I run.
Rocks are landing all around me, and I can’t even begin to guess how many kids there are.
“Ollie-ollie-oxen-free!” “Ollie-ollie-oxen-free!”
And more are coming.
They chase after me. They pour out of the alleyways and appear for split seconds in open windows. I try to chase a little boy down. Maybe if I can just get my hands on him I can make them stop.
But as soon as the light comes again I realize I’ve lost him. These streets are their backyard. I’m just a visitor.
A rock hits me in the back of the head. More thud into my chest. It’s getting bad. I try another sprint, but it’s just too hard to run in the dark. A jagged flagstone catches my foot, and I fall to one knee. They’re laughing. I’m back up in a second, struggling on.
It’s the laughter of children. Lighthearted, carefree. Sadistic.
I turn and try to kick down a door. My foot breaks through the rotten wood and gets caught there. More stones pelt me from behind. One hits the back of my head, and I see stars for a moment. Their laughter gets louder as I struggle with the door.
“Ollie-ollie-oxen-free!” “Ollie-ollie-oxen-free!”
There’s the crack of a gunshot and a bullet whizzes by my head.
Jesus fucking Christ. One of those kids is armed.
I pull my foot back, taking some of the door apart, then I use my shoulder to burst through it. I lean against a wall. There’s a child in one corner, huddled up. He’s got a rock in his hand. I lunge for him, but he dives out of a window before I can catch him.
Damn.
A small feminine voice calls to me in a sing-song cadence. “We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you.”
Other voices join in with her chant. Stones clatter against the walls of the building. The ceiling above me creaks, and then there are some heavy thuds.
God, they’re coming in from the roof.
“We’re gonna get you,” the chorus of children chants on, getting louder and louder.
Some of the voices are coming from above me.
Shadows run back and forth in front of the door I’d kicked in. Faces pop up in the windows. Stones knock out one of the few sets of shutters that were left.
“We’re gonna get you.”
A face peeps down the stairwell. Children are gathering in the doorway. I jump up to my feet and run toward a window. I dive through it, my backpack scraping against the narrow sill. I land amidst some surprised children, but they’re up before I am. They claw and bite at me with rotten teeth and broken nails. One gets a finger in my eye. Another is clawing into the meat on the side of my neck, drawing blood which runs down along my collarbone. I struggle to my feet, throwing a few away from me. One clings to my ankle. I stomp him off and power my way out of the mass of them. Stones start coming again.
I look about frantically for a place to hide as I try to run through the hail of stones and taunts.
“We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you.”
Some of them might even be corpses, I can’t tell. It’s no use, I can’t survive on the street. I break into another building, shouldering through its rotten door. A runnel of blood comes down from my forehead and drips into my eye. One of the rocks must have cut me.
“We’re gonna get you,” the chant continues.
They’re swarming around this house now.
“I won’t hurt you!” I shout.
Like they were even afraid.
“We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you.”
There are thuds coming from this roof as well. I look toward the staircase, but they haven’t made it that far yet. Blood is coming from where one of them bit me on the calf. They’d left their tooth in my leg. I pull it out. There’s no root. It’s a God damned baby tooth. I flick it across the room.
“We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you.”
My hand falls to my pistol, but I can’t. I can’t kill children.
“What do you want?” I cry, surprised at how desperate my voice sounds.
“Give us your corpsedust,” the feminine voice shouts out over the chant.
Then there is another voice, a male child. “No, stupid. He needs to give us everything. He might try and keep some.”
A wave of light comes. The baby tooth I’d tossed aside casts a shadow on the floor. That shadow wheels around as the light passes.
Somewhere in this city, perhaps as rotten as these children, is my boy.
“We’re gonna get you. We’re gonna get you.”
Fuck it. I’ve had enough of this shit.
“I’ll give you everything. I swear,” I shout. “I’ll even strip naked. I just need to ask Aiden a question. Can I speak to him?”
There is some muttering and the constant singsong calls die down for a moment.
