The possible answers were too painful.
Whatever the reason, taking Dillon was the biggest mistake of Skullface's existence. Richard would find him and rip the grotesque abomination apart. But first, he had to put his affairs in order. He went to where Carol had fallen and stayed throughout the cold night, the rain hammering at her lifeless body. Her expression now was peaceful, and her sodden hair made it look like she just got out of the shower. Richard lifted her easily, so much of her blood having leaked out and formed a crust on the floor. “You had a good inning, love, but we’ll take it from here.”
When Corporal Martin saw Richard carrying Carol across the forecourt, he frowned. “Where are you taking her?”
“Some place she’d like to be.”
Corporal Martin seemed to understand and showed Richard so by giving a respectful nod before turning and walking away. Richard continued into the showroom, ignoring the beastly Mustang. The GT’s driver door still hung ajar, which made placing Carol inside easy. Richard positioned her upright and held her in place with the bright-red seatbelt. Death had stiffened the old girl's limbs, but he could still position both her hands on the soft leather steering wheel before closing the door. “Drive safe, Carol.”
Back outside, the remaining men and woman gathered. There were less than twenty of them now. “We’re out of ammo,” said Corporal Martin. “We’re fucked. Totally fucked!”
Richard shoved the soldier, shocking him. “We’re alive, you fool. Maybe we’ll be dead tomorrow, but right now we're alive. Let's use that time to make as many of those bastards pay as we can. We lost a dozen good men and women last night, but not before we took fifty of the enemy. Next time, we'll take a hundred.”
“What’s the point, Richard? They outnumber us by thousands. We have no chance. Fighting them is suicide.”
“You said we’re fucked. It’s not suicide if we’re already dead. I’m going to find that bastard who took my son and destroy him. I will do it for Carol and David, and everybody else. That thing killed my wife, and it still isn’t satisfied.”
Corporal Martin swallowed, and he even looked worried. “Calm down, Richard. We have no ammunition, or any idea where that thing took Dillon and Alice. Let’s just bide our time a little and regroup.”
Richard shook his head. “You really think I can do that? My son is out there. I get that you want to stay and lick your wounds, but I’m going.” He raised his voice as he moved out into the open. “Do you all hear me? I am sick and tired of hiding, waiting to be attacked. How long did we cower at the newspaper office? What good did it do? If we act like frightened cattle, then it's just a matter of time until we're slaughtered. But I won’t go out afraid and hiding. I will go seek the bastards out and make them pay. I am a father whose son was taken by a monster. What can I do, but try to find him? The question is, what will you people do with your last days? Are you going to lie down and die while the monsters who took your families—your children—inherit everything we built together? Or are you going to take as many of those bastards down with you as you can?”
One soldier present cheered, and his reaction pushed the group to do the same. Heads nodded and muttered curses flew. Somehow, despite all the misery and loss, people were no longer afraid of the demons.
They were angry. Enough was enough.
Corporal Martin chuckled. Richard frowned. “What’s funny?”
“I was wondering when you’d step up and lead people.”
“You’re in charge, Corporal. I just want revenge.”
“A corporal is not a commander. We take orders from Sergeants. I believe that was your rank in the police force?”
“I don’t want command. There’s nothing to command.”
Corporal Martin shook his head and kept that annoying grin on his face. “Then you shouldn’t give rousing speeches. That’s the thing about strays—you offer your hand once and they follow you forever. These people belong to you now. Good luck, Richard. I’ll be right beside you.”
Richard studied the group of survivors, horrified to see their attention had somehow shifted from the corporal to him. Fine, if they wanted him to tell them what to do, no problem. They would all be dead before the day was through.
Not before I find Dillon though.
“Grab your stuff, people. Say your goodbyes to those we leave here in our memories because we head out in ten minutes.”
Hernandez
Hernandez found navigating England easy. While the narrow and winding roads were most un-American, the street signs were clear and easy to follow. As Portsmouth seemed to be the biggest city in the area, all signs pointed there.
