The Hellsblood Bride

by Chuck Wendig

  She peers out through the newly made hole in the side of the container.

  Can’t see much, but someone else has shown up to the party.

  Someone big.

  Flashes of wet red. A glimpse of a bald head so pale it might as well be a skull. Bodies whirling about. Thrown into each other. A fist like a subway car. A boot like an anvil. Suddenly her mind is back on sharks: out there, a great white. Fat, but fast—white belly and slapping tail. A massive, thrashing death machine.

  They pile on him.

  That doesn’t last.

  A rage-roar, a guttural bellow, and then one by one they’re thrown from the heap—heads spun the wrong way, limbs hanging loose like broken branches, bones popping free from exposed muscle. The last one flies free, slams into the vat, and Lacey tries not to scream but fuck it, she totally screams because what the hell is happening?

  A face appears at the hole.

  A guy. The guy. Face like a bulldog walking backward. Underbite. Hard teeth like gravestones collapsing against one another. Head like a diving bell.

  She knows who he is.

  “Mookie Pearl,” she says.

  “Nnngh,” he says.

  “Are you… gonna hurt me?” she asks.

  His face shrugs. “Doubt it.”

  “Is it safe?”

  Another shrug. “Guess so.”

  “Should I come out?”

  “Definitely.”

  And then he’s gone. Above her, the hatch wheel spins and opens with a bang.

  A hand big as a dinner plate reaches in. She takes it and figures she’s about to be flung upward, arm wrenched free from its socket, but the ride up is gentle.

  Mookie—big lug, brickhead, blockhead, body like a bunch of boulders lashed together with sinew and gristle—sets her down.

  He looks rough. Busted lip. Cut above his brow. Older bruises along his cheeks—now yellow like old paper. He cranes his neck left, then right. Vertebrae crackle and pop like tectonic plates grinding against each other.

  He’s sweaty, pale.

  “You’re one of the Get-Em-Girls,” he says.

  “Was, yeah,” she answers. “Gang ain’t together no more.”

  He grunts in response.

  She steps over a pair of dead cultists.

  The tentacled-thing in their mouths is gone. Retreated into the body?

  Or retreated away from the body?

  She shudders.

  “You’re, uhh, dating Skelly,” she says.

  “Kelly. She goes by Kelly now.”

  “I liked her.”

  “I like her too.”

  Lacey swallows hard. Being on skates is like standing on a boogie board in the ocean. Drifting, swaying, rebalancing. “Um. So. Thanks? But I should probably—”

  “I’m gonna need that book.”

  “What book?” she says.

  “One that’s weighing down your backpack.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You do. The Maro Mergos. We’re here for the same thing. You’re faster than me and got it first, but I saved your ass and now I want it.”

  He licks his lips. He blinks. Sways a little. “You feeling okay?” she asks.

  “Tip-top,” he says, but his eyelids flutter. “Book. Now.”

  “I need it.”

  “Not like I need it.”

  “I gotta get out of this city. Everything’s gone to Hell, you know that. The money I get from this will get me far away—”

  “My daughter’s gotta get out of Hell!” he hollers. The tendons in his neck tighten like tow cables. “That book’s gonna tell me how to get her out. You don’t know what you have there. I’ve been hunting for it for months, and now—” He groans and clutches at his chest, gathering a fistful of his white T-shirt. “I’ll pay you for it.”

  “How much?”

  “I… dunno.” His words sound spitty. A dry tongue slides over his bleeding lip. He suddenly jerks to the left like he’s going to fall, but rights himself. “I don’t have much now but I can get you—”

  “You don’t look good.”

  “I feel fine.”

  “You look like a hot mess.”

  He grunts. Reaches for her. “The book. Now.”

  She takes a step back. He drops to one knee. He bows over, almost reverent in his posture, but she knows the only place he’s praying is at the altar of pain. She watched her own father have a heart attack. Looked a lot like this. The sweating, the pale face, the grunting and chest-grabbing.

