Hunted, p.1
Hunted, page 1
part #2 of Realms Unseen Series
Realms Unseen: Hunted
Jeremy Michelson
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
What happens next?
Thanks for reading
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1
Hilario’s favorite pizza place was full of dead people.
Freshly dead. Their spirits still wandered in and out from what remained of the old, brick two story shop. Confusion and anger twisted their ghostly faces.
It must have been one heck of a fire. The stench of smoke was thick in the air.
He sat in his white van, parked at the curb about half a block down from the Stung Sparrow. Fire engines and police cars blocked the rest of the street. Red and blue lights flashed. Painted the narrow canyon of old brick buildings in blood and ice. Buildings that huddled shoulder to shoulder, holding each other up. Their tall, narrow windows looked down blankly at the sorrow below.
Water sluiced along the gutters. Looking too, too much like ichorous blood.
He didn’t want to get any closer anyway.
Thin streamers of smoke still rose from the wreck of the restaurant. Firefighters sprayed water on the collapsed roof and the walls of the brick buildings on either side. Grim faced police officers stood behind yellow barricades. Kept back the curious and the fire junkies.
A young woman in a red dress collapsed to her knees, hunched over a form covered with a white sheet. Her sobs rose into the night. Echoed off the brick canyon of old downtown. The ghost of a young man in a leather jacket kneeled beside her, gesturing and shouting.
She couldn’t hear him.
Hilario flicked his gaze away from them before the young man’s words started echoing in his head. He said a brief incantation to focus his spirit shields. For all the good it would do.
This would have been a good night to line his wig with aluminum foil.
Lingering smoke hazed the air. The smell of it clenched Hiliaro’s throat and sent his blubber encased heart into a tap dance of terror.
It was a stench of roasted foam upholstery and cloth and charred pizza. And…barbecue.
When people burned…their flesh smelled almost, but not quite, like pork. Most people wouldn’t know the difference.
Unfortunately, he did.
His empty stomach, the cause of him being on this particular street at this particularly bad time, twisted and threatened to launch hot, acidy bile up his throat.
He forced it back down. Food type things went into his tremendous gullet through his mouth. They didn’t come back that direction.
He clenched his white gloved fingers around the steering wheel. He was still in uniform, just off a bad party. The orange and white striped puffy suit that covered his 500 pound frame was soiled from the drunken boyfriend’s antics. Fortunately the flying cake had missed his fuzzy purple wig. That would have taken forever to clean out.
But he’d had to run out to the van for his emergency makeup kit. Cake had smeared his greasepaint. Had almost left bare skin exposed.
Bare skin was bad.
And the mother’s drunk boyfriend had almost made Hilario do something bad.
But he contained himself. Barely.
He recovered and got back to making the kids happy. Which made him more than happy. The children’s joyous laughter charged his depleted reserves of psychic energy. What he took from them was just the merest sip of what they produced.
It would be bad to waste it on petty revenge. Especially on a moron like that lady’s creep boyfriend.
He’d collected his check and exited. Even though the embarrassed woman had kindly invited him to stay for the barbecue.
Barbecue.
Now he wished he had.
He wouldn’t have had to see the still smoking remains of the Stung Sparrow.
And maybe Larry Sparrow’s ghost wouldn’t have seen him.
Larry Sparrow came running out of the smoking ruin of his restaurant. Tall and thin, with long, black hair tied behind his head, Larry ran around in circles, his hands pressed to the sides of his smoking skull. He shouted and wailed. He still wore his white chef’s outfit with the fancy double breasted button up coat.
Spotless, like always.
In all his years of knowing Larry and watching him make his wonderful pies, Hilario had never figured out how the man wasn’t covered from head to toe in tomato sauce. Chef Larry made pizza with an exuberance and zest that made a tornado look like summer breeze.
At least he used to.
Before he could stop himself, a jolt of sorrow went through Hilario for all the pizza Larry Sparrow would never make.
Followed instantly by a stab of guilt for weighing the value of his friend’s life with pizza.
Though, it had been really good pizza. The best in the whole city of New Bedlam, in fact.
But, even worse, the spike of strong emotion from Hilario was like a beacon for the spirit of Larry Sparrow.
