Coffee with a Devil

A Story in Serial - Part Twelve

Viggo couldn’t deal with the voices any longer. He’d woken up in a hospital bed with an alarm going off, and a nurse had rushed in to check on him. The panic brought on by such disorientation had been overwhelming and he’d lost control. Several other people had rushed into the room and held him down to the bed while a man had put something into his IV line with a needle. 

Now he was in another room, and there was a man in a chair just outside the door. He was flipping through a magazine and randomly glancing into the room to check on him. Viggo tried to sit up but felt resistance. He looked down and saw that his hands and feet were bound by straps attached to the bed. This was more cause for panic, but he forced himself to remain calm. There was the matter of the voices to deal with, and he was sure they had gotten him into this predicament. He couldn’t let them win with their lies. 

They told him irrational things he knew to be false, but he also wasn’t in a rational state of mind. He could feel the residue of the drugs the doctors had used to sedate him. He kept dosing off, and his thoughts felt far away as if they came to him through a tunnel.

But the voices were close. So close.

“She knows,” they whispered. He told himself it was the drugs, but they sounded like they were beside his bed. Two of them. He could feel their presence. “She is here,” one would say and then, “She is going to the house you were going to, Viggo. Lisa will hear the truth of your lies but not from you. Miranda Williams will expose you for what you really are.”

He yanked helplessly against the straps, but he could not move his arms or feet more than a half an inch. He heard their laughter as he clenched his teeth and screamed. Their verbal assault was relentless, and he heard them even above his screams. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the seated man rise, his magazine falling to the cold, polished floor. He rushed into the room along with two women and another man. He saw them through dark, translucent fog. The voices told him that the doctors weren’t real; they were there to hurt him, and Viggo knew they weren’t lying.

The voices had never lied, for everything they’d told him was true. All of his soldiers were dead, and it really was his fault. The crimes he’d committed since that day were his fault, and Lisa knew. Knew everything. Why would the voices lie about these nurses and doctors? Only the voices cared enough to warn him. An arm reached across his chest, close to his chin. Viggo bit the arm, latching on so quick and hard that blood squirted from the arm. He heard a scream.

Hands all over him, pressing him down. The voices closer to his ears, begging him to fight, to not give in. 

Darkness took him.

*  * *

Abaddon kicked Talis in the chest, and the archangel fell onto his back. His head hit the tile of the diner floor hard. For a moment he lost his vision, but when it was restored, he was looking up at a man-made ceiling and not a forest floor. 

He winced in pain and tried to reach to his side where his sword lay. A boot to the side of his face stopped that effort and he groaned in agony with the crunching of bone. He saw Abaddon standing over him, holding his sword. It broke Talis’s heart to see the blade of an archangel in the hands of one of the fallen, but the fear of what that meant outweighed his sadness. 

Abaddon sheathed his own sword and held the archangel’s blade up so that the hilt was at eye level. He studied it for a moment and then a wicked smile slowly spread on his face. He reversed his grip and lowered the tip of the sword to the ground so that he was looking down at the round pommel. Talis felt his heart sink as Abaddon began to twist the pommel, unscrewing it.

“It was never about the human, was it?” he asked as he clutched his open chest.

Abaddon smiled wider and shook his head. “No, but you and your heavenly do-gooders just couldn’t resist the bait.” He finished unscrewing it and dropped the pommel unceremoniously dropped it on Talis’s head. The archangel cried out as the ancient metal struck his eye. He clutched the eye immediately and writhed as water flooded the orb. With his remaining eye, he watched in horror as Abaddon once again raised the sword and tipped the contents of the now-open hilt into his palm. 

Two golden keys, long and ancient, fell neatly into his hand. The demon’s eyes lit up. He clutched the keys tightly and tossed the sword away. It landed with a clang that Talis knew would haunt him forever. 

“Your time here is up, archangel,” Abaddon said with chilling confidence.

Talis closed his eyes and scolded himself for what was coming. Not only for himself and his army but for Viggo and Lisa. Viggo was alone now, and Lisa had lost her way from Jehovah years ago. The lies she would soon be hear were likely to destroy her marriage, and Talis was helpless to stop it.

He felt rough hands grabbing him and tried, futilely, to pull against them. There was no point. He was outnumbered, and he knew it. He opened his eyes, only one of them fully and able to see. Abaddon stood in front of him with the keys dangling from his fingers. Talis felt his hands and feet being shackled and tried not to notice the overwhelming heat. He looked around and saw the fumes of eternal flames, the red darkness of the skyless underworld of Hades. 

To his right was a large creature, blacker than the darkest midnight sky. It raised its slick head and bared shining fangs in a wicked smile. Abaddon was walking toward the monstrous demon. As the demon general used the keys to unlock the creature, the one Talis knew all too well, it smiled again.

“Caught off guard?”

Talis looked away and squeezed his eyes shut. He yanked hopelessly against the chains and wished he could cover his ears to silence the anguished screams echoing all across the vast, burning void. But there would be no silencing the screams. As he heard the struggles of his warrior angels being similarly shackled next to him, he knew that his screams would soon join the tortured chorus.

To be continued…

If you enjoyed this rough draft, you might also enjoy my finished works in the Journey of Fate series. Check out the prequel short story now, for free, by signing up for the mailing list!