Soulfall (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 2)

by Shaun O. McCoy

  Herring boxes without topses

  Sandals weren't for Clementine.

  The Erebus, it’s fighting against me. I tried to be optimistic, I tried to convince them I knew which way to go, but I feel its hopelessness creeping in around the edges. I can see the dead look in Aiden’s all-but-black eyes.

  But he’s running. He’s awake. He’s as alive now as he’s been in weeks. I will not let this place take me because dying here is only the second worst thing that can happen.

  Drove she ducklings to the water

  Every morning just at nine,

  Hit her foot against a splinter

  Fell into the foaming brine.

  More stone ribcages line the walls. I see the poor bastards who’ve been trapped here for only the Devil knows how long, caught up behind the granite cage bars. If we fail, we’ll end up like them. Not dead, no . . . the Erebus, or that hatred emanating from below us, would never let the dyitzu finish us off so quickly. This one is eviscerated, just like the man we saw before, only there are rats eating at his guts. His guts must be regrowing at just the right speed because the rats don’t seem to be making any progress.

  But that’s nothing.

  That’s not pain.

  I round the next corner to see my own grave.

  Ruby lips above the water, Myla sings.

  Blowing bubbles soft and fine,

  It looks exactly like the one I’d imagined. Exactly, and I feel the weight of those fifty imagined years of grief because here, in this Hell, imagination is reality.

  But alas, I was no swimmer,

  So I lost my Clementine.

  The hell is wrong with this song? How the fuck do I know the lyrics? It has to be someone else. It can’t be coming from my mind.

  “Leave it!” I yell, jumping over my own grave.

  “But it’s got your—” Aiden begins.

  “I said leave it!”

  But he doesn’t know that it came from my mind. He thinks it’s Hell that put the grave there.

  Jesus, he might start to lose faith in me.

  How I missed her! How I missed her!

  How I missed my Clementine,

  Till I killed her little sister,

  And forgot my Clementine.

  The fuck? That can’t be how the song went. Hell must be warping the words or something.

  Stairs, leading us up! Thank the fucking Infidel. Something is going right for us.

  Then the miner, forty-niner,

  Soon began to peak and pine,

  I thought he oughter join his daughter,

  Now he's with his Clementine.

  “Shut up!” I yell. “Myla, that’s not how the song goes!”

  But Myla isn’t here, or at least she’s not really here, and shouting her name only makes the figment of her singing to us become more real.

  Aiden stops, one foot poised in the air over the next step. I look with him back down the long flight of stairs. Q, Cid and Neb turn around too. There’s a naked little girl at the bottom. Her skin might be grey, like the babies before, but it’s hard to tell in the light. She’s emaciated, and I can see her ribs and the awkward juts of her hips beneath her sunken stomach.

  Neb shrieks. He stumbles backward onto the stairs, his feet kicking to try and propel him upward.

  The girl’s mouth opens. “Ich kann Sie nicht sehen!” Her voice is high pitched and desperate. “Ich kann Sie nicht sehen!”

  Q helps Neb to his feet and I start backing up the stairs. She’s speaking German, so she’s obviously from the Necromancer’s mind.

  “She’s not real, Neb!” I yell. “You’re imagining. . .”

  But it doesn’t matter if he imagined her or not. The fact that she came from his mind does not mean she’s not real.

  I trip over something on the stairs. It’s a shoe, an old looking shoe, like one a child might wear. And there is another on the next step, and another. Some are for adults, some for children. Some for men, and some for women. They’re all made in an elder style, though, like something from the 40s or 50s.

  There is light above and the stairs lead us into a room—a huge room—filled with so many shoes that they form a fifty foot mountain, soaring up almost halfway to the dark ceiling.

  I check back down the steps, but I don’t see the girl.

  I see an exit on the far side of the room ahead. I step onto the mass of footwear. It’s like trudging through snow. Hell, maybe one of these pairs would be better for me than Jessica’s.

  Everyone is following me, step by step—except Nebuchadnezzar.

  The shoes seem almost to melt away under his feet as he steps and they cling to him as he tries to climb after us. El Cid reaches back and grabs his arm. He pushes forward with her help. It’s getting worse, the shoes are dragging him down. El Cid’s strength isn’t enough to help.

