The infidels call them pigmiditz, or pigs for short. I just call them imps.
“Heads up!” El Cid calls.
I realize that the ceiling is covered with them. They’re crawling upside down like little exorcist babies, trying to get over us. El Cid lights up the room with three-round bursts and the imps start falling like rain.
“Faster!” Cid yells.
Stroke.
The first one I spotted drops from the ceiling and lands right on the stern of the gondola, a foot away from Neb’s head. The Nazi shrieks.
Stroke.
I lean forward, getting the Old Lady within point blank range so that stray buckshot doesn’t kill the Aryan necromancer before his time, and fire. Its shoulder and face explode as its body topples backward.
Stroke.
Its corpse hits the water to join the splashes of the ones El Cid is killing.
Neb shakes off the panic and starts firing.
Stroke.
They’re dropping all around us now and not all of them are dead. They start swimming toward us, heads bobbing like rats. I see one as a silhouette against the azure light of the river, a foot or so under water. It spreads its wings and launches itself up through the surface, droplets glinting in the light, heading right for Cid’s back.
With a quick shift, I launch a volley of buckshot at it—mutilating it. The creature hits Cid, but bounces off of her, falling into the water on the far side. Cid turns with the hit and fires. And fires again. She switches clips so fast I can barely detect the extra pause between her shots.
A trio of imps plummet dead to the stone bank, one after another. I hear Nebuchadnezzar take a shot with his Luger. The hollow sound of the Nazi weapon fills the chamber as a fourth imp falls, crashing into the river.
More are coming at us, darting through the water.
“Neb!” I yell. “Below!”
I switch my grip on the Old Lady as a wave of golden imps breaches the surface, rocketing up toward us.
Nebuchadnezzar shoots one down as I Babe Ruth another. El Cid ducks the third which sails over us. The necromancer holsters his Luger and picks up the pole.
Two more waves come. Neb and I knock them down as El Cid pivots about, shooting the imps on the ceiling closest to us. One, flailing after taking a round to the chest, bounces off the edge of our boat before falling into the water.
We’re almost out of this room. As the imps lunge toward us, they fill the air with a fine mist. The cool water is invigorating.
I hit another with the butt of the Old Lady and droplets of black devil blood joins the spray and coats my face. It tastes different than human blood. It’s bitter, and like the hungerleaf wrap, it makes me feel alive.
El Cid fires one more round as we enter the tunnel.
Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.
Shells, blood and one dead imp lay at the base of our boat. I pick up a shell, still hot, off of my son and toss it aside. Neb uses the pole as a lever to flip the tiny devil corpse out of the gondola.
Stroke. Stroke. Stroke.
The next room is larger, stretching almost half a mile. The river here widens into a lake. The light seems a tinge more green, and it barely touches the domed ceiling which hovers some three hundred yards above us. Along the shore, over the ruins of a fallen stone city, and all along that domed ceiling, the imps see us.
I feel no dread.
Q laughs.
“Faster.” El Cid’s breathy voice makes my blood boil.
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
A horde of the imps dive into the water as we speed toward the center of the lake. The ceiling is crawling with them, like an army of evil three foot golden roaches climbing to intercept us.
“Schaben,” Neb says, blue eyes narrowed, the nostrils on his Roman nose flaring.
I’ve no clue what the fuck he just said, but I know I agree with the sentiment.
Jesus those fuckers are swimming fast. I see ripples in the water on the far side of the lake where they are leaving the shore en masse. That disturbance in the water, and the golden shadowlike figures beneath the surface, are coming at us with the speed of a runner’s sprint.
“What did you say?” I ask Q loudly over the rush of the air and sound of his rowing.
“The ceiling.” Q’s breathing heavy. “They’ve got enough space to glide.”
Shit, they can glide?
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
“More of them than we have bullets,” El Cid says. “Q, where’s your fire?”
