“No, not that, put me back in the room, please, you said I could be free.”
“You will be freed,” the older boy said, his voice even, devoid of any emotion, “you will ascend as all before us have ascended to the gates of Heaven.”
“No,” the boy screamed as he was dragged into the crowd.
“Send him to Heaven,” the assembled boys shouted in one voice as the young boy was led away, the crowd parting before them like the waters of the ocean parting before a passing vessel. The young boy struggled against his captors, trying to break free, his eyes filled with terror.
Meat followed their progress and as they reached the stairwell he spotted the message.
This way to Heaven!
Had been painted on the wall of the stairwell, slanted to match the angle of the steps, an arrow beneath it pointing up. Drops of the red paint had dripped down the wall beneath each letter, tracing red lines like drops of blood staining flesh.
This way to Heaven!
Meat shuddered at the message as the leader of these savage children stood before him, his eyes locked with his own. He glanced to his left, breaking the contact, bowing for now to the whims of this savage. This was not the time or place to make a play. It was too confined, and there were too many of them. From the corner of his eye he watched as the leader sidestepped to stand in front of Window who locked gazes with him.
Don’t do it, Window. Meat thought as the two stood nearly toe-to-toe, staring into one another’s unblinking gaze. Surprisingly the Leader was the first to blink and he took a hesitant step back, quickly recovering his composure before the others had a chance to see what had happened.
“To the master,” the Leader said as he tapped Window and Meat on their shoulder.
Stepping over in front of Gregory the Leader looked up into the older man’s face. Gregory refused to look away, his expression twisted into a murderous snarl, his hands clenched into tight fists at his side. His arms stiff as one of the children stepped forward and slipped the rifle from Gregory’s shoulder, vanishing into the crowd with his prize.
These were the children who had murdered Gregory’s wife and daughter and Meat was surprised by the restraint the man was showing. It was obvious he understood how dangerous it would be to start anything in this tight space.
“To Heaven,” the Leader said, tapping Gregory on the shoulder before he turned and walked away from them, the crowd parting as he passed through, closing behind him as the children gathered around their captives in a jostling sea of tattooed flesh
“To the master, pain is love, love is pain,” the young boys shouted in a single voice, their eyes alight with a primal glee.
“To the master, pain is love, love is pain” they shouted again, flowing around Meat, Window, and Gregory like the raging waters of a shattered dam. The three of them were driven towards the steps where others waited, crowding the steps in a sea of dusty, tattooed, flesh.
“To the master, pain is love, love is pain,” the assembled children shouted as Meat, Window, and Gregory were driven up the stairs by the mass of bodies pressing in around them. On the first landing they turned to climb the next flight of stairs, to discover the same message written on the wall right above the rusting handrail.
This way to Heaven!, the message proclaimed. It was repeated on the wall above the next set of steps
When the room was empty Billie-Bob emerged from the shadowy depths of the hallway, he stood just inside the door, his head tilted to one side as he listened to the chanting of his friend’s captors. He wasn’t sure how he was going to pull it off, but he’d have to save the other three, and do it quick.
They did have one advantage; the children had not taken any of their pistols.
Twenty Eight
Surrounded by a churning sea of young boys they were driven up the stairs, their voices rebounding from the shadowy walls around them. A single name shouted like a chant. Each landing was crowded with stacks of rotting garbage, buckets of waste, and discarded propane tanks. The smell overwhelmed them, causing them to gag as they struggled to breath, the children around them oblivious to the stench.
Above each set of steps that same message was repeated.
This way to Heaven!,
An arrow beneath each one pointing towards the shadowy recesses of the stairwell above them. They had no understanding of what the message might mean, but Meat suspected, based on the response from the young boy who’d been sent before them that it couldn’t be any good.
As they climbed upward Meat realized there were no girls in the group that surrounded them. At each shadowy landing he searched gloomy hallways for any sign of the children they had come to rescue, his hand never leaving the butt of the pistol in the waistband of his pants. He was surprised they hadn’t taken their pistols, yet he was hesitant to draw attention to them, to remind them of the danger that existed in their midst.
On the fifth floor, after climbing ten flights of stairs, the group stopped. Meat and Window were pushed down a shadowy hallway as the group split in half. Those with Gregory vanished up the steps as the others led Meat and Window down the hallway whose floor was covered by a thick layer of garbage.
Meat had caught a glimpse of something in the stairwell that sent a chill along the length of his spine. Here the message was the same.
This way to heaven!
Sunlight illuminated the message, casting an odd shadow that struck Meat with a note of familiarity. He studied it as the boys around them moved he and Window towards the shadowy maw of a hallway bisected by alternating bands of light and shadows. Doors opened on either side of the corridor offered some illumination, revealing a dense layer of garbage covering the floor.
They were familiar with religion and belief systems, the power of the cross and what it represented. At the Bluff regular church services were conducted, more for the older generation than the young, but Meat had attended one of the services, more out of curiosity than anything else.
What he discovered was a stuffy belief that had little room for the reality in which they lived. It offered little hope for the future, but a promise of life after death. Meat had seen first hand what life after death was like, and it was far from pretty.
As they neared the only door that was closed he realized what the shadow on the wall had looked like and a cold chill slithered the length of his spine. It had looked like a cross with someone or something hanging from the upright. He began to understand the images he’d seen on the walls, and those tattooed to young bodies. Sometime in the past they had been introduced to Christianity, but in the interim they had embellished their belief system to suit their own purposes, and those of this master, Meat suspected he and Window were about to meet.
Twenty Nine
Just let it play out, Gregory kept reminding himself as he was forced up the stairs away from Meat and Window. Coming to a landing the first thing he noticed was the smell, the scent of death that was carried on a steady breeze through an open door that led to the roof. The second thing was the raucous cry of a crow accompanied by the sound of wings beating at the air, punctuated by the pain filled cry of someone beyond his view.
As they rounded the bend in the stairs and the roof beyond the open door came fully into view his earlier resolve to let things play out crumbled, and he backed away from the open door with a strangled cry of terror as the children drove him towards the opening.
“No,” he shouted as he turned to flee and they pushed back as one. He was four times the size of the biggest boy, but size didn’t matter when one faced a group as large as the one that surrounded him.
In a blind panic he drove himself into the group of boys, his meaty hands grasping at young flesh as he battered his way through them. Shouts of anger and pain surrounded him as the image of what he’d seen on the roof was permanently burned into his mind. They had bastardized a belief he’d grown up in, turning the precept of religion on its head to satisfy their own savage desires.
They screame
d around him in savage voices as he plowed into their midst, the steps only a few feet away as he battered and smashed his way through that wall of living flesh. Small fists rebounded from his face with little effect, panic blinding him to the pain as the boys around him fought to get his thrashing figure under control.
There were shouts and screams and yells that became an indistinguishable blur of noise as he focused all of his energy on one thing and one thing only. Reaching the steps and escaping into the shadows that dwelled below them. If he could reach the steps he stood a good chance of getting out of this alive. His only alternative lay behind him, mocking him .
Knives flashed around him, cutting through the soft flesh of his arms and torso as the fight escalated, and like a raging bull he pushed on through the boys. Swatting them out of his way, smashing with his fists, driving them into the walls that contained them. One of the boys fell over the railing with a scream that dwindled into the shadowy depths of the building. Several more were driven down the steps, bones breaking on contact with unyielding concrete.
Something slammed into the back of his head, stars exploding behind his closed eyelids as he dropped to his knees, his hands outstretched with the top of the stairs mere inches from his splayed fingertips. The flesh of his bare arms was covered by a multitude of cuts, blood staining his flesh, and coating the floor with smears and swipes.
It was then, as he lay on the cold concrete, their bodies pressing down upon him, that he remembered his pistol in the waistband of his pants. His panic had blinded him to the fact that he was still armed, and he plunged his hand down the front of his body, squeezing his arm between his body, the concrete floor below him, and the pile of boys clinging to his back.
He yanked his arm free, the pistol firmly grasped in his hand, and he fired wildly as the boys around him screamed with a savage bloodlust. The shots shook the air in the close confines of the landing, plaster falling from the ceiling and walls as the slugs passed harmlessly through their surface. Amazingly not a single boy was hit, and as the sound of the last shot echoed around him the bleak emptiness of unconsciousness reached up to claim him.
Thirty
While Meat and Window were led to that closed door and Gregory was driven towards an uncertain future, Billie-Bob crossed to the shadowy stairway. He stopped for a moment, reading the message on the wall that had been written in dripping red paint that bore a striking resemblance to freshly spilled blood.
This way to Heaven!
He had no idea what the writer’s intent might have been, but he felt, on a more primitive level, that it wasn’t good.
Eight steps led to a wide landing where eight more rose in the opposite direction, to another landing. As he stood on the landing he felt, more than heard, the movement of a presence behind him. Glancing back into the shadowy depths from which he’d emerged he spotted movement, an object darker than the surrounding shadows that seemed to glide across the room towards the steps. Goosebumps danced across the flesh of his arms as the short hairs at the nape of his neck stood at attention.
Silence had wrapped the basement in its grasp; the sounds of voices and shouts, of pounding feet racing up and down the steps above him came as if from a great distance away.
Something was coming.
He raced up the steps to the next landing, suddenly very afraid, yet not willing to admit to himself that whatever had moved in the shadows below had frightened him. Reaching a steel door he slung his rifle across his back and pulled his pistol from the holster at his hip, resting its barrel along his leg as he carefully opened the door and peeked through the narrow crack.
On the other side of the door lay a garbage-strewn hallway. The overpowering stench of piss and shit was strong with an undercurrent of decay that came from the discarded garbage that covered the floor of the hallway. Opening the door further he peeked around the corner in the opposite direction, a window at the end offered the only illumination. Seeing that the hallway was empty he stepped out into the corridor, letting the door close softly behind him.
Closed doors lined each side of the hall, and next to each sat a five-gallon bucket that proved to be the source of the smell as each one was half full of human waste. Mounds of paper, discarded plastic bags, Styrofoam plates, and the scattered bones of assorted small animals covered the floor. Beneath the surface of the garbage he detected movement as rodents foraged freely within the shadowy recesses close to the walls.
“They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws,” Billie-Bob whispered as he surveyed the hallway around him, drawing a small measure of comfort from the words. The walls between each door he noticed were covered with writing and drawings all in a heavy black marker.
He recognized a drawing of a cross bound in barbed wire, wondering to himself what the artist had intended with such an odd combination.
Pain is love, love is pain! The handwritten message proclaimed on the walls around him. Where they were no crosses this message had been scrawled in a variety of hands as well as inks, some even resembling the darkness of dried blood.
What did it mean? Pain is love, love is pain? It made no sense. They were familiar with Christianity and what the cross meant. In fact some of the inhabitants of Bremo Bluff attended regular church services. He’d gone to one once, just to see what all the fuss was about, but found it difficult to place his trust in a supreme being who would allow an occurrence like the awakening to take place. He might work in mysterious ways, but there was nothing mysterious about what had happened.
Positioned around the cross, in each of the four quadrants bisected by the members of the cross were smaller drawings of a Celtic Trinity with a circle binding the center. Below and to the right of each trinity was a double triangle created from one continuous line that created the illusion of three triangles.
“They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws,” he whispered as an old memory stirred at the sight of the triangle. He’d seen this image before, not as a drawing, but as a piece of jewelry that hung from his uncle’s neck.
The memory filled him with a sense of shame and self-loathing coupled with a healthy does of fear. He had successfully blocked everything that had happened during he and his brother’s stay with his uncle. But now, with that familiar image all around him, that memory struggled to rise up from the dark abyss where it had been locked away.
Something stirred in the garbage at his feet, yet he stood transfixed by the image of the triangle, as the memory of his mother abandoning he and his brother with his uncle stirred in his mind.
They had only been four, he and Bobby, when she had left them.
He only knew what he had been told, that she had been ill equipped to care for them, unable to even care for herself in this new reality. She had taken refuge when she was pregnant with an older man who would protect her and her twin boys in the early days of their life. But as with all things they eventually change, and her protector had died in a firefight with a marauding band of survivors. She had fled with her boys and all Billie-Bob could remember from that night was a kaleidoscope of dark images as she found her way to her brother’s where she left Billie, and his brother Bobbie.
As the old memories stirred, and a single tear traced a wet path down his cheek, he felt something touching his ankle. Looking down he saw a slender appendage protruding from the garbage-strewn floor, a mottled gray with black splotches in a random patter along its length, it had firmly wrapped itself about his ankle, the tip probing the top of his boot as it sought entry into his pants leg, the cuff of which had been stuffed into the top of his boot.
He lashed out, kicking the appendage away, backing across the hallway with a strangled cry. Like a snake going after its prey the slender tip swung back around, like a dog searching for its prey the tip tilted back as if it were sniffing the air as it sought him out. It dove in for his a
nkle and he sidestepped it, the tip slamming into the wall with a muted thunk, penetrating the surface of the plasterboard and becoming stuck in the drywall.
As it struggled to extract itself its entire body shook, shedding the garbage that had camouflaged it, exposing its entire length that stretched down the hallway, vanishing into the shadows at the distant end. The tip came free, whipping around as it unfurled its body.
Billie-Bob ducked his head and ran down the hallway. Reaching a foyer he glanced back to see the tip of the appendage as it zoomed towards him. It resembled an octopus’ tentacle without the suction cups. The narrow tip was riding a muscular body that was folding over on itself as it pursued him, slithering like a massive snake through the garbage. Rats squealed as it passed through, disturbing them. Pushing his way through a steel door he came into a dark stairwell and leaned with his back against the door.
“What the hell was that?” he said, no response coming from the empty shadows around him. He’d heard some strange stories in the past from the scavenging crews that ventured daily beyond the fence, but nothing that came even close to explaining what he had just witnessed.
The tentacle slammed into the door behind him, driving it open slightly before it slammed shut under his weight. It hit the door again, driving it open briefly as Billie-Bob leaned into it.
A faint light came from somewhere above and as his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the stairwell he spotted a board leaning against the wall next to the door. Grabbing it he propped it under the handle to block the door as the tentacle on the other side continued to pound against the door’s face, dents appearing on his side of the metal door, attesting to the power of this creatures persistence.
He turned to face the black depths of the stairwell behind him. The steps going down led to an inky well, while the stairs leading up were bathed in a faint glow that came from somewhere above. Sensing movement in the deeper shadows below he climbed the steps in the opposite direction away from those bleak depths.
All Roads Lead To Terror: Coming of age in a post apocalyptic world (Dreadland Chronicles Book 1) Page 12
