Hellhole

by Jonathan Maberry

  It had been Church who brought her into this matter, and who had warned her that the Book of Uttu might not be what it seemed. She did not know how Church acquired this information, but her Sikh friends knew of him and said that he could be trusted. Church had told her she could trust Joe Ledger and his team, and she did.

  Church had warned her that this matter could be dangerous, but even he did not seem to know how dangerous. How could he? That awful book had held its secrets for so long. The priests and imams who had protected it had kept the world safe from its potential.

  And now it was all falling apart.

  The Sikhs were too far away. Church was too far away. Joe and his men were at the bottom of an impossible pit. Maybe not even truly on this Earth, or in this dimension. She couldn’t even start to understand it all. How could she? How could anyone?

  All Lizzie had to work with was her knowledge of books like this—and with what was written on the two pages she had photographed with the drone. There was so much there, written in a dozen different hands, in half a dozen languages. And the text itself was conflicted, confusing. It was a mathematical formula written as a conjuring spell. It must have been meaningless to the priests who recorded it. Though maybe not. The Sumerians were known for an exceptional mathematical brilliance, for having developed high math skills with no recognizable backtrail of development. As if the knowledge sprang suddenly into being within a generation or two. Scholars and historians had puzzled over it for years, but now Lizzie thought she understood. It was Atlach-Nacha. Somehow that creature was no mere spider, not even a monstrous alien spider. She—it—was sentient and intelligent and somehow able to communicate to those ancient Sumerians. She had taught them advanced math, and engineering and other skills. But then something happened to break that process. Atlach-Nacha had become lost, trapped in the earth. Possibly some natural disaster, or the actions of another culture. Perhaps sanity prevailed within the group of priests and there was a rebellion in order to save their world. Lizzie did not know how that happened, or why. Probably no one would ever know because there was no record of it at all. The Sumerians went into decline and the planned invasion was forestalled. The knowledge had been recorded in a book, and that book hidden away and guarded fiercely for thousands of years.

  Until now. Until ISIL and Ohan and Mercer.

  Until an act of murder cracked open the world and the invading army mustered, ready to complete an invasion eight thousand years in the making.

  The gunfire and explosions from below were continuous. There was no sign of the battle slacking, but Lizzie knew there was only one way for it to end. Joe, Top and Bunny would run out of ammunition, and then they would be overwhelmed. Then Mercer and the priests would finish their ritual to open this world to the horrors of another.

  Lizzie read over the page again and again looking for some clue, some hint. Some hope.

  Then, suddenly, she turned to Sergeant Brock.

  “How much rope do you have?”

  “What?”

  “Rope. How much? Can you reach them?”

  He looked at the three lines that went down into the nothing below.

  “They’re too short.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “Pull them up.”

  Brock gaped. “What?”

  “Pull them up, Sergeant. Do it now.”

  14

  I GOT CAUGHT in a deadly pinch when I reached for another magazine and found that there were none left. Three priests rushed at me, two swinging pick-axes and one with a sledgehammer.

  There was no time to draw the Sig Sauer. None.

  I faded left, ducking in and under one pick-axe, and chopped upward with my forearm. Even insane ancient Sumerian priests have balls, and I hit his real damn hard. He let loose with a whistling shriek that hit the ultrasonic. I straightened fast and took the pick-axe from his hands, shouldered him into the sledgehammer guy and swung the axe at the third priest. The spike of the big tool punched a big wet hole in his solar plexus. I let go as he fell, taking his pick-axe away, following it with a ballet pirouette and slammed the spike into the crotch of the sledgehammer priest. He sat down and fell back, screaming something in a language I didn’t know. Maybe calling on his god. Maybe calling for his mother. I didn’t give much of a fuck.

  I moved to the priest I’d clubbed in the nuts and he looked up as I came at him. He had no time at all to block the kick to his throat.

  I drew my pistol and fired at two more of them, killing one with a single shot through the face and knocking another down with a sucking chest wound.