“Ain’t nobody here named Aiden,” a girl shouts as the chant picks back up.
“Good.”
I pull out the Old Lady. She’s a Smith & Wesson Model 916A pump action 12 gauge shotgun with a 28 inch barrel. I barge back out onto the street behind a surge of shot. Children screech in pain as the boom dies away. I’m sorry. Jesus fucking Christ, I’m so sorry—but they have it coming. I scream as I fire again, and again, aiming as much by the muzzle flash as by the light of the dim chamber.
The chant is gone now, replaced by the frightened shouts of retreating children. I step over the twitching bodies of the kids I’ve killed. They begin to rise again, this time as mindless corpses, but they’re too slow to bother me. I continue my rampage, gunning down a group of children running along a roof line.
A feminine silhouette appears ahead of the group I just felled. After my sixth shot, I put the Old Lady back in her holster on the side of my pack and draw my 9mm pistol. The flashes of light are more than enough to help me navigate after the fleeing girl. I ignore the rest of the kids and keep her in my sights. She’s jumping from rooftop to rooftop, making her way toward the tower.
I cross through an alley to get to another side street that runs parallel with hers. My hope is that she’ll be looking for me on the street I was just on.
A pack of children bursts out of the alleyway in front of me, but it doesn’t look like they’ve seen me. I drop into a doorway and freeze. One of them is coming down the side of the wall like a spider. He lands not four feet away from me and runs to join the others.
They pass quickly, and I look to the skyline to try and spot the girl. Did she get away? Maybe she went down into one of the buildings.
No, there she is, farther along the street than I expected. That girl is fast.
I run after her at a full sprint. I slow down as I get close and do my best to stay quiet by avoiding those loose flagstones.
She climbs down the side of one building and drops onto the aqueduct. I slip behind one of its pillars and stand beneath it. No other children are in sight. I wait for the next moment of light. There is a thin metal service ladder about one hundred yards ahead which an enterprising child might use to climb back down to the street. I jog over to it and stand in the shadow of one of the pillars.
After a moment, my chase is rewarded. The shadow of her mangy head peeps over the side of the aqueduct. She makes her way down the ladder. I wait until she’s almost all the way down, then, when she’s only got a couple more rungs to go, I whistle.
She freezes.
I step away from the pillar and put my pistol to the back of her head. “Ollie-ollie-oxen-free,” I whisper.
I pick her up with my left hand and drop her down in front of me. She’s shaking.
I pull back the slide mechanism of my pistol and show her the bullet in the chamber. “Now if I’m not mistaken, young lady, when Maylay Beighlay was still bright, people would pay a bullet to get someone to guide them through the city.”
She swallows and nods, then bites her lip fiercely.
I lean down so I’m only a few inches from her face. “Good,” I tell her. “Now, Miss, listen carefully. You’re going to g
et this bullet,” I point to the golden shell in the chamber, “one way or another. I’d prefer to hand it to you. So are you going to take me to the center of town?”
Her eyes narrow in thought. Her jaw trembles.
She nods again.
The smooth, metallic walls of the dry aqueduct bed rise up on either side of me, obscuring the city from my view. Every now and then the top of a tall building is visible over those grey walls. Other than that, all I can see around me is the dark ceiling with its periodic lightning shaped waves of light. The little girl’s shaggy head bobs back and forth while she crawls on, leading me to God-knows-where. It doesn’t look like we’re moving toward the center of the city.
“The core’s that way,” I say, standing up and pointing off to the right.
Her head stops bobbing and looks back at me. “Stay down!” she hisses. “They’ll see you.”
I go back to my hands and knees.
“Too many of my friends there.” Her voice echoes oddly in the aqueduct. “This is the way that’s safe. We’ll be alone this way.”
“Lead me into a trap and I’ll shoot you,” I warn her.
She turns back around. “I won’t.” She offers me a pinky.
For some reason the digit offends me. I point my pistol at her hand. “Get that finger out of my face or I’ll blow it off.”
