Execution

by Shaun O. McCoy

  Shock, naked and real, hits her, widening her pupil-filled eyes.

  I keep my face earnest. “You’ve been kind to me. I know you must hate Dendra. Come away with me.”

  Slowly, her mouth slightly ajar, she holds up the water.

  I drink it. She lets me have way too much.

  “Will you meet me here or at the river?” I ask. “I don’t actually know where on the river Ares will be, so it would be better here.”

  She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t go to feed the others. She sprints out of the room.

  I stretch my muscles.

  Come what may.

  “Where’s my food!” I shout.

  The guards, confused by Ghela’s sudden departure, step to where they can see me.

  “Where is it?” I yell.

  I rush them, slamming my body against the bars. The bells jingle in protest.

  Josh isn’t on duty now, for which I’m thankful. He kind of likes me. I’d hate to disabuse him of his affection.

  I step back to give myself some space and charge the bars once more.

  Again the bells greet me.

  I scream, letting my real anger escape.

  “Stop!” the first guard yells.

  “He’s cracked,” the other says.

  I see Cid looking up at me from where she lays in her cell. Neb is confused, perhaps unsure of whether I’m acting, or if I really have lost it.

  Oh, have a little faith, my Nazi friend.

  “Stay back!” the first guard warns, raising his rifle to his shoulder.

  I turn and rush the outward facing bars, slamming into them, screaming madly.

  It’s not a hard act. My rage is uncontainable. It flows through me like a river. I hit the bars again.

  “You’ll kill yourself!” a guard screams. “Stop.”

  I hear the sound of the corpses above me. I jump, reaching upward through the bars, shouting, until one of them catches my arm.

  I grip it back.

  I use the limb to pull my entire body up. I place my feet upon the ceiling and then jump downward.

  The arm crackles and I hear the snapping of undead tendons. The arm holds. I put my feet back up and jump again. With a snap and the sound of shorn paper, the arm rips free. The wood floor is as hard as concrete, but the pain of the impact doesn’t bother me. I toss the corpse arm aside and charge the outside bars again.

  I rebound off them and collapse by the wall where Fabian’s bullet had impacted.

  The tears in my eyes are both fake and real.

  The guards watch me cry for maybe five minutes before they return to their posts.

  From slamming into the cage, I have a good idea which bars are the weakest. I rip off the skin from the undead arm and crush it, letting the corpse dust fall at the base of the two bars I’ve decided on.

  I remove a shard of Fabian’s bullet from the wall, but my grip isn’t strong enough to chip away at the wood with it. I bite on my thumbnail to clip it just a little, jam the shard under my nail, and press it down into the wood to set it in my flesh.

  The pain shouts to me, a wailing woman in a far off land.

  I hunch over, pretending to cry as cover while I work at the base of the bars, using the broken piece of the bullet to dig up splinters. This lets the corpsedust settle more deeply around the bars.

  “Cris.” Q’s voice calls to me.

  I imagine his face.

  I’ve shared nothing of my plan with him. How much of what I’m doing does he understand?

  In my mind’s eye, his face is warm, caring. He has faith in me.

  I hear the distant quiet tinkle of a disturbed bell, and then silence. Q must be grabbing one of the bars nearest my cage.

  “Remember Maylay Beighlay?” he asks me.

  Of course I do.

  “Cris, hell could hardly hold you then,” Q says. “You had only a little knowledge, and barely any training. Imagine what will happen when you face it now.”

  He knows. He doesn’t think I’ve lost my mind. And his words are exactly what I want—no, what I need to hear. Those are the words that give life and logic to my intuition—to the idea that I can finally win.

  I redouble my fake tears and work as the blood of my thumbnail mixes in with the corpsedust and sawdust.

  I hear Aiden’s sneering voice from across the wall. “You’re a weakling father.”

  Q knows me better than my own son.

