Hell's Gifts - Complete Series Boxset

by Mark Russo

  “We can’t use the same trick. They will find out, eventually. How many of them are down there?”

  “I counted at least ten. We got a pawn in their game. They still have queens, kings, bishops, and knights.”

  He turned his back to me while asking me to wait with a gesture of his hand. “I have been working on something new, Vere.”

  I floated above the shrine before him. It looked very heavy, probably made of wood.

  “Our incursion in Plane R paid off quite well. We gathered a lot of different materials from various regions of their world.”

  The chest contained all kinds of objects: pipes, gloves, a pair of glasses, a necklace, and a rocket launcher, just to name a few.

  “All this,” he continued, “will help us checkmate without too much fuss.”

  I fluttered down by his side. “The Path of Space will get back to its ancient splendor. The Great Communion will lose this war.”

  He gave me a convinced smile. “Let’s ready our next artifact. This time we will get rid of their trainer.”

  “Laura. I met her only once when I was using the suit named Monica. From now on, I’ll be closer to her. I will find a chance to render her harmless.”

  7

  Laura

  “It looks like you are quite hungry today,” Brian said while I was having yet another piece of that French toast I found I loved.

  “That is not entirely true. I crave this specifically. Give me all the French toast.”

  He chuckled in a way that sounded like a rowdy vending machine. “You are not alone in this. I can see myself becoming addicted to almost all the food they provide here.”

  “You know what I like doing after having lots of these delicious things? I have one of those e-cigarettes. They are so good for me.” I was so natural.

  “I guess you are the healthiest person I’ve ever talked to. No, I’m actually sure about it.”

  I stared into his eyes. “So, got a busy day ahead?”

  “A two-hour staff meeting is waiting for me as soon as we finish stuffing our faces. Then I’ll have a few testing sessions before and after lunch. What does your day look like?”

  “I’m trying to have a meeting with our dear Charlie, but it seems he’s too busy to talk to me. I’ll drop into his office today at some point. Time to take extreme measures.”

  I could tell from how distracted he became that he had received some messages in the enhanced reality interface embedded in his contact.

  “Anything urgent?” I teased.

  “Well, no. One of those internal communications nobody ever reads. Anyhow, should we head to our offices?”

  I checked the time; we had spent more than an hour together. “We must. I lost track of time. I’m meeting a student in fifteen minutes.”

  He coughed a little after sipping his orange juice. “Sure. I’ll still bring along this jam sandwich. You know, I might get peckish.”

  “Is this what you nerds call a joke?”

  He nodded.

  “I’ll enroll you in one of those effective communication training. You kinda have to attend it.”

  He laughed so loud almost everyone looked at us.

  “Let’s go. We don’t want to put on a show here.”

  He had cleaned the table and brought our trays to the automated shelf line before I could even try to help. We walked side by side among the other tables, then, in the corridor, he didn’t turn right when he should have had. “I’m walking you to your office. You know, old-fashioned chivalry.”

  “Oh, thanks a lot, sir. Bakker, it would honor me.”

  He laughed again very loudly.

  I had to be killing this humor thing humans do. I didn’t know what else to say, so I kept my mouth shut until we were in front of my office.

  “So, have a good day, Brian. See you soon. I mean, we both live here.”

  “True. See you soon. Hope very soon.” I proffered my hand, expecting him to shake it. That is what they do when going separate ways.

  He didn’t grab it though. His face came very close to mine, and our lips touched for a fraction of a second. His breath smelled like coffee. Then he moved back and smiled at me.

  I was still on the door when he walked away, waving at me. I locked the door and touched my face where he had touched me.

  *****

  I was sitting at my desk and staring into space when Pavel knocked on the door and entered like a train going off the rails.

  “I’m not sure you allowed me in. Did you? I’m sorry.” His face was red, his breath short, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “I’m all ears. How is it going with your presentation?”

  “I’m stuck. I think.”

  “Where are you stuck?”

  He avoided eye contact, like a wild animal approaching a human being for the first time. “At the beginning.” His voice was so weak I had to stretch my neck to even hear him.

  “We agreed you would prepare your development plan, and you didn’t. Is this what you are saying?”

  He nodded while keeping his head bent forward.

  “It’s a good thing you came to me. I can help, Pavel.”

  He lifted his chin above his shoulders. “How’s this good?”

  “It’s not good that you couldn’t come up with anything. It is you who is asking for help.”

  His face remained frozen and unexpressive.

  “You want to make the best of your time here. Dare, try, experiment. This is the time for doing it.”

  “But you didn’t give me any directions—”

  “And if you have no directions, you just paralyze and do nothing? How’s that helpful?”

  Again, the lines on his face remained still, like he never even learned how to move them.

  “Okay. Look at this.” I shared a 3D walk-through presentation about self-development, a random one since those theoretical models all look the same to me. “See? Let’s say we choose this one.”

  “Why? Why do we choose this one?”

  I scoffed, but I shouldn’t have. “Start somewhere. Get your hands dirty, take some risks. You want to do it. Did you ever make a mistake in your life?”

