary Demonio didn’t believe in the word infinite when cycles or loops were involved. Hell, even Roseville, arguably the most barbaric perpetual repetition known to humanity, had to end eventually. Just like the Royal Guard’s tendency to pulverize and bring insubordination to a screaming halt.
Hazel and amber were cuffed together one final time. Dread of incomprehensible levels and elation skirmished for superiority. If given the time and patience, the two polar opposites of emotions would’ve brawled relentlessly until either the sunk sank or burned out. Gary lacked a lot of things most normal men of sound mind seemed to possess. Time, patience, and most prominent of all, mercy.
The Bereta thundered scornfully. Gallons of thick, inky darkness were expelled from the stairway by a gargantuan flood of white. The mass exodus of suspense was a glorious sight.
A searing chunk of metal sliced the frantically churned air to ribbons.
The golden smoking cylinder pockmarked the upper-right corner of his forehead with an isolated crimson stamp, terrifyingly flawless in shape and size. Perfect width. Exact circumference. All in all, in every way imaginable, it was an arrant circle. To Gary, it was beautiful.
His lust for serving justice setting his irises aflame was snuffed. Eyes rolled backwards, hazel optics plunged into the tenebrosity permeating his skull. Every rushing river of adrenaline was plugged and dried. Veins like electric cables powered by vigor were snipped. The colt crumbled to the ichor-stained dark wooden floor.
The ear-splitting crash of elephantine armor against the ground nearly drowned the agonized cry of the commander in the roiling cacophonous sea.
“Onyx!” The general caterwauled.
“Dammit, Gary!”
For a voice as stentorian and robust as his, combined with its esteemed ability to magnetize respect towards it, one would expect the pain of grief couldn’t seep through. An air-tight emotional bulwark and moat of stoicism was surely in place to prevent events such as this. After all, if an adversary heard this level of unfathomable sorrow, they’d cackle themselves half-to-death before ending everything with a single cleave. That’s probably what the bereaved soldier wants. A clean, quick death. The only wizardly remedy to this emperor of all ailments.
Gary swiveled his frame at break-neck speed. He effortlessly bounded the remaining five steps of the staircase in a half-second. His psyche was an indignant, tempestuous sea entangled in the throes of an irate storm.
“Kill him!” The commander thundered, righteous fury threatening to set the air ablaze. “Kill him now! That’s an order! No matter the cost!”
“It was nice knowing you, my friend.”
What remained of the mangled platoon burned rubber up the stairs, following closely in his tight-knit trail of sin-stained boot prints. Their spears practically roaring in longing for the metallic taste of Gary’s gore on their tips.
The raven-haired male rushed down the hallway. Strides bigger than a whale’s mountainous maw. Every step was a shotgun blast. His ears bombinated to no end. A flash grenade exploded within his cranium.
The sanctity of his hotel room all but lassoed him into its balmy quarters. He flew in, whipped around to face the steadfast freight train of consequence, and threw the door into its frame. The wall threatened to ripple like a serene pond desecrated by a mammoth boulder.
“This is quite the show, Gary Demonio.” Discord quipped, his badgersome voice only casting fuel onto the fire gripping his brain. “Shame my popcorn is nowhere to be found.”
Gary wheezed. His knees just barely met the requirement to hold his weight. If his bones had been robbed and swapped with a scarecrow’s extremities, he wouldn’t have been able to discern a difference. One thing prohibited the bastard from collapsing into a worthless heap of sweat-bathed, aching limbs. Levi Cronell. He wasn’t allowed to die until he drew his final breath. That was a promise no mortal force on this Earth could even consider vanquishing.
The incomprehensible power of a thousand gods blasted the jerry-built, spartan bedroom door. Its hinges were unflappable, their spirit fit as a fiddle.
“For fuck’s sake!” Gary managed to tear from his heaving lungs. A hellish blaze roared within. He spat a loogie onto the unexpecting planks at his feet.
“Have some damn faith in me, Discord, I’ll get us out of here.”
“I’ll-”
His sentence was butchered by another bash at the door. The world nearly trembled from the sheer might of the fleshy, armor-clad battering ram. Its golden begrimed hinges were embroiled in an abhorrent war between two worlds. A realm hellbent on infecting as many innocents as humanly possible with its limitless violence. The other on God’s righteous jury, sent down to the Earth to slay those who deserved slaying.
“I’ll find a way.”
