A ladder dropped down and Leona Kelley swung from it, landing on stage dressed in full Renaissance plate armor and regalia. Yet another ridiculous effect to make her reign of terror all the more surreal.
The reporters shrank back. Maybe they would listen to Jane now?
Leona applauded and wiped away a real tear.
“Glad to see you too, believe it or not. These people were giving me nothing but grief. I guess they don’t understand our world, eh?” Jane shrugged and folded her arms. She’d already been humiliated. If she was about to die, she would not show an ounce of fear to these people.
“I for one found your last words to be beautiful, dear,” said Leona. “You’re right, of course. You and President Matthews and all of the tacticians that proposed this action were right to do it. I am an enemy that diplomacy would fail to best. This is a circumstance where action and not words must be taken. There will be mistakes. The world will burn for it, too. So much for all the reason you tried to talk into me, dear girl.” She barred her teeth menacingly.
“Well, only the press would blame a good citizen for trying to stop the Apocalypse.” Jane smiled sheepishly.
Leona laughed and shook her head, extending a hand.
“Well, my little scapegoat, it’s too late for you. Maybe they’ll have time to appreciate the last ditch effort you made. For see, dear girl, it was you that stayed my hand in the same way that it was you who attracted my rage. These people are too quick to pin all their failures on a government they themselves instated. If they are displeased with the authority over them, then they are of course the employers and could simply ratify and reinstate better leaders. It would be bloody and costly, I assume. Oh, but it’s easier to lay the fault on a broken machine than it is to address the power and responsibility of a single citizen. Seems you and I have exposed every raw nerve in the Modern Political structure, yes? Seems we’ve lit the fires of Hell, dear girl. Now, come away with me. Let’s end our legend with a crescendo. I promise I’ll make your death a highly memorable one. Who knows, a few hundred years from now you might be as lucky as Joan of Arc and be canonized for this!”
Jane smiled and reached and took the She-Devil’s hand.
“I believe you, Leona.”
Leona Kelley giggled. With her free hand, she swung a canister of something like tear gas but far more potent over her shoulder and dropped it in the midst of the a couple dozen SWAT teams that had been assigned to the stage and had only held their fire because of Jane’s presence on it. They reeled, and their desperate dashing sent the reporter’s scurrying for the stadium walls. Today wasn’t the day for citizens to die, though. As controversial, as heretical to American civic religion as it seemed, the Andromeda Act had actually been successful. Leona took Jane up into the helicopter with her and let her have a seat. After only a week of implementing this plan, the She-Devil allowed the stadium cameras to capture and savor the image of herself and a single pilot making off with the American Andromeda, bound for some unthinkable Hell.
*****
Chapter 1
Their song accused him of his sins.
Dr. Lucien Kingsley jarred awake, surprised to find the top of Pirre Mountain swarmed by Harpy eagles. He was convinced that they’d come from the other side to whisk him off to judgment for all the terrible things he’d done.
But they hadn’t come for him. Kingsley sat up, the morning dew rolling around his shoulders like a blanket, thoroughly engaged. The eagles had answered her call. Of all the dangerous beasts of the forest, of all the wild and savage creatures, she alone could earn the trust of these birds of prey.
Bleach.
A mystery in and of herself. How could someone in Leona Kelley’s employ, a ruthless assassin who in some ways seemed barely human, also be so regal? Saint Mary’s serenity seemed to clothe her as she stood in the morning light, the eagles flocking to her shoulders, landing on her leather arm guards and bullet proof vest. It was strange. She was dressed in the armor of a Spec Ops SWAT officer, but with her vest and pant legs draped in human organs that the eagles greedily began to devour. But despite this gruesome feeding frenzy all around her, Bleach was smiling girlishly, green eyes dancing in the early light, the wind playing with her chin-length charcoal hair.
“Hello, my dear girl.” She was speaking to a young female eagle, half as tall as she was, strutting around on the ground next to her, eating the human heart that she had dropped on the ground. Bleach ran her fingers through the bird’s head feathers, eyes filling up with ironically remorseful tears.
