The big battle

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Shortcuts
by Terry Volkirch

Chapter 25

Sarah sat with Erin eating lunch and chatting about shopping, their work, fashion tips, the usual things girls talk about, except for boys. Erin always drew the line at boys. As they chatted, the brown-haired girl used her clairvoyance to secretly spy on a nearby table, watching as Big Jim sneaked peeks at both of them. He seemed just as creepy as ever but he kept his distance, more so since she used aikido on a transphobic bully.

She had to wonder if Jim might be attracted to her. She'd shapeshifted her formerly boyish face a little, grew her hair longer and filled out nicely with feminine curves by that point, enough that the bullies stopped insulting her and joined the increasing number of boys who considered asking her out on a date. It stroked her ego nicely, giving her the confidence she needed to continue her pursuit of Brian.

The two girls ate their lunch with one of them doing a little spying, but they were unaware that someone had been watching them throughout the morning. A certain dark being did watch them earlier and then changed his focus to something a lot more dangerous than any of the criminals that he'd been influencing.

On that day, the day of the vernal equinox, the start of Spring, a day of power for certain otherworldly beings, the dark being sealed his classroom, drew a magic pentagram on the floor and began chanting. He drew a wide, complicated pentagram with a felt pen after scooting all of the desks and chairs to one side, and in his haste, he failed to notice that the new moon also coincided on that day, adding to his dark power. Considering how angry he was, he probably wouldn't have cared. He only wanted to play his last card, his ace in the hole, in a desperate attempt to push Sarah over the edge.

As his chanting increased in volume, energies focused in the magic pentagram and a portal to another realm opened. The chanting changed slightly then, becoming a call, an offer that couldn't be refused for whatever heard the call. Within a few minutes, a non-human head, with short, black fur, black horns and glowing yellow eyes, rose up through the floor, moving through the portal from the other realm and into the classroom, where it stood seven and a half feet tall from the bottom of its hooves to the tip of its long, slender horns. Mister Guile had summoned a demon, a very powerful demon, more powerful than he realized.

Demons existed just as various beings of light and dark existed. Mister Guile might have been considered to be a demon, except for the fact that he was once human. He'd been corrupted ages ago, and he'd gained enough power to do a lot of damage, but it paled in comparison to the power of the demon that stood before him.

The demon outclassed the dark being who summoned it, yet the dark being's moon-amplified magic still controlled it. Mister Guile gave it a single command, "Destroy!" and it tore through the outer wall of the classroom, heading for the parking lot where lots of large, shiny toys waited to be demolished.

Sarah's fork poised just in front of her mouth when the first explosion went off, followed by dozens of car alarms. She dropped her fork and looked to Erin, who stared back with a worried look. A loud roar followed the other noises, causing the hair on the back of Sarah's neck to stand on end. It sounded like a job for Golden Girl.

An announcement suddenly crackled over the PA system, telling everyone to evacuate to the back of the school immediately. Erin raised an eyebrow and Sarah nodded. Erin herded the panicked mass of bodies out of the lunchroom but didn't follow them. She ran off in the direction of her Government classroom, leaving her friend alone to duck into an empty classroom for a quick change.

With the large increase in crime over the past several weeks, Sarah's intuition kept her on high alert. She was ready at all times, wearing her stretchy body stocking and tights under her clothes, ready to change into Golden Girl at any moment. This was that moment. The superheroine turned invisible, slipped out of her school clothes and shapeshifted. She flew to her locker, where she tucked her clothes inside and grabbed her black leather jacket to top off her Golden Girl look. Another explosion sent a tremor through the school and she took off to put a stop to it, any way she could.

Still invisible, she blasted the front doors with telekinesis - 'Sorry, Principal Olason' - and shot out to see the large, rectangular parking lot in a horrible state. Crushed and broken cars littered the area. Most of them still sat in the parking lot, but several were also scattered across the grass and one was embedded in the side of the gymnasium that sat adjacent to the parking lot. A couple of burning cars had obviously exploded, having a spray of plastic and twisted metal surrounding them. One burning car, upside down on the front grass, looked relatively intact and ready to explode. Crystal readied herself to extend her telekinetic shield if necessary.

