Hellfighters by Alexander Gordon Smith
That did the trick, everyone scuttling away from the clicking bag like there was a demon inside it ready to clamber out. Pan went in first, Marlow and Charlie almost wedging themselves as they fought to get through the gap. The redhead was next, standing in a corner and looking nervously at Pan.
“Room for a little one?” said Truck, barely able to haul his capacious frame inside. Herc thumped the button, the elevator wobbling up a few feet then falling still.
“Don’t you dare,” said Pan, so much violence in her voice that the elevator shuddered into life again, reeling them back to the surface. Nobody spoke, everyone thinking the same thing.
Keep moving, please don’t stop. Marlow could picture it, the day overhead. The craving he felt for sunlight was overwhelming, an addict’s need.
The elevator ground to a halt again and Marlow almost ripped the gates off completely as he clattered out into the corridor. Even here the ground didn’t feel particularly solid, the Engine a gaping maw directly below him. He flinched when he saw the girl up ahead. Claire was hunkered down, blinking at them through big, frightened eyes. She almost smiled, then leaned over and retched. A string of black bile hung from her lips.
“Told you we’d come back,” Marlow said, doing his best to find a smile. She got to her feet and wiped her mouth, her weak grin the next best thing to daylight.
“It is over?” she said, rubbing her stomach.
“Not even close,” said Herc as he walked past them.
“They led Ostheim right here,” said the redhead. “Did you see him?”
Claire looked at the floor, her eyelids blinking hard as if trying to scrub the sight of him from her corneas.
“He walked right past me, Jaime,” she said. She shivered, wiping away a tear. “I don’t think he even saw me.”
“He’s in the Engine,” said the redhead, Jaime. “He’s won, Mammon’s dead.”
“He hasn’t won,” said Marlow. “Not yet.”
“How’d you figure that?” Herc said.
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
They reached the Red Door, still hanging open. Beyond was the cathedral of candlelit rock, those fires roaring. They walked out together, Herc pulling the door shut behind them. The sound it made when it locked could have been a depth charge going off beneath the ocean. He didn’t waste a second, bolting between the columns and shouting over his shoulder.
“Hey, Red, you know the path out? I don’t feel like crawling through the Liminal again.”
“Left,” she yelled, and they jogged together. Marlow was running on fumes but the sickening waves of bad energy pouring out of the Engine were a powerful tailwind, propelling him around corner after corner, through seemingly endless corridors forged from bone. It took him a while to notice that the ground was sloping upward, slightly at first, then steeper.
“This one,” said Jaime. She had stopped next to an alcove in the wall, barely big enough to let one person through. They’d passed hundreds of them on the way.
“You sure?” asked Herc.
“With Ostheim behind us, not to mention an atomic bomb, I’d better be,” she replied, disappearing.
Herc grumbled something and followed her, and Marlow was next, almost tripping on the stairs. It was another spiral staircase, decorated with the dead.
“We came down this way,” said Marlow.
“No, you didn’t,” Jaime replied from up ahead, her voice echoing off the walls. “This place is a warren. Only a couple of paths actually lead to the Engine, the rest are traps. Get stuck in one, and you’ll be there forever.”
“Unless you punch through the wall,” said Truck.
They climbed in silence, their breaths ragged and desperate. Marlow lost count of how many stairs there were after two hundred, but there had to have been as many again. At one point he swore he could hear Truck sobbing.
Then they were out, squeezing from a narrow doorway into a tunnel. They were still underground, but Marlow could feel the change in pressure—no longer a mile of rock overhead. The cry of the Engine was still in his veins but it was quieter now. There was a sign on the wall that said something in French, a picture of an electric bolt. Pipes ran the length of the corridor. Beautiful, human pipes that carried electricity or water or gas to a world he’d been sure was lost to him.
And he was smiling before he remembered that the world wouldn’t be there for much longer. Not once Ostheim had opened the gates.
