by Edward Lee
“Those punks’ll never get me,” Xeke bragged. “They wish they could get me.”
But the keep seemed very serious. “Word is Nicky the Cooker is looking for you and Via. Word is you scammed him out of five grand.”
“That goombah greaseball can sit on a Caco-Dragon’s horn for all I care,” Xeke said, “Now gimme a shot of your best sour mash, not the rail stuff, the stuff from the back.”
“Oh, so it’s Grand Duke Xeke now?” The barkeep laughed. “Don’t bust my balls. You and I both know you ain’t got the cash for that.”
Xeke opened the paper bag. “I’ll have plenty of cash once you exchange this for me. And don’t try to jive me with the city exchange-rate. I want it from your people on Trafficante Street.”
The barkeep’s eyes shot wide when he saw the catfish spines and bone meal. It all glowed in the bar’s darkness like lime-green fire. “Holy shit! That’s worth a quarter-million Hellnotes on the street!”
“Which is why I’ll take a hundred and fifty large from you.” Xeke acted as though he expected a haggle, but all the barkeep did was go into a back room and reappear with a sack of cash. “My people will shit when they see this, and I’ll get a kick-ass commission. Thanks for coming to me, man.”
Xeke downed his drink and grabbed the sack. “No problemo. Keep your mouth quiet about this and I’ll have you up to your eyebrows in commissions.”
“You mean ... you’ve got more bones?”
Xeke just winked and turned back to the others. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But I thought you guys were hungry,” Cassie pointed out. “Why not eat here?”
Xeke frowned at the specials board. “With the kind of cash we’re packing? Hell, I wouldn’t eat that slop ... with Via’s mouth.” Then he laughed and slapped Via hard on the back.
“Yeah?” Via retorted. “I’ve got something for you to eat—” But before any more insults could be traded, Cassie noticed the barkeep staring at her.
“Oh, hey,” he said, “I didn’t recognize you with your hair that way.”
“Are you—” Cassie looked behind her confusedly—“talking to me?”
“Yeah, sure, you been in here a bunch of times, said you worked the cages at the S&N Club. Wasn’t I talking to you the other night?”
Uh, no. I wasn’t in Hell the other night. She couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “Sorry. You must be mistaking me for someone else.”
“You don’t say?” The keep smiled, shaking his head. “There’s this chick, comes in here all the time for Desolation Hour, and I mean she looks exactly like you, except her hair’s different. Spittin’ image of you.”
Cassie stood mute for a moment, then Xeke whispered, “He might mean your sister. Ask him.” Then Hush pointed to her locket.
“Her hair? Is it long and black, with a white streak?” Cassie’s heart was already racing. She rushed to the bar, opened her locket with Lissa’s picture inside, and showed it to him. “Is this the person you’re talking about?”
“Yeah, that’s her. Ain’t that weird?”
The implication slammed into Cassie’s consciousness. He’s talking about Lissa! He’s SEEN Lissa!
“What were you saying? You said you know where she works?”
“Yeah, that’s right—”
“Where!” Cassie exclaimed.
Her excitement took the barkeep aback. “She was telling me that she worked—” His words paused, then he looked up at a keening sound. “Ask her yourself.”
Then he pointed over Cassie’s shoulder. “There she is.”
Cassie turned very slowly. All she could do was stare, a lump in her throat.
There, standing in the tavern’s doorway, was her twin sister.
Chapter Eight
(I)
At first she couldn’t believe it—she couldn’t believe any of it. She wasn’t in this bar. She wasn’t in Hell.
And it wasn’t Lissa standing there looking back at her.
No. This was crazy. She was dreaming. She was hallucinating everything. There was no Via, Xeke, or Hush. Her house wasn’t a “Deadpass” and there was no such thing as an Etheress.
“Cassie?”
Lissa’s voice.
Lissa’s face and body.
Lissa’s hair, down to the white streak on the right side. She wore black-velvet gauntlets, a short black crinoline skirt and black-lace blouse. The same thing she’d been wearing on the night she shot herself in the back room of the Goth House. The tiny barbed-wire tattoo around her navel was the final proof.
Cassie knew then that she wasn’t dreaming. It was all real.
