Pandemonix CH 1 Excerpt Part 1

Please be warned. There is graphic violence in this.

“Kay!” Pa yelled, his voice barely audible over the sudden gale that had blown up. Storms came and went like the moods of a fickle cat in the Great Plains, and it seemed like a particularly nasty one was kicking up right at that moment.

The wind howled behind Kayla Winters as she ran as fast as her eight-year-old legs could carry her. Her bright red hair trailed behind her like a streamer. She clutched a doll to her chest.

“You get inside now!” he continued to yell out to her. “Get in and get downstairs!”

She ran for her life, though not from the storm. Kayla feared what was within it.

As she ran, she could hear the thunder of the horses racing beside her. The stallion and the mares shared her horror. Spittle slathered their mouths, soaking their dark coats.

Beneath the steady moan of the wind was another noise, a sort of unearthly, guttural growling. Kayla could hear voices, moaning out to her, but they sounded like nothing she had ever heard before.

“Kayla! Hurry, darlin’!” her father called again.

I can’t reach home, she thought. It seemed the further she got away from the house with each stride as if the house were being drawn away from her. With each step, their small farmhouse got smaller until it looked like a dot upon the endless grains of wheat dancing violently in the wind.

She felt like she was dropped in a nightmare which she couldn’t awaken. The voices continued to screech for her, bellowing for her attention, their insidious tones mingling with the wailing winds surrounding her and the galloping horses.

The voices grew closer. Kayla had never heard the language they spoke, understanding in her young mind that they were not speaking any English that any of her family had taught her. In fact, she was certain that it wasn’t a language spoken on Earth.

“Daddy!” she squealed, pushing her young body to the limits as she sprinted. Her thighs started to burn from exhaustion, and she panted. She glanced behind her and saw ebony shapes rushing amongst the gale.

Their forms were surrounded by black miasma. Mist danced off their bodies in thin tendrils.

Why are they following me?! Kayla screamed, only the words stopped within her throat.

She understood only one thing about them. These things were not friendly. Moreover, they were chasing her.

Taking a gulp of air, she tried to push herself further, to reach the shrinking farmhouse in the distance. The fatigue was winning out.

Finally, as happens as one could not outrun the will of nature, the winds overtook her. An insidious malevolence surrounded her. Her legs became leaden, and she stopped in her tracks.

Tears cascaded down her cheeks in steady rivulets. With each breath, her chest ached. “I’m scared!”

Kayla felt as if she were shot with a tranquilizer. Everything seemed to grow dull, the world fading into a sharpened gray visage. The house had become a basal point ahead of her, and wisps of black swayed off of the trees in the distance beyond her home, lifting to the cloudless gray heavens. It was as if all around her were pictures on an overexposed negative of film.

As she blinked, forcing her eyes closed and opened once more, her surroundings would not return to normal. Her heart thumped, drowning out any of the sounds around her—if she could have heard the noises, but she could not. Everything was deathly quiet.

She became suddenly very aware of the sources of the voices she had heard in the storm, and in the same instance, she knew that they were not human or any creature on earth.

Three creatures, appearing to be half-man, half-goat, surrounded her. They looked her over with eyes that seemed to peer into her soul. Except an upside down triangle branded into their shoulder, the beasts were naked.

You’re demons! Kayla exclaimed, but once more, the words did not leave her lips. She shivered. With an older, more cynical mind, she wouldn’t have believed what she saw or what they were.

“This is the vessel?” the biggest of the three uttered, rubbing a clawed against his pointed chin, grasped his long goatee, and pulled down upon it.

She tried to move gain, but she stood still swaying on her feet as if she were given a sip of alcohol like her mother liked to do for her on New Year’s Eve. As if her feet were glued to the ground, she was held fast.

He continued, “Asmodeus is a fool. She’s only a child. How is she supposed to be the one that we seek?”

“It is there in her future, Lozral,” another countered. “Look, and you will see.”

