The Malavide - Complete Audio

Hell was never so quiet; there was one tiny little squeak, the squeak of rope upon wood. Some of the bodies dripped fluid; all of them had expressions of horror and bug eyed misery upon their faces. Pedderse noted that all of their arms were broken, except for the smallest children, and he felt tears well in his eyes. No sign of life left, barely above room temperature, the people of the little town hung like so much fruit.

Pedderse clenched his fists and realized he was moving further into the church.

Why would their arms be broken? He asked himself, and then realized the answer, and wanted to vomit. It was an easy way of controlling them, of not having to tie their arms when they were hung. They might still be able to reach up and claw at the ropes, but with broken arms they would not have had the strength to free themselves.

They had died hard, and long and it showed in their faces and bloody fingers.

"They are evil," he heard the captive's voice filling his head. "They are evil, and they must be killed . . ."

And Pedderse saw a movement, to his left and his right, and he reacted without thought, hands going swiftly to his guns, pulling them free from leather and coat. Pedderse fired instinctively, fired at figures moving among the swinging corpses.

He shot three times with each gun, and then blinked as he realized that he was still in the small interrogation room. There were alarms everywhere and the room was filled with gun smoke. He realized he had been hit three times, all in the chest, all in the vest, and that everyone else was dead except the thin balding lawyer.

Well, not quite. He stepped forward and looked past the table to see the captive was a captive no more. His face was buried in the curve of Phillips throat, and his eyes once again met Pedderse' as Phillips breathed his last sigh.

The captive let the corpse fall away and stood up, casual and with an easy elegance that ignored the carnage around him. "You had better run, Mr. Pedderse," the Malavide said softly, and reached out and plucked the glasses from Pedderse' face. "Even these wouldn't help you, I'm afraid," Thonos' smile was easy and casual. "I can alter my electromagnetic field; I just haven't had to until now. It takes little enough energy. Real invisibility takes much more."

Thonos grew faint around the broad grin and Pedderse blinked and stumbled backwards, almost tripped over someone's arm. He could hear yells and feet pounding down the corridor, but he could not take his eyes off the quickly fading form of Thonos. "It took me years to perfect this trick," Thonos' voice was soft as his body faded around the smile. "I can only turn really invisible just after I've replenished my energy. You could have at least left me two of them alive. Good bye, Mr. Pedderse, and I am sorry that I had to use you. At least you know what you are fighting now."

And with that the grin vanished from sight, and Pedderse was left in the small room. He dropped his guns and put his hands on top of his head as the first agents burst into the room.

PART TWO

Section 7

Jon Pedderse stared at the 8"x10" picture on the wall across from his narrow bunk -- it was in colored pencil and showed a path with a small bridge that opened into a sunny meadow. One of the other inmates had drawn it with a colored pencil set.

It was a very good drawing; it gave him hope that things would somehow work out, but he was not convinced in any real way that they would. He was currently sitting in solitary, locked in an 8 x 10 foot cell 22.5 hours out of the day -- one hour for exercise, and a half hour for a shower.

It had been several days since he had had a shower.

He stared at the picture and tried not to think of the other images that played through his mind -- the image of him, in 4K digital clarity, gunning down six other agents and lawyers. He tried to think of why all the men had been in there in the first place -- that never happened in an interrogation. Never.

Guns weren't allowed in either, yet he and the others had had their guns. He didn't remember thinking it odd that day, just some vague thoughts but he was beginning to realize that he had been blind to what was actually happening.

And, he had to admit, he had been rattled by what the smart-shades had been showing him. He had been so rattled that, even months after the trial and cooling his heels in prison he still had not really thought about the events that had transpired.

He had just started thinking about the evens of those two days in a different fashion, not as someone who had experienced it, but as though he were standing on the outside looking in.

Most of the time spent in the intervening months had been spent in a strange fugue, and a deep depression; the psychiatrists that talked to him on a regular basis constantly tried to guide him through the events, but he had never talked about them at all. They worked for the state -- they were not to be trusted. But he was now finally thinking about something other than what had actually happened in the room -- he had been obsessed on that for so long, but the answers had always been short.

He was starting to think about what had happened outside the room -- and he was starting to realize in an intellectual manner what he had known by instinct from almost the first. He had been manipulated through the entire event. The question was why. And the outcome that had happened was not the outcome those who been manipulating him wanted.

He was not sure, but he had begun to think of a worse case scenario. On one level the idea seemed to make sense, and then it seemed like it was too obvious a solution. And more than a bit ludicrous.

He was an extremely good interrogator -- that was what he had assumed was the reason he had been called into the room in the first place. He now doubted that was true, but there were too many pieces of the puzzle he had not seen yet, and would never see as long as was stuck in an 8x10 prison cell.

The vision he had experienced in the interrogation room had been more than realistic -- he could still feel the gritty sand of the roadway under his feet as he approached the long, narrow building -- the church. He could feel the heat of the sun on his neck and shoulders.

He remembered the smell of the corpses as they hung from the rafters, and the terror and revulsion that had coursed through his veins -- through his soul. Thonos had known somehow -- an errant sentence from him, and then the guess at the technology that had allowed the feds to spot him.