  I whisper back to him. “Somewhere beyond your body, you can hear me. I’m coming for you again, Aiden. Do you understand? I’m coming, and there is nothing in this Hell, not on Earth or in Heaven—not man, not woman, not devil—that can stop me.”

  My work done, I lay down in the darkness.

  I close my eyes and rest.

  The rest isn’t really sleep because my day has only just begun. Rather, I feel almost meditative. It reminds me of a long commute in an old world morning, when the traffic is light and the sky is dark. My body feels good. My muscles loose. My wounds healed.

  I know what you want, Callodax. You want my son. How much do you want him?

  You’re out there, I know it.

  Ghela has surely found you by now. You’re in a hurry, getting your forces ready. There isn’t much time, she’s told you. Aiden escapes in the morning, she’s told you. The boy will be out of your reach and the infidels will be free.

  I can’t know your motivation, Callodax. I know only that you came from Soulfall, and that you might have come from Sheol before that. I know you’ve tried to kill us without fail ever since then. But will you come now?

  Somehow I know you will. Whatever hints about your character I’ve picked up in our brief interactions, I can say at least this, you want Aiden.

  But I want him more. More than anyone. More than anyone has ever wanted anything.

  I breathe in and out. When I breathe in, I imagine a brilliant light of purifying power, and when I breathe out, I imagine exhaling a black cloud of my own weakness.

  Come what may, I’ll kill it.

  I feel the change in the light before my eyes can detect it.

  The routine sound of boots on the stairs, a guard change and nothing more, adds an air of militarism to the queer silence which hangs over us like a blanket, muffling the whispering leaves and the oh-so-gentle breeze. I rise. Was I ever sore? Had I ever been wounded? Has anything ever hurt me?

  I cannot know.

  The guards exchange a soft perfunctory greeting as their shift changes. One of the new men is Josh. Maybe I know this because I’ve memorized the schedule. Maybe I know this because I can detect the fact that he favors one foot on the stairs. Maybe the Devil told me.

  Lightly, as if I were an infidel, I come to the inner bars.

  Blood drips from where I had previously embedded the bullet shard in my thumbnail, splattering against the wooden floor beneath me.

  Josh is disheveled. Tired. Torn.

  It will not get better for him.

  He looks at me.

  “You can feel it, can’t you?” I ask him.

  His friend freezes. Even insane infidels like myself are dangerous. Even caged ones. Even ones doomed to die.

  “Don’t listen to him,” the treeman advises Josh. “He’s fucking with you. He’s trying to get under your skin.”

  Josh’s eyes are glued on me.

  I cock my head to one side and listen. “It’s in the breeze, don’t you think? Or maybe you can feel its vibrations, coming through the stones and into the trees. It’s in the way the birds have stayed silent this morning.”

  Josh stops, also cocking his head to listen. His friend starts to speak, but then pauses, perhaps entertaining my suggestion.

  “It’s coming,” I tell him. “That thing you fear. The attack. The devils. Callodax’s army of thugs, fools and demons. They’re coming.”

  Josh’s friend grabs his arm, trying to turn him away.

  Josh shakes himself loose, his eyes focused on me.

  “When it comes,” I
tell him. “You’ll need to let me go.”

  “See!” his friend shouts. “He’s trying to get in your head.”

  The shout dies, sucked away by the quiet. There is the breeze. A single, hesitant chirp . . . and then silence.

  Josh swallows hard enough that I can see his Adam’s apple bobbing in the near darkness.

  “You’ll need to let me go,” I continue, “because without me, your people will lose. You won’t survive this, Josh. Nor will your family.”

  His friend grabs his arm again. “Don’t listen!”

  I step close to the bars, so close I can feel the cool air surrounding the iron on my cheek.

  “If you do not listen,” I tell him, “then run. Gather those you love and get out while you still can.”

  Josh turns away. His shoulders are rising with his heavy breathing. That man is terrified. Good. He should be. My hell is coming.

  And for a perfect minute, all around us is that eerie tension before a battle.

  The wind whispers to me. “You are mortal,” it says. “Never forget you are mortal.”