  In my ear, Lizzie was yelling at me. “Get the book, Joe. We need it.”

  “Get it and do fucking what with it?”

  The answer hit me across the shoulders and I slapped it away, thinking it was a snake. It wasn’t. It was one of the rappelling lines. I looked up and saw that far above me it was knotted to a second line. And, I presume, the third far above that. Smart lady, that Lizzie Corbett.

  A moment later something thumped down hard behind me and I spun. It was a big canvas equipment bag. My equipment bag. I fired six shots at some spiders and then rushed to it, tore it open and nearly wept.

  Fifteen magazines for the MP7s. Grenades. More magazines for sidearms.

  I don’t know if that was Lizzie’s idea or Brock’s, but one of those two was going to get a big wet kiss.

  “Echo Team,” I bellowed. “Ammunition. On me.”

  Bunny and Top shot looks at me, saw the bag and the dangling rope. They understood. They began sliding along the wall, firing with renewed frenzy. Top’s MP7 was slung, probably empty and he was using the grenade launcher. There were dead bodies everywhere. Dozens of them. It was a slaughterhouse. It was what we call a target-rich environment, except that usually doesn’t mean that the shooters were likely to lose.

  But now we had a chance. I laid down covering fire with my MP7 and lobbed a few grenades as party favors. They ran. We all reloaded and stuffed the magazines into our pouches.

  The priests and the spiders kept coming.

  There were still so many of them.

  I picked up the empty bag and pointed to Mercer. “We need to secure the book and send it up on the rope. All other considerations secondary, hooah?”

  “Hooah,” they said.

  “Grenades,” I said. “Blow these fuckers up. Buy me time.”

  Bunny and Top stood their ground and as Top fired, Bunny hurled one fragmentation grenade after the other. They set a pattern, tossing the grenades just over the front rank so that the priests and spiders in front shielded them from the shrapnel. It was a rinse and repeat method, but we knew it couldn’t last. It just had to last long enough.

  I threw a pair of grenades underhand at the killers and monsters between me and Mercer, making sure not to over-throw. Lizzie didn’t say that I could kill Mercer. Which sucked, because I really, really wanted to.

  The pit was filled with lightning and thunder as the grenades detonated. Cracks appeared in the walls. Even worse, the cleft was widening—either from the concussions, or the spell, or the diligence of the spiders in this world and the aliens in the next. It was madness down there. Total madness.

  I don’t know how long it took me to kill my way to where Mercer knelt. Ten seconds? Ten years?

  Time was meaningless. Hope was a nail hammered into the center of my chest. Hate filled my head with thorns. I was deafened and screaming at the top of my lungs.

  As the spiders and priests died, I saw Mercer again. With all of the violence and madness around him, he had not moved. Never even looked up, as if he existed in a space apart from this hell hole.

  I switched from grenades to knife, not wanting to risk accidentally shooting the prick. There were four priests between me and Mercer, and they tried to form a protective wall.

  They tried.

  They had big weapons. My knife is a Wilson Rapid Response folding knife with a three and a half inch blade. They should have won, at least in the way they would ha
ve calculated the odds. But the math works best for who wants it more. They were fanatics, but I’m actually crazy.

  Batshit, monster-in-the-dark crazy.

  They tried to keep me from saving my world. They tried hard.

  I cut them to pieces.

  As the last one fell away, his hands clamped to what was left of his throat, I stepped up to Mercer. He knelt there, his skin steaming with heat like a roasting pig. His dick was still fully erect as if in the throes of the most intense and existential of sexual encounters. I was very tempted to use my knife on him, because this son of a bitch deserved it. But not yet.

  Instead, I put my knife in my belt pouch and reached for the book.

  Yes. I thought it would be that easy.

  Fuck.

