The Stars Never Rise

The degenerate loomed over me in her creepy half crouch, rank breath rolling over my face as she leaned closer, her mouth open, gaping, ready for a bite.

“Over here!” someone shouted, and the degenerate twisted toward the fence, snarling, drool dripping from her rotting teeth and down her chin. Over her bony shoulder, I saw a shadowy form beyond the chain-link. A boy—or a man?—in dark clothes, his pale face half hidden by a hood.

She snarled at him again, one clawed hand still tight around my ankle, and I saw my chance. I kicked her in the chest with my free foot, and she fell backward, claws shredding the hem of my jeans.

“You don’t want her. Come get me!” Metal clinked and rattled, and I realized the boy was climbing the fence. And he was fast.

I crawled away, trying to get to my feet, but she grabbed my ankle and gave it a brutal tug. I fell flat on my stomach, then rolled over as she pulled and I kicked. My foot slammed into her belly, and her shoulder, and her neck, but she kept pulling until she was all I could see and hear and smell.

Concrete scraped my bare back when my coat and shirt rode up beneath me. I threw my hands up and my palms slammed into the degenerate’s collarbones. I pushed, holding her off me with terror-fueled strength. The chain-link fence rattled and squealed on my right. The beast snarled over me, deformed jaws snapping inches from my nose as my arms began to give, my elbows bending beneath the strain of her inhuman strength.

“Hey!” the boy shouted, and a thud told me he’d landed on my side of the fence, just feet away. His arm blurred through the shadows, and the degenerate snarled as it was hauled off me.

I scrambled backward, and the seat of my jeans dragged on the ground until my spine hit the trash bin again. My hands shook. My back burned, the flesh scraped raw by the concrete.

A bright flash of light half blinded me, and when my vision returned a second later, I could see only shadows in dark relief against the even darker alley. One of those shadows stood over the other, malformed shape, his hand against her bony sternum, both glowing with the last of that strange light.

What the hell…?

An exorcist.

An exorcist in a hoodie. Where were his long black cassock, his cross, and his holy water? Where were his formal silence and grave demeanor?

As I watched, stunned, that light faded, and slowly, slowly, the rest of the alley came into focus.

The boy stood and wiped his hands on his pants, his hood still hiding half his face. The degenerate lay unmoving on the ground, no less gruesome in death than she’d been in life, and now that the violent flash had receded from my vision, I realized the alley was growing lighter. The sun was rising.

I pushed myself to my feet while the boy watched me with eyes I couldn’t see in the shadow of his hood. “I…I…,” I stammered, but nothing intelligent followed.

“Holy hellfire!”

We turned to see the Grab-n-Go night clerk standing at the end of the alley, backlit by the parking lot lights, staring at us both. In the distance, a siren wailed, and I realized three things at once.

One: The clerk had reported the disturbance, and the Church was on its way.

Two: He hadn’t realized this was more than a scuffle in an alley until he saw the dead degenerate.

Three: I was still in possession of borrowed/stolen clothes, and since I was the victim of the first degenerate attack in New Temperance in the last decade, the Church would want to talk to my mom.

I couldn’t let that happen.

“Is that…?” the night clerk stared at the degenerate, taking in her elongated limbs and deformed jaw. His gaze rose to my face and he squinted into the shadows. He couldn’t see me clearly but was obviously too scared to come any closer. His focus shifted to the boy standing over the degenerate, and his eyes narrowed even more. “Are you…?”

“Run.” The boy didn’t shout. He didn’t make any threatening gestures. He just gave an order in a firm voice lent authority by the fact that he was standing over the corpse of a degenerate.

The clerk blinked. Then he turned and fled.

“You okay?” The boy shoved his hands into the pockets of his black hoodie. And he was a boy. My age. Maybe a little older. I still couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see his cheek. It was smooth and unscarred. No Church brand. No sacred flames.

What kind of exorcist has smooth cheeks and wears a hoodie?

“That’s a degenerate,” I said, and it only vaguely occurred to me that I was stating the obvious. I was just attacked by a demon. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. How had it gotten into town?

“Yeah. Is there any way I can convince you to maybe…not tell anyone what I did?”