Gary tossed his utensil of doom onto the black-and-white striped blanket lying in a twisted cyclone on the mattress. The male dashed to its side, his bones coiled with glowing red-hot springs, planting his hands firmly into the lush bed. The very same he once called a safe haven several hours before. Now, it was his final ally reluctantly aiding him in erecting a dyke. The only rampart forming any sort of separation between him and the ravenous punishers yearning for his ichor on their tongues.
He rooted his arched feet into the boards. Calloused hands welded to the middle of the plush cot. Veins bulged from beneath his sweat-slicked skin like raging dales of brilliant watercolor. Invisible icy bear traps of pain chomped onto his calves with savage fervor. The bed’s thick square legs abraded the hardwood floor, carving incurable scars and gorges into its pristine skin. Slender golden lamps clattered. The diminutive nightstand stood zero chance against the wrath of this glorified wooden snow plow. Their efforts were the equivalent of hurling rusted forks at a mountain face.
Another bone-rattling smash barrage walloped the door. It was a miracle the entire globe didn’t quake from its otherworldly might. Scratch that. The full expanse of this life and this next each got a taste of the incomprehensible power. Hinges were crying out in indivisible agony, howling to the heavens above for their suffering to be forced to a halt. Clemency would never come. A sentiment echoed by the avengers outside, and the depraved demon inside.
Gary pinned the king-sized mattress to the austere entryway. A more fitting name being the soon-to-be lake of splinters and firewood. An even more fitting name, an all-you-can-eat buffet for a furnace.
Another crash at the door. A solid gold pin popped from its chamber on the ever-so-maimed hinges. Lustrous golden armor appeared through ruptured slits in the jerry-built wood.
“Shit.” Gary grimaced, his face a twisted death mask glazed by a thin film of sweat. “For fuck’s sake!”
“What made you think they’d-”
“Be fucking quiet!”
Gary’s arm straightened, limb frozen in perpetual paralysis. Wrist vibrating with galvanized elation. Finger animated with a glut of zeal. If the raven-haired man had been snapped away from Ponyville and penned in the stomach of a volcanic leviathan, he wouldn’t have been able to discern any difference. The air was blistering and pungent, a churning angry maelstrom of fathomless wrath and soupy unease. Unplumbed, righteous, warranted dudgeon. A cloud-slicing comber of emotion more vigorous than anything he ever laid his astute irises upon.
Perhaps this entire debacle was the work of some foreign chagrined god. Another eldritch being with the appearance of a deranged child’s imaginary companion. Wrenched from an endless chasm of thorny, blackened vines. A being that one would find solace in the fact it was rooted in fiction. Forever hemmed behind titanium gates of fantasy.
Two seismic, skull-cleaving barks erupted from the barrel’s lightless catacombs.
A duo of bullets navigated frolicked through the boiling ocean of throat-gripping anxiety. Searing chunks of metal, dreadfully similar in power and appearance, chewed two knuckle-sized holes about three inches apart from one another in the spartan door. Right below the entryway’s midsection.
A contorted, mangled mewl of unfathomable agony and nigh-fatal grief tore from a soldier’s throat. Another one bellowed an ear-splitting caterwaul, the unholy offspring of vision-robbing anger and a kahuna of unmatched sorrow. Clusters of elephantine golden armor blared against the forever-marred planks. Muffled ever-so-slightly by the half-vanquished jerry-built wood, but still enough to rattle the male’s skull. And if the disembodied wraith tenanting his cranium could be shocked or appalled anymore, he’d be zapped by a lightning rod of perturbance.
“No! Flash!” A heavy-hearted, emotionally gutshot trooper wailed in terror. “Flash, no! Get up!”
Their commander gave no response. His thunderous, respect-commanding timbre was a distant memory, sinking ever so deeper into the murky bowels of triviality. Becoming nothing more than an echo of a time long lost. A time that was thoroughly impossible to recreate or experience again. The lionhearted paladin, the spearhead of this fearless calvary, sputtered ichor from his trembling jaws in response.
“Captain!” The soldier seemingly directed his attention to the remainder of the cannon fodder. “Get help! Alert the Royal Castle, hurry!”
A slender string of glimmering crimson blood snaked beneath the shoddy lumber, saved from an irreversible bout of razing by the crack of Gary’s gun. Like a mountain-sized whip upon the back of unruly cattle.
Flash gargled haplessly. The sound would’ve been nothing short of nauseating to any regular, ordinary human being. Hell, any regular living being at all. Pony, unicorn, pegasi. Anyone would’ve keeled over in a loch of khaki-colored vomit when the revolting noise kissed their eardrums. If Gary was honest, saying he’d heard worse bereft of a guttural response would be a mammoth understatement. He’d caused and witnessed with front-row seats immeasurable atrocities of hellish proportions without a care in the world. Lodging a blistering bullet deep in the gullet of a talking horse would be no difference to him.
