Judgement (The Twelve) Read online

  172

  (The Twelve)

  Judgement

  Book 1

  By J R Ashcroft

  Dedication

  I’d like to dedicate this book to my loving wife Julie, who has put up with being on her own, whilst I typed away furiously in the study and who always believed in me.

  To my son Tom, keep up the hard work at university. One day soon you will achieve your hearts desire.

  Finally to both my parents for bringing me into this world and raising me (A feat, that was no easy matter), may they rest in Peace

  Prologue

  For this story to mean anything, you have to understand one basic fundamental fact. Heaven and Hell really exist. What they are in terms of our mortal understanding, is another thing altogether. Therefore I cannot describe or dwell upon God or the Devil. I deal instead with there representatives here on Earth.

  So it came to pass, that over centuries when a few chosen humans died. The Creator picked them to be reborn as The Protectorate of the human Race. These special few became known as The Twelve, an odd assortment of humans, reborn with God given powers to help them defend the living against those spawned by the Devil.

  But it also came to pass that The Dark, a few truly evil human beings were also allowed back from death to do Hells bidding. They are the enemy of the Twelve. The Twelve are the enemies of The Dark

  The Dark created an army of Shades, grey slime covered humanoid shapes containing a trapped human soul within. It is this soul that powers the Shade which in turn is driven to do evil and feed upon the living. Thank God you never get to see one, for if you do it would mean almost certain death.

  So it is written that for every positive, there must be a negative, for every action a re-action, Ying and Yang. It is an undeniable fact that Life must be balanced in all things, including death, for the world to exist.

  Except……The Twelve were only now ten and the ranks of The Dark, eleven. It was foretold that one called ‘Judgement’ and his opposing number who shall be named The Chosen One, will one day appear and when that time arrives. God shall win or loose Earth and its peoples forever.

  Eight thousand years pass and still Judgement fails to appear. Until one rain drenched, freezing cold night, in some pitiful London back street, filled with a cardboard city of down and outs. Something happens…….

  Chapter 1

  Chris lay huddled in his shelter, daring the walls to bleed water. His home was a large and somewhat battered cardboard washing machine delivery box. Padded with two dirty blankets and draped with two ripped open black plastic bin bags.

  The cardboard flaps that acted as doors were held shut by an old wire coat hanger bent in half with hooked ends and thrust through a small hole in each of the main vertical flaps. It did the trick, but Chris was worried the rising gale force winds might just rip them open. For the umpteenth time he reached up to the ceiling, feeling for dampness, daring the pouring rain to find its way in past the bin bags. His home was propped up against one brick wall of a three foot deep recessed fire exit behind a building that was never used, well except for drunks who used it as a toilet but you can’t have everything. It did make for an excellent wind break.

  He shivered, even though he had newspapers stuffed inside his thick well worn woolly jumper over his dirty blue chequered shirt worn underneath his short anorak. He hugged his knees tight to his body, his ripped jeans offered little warmth but the blankets helped. He wore socks over his thin soled trainers but his feet were freezing cold.

  Chris reached for an old well used plastic one litre bottle and drank tap water supplied by the Sally Army shelter. He’d nicked an apple that morning, well not really nicked it. The apple had been blown off the street barrows packed display and had rolled ten feet to stop by his feet. He waited for someone to re-claim it and when no one seemed to have noticed, he snatched it up for supper. He licked his lips in anticipation. He’d have it in a minute and eat it slowly.

  Chris was sixteen years old. He’d run away from his adopted parents six months ago and had travelled the short distance to London. He had no intention of ever returning or even letting them know he was alright. This cardboard box was heaven compared to the abuse his drunken step father administered on a regular basis. How, he wondered for the fiftieth time had his condition been overlooked by the adoption agency. His step mother was covered in bruises, cleverly hidden from sight with thick make up and it didn’t take long for Chris to start collecting ones of his own.

  One night his step father had staggered into his bedroom and abused Chris once to many. For Chris that was the end. Later that night, he’d taken some clothes, food from the fridge and ten pounds from his step fathers wallet and left, never to return.

  Chris led a loner’s life style, safer that way, but he didn’t mind. The narrow road he’d made home, was in Soho. He reasoned that there must be over a hundred other cardboard homes on either side of him but he only knew three of the inhabitants. One of whom was Wally the trolley (he kept his worldly possessions in an old shopping trolley). Wally had the box directly opposite him. Chris was worried about Wally. He wasn’t a young man any more and his coughing had got worse over the last few days. Suddenly Chris realised he couldn’t hear Wally coughing, even through the hammering of the rain upon his cardboard roof. Wally coughed even when he was asleep, it was never ending but now it had stopped.

