Hellfighters by Alexander Gordon Smith
Herc snorted, shaking his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Hell, you wouldn’t believe me if I showed you a photo. Guy’s … Well, he’s not…” Herc swore, looked to Pan.
“Looks like he couldn’t win a fight with a blindfolded, one-legged kitten,” she said.
Taupe frowned.
“All these years fighting for somebody, who’d have figured?”
“Hey, he’s still Ostheim,” said Herc, nervously scanning the walls, the ceiling. “Don’t judge a book by its cover, and all that. He’s still Ostheim.”
Taupe swallowed hard, nodding. Then he broke into a smile again.
“New recruits, I see,” he said. “They seem to get younger every time.” He glanced at Marlow. “Younger and rougher around the edges.”
“Yeah?” Marlow said, trying and failing to think of a comeback. “And who the hell are you? The baker?”
Herc sighed.
“Marlow, Pan, Truck, this is Taupe. Ex-Engineer turned … I don’t know, what’s the kind word for it? Mercenary? Profiteer?”
“Please,” said Taupe. “Businessman is just fine. It is good to meet you, Marlow, Truck. And Pan, what an honor. I did not think it was possible to make a deal with the Engine for such beauty.”
Are you serious?
Marlow bit back a laugh, then almost choked on it when he saw Pan blush. She smiled, holding out her hand for Taupe to shake. He grabbed it and kissed it, holding it for a fraction too long. Not that Pan made an effort to pull it away.
Marlow shuffled uncomfortably, realizing that his own cheeks were heating up. For a cellar, this place was hot.
“You were an Engineer?” asked Pan when the French guy finally let her go. “I thought Engineers just, you know, stayed or died. I didn’t think anyone had actually left.”
“Not many,” said Taupe. “Just a handful. I made more than thirty contracts, back when I was a teenager. More missions than I could count.”
“Eighty-four,” said Herc.
“But age is not an Engineer’s friend. Eventually the contracts became too complex even for … even for Saul, God rest his soul. So I left.”
“Been working with us ever since,” said Herc. “Logistics, weapons, recon. Makes a damn fine sourdough, too. You heard about Saul, then?”
Taupe nodded. “Yeah, I heard. That bastard Mammon. I did not think it was possible, Herc. I did not think anyone could breach the Red Door.” He glanced at Marlow and the room heated up another ten degrees. “But we will find him. He is here, somewhere. The Engines are here. After all these years of looking, now is our chance. The blood on the streets does not lie.”
“Only good thing about the Engines being reunited,” said Herc. “Hopefully they’ll lead us right to them.”
“They know that,” said Taupe. “They’ll be waiting. And Mammon will be throwing out Engineers as quickly as he can. Finding the Engine is one thing, getting to it alive is something else.”
“Which is where my big girl will come in,” said Herc, walking to the table and hefting the bazooka onto his shoulder. “You can make a deal for anything you like, but a high-explosive antitank warhead to the face is gonna end you, contract or no contract.”
“Amen to that,” said Truck, walking to the table and picking up a shotgun. “Dibs.”
He took a crossbow in his other hand and gave it to Pan. She took it, investigating its weight and sights.
“We have only three bolts,” said Taupe. “All we had left after Morocco. They’re old magic, though, straight from the Engine, and they’ll put a hole in a demon.”
“Cool,” said Pan, and Marlow wasn’t sure if her smile was for the crossbow or for the Frenchman.
“Marlow,” said Herc. “Grab something.”
“I’m fine,” he said, flexing his damp hands. “Got powers.”
“They might not last,” said Herc. “Mammon could end them any minute now. Go, take a weapon.”
Marlow swallowed, wondering how his throat could have gotten so dry. Herc was right. His contract could be canceled at any time. It wasn’t the loss of his strength and speed that scared him, it was the fact that his asthma would come back—and it would come back hard. The monster around his throat would be pissed, and he didn’t even have an inhaler. He coughed at the thought of it, rubbed his chest. Then, when he realized that everyone was waiting for him, he walked to the table. The guns looked big, and mean, and ready to put a hole in him the moment he laid his hand on them.
“They won’t bite,” said Taupe with a high-pitched chuckle. Marlow wanted to throw a punch at him, see if he was still laughing then. He reached out and grabbed the biggest machine gun, lifting it awkwardly to his chest. It stank of metal and grease.
“Bloody hell, Marlow,” said Herc. “Put that down. Taupe, give him a forty-five, would you?”
Taupe laughed again, pulling the assault rifle from Marlow’s grip. He laid it on the table then picked up a small black pistol, handing it over. With every pair of eyes in the room on him, Marlow didn’t have any choice but to take it. He studied it. It looked like it fired Pez candy.
“It’ll give you time and space if you need it,” said Herc. “Remember, unless they’ve traded for invulnerability then you can still kill them.”
“The perfect little gun for le petit garçon,” said Taupe, and he had the nerve to fire a wink at Pan.
She stifled a smile and Marlow’s blood pressure rose so high he thought the top of his head was going to pop off. He tucked the gun into the waistband of his pants before he would crush it into a paperweight.
“It’s not about the size, Toupée,” he muttered. “It’s about how well you can use it.”
“And do you know how to use it?” the guy replied without missing a beat.
Once again Marlow’s brain gave him nothing to come back with and suddenly the whole room was laughing. His hackles rippled up and for a moment the world burned so bright that he wasn’t sure he could control himself. Then he felt a hand on his arm.
“Ignore him, kiddo,” Herc said, hefting the rucksack onto his back. It looked heavy. “We got more important things to worry about. Taupe, ain’t no point us sitting here staring at the walls. Where’s the best lead, where can we start?”
“Where to start?” The French guy mulled it over, his eyes scrolling the dirt floor. “In this city, where else could it be? We start with the dead.”
NOPE
Paris was losing itself.
Pan watched it coming apart at the seams, the threads that made this great city being pulled by the Engines that surely lay somewhere beneath it. Through the filthy window she saw people running down the streets, teeth bared; she saw dogs savaging their owners; she saw broken windows and a burning car and at least two dozen emergency vehicles fighting to get through the chaos. As they pulled back onto the road that ran parallel to the river she thought she saw people jumping from the bridges, a line of them, like synchronized divers.
“Hang on,” yelled Taupe from the driver’s seat. He had loaded them into an old Russian army bus that looked like it hadn’t been driven—or cleaned—since World War II. The windows were smeared with orange dirt, and what must have been half a sand dune formed drifts around their feet every time the bus turned a corner. He changed gears and the vehicle bellowed, shuddering so hard she had to grab the seat in front to stop from sliding onto the floor. The crossbow dug into her back and she shifted it to the side.
“It is not far,” he said.
“Thank God,” muttered Marlow from across the aisle. “He needs a driving lesson.”
She ignored him, sneaking a glance at Taupe’s reflection in the rearview mirror. The guy was cute. Ridiculously cute. Even amid the chaos, even though he was driving them to war, there was no denying it. More than that, though, she’d heard about him. Betty, the woman who’d patched them up after each mission, who’d done her best to stitch the pieces back together, had always spoken about “the Frenchman.” She’d been a little obsessed with hi
Less weird, though, now that Pan had met him.
Pull yourself together, she thought, turning to the window. They passed a fire truck that was actually on fire. That had to be one of the signs of the apocalypse, right?
She looked at the mirror again, studying Taupe’s eyes, the furrow of his brow. He must have sensed her because he looked up, his reflection winking. She turned away sharply, the heat burrowing into her face. Marlow was looking at her, too, and he was wearing the expression of a kid whose favorite toy has been snatched away.
“What?” she demanded.
“He’s…” Marlow started, shrugging. He looked like he was about to burst into tears. “He’s French.”
Pan shook her head, turning her attention to Herc in the seat in front of her. The rucksack sat next to him.
“What’s in there?” she asked.
“A surprise,” he said. “A little present for Mammon.”
She didn’t have the energy to pursue it. “So, what do we know?”
“What do we know?” Herc replied, leaning his elbow on the back of his seat. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But we can guess. One thing we always suspected was that wherever the Engines are, you can be sure to find death.”
“Death?” said Marlow, leaning across the aisle. “How do you mean?”
“Death,” said Herc, shrugging. “Like, not living. It’s why you’ll find the Red Doors in big cities, old cities. The Red Doors pump out bad vibes like a faulty nuclear reactor pumps out radiation. Murder rates skyrocket near every place the door opens to; assault, suicide, everything you can think of. And that’s just the door, not the Engine.”
He smoothed a hand down his stubble, contemplating something.
“You have to understand that the Fist has been hunting for the actual location of the Engine for centuries.”
“Mammon’s Engine?” said Marlow. Herc shook his head.
“No, our own. Nobody has ever known, they have just accessed it through the Red Door. The door essentially teleported them to the Engine’s location.”
Pan thought of the way it pulled you apart, the way it put you back together, layer by layer, cell by cell.
“Even with today’s technology, nada. Ostheim has spent a fortune scanning beneath cities, using satellite imaging and that sort of thing. But whoever built the Engine—the Engines—wanted to keep them hidden.”
“I thought they wanted people to find them, though,” said Pan, holding on to her seat as Taupe steered them around another corner. “To use them.”
“Find the door, yes,” said Herc. “Find a way inside so they can make a deal, yes. But find the actual Engine, no. It would make it too vulnerable, too easy to locate and destroy. The Red Door was smart, you always knew that bastard thing was watching you, that it could, I don’t know, read you somehow.”
Pan’s flesh crawled at the memory. The door had been an evil piece of work, no doubt about it. Clever, too.
“But the Engines, both of them, they were hidden somewhere deep, somewhere almost impossible to find. They were—”
Something smashed into the window by Herc’s head, spraying glass. He swore, turning to yell at a crowd of teenage boys in the street. They lobbed another couple of bricks but Taupe put his foot on the gas, the bus roaring out of reach.
“Damn things,” Herc said, brushing the shards from his head. “Where was I?”
“Engines impossible to find,” said Pan. “We don’t stand a chance. You know, boosting our morale.”
“They were,” he said. “But not anymore. Mammon is trying to bring the Engines together, his and ours. In order to do that, far as we can tell, they have to move. It’s just physics, plain and simple. It’s like a hunter waiting for its prey to break cover—invisible when it’s still, but as soon as it moves you get your shot.”
Yeah, you get a second or two, then it’s gone forever.
“So, death?” Marlow said.
“Oh, yeah. Death. There’s one thing, so far, that all of the Red Door locations have in common. They’re in, or close to, churches.”
“Ironic,” said Pan.
“Yeah, sure,” said Herc. “Makes sense, though. If the Red Doors corrupt then why not consecrate the ground; try to, I don’t know, unsalt the earth.”
“Good way of hiding them, too,” said Pan. “You don’t look for the devil in a church.”
“True,” said Herc. The bus lurched as it plowed into something, Taupe not slowing down. “Not just churches, either, but graveyards, cemeteries. The Red Doors were always surrounded by the dead.”
“Corpses?” asked Marlow.
“The more dead bodies, the better,” said Herc. “The church in Prague was built over a boneyard, an ossuary. If you’d kept walking down those basement tunnels you’d have found the skeletons of a few thousand people.”
“And you let me use the bathroom down there?” yelled Truck from the back.
“Paris has tunnels filled with bones?” said Marlow. Herc nodded.
“The city is built on them. There are six million dead beneath us right now.”
“What?” said Marlow, shaking his head. “Nope.”
“The Catacombs,” said Herc. “A thousand miles of tunnels that cross the city, built from bones. The world’s biggest graveyard.”
“Nope,” he said again.
“And somewhere down there, as far as we can tell, are the Engines.”
“Just nope,” said Marlow.
