by Chuck Wendig
NERGAL.
The tall, broad-shouldered man steps forward. Long wild beard hanging down to his bare, muscled chest. Flies nest in the kinks and curls, fat black bodies catching what little light there is to catch. His own scalp is bare—his legs swaddled in leather strips and torn rags. Bare feet slap against the concrete as they approach.
And all around are the bodies of dead teenagers. Children. No longer wearing the features of animals. All human. All dead.
“Worry not,” Nergal says, his voice deep, crisp, but there lurks an almost regal trill to the words he speaks. “They were dead long before you came. I just borrowed their bodies to house my Sebittu. My seven protectors. I will have to find new... volunteers.”
Cason cannot stand. Not yet. But he forces his hand to the pocket. Where the trigger for the bomb waits. He slumps a shoulder, lets the pack slide off.
“You bested them all,” Nergal says, now standing tall over Cason. The man—the god—smells of ozone, of streets after a rain, of an infected wound, of musk and flesh and electricity and death. Flywings buzz. “You have the beast in you. Wants to rise to the surface, doesn’t he?” Nergal runs a callused thumb over Cason’s brow. “Here. And here. The marks of that beast. Fading. But they’ll come again.”
Cason has no idea what the man is talking about.
Doesn’t much care, either.
Frank’s gonna miss the show.
“You brought my wife and son back to life,” Cason says.
“Did I?” The god seems bewildered. “Oh. Good.”
“I want to thank you.”
“Of course you would.”
“I got you this.” Cason shifts a shoulder—lets the bag hang off his forearm.
Nergal stares at it like it’s naught but a fossilized turd, as if to say, this is my gift? He sneers and scratches the beard—flies take flight before roosting once more in the dark twisted folds of hair. Cason thinks, he’s not going to take it, but then, sure enough, Nergal—the god of storms, the Lord of Cutha, the inadvertent king of the underworld—reaches down with a hand and haughtily raises the bag in front of his face to give it a long sniff.
Cason grits his teeth, breaks free from his subservient position, and leans backward—
Just as his hand spins the dial on the remote control in his pocket.
Boom.
The air pops—a brief wind shoves Cason back—and there’s a flash and a bang. His ears ring and a stray thought flits through his mind: blowing up gods is getting to be a real habit—and then he’s crab-walking backwards and scrambling to stand.
When the white smoke clears and the middling darkness resumes, lit only by the faltering barrel fire, he sees the broad-shouldered shadow of Nergal the Storm Lord standing there. Silent. Trembling.
All around, little white pieces of burning paper float to the ground.
What Cason expects: Nergal slides into component pieces, like a cartoon knight sliced into chunks by a swift-cutting sword.
What Cason does not expect: Nergal brushing himself off as if nothing happened.
The latter is what happens.
“That was no gift,” Nergal’s voice booms. A voice that seems genuinely surprised, as if incredulous that any would dare give him anything less than a chest of the richest gold, the finest silver, the rarest gems. It was an attitude Cason remembers in Eros—his boss always seemed to expect the world to bend to his will. And it almost always did.
Little pieces of paper smolder in Nergal’s beard. Flies gather to extinguish the cinders of the smoking adabs.
The bomb didn’t work.
That’s not good.
“You made a terrible error,” Nergal says.
And before Cason can do anything else, the Lord of Storms is standing before him. From ten feet away to ten inches, in the space of a single heartbeat.
Cason does what Cason does. He fights. Throws a punch. Connects with Nergal’s face—the god’s head snaps back and a cloud of flies coughs into the air. Gut punch. Knee-kick. Elbow to the throat. Nergal stands there. Takes each blow the same way a building takes a bird flying into its side: with complete and utter disinterest.
One more, for good measure—a deal-closer in the ring, when he was afforded the rare chance to pull it off. Cason snaps a high kick to the side of Nergal’s head.
The god stops it.
He reaches up like a lord waving to his serfs and catches Cason’s ankle. Balance gone, Cason’s other foot skids out from under him—
Nergal reaches with his other hand, grabs Cason’s knee. Then, one hand low and one higher up, he twists.
