Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  What the fuck is he talking about? Mucus mouthed to Simon.

  “Which is why we require a term of service before newcomers such as yourselves can become citizens and gain admission to Dis, our capital. As residents of the River Phlegethon, you are all suited for one thing and one thing only: war.” He repeated the final word several times in a multitude of languages.

  A rustle went through the crowd at that. He’s not wrong there, Simon grudgingly had to admit. War was something that he was damned good at.

  “You will all be made a part of the Thirteenth Legion,” the captain explained. “Through service to the Kingdom, you will break your chains and earn your citizenship. Lord Prophets Longinus and Fritz will directly oversee your abilities…and your enthusiasm.”

  Legion? Prophets? Simon was starting to grow weary of nothing making any damn sense. He opened his mouth to mutter something cynical and angry to Mucus, and then abruptly closed it. In the shadows of the shattered statue on which the captain stood, two new figures clad in dark-red robes had appeared, as silently and suddenly as ghosts. One of them—a tall man with a merry face and a head of blond curly hair—jumped up to the ruin and lazily sat upon it. The other one silently stood in the shadows that wrapped a veil of darkness against his weathered, bitter face.

  The captain looked over at the newcomers expectantly, clearly waiting for them to take command of the situation. Neither of them bothered to pay the slightest attention to him; the blond man was too busy picking at his fingernails, and the other one—it seemed to Simon that he was shorter and older—merely stared out over the gathered slaves with his cold, dark eyes. Somewhere in the mass of humanity, someone coughed.

  “The Prophets are the greatest guardians of the Kingdom,” the captain began awkwardly. Again, he repeated himself in multiple languages, all of which Simon found that he understood. “They are the right hands of the Holy Council, and represent the very best of humanity. Fight hard, and even the lowest of you may rise into their ranks.”

  A small smile flickered across the blond man’s lips. The other so-called Prophet’s face seemed to be carved of stone.

  “Prophets Fritz and Longinus have served our Kingdom with great loyalty—you should emulate their example!” The captain took a step back and gave an inviting motion to the two silent men. “And now, they will give you some words of inspiration.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause as the two Prophets exchanged a glare. The taller one must have lost the silent confrontation, for his shoulders slumped down in a sigh.

  “Don’t do drugs,” he said in a dull voice that betrayed his utter boredom. “Stay in school.”

  “Prepare yourselves for pain,” the shorter man rasped in a cold voice that had long gone numb from hate. “In this world, there is nothing but pain for the damned.”

  “Yeah, what Longinus said,” the other man agreed.

  A murmur of disbelief spread through the crowd. Even the sailors and men operating the stiltwalkers seemed to be taken aback. “These are the Prophets?” one of the sailors muttered somewhere near Simon in shock. “They’re supposed to be the baddest bastards in the Kingdom—why the hell would they show us a wrinkled old grandfather and a clown?”

  “Be quiet,” the captain shouted over the crowd. “You will show respect to your masters!”

  “Can we go now?” the one called Fritz yawned. “This is a waste of time. The meat grinder will have them all anyway.”

  The crowd grew even more agitated at his words, and a few reckless souls yelled out insults in spite of the patrolling stiltwalkers.

  “Slaves require discipline,” the older Prophet said in a voice so low that Simon was barely able to make it out over the angry rumblings. “A demonstration is in order. Pick one for us, Fritz.”

  Fritz sighed and rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine.” He nimbly leapt down from the torso of the toppled statue and strode toward the front of the line of slaves. With one hand, he reached into his blood-red cloak and withdrew a device of dark steel. The crowd of slaves began to nervously back away from his approach, making him chuckle. “Which one, which one?” he asked himself as he twirled the strange contraption (it was almost certainly a weapon of some sort; Simon was sure of it) from his right hand to his left, then back again.

  Down the line of captives he walked, carefully appraising faces and steadily drawing closer to Simon. He briefly paused in front of one of the slaves, a brown-haired woman, and suddenly seized her by the hair, ignoring her cry of protest. A look of pure venom crossed his face for a moment as he glared down at the squirming woman.

