BURN IN HADES (18 page)

She skimmed down the obsidian mountain and tore through the crawl space between the conjoined mountains. If she hadn’t paid attention to those landmarks, it would have seemed as if she had been instantly transported to the river on the border of Mictlan where she had ended her race.

As promised, the squals were waiting for her on the other side of the river. They taunted her. The only way back was through them. But her new object would allow her to race right past them. Lucky her.

“Catch me if you can,” she yelled across the river to them.

She skipped across the surface of the water and met the squals, who were frozen in time from her perspective. All of them stared across the river as if she was still on the other side. She sliced the fleshy stomach on each squal she passed.

She kept speeding west until she found herself running at her normal pace. The lantern’s flame had been extinguished.

She struck her re-lightable match and placed the fire onto the wick. The lantern failed to light. The kerosene tank was empty and she had no idea where she could refill it. Returning to Mictlan to ask Manauia wasn’t an option. Diamond Tooth dropped the lantern in her sack. She didn’t even know what realm she had stopped in because never expected to stop there.

“Do you desire of this fruit?” a voice clunked. Bones protruded out from the branches of a tree and formed a skull. “My one true friend left me alone many months ago,” said the skull. “It would bring me great joy to share a friendship with you.”

Bottle shaped fruit glistened on a branch. Her lip quivered and her mouth watered for it, the most delicious fruit she had ever seen or craved to bite into. She dropped her sack.

“I’ll have some,” she said.

“Stretch out hither your right hand.”

Diamond Tooth held both her palms out. The skull spit a wad of saliva in her hands.

“I have been waiting for you, daughter of Lilith,” said the skull. “The beautiful demon who brings pain and suffering to all souls shall now—”

She launched a barrage of tiger claws into the tree. The skull chuckled. Its glowing white eyes.

“I am merely a skull,” it said. “A round thing placed in the middle of branches. Your thorns shall never prick me.”

Diamond Tooth wiped her hands on her pants but the saliva remained in her palm. It absorbed into her skin. She could feel the tingle of it swimming through her arm; it wiggled its way into her womb where it settled.

“What the hell is that?” she said.

“My saliva, my spittle is merely a sign that I have given you, courtesy of your master.”

“My master? What do you mean?”

The skull’s glowing white eyes dimmed. “This was the only way to protect my one true friend. Your master promised me his safety should I give you this gift.”

“What did you do to me?”

The skull retreated into the tree. She clawed at the tree with her bagh nakhs trying to carve it back out. A stabbing pain ripped through her stomach. She hunched over and placed her hand over her abdomen.

She took a moment to gather herself and staggered around the tree, collecting tinder and kindling. She built a nest and lit the kindling with her re-lightable match. Once the star-fire blazed, she removed a log from the star and carried the torch over to the tree.

The tree swung downward. The branches swept Diamond Tooth off her feet like a broom clearing up dust. She tumbled through the air and slammed to the ground, the torch still burning beside her. She picked it up.

“Let’s see if you can swat something smaller.” She tossed the torch into the tree and it lodged in between branches.

Flames instantly devoured the dry wood. Fruit exploded. The skull screamed and swayed in distress, helpless to douse the fire.

Watching the tree burn to ash was a scene that would have normally given her a high, but whatever the skull injected into her body writhed, and diminished any kind of pleasure.

She faced the light of paradise to get her bearings straight and continued her journey west on lethargic feet for about a mile. Her legs were as heavy as a colossus and begged for rest. But the longer she rested, the further away Clem Balfour would get.

She staggered up to a calm river. If she could make the swim across, she could seek support in the Palace of Hel. It was about five hundred miles from her current location, but it was the closest place that would accommodate a demon. Her only other option was to lay down where she was. But if Clem Balfour never slept, then neither would she.

She dove into the freezing river and paddled. The current roared as if rejecting her presence. It reversed its normal southern direction and pushed her north. She was too bogged down in exhaustion to fight the current. It swept her away.

She awoke washed up on the corpse-covered beach of Náströnd at the foot of the Niflheim Mountains. She was far in the north, more than a months’ worth of sleep cycles away from Kurnugia.

Her breasts were swollen and tender to the touch. She adjusted her top several times and couldn’t seem to get it comfortable. She lay on her back in the gritty sand, her eyes closed and inhaled the decayed scent of the corpses that littered the beach and also waded in the lake of serpent venom. Unfortunately, not even their torment lifted her from the depths. The slithering inside her womb dominated her thoughts.

She merely watched in envy as the serpent, Níðhöggr, roamed the beach and sucked the skin right off of spirits. Oddly, it left their heads intact, staked on spears, and it ignored the heads as though it was forbidden to touch them. This was strange to her because the worm-like beast wasn’t known for its obedience, unless the orders came from the Master.

Maybe she was meant to witness this abnormal behavior. That’s possibly the reason the river had brought her there, specifically. But she still didn’t understand what it meant, if it even meant anything at all. She could almost hear the Master’s voice scolding her for lying down and pestering her to get up.

It wasn’t the master’s voice though. It was hers. She picked herself up. She had work to do.

Manauia had claimed that Clem Balfour came to Kurnugia with the Tribulation, but Diamond Tooth discovered a peculiar sight in that realm. Like all the gates of the underworld, the impenetrable kingdom walls had collapsed. Yet, hearing about it was not the same as seeing it for herself. What was once a thriving city of enlightenment was now just another torched realm.

It still vomited the familiar scent of boiled radiators, however. The fragrance brought back memories of her search for wisdom and guidance from the elders. There, she had learned the arts, sciences, and philosophies that had once flourished. Kurnugia used to be the most advanced realm in the underworld. With its ever-growing towers of metal and glass, it had once held the highest population in the underworld, and the advanced architecture once housed the most intelligent beings in the underworld.

