DEMON DAYS: Love, sex, death, and dark humor. This book has it all. Plus robots. Read online

  © COPYRIGHT 2015 CARL S. PLUMER ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from the author at [email protected].

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, events, and places portrayed in this book are products of the author’s imagination and are either fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author. For more information on the author and his works, please visit www.carlplumer.com

  Editors: Becca Hamilton, Beth Lynne, and Kristen Plumer

  Cover: Alan Davidson

  ISBN 10: 1-942947-03-8

  ISBN 13: 978-1-942947-03-5

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  For Kristen,

  Happy Anniversary!

  And for my four personal heroes:

  Hannah, Joseph, Kira, and Lee

  May the road rise up to meet you.

  May the wind be always at your back.

  May the sun shine warm upon your face;

  the rains fall soft upon your fields

  and, until we meet again,

  may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

  – Traditional Irish Blessing

  PRESENT DAY: 2035

  Zachary Zemeritus hailed a cab on 7th Avenue and hopped in, shaking the warm, summer rain off his sleeves. He grabbed his phone out of his pocket and started it up as water dripped off his conservatively short dreadlocks. There was a message on his iPhone1 12G14. Zach tapped.

  “We still on for tonight?” Mallory’s voice, as approximated by the device. Pretty close.

  “I think so, yeah. Let me get back to you in an hour or so,” Zachary wrote back.

  “Where to?” the driver asked, easing the battered, sputtering taxi into traffic. The clunker he drove used the old hydrogen-cell technology seen only in the few remaining old beaters. Such as this VolkswagonFordKia (VFK) SimpleAIR from back in 2022.

  “62nd and Amsterdam,” Zachary said. “You want Number 34, 62nd street. You know the area?”

  “Yeah, I know it,” the cabbie said, staring straight ahead, his face a mask of indifference.

  Zachary’s phone buzzed. Mallory again.

  “U BTR <3” The iPhone’s voice read him the message at a frequency only he, as the phone’s owner, could hear: “You better. I love you!”

  Zachary smiled and sent a heart back to her. “I <3 U 2.”

  It was already almost nine at night. The end of a long day, at the end of a long, hellish week. Not the best of times, but not the worst of times, either. Summer was heating up good old New York City, but these storms—so many lately—were starting to make things messy. Gray skies all the time, and the goddamn sweltering heat that just wouldn’t break. Wore a person down.

  Zachary gazed up at the clouds. The big puffs had a menace to them that he didn’t remember noticing before. Deeper black, and glowing as if a dark light was bleeding through them. Not the sun doing this, but the opposite of the sun. He shrugged his shoulders. Weather: everyone complains, as the wise man said, but nobody does anything about it.

  “Here we are, buddy,” the cabbie croaked. He puffed on an electronic stogie. No smoke, but still plenty of stink.

  “Cool. Thanks, man,” Zachary said, stepping out of the taxi.

  “One-forty-four and eighty cents.”

  Zachary handed him two one-hundred-dollar bills. “Keep the change.”

  Zachary headed up the steps of his apartment building as the cab splashed away. Lightning etched the sky, causing the glass doors of his building to momentarily glow a radioactive green.

  Weird.

  Across town, Mallory Alexandria gazed out her apartment window at the same dark skies. She turned and padded to her bathroom. She added some lipstick and applied another coat of deep pink-red shadow on her eyelids.

  Mallory was going to the club, whether Zach showed up or not. Helena and Dani would be there, no doubt. It was their second home. So, it would be fun no matter what. More fun with Zach, though.

  She really liked him, she had to admit. They had only been seeing each other for a short time, three months or so, to be accurate. But she could tell he was the One. This was the real thing: she was in love.

  Zach was sexy, of course. Funny, too. And smart, real smart. But more than that, he was kind, and he cared. It was a new sensation for Mallory to be with a man who cared about her. She smiled. She hadn’t been with a boy in quite a while, and she enjoyed doing it. Sex, in other words. She and Zach had done it countless times in the initial few weeks, every position, and practically everywhere. But just recently their schedules at work had gotten crazy and they hadn’t been able to connect. In fact, tonight would be the first time they would see each other in almost a week.

