by James Hunt
Amy twisted her face into a grimace, stumbling around this new hell, trying to figure out where she’d gone. What had happened?
“It’s never something you get used to.”
Amy gasped, the voice startling her from behind as she quickly spun around. With her feet still burning, she paced backward, shaking her head. “Who are—”
“Don’t recognize me?” And then the man smiled, exposing a gold tooth in his mouth.
Amy frowned, shock trickling down from her mind and numbing her all the way to her toes. “That’s not possible.”
“It is,” the miner said, still smiling. “Because of you.” He pointed at her the way she remembered all of those cheesy used car commercials used to on TV. “Your soul was my ticket out of here, and your ticket in.”
Amy’s eyebrows briefly twitched together in a brief flash of confusion. “I don’t understand—”
“No, not right now, you don’t.” The miner pocketed his hands, stepping forward, and it was when he started to move that Amy noticed that his feet weren’t touching the ground. “You gave me your soul. And whoever controls the soul controls the host.” He pointed at her again, this time more foreboding. “And that’s you.”
Amy stepped forward, standing her ground despite the burning scent of flesh that rose from her bare feet. “You have your freedom. What else have I done to you? Nothing. I did not put you here. I set you free.”
“And I gave your daughter her life back,” the miner said, spitting the reply in her face.
The anger melted from Amy’s face, and she frowned. “I just don’t understand. Why— What do you gain?”
And as Amy watched the miner’s face, which had been completely reanimated by whatever powers controlled this place, she swore he looked more ghostly than ever before.
“I’ve been in this place for nearly two hundred years.” The miner glanced around the landscape with an expression of shock and horror. “I wandered aimlessly. Lost. In pain. But my cries for help and mercy went unheard.” He stared down at his hands, peering at them like foreign objects. “I watched myself waste away. And I felt all of it. Every peel of decay and cell dying off.” He shut his eyes and looked away. “And I was forced to be here without my wife, forever cursed with a lack of food and water. It wasn’t right!” He pounded his chest with his fist. “I should have never been cast here! I wasn’t the one who opened the mine! I just worked here. It wasn’t my fault that I tried to survive. That I was the last man standing. I had a will to live. Is that a crime? Why should I be punished for wanting to live? To be more than what I was!” The miner screamed until his cheeks flushed red, matching the crimson skies above.
The burning ground had numbed Amy’s feet, and she stood there, staring at him. “You were not innocent. You knew what your boss did to the tribe that lived on these lands. You cast them out for your own greed. You knew what would happen to them. You cared more about the gold in the ground than the flesh that roamed the surface.”
Contempt spread across the miner’s face as he hovered near Amy. “We do what we must to survive. It is nothing but the act of nature itself. We live and fight for as long as we can. Some of us have more fight than others.” He drifted back. “You will suffer here, Amy. You will experience hardships that you couldn’t drum up in your darkest nightmares. You will rot. You will burn. You will be alone.” He reached behind him, holding the jar that contained her soul. “I’ll be sure to give my wife your regards.”
A flash of light popped from behind the miner, blinding Amy and forcing her to turn away. When she opened her eyes again, the miner was gone.
Amy stared down at her feet and lifted her left foot to examine her sole. The skin had blackened, and a yellowish patina formed over some of the open wounds as they struggled to heal in the harsh environment.
When Amy planted her foot back down, the pain she had experienced erupted all over again. And as she gazed out onto the horizon, Amy sought solace in the one piece of information that was available to her. Her children were alive. Terry was alive. And while she wouldn’t see them grow up, at least they’d get the chance.
And as their memories floated through her mind, the ground cracked beneath her feet. She tried to move, but she was frozen in place.
Hot gas burst through the openings, spraying her body, burning its way through her clothes and skin. She opened her mouth to scream, but the first few seconds was nothing but gasping silence. The pain was so intense that it numbed her. But it didn’t last for long. This was Amy Holloway’s new reality. This was hell.
