As soon as the vibrations began rippling through the concrete floor, Drake thought about making his exit. Before he could leave, though, he felt a buzzing in his left ear that turned into a high-pitched whine. He looked over to Bits and Bytes, who sat in the far corner of the room recording the procedure, but he failed to catch their eye.
The whining intensified until it became unbearable. Reaching into his ear, he plucked out the blocking device and held it between his thumb and forefinger. It looked the same as it always did. The whining stopped but was immediately replaced by an invasion of a different sort.
Drake looked at the gurney and saw Salem’s eyes fluttering. “Fuck,’ he managed to say before she wormed inside his head.
***
Now that she knew there was a device in place to keep her out, Salem found it easy to bypass it. She wanted to scream for joy when Drake took it out, but she focused on the task at hand, which was to find an energy source that would bring her out of her fugue state. Hate was a great source of energy, and she figured that Drake had plenty to spare.
She wasn’t wrong.
Salem slipped inside his head and accessed a lifetime of memories. She saw wars and bloodshed, savagery and pain, all delivered by Drake’s hand. She flipped through his catalog of atrocities, sucking in the hate of the man and the fear of his victims, all of it fueling her and making her stronger.
She wormed in deeper, flipping the memories faster and faster, so much so that she almost passed the most important of all. Reaching back, she saw Drake step out of the car, saw him walk behind Terry and Craig and saw him put bullets in the back of their head.
All pretense of unconsciousness ended at that point.
Salem let loose a scream as she pulled the needles from her arms, her blood still leaking from the holes. She stayed inside Drake’s mind as she leaped off the gurney and went to stand before him.
She heard guns cocked and fingers falling on triggers. They became nothing more than a hollow echo as she slowed the world down and stood before Drake, whose face was carved in a rictus of fear.
“You should be afraid,” Salem whispered in his ear before making the mark of the cross on his body and turning back to take in the rest of the room, swatting away the bullets that moved slowly through the air.
It was then that she noticed Thorn standing on his bed, moving at normal speed as he tore the mask away from the ruined side of his face, which was now reptilian in appearance.
“Say hello to Daddy,” Thorn said, flicking out a barbed tongue that split down the middle and went off in different directions, as though possessing a mind of its own.
Salem looked beyond the billionaire, who was continuing to evolve before her eyes, to try and see what was going on with Raven. Her mother was still out cold, the excess gas she consumed keeping her under.
A scream echoed around the room as bone tore free of Thorns’ skull. On one side of his head, a horn, like that of a bull broke loose while a half rack of antlers burst free on the other side.
Deciding that it was time to speed things up again, Salem rose her hands to set time straight but paused for a moment when she saw muzzle flashes appear on the guns held by the security guards. In low motion, it looked as though they were holding sparklers, and Salem thought it looked almost pretty.
She followed the slow track of the bullets and saw that they were all headed to the point where she previously stood, right in front of Drake.
With a wave, she returned things to normal speed, flinching as the sound of gunfire joined in with Thorn’s screams in a hellish chorus.
Salem turned in time to see Drake’s body slice apart down the middle and across the shoulders in the mark of the cross she had left. Each of the pieces were torn to shreds by the hail of bullets as they fell to the ground and piled up like dead meat in an abattoir.
The guards all looked confused for a split second, wondering where their target had gone and why their leader was now nothing more than torn flesh and bones. Their training kicked in quickly though, and they all turned their weapons on Salem as she covered the space between herself and Thorn in lightning speed.
“Lay down your weapons,” the billionaire yelled.
The men turned to face him and looked horrified at what they saw. Thorn was not a pretty sight at the best of times, but he was now something torn from the pages of a nightmare novel. Besides the lizard face and crown of horns, he also had gills on his neck and a torso that looked like that of a bodybuilder. His arms were sinewy and slender, ending in oversized hands tipped with razor sharp claws. Thorns legs were thick and muscular with cloven hooves for feet.
Salem hit the floor and slid under Thorn’s bed at the same time the guards all dropped their weapons. She came out the other side, close to Raven’s gurney and stood quickly, almost ripping her skin on the spikes that jutted out of Thorn’s back.
“Where are you going, little one?” Thorn asked as he jumped off the bed, his hooves raising sparks as they contacted the floor.
Never taking her eyes off the man, Salem pointed at the guards, the medical team, and Bits and Bytes, and said, “Sleep.” They all dropped to the ground as she made it to her mother’s side.
“You got what you wanted. All I ask is that you let me walk out of here with my mother. I won’t hurt you if you do that.”
Thorn looked at her for a moment, his yellow eyes flitting left and right, and then he threw back his head and laughed.
“Oh, child. Do you really believe you can hurt me now? You and I were meant to be. Don’t you see that? Think of the children we could bring into this world. An unbeatable army.” His tongue flicked out quickly and licked Salem’s neck, leaving a trail of sticky drool.
Swallowing down the rising bile, Salem wiped her neck and shook the thick mucus from her fingers. She needed time to think. “What about Raven?”
“What about her? She is obsolete.”
“Not true,” Salem said. “Your transformation only came with blood from us both. You still need her.”
“Look at me,” Thorn said, spreading his arms. “I am a finished work of art. I need nothing more from her. You, though, are the golden child. What wonders we will accomplish together.”
Mother, please wake up. I need you. I NEED YOU.”
The internal scream seemed to do the trick, as Raven’s eyes began to flutter open.
Ewwwww. I knew he was that nasty! 🤢
Oh. Damn. This just got real.