Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

  Adrian?

  Over here. I see you.

  An arm waved up ahead. I couldn’t really see that it was an arm. I could only detect the loose shape of a swaying appendage and, given the height of it, I assumed it was an arm and not a leg, or a tentacle, or whatever.

  I approached the arm, and yes, found it attached to Adrian, who had crushed himself up against a shuttered window. The shutter had a crack in it, where something had busted a couple of slats. Air breathed gently out through this crack, slightly warmer than what was outside around us.

  “Someone’s inside,” he said, and pointed at the hole.

  “I know. But I don’t think she got in this way.”

  “Very funny,” he said. “I don’t know how she got in, but I saw her for a second.” He pointed inside again. I didn’t see anything but a room with a desk and some chairs that looked like they belonged in a doctor’s office circa 1970. But as I stared a little longer, letting my eyes fine-tune to the dim interior, I detected a doorway without a door to block it, and in the hall beyond it, a glow so faint I might’ve been imagining it.

  “She has a light,” Adrian told me. “She was walking that way.” He indicated an imprecise direction off to our mutual left.

  “I just came from that way, and I didn’t notice anything open. She must’ve gotten inside farther down. Did you see any point of entry?”

  “No, but it’s fucking dark.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  “You’re welcome. We could break in, couldn’t we? Just pop one of these doors or, or whatever it is you do?”

  Our voices stayed very, very low. I didn’t think anyone could hear us, least of all someone inside. “It’s noisy,” I said. “If these windows weren’t all shuttered, I’d cut the glass out and let us in that way. But breaking the shutters open is just as loud as breaching a door.”

  “Raylene?” he asked, the one-word question a tiny bit loud. His eyes went big, and he was getting that glazed, disoriented look that I’m sure I’d been displaying a few seconds before. “Do you feel that?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I feel it. I’ve been feeling it.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “I have no idea. Fuck it,” I declared, and I reached for the nearest door. It was doubled, and its planks were held together old-fashioned-style with big iron bands. It had a new-fashioned lock, though. A dead bolt built unobtrusively into the wood, destroying the authenticity but offering modern security.

  Well, not perfect security. I jostled it open with less finesse and more noise than I wanted, but I didn’t exactly kick over an air raid siren, either.

  “Come on,” I told my companion, who almost tripped over me in his eagerness to get inside. I understood. I was feeling it too, that urgent sense that shelter should be sought, even if shelter meant a building some two hundred years old and probably, God help us, not built to meet earthquake codes.

  Inside it was even bleaker than the overhang with the arches, which seemed impossible but apparently wasn’t. We staggered toward the open doorway and into a hall. By then I could see again, a little, but Adrian couldn’t—so he grabbed the back of my shirt and I led him in the direction he said she’d gone.

  “It has to be her, doesn’t it?” he asked me, so close I could feel his breath on the back of my head.

  “If it isn’t, we’re going to feel real silly in a minute,” I told him. Then, more to myself, “I wonder where she’s going.”

  Up ahead I could hear something; it hovered on the edge of the buzzing hum, a staccato noise … or not quite. Footsteps, yes. Off in the distance, deeper in the mission. I kept heading toward the footsteps, and Adrian kept his death-grip on my shirt, and the hum grew harder—not louder—beneath our feet.

  Adrian all but sighed, “Earthquake?”

  “I don’t know,” I sighed back. At least it wasn’t lightning. Aggravating hum notwithstanding, there was no undercurrent stink of ozone—and as of a few seconds previously, the sky had been utterly clear. I knew, because I’d been checking it. A good lightning strike or two within fifty feet of you will make you paranoid that way.

  So yes, this had to be some kind of earthquake.

  It made sense, from a warped, crazy-person angle. In the Pacific Northwest, she’d reached for a storm—and in California, she was reaching for the ground.

  Adrian stumbled behind me, yanking my shirt so hard that the neckline jabbed me in the throat. Our feet were going numb from the vibrations, and we were both getting clumsy, so I didn’t smack him. I’m just charitable that way.

  Besides, my obsessive compulsions and neuroses were distracting me. Should we get outside after all? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do, in case of a quake? Override that instinct to find shelter, and find a place that won’t fall on top of your head?

  But no, this wasn’t something so normal or simple. Adrian and I both knew that.

  Christ, that mission was an interminable building. Again I had that sense that the interior was warped, that it was larger than it looked from the outside—larger than it could possibly be—and we were only pushing dream-like forward, skulking in place without making any progress.

  Until finally, up ahead, the timbre of the footsteps changed and their location began to rise.

  I stopped, and Adrian ran into my back.

  “What?”

  “Can you hear that?” I wanted to know.

  “No.”

  “She’s going upstairs. I didn’t know this place even had a second floor.”

  “It doesn’t,” he whispered. “But there’s a bell tower, remember? You can see it from outside.”

  Bell tower? Oh yeah. “Vertigo,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Vertigo. I just now remembered. That’s what movie was filmed here. There was … there was a big scene,” I muttered. “In the bell tower. Jimmy Stewart.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Come on. Let’s go imitate some art.”

  He said, “Yikes,” but he tagged gamely behind me.

