by Bryan Smith
She cried now and braced her arms on the bed, cursing herself for imagining she could do to him what he’d done to her.
How naive.
How goddamn naive.
And now he was screaming.
A sound that reached into her and gripped her pounding heart like the ice-cold hands of death.
The creature’s misshapen head loomed in the darkness, its yellow eyes glittering like bar-window neon. Chad loosed a kamikaze yell and charged forward, leaping over a mangled body. The shapeshifter’s snout opened wide, its lips curling away from rows of glistening teeth. It hurtled toward Chad with a speed that would have shamed a greyhound, but Chad had the machete in motiona perfectly timed blow. The blade thunked into the creature’s thickly muscled neck, stopping it in its tracks.
Chad wrenched the blade loose and watched blood pump from the wound with a primal satisfaction that felt at once foreign and familiar, an echo from the collective unconscious-from a time when his ancestors had lived in caves and killed their dinner with spears.
He lifted the machete high over his head and brought it down hard, bisecting the shapeshifter’s head with one devastating blow. The machete’s handle vibrated with power, and the power coursed up his arms, invigorating him and filling him with strength he shouldn’t possess. He yanked the blade out again and kicked the dead shapeshifter’s falling carcass aside.
Another shapeshifter sprang out of the darkness.
Chad moved without thinking, guided by the power suffusing the machete, and the blade penetrated another mound of thick flesh and matted fur, piercing the creature’s galloping heart with the tip of the blade.
The sound of gunfire was loud in the tunnel, explosive and powerful.
And effective.
The passage was riddled with the bodies of fallen beasts. But Chad didn’t envy the firepower of the guards. The weapon in his hand felt like the most potent weapon on earth. And he was its Master.
The ultimate arbiter of life and death.
Then, all at once, there was quiet.
The guns went silent.
Chad stood panting in the tunnel. He turned in a slow circle to survey the carnage around him. He saw the bodies of Todd Haynes and Jake Barnes. The old man had been disemboweled. Todd’s throat was a bloody mess. Wanda stood weeping over him. Jack Paradise was slumped against the tunnel wall, blood pumping from a wound at his shoulder.
“Keep moving, Chad,” the soldier told him. “You’re not done yet.”
But Chad felt rooted to the spot. The shapeshifters were all dead. He’d killed the last of them. But the victory was spoiled by the terrible knowledge of its cost. Most of the people who’d worked so hard to get him this far lay dead and dying around him. He thought of Cindy. Saw the gun blow her head apart. A fury filled him, and he clenched the machete’s handle so hard he thought it might shatter beneath the force of his grip.
So much death.
So much to avenge.
A hand fell on his shoulder.
Lazarus. Somehow the old singer had made it through this without a scratch. His continued health was pure luck. He’d waded into the battle as unhesitatingly as any of them. “Come on, friend. I’ll get you the rest of the way there.”
Chad looked at Paradise. “You should be there, Jack.”
The ex-soldier flashed a grim smile. “Nah, think I’m sitting this one out, buddy.” He grimaced and slumped farther down the wall. “You don’t have time to waste with me. Get your ass in gear.”
Lazarus retrieved a fallen machine gun. He ejected the empty ammo clip and inserted a fresh one. He seemed way more familiar with the operation of such a thing than a former reveler in the summer of love should have been. Chad could only wonder what the singer’s still-devoted legion of fans would make of this scene.
Wanda turned away from Todd’s mutilated body. “You fuckers aren’t going without me.”
Paradise spoke through gritted teeth. “Just go, all of you.”
So, accompanied by the handful of guards still standing, they went.
And soon they reached the end of the tunnel.
They stood at the beginning of an expanse of cracked tile and cinder-block walls. A thick metal door stood open against the far wall. One of the walls bore a scrawled slogan: “Lazarus is the way.”
Chad led the way across the expanse of tile.
Following the path a desperate slave named Eddie King had taken a day earlier.
Dream sat cross-legged on the bed, shivering with her arms folded over her breasts. The Master was pacing the room, crossing and recrossing it in long strides. His nude body was a roiling mass of spasms and nervous energy. He was distraught. He was raging against everything. The gods. The people of Below. His own mortality. He was a volatile mass of dark energy. He was furious.
He was afraid.
“I can’t do it, bitch! I can’t do it!”
Dream flinched, keeping her head down. She couldn’t bear to look at him, she was so afraid. Still, she found one more reservoir of courage. She managed to say, “Yes, you can.”
He abruptly stopped pacing. He crossed the room in less than a heartbeat, seized her hair again, and screamed, “I CANT!”
Dream trembled. “You can.”
He screamed again, but relinquished her hair. “You don’t understand, Dream. You bitch, you’re just too stupid to understand. The gods have abandoned me. My only way to paradise is a sacrifice I can no longer deliver!”
His eyes brimmed with moisture. The presence of tears seemed to offend and disgust him, and Dream wondered if this thing had ever cried-if it had ever known grief.
Maybe now it knew a kind of grief.
The self-pitying kind.
