8: Enter Helen Nerband

Most of the demons had passed by already. Pretty much everyone was dead. Helen Nerband considered herself lucky to be the only survivor. The sole survivor of Hell on Earth. She had recently stolen a crashed-but-working semi-truck and driven to the gun store in downtown Bellesview, a town that was almost small enough to be considered a village. Now driving this monster of a truck was not an easy task. She had accumulated a license legalizing her usage of such a vehicle, but that had been twelve years ago. Since then she had not even been in such an automobile. She got rides from friends and cab-drivers, not bus-drivers. Multiple times she had nearly crashed into a deserted car due to either trouble with the brakes or trouble with steering efficiently.

There she had snatched a couple of hunting rifles, a 9mm pistol, a Colt Python (which the gunshop owner had recently gotten for a special order), and a shotgun. Luckily most of the glass cases had already been shattered, so she didn't have to shatter much glass in order to acquire the guns. She grabbed most of the ammo she saw, only having vague ideas of which type of bullet went with which type of gun. She didn't even know if she would be capable of making the guns worked. She hoped to God she wouldn't die because of a safety button. To remedy this problematic possibility, she snatched a gun owner's manual from the messy, blood-coated counter top.

She had thrown everything into the passenger seat, which subsequently created a cramped space that Helen was quite uncomfortable residing in. Before she drove away from Denko's Shop 'n Shoot she grabbed a box of shotgun shells and loaded them into the shotgun. She then inspected the shotgun further to be certain that there was nothing that would prevent the shell from putting a big ol' hole through a demon's stomach. Using the gun owner's manual she deemed the gun ready for action.

After that her captivating sea-green eyes then moved on to inspect the rest of her armory. The assortment of bullets was disorienting. She grabbed a box of one specific type and examined the size and weight of one of the bullets. She then flipped the Colt Python open and examined the sizes of the slots for the bullets. It didn't take a rocket scientist to realize that it wasn't a match. She then grabbed the 9mm and ejected the empty magazine after skimming through another chapter of the lengthy manual. She filled the magazine with the bullets after realizing that it was a match and placed it back into the gun. She skimmed some more and chambered a round.

Once she loaded the pistol she noticed that she was going to have some problems with it. She imagined herself running out of bullets in the middle of a battle between her and hordes of Hell. Her gun ran out of bullets and she ejected the magazine. Helen's vision of herself quickly tried to replace the bullets one by one, but was taken down and shredded to millions of narrow ribbons. Helen's real self filled with dread as though it was a destined event to happen.

She exited the cab of the semi-truck with the shotgun held at the ready and a pistol tucked into her pants. She hurried across the small strip of the desolated town between her and the shop. Such a terrible, depressing, lonely sight the once beautiful and uplifting town now was.

In the shop Helen quickly scanned the place again, searching now for a specific item. Items, actually. A collection of magazines for the pistol was necessary if she expected to survive a fight. Correction: a collection of loaded magazines for the pistol was necessary if she expected to survive a fight.

She smiled with glee upon discovering several. She grabbed ten of them, which was the maximum amount that could fit in her pockets, and then turned back to the front of the store. She hadn't considered the missing body of Denko, the gun shop owner, a mystery worth solving beforehand. Now she had solved it without even trying to. The five foot twelve inch, muscular frame of Denko stood in front of Helen with a smile on his rugged, aged face. He was sixty years old and his hair was mostly gone. Helen gasped and dropped the shotgun. She then calmed herself down and laughed at her own reaction.

"Jesus!" she laughed. "You scared the Hell out of me. I'm frigging great! I mean fucking great. Are you the owner?" Denko looked around the room with eyes that looked as though they were in a galaxy far, far away. The eyes finished their eccentric inspection and came to rest on her again. The eyes didn't look as though they could see her, but they were staring right at her. Helen took a few steps away and her joy disappeared. "Are you all right?" She began to notice more about Denko. Things she hadn't wanted to notice before. Blood soaked his attire was soaked so completely with fresh blood that it was dripping to the brown-carpeted floor. A bone was protruding from his left arm at the elbow. This was because that's where the arm ended in a fleshy stump. Denko was quite obviously not all right. Helen was shocked that he was still alive, let alone standing.

"Oh my God," she whimpered, incapable of saying anything else. "Oh my God." An evil smile then spread across Denko's face. He took a step toward her.