She shrugs nonchalantly before continuing.
This aqueduct is dry. Bone dry. The dust on the bottom sticks to my hands and knees. I wonder if it had stopped carrying water even before Maylay Beighlay went dark.
“Are you an Infidel Friend?” she asks.
“No.”
She looks back. “I think you are.”
I point my gun at her again. “Keep crawling.”
A light wave comes and she closes her eyes until it passes. Counter intuitive, but the girl has the right idea. There is enough dim light in the chamber to see, if one can only get their eyes to adjust. By keeping my eyes open during the brighter moments, I was ruining my dark vision.
I have to give the girl credit, she knew what she was doing.
Finally, she turns around and continues to crawl. “Why have you come?”
There’s no reason I should tell her, but I figure it can’t cause much harm. “My son, he’s about your age. I think the Devil has him.”
“What’s his name?” she asks. “Maybe I seen him.”
I don’t answer.
“It’s Aiden, isn’t it? That’s why you asked us to talk with Aiden.” She pauses for a moment before carefully climbing up the side of the aqueduct. “When we said we didn’t know him, you knew you wouldn’t kill him when you were killing us?”
“That’s right.”
She peeks over the edge and then drops back into the aqueduct again. “You are very smart. What’s your name?”
“Cris. No ‘h,’ to avoid confusion.”
Her little brow furrows and she scratches her head with one finger. Tufts of hair drift down around her as the dying skin of her scalp gives way beneath her fingernail. “Confrusion with what?”
“The etymological meaning of Christopher is ‘follower of Christ.’”
She crinkles her nose. “I like that word. Entomological.”
“Etymological,” I correct her.
She shakes her head seriously. “Entomological sounds better.”
“Enough, Princess of the Flies, move it along.” She had been trying to kill me just a few minutes ago, so I’m far from ready to view her as a little girl.
As we travel, though, I start to feel a little guilty. “Besides, entomological has to do with insects.”
“I don’t like insects,” she informs me. “I got cut by a silverleg spider once.”
The side wall of the cavern is getting closer. The aqueduct looks like it’s going to dead end into that wall.
“That’s an arachnid, sweetheart. And while we’re on the subject, it’s ‘All ye all ye out and free.’ Not ‘ollie-ollie-oxen-free.’”
She climbs yet again up the side of the aqueduct as a light wave whips her shadow around the aqueduct bed, but this time she finds another service ladder and starts heading downward. “I think you’re very smart, Cris. Will you marry me?”
Jesus fucking Christ. “No. No I will not marry you.”
She stops climbing down so that only her head pokes over the ledge. She seems devastated. “Why not?”
“You’re too young.”
“I can grow up!”
“You tried to murder me earlier.”
Her face brightens. “I know! I can marry Aiden. He’s young too, and I haven’t tried to murder him.”
I close my eyes as another wave of light washes over us. “Sure.” I figure it’s easier just to play along.
I climb over the ledge and follow her down. There’s a path cut along the wall here.
We’re right on the edge of the cavern, with the deceptively empty looking city spread out to my right. She finishes descending the ladder and steps up on the stone path. I follow her warily, my eyes on Maylay Beighlay.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “that was the hard part. We’re almost there. I won’t take you much farther than the edge of the Heart. It’s not safe for me there. The old Prince of Maylay Beighlay still controls the Heart, and he hates children.”
The Heart chamber of Maylay Beighlay is almost as bright as day, seemingly untouched by the coming darkness the Devil brings. I block the light with my forearm while I wait for my eyes to adjust. The light flickers a little, though, as the girl leads me forward. Not even this place is untouched.
I put my arm down as we walk. The houses here are in better repair, but I’d be surprised if there are any that aren’t abandoned. They’re not any larger than in the last chamber, but their construction seems much more meticulous, and where repairs were made, they blend in with the original architecture. Even the street seems more solid. The flagstones here are held together by some kind of mortar absent in the outer portions of the city.