Infidel Fire. The one thing the infidel’s ridiculously scientific world view gives them is a good understanding of how to warp the materials of Hell into an explosive. Still, even for them, it’s hard as hell to make the stuff, and if Cid wants to use it, that means she thinks we’ll die without it.
“My pack,” Q answers, “right pocket, near the bottom.”
El Cid leans down and fishes out two metal cylinders, each about six inches long and maybe two inches thick. She tucks them into a pocket sewn into the back of her body armor.
She shoulders her M-16 as I fill the Old Lady with shells.
There are so many climbing along the ceiling ahead of us that it looks almost like they are a molten gold river flowing upside down. The part of the lake beneath them is smooth enough that I can see the reflection of that river in the glowing water.
“Edge right, Q,” El Cid orders. “We need more space between us and the swimmers.”
“Longer route!” Q warns, nearly breathless.
“I know,” Cid says.
Stroke, stroke, stroke.
One of the imps along the ceiling drops. I watch it plummet. Is it dead? No, Q warned me that they glide.
After falling about a third of the way to the lake, perhaps one hundred yards, it throws out its small wings. The imp’s descent curves, leveling off almost completely as it soars toward us.
“Gott im Himmel,” Nebuchadnezzar breathes.
It’s as if that first imp’s flight was a signal. They start coming in droves, dropping from the ceiling like the rain of some biblical plague. A few spread their wings early, others later, but they are all heading in our direction.
I realize that this is probably the end.
El Cid starts firing. I join her. We kill dozens, but there are so many.
“Faster, Q!” El Cid shouts over a pair of three-round bursts. “As fast as you can. Straight to the exit.”
Stroke-stroke-stroke.
El Cid lets her M-16 fall into the boat and draws her thin, white sword from her pack. Q’s blade handle is sticking out of his.
It’s as if he reads my mind because he shouts. “Get it, Cris!”
The head of the imp wave is two hundred feet away.
I draw the purple-bladed weapon.
One hundred fifty.
El Cid draws a canister of infidel fire, not one of Q’s, from a holster where she keeps her sawed-off double barrel. She throws it, not toward the flying throng, but ahead and to the left of the boat. Toward the swimmers that will reach us first.
One hundred feet.
The cylinders have a vacuum tube inside them which draws in the air when their seal is broken. I hear that as a high pitched whistle while the cylinder flies. Will it even work if it hits the lake?
It splashes amidst the golden horde . . . and then explodes. Water shoots up into the air. It’s not just the swimmers right by the blast which are affected. For some reason, the imps for thirty feet or so all stop swimming.
She’s already thrown a second cylinder.
And then Q’s pair.
Their whistles mix together, each at a slightly different pitch.
One explodes midair, filling the sky with fire and sending the imps careening in all directions. Two more detonate in the water, almost directly in front of us. Great geysers of blood colored misty water rise up from the lake.
Q rows us into the falling droplets.
The imps, blinded by the geyser but guided by instinct, come bursti
ng through the mist. El Cid is striking already, adding their blood to the rain. The white and purple glow of our weapons overpowers the azure color of the skystone beneath us.
I slice one out of the air as Neb starts firing his Luger.
One crashes into me, knocking me down over my comatose son. Its beaked mouth tears through my shirt, puncturing the skin at my shoulder. El Cid’s white blade flicks over, cutting through the imp’s skull.
The water rains down on me as I regain my footing on the rocking boat.
Stroke-stroke-stroke.
Suddenly we’re clear of the mist. Most of them have overshot us. I see them through the haze, dropping into the water. The swimmers are behind us now and gaining. El Cid draws another pair of infidel fire cylinders.
“We’ll be out!” Q warns.
El Cid nods and tosses one behind us.
Again, a whistle fills the cavern. The imps swim on, heedless of the explosive. As before, the blast is far more effective than I’d imagine. Even those devils fifty or sixty feet away, while not killed or stopped, seem to swim slower.
The water pressure, I realize. It’s like fishing with dynamite.
