by Cynthia Hand
Selfish, it reads in the curve of her elbow.
Slut, in the tender space where her arm meets her shoulder.
And other things, more specific sins, like I lied to my mother, I lied to my friends, I started a rumor, I hid the truth, in tiny scribbled print all along her bicep, the word LIAR spelled broadly across it.
“Sit,” Samjeeza commands us, and we sink obediently into a pair of folding chairs against the far wall. I try to keep my eyes down, but some part of me can’t look away from Angela.
“Desmond, we’ve brought you some new customers,” Kokabel says.
“I’m just finishing up here.” Desmond sniffles like he has a cold, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. His eyes flit to Samjeeza, then quickly away.
I lift my gaze to Angela’s neck, the spot where Desmond is currently leaving a line of characters. He spreads his fingers to stretch the skin there, touching the gun into the tender space under her ear, wiping away a smear of black ink with a dirty cloth. The letters are dark and startling against the fragile whiteness of her flesh.
Bad mother.
“A bad mother,” Samjeeza remarks. “Who’s her unlucky offspring?”
Kokabel shakes his head. “Penamue’s, I believe. I thought he didn’t have it in him to sire children, but they say he’s the father. She’s a troublesome one. Asael sends her back to us every time she displeases him, which is often.”
Angela takes a sudden breath, a strangled whimper escaping her, the cords on her neck standing out and halting Desmond’s progress. Without blinking an eye he rears back and slaps her, hard, across the face. I have to bite my lip to keep from crying out. She slides down on the chair, closes her eyes. Gray tears slip down her cheeks as he finishes the words.
Samjeeza turns to Kokabel. “I’d like to choose the design for the female,” he says. “Will you show me your book?”
“Yes. This way,” Kokabel says. “I’ll be back for the girl,” he directs at Desmond, and then he steps into the hall. Samjeeza holds back a moment longer, reaches to slip something into Desmond’s hand, a plastic bag, then follows Kokabel to deliberate on my ink.
I’m thinking it’s not going to be a pretty butterfly on my hip.
Desmond puts the bag in his pocket and pats it, like it’s a pet or something. He scoots his stool up to my chair. I force my eyes down as he takes my chin and turns my head from side to side.
“Lovely skin,” he says, his breath like sour cigarettes and gin. “I can’t wait to work on you.”
Christian’s body tightens like a bowstring.
Don’t, I tell him with a look, not daring to speak even with my mind in here.
Desmond gets up and peels off his gloves, throws them onto a counter in the corner, stretches, wipes at his nose again.
“I need a refreshment,” he says, clicking his fingers together in a kind of nervous rhythm. Then he goes out, sniffling and rummaging for the bag Samjeeza gave him, and closes the door behind him.
You have perhaps five minutes to make your escape, comes Samjeeza’s disembodied voice in my head, the second we’re alone with Angela. Go back to the train station and take a northbound train, which will come shortly. Hurry. In a few minutes the whole of hell will be after you, including me. And remember what I told you. Don’t speak to anyone. Just go. Now.
Christian and I rush to Angela’s side.
“Ange, Ange, get up!”
She opens her eyes, the dark traces of tears still on her cheeks. She frowns as she looks at me, like my name isn’t quite coming to her.
“Clara,” I supply. “I’m Clara. You’re Angela. This is Christian. We have to go.”
“Oh, Clara,” she says wearily. “You were always so pretty.” Absently she rubs at her arm where it says jealous. “I’m being punished, you know.”
“Not anymore. Let’s go.”
I pull at her arm, but she resists. She whispers, “I’ve lost them.”
“Ange, please …”
“Phen doesn’t love me. My mother did, but now she’s lost, too.”
“Web loves you,” Christian says from beside me.
She stares up at him with anguish in her eyes. “I left him for you to find. Did you find him?”
“Yes,” he says. “We found him. He’s safe.”
“He’s better off,” she says. Her fingers drift up to scratch at the fresh words on her neck. Bad mother.
I grab her hand. Her self-loathing churns through me. I get the sharp taste of bile in the back of my throat. No one loves her. She can never go back.