Marlow wasn’t sure how any of them made it up the last few flights of steps, but they did. Jaime reached a huge cast-iron door and tugged on it until it squealed open. A torrent of sunlight poured through, a river of it, wrapping Marlow in fingers of gold and pulling him out into the day. He dropped to his knees, pushing his face into the glorious heat, crying again.
“Hey, Marlow,” Pan said, grabbing his T-shirt, helping him up. “Nuke. About to explode.”
They were on a street next to the river, Paris laid out before them in shades of white and gold. Smoke rose from five or six places, the sound of sirens filling the air like birdsong as the Engine continued to pollute the air.
“Now what?” said Pan.
“Now we find transport,” said Herc. “Something big.”
“On it,” said Truck, wobbling up the street.
“Herc,” said Charlie. He stood naked as the day he was born, shivering despite the heat. “Won’t a nuke, you know, like, destroy the whole city?”
“No,” said Herc. “Too small, too deep. We probably won’t even feel it up here.” He checked his watch again. “Ten seconds.”
They counted down together, silently.
“That was almost disappointing,” said Marlow. “Did it go off?”
“It better have,” Herc grumbled. “Paid a goddamned fortune for it. Should be—”
The entire street bucked beneath Marlow’s feet, almost knocking him over. In front of them, the river surged up the sides of the banks, foaming in a frenzy as it crashed back down. The city beyond it looked as if it had hiccuped, everything bouncing once. Half a dozen buildings crumpled into themselves, sagging like they were made of cardboard. A cloud of dust rose, filtering the sunlight and turning the whole area red. Herc, though, had paled considerably.
“Whoops,” he said. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Least that asshole Ostheim will be picking rocks from his hair for a while,” said Jaime.
Marlow heard the sound of an engine, the crunch of gears. He looked back to see an ice cream truck making its way toward them. The street was a patchwork of shattered asphalt, a busted fire hydrant spraying rainbows. Truck leaned out the window and flicked on the siren, a blast of “Pop Goes the Weasel” filling the air over the sound of a thousand alarms. He already had a cone in his fist, and he was grinning.
“Seriously?” said Herc.
“Best I could find,” he yelled through a mouthful of ice cream.
“It’ll do,” said Herc. “Everyone on board. Marlow, I need to know everything that Mammon told you.”
Marlow nodded, opening the side door and hopping up the steps into the back of the van. He sat on a box of cones and Pan squeezed in next to him, neither of them saying anything but both of them thinking the same thing.
There was still hope.
“We’re Hellraisers,” Herc said from the broken street. “It ain’t over yet.”
The old guy watched as they all clambered in. Charlie was last, and Herc’s face creased in disgust as he watched him climb the steps.
“First thing first, though,” Herc said, hauling himself up and slamming the door shut behind him. “We find Charlie some goddamned pants.”
PART III
ANNIHILATION
CONTRACTS
After so long stuck inside the festering anus of hell, a shower felt like heaven.
Pan pushed her head into the spray, the powerful water massaging her scalp. It was so hot it was almost scalding, a hundred cuts and scrapes and bruises protesting. But the he
A torrent of black water spiraled around the plug—smoke and dirt and dust and blood. She wished that the shower could cleanse her inside as well, carry away all of the hate and the grief and the guilt. Her soul was blacker now than it had ever been.
It didn’t make any sense. The day was a blur of disbelief, her mind doing its best to push the truth away. All this time she thought she was fighting for what was right, fighting to save the world. Not a hero, never a hero—she had killed too many people to ever be called that—and certainly not a saint. But the things she’d done, she’d done them for the right reason.
Take one life and save a billion, she’d always told herself. But she’d been taking the wrong lives, and put billions more in harm’s way.
She gripped her hair in her hands, pulling until it hurt. More dirt ran from her, as thick and dark as oil—so much it seemed like it was pouring from inside her, like she was rotten in there. And that was true, wasn’t it? She’d been doing the devil’s work, and what did that make her if not something truly evil?
It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.
