New Olympus Saga (Book 3): Apocalypse Dance (25 page)

The Darkling Plains, Time Undetermined

I find out you need friends in Hell.

The day after I wake up, I take out a second asshole – a pimp whose retirement plan for his girls consisted of a shallow grave out in Jersey – and decide to go hunting for more. The hook I took from the pedo disappears in the body of the pimp, but I find a piece of rebar as a replacement weapon. I’ve heard screams in the distance before, while I was still in a daze, and I figure there’s more people like me out there, sleepwalking in between torture bouts. Nobody deserves to end up like that. If I could wake up, maybe the others can, too.

Sure enough, after I wander around the endless ruined city for a bit, I hear screams. I find a woman who’s been cornered by one of the ghosts, a skinny fuck with a large switchblade. He’s cutting her. I can see bloody wounds on her arms and hands; she’s trying to defend herself, which surprises me; she must have woken up already. Not that it’s helping her any; she’s unskilled and unarmed, and the punk is slashing her with impunity. Soon enough she’ll be too weak to fight back, and that’s when he’ll have his fun.

Not this time, motherfucker.

I creep up behind him while he laughs and slashes at her. He barks playfully in her direction, or makes kissing noises, just to add a little extra to the torture-murder routine. He’s having so much fun he doesn’t notice me until I ram the piece of rebar I’ve liberated right into the side of his neck. He stops laughing then; his dying gurgle is the most wonderful sound I’ve heard in a while. I pull the rebar out and he goes down, kicks a few times and goes still. A moment later, he’s nothing but a shadow on the gray soil, and a moment after that the shadow’s gone.

The woman is sobbing and hugging herself, driven mindless with pain and terror. “Hey.” I said in a soothing tone. I remember saying ‘Hey’ to Christine, and her blue-gray eyes widening as they look at me.
I’m coming, Christine
. I hope that’s a promise and not a pathetic wish. “Hello there.”

She stares blankly at my blank face. I don’t have my super-powers, but I still have no face. This is Hell, all right. “Oh, God. You’re not one of them, are you?” she asks me.

“No, I’m not one of the ghosts. Just a fellow victim, except I’m done letting them do what they want to me. We can kill them, you know. I don’t think it takes, but at least it gets them off our backs for the rest of the day. My name’s Mark, by the way.”

“I’m Wanda.” She wipes her eyes and calms down a little bit. “Mark. You have no face.”

“I don’t? Must have left it at home.” Wanda doesn’t handle sarcasm well; she starts sobbing again, and I feel like a douchebag for upsetting her. “Hey, it’s cool. Yeah, I lost my face a while back, but I’m not going to hurt you, okay?”

“Everything hurts,” she says. “He found me in the morgue and made me his slave. I’m the devil’s receptionist, but my mind is trapped in here.”

I’m not sure what she’s talking about, but at least she’s not a mindless zombie; from the looks of it, she hasn’t been in a fugue for a while. “That sucks. But at least you know what’s happening, and that’s better than just suffering like a dumb animal, isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” she replies, and gets to her feet.

“Good.” None of her cuts are life-threatening, but I sacrifice my t-shirt to make some bandages and staunch the bleeding. “You’ll be all healed up tomorrow.”

“I know.” She thinks about her words for a moment. “You’re the first person I’ve seen who knows what’s happening.”

“I’ve been awake for just a couple of days. I heard a psychic scream from a friend of mine, and that did the trick.”

“I think I heard that too. A day, two days ago? Time is weird in this place.”

“Yeah, got no clue how long I was here before I woke up.”

“I was killed in September,” she says.

Has it been that long? “What year?”

“2009.”

Fuck. “I died in May, 2013,” I say.

“Jesus. Four years. I’ve been in this hell for four years?”

I can’t help myself. “It could be longer. I don’t know how long I’ve been here, and like I said, I only woke up a couple days ago. Before I woke up, who knows? I could have been out of it for days or years.” I really hope it hasn’t been years. What’s been happening to Christine since then?

