by James Hunter
“I’d understand better if you explained a few things,” I replied, holstering my pistol. “Like where we are and why you’re interested in helping me. I tend to be suspicious of folks who give me a hand out of the goodness of their hearts.”
His nostrils flared again and his face rippled, wriggling like he had a brood of snakes living just below the surface of his skin. “I’m not helping you out of the goodness of my heart,” he said, thrusting a plump finger at me. “You’re going to help me murder someone. A mutual acquaintance of ours.” His eyes narrowed, hate radiating off him in waves. “A man by the name of Arlen Hogg.”
TWO:
Pandæmonium
Arlen Hogg.
Now there was a blast from the past. Last I tangled with him, he was working with the Little Brothers of the Blade at this lab over Hub-side, trying to create an uber virus that’d make a loyal army of the near-dead. I didn’t know his story, but the guy had some awfully powerful backers—including the Irish Morrigan—and was as crazy as a college kid on bath salts. I’d shut him down, burned his mad-scientist lab to the ground, and killed a bunch of his goons. He’d managed to beat feet before I could turn him into meat paste, though, and I hadn’t heard anything about him since.
What could this guy want with Hogg? Hogg had done some brutal, messed-up experimentation of humans and halfies alike, so personal revenge maybe?
Before I could ask him, Levi simply pulled open the door and strode out onto a wide street packed with the hustle and bustle of commuters on their way here or there. Except these weren’t your typical urbanite dwellers. Ahh, no. Not even close. Many were human, men and women of every nationality, but they all looked oddly washed out and pale. Plus, most of them were rotting and moldering, their skin sloughing away in places, revealing ropy muscle beneath or the gleam of white bone. Many of the fresher-looking corpses were missing big chunks of meat, as though someone had taken out a big bite.
Uncomfortable recollections of the zombies Pa Beauvoir had summoned in Cité Soleil flashed through my mind. Except, these zombies didn’t seem all that interested in eating brains or terrorizing the unprepared living. They seemed like people, just dead ones. The craziest thing, though, was that the almost-zombies were the most normal looking freaks in the crowd.
Horribly disfigured people—clad in dusty leather and adorned with barbed wire, wicked hooks, and rusty chains—bebopped along like this was just another day at the office. Most were hairless, their lips and noses carved away, their skin melted like wax or flayed clean off. Other, less human, things scuttled by en masse. A prodigiously fat bald man slithered by on a set of giant octopus tentacles studded with fleshy spikes. Farther up, I spotted a cloven-hoofed woman with saggy tits and decaying wings protruding from her back walking a praying mantis the size of a large Rottweiler on a leash.
And that was just the opening act of this horror show.
There were nightmares of every flavor, in endless iterations, for as far as the eye could see. I faltered for a second as a little girl of ten, with blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a faded floral dress, ambled by on my right. She looked perfectly normal. Absolutely adorable, really. The bleeding heart in me almost stopped to see if she needed help, but then I noticed the bubble of open space she moved in. Monsters on every side shot secretive, fearful glances at the girl and gave her a wide berth as though she were the real nightmare walking these streets.
I shuddered involuntarily.
I’d been to a lot of awful places, but this was the worst, hands down.
Still, I couldn’t afford to stay in one place, and since none of the commuters glanced my way, I edged out into the flow of the crowd. My skin, clammy before, instantly broke out in rivulets of sweat, matting my shirt to my chest, while perspiration exploded across my brow. Holy shit. As unbearably hot as the inside of the room had been, it was even worse outside, and the press of too-hot bodies certainly didn’t help. Maneuvering through the crowd was like doing the back stroke through a pool of liquid magma. The blistering heat was a sucker punch to the teeth, which left me drunkenly reeling, fighting off a wave of dizziness.
Naturally, no one else seemed to notice the ungodly weather, and I briefly wondered if it was just me.
Was I sick, maybe? That would certainly explain a few things.
