It's eight at night, and here I am chasing a seven foot wrestler through stop-and-go traffic; how did my afterlife get so out of control? This isn't even my bounty!
My name's Dax, Xader Dax, and I'm an agent of Purgatory. It works like this: If you are good in life, you go to Heaven. If you are bad you go to Hell. If, however, you are somewhere in the middle, you go to Purgatory to work off the bad. As you can imagine, Purgatory is a crowded place.
Not that I see much of it, mind you.. I spend most of the time I am not writing reports about chasing down demons from Hell actually chasing down demons from Hell. Right now I should be having a little well deserved down-time, but instead my friend and fellow agent, Emily Adams, has asked me to help her with her assignment.
In this case “help” seems to translate to me chasing this creep down while she goes “ahead to cut him off”. I can see him up ahead of me, and I think I could take him down with my gun, but if I missed... well the paperwork would probably set me back a year, and that's if I didn't hit anyone.
He moves between cars stopped for a red light, but he's not too hard to track since he's taller than most of the vehicles on the road. I run harder, trying to make up for the extra long strides of my quarry. I wish I had worn sneakers.
This demon has been going under the name Vladimir Selig, also The Brimstone Crippler. He was making the rounds on the semi-professional wrestling circuit, and from what I have seen online, he was good; too good. He got someone's attention upstairs.
Selig has been on the loose for at least two years (it seems next to impossible to get completely accurate information out of Hell), and, like many demons, he feeds off of emotions; negative emotions. Playing a heel is a great way to get negative emotions thrown at you, and being giant who is strong enough to lift most of your opponents over your head doesn't hurt that any.
He knows that I'm behind him, but I don't know if he can see me; probably can with the headlights behind me. I've got to keep moving though; have to keep on him. If I somehow manage to lose him, Adams will never let me live it down.
“What the hell?” I ask myself when I come out from between the front bumper of and SUV and the back bumper of a van and see that Selig is no longer on the road ahead of me. I stop, and look around. Is he hiding?
The light's just turned green, and he is moving; the burning sensation from my agency ring is lessening; he is getting away from me, but how? The guy's a freaking giant!
Then I see him, he has somehow gotten on top of that city bus up ahead of me, and that bus is picking up speed. I haul ass.
I leap for the back of the bus, and barely manage to wrap my fingers into the grill over the bus' engine. The heat from the engine is hotter than the burning of my ring telling me that I am right next to a demon.
I claw my way up onto the top of the bus, an act will as much as it is an feat of strength. I find the big man standing there; feet wide apart to maximize balance.
“Give it up, Selig,” I say, struggling to stay on my feet.
“Let me go, hunter!” the demon half demands, half begs, “I haven't hurt no one! This ain't fair.”
“You don't need to try and convince me.”
“No?”
“No, I don't care. You've already been judged; I'm just carrying out the sentence.”
Now don't get me wrong; it's not that I am cold and heartless. It's not even that I am a good little soldier who does not question his orders. I have been doing this just long enough now to know that when it comes down to it evil does evil. It may not be Selig's fault that he was made a demon, but if he has not harmed someone yet he will eventually.
“Like hell!” Selig yells.
Vladimir charges me; he seems strangely sure-footed on the roof of a moving vehicle, while I'm just barely able to stay on my feet. I grab his arm as he reaches for me, trying to use his momentum to throw him off of the bus. I might as well try to throw a mountain; my grab doesn't even slow him down, and he wraps his meaty hand around my face and lifts me into the air.
I reach under my jacket, past my gun to the knife I keep sheathed at the small of my back. I pull it, and slash it across his arm, cutting through his leather jacket and into his flesh. Red light spills from the wound, and he howls. Rather than let me go though, he slams me down onto the roof of the bus; I come far too close to impaling myself on my own knife.
While I scramble for my feet, Selig leaps off the moving vehicle, and lands solidly on the trailer of a truck in the next lane with the Burger Bro logo on the side of it. I leap after him, but do not stick my landing.
As I try to stop my forward momentum, Selig lashes out with one of his huge feet, and kicks me in the stomach. I hit the roof of the trailer hard, sliding off the side. I grab the lip of trailer's roof, and start to pull myself up.
