The Other Doorway

Kelsy ran as if the hounds of hell were at her heals.

Which, they were.

She felt the heart-shaped locket pounding hard on her chest with each stride, mirroring the beat of her own as she gasped for air. She pumped her arms, willing her legs to move faster. The pack was so close, their blood-soaked saliva dripped on the backs of her bare legs like intermittent rain.

The streets of London held the heaviness of destruction in the pavements as she turned down another narrow road, the empty balconies of what was once an affluent suburb now stood as a silent, eyeless witnesses to her folly.

She knew this was a fool’s mission. The last of the survivors had told her as much. She was done waiting and watching as they were picked off, hunted for sport, for food. The world was dead; gone these last five years. She was tired of just surviving.

Life was for the living. If this was the way she exited this life, then so be it.

She breathed deep through her nose, relaxed, let her muscles loosen, let them remember what it used to be like when she had trained. When, once upon a time, she was an Olympic Tae Kwon Do silver medalist for Britain.

A Dark Beast leapt, razor fangs snapping at the back of her lose grey cardigan and pulled her backward. Her body instinctively twisted out of the clothing, letting the beast have at it as she spun, her palm punching the throat of another hound, instantly snapping its neck. A back flip had Kelsy picking up a circular bin lid. She held it up like a shield as the beasts hit her, jaws clacking, their unholy bark like a baby’s terrified scream as she slammed into the middle of the pack, decapitating the nearest with the edge of the lid. Her other hand flew, the fist slamming into the emaciated bodies of the hounds, bones cracking. The beasts stopped and stood back, circling her. Their panting breaths curled in the twilight of the evening. She knew it was a matter of minutes before their master would be prowling for her.

Her breathing slowed. She resisted the urge to check that the necklace was still around her neck. It was the only thing standing between her and His total annihilation of what was left of this world.

A few brave beasts tested her perimeter. She lashed out, drop-kicking them into the main part of the group. Hundreds of the hounds of hell scattered, their collective growls sounding so low they trembled the road beneath her tattered tennis shoes.

The jaw clacking grew louder as they circled her. Kelsy focused on the inner calm that had always held her in good stead when she had been competing. The world around her paused. Sound came to her from all aspects of the street. Her sense of place heightened till she felt rather than saw what was all around. She could smell Him, that stench of death and decay. It clung to Him like a favourite bespoke suit.

Kelsy let out a growl of her own, the sound foreign and feral to her ears. She frisbeed the trash lid into the nearest beasts as she executed a roundhouse kick on the hounds behind her. A half dozen went crashing into the nearby wall, the sound of their bones crunching echoing around enough to give the rest of the pack pause. Kelsy used the momentum to run free-form up the nearby cracked wall and leaped, grabbed a hold of the first-floor balcony’s twisted wrought-iron railing. She backflipped onto the balcony as the beasts leapt to follow her, the clacking, snapping of jaws echoing down the street. She took a running jump up to the broken second-floor balcony of the next-door apartment block, rolling in through the broken French doors and flipped up on her feet, glass crunching under foot. She took a deep breath and went to move through the property when she paused.

All her senses went on high alert as she felt the air change to oil, its suffocating tentacles wrapping themselves around her throat and invading her nose. She stood in fight position.

He was here.

A chuckle snaked its way out of the dense darkness of the destroyed apartment.

“Interesting move, Little One.”

Kelsy’s nostrils flared, seeking a clean breath of air.

“Theatrics don’t become you, Zeus.”

Splintered lights buzzed on, highlighting the God lounging in a pristine, black leather chair. He was exactly what the history and mythology books had always said he was; the Golden God, with eyes like a lion and a physique made to be showcased in Greek leathers. Dressed casually in slate grey trousers and a black cashmere sweater, he stretched out his muscular thighs as the polished black leather of his boots reflected the magically induced light in the room. His full lips smirked in a smooth face that looked like it had been touched by the sun. He slowly swirled dark brown liquor in a cut-crystal glass while his eyes travelled up and down her disheveled form.

“You could still be mine.”

Kelsy tampered down the savage urge to vomit the bile that had suddenly travelled up the back of her throat. “Fuck you”.

Zeus cocked his head to the side. “Is that an offer?”

She bared her teeth at him. He chuckled. He was distracting her. She could see the items in the room creeping into what would have been their original order. Smashed glass slid back into its rightful place. Broken chairs and torn books became unbroken. The rug beneath her feet turned from a black pitted mess into the deep green colour of the forest she used to play in as a child. Kelsy knew he was creating a beautiful cell to hold her in. That was one of the many things he could do; rewind time and damage to seal a place and use it to his advantage.

