Limbus, Inc.

by Anne C. Petty

  What was the payoff that made this kind of risk worth it?

  I mean … how could one member of the club ever sell this kind of thing to a friend?

  Shit.

  The thing that really chilled my blood, though, was the art on the walls. Spaced at regular intervals around the room were two-by-three foot posters in wooden frames. Women’s faces. All very young, all very pretty. Each of them looked absolutely terrified, some looked like they were in terrible agony when the photos were taken.

  I counted them.

  There were sixteen pictures. And empty frames for another ten.

  I could only see a couple of the faces—and they were strangers, but I’m pretty sure I’d seen them before, but in pictures I’d seen none of them had their skin. Were these trophy shots, taken during rape or torture? Or at the moment of their deaths?

  The wolf began to growl, low and with dark intent, deep inside my brain.

  One man, a very tall, thin guy with prematurely white hair, kept glancing toward the door through which I’d entered and then down at his watch. He was probably wondering where the rest of his fellow worshippers were.

  My time was running out. Bambi’s, too.

  So where was … ?

  Suddenly a curtain in the back of the chamber opened and two burly guards came out, supporting Bambi between them. She was dressed in a little tunic that was made from the sheerest of fabrics and belted by a gold sash. The girl was able to walk, but even from across the room I could see that she was totally whacked out. Drugged on something. She seemed to float along with the men, her mouth slack, eyes glazed.

  The gathered men all turned and began applauding. Some of them were still naked. They beamed smiles at her and gave her a thunderous great ovation, pounding their hands together with enthusiasm that was clearly genuine. One of them started a chant and within seconds the others joined in. Someone cut the tribal music and chants to allow this new mantra to dominate the room.

  No real surprise what they chanted.

  “Moloch … Moloch … Moloch …”

  Balls.

  But they were chanting like frat boys. “Moe-lock … Moe-lock …”

  Made it sound a little silly, but for all that it was still scary as shit.

  The man with the white hair nodded to the guards and they half-led, half-pushed Bambi up a short flight of steps in front of the golden statue. Then they used red silk scarves to tie her wrists and ankles to small rings set into the statue.

  The gathered men applauded this, too. They were a happy bunch. They laughed and elbowed each other and hurried to pull on their robes.

  White-hair looked at his watch again and spoke to one of the guards, nodding toward the door as he did so. The guard immediately began heading toward the door.

  My time was up. If the guard went downstairs he’d see the three guys I’d trashed.

  What choice did I have?

  I stepped out of the shadows and pointed the gun at the center of the crowd. As I did so I yelled to the whole crowd, very loud and very clearly.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  They did.

  They actually froze in place, their chant snapped off like someone had hit a switch, leaving their mouths hanging open. White-hair pointed a finger at me.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  It was a reasonable question.

  Wasn’t one I wanted to answer, though.

  “Cut the girl down,” I said.

  They didn’t. They also didn’t move or speak. The whole bunch of them simply stood there and stared at me. So I swung my gun toward White-hair, aiming it at his face.

  “Cut her down,” I repeated. “Right now.”

  He didn’t even bother looking at the gun. Instead he looked at me and a slow smile formed on his face.

  Smiles are not what you want to see when you have someone in your sights. You want to see fear and a cooperation born from a desire for self-preservation.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “The fuck does that matter to you?”

  “You come in here, waving a gun, disrupting our religious services—we should at least know who you are and why you’re here.”

  “I’m just here for the girl,” I told him. “I’m taking her out of here and I’ll blow a hole in anyone who so much as blinks.”

  The rude son of a bitch actually blinked. Deliberately and repeatedly. Smiling all the time.

  “You’re not a policeman,” he said.

  “I could be.”

  He shook his head. “We own the police.”

  Ah.

  “And you’re not FBI.”

  “You own them, too?”

  Another shake. “No…but they’re too smart to show up alone.”

  “Now that’s just mean,” I said.

  He chuckled. So did I. The other guys didn’t laugh, though there were a few tentative smiles. Most of them were still trying to figure out what was going on. Me, too. Only White-hair seemed to be comfortable with the way things were falling out. I didn’t find that comforting.

  I cut a look at Bambi. She was still on her feet, but the glazed look in her eyes was intensifying. I wondered if they shot her up with something just before bringing her out. It looked like the drug was still hitting her system. She tugged at her bonds but instead of being alarmed at being restrained she seemed only mildly surprised.

  “Look, chief,” I said to White-hair, “let’s cut the shit. Cut the girl down now.”

  “Or—?”

  “I thought we covered that. I shoot you and take her anyway.”

  He nodded at my gun. “That’s a Glock 17 with an optional floor plate, which gives you nineteen rounds instead of the standard seventeen. That’s nineteen shots max and there are more than twenty of us, not counting the guards. Even if you dropped one man with each bullet—and I think we can both agree that’s unlikely—the rest of us will drag you down.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely,” he said.

  “You won’t live to see it happen.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He looked like he genuinely didn’t.

  “Bet you’ll feel different when your brains are on the wall.”

