The Hellsblood Bride

by Chuck Wendig

  But all the time that guy’s speaking, the other guy is looking Mookie up and down and it’s like tumblers in a lock starting to go clickity-click because suddenly his eyes go wide and he’s slapping Dark Brows on the shoulder with the back of his hand, saying, “Hey, hey, hey. It’s the guy.”

  Dark Brows darkens his brow. “Guy? What guy?”

  “The guy. Used to be Zoladski’s downstairs man—”

  “The old goat?”

  “No, no, the old goat’s guy.”

  Mookie waits for it.

  They both fall silent and look at him.

  Wait for it.

  Wait for it...

  There it is.

  Dark Brows is the first one to move. Hand in coat to find his pistol. Mookie’s big, and not always as fast as he’d like to be, but here at least he knows what’s coming and so by the time the Russian has the 9mm Strizh in his hand, Mookie’s already got the cleaver snapped off his belt—

  It’s like breaching a pig’s head. Splitting the skull in hand. Mookie gives it everything he’s got, all the rage and venom he’s been building up coming down through his shoulders, to the meat of his arm and to the end of that cleaver.

  The blade bites through skin and bone.

  The hand flips up, gun still in it. No longer connected to the arm.

  The gun never goes off.

  Already Slushpuddle is squeaking out a sound of alarm and going for his own pistol—a tiny little Makarov, a gun for a child’s hand, a gun that Mookie feels like he could grab and squeeze and smelt into a leaden lump. So he reaches for Slushpuddle’s wrist and gives it a hard twist as the gun goes off—pop!—and the bullet punches through Dark Brows’ forehead, ejecting a mist of blood and brains and skull matter out the back. Then Mookie squeezes and twists.

  Wrist bones break. Fingers shatter, molding around the pistol. The gun goes off again, the bullet ricocheting off the metal font—vvvving—and then the man is down on his knees, screaming like a woman whose child just died.

  “Please please please nyet puzhalsta please—”

  “Told you my God lives here,” Mookie says, reaching down and grabbing the guy’s throat the way you might grab a fistful of curtain before yanking it down off the rod. He closes his hand. Trachea gives way. Eyes roll. Throat gurgles.

  Body thuds.

  That’s that. Mookie heads all the way inside.

  *

  The cathedral above his head is all dark woods and shiny floors. Gilded window edges. Pews the color of oxblood. Paintings of saints every step of the way, all of them with wide almond eyes, looking like judgmental aliens though they were thought to be human. Mookie doesn’t care about all that. He believes in a God because he’s seen shit that shouldn’t be real, but he also knows that any God that allows this Hell to exist is no God that deserves his clasped hands and whispered praises.

  The basement is a different story. Scuffed wood floors. Buckling boards. Like the city’s trying to rise up from underneath: a fist, a belch bubble, a shoving shoulder, like it’s trying to break up this holy place and bring it low. All around are religious supplies: cassocks from uniform supply, communion cookies in crates, old candelabras strung together with spider webs.

  There, near the door to the boiler room, stands Little Lexie Losev. All four-foot-eight of him. Shoulders hunched forward. Saggy gut pooching against the inside of his uniform. Somebody’s worked him over—new bruises cover old bruises.

  He sees Mookie. His eyes light up.

  “It’s you,” he says. Lexie hurries over. Holds out a pair of hands. Mookie offers him one in return and the little man grasps his mitt and vigorously shake-shake-shakes it. Then he apparently throws all caution to the wind and he leaps up and gives Mookie a big, sweaty hug.

  A twinge of pain shoots through Mookie. From the battery of his heart—an electric shock gone out to his limbs. He winces. Clamps down on his teeth and tries not to show it. Through his bite he says, “Lexie, see you got some new bugs in the bed.”

  “Chechan bratva—mafiya,” he says. “Man named Ruslan. I’m sorry, Mister Pearl, so sorry.”

  He drops to his knees, holds Mookie’s now-clammy hand to his brow. Mookie yanks his hand away, uncomfortable. He’s nobody worth worshipping. He’s nobody’s savior.

  “They in there now?” Mookie asks. “This Ruslan and the others?”

  Lexie nods so fast and so hard it looks like his eyes are the slots on a slot machine. Full tilt bingo boogie.

  “You going in?” That middle word—he pronounces it goink.

  Mookie again unsnaps his cleaver. He shakes some of the blood free.