  He inhaled, emitting a noise I thought would kill him. “But what about all the other options? How do I know they aren’t better than the one I chose?”

  “Well, Pavel. You just don’t. That’s the very definition of risk.” I thought he would cry, with the reflections of those 3D images before his wet eyes.

  “I don’t think I can handle this,” he said after a full ten seconds of silence.

  “Let’s try something. I’ll show you how I prepared mine. Do you think it would help?”

  He nodded like a small kid would in front of a big bowl of ice cream. “Thank you. Thank you, Laura.”

  These creatures—it’s so easy to make them happy.

  *****

  I headed next to level minus two. It had been some time since I had spoken to Lee, and I wanted to catch up a little.

  He had cleaned the corridor leading to his laboratory. He even had some special wall lights installed that reversed the spooky feeling the area had before.

  I heard him before even seeing him. The whirring of what they call an electronic scalpel welcomed me.

  “Do you mind bringing me the clamp?” he asked as soon as he noticed me.

  “If I had a clue what that is, I totally would.”

  “Is the big metallic one. It looks like a bird’s beak.”

  I picked one of the many tools I had in front of me. From the face he made, I had collected the right one.

  “I’m working on some improvements for our conversion process. Sorry, I forgot the human small talk part. I never remember it.”

  We finally shook hands.

  “Don’t bother with that. I’m terrible at it. So, how is it going down here?”

  He pointed at a line of bodies hanging on a metal bar on the side wall. “It’s going faster than expected. Chunk left a lot of useful
tips and tricks on how to handle these people.”

  I had never met Chunk. Heard he was good though. “You are processing the research center, right?”

  “That’s right. We follow the same plan they followed last year. No point in changing a winning team.” He activated another buzzing device, this time one that would lift the body he was tinkering with onto an operating table surrounded by glass walls.

  “Oh, I didn’t see that. What do you do after bleeding out the corpses?”

  “Well, I move them to the table. They get all those body enhancement devices Cullman Industries produces.”

  I looked at the clean-cut man before me. “We’re preparing for war.”

  “That was the plan all along. We’re just putting it in place.”

  “Exactly. Our plans were clear, and we are all working toward it. Do you think we can reach our goal?”

  He stopped working, dropped his tools and looked straight in my eyes. “Do you?”

  “Hey, where’s the old-time chivalry here?”

  He scoffed then leaned on a countertop by his side. “Did you manage to talk to Charles recently?”

  “I’ve been trying to do it for two days now. He keeps rescheduling our meetings.”

  “He’s probably very busy. But still, you have to talk about Pavel, right?”

  “We should. How many more people do you have in the research center to process?”

  “Around fifteen. I saved the management for last.”

  “I get it. Students will be the next group. We’ll probably have to convert Pavel too. He’s not improving. That’s what I came here for.”

  “Talk to Charlie. He’s been … let’s say, distracted.”

  He let my doubt grow even bigger.

  *****

  It was almost time for bed. I skipped dinner, as I was not hungry. I was walking to my room when a distinct noise farther ahead in the corridor, like an object falling to the floor, caught my attention. I stepped forward as the motion sensors activated the lights.

  Something behind my back pushed me.

  Suddenly, I was no longer in EIBM. The green gleaming and the stillness of the air were two clues I could not mistake; someone had forced me to return to Plane K. I looked around, but I was alone. The surrounding landscape was not familiar—not a surprise, Plane K is way bigger than Plane R, and there’s no point in exploring it. We had much faster means of transportation.

  Something I could not see grabbed my arm and pulled, like in a judo kind of fashion, trying to knock me down.

  It was time to fight. I stepped in the temporal series and looked behind me. They wouldn’t get to me in there, but I still couldn’t identify my attacker. I stepped out of the series and jumped on top of a rock nearby.

  The invisible force simultaneously grabbed one of my legs, one arm, and my head. I didn’t know Path of Mind that well, but that was a mind blast for sure.

  “What happened to my familiar? Did you end him like you are trying to do with me?”

  Very much unsurprisingly, no one entertained my query. I dove in the tunnel of parallel realities again. I held my time blade while circling the boulder I had used as shelter before. Despite the whirlwind of images, I couldn’t locate the unpleasant mind marcher attacking me. In Plane K, we call marchers those acquainted with the paths. If time walk was not enough to come out of the clutches of my mysterious assailant, I had another skill to solve that. I kept wandering in the time series that place created to keep my guard as high as possible.

  I dashed in and out of it a few times, blowing hits here and there with no results.

  It looked like I was dealing with someone who knew what he was doing, but I still had many tricks up my sleeve. I wielded my blue blade and dashed out my magic tunnel once more. I lingered for a second outside of it by the side of a rock wall towering above the area. My human face reflected on the blade’s smooth surface.

  The mind blast hit me harder.

  My throat hurt, as if someone was remotely strangling me. I tapped into the energy I had harnessed from leaping out the time series and released a time nova—a circular explosion of blue light that expanded all around me. Rocks and pebbles flew in all directions.

