Hellfighters by Alexander Gordon Smith
They huddled together, insect-small in the vast space. The shout up ahead was being answered by another that could have been a crow’s caw. More rose up in the dark, a swelling tide of noise. These weren’t the call of the Engine, Pan understood.
They were real.
Something snatched at her foot, a cluster of long bones. It punched a grunt of horror from her throat and she shook free, kicking the hand onto its back where it trembled like a dying insect. This one was decorated with smudges of rust-colored blood that looked centuries old.
Truck swore. He was skirting around a skull that was moving inside its nest of bone, its lower jaw twitching wildly like it was telling a joke. A scraggy cap of blond hair hung over its side. The big guy was smearing his palms down his T-shirt, again and again.
“Ignore it,” Herc said.
“Ignore the moving bones,” Truck said, and Pan could hear the hysteria in his voice. “Yeah, su—” His foot suddenly plunged into them, ankle deep, and his scream soared into the cavern like it was a trapped bird, fading fast. “Goddammit.” He pulled his leg free and aimed the shotgun at the skull, firing off a blast that made Pan’s ears ring.
And in the flash of the muzzle she saw something to her side—there and gone in an instant.
“Herc, your three,” she said, and Herc swung the flashlight.
It looked like a huge moonlit ocean over there, bone white and restless. There was still no sign of the end of the cavern, or the roof, but she could hear the endless, crashing crescendo of churning water.
Water?
“Oh, Jesus,” said Marlow. “That can’t be…”
Pan stumbled on, unable to believe what she was seeing. The ground before her seemed more agitated with every step, bones writhing against each other, scratching at the air, at their legs as they passed. Some of the skeletons had scraps of flesh and muscle, like leftover meat on a barbecued rib. One of the skulls had an upper lip, as fat and wet as a slug. It moved up and down in silent speech.
Then she saw a face. A real face.
It sat in the ground like it had been buried up to its neck, an old woman with patches of silver hair. The skin was withered and torn, one eye fused shut. But the other was a weak, watery gray thing that fixed on Pan and blinked furiously. The woman’s mouth opened, and through it Pan could see the floor. Her scream was just a gust of dry air, but it felt deafening.
Pan’s terror was too big to fit up her throat and she beat it back, forcing herself to stay numb. She felt a tickle of insanity in the corner of her mind, wondered how close she was to the abyss, to falling into that madness and drowning there.
The closer she got to the ocean, the more she saw that there was no water there. It was a sea of flesh and bone, of things that could not possibly be alive and yet were. Arms dug at the dirt, shedding fingernails in their desperation. Feet kicked at the ground, at the air, like the final, awful movements of somebody trapped in a landslide. Limbless torsos twitched and trembled.
And the faces. So many of them. They stared with red, bulging eyes, fat tongues sticking from their mouths as if they’d been hanged. They were obviously aware that they had company. Some of them cried, some of them called out in a language Pan did not recognize. Most of them screamed, a rising wave of sound that rippled outward, surely loud enough to bring down the walls of the cavern, to bury them all forever.
They screamed and they screamed, and Pan put her hands to her ears and screamed, too.
Herc kept moving, shaking off the hands that grabbed at him as he waded deeper into the ocean. Pan’s foot slipped on something wet and she looked to see a man’s face there, gulping at air that he couldn’t need because he had no body. His eyes scrolled blindly back and forth.
Sorry sorry sorry, she thought, but could not find the strength to say.
“There,” yelled Taupe, his shout reduced to a whisper by the roar of the dead. He was pointing ahead, and when Herc shone the flashlight Pan could just about see a column of rock stretching up.
Pan set off for it, moving too fast. Something grabbed her leg and she was falling, landing in the grasping ocean of wet flesh. Her fist plunged into a decaying torso—one that squirmed beneath her, which pulled at her. She was face-to-face with a man who had only half a head, the bowl of his skull gleaming. His one eye rolled her way and a toothless mouth moved against the air, like he was trying to kiss her.