All roads lead to Rome.
All roads lead to vengeance.
The closer he got to his destination, so far unaccosted, the surer he became he would wrap his hands around Guy Granger’s throat. The countryside teemed with rabbits, and even the occasional deer, but there were no people. If anyone was left, they were at Portsmouth, a place the fisherman who brought him here fancied the last Bastion of their ancient land. Hernandez’s ancestors hailed from Catalonia, Spain, and he wondered how well his ancestral home was faring. Better than here, he hoped.
Where are you, Guy? Have you wormed your way into safety, or are you out here somewhere in the wild?
I’m coming for you.
Hernandez knew he had lost his mind to an extent, but it wasn’t mental illness. It was a lack of anything else to occupy his mind. Focusing on punishing Guy was all that was left for him. His old life, his career, his family, were all gone. The only goal still attainable—killing the man who caused his downfall.
How had life come to this? Hernandez had dedicated his life to saving people, and now he was a nomad promising murder. He was supposed to be a hero.
Really? A voice in his head asked him. Do people join the Navy to save people? Doesn’t the Navy kill? Make war?
Hernandez bit at his lip and asked himself a question out loud. “Am I some kind of psychopath?”
“I believe the prevailing term is sociopath?” came a husky voice through crackling leaves. “But the desire to see one's foes reduced to viscera is as old and as human as civilisation itself. Do not admonish yourself for it.”
Hernandez’s heart burst through his chest. He had not heard a human voice in more than a day, and for one to suddenly pierce the silence out here among the trees and fields was jarring. He looked at the old, hairless man and raised his unsure fist. “Who the Hell are you?”
“My name is Oscar Boruta, and you are a foolish man. This is the End of Days, yet you stroll through the countryside without a care for your own safety.”
Hernandez looked around at the open countryside. “All seems pretty safe to me, old man. Your concern is unwanted.”
The old man grinned. Burnt abominations in the shape of men emerged from the landscape, seeping from the bushes and stepping out from behind trees. The old man's grin turned to a scowl. “You haven’t taken a single step without it being seen, fool. It is only your outright foolishness that has allowed you to live this long. I admit to a certain curiosity. You wear anger around your neck like a leaden torc. Your soul reeks like smoking, black oil. A dark heart like yours is a shame to waste.”
“What are you talking about?” Hernandez eyeballed the demons coming closer on all sides. “You’re human. What are you doing with these creatures?”
The old man blinked, eyelids moving sideways like a lizard's. He flicked a forked tongue. “We were all human once, fool, but no more. I am something greater now, a ruler of a new earth. Your life is mine, fool, as is all life fated to tremble beneath the gaze of the Red Lord.”
“Who is-”
The old man ignored him. “That black chain around your neck—who put it there?”
Hernandez frowned, then realised the man was referring to his anger. “A man who wronged me. A traitor.”
“There’s a place for traitors, but it’s been recently relocated.”
Hernandez was t
ired of being spoken to like a child. “Leave me be, Mr Boruta.”
“Do not make demands of a Lord, you worthless insect. I could crush your skull with a blink of my eye. Your insolence amuses me, though, as does the blackness of your heart. I will allow you to take your revenge, fool, for the spilling of human blood honours my master. Go! Go and spread your suffering.”
Hernandez nodded, strangely thankful that someone supported his mission. He took a step forward to leave, but then stopped. He realised he was surrounded by hundreds of demons. They would rip him apart, surely. “How do I—”
“Come here, fool.”
“W-what?”
“DO NOT MAKE ME REPEAT MYSELF.”
Hernandez stumbled towards the frail old man, almost wetting himself, as even the sun seemed to flee. As soon as he got near, Boruta lashed out and nearly broke Hernandez's wrist, clutching it in a crushing grip. Hernandez wanted to scream, but he knew it would only shame him in the eyes of this wicked creature disguised as a man.
