by Matt Turner
A sudden burst of pain stabbed into her left ankle, bringing her back to reality with a gasp. What? She glanced down, suddenly sure that she had glimpsed Lieutenant Krakowsky’s dead hands wrapped around her. But no, there was nothing other than a few spatters of blood spilled on the dirty floor.
The shriek of the train whistle ripped through the world like the roar of a wrathful god. In response, the gunfire began again, but the soldiers were shooting blind; Vera’s explosion had seen to that. But there was no time left, no goddamn time!
“Fuck!” She sprinted into the haze, guided by nothing more than the roar on the tracks. Bullets whizzed around her and somewhere close, the Maxim began rattling again. A half-collapsed pillar burst out of the gloom before her, and she slid behind it, tearing her habit open in half a dozen places just as a burst of fire shredded the rubble around her. In spite of everything, she couldn’t help but let out a whoop of excitement. This was what being alive was all about!
“Oh God…”
A bloody and bruised hand reached out to her from below the pillar. She jerked in surprise to see that Petyr’s body lay before her, nearly entirely buried by rubble. She could only barely make out his bloodshot eyes, peering out at her from beneath the bloodstained marble.
“Help me,” he gasped in a wretched voice. “Oh Christ…what have you done?”
His pleading fingers grasped at her, and she scornfully knocked them aside. To think that she had ever followed such a fool when she had had such explosive power at her fingertips!
“I do only what is necessary for the Revolution,” Vera said. It was now impossible to make out the whine of individual bullets over the roar of the train, but she gambled the smoke would obscure her awhile longer. “Good-bye, Petyr.” Just to be safe, she lit a thirty-second fuse with her cigarette and placed it by his head—it would hurt the People’s Will if he were taken alive.
“Don’t leave me,” he begged. “Vera!”
She plunged into the fog of war once again, the carpetbag pressed against her chest. The floor beneath her vibrated with the clashing metal of the tsar’s train—the locomotive had already passed, but that was all right; she still had a chance.
A great whoosh of air suddenly cleared the smoke ahead of her. Before her stood half a dozen soldiers, rifles at the ready, and behind them, at last, she saw the train. Rows of blurred, frightened faces peeked out at her as the passenger cars hurtled past. Inside the carpetbag, she placed the cigarette a bare millimeter from an army’s worth of explosives.
“Anarchist!” One of the soldiers reflexively fired at her, but his shot went wide. Another joined in; his bullet left a bloody furrow through her cheek. Inside the carpetbag, she gripped the detonator.
Time slowed down to a crawl as another bullet crashed into her left shoulder. There was little pain, only a numbness as her arm went limp. The carpetbag would have fallen from her grasp had she not seized one of its handles with her teeth. And still she sprinted toward the train; it was barely five meters away now. She could make out curtains emblazoned with the royal seal decorating the windows—she was so close!
One of the soldiers dropped his rifle and rushed to tackle her. It was too late to change direction; she instinctively dived low, felt his legs give out from her blow, and her sheer momentum carried the both of them forward. Bullets tore at her, but she paid them no mind; her mission was nearly complete.
The soldier’s head jerked backward and exploded as it collided with an outcrop of railing from the train. Vera gazed at the passenger car, only centimeters away, and chuckled.
“For the People’s Will!” she cried out through the handles of the carpetbag. The cigarette slipped out from between her fingers.
Every window for half a kilometer shattered as all St. Petersburg heard her death.
8
Simon jerked back to consciousness to find himself floating in a world of red. What? He instinctively flailed his limbs about. In response, the world shifted with a sickening lurch, and he found himself on the verge of vomiting.
Where am I? His movements felt sluggish and weak, as though some force were resisting him. He struggled to find his bearings—red to the sides, blackness below, and a dimming light above. Unbidden, faces swam through his memory…the heretics he had slain, Bishop Vaux, and Amaury. At first, he thought the sickening sensation he felt was his own heart, pulling him down. He let out a deep sigh, and was surprised to see a bubble of air escape his lips.
In a flash, everything became clear. He was underwater. And he was sinking.