  Lacey doesn’t know Mookie, not really. She knows his reputation, though. He’s a monster among monsters, a human nightmare given form. He used to be part of the problem, way she saw it. Keeping gangs like the Get-Em-Girls down. Farming the Blue with his teams of Mole Men. And now here he is. She thinks: she could help him.

  But why?

  He’s just another sonofabitch. Gonna try to take away what’s hers. Like her father did. That goddamn rat.

  That means she’ll do what she did when she saw her own father suffering. She left him on his bed to die. Stole money out of the flour jar. Walked out of the house and out of his fading life. End of story.

  She takes a few steps back.

  “You should get some help,” she says.

  “Please. My daughter, Nora—”

  That’s right. Nora’s his kid. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—and it rots where it lands, given what she knows about Nora. “Persephone.”

  She cinches the backpack tighter. Winces against the pain in her arm and shoulder, then turns and skates. Taking the book with her. And leaving Mookie Pearl to…

  Well, to whatever awaits him.

  2

  I press my hand to the wall and I… feel things. I can feel a milk-spider scuttling through a bolthole somewhere. It’s hunting. I don’t know I know that, I just… know it. I can tell that, beneath me by a half-mile, a pack of goblins is eating something. A dog, I think. Sometimes they raise dogs to eat. Gross. Another mile down, a golem is—I don’t know why, but he’s cracking open his head and rubbing the inside with Blue. That’s the other thing. I know where the Blue is. I touch the wall and I can feel the closest vein of it. Ain’t that a trip? All this time I wanted to conquer the Blue trade and now in a way I guess I have. And none of it matters. God, I hate this place.

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  This, then, is Mookie Pearl:

  He’s a big bull past his prime. All tough muscle and hard skull. His head and neck and shoulders made heavy by a yoke of regret and grief. And anger. Anger heavy and dull like a cannonball. This is the tired rage of an older man—a man who just sailed past fifty and doesn’t have much to show for it but a handful of dust and broken pottery.

  He’s an old steamship heading for the rocks. He’s trying to course correct. Trying to right the ship, trying to sail toward the sunset instead of the storm.

  He’s the meat in the meat locker. The wrecking ball at the end of a crane’s chain. The seawall that stands between the ocean and the shore.

  Big. Bald. Beaten down.

  Mookie the Mook. Mookie the Meat Man.

  Mookie—

  The monster that all the other monsters fear.

  Right now, he’s not much to look at.

  His heart feels like it has a Charley horse, like the whole thing is a knot cinched tighter and tighter. A shoelace ready to snap. He can feel a dull beat in the deep of his temples, right where he rubs the Blue stuff. A beat like goblin drums, doom-da-doom-da-doom, faster and faster. The flats of his hands on cold concrete. Blood of the cultists pooling around him. He tries to get up and go after the girl, but when he does, everything seizes up. It’s like he can’t catch a breath. Like he’s drowning in his own body. The Blue leaves him suddenly like a lit match blown out by a cold wind.

  And then he’s down. All the way down. Forehead against the ground. Darkness swimming up like a living thing and pulling him deep.

&nbs
p; A smell pulls him up out of the mire. Mookie, for an uncultured lug, he’s got a good sniffer. An excellent palate, too. In another life, he could have been a chef. Or at least a talented line cook. That instead of an old thug standing between a pair of warring underworlds.

  The smell that reaches him is—

  A little bit of death. A faint whiff of French fry grease.

  And a heady, gamy reek of goat.

  James Werth, that old goat, says, “Get up, you big bastard.”

  A hand taps the pot roast Mookie calls a bicep. Mookie turns, takes the hand, but does not yet rise up. Werth stares down. The spiral curl of his horns. The bristled fur stuck up out of his sleeves. Two hooves pointed forward like the tines of a devil’s fork.

  Blood soaks his jacket. Old blood. Black blood.

  “You’re dead,” Mookie says.

  “You don’t look much better.” Werth grins and licks at his one dead tooth.

  “Fuck you.”

  “That any way to greet an old pal?”

  Mookie grunts, gets up to one knee. “You betrayed me.”

