Where can you go to escape the voices in your own head?

The Apostate, like a splinter, wormed deeper under the rotten flesh of the city, hoping to find solace in its underbelly. Where the subway tunnel split off and the old wooden barricade was long since broken away. Where the squatters and homeless drank and pissed and fucked themselves into oblivion. Where the defeated went to die.

This would not be his haven, however. Here it was no different than above. Colored auras assaulted his eyes with no less brightness in this dismal pit. Like an underground sea of red, these people marinated in it.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.

He walked, feet crunching over broken glass. A man asleep, wrapped in newspaper and a wool coat, smelled of feces and exuded a constant crimson cloud. A hovel, a ramshackle tent of plywood and torn plastic, leaked like a broken fountain pen a spray of red with each merciless thump of something being beaten inside.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

Three figures huddled around a flaming barrel. Between them stood the twins – Desolation and Destitution – both of them staring as he passed with eyes full of black. They grinned wide, razor-toothed grins, then turned on their vagrant prey hungrily.

Thou annointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over.

The Apostate looked away.

His steps slowed as he neared the mouth of the tunnel, where outside he could see the sunlight decaying into dusk over the abandoned tracks that once whisked subway cars from the heart of this rotten city. Now, it was a cracked cement valley for drifters and vagabonds. Here, on the edge of light and dark, this piss-soaked micro-village huddled. Two small children splashed a tattered soccer ball through a puddle of brown water and he was struck watching them, wondering about their fiery red trails and if he should smite them now or wait for their next sin.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

“Help me.” The words were almost a whisper. More like a croak. The Apostate turned. A frail woman clutched her starving infant to her breast, muffling its screams, both of them blue as the open ocean but looking no less pitiful for it.

“Help me,” she pleaded to him, her eyes full of agony. “Take my baby.” The woman stretched out her arms. The naked thing squirmed, weeks old at best, arms outstretched, hoarse screams pitched in fear and hunger and the terrible cold. The woman opened her mouth to speak, but was overcome with a fit of coughing so violent that she had to pull the child back lest she drop her to the ground. Pneumonia, perhaps. Or worse. Blood colored her lips when she looked up again and she wiped it back.

“Please…,” she tried again. Tears welled in her eyes. “She’ll die…”

"Me?" The Apostate was more confused by this woman than he was by anything else. Was she so much more damned than he was, that he was help to her? Clearly she was doomed, but her aura suggested she was not yet damned. The child was innocent, and doomed. She was also the least among them, and as such the Apostate's mandate was clear. Verily I say unto you, in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

"How old is she and what is her name?" He took off his blue hooded sweatshirt to swaddle the child. Under that sweatshirt, he wore a button down shirt that had once been white, but was now grey with dirt and brown with sweat. The top button was missing. He reached out his arms, holding the sweatshirt to wrap the child in.

She passed the screaming infant carefully into the stranger's massive hands. Then, as if invisible crutches had been kicked out from under her, the woman crumpled to her knees. She sobbed uncontrollably, coughing violently in between throes of unknowable sorrow. Somehow, The Apostate thought he heard her repeating a single word: "Magdalene."

"You named your baby after a whore." The Apostate had pity for the poor woman, but he was so overwhelmed by all the sounds and smells and auras shining off of everything that he could no longer maintain a normal affect. His communications were reduced to statements that sometimes only made the most tangential sense. He cradled the screaming infant in his arms, and bent over to speak to the woman struggling to breath on the pavement in front of him. The smell of sickness and filth pervaded his nostrils, but he had expected nothing less.

"Accept Christ while you have time. Your daughter will want to see you again in heaven." The deep blue thoughts of the mother flickered up like gas flames.

The shrieking bundle of bright blue witch-fire tucked in his arm like a football sounded like she agreed. Magdalene was why he was here, why he had been sent into Midian, he was sure of it. There was a purpose to his torment, and it was to rescue this little one from her torment. He looked down at her, and thought. Hungry, dirty, dehydrated, cold. She has a jacket swaddling cloth now, so that's cold taken care of. Formula. Diapers. Wipes. Drug store.

The Apostate approached the men at the flaming barrel, watching the red thoughts dance between their heads and splatter from thier mumbled words. Desolation and Desperation danced macabre steps around the fire, and they expanded their orbit to take the Apostate into their widdershins circle. In the black-smoking flames of burning treated lumber, cardboard, and particle board, a hundred hundred hands grasped for purchase to climb out of Hell.

