A Damned Shame

An Outerlords Chronicles Story

Few sounds are a visceral as gunfire. Your ears hurt from the intense pressure of it, and it’s one of those sounds that can strike fear into anyone’s heart. Everyone knows what the sound means. You can’t outrun what’s coming for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re as fast as Usain Bolt. Most people are smart. They try to hide, and then there’s me. I don’t hide, not anymore.

Let’s back up a bit first. My name is Sebastian Rooks. If anyone were to describe me physically, it would be angular. I’m a little taller than average with dark hair cut short. The Nevada sun keeps me tan, and my job keeps me in shape. There isn’t a whole lot special about my features other than my eyes which are a shade of blue that I guarantee you’ve never seen before.

Not too long ago I was a photographer. Well I’m still a photographer, but now things are a little different. I run my business out of a little strip mall just outside of good ol’ Sin City, and it keeps the bills paid. If you see my Open to Enter-pretation sign lit up, stop on in, I could use the business.

I don’t see myself as just a photographer anymore. I still do it for a living, but now I do something more. You see, I’m a Knight. I know, I know, it sounds like I should be put away somewhere, but hear me out.

The Knights have been around since…forever…in one form or another. However, it wasn’t until the legend of Saint George that the Knights finally became a true force in the world. Knights are important…I mean really important, the fate of the world on our shoulders kind of important.

The Knight’s purpose is to stand the front lines against the Outers. You’ve doubtless heard stories of knights in shining armor slaying some evil thing or another to save the damsel, or the country, or what-have-you. People love those kinds of stories. They fit into our lives, and they make us feel safe when the hero defeats the rampaging beast.

All kinds of stories and legends will lead you back to a Knight. Jack the Ripper, werewolves, dragons, shapeshifters, the chuppacabra, crop circles, possession, ancient deities. The list goes on and on. Most of those stories are real, they happened, and they are full of information about real world Outer activity on Earth. You need to get used to that if you want to understand how the world really is. Once you have come to terms with that, you’re ready to learn about the Outers.

Nobody really knows what the Outers are, or where they come from. One certainty about the Outers though is that they want to destroy this world and everything in it. That is a fact, and it goes back to the birth of the world.

However, we’ve managed to learn some few things over the millennia. From what we can tell, they have a society, or maybe it’s more appropriate to call it a hierarchy. There are the lowest level of Outers that could be characterized as animals. Low intelligence, but serving their roles. Those higher up use them for whatever purpose they need. Whether it’s to scare some locals, or slaughter entire countries, you’ll find these Outer Beasts in willing servitude to their masters.

As you move up the hierarchy, you encounter Outers with increasing levels of intelligence. With increased intelligence comes greater levels of power, influence, and sadistic intent. The upper most levels of the hierarchy are populated by the Outer Lords, and they are beings of unimaginable power.

If you have heard of the birth of England and the legend of Saint George the dragon slayer, then you have heard the story of the one Outer Lord that was ever slain. Saint George is the only known Knight to have faced an Outer Lord and survived the encounter. The Lords are the major players, they are god-like in their power, and their legends are the most awe inspiring in the world. If the birth of a nation was the legendary result of one Lord dying, it can only be speculated as to what roles these beings have played in the history of our world.

That’s the easy part of describing the Outers to you. The hard part is trying to describe them physically. What they look like, what they sound like, even what they smell like. One of the reasons why it can be so hard is because they’re all different. From what the histories of the Knights show, there has never been a report of one Outer physically looking the same as another. There are similarities to be sure, but nothing exact.

The ancient histories are full of descriptions that try to make sense of something that the human mind can barely comprehend. When a person tries to describe an Outer, they usually equate appearances to something that they can make sense of. A great example of this is actually the classic dragon figure that was made famous by the Outer Lord that Saint George slew.

The description of shield-like scales, claws like swords, a scourge for a tail, and rows of teeth deadlier than spears was easier for historians to describe when in reality a more fitting description would be much different.

Flesh that appeared slimy with rivulets of blood visible beneath the surface. When touched, it did not yield to any pressure and had the texture of stone. The beast’s five limbs were of varying lengths and shape. Most were tipped in what appeared to be sharpened bone, not horn or talons…but bone. The last, and largest limb, was laden with hard muscle and lined with small open mouths of gnashing teeth, which continued their eternal chewing long after the creature was slain. Where the head of an animal would normally rest, this monstrous creature possessed only a lump of writhing tentacles varying in length and tipped with a serrated, clear material harder and sharper than steel. No eyes were ever found and the only orifices that the being possessed where those on its longest limb.

