Chapter 6: S.I.T.C.O.M., Pt. 3
"NO!" Mabel screamed, slamming her fists against the metal doors and sobbing uncontrollably. "NO! Lemme go back in there! I'm going to rip those fuckers limb from fucking limb! Open the fucking doors!"
"I'm genuinely sorry for your loss, Captain," Stoltzfus stopped her, resting a hand on her shoulder, feigning sympathy. "But Max knew the risks and—"
"Shut your fuckin' whore mouth," She spat back at him, shoving him back and unholstering her hand axes, pointing one of the blades at the chaplain's throat. Blitz shoved Stoltzfus back, the chaplain falling back against the table and accidentally knocking one of the general's several horse figurines underneath the table as he broke his fall. He placed himself between his two subordinates, a drop of sweat making its way down his forehead as he noticed the sharp edge of the ax only a half a centimeter away from his jugular.
"Woah, woah, Mabel, calm down! Don't take it out on him—"
"Don't tell me to fuckin' 'calm down,' sir! How'd ya like it if Father Dicksucker here was on the other side of that door, hm?! Wouldn't you wanna do somethin' about it?!"
"I mean… yeah, I'd be pretty pissed, sure, but—"
"Then fuckin' let me at 'em! I need to make those fucking things pay in blood for what they did—what they're probably doin' right now—to my Max!" She felt another wave of tears stream down her face as she thought about all the unspeakable things that those creatures were doing to her beautiful husband.
"I-I can't, Mabel. You know I can't."
"Why not?! I've got nothin' left! NOTHIN'! Don't you fuckin' get it?! He was my everythin'! We were—we were supposed to have our date night tonight and now… now, he's…" Mabel lowered her ax, unable to maintain the momentum of her tirade in the face of the overwhelming grief washing over her.
"It's okay," Blitz told her, gesturing to the three of them. "What matters is that we're still here. It hurts, I know, but—"
"Don't fuckin' 'but' me," Mabel growled, her strength returning to her as she raised her axes with renewed conviction. "I'm done with all this bullshit, sir! It's that fucker's fault we're all in this shit in the first place—it's his fault that my husband's dead!"
"Please," Stoltzfus added, pressing one of the buttons on the table and opening the passage leading down to the portal room. "Don't do anything rash, Captain! The best thing we can do right now is to take stock of what we have right here, right now, and take the fight to them. If we can cause enough havoc down there, hopefully we can draw them away from here and at least leave some of this project intact." The general's expression contorted and he twisted his head around towards the chaplain.
"I—WHAT?! No! Fuck! That! I'm not gonna risk losing what little I—we—have left!"
"Yes, yes, I know it's hard, but please darling, you know that we don't stand much chance against those three things in there. You've seen what they're capable of, how ferociously they fight! They've already terminated Colonel Richardson and probably Lieutenant Erikson as well! You know that no matter how many reinforcements we get from above, they're going to turn them and eventually us into a fine red paste and then we're going to have nothing to show for any of this!
"You know that we've never sent any folks down there—"
"Please. For me. For all of us, and all the people up there. We may have been put in a no-win scenario, but we can at least make our last hour our finest hour." He leaned down and pressed his forehead against his lover's, giving him a quick kiss on the lips to butter him up to his proposition. "You know I'm right, deep down. Please."
"I…I…"
"Are you both fuckin' kiddin' me with this shit?!" Mabel interjected, moving in closer and tightening her grip on her axes. "I just lost the love of my goddamn life and you two are just—fuckin' rubbin' it in?!" She growled and stomped over to the table, the two men separating from each other and keeping well clear of her as she moved. "Fuck both of ya. I'm goin' in there to tear those fuckers in there a new asshole or… or I'm goin' to see Max again real soon. Either both of ya are goin' to help me, or stay the fuck outta my way."
Without any protest or any attempt by her superior officers to stop her, she slammed the button and the doors opened with a loud ker-chunk. As they slid open, a wave of smoke flooded into the room; their offices were totally ablaze, and through the smoke, three small figures were shoveling massive piles of their paperwork into the flames, along with any computers and electronics that they'd gotten their hands on.
Blitz's heart sank to the bottom of his stomach.
Everything was gone, just like that.
And what had he done to stop it, to prepare for something like this? Not nearly enough. He knew that everything that was happening right now was his fault, that he hadn't been careful or prepared enough.
He thought back to when he'd first been offered this assignment by the Joint Chiefs all those months ago, how they'd given him explicit orders to not fuck this assignment up like all the others he'd been given. At first, he thought it was a punishment, well-deserved after losing countless men in so many different postings. But after they opened that portal for the first time, when it turned out that Stoltzfus's weird occult bullshit actually worked and that these demons that he—and D.H.O.R.K. before him—had been raving about were real, he finally came to believe that this was the one that he'd actually be remembered for, the one that would finally get him in the good graces of his colleagues.
Now here he was, staring at the burning remains of the few things he had left that gave him even a shred of satisfaction in his miserable, lonely life.
Blitz felt Stoltzfus's hand slip into his own, squeezing him tightly. He turned his head back and met his lover's wide, scared eyes, tinted by his red sunglasses.
Okay, maybe he wasn't so lonely now that he thought about it.
He and Stoltzfus watched on in awe as Mabel strode out into the inferno, tapping her axes together and whistling an old Southern folk tune as she hyped herself up for the fight of her life. Soon, however, realizing that she would only delay the imps for so long, Stoltzfus was yanking on his arm and hauling him towards the staircase leading down to the portal room.
—
Moxxie heaved the stack of papers in his hands into the fire, grunting and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It was times like this when he regretted wearing his suit and bow tie everywhere he went; sure, fire in the mortal world wasn't actually capable of hurting him, but it sure as heaven made the room unbearably hot.
They'd been systematically going through S.I.T.C.O.M.'s offices for the past half an hour or so—he'd stopped keeping closer track of how long they'd been doing this a while ago—and destroying everything they could get their hands on. Files, documents, computers, hard drives; anything and everything that could even be capable of having evidence of their existence was smashed or burned. In their zeal, however, they'd started a blaze that consumed the entire office which, while useful for destructive purposes, was starting to really irritate Moxxie, between the relentless heat and the choking smoke.