The bone snaps.
He drops Cason like a sack of potatoes.
Then Nergal steps on the other leg. Lends it his full weight—an inhuman weight, the weight of a horse, a truck, a mountain.
The bone creaks. Grinds. Then snaps.
Cason screams like he’s never screamed before. Not in the ring. Not ever.
Nergal grabs him by the scruff of his neck and carries him like a mother cat carries an impudent kitten.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Broken Legs
BARNEY RUNS AROUND, whacking the remote control against everything: window sill, chair tops, heating vents. Cason catches up with him, gently plucks the remote from the one-year-old’s hand.
Of course, the kid cries.
Alison, in the kitchen washing dishes, looks out—the apartment is all pretty open, so it’s not hard for her to see. “I swear, he’s only one and we’re already into the terrible twos.”
Barney does this foot-stompy, hand-wavey angry baby thing when something he wants is taken away. And that’s what he’s doing now.
But Cason has a trick. He takes Barney, spins him around once, twice, then a third time, and when he’s finally done spinning, Cason gives Barney a favorite toy: a little wobbly plastic police car with one rolly ball in the center instead of four functional tires.
All the tension in the boy’s face melts away. He smiles—showing off his two goofy looking teeth jutting up out of his lower jaw like a pair of tiny white stones—then grabs the toy and toddles off like a drunken robot.
Cason heads into the kitchen, comes up behind Alison. Hands around her middle. The flats of his palms under her shirt, across her stomach.
He kisses her neck.
“That was a smooth move back there,” she says, leaning back into the kiss.
“It’s aikido.”
“I don’t think I saw you karate kick our son.”
He laughs. “Aikido isn’t karate, Al. It’s a different martial art. Means the ‘Way of Harmony.’ It’s all about redirecting energy, right? Attack comes in, you move them a different way—redirect their energy, leave them vulnerable to attack. That’s all I did. Redirected his energy a little.”
“Well, you’re good at it.”
His hands travel lower, sliding past the hem of her jeans.
“I’m good at a lot of things,” he says. She moans.
Then: fump fump fump fump.
Cason feels arms wrap around his knee. Then a string of babbled gobbledygook rises up from behind him. Barney’s at that stage now where he doesn’t say words so much as he fountains forth whole paragraphs of complete and total nonsense.
“Hey, Barn,” Cason says with a sigh. “You’re kind of c-blocking Daddy over here.”
Alison twists her neck, plants a kiss on his chin. “The joys of parenthood.”
“Nobody told me celibacy was one of them.”
“Do you regret it? Being a Daddy?”
“Not one bit.”
“Your Daddy did.”
He lowers his voice, grumbling. “Well, my Daddy can go to hell. Besides, he’s not even my real Daddy, anyway.”
“Maybe you should try to find your real Daddy.”
He ducks down, grabs Barney, flies him around the kitchen before plopping the kid’s diaper-clad butt down on the kitchen counter—an act that earns him a cockeyed look from Alison, who likes to keep t
he counters clean. Cason ignores the look and says, “I don’t need any more family than what I have in this room, right now.” He kisses the top of Barney’s head, who squirms and giggles. “All right. The fighter fights. Back to training, babe.”
CASON AWAKENS WITH a gasp—pain jumps between both legs, zig-zagging between them. His eyes cross, everything blurry until they start to adjust—
A room lit by fire. Torches bolted into the wall, giving the industrial space a gloss of the medieval.
Old red brick. Flies buzzing.
A metal desk turned on its side in the corner. A few framed photos hanging on the wall—dusty, the glass cracked, pictures of men from decades past.
A few papers slide around the room on unseen currents of air.
Then there’s him.
The Storm Lord. Nergal sitting on a throne made of white wood—each piece carved and sculpted, the wood smooth as untouched snow, gleaming like polished bone. And that’s what it’s made to look like: bones. Skulls and femurs and rib-bones—and many other bones that don’t seem human, don’t even seem mammalian, giving the throne less the look of a chair one sits in and more the look of a dead steed one rides into the thick of battle.