Boruta gritted his sharp, rotting teeth and raised his free hand. The nails on each finger lengthened like retractable blades. He sunk them down into Hernandez's exposed wrist.
This time, he had no choice but to scream.
After several seconds of excruciating pain, the old man shoved Hernandez away who bent over double, clutching his burning flesh. “Keep your arm attached, and you will be safe, for now.”
Hernandez rubbed his burning forearm and felt ridges. When he examined, he noticed strange markings scored into his flesh. Scar tissue had already formed over the wounds.
What had the old man done?
Boruta waved a hand dismissively. “Go!”
Hernandez began walking, his legs hollow and unstable. The demons in his way glowered, but they moved out of his path. Within seconds, a dozen of them had scattered, leaving a clear passage through their centre. Hernandez then realised what the old man had done.
The markings on his arm...
He was untouchable. Free to move amongst the demons.
For now, the old man had said. You will be safe, for now.
Better make the time count, Hernandez thought, making his way towards Portsmouth with both hands clenched in fists.
Skullface
Skullface grew tired of battling with the children, so he shoved them aside and into the arms of his minions. Let them restrain the snivelling worms, he had preparations to make. Children of his own to nurture. Their arrival would be glorious. Their plague of pain a joyous event.
Beedle. Molok.
The original connoisseurs of agony.
Skullface trod on the disembodied skull of a dead human and enjoyed its hollow crunch. The corpse was not his doing, but it still pleased him. This field, with its gaudy fairground rides, had laid witness to some wonderful atrocity in days past. The brethren had swarmed here and left a meadow of human corpses behind them. Every seat on the Ferris Wheel had a body hanging from it. The coconut shy's bristly fruit had been replaced with open-mouthed heads; eyes gouged out and placed between the teeth. It felt like Lord Amon’s work. Had his army been here? Scouring the land clean?
Skullface sought to honour the Red Lord with the greatest gift he could give: the gift of his son and daughter, Beedle and Molok. The first humans ever to bask in the suffering of others. Humanity’s first serial killers.
Beedle and Molok, twins alike in looks and spirit, had tortured and gutted a mongrel before they turned six years old. He, their father, had found them playing amongst the animal's innards in the hills beside their home. The murder had not disturbed him, no. He was a proud father.
He was Cain.
His children had murder in their veins.
They killed their first woman at nine years of age. Beedle had wept in the forest, yelling that she was lost and afraid. A nearby shepherd’s wife heard her cries and came to help, but Molok waited nearby with a club and cleaved her skull in two. The children played in the woman's insides until dusk and even took the intestines home to attract more hungry mongrels to kill. Sometimes they ate the mongrels. In years later, they would eat their human victims too.
While Cain had lived a thousand years, his children were young, less blessed by the pure life force of God passed down through Adam and Eve. Every line of descendants diluted that essence and therefore, Cain would watch his children age and die. Before that happened, though, they would show the world true darkness. Humanity could only know light if it cowered from the shadows. That was Cain’s gift to the world.
Balance.
Evil needed to exist for good to flourish, and his children would provide it. It was as God intended.
Yet it was all ruined by a motherless widow. Her tears burned Cain's memory even now, millennia later.
That whore.
Beedle and Molok were in their twentieth year when they brought home the twin girls. They had never killed fellow twins before, or even seen such an oddity repeat itself. Such a thing was rare, and the villagers exalted any children that came in pairs. Beedle and Molok had tortured them for days, cutting off parts and strangling them half to death before bringing them back again. All the while, Cain tended his cornfield, readying the year’s harvest.
The children’s mother had returned home from a walk that evening to find her husband dead—his skinless body propped beneath a nearby willow tree. Screaming without relent, she had feared finding her precious twin girls the same way, but merely found them missing. The men from the village saw the devastation wrought upon the woman and set out with torches and clubs. Rumours had fluttered for many a year that innocent souls fell to the creatures at the shack upon the hill—the one surrounded by the cornfields.