67
Naked, bruised, bloody, and covered in sweat, Terry sat naked and bound to a chair in the middle of a concrete room. Even after the hours of relentless assault against Terry from Mulaney’s men, every punch felt like the first.
Terry didn’t know how long it had been. An hour? A day? He knew it was long enough for his legs to have gone numb and to have wet himself.
A quick jab knocked Terry’s face to the left, and the restraints that attached him to the chair kept him upright. Mouth closed, blood and saliva pooled and then dripped from his lips. It tasted terrible.
“Is that all you can take?” A man’s voice asked, circling Terry like a shark in the water. “I’ve hit nuns tougher than you.”
Laughter erupted from the man’s comrades.
“Jensen, you’re one sick bastard,” a second voice said.
“Yeah. I know.” Jensen placed a finger beneath Terry’s chin and tilted his face up.
Terry blinked, the man in front of him blurry even at close range. Another right hook smacked his jaw, this one hard enough to topple him and the chair to the floor.
Paralyzed, Terry gasped for breath, deaf to the laughter from his attackers. He lay on the ground for a while, his entire body aching, and then a door opened, cutting the laughter off. Terry was picked up from the floor and sat upright.
He blinked, his vision limited to light and darkness. “Please.” He wasn’t sure if his voice was loud enough to be heard, but he tried anyway. “Stop.” Terry shuddered, and the trembling worsened when a hand touched Terry’s shoulder.
“God, just look at you. You’re a mess.” A voice feigned empathy. “Let’s get him some water.”
The orders were followed promptly, and Terry gulped greedily from a bowl that was brought to his lips, which was pulled away before he had his fill.
A blurry Douglas Mulaney sat in front of him, dressed in a three-piece-suit, staring at him with a natural and easy indifference as though Terry was nothing more than a piece of property that Mulaney was assessing for value.
“Christ, Terry,” Mulaney said, shaking his head.
Terry leaned back on the uncomfortable chair, head flung back, exposing the sweat and blood that glistened on the pale flesh of his throat.
“You do know that this could have all been avoided, right?” Mulaney asked. “All you had to do was keep your end of the deal. But you had to double-cross me. You had to make things difficult.” Mulaney stood and walked over to Terry, hovering over his face and blocking out the light above, causing him to become silhouetted. “You’ve brought a shitstorm of allegations against me, Terry.”
“My… family…” Terry slurred the words, his tongue swollen.
Mulaney leaned close to Terry’s ear. “You need to convince me not to bring your daughters here, Terry. You need to convince me that you can make all of those false claims you sent to the EPA go away.”
Terry shivered and would have cried if there was any fluid left in him, but the men who’d beat him had hollowed him out.
Mulaney grabbed a handful of Terry’s hair and yanked hard, growing angrier. “How are you going to help me fix this? Do you think I want to hurt your girls? Do you think I want to introduce them to my associates?” He shoved Terry’s head forward in disgust. “No!”
Mulaney walked around to Terry’s front, hands in his pockets, calming down. “I didn’t want to do this, Terry. Really. It causes more headaches f
or me, but you need to understand something about the way I do business.” He removed his right and brandished a small revolver that he pressed into Terry’s forehead. “If I go down, then so do the people around me. So that means you and your family. Understand? I don’t come out of this without getting hurt, then neither do they.” After keeping the revolver’s barrel pressed against Terry’s forehead for a few seconds, Mulaney lowered the weapon. “But let’s hope it doesn’t come that.”
Mulaney left the room, taking his thugs with him, and when the door shut, Terry released a hefty sigh of exhaustion and relief.
Alone, Terry became more aware of his predicament. But what Mulaney wanted him to do, what he expected, Terry wasn’t sure he could accomplish.
The EPA email that he’d sent, the one with all of the mining samples and safety hazards as it would relate to drilling, couldn’t be unsent. The appropriate parties had most likely already seen them or would very shortly. He couldn’t unopen Pandora’s box.
But he couldn’t let Mulaney know that.
No, if Terry wanted to have any chance at saving his girls, then he needed to convince Mulaney that he could change things. At least buy him some time until… what? No one knew where they were. Ghost Town had been evacuated.
Terry whimpered at the hopelessness of their situation, his face lowered to the ground. He was a dead man. The best that Terry could hope for was making sure that his girls stayed alive. That was the only thing that mattered at this point.
Terry studied the concrete. In addition to his own blood and other bodily fluids, there were other red stains that marked the floor. This wasn’t the first time Mulaney had used this room.
Terry wiggled his limbs, and while he watched them move, he couldn’t feel them any longer. Through his one good eye, he saw that both ankles were bound to the chair’s leg and judging the position of his hands behind his back, his wrists were bound to the back.
Aside from himself, the restraints, and the chair, the only other tool at his disposal was the light above his head. It was a fluorescent bulb encased in a clear piece of plastic. The ceiling was short, eight feet high at the most. He could easily reach if he could stand on the chair.
Terry swiveled his head around, glancing in the corners of the room, checking for any recording devices, but with his one good eye, he couldn’t spy any. Which meant that he was alone, truly alone, with no one to keep tabs on him.
Terry shut his eyes, reaching deep into the recesses of his consciousness, trying to gather any momentum to think his way out of the situation, but he came up empty. All he could think to do was keep working at the restraints, and maybe he’d get lucky enough to free a hand. And while he slowly rubbed his wrist, tearing away at the flesh that surrounded it, Terry whispered a silent prayer to any god that would listen to keep his daughters safe.
68
The landscape was like the inside of a volcano. Black and red with jagged rocks protruding from the earth. No green grass. No blue sky. No trees. No life. Nothing. Amy was walking the valley of death.
Above, the sky was a crimson red, which bathed the world in the same dark hue. The rough terrain stretched toward the horizon. It was endless. Infinite.
The heat had intensified over the past few hours, forcing Amy to shed all her clothes save her underwear. But she had put the discarded clothes to good use, wrapping her shirt around her left foot and her pants around her right, preventing her soles from burning off.
Amy lifted her right foot and discovered that most of it had burned away, exposing a small portion of her heel. “Shit.” She gingerly put her foot down and pressed onward.
Amy wasn’t sure how far she walked, or for how long, but the distance didn’t make a difference. The landscape never changed. The journey only became harder, brought on by fatigue and a more treacherous road.
Amy finally stopped and flung her head back in exhaustion. Sweat made her body glisten. A hunger had pained her stomach, and the only thing she wished for in that moment was relief from the trials of her journey.
But no amount of prayer would grant her a reprieve. She was stuck, lost, buried in a void of no return. Running Water had told her that the extraction of her soul would cost a terrible price, but she had underestimated the cost.
Still, her girls were safe. Amy clung to that thought. It was the one thread of sanity that remained to her. And in this place, she needed it.
“Mommy?”
Amy froze. She shut her eyes, but her immobility caused the ground to burn through the rest of the cloth at her feet, searing her soles.
“Mommy, please, it’s hurting me!”
Amy breathed sharply through her nose, ignoring the voice. “It’s not real.”
“Mommy, help!”
It was the strain in her daughter’s voice that caused Amy to spin around, widening her eyes in terror. Maisie cried on the altar of a rock, hoisted high on its flat surface. Ropes had been tied around her wrists and ankles, splaying her out in a soiled white dress. Her cheeks were red and shiny from crying, but dry of tears.
The quick movement toward her daughter caused the burned flesh of her feet to rip from bone, and Amy tripped forward, screaming in agony. She forced the bloody stump back to the ground, limping toward her daughter, bloodied footprints trailing her path.
Breathless from the pain by the time she reached her daughter, Amy stretched her arm as high as possible, but Maisie remained just inches out of reach.