You can see the problem.

Outer’s also possess a complete lack of symmetry, without fail. It’s one of the few constants that they all share between them. Even the ones that can pass in appearance as human have something about them that gives it away.

Most anything from Earth possesses, and obsessed with, physical symmetry. If you don’t believe me, try this. Think of the last bad haircut you had. I guarantee the feeling of it being wrong had something to do with a lack of symmetry. Now try to imagine an entire being that would give you that feeling just by looking at it.

There is one more important fact that you need to know about Outers. All of them, from the lowliest Beast to the Outer Lords themselves, possess a power that most people would consider Magic. Whether or not it is actually magic, doesn’t matter. What matters is that they can do things that defy natural laws and physics. It is this defiance of natural law that requires the most powerful of Outers, the Barons and Lords, to need help from our side to summon them into our world. Our reality prefers balance, the Outers don’t, so the Knights receive the most help from the world itself fighting back. Almost like a body fighting off an illness or infection. Like most bodies, if the things that keep it in balance are off, infections can spread.

Chaos is what the Outers need to have in the world to allow them to cross over, and the greatest forms of chaos tend to stem from human suffering. Humans themselves are, in many ways, the Outers greatest allies in our world.

This magical power gives the Outers an advantage in every conflict they are a part of. In ancient times, we used to have no way of countering this advantage until, as fate would have it, Saint George discovered something miraculous in his fight with the Outer Lord Gyp’darett.

In most of the stories you’ve heard, especially the oldest ones, the evil what’s-it dies when the valiant hero strikes a mortal blow with a special weapon. Silver bullet, stakes to the heart, cut off its head, whatever the case may be. In reality, these things still work just fine, but it’s in the details where you can find the truth.

The silver bullets are obvious, the stakes tend to be ornately crafted with special metals, and the sword is often referred to as magical. It turns out that there are two things in our world that give us an edge against them, and both have their own way of helping us defeat the Outers.

One is silver, like I said that one is kind of obvious from the stories. Silver acts like a poison to the Outers. It has an effect that breaks down the physical make-up of any Outer, causing it great harm. Close proximity to silver can even cause discomfort to Outers, and they tend to stay away from areas with large amounts of silver nearby. This is where a lot of the “shining armor” stories come from.

You can tell when silver is affecting an Outer when it starts to tarnish. Science explains this as oxidation of silver’s component molecules, but it’s actually the stain from an Outer’s energy that causes it to darken. This is the reason why the Knights have spent a long time integrating an appreciation for silver among the cultures of the world.

The second substance that has been found to give humanity an edge against the Outers is one that was only discovered by Saint George himself. Our historians were able to determine that when Saint George slew the Outer Lord, he wielded a sword that was made of silver, but it was also decorated with intricate inlays of cobalt. His armor as well was made more ornate with the addition of this strange metal.

When the battle was over, it was discovered that the additional material in his sword and armor seemed to pulse with a vast quantity of absorbed energy from the Outer Lord, likely saving Saint George’s life in the process. After a great deal of observation and experimentation, it was found that this material not only had the ability to absorb an Outer’s energy, but it could be repurposed and used to do amazing things.

Modern Knights refer to this repurposing as Appropriated Mystical Phenomena, or Amp for short. Knights are now equipped with Amped weapons and armor to help in their fight against the growing Outer threat. Every Knight trains in the ways of using Amped items to get a specific result, and Amped items are painstakingly crafted to elicit one type of effect or another.

Centuries of study and learning have gone into discovering how to utilize this energy, and though we have come a long way, we still don’t know everything. A Knight armed with silver is dangerous to an Outer, but a Knight armed and trained in the use of Amp is the most dangerous force we have to use against them. No Knight would be caught without some type of Amped item on their person at all times. Well…all of them, except for me. I can somehow do it naturally within myself. Just like an Outer.

That starts to lead us back to the bullets.

***

Don and I have gone up against groups of Outer worshippers a couple of times since I’ve joined the Knights. We’ve usually been able to stop these cults before they could fully assist an Outer to enter our world. Last time, however, they were able to complete what they were doing and summoned a Baron into our world. Barons are powerful Outers with only one goal so far as we can tell, and that is to spread chaos and death in service to their Lord. I was able to stop the Baron and destroy it, but it hadn’t come easily and the price for doing so was high.

Since then things in Las Vegas had been quiet where the Outer are concerned. I’d started to relax when I’d had one of my dreams, or visions, and I knew that something big was coming again if we didn’t find a way to stop it.