"Drug store," the Apostate said. The three men looked at him, one blankly, one with fear, one with aggression.

"Man, what the f-" Aggressive started, sparks of red flying from his lips. He hadn't gotten further than that when the Apostate grabbed Aggressive's wrist and held his hand down over the flames. The Apostate's hand was in the flames as well, but he didn't seem to mind.

"DRUG STORE." The blue shout bounced off of every surface in the concrete chasm, rippling like a stone thrown into a pond. Blank and Frightened looked at him blankly and fearfully, respectively, gathering ideas about what they should do. Red thoughts pooled on their brows and dripped onto the ground. Desperation did a somersault with glee, exaggerated genitalia and tail arcing skyward.

Aggressive jumped and danced, struggling futilely to pull his arm back from the flames. "God dammit!" he screamed, and the red of the scream flew up to the heavens like a shooting star in reverse. He tried to turn around, away from the Apostate, but he could not, and the Apostate used his broad shoulder to protect the precious cargo still tucked under his arm, still crying.

"Don't blaspheme," the Apostate said simply, releasing the man's hand and grabbing the dingy collar of the remains of a denim jacket that the aggressive man wore. He thrust the man, head and shoulders, into the barrel. Black smoke enveloped his head. His arms waved and struggled futilely - touching the side of the barrell burned his fingertips, and there was nothing else to grab. He howled into the barrel until his luings were empty, and then fought to take a next breath, with air too hot and too dense with black smoke for his throat to allow its passage.

"DRUG STORE!" The Apostate bellowed at the two men, who still had not moved from their places. "DRUG STORE! DRUG STORE! DRUG STORE!" The blue ripples agitated the air around him until everything was cigarette smoke hazy.

Blank held up one arm and pointed in a direction, red dripping like a judgment from his fingertips. His face was no longer blank, but he hadn't settled on an expression yet.

"How far?"

"Three blocks!" Frightened blurted out. "Go left then and down the street."

The Apostate pulled Aggressive out of the barrel and dropped him on his backside. He rolled and covered his face with his hands, coughing and choking and gasping for air. Smoke and a stink like burning sausage came up from him. Desperation danced over him, kicking him in the ribs as it gamboled in delight at the suffering of a sinner.

The Apostate walked into Midian's night, with Magdalen cradled in his enormous arm.

Although it wasn’t truly a drug store, the Kwik-E-Mart was right where Frightened said it would be: three blocks down, then left. Funny how the truth was so near the surface, yet so hard to extract. The Apostate ambled down a darkened street spotted with streetlights through an area that was residential, but far from suburban. It was a collection of older homes, ruined apartments, and section eight housing. The night was growing cool, but, bundled in the sweatshirt, the infant had foregone its wailing and settled for a disgruntled murmur as it suckled hungrily on a dirty thumb. The blue washing off of it was hard for him to look at.

A prostitute leaned against a utility pole outside the 24-hour convenient store and appraised the hulking stranger as he crossed the street. The light above her rained yellow and gold, while the wide, caged windows of the Kwik-E-Mart spilled out a more dirty tint of the same hue. But she was as if bathed in blood. Lust perched over her shoulder, pleasuring its engorged member with wanton abandon.

“Hey there, honey,” she smacked around her chewing gum. Red as thick as ink spattered from her lips with every syllable. “You wanna party?”

The Apostate reached her side of the street and she got a glimpse of the bundle in his arms. “Oh, how sweet!” she squealed, stepping into his path. The sound sent shards of splinters through his head. Her business forgotten, Lust grew instantly offended and waved its obsidian phallus at him. “What’s her name?”

The Apostate looked at the lady of the evening, and at Lust, and he felt disgusted by them both but emboldened by the bundle of blinding purity in his arms. "If you will repent and reject sin, the Lord will rejoice. I could use a woman's help, if you could offer it." He watched her color closely, praying quietly to see the color shift from Red to Blue, or even a war of hues of some sort. She would not touch the babe if she was red. He would fling her over the building across the street if she tried to foul the child with her crimson filth.

