Of all the weirdos, freaks and nutters that were collectivelly known as 'heroes', John never expected to basically team up with the newest one, who also had the most outlandish name AND backstory: Doom Slayer, a soldier from an alternative Earth. John could call bullshit when he saw it, but he didn't know much about the guy, aside from him having his base on Mars, being pretty damn strong, and most importantly a gun user not afraid to rip people apart with said guns... and his bare hands.
John grimaced when he remembered the pictures of what he did to those underwater wankers. There were demons more restrained than him.
At the same time, one doesn't call himself Doom Slayer and end up not killing anything. Plus, the fact he was not afraid of killing and more than willing to being worse than them made him a good deal better than that cowl-wearing nutjob from Gotham, at least to John.
'I mean, one thing is not stooping to their level, another is to send the bloody Jack the Clown to the madhouse, instead of the morgue.' He wasn't critical of Batman's actions per se, he was just annoyed at the Bat's adherence to the Fifth Commandment.
And then there was the strange... energy, for lack of a better way to describe whatever he felt when he looked at the guy. It wasn't magical in nature, and he pretty much doubted it was normal radiation, but he was practically radiating with it.
'Like some kind of eldritch Elephan'ts Foot.' He thought as he waited a few seconds to follow after Slayer secured the area or something like that.
He couldn't exactly pinpoint what exactly it was. Plus, despite everything he knew about Slayer, namely his strict code of good and evil and how to deal with the extreme of the latter, he didn't fancy having his skull crushed by a space soldier, at least not yet. He could always ask the guy later, or get some demon or ghost to attack him and try and get results from the massacre, for now it was time to work.
Crossing the portal after Doom Slayer, John found himself surrounded by darkness. Conjuring a light to see around, the occultist saw they were on the ground floor of the apartment building, your typical lobby with a kiosk near the entrance and a sectional door on the back. It would have been a normal sight, if not for the literal gallon of blood spilled on the floor. Dry blood.
And then he heard someone scream. No, not someone, something.
Turning around, he saw Doom Slayer holding a screaming woman by the throat, near the stairs. By the face and clothing of the brunette, she had to be middle-aged, with a body clearly wracked by at least one pregnancy, and she did not have the looks of a worker... In other words, she was your average homemaker.
Well, more like had been, given the blood on her clothes.
It was a daunting sight, seeing the seemingly hapless mother being painfully restrained by a super known but for the wrong reasons: the woman was clearly furious and bloodthirsty, instead of scared shitless by the soldier from the future, and her screams were somehow distorted, maybe even...
Demonic.
John sighed "Definitely possessed." He muttered. Not the last time an inhabitant from Hell controlling a living body couldn't stop itself from accidentally revealing its presence in a stupid manner just by opening the poor sod's mouth.
Just when the giant of a man was about to do something that would have definitely have killed the possessed woman (he only raised his free arm, but even a forceful poke from a guy that could stop a speeding train would have pierced her skull), John stopped him by grabbing his shoulder, having to fully raise his arm to do so. He wanted to try something.
"Wait, don't kill her yet. I gotta try and save her soul or whatever, remember?"
The Doom Slayer looked at him, and then at the snarling woman.
"It bites." He warned. He also didn't say 'her, but 'it'. That didn't bode well, that's for sure. It also meant that Doom Slayer might not really care about the innocent slaves of a demon, but hey, not all could be saved from their grasp.
"I know, I know." John waved him off as he got closer to the prisoner, taking care to not getting too close to clawing range. No way he'd let some spaniard bitch scratch his face. First, he inspected her from a safe distance.
She had the red eyes and the manic expression, but at the same time something didn't add up: blood dripped from from her mouth and her eyes but these seemed to be untouched, she had bites across her body, and then there was the fact she was acting like a mindless animal, not even bothering to arm herself or use magic.
'What kind of demon are you, mate?' John thought to himself as he continued inspecting the woman.
Up close she didn't look like someone whose body had been taken over by an inhabitant from Hell... As a matter of truth, she looked more like someone suffering some sort of rabies than your average demon host/vehicle. This was definitely not your average possession, that was for sure. But according to the Vatican, the possessed girl, Medeiros, couldn't be any older than twenty. Did the demon jump hosts? If so, why did it use bites instead of possessing her outright?