Even down to the two colors.

'Don't trust the others' -- not talking about black or brown or white -- not talking any ancestry, not talking about a different religion.

'Don't trust the others'. Two different colors from the smart-shades; more than half a dozen people that had turned from blue to green in one night.

Don't trust the others

Two colors.

He admitted that he might be going insane, but that did not explain the circumstances of what had happened to him.

Don't trust the others -- and two colors. Blue, and the others -- green.

He really was a very good interrogator -- and he was also very sure of one other thing. The psychiatrists that they sent to interview him were all greens -- and they would know things.

Jon Pedderse stared at the drawing on the wall of his small cell and began finally thinking in a clearheaded fashion. Had his enemies seen his face on that night, they would not have been comforted.

Section 8

Thonos, who had been Samuel Arkin, and who was now Stephen Jonson, was in a foul mood. He had just killed one of the Ourde. He should have been happy, and he should have felt the familiar exultancy of drawing the life-force of his sworn enemy into himself.

He was in a killing mood, but killing had not brought him out of it. It had been months since he had been captured and then freed himself with the help of the erstwhile Pedderse.

He had gotten lazy of mind and body -- for too long he had simply been drifting through his long, seemingly endless life -- long before the last attack and his subsequent arrest.

"A rut," he growled. He didn't even feel like flying. He left the abandoned tenement and slipped silently out of the building. He did not see a single person.

The question most on his mind was why they had not simply killed him as soon as they captured him. The enemy knew the capabilities of the Malavide; it was a giant mistake to leave one of his kind alive a moment longer than necessary.

And then, finally, some time ago the solution had come to him almost as if it was a vision by God.

At first, there hadn't been enough of them to cover the crime -- he had thought about it from so many angles; why had they not kidnapped or just killed him right after they had taken him? It took time to inhabit a human soul -- and then displace it. The team that had caught him had been mostly human, he now realized -- or all human, and one of the Daem -- the Ourde - had simply heard about the mission and put two and two together.

This realization led him to another -- he had been blind for thousands of years. Perhaps it was because of the way he had been trained to think about the demons that posed as people; that they were simply bloodthirsty creatures who wanted to impose death and suffering on humanity for their own enjoyment. With that mindset, he had hunted the demons individually and sometimes as small groups.

What he hadn't done, through the distraction of the hunt, was think about why those individuals and groups were doing what they were doing. It was not that long ago when he realized that he was playing a checkers game with someone who was a chess master. And that he and his kind had been losing consistently for a long, long time.

This latest kill was the first in a long time. For more than three months he had been following the demons, studying them to learn what they were doing in the world. He did not like what he saw, and he realized that he would need allies if he was to try to prevent their plans, most of which were still a mystery. He had begun to discover the way the creatures communicated and planned their actions, but he was a long way from knowing even the whole of that, much less what their larger goals were. The difference was he now at least knew there were larger goals.

He had killed tonight because one of them had discovered his surveillance, and the man had been good -- been good enough to almost defeat Thonos single handedly, which was nearly unheard of. Good enough to notice him in the first place.

Which meant some of the others in all likelihood already knew of him.

He had begun building a knowledge of the demon's network, including outlying members.

Now he began searching that group of outflung members, who had irregular contact with what he considered the leadership role -- for one purpose -- to feed. To gain strength. He disposed of the remains completely -- there would be no physical evidence of what had happened. There would be nothing pointing to the truth.

And he went back to watching. Patience, for whatever reason, had always been Thonos' strength -- and it had always been one which he had underestimated.

Section 9

Avolin was tired of the endless boredom of surveillance -- unfortunately, she was also a good soldier, a good disciple. So despite how bored she was, she could not go to a bar or a rave to have a good time. Indeed, in her current state of dress and disguise she could not have gone to either of those places unless they were meant for the homeless. She could not have gone to a movie theater the way she looked now.

Well, some movie theaters, yes.

Avolin hated training; she hated the city she was in and she hated that she had agreed to this whole thing in the first place. If it had not been for her fucking uncle, she thought, she would be at college going to parties and, well, doing all kinds of stuff that she should not be doing. In the modern vernacular it was called 'having a great time'. Instead she was following a small group of people who seemed to have almost nothing to do with each other.

Like the person she was following tonight. He was a trader at some minor firm and had been assigned to her surveillance list. He seemed like a standard corporate douchebag. She had surveilled him under a number of circumstances, not just as a homeless person. But on the street, in this city especially, being homeless offered a sort of -- invisibility.

And tonight that had seemed to pay off. He had changed into something different than his custom-tailored douche suit, clothes that were much rougher, and matched the clothes of the small group of men he fell in with within a few minutes of leaving the firm. For the first time, Avolin was actually curious about this man.

She slipped behind the group as they made their way down the street. It was late, past ten pm and this was not something she had seen in over a month of tailing this guy. She knew the way a small group of people walked when they were not really sure what they wanted to do. Yeah, part of a group wanted to eat Chinese, but another part might want home cooking or Indian or Hispanic flavors. In most small groups things were up in the air and could be decided on the spur of the moment.