The Heart is built like a donut around a huge natural rock face which supports the ceiling of this area like a pillar. That pillar appears to be about a quarter of a mile thick, and the citizens had called it the Core when I was here last. The rock around the Core looks blackened. It reminds me of the way a wall looks above a torch sconce, but I don’t know what could cause enough fire to blacken that much rock. The aqueduct runs through the Heart as well, though it is much higher here—perhaps over three hundred feet tall in places. There is a break in the aqueduct where the water plunges from that height into a pool below. Nearby the Core is a large palace, resembling the Taj Majal because of its five spire topped domes—four small ones grouped around a huge central one.
The girl stops, obviously terrified.
I toss her a bullet.
She clutches it in her hands and then holds it to her chest. “Jenner,” she says.
I’m not sure what she means. “What?”
“My name is Jenner.”
She turns and runs, her feet slapping against the stone. I watch her until she disappears down an alleyway. I cut over to a large main street which dead ends at the palace in about a mile. There is no one here, not even a corpse. I pick the right side of the street and move close to the buildings there and pause, listening for footfalls.
Nothing.
Slowly, my hand dropping to the pistol at my side, I begin my march.
Don’t worry, Aiden. I’m coming. Daddy’s coming.
A trail of smoke rises up from one of the two story building’s chimneys, snaking toward the Heart’s ceiling before dissipating into the air. As I near it, I notice a wheelbarrow parked in the alley by the building. It is filled with dead bodies.
The charred smell of woodstone fills my nostrils as I walk by the door. Someone’s home.
I knock three times, and when no one comes, I knock three times more.
Finally I hear some shuffling inside. Rusted hinges squeak as the door opens.
The man
who opens the door is suffering from the rot, but with more dignity than those I saw in the outer chambers. The patches of dying skin seem almost like wrinkles, and his hair has gone grey. It’s as if the corpsedust had aged him. He does not greet me at all, not even with a smile. He turns away and walks back inside. The door hangs open, so I enter and close it behind me.
I hear the crackling of his woodstone fire. It burns in a stove, heating what looks to be a pot of devilwheat. The man moves slowly, walking with a stoop, shuffling behind a polished woodstone counter to tend to his stove. There are a few tables around and a staircase in the back of the room. This must have been an inn, or a bar, before the Devil came.
I sit down on a stool by the counter and watch the man. He picks up a woodstone spoon and begins to slowly stir the devilwheat. The spoon clacks against the pot’s side with a slow rhythm.
Tick tick tat. Tick tick tat.
The old looking man stands with his back to me, saying nothing. The crackling of the fire continues, as does the clacking of the spoon, for several minutes.
Tick tick tat. Tick tick tat.
Then he lets out a grunt. “You should not be here.” His voice is raspy, as if the rot had lodged in his throat.
He turns and looks at me intently. I shrug.
He shakes his head. “Maylay Beighlay was once a fine city. A place to rest and hide from damnation. But it is not so now.” He coughs. “This place is no good. Do you hear me? You turn around and leave this place. I know the Heart here looks less rotten, because it is brighter, but this place is the most rotten of all. It is the darkest here, do you hear me? The darkest. The Devil came here, understand?”
I set my backpack down beside me.
His eyes narrow under half greyed eyebrows. “You an Infidel Friend?”
I shake my head.
He continues the slow stir. Tick tick tat. “Then I don’t like you.”
I fold my arms and rest them on the counter.
Tick tick tat.
He grunts again. “You’ve come to join the Devil, haven’t you?” He suddenly points the wooden spoon at me, the violence of the motion sending droplets of water and a few small clumps of devilwheat flying through the air. “Haven’t you? There is never rot without rats. Well you can have him. He’ll trick you into rotting with the rest of us. No good will come to you from this one. If you want to sell your soul, go find a Minotaur who will take it. That’s my advice.”
Affliction (Hellsong: Infidels: Cris Book 1) Page 2