Yes, you can, I whisper in her mind. Come with us. But I don’t know if she can hear me. She never learned how to receive.
“What’s the point? It’s over. Ruined,” she says. “Lost.”
In that instant I know that her soul is wounded. She’ll never wake up from this trance she’s in, not like this. She’ll never agree to come with us.
We came here for nothing.
No one loves me, she thinks.
No. I will not let this happen, not again. I grab her shoulders, force her to look at me. “Angela. I love you, for heaven’s sake. You think I would have come all this way, to freaking hell, to rescue you if I didn’t love you? I love you. Web loves you, and what’s more, he needs you, Ange, he needs his mother, and we don’t have any more time to waste with you feeling sorry for yourself. Now get up!” I command her, and at that precise instant I send the smallest blast of glory straight into her body.
Angela jerks, then blinks, shocked, like I threw a glass of water in her face. She looks from Christian to me and back again, her eyes going wide.
“Angela,” I whisper. “Are you okay? Say something.”
Her lips slowly curve up into a smile.
“Geez,” she says. “Who died and made you boss?”
We stare at her. She jumps to her feet. “Let’s go.”
No time to celebrate. We slip into the hallway, back to the deserted waiting room. It takes all of two seconds flat for us to be out the door and down the street, staying close together, Christian leading us north, toward the train station, followed by me close behind him, trying to walk in step to keep some kind of subtle physical contact between us, trailed by Angela. In this chain we make our way past a row of dingy, falling-down apartments and onto Palo Alto Street, which on earth has a charming, hometown-America feel but in hell is like something out of a Hitchcock film, lined with twisted, leafless black trees that seem to claw at us as we pass, the houses decaying, the windows broken or boarded over, the paint peeling in gray flakes. We pass a woman standing in the middle of a yard, holding a hose, watering a patch of grassless, muddy ground, mumbling something about her flowers. We see a man beating a dog. But we don’t stop. We can’t stop.
The rundown neighborhood gives way to more open city, commercial buildings, restaurants, and offices. Angela’s looking around like she’s never seen this place before, which I find odd, considering she’s the one who’s been here for almost two weeks. We pop out on Mercy Street near the library, and city hall looms over us, a huge granite building with lots of blackened windows, and suddenly the street is flooded with the gray people again, groaning and crying and tearing at their skin. It’s hard going, since the lost souls on the sidewalk are mostly moving south, the wrong direction. We’re like fish pushing our way upstream against the current, but at least we’re getting there, step by slow step. It feels like we’ve been walking for hours, but we can’t have been gone longer than five or ten minutes.
Very, very soon, they’re going to notice we’re gone.
We’re just going to walk out of here? Angela thinks incredulously.
That’s the plan. I give her a tiny nod, not sure that she can hear me. There are no locks in this place. It’s not a prison. They could all leave, I tell her, glancing at the people walking by, if they chose to. I’m suddenly overcome by the urge to grab one of these gray people by the shoulders and say, Come with us, and lead them out of here single file.
&
nbsp; But I can’t. It would break the rule Samjeeza laid out for us very plainly. Don’t speak to anyone.
At last we turn onto Castro, the main drag. We’re in the heart of downtown Mountain View, the street lined with restaurants and coffee shops and sushi bars. My eyes go straight to a building that on earth was my favorite bookstore: Books Inc., a place Mom and I used to go to simply hang out and drink coffee and sit in the comfy chairs. But here something has scratched away the word Books from above the door, leaving deep gouges in the stone like the building was set upon by an enormous beast. The black awnings are tattered and hanging in shreds, and smoke pours out from the shattered windows from a fire burning somewhere in the back.
We trudge on about another two blocks, keeping our heads down as much as we can, like we are walking into the wind, until the black wrought-iron archway that marks the entrance to the train station comes into view. My heart lifts at the sight of it.
Almost there, Christian says. I hope we don’t need a coin or something to get out of here, because Sam didn’t give us anything for a return trip.
