“Well, we weren’t able to locate the children, but knowing Jessop I’m sure he’s got them all secure. We’ve found Lucia’s order. Even he has a Boss. Or in this case seven.” Kingsley’s lips had turned blue. His eyes met Jane’s. They stared at each other for a long moment. Mutual understanding passed between them. They were each sorry for the other that their lives had concluded on this note. Wondering how long forever was in more than just theory, they prepared their minds for battle. They prepared their hearts for pain.
“It’s not like we’re going anywhere now. It’s over, right? Good, let it be over. Guys…We saved the world.” Jane turned to look at each of them in turn. Their eyes reflected the same ominous shadow as her own did. Jane gulped back grief and horror. Why should they be so downcast? They’d succeeded in doing the utmost people could ever be capable of. Whatever came next was just gold on top of treasure.
“You’re right, Jane—but you’re also wrong, as little sense as that might make. Personally, I want to live now. More than just surviving or enduring, I want to experience and celebrate! I want to do more than just pay the piper’s tab now that the rides’ over, you know?” Dexter cleared his throat. All eyes trained on him. Kiara nodded.
“He’s right, Jane. If this is our forever, then we should build it to be something worthy. We’ve inherited a new world and a greater gift in it. We are the conquerors. Shouldn’t we enjoy the spoils of the fight now?” Kiara smiled. Her eyes trained on Kingsley. What he had sacrificed for her had awoken a new spark in her that no one thought could burn as brightly as it did. Her love was flaming, enough to sear the consciousness of Hell.
Jane let out a shaky breath. She was afraid to live by that philosophy. Traumatized, tortured, dead in all senses save one, she was still too unsure of her life’s direction to make that call. Maybe it was time to run in numbers? She could trust them. They were on her side. If she fell, they would catch her. She had no doubts.
“Right. I’m done leading the pack, people. I need a vacation from all of that, huh? I’ll let you guys take the wheel for a while. Say the word and I’ll follow.” Jane straightened her shoulders up. She felt a cross breeze from the compact jaws of the Poseidon Gates cut through her, stirring her hair and lighting electron sparks in it. Everything in this brave new world felt electrified. Static, creation was spoiling for a fight against itself. This world and everything in it was unnatural, on the cusp of its own Apocalypse. None of them wanted to admit it, but they could feel it.
“We know two things. One this world itself is on the verge of revolt and its own furious ending. This must be the reason why they were so hell-bent to use us for their gain. The other thing we know is that our place in the puzzle was the crux of their entire plan. The Achilles’ heel of their own universal domination schematics. If we could use this terrible influence to our advantage, we could reverse all the wrong doing the leaders of this place have done to us and ours in this life and the next.” Kiara smiled. She took a fraction of hope from that ideology. Jane let out a shaky breath.
“Mm, I see. So this is a Purgatory of sorts. We’re going to make it Paradise if we play our cards just right?” Jane smiled at her friends. She turned to face the Gates.
“Yeah, playing the cards is our chief concern at the moment, ladies, and gents. We’re dancing a sword dance of fates with self-acclaimed gods. It’s never a good combination. The balance is precarious and the deeper you go…The uglier it all gets.” Vincent crowded closer, laying a hand on his daughter’s shoulder.
Jane felt a shudder pass through her. Something told her that their next actions would change the course of history for every Universe in existence.
*****
Chapter 4
His back hit the wall. Derek Matheson felt his eyes pop and his breath knocked out of him. Leaf tumbled down the stairs and landed beside him.
He’d been running all his young life. Derek smiled, reaching out to Leaf. He grabbed his forearm and let his hand slide to his wrist. His pulse echoed through his fingertips, heart pleading for the life that he’d shed in fractions.
“Hey, look at you, tumbling down the stairs like a drunk frat boy. The shakes is my deal, man…” Derek leaned closer to Leaf in the dark. They had always been on the run. Ever since they’d begun the journey of their lives together. All the way to this end.