She tried to get up but something was holding her tight—fingers sprouting from the earth and groping for her, a leg winding around her waist like a wrestler’s, another fistful of fingers probing into her mouth, tasting of spoiled food and old blood, another yet in her hair, filthy nails scraping her scalp. And the man, his lips searching for her, breathing on her with the stench of old meat, that one eye rolling madly in its puckered socket.
The fire burned up inside her, too much of it for her to control. She closed her eyes and let loose a pulse of electrostatic energy, one that blazed out of her in every direction. The man’s face erupted into ash, the ocean of limbs crumbling, freeing her. She pushed up, shaking the sparks from her smarting fingers. Her mouth tasted of copper, tingling like she’d bit down on a live wire.
“Easy, Pan!” said Herc from somewhere behind her, his voice jittery. She ignored him, moving as fast as her legs would let her, not caring that her boots were crunching through faces, not caring about the crack of breaking bones and the slap of wet meat beneath her. She just ran through the living corpses, through their endless screams, heading for that wall of rock.
It rose from the living ocean, catching the swinging beam of Herc’s light. She couldn’t see to the top—or anywhere near it—but she could feel how tall it was. The height was vertiginous, like she was standing in the shadow of the Empire State Building. There were openings in it, a collection of mouthlike caves running along the bottom. They looked like they might hold spiders, but they couldn’t be worse than this.
Nothing in all of hell could be worse than this—the countless, shrieking dead.
The caves along the wall grew vast as she approached them, each the size of an apartment block. She stumble-ran into the nearest, the Engine still pulling at her, still guiding her. Herc and the others were shouting but she didn’t care. She just wanted to be out of this nightmare. She felt that she would throw herself into the black pool, would gladly give her soul to whatever lay there, just to be free of this place.
No light here, just more groping fingers and howling mouths. She pushed on, the ground sloping beneath her, gently at first and then hard. She lost her footing, sprawling. But the drop was too steep, the dead didn’t have the strength to hold her. She rolled, bouncing between the moving corpses. She fired as she went, sparks of electricity exploding like a camera flash—glimpses of bared teeth, of rabid eyes.
Then she was falling into something rabbit-hole deep and lined with fury—a pit of snatching limbs and jaws. She reached for them, trying to halt herself, but she was going too fast. The hole was narrowing, too, arms and legs slapping against her from all sides. The sound of their panic was like a choir of the damned, enough to reduce her brain to a pulp.
She would be buried here. Buried alive, because she would not die, not in the Liminal. She would lie here for the rest of—
Light, somewhere beneath her. Just a faint glow. The forest of teeth and hands was silhouetted against it, everything still trying to grab her. It was working now, too, trapping her fall like a spiderweb traps a fly. She felt one of them bite into her arm, shouting at her through a mouthful of her blood.
She had stopped. They had her.
She pushed downward, clawing her way past the corpses like she was trying to pull herself from a tar pit. Another set of teeth grated the side of her head and she growled, almost losing herself inside an ecstasy of terror. They were tearing chunks from her, they were trying to devour her. But the light was growing, it was just there, just there.
Gravity took hold of her, and she was out of the hole, falling again. She hit the
Only then did she force herself to calm down, both hands on her chest as if she could massage her pulse back to normal. Her eyesight was boiling at the edges but with each breath the panic subsided.
“Get off me!” came a muffled voice, then Truck tumbled from the fissure in the ceiling, landing with a splat. Marlow and the young girl dropped out next, arms wrapped around each other, the big guy cushioning their fall. Marlow scrambled up and out of the way, spitting, and Truck was halfway to his feet when Taupe slid free, falling on him.
“Dammit,” Truck yelled. “Let me get—”
Herc was last, screaming as he crunched down onto Taupe and Truck. He rolled onto his feet, his breaths half pant, half scream. His eyes were drenched in fear, the eyes of a madman, and when he met Pan’s gaze she barely recognized him. Then the old guy blinked, twice, three times, and each time he slipped further back inside himself until it was just good old Herc standing there. He sniffed, adjusting the straps of the bag on his back.
