The Sixth Legion

Chapter 1 - Reflections on Darkness

Blood truly has amazing properties. He stared intently at his palms and marveled. After scouring them twice with detergent and a dish brush, applying waterless hand sanitizer multiple times, and finally, scrubbing furiously with an automotive grade hand cleanser he could still see traces of brownish red substance imbedded between the dermal ridges of his fingers and palms. He could even taste the damn cleanser. Somehow he must have gotten some in his mouth. "Holy Christ! What in hell does it take to get this crap off?" he exclaimed. 

Donny had seen all the true crime documentaries on TV and knew that blood was almost ageless and practically indestructible. When they finally discovered where old Jimmy Hoffa had gotten whacked, it was still there. Undetectable to the human eye, but nonetheless, thirty years later, still there. All it took was an old burnt out wise guy on his deathbed scrambling for loopholes out of hell. He pointed the agents in the right direction and even though it was decades ago, and the murderers had washed the place down like Mr. Clean, they found it. Oh, they found it alright... They had killed a famous man and disposed of his body, but the blood was still there. They had scrubbed it, painted it, tiled over it, but it was still there! Who the hell could have imagined that after decades, the stuff would stand right up under luminal and a black light; like a neon sign rising from the abyss saying, Here I am, and oh boy - do I have a story to tell! 

So, he didn't have to wonder why he was suddenly thinking about those crime shows right now. He thought about when he was just a dumb kid wiling away Saturday mornings glued to the T.V. and completely oblivious to the meaning it would have for him years later... yeah... the power of blood...

He couldn't get out of his chair. He just sat there glued in and the thought occurred to him that it must be a little like the night terrors; you want to run, and you want to scream, but you can't. He was simply frozen into the high-tech office chair like one of Dante's tortured souls - begging, pleading, bargaining for a moment's relief. His situation was futile. There was no going back. He had passed through the gates of hell and was beyond salvation. He started weeping quietly again, and that lead to another round of desperate praying, but he was certain that this time God wasn't listening. He felt like he was permanently separated from the light and slowly but surely descending into the obsidian void. 

However, glancing at his palms again he knew those small traces of blood wouldn't be his undoing. Oh no, not on this earth it wouldn't... Apparently, he was untouchable here.  But his Catholic upbringing was haunting him about eternal consequences...  He had done terrible things and wondered if salvation was still in the cards for him, or if he had crossed a line there was no coming back from...  - 

In this life he had a new pal, and that good... buddy... was making sure that as long as he was sucking air everything would be beautiful; but what about the cost? Don no longer had fear of earthly authorities. It was the unseen powers that scared him now. He had fallen into an evil game directed from hell that was being played out in the earthly realm from time immemorial, and he had managed to drag all the people he loved into it with him. There was a force swirling all around his life that compelled and protected him, as long as he continued to play his part. You see, it wasn't physical death that terrified Donny anymore. It was what comes after; the ultimate price, right? It was hell. That place that the devil has done such a good job of convincing all us piss ant humans doesn't really exist. Well, Don now knew that heaven and hell were actually real, and after that it didn't take a great intellectual leap to put it all together: If heaven and hell were real, then people have souls, right? And those souls only have two places to go in the end, and Donny had a pretty good idea where he was going on that terrible day... Yeah, this was Donny's problem alright – eternity... and unlike most humans, he had already had a pretty damn good sampling of hell on earth, and the thought of spending an eternity there was beyond mortifying.