  He shook his head. “If I die then I ascend to the golden halls of Lord Moloch where I will sit on a jeweled throne and have a thousand slaves bowing at my feet.”

  “Or, you’d be worm meat in a box.”

  One of the security guards chose that moment to go for his gun. He was to my right and probably thought he had a reach chance.

  I pivoted and shot him in the chest. I don’t care how big your pecs are or how much Dianabol you take, a nine millimeter slug is going to punch your ticket. The round went in beside his sternum and punched its way out through a shoulder bone, taking pieces of his heart with it. Blood sprayed some of the gathered men.

  The guard dropped right there and then.

  The crowd looked down at the blood on their clothes and skin, and immediately began rubbing at it. I thought they were freaking out and trying to rub it off. But that wasn’t it. They were smearing it into their skin, smiling as they did so, laughing as if they were in ecstasy.

  The rest of the crowd…cheered.

  The second guard was also cheering as he pulled his gun. He was standing five feet from Bambi, and I swung around and put one into his chest and a second through the bridge of his nose. The back of his head exploded, splattering the girl and the golden statue with brain tissue and blood.

  The crowd began yelling, laughing, applauding.

  I turned back to White-hair, who was clapping his hands together with slow irony.

  Around us the cheers were turning into a new chant of Moloch…Moloch.

  White-hair said, “Do you have any idea what’s happening here? Do you have any idea what you’ve stepped into? What you’ve interrupted?”

  “Some,” I said. “Bunch of dickheads making human sacrifices to an ancient god in the hopes of getting some divine assis
tance with your stock portfolios.”

  He beamed at me. “That’s wonderful. Oversimplified and a little naïve, but wonderful.”

  “So, fill in the blanks,” I suggested.

  “Why? Are you hoping to join us?”

  “I don’t know. Let me hear the recruitment speech.”

  He spread his arms and turned toward the golden statue. “You said it, friend. We’re praying to the god Moloch. We sacrifice to him as man was instructed to do—a sacrifice of the children, made in blood and flesh and flame. In return he guides us and protects us and fills our pockets with gold.”

  “Uh huh. Tell me, sport,” I said, “how many of those sacrifices are your own kids?”

  He snorted. “Our own? Do we look crazy?”

  “Pretty much.”

  He glanced around. “Okay, sure, in the moment, but you came in at the wrong part of the show. If you’d been a little patient you’d have seen the main attraction.”

  “Which is what, you going all Hannibal Lecter on a teenager girl who can’t defend herself? Excuse me but that’s hardly a—”

  “No,” he said. “The life or death of that worthless slut is nothing. You’re a man, you should understand that. She’s a cow, a piece of meat. If you’re here looking for her then you must know her history. A whore and a junkie whose life would never have mattered. If we hadn’t given her the chance to matter, then she’d have wound up in a crack house giving two dollar blow jobs while marking time until disease and a cirrhotic liver took her down to the hell that is surely waiting for her.”

  “Oh, right, and you guys are the Salvation Army. Skinning her alive is the best way to save her soul.”

  “Her soul doesn’t matter,” he said, his smile flickering a bit. “She is a means to an end. Our god is appeased only through the offering of living flesh, and the only flesh that matters is that of the young. That is the pathway to glory. It is through such offerings that every man here—every devout believer in the majesty of Moloch—has become wealthy beyond his dreams.” He scowled at me for a moment and shook his head. “You probably can’t grasp this. You put on an expensive shirt and think that’s going to make you look rich? You stink of poverty, of cheapness, of weakness, so this might all be beyond you.”

  “Maybe not.”

  He gave another shrug. “But we were all born to money. We deserve the good things we have. It’s in our blood, in our breeding. We are the elite of this world.”

  The men all applauded this. Some of them gave each other high-fives.

  “It is our right to take what we want,” White-hair continued.

  “Even if it means killing the innocent?”

  He spat on the floor between us. “Innocent? That’s a bullshit word and it doesn’t mean a fucking thing. That girl and everyone like her is a parasite. It’s because of people like her that our whole country is on the edge of economic collapse. She’s a leech on the system, and who pays for her free food and medical care? Us! The very ones who actually make the money and whose skill and genius made America great in the first place. It’s people like her—and you—who want to take it from us.”

  “Seriously,” I said, “you want to turn this into a political rant? Now? With a gun in your face and your guards’ brains on your shoes? That’s where you’re going with this?”

  He stopped and cocked his head as if listening to a replay of his own words. Then he sighed.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I got caught up in the moment.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Where were we?”

  “The girl. You were about to come to your fucking senses and let her go.”

  “Ah,” he said, gesturing to a small table near the golden statue on which were various knives and scalpels. “No. I think I was going to invite you to watch our god accept the sacrifice of flesh and blood.”

  “I’m pretty sure we weren’t going there.”

  Behind me fists began pounding on the door. They must have broken through into the hall downstairs. My time was up. His eyes flicked to the door and back to me, and his smile returned, brighter and broader than ever.

  “Playtime’s over,” he said.

  I shifted around to stand between Bambi and the crowd. White-hair turned with me, so I edged closer to him so he could get a better look at the barrel of my gun.