But she didn’t ask, either. She didn’t question it. She’d taken Ostheim’s words for granted, she’d obeyed him mindlessly. After everything that had happened with Christoph, after she’d almost knocked his head clean off in that apartment in Queens, she’d needed something good. She’d needed a way to redeem herself. When Herc had marched into her cell all those years ago he’d given her exactly that.
You did a bad thing, kiddo, but you know what, it doesn’t have to be the end. He’d smiled at her—so much younger, all his teeth still where they were supposed to be, so hard but so kind—and he’d said it. Take one life, save a billion. Pick door number one and I’ll show you how.
She’d been so relieved that she’d said yes and never looked back.
Letting go of her hair, she cranked the temperature up even further. She wrapped her hands around herself, shivering despite the heat. It was too bright in here and she closed her eyes, but all she saw there were the enemy Engineers she had slaughtered. Dozens of them. All those kids in Paris, thrown into a war they couldn’t possibly understand, all the ones before that.
Not to mention Patrick, and his sister Brianna. Pan’s stomach cramped at the memory. She hadn’t killed Brianna but she’d captured her, and let her die in the worst possible way. Patrick, too, his body fused with the concrete of Rockefeller Plaza, screaming as he held the bloated body of his sister. Oh God, what did I do to them? It was unimaginable, it was unbearable. Why hadn’t they just said something to her? Why hadn’t they told her the truth?
They had, she realized. How many times had they told her she was fighting for the wrong side? They told you the truth, but you wouldn’t hear it.
She pounded her head against the wall, again and again, harder each time until a wave of vertigo grabbed her, trying to haul her into darkness. The exhaustion had completely emptied her, left barely enough inside to keep her standing. Her left leg was actually twitching as her muscles struggled. But there was something else there, too, something not entirely unpleasant in the way her body felt. It was as if a cloud had been lifted from her soul.
It wasn’t just fatigue, she realized. Stretching her fingers out in front of her, she willed up a charge—just a small one.
Nothing happened.
Again, drawing it up from deep inside, snapping her fingers like she was sparking a lighter.
Her contract had been canceled.
She didn’t know whether to scream with fear or howl with laughter. She saw Ostheim—the thing that had posed as Ostheim—stretch its spider limbs into the Engine, could picture them probing the machine, flicking those infernal switches and ending her deal as easily as programming a washing machine. If Ostheim was anywhere near as powerful as Mammon said he was, if he knew as much about the Engine as Pan feared, then why wouldn’t he cancel her contract, leave her defenseless?
Hey, at least you don’t have to vacation in hell, right?
Except sooner or later, once Ostheim had opened the gates, hell would be right here, walking the streets. The whole world would burn.
Suddenly the slap of the water on her shoulders was too much, too hot. She turned off the shower, her whole body trembling, steam rising off her. She just stood there in silence, trying not to feel anything much at all. Right then, one more thought, one more emotion, would be enough to scatter her cells in a million different directions.
Eventually, she wasn’t sure how much later it was, the cold started to creep back in. She stepped from the cubicle and shivered her way across the bathroom, grabbing a plush dressing gown from the back of the door. Truck had driven them south, through the mountains and well into the night, and now they were in a luxury hotel somewhere in northern Italy. Her room was huge but it still wasn’t large enough for all of her ghosts. Her dead—the ones she had killed, the ones she had let die—crowded on the bed, on the carpet, on the desk, in the shadowed corners, all of them watching her. Patrick and Brianna were there, too, their twin faces gaunt, their dark eyes accusing.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered to them. “I didn’t know.”
None of them replied, their eyes bulging from cracked sockets, their flyblown lips speaking soundlessly, their withered fingers reaching for her. She couldn’t bear it so she ran to the door, escaping into the silent, deserted corridor beyond. She slammed it behind her, trapping the dead inside.
Where the hell was everyone else?