  Fuck you, wind.

  Then, even as the first signs of light begin to breach the lower mists, the explosion rips across the chamber. It’s not like the small points of demolition caused by our infidel fire—no. Not at all.

  The boom is a horrific thunderous crack which sounds out like a mountain splitting, echoing in a horrid, repetitive staccato across the chamber as it’s shockwave shakes the trees. The birds cry out as rock shrapnel pummels the trunks and rips through the leaves. Dust fills the chamber as the gentle rain of silt descends through the air, some of it billowing through the outer bars and into my room.

  I do not move as it swirls around me.

  Josh and the treeman have dropped, taking cover in their fear. Josh’s eyes are wide. He stares up at me.

  “Callodax is here,” I say.

  His friend stands, tugging at him, shouting—though the voice seems small after such an apocalyptic clamor—pleading. “Your family, Josh! My daughter! We’ve got to get them out. Leave this infidel. Leave Fabian. Let’s leave this whole damn place.”

  Josh shakes his head. “We have to fight.” He turns to me. “I’m sorry.”

  I shrug.

  Josh and his friend rush away, but it is no matter.

  I learned how to throw a sidekick back on Earth, but I never really used it much. El Cid had tweaked the way I threw it. The power, she taught me, is in the moment when I shift my weight on the ball of my planted foot. The kick is strongest when that shift comes just slightly earlier than I’ve been executing.

  I sidekick the ever-living shit out of a bar I’d weakened with my careful chipping and application of corpsedust. With the dull ring of iron and the sudden crack of rotten wood, the first bar falls free. It rings as it hits the wood, rolling and tumbling down until it settles on the wide smooth branch below.

  With similar force, I kick out the second bar.

  The treemen are shouting, though I can’t see them through the thick mists. Already I hear the distant hiss of dyitzu and the sizzle of their incoming fireballs.

  I look behind me.

  Cid, Neb, and Durgan are all staring at me.

  I meet Durgan’s glassy, black eyes. “All ye all ye out and free.”

  Cid is smiling.

  I remember something she told me once.

  I have to turn your blood into lava and your body into whetstone. I have to turn your mind into a raging current of lightning, your will into an avalanche, your soul into a wellspring. And then, when you have learned to despise Hell, when you know her weaknesses, when you know how to break her, then I have to unleash you.

  I leap through the breach.

  The grey bark slopes out beneath me as I slide along. Broken pieces of it shower down around me. Where the trunk meets the branch-formed landing, I roll and come to my feet.

  The particulate of the explosion and the heavy morning mist hang together in the air, forming a shifting haze which swallows the edges of my vision. From where I stand, I can just barely see the hanging vines of sinfruit against the grey wall of forever. Despite my limited visibility, I know the fight is on. I hear the howls of hounds and the hiss of dyitzu. I hear the flap of leathery wings in the air and the rush of the last remaining showers of dirt as they make their way down through the canopy. I hear the sorrow of dying men and women.

  The haze mutes Dendra’s illumination so evenly it seems to come from nowhere. All is colorless here except for the small red bubbles of light that paint the distant mists with streaks of sunset pink.

  That’s dyitzu fire.

  At my feet lies one fallen bar from my cell. I put one of Jessica’s boots under it and kick it up into my hand. I make my way to the vines. Then, from behind, I hear with perfect clarity the increasingly loud flapping of approaching winged devils.

  I duck into the hanging sinfruit and look out, hoping the flora will give me enough cover.

  Three dezendyitzu break through the walls of grey, flying in a triangular formation. Two alight on the landing where I just stood. The third hovers mightily in the air above them, its huge wings swirling the mists as it struggles to keep its dyitzu-shaped body in the air. A fourth creature, an Icanitzu, coalesces out of the mist. Its flight is more graceful, and when it hovers, it does so with less effort. The three dezens each loose a trio of fireballs. These aren’t the typical dyitzu red. Dark blue and purple baubles of fire erupt from their hands, spinning unpredictably across the expanse, tearing into the vines and sending them swaying this way and that. Their multicolored flames drip down through the vines, curling the leaves into black stumps, boiling the juices out of the sinfruit and filling the air with the smell of burning sugar.

