SATAN'S KISS

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The silence was broken by pounding footsteps on a rotten, wooden staircase. Somewhere in the apartment above, a faint, rapid, shallow breathing could be heard. The runner was carrying a glass jar, and inside were dozens of hissing black cockroaches with long floating feelers.

The runner entered a bedroom eaten through by termites and black mold. In the corner, a young white girl was tied to a steel table crusted with blood and strips of flesh. A shadow slowly pried open her jaws with delicate pale hands and inserted a metal spring-clamp.

“No, no, no, no, no, no!”

The girl gagged on her own saliva and blood as the runner gave the glass jar full of cockroaches to the pale hands. He took it and the runner backed out of the room. Then he stepped out on the third floor balcony and looked down at the men and women dancing in the street. He could smell the river and the smoke and the diesel and the exhaust. He felt alive. He smiled and wanted to shout to them that he had saved them all.

“No, no, please no! let me go!”

The shadow with the pale hands unscrewed the glass jar lid, inserted a forceps and removed a cockroach. The girl saw the black thing with the dancing feelers and thrashed around on the table until the first cockroach was dropped into her mouth.

“We give her to you, Lord, to save us all…”

The first cockroach squirmed down her throat as the jar was tipped and the rest of the cockroaches came spilling out and sprinted across her face and down her neck and across her belly.

“Accept this sacrifice so you might spare the city from the terror to come…”

The pale hands wiped the fleeing cockroaches back into her mouth and then picked up a scalpel from a side table and quickly sliced away her bloody gums to reveal freshly drilled, white jaw bone. Then the pale hands removed the metal spring-clamp, picked up three silver rings and quickly locked them in place through the drilled holes.

“Save us, Father of Lies…”

Brian Bowes, a 36-year-old arson investigator for the city of New Orleans, sat up in bed and flicked on a table light. His knees popped and pain stabbed through his left shoulder. His sheets and pillowcase were soaked with sweat.

"Fuck getting old..."

He grabbed a bottle of water from a nightstand and took a deep drink. Then his bathroom door opened and Stacey Sova, an N.O.F.D. firefighter, walked out wearing his University of Oklahoma sweat shirt. She smiled at him.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing.”

He angled the table light at her and saw she was naked. She stood at the foot of the bed and smiled back at him. She did a slow-motion, stripper bump and grind.

“You call that nothing?”

“No. That’s something.”

“You would kill for that, wouldn’t you?”

“Just point out a victim.”

She laughed, threw the towel at him and started to get dressed. He watched her pull on her underwear and her black jeans and an N.O.F.D. t-shirt. She tied her thick auburn hair in a ponytail.

“What’s it gonna hurt if you stay?”

“My self-respect, you man-whore.”

She started to lace up her boots and Bowes pitched back on the bed, clutching his chest and thrashing and moaning. She stood up and grabbed her green canvas satchel.

“I think I’m having a heart attack. I need you to save me.”

“Nice try. Go fuck yourself.”

“I need mouth to mouth.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“What about mouth to penis? Penis to vagina?”

She threw a box of tissues and a copy of Cormac Mccarthy’s All the Pretty Horses at his head. Then she flipped him off, walked out of the bedroom and slammed the door.

“Goodbye, Satyr-man!”

Bowes laughed, smiled at the ceiling and grabbed the remote off the side table. He watched an old black and white movie about a young man who posed as a returning war hero to steal a village church’s gold statue of Jesus. It was in Italian. He fell asleep.

*

A digital camera image flickered to life and showed a young Jesuit priest, Father Anthony Sardis, standing in the chaos of a street full of drunk tourists, crack dealers, bored cops and transsexual whores. He was speaking into a camera he held on himself. His voice had a dream-like quality.

“This is my fourth day in this vile city. I still haven’t found the killing room, but I’m getting close. I can feel it. I know it’s down here. There is a divine judgment coming. I have to stop them before it’s too late…”

Sirens suddenly blasted out of the background and red lights bounced off the apartment building walls and filled the black smoky sky as the crowd parted. Father Sardis turned to see two fire trucks turn onto the street and stop in front of the apartment building at 223 Madison Street. He swung the camera around to his P.O.V. and moved toward the fire trucks. He walked up to the lead truck just as Stacey jumped down and grabbed an oxygen tank and a pick axe.

“Back the fuck – oh, sorry, Father.”

“Don’t be afraid. I know this might sound strange, but you need to tell me if you find bodies in there."

“Why would you think that?”

Sardis’ face remained calm and without expression. Stacey signaled to a police officer to watch him. Sardis filmed the hulking officer with the crew cut as he walked up and forced him into the backseat of a blue and white police cruiser.

“We’re gonna talk when I’m done,” Stacey said.

“This force isn’t necessary. I’m not going anywhere. I just need to know if you find any bodies. It’s a matter of life and death.”

The police officer unzipped his jacket and Sardis saw the .38 tucked into his shoulder holster. “If you don’t get that camera out of my face, there’s gonna be a death,” the officer said.

Sardis lowered the camera and Stacey called out to the police officer as she fell in behind a line of fire-fighters entering 223 Madison Street. “Keep him here. If he tries to leave, cuff him to a light post.”