They were scattered through the hotel, but she’d seen Marlow enter his room, almost directly opposite her own. She ran to it, pounding on the door loud enough to wake everybody on the floor. Everything ached but at least some of the tiredness had gone, some of that endless ache the Engine pushed inside you, like your body was made up of lead and concrete and corrugated iron. She pressed her ear to the wood, hearing nothing.
“Marlow, open the door, goddammit,” she yelled, thumping again.
A groan, footsteps, the click of the lock, then the door swung open to reveal Marlow’s face. He blinked at her, his mouth hanging open like he’d just woken from a hundred-year sleep. He was wearing nothing but jockey shorts, his lean body a patchwork of scars and bruises. He smelled of the same luxury-brand shampoo as she did. It seemed to take him a while to recognize her.
“Pan?” he said after a moment. He yawned.
“No, you idiot, it’s Santa Claus.” She pushed past him into a room lit solely by a table lamp. The bed was ruffled, and she perched on the end of it, drawing cotton threads from her dressing gown and rolling them into balls. Marlow closed the door and traipsed over, clambering back under the covers. His eyelids looked like they were holding sash weights and he squinted at her through them.
“Can’t sleep?” he said, yawning again.
“Just didn’t want to be…” What? In a room full of ghosts? On your own? “Just thought I heard something. Wanted to check.”
Marlow nodded. “I’m cool,” he said. “Well, you know, not cool exactly. Not after today. You okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” Pan shot back. The anxiety was a lump of stone right in the middle of her, heavy enough to pull her down through the floor, through the ground, to drown her in the dark. She opened her mouth and the air refused to come. It took a desperate gulp and a bolt of adrenaline to kick-start her lungs. “Contract has been canceled.”
“Yeah?” said Marlow. “That’s good, right?”
“Great,” she said. “When Ostheim comes after us, not having a contract is gonna be real helpful.”
Marlow sighed, chewing at his knuckles in the infuriating way he always did. She rubbed at her chest, over that lump of stone where her heart should be. All she could feel right now was pent-up rage, like there was a live grenade in there, too, pin pulled.
“Right,” she said, getting to her feet. “Well, this was fun.”
“Hey, you came to my
She spun around to face him and for a second she thought the grenade had blown, the world burning white for a second. The anger was boiling up her throat but she choked it back down, just standing there. Her fists were balled so tightly her finger bones could snap. Why had she come here?
Marlow didn’t speak, just lifted the sheet and tilted his head to invite her in.
Yeah, right, she thought and almost said. She didn’t move, her feet glued to the carpet. It was Marlow, the guy who’d ruined everything, who’d let Charlie into the Nest, who’d led Ostheim right to the Engines. Not his fault any more than yours. Ostheim had you all fooled. And when she looked at him again he was just a guy, just a teenage boy, caught up in the same crapstorm as her. They were both puppets in a show that neither of them really understood. And the sudden tide of exhaustion that swept through her was enough to carry her to the side of the bed, to climb in beside him.
Smiling gently, he lowered the sheet down over her. His hand lingered for a moment then landed on hers, as delicate and hesitant as a butterfly. They lay there, face-to-face in the twilight. Pan tongued the gap where she’d lost a tooth, her heart drumming faster now than it had back at the Engine.
What on earth was going on?
Marlow pulled her close and she didn’t resist, putting her arms around him, her cheek against the smooth skin of his chest. She could hear the thump of his pulse, the soft wheeze of his lungs. He was so warm. He held her tightly and she let him. She didn’t even know why, other than it was quiet here, in his room. Being here with him, it kept the ghosts away.
And she kind of loved him for it.
She moved her head, her lips brushing his neck, then his jaw. Her heart was hummingbird-fast, no longer made of rock but hollow-boned and light enough to lift right out of her. A smile danced on her lips and she was suddenly sure, so sure.
“We made a deal,” she said, her fingers tracing patterns on the bare skin of his arm. “I owe you a kiss.”
Marlow murmured and she pressed her lips to his before he could say anything stupid. She held them there, everything quiet, everything beautifully peaceful, everything perfect.