"How's it comin', pumpkin?" He heard Millie call out as she came up from behind him and threw a collection of CDs and video tapes into the fire.
"Fine—ACK!" Moxxie replied, nearly hacking up a lung after getting only a single word out. He beat his chest with a fist several times to help himself get through it, but each successive percussion only made him cough harder than before. "W-We should probably start wrapping this up soon," he continued once he was finished, dusting off a significant amount of ashes from his jacket. "I think the smoke is—" He started hacking again, doubling over for a second as he cleared his throat of ash and smoke. "—starting to get to me and I really don't know how much more I can take."
"Eh, I wouldn't worry about it too much! 'Sides, my daddy used to tell us that a lil' smoke was actually good for ya!" Millie gave him a hard slap across the back for good measure, making him heave a few more coughs out.
"H-Honey, forgive me, but I don't think that's true at all—"
"Allllright, you two!" Blitzo called out, throwing another stack of paper into the fire. "I think we're almost wrapped up here! I'm gonna find us a way into that room so we can kill those bitches and go home—"
Ker-chunk.
A loud metallic tapping, just barely audible above the roar of the flames.
An ominous whistling emanating from a silhouette emerging from the now-opened conference room, with two more retreating into some sort of entrance on the far side of the room.
All three imps turned their heads, their tails standing on end as they stared down their adversary. Millie slung her ax into her hands as Moxxie and Blitzo drew their guns, readying themselves for a fight.
"C'mon out, you sick fucks!" The figure shouted, stopping her whistling and brandishing a pair of hand axes whose blades glowed with the reflection of the brilliance of the inferno. "This is for my fuckin' husband!"
Mabel charged at them with an almost unnatural speed; Millie immediately put herself between her and the rest of the group, blocking the larger mortal's axes with her own before she could get a swing at Moxxie and Blitzo and sending sparks flying as blade scraped against blade. Blitzo lined up his pistol on the woman's head while she was distracted with the parry and pulled the trigger, but just as the shot went off, she ducked her head and swept Millie's feet out from underneath her, knocking the wind out of the imp as she hit the ground hard.
She was about to bring an ax down on Millie's head while she was down, but Moxxie shot the ax out of her hand, the large-caliber bullet from his rifle leaving a hole in the blade as it tumbled through the air and embedded itself in a nearby wall. Mabel's eyes fixated on the smaller imp, recognizing the rifle in his hands as her husband's, the one that he'd shown off to her many times as he'd made many modifications to it over time. Her face contorted with unbridled rage and she let out a primal bellow, storming forward in a frenzy, ready to rip him limb from limb.
Moxxie pulled the trigger again, but the rifle only let out a quiet and panic-inducing click, the last thing he wanted to hear in the middle of any fight. He shouted a string of expletives as he racked the bolt several times to clear the jam; thankfully, Blitzo tackled Mabel before she could reach him, knocking her into a nearby filing cabinet before yanking on her head and bringing her down to the ground.
Kneeling on top of her, he whipped her across the face with the butt of his pistol, sending blood shooting out from her mouth and nose. Just as he was about to load another shot and put it in her head, she headbutted him, knocking him off of her and sending him staggering backwards. She swung her remaining ax forward, slashing Blitzo across his upper arm before he could pull it back; he grunted in pain and clutched at the wound as he stumbled back and onto the ground, his blood seeping through his fingers and onto the concrete floor around him.
Millie, finding her footing again, grunted and shook her head a few times before retrieving her ax off the ground and rushing towards the soldier, blocking Mabel's blade with her own before she could strike a finishing blow on Blitzo. However, as their blades were locked, Mabel used her free hand to grab the smaller imp by the neck and, while choking her, smashed her against the wall, bashing Millie's hand with her shoulder to knock the battle ax out of her grasp.
"NO!" Moxxie barked, shouldering his rifle again to take another shot at her. He hadn't been able to get a clean round off after clearing the jam, not wanting to risk hitting either Millie or Blitzo with an errant shot with how quickly they were moving; but now that he was watching this mortal about to bring an ax down on the love of his life, he had no choice but to make the shot. "Keep your fucking hands off my wife, you bitch!"
Mabel froze.
Wife?
They were married?
She snapped her head around, her eyes meeting Moxxie's; she recognized the blazing fury in his, the same kind that fueled her now and gave her renewed purpose, accentuated by the dancing flames around them. The kind that only a lover would know or be capable of having.
For a split second, she swore that she recognized a little bit of Max in those demonic yellow eyes, and her heart sang for her husband, knowing that she was going to see him again soon.
Two loud pops filled the room, and Millie was showered with blood and brain matter before the hand around her throat went limp, the mortal's body collapsing to the floor like a pile of bricks. Millie gasped for air as she regained her footing, using a nearby desk for support. Moxxie lowered the rifle, his gaze softening as he rushed over to check on her.
"Millie!" He cried out, scooping her up in his arms and holding her tight. Millie giggled at her husband's protectiveness, but then began coughing profusely. Moxxie, realizing that he was unintentionally hurting her, loosened up his grasp, choosing instead to wipe some of the blood off her face and pick some pieces of skull out of her ebony hair.
"I'm fine, hun," she choked out, coughing again as she finished her words. "Thank you for savin' my hide."
"Fuck! You! Whore!" Blitzo shouted, rising to his feet and kicking the mortal's body for good measure and to let out some of his anger.
"Are you okay, sir?" Moxxie asked, letting go of Millie and coming to Blitzo's side to tend to his wound. "Looks like you're gonna need a bandage—"
"Yeah, I'm fine. Bitch got me pretty fuckin' good, yeah, but it's whatever," he answered, spitting into the bloody mess where Mabel's head once was. "Good shootin', by the way."
"Really, sir?"
"Would've really appreciated it a little earlier, but… yeah." Blitzo turned toward the open door from which Mabel had emerged and pointed towards it. "We've gotta find those other two fuckers, fast. They've gotta be in there, somewhere."