  “Lots of Jews here,” he scowled. “I can smell them.”

  “This batch has been smaller than most, my lord.” The captain coughed. “We can only spare one.”

  “You heard him,” Longinus growled. “Don’t be wasteful.”

  “Disgusting,” Fritz sneered, but he reluctantly released the woman and continued walking. “So many smiling faces here.” He chuckled. The laughter did not reach his eyes. “It’s difficult to know where to begin.” His cunning eyes flickered down the line and met Simon’s. Recognition began to dawn on his face, and he walked faster, his cloak billowing out behind him as he ignored the other captives.

  Underneath the rough tunic, something twinged in Simon’s shoulder blade as the Prophet drew closer.

  “Something about that one…” Fritz murmured to himself.

  Simon’s heart pounded in his eardrums as the man came closer and closer—whatever these Prophets had planned, he sensed that he absolutely wanted nothing to do with it. The pain in his shoulder grew to be more than he could bear, and he closed his eyes in a desperate attempt to blot it out.

  “Knew it!” Fritz called out in triumph. A spray of blood spattered Simon’s cheek as the Prophet viciously backhanded Mucus. “You little shit,” Fritz cursed as he wrenched a piece of metal away from the captive’s grip. “Thought you were gonna shank me, did you?”

  Mucus clutched at his broken nose and groaned. “Fuck your mother,” he spat out through a mouthful of blood. “Jesus, that hurt.”

  “I know that language,” Fritz said. All anger immediately left his tone as he stared down at Mucus in something like awe. A strange expression began to dawn on his face—one of absolute delight. “Vy russkiy?”

  Mucus did not respond quickly enough for the Prophet’s taste and received another blow to the face. “Da,” he groaned.

  “Excellent,” Fritz breathed excitedly. “Excellent! Krasnaya armiya?”

  Mucus shot a desperate glance over at Simon, but the older man was keeping his focus squarely on the dirt at his feet.

  “I asked you a question, Russian.” Fritz took a few steps back from the front line of slaves and began to draw what looked like a long length of chain from the sleeve of his cloak. The individual links were tipped with razor-sharp barbs of steel and immediately drew blood from the Prophet’s unprotected fingers, but he did not even appear to notice. “Red Army?”

  “Da,” the prisoner choked out. “Senior Sergeant Tarasovich, Second Tatsinskaya Guards Tank Corps—”

  In a lightning-fast movement, the weapon in Fritz’s hand lashed out and buried a foot-long metal spike in the center of the Russian’s forehead. For a moment, Mucus sat there, a confused expression on his face—and then Fritz yanked the chain back, tearing out a significant portion of skull and flesh from the captive’s face.

  “Looks like we have one, Longinus!” Fritz called out merrily over the screams of the man who thrashed and howled in the dirt before him.

  The other prisoners recoiled in horror as much as their chains would allow.

  Without so much as blinking, Longinus raised his fist and slammed it against the fallen statue. There was a mighty CRACK as the ancient marble gave way and a spider’s web of tiny fissures spread out across the headless and handless torso. With a last groan, the statue’s form utterly disintegrated into little more than a loose pile of dust and rubble.

  Holy shit, Simo
n thought in astonishment. Not possible—

  “What the fuck,” someone blurted out at the impossible sight, though whether they were referring to the smiling man slamming a blood-soaked, razor-embedded chain against a screaming captive missing half a face, or at the sight of a man disintegrating a statue with a single fucking punch, Simon never knew.

  “Maybe coming here wasn’t such a bad idea after all.” Fritz grinned. He slammed the chain over his shoulder and allowed it to curl around his body several times, ignoring the barbs that tore through his robes and drew blood from his torso. “I do love Bolsheviks so.”

  Two sailors ran forward and hurriedly unhooked Mucus from the line of slaves. For a moment, Simon was utterly free, unchained to anyone. I could run now, he realized. All attention was still focused on Mucus and the Prophet, who gleefully kicked at his body. I could run… He ever-so-slightly shifted his feet on the bloody sand, readying his legs for a desperate dash.

