Hellfighters by Alexander Gordon Smith

“No,” said Marlow. “No, that’s not right. You expect me to believe that when you’re right here, opening the gates yourself?”

  “Take a look, dude,” Charlie said, lifting his arms. “Just take a look. This seem to you like I’m opening anything?”

  Marlow looked past him, seeing the wasteland there.

  “You’re not opening the gates to hell?”

  “Marlow,” said Charlie, one eyebrow raised. “I know I ain’t exactly a saint, but you ever heard me say, Boy, you know what I feel like doing today? Setting free a bunch of demons and maybe the devil and watch them rip the world apart?”

  “Then what the hell are you doing?” Marlow asked.

  “Destroying it,” he yelled back, and the Engine seemed to roar in outrage. Charlie put his hands to his ears, practically screaming the words. “This was the only way. You have to bring the Engines together in order to use them, but you have to bring them together in order to take them apart, too.”

  Another section gave up the ghost, crumbling in the heat. Charlie took a few more steps forward until he was almost close enough to touch. Heat was still radiating from him, like Marlow was standing next to an oven with the door open.

  “Mammon found me, right after you’d left,” Charlie said. “Took me in, waited for me to sober up. I thought I was dead, man, I thought you’d poisoned me or something, that I was hallucinating him. Thought he was a monster.”

  “I’ve seen him, Charlie. He is a monster.”

  “No, he’s not. I mean, he’s messed up, all those years using the Engine, he’s a ruin. I don’t even think he’s human anymore. Gives you the creeps, no doubt. Truth is, though, he’s just a kid. Least he was, back when all this began. He told me what was happening. Told me about Ostheim, about what he wanted to do with the Engines. Told me Ostheim is a lying bastard, that he’s brainwashed you and that girl and the old guy and everyone else who works for him. Made you think you were fighting for the right side.”

  Charlie paused, running a hand through his hair. Marlow chewed his knuckles so hard that it hurt. It didn’t make any sense. He’d met Ostheim just that morning. He was harmless.

  “Hate to say it, Marlow,” said Charlie, like he was reading his mind. “But he’s about as evil as it gets. He’s old. Older than he looks. He’s been doing this for years. Centuries. So has Mammon. They’ve been at each other like stray dogs for half of time.”

  “You’ve got it wrong, Charlie,” said Marlow, but the words sounded hollow.

  “Not this time, man. Mammon told me, he showed me. All the stuff Ostheim has done, all the people he has killed. He told me he needed my help. He told me you needed my help. If I didn’t say yes then Ostheim would use you the way he uses everyone, would use you to open the gates.”

  The world was reeling and Marlow had to screw his eyes shut for a moment. When he opened them again Charlie was even closer. He looked at his friend, saw the scar on his stomach.

  “He tried to kill you,” said Marlow. “Got that girl to shoot you, got Patrick to throw you off a mountain. How is that being on the right side?”

  “It was part of the plan,” Charlie said. “Wasn’t exactly supposed to go that way, though. Patrick was broken. He was crazy after what happened to his sister. You were supposed to get me back, smuggle me in.”

  “So you could open the Red Door from inside,” Marlow said. Charlie nodded.

  “Mammon told me that as soon as I got to the Nest I had to try to get inside the Engine, it was the only way. Get inside the Engine and make a deal.”

  “To be the human torch?” Marlow asked.

  “To have the power to destroy the Engine,” he said.

  “No way. There’s no way the Engine would let you trade for that.”

  “It’s just a machine,” Charlie said. “The Engine does what it’s told. Just a machine. I got my powers, and I opened the Red Door.”

  Marlow jabbed a finger at him, a fire of his own burning up from inside.

  “Yeah, and you killed them,” he said. “You killed all of them, Bully and Hope and Seth. Christ, Charlie, he was just an old man.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Charlie said, holding up his hands. “Mammon did. He couldn’t take any chances. He’d been waiting decades, longer, for a way inside the Engine. He couldn’t afford to mess up. You don’t get it, do you? You don’t get what’s at stake here. It’s everything, Marlow. The whole world. What’s a handful of lives compared to a million? A billion?”

