A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

Paul Campbell ignored the devils who lurked in the corner, and concentrated on the Old Man.

“Sam and Reese are my girls,” he told the Old Man. He stood, looking up at the Old Man, focusing alternately on the Old Man’s human eye and devil eye, face showing no emotion, arms held relaxed at his side, the way he always looked and stood. Any deviations from the norm would be instantly spotted by the Old Man. “Even now. I expected to be there today.”

“They are my girls,” the Old Man responded, his red and black eyes radiating a greedy warning, but also amusement and satisfaction. “They have been my girls all this time.” He smiled then, and paused, his eyes no longer looking at Campbell, looking into the past.

Campbell remembered the same night that he knew the Old Man relished. He had learned that night what it meant to endure as he watched the flat faces of the woman and the girl who had been sent in to kill the Old Man, who would become his best hitters.

“You were only borrowing them,” the Old Man said, voice a bit distant, eyes still out of focus, lost in the memory of how he came to acquire them.

Campbell nodded. Like his stance, his blank face, his protest was perfunctory, something the Old Man expected him to do. He had worked for the Old Man for nearly twenty years. He knew better than to try to fool the big half-devil. In this, though, he wasn’t trying to mislead. Sam and Reese didn’t deserve this. Nor did he deserve to be left out.

“I’ve watched over them for four years,” he said. “They’ve been nothing but loyal to you. And me. If they’re going to get the shaft this way, I think I should be there.”

The Old Man focused on Campbell again. He leaned over and reached out with his human hand. Campbell didn’t flinch when the big hand closed on his shoulder and gave him a squeeze. “You don’t fool me,” the Old Man said.

Campbell looked down, admitting that he had another purpose than the one he stated. Then he looked up to  wait for the Old Man to either misconstrue or kill him.

When their eyes met again the Old Man laughed, his breath slightly sulfurous in Campbell’s face. “Are you getting sentimental on me, Mr. Campbell?” the Old Man asked, still smiling. “Sam is your favorite, is she not? Then she will be the one I spare. For you.”

“They are the best we have,” Campbell said. “Both of them. It seems such a waste–”

The hand on his shoulder squeezed a warning and Campbell stopped.

“They are not being wasted,” the Old Man said. “Precisely because they are the best I have. After you, of course. But that is why it had to be them.”

And Campbell realized why he had been excluded from today’s ambush. His own future would be too clearly visible in the fate of Sam and Reese. And the Old Man was keeping that from him.

“Sam will have to die too, of course,” the Old Man went on. “Eventually. But maybe we can arrange a rendezvous for you and her after I have finished with her tomorrow.”

Campbell kept his eyes locked with the Old Man’s, seeing the hints of betrayal, the proof of his own eventual demise. After nearly twenty years, the Old Man should have known better than to think he could fool his most loyal lieutenant. Or maybe, Campbell thought, the Old Man didn’t care if his lieutenant suspected what was coming. All Campbell said, though, was, “Thank you.”

The Old Man gave his shoulder another squeeze, not quite enough to break the bones, and then let go, smiling. Campbell neither smiled nor showed any sign of the pain that had shot through his bones. They had played this game many times over the years. The Old Man’s affections always inflicted extreme pain on those he showered them on. And the only acceptable response was apathy, accept the pain.

“I need you to take the virgins to the warehouse,” the Old Man said. “Have them queued up and ready to begin the ceremony promptly at sundown.”

“I’ll see to it personally,” Campbell said.

“I know you will,” the Old Man said. “I will be there at four o’clock to complete the cleansing.”

“Everything will be ready.”

Without warning the Old Man’s lips pulled back in a writhing grin, showing his mix of teeth, human and needle sharp devil. He flexed his massive arms and looked ready to dance. “Can you feel it?” he asked. “Tomorrow is almost here.”

Campbell gave a single nod, and the Old Man laughed loud enough to shake the room.

Campbell stood, impassive, as the Old Man gathered up the crew of devils and departed. He kept his mind blank as he watched them, not trusting his face to remain blank if he really thought about what awaited Sam and Reese, what awaited him.

When he knew that the Old Man had left the building, Campbell took the elevator down to the sub-sub-basement. As he descended, he called to confirm that the cattle trailer was ready.

“Yeah, Mr. Campbell,” the loading dock foreman told him over the cellphone. “I got the truck all hitched up and waiting for the girls. You sure you don’t want me and some of my boys to help with the loading? That many virgins can be a handful, even for the Big Guy.”

