Dead Harvest

  A snarl behind us, a frightened gasp. One of the demons had reached the entrance to the subway stairs. He wore the flesh of a bike messenger, though he no longer moved as if human – he scrabbled along, half walking, half prowling on all fours, his eyes so full of raging darkness that it spilled outward from them, flickering black across the tiles of the stairwell. He pushed aside a woman in a jogging suit – the one who gasped, no doubt – and she tumbled down the stairs, landing in an awkward heap at my feet. Two others joined him at the head of the stairs – a woman in a brown tartan business suit, now streaked with dirt and grime, and an overweight man in a hot-dog vendor's apron, his face sweaty and purple from the unnatural exertion, a set of greasy tongs dangling forgotten from the apron tie around his waist. The bike messenger spoke then – just one word, and in no language that I understood, but I recoiled nonetheless. Those two syllables seemed to rise from the pit of hell itself, rendering every curse, every epithet ever uttered by Man a mere shadow, a trifle, a charming colloquialism.

  It was then that they came for us.

  I would say they came like animals, but that's not exactly true. Animals must abide by basic laws of nature and physics, but these things hold no sway over a demon. No, they came at us like death, like damnation, like the devil himself. They clawed and scratched their way down the stairs, crawling and bounding along the floors, ceiling, and walls – as if all three surfaces were the same, as if all three had been put there for the express purpose of conveying them to us. Soon the stairwell was filled with the dust of broken tiles and the spatters of their vessels' blood, the vessels that were so much more fragile than the monsters they disguised. I'd like to say I fought, or schemed, or even ran, but the truth is, in the face of their imminent arrival, I did nothing – just stood there, stock-still, watching. Tears streamed down my cheeks as I surrendered to my fate. I'm not proud of it. I'm not even ashamed. At that moment, there was simply nothing else that I could do.

  Lucky for me, Kate didn't feel the same. Maybe it's because, deep down, she still had hope to cling to, where I had nothing but regret. Maybe I was just a coward. Maybe it doesn't matter, because when she yanked on my arm, she shook me from my dazed and sorry state. We hopped the turnstiles and sprinted together across the platform, in that moment denying the inevitability of our fates. Whatever had come over me had passed. But that didn't mean we were out of it yet. We were cornered, and they were coming fast.

  Scratch that – they were here.

  The platform was crowded with afternoon commuters, serious folk in business suits jostling for position with uniformed wage slaves as they waited for their trains to arrive. At least, that was the scene when we arrived. What happened next was more of a nightmare.

  As we shoved through the crowd, no goal in mind but to get away from the demons at our heels, we were greeted with muttered curses and the occasional elbow in return, so annoyed were they to be disrupted in their routine. But when the demons reached the platform, that annoyance became fear. A scream rang out, and then another, and soon, the entire crowd jostled to get away, pressing tight to the far end of the platform as if those precious few feet would save them from the monsters that stood before them.

  It didn't. The three demons, that followed us down the stairs tore into the crowd with savage delight, rending limbs and gouging flesh before tossing them aside like so much litter. I watched in horror as they took to the walls again, climbing toward us with chilling ease. Others charged across the crowded platform, pausing only long enough to toss aside whoever stood in their way. Though they were clad in human clothes, their vessels no longer looked human in the slightest, so warped were they by the demons within. They were impossible, horrible; their shapes refusing to resolve themselves in my borrowed eyes, my borrowed mind.

  A cry rang out in the center of the crowd, quickly silenced. What replaced it was a low, wet gurgle, and as I wheeled to see what had happened, I saw an older gentleman in a blue blazer holding a girl in a waitress uniform up by her neck. She scratched and kicked at him to no avail, while he cackled with delight, black flames dancing in his eyes. His eyes met mine, and he threw the girl aside, starting toward me through the quickly parting crowd.