The prostitute screwed up her mascara laden eyes and hot pink lips in a queer, incredulous expression. The wicked halo of red made no sign of altering, however. Lust, suspecting something in the Apostate it did not like, hissed wickedly and shrank behind the whore's shadow. "Repent sin?" She almost laughed out loud. "Baby, you need a woman's help more than you know!"

Undeterred still, she leaned in to get a better view of the cradled infant. "She does have a name, don't she?" she persisted, this time a little more skeptical.

"She is called Magdalen, after the fallen woman who washed Christ's feet with her tears, and repented. I ask you again, woman, will you repent or be damned?" The flat affect that was a hallmark of those psychologically burdened as the Apostate was made his tone nearly completely unreadable. The woman could have no idea how literal he was being.

Again that screwed up expression, as if The Apostate was a melty, Salvador Dali painting and she was trying to figure it out. Finally, she gave up, evidenced by crossing her arms and stepping gingerly back from the stranger and his infant. "Fuck you, psycho," she spat. Lust extended two middle fingers and hissed.

The Apostate was in a hurry when he could remember it. The child was dehydrated and hungry and in his care. He expected to find formula at the Kwik-E-Mart and hoped to find a bottle. A drug store would have had a bottle. It would not be worth going back to the barrel to get better information, and this neighborhood seemed unlikely to have a pharmacy that was open. Kwik-E-Mart would have to do.

The store was bigger than it seemed from the street. Deeper. And, thankfully, scarce of customers this late in the evening. The Apostate lumbered down its maze-like aisles, collecting his essentials. Bottles here. Formula nearby. And diapers, wipes, one-sies, rags… Before long, his arms were full of baby and related paraphernalia and he was headed towards the check-out.

He hadn’t taken two steps from his last shelf (a rack of pacifiers and teething rings) when he knew something wasn’t quite right around him. He heard shuffling. The florescents flickered wickedly, dimming to an unearthly green. Voices, not his own, but all around him, from the store, the shelves, the ceiling, the floor. Telltale sniffling and slobbering.

He turned a corner. In aisle thirteen, between the Captain Crunch and Special K, an old woman was pushing her cart towards him. She was hunched over, greasy gray hair hanging around her head, and exhausting a noxious black cloud. Each step singed the dirty tile with a charred footprint. The twisted form of Hate was curled in the cart and slicing long gouges into its flesh with needle-like fingernails. The demon lashed out at the Apostate from its squeaky wire carriage as she passed and the large man jerked back reflexively. The baby in his arms whimpered and the crone snarled angrily at him, but kept walking.

His first instinct was to believe this witch was the source of the preceding disturbance. But he knew that wasn’t true. The next sound from behind him confirmed this suspicion.

“There he is, Tee-Jay,” came a familiar voice. “That’s the guy who was harassing me outside.”

The Apostate turned. Colors almost blinded him. Red, a brightest source of it, stood at the end of the aisle, next to the whore from outside. His name was Tee-Jay and he had a dark soul, with intentions to match.

“Hey, fat-ass,” barked Tee-Jay, dressed in baggy jeans and a sports jersey, decorated with gold chains and rings, all which sparkled in dazzling accents to his crimson aura. “You gotta problem, man?”

A wicked chorus of anxious sounds accompanied Tee-Jay the pimp and his whore. An audience of demons clamored to the crest of shelves and counters to watch the spectacle unfold. Greens and reds and blacks and yellows, assaulting and accusing.

“I asked you a question, man!” Tee-Jay demanded. Even his teeth were gold, the Apostate noticed. He was just a few inches shorter than the Apostate, though a hundred pounds lighter and not deterred by the difference. He had sculpted arms, broad shoulders, and facial hair neatly trimmed into a very thin line around his chin and lips.

He flipped something out from his pocket – a knife – and took two steps towards the larger man. The demonic audience erupted with frenzied anticipation.

"You are going to have trouble with the man upstairs," the Apostate said to Tee-Jay, looking at him levelly. He almost shouted, as he tried to be heard above the cacophonous din of the assembled Stygian audience. To Tee-Jay, he was a guy using his "outside voice" when he was inside.

The Apostate looked at the knife, and knew the Lord would protect him from it. Magdalen might not be so blessed. He turned so that his right side faced Tee-Jay, tucking the infant under his arm. He shifted and ducked in little twitches, dodging whatever filth his hallucinations told him the demons were flinging at him in mockery. Rotten tomatoes for a poor player, strutting and fretting his hour upon the stage.