A few people—again, “people” only in the most generous sense of the word—jostled me in passing, their disfigured faces contorted in hateful malice. Whatever those monsters saw in me gave ’em pause, though, because they all kept right on trucking, biting back any angry remarks. Remembering Molester ’Stache McGee’s warning, I coaxed my feet into motion and carved my way through the foot traffic, stealing cautious glances at the ginormous city stretching out around me.
Craggy black spires, tall as skyscrapers, clawed at an infinitely dark sky devoid of stars but marred by a single blazing column of jade light, which shot upward like a massive blowtorch. Pinpricks of fiery light, which could only be windows, dotted the towering structures like insect eyes while huge veins of glowing magma zigzagged over the building faces. For some reason, all I could think of were termite mounds. Ginormous, otherworldly termite mounds. Though the unnatural buildings flanked me on either side, stretching forever upward, the street itself was filled with shops.
I mean, they didn’t look like shops, just twisted black mounds with crude doorways slicing into the huge termite-towers, but the riot of neon signs advertised the wares within. One sign, burning a merry fire-engine red, looked like another motel: Wayfarers Rest. Another advertised high-quality body-shop work, but instead of mufflers or head gaskets, there were actual human body parts dangling in the grimy window: hands, arms, feet, lungs. Other signs—fallout green, lightning-strike blue, cotton-candy pink—boasted everything from sex and pain to gambling and food.
Honestly, I was expecting the weird shops, but there was also a variety of mundane businesses, which gave me real pause: Payday Loans. Greasy spoon fast-food joints. A ghoulish lingerie boutique with monstrous mannequins sporting far too many limbs. There was even a shop offering tax-auditing services—“Don’t lose an arm and a leg this tax season,” their sign read. I simply dropped my head, refusing to look at the twisted cityscape, the horrible shops, or the stomach-churning city folk, and forced my feet to keep on keepin’ on.
Survival was the important thing now, and survival meant not gawking like some country bumpkin in the Big Apple for the first time. That was a surefire way to get picked out as an easy mark in a place like this.
Levi trudged along at a good clip, so I picked up the pace, each footfall churning up a small cloud of dust the color of chalky cat litter. I raised a hand and covered my mouth, blocking out the fine grit fighting to get into my nose and clog my lungs. Like the oppressive heat, the dust didn’t seem to bother any of the other denizens, so my odd gesture drew a few unwanted eyes, but I couldn’t help it—the shit made it impossible to breathe. I edged my way past an emaciated woman with two hairless heads and found my flannel-wearing guide waiting patiently for me at a tight intersection.
He was leaning stiffly against a stone wall, shooting for casual and inconspicuous.
He failed spectacularly.
I hadn’t known Levi for long, but I got the feeling he wasn’t really a casual sort of guy. No, he looked perpetually uptight, like he had a stick shoved so far up his ass he wouldn’t be able to sit right. And as for inconspicuous, the guy was groping the wall with one hand, his muddy eyes hazy and unfocused, lost in whatever strange magic he was up to. After a few seconds, he snapped out of the trance, his gaze latching onto me. He nodded and jerked his head toward a connecting street, one lined with more shops and filled with more weirdos, which quickly snaked out of view.
I beelined toward him, cutting through the ebb and flow of bodies.
“Think we might’ve lost them,” Levi said matter-of-factly as I drew near. “They’re still in the area, though, so we need to be careful. Come on, we’ve got a ways to go before we
get to the safe house, and a lot can happen between here and there.” Without offering any other explanation, he turned and headed down the connecting street, sticking close to the wall so he could drag his plump digits along the stone.
“How’s about you tell me who is after us? I might only have one eye, but it works alright. I can keep watch if you tell me what to watch for.”
He stole a sidelong glance at me, then shook his head. “If you see ’em, it’s already too late. From that close, they’ll taste your scent in the air and be on us like a school of piranha.”
“Still,” I replied dryly, “I’d feel a tad bit better if I at least knew who I should be on guard for.” I absently squeezed over to the left, making room for what I could only call a minotaur. The passerby had an actual bull-head and was covered head to toe in coarse brown hair. Poor fella had to be hot as balls. He certainly smelled like he was hot as balls—the odor wafting off him was a delightful perfume of musty cheese and rotten old cabbage.