Most importantly now that the demon changed victims, what happened to everyone else? Did it just kill them, leaving their corpses on the upper floors? Not exactly impossible since he had seen a possessed midget go on a bloody rampage across a pub, but he still did so with a fireaxe and a shotgun, and with that kind of body she could have been restrained by a young copper or fireman.
And then, just as he was about to compel it to speak, the bitch's eyes focused on him, and she stopped trying to free herself.
"John Constantine!" The voice that came from the woman's mouth was not human, most definitely the demon controlling her.
John merely smiled. "Well, hello there beatiful. Nice to now even the spaniards know about me."
"Every demon in Hell knows about you, John Constantine!" She screamed as she kept struggling to free herself.
"Yeah, yeah." John waved her off before looking up at Slayer. "This sounds stupid, but try to hold her still, will ya? I need her inmobile."
The Slayer gave a light nod and did as John asked... by dislocating the possessed's limbs one by one and... 'tying' them to the railing. Good thing the demon-possessed woman didn't feel pain, John hated hearing the screaming of people having their limbs used as makeshift ropes.
The fact Doom Slayer just crippled an innocent victim of Hell didn't evade him, but he figured the guy had some super-advanced healing bullshit that would repair the damage after kicking the freak out of her. Even if he didn't, John himself could mend her a bit. Still, a warning would have been nice.
"Didn't need to break her bones, ya know." He told Slayer, who shrugged at his 'berating', before turning back to the woman. "Now, let's see what's hiding under the surface..."
John casted a spell to force the demon to respond his every question, to get as much info as he could before kicking it out of the host... and discovered something that actually shocked him: nothing.
As in, he couldn't feel either the demon or the woman's soul inside the body. There simply was nothing inside, and the woman should have been little more than a slowly-dying vegetable for lack of a soul, yet she obviously could move, and he could hear her heart still pumping, so she wasn't undead. This was a first.
'What the shit did I embroil myself into this time? Fucking catholics!'
He shook his stupor and adressed the creature. "Where are you hiding, asshole?"
The bitch stopped screaming and then smiled a toothy, bloodied grin.
"In your mother's cunt! You'd like that, wouldn't you?" She-it sneered. It was pointless to use feminine pronouns without knowing the demon's gender.
"Oh, c'mon, do I look THAT desperate to you?" He grinned back before finishing the spell and blasting the woman with it. It wouldn't last long, but he was confident it would be enough to get some answers. "Now, where are you hiding at, and how did this happen? No metaphorical stuff, no cryptic shite, straight to the point, alright? Don't try to resist if you don't want to feel how much pain can the human body withstand... and THEN, I'll give you to Doom Slayer here." He gestured at said soldier. "Believe me, he's one creative bloke when it comes to punishing the wicked."
The demon tried to resist, but John didn't earn the hatred of a good portion of Hell (and a smaller one of Heaven) for nothing. "The body of the girl I'm controlling is sealed in the penthouse; Albelda made sure that I wouldn't get out."
Finally, a name! "Albelda?"
The demon sneered. "He's the curate who decided to use my host to try and fire a solution to possession! Funny, given he deliberately injected children with the tained blood and fed me human body parts to keep me docile, or so he thought!"
'Well, fuck' John thought. He knew that some of the Vatican's people were assholes, but curates? All he had met in person had been as kindly as good as they seemed to be. Then again, if Albelda thought he could find a way to counter demonic possessions, he probably thought that stopping them from enslaving people would be worth Hell.
The demon kept talking. "The fool thought he could stop me and any future demon from taking over mortals by creating a... vaccine! As if science can stop us from taking what we want!" It said in a sarcastic tone. Had it beeen able to, it probably would have used air quotes. "Instead, he provided me with a efficient, quick way to ensnare souls AND create an army of soulless maniacs I can control as one!"
John cursed under his breath. If what the demon was saying was true (and knowing these kind of demons, it probably was), they weren't dealing with your average demonic possession, but a literal demonic infection that spread through people like some sort of, for lack of a better term, zombie virus. A supernatural zombie virus, instead of a man/alien-made one. That was a first.