Larry spun around. Jerked to a stop facing Hilario.
“Oh barnacle poop,” Hilario said.
He fumbled with the ignition key. Stupid! Why had he turned the engine off?
Too late.
Larry appeared in the passenger seat. A faint blue glow surrounded his translucent form.
“Hilario!” Larry shouted, “Hilario my-a big-a friend! Why-a am I a dead-a!”
Hilario hung his head. He would have beat it against the steering wheel, but his tremendous belly had put a stop to that ability a long, long time ago.
It wasn’t easy being a psychic, morbidly obese clown.
2
Hilario’s van was special.
It was a 1966 Ford Econoline Club Wagon, white in color. At one time in its life, the van had been a mild mannered delivery truck for a rural egg farm down in the Brokken Valley. It claimed to still have dark mud from the old farm still stuck up in its fenders.
Fortunately the van didn’t talk very much. That was one reason why Hilario kept it around. He didn’t like objects that complained or bragged too much. He got too much chatter from everyday objects as it was. Every lamppost, screwdriver and dinner plate seemed to want to relate its (incredibly boring) life story.
Or, even worse, the objects would make up wild stories about their adventures. Dinner plates that spun baloney tales of serving thick, juicy steaks to Albert Einstein or some such important person back in the day. When, really, the best they’d ever managed was holding the contents of an Alpo can while the dog horked it down.
But the van…it endured in stoic silence. Hilario admired that in a vehicle. Especially one that had to haul around a five hundred pound guy dressed in a clown suit.
Complaining about how much its shocks and struts hurt when Hilario climbed inside was how his last vehicle got fired.
The other reason Hiliaro kept the van around was the work his lost friend Ted Denton had done on it. Ted had been a machinist who worked and lived down on the south side of town, who had a magic touch with machines. Perhaps literally. Hiliaro had never been able to figure that one out for sure. He had never been able to sense any powers of the unseen world in the man. But then sometimes these things worked on levels he couldn’t touch. Even with all of his, um, experiences.
Ted had fixed the van up with a heavy duty suspension that balanced out the otherwise awkward van. He’d seamlessly stretched the driver’s side door to accommodate a person of girth, and replaced the seat with a much, much stronger o ne that swiveled.
He’d also done other things such as extend the steering wheel and put it on a gimbal that allowed it to swing up to ease Hiliario’s entry and exit from the vehicle.
There were other goodies, such as hidden compartments for objects that Hilario didn’t wish to have lying about. And the privacy screen and compact makeup station for when he needed to change in and out of his uniform. As well as altering the gas and brake pedals so they could be safely operated with his big, floppy clown shoes on.
Normally Hilario left the house suited up and in full makeup. His armor. But having the option to change in the van was helpful. Though incredibly awkward.
His 500 pound bulk didn’t maneuver well in tight places.
If the van had any complaints about Ted’s modifications or Hilario’s weight, it kept them to itself. As it should.
And it always started when Hilario turned the key.
He hoped that wherever Ted was, assuming he was still alive, he was making magic with machines.
He also fervently hoped the van never broke down. Because who in the doodley poop was he going to get to fix it?
And now, how was he going to get the ghost of his other friend, Larry Sparrow, out of it?
Larry put his ghostly hands to his head and let out a tremendous wail of pure soul cracking agony. Not physical pain. Larry was, unfortunately, unencumbered by a physical body any more.
But spiritual pain…
“Hilario! How-a could-a this-a happen to-a me?” Larry Sparrow shouted, “And how-a come-a you-a can see-a me-a?”
Hilario closed his eyes. Counted to five. Breathed in and out. Practiced a little calming exercise his coven boss had taught him for dealing with frantic, freshly cleaved spirits. Made his clenched fingers relax their death grip on the wheel.
He opened his eyes. Glanced down at the ignition key. Maybe if he just drove off, Larry’s spirit would fade away. Most spirits stayed where their bodies died. At least until the black angels came to collect them.
Truly agitated spirits wouldn’t go, of course. The old unfinished business thing. Or maybe they were just afraid of the black angels. Who, he had to admit, were pretty terrifying. They certainly didn’t fit the modern image of heavenly angels come to take the dead off to paradise.