Now, all of it was deserted and reduced to rubble, a war-torn junk heap. If she had a heart, she would no doubt feel sad from all the nostalgia. She felt nothing except the critters squirming heavily inside her stomach. They were growing.

Debris cracked under her feet as she paced through the vacant city searching for any indication of the Tribulation’s presence, but her footsteps were the only sign of life in the devastated streets.

She paced by broken chairs and scattered items left behind in haste, shrouded in dust to become relics for future generations. She climbed split ladders, rusted and stained clumps of junk, and she crossed pools filled with rotting wood planks instead of the usual sacrificial blood.

Paintings had peeled away. Automobiles had rusted over, their rubber wheels deflated. Nothings sat in the seats of some of those vehicles, frozen in the position of fleeing. One of the burned souls cowered beneath the protective arms of the other, both of their mouths gaped open in terror.

Chunks of metal jutted out from the ground, sharper than her tiger claws. Phallic structures of twisted metal that once reached into the scorching skies now leaned on their neighbors, weak and dull, straining to remain upright. All their bodies were corroded from bouts of acid rain, and their windows shattered from explosions.

The condition of the city reinforced what she had suspected for some time. The underworld was changing. The deities had evacuated their respective realms, souls were burning in record numbers and the Nothing was spreading. She was determined not to be around to see the final stages of this transition. She owned the key that unlocked Clem Balfour’s door.

The musty odor of the underworld had never bothered her before. She had even sought pleasure from the stench, but the deeper she ventured into the city, the more it tore her up inside. It wasn’t just that it stank, which it did, but it was more than that. The scent was too strong. Mucus accumulated in her throat and the urge to vomit crept up. She took a few deep breaths to quell the nausea, but each inhale brought in more of the sulfuric smell.

If she hadn’t paused for her illness she would have walked right past the half-melted trebuchets of the Tribulation. She found the weapons outside a crumbling edifice that had been made into a poor man’s fort.

She prowled inside, probing for life and found a room with no ceiling. Smoke swam in the sky across the dead sun, giving the illusion that the black eye was winking. A Tribulation flag waved in the wind beside a large cauldron that steamed in the center of the foyer. It smelled of salty barbot soup.

“Welcome, my friend.”

Diamond Tooth spun towards the speaker and aimed her bagh nakhs. The crusty soldier didn’t flinch.

“Do me the honor of making it quick.” He was soft spoken and stood stoic like the living dead—reanimated human bodies absent of souls.

Diamond Tooth lowered her fists and relaxed. He wasn’t worth burning. “I’m looking for a man named Clem Balfour,” she said.

“I’d like to find a spirit named Nìködemos. He’s the Anarchist Colonel that decided to burn everyone except me. I want to know why. But alas, some quests are best left alone.” The soldier tossed uncooked barbot wings into the stew.

Diamond Tooth removed a bottle of devil’s water from her sack and offered it to him. He took the bottle and drank.

“Balfour has only one ear,” she said. “He’s with the third.”

“If he’s with General Simeon, they’ve already left for Pulotu about thirty periods of sleep ago. Nìködemos’s frontline is right on their tails, and Yomi lies ahead of ‘em. Those poor devils are burned by now.”

“And what if they haven’t burned?”

The man drank from the bottle of devil’s water. “Lady, you must not have heard anything about Camp Erutrot. It’s one of those Anarchist torture camps you’d better hope you never end up in, especially in your condition.”

“My condition?”

“The Anarchists are ruthless. They won’t care that you’re with child.”

She had ignored the odd extra weight she carried around for fear of the absurd truth. She couldn’t be pregnant. Only beings that were created in the underworld were able to breed in the underworld, and it had only been a few weeks since her encounter with that tree. She couldn’t have been showing so soon, and she refused to be pregnant by the seed of a damn tree!

Slowly, she peeked down at her stomach with just her eyes. Her chin followed the downward motion of her gaze. She gasped.

“Something wrong?” asked the soldier.

She placed her hands over her melon-sized belly. The things inside her kicked. Her knees buckled. The soldier rushed to her side and braced her up in his arms. She shoved him away.

“I just think you should be careful,” he said. “It’s bad enough what they do to the men in Erutrot, but it breaks my heart how they treat the women and children. There was a time I’d pray for them,” He peered down at his feet, “but the Great Goddess doesn’t seem to be listening these days.” He returned the bottle of devil’s water to her.

She gently pushed it back toward him and gestured at her pregnant stomach. “Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

On her way out of the fort, she vomited. Everything ached, from her head to her back, which was soaked with sweat. She slogged through the field of twisted metal, dragged her heels through the rubble, and slid her hand against any stable surface in an attempt to hold herself upright.

Fluid gushed down her leg and she halted. A wave of cramps tightened through her back and abdomen. The pain was even worse than breaking her spine. She wailed in misery. Whatever was inside wanted out right now. It clawed at her stomach. She collapsed in a corner and went into labor.

Chapter 9 - The Peacemaker

Heated breezes carried black ash into Cross’s face
, guiding him deep into Gehenna—one of the only dark places in the underworld. But the night sky in Gehenna was sleight-of-hand. It was a false nighttime, as it simply burned with black flames. Glowing embers twinkled within them like shooting stars.

He stumbled into a desolate town bathed in the black blaze. Even though the fires ate gleefully away at the ghost town, the buildings remained standing as if there was an agreement between the two of them. The eternal flames consumed just enough wood to stay alive but not enough to level the town.