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Dominic Stabile

The November Editor's Pick Writer is Dominic Stabile

You can email Dominic at: stabiledominic@yahoo.com

Dominic Stabile

HOLY BULLETS
by Dominic Stabile

“I’m waitin’ on Elsa,” the young man said.

“I hate to interrupt,” John Raymond said, “but I was asking if your name is Jimmy Wesley.”

The young man, seventeen at most, shrugged his shoulders. He wore a dusty leather jacket, his hair slick and Viking-blond. John had noticed him leaning against the side wall of the gas station, and thought he’d finally found who he was looking for.

“Depends on who wants to know,” the young man said. He took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket with trembling hands, coaxed one out and set it between his lips. He lit it and exhaled a soft cloud of smoke.

“Can I get one?” John asked.

The boy eyed him a moment, and then handed him the pack of cigarettes. John took one out, lit it with his own lighter, tucked the pack into the boy’s pocket, and asked. “How long have you been waiting on your girl?”

“Fifty years, give or take.”

John grinned. “So I take it she’s not in the bathroom?”

“The hell you mean?” the young man said.

“Where’s she coming from?”

“You know.”

“Remind me.”

The young man turned to him. His blue eyes exuded a vigor John wasn’t used to seeing in the eyes of the dead. “Don’t play dumb,” he said. “Do what you’re gonna do, already. That or leave me to it.” He looked away as a middle-aged man came around the building from the front door, got into a red pickup truck and drove off. 

It was funny how no one paid John any attention. He was dressed in the black frock coat, black trousers, and black boots he’d died in back in 1855. Instead of tumbling right into Hell, he’d learned God had a special use for dirty cops, which was what he had been up to the day Allan Pinkerton fired the shot that carried him off his horse and into the unlife he knew these days. The rule was dirty cops got to keep on working after death, cleaning the world of the evil that plagued mankind. At first, John had thought he'd gotten off easy. Instead of burning in Hell, he got his gun back, and he got to keep on playing. But time had soured the game, and he found he was mostly just weary and ready to sleep.

“Doesn’t have to be hard,” John told the young man. He looked over toward the long black car parked at the nearest pump. It was a convertible, with white rings around the tires, and a hood that sloped down slightly, like a snout. “That yours?”

The boy looked where he was pointing, then turned to him and smiled. “That’s my little baby,” he said, seeming to forget all of his problems—including the ones John brought with him.

John tossed his cigarette. “May I?”

“You mark it and I’ll kill you.”

John nodded, and approached the car. The interior seats were white leather, and stained with dried blood. He placed his hand on the door handle, and there was a brief moment of static shock as the car’s history coursed through him:

The boy’s name was Jimmy Wesley. He and Elsa Henderson had been in love, but Elsa’s parents had forbidden them to see each other. Jimmy and Elsa had made a pact to die together and meet up in the afterlife—a little melodramatic to John’s mind, but not unheard of. They’d hopped into Jimmy’s car, a hot rod he’d put every cent he ever earned into, and cut it toward a tree. Elsa had lost heart at the last moment and leaped from the car. Jimmy died, and she hadn’t. Once a year, for the last fifty years, on the anniversary of his death, Jimmy had been picking up girls along this stretch of highway fitting Elsa’s description—blonde, dainty, enthusiastic with makeup—and taking them to a nearby house, from which they never returned.

John went back to the wall and bummed another cigarette. “Mind if I wait with you?”

Jimmy just shrugged.

*****

The moon lit the highway, gleaming off the white sedan that pulled in next. Jimmy came off the wall as a young blonde stepped out of the car and entered the gas station. She fit Elsa’s profile, right down to the caked-on mascara, and the heavy perfume that wafted through the night air with notes at once meaty and floral. 

“How many more girls?” John said, looking at his boots. He pulled back the tail of his jacket so Jimmy could see the handle of his 1850s service revolver, modified just for occasions like this.

“Until I find her,” Jimmy said.

“She’s not coming,” John said.

“What do you mean?”

John looked up at him now. He spat and tossed his cigarette. “She didn’t die, Boy. Why don’t you know that?”

Jimmy shook his head, and those fierce eyes filled up. He jammed his hands into his jacket pockets and turned away. “You’re a liar.”

“That’s not her,” John said.

“It could be her.”

“It’s not.”

“I have to know.”

