Las Vegas teemed with lights, the promise of fortune hunters and the glory of the most fantastic displays of extravagance not seen since the days on Ancient Greece. It was the undisputed gambling Mecca of the world. Every day, thousands of star-eyed and unfortunate mortals prayed here for the goddess of luck to shine on them for the monetary gain to help them live in styles of opulence or just deliver them from financial poverty. Others arrived to dive deep into the human cesspool of underground corruption. Rather than live above like normal mortals, these former human beings became living demons and sold foul lethal substances that could take years to kill or used their modern toys with their violently ejected stones to send as many regular people or others of their obscene ilk over to the other side as violently or as creatively as possible. Looking to the skies, many a hope filled mortal wondered what gods divine and pagan could allow this foul spot of humanity and non-humanity continue to exist.
Despite the streets under night lit up by neon signs and the shrill ads for promises of fortune and glory, there was an horizon of human civilization in this area of the desert country side that the tourists, gamblers and degenerated never saw or tried to look for from the limits of their cold desires for would-be fortune always denied them. It was the homes of the people who tossed the cards, sold the drinks, entertained the masses or just made life out here more bearable. Set apart from the degraded areas of the city, the modern suburbia of Spanish-styled villas, family homes of brick or adobe and frame houses of wood sometimes sat beyond the walls of those who made their lives comfortable by both honest and even legitimate means. However, it was not totally free from the apple of corruption and violence that lurked forth from the city. Jason Troy knew that. He had heard in the past gun fire from behind the wood fences where he once played baseball and he saw strange long and foul balloons on the grounds of the high school where he and other innocents had hopeful futures. His favorite modern haunt was All-Star Entertainment, a store indebted to selling anything of media delight from comic books with mighty heroes and busty female crime fighters to VHS tapes of forgotten movies. He had purchased his first DVD Player recently after getting late into the change of technology for distributed movies and was still trying to convert his prized VHS collection. The middle-aged woman behind the counter chatted and laughed with him. She was more than a saleslady to him. She was a best friend. She extended him credit along with all her best and most frequent customers and even delighted from his character improvisations and fascinating tales.
"Clash of the Titans, Jason and the Argonauts, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger…" She rattled off the names of his movies. "You really love that Fantasy stuff, don't you?"
"Fantasy?" Jason grinned up to her. "Comedy. Hollywood doesn't get the real story right."
"You would know." Karen beamed toward his expertise in mythology. A few of Troy's artworks on the subject were still for sale behind glass cases in her counter. Bare-chested and muscled heroes facing snake-like creatures and beautiful goddesses on winged horses in flight looked up from under the counter with high prices. Jason grinned to Karen with the look of a best friend and pulled a hundred from the wad in his pocket. It was a thick wad of bills she would like to have to pay off her own bills, but Jason was good for his purchases and always paid her on time. She wasn't quite sure what he did for a living, but she had her suspicions and doubts. No one like Jason who didn't drink or gamble could possibly sell drugs or fraternize with criminals. Nevertheless, she took the hundred-dollar bill he handed over and rang him up for his movies, stack of comics and graphic novels and reached for his change.
"Don't forget…" Karen looked up with her brown eyes. "My Sidewalk Sale is this weekend. I'm clearing my excess inventory again."
"Bright and early," Jason shined. "Call me if you need help setting up."
"I'll take you up on that." Karen gave him his change. "Hit my sign on the way out."
"Check." Jason flipped the sign in the bars on the door to read closed and started walking down the row of stores heading home. Behind him, Karen started shooing off the adolescents playing free video games in her place. Meanwhile, home for Jason was his apartment at Westside Apartments across the street from bungalows and two story frame structures. During the day, stay-at-home dads watered the lawns and mowed the yards while mothers trimmed gardens and watched children bicycling up and down the street. Young boys played ball in the cul de sac and hoped their balls didn't hit the houses, but at night, when the dark shadows stretched over the road and security lights were concealed by trees reaching to starry night skies, something came out of the city following selfish wants and forbidden evils. Boys who once could be counted as human brandished weapons that had changed vaguely over several years or modern hand-sized pistols they counted as tools to their anti-social ways and sought to make themselves stronger by feeding off the normal, the successful and the innocent. Everyone else to them, even their best friends, was the enemy.