But when she opened her mouth, to speak to her sister for the first time in over two years—
Lissa turned and bolted, ran out of the bar.
“No! Come back!”
Cassie disregarded all else. She ran out of the bar, too, and manically followed her sister.
Why is she running? came the anguished question. She should be happy to see me—
Then again, maybe not. Maybe the opposite.
I’m the reason she’s in Hell, Cassie reminded herself.
Her flipflops carried her across the wretched street; she hurdled piles of garbage and nameless waste. A pack of Polter-Rats dispersed, squealing, as she leapt over them. Overhead, the bloody sky squirmed, and down the dark avenue, Lissa dashed onward, as if fleeing a certain terror. She was easily out-pacing Cassie.
“Lissa! Come back!”
A huge carriage rattled down the intersecting street—not drawn by horses but by rotund, rhinoceros-looking beasts with shiny, pustulating skin. Lissa crossed their path and darted into an alley. Then the carriage inconveniently stopped as the beasts paused to feed on a demon corpse in the road.
The alley was blocked.
“Damn it!” Cassie shouted. “Lissa, come back!” But her sister was gone.
Cassie didn’t dare follow. That would mean skirting the swollen things that hauled the carriage, and she suspected they might prefer eating her to the dead demon.
The others caught up to her on the corner, out of breath.
“Cassie, don’t ever do that!” Via warned her.
“You need to always stay with us,” Xeke said. “You don’t know the turf; you wouldn’t last a minute on your own.”
Cassie knew they were right, but—
She was close to tears. “That was my sister! She was standing right in front of me and now she’s gone!”
“We’ll find her.” Xeke seemed confident. “She figures she lost you—”
“But she doesn’t know that we know where she works,” Via added. Even Hush’s little smile seemed assuring.
Cassie’s mind reeled. “I-I forgot what the bartender said. Where does she work? Some kind of club?”
“The S&N Club,” Via confirmed. “Sid and Nancy’s place. It’s in Boniface Square.”
“And you’ll love the club,” Xeke said.
“Why?”
“It’s a Goth club.” Xeke grinned. “In Hell.”
(II)
A groaning escalator took them beneath the street, where the temperature must’ve shot up fifty degrees; it was like being in a sauna. Fires could be heard roaring behind fungus-traced tile walls. Their rail passes were good here—herebeing the Rasputin Circle subway station. In the ticket cage, a fat woman with leprosy waved them through the turnstile, waved them, that is, with a skeleton arm.
Cassie barely took note of this latest bit of sightseeing; she was too pent-up over Lissa.
Why did she run away? the question tormented her.
But Via explained some more dismal realities: “This place changes people. Most can’t hack it at all. It changes every aspect of their personalities. You need to be aware of this.”
“You really can’t expect Lissa to warm up to you,” Xeke added.
“Consider what she’s been through since she got here. And how she got here.”
Cassie shuffled despondently toward the platform.
“I know. She’s in Hell, and it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. She killed herself.”
Yeah, but it was because of me....
“One thing’s very important, though,” Xeke added. “When we do find her, you have to let her think that you’re dead too.”
“Yeah, you can’t let her know you’re an Etheress,” Via forewarned. “There’d be a riot. If Lucifer ever got wind that there was an Etheress on the street, then he’d be after you with everything he’s got. He’d activate the entire Constabulary to hunt for you.”
“Why?” Cassie asked.
“According to the legends, if an Etheress is captured alive, Lucifer’s Arch-Locks at the College of Spells and Discantations could use your body in a Transposition Rite. Satan could fully incarnate demons into the Living World. He could even incarnate himself.”
“So,” Cassie wondered. “You mean Satan’s never really set foot in the Living World?”
“Oh, sure he has, a bunch of times,” Via continued, tapping her leather boot as they waited for the subway. “But only as a Subcarnate, not fully in the flesh. And the subcarnation rites never last long, they’re real hard to perform properly, and real expensive.”
Then Xeke: “That’s why we have to be real careful. No one can know that you’re an Etheress. A full incarnation is Lucifer’s holy grail, and if he finds out you’re an Etheress, he’ll do anything to get his hands on you.”