Moxxie glanced over at Millie; by now, she'd recovered from the fight and was dusting herself off, small puffs of ash dispersing into the air with each swipe. She gave him a thumbs up and the two made their way through the growing blaze and into the conference room.
"Contact!" A deep, gruff voice shouted from the entrance to the lobby, followed by a shot flying over Blitzo's head and slamming into the wall behind him. Panicking, he darted across the room, keeping his profile low as he dodged a hail of bullets and followed Millie and Moxxie into the conference room, still clutching his still-bleeding wound and wincing from the pain.
"Get this fucking door shut!" Blitzo barked at Moxxie, who turned his attention to the buttons on the table and swiped his hand across all of them several times. The projector above the table flickered on and off repeatedly, flitting between a few images of them on an old job before Millie smashed both the projector and the laptop connected to it with her ax. Eventually he managed to hit the right button and the bulkhead slammed shut again, cutting them off from the soldiers pouring into the office on the other side.
"Phew… wait, what's that?" Blitzo pointed behind Moxxie at the small doorway on the opposite end of the room. A staircase beyond it led even further underground.
"They had to have gone that way," Moxxie declared, pushing past one of the swivel chairs as he made his way towards the stairs. He kept his rifle raised as he slowly descended the stairs step-by-step with Millie following close behind him.
"Huh," Blitzo grunted, noticing a small horse figurine that had fallen to the floor underneath the table. Someone clearly had good taste around here. "Mine," He growled, bending down and snatching it up with his free hand. He shoved it into the inner pocket of his jacket before dashing over to the stairwell and accompanying his employees.
When they made it to the bottom, they found themselves in some kind of control center; beyond the row of computers with screens now displaying only static and a few warnings, beyond the thick glass, was a large chamber bathed in a sickly green glow. Blitzo wandered over to the window, pressing his face up on the thick glass to get a better view of the source of the light as Millie and Moxxie checked every possible hiding place in the room. His phone pinged and, grunting, reached his free hand across to the opposite pocket and retrieved his phone. He had been suddenly reconnected to the network; evidently, the hex that they'd used to block demonic magic hadn't been applied down here.
He dropped his phone back into his pocket and reapplied pressure to his wound; however, when his eyes followed the glow down to its source, they widened in horror. At the center of the chamber was a massive portal, the same kind that he'd seen Stolas use a few times in the past. Two uniformed figures, one significantly taller than the other, were standing right at the edge, staring down through it and into what looked like a garbage dump in Greed.
"Oh, fuck me," he uttered. "This is so fucking bad."
"Geez…" Moxxie commented as he and Millie came to their boss's side to see what he was talking about. "We need to get down there and take care of them right now."
"Problem is, we've gotta actually get down there," Millie added. "And I ain't seein' any big buttons or nothin' that'll actually get us through that door. Lemme try somethin' different, though." She brought her ax to bear against the window, putting as much force as she could into trying to smash through it and onto the catwalk on the other side.
However, nothing worked; whatever that window was made of, as Moxxie watched his wife bash herself against it, he reasoned that given the magic forces that these people were working with, it could probably at least withstand the force of a small nuclear detonation, let alone a single determined imp. He reached a hand out towards her and grabbed her shoulder, stopping her from overexerting herself.
"Oh, c'mon Mills, I've seen you take down a fuckin' sea monster," Blitzo answered her. "This can't be that hard, can it? It's just a fuckin' window! Try bustin' through that door instead."
Millie sighed and shook her head, taking slow, heavy breaths after nearly overexerting herself on a futile effort.
"Sir, flesh and blood is one thing; it's easy, and actually kinda fun, to rip through and tear apart. But titanium, or whatever this thing is made of?" She walked over and banged the thick airlock door with the flat end of her ax blade a few times to accentuate her point. "Whole different ball game, and I doubt I'd do better with this than that window."
Blitzo groaned, smacking his head on the window in frustration.
"Alright, fuck… Mox, don't you always carry, like, grenades or C4 or some explosive shit whenever you go anywhere?"
"Well first off, sir, I'm a little offended that you'd assume I'd be so brazen about safety around explosive devices—"
"Mox, I dunno if you noticed, but you literally keep a stash of guns in an unlocked drawer in your desk. I think it's more than fair for literally anyone to think that you're 'brazen about safety.'"
"Whatever! Second, given what little information you gave us about this job in the first place, I didn't think we'd be needing any explosives. Third, I don't think any explosives I have would even come close to making a dent in either that door or the window, given that Millie couldn't get through and that these folks probably did their homework on magic—"
"Okay, okay, I get the fucking idea," Blitzo interrupted him, waving him off with his hand. "Geez, you don't have to act all smarter than the rest of us whenever we ask a simple fucking question."
"I-I'm sorry, sir," Moxxie apologized, averting his eyes from his boss in embarrassment. "But in my humble opinion, I don't think we're gonna be able to get in there unless… unless…" By averting his eyes, he'd settled them instead on one of the few functioning monitors on the row of computers just in front of the window. "…unless we're presented with an obvious non-violent solution that we missed due to our inherent biases towards taking violent courses of action!"
"…What? You wanna dumb that down and run that by me again?"
Moxxie ignored him and strode over to one of the computers, hoisting himself up onto one of the chairs to read the warning flashing on the screen.
"It seems like they've got some sort of lockdown or 'testing procedure' in place; if I can find a way to bypass it or lift it, we can try to catch up with them." He grabbed a stack of papers off one of the tables behind him and slapped it down on the chair, using it as a booster to reach the keyboard and keep his eyes on the monitor.
"Oh sick, all that computer time I keep givin' you is actually payin' off! Though, um, how long's it gonna take? 'Cause I'd rather not have to sit here on my ass until those crayon eaters get through that door up there and to us."
"Well 'crayon eaters' is the wrong term to use in this case, since from what I've read about mortal cultures and militaries these people are with the United States Army and not the United States Marine Corps, two distinct branches of—"
"Holy fuck, I really don't care, they're people in uniforms with guns trying to kill us and that makes them all dumbasses to me."
