The moment they came inside, John heard an unholy screech coming from around them in the dark, followed by something charging at Doom Slayer and slamming into him with enough force to shove him out of the room. When he got a got look at it, John's eyes narrowed in recognition... and disgust.
It had to be the portugese girl the Vatican had told him about... but months of being possessed had turned her into an emaciated shadow of what she once had been: at least seven feet tall, impossibly thing, a grey skin covered in pustules, and a jaw that was simply too damn big for her head.
And then it spoke, the true voice of the freak that had started the madness.
"I'll kill you, monster!" It screeched at Doom Slayer as they wrestled on the ground.
'You couldn't have said something more ironic, couldn't you, slag?' John thought. The guy had proved himself to be practically impervious to damage, but in the not-so remote possibility that he was like Superman, weak to magic or something similar (King Shark didn't exactly count), he didn't want to find out if he was able or not to shrug having a fireball thrown at him by an ally... or if he did, still getting pissed because Constantine threw fire at him like a certain plant-man. Not again.
However, that didn't mean he couldn't try to exorcise the demon inside, although given the situation he didn't dare getting close to the two brawlers.
"Slayer, let her go! I wanna try and exorcise it!"
The Doom Slayer didn't respond, busy as he was fighting with the freak. Either he didn't want to kill her, which he seriously doubted given what the other infected had been like... or the demon had made her that strong. He liked neither possibility.
That said, he did hear him, because he grabbed the monster by the neck and raised it above his head. John chanted the encantation of the spell that would kick the demon out of the body (usually he would have sent it back to Hell, but as stated before the situation didn't allow him) so that the Doom Slayer could capture it with either his stupid strength or his bullshit tech, and then chucked the magic sphere at the thing, impacting and illuminating the entire room for the briefest moment, although not enough for John to discern his surroundings.
Nothing happened. The bitch screamed like a banshee and flopped on the soldier's grasp for a couple of seconds before trying once more to rip the Doom Slayer's faceplate off. It seemed that the 'hiding inside human body' part it screeched about before was literal, because otherwise it would still be out of the girl.
Only one option left, then, if the Doom Slayer wanted to grind it up for the vaccine..
"Rip it out of her belly!" He yelled at the soldier. The girl herself was simply no longer there, it was just a meat puppet. "Trust me, that's where I would hide if I was a tapeworm!"
However, before the Doom Slayer could to so, the possessed Medeiros, with a strength that a body that small simply couldn't have, grabbed the man's left arm and, after raising him above her head, slammed him several times against the floor, raising a cloud of dust that impaired John's vision even more, and with such strength the entire room shook from the force of the strikes.
And then, when the Slayer turned the tables and grabbed her by the head to do the same, and before he could rip the demon out of her living guts, the floor below them gave up.
Both combatants fell down the broken tiles and onto the depths of the building, breaking floors as they plummeted to ground level, leaving an astounded John behind.
"Slayer!" He screamed down the hole, receiving a roar of pain as response, followed by the sounds of something tough hitting flesh and bone. John gave a little sigh of relief: he knew the future soldier could handle the freak, but still, even the meanest sods of London's slums could get worried once in a while.
In another occasion John would have immediatly rushed down the stairs to help his newfound ally, but now that he was in the room that Albelda had been residing in for an unknown amount of time to experiment, he decided to take a look around, see if there was something of interest for him, and discover what exactly did just happen before they got there. Who knows, maybe the curate hid a holy manuscript up there.
Or money. He was dead, it wasn't like his corpse would miss a million pesetas, no?
Muttering the enchantation of an light spell, John raised his hand and illuminating the room.
Looking around the place, what John saw made him frown and curse outloud.
Photos, spanish and portuguese newspaper, files about tests and other paraphernalia about the Medeiros girl, alongside medical equipment and other such things John didn't want to know about. Apparently the Vatican didn't bother to tell him that the possession hadn't been covered, nevermind the fact he simply forgot to ask more than the absolutely necessary (or at least what he believed was the absolutely necessary).
However, it wasn't this discovery what made him freeze.
There, in the floor of the penthouse, and incidentally mere yards away from the hole, laid two bodies, both of them clearly dead. One was of a young man, a cameraman by the fact he had one laying near his head, and the other was... an exact copy of the possessed girl that was currently fighting for her 'life' several floors down below?
"The fuck is happening here?" He muttered to himself as he approached them for an improptu inspection. Frowning, he saw that the man, a brunette barely out of his thirties, had been killed with his eyes open in terror, with several parts of his bocy smashed by something blunt, which he guessed had been a hammer of some sort; on the other hand, his otherwise normal appearance and lack of excessive blood meant he had died human, and therefore his sould was in a better place.