Still not seeing the cause of the disaster, she drifted farther along towards the gymnasium. When she got closer, she heard some grunting coming from the far side of the building, and as she rounded the corner, she saw the impossible sight of a huge, black-furred creature with its back to her, picking apart a car. It pulled a large section of the driver's side window out and started chewing on the glass. The sight made her gasp.

The demon heard her and turned to look right at her. She moved up to the right and its eyes followed her. It could see her, even though she was invisible. There went plan A. She turned visible to save energy and tried speaking to it in as calm a voice as she could manage.

"Who are you? Why are you destroying our cars? Please stop this at once."

It cocked its head for a moment, like it didn't understand her. Then its face twisted with rage and it moved at her with incredible speed, taking her by surprise. A large, meaty fist hit her telekinetic shield, shattering it like glass. The girl flew up and away from the impact, momentarily knocked senseless.

In mid flight, Crystal regained enough of her senses to perform a quick healing of some slight bruising, and she easily caught herself before she fell. She hadn't had her telekinetic shield at full strength but she wouldn't make that mistake again. Actually, she didn't want to get close enough for another hit. She didn't have much of a choice though.

The demon kept after her, half running, half hopping, using its beastly legs with their backward bending knees as it chased behind, matching her speed. It obviously expected her to hit the ground and it hoped to pounce on her.

"Sorry to disappoint you," she told it, suddenly shooting straight up in the air.

The surprised demon bellowed a challenge and leaped straight up after her. It had no wings but it could jump, and it could jump extremely high.

Crystal ducked to one side just in time. The monster just missed her and roared.

"Now it's my turn, you poor, ugly thing."

As the demon reached its apex and began falling back to earth, she reached out with her telekinesis, turning the thing upside down and accelerating its fall. It only took a couple of seconds and the demon slammed into the ground, throwing up a large cloud of dust and debris.

She moved down closer to get a better look, and when the dust cleared, she could see the beast slowly moving. It rolled over from its side onto its back and let out a noise that sounded very much like laughter. It was laughing at her!

"So," she said. "That tickled you, did it?"

The superheroine reached out with her telekinesis again as an experiment. She tried holding it fast at low power and it easily broke her grip. She increased her power and still it shook free, though it seemed to have a little difficulty. Using her ability at full strength, the demon roared and did a quick double twist, again breaking her grip. It was too strong. She couldn't hold it, and she didn't know what else to do. If she got close enough to try her super strength on it, it might break her like an egg. She floated up and well away from it with her danger sense on full while she plotted her next move.

When Erin reached Mister Guile's classroom, she found the door closed but unsealed. The demon broke the time seal on the room after breaking out. She cautiously opened the door to find the dark being perched on the front of his desk as if ready to give a lecture.

"Mister Guile," she said in a quiet, stern voice. "You've been very naughty."

He didn't reply. He looked as if he was in shock.

"Mister Guile?" She walked up to him and lightly poked him in his upper arm with her index finger.

He flinched and whipped his head around to look at her. "I didn't mean it!" he said, sounding on the edge of hysteria.

"What?! You didn't mean to summon a demon?!" She turned to look at the floor, seeing the pentagram. "How do you accidentally draw a pentagram and summon a demon?! How?!"

The man threw his hands up. "That's not what I meant!"

"It doesn't matter," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Just un-summon it. Banish it. Whatever. It's being a nuisance."

He shook his head. "I can't," he said in a quiet voice.

"What?! What do you mean, you can't?!"

"It's too strong."

Erin got her faraway look as she consulted her otherworldly sources of information. She regained focus and sighed. "You didn't notice the new moon on the day of the vernal equinox? How old are you again?"