"O-Okay, that's fair. Anyway, hopefully this shouldn't take too long…" Moxxie pressed a few buttons on the keyboard, only to be met with more flashing lights, startling him. "…Well, maybe just a bit longer than I hoped for."
"Fuck, okay, just—oh! Wait!" He pulled his phone out of his pocket and pressed the button on the side to light up the screen. "We've got our connection again! I can just let Loonie know to give us a portal back and then we can haul ourselves down to Greed pronto before those bitches can—"
"Um, guys?" Millie interrupted him, jamming her finger against the window in the direction of the two figures now jumping down through the portal in the ground. "They're goin' through right now!"
"FUCK!" Blitzo shouted as he began to pace back and forth. "Mox, finish up with that fucking thing! I'm gonna tell Loonie to gear up and get her ass down there ASAP; we're gonna need all fuckin' hands for this one!"
"On it, sir," Moxxie replied, keeping his attention focused on the computer in front of him, refusing to let his nerves get the better of him this time; not with so much on the line.
—
Loona sighed and leaned forward on the desk with her elbows, her thumb gliding across her phone screen over and over again per her unconscious muscle memory, scrolling mindlessly through post after post after post on her Sinstagram.
It was all the same boring shit, day after day. One girl was posting about getting some wonderful head from some sick fuck at a lame-ass sex party down in Lust; another was some succubus bitch posting about how fucking wonderful her rich boyfriend was for buying her a fucking fourth new car after she somehow managed to crash her last one into a lava flow down in Wrath during an all-night bender. Shallow people, posting the most inane bullshit about how fucking wonderful their shallow lives were.
She wished she could put her hand through the screen and punch them in the fucking teeth; for her, it felt wonderful to give smug fuckers like them a fist-shaped reality check from time to time.
The hellhound growled and slammed her phone down on her desk, using the force of the impact to shove herself backwards on the swivel chair, spinning herself around in the process.
She was so. Fucking. Bored.
Sure, she was literally getting paid to sit around and do nothing—there were plenty of folks out there who'd kill for a gig like this—but from time to time she'd get a little jealous of the others for actually getting to go out and kill shit. Satan knew how badly she needed an outlet like that sometimes.
Loona stood up and stretched herself out, elongating her body and cracking her back in the process. She let out a satisfying groan with each pop, and when she was finished she eventually lowered herself back down into a normal posture, reaching a hand back to scratch an itch on the small of her back. Her feet carried her towards the couch, her seething rage at random people on the Sinternet giving way to an overwhelming desire to take a nap; after all, she hadn't gotten much good sleep last night, between the hangover and her embarrassment at having fucking Moxxie of all people get her home while she was drunk.
Just as she was about to collapse backward onto the couch and shut her eyes, however, her ears perked up as she heard her phone buzzing on the desk. Groaning in frustration, she dragged herself back over to the desk and snatched her phone, smashing the green button on the screen and pressing it against the side of her head.
"Yeah?"
"Loonie! Honey! S-Sorry for, uh, interrupting your really hard and important work, haha!"
"Yep."
"So, um… we, uh… fuck… the job got a liiiiittle more complicated than we expected a-and we really need your help on this one, okay?"
"…Sure? What, you want me to, like, portal to where you are right now?"
"No need! We're, uh… we're actually gonna need you down in, uh, Greed… yeah."
Loona cocked her head a little to the side and furrowed her eyebrows as her ears flipped backwards.
"…Wait, Greed? Why the fuck are you guys there? I thought you were—"
"No time to explain, just—just do whatever you need to do to get down here as soon as you can, alright? Just grab whatever you think you'll need, I'll send a pic of where we're gonna be in a sec!"
"Alright, yeah. I'll be there."
"Thank you so much, Loonie! Love y—"
Loona hung up before he could finish his sentence and jammed her phone into a small pocket in her shorts. She hadn't sounded like it at all, but she was at least a little grateful for having something to break up the total fucking nothing that she'd been saddled with for the past few hours.
She headed around the corner into the common space and then went across the room to Blitzo's office. Once inside, she scanned the room with her eyes, spotting the emergency backpack full of random bullshit that they'd gotten together the last time she'd had to save their asses—with Millie's help, of course—hanging from the back of a chair in the corner, forgotten ever since they'd gotten back here. She crossed the room, grabbed it, and slung it over her shoulder. Just to check, she twisted around and unzipped the main zipper, reaching into the depths of the bag and producing a baseball bat that absolutely should not have fit in there. Whatever, she thought, getting her grip on the handle with both hands and taking a test swing into the air to warm up her muscles; as long as it worked, she wasn't going to question it. At least, not too much.
Heading back out of the room, she went over to Moxxie's desk to retrieve the grimoire from where Blitzo had set it down earlier; however, as she ran her hand over the leatherbound cover, her eyes wandered to the set of car keys on the other side of the desk and a light bulb went off in her head. A portal would be quicker and easier, yeah, but Goetia magic had a tendency to attract unwanted attention, especially from demons that really didn't know how to mind their fucking business; this would be especially the case in Greed, where most of the imps down there would get gladly themselves risk getting themselves glassed if there was even the tiniest chance that they'd get a quick buck off of mugging royalty. On the other hand, taking a car a couple rings down might take a little while longer, but she saw absolutely no problem in having a multi-ton hunk of steel to use as a battering ram if need be.
Besides, it was Moxxie's car. It's not like she'd feel bad if she trashed it or anything.
Loona let go of the grimoire and snatched the car keys instead, stuffing them into the same pocket as her phone and resting the bat on her shoulder as she sauntered her way out of the office, eager to finally kill something for the first time in a while.
—
"SHIIIIIIIT!"
If Blitz weren't hurtling down towards the ground several dozen feet below him, he might've chosen something a bit more elegant for the first words spoken by a mortal in Hell. He hit the ground hard, hearing several cracks followed immediately by sharp pain in several points in his chest; he would've screamed, but the air had been knocked out of his lungs by the impact.
At least the feeling reminded him that he was still alive and breathing, albeit not as well as a couple of minutes ago.
Not long after his own fall, he heard Stoltzfus's own screaming, followed by a similar smack along with the cracking of more bones. He tried rolling over onto his side to get a look at his companion, but the pain was too much to bear.