“Flesh Eaters,” Levi replied, pitching his voice low and eyeing the passing minotaur suspiciously, as though afraid of being overheard. “They’re Asmodeus’ secret police.”
Asmodeus again. The name was so familiar—like it should be easy to remember, like it should mean something to me—but it didn’t.
“You say that like it oughta mean something to me,” I offered, before stealing a look over one shoulder. Maybe Levi’s paranoia was spreading, but it almost felt like we were being watched. Nothing. Just the awful heat, the press of unnatural bodies, and the warren of shops illuminated by the constant glow of neon lighting.
“But I can’t remember anything,” I continued. “Not you. Not this place. Not Asmodeus. None of it, pal. So maybe you could pretend like I know all of jack shit and start at the beginning. Just tell me who this Asmodeus guy is, why he’s sending people after me, and where we are. I’ve traveled all over Outworld, and I’ve never heard of a place like this. Never.”
Levi sniffed, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You really don’t remember any of it?” he asked, voice brimming with skepticism. “No recollection since Ong?”
“Sorry.” I tilted my head and puckered my lips into a thin line. “Bad, bad hangover. I’m sure you know how it is.”
“Maybe I do,” he replied with a cryptic nod. Carefully, he ran squat hands over his pants, his thin lips pressed into a tight line. “Your memory loss is probably a side effect of the exorcism,” he threw out offhandedly, like it was no big deal. As though ritual exorcisms were as commonplace as picking up a carton of milk from the store. “It should come back to you in bits and pieces,” he continued. “As to where we are, you’ve never heard about this place because most people who come here don’t leave. We’re not in Outworld. We’re past Outworld. In Hell.”
“Hell?” I asked, the word distasteful in my mouth. That couldn’t be right.
Demons occasionally crossed the threshold, but the living didn’t go to the Underworld, and the dead, in turn, didn’t venture back to the Mortal Planes—Inworld or Out. Ghosts and specters managed it by not crossing over in the first place, but once over … Well, that was it. End game. Checkmate. The final nail in the coffin. And to top it off, Hell’s gates were guarded by Arawn the Horned, Protector of the Unfettered Fae, who maliciously hunted down any unfortunate soul stupid enough to try and escape from the fires of the Great Below.
No one got past Arawn—that psycho was more dangerous than a dirty bomb.
Levi nodded his head. “Gehenna,” he confirmed. “We’re in Pandæmonium, the capital of the Second Circle. Presided over by King Asmodeus. The same Asmodeus who wants you dead.”
THREE:
Foot Race
We walked on in silence for a few minutes, pushing through the dense foot traffic, largely flowing against us, as the terrible weight of the situation began to settle around my shoulders. Holy shit. Somehow, I’d ended up in Hell—and not in the metaphorical sense of the word. I was stuck, smack-dab in the middle of the Underworld with legions of the damned all around me. I’d always expected to end up here sooner or later, but not this soon. For a heartbeat, I wondered if I’d actually died while fighting Ong.
Was it possible I’d jumped down his throat but never made it out in one piece?
Everything was fuzzy and indistinct inside my head like a blurry photo, but that didn’t sit quite right.
Surely I would’ve remembered kicking the bucket. Which meant I’d arrived here by some other means. So, for some unimaginable reason, I’d willingly come to Hell, and even worse, I’d somehow managed to piss off the demon lord who ruled over one of the nine circles, which was no bueno.
I had no idea who this Asmodeus was—my head throbbed whenever I thought about him—but in my experience, you didn’t get to the top of the corporate food chain by being an all-around nice guy. Especially not the corporate food chain in the Inferno. On top of all that, I had about a million other questions.
How long had I been tooling around down here in the Great Below?
And what was going on topside?
Was the Savage Prophet—Old Man Winter’s latest reincarnation—still alive and on the loose?
What about the asshats collecting Apocalyptic Seals, hoping to turn themselves into gods?
