The Pulptress (16 page)

“
The place was open, though
it'd be a good place to rest for a bit. I'm in between homes for
the moment.” Pascal was good at making things up, but there was a
difference between good for a stage and good for lying to
crooks.

A foot stepped down on
Pascal's face, blood streamed from his nose as two of the French
goons picked him up. “I don’t like liars.” The Brit spoke
pleasantly enough, “So, how about a real reason?”

Pascal just shook his head,
mumbling in French, “
Mes affaires font mal au
cul.
”

There was another thud of
Pascal's head being slammed forward, reverberating against my
hiding spot. Dribbles of blood thumped against my forehead. My eyes
met his and I saw him very slightly shake his head, and hiss a
soft, “Shh...”

“
Let's take him with us,”
the British man said, pulling Pascal to his feet, “I'm sure she'll
enjoy some fresh meat to chew on.”

“
Oh boy, taking me to a
femme
?” Pascal spat some blood out, “Where might this lady
live? The sewers?”

The British man laughed,
“Nothing nearly so crass. The catacombs are where you will meet the
bone queen.” He restrained Pascal, pulling a dark bag over the
other's head, “You three, finish this place off and return to
base.” He shoved Pascal from the apartment.

The smell of gasoline made
my heart start racing again and I saw one of the men beginning to
pour it over the floors. I put my hand over my mouth as gasoline
was sloshed onto the entertainment center, dripping down around me.
They systematically hit the main rooms of the apartment before
heading back to the door; the last one to leave threw a lighter
into the living room before shutting the door.

In the time it took me to
burst out of the entertainment center the apartment was fully
engulfed in flames. I moved for the door, “Paulette!” The heat
seared my words.

Paulette pushed out of the
kitchen pantry, and motioned to the window behind me before
hurrying past me. I followed after her, flames licking at my back.
The smoke was draining and I finally fell to my knees, blindly
crawling the few feet to the window. Paulette was struggling to
pull it open. I managed to get back to my feet and between the two
of us we busted glass and it shattered, raining glinting shards
onto the fire escape stairway.

Words were forgotten in
favor of coughing and gasping. I couldn’t stop coughing; my body
seemed to think that if I coughed long enough I would be able to
get all of the smoke out of my lungs.

“
You are alright?” Paulette
finally asked, her voice was breathless and her face was smudged
with ashes.

She waited for me to nod
before ushering us both towards the car. I limped after her, my
body was exhausted and every part of me felt heavy. Thirty seconds
in a fire had kicked my ass worse than any fight I'd ever been in.
I was not up for thinking about repeating that process ever
again.

Paulette started the car in
silence and we drove away as the fire fighters were arriving. By
now the entire building was up in flames, the small copy shop that
had existed downstairs was just a ball of fire. I didn’t even
realize that my eyes were shutting as the inferno disappeared
behind the car.

I woke on a small sofa. The
ash had been washed from my face, but I could still smell the
rancid scent of burnt hair and gasoline clinging to me like a thick
perfume.

I sat up, feeling the
familiar weight of the gun at my hip, “Hello?” I finally called
out. It looked like a hotel room. There was a small bed in the
center of the room; the sheets disheveled like someone had just
gotten out of it.

Paulette stepped out of the
bathroom in a burst of steam. Her skin was a raw pink and I
wondered if that was from the fire or from a too hot
shower.

“
Morning,” Paulette said as
she wrapped her hair in a towel, “Go shower, food is on the
way.”

I wanted to stop and ask
what had happened, where we were, and what we were going to do, but
the lure of washing the stench of fire from me won out. I kicked
off the blankets and stumbled to the bathroom.

Peeling off my suit, I was
glad to see that there was no major damage to it. Some of the
fabric on my arms and legs had been ripped, but at least the main
body area was still in tact and I wouldn’t have to run around
half-naked.

My body actually seemed to
be in worse shape than the suit. Every muscle ached and protested
any movement. I had a nice red welt forming on the side of my head
and cuts along my arms and legs. A green-purple bruise blossomed
under my left breast and it was already tender to the
touch.

The shower was a welcome
relief and it calmed my angry muscles and relaxed the tension from
my body. Washing my long dark hair I realized that a good chunk of
the end of my hair had been singed as it crunched into ash under my
touch.

I groped out of the shower
to my boots and found the thin knife I kept hidden there. I
carefully worked to even my hair back out, cutting off the uneven
and brunt off ends until I was satisfied.

Turning off the water, I
wrapped myself in a thick plush robe and pulled my hair up into a
ponytail; I didn’t want anything else catching on the ends of it. I
left my suit hanging up in the bathroom to try to air the smoke out
of it.

Paulette was dressed and
sitting on the bed when I left the bathroom. She motioned to the
food on the bedside table, “Eat. We have a plan to
make.”

I barely tasted anything as
I ate, the process to chew and swallow seemed mechanical this
morning, “We need to get into the catacombs.”

Paulette nodded, “Oui, that
is clear.”

“
What’s the best
way?”

“
The main entrance. Where
tourists go. Other areas blocked off.”

“
There are too many people
there; we won’t be able to get in. You know that these people are
not operating out of the places where people sightsee!”

“
The catacombs are very big,
they extend all over Paris. The main area has some paths blocked
with just thin ropes. We slip under them and are away from tourists
quickly.”

“
Someone is going to see us
do that Paulette.” I tucked a stray piece of hair behind my
ear.

Paulette smiled at me, “You
have not been to the catacombs. You see very little.”

“
What?”