We start moving faster. One block to go. One block and we’re home free. Of course, I know it’s not over. Getting out is only the first step, and then we’ll have to run, hide, and stay hidden, leave everything behind for good. But at least we’re all alive. I don’t know if, deep down, I really expected to survive this journey in one piece. It turned out to be so simple. Almost—dare I say it?—easy.
But then I see the pizza place.
I stop so suddenly that Angela bumps into me from behind. Christian yelps as I jerk on his arm. The gray souls jostle into us, moaning, shouting, but I stay for a minute with my feet planted and stare across the street at the small, boxlike building where my brother used to work.
Don’t tell me you want pizza at a time like this, Angela says.
Christian mentally shushes her. Clara?
He stopped showing up, I think.
I step off the curb and into the empty street.
Clara, Jeffrey’s not in there, Christian says urgently. Come back on the sidewalk.
How do you know? I have a horrible, aching feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Because he’s not dead. He doesn’t belong here.
We’re not dead. Angela wasn’t dead, I say, and take another step, pulling them into the street with me.
We have to go, Christian says, glancing wildly toward the black arch. We can’t get off course now.
I have to check, I say at the same time, and then I let go and pull away from their hands.
Clara, no!
But I’m going. The emotions of the souls wash over me all at once, now that I don’t have Christian’s added strength to help me block them out, but I grit my teeth and move quickly across the street, onto the opposite sidewalk. Toward the pizza place. Each step draws me closer to the front window, which has a long, horizontal crack in the glass, like it might collapse into a thousand shards at any moment, but through the hazy pane I see Jeffrey, his head down, a filthy dish towel in his hand, swiping at a table in absent circles.
It’s worse than I thought.
My brother’s in hell.
20
ZOMBIELAND
I don’t take time to think. I burst through the door and go to him, knowing that any second now Kokabel and Samjeeza and who knows who else could be after us, painfully aware that I promised Samjeeza I wouldn’t talk to anybody but Angela, but I don’t care. He’s my brother. In that moment it occurs to me that maybe my purpose in coming to hell wasn’t all about Angela, after all. Maybe I was meant to save Jeffrey.
He does a double take when I approach him, then scowls. “Clara, what are you doing here?”
I guess I shouldn’t expect him to be happy to see me.
There’s no time for small talk, no time for explanations. I spot Angela and Christian on the sidewalk right outside the window, their mouths open in horror that I was right. “I need you to do what I tell you, just this once,” I say quietly, glancing around at the gray people in the restaurant, one person to a table, but none of them look up. Yet. I grab his hand and tug him toward the door. “Come with me, Jeffrey. Now.”
He jerks away from me. “You can’t show up here and order me around. This is my job, Clara. My meal ticket. It sucks, but one of the things about having a job is that I can’t exactly come and go whenever I please. Bosses tend to frown on that.”
He doesn’t know where he is. He thinks this is his normal life. I don’t have time to ruminate about how depressing it is that my brother can’t tell the difference between normalcy and eternal damnation.
“This is not your job,” I say, trying to keep calm. “Come on. Please.”
“No,” he says. “Why should I listen to you? Last time you were really freaking rude to me, and you yelled at me, and then you didn’t come back for all this time, and now you expect me to—”
“I didn’t know you were here,” I interrupt. “I would have come sooner if I’d known.”
“What are you talking about?” He tosses his dishcloth down on a nearby table and glares at me. “Have you gone mental or something?”
Oh, I’m on my way. Already the barrier I’ve erected between me and the emotions of all these people around me is corroding, and little whispers are getting through.
None of her business.
I hate him. I deserve better.
Cheated. They cheated me.
I blink furiously and try to clear my head, concentrate on Jeffrey, but then—
What is she doing here?
Oh, crap. I stare over Jeffrey’s shoulder, and there’s Lucy, framed in the doorway, her expression totally shocked to see me.
“You … What are you doing here?” she marches up and demands, her eyes full of fury, but her voice controlled. She slips her arm into Jeffrey’s. Just seeing her again brings the memory of that night at the Pink Garter rushing back, the fireball she hurled at us, her shriek as Christian cut Olivia down, what she vowed afterward. I swear I will kill you, Clara Gardner. And I’ll make sure you suffer first.