When I have one of my dreams, I see strange glimpses of what the Outers are doing. We don’t know yet if they are limited by how close the Outer activity is to me. So far as I can tell, they are always about some sort of activity that I can have an effect on. I’d been having these dreams my whole life before I had realized exactly what it was that I was seeing in my dreams. Now I take them very seriously, I know what happens when I ignore them.

They are different than most people’s dreams. I don’t forget them when I wake up, I can’t. They stay with me, sometimes changing in little ways, until whatever it is that the Outers were planning, or doing, is finished one way or another. Then they fade just like any other dream. I’d been awake for nearly an hour, but I could still remember the newest dream in perfect detail.

I can see nothing but darkness, and I feel that I am surrounded by dirt, stones, and various plant roots. It’s not a tunnel, but rather it pushes down on me as though I am buried. I don’t feel of fear or panic, it is more a sense of excited urgency to escape. I can tell that I am naked. I can feel things crawling across my naked flesh. Long, thin, slime coated bodies leave lingering sensations of cold wetness behind in their wake. This too doesn’t cause me any concern. I can’t move, I can’t breathe, and I can’t hear anything. It doesn’t matter, maybe it should?

I’m looking down at a hole in the concrete floor illuminated by long Florissant overhead lights. It is filled with freshly turned soil, and I feel accomplished as I take in the sights around me. There are others in the room I stand in, but their faces are covered in crimson mud. They speak words to me that sound hollow and far away. A low hum or rumble in the background further distorts their words into senseless noise. I feel something warm and wet ooze down the side of my head and over my left ear. I pull my hand through my hair and find it stained with a red so deep it looks nearly black in the harsh lighting. Stained all the way to my elbow, to my shoulder, and further. I scream in exaltation.

I’m back in the ground again, with the wriggling things, and I feel something tugging at my toes…my fingers. It doesn’t hurt, but I can feel pieces of me disappear, like the lights being turned out in a building. The wriggling things are everywhere now, they cover me, and I can feel them growing as I shrink away. I am nothing but food, and I revel in it.

I had woken up alone in my apartment, lying on the floor of my bedroom next to my bed. I must have rolled off the mattress and not woken up when I hit the ground. It had been an awful nightmare, and I knew something was happening so I quickly gave Don a call.

Donald Shooter was once my handler when I had first joined the Knights. He’d been the one to make me a Knight’s Bachelor, or squire, and had taken responsibility for my training and my life during those early years. He’d also been the one to keep the rest of the order from killing me when they finally learned what I could do. Don is a friend, the greatest kind of friend you can have. When he answered the phone, I told him that I’d had a dream and he had me drive to his place to meet him.

Don lives above the bar he owns called The Shooting Gallery, and he was waiting behind the bar with an empty shot glass and a cold bottle of beer when I arrived. It was still early in the morning, so I’d grabbed the beer and he put the glass back on its shelf. He made me tell him everything while he wrote it all in a journal he’s been keeping since the first time he found out about my dreams. I’ve kept my own journal too, a dream journal I mostly keep out of habit from when I’d been seeing a therapist as a child.

We’ve been finding patterns in my dreams. Information that would help us figure out what to do, but it usually only came through in the way of most dreams…fucking weird.

After that, we’d both hit different sources for information to try and figure out what it all meant. Don hit the underground scene mainly. Owning a bar that caters, mostly, to societies ‘undesirables’ can make you some interesting friends.

I spent my time reaching out to some of my friends and contacts for anything strange happening around the city. As a photographer I had some connections with a local paper and the police department have me on file as an information source. My street photography has something to do with that, but mostly it’s my past that keeps the police interested.

I haven’t always been the most upstanding of citizen. The word terrorist has been thrown my way a few times, not really like you hear about now though. After I left that life, I became a freelance war photographer for a while, and I’ve seen my share of atrocities.

None of my sources panned out, nothing weirder than normal had been reported to the police, it is Vegas after all. My contacts in the news didn’t have anything for me either, and I had been contemplating reaching out to some contacts from my old life, when Don got in touch with me.

Don had eventually learned from a local dealer, who specialized in high end pharmaceuticals, that some people had been buying up a lot of his product lately. They weren’t regulars, and he had initially been worried about them being cops. He’d eventually learned that they weren’t, they were mostly business men, or people in the local gambling scene, and he hadn’t thought anything more about it. But the amount of product they’d bought wasn’t something that he was going to forget any time soon.

They’d had him deliver it to a small storage unit outside of the city on the way towards Hoover Dam. That night, Don and I had gone to check the place out and after a quick look around, Don had found records of the renters for each unit.