The two of them laid there in the dirt near each other, panting and heaving as they suffered from the stinging of several broken bones.
"Ugh…" Stoltzfus groaned from a couple feet away, sitting up with significant effort. "Maybe jumping down was a bad idea."
"Hey, it was your—unf!—your idea!"
"Well maybe we wouldn't—ack!— have had to do this if you'd been ready to send people down here weeks ago! Like I've been telling you over and over and over again, remember?"
Blitz kept his mouth shut, mentally chalking that up to yet another failure on his part to be adequately prepared for a scenario like this, the same lack of preparation that had just gotten three of his subordinates killed—or maybe just two? He wasn't sure since he hadn't actually seen Lola go down; it was unlikely, he admitted it, but he hoped she'd somehow managed to survive the attack and gotten away.
He sat up, clutching his ribs and wincing at the sharp throbbing from even moving slightly. Taking in his surroundings, his eyes widened in fascination.
"Wow… everything is so… green."
"Very elegantly put."
"Yeah, yeah, you know how good I am with words."
"Oh, I certainly do know, darling. Especially last night, hm?"
How Stoltzfus managed to put up a sultry tone like that while simultaneously struggling with several broken ribs astounded the general and made him reconsider their entire relationship going back to when they'd first met all back a couple years ago when they were both at the Pentagon.
Sure, they'd sent a few drones down here to collect samples and take a few photos, but it was different to actually see it up close. All the slurry pits, factories, and slums surrounding them and extending for who-knows-how-far, the nauseating stench of chemicals and toxic fumes, the tingle of burning acid in the air as it stuck to his skin; it wasn't too different from some parts of L.A. or New York, now that he thought about it. It was actually making him a little uncomfortable just how closely all of this resembled the mortal world.
His eyes drifted over to the right, and he spotted a pile of bones on the ground, picked clean by scavengers and whatever beasts inhabited this morbid plane of existence. They were clearly human; twisted, contorted, broken.
He knew it was Catja. They'd taken a few samples of her remains with their drones on a couple of expeditions for some of their biologists eager to study the rate of biological decomposition in Hell. Apart from confirming that it was, indeed, her, they'd been able to start building an interesting—albeit woefully incomplete—profile of the area's bacterial life. Too bad anything they'd gained from her death, any justification he could use to soothe what little remained of his guilty conscience, was now either smashed to bits or burned to a crisp, either impossible or near-impossible to recover.
"Think she's down here, somewhere?" he muttered, feeling that pang of guilt grow larger, a lingering emotional shadow that had hung over him ever since they'd used her to get down here.
"All humans are cursed with original sin at birth," Stoltzfus answered him, feeling up and down his ribcage and wincing whenever his fingers pressed on a particularly sensitive area. "And very few people are capable of living such a virtuous life that not only avoids other sins, but undoes the taint of original sin. Even as one of God's ordained priests, I know that I am unlikely to be judged very well by Saint Peter when I reach the gates of Heaven. I believe she's somewhere here, along with most of the dregs of humanity." There was not a shred of sympathy in his voice for her. He was cold, calculating, analytical, as he'd always been when it came to matters of both the project and other people. It was the one thing about him that irritated Blitz the most.
"Do you think that she…" Blitz trailed off, not bothering to finish his question. It was a stupid one anyway, he told himself.
"That she might have something to do with all of this?" Stoltzfus sighed, but grunted from the pain of his lungs pressing against several of his broken ribs. "I… I don't have an answer to that. I don't think so. We don't know what these creatures want from us or why they're pursuing us, much less if they have any relation with her to begin with. Regardless, if the remote chance that she's part of all of this is true… I like to think she understood—no, understands that the sacrifice she made was necessary, that she did such a tremendous service for both her country and humanity that went beyond her immediate emotional needs."
"You mean, the sacrifice that we made for her."
"Does it really matter?"
"I sure as shit think it does! And her 'immediate emotional needs?' She was stabbed by her brother, do you think she would just forgive and forget all of that the moment she showed up in the afterlife?!"
Stoltzfus remained silent, save for his wheezing as he took slow breaths.
"Besides, why the fuck are you still going on about your 'glorious crusade?!' Did you not see what those fucking things did to our project, to everything that we'd made together?! Do you know where we are right now?! "
"Yes, and that means we must both be America's and God's strongest warriors in this most dire of—shit!" Stoltzfus hissed, raising his pistol in the direction of a couple of silhouettes stalking them from behind a massive garbage heap; he took aim and popped off a couple of shots in their direction, forcing them to scurry away into the shadows again. "We're not alone!"
"Fuck!" Blitz muttered, slowly but painfully rising to his feet and keeping his pistol at the ready. "We've gotta move, God knows how many of those fuckers saw us drop down here. "
"Agreed, we should put as much distance between ourselves and here as possible. With luck, we can get those things following us off our trail and stay put until we can get reinforcements from the other side."
"Get reinforcements—and how exactly do you propose we do that, open another portal? You do know how much it took to just open one, right?"
"No, but…" Stoltzfus stretched out his arm and grabbed his prayer and spell book, rubbing some of the mud off the cover and the pages with his fingers. "… I believe I can boost the signal from our radios. Do you remember that one spell that I cast on our drones before we sent them through the portal?"
"Oh! Yeah, yeah. I see what you're getting at. Get some guys down here to drag our asses out of here, then pull everyone back and regroup whatever we have left."
"But why stop there? This is the perfect opportunity for us, darling! The culmination of everything we've done! Think about it! Once we get our men down here, we can begin setting up that forward operating base I've been planning out for the past several months, the first human foothold in a different dimension!"
"Woah, woah, woah, don't blow your load just yet, Stoltz. Before we even consider something that ridiculous, let's actually get in contact with our boys first, okay?"
"Fine."
Blitz felt the radio on his belt, briefly turning it on but immediately turning it off again when only garbled static blared from its speaker.
"That spell you used on the drones worked great, yeah, but we've never sent anything much farther than this junkyard. Are you sure it'll work that far out?"
"No, not for certain, but I have the utmost faith that it will. It must."
