“I heard everything.” Derek drew a deep breath from his nostrils. He braced himself for whatever came next. It had taken great courage to face his indomitable enemies. It took so much more strength to face his own alter ego. It called his name over and over, braying with blood lust, dragging a metallic hook down the stone walls. They hadn’t seen its face yet, but something in its cries told Derek and Leaf that it would be brutally disfigured.
“Yeah, me too. But did you hear the sound of sanity mixed in with all the madness? I could swear I heard a clear voice calling out to us. It was crying for rational help. What do you think that means? Is sanity craziness in this whacked out place?”
“Ah, what’s to lose, bro, we’re already in Hell. When in Bedlam, do like the psychos do, yeah? Let’s check it.” Derek’s eyes popped open wide and his brows went up and down. He nodded toward the only path available in the opposite direction. If that voice had called out to them in reality then that would be the only way to reach its assumed owner.
They descended and the paths shrank to them, vacuum sealing them to the darkness. Soon they were crawling. Derek was forced to climb on Leaf’s back or else he wouldn’t fit in the crawl space.
“To hell with personal space, right? It went from zero to a hundred in like nothing, huh? I’m surprised by how clean your hair is.” Derek pressed his face into Leaf’s hair drawing a deep breath. Smoke rose from his nostrils. It must have been a benefit of Leaf’s dormant serum virtue but his hair smelled like Cohibas in the cinders of his fire.
“Shut up, shrimp. Start groping me and I’ll kill you.” Leaf leaned back to look up at him. His eyes danced in the torch light. Only then did Derek realize there was torchlight in this passage. He didn’t want to think about what that meant. He found himself distracted by his friend’s youthful face and frame. Dying had stripped away a whole decade of care from his shoulders. Only by looking at him now did Derek realize how changed he’d been by all the chaos hunting down the Fulton Trifecta and Leona Kelley’s criminal enterprise had caused them.
“I wonder how much of you and me got swept up in all that mess our lives were. It was just one long episode of supremely crappy. If the word ever got out around these parts about all we know…” Derek let that thought die away in the air, smoothing down Leaf’s displaced hair. Leaf paused in the path to rip several walls of roots and barnacles out of their path. The voice echoed to them again reciting a simple mantra of “Hello? Help. Yo!”
Leaf nodded and cleared his throat.
“Yeah, man. I don’t know how much use it would be. I mean, we are dead, right? It’s not like we can tip anybody off on the other side.” Leaf craned his neck again trying to read Derek’s face. He swallowed. His stomach constricted with the fear of further torment coming to this man that had been nothing but a little brother to him.
“We know way too much, man. Dispensing with tipping people off, we could literally trump this whole system now that we remember everything. I mean, we know Kiara’s history as Bleach and the Keeper of the Hell-Money. That’s how your dad got the insurance to make his super-designs. His drug dependency opened his psychic chambers. If you want to be technical, Lucia designed the supersonic systems that trumped physics. He was the one that implanted your dad’s mind.” Derek groaned and laid flush with Leaf’s shoulders. He heard the screams of the dead. Their hands shot from the clay walls, scraping, clawing.
Leaf gasped as one seized him by his hair. Derek swung his fist, breaking the wrist of the spindly hand. A voice hissed somewhere from the darkness as the noodle limp arm was retracted through the hole it had formed. Worms spilled over. A hundred other hands dove through, along with faces. They were painted like zebras, with blood for eyeshadow. Their teeth were packed with smoldering coals. Hissing, they spoke a strange pidgin of old Tuscan Italian and Catholic Latin. Derek grabbed the face by the hair.
There was a moment of bitter struggle where the walls and the floor threatened to give way. Leaf screamed unintelligibly around the fingers that clawed down his throat, scratching the roots of his teeth in an attempt to carve them from his head. Leaf swung with his knees, kicking as many of the crawlers sailing through oblivions as he could before they got to Derek. Derek was still outnumbered sixty to one.
Flames shot through the wall in an organized path. Derek twisted in the arms of one of his assailants, amazed to see a man standing in the wall wielding an M2 flamethrower.
“Finally, somebody picks up the phone! Lost souls are really bad with conversation.” The man lowered his weapon and plucked a gas mask off his face. Under the mask was an African American about 35 years old. His hair had been singed off and slicked down with motor oil. A moon-shaped scar rose from his chin along the side of his face and curving behind his ear. He smiled, raising a brow in silent question.