Don made it very clear that he did not break into the businesses filing cabinets to find the records. They had, in fact, been lying out in plain sight when he’d opened the, miraculously, unlocked door to the manager’s office.

There had been one renter who was currently taking up several of the available storage units and after we’d poked around those units we’d found several empty dirt stained barrels, and some water damaged cardboard boxes. Whatever had been in the boxes had stained them red when they had gotten wet. We knew we were in the right place. The dreams are like that.

After that we had gotten lucky. While we were still there, someone had pulled into the unit’s parking lot. We’d watched as the man went into another of the units that was owned under the same renter’s name, and pulled out another of the cardboard boxes.

When the guy left, we raced back to Don’s SUV and pulled out after him. A little tailing and several minutes later the man’s truck veered off the road takin a service road toward the Hoover Dam. We’d followed, lights off and a good distance back, until we came to the end of the road and found the man’s truck along with several other vehicles.

Don and I armed up, and snuck into the service entrance closest to the vehicles. The door latch had duct tape over the frame to prevent the automatic locking system from engaging. The normal grey surface of the tape had worn down from heavy use, and looking at it more closely I could see several older pieces of tape underneath the outer most layer.

When we’d entered the building, we were immediately forced to choose which way to go as the door opened into a hallway that led in both directions. We had been about to split up when Don noticed a trail of red drop stains on the concrete floor leading to the right.

As we made our way down the hallway, we did very little to hide any noise we made. The place was loud. A constant heavy droning sound filled the space, killing any small sounds we made before they traveled very far from us. Due to this, we’d moved quickly down the hallway. There was very little in the way of cover to block anyone from seeing our approach if they were looking. Any the doors that dotted the hall were rare and all were locked when we tested them. Working on the assumption that the exterior door’s lock prevention would be the same for interior doors as well, we quickly moved past each of these doors.

Eventually, the hall widened from a basic concrete hallway into a more open area. Over the noise around us, we were just barely able to make out the sound of voices. The area where the voices were coming from was directly in front of us in a large open space filled with huge concrete pillars and with a floor sloping slightly downward.

Don and I had been able to creep close enough to see what the group was doing and found them surrounding a large hole that had been smashed out of the concrete floor. We watched as the man we’d followed from the storage units handed the small box over to another man very carefully, and then quickly backed away.

We had been about to draw our weapons and ambush the group when I heard something slap down to the floor behind us. Whatever it was must have been hiding among the pipes overhead and out of sight.

I’d turned to look at the source of the noice, and found myself looking at something that I can only describe as an eyeless, fur covered leach, with legs…a lot of legs. It was easily the size of a Great Dane and was covered in stiff bristled fur the color of the grey concrete around us. In the moment it took me to come out of my shock at seeing, whatever it was, the thing let out a whistling scream that seemed to come from two places at once. Then with a weird undulating motion, it threw itself right at my face. Its sucker like mouth seemed to swell to twice its previous size and fold back on itself as it flew through the air. Hundreds of worm thin tendrils, each about a foot long, shot out ahead of its lurching body.

As it flew through the air, I got my left hand up in time to grab hold of a fist full of the wriggling tendrils and pulled straight down…hard. Whatever kind of Outer it was, weighed far less than its size would suggest, and I overbalanced as I easily turned the creature’s forward momentum into bone crushing force as I smashed its sucker face into the concrete floor. Its back end snapped forward over my nearly supine body and I noticed that the end that had been facing me was almost exactly mirrored on the other back end. The difference between them was that the sucker mouth on the back end was lined with what looked like serrated shark teeth instead of writhing tendrils. Really big, serrated shark teeth.

I was still holding onto my fistful of wriggling tendrils when the back end whipped over me, and both mouths elicited a gurgling cry of pain as I began to drain power from it. That’s my gift, or curse, however you want to see it. Just by touching an Outer, I can drain the power from it the same way that cobalt can.

I twisted the fingers of my left hand to tangle in the mass of tendrils, and jerked up with my right to grab the other end of the thing just behind its other mouth. The coarse fur of its body felt as hard as iron, and dozens of the hair fine needles pierced my skin. I held on despite the pain, and gripping tightly with both hands I stood up and lifted the thing above my head.

“Don!” I cried out “Help!”

Don had taken cover behind a pillar, drawn a 9mm, and had begun firing into the group of worshippers as soon as he had seen me grab the Outer. At my call, he made a quick spinning sidestep toward me drawing a long, silver knife from a sheath at his lower back.