  It’s what Pan had always said, and he thought of her now, fighting Mammon. Was he telling her the same thing? Would she listen?

  It was Pan, of course she wouldn’t.

  Something was niggling at the back of his mind, something bad, but everything was moving too fast for him to grasp it.

  “But if you’re destroying the Engine … I mean, why now? Why didn’t you just destroy your own Engine, make it impossible for them to be joined.”

  “Doesn’t work like that,” said Charlie. “The Engines can’t be destroyed unless they’re joined. Look, it’s complicated, and this really isn’t the time. I have to do this, Marlow. I have to do this now, while both Engines are here.”

  The palms of his hands suddenly erupted, twin blowtorches that burned phosphorus bright.

  “Wait!” Marlow yelled, staggering away from the heat, from the light, from the awful, unexpected truth. “Just wait, please, Charlie. I don’t get it. I don’t get any of it. Where’s the other Engine?”

  “There is only one,” Charlie said. “There has only ever been one. But it is split into two, each one frozen into its own pocket of time.”

  “What?”

  “It’s the perfect defense, linked but separate, the same but different. Try to destroy one version and it repairs itself from the other, it self-replicates its broken pieces.”

  “What?”

  “And now they’ve been joined. You must have seen it, the way nothing seems right, nothing seems solid. It’s because both Engines, both those bubbles of time, are here, right now, in the present. Destroy the Engine now and it has no means of repairing itself.”

  It roared again, all around them, the sound of the world splitting in two. Charlie looked at it, his face warped with contempt.

  “Destroy the bastard now and it can never heal.”

  “But if you destroy it…” Marlow said. Charlie threw him a sad smile.

  “Then there’s no way of ending my contract,” he said. “There’s no way back. For you, or for me.”

  Great.

  “But hey, what’s one life?” Charlie said with a shrug. “And everyone else is saved. Got to be worth it, yeah?”

  There it was again, that thought nestling at the back of Marlow’s skull. Something important. Something wrong. He closed his eyes, peering into the storm.

  “Mammon, he planned all this, right?” he said, looking at Charlie again. The flames were creeping over his body again. His eyes were actually glowing, and when he nodded he left sparkler trails in Marlow’s vision.

  “He’d been planning it for years,” he said. “To get somebody inside.”

  “But it doesn’t make sense. Ostheim had the Engine locked up tight. He’d never risk letting in anyone who could open the doors.”

  “Must have thought he could trust me,” said Charlie. “’Cause I was with you.”

  “He never even knew me. I’d already put the Engine at risk once running off, why would he trust you any more than me?”

  Something exploded, a deep, bone-rattling roar that almost knocked Marlow off his feet. It hadn’t come from the Engine, he was pretty sure about that. It had come from somewhere overhead. Dust and debris rained down and he spat out the taste of it. That niggling thought was closer now, fluttering just out of sight like a moth against the night.

  “No way,” he said, as much to himself as to Charlie. “No way he’d just let you in like that. Not unless…”

  And there it was, suddenly right at the front of his head.

  “
Oh Jesus, Charlie. He knew.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Ostheim, he knew who you were, he knew which side you were on. He knew what you were going to do.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” said Charlie, the light in his eyes guttering out again. He blinked, frowning. “Why would he let me in?”

  “Because it was the only way,” said Marlow. “He’s been trying to find Mammon’s Engine for decades, right? To unite them. But all he needed to do was give up his own Engine, to hand it right over. He knew that when they were together they’d kick out a signal, make it easier to find them.”

  “No,” said Charlie, shaking his head.

  “We did it for him,” said Marlow. “We brought them together, we brought them here. We left the door right open for him. We have to—”

  Another sound from above, like the skies were falling. This time a stalactite detached from the ceiling, one that had to be bigger than a house. It fell lazily, the ground shaking as it landed somewhere out there. The Engine was moving faster now, every piece a blur, like it knew something was about to happen.