  “I saved you. And Nora.”

  He shoves Werth. “You betrayed me first.”

  Werth chuckles as he balances himself. “Order of operations, Mook. We should all be measured by the things we did last, don’t you think? Like you and your little girl. You got right by the end, and wouldn’t it be nice if that’s how the universe judged you? And believe you me, big guy—the universe is judging you.”

  “You’re not really here.” Werth couldn’t know all this. “This is a dream.”

  “I’m not really here. But this isn’t a dream, either. This is something else. Something’s coming, Mook. Something big. I’m here as a warning. The god-worms are close. Still curled up in their goblin temples just below the surface. This isn’t just shit hitting the fan I’m talking about. This is a sewage hose sprayed into a jet engine, my old friend. This is a shit tornado.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. Not yet. I’m dead, Mook. I’m down there in the dark. Things have changed. We spirits are restless, got nowhere to go. Used to be we ghosts would just…wander the maze, following the silver thread down into the Expanse where the god-worms ate us and turned us into so much spectral waste. But now they’re gone from that place. And we specters and wraiths don’t have anyplace to go. Not yet. Sometimes the god-worms twist through the open space. Through the tunnels and channels. They hunt us. They eat us. But I’m still there. And I’m telling you—I can feel it, man. Something is coming. Something is changing.”

  “Nora’s down there—”

  “Then she’s seen it, too.”

  “Werth…”

  “You’re sorry, I know.”

  “It’s all fallen to shit, Werth.”

  “That’s how life is, you big bastard. Things fall apart. But then you pick up the pieces and try to make something new. And then that falls apart. And again and again until you’re a ghost in a maze like me.”

  “Please—”

  “You gotta wake up now, Mook.”

  “What? I’m not asleep, you said this wasn’t a dream—”

  “You gotta wake up because someone’s trying to gank your Blue.”

  *

  Two voices hiss in his ears:

  “He’s got Blue. Look, look, he’s got it.”

  “Get it and go, get it and go, get it and go.”

  “Wait, wait, he might have something else—”

  “Is he dead? He’s not dead. Not like these others—”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I can see a pulse. His eyes, his eyes behind his lids—”

  “He’s dead, I’m gonna take his boots—”

  Mookie lurches upright with a hard gasp. Already his arm is out. His hand is closing around some Rag Man’s throat. Pale guy. Just a kid, really. Swaddled in blankets and jackets. His temples are bruise-dark—sign of a Blazehead. So is the other one: a pear-shaped black guy with a big gray beard so thick it looks like a bundle of steel wool hanging there.

  The kid gurgles and squeaks.

  The bearded one gets up. Starts to turn and bolt.

  Mookie sees that the sonofabitch has the little rusted tin—

  Where Mookie keeps his Blue.

  He throws the kid to the ground. Turns to go after the other one—but suddenly the wormy kid extends his arm and in his hand he’s got a makeshift knife. Piece of glass wound in electrical tape. He slashes at Mookie’s ribs and then runs.

  All Mookie can do is wince and lean against the vat and clutch at his side. His big callused mitt comes away slick with red.

  They got his Cerulean.

  He’s bleeding.

  His chest feels like a train drove through his aorta.

  And he doesn’t have the book.

  Goddamnit.

  3

  I sleep. Kinda. It’s not normal sleep and every time I close my eyes and get some rest I dream these crazy, unbelievable dreams. They feel real. Some are nightmares. Some are worse. Some are just… I don’t even know how to describe it. One dream I have pretty regularly: I dream of those big ugly-ass worms. The Hungry Ones. Like that one Dad and I rode up through the layers of Hell. One of them—I know it’s the one called Morquin—coils around me. Traps me in this dead temple: pillars with stone goblins and friezes showing Naga doing unspeakable things to people. And then the worm changes: it shudders like it’s having some kind of seizure, like a fish flopping on the deck of a boat. Then it’s no longer a big worm but a man. Handsome, but sickly: sharp features, like the jagged ridges along the worm’s back translate to nose, brow, cheekbones. I can see dark veins behind his skin. His teeth are so white they’re almost silver. And he steps over and takes my hand and kisses the back of it. His lips are like melting ice: wet and cold. Then he whispers in my ear: “Thank you.” What the hell does that mean?