She holds the last cylinder for a moment, but it’s clear they’ll catch up with us. She throws it straight up. I watch it fall behind us as Q rows onward.
This whistle seems lower than the rest.
Another geyser.
The lake, once smooth, is covered in ripples and waves. The azure light on the ceiling oscillates madly. The next wave of swimmers draws near. I join Neb at the back, sword brandished.
“Shotgun!” El Cid yells.
Neb loads another clip into his Luger. Fuck the Old Lady, I’ve got to conserve shells.
They come leaping up out of the water at us. The Luger picks two off. I slash another out of the sky, Q’s blade ripping into its wing. They keep coming. I slash madly as Neb shoots them down.
Suddenly, so quickly I almost fall over, the open air above us disappears as we enter a low ceilinged cave. I duck down instinctively. We’ve made it to the exit tunnel. Neb shoots down another pair of imps. I stand back up and slash a third.
I peer into the water as the gondola races forward.
“You can slow down now, Q,” El Cid says.
Stroke.
I turn. El Cid is standing, legs spread, over my boy. Dead imps, and parts of imps, litter the boat.
Stroke.
We’re still going faster than is safe, but it’s no longer the mad sprint Q kept us at in the lake.
I lean down, checking Aiden. He’d slept through the whole thing. An imp hand lies on his belly. I toss it out of the boat and check his breath.
He’s still alive.
I open one of his eyelids. God, his eyes are so dark I can barely see the blue.
I sheath Q’s weapon and help Cid with the blood and the bodies.
Stroke.
“Neb,” El Cid says, picking up a still twitching imp, “spell Q for a bit.”
Q shakes his head. “I’m good.”
She tosses the imp corpse into the river. Its lifeless body floats after us for a while.
Q’s endurance is unbelievable. I didn’t know a man could row that fast for so long, let alone keep us moving afterward.
El Cid looks at me.
She must be thinking that we’ll die doing this.
I don’t mind death, personally. This is something I have to do, but it’s not her fight. She shouldn’t die here. It’s not her son.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “I’m sorry you might die here for a boy that isn’t yours.”
“I told you,” she says, “you’ll make it up to me.”
When I was a child, I awoke from a nightmare that had seemed to last for years. This is the same—except it’s no dream.
I have no way of measuring time. In the beginning, I could remember how many turns I’d taken at the oars, but that was long ago. All I know now is that my arms are dead at my sides—burning with pain.
We’ve run out of ammunition. I was the first, but not the last. That honor went to Q, probably because he was rowing during the imp attack at Portsmouth.
As we journey deeper into Hell, the devils seem more surprised. Perhaps they’ve never seen a human before. Sometimes we can even get through a devil-filled room fast enough to avoid being attacked.
Sometimes.
Without bullets, it’s difficult to fend off the dyitzu. We rely on the rower, whose spent arms are expected to speed us away from danger.
Aiden remains still through it all. He barely breathes. I keep hoping he’ll arise from his slumber, but maybe I shouldn’t wish for that. Maybe the next time he opens his eyes, they’ll be all black.
The river draws us onward, and the farther we go, the darker the shadows at the edge of my vision become. I’m hypnotized by the irregularly shaped cavern walls, by the smooth pull of the water, and when it’s my turn at the oars, by the methodical agony of the beat of my strokes.
At first I think the shadows are growing because Hell is getting darker—and maybe it is—but when I look into the gondola, it’s as if there is a film over my eyes, dimming the visage of my son.
“I need another of those wraps,” I say, my voice dry and hoarse.
Q shakes his head.
“I’m about to tip over, Q.” I’m not lying.
I’m sitting on one of the wooden benches, my useless arms hanging between my knees, my head bowed.
“You can’t,” Q says. “You’ve had three already.”
Is that true? I don’t remember having another after the second one. Or was that the third, and I forgot the second? Who cares? It doesn’t matter.