  15

  TOUCHING THE BOOK was like touching a live electrical power cord. Not a little one, but a big one. The shock was so intense that my hands clamped onto the covers and I suddenly felt as if I was on fire. My body went totally rigid except for my hair, which stood straight as needles from arms and scalp. The pain was off the scale. There’s pain, and then there’s agony, and then there’s a level that is so big, so comprehensive that you can almost stand back from it and watch. Like seeing your house burn down and take everything you own with it. You’re aware of the pain, but it seems somehow unreal.

  That kind of pain.

  I don’t think I screamed. Pretty sure I couldn’t at that point. Nor could I move. All that was left for me was to experience it. And to feel myself die.

  They say your life flashes before your eyes. That’s not true. I’ve been out on the very edge too many times, so I know.

  What happened—at least to me—was that I saw the things I haven’t done, the life I had yet to live and would not get to live. I saw my lover, Junie Flynn, running through a dying world as monstrous fighting machines burned the city around her with heat weapons. I saw my brother, Sean, and his family, tangled in the big baskets on the back of one of those tripods, caught like trout and devalued to nothing more than food. I saw my friends and allies, and my fellow soldiers, fighting a losing war against an unbeatable army. Wave after wave of jets and helicopters going after the legions of fighting machines, and then falling like spent fireworks from the sky. I saw the green earth become choked by red weeds, in which the last free people suffered and starved and died.

  I saw that.

  It was all going to come to pass because of me. Because I’d failed in this task. To take a book away from a man who was not even able to resist.

  Because I was not strong enough to do even that.

  I wanted to scream. To beg for mercy from everyone who I’d failed. To cry out to Junie and my brother, and all of them.

  The heat burned me, and I knew I was dying.

  Except...

  Maybe it was the Dragon suit that saved me.

  Maybe it was that I saw a smile form on Mercer’s face, blossoming like a flower of hate in a blighted field. Maybe it was that. A last insult. The sting of mockery, the gloat of triumph.

  I don’t know what it was. I’ll probably never know.

  But my hands became mine again. Mine to use, mine to choose. Mine to move.

  My thumbs lifted first. And then each finger in a slow—bitterly slow—choreography of obedience.

  And then I was falling. Free of the book. Not free of the pain, though. That came with me as I collapsed. I dropped to my knees. The world was full of thunder and I could feel something warm leaking from my nose and ears. Blood, probably. I coughed and could taste it in my mouth as well.

  Mercer turned his head slowly, focusing his blind eyes on me. “Your world will fall.”

  “F—fuck you,” I gasped. I coughed again and spat more of blood into the hood of the Dragon suit. It painted the visor with viscous red, partly obscuring him. All I could see was that smile.

  “Joe?”

  The voice was in my ear and for a moment I could not tell if it was Junie or my dead mother or...

  “Lizzie?” I whispered.

  “Joe,” she said, “listen to me.”

  “I...” But really, that was all I could manage.

  “Joe,” said Lizzie as if from a million miles away, “all we need is the book. Do you understand?”

  I mumbled something. Not even sure if they were actual words.

  “We just need the book, Joe. Can you hear me?”

  “B-b-book...” My vision was dimming. The world was turning red as the edges of the cleft began to crumble. Mercer’s smile became a laugh.

  “Joe,” yelled Lizzie, “we don’t need Mercer.”

  She shouted those words. Over and over again. Trying to reach me. Forcing me to understand.

  I spat again. The visor was totally blocked now.

  My hands, swollen and burned and nearly useless, rose as if from their own accord. Finding my hood. Finding the seals. Fumbling their way through. Tearing the hood off.

  The air was so hot. Like an oven. Like hell.

  But I could see.

  And I could see James Mercer’s fucking smile. That smug, superior, malicious, evil goddamn smile. I wanted to wipe it off his face.

  One hand dropped to my lap.

  The other dropped to my waist. To the pouch. I could feel the hardness of the folded knife there.

  I think maybe I smiled, too.

  Mercer stopped smiling when I cut his lips from his face.

  16

  THEY PULLED ME away from him.

