 The most heavily guarded secret in America isn't aliens or the Illuminati, or the blood-drinking sex fiends that supposedly run Hollywood. It's that monsters exist, and it's my job to kill them. Don't get the wrong idea, I don't shrug on a heavy overcoat and stalk through the badlands with vials of holy water and a crossbow. My job is critical and often horribly violent, but I do it in a windowless room. The monsters are brought to me, restrained, sometimes sedated, and it's my business to find out how they die. I'm an executioner, the one who pulls the lever that springs the trapdoor. I've killed vampires not with stakes through the heart or sunlight, but with a vinegar fentanyl compound that was injected intravenously, and I've killed werewolves and demons and everything in between where they come from, I don't ask. Dinner table rules go where I work, politics, sex, and religion stay off our tongues. I have, however, heard whispers about hot points where our world crosses to others. One up at a gas station in Washington, another at a movie theater in rural Texas, but like I said, I don't ask, and they don't tell. That all changed today. Everything changed today. Before I tell you what happened, in the maze of underground hallways I knew so well, I'll answer a question I'm sure some of you have. What happens to the monsters I can't kill? That's the thing, everything has a flaw, a weakness, and Achilles heel to be severed. When these things join our world, however they do, they adopt our rulebook, good things die. So do the bad ones. I've had close calls, but in the end the monster always expires under my hand. Then today happened. The day I met the monster, I couldn't kill. He was called the Prince of Darkness, but I always knew him as Satan. I'd been briefed and was waiting, full of nervous dread. As the team of soldiers in black body armor wheeled in the figure I was meant to execute. Good luck, said the last of the supernatural enforcement agents as he slam shut the reinforced door. Yeah, good luck, repeated another voice. This one deep and amused and full of terrible malice. It made my teeth ache. It was disembodied, coming not from his mouth, which was muzzled with a charged strip of alloy, but voicelessly needling through my brain like a maggot. I turned to face the devil. He was restrained in a vertical dolly. Its two massive wheels snug firmly and bolted down divots in the floor. And my first impression was of Hannibal Lecter, bound and gagged for transportation. The devil was a tall black man with wide muscular shoulders, his face all sharp angles beneath a lean, buzzed head. I shouldn't have been able to see him through the grim muzzle, but his face flickered through like a reflection on water, twisted and drawn with a terrible smile. His eyes, a dark red like two burning rubies, watched me from above the chain mail straight jacket and thick metal bands securing him to the dolly. I cleared my throat. I don't need luck. He interrupted. Everybody needs luck. The devil chuckled a sound like bones rattling. And I think if anyone needs it, it's you, Jude Myers. I tried not to shudder at the sound of my name in his voice. Do you know why I'm here? He asked. I ignored him. It was better like that interacting with the subjects could get complicated. Without reply, I moved across the wide windowless laboratory, the one with grates in its floor and heavy ventilation with walls of murder tools and vials of arcane substances and retrieved a heavy revolver from a locked cabinet. It was loaded with silver bullets. I always started with silver bullets. I'm here, Jude, because I turned around and blew Satan's head off. The top of his skull erupted in a welter of gore spraying hot ribbons of brain and blood over the industrial concrete wall behind me. His body jumped in its restraints. His face twitched. His eyes slowly faded like smoldering embers faded until they were muddy and lifeless. I exhaled. My heart, which had been steadily galloping against the wall of my ribs, slowed to a tired trot. I turned away, sighing, and sat down the revolver. My shoulders were aching. I couldn't wait to. I'm here, the devil said in a dry rasp, because your business is exterminating my disciples like household vermin. I looked up and I felt a cold bolt of fear clipped through my stomach. At first I saw only the shredded remains of the straight jacket coiled up on the floor beside the torn, ruined dolly like a dead thing. Then I saw him standing before me unrestrained, wearing nothing spare the faded blue jumpsuit that was supposed to carry him through death. Gore dripped down the devil's face in sticky trickles, running from the jagged cavity of his ruined head. Suddenly the blood began crawling in reverse, climbing up his cheeks and forehead as his skull reconstructed itself. You didn't think it'd be that easy, did you? He snarled, his head crackling and ballooning and returning unblemished to normal. I swallowed. I tried for my voice, but it wouldn't come. I'd been backing up and now felt cold metal dig into my back. I was caught against the wall, trapped. I'm here because you're my business. He continued, I'm here to kill the one who kills. My heart was pumping cold fear through my veins. I could feel my stomach curling in on itself, nodding up and forcing sour bile up my throat. His presence, a dreadful, slimy heat radiated off of him in hot waves as he moved in on me, a shark cruising a lone swimmer. That terrible heat made my skin feel loose and sticky, sweat dripped into my eyes. I reached for my panic button, which lived in the right pocket of my lap coat and realized with a flare of sickening dread that I'd forgotten it in the recreation room. You people have it wrong, the devil hissed. There is no singular, everlasting God, one of light, and another darkness. Our thrones are passed down through generations, sons and their sons and theirs beyond, rule eternally, and we can die, oh yes, certainly. But my time of passing isn't here and now, that would be yours. He snapped forward, just as I realized where I was standing, against the heavy steel door. With a nervous yab, I slapped my palm against the scanner and tumbled back into the hallway as the door sucked open. I staggered up, groping desperately for the panel which would throw the door closed. There was a blur of movement inside the room, a surge of hatred as the devil rushed forward. I slapped the panel and heard the high whine of hydraulics as the door wiped across the frame. There was a moment of uncertainty, followed by sudden relief as the door whipped closed. But it didn't close. An arm shot through with the last second, catching the door like an elevator about to shut. I hammered the emergency button on the panel and fought to my feet as a high siren peeled out through the labyrinth of underground hallways. The light changed, going from a harsh sodium glare to the flashing red of emergency. Raw stone walls were doused the color of blood as dozens of G-men in black tactical armor flooded into the hall. I pushed through the sea of guns while somewhere behind me, tucked into the cry of sirens and the shouts of soldiers, metal screamed as the door was torn off its hinges. I looked back as a tornado of death and destruction whipped through the SEA soldiers. Men flew into walls, encrumpled like broken things, blood splashed in great rivers as soldiers screamed and gunfire lit up the world. Guided appendages, arms, heads, gutted torsos filled the air, trailing blood and gore. Drunk on exertion and fear, I staggered around a corner as the boom of gunfire and men dying filled the hallway behind me. I'm dead, not in flesh, but in fate. I'm trapped in a broom closet, hiding among stacks of chemical cleaner and mop buckets as I dictate this warning to you. He's coming. It's all I have left, words empty, but full of pleading. I'm glad I have no loved ones to face his wrath once his carnage here has ended. The gunfire stopped, and now all I hear are his heavy, even footfalls tattooing the concrete floors behind my hiding spot. This is it for me. I can feel hellish heat slowly filling the closet like noxious gas as he moves closer, closer, godspeed to the others, the others like me, and the innocents who will pay the toll for our sins. I'm gonna shut my eyes now. I don't want his grinning face to be the last thing I see.