“His name was Peter. He had the most wonderful blue eyes. I could have seen him becoming someone great. Leona used him for a pleasure slave in her sex torture room. I had to hear it…
“I thought it would be better if he died instead. So I killed him while she was sleeping. I cut out his heart and I saved it for you, dear girl. So that when he was gone part of him would go to the eagles. Soar away, away from the ground, away from this life…” She looked to the sky and let the tears stream down her cheeks with a wistful smile.
There was silence and then she realized without even looking in his direction that Kingsley had woken up.
“Good morning, Doctor.”
He slowly got to his feet. The last few weeks here in the Darien Gap felt like a dream. A very strange, beautiful dream where a less-than-human, somewhat-deathly angelic woman had trained him in martial arts and the skills required to be a master assassin.
“Whenever you’re ready.” She nodded that Kingsley should follow. The eagles ascended with her motion, taking off and hovering over them in the trees, seeming to protect Bleach as if she were their mother.
Kingsley marveled. Bleach moved with the wind and every leaf as though she belonged there. Not the faintest stirring of wildlife nor the far off cries of everyday Wars dissuaded her. She was a spirit in an ocean of trees. Immaterial, invisible. At peace.
She led him down from the peaks to the center of the river below it. The water echoed louder with the splashes of falling twigs than when her feet touched it. She climbed upon a stone and turned to look at him.
“Today is your last day of training, Doctor. When you emerge from these woods, you will no longer be the same person you were when I broke you out of prison. I have given you the power to become a force for good or evil. You know what this means, don’t you?” She swallowed, folding her arms. Kingsley nodded.
“I’m already a force for evil, in case you haven’t been reading the papers.” He hung his head, on the brink of despair.
“If you believe that truly, then you’ll never be able to change.”
“What makes you think I want to?”
“Believe me, you do. It’s the eyes of all of us that have seen the things that we have. The desire to be whole. To protect life and not take it. Yet we persist. Why do we continue when there is nothing left to die for, Doctor? You see, I’m lost. I’ve been lost since I was born the second time at her hands. Something within me will always want to be found. I don’t know if there’s any hope for that, but you might have some hope. There might be something that you can do to stop the chain reaction you started. It’s just something to think about.” She shifted on her heels, standing like a crane over the water.
Kingsley held his breath. He wanted to believe her. Yet he was wicked, his sins set in stone. His first choice would always be the wrong one.
“I know what I have to do,” said Kingsley. “I opened the door for the whore of Babylon. Now I’m going to bed her. Put out the fire of the lust that I inflamed. Serve her with the soul I sold her. If that’s wrong, then I refuse to be right.” He squared his jaw, resigned to his own sickness. Bleach shook her head in disbelief.
“I hoped to be your teacher, but I can’t be your master. If you’re hell-bent on going back to her, I’m not going to stop you. In fact, I will take you there, so that I can teach you the truth you need to know. It will be painful, Doctor Kingsley. It might nearly destroy you. But I promise that I will be
there to pull you out of the fire.” She bowed her head gravely.
“Why do you insist I need saving and that you will be the one to do it?” said Kingsley. Despite all the skills he’d learned from this woman, the transformation of his body and mind that she had wrought, he’d grown tired of her lectures. “You’re every bit the hypocrite my father has always been! You kill for that woman!” He clenched his fists.
“I don’t kill for Leona. I kill for mercy.” Bleach’s voice was cold and clipped. “You see, if I refuse to do what she wants she does worse to people that I loved. I made that mistake before with Horatio. With Peter… With so many more beautiful young men and women. She rapes some of them. Others she turns into things less than human. It depends on how she likes them. She prefers them younger than 30 for her bed. The females she collects, or the men over 30, they end up on her racks. I imagine that’s what happened to the good Captain and his Sergeant. Oh, yes, Doctor, I saw the footage. The World saw Shreveport burn from the fire that you started. Even knowing that, I still believe in you, Lucien Kingsley. I hope you’ll remember that after you become the scattered ashes she will make of you.”