Campbell chuckled at the joke, not because it was funny but because he was expected to chuckle. “No, thanks. The barriers are up?”

“Up and hot, like you wanted. Is it OK if the boys watch?”

“Yes, that will be fine,” Campbell said, then closed the cellphone.

The elevator doors opened, letting in the human stench that pervaded the sub-sub-basement. Campbell had never become accustomed–had not let himself become accustomed–to the smell and noticed it every time he came down here. But no one worked for the Old Man long who couldn’t work under uncomfortable conditions, and he didn’t even change his breathing pattern.

The torture chambers were quiet today, Campbell noticed as he walked through the sub-sub-basement, since most of the devils who worked them had gone with the Old Man. The lack of screams made it possible to hear the low, whispered conversations of the prisoners and detainees, and the moans of those too far gone to make words anymore.

“–Saturday, asshole. I’m the one with the calendar–”

“–in heaven, hallowed be thy–”

“–kill for a cigarette–”

They didn’t try to get Campbell’s attention as he walked past, eyes studiously avoided looking at him. No one lasted a week here in this little pre-cursor of Hell that didn’t learn to avoid notice.

The virgin block was kept clean, as spotless and sterile as a hospital, but even there, behind a series of locked doors, the stench of human filth and misery was everywhere, the alcohol and ammonia smells of the cleaners only underscoring what they were meant to eradicate.

Quam, the eunuch in charge of the virgin block, stood up as Campbell came through the doors. “Hola, Señor Campbell. The girls, you are here for them?”

Another old joke. Quam treasured the boys in his care. “And the boys, Quam,” Campbell said. “Virgins are virgins so far as the Old Man is concerned.”

The Sniffer, the aged woman who worked with Quam didn’t get up from her chair. She didn’t look up either, just continued her knitting, her skein of yarn a bright yellow today, but Campbell thought he heard her give a sniff of disgust.

Quam’s face showed his disappointment, but he didn’t hesitate. He grabbed his keys and led Campbell down the glaring white corridor.

“We’ll start with the locals,” Campbell said. “We need fifteen of them.”

Quam nodded and went to a door marked with a red square. Inside, the room had been divided into one meter square stalls, each with either a boy or a girl hunched down, held by sparkling silver chains, naked except for a random assortment of garishly colored knitted scarves, mittens and hats.

Virgins were virgins, the Old Man liked to say. Gender didn’t matter to him. And since most of the virgins he acquired were prepubescent, it didn’t matter much to them either. Quam kept them all clean shaven to make them even less distinctive. Ultimately, all that mattered was where they were from and whether the Sniffer ignored them when they were paraded past her–Quam, like any good trustee, could be persuaded to allow access, and the Old Man didn’t mind, so long as there were always enough virgins when he needed them. Red tattoos on their forehead meant they were from Hell on Earth, blue from Suburbia.

The locals were the ones that Campbell watched closest to maker sure they passed the Sniffer. Two of the girls and one of the boys he had picked made the Sniffer look up and snarl. Those, he had Quam isolate to be dealt with later.

Then he and Quam and two other eunuch guards, these with automatic weapons, led the procession of chained, naked virgins to the freight elevator and up to the loading  dock. On the dock, men and women in various uniforms, many of them dirty or greasy, watched, catcalling and hooting–but standing well back of the electrified barrier that surrounded the loading area and the entire tractor-trailer rig. The virgins didn’t respond, but they did stare in wonder at the bit of visible sky and at the noisy spectators.

Like the smell he could never ignore, Campbell always noticed how the bright, indirect sunlight of the dock made the lobotomy scars that slanted across the temples of all the virgins very obvious. Both smell and scars served to remind him of his humanity. The little of it he had left.

Campbell left the guards to keep an eye on the other employees and he and Quam went down to get fifteen blue-tagged Suburbanite virgins. As expected, none of these drew the attention of the Sniffer. Even Quam wasn’t stupid enough to allow anyone, no matter how much they paid him, access to such valuable property. The Old Man would keep the eunuch alive and screaming for years before letting him die.

When the cattle car was filled with the thirty virgins, Campbell drove the truck out of the loading dock by himself. He could’ve brought the eunuch guards with him, but he didn’t.

“This kind of cargo,” he told the guards, “we don’t want to draw attention to.”