He kicked his feet together and felt them brush up against something soft and squishy. Simon glanced down to see that he was not alone—in the fading light, he could make out a white-haired, bloated crone reaching up for him from the depths. Her blank eyes were nearly lost in the many folds of her grotesque, bone-white skin, and her naked body was so swollen and bloated that Simon initially had trouble recognizing her as human—it was as if she had drowned a century prior and had never noticed.
He frantically kicked his legs together, trying to escape the horrific monster, and reached for his torso to wrench his armor off, only to discover that he, too, was naked. It was not a comforting thought as the bloated corpse wrapped a hand about his ankle. Her flabby, fleshy grip was surprisingly strong. Let go, you bitch. Simon kicked his free foot at the monster’s arm, but still it clung on.
The darkness below began to shift, and suddenly Simon could make out the dim outlines of more pale, rotten faces peering up at him. Shit. He gritted his teeth, pulled his free foot back, and slammed it with all his strength into the bloated woman’s face. Her saturated flesh and swollen features barely offered any resistance as he buried his foot through the eggshell-thin boundary of her skull. A thick plume of her leaking brains engulfed Simon’s vision, and her grip loosened.
There was no time to revel in his victory as Simon kicked his way out of her grasp. His lungs were beginning to burn, and so he looked up for the source of the light. He had only an instant to make out the dark shadow plummeting toward him before another of the bloated bodies—this one a man with skin as dark as coal—slammed down into him and wrapped arms, with skin stretched so tight it looked as though they were about to burst, around him, pinning his arms to his sides in a great bear-hug. Simon found himself face-to-face with the man’s rotten face, so swelled by decay that he could not tell whether it were laughing or snarling.
They sank together into the blackness below as more hands eagerly grasped at Simon. Bodies floated around him on all sides now, obscuring what little illumination there was to a dim twilight. It was all he could do to swallow down the raw terror and disgust that threatened to swallow up his mind. Stay calm, Simon told himself. This was a dream, nothing more. Any second now, he would wake back up in his chambers at the Castle de Montfort.
But even if this was a dream, he’d be damned if he lost to a gang of rotting sea slugs.
With the last pocket of air in his lungs, he exhaled. It was impossible to tell which way was up or down, for so many bodies engulfed him that he had lost any sense of direction. Sure enough, in the minuscule light, he could just barely make out the bubble drift to his legs and vanish in the frothing darkness of bodies. They must’ve spun me upside down.
Simon had been raised since birth for one thing: the ability to inflict violence upon others. He was a master of knightly violence—he could swing a sword, shoot a bow, and stab a lance with the best of them. But any man could learn those skills if he had enough time and a decent trainer. The brutal bone-breaking, eye-gouging, blood-soaked method of violence—with only bare inches between the combatants—could only be taught on the battlefield. And Lord Simon de Montfort had been to many, many battlefields.
His arms were still pinned to his sides by the bloated man, but there was more than enough room to rock his leg back and slam his knee up into the naked man’s groin. The thing’s guts ruptured open, spilling entrails about, and it released Simon with a squeal that echoed
through the depths. Simon twisted about, placed his feet on the corpse’s head, and kicked upward to where the bubble had gone. The bloated thing hurtled into the depths below him, still gushing out its guts in a thick fog that obscured the water even further.
A pair of hands clutched at Simon’s throat. He intercepted them and viciously twisted, intending to break the thing’s wrists—and was utterly surprised when the thing’s flesh practically dissolved under his powerful grip. Fuckers are so waterlogged they can’t even stay together. He ignored the burning in his lungs and sneered in triumph.
Up he went through the flock of them. He hammered them with his fists, hurled them into one another, blinded them with their own refuse, and silently laughed in glee as their bodies fell to pulp before him. This is what fighting heretics should be like, by God! He couldn’t remember the last dream he had enjoyed so much.
The light from above was bright enough now that he could make out more of their features. As he seized one by its legs and bodily ripped it in half, he suddenly caught a flash of red hair in the corner of his eye. Still grinning, he turned his head to follow the movement. Swimming away, are we?