"Thief," he mouthed. Then he whispered in a truly horrifying voice that sounded as though it was straight out of Satan's vocal cords: "I do fucking hate 'em, I do. Thieving fuckin' bitch." Helen looked at her pockets full of stolen property, the shotgun on the floor, and the pistol in her pant-line.

"I'm sorry," she replied with a very weak voice. She felt like a kid in front of a candy shop manager after stealing a candy cane. She felt like she was six years old again. She had done something wrong and she was about to be punished. Her scars began to hurt again after years of being forgotten.

"Chastise them, I do." His one existing hand grabbed a shard of glass from a broken display case and he took three steps closer to her slowly retreating form.

"Don't, please. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Suddenly they were mere inches apart. She looked down at Denko's dead face and he looked up at her tear-stained, slightly dark-skinned face. Helen didn't see Denko anymore; she saw her father. She was the child of a black woman and a white man. Her mother had been killed soon after Helen's birth. Clues led to her father, but nothing was substantial enough to convince a jury of twelve angry men. So Helen was left to be raised by her racist father. Helen's knees felt weak. Her scars were flaring with pain. The scars on her legs and the scars on her back. The scar on her stomach. The scar stretching from the bottom of her right eye to the top of her right ear. Portions of her face began to throb with pain where she had once dealt with lingering bruises and swellings.

"Punish them, I do." Helen worked the pistol out of her pants and pressed it to Denko's/her father's chest.

"Fuck you," she muttered and pulled the trigger. Coagulated blood sprayed out in all directions. Denko's eyes traveled back to this galaxy and confusion infected them. The dead thing before her looked down at the hole in its chest and then back up at her. It was still smiling. Now Satan was laughing through its mouth.

Helen readied herself to pull the trigger again, not yet comprehending the pure oddity and impossibility of what she was witnessing, but Denko walked away. Helen sighed, believing it to be over. It wasn't.

Denko grabbed a pistol from a display case and pointed it at her. Dulled panic flashed through her mind and she pulled the trigger again. Being untrained in the area of shooting, her bullet hit the wall far behind Denko's corpse. It then attempted to shoot her. It encountered one problem, however; the lock for the trigger had not been removed. That combined with the fact that the pistol was unloaded created quite the problem for the corpse seeing as it couldn't shoot its target, but its target could shoot it. He was at the same disadvantage as every deer or squirrel or what-have-you that spent the last second or two of its life blissfully unaware of the fact that it was lingering in front of the action-end of a boom stick.

It abandoned the gun without a second attempt to fire and disregarded the display case full of guns useless to it. Apparently zombies were more intelligent than the movies gave them credit for. Helen was relieved of much stress at giving this thing a title even if it was "zombie". Anything was better than a blank.

The zombie then grabbed its glass shard again and came back at her with an aggravated look on its face. "Good fir no-thing, thieves. I kill 'em, I do." Helen was no longer frightened of this zombie. The memory of her father began to retreat. It had only been awaken by her intense fear, anyway. "No you don't, father." Helen then raised her gun and pulled the trigger again. A nice, perfectly circular hole appeared on the left portion of Denko's forehead. Its two-hundred plus pound body hit the ground like a ton of bricks. Helen wiped the tears away from her cheeks and sighed, disappointed with herself.

She went out to the semi-truck and filled the magazines she had collected. She set them down on the floor and started the truck. Then she remembered she hadn't picked up the shotgun. Had she dropped the pistol instead she wouldn't have gone back, but the shotgun was a precious item and she couldn't afford to lose it.

Again she went into the gun shop. She summoned a large amount of strength from deep inside her and managed not to glance at the zombie's body on the floor. She picked up the heavy shotgun. She would need to make sure the fall hadn't damaged it in any way. Again she turned to leave and again she was distracted. The coagulated blood from the zombie was laying on the ground right next to a spot of fresher blood that had dripped off Denko's clothes. She stood there like a bump on a log for a moment before she heard shuffling behind a door marked EMPLOYEE'S ONLY shortly followed by a quiet, Satanic voice.
"Fucking insubordinate students. I despise them. I have to murder them." Helen shook her head.

"Nope. Nope, nope. I'm leaving now. Fuck you very much." Moments after she began to drive away in the semi-truck she realized she had no recollection of what had happened between hearing that noise in behind the door and starting the semi-truck. She figured it was just as good forgotten.

She hit an imp, turning it into a mess that would require a mop for cleaning up, and smiled. Her scars didn't hurt anymore.