"I was angry! Sarah this and Sarah that. Everything is about Sarah and her pure little soul. I'm sick of it!"

The redhead sadly shook her head. "I think it's time to call off the wager."

"No! You can't! She just needs to kill something. Then you'll see. Once she gets a taste of murder, she'll go bad." His eyes glistened with a hint of madness.

"Will she be able to kill it? I thought it wasn't actually possible to kill a demon."

"You know what I mean. Yes. Technically, they're destroyed and their spirit is sent back to the nether realms. Whatever. She'll kill its current body and I'll win. You'll see."

"Oh, Mister Guile. You've been working too hard. I should've called off this wager long ago."

He suddenly glared at her.

"But I can't. I don't dare. Not until the demon is killed." She mentally added, 'Or it kills her.' She didn't know what she'd do if Golden Girl couldn't win.

Matthew sat at his desk in his warehouse office, working through his lunch hour as usual. He'd just finished eating and he felt stuffed. His large belly pushed into the front of his desk. 'When did I get so fat? I must've put on well over thirty pounds, ever since….' He didn't finish the thought. Whenever he thought about his daughter, he got stressed, and when he got stressed, he ate. Obviously, he'd been stressed too much lately.

He had the radio on at a low volume as he usually did. It was the only way to endure the burden of all of the paperwork that piled high on his desk. As he filled out a form, the radio station interrupted their normal programming for a news alert. Golden Girl was in trouble, fighting a large creature that could only be described as a demon.

The man's stomach gurgled and his left arm suddenly went numb. The gurgling was all too common but the numbness wasn't. It'd just started happening last week. He didn't seem too concerned about his health though. His attention was fixed on the news bulletin. Things didn't look like they were going well for his daughter and he did what any good, well-armed father would do. He grabbed his favorite pistol out of his top right desk drawer along with some extra clips of ammunition and a package of string cheese that he'd been saving for an after lunch snack. He half ran, half waddled to his SUV and peeled out of the parking lot on his way to his child's high school, the car radio blaring with Golden Girl updates.

'Good thing I shoot with my right,' he thought, the numbness continuing in his left arm.

The scene beyond the perimeter of the cordoned off school looked as chaotic as the front of the school. Reporters, television cameras, fire, police, ambulances and hundreds of concerned citizens flooded the area. The police gave up on crowd control, hoping the serious nature of the ongoing situation would appeal to everyone's common sense.

Golden Girl sighed as she watched the scene develop. She only gave everyone passing glances since she had a much bigger thing to worry about, but the large number of people concerned her and made her job more difficult. Keeping the demon's attention became nearly impossible. She frantically waved her arms and spared a quick shout to the police after they enthusiastically tried shooting it.

"Please! Stop shooting! The bullets aren't affecting it. They're just bouncing off and endangering lives!"

Sometimes she wished she had a megaphone. Her voice didn't carry well, but between some observant police officers and the few who didn't shoot, her message got through. They reluctantly stopped and waited to see what Golden Girl could do.

Shouting certainly got the demon's, but not before it had already thrown cars or pieces of cars at the crowd. The paramedics kept busy. Several people had been hurt, some of them seriously, but so far, there were no deaths. They could all be healed, right after a certain problem was dealt with.

Golden Girl taunted the demon as much as she could, shouting gibberish at it since it didn't seem to understand English. That worked fairly well. It focused mostly on her, throwing whatever it could at her.

She kept her telekinetic shield on maximum, deflecting everything that the demon threw at her. But she did have some trouble when the demon threw a large pickup truck at her. She deflected it but didn't account for the weight of the truck. The large force pushed her back into the wall of the gymnasium, causing her to scrape her face on the rough brickwork.

The wounded girl spared some energy to heal herself and rubbed her face with the back of her wrist, smearing blood and making her look worse than she was. The television cameras ate it up, and the world gasped. Their one and only superhero was in big trouble and no one could help her.