The one thing I know is that she’s still alive. I can feel her through our special connection, the one I severed shortly before I died. I may have severed it, but I think it’s growing back. It’s lain dormant for who knows how long, but something woke it up, and that’s what woke
me
up. Which means Armageddon Girl has saved my ass yet again, just by being there. Good thing we stopped keeping score a while back.

Wanda and I talk a bit more. She explains to me that after her murder, Mr. Night raised her from the dead. She knows her body is out there, answering phones for the asshole. Sometimes, if she concentrates really hard, she can see through her corpse’s eyes. Maybe that connection to the real world is what got her to wake up. And hearing her story makes me realize this is Mr. Night’s version of hell. He brought me here after I died.

After she is done with her story, I try to make contact with my body, like she does with hers. That’s when I sense Mr. Night’s presence – he’s in the driver’s seat, controlling my body.

That’s too much like what happened to another version of me, in that alternate reality Christine visited. Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of that universe? The thought almost sends me into a berserk rage.

Wanda helps snap me out of it. “So what do we do, Mark?”

“They’ve been hunting us, the hungry ghosts,” I say, and the savagery in my voice makes her take a step back.

“It’s time to hunt them back.”

* * *

This time it’s three of them. They’ve gotten the big Russian, Medved. They’ve tied him up with barbed wire and are entertaining themselves by poking him with improvised spears. I recognize one of them immediately: a big guy, flab over muscle, wearing a stained mechanic’s overall.

Hello, stepfather. Hello, asshole
. He’s been killing me here in Hell for quite some time. I’m looking forward to killing him again.

One of the others is also familiar. Not someone I’ve met in person. Someone I’ve read about. It’s fucking Joseph Stalin, that’s who he is. Makes sense. Medved killed him in 1942, and his ghost is returning the favor. Considering the guy murdered a good five, ten million people one way or another, he must be one stone-cold son of a bitch. In other words, another asshole who needs killing.

The third guy I don’t know. He’s a tall athletic guy, wearing something that is part military uniform, part superhero costume. His outfit reminds me of WWII Soviet uniforms.

“How does the traitor plead?” the unknown guy says. He’s speaking in Russian, but I can understand every word he’s saying. I guess being in Hell is the ultimate equalizer, and misery transcends all languages.

“Yuri!” Medved says in a pleading tone. They’ve wrapped barbed wire all around his head, piercing one of his eyes, but he stares out at his tormentors out of the other one. He’s in the same terrified daze I used to be in, able to suffer and maybe whine about it, but little else. “Yuri, my friend. They murdered you, the commissars! Why are you standing with Joe Steel, the one who signed your death warrant? I killed him for you, Yuri!”

“The accused has confessed,” Stalin says. “We can proceed with sentencing.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” my stepfather says. He pokes Medved in the stomach with his makeshift spear, and twists it inside his guts until the Russian screams. “Yeah, you scream, bitch. You’re gonna scream all day before I’m done.” He turns to the others. “And then we hunt down my kid, right? That’s the deal.”

“All enemies of the Revolution will be punished,” Stalin agrees. I guess that makes me an enemy of the fucking Revolution. Lucky me.

“What do we do?” Wanda whispers next to me. We’re crouched behind the remains of a wall, about four feet high, some twenty yards from the merry gang and their victim. I’ve got my piece of rebar, and Wanda is holding a makeshift club fashioned from a table leg. We’re outnumbered and outgunned, so to speak, but they aren’t expecting an attack. Before I woke up, all I did was wander around in a trance until a ghost found me and had his fun with me.

Things have changed.

“Element of surprise.”

“What?”

“I’ll attack them first. When I’ve got their attention, come on up and whack one of them from behind before they get me.”

“Okay,” she says, trying to be brave. My heart goes out to her. I don’t think she’s ever raised a hand to another human being, and the first time is almost always the hardest. If she freezes, I’m dead. Even if I take one of them out in the first few seconds, two on one means the one is fucked, ninety percent of the time, unless we’re talking Neos, and right now the only Neo thing about me is my no-face.

