Phoenix Falling

by Laura Bickle

  Robin emitted a low whistle. “That might do it.”

  “I need two people to make this work. I’ll need for you to summon Pigin, then drop it in the well and take off running. I’ll light the fuse when you get near the well. You chat him up, get caught up on old times. I’ll whistle when you need to drop it and get out.”

  Robin’s eyes narrowed. “How do I know you won’t blow me up, too?”

  “How do I know you won’t keep on running after you drop the package?”

  “Fair point.”

  “You do this, Pigin will be gone. You’ll be free of the haunting. That was the deal.” He wrapped the package of dynamite up in plastic shopping bags and parked it on the roof of the SUV.

  Robin nodded. “That was the deal.”

  Owen opened the back door. He unbuckled Robin and pulled him out. Anna watched from the front fender of the SUV. She perched there, kicking her feet into space, glaring.

  Owen pulled down the spit hood around Robin’s neck, resisting the urge to flinch if a loogie landed on his face. Robin did nothing.

  “I’m going to unchain you. Don’t make me regret it.”

  “You won’t.”

  Owen took the keys from his pocket and uncuffed Robin’s feet first, then the cuffs around the belly chain. He stood out of kicking and punching distance as Robin shucked out of the chains and took off the spit hood.

  “Are we good?” Owen unholstered his gun.

  Robin nodded, rubbing his wrists. “We’re good.”

  Owen picked up the dynamite and fuse, tucking them under his arm. He gestured with his service pistol. “You know the way.”

  Robin plodded along the forest floor, moving away from the road. Owen kept a close watch on him, gun raised. He had no issue with shooting the motherfucker if he fled. He could concoct a good enough story to justify it if he had to. All he had to say was that Robin tried to overpower him. He could shoot him, put him back in the chains, and take his body to the morgue. Nobody would give a shit.

  Anna floated beside him, her feet not touching the earth. Her arms were crossed, and she stayed close to him.

  “I’m sorry for this,” he said.

  She shook her head. There was a look of fear on her face, like he could screw her over like so many other adults before him.

  “But it will be for the best. You’ll see.”

  Anna put her head down and followed along, saying nothing.

  Feeling like a total shitnoodle, Owen gazed up at the sky. The smoke had grown thick in the air. Radio traffic told him that the Magpie Fire was less than a mile away, and that was part of his plan. He wanted to get this done and over, in and out. The fire would quickly wash over this area, obliterating any evidence of blasting.

  They crossed the dry creek bed and Robin stopped. Owen wordlessly handed him the package of dynamite. Robin tucked it in his back waistband, beneath his shirt. He took a deep breath and advanced on the well. Owen held the wire spool cradled in his artificial hand, reeling it out as Robin walked. He kept a few paces behind Robin, out of view of the creature at the bottom of the well.

  Anna shivered.

  Robin stared down into the well. “Pigin. It’s me. Robin.”

  Something burbled and churned in the muck. “Little bird. You came back to the nest.”

  “Yeah. It’s been a long time.”

  “I catalog the bones here. I count which ones came from you. Many, many bones.”

  Owen sucked in his breath. That asshole. He knew it. He’d killed more than Anna. Owen’s finger slid behind the trigger guard of his gun. He was going to bring that sonofabitch to justice, for Anna and the others. He stepped closer to Robin.

  “What have you brought me today, little bird?”

  “Something that will keep you satisfied for a very long time.”

  Anna shrieked, but an instant too late. Robin snatched the package of dynamite out of his pants and ripped the blasting cord out of Owen’s artificial hand. Owen stumbled forward. Before he could recover, Robin lashed the cord around Owen’s neck and began to strangle him. Owen fired blindly with his gun, missing his target.

  Owen struggled against the cable around his neck. Robin pulled it tight, and Owen could feel the vessels of his neck constricting and oxygen slipping away. He tried to jam the fingers of his good hand between his throat and the cord, but he couldn’t wedge them in. Consciousness glittered in his periphery, and he knew that he was moments from being choked out.