Nergal slouches in the chair. Gut out. Beard of black hair and blacker flies draped across his chest. Every time he shifts, the delicate chair shifts with him. “You are awake.”
Cason pants, tries to see past the pain—looks to his legs, which lay in front of him, useless, bent at wrong angles like the legs of a dead puppet. He grits his teeth. Tries to sit. Fails. Lays there instead, sweating.
“Go to hell,” Cason says, the words a misery even to say. It’s not just his legs; his whole body feels like it’s been run through a gauntlet of the world’s top fighters.
“Hell.” Nergal says the word like it’s foreign. “One realm of many. One for which I care little. The Devil’s domain. And he has not been seen in years. It is a realm that is closed to us, so your wish cannot be granted.”
“Fuck you.”
“You do not want that either, weakling. I’d split you open like a pomegranate. Your insides spilling out all over the floor like red arils.” Nergal sits up straight, his back stiffening. “Besides. I am taken.”
“You’re pussy-whipped,” Cason says. A laugh—a crazy one, at that—bubbles up out of him. Part of him hopes to enrage this fly-bearded fuck. Maybe then Cason can be put down like a dying dog; some small mercy to help end the misery. But then, in the dark of his mind, Cason hears Barney’s voice—a giggle from many years ago...
“Do you mean her womanhood? That I am tamed by it?” Nergal stands, suddenly, and Cason thinks it’s in anger, but then the god begins to pace, staring off at some place beyond the brick, beyond this moment. “I was tamed by it. I was tamed like a temple dog, for it was glorious. Soft and deep. Infinite folds. And when it needed to, it would breathe fire. It could strip flesh from bone with its bitter secretions. Serpents would crawl from her inner channel, serpents with many heads and venom so potent that even a drop of it could slay the Mighty Humbaba.” His voice gets small, speaks with love, lust, reverence: “Her womanhood was beautiful. I bowed before it. I worshiped at it as if it was a fount of sacred water. My tongue, my mouth, my teeth, my fingers, I would sometimes crawl deep within that charnel space and let her give birth—I would be born upon the cold floor of her palace, wet and squalling, and she would pick me up and kiss me and I would be... complete.”
“Ereshkigal,” Cason says.
“Yes. Ereshkigal. My only love.” Nergal sighs. Then, a spike of anger: “You are not fit to say her name. Do not say it again, or I shall have you eat the meat of your own shattered legs.”
“I thought she had you trapped there. You... partook of her food and drink and then couldn’t leave. A trick. A ruse.”
Nergal smiles. Yellow teeth past the buggy beard. “I did not merely partake of her food and drink. She bedded me. For seven days and seven nights, we stayed in her bedchamber. Her palace shook. The seven gates swayed as the fifty lesser gods howled for us to quit our lusty clamor. All the monsters of Kur tore at their eyes and ears so that they could not behold our love-making. She trapped me. Yes. And I loved it.”
“And you loved her.”
“I did.” A pause. “I do.”
Pain in that voice. A pain altogether different from Cason’s own—deeper. The pain of loss. Come to think of it, Cason knows that pain quite well; his mind travels to Alison and Barney. Today is not a day he can die. Not until he finishes this. Not until he can be back in her arms and hold his son once more.
It’s time to mine the stone of the Storm God’s misery.
“You’ve lost her.”
Nergal winds his way back to the throne of white wood, and slumps into it. “I have. Again.”
“She left you.”
The god’s lip curls into a sneer. He rakes his beard with dirty fingernails, and the flies move to let his digits pass and comb. “She’s... off again. To see the world, she says. So much death. That’s how she put it. This modern age lets us die in myriad ways, ways she has not seen—train crashes and building collapses. Diseases that cause you to vacate your bowels from your body. Men killing men with weapons undreamt by us. Humans have become masters of death, she said. Masters of avoiding it. Masters of creating it. I want to reclaim my mantle, she said. She said, she said, she said.”
“But you don’t believe her.”
Nergal growls: “She’s off with him again.”
“Another man.”