With a sigh, John closed the poor lad's eyes. At the very least this nameless sod was actually resting in peace (that, or passing through the trials of Purgatory to get there), instead of being sent straight to Hell like the others had been.
One out of seventy, children included.
After that John turned to inspect the other corpse. A quick scanning spell confirmed that this one was indeed the Medeiros girl, the real deal, which by extension meant whoever the Slayer was fighting merely looked like her because of the demon.
So, the demon had jumped hosts and turned his new vehicle into an exact copy of the Medeiros girl. For what, he didn't know. Maybe it was fond of demaciated women?
Thinking that maybe it had the key to everything that happened, and guessing that Slayer wouldn't need him for a short while, John grabbed the camera to see what it had recorded. Luckily for him, the thing still had enough juice for fifteen minutes.
What John watched made him: firefighters, cops and news crew get in, infected elder attacks and infects cop and firefighter, the coppers cordon off the area, guy from the MH comes and tells them about the outbreak and a supposedly rabid dog that they tracked there, the little girl that the Doom Slayer killed turns out to be infected, everyone sans the news crew turns into a zombie, the two get to the penthouse... and meet the Medeiros girl, or, rather, the demon inside her, who then beats the guy to death with a hammer.
The recording ended with the girl being dragged into the darkness, screaming... and then having the demon (a worm-like freak of nature) shoved down her throat.
John, morose but otherwise satisfied, turned off the camera.
"Shit seemed like a goddamn horror movie." He mused. And all of that had happened in less than three hours. Three bloody hours to infect an entire building the slow way, and it hadn't gotten worse because they got the dog in time. If the thing got out of the building and started puking blood at everything it saw... And that still didn't say why did it turn that girl into an exact copy of the Medeiros girl.
And, most important of all, who was the 'her' the demon spoke about, the one it was supposed to find? Another demon like it? An important condemned soul that had managed to get out of Hell? Someone who had pissed off a demon prince? All he knew
They needed the parasite alive, at least for the moment.
John sighed as he stood up. "Hope the big guy has already ripped that damn thing out."
And then, just as he was about to run out of the room up with camera in hand so that the Vatican could see firsthand the clusterfuk, he heard the freak roar from below, and then felt the entire building shake in a way he didn't like.
As in, half of the goddamned facade chose that exact moment to fall down, taking the damn tarp down with it! The entire damn place was falling apart! Rather than ponder just how the hell didn't he notice it before, or why hadn't the entire building fallen when the facade did, John chose to leg it before it collapsed with him still inside, but not without sending the camera to the House of Mystery to later send its recording to the Vatican.
And THEN he did run like Hell.
"Fuck, bugger, shit..." He screamed every swear of the english language he knew as he rushed down the stairs, the apartment block falling apart around and behind him. "This can't get worse, can it?!" His legendary luck chose that moment to make the snipers outside to blast at the uncovered building when they saw John running down the stairs, their shots landing dangerously close to him. "Yes, yes it can!" He sped up, dodging falling rubble and jumping over holes as he went.
When he finally decided to just jump to the ground floor and rush through the door, the building finally came down on itself, releasing a ginormous cloud of dust that covered the entire street, causing the crowd around the building to run away, and burying the infected's bodies.
As for John?
After getting up from the asphalt he had fell on, and cursing Doom Slayer, God and several other deities for nearly getting him crushed or shot, he began dusting himself.
"Bloody space marine could have tried and keep it tight and let me get down the fucking stairs, but nooo, he had to bring the entire damn building down with me still inside! And the damn coppers thought I was a goddamn zombie! Fuck!" He had been in life-threatening situations before, but this was the first one that didn't (fully) involve the supernatural; the closest had been that mafia chase back in Monaco.
All that said, John was fine and dandy.
But then, he remembered that Doom Slayer had been fighting the demon. Sighing yet again, John delved into the cloud. He pretty much doubted that Doom Slayer needed his aid, but someone had to make sure the guy didn't accidentally kill someone that didn't deserve it.
'Where are you, you big green bastard?' He thought as he looked around and moved through the cloud of dust, trying to discern either the huge frame of his temporary compadre or the outright eldritch silhouette of the demon's host, and pushing out anyone he bumped into to both keep them safe and to not bump into them again.
And what does he see when he finally meets up with the big greeb dobber, and the cloud finally dispersed, granting John full vision? The Doom Slayer surrounded on all sides by GEO troopers, all of them aiming their guns at the soldier, their officer in charge shouting at him to get down to the ground, something with which he obviously didn't comply. Behind the line of troopers, a dirtied woman was screaming hysterically about how it was the Doom Slayer's fault.
Too bad for her that John had seen the recording, and knew what she actually was.