  Top and Bunny.

  What was left of Mercer—what I had left of him—slumped down in red ruin. And as he fell it was as if time caught up with him all at once. His skin immediately caught fire and burned, the fats and oils sizzling and popping and steaming away as he withered to a blackened husk.

  I shook free of the hands of my friends and saw that Top had the canvas bag the ammunition had come in. I tore it from his hands and pushed him away from the book, which had fallen to the ground.

  “Don’t touch it,” I wheezed. “Don’t.”

  I wasn’t able to do the job, though, so Bunny took the bag from me and used it like oven mitts to nudge the book inside. Then he zipped it up.

  When I looked around I saw that the priests were dead. All of them. While I’d fought with the power of the book and with the evil of James Mercer, they had been doing awful work in the cavern. How many dead were there? I don’t know. Fifty? A hundred?

  The last of the big spiders had retreated and were tearing at the cleft, which was now twice as wide as before.

  “We need to get this to Lizzie,” I said, trying to stand. They caught me, and we staggered together to the dangling rope. Top took the bag and tied the handles to the rope and shouted for Lizzie to take it up.

  The rope shivered and trembled, and then the slack went taut and the Book of Uttu began to rise. We three turned and faced the cleft. With palsied hands, we reloaded and stumbled across the death pit, firing at the spiders. Firing through the cleft. Waging war against the invaders for as long as we could. The pit got hotter and hotter, making it hard for me to breathe without my hood.

  Then I heard Lizzie yelling.

  “I have it. Get out of there. Joe, Top, Bunny...get out.”

  “How?” asked Bunny bleakly, but then he turned and looked behind us. “Guys...guys. Look!”

  We turned.

  The rope was back. But instead of one, there were three. And fires burned more fiercely all around us. Fires that had not been there before. The mounds of priests were already starting to burn.

  The wall of the pit had changed, and when I looked up there were no longer stars above us. Instead, through the gas and smoke, I saw the cloudy afternoon sky of Turkmenistan. The walls were no longer impossibly high. Up there, twenty meters above us, I could see Lizzie and Brock and a bunch of US Marines. And above them two Black Hawk helicopters.

  I looked at Top and Bunny. We all glanced at the cleft and then at the ropes.

  “Fuck this,” I said, and we r
an for the ropes.

  17

  AS IT TURNED out, sealing the book was a process. A bastard of one, but Lizzie said she could do it. We lay sprawled at the edge of the pit. Burned, sweaty, half deaf, scared, watching her work. Not understanding a single damn thing of what she did. Trusting that she knew what she was doing.

  Then she looked up, flushed and sweaty, with blue eyes as bright as a summer sky. She glanced at the helicopters and down at me.

  “Do they have some kind of missiles or rockets or something?”

  The Black Hawks had ESSS systems, which are stubby wings loaded with things that go boom. I grinned. “Yeah. They have all of that. Sixteen Hellfire missiles each. How many do you need?”

  She chewed her lip for a second. “All of it?” she asked.

  I made a call and then we started running away from the pit.

  In the brief pause between my order and the execution, Lizzie said, “Hellfire?”

  “Yeah,” said Top.

  “Seems weirdly poetic.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  And hellfire it was.

  18

  THE HELOS HIT the pit with all thirty-two missiles.

  Then four choppers from the Turkmeni army came and threw in their own party favors. Four hours later—when we were all at a safe distance—a CIA black ops bird flew over and dropped a fuel-air bomb. Nothing survives that. The pressure wave kills anything organic and the fire cleans it all up. It’s the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in existence.

  They’ve since done ground-penetrating radar. There’s nothing down there. Nothing moving. Nothing alive.

  We survived our wounds. Time will tell if we would survive the memories, and the knowledge that there is an army waiting for us somewhere. Is it actually Mars? I don’t know. Certainly not the Mars we know. But I’ve learned that there are many worlds, and many versions of each world.

  That army is out there somewhere. Now we know it.