“Another god. She’d not dally with a man.” Nergal’s voice again softens. No less bitter, but now a quiet wind, if still an ill one. Mocking, too. Petulant. “The Bull of Heaven. Gugalanna. She chases him. He chases her. He should have died when those two heroes slew him and cut off all his limbs, but no. She had to breathe life into the sagging leather carcass.” Nergal rubs his eyes. “I like to think she loves me and only... lusts after him. But now I fear differently.”
Cason’s not sure what his play is, here. But he’s onto something. He remembers what Frank told him: ...this is where we find out how to kill Nergal. It’s always in the myths. The legends. The history. The stories. The stories have secrets. They tell the truth even when it’s a lie. Except here, Cason doesn’t want the lie. Fuck the legend. Because he’s getting the tale right from the monster’s mouth.
Which means: keep him talking.
“Tell me more.”
Again Nergal stands. “You don’t command me.”
“I’m not commanding. Just saying. You seem to like talking about her.”
Nergal steps closer, coming between Cason and the torchlight. His long shadow like a cold night. “You know nothing.”
“I know what it’s like to... lose someone you love.”
Nergal kneels next to Cason. Cason’s not a small guy, not by any means, but here he feels tiny—a mouse in the shade of a lion. “The way you say that, it sounds like you think we are equal. What I feel is love. All you can feel is some crass facsimile of it. Yours is a dog’s love for a dish of water, or for licking his own privates. Mine is a true thing. A beast of many faces, a gem of many facets. Deep as the primal ocean, tall as the roof of Heaven.”
You’re losing the thread... “I’m sorry, I—”
Nergal squats closer, leaning in. The flies hum and buzz. Lightning flashes in the dark of the god’s eye. “Do you know what I have planned for you?”
He doesn’t wait for Cason to answer.
“I’m going to keep you alive. I will take your body, and I will break it into its component pieces. I will make out of your bones and tendons and bleats and screams a brand new throne for the Mistress of Kur, for the Lady of Death, for my one true love. A throne that, this time, she will not choose to abandon.”
His hand closes around Cason’s throat.
Cason says, “That’s... her... throne there?”
His eyes darting to the pale throne of white wood.
Nergal loosens hi
s grip.
“Yes. That is her throne.”
“She...” Cason coughs. “She must have been happy to have it. Once.”
“Once. I made it for her before the gates closed. Carved it from bone-wood before the doors of our world shut and we were all exiled to this...”—Nergal makes a face like he’s got something foul in his mouth—“ugly place. I was able to bring it with us. I moved mountains, quite literally, to bring it here before my power diminished with that of all the others. A reminder of that other place. A memento mori from the throne room of the palace of Kur.”
Nergal stares at it longingly.
Cason knows this next part is going to hurt.
But he doesn’t see any other way.
Cason sniffs, and says: “Looks like a piece of shit to me.”
Nergal sits still for a time. Then slowly turns his head toward Cason, nostrils flaring, teeth grinding in a way that sounds like stone sliding against stone.
“You compare my handiwork to a nugget of dung?”
Cason swallows a hard, fearful knot, then shrugs. “No wonder she left.”
The god strikes like a thunderclap.
THE RAIN FEELS good on Frank’s scalp. For him, his skin is always hot—hot like a griddle is hot, always ready to cook a couple eggs. The rain is cool.
The buildings of the wire factory rise up around him. Offices, factory floors, warehouses, all defunct, all dead, empty brick and boneyards of rusted wire.
He doesn’t know where Cason is.
That’s not good. The sewer tunnel kept going and going—next two manhole covers down were sealed up, covered over. Had to hit the third one down, and by then it was well over a hundred feet, and by the time Frank popped his head up like a prairie dog, he was alone. No Cason to greet him.
Then, not long after, he heard the calls: jeers and cheers and chanting and—the roar of a big cat? What the fuck?
By the time Frank tracks down the source of the noises, all he finds is a scattered contingent of bodies united in death. They’re already rotting. Flies feasting, maggots munching. Teenagers, by the looks of them. Long dead. Seven of them.