The boat slows as Nebuchadnezzar’s strokes become less frequent.
“My turn,” Q says.
El Cid stops him.
“You’re point,” Q insists, “you’ve got to . . .”
She ignores him and takes a seat at the oars.
It’s the right decision. None of us can row for very long anymore. In the distance I hear a banshee scream. It’s not a comforting sound.
“She’s coming for us,” I say.
Nebuchadnezzar peers behind us, his blue irises standing out against his bloodshot eyes and the black circles which surround them. He seems more pale than usual. His, like mine, arms hang down limply by his sides. They must also be useless. The Nazi knows my pain, and I know his.
None of us are very alert. Someone has to watch.
I want to stand up to keep an eye on our surroundings. It doesn’t happen. Instead my head lolls to one side as the riverbank passes smoothly by. Here the stones are grey in color, volcanic rock I’d bet, and they’re pockmarked with tiny holes.
They remind me of the pattern buckshot leaves in a body.
Past the grey pitted rocks is a smoother kind of stone. It had been a river of lava once, I’m guessing, before solidifying. Part of that stream touches our river where a mound of volcanic looking stone rises.
Beyond that room crystals appear in the ceilings and in the walls. The light of the river is now a dark green, and the deeper we get, the darker the green becomes. Then some of the skystone turns orange. The ripples in the water make the stones look like they’re burning.
God, are you here? Can you hear me? Is it possible for you to hear anyone in Hell? Would you even want to?
Let me tell you something, God. What I’m about to say comes from the heart, not like when your Christians pray. I don’t know why you like them. They’re a dishonest people. Not dishonest because they tell things they think are untrue. Not because they aren’t trying to be earnest, or loving, or full of compassion. They are liars because they fooled themselves first. They took a wire in their brain and jammed it in the wrong hole. They’re dead eyed, like a pot head, but with more credulity than a man can stomach. Fools. You want to be worshiped by fools? Why? But that’s not what I want to tell you. I want to tell you what I’m saying means more because this is what I honestly want to say. It comes
from a man who didn’t sabotage his own brain or build up stupidity in some reservoir. It comes from a man who has the will to make his own decisions. From someone who doesn’t ask your help or guidance for his every life choice. From a man who’s brave enough to judge you.
So listen carefully.
We shouldn’t have to eat to live. We shouldn’t have needs. We shouldn’t have the power to hurt each other. Why did you give us that? What kind of bullshit was that? I understand why the Devil did, but you? You were supposed to be the good one. Isn’t that negligence? Isn’t that like leaving a child alone in a house with a loaded gun? Isn’t that like leaving someone in an Eden with a tasty self-destruct switch? Isn’t that like, not that I’m the best parent here, leaving your child alone in a street when he calls for your help.
You were willing to let your son die for you? Well fuck you. I’m dying for my son. You got that one backward.
Devil? Are you there? You fell from heaven to create a place of torture? Or was it torturous before you got here? What happened to taking the moral high ground? This place could be an Eden? Right? Couldn’t it—with a little redecorating?
Aiden whimpers and suddenly I’m filled with energy. I reach down into the cold rushing water, dodge El Cid’s metronomic oar swing, and splash water into my face.
“I was nodding off,” I report.
El Cid doesn’t respond.
I pick up the Old Lady from my pack and lay her across my lap. She’s just a club now, but she’s all I’ve got left.
Aiden whimpers again. I put a hand to his head. It’s hot, burning up. My heart beats faster.
Stroke.
“El Cid,” I say.
She doesn’t answer.
Stroke.
“I just wanted to tell you . . .”
Stroke.
“ . . . that I love you.”
The boat glides forward, tugged on by the river.
She picks up the oars and puts them inside the boat. She turns and looks at me. I realize now that we’re the only ones awake. This deep into Hell, Cid had said, it isn’t safe to have people sleeping.
We need to wake the others.
Far behind us, farther off than before, the banshee calls.
Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2) Page 9