So she played a game of cat and mouse with the demon, and as unaccustomed as she was to playing the part of the mouse, she started getting a little frustrated.

Matthew listened to the updates about his daughter with growing agitation, and his ignored health issue grew steadily worse. He started sweating and had trouble breathing. The worst part was the pain in his chest. It quickly became a major problem, making it difficult to concentrate on driving. But he did concentrate. He forced himself with the will of a worried father, fighting to save his child.

When he heard about bullets bouncing off the creature, he made a mental note to eject his current clip when he got to the school. His gun only contained normal bullets. But he came prepared for anything, and he debated whether to go with exploding bullets or the armor piercing kind. It gave him something to focus on besides the pain in his chest.

When the news reported blood visible on Golden Girl's face, he accelerated until he was well past the speed limit, and he almost swerved off the road several times. Curves were not his friend.

He continued driving well above the speed limit and his health deteriorated. Nothing could save him from his path of self-destruction. His only hope was his daughter. She had to survive her battle, and he had to get to her. Only she could save him. He was well past the ability of modern medicine to heal what was developing into a major heart attack. He thought he was racing to save his daughter when he was really racing to save himself.

Erin left Mister Guile alone to wallow in self-pity and went to see about supporting her friend. She couldn't really do much to help but she'd send good thoughts. She also contemplated performing a last, desperate act if needed, but only under the right circumstances. It was the least a higher being could do for her spiritual soul mate.

The redhead went outside and gasped at the chaos, and she gasped again when she saw a bloody-faced superheroine, hovering over behind the gym with the demon eyeing her friend like a piece of meat. Her fear soon turned to wonder and love though, as she watched Golden Girl, Sarah, try everything to stop the demon. She watched as a long section of chain link fence uprooted and wrapped around the demon. That didn't last long. The demon tore through it like it was tissue paper. Then came the blunt force trauma technique. The plan was to have two large rocks smash into the demon from both sides at the same time, trying to crush it, but the rocks moved too slowly. The large creature swatted them aside like flies. It even grabbed one of the rocks and threw it at a nearby news van, crushing the side of the van and ultimately sending several people to the hospital. Golden Girl stopped using large, heavy objects after that. She'd rather handicap herself than endanger innocent lives. It forced her to get more creative.

The superheroine next used telekinesis to siphon gasoline from several vehicles and spray it on the demon. She used some of the gas as a fuse from the nearest burning car and torched the large creature. It didn't do anything except give the demon an opportunity to get creative, as it sucked up the burning gas and breathed it out at Golden Girl. She felt the heat when she deflected the gas, creating a large puddle of flames on the asphalt just below her. No more of that!

She hated to try her next plan. She loved nature but she was running out of ideas and running out of energy. She splintered a large tree with telekinesis and tried skewing the demon with wooden spears of all sizes. That worked better than anything else she'd tried. The demon couldn't block all of them and a few of them penetrated its tough skin. Blood the color of yellow ochre oozed from the wounds. It had drawn first blood but she was ahead on points. Unfortunately, the damage didn't slow it down at all, and the wounds closed up within seconds. She'd have to do a lot better than that.

Looking around to see what metal she could use as a makeshift animated sword, a loud crash distracted her and nearly everyone else, even the demon. She saw a familiar looking SUV that had ran into a telephone pole and panic set in. Using her clairvoyance, she saw the pale, puffy face of her father in the driver seat with a lap full of a deflated air bag. His head lolled back against the seat and he didn't appear to be breathing.

"No!" she screamed. But as upset as she was, she still had the presence of mind to look back down at the demon.

The demon had been looking in the direction of the crash but when she screamed, it looked back at her and grinned with a partly open mouth of needle-like teeth. Its grin was creepier than anything she saw on Mister Guile's face and she shivered. Between the demon's grin and her father, she settled down to a clear patch of grass and froze, half in shock. All the demon had to do was leap on her and it would all be over.