“Something’s happening Below. Something momentous. Something I can’t stop.” He sounded like a helpless child, whining over a toy taken away. “I can’t do what I planned to do. It’s too late. The banished people are coming to the surface.”
He shook his head at the absurd wonder of it.
Dream climbed off the bed. The soiled blue nightgown fluttered around her waist, and she smoothed it down in one deft motion. She steeled herself, willed her legs to be steady, and went to him. She pulled him into an embrace, stroked his back, and whispered the things he needed to hear.
“Substitute me for the people of Below.”
His head fell against her, and he sobbed.
“Sacrifice me. Then go to paradise alone.”
His body shook with the force of his sobs, and she was again reminded of an inconsolable child.
“But… but I love you.”
Bullshit.
You miserable, selfish, evil piece of fucking shit.
She said, “I love you, too. So … doesn’t that make me worthy… of sacrifice?”
He went still in her arms.
Dream smiled.
His thoughts were almost audible.
Chad and his ragtag army swarmed through the abandoned security office, then into the outer room that was only a basement in the true house. Only a short time ago, The Master’s psychic eruptions had rendered it a surreal obstacle course for a desperate man fleeing the hounds of hell. But the magic was gone from this place.
A short flight of stairs led to a wooden door that stood ajar.
Chad took them two at a time
And was inside The Master’s kitchen within moments.
Wanda and the old singer were right behind him.
Then the guards were in, spreading out and brandishing their weapons.
Alicia experienced a momentary surge of joy as Ms. Wickman freed her of her bonds.
Here was the chance she’d been waiting for.
The opportunity to fight back.
To make this wicked bitch pay for her sins.
But that was not to be.
All the revenge fantasies faded the moment she tried to move. The pain held her down as effectively as a slab of cement. Every open wound puckered, pulsing with pain and incipient infection. So
she stayed where she was, unmoving, silent tears of helplessness sliding down her cheeks. She sensed the evil woman had returned to finish her off, and she could only hope the process wouldn’t be a protracted one.
Ms. Wickman lifted her off the bed, cradled her battered body with unnatural effortlessness, and carried her to a chair. She dropped her in the chair with a sadistic lack of concern for her tender condition, and Alicia screamed at the shock waves of pain that rocked her body.
Alicia watched Ms. Wickman open the razor.
The woman approached her.
Slowly.
Drawing it out.
Enjoying Alicia’s terror.
The sharp blade gleamed.
Alicia felt a strange intimacy with that blade. They were so well acquainted. Cutting edge to soft, yielding flesh. So she awaited the blade’s final, merciless caress, closing her eyes as it insinuated itself against her throat.
She felt the cold metal press.
But then the pressure was gone.
Alicia opened her eyes and saw something unfamiliar in Ms. Wickman’s eyes.
Something like … fear.
Alicia became aware of an external sound.
Something outside the room.
Something approaching.
Ms. Wickman’s gaze was riveted to the door as she backed away from her victim. Alicia saw the woman swallow a lump in her throat. She felt a mad urge to scream at the bitch, to ask her how it felt to be afraid.
HOW DOES IT FEEL, YOU HELL-BOUND CUNT!?
But she didn’t have the strength.
Ms. Wickman never looked at her as she retreated to the other end of the room. She stood with her back against the far wall, her eyes screwed tightly shut. Then something strange was happening to her. Her image grew hazy, wavering like something barely glimpsed over the horizon on a muggy summer’s day. The section of wall she was leaning against shimmered. Some weird kind of transmutation was happening, the substance of reality altering around the woman to allow-PASSAGE.
And then she was gone.
She’d gotten away.
The wall looked normal again.
Alicia sobbed. The memory of her rigid belief in a world of solid reality reared up to taunt her.
She’d thought she was so smart.
So levelheaded.
But she’d known nothing at all.
She didn’t want to live in a world where the sort of things she’d seen and endured were possible. She’d survived the ordeal with Ms. Wickman, a miracle others might embrace, but she knew she couldn’t live with the images in her head.
Which left her with only one choice.
To obliterate them.
To that end, fate had finally smiled upon her.
Ms. Wickman had left something behind.
Alicia gripped the armrests of the chair, gathered her strength, and lifted herself up.
She went to the bookshelf and retrieved the gun.
Then she hobbled back to the chair.
Sat down.
And put the gun in her mouth.
Dream’s heart fluttered at the sight of the long, ornate swords brandished by The Master. He’d retrieved them from his study. She saw right away that these were no ordinary swords. The metal no ordinary metal. The blades gave off heat, pulsed with energy. He proffered one to Dream, who took it with reluctance-but reluctance turned to eagerness as she felt the unnatural energy generated by the sword surge into her body, triggering an endorphin rush stronger and more sustained than anything she’d experienced through drugs or carnal sensation.
The Master smiled.
And beckoned her to the center of the room.
He knelt, positioning the tip of the blade against his chest.
Dream knelt opposite him, mimicking his positioning of the sword.