  And it was right.

  Marlow turned the way he’d come, everything lost behind a wall of mechanical chaos. But he didn’t need to see to know that something bad was coming. He could feel it inside every cell.

  “Ostheim,” said Charlie behind him, and despite the power that flowed through him his voice trembled. “He’s here.”

  WAR

  The black pool engulfed her, gulped her down. She tumbled into it, no chance to prepare for the panic, for the horror. Phantom hands groped for her, hauling her deeper, deeper. The darkness was absolute, and when she could hold her breath no more and she finally opened her mouth it flooded inside like cold poison.

  But she’d been here before, so many times.

  She pushed the panic away, studying that darkness until it began to part. Clouds, then sweeping, awful figures half-drowned in the shadows—and there, a mountain of flesh and bone that sat a million miles away, and yet somehow right next to her, which studied her with the festering rot holes in its face.

  What is it you desire? it asked, not a sound but a feeling that pulsed through the dark water. She shivered with the force of it—not disgust, not fear.

  Excitement.

  This place, right here in the heart of the Engine, is where she belonged.

  I want the truth. She fired the words upward, toward the thing that sat there. I want to know who is trying to bring the Engines together, and who is trying to destroy them.

  The easiest request in the world, why had she never asked it before?

  I want the truth, she said again. And again, and again, a mantra hurled out into the Engine.

  That is all? it asked. And suddenly Night was standing right beside her, utterly real. She reached out to Pan, her face wet with tears.

  “Please,” she said. “Just bring me back. It’s so hot down here. It’s so lonely. Please, Pan, you can bring me back.”

  No, Pan said. It wasn’t her, it wasn’t Night. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I want the truth, that’s all. The truth.

  It is done, said the creature inside the Engine, with another pulse of sound that could only be laughter. And the price is your soul. Then she was rising, out of that uterine quiet, up, up into the heat and noise of the world.

  She burst from the pool, clawing in a long, desperate breath. She kicked at the water, reaching for the rim and not quite finding it. She plunged under, those hands grabbing her again, trying to haul her below.

  Then a hand on her wrist, pulling her up. She let it, flopping out of the water and over the lip of the pool onto the beautiful, solid ground.

  Mammon was there, his face a boy’s face and yet also a hundred different faces, like his flesh couldn’t hold him. He held on to her for a moment more—and in his touch she saw his story in a heartbeat, a child who lived inside the Engine, whose brothers and sisters played among the moving parts; a child who was betrayed by one of his own, and who now wanted to destroy the Engines, always to destroy them—then he let go, holding his fingers like he’d been burned.

  “You know,” he said.

  “Oh God,” she groaned. She coughed black water from her lungs, the droplets squirming across the stone as they tried to make their way back to the pool. “Oh God, you were telling the truth.”

  The awful, unbelievable, soul-ending truth that her life was a lie.

  She would have cried if she could remember how.

  The world trembled again with the force of another explosion. She sat up, grimacing. What’s done was done. She had to think straight.

  “That’s Charlie out there, right?” she said, using the lip of the pool to get herself to her feet. “What’s he doing?”

  Mammon wasn’t looking at the Engine, though, he was looking up, and he was looking scared.

  “Too soon,” he said, shaking his head. “Too soon.”

  Noises were rippling through the open vault door, distant screams. There was another dull crunch overhead, like a giant was jumping on the floor up there. Rocks pattered down around her, some bouncing off the liquid surface of the pool and clattering to the stone. A section of the wall high above them bulged and cracked.

  The elevator shaft, she thought. Something was on its way down.

  Something big.

  Mammon turned to her, his eyes full of tears. He had opened his mouth to speak when a section of the Engine close to the platform burst into flames, so bright that Pan had to screw her eyes shut. When she looked again a mushroom cloud of smoke was billowing up, the mechanism beneath reduced to a collection of molten parts. Somebody was walking through the chaos, somebody crafted from fire. Around him the Engine whirred and roared, almost in a panic. She swore she could see parts of it withdrawing from the heat like a snail’s eyes, pulling into itself.