Three inches from his own, Amaury’s glazed eyes bored into his soul. The shock was too great; Simon shrieked in horror at the sight of his son. The foul water gushed down his throat, into his lungs, and Lord Simon de Montfort finally realized that this was no dream, for the pain was all too real.
9
Vera awoke gradually. My head. She groaned inwardly as she stirred from her sleep. It felt as though someone had gone over her brains with a red-hot coal.
She sat up and rubbed at her face. “I will never fucking drink again,” she mumbled. This was already shaping up to be the worst hangover of her life. “Christ.” She reached for her pillow to slam it against her face a few times to better wake up—and stopped as her fingers slid into something cold and slippery.
Fuck. She was in the gutter again; she should have never gone drinking with Petyr and his friends.
“Shit.” She groaned as she looked up to survey her surroundings. “Someone just fucking…” Vera gasped in horror, and the words kill me died on her lips.
A darkened sky loomed above her, shrouded in thick thunderclouds through which only the occasional stab of lightning could be seen. Somewhere in the distance, massive pieces of hail slammed down into the soft, pulpy plain—even from kilometers away, she could make out the dark shapes raining from the sky.
What is this? Vera rose to her feet and nearly fell on the slippery terrain. She looked down and let out a cry of disgust—stretching all around her was a vast field of blackened, oozing, churned-up mud. Her feet began to slip deeper into it, up to her calves, chilling her to the bone. She yanked her left foot out of the muck and winced at the sight of her blue skin. Raised above it was a grotesque patch of reddened flesh that gazed at her like a bloodshot eye—whatever it was, it certainly hadn’t been there before.
“Where are my goddamned shoes?” Vera said out loud. It was almost a relief to worry about something so mundane in such a nightmarish setting. And above her ankles… She instinctively used her hands to cover herself. “And where the hell are my clothes?”
The only response she received from her miserable surroundings was a faint gust of cold wind that carried a disgustingly familiar stench. Vera wrapped her arms about herself and shuddered; now that she had noticed it, the smell of the mud-plain about was quickly becoming unbearable. And somehow it was so familiar. A memory came to her. Petyr had proposed tunneling into the Winter Palace, and so they had spent weeks blundering through the decrepit sewers of St. Petersburg. And now…
“Shit!” She instinctively jumped back, accomplishing nothing but spattering more of the ice-cold filth across her legs. For a moment, she swayed in place and wrapped her hands over her mouth. A wave of bile made its way up her throat, but with a violent effort she forced it back down.
“Not real,” she gasped. “It’s not real.” To prove her point, she pinched her own cheek, and felt a lurch of fear when she sensed the pain. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not real!” She clawed at her face, drawing gashes across her pale skin, and screamed in utter despair as the pain only grew and salty tears of blood began to drip down her cheeks.
“GODDAMNIT,” she roared, and with a final sob she collapsed to her knees, heedless of the filth about her. What happens now? It was painfully obvious where she was—she did remember dying, after all—and she even understood why she was there, but—
What now? She sat there in the mush, so overcome by panic that she could barely remember to breathe. Kilometers away, the sky darkened further as the storm continued to rage.
At last, some semblance of calm returned to her mind. “I’m not done,” she muttered to herself. She rose to her feet and shuddered violently; her skin was quickly turning blue from the cold. To think, Mother always told me it was going to be hot. The thought brought a bitter smile to her face.
I’m not done. With that single thought to warm her damned soul, Vera Figner trudged into what she later found to be the Third Circle. For hours she walked, aiming for the distant horizon, to the point that she lost all feeling below her thighs. A soul-crushing loneliness descended on her as she splashed and slogged through the freezing, fetid mud. Is this my own private hell? Am I alone?
She didn’t dare to look back for fear of seeing how slow or meaningless her progress was, but her ears eventually told her that the storm was swiftly approaching. A thin mist of sleet began to rain down around her, numbing her extremities even more, and quite suddenly a bolt of lightning exploded the muck barely ten meters away.