A few cars carrying tired-eyed fathers or weary single mothers still followed this road headed for home. Jason just crossed the street looking forward to the rotisserie chicken and steamed vegetables waiting in his refrigerator at home. He waved to Mr. Cho running his favorite Oriental Restaurant closing his place up and then looked ahead to the dirt lot once used to sell used cars for years prior. Mr. Danvers had retired and cleared his inventory. Jason wanted to get his first car from him, and now he was sorry he hadn't. Mr. Danvers had been a father to him and his son a close friend. As he wondered where they both were, he eyed curiously the dark car parked pushed back into the brush next to the office building and tried to explain why it was there. Could Mr. Danvers have left one behind?
A shooting pain struck his back and abdomen and a warm spray of blood rendered through Jason and knocked him to his feet. His paper bag of comics and movie landed beneath him and slightly spilled its contents. Jason stuck his hands up to stop his fall and landed on this left hand first and then his side. His right hand felt to blood pouring from the wound in his belly. As he wondered what had happened, he became aware of two figures hovering over him and trying to rifle his pockets. They wanted something from him, and it wasn't his less than a hundred dollars of Amazing Spiderman and Mighty Thor back issues from Marvel Comics.
"He's still alive!" Someone said. "Get him again!"
"Give me the money!" Another voice ordered!
"Bastards!" Jason kicked one of them down off him. The other one on top of him was a pock-marked black kid a few years younger than himself with silver foil over his teeth and tattooed shapes over his neck. Lacking in any trace of anything resembling human, he forced Jason to his back and scrambled to get his fingers deeper into Troy's front denim pocket for that wad of bills. His partner was Caucasian with white hair and two just as equal hate-filled brown eyes. It was obvious the two of them had already sold their souls to greed and degradation. The glare of the pistol flashed again as another bullet hit the ground after going through Jason's chest.
"I curse you!" Jason could barely breathe. He tasted blood in his throat. "Damn your souls!"
The punk with the white hair fired again into Jason's skull.
"Tartaro occultus Hecate, dominus mysteria as occultus Thanatos!" Jason's voice trailed off.
"He's still alive!" The shooter emptied his gun into Jason's head until it started clicking. It wasn't personal. It was just business. Everyone was disposable to him. His buddy had the cash and they were now free to scramble covered in blood to toss away their shirts and dive into the 1986 Monte Carlo parked in the brush. His African American partner turned the engine over and hit the gas pedal to purposely drive over the body of Jason Troy they were leaving behind. Tires screeched against the dry asphalt heading south down the block out of this normal neighborhood reminding them of how far below the ladder of humanity they belonged.
"Twelve hundred bucks…" The driver grinned ear to ear. "Baron, he had twelve hundred bucks on him! Best hit we've had in weeks."
"I don't like the way he jumped up!" Baron Sadler sneered wiping blood on his sweating brow. "He kept coming after us until you plugged him. What about that curse stuff? Jimmy, what was that about?"
"I curse you…" Jimmy Kendall repeated it mockingly. "Screw it! He was a freak!" He listened to his car engine roaring as he forced it to carry him away. He had fine-tuned it to outrun police and the nitrous oxide underneath was his ace if police came after him. There were sirens in the distance to his ears. He couldn't tell if they were coming to him or from another direction. His mind just focused on the open dark road ahead of him. He knew this area. There were a lot of empty houses he could hide and people who owed him favors. He had just killed one person and he'd kill again to fuel his inhuman testosterone.
Baron, however, leaned forward as the car roared to the three-way stop. Someone was in the road waiting for them to get closer. Was it a cop? No, they were clad completely in long flowing robes and a long rifle lifting up to meet them. No, it was not a rifle. It was a long twisted rod with a curved blade and the face of the wielder looking at them from those dark robes wasn't human after all. It was a skull looking at them with glee. Kendall hit the gas and plowed the grillwork of his muscle car through the image of the grinning the grim reaper before him and hit… nothing. The figure slashed at them as they passed through it. Beyond it, Baron looked too late to the wall of the cemetery rearing up on him. The Monte Carlo plummeted over Harmon Avenue and crashed through its seven foot steel fence and shattered stone markers behind it. The several small immovable objects stopped the charging vehicle and even rendered through the engine block. Kendall's chest hit his steering wheel hard and Sadler struck the windshield with his head. A brief few seconds later, he found himself undeservingly still alive and being pulled out into complete darkness by human hands.
