by Bruce Blake
And it was good for someone to know she’d gone.
At the end of the alley, the Carrion crouched, stuck his fingers into the holes in a manhole cover, and lifted it as though it was made of cardboard. A light emanated out of the sewer access, flickering and glowing as if all the shit and gases in the sewer were on fire. The Carrion gestured and Mr. Dillinger’s soul hesitated. The man in black gestured again, insistent, but Mr. Dillinger shook his head and backed away a step. A few seconds passed, the situation appearing to be a stalemate until the Carrion took a deep breath and grabbed the spirit by the front of his jacket. Dillinger struggled a moment, but he was no match. The Carrion stuffed him down the manhole and quickly climbed down after him.
And left the manhole cover off.
Poe fidgeted in the shadow, staring from manhole cover lying on the ground to the glow emanating from below.
“Should we go?” Trevor sounded more excited than nervous.
Poe watched for another second, suspicious. Nothing happened.
Maybe he’s forgetful. She half-stood, stretching to see further down the hole. Nothing. Not bloody likely.
Whether she’d stumbled on a careless Carrion or he’d left the cover off to entice her down was irrelevant. Her goal was to get to Hell and this was the way. She stood and Trevor was at her side in an instant, nervous excitement radiating from him.
“You’re staying here,” she said looking at him.
He shook his head. “He’s my dad, Poe. I’m not losing him again.”
“You have to stay and let Michael know I’ve gone.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek. “And I can’t risk both of you.”
He looked back at her, the muscles in his jaw clenching and unclenching. His eyes flickered to the manhole and back and, for a moment, Poe worried he might be considering going anyway. Then he let out his breath and the tension left his body. Poe relaxed, too, and in that second, Trevor bolted for the manhole.
“No!”
Her fingers brushed the back of his jacket as he dove through the opening, then he was gone.
Poe stood for a few seconds, hands pressed against her eyes, and drew a shuddering breath.
Hell.
She went through the opening.
†‡†
Heat.
I don’t remember it being this hot.
Poe glanced at Trevor but the temperature didn’t seem to affect him. He sauntered along, hands in pockets, like any other fifteen-year-old slouching their way down the street on a sunny afternoon. He didn’t notice Poe looking at him, the sheer cliff rising on their right holding his attention.
“Are you doing okay?” It wasn’t what she wanted to ask—that would have sounded more like ‘what the Hell were you thinking?’ But there was no point chastising him now. And, truthfully, she felt safer having him there.
“Fine.”
“What about the heat?”
“I’m good.”
She wiped sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and in turn wiped her hand on the leg of her pants. Her legs quivered as they walked the path with the cliff looming over them to the right and an expansive plain free of grass or shrubs stretched to their left. She might have imagined the surface of Mars to look like this.
Except Mars wouldn’t have had the desiccated souls making their way across the rocky plains, hands and ankles bound together by chains.
“Wow,” Trevor said looking skyward. “What’s that?”
Poe looked up at the swirling gray clouds and saw what Trevor meant: a winged creature made its way across the bleak tapestry of sky. More followed in a loose flock, flying past, then circling back on the same path.
“Keepers,” Poe responded feeling suddenly breathless.
“Keepers?”
She nodded. “Exactly what it sounds like.” Her lungs burned.
“This is exactly how I imagined Hell. Just like in the movies.”
“For now.”
Poe stopped and bent at the waist, hands resting on her knees like she’d set a personal best in the Boston Marathon. Trevor continued a few steps before realizing she’d stopped. He turned back, the youthful enthusiasm of his voice disappearing.
“Are you alright?”
“Have...to...catch...my...breath.”
“I’ll try to find some water.”
She caught him by the wrist.
“No. Don’t drink...or...eat anything.”
“Sure.” He shook his hand away and looked around. “What can I do?”
“Need...rest.”
Poe sank to the dusty ground and sat cross-legged, head hung, elbows resting on her knees. She concentrated on filling her lungs, but they wouldn’t cooperate. A droplet of sweat rolled down her nose and clung to the tip. She watched it, eyes crossing, as it shivered, lengthened, fell. It hit the ground in a puff of dust which grew up toward her, blurring her vision. Poe blinked to clear it away, but the world grew hazy.
“Poe?”
She tried to raise her head to look at Trevor, assure him she was okay, but the task felt like raising a medicine ball at the end of a yard stick.
“I...,” she managed.
The world went black.
†‡†
Trevor jumped forward and caught the guardian angel before she struck the ground.
“Poe?” he said shaking her a little. “Poe.”
Her open eyes stared blankly toward the roiling sky and one of the keepers screeched high overhead. Trevor leaned his face toward Poe’s and felt her breath on his cheek.
“Passed out,” he said aloud and smiled with relief. “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the abyss.”
Poe had complained about the heat, but he didn’t feel it. Maybe the nether world affected mortals and angels differently.
Maybe it doesn’t affect me because I’m supposed to be here.
He didn’t really remember his abduction by Azrael, but between what he did recall and what his father told him, he thought it might be time for a healthy dose of fear.