  She left the bathroom and surveyed her apartment. Nice. It was clean. Nearly spotless, she thought with pride. But not so perfect that she looked obsessive-compulsive or anything. She wanted him to be comfortable when they came back here tonight. Mallory fluffed a pillow here and stacked pillows there. She took a moment to admire the candles she had strategically placed in all the right spots. Candles ready to burst into flames the moment she whispered, “Mood.”2 Mallory loved new tech.

  Her first night with Zach had been night and day. So good to have sex that way again. Of course, she’d been having plenty of sex up until just weeks before. But not with a man. Sex with a man, this man, was different, wonderfully different. Not better, but as if coming home, in a way.

  It had been almost six months since she and Helena Heroina had mutually agreed that while it had been fun, a lark, an adventure, it was time to call it quits. As they had been only experimental, first-time lesbians (aided by plenty of bottles of champagne), they both decided they were really interested in just men. At twenty-six, Mallory felt she couldn’t play the single-girl game too much longer. Time to settle down. Make babies. Little, squishy, drooly babes.

  She studied her iPhone 12G18 and found Helena and Dani on FourSquaretwitter.3 Yep, at the Big Blue Marble, their favorite club. Mallory put on heels, grabbed her coat, and headed down the elevator to catch a cab and get over there.

  “You bitch, how can you say that?” Helena Heroina laughed and chugged the last of her Margarita. The last in her glass anyway; two half-full pitchers sat in slick, shallow pools on the table.

  Helena was beautiful, and tough. She had short, spiked blond hair with crimson bangs. Magenta dotted her fingernails, and red bracelets circled her wrists.

  “Screw you, ho! You’re a stalker, you know you are,” Dani Pistachio said, killing her drink, too.

  Dani was more “girly,” despite being six feet tall. While Helena’s “power” color was red, Dani’s was green. Together, they were quite a sight. And tonight, they were both quite
drunk.

  “Matt, Johnny, get the hell over here,” Dani said, waving to two guys who were leaning against the bar. The two men either waved back or dismissed Dani and Helena; it was the same gesture, so it was hard to tell.

  “Idiots,” Helena said. “Don’t know a good thing when they see it.”

  “Or an easy thing when it’s good,” said Dani. Both girls laughed, although neither fully understood the joke, nor cared to.

  “Where is Mallory?” Dani asked, dabbing her wet lips with a napkin. “She said she would be here by now.”

  “You taking my name in vain again?”

  The two girls turned. Standing by the table was a tall, slender woman with night-black hair streaked with blue, cut sharply at the shoulders. She wore a pink raincoat with lipstick to match.

  “Malley!” both girls cried out. They swayed to their feet and all three embraced.

  Mallory was model-grade beautiful. Every man in the club had their eyes massaging every inch of her body. Even more so as the girls pulled apart and Mallory removed her jacket. She was wearing a tight black skirt, too short for business. Mallory adjusted her cream, button-down, nearly-see-through blouse, and revealed a long sigh of cleavage. She licked her lips and smiled.

  “Drink me,” she said.

  Dani Pistachio handed her a Cosmo. Mallory tossed her hair back around her shoulders to get it away from her face. She swallowed the drink in three eager gulps.

  “Damn, girl!” Dani said.

  “Another,” Mallory said, slamming the glass to the table. “Let’s get this party started!”

  The casement window banged against the sill, slapping with each gust of wind. In the basement, the single bulb swayed, a light on a ship at sea. The thing in the corner rolled over, its back to the window, wings spread around itself like insect wings inside a cocoon. The beast had found this place to stay after first appearing in the city in the middle of the night.

  A leaf blew through the open basement window, scuttled across the cluttered cement floor and caught on a rusty screwdriver lying across its path. The thing in the corner grunted, snatching a rat that was foolish enough to pass within arm’s reach. The thing chewed the struggling mammal alive, tail first, the rat’s head still squealing at the very end. Blood coated the thing’s lips and ran down its leathery chin. It huffed, curling itself up again, to sleep, to wait.