  A purple tongue of fire rolls down, inches from my face. Its heat is spectacularly intense upon my cheek and eye, but I’m as still as God’s conscience.

  The Icanitzu barks a short command. The two dezendyitzu who landed fight their way back into the air and the wicked foursome continue on through the mists.

  I hear men’s shouts and the reports of gunfire. I hear the twangs of bows. I hear the whine of a wounded hound.

  To climb, I tuck my iron bar under my left arm, wrapping my legs around one vine and pushing up with my feet to compensate for the limited use of my left hand. As I reach the supporting branches of the sinfruit vines, I see a dull red glow, larger than the globes of dyitzu fire, through the haze.

  One of the trees is burning.

  Ash, either from that, or from the vines, is drifting on the breeze. I can’t see far, but I think the supporting branch curves around to the front of the prison tree. Then there should be a bridge that will take me to my equipment. But I only know this from memory. To look at it, this grey branch leads off into the never.

  I can just now begin to make out tiny grey shapes ahead. I hold my iron bar before me like a tightrope walker and move quickly across the dewy branch.

  Those shapes become visible as a cluster of dyitzu, maybe five of them, spread out across a wide limb, hurling their fire at a wicker bunker in the tree. One unfortunate archer lays between the two groups, smoldering. As I approach, distant fireballs, again visible only as ruddy bubbles of light, streak through the fog—but this time they’re headed straight down. There must be devils crawling on the ceiling as well.

  One of the five dyitzu turns to me as I near it, a fireball already formed. It throws.

  Oh, you poor devil, you have no idea.

  Fifty feet.

  I slip the fireball, lowering my right shoulder and slowing my approach. One of his friends also focuses on me. If I can distract enough of them, the men in the bunker will get free shots at their backside. The pair looking at me tosses their fire. The dyitzu fireballs come as if in slow motion. One misses naturally, and I do a quick wide step, bending at the waist to avoid the other.

  Twenty feet.

  The first devil tries again as I near the pair. The branch is wide enough here to a
llow me some lateral movement. I spin to one side, swinging the bar at the passing fireball, hitting it from behind. The missile bursts, sending a burning napalm-like substance showering out in a wide arc behind me. Some of the flaming goo sticks to the end of my bar. I continue the spin, picking up more power before leveling a blow at a devil. The dyitzu does its best to block, but the burning iron bats its arms aside. I hear the iron ring with an almost bell-like sound as my makeshift staff impacts with its skull. Brained, the devil falls into the depths.

  The four remaining dyitzu have all turned to me. I weave my way through their fireballs, staying away from their reaching claws. I see the archers in the wicker bunker stand, suddenly free of the barrage of fire. Arrows find the backs of two dyitzu. I dart at one of the surviving devils.

  I hit it forcefully in the side with the butt of my staff. It bends over when I strike it, clutching the iron bar, heedless of the fire. I let it have the bar and front kick it off the branch.

  Instinctively, I duck, but there was no need. The remaining dyitzu had been felled by the treemen. They look at me uneasily from their bunker.

  I hold up a hand and wink at them.

  I pick up the discarded bow of their smoldering comrade. The quiver is mostly in good shape, though some of the arrows’ fletching had blackened from the heat. I strap the quiver around my waist. I put three arrows in my bow hand and keep a fourth ready.

  Unlike the infidel-made arrows, these have very narrow notches. I go ahead and nock my free one, because it will be hard to fire these quickly.

  I have to make a decision. Do I rescue my friends first, or go for my weapons? Josh and the other guard have left, but there are other treeman in the Wicker Tree who might want to put me back in my cage.

  In the mist, I find myself disoriented, but after a moment to get my bearings, I’m sure I know the path to the Storage Tree.