“Well, we aren’t lost souls. More like men with a mission.” Derek shook his head, eyes popping wide to see this guy. He turned to Leaf who languished fighting to shrug off the roasted bodies. Derek pulled Leaf free of the dead. He spat blood and two molars into the path, licking his lips to clean away the rest. He opened his mouth wide to pop his jaw which was carved into clean to the bone, exposed to the fly-infested air. His eyes went wide and crossed simultaneously as he studied their random rescuer.
“You seem pretty clear-headed for one of these lost souls you’re talking about.” Leaf scrambled to sit up, slipping in his own blood as he climbed Derek’s arm. Derek looked at him, lips clenched in concern.
Lacerations decorated his entire body now. His bones yawned white and blood spilled from him. A living man would have died already. This place was different in that respect. There would be no dying from pain. They would only be slowed by unspeakable increments until something far worse happened.
“Believe me, man. I’m not lost, either. Doing real time for a royal screw up in their cookbooks, you know what I mean?” The man held up a lanyard with Kelley Pharmaceutical lab passes dangling from the end.
“Dude, you were one of She-Hitler’s interns? That’s heavy.” Leaf wrung the blood from his clothes, eyes rolling, bewildered.
“Not just one of them. The best. I hold the keys to her kingdom.” The guy winced. Leaf’s insides had been scraped out and were tangling like a belt about his waist.
“Don’t be modest about it, yeah, Super Fly. Let’s hear the elevator pitch.” Derek knelt beside Leaf and reached to unravel his guts from his thighs. He squared his jaw, open to talking about anything that distracted him from this.
“Man, I like you guys already. Welcome to Hell, gentlemen. Or actually, worse. This is Poseidon Gates, the ultimate prison to have ever existed in the reciprocal dimension.” The guy tossed his M2 into the darkness. He pulled up a stack of bodies and slumped to sitting on their shoulders, crossing his legs and propping them on another set of throats.
“Sorry, we’re citizen soldiers, not class A scientists. What exactly is a “class A” dimension?” Leaf was turning green. He tried not to look at his guts as they coiled like snakes around him. He wanted to think about anything but this.
“I don’t know, man. You’re Cyrus Manson’s kid, right? Apollo Precinct was yoked up when they heard about you and how you perfect your daddy’s inventions. Then, lo and behold, you and your guys send him and the whole street-chasing Fulton Order down here. Right along with the Devil’s mistress. Go figure.” Their new friend reached into his pocket and pulled out a cigar. He picked up a jagged piece of a crawler’s tooth and cut it. He twirled it over a flaming thatch of dead man’s hair until it caught and sat taking thoughtful puffs from it.
“Okay, so I figured something like that had happened. You’re saying that my dad and his business partners were all part of some psycho alternate-dimensions cult following?” Leaf saw a broken jaw was tangled around the back of his knee cap. Groaning, he wriggled it back and forth to loosen it from his flesh.
Their friend coughed with a bout of faint hysterical laughter that turned into full-on wheezing.
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“Hey, it’s not that funny, okay? Cut him some slack, boss. See, it’s been a bit of a long day. Dying and being chased through the Underworld can really work your acid reflux. You’re the brains and we’re just house cleaners. Tell us what we’re really looking at here, what we don’t already know from our days in their shadows. We’ll sweep the chimney of all the Bad Santa. It’s a free trade, man.”
Derek, at last, had shrugged all of Leaf’s entrails into one long garland. He cupped his palm around them forming them into a basic ball and carefully pushed them back through the hole in his side.
“As a bonus, we’ll even follow them into whatever parts unknown it takes to finally flush this sewer. Just tell us what the heck a reciprocal dimension is and we’ll take it from there.” Leaf tore the belt from one of the corpses. He snatched a long broken hand bone from the pile and used belt and bone together to make a tourniquet for his gaping side.
“Oh, right…You’re just two guys? Up against Dante and the Order?” Their new friend had laughed until he was in tears.
“Somebody’s got to do it, man. Sorry, but what else do we have to lose even if we fail, right? We went to Hell before we died. If it gets worse, at least there're no real surprises.” Leaf eased himself to his knees and beckoned for Derek to lean close so he could look at the gash marks that had torn into his face.