  The Council had taken more than two decades to find the man. But now that he had been located, he would be destroyed. Once destroyed, they would get on with the Master Plan.

  Zachary woke up from his “energy nap” and checked his watch. He’d been asleep for over two hours since he downed that microwave meal. Well after midnight now. He grabbed his phone and tapped over to his usual sites. It had been a long day. Hooking up with Mallory was enticing, but he wanted her alone, not with her friends. They were good people, but Zach was feeling selfish. And horny.

  He wearily checked his mySpacebook page until he had to admit to himself that he was bored. Nothing kept his attention; nothing was interesting in the least. As tired as he was, he figured he might as well go out. A couple of drinks wouldn’t hurt him. He grabbed his coat and his phone and he stood up and stretched.

  “Let’s get this story going,” he said to himself.

  MARTIN BEEMER

  Martin Beemer took the elevator to street level. He emerged outside into the quad that made up this section of Columbia University Medical Center and New York-slash-Presbyterian Hospital. He pulled his backpack over one shoulder. A warm gust of wind aggravated his lifelong allergies, causing his eyes to water.

  He pushed his glasses back up his nose, jammed a cigarette between his thin lips, and lit it. It was late, nearly midnight. Not so late, yet he could be the last man alive in NYC. Certainly the last man alive at Columbia Medical School. For a city that never sleeps, New York seemed dead to the world.

  Beemer followed his standard route home from the school to his apartment building. Despite giving the last twenty years of his life to Columbia U-Med, he remained near the bottom of the pay scale. He still resided in the same apartment he’d taken as an undergrad. Now over forty, he looked ten years older with his hunched back, wrinkled neck, yellow teeth, and sparse hair.

  A researcher and scientist at Columbia by day, Beemer was also an aspiring novelist, ever toiling at the keyboard of his ego all night. He created what were clearly, to him, masterpieces. So far, he’d written a number of novels4, as well as a nonfiction book5, each of which were shoo-ins to be bestsellers. They were supposed to change everything for him. So far, though, instead of acclaim and riches, all he had received was rejection.

  And for his failures, he blamed one man and one man only: Zachary Zemeritus.

  The usual junk skipped by here and there as Martin Beemer walked along, deep inside his own thoughts. Bits of newspapers and flyers and fast food wrappers and plastic bags. The kind of crap that littered the sidewalk and the streets. Defective self-refilling fast-food cups, with soda and straws still in them. Dog crap. Discarded e-cigarettes. A broken heel from a cut-rate high-heeled eShoe, the GPS receiver still intact.

  When Martin Beemer reached his door, he expected to enter and trudge his way to his third floor apartment. He did not expect to be lifted by his collar and deposited on the roof of his building by Satan.

  “M-my, my God!” said Martin Beemer, his lip trembling, his nose running.

  The Satan thing mocked him.

  “CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR.”

  “Are you—?”

  “THE DARK LORD? NO.”

  The demon spoke in a voice that was part lion, part storm, part AutoTune6.

  “I AM NOTHING LIKE HIM. NOR AM I LIKE THOSE OTHER CREATURES FROM THE CRAVEN BOWELS OF HELL. MY PEOPLE DO NOT COME FROM THE CENTER OF YOUR EARTH. WE COME FROM THE CENTER OF THIS IMPLODING LITTLE UNIVERSE. FROM THE FIERY PIT THAT STARTED THIS WHOLE MESS. YOU KNOW WHEN YOUR GOD SAID, ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT’? THAT WAS WHEN MY PEOPLE WERE BORN. WE WERE IN THE LIGHT, THE THOUSANDS OF MILLIONS OF TONS OF BURNING HELLFIRE THAT STARTED EVERYTHING. BUT ENOUGH ABOUT ME—”

  “Wha–what do you want?”