  Chris sighed and muttered to himself, he was going to get bloody soaked! Finally after a few seconds of swearing, Chris pulled the wire free from the cardboard flaps and thrust himself out into the rain. Almost immediately his vision blurred as the rain drove into his short cropped white hair and ran down his face. He hadn’t been born an albino, just with white hair and pale blue eyes. He supposed that was why he’d been abandoned at birth. His parents must have thought he was an albino, a freak and cast him aside.

  “Hey Wally, you alright man?” Chris shouted across the narrow road to the darkened fire exit doorway that contained Wally’s cardboard home and shopping trolley.

  Wally didn’t reply but Chris saw that the trolley was still there, so Wally must be at home. He never went anywhere without it.

  “Wally man, answer for Christ’s sake! Don’t make me come over there, its drenching wet out here.”

  Still no answer, cursing Chris stood upright, pulling his anorak tightly across his chest. The zipped front had long since stopped working. He stepped towards the other side of the road and stopped in his tracks. Something was wrong with his eyes. He shook the rain from his face and peered intently into the darkness and pouring rain. A figure was appearing and disappearing from view stooped over Wally’s home, like a vulture standing over a corpse. Chris couldn’t make out what the person was wearing, everything seemed blurred and indistinct.

  Chris shouted across the narrow road, “Hey you, man. What you doing to Wally?”

  The figure slowly stood upright and turned his head to one side, staring back over his right shoulder at Chris. A shiver ran down his back, this guy was seriously messed up. It looked like his face had been melted by acid or something. He was completely bald and hang on one bloody minute, completely naked!

  “Hey freak leave him be!” Chris shouted.

  ‘Bloody perverts that’s all we need down here!’ He thought.

  The figure moved then and it frightened Chris for the first time. One second it was standing next to Wally’s home, the next it was half way across the road. Coming in his direction with hands held out towards him.

  “Bugger this!” he yelled.

  Chris blinked the rain away and the figure was now directly in front of him. God he stunk! Not the unwashed smell that Chris had grown to ignore but a terrible rotting flesh smell. It reached f
or his throat. Chris saw that it had talons instead of finger nails. Mentally he had gone from thinking of it as a person to an IT. Without thinking he swung his right arm up to deflect the things hand away. What happened next scared the crap out of Chris. At the point of first contact, two things happened almost simultaneously. Firstly a strange voice inside his head shouted triumphantly, ‘Be Judged!’ The second thing to happen was that the things hand exploded into red hot ash that was instantly absorbed by the rain!

  The thing let out an ear splitting blubbering scream of rage, pain and confusion, in a flash it was running fast down the road, clutching at the stump where its hand used to be. Chris stood routed to the spot, in the blink of an eye the thing was gone from sight. Chris looked at his own hand, the hand that had made contact with…whatever the hell it was. The skin on the back of his hand was blistered but as he looked the blistering slowly disappeared. A sudden pang of intense pain covered the area where moments before the blisters had appeared. Then just as quickly, the pain faded into nothingness.

  Chris found himself panting as his heart was racing wildly in his chest. Gulping, he tried to slow and control his breathing. Moving forward whilst still staring after the, whatever the hell it was. Chris found himself standing in front of Wally’s cardboard home. One of the front flaps was bent back revealing a pitch dark interior.

  “Wally you okay man?” Chris found himself whispering for no apparent reason.

  Oblivious to the rain and the fact he was now drenched, Chris reached out with a shaking hand to open the flap wide.

  “I wouldn’t do that kid.” A high pitched male voice instructed directly behind and to his left.

  Chris jumped six feet in the air, spun to face the speaker but there was no one there, yet his eyes snapped to the left and he actually seemed to see the outline of a person in the pouring rain. The next second it was gone.

  A gruff chain smoking male voice spoke from out of the darkness across the road next to Chris’s home, “He saw you.”

  This time Chris saw the person who spoke, or rather the outline. Then for the first time something clicked on inside his head and his vision seemed to sharpen, driving away the night. As clear as day he saw the person who had spoken. He appeared in his fifties and clad head to toe in black leather. Leather steel toe capped pointed boots, leather trousers. No shirt but a leather waist coat worn under a leather collarless style jacket. He was minus part of his left arm the sleeve cut off and sowed up over the stump just above were his elbow would have been. He was bald but wore a grey goatee beard. But it was the hilts of dozens of throwing knives protruding from stud covered sheaths worn in bandoliers across his chest , with a further two larger ones sheathed along each thigh that got Chris’s attention.

  “Not fuggin possible!” The same high pitched male voice exclaimed from behind and above Chris.

  Spinning around so fast he didn’t even remember moving, Chris found himself looking up at another figure hanging from a V shaped intersection of old fashioned iron drain pipes running down the building besides Wally’s doorway. The voice belonged to a teenager about Chris’s own age. Tall and very slender, with combed back fair hair, he too wore black leather in the form of a trench coat over thin black leather trousers tucked into combat boots. He wore fingerless studded leather gloves. Chris noticed the teenagers long slim fingers seemed to end in short curved claws like a large cat instead of fingernails like a normal human.