  “Guess so. Open it up, Lexie.”

  The keys jangle. Lexie opens the way.

  *

  Pat. Pat. Pat.

  Blood dripping off a crooked brick.

  Down here, the sewer tunnels are old brick: arched above Mookie’s head, the walls themselves shifting, crumbling. Gone crooked and warped. The center channel is just slush and ice and run off, and here the cold breath of winter is enough to freeze the marrow inside one’s bones.

  The blood and guts coming out of Ruslan and his men steam in the chill, still air.

  At least, Mookie assumes this is Ruslan and his men. He sees ruined limbs removed from their bodies, and on these limbs he spies tats from Russian prisons: playing cards, cathedral cupolas, eight-point stars on knees and elbows. He lifts a boot and touches a limbless, headless torso. He pushes the shirt up over the chest—and through the smeary blood he sees a big orthodox cross on the chest.

  That, then, is Ruslan.

  Ruslan. Tough guy turned torso.

  On the one hand, that gives Mookie one less thing to worry about. On the other, it means something came through here mean and hungry. Gobbos? Maybe. Not like them to let so much go to waste, though. The gobs are masters of recycling. They’d eat the meat. Maybe before fucking the holes, maybe after. They’d take rib-bones and make weapons. Skulls lashed to clubs with dried tendon. They’d still leave a pile of offal behind, but like a grandmother picking a chicken clean of all its useful parts first.

  But Mookie doesn’t know anymore. Things are changing, he can feel that much—it isn’t just what the dream-ghost of Werth told him. He’s seen it himself. The monsters haven’t been venturing up top like they used to. Still a few Snakefaces and Trogbodies around, but a lot have gone underground. And nobody’s seen a gobbo upstairs in a long while. They’ve been quiet there.

  But maybe they haven’t been quiet down here.

  Not much scares Mookie.

  This, though—this has his blood gone to stone.

  *

  The walk to Daisypusher.

  Daisypusher: a dead town, a literally dead town, here hundreds of feet beneath the Marble Cemeteries. Tree roots wind down and poke through stone and earth. Above, the gates: wound with rusted red wire and the bleached bones of beast and man. Rattle the gates, summon someone to open them. This time the one who comes isn’t Mother Cougar but rather the ill-shape of a dead girl: bones like matchsticks holding up the cloggy, swollen blue-flesh corpse. Arterial striations like fingers reach up over her crooked collarbones and her neck, as if they’re reaching for face and head in order to pull it down into the rest of the plump, water-logged body.

  Mookie can tell this one spent some time in water. A river, probably, given the heady, mineral smell coming off of her. Her breath like the steam rising off a rotten log.

  “You’re Pearl,” she says. Her voice sounds like it might have once been sweet but now it’s buried underneath a mushy, rheumy gargle. “Nora’s father.”

  “Uh-huh. Need to... ahh, see her. Speak to her. Something.”

  The girl burps a little, same way a guy does after he just drank some beer, ate some hot wings. She holds her fist to her lips, then can’t seem to contain it: brackish river water runs down over her chin and wets her shirt.

  She turns away, embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  “It’s no thing. On a good day I
look worse than you.” He’s not sure if that came out as nice as it sounds, but it’s as good as he can manage today. “She here?”

  “She’s not.”

  “I can wait.”

  The girl hesitates. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  What?

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I... you oughta talk to Burnsy.”

  “Burnsy?”

  “Burnsy.”

  Shit.

  *

  They walk up through the town. Pebbles and little bones crunch underfoot. Rat bones. Pigeon bones. The food of the dead.

  Folks mill about outside their ramshackle homes—huts made of old doors, igloos of cinderblocks, cots sitting out. It’s bigger now, this town. Mookie sees an old conversion van shoved up against the inside of the rock wall. Outside it sits a dead garden teeming with blooming black flowers. Inside he sees a pair of little children staring out from cracked, smeary windows. Hollow eyes, gray flesh, big smiles of crooked teeth. A musical giggle reaches his ears before ratty curtains whip closed and the kids are gone.

  Looking around, counting houses, he’d say the populace down here has doubled. Dead folk don’t usually stay in their bodies all that easily, and the population down here has been steady for a long time. Some come, others go, and Daisypusher goes on. But this change in numbers means a shift.

  Strange business. It nags at him. Like a bird tapping at his skull, looking for worms.