The demon flexed its leg muscles, only hesitating to pounce on the dazed superheroine because it thought she might be trying to play a trick of some kind. It couldn't know about her father. It only knew tricks and pain and suffering, and it wanted very much to inflict some pain and suffering on the girl.

Erin saw everything, and she saw her friend in trouble. It was time for her last desperate act. She ran towards the demon, screaming at it.

Crystal watched in horror as her friend ran at the demon. "No," she whispered. "Not you too."

One of the many television camera crews on the scene had a parabolic microphone aimed at the superheroine, along with a camera. The girl noticed and turned towards the camera, looking very grim as she spoke, "I'm not really sure if I can kill this thing. But I have to try. I'm sorry, Mom. I love you."

She hated herself then as she took full advantage of Erin's distraction. She knew what her friend was doing and she hoped to stop the demon before Erin got too close. She started powering up, using her enhanced strength and healing factor with the full force of her telekinesis in reserve. Just in case, she also kept her danger sense at full power as well. Within seconds, she had everything ready, but it wasn't soon enough.

The demon backhanded Erin, sending the redhead flying into the gymnasium wall with a squishy sounding thud. The body of the girl slumped to the ground, dead. Her spirit lived on as a higher being but Crystal couldn't see that. The distraught girl only saw the body of her friend, lying dead on the ground.

With no time to lose, no time to mourn, Golden Girl shot straight for the demon while its attention was still on Erin. The demon appeared to be taking a moment to appreciate its kill. It turned its head to look over at its victim and that left it vulnerable enough for one last try.

She aimed for the demon's chest, and just as she got within the its reach, its supernatural reflexes came very close to blocking her, as it pushed straight out at her with its hands. If her danger sense didn't warn her in time, the result would've been very different. Instead, she abruptly moved up and over the demon's arms to her real target: Its head. She grabbed its slender horns, one in each hand, as close to its head as possible and used a martial arts technique. She jerked hard to the right and reacted when the demon's reflexes kicked in to resist the motion. She used her full super strength to push down and suddenly reversed direction, spinning her whole body to the left in a blur. The demon didn't have time to adjust. It couldn't do anything as its head twisted clean off of its body. The upset girl spiked the head into the ground with a dull, squishy splat and turned invisible. She didn't stick around long enough to watch as the body and head caught fire and quickly turned to dust, or listen as the world cheered her victory.

Crystal rushed back into the school to shapeshift, exchange coats and stop by the rest room to wash her face. She also reapplied a little makeup out of reflex. She simply went through the motions and slowly emerged from the school as Sarah, wearing her long, black coat and looking exhausted. The tired girl wandered in the general direction of where she'd seen her father's SUV, wrapped around a telephone pole, and when she finally got close, she used some subtle telekinesis to get past the police who tried to give her the bad news as soon as they realized the dead man in the vehicle was her father. The confused police backed off and gave her a little privacy.

She used some enhanced strength and healing to yank open the passenger side door and she climbed inside the SUV. Another long look confirmed that the man in the driver's seat was her father and wasn't breathing. She held his cold, clammy right hand in both of hers and spoke quietly to herself. "What good is being a superhero when you can't even save your own father?" She bent over and hugged her father, crying her eyes out.

After several minutes of crying, the police came back just as Sarah felt an odd tingling. She was losing her paranormal abilities, one by one, and she didn't care. "They're gone," she said, after losing her last one, but she felt empty long before that moment.

The police looked at each other and shrugged at the odd choice of words. They thought that she might have meant that both her father and the redheaded girl were dead and left it at that.

There were too many deaths that day. First her father, then Erin, and then Golden Girl herself, in a figurative way. But it was just as well that the superheroine was no more. Not even Golden Girl had the power to bring someone back from the dead.

© 2015 by Terry Volkirch. This work may not be replicated in whole or in part by any means electronic or otherwise without the express consent of the Author (copyright holder). All Rights Reserved. This is a work of Fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents past, present or future is purely coincidental.