John sighed, and let his hand hover around the handle of his pistol. “Do you know what I am?”

“I know you’re dead like me.”

“Not like you,” John said. He pulled his gun just as the front door of the gas station opened and the girl walked back out. But John hadn’t even raised it over his navel before Jimmy whirled on him and caught his right arm by the wrist.

“She’s mine!” the young man cried, and as he spoke his mouth widened until his jaw dislocated, and his teeth became long, translucent fangs. His fat tongue sagged from his gaping mouth, green and scaled like a stunned lizard.

John reflexively fired two rounds into the wall of the gas station and a third through the long window advertising a two for one sale on twelve-packs of Coca-Cola. Then he used his free hand to slug Jimmy across the mouth.  His left was weak, but it came away with blood on the knuckles. 

Jimmy bit for his throat, and John slipped back, kicking his right foot into the young man’s belly at the same time. John fell straight back onto the pavement, losing his grip on his pistol. It skittered under his car and settled into a small puddle of oily water.

Jimmy stood over him, flexing the long claws that had formed on his overly long hands.  Something like a grin of pleasure touched his broken face, and he had started to move in when the front door of the gas station flew open, and the old man who ran the place came around the corner with a pump action twelve-gauge shotgun carried at his hip like a fire hose.

“Get the fuck off my property!” the short, balding man yelled before pulling the trigger.

Jimmy caught most of the pellets in his left leg. He twisted and went down to his knees. John rolled left, falling behind the rear fender of his car. He reached for his gun, gleaming just behind the right rear tire.

The gas station owner screamed high and sharp—a scream that told of unreal agony and madness, both realized in an instant. There was the sound of torn flesh, and the pop of dislocated joints, and the scream stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

John thrust his hand deeper under the car and got a grip on his gun. He rolled out and rose to his feet in time to see the long, black convertible pulling out into the highway with the young blonde in the passenger seat, her head set lovingly on Jimmy’s shoulder.

*****

John followed them for roughly half an hour down a winding dirt road leading back into the woods off the highway. The woods closed in so tightly that John didn’t think his car could get through. Jimmy’s car moved easily through the trees, seeming to curve organically around the tight bends, like a wolf stalking prey. He didn’t hurry, and John didn’t try any fancy maneuvers.  They were two men who truly had all the time the world.

After a while the trees opened up, and an old, two-story plantation-style house stood at the top of a steep slope that rose off the road like an embankment. A single tree grew out of the lawn, large and ancient in its own right. One of its heavy oak branches curved and lay over the upper floor windows, as if even the house itself were frightened to see that Jimmy had returned.

Jimmy pulled his car into the dirt driveway and led the girl inside. John parked his car in the middle of the road, pulled his gun, and went in after them.

The heavy door creaked open and sent a cloud of dust up from the floor. A red and gold Oriental rug led to a staircase that curved up and back toward the front entrance, where it connected with the second floor landing.

John checked the lower floor first, pacing through rooms that had once been beautiful, but now wore a sheen of dust as thick as a good blanket. There were large mirrors in every room, stretching from floor to ceiling, adding to the sense of endless space. He came to a room where all the furniture seemed to converge onto a large fireplace that took up the far wall. 

A man and woman were seated in matching white-leather chairs, tucked under a table just before the fireplace. The fireplace was lit and he heard the musical pop of burning logs.

He went around the table and got a look at the couple. They were little more than bones and the pale, dried memory of flesh: mouths gaping, eyes like the ends of gun barrels, and wispy hair.  There were two saucers with floral tea cups on the table; a thick, tawny liquid in the cups.

“Mom and Dad, I presume,” John said, his voice weak and muted against the heavy walls and the thick dust over everything. He figured these were Elsa’s parents because no way in Hell would Jimmy-Boy had lived in this house. He leaned down and sniffed the contents of one of the cups.

Blood.

The woman’s left hand, which had rested on the arm of the chair, slipped off and hung morbidly at her side. Her head fell forward with a click of bones, and her chin rested against her sunken chest. The glow of the fire made shadows across her forehead.

The man’s hand also dropped from his armrest, and his head fell forward.

Then the dead couple began to laugh.