“SHIT!” She leapt back and shielded her eyes from the blinding flash. A wall of energy slammed into her body and she staggered backward, completely dazed. As she did so, something hurtled down from the sky and splashed into the filth where she had just stood.
“God damnit,” Vera cursed, more at the excrement that covered her whole body than at the close call she had just had. The sleet came down even more thickly now, greatly reducing her vision, but she could now hear similar splashes all around her. The hail raining down had to be absolutely enormous, she thought. She knelt to examine what had fallen from the murky sky and gasped in shock.
A man lay in the filth before her. His features were difficult to make out from the blood that leaked from his nose and mouth, but he seemed to be a tanned, dark-haired man, with just the hint of a beard on his lean features. An Arab? She looked down at his unresponsive face. No, not quite.
Lightning cracked overhead—she instinctively glanced up and screamed. The sky above was now filled with human bodies. Some bodies floated along the screaming winds, but the vast majority were simply falling.
“OH FU—” Vera howled just as twenty of them smashed into the ground around her. The sheer force and cacophony of their impacts was overwhelming—it was something similar to what she imagined an artillery barrage to be like. An arm, severed by the force of impact, whistled past her head and she instinctively hurled herself prone against the unconscious man. There was no time to think; she burrowed herself as deep as possible into the filth to hide from the unholy bombardment.
“Shit,” she cursed reflexively. Another body crashed beside her, spraying sharp flecks of bone in every direction. She winced as one cut across the bridge of her nose. “Shit shit shit shit shi—”
Whether he was awakened by the intensity of the bombardment or the naked woman screaming curses in his ear, Vera did not know, but a tremor passed through the stranger’s body as he violently jerked awake. She recoiled from him with a cry of disgust and instinctively covered herself with her hands. The howling storm and the falling bodies were one thing, but Vera was damned if she was going to let this old bastard sneak a peek.
The man sat up, gently wiped the blood from his face, and turned to survey Vera with eyes that were both sad and distant. His lips moved, but his words were lost in a clap of thunder overhead.
The f
reezing sleet and wind brought tears to Vera’s eyes, but she forced herself to meet the man’s gaze with a glare of her own. I liked Hell better when it was empty, she decided. “What the hell are you looking at?”
“Vera Figner,” the man said softly. She jerked in surprise at her name. His eyes flickered down at her ankle, and he nodded to himself. “Forgive me.”
In a swift motion, he lunged out and seized her by the hair. She raised a fist to hit him but he easily slapped aside her arm, and she felt a sharp tug of pain as he jerked her head down—right onto the knee that he had slammed upward.
Vera felt the cartilage in her nose crack with a horrific snap. For a moment, darkness crawled at the corners of her vision as pain engulfed her face—it was all she could do to stay conscious. The man let go of her hair, allowing her to topple back into the waste with a splash.
“You bastard.” Vera moaned. Her entire face felt as though it were broken. “I’ll fucking kill you—”
“We will meet again.” His voice was remarkably calm in spite of the suddenness of the attack. He turned away from her and began to walk into the mist. “You should run.”
“Go to h—” Vera called out after the disappearing figure. The last word died on her lips; she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She settled on another cry of “Bastard!” instead. But the strange man was already gone, and the storm seemed to be dying with him. No more bodies rained down from the sky, and the sleet began to diminish to little more than a light drizzle.
Vera didn’t care. “God.” She moaned as she reached up and lightly brushed a finger against her smashed nose. It felt as though the old bastard’s blow had broken it in at least two places. And the blood…she spat out a thick gob of it onto the muck. There had to be at least a liter of the stuff dripping down the back of her throat. She gazed at the bright-red puddle she had spat out. Blood and shit and pain. Is that my world now?
As if in answer, a slight tremor made the small puddle ripple. She blinked, certain that it was her imagination. But no, the tremor repeated itself, and a tiny wave grew within the puddle of blood. More bodies? She looked up at the sky, but the storm had passed as suddenly as it had come—not a single one of the monstrous pieces of hail was in sight. She leapt up to her feet, every one of her senses on high alert.