  He’s waist deep.

  Q grabs his other arm and starts pulling. Aiden and I stop. I rush back down a few steps, bringing a small avalanche of shoes with me.

  Shoulder deep.

  Neb looks horrified. This must be a room from his mind, but what could it possibly mean? How could something as innocuous as shoes hold such terror in his psyche?

  “Come on, Neb!” I shout. “We need you for the Furies!”

  Neck deep. Q and El Cid are pulling, but his weight is taking them down.

  El Cid is shouting at Neb, but I can’t hear her over the hellsong. God, how many shoes did he imagine? A million? Two?

  Fear takes me.

  Six.

  Six million pairs of shoes. I’d learned that in school. At the camps they’d take the victims’ belongings and sort them into tremendous piles.

  “We forgive you!” El Cid is shouting.

  The hellsong is all wrong. It’s not Myla anymore. It’s a girl calling, in German, “Ich kann Sie nicht sehen!”

  “I said we forgive you!” El Cid’s voice cracks as she screams.

  Neb looks up at her, blue eyes wide. For a moment he stops sinking.

  “We forgive you,” she continues. “You’re not one of them anymore, Neb. You’re a traitor. You betrayed them. It took you a long time, but it happened. You’re on our side now. Do you understand? On our side.”

  Nebuchadnezzar is crying. All his pretentions of mental health and stability are lost. In their place is the pathetic shell of a war criminal who’s suddenly been forced to come face to face with his own mind.

  Soulfall has given his conscience teeth.

  “They’ll never forgive me,” he insists.

  “We do!” El Cid spits as she yells. “I speak for us. I forgive you. We forgive you. You’re fighting with us—”

  “The Infidel,” I interrupt. “Say it now. Accept his offer. He can absolve you of your guilt. You know he can. He wouldn’t have offered it to you if he couldn’t.”

  Those Aryan eyes open with wonder, and for a moment, it seems as if he truly can be redeemed.

  “Ich nehme an,” he whispers. “Nehme an.”

  He crawls forward, and the shoes seem to no longer want him. Symbolically, it’s a Jewish girl and a black man who drag him to his feet.

  We make our way around the mountain as fast as we can manage before climbing into the passageway beyond.

  There the Infidel, or the figment of him, sits waiting for us.

  “He loves you,” the Infidel tells Aiden.

  Then he nods back over his shoulder to where more stairs rise. At the top of those stairs I see the swirling darkness of the Erebus. The hellsong mounts in my ears, but I don’t give a damn about its version of Clementine.

  We’re getting Aiden as close to Sheol as we can, and I’ll kill anything real or dreamed that stands in my way. Q and Cid rush past me as I drag the gaping Aiden away from the Infidel.

  I hear it now, a distant noise, a shout or a call or something like that. It reminds me of a train.

  “The Furies.” El Cid freezes where she is on the top stair. “It’s time,” she says quickly.

&nbs
p; Q turns to me. He kneels, but since he’s a few steps up, his eyes are level with mine. He offers me his sword, hilt first.

  I take the blade.

  “No,” Aiden’s small voice trembles. “We need you!”

  “They can’t help us,” Nebuchadnezzar says. “Nothing can face the Furies. Nothing. I can trick them, make them attack the undead on the upper city, but no one can defeat them.”

  El Cid drops to one knee as well and offers her small white sword to Aiden. He takes it. The blade trembles in his tight fist, its white light vibrating across the stones. The sword, sized perfectly for El Cid, seems oddly large in his hands. El Cid hurriedly takes one step down. For a moment, I look up into her beyond-green eyes. She puts one hand behind the back of my head, cupping my neck. She pulls me forward and presses her tiny lips into mine. For half a second, her tongue flicks along my tongue.

  She takes my pack and passes me by.

  Q slings Neb’s pack over his shoulder and embraces me fiercely. “I know you have to do this, live or die.”

  He follows her.

  “I’ll be right after you!” Neb shouts to them.

  For a heartbeat, I watch the infidels descend the stairs. Without them, I feel naked. I shouldn’t. I faced a decade of Hell on my own. And technically, I’m one of them. Only, without much of their training, I don’t feel like an infidel.

  “Follow me.” My voice sounds rough, confident . . . not at all how I actually feel.

  I run up into the Erebus, toward the rush of the dark air and the streamers of electricity, headlong into the nightmare reality, toward the call of the Furies and the wall of undead, toward the life of my son.

  I can tell where Aiden is behind me from the bouncing glimmers of white light that reflect off the stone bricks and rubble which line the mountain ahead of us. I climb its steep slope. I turn back to look out across Soulfall. . . and I shouldn’t have.

  The cliff wall beyond rises like eternity. Distant now, small as ants, I can see the silhouettes of the dyitzu in their caves. Their fire starts coming at us, defiantly shining out as miniscule pin pricks of red light which grow infinitesimally larger as they approach through the torrential ripples of the Erebus.

  The stuff of the river presses now against my skin, like an unholy wind. I feel it rustling through my hair and soaking into my clothes. I watch it part just slightly around Q’s blade. Its rush is a hollow sound in my ears. Over it, and very faintly, I hear the long cries of the Furies.

  I look to my right, upstream, to watch the rush of the river and the cords of electricity. I see the score marks on the stone where the lightning had touched down some time ago. I hop up over a broken stone wall and climb along the side of a pillar. The stones are slick under my free hand and the dark taint of the Erebus collects on my fingers. I’m breathing it in. The air is bad, but so am I.

  “Almost there!” Nebuchadnezzar calls.

  To his right, woefully off target, a ball of dyitzu fire explodes against the side of the mountain. There is no way to climb and keep watch behind me to make sure that I don’t get hit by a lucky blast. All I can do is hope as I crawl up the mountain.

  I spot another shortcut, a crumbling wall that had once been the side of a building. I try to climb it, and maybe I could have if I wasn’t carrying Q’s sword. Instead, I give up halfway, and run laterally across the ruins of Soulfall until I see a set of wide marble steps.

  A dyitzu fireball explodes in front of me, its red light welcome in the sea of dimness that surrounds me. I step around it as I hurry up the steps to the plateau.

  There are the dead.

  It’s not really a plateau at all, but an agora made of obsidian-black whetstone bricks. Nothing can cut whetstone, except apparently for the stonemasons of the Ancients. Perhaps that substance repels the lightning like Neb was saying, but over the centuries, the streams of electricity appear to have leveled many of the buildings whose ruins surround this black-bricked plain.

  My legs are burning in pain, but there is no time. I run forward as fast as I can.

  The undead are spread evenly throughout the agora. The closest ones notice us. They turn their heads first, and then their bodies. As they do so, they disturb the ones behind them.

  I skid to a halt.

  In places beyond the mass of the dead, along the edge of the plateau, black pillars of forgotten buildings still stand like the blackened bones of long dead skeletons.

  The dead start advancing, a few at a time.

  Now I see the far wall—I see Sheol. There, across from us is the Hell beyond, my next afterlife, my next destiny. The place that I have to take Aiden to the edge of, if only to ensure he does not go there.

  But there is no way to get Aiden close to it. The corpses are too thick. Even if we still had bullets, even if we had Q and El Cid, I’m not sure we could fight our way through them. All this way to fail? Maybe we can climb around the edges. Get on the cliff and . . . but that’s too slow. The Furies are coming.

  Hell, the dead are coming.

  Maybe we’re close enough.

  “Can you feel it?” I shout to my son. “The ether?”

  He closes his eyes and extends his fingers. Then his head shakes. “No.”

  Neb puts a hand on my right shoulder. “There!” He shouts, pointing ahead.

  His grey overcoat, stained with the blood of children and the black soot-like residue of the Erebus, ripples in the wind-like current.

  “What?” I shout.

  “There! The bridge! We need to get Aiden there.”

  I see what he’s pointing at, on the far side of the agora, but there’s too many of the dead.

  “The corpses!” I shout.

  The first of them is only ten feet away. I dart forward on shaky legs and swing Q’s sword. I miss, my blade coming up short, but I get the thing across the jaw with my backswing and again in the chest as it stumbles forward. Q’s blade is unbelievably light and preternaturally sharp. The corpse falls to my feet.