  The gruesome thing gave a mongoose howl, a wolverine in heat, clapping its four hands together. It had three arms, but one of the arms had an extra hand. The thing spoke again in its electro-beast voice, the echo of the laugh hanging in the air:

  “WHAT DO I WANT? WHY, YOU ARE SO KIND. I WANT EVERYTHING! THIS PLANET. THE PEOPLE ON IT. YOUR SAD LITTLE LIVES. AS WELL AS, OF COURSE (AND THIS SHOULD GO WITHOUT SAYING) YOUR DAMNED ETERNAL SOULS. THE SOULS OF EVERY DAMN LAST ONE OF YOU.”

  “I meant—” Martin Beemer gulped and tried to hide his trembling. “I meant, what do you want from me?”

  The thing stared at him. It was as if it were trying to decide whether extracting the information it sought was more fun than ending this impudent pipsqueak’s life. It stroked both of its chins, one on each of its heads. The head on the beast’s right shoulder was deaf, dumb, and blind. So, the left head did the talking.

  Thankfully, for the sake of the pipsqueak, he decided the information was vital.

  “WHERE IS THIS EARTHLING, ZACHARY ZEMERITUS?”

  “Who?”

  “ZACHARY ZEMERITUS.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “OH, COME NOW, DO NOT PLAY GAMES. I COULD PULL THE LEGS OFF YOU, YOU BUG, MARTIN BEEMER. ZACHARY ZEMERITUS. HE’S ONE OF YOUR PEOPLE. ONE OF YOUR EARTH PEOPLE. . ..”

  Martin Beemer could only choke out a response, his larynx constricted with fear. “Honestly,” he squeaked. “I really have never heard of him.”

  The monster called Atrōx Manzer7 pulled itself up to its full height. It stood balanced on three legs in a tripod formation. Then, like an odd child playing idly with a Ken doll, it casually and without warning hoisted Martin Beemer’s arm out of its socket.

  Martin Beemer screeched. Atrōx Manzer growled:

  “YOUR ARM IS ONLY OUT OF ITS SOCKET, YOU CRY-BABY. IF YOU DON’T TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO K
NOW, I SHALL RIP THE WHOLE THING RIGHT OUT OF YOUR SHOULDER. BLOOD, BONES, MUSCLE, AND STRINGY LIGAMENT. AND I SHALL SMACK YOU WITH IT.”

  The AutoTune effect put an upward trill on the last three words so they rose to a crescendo, . . . you with ITTttTT.

  “NOW, SPEAK!”

  Martin Beemer wished he could disappear into the air. “Okay, okay. I do know Zemeritus,” Martin Beemer wheezed.

  Atrōx “Rocks” Manzer stretched the skin around his teeth. This was his version of smiling.

  “GO ON, INSECT. . .”

  “Okay, I follow him. Not just online, assuming you have any idea what I’m talking about.” Tears of pain splashed onto Beemer’s face from his reddened eyes. “But in the real world, I stalk him everywhere. He is responsible for the wretched life I live! I have sent him hate mail, both electronic and physical. I, I—” Beemer grimaced in agony. “I once sent him a SASE8 filled with itching powder. But only because you can’t get anthrax or anything anymore. I want to see the bastard suffer and die!”

  “YOU MAY VERY WELL GET YOUR WISH, WORM.”

  Beemer gave the demon a bewildered look. “Well, in the meantime, can you please put my arm back in?”

  Martin Beemer squealed a second time, this one even louder, as the beast hammered his arm back into its shoulder socket.

  “BETTER?”

  Atrōx “Rocks” Manzer waited, breath steaming from the nostrils on both of its heads.

  But Martin Beemer didn’t answer. He had passed out from the pain and the fear.

  BIG BLUE MARBLE

  Zachary Zemeritus stood outside the Big Blue Marble club on West 45th in midtown. The wind blew hard. It was almost 1:30 in the morning, but the place was going strong, thanks to legal highs9. Zachary was dry on all counts. Sober as a tree. He’d have to catch up fast to have any real fun, but he wasn’t feeling it tonight. He’d never been much of a substance abuser, legal or otherwise. Beer, mostly. And brew had not changed a hell of a whole lot in the last few thousand years.