Most importantly, though, were my friends okay?
All burning questions that I simply had no answers for. Pretty much, the whole world was teetering on the edge of utter destruction and I was stranded in the friggin’ Nether Realm, completely lost in the sauce.
If I could get back to the Mortal Planes, though, maybe I could fix this apocalyptic shitstorm. Anxiety built and built the more I thought about it. The bigness of the problem threatened to crush me under heel and leave me a gibbering ball of madness. But I beat the growing worry back with a baseball bat of pure will and determination. This wasn’t the end for me, dammit. I couldn’t afford to get bogged down by the flood of details; I just needed to stay focused on the here and now—I needed to figure out how to move forward one step at a time.
First, I’d find a way to break out of Pandæmonium. Then? I couldn’t think about then. Escape was all that mattered for now.
“Okay,” I said with a sigh as we headed onto an even more tightly packed street, “so this guy Asmodeus wants me dead, and he’s got goons out scouring the city looking for me, right?”
My odd tour guide glanced at me and nodded.
“So, let’s go back to the basics. One”—I thrust a hand into the air and started marking off my questions—“why am I in Hell? Like how did I end up here in the first place? Two.” Another finger joined the first. “What did I do to piss this guy off so bad that he’d want me dead? Three, why am I covered in glowing tattoos and why is Azazel no longer running the show? And four, who are you and why are you helping me? Obviously, you’re not human,” I continued, “so are you some kinda Hell-based travel guide or something? Do you spend your days on a tour bus, showing visitors around, pointing out all the nifty attractions?”
Levi halted and rounded on me, arms folded across his chest, staring at me over the top edge of his glasses. “Is there something wrong with you?” he asked in all seriousness. “What part of this seems like a joke to you? Because this”—he turned and swept an arm around—“is Hell. And Hell isn’t a joke. It isn’t a game. This is as far from a game as things get.”
I glanced away, not wanting to meet his accusatory glare. Of course this wasn’t a game—I knew that better than anyone—this was my life. “Life’s a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot,” I replied eventually. “Charlie Chaplin said that, and I think it pretty much sums up my story. You just gotta laugh, otherwise you’ll start crying instead.”
He grunted, sniffed, and needlessly readjusted his glasses. “To each their own,” he mumbled, then began walking again. “To answer your question—no, I’m not a tour guide. A lot of people went through a lot of trouble to get me here. Specifically, to find you.”
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“That so?” I replied, listening to the crunch of dusty gravel beneath our feet and the bustle of foot traffic around us.
My guide abruptly stopped, holding up a hand to silence me as he stared around, wide-eyed and slightly panicked. The crowd around us had thinned, folks giving us a wide berth, but nothing else looked out of place. Well, everything looked out of place, but nothing looked more out of place than it should, considering the circumstances. Levi dropped to a knee and squashed his palm flat against the gritty earth, his fingers digging divots into the dirt.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, feeling goosebumps break out along my arms and legs despite the ungodly heat.
He shot back to his feet, ignoring me completely, his gaze roving urgently across the mass of deformed Hellions. His breath caught a moment later; it sounded like someone had just decked the poor guy in the gut. A clamor from behind caught my attention—a string of deep guttural curses filled the air with threats of violence followed by squawks and shrieks of protest.
Keeping my head low, I turned, surveying the congested street, and immediately caught sight of two gangly sons of bitches in black bondage leathers—zippers, hooks, and barbed wire running every which way—rudely shoving their way through the crowd. These ugly assholes stood head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, moving on over-long spidery legs, their rail-thin arms swaying as they walked. One had stringy black hair while the other was as bald as a spoiled egg; both wore black ventilators and thick steampunk goggles embedded directly into maggot-white skin.
“Flesh Eaters,” Levi muttered under his breath. “They found us.” He turned toward me and wrapped a hand around my forearm, his grip as strong as a steel cuff. “Keep close and keep up,” he admonished before wheeling around and barreling into the crowd, tossing people aside like a professional linebacker.