“Amen, Reverend! Now, if you’d be so kind, sir…We’d like some information regarding the uh…State of the union around these parts. You don’t have to worry about us disclosing your name or anything. We don’t even know what it is?” Derek twisted in Leaf’s grip to try and meet their new friend’s gaze.
“Ethan Boothe. But hey, y’all, I can do better than that. If you spring me out of this place, I’ll show you the way through here. I’ll show you where they locked up the serum I invented. The serum that extends an even amount of animation and gives the extended consciousness neurological function into framing its own DNA. A wonder drug that combines all of Leona Kelley’s euthanasia pharmacy and the infamous Andromeda serum, giving us the resurrection serum to trump the others.” Ethan licked his teeth and flicked the ashes from his cigar in a dead man’s mouth.
Silence pervaded. The soldiers tilted their heads symmetrically, faces paled and lips twisting in unvoiced questions.
“The reason I was sent down here…I worked for Kelley Pharmaceuticals all the way back when they first started the super drugs the Feds ordered. You know about that, right? I mean, you boys have got the juice floating dormant in you so the story goes.” Ethan shrugged with a soft sigh.
“We know more than you think. We were the Shreveport secret intelligence that helped rat She-Hitler out of her back up hiding.” Leaf ripped two small pieces from the end of his fatigue’s jacket and used it as gauze to stuff the gaping holes where his back molars had once been.
“Never got the chance to do full disclosure, but as far as the surface world’s deal we know everything. Without our bodies, the memory suppression Leona Kelley put on us in the way past is gone now too. If you’ve heard the rumors about our internship with Vincent Lewis back in the dog days of She-Hitler’s summer, well, they’re all true.” Derek twisted to look back at the path he’d come. His words echoed down what little remained of the clay walls. Who knew what kinds of things might be stalking out there?
“Oh wow. Okay, let me show some respect.” Ethan bowed like a samurai, eyes wide with wonder. He paused, licked his lips and then cleared his throat.
“Right, so anyway, I worked for the company back then. I was like their wonder child. Just a college-aged chemist at the time engaged to a beautiful woman all that jazz. Part of their dream team of assets, you know about it if you know Jane Lewis, her brother Brett was on that team for his sale’s abilities. One of the best when it came to running drugs, chicks, and guns into Louisiana. They called him the Ring-Master because his psycho-active astral projections into this whacked-out place built the world of the Athena Rings, which is like our Gladiator hull down here.” Ethan raised a palm, waiting for them to catch up.
“Yeah, we knew Brett. We also know what kind of low life he became in the grand scheme of Leona’s terror reign in Louisiana. That’s a long and ugly story that would take like an entire documentary to make a note of.” Leaf thumbed the blood from his quivering nostrils, clenching his teeth subconsciously and to his great discomfort. Ethan winced and looked at Derek. Derek smiled, easing himself up on his haunches and leaning forward.
“So, yeah, there’s to name dropping. Man, you were about to tell us about a resurrection potion. Details!” Derek waved Ethan on. That sounded too good to be true.
“Right, I off track a little. Brain feels like a freaking hamster in this hell-hole. Anyway, I was on that dream team. I combined the ingredients of all the She-Hitler’s drugs that she extracted from the DNA of the same animals she used to turn her lab rat children into the psycho freaks they are—Kingsley’s teenaged pals, you know them I bet. I’m the one who really broke down the ingredients label to Andromeda serum for Leona. I cracked the secret on how it turns girls like Jane Lewis into missile-android freaks that would make Nagasaki look a firecracker.” Ethan snuffed his cigar, studying them in its dying glare. He licked his lips, eyes fluttering.
“I’ll break it down for you like this. The drug at its ingredient base uses a hyper-digital transposon response in the adrenal glands and cell tissue of hybrid animals to recycle the natural radiation of a thermonuclear biological response. If you combine these specific animal extracts they actually work like crack for ionized radiation, allowing a body to metabolize it, absorb it where it isn’t harmful, basically turn living things into walking torches. If you balance those drugs with something that has natural potassium or thorium deposits, like bananas and certain clays, you can slow it back down to its initial function that all bodies have. That’s great but there’s something better.