  They pass by the town fountain. The golem head still sits atop a cairn, water pouring through the fracture in its geode skull. A kid with an orange vest and rope burns around his neck stares up, eating a roach-rat on a stick, pulling at it with wolfish yanks of his head and neck. Nearby, a smirking guy with a prosthetic foot and skin puckered with hundreds of little fresh cuts feeds something wet and red to a fat half-rotten seabird sitting on his shoulders. “The gannet is a greedy bird,” he cat-calls as Mookie passes.

  “Sorry,” the girl says, as if to apologize for her town.

  “It’s all right.” I don’t belong here. Which makes him think: does Nora?

  “I’m Delia,” the girl says.

  “Hey.”

  “You don’t say much.”

  “Not much to say.” He still feels off. And now: Nora is gone? That’s sitting inside him like the engine block of a ’67 Pontiac GTO. “She say where she was going? Nora.”

  The girl shrugs. “No. Sorry.”

  She looks away. From her ear gushes a little stream of water. Purging a few slimy threads of river weeds. “You drowned,” he says.

  “No. Killed, then dumped.”

  “Jesus. Murdered, you mean.”

  “Uh-huh. The Riverside Carver,” she says.

  “They never caught that guy.”

  “Nope. But a few of us who didn’t make it are down here now. And we’re on the case.” She smiles. A little proud of herself, chin lifted. “We’re like detectives now.”

  “Good luck with that.” He means it. He knows they probably don’t have a shot in Hell—but what are you going to do? “You’re new, then. Lotta new people.”

  “Yeah. I dunno why.” She shrugs.

  There, then. Burnsy’s house. House by way of a pair of garage bays. Rebuilt since Mookie trashed it last year. A little bigger. “This is me. Good luck with your, ah, case?”

  “Thanks. Good luck with your daughter.”

  I’ll need it.

  She totters off, swaying those river-sodden hips.

  Mookie turns, bangs on the door with the side of his fist. A gorilla demanding entry: whong whong whong. “Burnsy. Mookie. Open up.”

  A rattle-clang, and then the door buzzes—electrically, a motor humming—and raises up all on its own. As it opens, it reveals the shiny, blister-red burned body of the one-time stuntman Steve Lister. He’s wiping his raw, burn-flesh hands on the legs of his overalls, leaving new streaks of black oil atop old streaks of black oil.

  “Mookie Pearl, as I live and breathe,” he says.

  “You don’t live or breathe,” Mookie says.

  Burnsy waves him off. “Yeah, but that’s not the saying, is it? Mookie Pearl, as I languish in animated death and wheeze my decaying death rattle, expelling gases that are not breath so much as they are fumes caused from the breakdown of my flesh—that’s not likely to make it into the vernacular, you know?”

  “Vernacular. Big word.”

  “I got time to read.” Burnsy shrugs.

  “And build,” Mookie says, lifting his bedrock chin and tilting it toward what appears to be Steve Lister’s latest project. “Is that a tank?”

  “Mmyep. Ford 3-Ton M1918. Army ordered 15,000 of these back in World War I, but only made 15. Someone didn’t like the design or maybe there was something political about it, I have no good goddamn idea. What I know is there are three of these left in existence. Two are in museums. One is right here.”

  “Trying to get it to work again?”

  “Yeah. Trying and failing. Piece of shit. Ford Model T engines are old, don’t work. The gun—a .30 cal machine gun—is jammed up with so much rust no real good way to clean it out and get that working again. Still. Thought it’d be a nice addition to the ol’ four-wheeler. She can be fast and nimble. This can be slow and tough. But I need a couple new engines and, you know, fuck it. I don’t think it’s in the cards.”

  “Looks too small anyway.”

  “It’s a two-man tank, Mookie.”

  “I don’t see how two men could fit in that Spam can.”

  “I mean, two normal-sized men. Not two Mookie Pearls. You’re the size of the tank you’d be cramming into.”

  Mookie grunts. “Good point.”

  “You didn’t come here to talk about my vehicular exploits.”

  “The girl who brought me in—Delia—said Nora’s gone.”

  Burnsy hesitates. He pulls a tube of moisturizer out of his pocket, squirts a blob out into the center of his hands with a wet fart sound. As he begins to slather himself with the stuff—oily, glistening—he says, “Yeah. Mook, shit, I tried to stop her.”