The leader, Lozral, clutched her by the jaw, lifted her off of her feet, and forced her gaze into his. His entire eye was covered in darkness; there was no iris or pupil. The black sclera rippled as if it were made entirely of dark liquid.

In that instance, she could see everything that he could. Images of fire and brimstone raining from the sky and a giant scythe rendering flesh from the bones of panic-stricken people —visions of her future, she knew it—flashed by so fast that she couldn’t make sense of it.

Her head throbbed. Searing buzzing echoed between her ears, deafening her to the eerie sounds that she heard around her. She screamed in terror. Spittle clung to her bottom lip.

As suddenly as the torrent of images began, it stopped. She was left with only a throbbing vein in her forehead and the confusion of seeing a visage that she couldn’t understand as a result.

Kayla was in her father’s arms, clutching to him tightly, her eyes clenched shut. Behind them, she could still hear the demons, whispering to her about what her future would entail, but she dared not open her eyes.

Daddy, she prayed to the man that held her, still unable to voice her thoughts, make them go away. Her father would protect her, drive away the creatures from her. Much like the devoted daughter that she was, she thought her father was capable of anything. Even defending her against forces that she couldn’t understand. When she was younger, she was afraid of the dark, and like most other children, she had an innate fear of monsters under the bed or lurking in the closet of her bedroom.

How was now any different? It wasn’t. He wouldn’t let her down. He couldn’t, she surmised.

Around them, she heard the horses’ horrific wails of agony, their last death rattle, and she knew that the beasts’ were tearing them apart. Above the groaning gale, she listened to the sounds of sucking and the mistakable crunching of bone as she imaged her beloved mares flesh rendered between their jagged teeth. In a matter of seconds, the ghostly sounds of the horses were gone.

The driving rain turned to painful hail, the frozen rain releasing from the heavens, and crashed down upon the earth. Several pellets hit on the top of her head, the crest of her shoulders, and the center of her spine. The sounds behind them grew closer, and she wondered why her father was not reacting to the creatures. It was as if he did not see them or the ghostly visions of the horses darting pass.

“Keep your eyes—” Then, suddenly, her father’s body slouched against her.

Kayla opened her eyes as her father dropped to his knees.

His mouth flopped open and close like a fish greedily sucking in oxygen on dry land. A sickly pallid color, turning his skin ashen, crept across his countenance.

She drooped in his arms as he clutched at his chest with his left hand.

His bulging eyes seared into her soul, and gobs of blood soaked the front of his flannel shirt, splattering on the bottom of his chin.

Still, his mouth continued to flap in that horrid expression. He was trying to tell her something—the last words of a dead man—but the words would not leave his failing body.

She fell completely from her father’s clutches as he dropped forward onto his face onto the wet earth, and she knew that he was dead.

Standing behind her father’s body was the demon, Lozral. His clawed hand was clenched around her father’s still beating heart.

Streams of blood spurted from the muscle, splattering on his human-like face and the mountain goat-like horns adhered to his head in twin streams.

Kayla tried to move, to scoot away from him, but the ground held her fast. She didn’t want to share her father’s fate. She was much too young for her life to be snuffed out so quickly.

Tauntingly, with a deliberate stare, Lozral devoured the organ before her, his steak-knife-like teeth cutting into the muscle as if it were an ordinary piece of meat. Blood slicked his smooth chest, dripping off his hardened nipples and landing with a plop in the widening crimson puddle surrounding her father’s corpse.

I can’t get away! She screamed to herself.

“I will take the girl,” Lozral growled in command to his companions. “Asmodeus will hoard her until it is time. Kill the rest.”

The smaller beasts darted off, heading for her home, and terror ballooned within her. Her mother, older sister, and younger brother were within, baking cupcakes to give to Kayla and her father when they were finished working with the horses in the field.

Now, Pa is dead, she thought, and these things are going to kill the rest of my family.

She pondered what they wanted from her, why would they kill all of her relatives, and she knew that nothing good could come from them.