“Just let me go!” Selig yells, and stomps on my left hand. I grunt in pain as I feel a couple of my fingers break, but I keep my grip.
I haul myself up, and before he can raise his boot to stomp again, I plunge my knife into his foot. The blade cuts through his boot like it was paper, and he pulls back as the red light starts to flow out, pulling my back up onto the roof with him.
I pull my knife free, and Selig staggers away from me. I take the advantage, and lunge at the wrestler's midsection. He's off balance because of his foot, and I am able to drive him backwards and over the other side.
Together, Selig and I crash to the ground, breaking through a bench with the smiling face of some real estate agent plastered to the back of it. The bench splinters, and the momentum causes me to roll off of my target.
He's to his feet quicker than he should be with his wounds; probably what makes him a good wrestler. He grabs one of the cement ends of the bench, and swings it at me. It catches me full I the chest, knocking me across the sidewalk and into the front window of a darkened shop. The window holds, my ribs don't, and I feel my knife slip out of my grasp.
Selig sees the knife drop to the ground, and, dropping the chunk of bench, he crosses the sidewalk in two big strides. I feel his big hand wrap around my throat. He lifts me away from the window and then choke slams me through it.
I tumble through a display of “lucky” bamboo, and onto the linoleum past it. The inside of the store is dark, but it looks like one of those independent junk stores; the kind that carry jackets with poorly translated sayings on them and “Nikke” t-shirts.
The Brimstone Crippler steps up into the display window. Between his height and my being on the floor he looked kind of scary. The red light streaming out of his arm and foot did not hurt that point either; nor did the fact that he was holding my knife.
You see, weapons issued by the agency are the only things that can truly destroy a demon. Rumor has it that they can even kill and angel, and while I don't know if that's the truth, I do know that a simple agent like myself can be destroyed with my own weapon.
I start to go for my gun when another shape comes into view. I see the silhouette of a small person with wild, curly hair leap through the broken window, and wrap its left arm around the demon's neck. With its right arm, it plunges something into the big man's neck. As the red light bursts out of the new wound I know who this new player is: Agent Adams.
“Shoot him, Dax!” she yells as the demon thrashes around, trying to throw her off of him, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot hi-”
Adams is cut off as Selig grabs her by her wild hair, yanks her free, and throws her into a rack of gift bags hung on long metal pegs.
Selig rips Adams' weapon, a silver retractable ballpoint pen, free from his neck, drops it, and then claps his hand over the wound. While he is distracted with his life-force flowing free I pull my gun, aim, and fire.
The interior of the store rattles with the sound of holy thunder as my gun, seemingly a simple Beretta, fires a burst of light at the demon's chest. I close my eyes in an attempt to shield them from the light, and am thrown backwards by the explosion of demon life-energy.
When the world goes quiet again, save for the noise of traffic outside, I climb back to my feet, and see Adams pulling herself out of a small mountain of cheap, brightly colored gift bags.
“That's twice I've saved your ass now, Dax,” Emily says, picking my knife and her pen out of the pile of ashes and clothes that were the demon known as Vladimir Selig.
“That's also twice I've had to help you out on what was supposed to be your assignment, so we're still even in my book,” I say, taking the knife from her and then re sheathing it and holstering my gun.
“You buy me a coffee, and we call it even.”
“You've, uh, got a little something there,” I say, pointing to the metal peg sticking out from just under her left clavicle.
Adams looks down and the peg, and then back at me, “Would you mind?”
“Yeah,” I say, and place my left hand, which feels full of pins and needles as my fingers start to heal, on her shoulder, and yank the peg free with my right, tossing it away, “So where did you go anyway?”
“I was waiting for you guys down the street, but then I saw someone get thrown through a window and figured it must be you. You totally screwed up my plan.”
“How did you even know he was going to go that way?”
“Research.”
I can hear sirens in the distance. I guess this means that we were not quite far enough out of public view. Chances are that Reg, our boss, will send in someone to claim it was a bombing or some other random act of violence.
“I think that's our cue to leave,” Adams says, motioning to the window, and the people outside that are slowly building up the courage to investigate the damage.
We sneak out an emergency exit at the back of the shop, and begin our trip back to the office to begin the seemingly endless amount of paperwork that will be waiting for us. If we weren't already dead, filling out those reports would surely kill us.