“Just think about all the shit they’ve done to you since you’ve been here. Get good and mad. This is the day you start getting some payback.”

“Okay,” she repeats, more firmly this time.

It will have to do.

Medved’s screams cover my quiet approach. Stalin and his pals are having too much fun to see me coming. I manage to get within four feet of them before Yuri stops the stabbing game and starts turning around. That makes him my first target. I leap, screaming like a bull gorilla, and shove the piece of rebar into his gaping mouth with all my strength. Something goes crack inside his head and he goes down, and I barely have time to yank the rebar out of him before he goes up in smoke.

“Fuuuck!” is my war-cry. I swing at step-dad and get him on one arm; bone cracks and he screams, but then Joe Steel prods me with his spear and I have to jump back to avoid getting spitted. Step-asshole is hurt but he shifts his grip on his spear for an overhead stab, and the two come at me from two different directions. ‘Even Hercules can’t fight two’ is an old saying, firmly grounded in plain common sense. If two assholes know what they’re doing, they come at you so that if you face one, the other gets you from behind. I figure I’ll last a whole five seconds before one of them lands a stab on me, and then it’s all over but the screaming.

Two seconds later, Wanda’s club smashes Stalin’s head from behind, just on schedule. Hats off for the girl. It’s not a lethal blow, but he staggers forward, right into range. I swing my rebar like I’m Babe Ruth and land another hit on his skull; this one cracks it open. Stalin goes down, but step-dad stabs at me. I try to deflect with my rebar, but I’m off-balance and I only manage to turn the spear so it gets my in the arm instead of the chest. It hurts, and that arm flops uselessly down to one side, but I’m not dead, and now it’s two on one, odds in my favor.

I’ll give the asshole this much: he doesn’t try to run. He makes a fight out of it, and it’s not over until Wanda breaks one of his legs and I end up sitting on his chest, stabbing him over and over with the short end of the rebar piece, and man, does it feel good to see him die once again. Murder can be damn good therapy.

All three assholes turn into shadows on the ground as we work on freeing Medved. It’s not easy; they’ve wrapped up the big guy with a good quarter mile of wire, and he’s got almost more punctures than skin at this point. He shudders and groans as we remove the wire, but keeps the screaming down to a minimum. I respect that. Maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy before he fell under Mr. Night’s influence. I’m feeling pretty optimistic right now: killing instead of being killed always cheers me up.

“That’s the last of it, Mr. Bear,” I tell him, and he steps away from the wire, bleeding from hundreds of tiny wounds. He’s got to be in agony, but he doesn’t let it show much, except for a tremor or two.

“Thank you,” he says as we help him lie down. His eyes shift, focus on me; he’s waking up. “I remember you. I tried to kill you, back at the Lurker’s cave.”

“I hope you don’t feel like trying again.”

He shakes his head. “No. Mr. Night betrayed me. He stole my body, sent my soul here. I owe him no loyalty. Nor to Daedalus Smith, who made me work with Mr. Night. But Yumi, my Yumi, what has become of her?”

“Do you mean Lady Shi?” At his nod, I continue: “Last I heard she was alive and well, and five million bucks richer. She saved our ass and turned on Mr. Night.” I don’t bring up the fact that last time I heard of her, she was in an off- and on-again BDSM relationship with Condor and Kestrel; the big guy might take those news the wrong way.

“This is good,” Medved grumbles. “What is your name, man without a face?”

“I’m Mark, and that’s Wanda.”

Wanda waves at him. “Hi.”

The Russian giant laughs despite the pain that’s making him shudder. “My name, it is Marko. We have the same name. It’s funny, no?”

Oh, goody. “Okay, you’ll be Marko, I’ll be Mark, and hopefully nobody will get confused.”

“There are only us two, and the girl,” Marko says. Wanda doesn’t look happy at being verbally relegated to second-class status, and I don’t blame her one bit. “Who is going to be confused?”

“There are others like us. People Mr. Night managed to drag into this little amusement park. We’re going to rescue them and wake them up.”