At first the laughter was low, but it built quickly to hysterics. When they raised their heads in unison, their eye sockets had filled with milky-white orbs. The firelight gave those eyes life, and glinted off the thick saliva dripping from their long fangs. Fat tongues dropped from their mouths, purplish and wet. They waved their tongues and laughed, and wrenched their bodies back and forth, rocking their chairs onto the front legs and then back, and then up again.

It took only a moment of this before John realized they were stuck to their seats. He looked closer. Not stuck. Bound. Barbed wire had been worked through their flesh, wrapped around their bones, and fastened to the chair.

He understood what they were. What Jimmy was. Though many of his quarries had fangs, most could easily free themselves from earthly bonds. The only exceptions were zombies and vampires. And these were no zombies.

John stepped back and laughed along with the couple. It wasn’t funny…as afterlife punishments came, these two had been hosed by little Jimmy-Boy. Sometimes he couldn’t help but laugh at the creative ways cruelty often showed itself. And he knew he was here to bring some amount of suffering, as well. He brought God’s judgment, and he also brought the torment that followed.

But, as he raised his gun to the lady first, he liked the idea that, occasionally, he brought mercy.

There were two gunshots, and the couple slumped in their seats.

John watched them a second in the new quiet.

Then there was a high-pitched scream that must have been the blonde from the gas station. It sounded like it came from the second floor. John watched the couple another moment as they lay motionless, feeling something like envy. 

Then he made his way toward the stairs.

*****

The screams got louder as he reached the second-floor landing. There was a door straight ahead. It was cracked just enough so he could see part of a tall window at the far end of the room. Moonlight shined through the window.

John kicked open the door, and it swung back and hit the wall. Dust hissed against the hardwood.  In the splash of moonlight from the window, he saw the girl lying on the floor. Jimmy was over her, having his meal. She was alive, but too weak to scream now. Her eyes were lax, dreamy. She’d brought a hand up to her mouth and touched the fingertips to her lips, as if she were working over a tough decision.

Jimmy looked up at John. He grinned, and blood dripped from his open mouth. Done eating for now, he slung the girl across the room with a faint flick of his wrist. She hit the wall just beneath the window.

Jimmy charged.

John raised his gun casually, and fired.

The bullet hit Jimmy in the right shoulder, and he spun and hit the floor on his back. He slid a few more feet over the hardwood and stopped moving.

John watched him there, half exposed in the sliver light, half hidden in shadow. He gave him a second to make another move, and then he walked over and knelt next to him.

Jimmy was Jimmy again. He coughed up a gob of blood; some of it his, but most of it likely belonging to the girl.

“Not like me at all,” Jimmy managed.

“I told you,” John said.

“I heard of you. I didn’t know what you looked like.”

“I hope I don’t disappoint.”

Jimmy laughed, which turned to choking. After a moment, he said: “Where am I going?”

“You’re a suicide,” John said grimly. “And since then, you’ve been killing girls. It doesn’t look good, friend.” 

“But you know Him, don't you?” Jimmy said. Tears had formed in his eyes. 

“I don’t know Him too well,” John said, not sure why he was bothering, except that he wasn’t in a hurry tonight. And this was a boy. It had its own, unique tragedy to it, he guessed. He couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He’d let Jimmy talk a little longer if it made him feel better.

“Can you talk to Him for me?”

John started to answer, but stopped when he heard a sound from outside. He got to his feet and walked toward the window.

Jimmy started laughing, low and weak. “Please, Lord, forgive me,” he said. His tone was mocking.

John tightened his grip on the gun handle, looked outside; but he didn’t see anything. “What the hell is that noise?”

The sound got louder. He could swear it was wind…but on the wind—voices.

Jimmy’s laughter grew louder, maniacal.

John turned to him as the sound increased in volume. The voices seemed to be in the room with them now, pinging around the walls like tiny insects. “What the hell is that?” John demanded.

Jimmy’s laughter stopped, and he seemed to gather up all of his strength for what he said next. “My girls,” he rasped, and his body slumped into the floor. He didn’t move.

John looked down at Jimmy and thought, Fifty girls for fifty years...

*****

The blonde shot up from the floor, like one of those blow-up punching bags with a clown face. Her eyes had turned that same milky gray as the folks downstairs. She opened her mouth. Her jaw popped and rearranged to make room for too many overly long teeth. She made a sound somewhere between a scream and a desperate breath, and leaped for him. John raised his gun—and it clicked.