The demon-inhabited girl either didn't notice or didn't care that John was there. "He killed them all!" It screamed in spanish as it pointed at Doom Slayer; as a matter of fact, that was the only thing it said, probably to make the 'hysterical, traumatized girl' guise more effective.
John snarled when it finally dawned on his mind: the damned freak was trying to put the blame on the Doom Slayer, and these people were daft enough to buy it outright, rather than, say, ask more of what happened in there, or, more importantly, how the fuck was 'she' still alive after the building fell apart!
He also wondered why was it still alive despite going against the Doom Slayer, but he didn't ponder on that for long.
Unfortunately for it, it was within casting range of the Occult Detective, and he had the perfect spell for the occasion: transmogrify, the spell he used when his bank account was too low and his hatred for pigeons reached its peak; best of all, the transmogrified didn't change back to their original form if they died, so there would be no stupid misunderstandings when they killed it.
He did feel sorry for the lass, but if the creature controlling her body. Besides, he morosely thought, it's not like she could be saved anyway.
"Get away from her, she's not human!" He screamed in spanish before launching the ball, hoping that the GEO would fall for it.
The moment the sphere of magic hit the crying girl, he. Five seconds later, what had been an otherwise pretty lass was now what could be best described as the unholy love child of a troll and a dog. The freak, seeing that its ruse had been blown, roared in rage, slammed the Doom Slayer back into the destroyed building with a swip of its arms, and began to rip the GEO closest to it apart, with most of them too shocked too react fast enough as it tore through them; the few that weren't fired everything they had at it, but their weapons had no effect.
Seeing the massacre taking place in front of him, John grimaced: maybe revealing its true self by accidentally making it stronger hadn't been the best idea. If it decided to just puke blood at everything it saw...
Fortunately, and before the thing thought of doing exactly that, the demon's rampage was stopped by the Doom Slayer, who grabbed it by the head and...
Honestly, John didn't really know what the Doom Slayer would do now that he didn't have to restrain himself. Smash it to a bloody pulp and retrieve the parasite from said pulp? Rip it apart with his bare hands? Blow it apart with his shotgun? Maybe pull that supposed chainsaw John heard about to use?
None of the listed: he merely shoved his hand inside its stomach, making it scream in pure agony, and then pulled its guts out, screeching maggot included, as John himself had told him to do minutes prior. Then, before the screaming monster fell, some kind of tube came from the back of the Slayer's armor and spat flames at the thing, roasting it until it turned into a burning mush.
"Holy shit..." John muttered.
And then it him. After however many minutes fighting alongside the brute, now he realized something: bigass guy from the future, bigass guns, uses a chainsaw, fights demons without fear of them... Why did he tick all the marks of a Space Marine? As in, the ones from the goddamned Warhammer 40K of all things?
To be honest that was beside the point at the moment, but still, John couldn't help but wonder about the coincidence.
The detective didn't have time to ponder about this coincidence, bcause as the remains of the transformed woman broke apart, the Doom Slayer turned to face the surviving GEO, raising the wriggling worm in the air.
"This creature" the Doom Slayer began to say, raising his voice so everyone could hear him. ", is an alien parasite from beyond our solar system that landed on Earth. It can take control of living bodies via virical infection, destroying the minds of those infected. This monster from above has killed seventy men, women and children."
The news: they reacted with the expected horror of what happened, terror about the possibility of more 'aliens' coming, anger that the evil-slaying hero hadn't killed it yet, relief that everything had ended well (relatively speaking), sorrow that people had died anyway... The typical really, only on a much larger scale, and public. At least he didn't say it was a demon.
So, Slayer spoke with the authorities about what happened, told them to search for the bodies of the infected and burn them, and some other things John simple didn't care about, with the detective near him all the time. He didn't like people in general, but having something of good PR could help him in the future.
However, when Doom Slayer called up his now iconic portal to leave the scene, instead of doing so outright, he stood in front of the blue space-time hole and stared silently at John.
John understood what the soldier was silently saying. "You want me to come with you?" Seeing him nod, he continued. "Need help with the maggot, right? Try to know what it knows, I mean."
Again, the Doom Slayer nodded, before turning around and going through the portal.
Sighing and shrugging to no one in particular, and wanting to know if he could actually create a vaccine from the worm with his help, John walked after Doom Slayer, wondering if he could smoke in that Castle Grayskull of his.
..........
So, how was the chapter and end of the Hellblazer arc? Too narrative heavy? For the public's strangely understanding attitude, don't worry, Doom Slayer and Constantine coming out of a building and saying that seventy people died will have consequences that he'll have to address and explain the parasite.
As for John's sudden cavalier attitude in the end, this wasn't his first rodeo, only the biggest: he's been desensitized to a point due to these things.