Free Demon Jack by Patrick Donovan Page B

of sheer volume against my eardrums. Chad heard it too, his head snapping around and leveling her with a green-eyed gaze. I think she screamed, I couldn't be sure though. The alarm was just so damned loud.
    It was the opening I needed.
    I grabbed a handful of Chad’s scrubs and jerked him backwards, hard enough to bounce him off the window. His knee buckled again. He took a staggering, falling step forward on the rebound. I drove my shoulder into his chest, driving him backwards and into the window again, pushing with every bit of muscle and ounce of pissed-off I could muster.
    The windows they use in a psychiatric hospital aren’t really glass at all. They’re made of a heavy-duty ballistic plastic, the same type of stuff they use to make the bullet proof partitions in banks. The point is, they are damn near impossible to break. That said, damn near impossible isn’t the same thing as impossible. The fake glass behind us flexed outwards before it broke with a loud popping sound. There was a fleeting sense of weightlessness as we hit the empty space of open air before gravity kicked in and the ground started to rush up towards us. I held onto Chad’s scrubs with one hand as we fell, throwing wild rabbit punches with the other and trying to mentally prepare myself for the inevitable end result of gravity.
    The feeling of hitting the ground after a thirty-foot drop is damn near indescribable. There is a sudden stop followed by a brief moment of total blackness. Not unconsciousness mind you, you’re still completely aware of the fact that you just slammed into unyielding earth. It’s just a flash of nothingness behind your eyes and a quick instance of total, weightless comfort while your brain tries to catch up with the trauma that was just inflicted on the body. Then there’s the pain. It's a completely new, startlingly bright variety of pain. It raced across my nerves in tiny little bombing runs of agony. The taste of blood filled my mouth, pooling in the back of my throat and threatening to choke me. I bit back a scream as another, absolutely new breed of misery came to life in my arm, pulsing in rhythm with the now familiar pain in my chest. A piece of plastic roughly the size and shape of a pizza slice had pierced clean through the muscle in my upper arm when we’d hit the ground.
    Thankfully, Chad had taken the brunt of the fall, since well, I had landed on top of him. The green glow of his eyes radiated pure, clean, pristine hatred.
    Even with a demon riding your body, there’s only so much abuse it can take before it’s rendered useless. Granted, that damage is above and beyond what you could endure without a hell spawn as a co-pilot, but it has its limits. I could take a hell of a beating, but shoot me in the face and I was as dead as the next guy. I assumed the same was true of Chad.
    I didn’t have any intention of waiting to see if Chad had reached that threshold. I pushed up to my hands and knees, fighting to breath, to stop my vision from swimming and blurring. Looking up, I could see the faces of hospital staff peering out at us through the empty window.
    I stood and started moving, trying to put as much distance as possible between Chad, the hospital, and myself. I stumbled once, falling to my knees and fighting through an agonizing fit of coughing. Blood sprayed from my mouth, splattering against the grass. It took me a few seconds to make the world stop spinning long enough to brave a second attempt at flight.
    Behind me, I could hear Chad stirring, fighting to sit up. I chanced a quick glance over my shoulder. He was staring blankly at two sharp ends of bone jutting out of his skin just above the wrist. He tried to stand, the knee I had snapped folding underneath him, spilling him to the ground. He let out another of those weird modulating screams and began dragging himself across the ground towards me. It was damn freaky, using just his hands, he was pulling himself across the ground faster than