  He looked around to double-check whether anyone was looking at him, and his heart sunk. The Prophet called Longinus glared directly at him with his beady dead eyes. Not a muscle moved on the man’s stony face, but a cold pit formed in Simon’s stomach. Running would be a very stupid move, he sensed, and so he allowed himself to be re-chained back to the line of slaves as Mucus was dragged before the ruins of the statue.

  “There are not enough of you to justify a decimation.” Longinus’s words were quiet, but instantly silenced everyone else on the beach. The only other sounds were Mucus’s sobbing, the crash of the waves, and the faint rustle of the ash-tinged wind. “So today we conduct the fustuarium supplicium.” He pointed a single finger at Simon. “Prisoner. Approach.”

  There was nothing that Simon could do but grit his teeth, rise to his feet, and walk to the rubble of the statue. Pulled along by his chains, the front rank of slaves followed in his footsteps. Fritz motioned for him to stop just in front of Mucus’s thrashing, bleeding body. To Simon’s surprise, the Prophet picked up a piece of marble from the rubble and placed it into his hands.

  “Have at it, soldier.” Fritz winked.

  “Let this one be an example to all of you,” Longinus rasped.

  “And welcome to the Thirteenth Legion,” Fritz called out. “You know what to do, prisoner,” he said to Simon as he walked back down the line, handing out head-sized chunks of rock and marble to the other captives.

  Simon did indeed know what to do—once upon a time, he had even ordered it himself. He looked down at the man before him. His entire forehead and much of his scalp had been torn away by Fritz’s weapon, exposing his fractured, fissured skull to the air. Simon could even make out the dull-gray of brain bulging through some of the cracks. He raised his stone above him in the air, ready to unleash it.

  Senior Sergeant Mucogov Tarasovich’s bloodshot eyes gazed up at Simon’s face. “Please, Comrade…” he moaned.

  Simon gritted his teeth as he stared down at the man’s ruin of a face. And then he slammed the chunk of rubble down.

  15

  In the darkest moments of her young life, Vera had always clung to the teachings of Marx. It had been difficult, in those early days, sneaking out at night to hear the words of the rabble-rousing speakers, or to even sneak a pamphlet or two under the nose of the vodka-soaked filth she called a father. One night, it had been especially bad; the old man had accused her of selling off her body and had covered her face in bruises with his hard, knobby fists. She vividly remembered curling into a ball under her sheets, trying to stifle her sobs, and reaching out for the yellowed pamphlet of wisdom under her straw mattress. There she had read the words that changed her life forever: Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. It had given her such a rush of power, reading those words, and knowing that the Revolution would be impossible without her!

  Of course, it had been hard to remember those words the next time her father came home stinking drunk, and it had given her a sour taste in her mouth when she read the next line: Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included). Nevertheless, that was the moment she dedicated herself forever to the liberation of the proletariat—not out of some misplaced idealism like Petyr and the other members of Narodnaya Volya, but just to make a change, any sort of change at all, damnit, in the cold, hateful world she was born into.

  Well, now her twenty-nine years in that first world were over. With any luck, she had dragged the tsar down to Hell with her when she destroyed herself and his train (an act that she still took considerable pride in), but it was time to look forward. She was now in an even colder, more hateful world, something that she would have thought impossible just a few short days ago.

  But the hellish nightmare of the Fourth Circle was something that she feared not even the Revolution could touch. As the stiltwalkers led the line of chained women forward, she gazed in utter awe at the massive buildings that towered above them. They were massive, labyrinth expanses that hadn’t been assembled so much as thrown together, forming ramshackle fortresses that leaned against one another, intertwined hundreds of meters up in the air to form still-larger complexes that somehow resisted the pull of gravity. Many of the buildings seemed to have simply collapsed, forming still-smoking and burning mountains of rubble that further blocked the maze of streets, alleyways—and still workers tended to pounding, screaming machinery underneath the dark sky. The sky itself was nearly impossible to see, thanks to the ceiling of wires, pipes, and tottering bits of stone and steel that formed a thick layer high above their heads. Even the rare patches that did allow a streak of light to come through were tainted with the smog and smoke that streamed from a hundred thousand chimneys.