Gary flipped the safety of his tool of misery before stuffing it into the rear of his pants once more, hugged snugly by his crinkled belt. Discord was silent. Everything and everyone was silent. Every inch of the world was bathed in never-ending serenity. The only sound that dared to defy the tyranny of quietude was the muted sobbing of a warrior. Bawling his shattered heart out at his dying chief’s side. Remorse was far from the sensation that seized Gary.
The raven-haired male glided his stony palm over his buzzed sweat-caked scalp. He marched to the begrimed sliding glass door. The floor suffocated the urge to retch and quake from his presence. The scarred, wounded walls glowered at him with never-before-seen ferocity. Glowing white-hot knives of wrath sank deep into his back, searing his spine a foreboding shade of black like the bricks of a castle in Hell. But, like all things that had nothing to do with Levi Cronell, he didn’t give a damn. Not about the ravenous grimace adorning the room. Not about the pitiful pair of corpses he abandoned in his wake, simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Trying in bitter vain to incarcerate the absolute wrong person. Not about the dumb-founded audience of one inside his head, drowning in thick, soupy silence. Only about his goal. His objective. The broad meaning of all this limitless carnage. The bigger picture painted in gore that overlooked everything.
Gary flipped a tiny lock on the door’s oblique, tearing it open incautiously. Its elderly hinges squealing akin to a strangled bird. A tranquil arrow of wind whistled stridently into the mutilated battleground, formerly known as a hotel. The enticing scent of rain avidly punted him two and a half decades back in time. His terminus residing at the tail end of a happier time. A period where there was no mystical unnecessary obligation for vengeance. A time where Levi Cronell didn’t exist. Where Alan Sizemore didn’t exist. Where his tumultuous, crimsoned reign of terror over Roseville, Alabama had yet to come to fruition. No killing sprees with no visible end. No unfourtnaute victims begging on their blistered hands and knees for mercy at his feet. No gun barrels pressed against the skulls of souls he deemed unworthy of life. Human beings entangled in the thorny vines of lamentable circumstances. Robbing them of a life they could’ve easily forged into a path paved with gold.
That chance was long-gone. Much like the chance of Gary Demonio being anything other than what he truly was. A ravenous, bloodthirst, sub-human monster. A nameless beast who crawled from the volcanic depths of Hell’s belly. The smoking cauldron of sin and punishment he was cast into welcomed him with open flaming arms. Only he rejected their hospitality. Down there, punishing and massacring innocent men and women was not his prerogative. That was a reality he refused to accept. That was probably among the multitude of reasons he clawed his way out of that warranted sentence. Where there was havoc to be wrought in the mortal world, Gary could be found. Skulking in the shadows one second, jamming his boot on the neck of a man the next.
Gary stepped out onto the sub-par balcony. Old planks moaned beneath his weight. The wind threatened to sling it to the vibrant grass below with every whimsical breeze. A silvery blanket of steel clouds stretched as far as the human mind was able to fathom. Shrouding the nation and its entirety in a gloomy umbrella of shade. The sun was unable to provide a sliver of salvation for those who appreciated its presence. Cool gales whipped his frame painlessly, transforming his sweat-painted back into a plate of ice. A mighty lion of thunder roared in the distance. Beckoning him. Summoning him to far away lands. A vista that was yet to taste the delicacy of chaos and anarchy ready to be cooked by the dynamic duo. The god of all things discordant and the Alabama butcher.
Gary swiveled his aching head back to his former sanctuary. The bed fastened against the tawdry door, solid gold visible through small cracks, and the whining, sorrowful and unceasing. He gazed forward once more at what truly mattered. The world who had no idea the danger that had just breached their tooth-rotting barricades. He was doubtless in his assumption that there would be hell to pay for this travesty. After all, a globally revered army suffering two losses at the hands of a madman was sure to be broadcasted everywhere. He’d give it an hour or less before news reached the diplomats and the newspapers. Maybe ten minutes before greedy assassins prowled the streets for his head on a pike.
Gary looked down at the expanse of grass below. A five foot drop at the bare minimum. Not many grievances would befall him if he dove from the deck and continued his journey. Every step of the way carving his path into the unexpecting earth.
Gary gazed one final time at his room.
He double-checked the back of his pants, feeling the rigid bulge of his pistol.
Then, without another crumb of thought, the male leaped from the balcony.
No wrath could ever consider stopping him now.