  “Pan,” said Mammon. “I—”

  The wall above the vault door split further, a booming howl rising even above the noise of the Engine and the roar of the fire. Mammon glanced over his shoulder.

  “I thought we had more time,” he said, then he turned back. “You have to get out of here, you have to survive.”

  “But—”

  “I won’t be able to hold him back, Pan,” Mammon said. “You need to go, I will distract him as best I can. When you’re clear—”

  Another pillar of flames to the side, and more dull explosions from behind the wall. Pan felt like she was caught between a forest fire and a minefield. The concussive waves coming from both sides were enough to pulverize her. Mammon took her head in his hand, gently, and drew her back to him. He looked even younger than before, just a boy.

  How had she gotten it so wrong?

  “I got it wrong, too,” he said, plucking the thought from her head. “I didn’t see what he was doing. I thought I had outmaneuvered him. It was all part of his plan.”

  “But he’s, he’s just a man,” said Pan, picturing Ostheim with his old clothes and his comb-over.

  “It’s a clever man who plays the fool,” said Mammon. “A strong man who plays the coward. And only the very worst of us can pass as human.”

  “Wait, what?” said Pan.

  A wave of blast furnace heat rolled over her, another section of the Engine melting into molten puddles. The figure on fire strode from it, followed by another. She could barely make out the second guy in the blazing light, but then he darted forward, clambering up the side of the platform.

  “Marlow,” she said, and it took everything she had not to run to him, if only because he was somebody familiar, an anchor to stop her flipping upside down with the rest of the world. He stood there, staring at her, then at Mammon. For a second she thought he was going to charge at him and she had her mouth open to tell him to wait when he spoke.

  “I know,” he said. “Charlie told me.”

  He turned, ducking onto one knee and offering his hand. Then Charlie was there, no longer on fire. He scooted onto the platform and Marlow p
ulled his hand free, yelping.

  “Dude, you’re hot.”

  He was also completely naked.

  Something crunched from behind the vault door, a cloud of dust erupting through it.

  “He is here,” said Mammon. “Pan, do as I say. Get out. Ostheim will open the gates, but it doesn’t mean the end. There is another way.”

  “Another way?” said Charlie as he and Marlow joined them by the pool.

  “Find Meridiana,” Mammon said. “She is the only one who can defeat Ostheim, the only one who can end this.”

  “Meridiana?” said Marlow. “The evil one?”

  “Not evil,” said Mammon. “Her mind has gone, but she is not evil, she was never evil. Find her.”

  “Where is she?” said Pan.

  “Hiding,” said Mammon. “She has been in hiding for years. Look for her in the spaces between, it’s all I know. Look for her in yourselves. She’s hiding in time, somewhere clever. Somewhere he could never find her.”

  “So how are we supposed to?” said Marlow.

  “Because—”

  The vault door spun off its hinges, flying out into the Engine like a cannonball. Something was moving in the darkness beyond. Mammon glanced up at it like a child waiting for a punch to land.

  “Because she will feel the change,” he said. “She will know that Ostheim has the Engines. She will want you to find her.”

  “And if she doesn’t?” said Pan. Her heart was trying to crack her ribs on its way out, her whole body shaking.

  “Then we are all worse than dead,” said Mammon. “Go to Venice, to Castello, the old town. All I know is that the last we saw of her she had a shop, a mirror shop. You will find her there, somewhere, if she wants you to. It’s our only hope. It’s— No!”

  Ostheim walked through the vault door and stood at the top of the steps. He looked exactly the same as he had that morning, drowning in baggy clothes, his lank hair falling over his face. Only his expression had changed. His eyes were bulging, his mouth twisted open into a rictus smile, one that seemed too big for his face. He looked out into the Engine and that smile split even further, a deep, unpleasant laugh spilling out.

  “Go!” said Mammon. “And do not look back.”