  “You’re right,” I said. “We’re done fucking around. I want you and all of your asshole buddies down on the floor, hands behind your heads, fingers laced. Last man done gets a bullet in the head.”

  Nobody moved. All the chanting died away and the room fell into silence except for the fists pounding on the door.

  Bambi stirred and moaned.

  White-hair smiled.

  Behind me, Bambi suddenly screamed.

  I whirled, bringing the gun up, expecting to see a guard or one of the men trying something fancy, maybe sneaking up behind me.

  I wish that’s what it was.

  But it wasn’t.

  When I’d shot the second guard his blood had splattered all over the statue. As I turned I saw that almost all of it was gone.

  It hadn’t dripped or rolled off.

  As I watched in absolutely stunned horror I saw the blood vanish as if it were being absorbed, pulled into the skin of the golden statue. Bambi screamed and screamed. Not because the blood was vanishing…but because the statue was moving.

  Moving.

  Moloch, the bull-headed god.

  Moving.

  Flexing its massive limbs, muscles rippling beneath a skin that glistened like polished gold but which was becoming real, tangible flesh. Still golden, but pulsing with life. Wherever the blood had touched it, the statue’s surface became alive.

  Behind me I heard White-hair say, “Behold the glory of Moloch. Behold the demon-god made flesh through a sacrifice of blood. Behold your death.”

  *

  Bambi screamed and screamed.

  And I screamed, too.

  My mind reeled just as my feet staggered backward. This was impossible. This wasn’t some fucked up frat stunt…these men had actually conjured a monster, a demon, from the darkness of the ancient world. It was real.

  It was real.

  The giant bull head was still immobile, but the blood-spattered chest expanded and the muscles of its abdomen rippled. Then from the open mouth of the statue an impossibly long tongue lolled out, uncoiling like a pale serpent until the tip of it touched Bambi’s shoulder. Her whole body was speckled with blood, and the obscene tongue licked it up, drop by drop, hooking gobbets of meat and curling them back into that golden mouth.

  The face—the solid metal mask of its face—moved. Jaws opened and eyes blinked once and again, losing the blank stare of a statue and flashing with hideous life. Its lips curled into a sneer that was part sensual delight in the taste of human blood and part in cruel expectation of a greater feast to come.

  The gathered men once more began their chant.

  “Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

  White-hair laughed like a madman as the demon-god drew in a massive lungful of air and then let loose with a roar that was unlike anything I could ever imagine. It was so loud that it knocked me backward. I lost the gun and clapped my hands to my ears. Blood burst from my nose. I landed hard on the floor as the sound smashed me like a fist.

  Then it stopped.

  I gagged and rolled over onto hands and knees, vomiting onto the hardwood.

  “Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

  My ears were so badly damaged that the chant sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep well.

  “Moloch…Moloch…Moloch…”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw White-face bend down to pick up my pistol. Beyond him the men in robes were crowding the table on which the knives were displayed. Bright steel seemed to sprout from every hand. There was a weird sound like bending metal as the demon-god Moloch began to move its massive limbs.

  Bambi’s screams were rising to the ultrasonic as the full hor
ror of what was happening pushed through the protective haze of the drugs. Somewhere deep within that scream I could hear the lost sea-gull cry of a little girl. The desperate and utterly hopeless shriek of a child who is being used and used and who knows that no one will ever, could ever come to save her. It was the most horrible sound I’d ever heard. It was the sound of innocence being destroyed.

  I think that’s what did it.

  Not the threat of the gun.

  Not the men with their knives or the pounding of guards’ fists on the door.

  Not even the first earth-shaking footfall of the demon-god.

  It was the sound of the lost child within the woman’s scream.

  It was primal.

  Feral.

  And in my mind, the wolf heard the scream and he—it—howled back in unbridled fury. The young of the pack were in danger, and the strongest of the pack had to answer. Had to respond.

  Had to fight.

  I transformed without knowing I was going to do it.

  No…that’s wrong. I transformed without resistance. All of me—man and wolf—wanted this. All of me needed this.

  On one side of a broken second I was a man, smashed to the ground, broken and lost; and on the other side of that second I was the werewolf.

  I rose from the floor just as White-hair raised the gun.

  I saw the surprise in his eyes. The shock.

  The fear.

  The doubt.

  Even with all of that he pulled the trigger.

  Again and again. Each bullet found its target. In my chest. In my heart.

  And it did him no damn good at all.

  I leaped into the air, closing the fifteen foot distance between us in the space between his third and fourth shot. I took him with my front paws, claws extended. He exploded around me. Arms and legs and head.

  His blood was a cloud of red mist that I flew through as I rushed toward the other men.

  They had their knives.

  They tried.

  They tried.

  But they might as well have turned their knives on themselves.

  I filled the room with screams. Theirs. Bambi’s. Mine.

  They died around me. Beneath me. In me.

  The room shook and I wheeled amid red carnage as the demon-god came toward me. Bambi was still tethered to him, tied wrist and ankle with red scarves. As he reached for me with one massive hand he reached for her with the other.