“Everyone okay?” he asked.
“No,” said Truck.
“Non,” said Taupe and Claire together.
“Not even close,” said Marlow, brushing the grime from his clothes. “What was that?”
The French girl had been right.
That had been a little slice of hell.
“The Engine needs death,” said Herc, his voice still shaking. “It needs suffering. We all knew it, we all knew it would be bad. Now, where are—”
He stopped, and actually smiled. Pan followed his line of sight.
They might have been inside a cathedral, but one made from rock and flesh. The space they were in was the size of a football field, another vast underground cave. This one, though, was lit by torches. Thousands of them, mounted on the forest of pillars that filled the cavern. Each torch was set inside the mouth of a body mounted on the stone, their limbs seemingly fused there. The sight of it reminded Pan of Patrick Rebarre, of what had happened to him back in New York—teleporting inside the ground, and becoming part of it. It made her shudder.
Not as much, though, as when she realized that each of those poor souls had his eyes open. They stared down at her, their dirty faces marked by rivulets of tears, their mouths infernos that spat and crackled. The constant susurration of their blinking eyes was like a flock of distant birds taking off.
The columns stretched up to a vaulted ceiling decorated with sculptures that might have been people. The walls, too, could have been red stone, or could have been skinless bodies. Thankfully none of them were moving. There was only one more thing in the giant space, embedded in the far wall—something that filled her with fear, but which also flooded her mind with relief, because in the unimaginable horror of what they had just waded through, even something as rotten and wrong as this was still beautifully familiar.
“Well, what do you know,” said Herc, walking to her side. “We only went and did it.”
“Look at it,” said Truck, appearing on her other side. “Just sitting there all evil and stuff.”
“Wants us to open it,” said Marlow. “I can feel it.”
He was right. She could feel it, too, a nagging itch right in the center of her brain, and a graveyard voice that whispered, What is it you desire?
“So let’s give that bastard what it wants,” she said.
And as one, they made their way across the cathedral, to the Red Door.
HOME SWEET HOME
“Dibs on not being the one,” said Truck, holding up his hands.
“Same here,” said Pan and Herc together.
“What?” said Marlow. “Wait, that’s not fair.”
They stood in front of the Red Door. It must have been happy to see them, because it was blasting out images that belonged in the sickest of horror movies—images and sounds and thoughts that turned Marlow’s stomach. It seemed impossible that this was the same door they had used back in Prague and Budapest, but there was no denying it. The same slab of patterned wood, the same glossy, lacquered paint the color of blood, the same antique brass handle.
The same gut-wrenching evil.
“What about Mole, he didn’t call it?”
“We do not have this dibs custom,” said Taupe.
“Yeah, the Frenchies are exempt,” said Herc. “Just do it, Marlow.”
Marlow reached out, then pulled back, like the door might be electrified.
“I thought there was no way of opening it from the outside,” he said.
“From anywhere else, no,” said Herc, adjusting his bag again. “But this is the real door, and the real Engine.”
Marlow reached out again, his hand hovering there.
“What if it—”
“For God’s sake,” said Pan, barging past him and grabbing the handle. She twisted it, shunting it with her shoulder. It opened like Pandora’s Box, spilling a freak show of noise and terror into Marlow’s head. He balled his fists, let it ride over him.
They were just images, after all. It was like a Disney show compared to what he had just crawled through on his hands and knees.
The door opened silently, smoothly, like its hinges had been greased. Whatever Marlow had been expecting on the other side, this wasn’t it. No Engineers, no Mammon, just that familiar gray corridor stretching toward the elevator shaft.
“Home sweet home,” said Truck.