Then again, most people had no clue what really happened after death.
Unlike Hilario.
He reached for the ignition key. Glanced outside the windshield as he did.
And his heart nearly stopped in a jolt of sheer terror.
The black angels were already there. But so soon?
Spiky black shapes moved through the crowd of still living humans. Spindly and tall, the beings carefully avoided touching the living–though he could see a couple humans shudder as the creatures passed by. Most living creatures wouldn’t see them. But occasionally the black angels could be felt if they passed close enough.
The black angels, featureless silhouettes that seemed to be made of shards of broken glass, moved with slow grace toward the smoking ruin of the the Stung Sparrow. Where the freshly dead still lingered. The spirits’ faces were still blank with shock. They drifted in and around the living. Some tried to get the living’s attention. Others just stood. Stared in wide eyed shock at the scene before them.
None of them had noticed the black angels yet. The spirits weren’t quite attuned to the plane of the unseen world. The black angels would be shadows at the corners of their vision.
“Why are they here so soon?” Hilario mumbled to himself. Something tickled at his memory. Something about fire. But the bowel loosening horror of the Black Angels drowned it out.
Larry snapped his insubstantial head around
“Holy crap! What the hell are those things!” he said.
If Hilario hadn’t been so terrified, he would have been amused to hear Larry drop his fake accent.
However…
“Shut up!” Hilario hissed, “You’ll draw their attention. Don’t even look at them.”
What was he saying? Didn’t he want Larry out of the van?
Yeah, but he didn’t need the black angels sniffing around him. They never forgot. And never forgave.
Which meant he was still on their poopy list.
“What are they–Oh my god!” Larry shouted. The dead idiot was completely ignoring the whole don’t look thing.
Hilario bent down and twisted the ignition key. The van’s engine r-r-r-roared to life. Okay, coughed to life. But it started. One less thing to twist his guts at the moment.
He didn’t need to look at what the black angels were doing.
Been there. Seen it. Peed his pants over it the first time he saw it.
The black angels would be drifting up to the freshly cleaved spirits. And Hilario heard the screams start. The sounds didn’t reach his ears. They came through the unseen world and echoed inside his mind.
The spirit would suddenly see the black angel. A terrifying being of darkness and sharp, glittering angles. Towering over them.
Then a spiky black arm would dart out and spear the spirit.
The spirit would scream (as Hiliaro was hearing now). And then the black angel would swirl around the spirit and they would disappear. Shrinking down in a black vortex before popping out of existence.
Going to places Hilario didn’t want to think about.
He glanced up at Larry. Who was staring at the scene with his eyes wide and mouth hanging open.
“Stop looking at them!” he shouted, “That attracts their attention.”
Hilario risked a glance.
“Oh booger doodles,” he said.
One of the shadowy beings was drifting their way.
Hilario shifted the van into reverse and stomped the gas. The van lurched backward. He spun the wheel around. The van’s suspension groaned. Two wheels left the ground. For a sickening moment it felt like they were going to tip over.
Then the van righted itself. Hilario shoved the selector into drive and punched the gas.
It would have nice if the van had leapt like a gazelle and sped away.
But that wasn’t the type of vehicle he had. The engine rattled and the gears whined as it pulled away at a stately pace.
He should have had Ted put a bigger engine in the thing.
Larry turned around to look behind them.
Hilario risked a tiny use of power. The privacy curtains zipped closed, blocking the view.
Larry turned back. His eyes were so wide, they were like cartoon ping pong balls, ready to fall out of his ghostly skull.
“What’s going on!” he said, “What are those things! And why am I dead?”
Hilario sighed. He had some questions of his own. The main one of which was: What am I doing?
3
Hilario’s day job was to entertain children. He considered this both a service and atonement for things he had done in his other life.
Plus it was a source of light energy. Pure, good energy untainted by the bad things.
Children were the main source of light energy. They were natural generators of it. And he had the ability to take that energy, amplify and feed it back to them in such a way that they released an even stronger and purer form of light energy.
When he went to entertain children at birthday parties, he would start with the usual clown routine. Before long they would be laughing and their joyous energy would fill the air. He would absorb it, then send it back. Filling their minds with visions of flying over chocolate mountains and candy cane forests.