This group of people were not acting like that. There were six of them, including the douchebag. They may have been having fun, Avolin realized, but they were not purposeless. She tasted the metal in her mouth, recognized her elevated heartbeat and blood pressure, and backed off the group a bit out of pure instinct.

She blended perfectly with the shadows, and slipped into the next alley that was available.

Thonos watched the homeless person stumble into an alley and went back to watching the small group of people walking down the street. He had stumbled upon this small node of demons while investigating what he considered his true targets, but they had proved somewhat interesting. He had never really thought of the things having a command structure in the true sense of the phrase. The Malavide certainly didn't. Each individual may have had a mentor, and some of them had respect for each other, but they did not seek out their own company.

But the banker was obviously the one in charge in this small group, and they walked with a purpose. After they passed the alley, one of the group lagged behind, disappearing to most people into the shadows. He stayed there for a full minute -- until they were well out of sight, and then half ran till he caught up with the main group.

Thonos was being very careful now; he left the large population centers where he was conducting most of his surveillance and fed on the fringes, concealing the deaths as accidents or disappearances. He had not touched any of his targets, except the one that had discovered him. That was the best he could do.

The human cost was the worst part of the bargain. The Daemonium, as Ahk'Tabur had called them, were merciless killers like starving packs of wolves. But finally, at last, Thonos had realized that they were more than that -- much more.

And they were also just that. He knew the group below him was going to do murder, and he knew that he was going to let it happen, for he had realized finally that he was seeing only a bare edge of the puzzle. He had never in his life allowed damage to an innocent person, but he had realized early on -- once he had seen the truth of the actual game he was playing -- that he could not intervene in any way.

In the quantum universe, measuring something stops it. In the real world, stopping something causes other things to be measured. If he stopped the demons from killing innocents, they would know he was watching them.

That could not be allowed. He finally had a small glimpse of some sort of truth, after literally centuries of heartache, revenge, attempting to defend the weak. Of frustration, and death.

And life, and art, and laughter. He wanted those things to go on, he told himself, so he had watched a dozen innocents die at the hands of the demons in the last months. He would find out what they were really doing, he told himself, and then would kill them all. A certain bleakness had settled over his soul with the witness to each murder.

Part of him looked down at the rage that now consumed him and despised it for what he allowed himself to witness without intervening. A greater part told him mercilessly that it was the only way -- the only way for greater justice, the only way to figure out exactly what these creatures had planned.

Four blocks later he saw the homeless person again, passed out in one of the alleyways that the group was walking past. Whoever it was, the person was small. Thonos, despite his enhanced vision could not tell whether the person was male or female. Rough dressed, and with a slim walking stick not quite equal to the person's height. How was that person here, passed out, when Thonos had seen the same person minutes ago and blocks away, behind the people he was following?

He let the group of Ourde pass by him, and instead started following the homeless person.

Avolin let the people she was trailing pass her, then quickly slipped back up the alleyway. She would cut them off two blocks from here, and then see what she could see. For the first time since she had started following this target she could sense danger. She did this for eight more blocks, skirting the small group through alleys and side streets -- where were they going? she asked herself, and then in one alley she found 6 people in a small cluster; they were out of sight of the main street, but instantly there was something wrong about it.

Two men were at the apex of this small group; the rest were as far as she could tell were women -- perhaps one or two were trans. Whatever they were, the other four women were victims -- they huddled terrified against the rough brick all, not even looking at the two guards. She felt a surge of adrenalin, and suddenly knew that this was where the group she was following was actually heading towards. She slipped up the alleyway towards the small group she had just found. She gripped her walking stick and became part of the shadows of the alley; became part of the background noises as she had been trained.

Maracus, or 'Mark' to his trader friends, felt as though, finally, he owned the world. He had a high position amongst the Cogi now -- and he still had his old street gang as well. Four of the people following him were among the Cogicen -- the fifth was a potential recruit. They would find out tonight if he was worthy of consideration. He knew what he was about to do was a visceral pleasure. And he did not care; it was one of the things that drove him. The important thing was that he was not associated with whatever the act was.

Not associated with, but he would definitely take a part of the act. He could already almost smell the blood, the terror of their entertainment tonight -- they were almost there.

Avolin watched the group she had been following turn the corner into the alleyway; a moment later the men, now eight of them hustled the four women into a large metal door set into the side of one of the buildings that made the alleyway; she stared at the door, frowning slightly, then sprinted around the back of the building. Building codes were always a good thing to know, her uncle Connor had always said. She found another door in the back of the building, covered over with a mound of debris. Once she exposed it, she had the door open within a minute. She never saw the thing that followed her inside the building.

She knew from her studies that most industrial buildings had fairly simple floor plans -- it was a matter of efficiency and administrative personnel over manufacturing capability. This building had obviously been mostly manufacturing, with a very small administrative section. She found the group within minutes of entering the building. While it was not a secure building in the security or military sense, it offered just what the group of predators wanted. Isolated, insulated from screams, anonymous and fairly simple to defend.