  “It’s nothing personal,” Robin was saying. “If I feed the Toad God, he will grant me a new face. A new face is freedom. I won’t ever be behind bars or locked doors again. You wouldn’t understand.”

  From the corner of his watering eye, Owen could see Anna crawling up on the sandstone rocks around the lip of the well. She shouted into the well: “Let him go! Let him go, and I’ll . . . I’ll stay with you. Forever.”

  There was a mighty belching sound from underground. “None of the ghosts has ever stayed . . . I would like the company.”

  No . . . Owen would not allow this. Anna needed to be free! He gurgled against the cable, twisting and turning in Robin’s grip, trying to reach Anna.

  Anna gazed at him with resignation. She was perched on the sandstone rim of the well, and had slid one foot down into the dark, making ready to jump down into Pigin’s hell.

  No. Owen backpedaled. He ran backward with all his strength and slammed the backs of Robin’s knees against the lip of the well. Robin’s grip faltered, and he released Owen. Owen slammed his head back into Robin’s nose, hearing a satisfying cracking sound in the back of his skull.

  Owen rammed his elbow back into Robin’s gut. Robin tripped and fell backward, backward into the well with a howl.

  Owen landed on the ground on all fours, gasping. Anna was at his side, eyes wide with panic.

  A great chuckling emanated from the well.

  “Well played, Owen. Well played. I knew that you could do it.” A crunching sound and male screams emanated from the bottom. “It seems I need a new acolyte, someone to bring me flesh. I think you would do wonderfully.”

  Owen crawled forward, reaching for the blasting cord. It led down into the well. The dynamite must have fallen in during the scuffle. Maybe Pigin hadn’t gnawed the cord free of the explosives yet. He fumbled in his pocket for his lighter, and lit the fuse midway down its length. Not much time. He pulled himself to his feet and stumbled away, Anna at his elbow.

  When he looked back, the spark had traveled over the rim of the well, going down into darkness.

  After a few heartbeats, a deafening explosion sounded, flinging dirt, blood, and rotted crud into the air. Owen covered his head with his arms, feeling wet sludge and gravel raining down on him. When he dared look back, he saw that the well’s sandstone had been broken, shattered in a vaguely star-shaped pattern emanating from a black hole in the earth. Sparks and embers drifted lazily in the air.

  Owen rolled to a sitting position, panting. His ears were ringing. He could barely hear Anna asking: “Is it over?”

  Owen nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  There was echoing silence for several minutes. Owen sat with his back to a tree and stared at the well. Truth be told, he had intended on giving Robin to Pigin, anyway. There was only one way to be sure that the scales were balanced—he had to kill both of those rotten bastards. His gaze shifted to a bloody sneaker lying a few yards away.

  He glanced at Anna. He wasn’t sure what he expected to happen when the deed was done. He thought that maybe a bright light would show up and she’d wave and vanish into it like one of the fairies from her cartoons. But no, she was still here.

  He inhaled and coughed, both from the injury to his throat and the thickening smoke. “We should get outta here.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  Before they could move, though, a black roar emanated from the bottom of the well, shaking the leaves on the trees. Owen reached for his gun as an oozing black shape crawled out of the fractu
red well.

  “Oh my God,” he breathed.

  And the word god was the only one that came close, this atavistic creature that crawled over the fractured sandstone. It was a giant, reeking lump of decomposing flesh the size of a car, leaving behind bloody footprints as it moved. Black veins covered grey flesh, looking as if it had been subjected to flesh-eating bacteria. Covered in pieces of gore that Owen could only assume had once been attached to Robin’s guts, the Toad God glared at them with bottomless black eyes.

  “You cannot destroy me, Owen,” Pigin growled. “I am rot. I am eternal.”

  Owen lifted his gun, though he knew it was futile. He began to back away, calculating how fast he could run to the SUV, if he could outrun this creature from hell. “Go to hell, Pigin,” he said. It was the most creative thing he could think of. He pulled the trigger, but the hammer clicked on air. He’d used up his rounds. Shit.