  Signy let out a great, hacking cough from behind Vera. “How do you breathe this?” she gasped out as tears streamed down her reddened eyes.

  You can’t. Vera took note of a group of workers passing them on the narrow, cluttered street. They all had on uniforms of rough tunic—she tried to cover up her nakedness once again—and their faces were all too familiar: pale, sunken, and narrow. One glanced up at her as he hurried by, and she was struck by the utter despair she saw in his eyes. They look just like my father.

  A yell of panic echoed above them, and there was a great screech of metal. From high above, a piece of masonry collapsed down, bringing half a dozen workers with it. Besides a quick glance upward to make sure nothing else was falling, no one in the street gave the debris and spatters of blood a second look. One of the captives ahead of Vera shrieked at the gore that covered her, and kept shrieking even when one of the stiltwalker operators bellowed down at her to shut the fuck up.

  As the stiltwalker’s mechanical arm reached down for the screaming woman, more of Marx’s words floated to Vera: The classes too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way. She looked away from what she knew was about to happen. The weak are doomed.

  “Pliers, you ugly fuck.” Signy pointed to the stiltwalker as it gently rested a pair of claws about the screaming captive’s head. “Make that one stop.”

  Pliers turned from the front of the long column of slaves and gave Signy a kind smile. “And why, pray tell, would I do that?”

  “Because otherwise I’ll fucking murder—”

  “You’ve lost twenty-three of us already,” Vera blurted out. And it was true; he had, largely thanks to the hellish conditions of the Third Circle and the stiltwalker’s penchant for crushing the skulls of anyone who acted up. “Nearly a quarter of us. If you lose any more…”

  Pliers chuckled. “You clearly don’t understand the economics of the Kingdom.” He grinned. “If I lost all but ten of you on the way here, I’d still be paid.” Nevertheless, he barked an order to the man in the stiltwalker, who reluctantly released the hyperventilating captive. “What’s your name, darling?” he kindly asked the woman.

  The terrified captive whispered something that was nearly inaudible. Pliers sig
hed and nodded to the man in the stiltwalker, who happily reached for her again. “A-Akazome Ogata!” she called out again.

  “Akazome fucking Ogata,” Pliers said slowly. He placed a gentle hand on her shoulder and partly pulled her out of the line so that he could turn her to face Signy and Vera. “Look at those two, darling. They just kept Miguel up there from crushing your brains out.”

  Akazome said nothing and meekly stared down at the ground.

  Pliers gave her a little shake. “Well? Aren’t you going to thank them?”

  “T-thank you.” Akazome shuddered.

  “That’s better.” Pliers smiled. He shoved her so hard back into the line that she would have slammed headfirst into the cracked pavement if her shackles didn’t hold her up. He gave Vera and Signy a cruel smile. “Akazome Ogata. I might just remember that name. Best not get too attached to her, you two.”

  “We already are,” Vera said slowly. She held up her shackled hands, connected to the steel link that bound all of Pliers’s captives together. “Attached, I mean.”

  Pliers’s ever-present smile turned into a scowl. “Shut your fucking mouth, whore.”

  “Relax, Lawrence.” Vera grinned. “I’m just pulling your chain.”

  Even Miguel had to laugh at that awful pun. “Hey, Pliers, why’s she calling you Lawrence? Is that your real name or something?”

  “Enough,” Pliers spat as his face reddened in fury. “We’re marching double-time, now.” Even so, he sullenly returned to the front of the column as they made their way through the sprawling graveyard of industry.

  At last, they arrived at their destination: a one-story brick warehouse nestled beneath two larger buildings that leaned and connected with each other over it. Vera had little time to do anything but try to squint through the fog of falling sparks and smog before Pliers led the captives through a barbed-wire fence and into the warehouse itself. They were immediately greeted with the piercing whine of machinery as they entered.