“I was just overcome with grief realizing the freaking Feds are never going to pay us a dime in pension.” Leaf jabbed his elbow into Derek’s side with a playful huff. Derek smiled. In his hallway, the light was dim, shining only in his eyes. His face was so young now. So much care had been lifted from his shoulders once death had been actualized.
“What could we buy with it down here, eh? Worms?” Derek craned his neck. The Order was on their trail again.
“Hey, I don’t know, man. I can feel ocean breeze even down here. Beach front property sound good to you? I wonder if you’d call it an Eternity share since there’s probably no time here, right?” Leaf looked at Derek, raising a brow. Derek laughed and shrugged. He was oddly optimistic now, even for his indomitable personality. Leaf laughed.
“Not gonna make a bit of difference if we can’t get my dad to let us rest in peace, we’d be doing something productive. Other than saving the world, eh? Already scratched that one off the to-do list.” Leaf’s hand tightened around Derek’s wrist returning the gesture. The two of them were walking blind into a war that they had never fully understood. Had it reached its climax when they opened the doorway between the dimensions and sucked their enemies through it? Or could it be that they had only scraped the black filth off the edges of Pandora’s jar, spilling the contents of true evil out into the airways?
Whether they’d gained ground or seriously lost it, one thing was certain. They had each other. They had always had each other.
“Man, just because we don’t understand what the heck is going on doesn’t mean we can be tardy coming up with a course of action. We need a plan. One that circumvents the whole ‘need to know’ basis thing.” Derek felt a current passing through the tunnel. It stung his skin like acid and sent shivers up his spine. Was this a strange fact of life in this place, or a deliberate action?
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, but I have. This place is a packed house prison.” Leaf’s eyes glittered. Did Derek follow what he was thinking?
“Ah, I get it. You want to harvest the Gates of Hell and get the down low from the inmates, huh? I’ve always liked your style, amigo.” Derek winked. He let his hand scan the wall behind them. Leaf took a shaky breath.
“Do you feel that?” Leaf closed his eyes. There was something tingling in the air. A force eternal, sentient in its own motions and yet not alive.
Heat rolled through the prison’s guts. Derek cried out and threw himself on top of Leaf, pushing him to the floor. The heat was enough to turn the sandstone walls to eerily tempered glass. A voice giggled somewhere inanimately. A hoarse wheezing chant rang off the rims of this blown glass plateau.
“A city of gods and monsters…You think you can change it, stifle it? How can you champion any cause if your own worst enemy is the alter ego you manifested with death?” The chuckling continued. Leaf’s jaw dropped. The speaker was known to him first. Derek held his breath, anticipating the worst without being able to guess what was coming.
The smell that wafted their way was one of cholera and battery acid. His rage alone was death’s incarnation, but it hadn’t stopped there.
“You! I thought we buried you!” Leaf stepped away from the wall and balled his hands into fists. A man was coming their way. At first, he was only reflected off the glass, a silhouette the height of a tree and the color of motor oil. As he grew closer his visage caught fire. His eyes burned red and amber with golden flecks of oil that splashed upon the veneer his heat created. His smoldering flesh and rotten core all had a similar shape. This was Leaf as he had been in life, preserved by hate and vengeance’s mandates.
“You always championing y
our causes, always picking your battles and polishing righteousness! Did you forget that your god-ship came from my machine? I am the bones it took to sacrifice while yet alive. I am the roasting, crackling, brewing, festering, churning urn of blood and bones and entrails and ashes that gave you shape and vision. You have no chance without me. Don’t be so high and mighty in the wake of all you’ve had to face! Learn to walk with your demons!” The alter-ego stopped. He raised a single finger, jabbing it under Leaf’s nose. The young soldier froze, eyes crossing as he studied the golden mother of pearl light that illuminated his ash-stained cheeks.
“Who are you?” Leaf grabbed the wrist. Derek gasped in horror, immensely relieved when he realized that Leaf’s body could withstand the flame he’d taken hold of.