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  Dawn in Brooklyn.

  The winter cold feels good. The sun does, too, warming his cheeks.

  The East River churns, slow and gray.

  He walks.

  *

  He should go home. He knows he should. It feels like he’s been away forever. Three days is a long time when you haven’t been sleeping. When you’ve been burning the Blue around the clock. When you’ve been chasing leads on this book, this goddamn book that nobody understands but that might, might contain a secret buried in its cipher-scrawled pages to help your daughter get out of the Great Below.

  And now: cut by some Mole Man punk searching for Blue.

  Since the Organization fell, the city’s shit the bed. Nobody’s got control. It’s a hot rod without a driver, the suicide wheel spinning and spinning. That means gangs. Big ones. Little ones. From all corners and all comers. The Blue trade—once a secret reserved to those who either needed to know or could pay—is wide open. The public isn’t onto it, but every day Mookie sees new Blazeheads in the subways, on the streets, hiding in alleyways. Those ink-smeared temples. Those haunted eyes.

  And he’s heard the Red Rage is out there, too, now.

  Cerulean and Vermilion. In the general public.

  Jesus.

  But he can’t care. He’s got one thing on his mind and everything else is cut down like tall grass—he’s got to save Nora. Fix what he fucked up. He gave her the Death’s Head mushroom. Saved her life and damned it at the same time. Now she’s trapped down there. She gets too close to leaving, she gets headaches, starts shaking. Any closer than that? Capillaries burst in her eyes. Nosebleeds. Seizures.

  He doesn’t want to see what happens when she gets all the way out.

  These are dark days. Strange days. Mookie feels unsettled. Usually he’s a rock. Fixed to the earth like a mountain. But now everything inside is all landslide, mudslide, avalanche, earthquake.

  He needs to eat.

  *

  Karyn’s got a new place up in Gr
eenpoint. He hoofs it north. Past spears and spires of trash stuck in frozen mounds. Past cars parked in by plowed snow. He sees a homeless guy asleep on a grate, the hot hell-vapors of what lies beneath venting up around him. A trio of crows stand nearby, still as statutes as they watch and wait to see if the guy’s going to end up dead, if they’re going to get to pick him clean.

  It’s a long walk but Mookie needs it.

  Karyn’s new place isn’t Mackie Messers. It’s called the Knife & Chair. Not a butcher shop, but rather, a salumeria.

  It sits next to a little bookstore. Down the block from a Polish place Mookie likes. Her sign out front is like a guild sign: a wooden knife hanging from two rusted chains. Icicles line the sign like yeti teeth.

  It’s not even 8 a.m. yet, and they’re not open.

  Mookie fogs the glass and cleans it, then peers in. It’s dark.

  So he hunkers down and sits. The cut at his ribs reopens and runs fresh. He folds in on himself, tries to stay warm.

  Eventually, footsteps. The crackle of rock salt under a boot.

  Before he even looks up, he hears Karyn say, “You.”

  He offers what’s meant to be an apologetic nod. “Can I—”

  She steps up past him, unlocks the door, then heads inside.

  The door locks behind her.

  He grunts. A momentary spike of anger—a flash like from a gun muzzle in the back of his mind, and in it a little mini-movie of him punching open the door and stepping through the shattered wood and fractured glass and then grabbing whatever he wants from the meat case and leaving. Not a fantasy, this image, unless it’s a fantasy entertained by the worst of himself, a side he’s trying real goddamn hard to shove in a box that goes in a bag that gets buried in the loamy dirt in the deepest recesses of his head. The anger inside him is a toothy, vicious thing: a starving dog on too long a chain. He’s better than this. Or maybe he’s not.

  But he wants to be.

  He puffs out his cheeks and warms his hands and sits back down.

  Ten minutes later, the door unlocks.

  He hears Karyn’s voice above him: