9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1

by Static, E. C.

Malina looked down too. Her eyes widened.

  The one snake had become many, a whole hoard of them twisting through the muddy grass at their knees, soft and whispering as the wind. None of the men seemed to notice them over the sputtering storm overhead.

  “Holy shit,” she whispered. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. It was in that book you said I shouldn’t waste time reading.”

  Malina grimaced. “Sorry. For that. I was—”

  “I know. You were right. Honestly, I should have listened to you.”

  “Hey,” Jeffery snapped at them. “Shut the fuck up.”

  Malina snapped over her shoulder, “If I’m about to die, I can have some last words, okay, asshole?”

  Jeffery whirled on her, but Atlas waved a hand at him, lazily.

  “Relax, Jeffy,” Atlas said. He pulled a lighter from his jacket and cupped his palm over his cigarette to keep it dry. “Let them enjoy their last few moments alive.”

  Jeffery just scoffed at her and lit up one of her cigarettes. “When I get the order from Florence, I’m shooting her myself.”

  “Whatever makes you happy, mate.”

  “What do snakes have to do with it?” Malina whispered back to Clint, her voice so soft he barely heard her.

  He shrugged. “They’re the judge. They decide if people leave limbo and enter the next level. That’s what the book said.”

  “So you did read it.”

  He shrugged. “Skimmed it.”

  Malina’s grin was bitter and immediate. Her thick hair had fallen out of its bun and cascaded down in wild black curls. She tossed her hair over her shoulder as an excuse to look back at the men, who were still murmuring amongst themselves.

  “Fine,” she said. “What are we supposed to do?”

  Jeffery glanced at them. He looked even goofier when his eyes narrowed in suspicion, but the bastard still had a gun, no matter how stupid he looked.

  “That’s enough last words, you two,” Jeffery grumbled before he turned back to face his teammates.

  The snakes just watched them, expectantly.

  Clint made eye contact with the largest of them all, whose razored eyes followed him with distinct curiosity and intent. It kept slinking in and out of a burrow that seemed to tunnel deep under the earth.

  Clint looked at the snake and said, as sincerely as anyone could talk to a snake down in Hell, “Please judge us, uh…”

  The snake looked at him, unimpressed. Its tongue flickered out, and it turned to disappear back into its burrow.

  Clint tried again, bowing his head in deference, “Judge us, wise king.”

  The snake’s head dipped in return, as if dismissing him, before it coiled past Clint and disappeared into the grass by his feet.

  “You sound like an absolute moron,” Malina informed him. “Just so you know.”

  Now Jeffery stormed up and stood in front of them. He shook Clint’s rifle before Malina’s nose. “Do you really want to die just because you can’t keep your fucking hole shut?”

  Malina spat blood into the dirt. “I’d be happy to die if it means I pissed you off.”

  Jeffery flipped the safety of the rifle down. A snake with a body as thick as Clint’s thumb slithered over the man’s boot. He leapt back with an immediate yelp and shot wildly at the snake once, twice.

  Clint’s ears rang, but the snake crawled away, unharmed, even as Jeffery swiped at his legs and swore, over and over again.

  Atlas cackled at him. “What the hell was that for?”

  “I fucking hate snakes, man.”

  “Oh, god.” Atlas wiped at his eyes as he grinned. “Boots will be disappointed he missed that.”

  None of them noticed the biggest of the snakes winding itself around Clint’s ankle. Once, twice. The grip was tight and certain, sending pins and needles crawling down Clint’s leg.

  He nodded down to the snakes and hissed to Malina, “Do what I just did.”

  “What?”

  “Ask him to judge you now.”

  “Please,” Malina said to the snakes, her swollen face twisted and weary, “judge me, I guess.”

  “You will speak to a king like he is a king,” the snakes answered as one. Their voices sounded like their scales singing against the grass, rasping and cold as the wind tugging at Clint’s cheeks.

  Jeffery froze. “Did you hear that?”

  “I heard you being a little bitch, yeah,” said the third soldier, which just made Atlas wheeze a snort-laugh.

  “The snakes talked!” Jeffery sputtered.

  “I thought I was the only bloody drunk here.” Atlas smirked, his words clouding blue and smoky. “Talking snakes. Very reasonable.”

  Malina looked at Clint in disbelief, then she let herself fall forward, so her head rested at eye-level with the largest snake.

  “Uh,” she whispered, so softly that Clint could barely hear her. “Apologies, my lord. Please, judge me. Let me pass through. Please.”

  Atlas’s walkie-talkie beeped and crackled, like a cold knife sinking into Clint’s soul.

  Over the speaker, Florence’s voice growled, “There’s nothing here. Kill them.”

  “End of the road.” Atlas pouted in mock-apology. “Sorry to see you go like this, but we all have our time, don’t we?”

  “Can I still have that cigarette?” Malina said.

  That made Atlas’s grin sharpen. “You missed the boat on that one, darling.”

  Everything happened in slow motion.

  Clint watched Jeffery raise his rifle. Watched the blood-hungry grin light up on his face. He stared down the open maw of the gun and wondered if this would be the last thing he ever saw.

  “It was a nice trick,” Jeffery commended him. “While it lasted.”

  The rifle barrel pressed against Clint’s forehead, still stinging hot from Jeffery shooting at the snakes. Jeffery flicked the safety off again with a click that sounded like a door forever closing behind him.

  Clint glared up at him. If he had to die, he wouldn’t let any of these bastards see his fear.

  Jeffery’s finger twitched over the trigger.

  And in that moment, the snake sunk its teeth into Clint’s flesh. It was a needle-hot burn that surged instantly up his veins, liquid fire stabbing up one leg, down the other, through his torso, down his arms — all in one single ragged breath.

  The field collapsed around him, crumbling into streaks of darkness, star-specked and cold, as if Clint had fallen headfirst into the night sky.

  He gasped, “What the fuck?” before gravity squeezed the air out of him and kept pulling him down, faster and faster.

  The open air roared in his ears as he plummeted down, down, down. He strained to lift his head up, to see if Malina was there, but he just found light-speckled darkness in all directions.

  Clint knew he should be afraid, but he couldn’t stop grinning. He had been so certain it was over. That he’d done all of this for nothing, in the end.

  But there was still hope. The memory of Rachel’s smile burned in him like a second soul.

  Virgil floated alongside him for a second, his arms tucked behind his head. “Congratulations,” he said, like the downward tug of gravity wasn’t flattening the air out of his lungs. “You figured it out.”

  “Where’s Malina?” he yelled.

  “You’ll see.” The kid’s smile was devilish and delighted. “Welcome to Level 2. I’m afraid there’s no prize for second place.”

  “Could you untie me?” Clint said, wrestling against the duct tape still holding his hands behind his back. “Please?”

  “Hm…” The kid’s lower lip puckered out, like he was really thinking about it. “Probably not. Good luck!”

  He vanished, just like that. Not even a blink. He was there one second and just empty space the next.

  “That little prick,” Clint gasped under his breath.

  He fought against gravity to tilt his head down.
There was a pinprick of light below him, like the end of a tunnel. A doorway into the unknown.

  Clint surged toward it, to face whatever Hell threw at him next.

  CHAPTER 28

  N

  OW THE GAME WAS GETTING fun.

  Virgil had already sent an avatar of himself to give Malina and Clint a mostly-friendly welcome to the next level. Both of them had looked panicked, of course. Utterly convinced they were going to die. He still had their respective feeds pulled up in the upper corner of his own HUD, where his own player profile simply said:

  Really, their “plunge through infinite space” was more like “the same background texture looping on itself,” but they didn’t need to know that. He’d give them a minute or two before activating their entry to Level 2, just to give a good sense of atmosphere.

  Most of his job was showmanship, after all.

  Plus, he didn’t want to miss out on the sheer schadenfreude delight of the carnival of dunces gathered before him. Life didn’t offer this kind of perfect irony often: the players standing right over the entrance to Level 2, arguing over what happened to their prisoners, as if it wasn’t fucking self-evident.

  “Amazing,” Virgil said. He reached into the empty air and materialized a container of popcorn. It was technically an item from a future level, but he decided he could treat himself.

  The remaining players scrambled like ants in a flooded anthill. The goofy eyebrowless fucker was furiously circling around and around the spot their prisoners had once lain, shaking his rifle and yelling, “Where did they go? What the fuck?”

  It was like watching dogs try to make sense of a whack-a-mole game. Virgil settled down like the air was a stadium chair, ate his popcorn, and watched.

  Atlas paced the same short span of dirt, over and over. He murmured into his radio and turned the volume down low so the others couldn’t hear him. No doubt telling Florence he had no idea what the fuck just happened and she needed to come over quick.

  “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  That voice chilled Virgil’s blood. He jumped to his feet and turned to see the Lord of Hell standing beside him like a lone skeleton tree in a graveyard.

  Death wore a red brocade suit jacket, patterned with skulls instead of blossoms. The rain stopped just short of him, like there was a thin halo of protection keeping Death immaculately dry.

  Virgil let his popcorn vanish into thin air and said, “I was just transporting two more players who found Level 2.”

  “Right. With snacks.”

  The kid smiled, slyly. “You can’t blame me. It’s a good show.”

  “I know. I’m terribly behind on my paperwork thanks to it. I think I’m beginning to understand humans and Netflix now.”

  Virgil scoffed. “And yet you pulled me off reaping for watching it.”

  Before Virgil became Death’s adviser, he burned through a few different administrative jobs, only managing to get new ones because Death seemed to like the irony that he looked like a sweet little kid but acted like a supreme asshole.

  Death’s skin was so pale, it seemed translucent. Virgil could almost see Death’s exposed mandible in his tightening smile.

  “I pulled you off reaping because you kept delaying your scheduled deaths by hours to finish whatever television show they were watching.”

  “Look at all the pop culture knowledge I gathered for this noble venture, though,” Virgil said.

  If he kept his mood light and easy, Death would just glance around, say something vaguely authoritarian, and then leave, like he always did.

  Unless he actually read the server logs. Unless he noticed the tiny, experimental tweak on Clint’s player profile.

  Virgil’s heart pulsed quick and nervous, but he refused to let it show.

  Death said, his voice flat with disbelief, “I can’t say I expected those two to live.”

  Virgil swallowed a hot bubble of panic and said, keeping his expression perfectly smug and smooth, “You did want a game that kept you constantly guessing, sir.”

  “Indeed.” Death’s stare flicked over him, appraising him. “And I know my honorable adviser would never give anyone in this game an unfair advantage.”

  The Inferno hidden in Virgil’s pocket pulsed like a telltale heart.

  Virgil couldn’t even explain to himself why he did it. There was something deeply and uniquely human about both Clint and Malina. A kindness Hell hadn’t managed to kill, not quite yet.

  When Clint stalked away in that mad, last-ditch effort to save Malina, Virgil had already seen Florence’s soldier skulking around the other side of the library. He said nothing, just sat there and let Clint walk right into his trap.

  It wasn’t the first time he watched a player nearly die just from being an unobservant idiot. But it was the first time he intervened.

  He’d reached into Clint’s backpack, pulled out the book, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket, through the dimensional-zipper that allowed him to carry an impossibly big inventory.

  Technically, it wasn’t cheating. All he did was hold onto the damn thing. Florence’s team could find the answer in the exact same way, by pausing to investigate the book-falling-off-a-shelf random event that kick-started Level 2.

  So the next words out of Virgil’s mouth were barely a lie.

  “Of course. And I know you’d never distrust me, sir.”

  Death didn’t smile, exactly. The upper corner of his mouth twitched, which was close enough. He tilted his head as Florence and the two soldiers who had left with her came sprinting across the other end of the field.

  “I have a new task for you,” Death said. “I expect you to make it your top priority.”

  “Always, sir.”

  The rain poured down as the Lord of Hell told Virgil his plan.

  No one else heard. Not the players or the snakes or the gray miserable sky. Only Virgil and Death knew the secret that would irrevocably change the game.

  Virgil stared at him, wide-eyed. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m always serious, boy. I want to make this game fun.”

  Virgil frowned at the players surrounding them, already evaluating them for who would best fit Death’s plan.

  “This is starting to sound unfair,” he said.

  Death’s glare fell on him, quick and sharp as a guillotine. “I don’t recall ever promising to play fairly.”

  Virgil suppressed the urge to roll his eyes. Of course, this game was always about Death’s morbid sense of excitement. Not about saving anyone or offering a second chance at life.

  There was no real mercy in it. Only death and more death, all for the Lord of Hell’s enjoyment. Death was just a cat watching the mice run through a maze, and if the mice didn’t stay entertaining enough, he’d simply corner them and devour them whole.

  “You’re right.” Virgil pasted on an easy smile, barely masking the resentment in his eyes. “That would be out of character for you.”

  “I’m getting the impression you disagree with my idea, boy.”

  Virgil stiffened. He felt it then, the undeniable truth: he was just another mouse in the maze, too. And the cat was only going to keep him around as long as he was more interesting alive than dead.

  “You think I’d dare argue with the Lord of Hell?” Virgil said.

  “Oh, I absolutely think that.”

  “Fair enough. But I’m not bitching this time.” The kid smirked. “It’s your game. I just run it.”

  “That’s the right answer.”

  The Lord of Hell patted Virgil’s rain-soaked shoulder and grimaced at the water on his palm. He pulled a black pocket square from his breast pocket and dried his hand primly, finger by finger.

  “Tell me your top three candidates by, oh…” Death inspected his watch, lazily. Today, the band was a pair of gold phalanges, curling around his wrist. “The end of the week, Earth time. Devil only knows how much work I have to catch up on before I can play.”
>
  Thunder murmured overhead like a warning.

  “Of course, sir. I’ll give you the very best.”

  “There’s a good boy,” Death said, like Virgil was a dog. A particularly wet and filthy dog.

  Virgil pulled his tablet from his jacket, his belly tightening when his fingers brushed against the book.

  He tapped the screen on and clicked his tongue. “Ah, I’d better go meet them. They’ll be hitting Level 2 any moment now.”

  Another not-quite-lie. They’d enter the next level the second Virgil tapped the transfer button on his tablet. But he couldn’t afford to have Death sense his unease.

  The Lord of Hell waved him away. “Very well. Make it count, would you? That first girl is terribly boring. She just… reads things and carries out simple quests. Why do we even have quests?”

  “For immersion, sir.”

  “The next time we do this, no quests. Only bloodbaths and psychological torture.”

  “You got it, sir,” Virgil said. “Fun for all ages.”

  Death vanished as suddenly as he appeared, but Virgil couldn’t really enjoy watch the idiots scamper now. His very blood was buzzing with relief and dangerous optimism.

  He’d gotten away with it: a stolen item, a tweaked stat. Death didn’t notice a couple little aberrations among a list of thousands of system changes.

  If he could sneak that much past Death, this game was going to end much, much differently than the Lord of Hell could ever imagine.

  Virgil’s grin grew fanged. Outright demonic. He opened up the launch screen for Level 2.

  He said, “Let the fucking games begin.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I

  N THE DEEPEST CIRCLE OF Hell, Rachel leaned out her castle window. The lava moat churned down below. Even from hundreds of feet up, she could feel its heat kiss her cheeks.

  If Death looked into her room, she might look like she was perched wistfully at the window, staring out at the gray horizon, as Clint kept dying on the wall behind her.

  At first, she had let herself cry. But when the minutes became hours and Death still hadn’t claimed her soul, her despair wildfired into fury.