“So this place is the world’s biggest graveyard and you’ve never thought to look here?” asked Pan.
“Of course we’ve looked,” Herc replied. “We’ve had teams down there for years, mapping the tunnels, cataloging the contents, and looking for clues. Ostheim has had tectonic ultrasounds made from the basement of pretty much every building in Paris, probing. But you’ve got to understand, these tunnels, they’re old mines, connecting to even older cave systems. They’re deep.”
“We’ve lost more than one person in there,” yelled Taupe. “Just vanished into the walls, like the dead pulled them in, devoured them. Hang on.”
His cell was ringing and he pulled it from his pants pocket, the bus lurching as he let go of the wheel.
“Because the Engines, they have ways of protecting themselves,” said Herc. “Hiding themselves.”
Pan blew out a sigh. Six years she’d been running missions for Ostheim and Herc, six years she’d been a member of the Fist, and she felt like she knew less now than she ever had.
“It’s our best shot,” said Herc. “Right now it’s our only shot.”
“And we’ve just had confirmation,” Taupe said. “The code readers, they’ve found a cluster of anomalies at the entrance to the Catacombs. Engineers.”
“And they know we’re coming,” said Pan.
“Let’s go crush some ass, then,” said Truck.
The bus roared around a corner, Pan sliding across her seat and nearly falling into the aisle.
“Hang on, hang on.” Herc shook his head. “No way, it’s too easy. Stop the bus, Taupe.”
The Frenchman did as he was told, bumping them up onto the curb. Over the idling engine Pan could hear more shouts from outside, a scream.
“What?” asked Taupe, looking back.
“We have to assume Mammon knows we’re here, and that we’ll be looking for anomalies. So he sends all his Engineers to the entrance to the Catacombs.”
“To protect them,” said Truck. “Like Marly said, he knows we’re coming.”
“Or to pull us off the scent,” said Pan, and Herc nodded.
“We head straight to them, and even if we do get past the guards we’re in the wrong place. He’s lured us away from where we need to be.”
“Or he’s just protecting the right place,” said Marlow. “How do we know?”
Herc popped his lips. “You heard from Ostheim?” he asked Taupe.
The other g
“What about any other blips, smaller ones?”
“A couple,” said Taupe. “One on the Seine, another in a Metro station.”
“Which Metro station?”
“Uh … Châtelet, Rue Saint-Denis, near—”
“I know where it is,” said Herc. “Head there, that’s where we need to be.”
“Why?” Taupe asked. “It does not make sense, scurrying around like this. We should meet Mammon head-on.”
“It’s what he wants us to do,” Herc said. “I know him, I’ve been smacking heads with that asshole longer than any of you been alive. I’m telling you, it’s a trap.”
“I think not,” said Taupe. “We carry on.”
He gunned the engine, the bus thumping down onto the street and into traffic. Pan and Herc shared a look, and Pan flexed her fingers to shake up a charge. Taupe may have been a legend. He may have been the best-looking guy she’d seen in a long while, but times changed and people changed. In this line of work, you couldn’t trust anyone.
Herc must have been thinking the same thing because he’d unbuttoned the holster of his sidearm, pulling out a Desert Eagle. He aimed it at the back of Taupe’s head.
“Hey, Taupe,” he growled. “I need you to turn this bus around.”
Taupe glanced in the mirror, then looked over his shoulder.
“Hey, Herc—chill, man. This is the right move.”
Herc cocked the hammer, finger on the trigger.
“That’s an order, Taupe.”
“You stopped being able to give me orders a long while ago, old man.”
He’s working for them, Pan thought. He’s on Mammon’s payroll and he’s taking us right to him. A spark escaped her finger and fizzed across the floor of the bus.
“Ostheim said whatever it took, Herc,” Taupe said, the bus going even faster, glancing off the side of a parked car. “He said this was going to be brutal. Mammon is preparing for a fight because he knows we’re onto him. I’m telling you, if we head to the Catacombs, to where his Engineers are waiting, then we’ve as good as found the Engine.”