“I am the android. The receiver of your creative backwashing. I am you as you were, a mouthpiece of yours as you are, a shadow of what should and might and will have been if you should fail. In all of this, I am an anti-conscious. An agent of hyper-sanity bordering the peaks of psychotic break. I am the path to perdition, laced in poison, in madness, and in rage… Yet the ridges of Paradise are found in my wake. What will you do with all of this is up to you? I am you, so you must choose. I am and I’m not. That’s my enigma. I am Prometheus.” The alter-ego flashed with all this strength. His fire went out. The soldiers stood looking into an unfathomable depth of night as the spirit scaled the room as if testing his parameters.
“Can you dictate life? If you could, you would. Can you create life? You did. I am. Will you transform life? Belief and visuals go hand in hand. I am not unseen though I walk in the immaterial. I am not untouchable. You feel and know, live and breathe. All because I am and you are and we…We shall be forever. There is no limit to all of this.” A flame flickered again, for a fraction of a second. There was a gush of wind and the stinging balm of battery acid that white-washed the walls caught blazes, chasing down the tunnel. Souls in their prisons were illuminated. They scrambled to the doors, clutching at the bars.
“Apathetic. I would care if I could but then I’d need your compassion. Your composure is maddening and puts binds on me, confines on me. You are a spirit and guileless and guiltless! Confining, restraining, oh and limitless. How can you be an enigma and why must I be dogma!” The alter ego version of Leaf tore at his own burning flesh uttering a shriek that cracked the glass walls he’d developed just passing through.
Leaf coughed. The fire from his ghost was enough to asphyxiate him. Shaking his head and exchanging a brief glance with Derek, Leaf reached and collared the creature.
“Okay, so you’re a phantom. The opposite but equal force and consciousness of me, correct? Do you know if there are more things like you? One that looks like this guy? Another one that would look kind of like Jane? You know, Jane, right?” Leaf’s eyes shifted as he looked over the strange incarnation of himself.
“Oh, poor fool. You honestly don’t know the depth of the darkness that has come forth, do you? There is no end to Lazarus or his night. The bars of the Parthenon you’ve unleashed have crushed the Poseidon Gates. Turned the world upside down.” Prometheus licked his lips. He would have gloated over the two men caught in his trap. There is a saying that there’s always another greater fish in the sea. Prometheus flinched as something moved in the dark.
“Cry to God for mercy! Pray if you enter any of the torments here in the great below, pray that you don’t succumb to the light!” Prometheus clutched his throat, choking without explanation. He leaned back, bones bowing in on each other like bending rails. They beat against each other with a sound like drumsticks striking drumsticks. The android creature screamed, catching fire, disappearing into a plume of electrified smoke.
Leaf turned away from the shadow of his burning alter-ego. He saw that Derek’s eyes had gone wide. The Captain swallowed and nodded.
“So, there’s a lot more of those things down here?” He didn’t have a comeback for this. Derek took everything in stride. If he was rattled, then this was a massive deal.
Leaf nodded.
“Yeah, I guess. Which just means more fun for us, right?” He smiled. It was a typical cheeky thing for him to say. Still, if there were any words in his arsenal that he could use to protect his friend from the shapes in his own head, then every syllable was ammunition. This fight wasn’t just about fighting monsters out there in the night anymore. It was about fighting the monsters within the sanctuary of their own souls.
*****
Chapter 5
Kendra’s eyes opened on a furnace world. It took a moment of blinking back charring snow for this to sink in.
She sat up and held her hands up, palms turned upward. They filled rapidly with tiny flakes of ashen powder. The smell in the air was rank, like a crematorium.
“What?” Kendra’s entire body flinched and recoiled into a natural sitting position. A human molar had landed in her upturned palm, the strange half-colored bright yellow and gray of partially burned things.
Kendra looked at it for a moment. She turned it to either side, letting the light catch every crevice. Her heart throbbed against her own teeth, spelling the tragedy as one by one they more molars joined the one in her hand. They fell like stars gone fugitive from the galaxies, marble testaments to human sorrow.
“My God!” Kendra spun in a tight figure eight that slapped mud up into her face. She looked at her surroundings. This was Hell. How could it be anything less?