Zeus downed the last of his drink and set it on a nearby newly repaired desk with a light clink of glass on polished wood. He sat at ease, as if watching a play at the theatre.

Kelsy saw the memories of the apartment replay and rewind of the final moments of a young couple trying desperately to stay alive as the first days of the invasion were in full swing. She fought to keep her focus on the power-hungry God in front of her as the couple were slaughtered with the vampire-bred beasts. One of Zeus’s henchmen tore through the place, confiscating what would have been any silver items. These items were missing in the reconstituted room. Silver to the heart was the only deadly weapon to the God, and others like him.

He clapped as he watched the woman’s silent scream rewind. “Truly better than anything that was on television.” The grin he flashed Kelsy sent cold sweat running down her spine.

He cracked the bones of his neck as his unblinking eyes watched her like a predator seizing up his next meal. “Here’s the deal. You get to live your little human life with no interference from me or anyone else in my circle, in exchange for the locket.”

Kelsy knew her window for escape was closing. The scene was rewinding at a faster pace now, the room almost completely normal. The lamp on the floor behind Zeus realigned the globe and its shade before bounding backward up onto the small lap desk. A silver letter opener slid out from where it had fallen in the gap between the wooden floorboards and the wall, overlooked by all but her, and finally coming to rest on the desktop.

Something in her smile set him on edge. He bared his teeth, their needle-sharp points glinting in the renewed light. “Hand the locket over, Sweet Pea. And I won’t rip your spine out.”

Kelsy spun, her foot picking up a glass coffee table and smashing into his chest. He held up his arms against the glass as he toppled onto the floor. He lashed out with the darkness, sending the leather chair he had been in hurtling toward her. She hit the floor as the furniture flew over her head and imbedded itself into the wall. This prison had been reinforced. The only way to get out of this place was to be the one left alive.

Her vision turned red as anger bubbled. She was only two blocks away from The Other Doorway that when the locket reopened it, she could send him back to the hell he’d sauntered out of.

He launched himself at her, a fist hitting the floor where her head was before she rolled. She kicked, punched, parried and twisted around his punches, blocking his advance and beating him back when she could. He jabbed, lashing out with the darkness, cracking a few ribs and throwing her into the little desk and the wall behind it. Kelsy hit the floor on her knees and screamed through the pain as the sound of her kneecap cracked in the room. Her breaths came in short pants, and she spat out the blood in her mouth onto his still-shiny boots. His eyes lit up like starlight as the darkness gathered around his shoulders like a greatcoat. She couldn’t stop the tears; didn’t want to. Let them streak down her dirty cheeks, their cleansing rivers reminding her she was still alive, that the stabbing fire of pain beating in parts of her broken body meant she was still here. Still fighting.

She slid along the floor into the corner, her ruined leg protruding from an awkward angle as the contents of the desk scattered at her back. Zeus slid like the snake he was up to her and crouched down, his fluid movement turning the darkness into a grey fog that blocked out the light in the room. Kelsy felt around the floor behind her, her fingers seeking the one item he and his henchmen had missed in The Cleansing. The sound of her breath was as loud as a gunshot in darkness. Zeus’s eyes glowed brighter as he came closer to claim his victory.

“You could’ve been a god, Kelsy. Yet, you threw it all away for what? The few miserable souls who found refuge in Buckingham Palace?”

Her breath came in faster, shorter spurts. His laugh rumbled through her broken chest like a blast of cold wind. “I’ve always known where your kind are, and what they were doing.” The cold fingers of death lifted the sweat-soaked hair off the back of her neck, making her shiver. Her hands found what she’d been seeking as she never took her eyes from his.

“How do you think I became a God in this pathetic world, six thousand years ago?”

Kelsy drew as deep a breath as she could around her broken ribs, her voice croaking. “If we’re so pathetic, why would you even bother with us?”

He paused the fingers of darkness at her throat in their move to strangle her. She sensed rather than saw the shrug he gave. “Because it’s fun”.

Just as he released death on her throat, she launched a battered arm straight up into the area of his heart and imbedded the silver letter opener in his chest. The hands around her neck instantly dropped. Zeus fell forward onto his knees. The darkness turned like a million pairs of eyes on their fallen master and feasted on his body identical to the ravenous beasts still circling in the street below. The final vision Kelsy saw of the world’s tormentor, dementor and invader was a flaking golden hand reaching out for the locket that had fallen out from beneath her blood-spattered shirt to rest, sparkling in the light against her collarbone.