If Poe didn’t recover, how would he get out of here?
He looked up at the keepers wheeling through the sky above. They appeared closer now, close enough he saw them as man-shaped creatures with wings rather than birds. Gargoyles.
Are they coming closer because of us or is it a coincidence?
He didn’t want to hang around to find out.
Trevor lay Poe down, careful not to bang her head on the stony ground, then walked to the cliff; its sheer face looked an impossible climb without equipment, even without an incapacitated angel on his hands. He thought about leaving her to search for help, but he banished it immediately. Forget what might happen to her, what kind of help would he find in Hell?
Trevor turned from the cliff and looked across the boulder-strewn plain toward the chain-gangs of damned souls marching across it. They trudged slowly, like they had no real destination or desire to get there. They also didn’t look dangerous, not with their hands and feet chained, at least.
“That way.”
He returned to Poe, checked her breathing, then worked his arms under her shoulders and knees. Before standing, he took a couple of breaths, preparing himself for the strain of her weight, but when he stood, he found her quite light. And touching her didn’t bring the same sensation he’d felt before.
“Not good.”
He put it from his mind—worrying wouldn’t help.
His first steps carrying Poe were unsteady, but he soon found his footing. He dragged his feet as he walked, sending loose rock and gravel skittering ahead, and he glanced up frequently, tracking the keepers as they flew overhead.
Closer. Definitely closer.
He increased his pace to as fast as he dared, careful not to lose his footing on the loose stones. The rocks his steps sent clattering across the ground sounded unnaturally loud, each impact of stone against stone echoing in his head like a bowling ball thundering down the alley. Ahead of him, the lines of damned souls look
ed to have heard the ruckus and amended their path to intercept him.
“That’s not good.”
Trevor veered further to his right to avoid the creatures he presumed had once been healthy, and perhaps happy, living things. Despite their languid pace, the distance between them closed. A keeper screeched above, too close for comfort; Trevor forced himself not to look up and veered harder right.
He almost walked over the edge of the canyon before he noticed it.
A chasm capable of making the Grand Canyon blush with inadequacy stretched out at his feet. The far side looked miles away, the bottom hidden by a swirl of thick, white mist—if a bottom existed at all.
“Shit.”
Trevor looked back. Impossibly, the souls were ten yards away. He shuffled away from the edge and from the chain gang, his breath short, nervous bursts from the effort of carrying Poe.
And fear. This wasn’t like doing a back flip off your friend’s garage or eating something unstomachable on a dare. This was damnation, eternity.
The first hand on his shoulder startled him. He pulled away jerkily, teetering on the edge of losing his balance as Poe’s dead weight shifted in his arms. Then the others were on him and he saw their unspeakable despair. Their mouths drooped in exaggerated expressions like ghostly Halloween masks, their eyes burned into him, pleading for help, for relief. Their uniformly gray skin looked like steak gone bad; their bodies and limbs were strangely elongated as though they’d been stretched on a rack.
Trevor gasped air in through his mouth, tried to pull away from their groping, but they outnumbered him too badly.
“Get away,” he yelled, twisting and turning. “Leave us alone.”
Long fingers brushed Poe’s hair, stroked her cheek, caressed her arm. Shoulders bumped him, hands pushed him, but none sought to touch him directly. They all wanted to contact the angel in his arms.
“P-p-p-,” one of them stuttered with a mouth unused to forming words.
“Oh,” another groaned. “Oh.”
The others in the group surrounding them—thirty, maybe more—added their unpracticed voices, increasing the volume and settling into a chant.
“P-p-p-,” the first group stuttered.
“Oh. Oh,” the second groaned.
Trevor looked frantically from one slack face to another, glanced over his shoulder. Nowhere to go but down.
How will we get out? Where can I go? What--
The cadence of the souls’ chant interrupted his thoughts. The syllables connected in his head.
“P-p.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“P-p.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“P.”
“Oh.”
“P.”
“Oh.”
The creatures weren’t stuttering and moaning, they were combining their voices to speak as best they could.
They’re saying her name!
He jerked her away from their reaching hands, the aching muscles of his arms suddenly aware of the weight he carried. His feet stirred a low cloud of dust as he shuffled away until his heel hung over the edge of the chasm.
Nowhere else to go.
His pulse hammered in his ears, nearly drowning the chant of the damned souls. They pressed toward him and he could only hold his ground as they pawed he angel, touching her, caressing her. They didn’t seem to want to hurt her, but how could he be sure?
“P.”
“Oh.”
One of them wrapped its long, gray fingers around her arm and tugged, testing his hold. Another grabbed her ankle, another her wrist. Together they pulled and Trevor stuttered forward a step trying to keep them from wrenching her from his grip. He should have been relieved to take a step away from the abyss, but the prospect of losing Poe to this mob—losing his guide, his way out and possibly his father’s last hope—sent relief skittering into the clutches of fear and panic.
“No.”
He pulled back and the hands gripping Poe let go, making him stumble back a step, two. With the second, his foot touched empty air.