His spin took him away from his cover position and just close enough to me to reach out and glide the razor edge of that knife along the length of the Outer’s body. With one more rotation, he was back behind his cover position, knife back in its sheath, and sending silver flashes streaking from his gun towards the remaining cult members again.

As his knife passed through the creature, it split open like an uncooked sausage and brownish red fluid began to ooze from it. While it did, the creature convulsed in my hands like an eel, my right hand screamed in agony as more, and more of the fur needles pierced my flesh.

I let go with my right hand and, with a cry of pain-fueled rage, swung the thing out with my left hand as hard and I could, smashing it into another nearby concrete column. The force of the impact was so great that the mass of tendrils I had been holding on to ripped free from the creature with a little pop and the creature actually stuck to the wall. More gore exploded from the thing, covering the pillar in the Outer’s stinking fluids.

***

The death of the beast fills me with power. The savage energy that courses through my guts tears me out of my reverie over the last few days, and I turn to face the remaining cultists. Several of them are down already, bullet holes leaking blood onto the grey concrete floor. The remaining men and women take various positions of cover around the room, and they are armed and returning fire, which I’d hardly registered during my battle with the Outer Beast.

“Get behind me,” I yell to Don as I lunge past him.

As I do so, I stretch out my hand, and feel the terrible energy that has pooled in my midsection twist and writhe within me like a living thing. The pile of broken concrete shards that were left over from the hole the cultists had dug fly through the air and hang suspended off the ground creating a fractured wall barely two feet in front of me. As I stride forward, Don right on my heels, bullets from the cultists begin pounding into my improvised shield. Bits of concrete chips and puffs of dust fly every which way as the cultists unload in our direction. As pieces of the concrete break down, I use more power to fill the gaps with new pieces.

The energy I had collected from the Outer twists and turns inside me like a scared animal as it slowly drains away while I hold the shield in place.

The gunfire sputters to a stop. Men and women begin cursing while they fumble to reload. I look to my right as a man cries in a high-pitched wail, “Lord Iiderios” before charging out from behind cover. He holds his handgun by the barrel making it into a rude club, and fanatic devotion replaces the fear he should be feeling.

A shot tears its way out of Don’s gun bare inches from my ear, and a crimson mist of blood fills the air as the back of the man’s head explodes under the force of the killing blow. The initial shot is quickly followed by two more to the chest as Don ends the man’s life in the perfect rhythm of a trained killer. Mozart couldn’t have played a better cadence.

As members of the cult begin reloading their weapons, I send the remaining shards of my improvised shield shrieking out from me in a semi-circle. The power within me tears at my insides with jagged claws as I use yet more of the stolen energy.

Thuds of painful impact are followed by grunts and cries as hundreds of pounds of shattered concrete smash into the cultists with the speed of major league fastballs. After the barrage, few of the cultists remain conscious and none are willing to put up any sort of fight.

As the remaining cult members surrender, Don pulls out a bundle of zip ties and begins to secure the survivors. I pull out my phone and call our commander.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice slides through the phone. Her polished Oxford accent clearly recognizable even over the drone of the magnificent Dam around us.

“Natalia,” I say with exaggerated care, “it’s Sebastian.”

“I know.” She replies.

“Don and I are down at the Hoover Dam. We’ve just cleared a group of Iiderios’ cultists and we need them rounded up.”

There’s a moment of stunned silence before she replies that a team will arrive in less than an hour.

I give her the directions to the small service road before hanging up the phone.

As Don continues to secure the survivors with no resistance, I look down into the pit.

It’s deeper than I would have imagined, and I can see rich soil inside. The hole is wide enough for a man to lie down in it, and as I lean in closer, I can see that something is making the dirt move. As I watch, hundreds of similar, tiny, versions of the Outer we had killed boil to the surface only to sink back down again. The roiling motion of the dirt reveals the mostly consumed corpse of a man before the dirt flows over him again. The damage to the corpse is so severe, that I am unable to determine even what age the man had been, though the body is too large to be that of a child. Thank God.

With an effort of will, I tear the last writhing bit of energy from within me and sacrifice it to light the air on fire. A flash of intense heat scorches my face as a boom of blue flames fills the hole. Sudden thick wet smoke chokes the air with a putrid smell so foul that I vomit into the pit. When the smoke clears enough for me to see again, the hole opens before me and it is nearly emptied of dirt from the resulting explosion. The charred remains of the tiny Outers can be seen littering the floor.

“Looks like cleanup will take a little longer for the crew today” Don says.

“Yeah” I reply dryly, “it feels like the cleanup never ends.”