"What was that? What was that?" He cried out.
"Someone's screwing with us, man!" Kendall hurriedly reloaded his pistol with loose bullets from the floorboard of the car. "Let's go!"
Baron knew better than to tick Jimmy off in the middle of escaping from the police, but he knew he didn't want to be here. It took him a while, but slowly he recognized the tombstones and grave markers around him. For him, Halloween came this hot summer night. Rushing over graves and burial sites, he slowly realized something was not right. Jimmy then stopped him and held him back.
"Who's there?" Jimmy held his gun on the figure in the darkness before him. "Come and get a piece of this!" He peered through the muddled shadows of trees and untrimmed shrubbery and realized he was looking at a figure in white, but a man with sullen features and an immaterial body. He fired on it, but the bullet hit nothing. Baron started screaming as he saw other figures rushing for them. An eyeless woman in a prairie dress without eyes and thin arms clutched for him out of nowhere. Several other figures in shades of white, light gray, pale blue and dirty green wearing tattered period clothing surrounded them en masse. Kendall refused to accept what he was seeing. He continued shooting and firing until his pistol was empty. He should have brought his revolver with the clip, but even then, it might not have been very useful. His eyes ablaze with terror, he screamed not for help but out of frustration. They just kept coming. They just kept coming. The spirits of the dead surrounded him were ganging up on him as his pistol fell from his shaking hands. He was afraid of nothing! Nothing!
"Sadler!" He screamed over their mournful shrieks. "Where are you, man? Where are you?" More eyeless specters reached for him and gripped at him with steel grips and bony arms. It couldn't be real! It couldn't be! If he could last till morning, he'd wake up, and the sunlight would reveal it was just a dream. It had to. There was no such thing as ghosts!
The sun eventually did come up and Police Captain Jim Brass found himself staring at the wrecked and deserted Monte Carlo twenty feet into the cemetery over shattered and broken tombstones and upturned earth from the direction of Puckett Street across Harmon Avenue. The cemetery caretakers were not going to like this damage. An officer had reported the wreck at seven o'clock. The morning dew had dried and he was facing a mystery that defied the lengths of logic. Criminologist Gil Grissom also arrived not far from him. The morning sun quickly baked his bare forehead as Grissom pulled on tinted glasses and he grabbed his forensic kit. Rational, logical and astute, he looked up to Brass with another of those faces that made his morning.
"I've got Sara on the shooting victim." He started. "Is this the car of our suspected shooters?"
"Yeah," Brass looked at him a bit unnerved and steered him away from going over it for forensics. "I've got something else to show you." He flipped open his pad to read it to Grissom. "Car is registered to one James Kendall, eighteen. Escaped juvie with one Baron Sadler, seventeen, last month, the two of them both have records for assault, burglary, manslaughter and possession of drugs."
"Nice to know they got a hobby." Grissom walked the cemetery with Brass toward his associate Warrick Brown in the cemetery. He seemed to photographing something in the dirt.
"Last night," Brass continued. "The two of them shot and killed one Jason Scott Troy, thirty-five, a freelance artist and writer… a shot to the stomach, a shot to the chest and four to the head."
"Overkill."
"They took off in this direction, ran the stop sign and wrecked the car." Brass continued. "Officers found their bodies here two hundred and seventy-six feet from the car." Brass looked at Grissom with a look challenging him to figure this out. Grissom just moved around Warrick in stunned shock and looked to the ground. His jaw dropped and he removed his glasses in two simultaneous movements.
Kendall and Sadler had been buried in the ground upside down up to their ankles. Two pairs of high-priced sneakers still being worn by their owners were sticking out of the intact ground. The grass was undisturbed, there was no sign of disturbed topsoil and the obviously dead punks were driven into the earth by forces unknown. Warrick just continued blinking his eyes trying to get into the right mind to accept what his eyes told him. Grissom looked back to the boys' car almost two hundred feet away and back to their feet sticking out of the ground.
"How fast were they going when they hit the cemetery wall?" Grissom asked out loud.