The fall happened in slow motion. Trevor canted backward, his gaze locked on the souls directly in front of him. Their expressions didn’t change—no surprise, shock, or regret—only maybe deeper disappointment in their eyes as what they saw as their possible redemption slipped over the edge.
Trevor tumbled backwards, the gray, despairing faces vanishing, replaced by angry clouds that made him miss the sun. He closed his eyes as the stinking air enveloped him, pulled him down toward the mist he knew swirled below hiding...what? Rocks? Monsters? Nothing?
Death.
Wind flapped his hair by his ears, and he imagined his mom and dad—not his parents how they were now, but how he remembered them: together and happy, as far as he’d known. He thought of the Tinker Toys he and Ric spent hours playing with, building cars and towers, simple structures for a young boy to enjoy. He thought of his mother taking him to soccer practices—a time he’d loved in his youth but lost interest in as he grew.
Why do things have to change?
And then the falling stopped.
He gripped Poe tighter against his chest and opened his eyes. The tortured sky hovered above; the sheer chasm wall floated beside him; his hair no longer whipped his cheeks. He felt arms under him—powerful, muscular arms supporting him the way he held Poe—and he glimpsed black wings flapping on either side of him, each stroke pulling them up out of the abyss.
Trevor kept his eyes fixed on the canyon wall sliding past as they rose. He didn’t want to see what held him. In Hell, it couldn’t possibly be better than falling to his death.
They floated up past the edge of the cliff and he saw the faces of the souls who had inadvertently caused their fall. This time, he saw their expressions change, the slack-cheeked desperation and despair shifting to fear bordering on terror. The souls shuffled away from the cliff, their chant ended, the chains binding them at ankle and wrist clanking.
Whatever carried Trevor and Poe lifted them thirty feet beyond the cusp of the canyon and the souls threw their heads back to watch. From above, Trevor saw how wrong he’d been about their numbers; where he thought the damned numbering thirty or forty, there were thousands of gray, fearful faces staring at them and the creature holding them.
The thing sank back toward the ground, its descent sending the souls shuffling back with a clatter of chains. It landed and set Trevor down, Poe still in his arms. The teenager stumbled away and the crowd of souls gasped, but he kept his balance and resisted the urge to turn and gaze upon his rescuer for fear it might also be his executioner.
Or worse.
“P,” half the crowd before him began quietly.
“Oh,” the other half answered.
“P.”
“Oh.”
The chant grew progressively louder until it echoed across the plain like a soccer match jeer. The ground trembled with it. Trevor looked at the angel unconscious in his arms and wondered if giving her to them might be the only way to save himself.
The creature behind him didn’t give him the opportunity to give the idea serious thought.
The screech it emitted was loud enough he almost dropped Poe to cover his ears and protect his brain from scrambling. The soul-mob fell instantly silent.
It took a few seconds for the ringing in Trevor’s ears to subside, leaving silence. He swallowed hard, the sound of saliva squeezing down his fear-constricted throat the first sound his ear drums comprehended. Then the cadence of his heart beating frantically in his chest. Finally, he felt as much as heard breath chuffing behind him, like a bull preparing to charge.
Trevor’s body stiffened as he realized he could no longer ignore whatever stood behind him. Facing it might mean his death, but if that was the case, then not facing it would likely yield the same result. Wouldn’t it be better to know it was coming than stand blindly in fear of it?
He thought so until he saw it.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Sixteen
The bag over my head smelled like someone’s high school gym shorts—ones brought the first day of school and unwashed until the last. I did my best not to inhale the stench as two men gripping my arms hard enough to hurt pulled me away. On the bright side, the bag smelled marginally better than the crowd of zombies.
My feet skittered across the ground finding no purchase to impede the men, so I gave up, stumbling along as they dragged me. If I fought them, I’d end up out of breath, gasping, and I didn’t want to increase the taste of crotch already entering my mouth, so I decided to reason with them instead.
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”
No response.
“I’m here to throw rocks like everyone else. Let me go punish that bitch for giving a speech. The nerve of her.”
No response.
Try something else.
“You’ll regret this. I’m a friend of Azrael. Let me go and I won’t tell him what you did.”
“Shut the fuck up, Ric.”
Very few people remembered to call me Ric, no matter how often I insisted to the world not to call me Icarus, but recognition eluded me at first. I was never very good at the ‘guess who’ game. In fact, it usually pissed me off.
“Who’s there?”
The hand holding my right arm tightened its grip, gave me a shake.
“Shut up and keep walking.”
He’d spoken enough words for me to place the voice and, although most of the words I’d heard him speak through the years were alcohol-slurred, I knew who it belonged to.
“Is that you, Marty?”
A grunt.
“Dude, it’s been months. How’ve you been?”
Truth be told, I didn’t much care. The last time I saw him, he tried to beat me to death. Not his fault, I guess, being possessed and all, but he’d also said some uncomplimentary things about me when he thought I was dead, so I owed him. Asking a Hellbound dead guy how things are might be a subtle jab, but a jab nonetheless.