There’s an ingredient, a clotting agent, found only in a young lamb’s blood that if introduced with the raw Andromeda extract will start to absorb its crazy into itself. It will expand like it was freezing or something, turning into a black gas. Introduce the stabilizing ingredients in bananas and clay or other earthy elements, and you get an all new drug. A balanced one that also makes the cells rejuvenate like crazy. It causes immortality in a living organism. It actually reconstructed the cells of a rat that died in our lab and brought it back to life, after it had been sitting in a test bag unnoticed for a week.” Ethan leaned forward, eyes narrowing. Derek nodded, understanding where he was going with his. He looked at Leaf, drawing his eyebrows up and down. Leaf nodded.
“We’re going after the golden sheep or whatever, yeah? This will make for a totally boss story. Get me up, gentlemen!” Leaf applauded the idea. The other two men exchanged a glance, smiling like the fools they were for risking this venture.
*****
Chapter 9
“We’re coming up hard on it now. You hear that? Sweet music. She-Hitler’s drawn my boys in for the grand finale.” Taylor stood on a reef made of human bones. He smiled as the wind lifted his hair off his neck. Kendra climbed up behind him to see what he saw. Her breath caught as a flock of motorcycles topped the hill.
“Hey, Boss-Man. We brought you a new bike. None of those Manson deals, I’m afraid. I can’t afford that fancy, not with this crappy dragon-slaying pay, huh?” Croc closed the distance between them with a figure-eight. He dragged a vintage Indian Scout behind him on a web of chains. Taylor breathed a sigh of longing when he saw the bike.
“Dude, vintage is the only way to fly, right? You’re just in time. We’re standing at the threshold of Athena’s Rings.” Taylor took the bike’s handlebars and looked at the horizon, jaw squared. They’d all actively suppressed the sound of ominous wailing, like Shinto prayer chants hanging in the air away to the east. The sky had turned a deep rust. Teeth and blood still rained on the shoals of this poisoned river. None of them knew how deep it was or where it ended. All they knew is
that around the river’s bend there would be hell to pay. Could they face that last enemy?
“Well, now, look what the cat drug in.” Reilly Riveaulx climbed up the steep salt and molar impacted hills. She leaned on a staff she’d made from a human shin bone, smiling like Shirley Temple. Kendra’s jaw dropped. Of all the strange people she’d met during her adventures in the She-Hitler coverage, the She-Hitler’s daughter baffled her the most.
“Oh, wow, so everybody showed up for the finale. And I must say, Dr. Kingsley the Elder, you’re aging well!” Taylor clapped. He was elated to see the procession following Reilly. When Joseph stepped out from behind her, all the others were astonished. Maybe it was just a side-effect of the OBE or maybe it was something hanging in the air here, but he was de-aged entirely. He looked no older than 35 now. He was ornery as ever and twice as confused. Blinking, he smiled, waving his arms.
“Yeah, I feel pretty good, you know? This place is growing on me, Timlin. Thanks for the tour.” Joseph turned to Agent Timlin who silently walked up behind him, Lindsey and Ivy at his heels.
“Run the plan by us again, Taylor?” Kendra swallowed, pressing a fist to her lips. He’d explained his intentions before some back in Washington. The bitter history of the Riveaulx clan and all their dealings in the dark had sailed clean over Kendra Reagan’s head. It would take decades of deep research on the part of enhanced detectives before justice ever came.
“Basically, we’re going to call out the think tank behind all this lovely crème pie of crap. The master of illusionary tactics, Keith Fulton. AKA Dante.” Taylor nodded. Even the rigid zombie man looked uneasy at the mention of this name. The others exchanged a glance not sure what to make of Taylor’s innate fear of his nemesis.
“You told me so before? You didn’t say exactly why. Why go for an old think tank when you could take out the people at the wheel? Like Lucia or She-Hitler or any of her moguls, that are calling shots on this whole bundle of crazy?” Kendra cleared her throat, looking to Croc and the others to see if they could offer any input. They kept their eyes trained on the ground, their shoulders rigid. Kendra could only imagine the kind of secrets they’d been forced to carry to this their frequent grave.
The Good Death Box Set: A Hard SciFi Science Fiction Series Page 48