  “Stop her? From what?”

  “From leaving.”

  “And going where?”

  “She wouldn’t tell me the whole story—”

  “Going where?”

  “She thinks she’s found a way out. Back up top. Some... plan, some scheme to get her out of this place.” He stops with the moisturizer. Stands like he’s ready. Ready for Mookie to come at him again, for the two of them to clash in another hellbound throwdown, pitching each other through walls and smacking heads against stone.

  Mookie thinks about it. He really does. He’s mad. The temperature in his thermometer’s about to go volcanic. A crack of the glass and a hot napalm geyser. He told Burnsy when this shit went down: Keep an eye on her. She’s your responsibility.

  But then that rage-bubble ruptures. Because, really, Nora was Mookie’s responsibility. She was his daughter. And besides, when she gets something in her head, it’s like a splinter buried deep—you can’t pull it out, not with fingers, not with tweezers. It’s just got to work out on its own.

  Still, Mookie grumbles, “You were supposed to watch her.”

  “I did watch her.”

  “You shoulda come and got me.”

  Burnsy scowls. “You haven’t been down to see her in months, Mook. Jesus. She was hurting. Here she is thinking maybe, just fucking maybe, your relationship was going to start going north instead of south, and just as she’s feeling like there’s this little tiny golden thread of hope to cling you, you go poof. Mookie turns to steam. Just another ghost you can’t grab onto.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mookie lies, because he knows it damn well is fair but that sometimes you say things even though you know they’re not true because the fear of admitting them feels somehow worse—like the fear before puking, like the fear of the first day of school. “I sent things.”

  “Because a girl trapped in Hell wants goddamn gift baskets? She didn’t
go off to college, dude. She basically went to the equivalent of a Russian gulag and you’re sending cookies and bottled water.”

  Mookie growls, “I see you’re enjoying the moisturizer.”

  Burnsy looks down. “Oh. Yeah. Actually. Thanks.”

  “Goddamnit. She say anything? Anything at all about where or what?”

  “Like I said, she’s chasing something. She wouldn’t say what. But, ehhhh, she did say one thing...” Burnsy winces lipless around gritted teeth.

  “Spill it.”

  “She’s heading to the market.”

  “The Oddments?”

  “Yonder.”

  Jesus. What the hell would she be looking for there? You want something odd—some canker gall, a firebug lantern, a new tin for your Blue—you go to the Oddments. You want something serious, something big and bad with a cost that’ll cut a hunk out of your soul, you head to Yonder. You want hard drugs? Yonder. Dark secrets? Yonder. Something you can’t get anywhere else, ever? Goddamn Yonder.

  They say that someone going to Yonder is “going the far distance.”

  That’s slang, too, for death.

  Because sometimes you go to Yonder looking to find something and you end up getting lost, instead.

  He feels a twinge in his chest. Little lightning currents shooting down his left arm. To the tips of his fingers. Buzzing there like antennae.

  “What’s she looking for there, Lister?”

  Burnsy flinches, but then he says, “She’s looking for a ticket.”

  “A ticket? A ticket to what?”

  “The 13 Train.”

  It’s Mookie’s turn to flinch.

  “C’mon,” Mookie says. “We’re taking a ride. By the way, you got any Blue?”

  7

  The old subway line has a lot of names. The L2L, or “Hell-to-Hell” Train. The 80s, or “Hades” train. The Deep-V, the Dire Line, the Triple-6s. All those written in graffiti on the side, or so the stories say. But most just know it as the number that’s reportedly on the front and the back: the 13. It’s a legend, this train. Not just down here, either, but up top. People sometimes say that they’ve seen a train go speeding by with a grungy number 13 on it, and no 13 Train has ever existed in this city. And it always comes before or after something bad happening. A kid falls on the tracks and gets hit. A gas main explodes or a building collapses. It’s even been an excuse for delays—“Oh, shit, man¸ it’s the 13, again.” And they laugh. It even went around after 9/11, that story—a whole bunch of people claim to have seen the 13 the morning just before the first plane hit the North Tower. Thing is, it isn’t just an urban legend. It’s a real train. A ghost train. I know it’s real because I can feel it down here. And if you manage to get a ticket, you can take a ride on that ghost train, well, the story goes that it’ll take you wherever the hell—or maybe wherever in Hell—you need to go.