Hellwalkers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  No.

  He wouldn’t lie down and die. It wouldn’t end like this. He’d faced up to the Devil once, he’d do it again—even though it would be the last thing he ever did.

  “Come on,” he groaned, finally managing to sit up. He rolled the canister toward him, his bloodied fingers grabbing the gears and cogs, pulling it to his side. All the while that bodiless heart beat and beat and beat, growing ever faster. “Come on, you mother—”

  The canister clicked, a pop like the universe was snapping its fingers. Its mechanisms were moving, those clockwork pieces grinding in unison. They were slick with blood, he realized, his blood. He looked at his hand, a ragged gash across his palm.

  Marlow pushed his hand against the mechanism again, felt those pieces rotate against him. Then there was something wet, like a tongue, and he pulled his hand back only to find that he couldn’t. Something had hold of him. He grunted, kicking, his hand finally coming free as the canister rolled back along the floor.

  Empty.

  He looked down, saw something embedded in the wound in his palm—something that wriggled like a leech. He followed it down, saw a grotesque lump of meat and gristle, of obsidian and bronze, of dark light and blinding shadow, hanging from the other end of it. It pulsed madly, its infernal mechanisms gyrating as more of those veinlike threads fired out and plunged into his hand. He could see them there, writhing beneath the skin of his wrist, and the scream was in his throat, burning its way out of him, when the world went black.

  TRUTH KILLS

  If the view from the ground had been bad, the view from up here was worse.

  Pan stared through her gaunt reflection at the burning world beneath her. The destruction was limited but it was spreading fast. The Devil was a pocket of seemingly infinite absence, one that carved a path away from the harbor and through the vast warehouses that sat next to it. A churning cloud of smoke and debris revolved around it, so Herc was keeping them to the side at a steady two hundred feet, low enough to make out the people on the street below.

  Low enough to see Marlow and Charlie trying to get themselves killed.

  “What the hell are they doing?” she said, speaking into the mic of her headphone set. They were running with the canister, almost getting hit by a silver car. Marlow dropped his end, scrabbling for it. They looked like two of the Three Stooges trying to carry a ladder, and at this rate they were both going to be dead in about four seconds.

  Herc had obviously seen it too, because he spun the chopper in a wide, lazy circle.

  “If you’re going to get this weapon of yours, you’d better do it fast,” she said. His growled reply was fed into her headphones.

  “Huh?”

  “I said there’s no time. Goddammit, the nearest weapons cache we have is in Queens. By the time we get halfway there Marlow’s gonna be toast.”

  She ran a hand through the knotted mess of her hair.

  “There must be something else,” she said. “Come on, Herc. No pressure or anything but the whole world is counting on there being something else.”

  He angled around again and it took Pan a second to find them.

  “Can Charlie drive a truck?” she asked, but the boy answered her, the semi swinging around in a wide arc and dragging its trailer behind it. It had to be the slowest mode of transport they could find—stupid stupid stupid—then the semi started thumping through the motionless traffic and she took the words back. The roads were pretty clogged, and the Devil was fast, but at least in a truck they might be able to shake him off.

  They’d stand more of a chance if Herc could think of a plan.

  “Anything?” she said.

  “Something,” he replied.

  He wasn’t sharing, though. Instead he pushed the stick and followed the Devil, staying low. She looked out over the buildings of Jersey, New York glittering on the other side of the bay. How long before everything fell, before the whole country turned to ash?

  And suddenly she was thinking of her old house, over the East River. She wondered if her foster mom was still there, if she still thought about her missing child. Christoph’s apartment was out there too. It was like a punch to the gut, the knowledge that all of this had started there, with her hand wrapped around the cold, metal base of a table lamp.

  Thunk. Thud.

  “Hey, Pan,” said Herc. “You still with me?”

  She realized he was waiting for an answer to a question she hadn’t heard, stared at him until he repeated it.

  “They still alive?”

  “Yeah,” she said, watching the eighteen-wheeler smash its way through traffic. The roads were opening up as they tore south into Bayonne, whoever was driving pulling them onto what looked like the 440.

  Her stomach lurched as Herc accelerated after them. She could feel him looking at her, and when she turned to him again he was wearing an expression that was one part misery to two parts guilt.

  “You were somewhere else, there,” he said. “Wanna tell me where?”

  “Home,” she said, shrugging. “Just thinking back. Never actually thought that it would lead me here.”

  “Christoph?” he said, and when she nodded something shifted in his expression. He took a deep breath, like he was about to dive out the door. “Look,” he said, not meeting her eye. “I never planned to tell you this, but … But it’s changed, hasn’t it? Everything has changed.”

  “What are you talking about, Herc?” she said.

  “Maybe there’s something you need to know,” he replied, clearing his throat. “Maybe there’s something you need to know, and I don’t know if I’ll get another chance to tell you.”

  “Herc,” she said, trying to laugh. “I know you love me, but it’s your face, I could never love somebody with a face like…”

  “It’s about Christoph,” he said.

  And she clamped her mouth shut. Christoph was dead, Christoph was long buried, Christoph was nothing but a memory.

  Herc finally turned to face her. He looked old, like one-foot-in-the-grave old.

  “You have to understand, we needed Engineers. We were losing the war, we were losing too many people.” He stalled, his red eyes blinking like he was trying to send her a message in Morse code. “I didn’t think you’d say yes unless…”

  “Unless what, Herc?” she said. Her palms were stinging and she realized her fists were bunched, nails digging into the flesh.

  “Unless you thought you didn’t have a choice.”

  Choices: it’s what Herc had offered her when he’d walked into her cell that day. She’d been thirteen, she’d killed a man. It had been self-defense, but the cops hadn’t exactly gone easy on her. What had the detective told her? Juvie, prison, and a life flushed down the can.

  Then Herc’s face, smiling at her as he offered her a way out.

  Pick door number one.

  “What are you saying?” she said. But she knew, she knew exactly what he was saying. She just had to hear him actually say it.

  “You didn’t kill him.”

  He spat the words out like they were rotten fruit, running a hand through his thinning hair.

  “You didn’t kill him, Pan. You knocked him halfway to Sunday, caved in his head so much he had to have a metal plate fitted. Hasn’t ever been right, he’s been under medical supervision for four years now. But he didn’t die.”

  The chopper might as well have crashed, because Pan’s world was suddenly burning phosphorus-bright; she was blinded by it. She pushed her head between her knees, a low, awful groan spilling out of her.

  He wasn’t dead.

  She hadn’t killed him.

  And the numbness was suddenly something else, something that rose up inside her, erupting from her mouth. She screamed, pounding at Herc—his chest, his face—scratching at him. The chopper rocked wildly but he didn’t fight back, he just sat there and let her hit him until the rage drained out of her, the shock, the fear, the relief—until there was nothing left inside her but that sound—thunkthud
—the one she’d carried inside her for so long. She fell still, unable to move because Herc had cut the strings that had held her up for so long, that had kept her going.

  He wasn’t dead.

  “I’m sorry, Pan,” Herc said. “I had to. You never would have come. You never would have come.”

  She tried to speak but she couldn’t summon the words. Something inside her had fundamentally shifted. Christoph’s death had defined her, it had made her a killer, and everything that followed had been drawn from that. It felt as if the child she had been, the one who had picked up that lamp and swung it at Christoph’s head, had somehow been erased—and everything she had been since then was disappearing too, eradicated from history. She felt like if she sat here she would gradually fade away, never have been.

  “I’m sorry,” Herc said again. “I’m sorry. But you were the best we had, Pan. I didn’t know it at the time, but I know it now. You were the best we had, and if I had to do it again, if I had to look you in the eye and tell you you were a murderer, I would. You saved the world; everything you did, you held off the darkness.”

  Until now.

  She looked down to see the Devil as it burned after Marlow, whipcracks of dark lightning carving through the skies above it.

  “It would have happened a lot sooner without you,” he said, reading her mind.

  Where would she be if Herc had never shown his ugly face? The cops might have let her go and she’d be sitting in her room right now, maybe, or in a class at school, or just walking down the street, oblivious to everything. There would have been no Engine, no Ostheim, no Marlow, no hell.

  There would have been the Devil, though. She’d have looked up from her desk, from her phone, from her ordinary life, and she’d have seen the darkness overhead, the impossible storm that gathered. She’d have been just like the others, running and screaming and lost.

  At least here, now, she knew what it was. At least she could fight it.

  Herc had given her that.

  She sat up in her seat, so woozy that she might have been drunk. Herc flinched as if she might start hitting him again. He had a smudge of blood beneath his nose, and when she looked at her knuckles she saw more of it there.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I never should have—”

  “Priorities,” she said, her voice robotic. “We survive this, we can talk about it then.”

  He nodded sadly, offering her a hand. She stared at it for a moment, thinking back to her cell. He’d offered her the same hand then, so much bigger in her memory, so much stronger.

  Choices.

  Pick door number one and you join us, you help save the world.

  What he’d done to her was wrong, was unforgivable. But it was done. She had to live with it. Christoph might still be alive, but it was his death—his not-death—that had driven her into the arms of Ostheim, and how many more had she killed in his name? How many more had she sent to hell?

  So nothing had really changed. She was still a killer.

  “Let’s do it,” she said, taking his hand. “What are we waiting for?”

  Herc nodded, banked the chopper, and the end of the world rose into view.

  The Devil was a spiraling vortex with a core of absolute darkness. Pan couldn’t look directly at it but she kept seeing staccato bursts of light at street level, there for a second and then gone. They were almost like gunshots, only Pan knew what they were—men, women, children, exploding into fire and then dust. It trailed a wake of nothing, the land scorched to dust all the way back to Greenville.

  The chopper shook, caught in an updraft from the destruction below. An alarm sounded and Herc mashed the heel of his hand against the control panel until it stopped.

  “Damn thing,” he growled.

  A pulse of black light rippled up through a building beneath her, blasting out the windows like demolition charges. Herc yanked the stick, Pan’s stomach trying to clamber to safety out of her mouth. The chopper shook, hard, the windshield full of the inferno that churned into the clouds.