The heat and pain eventually forced Amy back, and she could only look up in horror as her daughter caught fire.
“No!” Amy cried and thrust herself upward on the rock. She jumped repeatedly, but it was like the rock grew higher with each attempt, mocking Amy’s efforts.
“AHHHH!” Maisie’s voice reached a shrieking crescendo, and then her body transformed from an angelic little girl into a charred and blackened demon.
Amy retreated in horror as massive wings sprouted from the demon’s back, its eyes glowing amber. It clung to the rock, shrieking in a horrible high-pitched wail, loud enough to burst Amy’s eardrums. She clamped her hands over her ears, but it didn’t diminish the cry.
The beast leapt off the rock, landing near Amy. It hissed and shrieked, snapping its massive jaws, its mouth filled with razor-sharp fangs. A long, skinny forked tongue rolled from its open mouth and swung hastily around through the air. Twice it reached Amy’s face, burning her skin like acid.
The demon jumped on top of Amy, keeping her pinned to the molten hot rock. The creature opened its mouth just inches from her face. It let out a long shriek, releasing another blast of acid. Finished, the demon leapt upwards, its shrieking fading until it disappeared into the red crimson sky.
Body on fire, Amy forced herself off the searing blacktop. Standing, she twisted at the waist, getting a better look at the carnage on her back.
Black scabs had formed over the areas where her flesh had touched the scalding surface. They were crusted with blood and the same yellowish-green patina that had oozed from Maisie’s face just before she transformed into that creature.
She only poked the scab once, her stomach lurching when her finger came in contact with the crusty surface. She trudged forward, propelled by the burning of her soles. The pain of her injuries helped block the image of her daughter being burned alive.
What Amy had seen wasn’t real. Just another illusion, like what she saw in the desert with Liz. Maisie was safe.
And yet there was a whisper that stoked her doubts. Had she set her daughter free? Was she still somehow trapped here? She never actually saw Maisie walk into the safe and loving arms of her father.
Maybe the miner had gone back on his deal? He had what he wanted, and there was no reason for him not to keep them both here.
“No.” Amy spoke the defiance aloud. That wasn’t her daughter. It was just another evil creature that plagued this world, feeding off her fears, her doubts. Her family was safe.
“Mom!”
The cry came from the l
eft, but Amy kept her eyes straight ahead, refusing to break stride.
“Mother, please!”
Amy didn’t need to look to know who it was. She recognized Liz’s voice.
“Why won’t you help me? Please help me!” The desperation was thick in her voice, and then her screams of pain transformed into screams of anger. “You did this! You did this to me! You bitch! You let your daughter suffer! It’s your fault! Your fault!”
The tears that streamed from Amy’s eyes evaporated into steam, the air so hot that it sucked the moisture immediately. It took every ounce of Amy’s strength to walk past, Liz’s voice fading behind her.
No, not Liz’s voice. Just another demon. Another trick.
The heat continued to plague her aimless journey. The longer she walked, the more her joints ached. The pain started in her knees, then spread to her hips, and back, and finally her shoulders, which grew more stooped and rounded the farther she walked.
“Amy.”
She stopped in her tracks. The voice didn’t scream her name, provided no fear or malice. It was a seductive whisper, and her heart skipped a beat. The emotion turned Amy’s focus toward Terry. He stood to her right, dressed in a white shirt and pants. No chains, no ropes tying him down. He was smiling at her.
“What are you doing here?” Terry spoke the question with the innocence and earnestness of a child seeking the truth.
“I had to save our girls,” Amy answered, her throat dry and cracked from exhaustion and dehydration.
Terry walked toward her, barefoot, and while he displayed no obvious signs of pain as he walked, Amy noticed a few drops of sweat on his forehead. He opened his body to her, arms outstretched and welcoming. “Why?”
The question took Amy aback. “They were in danger.”