  He stood in front of Anna. “You can have me. But let her go.”

  The toad snorted. “Our deal is off. You destroyed my house. I will take the two of you as payment. You can join me in rotting for eternity. We will have much to discuss.”

  The toad hopped toward him with ferocious speed—much faster than should have been possible—and Owen flung up a hand to shield his head that he was certain was going to be rolling around in the gut of a monster in about five seconds—

  But a blinding sheet of light seared down from the heavens, his upraised hand doing nothing to block it from his eyes. Owen fell back with a cry, his skin blistering. Through his half-closed lids, he saw the shape of a bird surrounding the Toad God. Pigin howled in fury and launched himself at the bird. His jaws locked around the bird’s wing, and they sprawled on the ground, sun and shadow. Where the combatants rolled, fire lit and raged. The reek of something like burned tires suffused the dark forest. Sparks surged upward, lighting and burning away the dark canopy.

  Owen tried to drag himself away. Anna just stood before him, gaping in fascination.

  Something crawled up from the well, a skeletal hand cloaked in something viscid. It hauled itself up and into the stinking light, the shape of a man wrapped in rotting skin and slime. It staggered away, toward the fight. More clawed hands pulled blackened forms up from the well, viscous and vicious, leaving a black trail behind them. One by one, tatters of men were spat up into the ground. They plunged into the fray, clawing at the phoenix. There had to be at least a dozen of them, in various states of brokenness, joining Pigin as he tried to swallow the bird.

  “What the hell” was the only thing Owen could think to say.

  Anna was beside him, brow wrinkled. “The dead. They are . . . the dead whose bones remain in the well. He’s a god of corruption . . . and he pulled them up from that dark place to fight.”

  “Dear God . . .”

  But there was nothing dear about the Toad God. And as Owen watched, a rattling shape crawled out from the pit of the well, twitching like an injured insect. Bile rose in Owen’s mouth. He recognized the sweatshirt underneath the black ichor. The head was mostly gone, but bits of scalp and part of a face remained.

  “Robin,” he gasped.

  The creature that had once been Robin launched itself into the fray, attempting to smother the bird in decay. Fire raced through him, and he went up like a torch, flailing at the bird wrestling with the black Toad God. Pigin struggled to swallow the bird, but flames chewed away at his stinking flesh, sizzling it and showing the white glisten of bone before it disintegrated. The bird shrieked, the high-pitched sound of an eagle, while Pigin groaned like a house about to collapse.

  Whatever the fuck this was, this was not his fight.

  It was Armageddon.

  Owen coughed, struggling to breathe through the thick smoke. He rolled his eyes up to the canopy. The forest around him was on fire, walls of flame in all directions. He stumbled toward the path they’d followed here, but the fire roared thickly along the dust and brittle leaves. His mustache singed, he was forced to back away. There was no escape.

  “Owen!” Anna screamed. She was standing on the rubble surrounding the well.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know what else is down there!” Clearly, Pigin had been assembling monsters—and the monsters weren’t doing so well. In the bright blaze of the fight, the last skeleton twitched to the ground, all flesh burned away. Owen was pretty sure that one was Robin. His bones blackened and then crushed when the toad rolled over him, snapping at the bird.

  “You’ll die for certain if you stay up here.”

  She wasn’t wrong.

  Owen snatched the length of unused blasting cord and pulled it behind him. He wedged the end anchored into the spool between two large rocks and began to climb into the broken well. The cord was skinny as hell, but it was all he had. Sandstone scraped his shoes as he tried to rappel down with one hand, clumsily. The thin cord dug into his palm and snapped. He fell, plummeting into the dark.

  He landed with a splash in filthy water. He spat it from his mouth, gagging and retching. He was able to touch a rubble-strewn bottom, and he idly thought that the water he dredged must have leached back in here from somewhere. He spun right and left with his good hand out, convinced that some zombie monster was going to rise up and chew on him.

  Anna was at his side, floating just above the water. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” he gasped, not wanting to consider how much of the sludge he’d swallowed was part of Robin and God only knew what else out there.