They had accepted that and gone back to the sub-sub-basement without comment.

Campbell wondered if he might be subconsciously wanting to be hijacked, the load stolen and himself killed.

Except it wasn’t subconscious. Not at all.

He drove through the city on the regular highways, keeping to the speed limits, knowing that none of that would happen. The truck bore the Old Man’s logo. To attack or hinder the truck in any way would be an act of war. And none of the other crime lords nor the city fathers and police wanted open war right now.

Of course, if they knew, as Campbell knew, that the Old Man planned to start open war in the next day or so, those notable men, women, devils and demons might’ve taken a different view. But they didn’t know, and Campbell wasn’t going to tell them, so his trip to the converted warehouse where the Old Man would enact the ritual sacrifice of these boys and girls went unmolested.

He spun the big rig around and backed it up to the warehouse’s loading dock, wondering why he didn’t just inform the Old Man’s rivals. He knew that the Old Man was going to betray him now. He didn’t know when he would back into the knife held in the Old Man’s outstretched hand, but there was no longer any doubt. Except that he really was loyal.

The same loyalty that made him want to be there when Sam and Reese knew they had been setup made him want to deliver his resignation directly to the Old Man. Intermediaries were for cowards.

He had had the first stirrings of doubt when the Old Man told him about Sam and Reese, and how they had decided to get out, to go independent again, and were moving against the Old Man. Campbell had been shocked, and started to order their elimination, but the Old Man just laughed one of his deep, dark laughs.

“They only think they are leaving me,” the Old Man said. “Their betrayal is exactly what I need of them. Both of them.”

When Campbell expressed his confusion, the Old Man had said, “You will understand in time.” Then the Old Man had left him, still laughing softly.

And now, as Campbell thought of the betrayal hidden within a betrayal, he knew what he would do. And he knew that he was a coward, at least a little bit, because of how he was going to do it.

He got out of the truck, walked to the main door of the warehouse and entered there.

The interior of the warehouse had been emptied of everything but an iron cauldron that stood two meters tall and that Campbell figured could easily make stew of him, the Old Man, Sam and Reese all stuffed in there together, with enough room left to make a thick broth. Above the cauldron, suspended from the ceiling was the Old Man’s blood press, with adjoining catwalks.

Campbell looked at the cauldron, and gauged the distance from the top of the cauldron up to the bottom of the blood press. He knew that the Old Man was going to have to crouch in the cauldron, because the Old Man had bitched about it for weeks, trying to find a bigger one.

Then Campbell went to the big doors of the loading dock and pulled them open.

When he opened the back door of the cattle trailer, the boys and girls all turned to look at him. He took the lead chain of the Suburbanites and pulled on it, drawing them into the warehouse.

The girl at the front of the line was, he figured, about twelve, maybe thirteen. She was as hairless as the others, but her chest had begun to swell with the first months of puberty. Campbell looked into her eyes, but nothing looked back at him. A bit of drool gleamed on the girl’s chin.

The other virgins stood around, except the one next to her in the line, who was pulled down when Campbell pushed her to the floor, while Campbell raped her. It took him longer than he expected, and when he finished he pulled away from her, stood up and looked down at her. He wished he could cry. But his eyes remained dry.

Maybe he had overestimated the amount of his humanity that remained.

After he had cleaned her up, removing the blood and semen with a towel he found in the cab of the truck, he helped her back to her feet. He kissed her on the forehead.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The girl made a sound in her throat. Campbell turned away then, tasting bile in his throat.

Campbell led the girl and the rest of them up the metal stairs to the catwalk and secured them in the narrow cage of the queue. After he had led up and secured the second group, he stood on the catwalk and looked down at the cauldron.

The Old Man would go through the locals first, saving the greater punch of the Suburbanites for last. And the first one of those was no longer a virgin.

Campbell didn’t know if it would work, his little betrayal. He wasn’t even sure what effect one non-virgin would have, besides possibly forcing the Old Man to start over. But maybe that would be enough to thwart whatever it was the Old Man had in mind.

Maybe.

Because there was also the chance that even this, his attempt at a betrayal, was part of the Old Man’s plan.

No way to know until it was over, though.

The Old Man expected him to stay at the warehouse and wait. Campbell decided, though, that he would rather wait for death at home, where he could listen one last time to some old music, some LP’s from before Hell on Earth had forced him out of music, calling due what he had promised.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.