“Let go of him,” I say in a low voice.
Christian is suddenly by my side, staring at Lucy with fierce eyes that dare her to attack us here, like he’s reminding her that he killed her sister and he might have a glory sword with her name on it. Which makes me wonder if glory swords work in hell.
I really, really hope they do.
Lucy stares at me wordlessly, her hold on my brother’s arm tightening. I feel her hatred of me but also her fear. She wants to hurt me, to sever me in two with her blade, to avenge her sister, to earn the respect of her father, but she’s scared of me. She’s scared of Christian. Deep down, she’s a coward.
“We’re going,” Christian says. “Now.”
“I’m not going with you,” Jeffrey says.
“Shut up,” I snap. “I’m taking you out of here.”
“No,” Lucy says, her voice much calmer than what I can feel churning inside of her. “You aren’t.” She smiles at Jeffrey sweetly. “I can explain all of this, baby, I promise, but first, I have to handle something. You stay right here, okay? I have to go for a minute, but I’ll be right back. Okay?”
“Okay …,” Jeffrey agrees, frowning. He’s confused, but he trusts her.
She leans up to kiss him softly on the mouth, and he relaxes. Then she lets go of him, which kind of shocks me, that she’s releasing him without a fight. I brace myself for a sudden sorrow blade to the chest, but she brushes past me without a second look in my direction.
Then I feel what she intends to do. She’s going to the club, three blocks away. To find her father. To bring a whole world of hurt down on our heads.
She hopes that Asael will turn us all, me and Christian and Angela, to tiny piles of ash.
When she’s out of sight I turn to Jeffrey, who goes back to wiping down the table. “Jeffrey. Jeffrey! Look at me. Listen. We’re in hell. We have to go, like now, so we can catch a train out of here.”<
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He shakes his head. “I told you, I have to work. I can’t leave.” He moves to another empty table and starts stacking dishes.
“This isn’t the place where you work,” I say, careful to keep my voice even. “This is hell. Hades. The underworld. It looks like the pizza joint, but it’s not. It’s only a reflection of earth. This isn’t real pizza, see?” I cross to a table and grab a slice of fake pizza from the plate, hold it up next to Jeffrey’s face. It’s like a hunk of soggy cardboard, gray and textureless, dissolving in my hand. “It isn’t real. Nothing’s real here. Nothing’s solid. This is hell.”
“There’s no such thing as hell,” he murmurs, his gaze on the pizza, vaguely concerned. “It’s something church people made up to scare us.”
“Did Lucy tell you that?”
He doesn’t answer, but I see it in his eyes, the beginnings of doubt. “I can’t remember.”
“Come with me, and we’ll take a train, and everything will get clear again. I promise.”
He resists as I pull at his arm. “Lucy said that she’d be right back. She said she’d explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain,” I say to Jeffrey. “It’s simple. We’re in hell. We need to get out. Lucy’s a Black Wing, Jeffrey. She brought you here.”
He shakes his head, jaw tightening. “No. Not possible.”
Christian is pacing at the door, unwilling to wait any longer. You have to come now.
I turn to Jeffrey. “Come on, Jeffrey. Trust me. I’m your sister. I’m the only family you’ve got. We have to stick together. That’s what Mom told us, remember? Do this for me now.”
His silver eyes get mournful, and I feel behind my ever-crumbling wall how hurt he is by all that’s happened: the inexplicable vision and his failure to enact it, the way everything was always about me and never him, Dad abandoning us, Mom dying and leaving him with so many unanswered questions, everything turning to ashes right before his eyes. Everyone’s gone, and there’s nobody left for him but Lucy, and there’s something that he knows is missing in her, something important, and he doesn’t know if it’s all his fault, if it’s because he’s not the person he’s supposed to be, but he doesn’t want to lose her, too. Who am I? he thinks. Why am I here? Why do I have to hurt so much all the time? Why does it never, never get any easier?