Not exactly what Blitz wanted to hear, but it was reassurance enough for him, given the circumstances. Better to believe in the slimmer of a chance at salvation than to just give up and guarantee their deaths. He reached down and grabbed Stoltzfus's upper arm, pulling him up to his feet and ignoring the throbbing in his chest as he did. With a defiant grin on his face, he racked his pistol and, with his partner following closely behind him, began limping in the direction of the nearest run-down apartment block, ready to face the demons lurking just beyond in the darkness with the determination of a man with nothing left to lose.
—
Bang.
Bang.
Bang, bang.
"Who the fuck locked us out?!"
"Somebody get this fucking thing open, Johnson and his squad are still in there!" A muffled, deep voice called out from the other side of the thick metal bulkhead that was now blocking the staircase that led into the control room. The bodies of various soldiers lay about the control room now, most of them riddled with bullet holes and missing several limbs; they'd managed to get their way down here before Blitzo had found the button to close the door behind them. Millie dug her ax out of one's back with a grotesque squelch, a stream of blood shooting up and coating her shirt in the process.
"Hurry the fuck up, Mox!" Blitzo shouted. One of the dying soldiers at his feet groaned and reached up, only to come face-to-face with the muzzle of Blitzo's pistol and have half his head blown off.
"I'm trying, sir! Every time I try to open the door it just keeps rebooting!" Moxxie typed a few more commands into the computer; he was close, so fucking close, but at the end of the day he was fumbling in the dark with a system that he'd never used before.
There was no way that they'd get through in time, not like this.
Another error popped up on screen, the same one that he'd gotten almost 50 times so far.
Moxxie was really fucking tired of seeing it.
In a fit of rage and letting loose a string of expletives as he did it, Moxxie seized his rifle from the top of the console and smashed the computer over and over again with the butt, each hit accentuated by an animalistic grunt. The monitor began to crack, the text on the screen glitching out with each impact.
He must've hit the console just the right way or something, because a bright green checkmark flashed on the screen and off to his right, the airlock door hissed and slowly, bit by painstaking bit, swung open inward. As he watched it open, he let his rifle hang down by his side, his jaw agape in disbelief.
"You've gotta be kidding me."
Huh, he thought. It did require a more violent solution speaking to their inherently violent tendencies after all. He felt a little stupid for not trying it earlier.
"The fuck are you—" Blitzo turned around and his eyes expanded. "Oh shit! Great fuckin' work, Mox, let's get our asses moving!" He rushed across the room and out onto the catwalk; Millie, following shortly behind, grabbed her husband by the arm and dragged him out with her, with him slinging his gun onto his back as they ran. Once outside, Moxxie noticed a lever by the side of the airlock door and pulled down on it, manually triggering it shut behind them at the same labored pace that it had opened for them.
The elevator to get down to the portal, however, was taking its sweet time. Blitzo had already pressed the button to call it up and was impatiently tapping his foot against the metal, his arms crossed.
"Fuck this," he eventually blurted out, pressing the button on the wall again to reverse the elevator's direction before ignoring all conventional elevator safety and vaulting over the gates down onto the now-descending platform. Millie leapt after him without hesitation; Moxxie gritted his teeth, nervous about such a considerable drop, but when he turned back and spotted the fingers and crowbars prying the door into the control room open, he gulped and dropped down. He grimaced as his feet slammed against the metal, his legs immediately sore from the impact and making him stumble and nearly fall on his ass.
They didn't wait for the elevator to arrive at the bottom, instead waiting for it to reach a safe enough height before jumping off again all together and landing on the concrete floor, wasting no time in rushing towards the portal.
"Go, go!" Blitzo slowed down and let his employees go ahead of him, watching as they took each other's hands and jumped back down into the portal together, holding each other tight as they fell. Before he followed them, he flipped off the soldiers watching him like hawks through the observation window with both hands, letting himself tip backwards and flip through the air in style as he plummeted back down to Hell.
He managed to land on his feet with a surprising amount of grace—he supposed he was thankful for his upbringing in the carnival for at least one thing—and dusted off his jacket. He turned his eyes skyward, the portal still shimmering above them.
"Ughhh," Moxxie groaned, clutching the small of his back. "Maybe I should've been more careful about landing under you, honey…"
"Aww, don't worry about it, pumpkin," Millie told him, taking his hand off and replacing it with her own, gently massaging the pain out by slowly circling her fingers on the spot. "I'll put some ice on it later, alright?"
"Sounds amazing," Moxxie replied. His eyes shifted to the right and he spotted a pile of bones on the ground nearby; they were directly underneath the portal, with most of them broken and picked clean of whatever meat and tissue was left on them. "I think—I think those are mortal remains, sir."
"Oh?" Blitzo spoke as he snatched a discarded rag from the top of a nearby pile of garbage, using it to finally bandage the still-bleeding slice wound on his arm. "So you're telling me that those freaks somewhere around here aren't the first ones down here?"
"Maybe…" Moxxie walked forward and knelt down beside the bones, picking some of them up and examining them closer. "No. At least, I don't think so. I think whoever this was was already dead, or died when they hit the ground. I can't tell all that well, given how much is gone, but based on everything we've seen so far and who our target was…"
"What?"
"Do you think this is our client, sir?"
"Pfft, don't be ridiculous, Mox, that's…" Blitzo was about to continue dismissing the notion, but his words got caught in his throat; something was starting to click in his brain, and he didn't like it at all. He ended up coming to Moxxie's side, kneeling down and grabbing what was probably once the mortal's forearm. "That'd actually be freaky as shit," Blitz muttered, dropping his over-the-top façade for the moment.
"This whole situation is too weird," Moxxie continued. "There are way too many coincidences going on. A woman gets killed by her brother—probably for some ritual—who also happens to be part of a unit in a mortal military dedicated to studying us? Then that woman just happens to hire us to kill said brother and we have to deal with said unit in the process? Are you seeing what I'm seeing, sir?"
"When you put it like that, yeah. I don't like this one fucking bit."