  She was using a light, yes. A gas-powered lantern, a Coleman or something like it. I could smell it as we gained on her, that small, burning scent of fossil fuel and a cotton sock wick. And up ahead, somewhere around a corner, the glow it left behind was calling to me—drawing me moth-like onward.

  We passed through several rooms, mostly decked out like museums with glass cases, informative plaques, and long benches for tired tourists to rest upon. And then we spotted the gate that usually blocked off the tower. It hung open, its padlock cut by something big, maybe bolt cutters. I ran my hands over the jagged edge left by the snipping and I knew the feel of it. I’ve cut plenty of locks in my time. It’s not the most elegant way to breach a barrier, but it’ll do in a pinch.

  I had a feeling that Elizabeth Creed didn’t expect anyone to find out what she’d done, and she didn’t care about leaving a trail. As the low-key hum underfoot grew to a more distinct tremor, I started to run.

  Adrian kept up with me fairly well. I couldn’t do my usual blinding speed, since we were indoors and it was almost too dark to see, and the stairs weren’t the kind of perfectly even steps people produce in modern times, so I had to be careful. But there was a light up ahead and I chased it, and he was hot on my heels.

  When finally I burst out into the open air, the whole place was shaking and I realized in that instant that part of the hum I’d heard, and felt with my whole body, had come from the bells. They were big and solid and utterly black in the shadowed night of the tower. They were bell-shaped failings in reality, heavier than anything had a right to be.

  They were bells, and not bells at the same time, and I was entranced by them.

  She’d done something to them—or she was doing something to them, I couldn’t say. But they weren’t here, not anymore. They weren’t part of my universe. Or maybe (and this might be closer to correct) they were in two places at once—our world, and some other world, too.

  I tore
my eyes off them with difficulty. They were black holes, these bells, and their gravity stole everything.

  “Elizabeth Creed,” I called. It wasn’t a question. If not her, who else could it be?

  I was answered by a croaking bark. It was a cry of dismay and irritation, tempered by blind hatred. I didn’t like it, this certainty that someone wanted to blow me to smithereens on general principle.

  I spun on my heels, again resisting the pull of those bells, and I saw her.

  She was out on the roof, standing on the curved clay tiles that baked themselves brittle under the California sun. Her feet were steady and she was not moving—not fidgeting, not humming, not vibrating like everything else. She was the one stable speck in this warped old mission, which reassured me not in the slightest. I already knew how unstable she was on the inside.

  In her hands she held a box—the kind children use to keep their pens and pencils together. It didn’t look like a humidor to me, but maybe she’d swapped it out for something of her own. She wasn’t quite the wild-eyed mad scientist I expected; her hair was graying in rivulets and it was contained in a tidy ponytail. The jeans and T-shirt she wore wouldn’t have looked out of place on … well, on me, or anyone else.

  She asked, “Who are you?”

  Suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I was being called upon to account for my presence there, and my future actions, and what could I tell her? I’m not ordinarily put in the position of defending myself to my victims. Most of the people from whom I steal have no idea who robbed them, and none of them ever catch me in the act. Then again, I never have to chase them down and physically take things away from them, either.

  I made a mental note to consider it a deal-breaker on future assignments.

  I had to tell her something, though. Or at least I thought I did, despite the fact that, in retrospect, I could’ve just barreled into her, swiped the box, and moved on with my life. I’m not sure why I didn’t. Maybe it was the hum, or the bells. Maybe it was the way she met my eyes without blinking, and made me feel like a naughty schoolchild who’s been caught eating crayons.

  Regardless, I said, “I’m here to take back what you stole.” Because that sounded better than, “I’m going to steal your stuff for my own nefarious purposes,” yet it did not fully spell out my intentions.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I’m being paid to. Put down the bones, Ms. Creed.”

  She said, “No.”

  Her eyes hardened and mine probably went wide. I don’t know; I couldn’t see them. But I could feel myself starting to freak out—my hair was standing up on end again, like before the lightning in Portland, even though the sky was still as clear as a bell (but not the bells behind me).

  “What are you doing?” I shrieked at her. “Put down the goddamn bones and get out of here now unless you want to die!”

  She snorted. “You didn’t answer my first question, so I won’t answer yours. That’s fair, isn’t it?” Then she stuck the box into a bag she was wearing cross-body style, the strap slung across her chest. I hadn’t seen it before because it was resting on her ass. “And I’m not going to die.”

  We faced each other down, both of us increasingly convinced that the other one was being ridiculous, and possibly about to breathe her last.

  I have no idea what kept me from launching myself at her, knocking her off the roof and smashing her onto the ground below, but it might’ve had something to do with her right hand, which was clutching something thin, pale, and just long enough to stick out both ends of her fist.

  “Last chance,” she told me. “This whole place is going down.”

  “While you’re standing on it?”

  She smiled, and her knuckles were so white they gleamed like teeth. “Did you know this mission, this whole town … sits on the San Andreas?”

  “I did not,” I admitted, sticking to the facts because, holy shit, I only just then noticed that she was not actually standing on anything. She was hovering a few inches above the tiles, which accounted for why she was able to hold herself so steady while the rest of the world quivered.