  The building slumped—not collapsing, just leaning to the side like it was exhausted. Glass and metal rained to the earth in what looked like slow motion, reflecting the sun. Most of its skin had been ripped away, girders sticking out like bare bones.

  Pan looked at it, at its skeletal form, at the clouds of ash that danced around its burning base. She looked, and she suddenly understood what she was seeing.

  “Hell,” she said. “This is where it begins.”

  The toppled buildings, the wasteland, the mountains of the dead.

  None of it made sense, it made her head hurt just trying to think about it. But wasn’t that what the watchmaker, or whatever Marlow had called him, wasn’t that what he had said—he’d kept the Devil prisoner until the future.

  Until this future.

  And the fear that washed through her was like acid, burning every cell. Because if they didn’t do something now—right now—then there would be nothing left here but corpses and cursed souls. It would be hell on Earth, pure and simple.

  “Time’s up,” Pan said, staring through the dust, looking for Marlow. It wasn’t hard to find him again, the Devil chasing them like a shadow, all of them heading for what looked like a shopping mall. Even as she watched she saw a pulse of black light burst from the Devil, a shock wave that shunted the semi off the road and into a parking lot. They didn’t slow, just churned their way through cars heading right for a store.

  “Goddammit,” said Herc, craning up in his seat to watch them. “They wouldn’t…”

  They did, the truck slamming into the front of the building, vanishing in a cloak of smoke. The Devil was halfway across the parking lot, and even up here, even over the roar of the rotors, she could hear it speak. Herc pushed the stick and the chopper angled earthward.

  “Drop me down there,” she said. “I’ll … I’ll think of something.”

  “Pan,” said Herc, swinging the chopper around. “I can tell you absolutely and positively that isn’t going to happen.”

  “Where are you going?” she said, watching as the Devil closed in on the building—she thought it might be a Walmart. “Herc, if Marlow’s in there we have to do everything we can to stop it getting to him. Because if there’s a chance, even the slightest chance, that we can stop this from happening, then—”

  “I know that, Pan,” said Herc. “You know, you really do have a habit of stating the bloody obvious.”

  “Then what?” she asked, the chopper aiming for a low building across the street. “How are we…”

  The chopper juddered as Herc lowered them, Pan gritting her teeth until they were hovering over the roof. She looked down, and suddenly she knew what he was planning to do.

  “Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you even think about it.”

  “Hey,” he said, shrugging. “I’m getting too old for this, kiddo. And I’ve done too many bad things.”

  “Herc,” she said, taking hold of his hand. “I mean it. There’s another way. You don’t even know if this will work.”

  “We don’t know it won’t,” he said. “You’re clear.”

  She glanced out the window to see the roof ten feet below, the chopper weaving dangerously from side to side. She ignored it, turning back to Herc, holding his big bear’s paw as tight as she could.

  “I won’t let you,” she said. “We can think of something else.”

  “Listen to me,” he said, squeezing her hands in his. He fixed those watery eyes on her, and he smiled—all scars and broken teeth. “Listen to me, Pan. We’ve been through a lot together, you and I. Christ, we’ve been through a lot. But everything we’ve done has been to stop that thing over there. That’s all this is, a job.”

  “But—”

  “It’s been an honor working with you, soldier,” he said, his jaw trembling. He wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry I did what I did. I’m sorry for it all. But I did it for the right reasons.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” s
he said, brushing away a tear of her own on her shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have done it any differently either. I would still have picked door number one. I’d pick it every single time.”

  He smiled again. His face was a mess but that smile was the brightest thing in the world. It had welcomed her home from a hundred missions, the first thing she’d seen each time she’d escaped hell. The thought that she might not see it again was like a piece of her own being had been torn away. She gripped his hand, hard enough to hurt her fingers.

  “This is my penance, Pan. It’s my way of making it all right.”

  “You’ve got nothing to make right,” she said. “Nothing.”

  He nodded, the tears rolling freely now.

  “I can’t land this damned thing anyway,” he said. “Doing it this way just saves me the embarrassment.”

  The laugh escaped her before she could stop it and she lunged at him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. He yelped, fought to control the chopper, hugging her back with his free hand. She pushed her face into his chest, breathing in that Old Spice smell of him one last time. Then she let go, a sob forcing its way up from somewhere deep inside her.

  “I love you, Pan,” he said. “Whatever happens next, if this thing survives, kick its goddamned ass back to hell.”

  “I will,” she said. “I promise.”

  “Go on,” he said, turning to the windshield, hunched over the stick like a big kid on a toy. “Go on now.”

  She popped the door, suddenly gripped by noise, by the howling wind. She shuffled out onto the runners—looking back once, barely able to see him through the tears.

  “You’re a good man, Herman Cole,” she said.

  Then she dropped.

  The fall was longer than she’d anticipated and she struck hard, a spasm riding its way up her spine as she toppled backward. By the time she’d recovered, the chopper had banked back the way they’d come, the thrum of the blades fading as it disappeared beneath the roof. Pan tore off her headphones and ran after it, through the heat, skidding to the edge and almost losing herself to gravity. She called Herc’s name but her voice was a ghost’s, lost in the storm.