"Mox, baby, I think you've been readin' way too many detective stories lately,'' Millie stated, balancing her ax across her back and dangling her arms from the handle. "Y'all might readin' into this way too much. What's the thing called? Somethin' or someone's razor? Point bein', coincidences do happen. Regardless of who this is or whatever happened to 'em, we have a job to do right now: find wherever those mortal fucks are and kill 'em. Stay focused, boys. Shoot first, ask questions later, alright?"
"Yeah, you're right, honey," Moxxie replied, standing up straight and turning around to give his wife a peck. "Let's just take a step back and—wait, sir, where's Loona? Didn't you tell her to be here already?"
"Oh yeah, gimme a sec…" Blitzo grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of their surroundings, sending it to Loona over text. "She'll be down here in no time, don't worry about it. Just give her some time to work her magic, alright?"
"Respectfully, sir, knowing her, I wouldn't be surprised at all if she's still at her desk doing absolutely nothing—"
The popping of gunfire outside the garbage dump interrupted their argument before it could escalate further, with all three imps turning their heads in the direction of the noise. "I think those are our guys," he continued, shouldering his rifle again and chambering another round.
"Well that saves us all the fuckin' trouble of actually having to find them," Blitzo declared, grabbing his pistol out of his inner jacket pocket and loading another round into the chamber. "Alright, let's get movin', you two; I am not lettin' some mortal cocksuckers ruin our perfectly-legit-and-not-illegal-at-all business!"
"Shouldn't our priority be the fact that mortalsare running around in Hell in the first place, sir? There's a lot more than just our jobs at stake."
"Well, yeah, no shit, Sherlock. I just want this whole thing to wrap up with me still being able to make a shitload of cash, okay?"
"…Okay yeah, fair enough."
—
Blitz cursed under his breath as he dove behind another car, slapping another magazine into his Beretta and took a few more potshots around the side at the various imps down the street. They'd been in a rolling firefight all the way down the street; he and Stoltzfus were nearly out of ammo already, and he reckoned that they'd probably have start picking up new weapons off the fresh corpses of these demons if they were going to keep themselves alive until they could radio for backup.
"Why the fuck do so many of these shits have guns?!" He shouted to his companion, who was hiding just inside the entrance of an alley between two apartment blocks across the street. "I thought we were in Hell, not fucking Texas!"
"I don't know! Maybe we'll get the opportunity to investigate the intricacies of their culture when—" A shot grazed the corner of the wall next to him, spraying dust into the air and making his eyes widen in fear . "—when we aren't being shot at!"
"True!" He was about to lean out and fire off a few more rounds when he heard a loud, piercing whistle from behind them.
"Hey, shitbags!" Someone called out from behind them. Blitz and Stoltzfus turned to see who was speaking to them and both of them felt their hearts sink as they saw, sauntering down the middle of the street with guns drawn, the three imps that had attacked their headquarters. The general, realizing he was exposed to them, vaulted over the hood of the car and pressed his back against the cold metal, trying his best not to keep his breathing under control. He watched as the imps down the street scurried away, taking the lull in the action as an opportunity to save themselves. He would've shot them as they ran, but he couldn't afford to waste the ammunition. "Mortals like you ain't supposed to be down here!"
"I-I-I-I t-thought the lockdown w-would've kept them out longer!" Stoltzfus stammered.
"Well clearly it didn't, because they're standing right fucking there!" Blitz answered
"That sounds vaguely bigoted, to be honest!" Stoltzfus shouted back at the oncoming trio.
"Oh come on, are you serious?!" Moxxie replied, taking up a position behind an overturned dumpster leaking some kind of unknown green goo. "It's not being bigoted, it's just a fact! Geez, get over yourselves!"
"Regardless, just let us go! You gain nothing by killing us!" The general facepalmed and stared at Stoltzfus in utter dismay and confusion. His chaplain only shrugged at him innocently. He had no idea why he was even bothering with an attempt to negotiate. Any person with even the tiniest amount of common sense knew that they'd never let them go, not given everything they knew and the damage that they'd be able to do with more manpower. There was only one way this was going to end: with lots of blood running through the streets. He'd rather it be theirs than his.
"No! Fuckin'! Way! You'd just bring more of your kind back here!" Blitzo yelled, kneeling down behind a barrel of toxic waste that had been left on the street and resting the end of his pistol on the rim to help stabilize his shot. He lined up the sights in the direction of one of the voices.
"'Your kind?' Again, with the anti-human bigotry! Are all of you like this?"
"Just shut up and—ugh, fuck it, Mox, light 'em up!"
The moment Moxxie heard the words, he pulled the trigger and let loose a storm of bullets down the street. Both mortals were forced deep behind their cover, not daring to poke anything out. However, there were only so many rounds in Moxxie's magazine, and when he ran out, they returned fire.
"Mills!" Blitzo called out, straining to make his voice heard above the gunfire. "Try to get around and attack them from the rear!"
"On it, boss!"
Millie scaled the wall next to her and Blitzo, dodging a few bullets that happened to head her way, and slowly crawled along the top with her ax on her back, careful not to make her silhouette too visible. The firefight on the street below was intense, and she could feel the growing heat in the air from all the gunfire.
Good, she thought to herself. Heat only riled her up more.
"Fuck, there's one up top!" The one behind the car screamed, aiming his pistol at her before unloading what was left in his magazine at her. Thankfully, he wasn't too great of a shot; she leapt down off the wall unscathed, raising her ax in the air and letting out a primal scream as she was about to bring it down on his head.
However, the general ducked just in time, and Millie instead dove over his head, landing on her feet just behind him. She took a few swings at him with her ax, driving him towards the wall as he kept jumping back to avoid the blade. He ducked again when he realized his back was against the wall and the blade dug deep into the brick, leaving a large slash mark behind. Taking a great risk, he charged forward and body slammed her, knocking the ax out of her hands and underneath the car that he'd just been taking cover behind.
On the other side of the street, Blitzo began closing the distance between them and the other mortal, forgoing his pistol in favor of a knife as Moxxie continued to lay down covering fire.