  “It has to go. All of it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Mistakes need to be unmade,” she declared.

  Her eyes rolled back into her head. Her hand crushed harder around the brittle white bone, and I could see even from these few yards away that it was beginning to bend, creeping toward some shattering point.

  The harder she held it, the louder the hum buzzed—and the harder the ground moved. Her lips moved too, but I couldn’t understand what she was saying, muttering in that weird, dark rhythm. What had started as an odd vibration blossomed into a lurch, a heave, and a shudder—accompanied by the crack of trees and the tinkling crash of clay roofing tiles falling to the sidewalk.

  Something moved behind me; I saw it out of the corner of my eye.

  Adrian. I’d forgotten he was there, behind me—still on the stairs, or near them.

  Elizabeth Creed hadn’t seen him. That much was apparent from the surprise on her face when he struck her in the chest. He’d flung himself at her, shoulder-first with his head down, and hit her square and with his full weight—perhaps 180 pounds of off-duty drag queen catching a fifty-something engineer like a ton of glitter.

  As they dropped to the banging, jostling roof, tiles went scattering and more than the wind got knocked out of Creed.

  At a distance and in slow motion, I watched her fingers unclench and the bone slip away from her palm. It scooted down the roof and rolled awkwardly toward the edge, ambling toward the rim, over which it would tip in a matter of moments.

  For no logical reason, I knew in the bottom of my stomach that I had to catch that bone. I knew that it couldn’t break, that I had to pick it up and take very good care of it until this spell, or enchantment, or whatever it was … had either dissipated or been undone.

  The world heaved beneath me, or maybe only the roof did, I couldn’t tell. I tried to jump toward the escaping bone as it loped downward, but my next step dislodged a tile—sending it shooting off the roof and over into space. Forward I flopped, skidded, and flailed. Down I scooted, and the sound of clay grating against my pants, knees, and elbows was a pottery symphony … and although it felt (and surely looked) like I’d lost all semblance of control, at the last second I stretched and lashed out—and grabbed the bone right as it toppled off the edge.

  I toppled off the edge behind it, or rather underneath it. I shifted midair to put my body between that precious penis nub and the hard ground below, and I did a good job.

  Flat on my back, I landed with a smack that cracked my skull and left me seeing stars before I saw nothing at all.

  As I blacked out, a muddy procession of half-formed images and thoughts went sliding through my mind. The sky above, speckled and domed. A cheer of relief that the mission was only one story, and I hadn’t fallen any farther. The taste of powdered clay and sidewalk dust flavored with rubber sandal soles. And the brittle, unbroken bone cradled against my belly.

  The world stopped moving, but if it was the whole world or just me, I couldn’t tell.

  8

  Adrian wanted something, but he could wait. It was dark and pleasant where I was lying, and nothing hurt. Except the back of my head. And my spine. And my ribs. On second thought, pretty much everything fucking hurt.

  What the hell?

  I opened my eyes and he was there above me, shaking me like a British nanny.

  “Get up! Up, goddammit! We have to get out of here!”

  “We have to … what?”

  “Out of here, now,” he added for emphasis—and then he yanked me up off the ground in one smooth move that underscored how badly I had gotten hurt when I’d thrown myself from the roof.

  I yelped, and he yanked again. “This is no time for you to require babying,” he said and I tripped behind him in the dark, trying to get my thoughts together and my body upright of its own accord. Both tasks at once were
more than I could swing with any real grace.

  My legs alternately buckled beneath me and wobbled forward behind Adrian, who towed me through the darkness with considerably more confidence and determination than I, personally, possessed. But he hadn’t taken a header off a roof as recently as I had.

  “Dude,” I gasped as my knee stuck in the “straight” position and pain went cavorting through my nervous system. “Slow down!”

  “No way. We’re getting the fuck out of here,” he wheezed, “before this gets any worse!”

  “This what?” I asked like an idiot.

  This was the earthquake that was getting a good shudder going, and this didn’t even remotely help my feeble ability to put one foot in front of the other right at that moment.

  “I don’t know. The Big One?”

  I couldn’t see where we were going. It was like I was wearing sunglasses in the middle of the night. Man, I’d really knocked myself good. “The Big One? Like LA falling into the ocean?”

  “I don’t know. I’m a southern man, and I don’t do earthquakes.”

  “I don’t think this one is very bad,” I told him.

  He didn’t believe me. “Get a move on, Ray. The car’s still another few blocks that way.”

  “We’re not going to … we won’t … we can’t … outdrive an earthquake.”

  “We’re going to give it a shot.”

  “What about …,” I stammered. “The bones? Did you get them?”

  “No. She went off the other side of the roof and took the bones with her.”

  “But I caught one. I have one,” I mumbled, even though my fingers were spread wide, and wiggling like bait.

  “She took it away from you.”

  Because I was staring at my hands like an idiot, I tripped over a rock or something, did the stupid trying-to-find-my-balance dance, and found it in time to ask, “She took it away from me?”

  “Yes.”

  “If she went off the roof, we could go back and catch her.” I looked back over my shoulder, seeking some sign of another woman loping in the other direction.