Our nearly unspoken plan was simple: force our way through the apartment to get to the penthouse, kill every infected in the way, enter the penthouse, pull the demon out of the husk of the Medeiros girl, and then leave before the authorities came in, after which I would make up an story about an alien parasite that could turn people into mindless puppets, with their major organs active but their brains entirely dead because I neither could nor wanted to hide the massacre from the public.
The fact some of the infected didn't remain human helped.
As for the demon itself, you're probably wondering why didn't I say that I would squash it like a bug, or better yet, give it to Constantine. Don't misunderstand me, I WOULD kill it... but not before cutting it up and finish Albelda's work.
The curate's goal of making a vaccine against demonic possession was noble, and his idea to accomplish it made sense from a scientific point of view... but sadly, he made the mistake of trying to accomplish his task with a purely scientific method, and he had done his research not only in the must inhuman manner possible, but also in a completely unsafe environment. Because of that, more than fifty people had been turned into mindless, soulless monsters.
A perfectly sealed dissection table on Mars, inside a castle from which nothing could get out without my express permission, and which in turn was surrounded by an array of defenses that could destroy a one-inch wide target several miles away, and all under the control of a man who have demonstrated a strength and durability level close to Superman's, though? A safer environment couldn't be found, at least in this cluster of the Orion Arm.
Having said that, let's go back to mine and Constantine's cleansing of the apartment building.
Calling the infected 'zombies' would be a compliment to zombies everywhere, both undead and living ones. They were nearly as tough and just as relentless as the former, but had the speed, intelligence, capacity to use weapons and unrelenting rage of the latter, to the point they reminded me of the armed zombies from DOOM.
All that said, however, they were up against me and Constantine, so their strengths meant nothing against us. Constantine chucked fireballs left and right, when he wasn't just throwing them over the railing down below (while it was kind of an stupid move on the lower floors given how resilient they were, it stopped being so as we went our way up), and I, well, I was Doom Slayer.
"How many floors are left?!" Constantine shouted as he uppercutted an old woman before burning her head, and then snapping her neck. "I'm getting tired of these daft bastards!"
"Six." I replied as I blew apart a balding gentleman. By then we had already killed little more than their total number without as much as tiring. Why did the demon keep sending his puppets against us. "And it's your fault that some come from behind us."
Constantine screamed. "Sod of, you wanker!" He cursed at me, though he was smirking as he did so.
What we didn't know at that moment was that, because of the hivemined the infected shared with the original demon, the creature could see us as we tore our way through his thralls.
It would be the first local demon to learn firsthand what it feels to feel fear.
Fear of John Constantine.
Fear of me.
..........
Several floors above the two, hidden within the darkness of the warped penthouse of the building, the source of the evil that had happened on the place, a disgusting creature shaped like a worm sent its army, and saw, felt firsthand how good they were at fighting, at killing.
For the first time since it had come to the corporeal world, the Worm was afraid. Not wary of the duo's prowess, not furious that its extensions were practically worhtless, not concerned that they were actually getting closer and closer to it, but outright afraid of the unimaginable turn of events that was happening after a long night spreading terror across the building.
It already had an idea of what the despised Constantine would do to it if he reached its host, heard of those demons the bastard had outgambitted and scammed.
However, between Constantine and the soldier, it was the latter who scared the Worm the most, and not just because of the brutal way he dispatched the infected.
There was something about him, At first glance it looked like some kind of power, one that came from his soul, and it wasn't magic. However, even with the true sight that it shared with its hellish kind, it still couldn't make head or tails of what kind of energy was he emanating, only that it was as supernatural at it (the Worm) was.
Which was why the Worm was doing its damnest to kill him, rather than infect him as he had planned with Constantine: the wizard's magic was tied to his soul, a soul that would surely spent eternity in excruciating torture, and the Worm was certain that the soldier's strength came from his. Therefore, the moment tainted blood touched his, he'd become nothing more than another living meat puppet under his will, although a particularly big, strong one.
'Maybe strong enough', it realized, 'to force its way out of the quarantine!'
The Worm changed its mind: he would try everything to infect them. With the brute's strength compensating for their reduced numbers, the infected would barrel through the containment tarp and attack any mortal they could get their hands on; its consciousness would spread across Barcelona too fast for either the Spanish armed forces or the Church to respond.
Soon, it would have an army worthy of the name.
And then it would be able to find her. It was, after all, the whole reason he possessed the Medeiros girl.
Still, it didn't change the fact the brute was an enigma to i.
'Who are you?', the Worm thought as it sent down its first, hastily made contingency to stop the intruders: several infected children. It knew by experience that most mortals balked at the idea of hurting children, even those not of their blood. Even that bastard englishman would no doubt stop long enough to let the soulless creatures infect them. 'It matters not. Soon, you will nothing more than a puppet'
It would get a very, very nasty surprise.
..........
As we kept ascending, resistance became slightly stiffer: the infected that attacked us directly carried weapons (mostly knives, cleavers, and anything they could get their hands on, although a couple carried hunting shotguns, as I stated previously), those who didn't threw stuff at us from the upper floors, tried to ambush us by hiding on rooms... It was all for naught, but it did prove that the demon was not stupid. I also noticed that the infected began focusing more on me, specifically my unarmored elbows, and given their gaping mouths, I quickly deduced why.
It would have been useless. Aside from the fact I was completely inmune to the tained blood, my skin was simply too tough. After all, King Shark, a demigod, had bit me there and he didn't even get through my skin it despite his bite being strong enough to cut a man in half.
Sadly, letting them bite me and receive wouldn't have recovered their souls, it just doesn't work that way.
As we fought, an infected cop, one of the very few in possession of a gun, in this case with a pistol, ran up at me firing its weapon, every shot hitting me right in the helmet.