"Alright, you fuck, come get some of—"
Just as Blitzo was about to round the corner and sink his knife into the mortal, he was struck across the face by a large book, throwing him onto his back. Stoltzfus tossed his prayer book aside, realizing that he probably didn't have any spells or prayers on hand that could help him in a close-up fight against a demon, opting instead to go the old-fashioned way and just beat the tar out of these vile beasts instead.
Blitzo sat up and, in a moment of quick thinking, dodged a fist heading straight for his face. He swept the mortal's feet out from under him and, recovering his knife from the ground, climbed on top of the chaplain's chest and lined up the tip of the blade with his fast-beating heart. But just as he began applying pressure, Stoltzfus headbutted him and knocked him against the wall. The chaplain kicked the knife away and out of Blitzo's reach and, rising to his feet and coughing profusely, hoisted the demon up by his arms and began letting loose punch after punch into him.
Meanwhile, Millie was still struggling to take care of the general. She was swinging her ax wildly, infuriated that this mortal was still drawing breath. She took one more swing at his chest, one that he couldn't quite dodge in time; the blade sliced through his uniform and across his chest, leaving a red line across his body that began seeping blood down his abdomen. He let out an almost feral growl and body slammed her again, throwing her against the wall and knocking the ax out of her hands and under the nearby car. He wrapped his strong hands around her throat and, carrying her over to the car, slammed her down hard into the trunk; the force knocked her unconscious, and he tossed her aside like a ragdoll.
"Millie!" Moxxie screamed, tossing aside his rifle and grabbing the double-barrel shotgun from his jacket, charging down the street towards the general with reckless abandon. He didn't seem to notice the charging imp at all; he was too busy recovering from his fight with Millie and ready to land the finishing blow to turn around and see him come to a halt, bring his shotgun up, and pull both triggers.
Unfortunately for Moxxie, he missed, with only some of the spread of pellets hitting the man in the shoulder. He grunted and stumbled forward, catching himself against the wall before turning around and coming face to face with Moxxie. Panicking, Moxxie opened the breech and slammed a shell into each barrel before closing it shut again with shaking hands.
"You little shit, you fuckin' shot me!"
The taller mortal, ignoring the tiny, profusely bleeding holes in his upper arm and driven solely by blinding rage and adrenaline, lunged toward Moxxie and tackled him to the ground. Before Moxxie could put another shell in him, he wrestled the gun out of the tinier, weaker being's hands, tossing it off to the side. He pressed his pistol into the creature's forehead, cackling as he cocked the hammer back.
"I've waited so fucking long do to this to one of you freaks! Say your prayers to Satan or whatever fucking thing you worship, bitch!"
A car squealed around the corner, and both the human and Moxxie snapped their heads around just in time to see a pair of headlights barreling towards them at high speed. Intent on not being caught under the wheels, Moxxie mustered every ounce of strength he had left in him and punched his adversary squarely in the balls; he screamed in agony, stumbling off of him backwards and out into the street. He took the opportunity to grab his shotgun off the ground next to him, hastily shouldering it and lining up the sights on his target's head.
Moments later, though, the mortal was hit by several tons of accelerating steel. He rolled over the hood and off the back of the car, hitting the pavement with a sickening thud, his blood splattering beneath him. The car swerved from side to side, and the driver quickly opened the door and bailed out before it slammed into a nearby light pole, the engine block catching fire from the impact as the front end wrapped around the metal beam.
Moxxie swore he felt his heart skip a beat as he saw Loona get to her feet and whip her head back and forth a few times, letting her long, flowing gray hair unfurl and untangle itself. He had never been so thankful to see her in his entire life. Well, he'd never really been thankful to see her ever, so this was definitely a first.
"Gimme that," she barked, ripping the shotgun out of his hands and breaking open the chamber to check if it was loaded. Seeing two unspent shells in the chamber, she flicked the action back shut, and Moxxie watched as she nonchalantly sauntered over to the gasping, broken, bloody mess on the street. Without saying another word, she pressed the tip of the shotgun to the mortal's chest—or rather, what was left of it— and pulled both triggers, firing both barrels into him and killing him instantly.
When she was done, she walked back over to Moxxie and tossed the shotgun at him. He almost fumbled the catch, juggling the gun in his hands for several seconds before getting a stable grip on it. When she was close enough, she knelt down and leaned in close to his ear, close enough for him to feel her hot breath on his skin.
"You owe me, now," she growled. "I fuckin' own you until I say otherwise. Got it, fatty?"
"Y-yeah, l-loud and, uh, clear. Totally. 100 percent. Y-yep."
She only acknowledged his response with a grunt and stood up again, grabbing her baseball bat from the strap on her backpack and turned in the direction of the other mortal, scraping the tip of the bat against the ground as she did. However, when she saw that said mortal was bringing his fists down on Blitzo again and again, she went into a frenzy, bolting towards him as fast as she possibly could.
Smack.
Smack.
Smack.
"Oh c'mon, is that all your tiny little mortal hands can do?" Blitzo coughed and some of his black blood spilled out of his mouth. "If you want, I can–agh!–moan for you, set the mood a lil' better for the both of us!"
"Ugh can you just—be quiet?! I'm trying to kill you, you disgusting creature, not fuck you!"
"Are you sure? Because you're about to be reeeeeal fucked in about a second."
"What are you talking about…?"
CRACK.
The impact of the baseball bat against his temple knocked Stoltzfus off of the smaller imp and onto his side, his vision going blurry as he slammed into the ground. His red-tinted sunglasses, thrown off by the force of the strike, were soon crushed underfoot into tiny pieces of metal and glass by the pissed-off hellhound circling around him. He tasted blood in his mouth and felt more dribbling down out of his nose and onto his uniform.
"P-P-Please," he sputtered, turning towards his new adversary and covering his face with his hand. Loona nudged him onto his back with the bat, taking a moment to line up the end of the bat with his temple, tilting her head as she did. "Y-you don't have to—"
The crack of wood against flesh and bone rang out several times as Loona took swing after swing at the vulnerable mortal's head until there was very little left to hit. When she was finished, she took some deep breaths to regain her strength before spitting on the still-twitching body.
"Never fucking touch my dad again, you son of a whore," she whispered, barely audible.