The blade’s tip thrummed against her with its strange magic, suffusing her with ecstatic joy and a marvelous sense of peace. She could almost feel the blade pulling itself into her, parting her flesh without assistance.
YES!
This was what she’d always needed.
Tears of joy ran down her face.
Blood trickled from the nick between her breasts.
The Master smiled. “I really do love you, Dream.”
Dream smiled, too. “I know.”
And maybe he really did.
In a really fucked-up, nontraditional kind of way.
The only way he could.
Not that it mattered.
Only his death mattered.
Our deaths, she reminded herself.
The Master slipped into the Trance of meditation.
The state others could access only by ingesting the plant of the same name.
Loth! he intoned.
The answer was immediate.
You have failed us.
The Master’s ethereal laughter resounded in the shimmering realm.
But I have another offering for you!
And now Loth laughed.
Do you?
The Master’s disembodied sigh rolled through the alternate plane like a gust of hot wind across a desert plain.
I do.
And the admission that followed was almost-almost- bittersweet.
The apprentices occupied the top, most exalted rung of the ladder in The Master’s hierarchy of servitude. For many of them, life as an apprentice was good. Very good. Quite a few of them considered their place here preferable to what they’d known in the “normal” world. Here was a place where they could indulge their sickest desires-and never fear for a moment the specter of legal intervention or retribution.
When these people sensed the unusual disturbance occurring in The Master’s home, they never suspected what was coming. The Master was all-powerful. The Master would always protect them. They had nothing to fear.
So they poured from their upper-floor rooms to see what the commotion was all about.
And learned, too late, that maybe they weren’t so safe after all.
Giselle seized Eddie about the wrist and dragged him out of the room. They were in a hallway clogged with black clad apprentices before he even had a chance to protest.
He couldn’t know, of course, that this was as Giselle had planned it.
She had plied him with the sex magic.
Had provided him the exotic thrills of his darkest fantasies, the ones he never spoke of, that he could never admit aloud, scenarios of bondage and submission.
And it had worked.
Rendered him pliant.
Suggestible.
But she’d thought it wise to leave Eddie in the dark until just moments before the time arrived for him to do what he had to do.
That time was now.
Eddie flinched at the sight of all the apprentices. “Jesus-what’s going on here?”
“Can’t you smell it?” Giselle smiled. “Revolution is in the air.”
Then she was pulling him through the clot of people in the hallway.
Toward The Master’s chambers.
Chad made the second-floor landing faster than he would have thought possible, taking the stairs three at a time. The machete blade glowed with heat, shimmering like a precious ore exposed to a heat beyond fathoming. It seemed to pull him along, taking him where he needed to go through some almost sentient alchemical instinct. He stood panting on the landing and scowled at the wary faces of the apprentices.
Lazarus made the landing a moment later.
He took one look at the faces turned toward him.
Saw the corruption that pulsed behind their shiny eyes like bloated parasites. And opened fire.
Giselle threw open the massive doors to The Master’s chambers and Eddie stumbled in after her. He gaped at the sight that greeted him. Two people kneeling on the floor, two lethal-looking swords pressed to their chests.
A suicide pose.
A hari-kari pose.
But that wasn’t what shocked him. What shocked him was the people poised to do themselves in. The guy, who h
e deduced right away was The Master, didn’t look the way he had looked the last time Eddie had seen him.
In fact, he looked exactly like Eddie.
Only bigger.
And the other was the woman from his dreams.
“Dream,” he breathed.
Yes. Dream. So he had seen the future! Only, she didn’t appear to be morphing shapeshifter-style. There was, however, some change under way behind those heartbreaking, sky-blue eyes.
Something tragic.
Eddie was so saddened by this beautiful woman’s obviously damaged soul that he at first took little note of The Master’s newly focused attention.
On him.
NO!
Dream wanted to scream when the son of a bitch began to stand up.
So close!
She’d been so close to ending his obscenity of a life.
She glanced in the direction of the disturbance, took little note of the pretty, pale girl standing next to King’s doppelganger. The man was a grungier, less thickly muscled version. There was something else different about the intruder.
The unmistakable humanity evident in his eyes.
She moved on instinct when The Master advanced on the man.
The blade seemed to move of its own accord, swooping in a perfect arc toward the creature’s perfectly exposed throat. The blade’s power filled her with a galvanizing energy. She could feel it coursing through her veins like liquid light. She saw how it would happen in her mind, the blade taking his head off at the shoulders.
So she was shocked when his free hand halted her sword’s path at mid-arc.
She realized how strong he was then.
Stronger than she’d ever imagined.
Stronger than nature.
His head swiveled slowly in her direction, turning farther than a normal human head ought to turn. His face was a twisted mask of loathing and-oddly, incredibly-heartbroken betrayal.
Dream wavered for a moment.
Just a moment.
I could have been his Queen, she thought.
In that moment, just that slightest, almost immeasurable nanosecond, she felt she could have become what the creature wanted.
A sadistic mistress every bit his equal.
Reigning here on earth and, later, in the afterlife.