Bleach and Kingsley stared at one another for a moment, then turned wordlessly to their established routine. They trained the rest of the day in echoing silence. It was a simple balancing technique they were working on, much like Tai Chi. He felt some alarm that the last thing she would teach him would be a ritualistic procedure for finding inner peace. He was convinced of what he wanted. Lucien Kingsley had never learned to take sound counsel, or consider “no” for an answer. Once his mind was set, dynamite could not blow the illusion out from his mind’s eye. Nobody could save him. So why was she so adamant that he could still turn himself around? Why did it seem that Bleach, who herself served Leona in her own way, was trying to somehow redeem Kingsley?
It was an intense workout. For all the running, jumping, and climbing he’d done over the past months; for all the drills and sparring and grueling exercises he’d endured, nothing was quite as hard for Kingsley as focus and balance. His muscles burned, and each second that passed seemed like an hour. But still the sun moved across the sky, and then, finally, at dusk, it was all over. Bleach looked at him with wistful eyes and a broken smile that hid her metallic, electrified teeth from his vision.
“Alright, Doctor.” She was in the habit of picking up and continuing old conversations hours, even days later, as if no time had passed. “If you insist, then I know the way to her doorstep. This time you’ll enter in at the Inferno’s gates. God help you.”
*****
Chapter 2
Jane felt water steadily dripping straight between her eyes. They opened groggily to the gray mist and rolled around in her head, trying to make sense of the spinning ceiling. The water rolled down her philtrum and landed in the center of her lips like a wraith’s kiss.
She coughed and tried to sit up. Her body was submerged up to the waist in what she thought, at first, was water.
“I know, I thought it was water at first too…” A voice echoed off the ancient marble walls and then broke into a coughing hit. “Then I made the mistake of breathing. I have no idea if it’s human or animal. It’s the color of human…”
Jane felt her whole body twist in revulsion as she tried not to look down. Not water. It was cold but sticky. Too thick for water and far too clumpy to be some kind of oil. Finally, its crimson tinge told her what it was.
“How many people do you cut open before you have enough to do this with?” she croaked, still not looking over to see the man that had spoken.
“Just enough to make your name and a little more to have some sick fun.” The man whose voice Jane had heard coughed again and gasped in agony. She leaned back her head. Why couldn’t she look directly at him? He didn’t sound too far way.
Then she realized with disgust why her belly felt numb. It wasn’t just the cold.
“Oh my God!” she cried, looking down to see that she was impaled on a spear. Or to be more accurate, the spear was in fact a gargoyle’s horn. She was impaled with the nose-horn of some creepy statue in a dank dungeon out of an Edgar Allen Poe story, submerged to her waist in blood that was now mixed with her own. Her head was confined and she still had yet to figure out why. To top it all off, there was a man somewhere away in the dark dying beside her.
“Hey…You’re okay…” He reached gradually, fishing his hand through the brickwork and the iron shapes that protruded from the wall. She felt his fist close around her own trembling hand.
“I’m okay?! Buddy, I’m a nurse. I know what happens to a wound that gets in contact with rotting blood! That and-gah-how bad is it? I’m impaled on a pagan idol’s schnoz!” She thrashed with a loud whimper and felt pain seize her lower back and jump like salmon fjording a waterfall all the way to the back of her skull.
Now she realized why she couldn’t move her head. Her neck was forced in between the gaping jaws of another one of these sick statues. She cried and spluttered. What the hell had she gotten herself into? She just wished that if she was going to die, it would go ahead and happen. Waiting was the worst part of everything.
“You’re okay… I promise. You won’t have to live with it much longer. I’m going… Leaf’s…” He choked up.
“Leaf? You mean, as in Sergeant Leaf Manson? So, that makes you…?”
“I used to be Captain Derek Matheson. You’re right. But not for much longer, missy. I think I’ve come down with TB or something. Been spitting up blood now for three days. I probably got worse from drinking the actual water that spills over from the roof. They don’t feed us.” He held her hand tighter. She couldn’t see his face yet, but his voice was comforting to her. With a soft air of Texas to it, it droned on calm as an English teacher in the face of their impending, unpronounceable death.
