Epilogue

Epilogue 2.19

---Em---

     Slam. Another slam. Ace, Topher, and I wait out the onslaught in a run-down convenience store. Our makeshift barricade won't hold for much longer. These hellhounds are persistent as, well, hell. I smash the glass doors of the refrigerator with my baseball bat. Catch my reflection in the glass shards. If that thing gets through here, I'm slicing open my neck before it gets the chance to eat me alive.

     We were pretty damn thorough with the barricading, though I can still glimpse the outside world through patches of glass window. Slowly but surely, the murky purple of night is giving way to the hazy green of day. We've only got to hold on a little longer. Question is, will our barricade last that long?

     Answer is, no.

     The hellhound comes crashing through our barricade. The fridges, the ATM, the vending machine—pretty much everything not attached to the floor that we could move—all topple over like dominos. The hellhound emerges from the wreckage, slobbering lava-drool. Hound is a bit of a misnomer—more like a rabid, fanged beast the size of a lion, with prickly crimson fur, blood-red eyes, and scaly claws.

     I grab a shard of broken glass and hold it to my neck. Topher pushes me out of the way, nearly making me stab myself. He aims a fire extinguisher at the hellhound and lets loose. A thick stream of foam smothers the hellhound. I gape in disbelief.

     Once he's emptied the canister, Topher looks over at me and shrugs. "I thought it was worth a shot."

     If I die now, I can at least say I lived to see someone attempt to incapacitate a hellhound with a fire extinguisher. Actually, that sounds stupid enough that it just might work. I watch the foam bubbling, clinging tightly to my glass shard.

     The hellhound shakes like a wet dog, spewing fire extinguisher foam everywhere. It waddles forward, all soggy and sticky, and then collapses on the floor in front of us. Well I'll be damned. Except, you know, not literally. I just spent the last six hours trying to avoid that.

     "Please tell me there's not a fourth wave," Topher groans, his arm covered in cockroach bites. I'm still not really sure which of the waves was the worst: the pterodactyls, the mutant cockroaches, or the hellhounds.

     "I think we're in the clear," says Ace, still a little out of sorts from his chest wound. "Sun's coming up."

     "Then we should get going," I say, sidestepping the felled hellhound. We wasted all of yesterday waiting for Kag and his demon posse to abandon the toll booth, and look how that turned out. By Ace's projections, travelling on foot, we won't be able to reach Dante's lair until evening. Comma could already be... No. I'm not going to entertain that thought.

     Tired, bruised, and just all around demoralized, we set out once again. The city is dead quiet around us; it's hard to imagine this was the same place teeming with pests and predators just hours ago. We duck into each convenience store and fast food joint we pass, on the off-chance that we might be able to scavenge something to eat or drink. Not that I'm entirely sure we'd want to, anyway. The vines and moss growing on the abandoned cars, the rusted fire hydrants, and up the dilapidated buildings on the verge of crumbling like chalk all seem to indicate that this world has been apocalypsized for longer than any reasonable expiration date.

     So it turns out Ace's estimate was a little off the mark. We've still got a bit of a ways to go when the first pterodactyl takes to the skies. One way or another, we're going to have to relive last night, aren't we? This time we'd best take cover underground. We head for the nearest sewer grate and are working on prying it off when we hear the roar of a motorcycle.