Only now did the implications start to sink in. Satan, she realized, will put a dragnet out for me....
The prospect made her stomach clench.
More from Xeke: “You can’t let on to your sister that you’re different from everyone else here. So when we catch up to her, you’ll have to be real careful. I know you want to see her, and I can imagine you won’t rest until you do. But we gotta be honest with you. Like Via was saying, Hell changes people.”
“You might not like what those changes are,” Via said. “She probably hates you, she might even attack you.”
“I don’t care,” Cassie told them. “I just need to ... tell her I’m sorry.”
The silence that followed made it clear that they all understood her motives. Several rag-tag demons and a few humans waited at the stop. One man stood by smoking a cigarette, though his rib cage was missing; black cancer-ridden lungs leaked smoke when he inhaled. A woman in a football cheerleader’s outfit peeled crusted scabs off necrotic skin; she seemed to be selling them to an Imp in an overcoat. When Cassie glanced down off the platform, she noticed an abundance of crushed bodies and body parts: people thrown onto the tracks.
A deafening roar approached, augmented by loud metallic clangings and screeches. The string of subway cars that pulled in looked more like a procession of iron boilers with rivet-seamed porthole windows. The black metal hissed from intense heat. When the subway stopped, a human in a Ted Bundy t-shirt shoved a crippled demon against the car’s exterior surface. The demon howled, its face sizzling against the scalding iron, and when it recoiled, half of its face remained on the car, frying.
“Where do we sit?” Cassie asked, noticing no seats in the coach.
“Nowhere,” Xeke told her. “Grab the hand loop. The subway travels through the underground fires; it’s super hot.”
“If you sat down,” Via suggested, “you’d literally cook your ass off.”
Cassie grabbed the overhead loop, then glanced down in dread. “My flipflops are melting!”
Xeke and Via chuckled at the oversight, while Hush tugged Cassie forward to stand on the tops of her boots. Then the awkward ride began.
“I feel idiotic!” Cassie exclaimed, embarrassed. She hung partially from the hand-loop, balancing her feet on Hush’s boots, while Hush hugged around her waist.
“It’s only a few minutes to Boniface Square,” Xeke said. “You’ll like it, it’s a pretty hopping part of town, lots of action.”
Cassie frowned; she was pretty sure she’d seen enough “action” already; she couldn’t even contemplate what she’d feel like by now if she hadn’t taken the Reckoning Elixir. The subway jerked periodically, and seemed to be accelerating at a phenomenal speed. Soon, the sound of its wheels clattering over the tracks was completely drowned by the sound of roaring flames. A glance to the port-hole window showed her whitehot fire. Next, she glanced around the car itself. Someone had etched some graffiti on the inside of the hull:
Jesus saves.... He passes to Moses, shoots.... HE SCORES!
And as in any subway, advertisement panels ran across the top of the car. One was a photograph of a demon-child grinning as he threw a rock through a window. JOIN THE MOVEMENT TO RID HELL OF THIS SOCIAL OUTRAGE. GIVE GENEROUSLY TO THE “KILL THE BROODREN FUND.” Another showed a solemn cloaked and hooded man holding a handful of gemstones: SICK OF POLTER-RATS EATING YOUR FLESH? TIRED OF BAPHO-ROACHES LAYING EGGS IN YOUR BODY CAVITIES? CALL PIP BOYS NOW! THE BEST IN CRYSTALOGICAL PEST EXTERMINATION!
And another: DO YOU HAVE AN UNWANTED HYBRID? ARE YOU TIRED OF ALL THAT SQUALLING, ALL THOSE DIAPERS, AND ALL THAT MESS? WE PAY CASH FOR YOUR BABIES! WHY WAIT? VISIT AN URBAN PULPING STATION NEAR YOU! THAT’S RIGHT! CASH FOR THOSE UGLY LITTLE CRITTERS!