  “I think we’re alone down here,” Anna said.

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  Above, the fire roared and licked over the sandstone. The sky went black, and all he could see above was that red-hot fury. He clenched his fists, trying to breathe shallowly. Surely the air in here was limited, and he didn’t want to use it up before the fire consumed the oxygen. But it was looking really grim.

  “It’s okay,” she told Owen.

  It sure didn’t feel okay. Owen could imagine that this is what Anna had seen, what she had felt before the end, terrified, in stinking darkness in the belly of the well.

  The fire seemed to wash overhead, crackling as it consumed everything in its path. Owen didn’t want to think of what it was likely doing to his freshly waxed SUV.

  The roaring of the fight, the squeal of the bird and the toad’s bellows, faded away.

  He keyed his radio at his shoulder. Nothing but static. He fished in his pockets for his cell phone. It was waterlogged and useless. He did keep a small flashlight in his gun belt. He clicked it on, seeing the sides of the well illuminated in cold blue-white LED light. There were spatters of black ichor, blood, and God only knew what else smeared up the sides. The detonation had crumbled many of the blocks used to build the well from above. Below, there was just earth. He ducked under the slimy ick and felt every inch of the well. He could find no opening, no place that Pigin might have retreated to in times past, no underground network of vaults that he could reach now. There was just sharp rubble. He could feel water draining in through gaps on one side, but the holes there weren’t big enough for him to stick his pinkie finger in, and they felt cool. Maybe air was getting in here from somewhere. He coughed into his shoulder. He sure hoped so.

  Owen reached up for the warm sandstone. The stones had been roughened from the blast, but there was no way to gain a toehold. He growled in frustration, trying several times to launch himself out of the water far enough to reach a tiny rock jutting out an arm’s length over his head. When he reached it, though, the brittle sandstone shard broke off, and he landed in the water with a wet smack.

  “Shit,” he said. Panic settled into his chest. “Shit.”

  “The deputies will come looking for you.” Anna was trying to sound reassuring.

  “Well, they would, but they have no idea where I am.” It would be a long time before someone would come looking for him. He hadn’t even told Robin’s doctor where they were going. He had told her that he was taking him to his off
ice to look at some evidence, swab him for DNA, and get some prints, because she’d never approve of him taking Robin out in the woods alone. Yeah. That seemed pretty fucking stupid now. He calculated how long he could last. He couldn’t drink this slime. He would last two days, maybe three, before he died of dehydration. He pressed his head against a clean-ish patch of sandstone and muttered: “Shit.”

  In desperation, he faced the opening of the well and screamed for Pigin. Pigin didn’t answer him. Whether it was because the Toad God had lost the fight or he wanted to leave Owen to rot, he couldn’t know.

  Anna floated above the water, her legs crossed and her elbows on her knees. “Is this what they mean when they say someone has screwed the pooch?”

  “Yeah. I definitely screwed the pooch.” He laughed, shaking his head. Then he got serious. “Look. You don’t have to stay with me.”

  She looked surprised at him. “Where else would I be?”

  “Your case has been solved. Robin is dead. At least I’m pretty sure that he looked dead when the toad rolled over on his blackened bones. You can go now, into the light or to heaven or wherever else little girls go in the afterlife.”

  “I’m not leaving you alone down here.” She shook her head stubbornly. “I know what it’s like to die down here. It’s awful.”

  He swallowed. “I appreciate that. I really do. But this isn’t about me. This is about you. About you getting to have some peace after all that happened to you. It wasn’t fair, and you deserve to be able to move on.”

  She sighed. “I’ll stay with you, Owen. For a little while.” She seemed to settle in with her back to the wall. “Tell me a story.”

  Owen was all out of stories. “Um. Like from one of your movies?” He dimly recalled enough of the one about the pastel ponies to recite some of it. Possibly he could even sing. Maybe it would comfort her.

  “No. Tell me a story from your life.”

  Owen grimaced. “There aren’t very many good stories about my life.”