Paulette sighed and stood
up, “It is very dark, and there are many hallways to duck down. Few
people, especially now in the morning. Come, get dressed and I will
show you.”

I was surprised that there
wasn’t a line to get into the Catacombs of Paris. Paulette and I
were able to walk inside to a bored looking woman sitting behind a
small window. Paulette paid 19 Euros for the two of us.

“
That way please. Watch your
step,” the woman said in carefully practiced English.

Paulette smiled at her and
headed down a dark hallway that grew more and more narrow until we
finally hit a set of spiral stairs. I felt like my shoulders were
going to graze against the stone as I spiraled down and down. I
couldn’t see Paulette even though I knew she was only a few steps
ahead of me. Dizziness began to hit as we continued round and round
and down and down. The air was getting drastically colder and I
could feel the weight of the world pulsing from above. When the
stairs finally ended I had to put my hand to the wall to steady
myself, I still felt like I was running in circles. I’d never been
claustrophobic before, but that staircase was something else
entirely.

“
Come,” Paulette said, and
motioned forward where a few lanterns were glowing. The room was
made of stone shaped into arched shapes with pillars carefully
designed for support. There was a final archway that led into an
area of almost pitch-blackness. Carved overhead was a simple
message:

Arrete! C' est ici
L'Empire de la Mort

“
Dramatic, aren’t they?” I
muttered.

Paulette glanced at me,
“They simply give warning. This is the Empire of the Dead, not of
your world.”

Just pass that sign and all
I could see were bones. They were stacked on top of one another in
carefully arranged patterns, a block of skulls here, leg bones
here, and assorted other bones here. Thin limestone pillars
separated little hollows of various human parts stacked all the way
to the wall. The degrading of the limestone made the stones rough
with small pores, like large bones wrapping around the entire
chamber.

“
How many—?” I started to
ask.

“
Six million. There are
around six million dead here.” Paulette answered. She moved without
hesitation through the chambers of bones.

“
Do you know where we need
to go?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Paulette’s back; she was simply
a shadowy figure in this low light.

We passed a wall of femurs
carefully stacked with a heart made of skulls in the center; the
monks that stacked these bones must have had some
issues.

“
Oui
, look
up.”

I glanced up, the low
ceiling wasn’t very high over my head, and was a chipped and worn
old stone with a thick black line painted on it, running in both
directions.

“
Long ago the ceilings were
marked because too many would get lost and perish here. We will
follow it for some time before we go a different way. Remember it
and it will help get you back too.”

“
You’ve done this before
haven’t you?”

A ghost of a smile crossed
her lips, “Pascal and I use to play here. Our mother was a tour
guide for many years.”

That explained how she was
so calm as we delved deeper into the catacombs. I, on the other
hand, felt like my heart was going to freeze in my chest. I’d been
around death, hell I knew how to fight to the death. It wasn’t
something that I was afraid of, but this, these bones stacked with
almost library-like precision and care unnerved me. Sheer number
overwhelmed my ability to rationalize. How could I possibly hope to
even understand that there were six million skulls, femurs, spines,
and countless other bones scattered all over here. I was hoping
that Amaury wasn’t going to be among these bones.

Paulette led me through the
main areas with ease before we finally slipped into a hallway that
had been roped off, then another, and another. The areas here were
pure blackness. I couldn’t see anything and Paulette kept hold of
my wrist as the two of us crept through the darkness of the
tunnels.

I fished a small flashlight
from the pocket sewn into the side of my suit and clicked it on.
The hallways here were less organized; the bones were sloppier,
slumping to the side in a shapeless mass of faded ivory.

“
We are a few miles from the
entrance,” Paulette said softly, “Keep close.”

The two of us moved as one
shadow through the tunnels. Paulette would occasionally stop and
direct me to point the light down different pathways before she
would choose the way we needed to go. I tried to keep track of all
of the turns, but I was getting disoriented.

A crunching and creaking
noise began to echo in the chambers, building and building until I
was sure that the sound was going to make the collection of bones
clatter to the ground around us.

Paulette looked at me and
without a word I knew to turn off the light. The world flickered
back to pitch black as the crunching noise grew louder. I grabbed
Paulette and pulled her back into one of the bone filled chambers.
The bones were stacked high and tight, but we were able to crawl
over them, ducking down in the small alcove between bone and wall.
Pressing my cheek against the rounded end of a femur I closed my
eyes and focused on trying to breath as silently as
possible.

The noise came through the
floors, vibrating in time with dull, thudding footsteps that
crunched and groaned. There was a scraping of something hard
against the walls and my stomach went into a pin tight spiral at
the sound too close to nails on a chalkboard.

The bones in front of me
shook and I felt the pile shift as the bones were pulled out and
clattered to the floor before there was that cracking sound like
the opening of the shell of a nut. I felt Paulette go rigid and
press her back further against the limestone wall, there was
nowhere else to hide or go.

The wall of bones in front
of us was thinning out and a blast of hot rot hit me and made me
put a hand to my mouth to silence my innate gagging.

And then the noise stopped,
the bones fell still and a familiar British voice called out, “Come
on you barmpots, there’s nothing good here. Stop wasting time and
move to the west tunnel.”

The shuffling crunching
noise began again; fading slowly down the tunnel, and only then,
when the world had gone silent I dared to breathe again. Paulette
was already moving, climbing over the bone pile and back into the
hallway, “Hurry up,” she hissed.

The bones glided and
shifted under my weight and I thudded lightly back onto the
Limestone. The ground had several cracks and indentations in the
shape of feet.