The heat was insufferable; Cassie felt like a piece of raw clay baking in a kiln. But when she feared she might pass out altogether—and flop to the griddle-hot flooring—the subway had ground to a halt, and in another moment they were helping her out. Cassie paid no mind to the amputated derelicts plodding around the platform on their stumps, nor to the pack of Broodren beating a She-Troll down with crowbars near a vending machine that sold Skin Jerky. Cassie began to revive as the grinding escalator ferried them up into an open park. A statue of Lizzie Borden—bearing an axe—greeted them on the street. It seemed darker here—long twisted tree limbs from malformed branches overhead blocked out the eternal twilight. Cassie noticed ill-colored fruit hanging from some of the trees, fruit the size of footballs.
“Don’t stand under the Uter-Gourds,” Via warned and pulled her away. But Cassie noted that the bizarre things were churning as if to dispel their contents through a suspiciously vulvalike groove. Cassie didn’t care to see what came out.
“Make way,” Xeke said. “Don’t piss him off.”
Cassie nearly screamed when she looked at the thing that trod down the sidewalk: a great fleshy mouth a yard high, walking on a pair of human legs.
“A Dentata-Ped,” Via identified. “They made thousands of them at the Office of Transfiguration before they decided to cancel the project. At first Lucifer wanted an entire army of them to supplement the Mutilation Squads.”
“But they don’t have much for brains.” Xeke chuckled. “They were chomping up Ushers and humans alike.”
The thing strode by, teeth the size of paperback books and a huge lolling tongue.
On the side of its burgeoning head, great orbs for eyes gave Cassie a lusty glance.
“And speaking of Mutilation Squads,” Via pointed out, “here’s something you should know.”
At the comer a sign stood: CITY MUTILATION ZONE.
Cassie stopped, remembering. She remembered her dream.
“I saw that,” she said, “or something just like it.”
“In a nightmare?”
“Yes.”
Then the ensuing carnage replayed in her mind, the phalanx of demons tearing into a crowded street to dismember, rape, and destroy.
“They have the Zones to keep things from getting dull around here,” Via mentioned. “Without any warning, the Squads will Nectoport into a Zone and go on a rampage, just for fun.”
“Anything goes in a Mutilation Zone,” Xeke added. “But don’t worry; they did this street not too long ago. Probably won’t hit it again for a while.”
Cassie tried to feel confident as they passed the sign and stepped into the street. “What did you say a minute ago? They ... Nectoport?”
“It’s the most advanced form of spatial displacement. Kind of like the transporters on Star Trek, only the So
rcerers at the De Rais Labs use tapped psychic energy from their Torture Factories as fuel for the process. It’s the same sort of power that Hell uses in place of electricity, except the Nectoports use a lot more energy.”
They were in the middle of the street when Cassie asked, “So these Squads could appear—anytime—on any street in a Mutilation Zone?”
“Uh-hmm.”
“Even this street right here?”
“Uh-hmm.”
Flipflops snapping, Cassie ran the rest of the way across the street as the others laughed after her. Eventually they all crossed.
“So where are we going now?” Cassie asked.
“Munchies,” Xeke answered.
The short walk seemed as pleasant as it could be, considering that this was Hell. Open-air cafes lined the street, wafting awful scents over the heads of their patrons. One waiter prepared a tableside dish on a red-hot iron plate: small mice-like rodents jumped on the plate, squealing, as they were flambee’d in smoking oil. Espresso machines hissed, expelling steaming blood into dainty cups.
“Careful here,” Xeke said.
One by one they carefully stepped into a large revolving door, as one might find at the front of a ritzy Manhattan hotel—only the edges of the door were sharpened cutting blades. Dried blood and skin on the blades proved that some hadn’t been so careful.
Shortly thereafter, they were sitting down at a table in what was, by initial appearances, a high-class restaurant. The Alferd Packer Room at the No Seasons Hotel.
“This is the best restaurant in any human district,” Xeke said, “and finally, we have the money to eat here.”
A waist-coated busboy—with white warts all over his face—politely filled their water glasses, but the water looked full of rust. Cassie noticed maggots frozen in the ice cubes. “Almost all of the entrees are human-based but it’s not that ground-up stuff that comes out of the Pulping Stations,” Via said with enthusiasm.
“I’m not going to eat human meat!” Cassie whispered hotly across the table.
“It’s not like cannibalism in the Living World, Cassie.” Via perused a shiny black menu with gold tassels hanging off the spine. “Here it’s just ... meat. It’s an everyday resource.”