The moment it came close enough, I cut it in half, then grabbed its weapon and whatever clips it had left and threw them at Constantine.
"I didn't need a gun, but thanks anyway!" He said before blasting away at the infected. His shooting skills were average at best, but not once he shot at me, so and never missed the infected. Being a globe-travelling Occult Detective must have had its perks.
That said, between him and me, he had by far the smaller killcount.
An infected I tore apart. Another I ripped in half. Another yet I decapitated with a backhand. A fourth I grabbed and then threw to a fifth with enough force to make them splatter against the wall. And so on, and so on, I pretty much exterminated any infected that got too close to me.
I focused on killing them, because that way I wouldn't focus on the fact that an entire apartment block worth of people, children included, had been condemned to Hell for eternity. Sure, this wasn't DOOM's Hell where everyone not a demon ended up tortured and harvested, but it was still a place of eternal torture and dispair.
And then, just when we were only three floors from the demon's hiding spot, I heard Constantine shout and point at something waiting for us in front of the stairs.
It was a group of children. Filthy, red-eyed children who were clearly not normal anymore, but children nonetheless. There were four of them, all under the age of ten, with a small girl who couldn't have been much older than five at the head of the group.
Their presence stopped us from our rampage.
"Bloody hell..." I heard John mutter in a mix of shock and anger. Given his career, he must have seen something like this before.
I just stared at the 'children'. On the one hand, well, they looked like scared boys and girls crying out of sheer terror, but on the other I knew they just weren't human, not anymore.
That fact made me even angrier. Not only did that freak take the souls of the innocent to an eternity of pain and terror, it also had the gall to use their bodies like that, to entice people into lowering their guard.
Too bad for it, its little trick wouldn't work on us.
And made me angrier.
The lead infected stepped forwards to me.
"Please, mister." It said in spanish, its voice human in tone unlike the first infected's. ", my mommy turned into a-"
I didn't let it finish: the moment it opened its mouth, I grabbed it by the head and then, without hesitation, gave it the cleanest death I had performed since arriving here: snapping its neck.
The other infected, realizing they couldn't fool us, screeched and charged at me.
Needless to say, they didn't do much before I reenacted what I did to the girl.
..........
Had it had an actual mouth, the Worm (and not just its current host) would have cried in horror... and terror.
The soldier killed the children.
Nay, it diddn't just kill them: it butchered them without as much as a second thought, grabbing their little heads and twisting them with stupid ease, one by one! Like the lion amidst the sheep!
At that moment, hundreds of questions appeared on the Worm's mind.
What hero could ignore the instinct to save infants and then massacre them?
Would his last resort stop the beast and the loathsome magician?
What could it do against such a relentless monster, a beast that might as well sent by Heaven itself with such unrelenting power and will of iron, hellbent on killing it?!
'What are you?!' The Worm screamed as the last puppet died, severing the connection with that floor.
..........
I stood there, motionless, over the corpses of the former humans I had killed. Even though their deaths had been clean and quick, I hadn't even put them out of their misery, since their souls hadn't been trapped there, but in Hell, one I had no knowledge of beyond the basics.
"Slayer..." I heart Constantine say. "You okay, big boy?"
I may have said several times before that the Occult Detective would end up making me contemplate shove a box of cigarettes down his throat, but that would be much later.
I didn't bother to respond, thinking as I was of what I just did. True, they had long ceased to be boys and girls, and from a certain point of view my actions had been necessary, since they could have slipped us and somehow escaped outside... but it didn't change the fact I killed the soulless, hivemind-controlled bodies of children.
No wonder all the demons you kill in DOOM are all adults, and clearly undead.
Again, I stood there, contemplating the bodies.
And then I thought of the demon that took their souls and used their bodies. Everything it had done only made me add more and more horrible experiments to inflict upon it before killing it. Again, though, we had to reach it first.
"Remember, those things weren't human anymore, just soulless husks-" He began to say, possibly trying to comfort me, before I stopped him.
"I'm alright." I replied. I wasn't exactly lying." We must stop it, before more suffer their fate."
Constantine merely nodded.
Finally, after however many minutes and killing several more infected, we reached the last floor before the penthouse where the demon hid, and the last four infected that remained. These, however, could not longer be considered merely infected humans: they had grown taller and bulkier, their nails had been pushed out by claws, and their teeth had sharpened into fangs. It seemed that the infection was also capable of mutating those it afflicted after a time. To be honest, this reminded me of the film.
Unfortunately for them, their mutations would still not be enough to fight us. They were valuable enough for me to merely break one's neck, though, as proof of the 'alien parasitic infection' cover-up.
"That bastard is waiting for us behind that door." Constantine said as he kicked a dead pseudo-demon. "I had planned to just kill it, tell the Vat, and be done with it. You?"
"Extract it if possible, take it back to the Fortress to finish Albelda's work by torturing it until it dies, tell the public a version of the event to not cause panic across the planet, and then give the vaccine to the Vatican... alongside a recording of this. I might require your expertise for the experiments."
Constantine, rather than ponder on my response, merely nodded. "Usually I would ask for some more dosh for working extra, but I consider this part of the Vatican's job. Besides, that wanker has hit a nerve."
We stood in front of the dusty door, waiting if the demon came out itself. After a minute of nothing happening, and then the mandatory count to five, I kicked down the door and barged inside the room with Constantine in tow, guns raised and spells prepared.
And then, as we looked around the darkened room, something slammed into me.
..........
Sorry for the cliffhanger, wanted to post the chapter this day.
Was the scene with the infected children done right? Did I go overboard by using them... and killing them? I mean, in the sequel they do kill the girl, and there's also the matter of the the japanese's son, who we didn't see after the infected escaped the workshop.