Cain had hidden his identity for many years, known only as a quiet man who traded corn. That he even had children was unknown to most, which was why, when the widow and the mob fell upon Beedle and Molok in the midst of peeling off the dead girls’ faces, they had been horrified. But their horror had quickly turned to fury.
Cain had tried to intervene, but he was restrained by too many men and forced to watch while his glorious progeny were strung up by their ankles as the snarling widow hacked away at their torsos. Cain winced as his children's ribs broke, fought his captors tooth and nail for the three hours it took for the widow to murder them. Then, when the whore was done, the men had pulled Beedle and Molok down and set their corpses on fire.
Mankind had learnt murder that night, and let the darkness in willingly.
The mob left Cain with two broken legs and both hands cut off, a dead man unable to even staunch his own bleeding. But he had left the wretched earth with a grin, for, using the last of his strength, he had visited the murderous widow at dawn, found her sleeping on a patch of hay in her barn. He set upon her with handless arms and floppy legs, yet had successfully impregnated her by the time her screams brought help. Before anyone could drag him away, Cain bled out right there on top of her.
The widow had kept the child.
Enoch.
Sent to Hell to burn with Lucifer and the rebelling angels, Cain found himself unable to locate his children. From Lucifer himself, he learned that God had banished them to the darkest pits of the Abyss, a place he could not enter.
Why God? Why did you punish my children for their nature? They brought darkness to your earth so that mankind could truly enjoy the warmth of your glow. You punish innocents.
You punish my children?
Then the Red Lord had burst forth from Hell's centre and invaded God’s many paradises—each one in turn. Now, Cain would use his captured prey to finally free his children from the undeserved prison. He glared at the two snivelling children now and wished there had been more to pick from. The boy was defective, but would have to do. Children were scarce in any form. The girl was pure, yet resembled his daughter in no way. Again, compromises had to be made. Soon their bodies would play host to Beedle and Molok and humanity’s original serial killers would return.
This time their lives w
ould be glorious and without end.
Richard Honeywell
Rain poured again, the sky so grey, day felt like night. The van’s automatic headlights came on and cut a shaft through the silvery sheets of falling rain. Wipers lunged back and forth furiously to keep back the tide. Richard’s followers were able to cram themselves into a single vehicle—so few of them left.
Richard rode up front. Corporal Martin had the wheel. “Which way?” he asked Richard as they approached a T-junction.
Richard closed his eyes and listened to his blood pulse in his ears. If God existed, this was the time to lend a hand. Please, just show me the way? Which way do I go? Give me a sign. Please.
Movement caught his eye. Corporal Martin leant forward over the steering wheel. “Is that…?”
“Yes,” said Richard, a bemused expression on his face. “That there is a chicken crossing the road.”
Dillon and Alice had fought to save the lives of a group of chickens because they were innocent children who still valued life. If Richard was hoping for a sign from God, this was about the best he could imagine. The chicken bobbed its head without a care in the world, despite the heavy rain, and then disappeared into a nearby hedge off to the left.
“That way,” said Richard, pointing to the left. “We go that way.”
Corporal Martin gripped the wheel and took the turn. As they passed by the hedge, the chicken was nowhere to be seen. Richard was unsure if it had ever been there to begin with. They headed down the road for the better part of a mile before they were forced to stop. An overturned lorry, its cargo spilled across the road, blocked their way ahead. A small slip road led down a woody embankment on the left.
“Skullface could have blocked the road ahead,” said Corporal Martin. “Could be an ambush.”
Richard thought about it but disagreed. “He didn’t go that way.”
“How do you know?”
The lorry’s fallen cargo contained vegetables, fruits, and grains. A miasma of mould festered on the road—blackened bananas covered in fuzz, dried out apple husks withering away like cancer-infected hearts. Yet none of it had been trodden on or disturbed. No apple or banana lay squashed or kicked aside.
Hell On Earth Box Set | Books 1-6 Page 74