  “Stand back!” Neb shouts.

  Another is going for Aiden. I take a couple of side steps and stab it in the ribs. It turns, clawing at me. One of its soot-covered hands grabs my shirt and I feel its rotten nails cutting into my flesh. The Furies howl with my anguish. I turn Q’s blade and kick the corpse back. There’s more, many more, some only twenty feet away, standing shoulder to shoulder. There’s no way I can cut that many down. We’ve got to run, only I can’t make myself do that. I’ve come too far. I’m too tired. It’s time to die.

  El Cid will understand.

  I breathe in the dark air and scream.

  “I said stand back!” Neb’s voice cuts through the howl of the wind and the Furies. “Zurücktreten!”

  I do as he says. Aiden steps up next to me.

  The grey Nazi overcoat falls off of Neb’s shoulders. He walks forward to meet the wall of undead. They are wearing the clothes of the ancients, white togas turned black in the centuries they’d been exposed to the Erebus. Who knows what lives they lived before equal parts of Hell and corpsedust twisted them to serve this dark purpose.

  Neb holds his hand to the sky and the rush of the Erebus obeys his command—and of course it does, because here, in Soulfall, the world around us obeys our minds. The bad air rushes around him, half whirlpool, half dust devil, roiling and spinning. His blond hair and dark undershirt whip about in the wind. Hair and flakes of dead skin come off of the corpses, swirling about in the gusts.

  He holds forth his pouch, filled with the products of whatever mad alchemy he has at his disposal. Of course he doesn’t fear the dead. He is their master, their piper, their king—their Fuehrer.

  He digs a handful of dust out and holds it over his head, offering it to the Erebus. The current picks it up, swirling it around to the drumbeat of hellsong, spreading it in concentric circles across the mass of undead, across me and my son, across the shells of buildings.

  The undead stop, and they turn away.

  That’s when I see the Furie
s.

  Neb is shouting in my ear and grabbing at my shirt. I can feel the cloth brushing against the wounds the corpse left in my shoulder, but I don’t care.

  I see them.

  Three Furies, swimming upstream through the Erebus. Distant white lights, like angels, darting toward us. They look like women, white robes flying behind them. They are too far away for me to be sure, but I think they have many arms.

  “… too random…” Neb’s voice sound’s hoarse. “I couldn’t get . . .” The three Furies call together, and I cannot hear the necromancer over them. “. . . do you understand? I couldn’t get them all . . . some will still attack you.”

  A dyitzu fireball crests the stairs behind us, soaring up through the endless abyss.

  I try to focus on Nebuchadnezzar. The undead. He didn’t get all the undead. Some will still attack us.

  “You have to . . . now!” He’s shaking me. “Now, Cris! You . . . to take Aiden now!”

  Nebuchadnezzar turns and runs.

  I hold out my left hand. Aiden doesn’t seem to be in any pain. And why would he? Nebuchadnezzar told him the Erebus would take away his misery, and so it has. I feel his small hand in mine. I see the ones Neb was talking about, the undead he didn’t affect. They are coming toward us still, but they are adrift in the sea of Neb’s mob.

  Aiden and I move through the crowd, darting with them and around them. The hands of our enemies come at us from behind the shoulders of dead strangers. I cut at the dead, ducking beneath their reaching arms. I do my best to keep Aiden clear of them, but mostly we just run. We knock good and evil corpses away with equal vigor. The drumbeat of the hellsong is loud enough to shake my heart, and it grows stronger as we approach the bridge. Of course it would, our minds gain strength over the environment as we make our progress.

  Aiden gives out a small shout. One corpse has managed to grab hold of his shoulder. He stabs up at it with El Cid’s white blade. The thing jerks back, dead hands clutching, ripping off a piece of Aiden’s ear. I strike at it too and drag my son around another corpse. The slick motor oil of a half man, half wight leaks down the side of his neck.

  The next one catches my thigh. I hack at the limb, once, twice, three times, before I disengage it, ripping off some of my pants and some of my skin with the effort.