The cacophony inside Marlow’s head had muted, but there was something else there, a noise that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It was something industrial, something far away, something loud. He wasn’t sure if he could even hear it, or if he could just feel it, a thunderous tremor that ran up his bones and reverberated around his skull. It came again and dust drifted down from the ceiling inside. He glanced at Pan and knew she heard it, too, knew what she was thinking.
This is something new.
It came again, like artillery fire. It was definitely an explosion of some kind, and Marlow couldn’t help but think of somebody trying to blow open a vault door.
Or trying to blow open the gates of hell.
Pan walked through, one hand on the wall to brace herself. Marlow followed, feeling nothing as he crossed the threshold. Why would he have, though? There was no need for the Red Door to teleport him this time. He’d just crossed the Liminal on foot.
But something weird was happening inside the Pigeon’s Nest. Nothing seemed particularly solid. The walls were shifting, the movement too subtle to really see, just a flickering in the corner of his vision. The floor, too, didn’t feel solid. The concrete passageway was pumping out a hum that made his teeth ache.
“Just don’t let your guard down,” said Herc as he joined them. “This doesn’t feel right.”
“It feels like a trap,” said Taupe. “Too easy.”
It was too easy. Marlow passed one of the swastikas painted on the wall, left over from when the Nazis had occupied the bunker during the war. Even as he looked at it, it vanished—just for a second, then it was back, like a video game glitch. He leaned in, putting his hand to it. The pattern of the concrete wall was shifting, scratches and scuffs appearing then disappearing. He could make no sense of it. Was this the same thing that had happened back on the train? Mammon making a building grow from the locomotive? He didn’t think so, but how could he be sure of what was real and what wasn’t?
She’s real, he thought, looking at Pan. If in doubt, just look at her.
And he did, watching the way she leaned against the wall, the way she balled her fists to stop her hands from shaking. He saw the exhaustion there, in every line etched in her face. She rubbed the scar on her chest, then spott
Yeah, she’s real, all right.
“Keep your eyes open,” Herc said as he walked past them, stooped beneath the weight of the duffel bag. He had his Desert Eagle clenched in one sweaty fist.
“Where are the Engineers?” Marlow asked. “I don’t get it.”
It didn’t make sense for Mammon to throw all his Engineers up onto the street. This corridor was the perfect place to defend—narrow, just one way in. Mammon could have rigged the whole thing with explosives and killed them all the moment they stepped inside.
It’s because we’re too late, he thought. He doesn’t need to fight us anymore, because the Engines have been united.
A peal of distant thunder again, from deep beneath them—one that made the corridor flutter out of reality for a moment, everything blurring. Marlow’s stomach did a loop like he was riding a roller coaster.
Something was happening to the Engine.
They reached the elevator and Herc pulled open the gate, craning inside.
“Think it’s safe?” Pan asked, cradling her crossbow to her chest.
“Bloody thing has never been safe,” he said. “But I can’t see any sign it’s been tampered with. I don’t think Mammon would want to risk being trapped down there.”
“Why is it up?” Marlow asked. Herc frowned at him. “I mean, those Engineers needed to get to the surface, right?”
“Sure,” said Claire. “We came this way.”
“But why leave it here, why not pull the elevator back down, make it harder for us?”
Nobody had an answer.
The world rumbled again, a buzz that seemed to rattle Marlow’s skull.
“There is no way in hell I am going in there,” said Truck.
Herc daintily placed a foot inside the elevator, tapping his toes against the floor.
“Up to you,” Herc said. “Take the stairs if you’d rather.”
Truck glanced at the access door to the stairwell, frowned, then shook his head.
“The elevator looks safe enough,” he muttered.
Herc went first, the cab rocking as he entered. Pan followed, the fear flowing from her in great big waves. Marlow pictured the elevator coming loose, suddenly plunging into darkness. And it was because he didn’t want to lose her that he stepped inside. There were grumbles as the others joined them, all except for Claire. She stood in the corridor, chewing her nails like she hadn’t eaten in a month.