So, Romero and Argento ended up being partly-right. Too bad the dead were neither slow, nor actually dead, at least in body.
Were it not for the fact it was actually happening, and he was the one charged to clean the mess, John would have laughed at the idea.
"Now all I need to do is to escape this wretched building, infect the population, and scourge the planet in search of her!"
That made John to raise an eyebrow in confusion. 'Her'? "Who's her?"
But the demon sneered. "I won't say more, your spell is no more! Nothing you can offer me can sway me, and you can't threaten me with this man-shaped creature that reeks of power!"
Doom Slayer tightened his grip on its neck at this last part, and John could see his free hand clench into a fist. Well, at least he wasn't the only one getting a strange feeling from the big lug. Still, maybe he could get some more info from this.
"Say, would you be willing to tell me more about whoever this lass is if I-" He began to say before the demon roared at him.
"I don't want your stinking soul, Constantine!" It cried. "I know your tricks, human, they won't work on me! I shall speak no more about my mission!"
Damn, first smart demon who refused a (not really) free soul.
"You and your monster friend's bodies will be a great addition to my army!"
Oh, right, he had momentarily forgotten, it had infected everyone in the building. They could not be saved, much less the Medeiros girl; even if (well, more like when) the two of them got to the girl and dispatched her, the others would still be soulless husks, basically motion-able vegetables.
John grimaced. This was the third time he came too late, and the first time more than a dozen souls had been taken to the Biggest House, for no reason than sharing the same building a crazy priest did.
"Your souls will burn in Hell forever, adding two more to my hoard!" It cackled.
Doom Slayer, not bothering to wait for John to even open his mouth, tightened his hold on the still cackling woman's neck before completely crushing it, popping the head off. John could imagine a sneer of disgust on his face behind that helmet.
The moment he did so, several animal-like screams coming from at least a few dozen throats echoed throughout the entire building, followed by the rushed steps of the owners of said throats rushing down the stairs. Seventy soulless husks knew they were there, and all of them wanted their blood, and very possibly escape and murder and infect anyone they could get their filthy hands on, and start a bonafida apocalypse worthy of getting the 'A' treatment.
Over their dead bodies.
John grunted as he lightened a cigarette and took a smoke. He always did so before a big fight, which was a rare occurrence. "Whelp, there's no turning back now. We'll have to fight our way through those poor bastards and get the wanker."
Doom Slayer merely pullet out that bigass shotgun of his. "To the penthouse then." Then Doom Slayer looked above at the approaching horde of pseudo-zombies, and did something that, to be honest, the detective had expected of him given who he was.
A one-liner about putting the infected out of their misery, like some corny action hero from the eighties? A roar of rage that would have shaken the entire damn building and challenged the infected? An oath to protect all that was good and pure, like the Lad in Blue, as some called Superman back on the Isles?
None of those.
He merely cocked his shotgun and waited for the first infected, a bald firefighter with a sledgehammer, to reach the floor down to them, at which point giving him a bodyful of futuristic buckshot for his troubles that completely disintegrated him.
John smiled grimly before summoning a fire on his left hand and then throwing it at an old asian man that had been smart enough to jump over the railing, followed by another.
He could already hear Goblin's music blaring off on the back of his head.
..........
So, how was the chapter? Less action, more narrative, I know, but I wanted to save the brutality for the next chapter. Did I write Constantine's personality and attitude right? And the cockney slang?
Obviously the REC side of the arc is not goint to be a complete copy-paste of the first film: for example, there are only eighteen people, but I raised it here to seventy infected because, well, it will make the slaughter last (a bit) longer than a minute, and therefore allow Constantine to shine. Yes, I know, canon John isn't exactly a fighter, nor an offensive magic-user all things given, but I'm basing this itineration of him on the DC Animated Movies Universe, who's basically a D&D mage.
Goblin is the band that recorded the OST of the original Dawn of the Dead, and its music is much heavily featured on the european cut. Yeah, John knows this is basically a zombie apocalypse.