What happened next, happened fast. Tee-Jay, relishing an opportunity for violence, grinned and lunged forward with the knife. The blade, cold and sharp, plunged into the Apostate's right side, just below his ribs. A chorus of demonic cheers filled the store, audible by only one. Bottles and formula, diapers and bibs tumbled down.

Fast, Tee-Jay yanked out the blade, as if he might plunge again, his eyes sparkling with an otherworldly flash. His expression changed instantly when the Apostate's meaty hand clamped around the neck of his attacker and flung him straight into the air. The demons howled with delight. The whore shrieked. Tee-Jay crashed into the ceiling, fifteen feet up, then tumbled back to the ground.

The knife clattered towards the Apostate's feet. The wound in his side was a stabbing, crippling pain that burned with the hellfire of a soulless evil. It gushed, quickly soaking his shirt, his pants, the sock in his shoe. The infant screamed in blue. The demons cackled and howled and cheered. The whore spouted an endless stream of angry curses and swearing.

But he was not done. Tee-Jay, miraculously, pushed himself to his knees. Where the drop ceiling's structure had crumpled into his back, his shirt and flesh beneath were split. Scales of black bubbled from beneath. Tee-Jay looked up, grinning, blood drooling from his broken mouth. His face had cracked like a ceramic mask. Under it lay something worse. Something twisted.

A long, green tongue snaked out to taste the blood, drooling from his chin. When he spoke, his voice was not human.

"Vestri vicis est brevis, Apostate," he hissed. "Be sober. Be vigilant. Because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about... seeking whom he may devour."

The fluorescents flickered then. Wild and violent, they cast the store in strobe lighting for an instant. Then, nothing. The demons had gone. Tee-Jay lay a broken man and nothing more, his whore clutching at him, whimpering, punching clumsily at her cell phone.

The store manager, standing in a state of semi shock from the other end of the aisle backed several stumbling feet before turning and running from sight.

Vestri vicis est brevis, Apostate, he had said.

Your time draws short.

"Lord, I beg you, forgive your servant for taking such poor care of the temple you have given me. Restore me to health, oh Lord hear my prayer Amen." The Apostate murmured the prayer, holding his right hand against the wound on his side. His hand glowed briefly, as if illuminated from behind by a flashlight. When he removed his hand, the bleeding had stopped, and although he was still bathed in his own blood, he appeared satisfied. "Hallelujah," he mumbled. From the next aisle over, he could hear something hissing.

The Apostate turned his attention to the prostitute, who had proven herself irredeemable. He turned his right foot back and forth a little, readying it. He whispered a word, a word given by the Lord to Moses, and to the Apostate. From behind him, something that had been creeping up close to him gasped and fled.

"Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity," he said to her, a command more than a quote. His eyes burned into hers as she looked up at him from her cell phone, the 911 sending but not yet completed. He raised his right foot and brought it down, hard, on the ground next to where she and Tee-Jay were on the floor. There was a thunderous cracking noise, and an small explosion of dust and blood red smoke as the ground opened up underneath the wide-eyed woman and her recently departed master. She had time to utter a half-shriek as the earth swallowed them both, leaving a small filled crater on the floor where there had once been tile over concrete. A pool of mirror smooth red lay in the base of the shallow crater, and a faint sound came up from it, almost like a chorus singing.

Magdalen shook and then screamed blue murder with shock and terror at the sudden, deafening noise. The Apostate gently cooed at her and poked gently at her too-skinny belly with a large fingertip. "Don't worry, little one, we'll take care of you. Breakfast is soon."

He squatted to gather the baby supplies, stepped gingerly around the crater in the aisle, and went to the checkout. There was no one there save Greed and Larceny subtly indicating the exit, exhorting the Apostate to lam it. He put two portraits of Andrew Jackson on the counter, and unpacked the things to take care of Magdalen. First a diaper, then a onesie, both too large for the malnourished child. Finally, he popped the top on the bottle of formula and filled a bottle.

The Apostate cradled the babe in one arm, holding the bottle in place with the other as he walked out into the night. There was a pacifier in his pocket. A swarm of imps left the store after him, dispersing into the night to work mischief, sow chaos, and spread the word through Midian that righteousness was afoot and must be stopped

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