His eyes widened, and he dropped, rolling to the right, as the girl sailed over him. She landed on all fours, turned, and leaped for him again. He caught her by the wrists, and they slid across the floor, John on his back, the girl held over him, thrusting her head toward his neck, trying her best to take chunks out of him. They hit the wall next to the window.

The sound of wind was louder now. John could hear the voices in his head…thin, tinny sounds, like voices in a dream.

The girl was still snapping for his throat, her uneven teeth turning her own gums to hamburger. Blood dripped from her lips onto his chest, his face. Her gray eyes shined like steel bearing balls in the moonlight.

John worked his right boot against her belly and kicked out hard. She shrieked and flew back into the darkness of the room. He got up, pulled the speed-loader from his coat pocket, already packed with six of his holy rounds. He popped the cylinder out of his gun, and the blonde slapped it from his grasp.

The gun went flying, hit the floor and slid away.

John pocketed the speed-loader just as she brought five claws across his face. Hot pain shot through his right eye. For a second he had double vision; he saw her take a step back, move out of the light. Then his right eye went dark.

He slipped the silver Bowie knife from his belt, and slashed out into the shadows ahead of him, backing toward the window. When his back hit the wall, he slid along it. His gun had fallen just out of the light on the opposite side of the room. He kept his left hand out in front of him. His right gripped the sweaty knife handle, ready to swing.

When he crossed the window he could hear the voices on the wind more clearly, high, angry shrieks. He crouched, and began to feel along the floor for cold iron. The blonde was moving in the dark. He scanned the shadows with his one good eye, but he couldn’t see her. She was toying with him.

“Don’t you want to play?” she said. Her breaths became hungry, impatient.

His fingertips felt cold metal. He closed his hand over the open cylinder of his pistol. He got on one knee and scanned the darkness.

“On a normal day, I’d love to dab it up with you, Sweetheart,” he said. “But I’m a hundred years off from my last normal day.”

He slipped the speed-loader from his pocket and reloaded the pistol. He snapped the cylinder back into place and sent it spinning as he got to his feet and held the gun out in front of him. The light from the window cut the room like a pure stream. He was on one side, and her voice had come from the other.

“How about you come out and let me put you where you need to go?”

She had him by the arm before he realized she was standing right next to him. “I don’t want to go.”

He tried to turn his gun on her, but she threw him across a stream of moonlight shining in from the window, and he went down face-first into the hardwood and slid into the opposite wall. He turned over and saw her step into the light, her claws out and ready.

Then something obscured the light from outside, as if the wind had moved the branches of a tree, making shadows dance across the floor. But there was no wind. The sound of wind was wings, he knew. Jimmy had never killed a single one of his girls. He had loved them all as much as he had the real Elsa.

He was having this thought when the window shattered, and a steady stream of gray, cackling forms flew in and spread throughout the room. The voices he had been hearing became loud, painfully loud. The blonde’s smile dropped. Her face sagged from her skull like a piece of tossed chicken skin.

John crawled back against the wall and let the darkness close over him. He had his pistol aimed at the blonde and his Bowie ready in the other hand. 

The fifty girls swirled around the room, their fleshy wings sending dust up in a whirlwind. Grit caught in John’s teeth. It itched in his one good eye. Every once in a while, one of the new girls would swoop in and slash at the blonde, cutting her arms and face in a hazing ritual or jealousy.  Maybe both—John didn't know.

He just wanted to get out of there, come back during the day. He got to his feet slowly, and had barely taken two steps toward the door when the blonde outed him. She pointed in his direction and shouted two words over and over: “Holy man!”

The new girls hadn’t yet touched the ground. They turned toward John as one continuous entity, like a flying snake of rotten gray flesh and a hundred steel eyes. Their voices had turned to guttural noises, the hungry mewing of starved predators.

John plugged the one that made the head of the snake, as he side-stepped toward the door. She let out a cry that sounded more like disappointment than pain, and hit the floor hard, sliding into a heap next to the window. 

He kept firing, and each time he did, the room lit up for an instant, and he saw the awful things that filled the dark. More of the girls dropped. They separated as John reached the doorway, and he could hear them shuffling over the floor.

He popped the cylinder from his gun, and empty casings sang against the hardwood.

The blonde screamed a high, piercing wail that should have shredded her vocal cords, and ran at him again, perhaps to earn her place with her new friends.