She looked on in horror. There lay Taylor’s motorcycle on its side, seared, bleeding motor-oil, blazing on its back wheel. All across the land, gallons of blood mingled came down in rain sheets mingled with the continued hail of human pearls.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? My inheritance.” His voice was snowfall on her ears of its own. Taylor was standing there with granite posture, waiting for her to wake like the mountains had always stood sentinel, unassuming. She shifted her weight, eyes refocusing on him in the horror.
Behind him was a massive pyre of human bodies. It was as tall as the Empire State Building and composed of various legions of people throughout the annals of human history. Those who had burned the longest slid like hourglasses, becoming granular ashes. Those in the center warped and exploded showering their teeth and small extraneous bones. Kendra’s breath caught as she looked up into the gaseous air of the pinnacle.
The shapes at the top were mostly unburned, bloated with boiling water that remained in their cells. Their eyes moved in epileptic seizures. Kendra realized that their red eyes and twisting skull like features were similar. What stood out more than anything was how many of them she recognized. They were doubles. Doubles of Jane and hosts of Leona’s Medusa doubles lay in crucifix positions, forever burning there.
Taylor nodded and held up the small skull and crossbones with the flaming red eyes talisman he’d used somehow to open a doorway into this dimension.
“Yes, you can say you’ve seen their faces before. I’ll be taking your questions now, miss. Let me tell you one thing before we begin. Try as you might to cover this story, you can never fully cover the atrocities of this Order or what She-Hitler’s administration has done. It is all consuming…An empire of ashes.” Taylor nodded and swung the small skull and crossbones back and forth like a pendulum.
Kendra stood up, letting teeth and blood cascade over her. This was a religious experience. She felt convicted of every small grudge she’d ever felt in a single moment. It was strange how Hell could exact the obedience ordained for Heaven’s use in the first watches of its night.
“I don’t think I could ever begin to understand this…But I will ask, where…?”
Kendra’s voice died in her throat. She folded her arms. This land was on fire, blazing from its apple-cored centers outward, like a husk of rotten fruit on a trash pile. Yet it was cold like the craters of the moon. Relentless paradox. Hell unhinged.
“Miss, if you have found this place, you don’t have to unravel the entire web that was the Fulton Empire. You will have all the wind
ing paths and corridors that make for it, but you won’t need it. Even here, you won’t need to know the She-Hitler’s mind or the beautiful compilation she, Nero, composed in the middle of burning the empire they created. You might hear the story of this place, but there’s only one small point to gather from here…” Taylor bowed his head. The tough undead biker’s face was changing, taking on a rigid sorrow that’s depth was Marianna but the surface was contoured to hide its depth.
“Tell me…Where are we? What do I need to know?” Kendra took Taylor’s arm. He was stone and fire yet she felt like he needed her sheltering. In all this lonely world, he seemed to be the most solitary if only because he alone was conscious amongst the dead.
“The web leads to its spider, Miss Kendra. Professor Lucia is the grand architect of all the troubles you’ve witnessed. You are in the Athena Rings. The bloodiest place in all of their fabricated Hell and a sweet girl like you finds her way to the doorstep! That’s my fault, I’m afraid, but someone has to tell your story when you go back. Make no mistake, you will go back. This place is like a holding cell for the dead. The spirit never truly leaves the living world you are familiar with because this is a digitally monitored super-holographic Purgatory program of sorts. Lucia created it using the young love and genius of Caroline Riveaulx and the boy called Dante.” Taylor shuddered but nodded.
Kendra looked on across the fields. She could see behind the pyre massive circular walls of iron. Lions screamed from that direction. The blood was pooling and rolling up from under it in that direction as well.
“If you say so, I believe you. I suppose now I get to find out what your master diversion plan was back there in Washington. Also, if we’re in a classified afterlife I guess we’ll be meeting some of the greats of your She-Hitler’s mythology, right? Even the infamous, mysterious Dante.” Kendra swallowed.
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 46