  “Moves almost as fast as you do,” Added the gravely voice.

  Chris automatically glanced behind him for a fraction of a second before looked back, the teenager was gone! Had he fallen off? No he wasn’t behind Wally’s box.

  Chris turned around again to look back across the road, “Who are y…”

  But the other one had vanished as well. He glanced up and down the road for several seconds before remembering Wally. Carefully he opened the flaps on his cardboard box. Once again his vision seemed to pierce the darkness within. Wally lay dead. Of that, Chris was one hundred percent sure. He stepped backwards in horrified shock, Wally lay in a pool of red rain water, except Chris knew it wasn’t rain and it wasn’t water. He lay in a pool of his own blood, with the rest still trickling down his chest from the stump were his head used to be. The head! Wally’s head lay in his lap, eyes staring wide open up at Chris, as if to say, ‘Look what’s happened to me!’

  Chris started to stagger back away from the sight, when a hand descended gently upon his left shoulder, “Told you not to look kid.”

  Chris spun around to stand face to face with the bearded one armed man. He glanced at the knives.

  “You killed him!”

  The man shook his head slowly from side to side, “A Shade meat gatherer did the job.”

  Chris didn’t understand, “A Shade what?”

  “Not me that’s for sure and you interrupted us from doing our job kid, Anvil won’t be happy.”

  That same high pitched voice appeared in Chris’s right ear, real close. So close he felt his breath, “Shade got away. Anvil will be pissed that’s for sure.”

  Chris yelled and jumped back a step, the teenager moved to stand next to the bearded man, “see him do it?”

  The man nodded, “Touch flash burned the bugger, never seen that before.”

  The teenager jerked his head from side to side, “He saw it as well. Saw it clear as day.”

  The man nodded again, “Best we tell Anvil.”

  The teenager flickered and in the blink of appeared next to Chris, “Take him with us?”

  Chris had had enough, “Hey freaks I’m not going nowheres with you.”

  The bearded man was deep in thought and absently corrected him, “It’s anywhere, not nowheres.”

  Chris was beginning to realize three things. One, a dead man not fifteen feet away had been murdered. Two, some….thing had killed him and three, he looked at these strange leather clad men, “Who the hell are you?”

  The bearded man seemed to ignore him, “No let’s tell Anvil first, we can always find the kid again.”

  Chris watched as both the teenager and the bearded man flickered, shimmered and faded into black and white and started to walk away. They looked almost like ghosts. Chris stood there with bulging eyes as he followed them.

  The teenager glanced back, “Hey he can see us!”

  “Not possible.” Bearded man replied but he stopped and stared back at Chris, none the less.

  “Hum, “He added as he searched Chris’s face.

  The teenager flickered and flashed to stand in front of Chris, now back in full techno colour.

  “What are you kid, you something new?”

  “Not a Shade or a Ghoul.” Half answering his own question.

  Chris automatically stepped away from him, “What are you two?” It was a justified question all things considered.

  The teenager snapped his head back towards the one armed man; Chris was amazed his neck didn’t snap. One arm met his look and nodded once. The thin ones head snapping back, he smiled a cold smile that didn’t reach his eyes. His hand flashed upwards, Chris almost blocked the blow but failed. The impact under his chin struck hard. The world spun and Chris felt the ground coming up fast. The last thing he remembered was trying to hit back and a voice yelling, “Don’t hit him ask him!”

  Before his world went black.

  He saw an image of his step father standing in front of him, drunk as a stunk. Removing his trouser belt, Chris was backed up against his bedroom wall. No not again! This time as his step father started to lower his trousers; Chris ran forward and tried to hit his Step Father who easily brushed the blow aside.

  ‘Not that way’ He heard Wally state. Chris found himself back in the alleyway. Wally was standing there in front of him, dead as dead can be,’ this way boy.’ Wally pointed to his right and Chris saw the same strange looking thing that had killed Wally. It was still minus its hand and most of its arm. The thing snarled, let out a high pitched scream and ran straight at Chris who
without thinking hit it hard on the chin. Bang! The creature exploded in a huge shower of sparks and ash.

  Then the white haired teenager appeared hanging from the drain pipes again, ‘You killed the old man.’

  ‘No I didn’t!’ Chris found himself defending his actions, ‘I destroyed the thing that killed him.’

  The bearded man appeared at his side,’ Not possible. You’re a kid. You don’t have the power to kill Shades.’

  His step father climbed up out of Chris’s cardboard box, ’Think you could get away from me. Come here boy.’

  ‘No!’ Chris shouted backing away from him.

  The teenager jumped across the road, landing next to his step father,’ He needs punishing, he killed an old man.’

  His step father nodded, ’Yes Chris time to take what’s due.’