  When Plane K’s air returned to its natural stillness, the effects of that powerful skill had disappeared.

  The blade was still in my hand; I wouldn’t release my grasp from it. Nothing was pulling or yanking my body, suggesting my attacker had gone. Mind people always underestimate Time ones.

  I opened a portal with my residual energy and returned to Plane R. I learned a lot about humans. Having someone hurting me clarified that concept of pain that felt so obscure up to a few minutes before.

  8

  James

  Most of my body was like before. I touched my face and shoulders, and they felt just as I remembered them. My arms and legs were in the right place; my nose and ears were there too. When we left that place, Emma had remained in the back, talking to that guy. I didn’t pay attention to what they were saying. I would ask at some point. When we reached the outside of the building, it felt cold, so I wrapped my arms around myself.

  “Where is the big guy?” Emma asked, a step behind me.

  I looked around, but I also couldn’t see him. “It looks like he’s gone.”

  “We lost our tour guide. Sunil was talking about some water pools. He said they are close. They should be relevant, if you consider we’ve seen only rocks until now.”

  She had a point, and that name rang more than one bell.

  “Hang on to my surfboard. Do you remember what the guy said? Where do we go?”

  She hesitated then nodded.

  We began cruising.

  “He said his group had gone to these ponds only once. There were some monsters there, and they ran. I prefer to call them demons. Do you agree on demons?”

  “I like demons too. It’s just … if they are that, what are we then?”

  The noise of the surfboard scratching Plane K’s rock surface wedged between us.

  “Is this the fastest this piece of dirt can go?” she asked, looking away.

  “Let’s see what I can do. Buckle up.” I infused more of my power in the stone board.

  We remained silent. The thought of finally seeing the ponds distracted me from what I learned about myself. I stopped the board and looked before us.

  “I guess they see this place as a six-star deluxe resort here,” Emma joked as she stepped off the board.

  “It doesn’t get better than this.”

  The ponds looked exactly like that—holes in the ground with some water in it, thrown in the middle of Plane K’s desert. We got a little closer. The murkiness hid the waters’ depths; it could have been thirty centimeters or seven meters, couldn’t say better.

  “I don’t think we should bathe in there. I’m not interested in finding out what a fish in Plane K looks like.”

  “I don’t think there’s any fish here. You think in Plane R’s terms.”

  She nodded. “Of course. We are from Plane R, and I’m not forgetting that.”

  We eyed each other.

  “What monsters do you think they saw here? If it’s something too badass, we might have to run.” Her voice sounded both curious and concerned.

  “I know the most common type of demon are those belonging to the Path of Mind. It should be an advantage if you know their skills. Or at least some.”

  A stone rattling nearby stopped our conversation. We both waited for something else to happen, but the low fog surrounding the area made it arduous to detect movement. A jouncing sound resounded farther ahead.

  I didn’t think twice, not even once. I raised a stone wall and jolted it forward, plowing the arid soil of Plane K with its weight. After the piece of rock stopped moving, I heard the rattling sound again—now it spread all around. I didn’t have to count them, but, as they approached us, I could tell those were itchlings.

  Emma raised her hand toward them, and they relented their de
sire for blood. “I can control them, but it’s like someone else is trying to do the same. You don’t know how to do it, right?”

  “Path of Mind is Arabic to me. Can’t do that.”

  Her face was one of struggle.

  One of those faceless creatures kicked and pawed like readying to attack again.

  “Stop them, James! I can’t control these itchlings,” she said.

  A small rockjet pulverized a few of them with no effort. “What is happening, Emma?”

  “It’s not the itchlings. Someone else is here.”

  I saw her lay her fingers on her temples like her head began hurting.

  More itchlings appeared from below the thin layer of fog. Their pointed faces crowded the space before us in a vast number. The large swarm of Plane K’s deformities marched toward us.

  I prepared for battle. A makeshift stone board appeared below my feet, and I grabbed Emma’s wrist and dragged her on top of it. We rushed toward the side of one of the ponds where I had the impression those small creatures were in a lesser number.

  Their eyeless heads swiveled as we moved.

  I tried to count them rapidly, but I stopped when I reached thirty.

  Something bigger emerged from among them. I would have called it a snake in Plane R—a giant one, bigger than those Brazilian anacondas.

  I drove the board closer to the group of monsters, and the serpent coiled on itself, assuming a defensive stance.

  The itchlings charged toward us.

  “I can’t control them. Something is wrong with me,” Emma said.

  It was better to leave. I could accelerate and leave all of that behind us. Something about the reptile though drew my attention. “Wait here. It’ll take a minute.” I dropped her far enough from the ponds.

  She said something, but I didn’t understand her. I didn’t even listen.

  I jetted toward the swarming group of creatures.

  The snake grew bigger as I drew closer. It was him. I knew it for sure; I couldn’t be wrong.

  The board quickened without me even wanting it. All around me, stones and pebbles rose in the air as I bolted toward my sworn enemy, the one I had tried to kill one time before already. A roaring rumble added to the mix, and I noticed the soil moving below me.