He took another speed-loader from his pocket, loaded his gun and snapped it shut. She was less than three feet away when he raised it to her head and fired. The top right side of her skull disappeared, and she took three more lifeless steps before she slammed into him.

He fell back through the doorway, and the blonde landed on top of him. Gray matter leaked from her open skull onto his coat. He could still smell hints of her perfume beneath the pungent odor of her brains and blood.

More of the undead girls entered the light of the doorway, their mouths open in wide grins, tongues dripping with anticipation. John lifted his gun around the back of the dead blonde and shot the first girl between her neck and the right collar bone. She looked amused for a second, then an expression of immense agony crossed her face, and she dropped, clutching the smoking wound.

John kept firing until he was out. Then he reloaded and emptied the gun again. Gun smoke and blood-spray filled the air like an acrid smog as the girls kept falling—and more kept coming.

One girl a year for fifty years, he thought again.

A girl—who’d obviously been dead since early in Jimmy-Boy’s career as a vampire—climbed the heap of her sister’s bodies, which now towered almost to the lintel. She was almost completely fleshless. What skin she had left looked tight and dry. She coughed a cloud of yellow dust. Only her eyes seemed to radiate with moisture as she came down over the mound. 

John was out of bullets.

He tried to slide out from under the blonde, but her weight had been reinforced with the weight of a dozen of her sisters. He couldn’t move them.

Grasping his knife, he held it out in his right hand, and had his gun by the barrel in his left. He used the gun like a hammer. The handle of the gun struck her lower set of teeth, and her jaw came away from her face, hanging by a single hinge. She lost interest a second, trying to make her mouth work, and John thrust the silver blade into the side of her head. She screamed for what felt like hours, and then slumped over—one more weight pinning him to the floor.

He heard the hungry moans of the other girls as they climbed the mound of bodies. The mound rocked with their weight.

He lay back and waited. He wondered what happened to him if he failed at his task.  He’d never asked, and neither the angels nor the saints, nor God Himself had ever volunteered the information. 

He was sent to these towns, not sure what he was looking for; but he always found it—or it found him. He killed it, and hoped it wouldn’t be too much longer until he was free to pass on to the other side—his penance done.

But what happened if these girls chewed him up to a point where he couldn’t regenerate? What new fate waited for him?

Suddenly the girls in the room began screaming, not in rage, but in fear…horrible, gut-wrenching shrieks that threatened to turn his brains to oatmeal. Sets of gnarly fingers shot over the peak of the body pile, clawing through the dead flesh. But it was too late. He could smell them cooking. 

John realized that it was dawn, and sunlight was filling the room. He laid his head back in relief as the light got brighter, the screams faded, and then quieted altogether.

*****

It took John nearly an hour to free himself from beneath the pile of corpses. By the time he did, the sun was well up in the sky. It was a welcome sight as he pushed his way through the wall of bodies and stumbled back into the room, looking for Jimmy.

At first he thought Jimmy might have turned to ash and blown away. Then he noted the bloody drag marks on the floor, leading to a spot of wall in a dark corner of the room, where the sunlight didn’t reach.

Jimmy tried to say something, but for a moment he couldn’t speak. He was almost gone now. “Can you talk to Him?” he managed finally.

John stood over him. “I could,” he said, and grabbed Jimmy by the pant leg, patience gone. He dragged him toward the bath of sunlight in the center of the room. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a lick of pull with the Guy in the Sky.”

Jimmy caught fire like a fuse. He let out a single, child’s scream that turned John’s stomach, and then he went silent. There was only the crackle of his cooking flesh.

John knelt down and said a quiet prayer for mercy that he knew wouldn’t be answered.

When he was done, he approached the window and stood in the light. He pulled back the left sleeve of his coat, and watched as the image of Jimmy Wesley glowed on his left forearm like a piece of crystal caught in the beam of a flashlight. Then the glow faded, and a black tattoo of the young man was left, imprinted next to half a dozen other monstrous images from places throughout time.  

Dominic Stabile’s fiction has appeared in a few journals, including Beyond Centauri, Atticus Review, and Hellfire Crossroads Vol.3. His horror novella, The Messenger Out of Darkness, is currently under consideration. The first installment of his Nick Dioli P.I. series titled Whiskey for Breakfast is soon to be released. Check his website at dominicstabile.com for updates.