“So, your friend… Where’ve they got him?” Jane hadn’t registered his meaning yet.
“Heaven.”
“You mean?”
“He’s dead, miss…” The Captain groaned, forcing the sob he was holding back into his gut. It wasn’t time to cry for Leaf just yet, despite the fact that he’d loved him like a brother.
“It’s okay… Think he had salvation. I used to hear him praying at night before the sickness finally took him. The night he went I could hear his rosary clicking against the bricks like he was trying to dig his way up the wall. Up to the angels that came to get him. If the angels ever came for somebody…
“It was over for him easy. He coughed three times, lost his breath. He wheezed just for a second like he was scared, but I knew he was ready. When I called his name, he didn’t answer, and I knew…” The Captain’s voice trailed off. Jane felt him massaging her fingers.
“It’s okay…You’re Jane, right? Your friends were looking for you that night. I hope they found you, so that you got to say goodbye. This won’t last much longer. We’ll go soon. It won’t hurt as much. If they try to come for us before you get sick and I’m still strong enough, I’ll break your neck. It’ll be over before you feel it. Then they won’t torture you like they do the others…
“That’s the worst part. I hear them scream at night. Mostly from the pain of whatever they do to them. And they do everything. Sometimes they sound hungry. Sometimes it’s just sorrow, like they’re so tired of being alone. They cry out and I understand… I wish it was over for all of us. I wish we could all go wherever Leaf…” He coughed and shook his head falling silent.
Jane clutched at his hand, feeling it grow limp.
“We’re not dead yet and I’m not sick. If I can get down from this thing sticking me, I could get us loose. We could, at least, try to break out of here, right? Don’t you think that’s what Leaf would have wanted?” Jane wasn’t ready to give up yet. That just wasn’t in her nature. The Captain coughed and didn’t answer.
“Derek?” She thought it would be better to call him by his given name.
“I can’t leave here without his remains. He might have
wanted me to come up from here alive, but… You see, I couldn’t live with myself if we didn’t both come out. I can’t stand the thought of what might happen to his body. They say there’s an assassin here that will sometimes eat the people she murders. They say it’s because she’s crazy and feels the pain that Leona inflicts on them, so she tries to swallow the agony left behind in their corpse. I wonder if it works. I don’t know for sure and so… so I couldn’t leave him.” Jane twisted around despite the pain. Finally, she could see him, if only because he was leaning close to her in the dark. His emerald eyes danced in horror and pain. She wished for him that it was over. Something told her he was dead already, if only in the soul.
“Nobody said anything about leaving Leaf. We’ll carry him out. The two of us could lift him over our shoulders. I imagine he got pretty skinny there at the end…”
“Bones and paper, miss. His face shrank around his chin and he didn’t even look like the same Leaf. He laughed and told me I should call him “Autumn” because that’s what leaves do in autumn… they shrivel.” Captain Matheson coughed and shook himself. He was talking out of his head in half-tones that belied creeping insanity. Despite his apparent calm, Jane could see now that he was on the verge of cracking. That he was talking now just to keep the fear at bay until the very end.
“Are you chained up or stuck like me?” Jane coughed. She felt blood spew down her face, but chose to ignore it for the dying soldier’s sake.
“I’ve got a lot of something sticking into my ribs… I can’t move much or I would have gone to him and closed his eyes. They were green and uncannily beautiful before the flies started eating them. I loved him like he was my brother. Wonder if he knew that…” The Captain let out a tiny whimper and Jane could sense him trembling.
“We’ll close his eyes. If nothing else, we’ll close his eyes. I promise. I’ll get down first. I’m not as stuck.” With one epic thrust, crying out to the silent catacomb, Jane drove her feet into the brickwork and yanked herself off the spike. Her impalement wound wasn’t as bad as she thought it might be. It was very narrow and only bled in spurts, generally having warped closed from the smallness of the wound and the flesh-atrophying cold of the dungeon. She pressed her fist to it to keep it from opening, thanking God that the spike had missed her spine. She looked up feeling her whole body jar when she felt the Captain fingering her wound, trying to staunch it with a bandana that had been tied around his neck.
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