by Matt Turner
There was only one logical conclusion: through sheer blind luck, the will of the gods, or some other twist of fate, Kapitän Fritz Rybka had stumbled across a new Horseman—War, judging by the similarity between Simon and Longinus. As a Prophet of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace, he was obligated to immediately eviscerate Simon and drag his bleeding corpse to the city of Dis for dissection and containment.
I have a better idea. Fritz, loath as he was to admit it, was one of the few Prophets without any sort of powers. He was no former Horseman and he had not been one of the extremely lucky few to bind themselves to one of the extremely rare demonic survivors of the Second Rebellion. All he had was cunning, a few toys he had built over the years, and a natural affinity for inflicting pain—all worthy traits in their own right, but hardly fitting of an Übermensch. But now, a solution had fallen right into his lap. He hungrily gazed at the spot on Simon’s shoulder blade where the Mark lay.
That power will be mine, he swore. There was a ritual of some kind, some means of transference, but he had no idea how to conduct it. No matter; he knew of others who certainly did—there was that woman doctor in the Fourth Circle, for one thing—and it would only be a matter of time until he could conduct it himself. And when that’s done, Frenchman, he thought with a nasty grin, only then will I give you over to the Flagellants.
His time was finally coming, and all Hell would quake when it arrived.
18
“Ain’t it beautiful, darling? Reminds me of my early days in good ol’ Florida.” Pliers had to raise his voice to be heard; the clash of machinery only grew louder as they descended into the depths of the factory.
Vera had no idea in which layer of Hell Florida lay, but it had to be in the deepest, darkest pit, for the staircase that Pliers was dragging her down—the same one that Cenodoxa had emerged from earlier—had the most ungodly stench she had ever encountered, even worse than the shit fields of the Third Circle. She hacked and gagged, but the guards behind her refused to let her slow down for even a second, going so far as to slash at her back with their bayonets at random intervals.
She received a rifle butt to the back of the head when Pliers suddenly came to a stop on one of the flights, forcing her to screech to a halt as well. “God damnit,” she cursed as her vision blurred. “Stop hitting me, you fucks—”
“Here we are,” Pliers said happily. “Oh God, I can’t wait to see the look on your face.” With a merry chuckle, he pulled a chain of keys from his pocket and unlocked an iron-slabbed door built into the concrete wall. “This is gonna be great!”
One of the guards pulled the door open with a grunt of effort, to reveal…
Vera felt vaguely disappointed by the sight. She had expected some sort of grand torture chamber or hellish prison, but instead all that greeted her was…a typical office. True, the bookshelves that lined the walls and the desk in the center of the room were made out of a strange reddish wood that had far too many carvings of human faces for her liking, and the animal hide lying in front of the roaring fireplace had a bit too many horns protruding from it, but other than that, it was as if she had been transported back to her previous life and was in a bourgeois antechamber for a wealthy capitalist. That was still technically true, she decided. The only significant difference was the ungodly stench that permeated everything.
A churchman—she could tell immediately from his too-tight collar, uncomfortable-looking garb, and smug look—glared at them from beside the desk. “My appointment comes first,” he said without any sort of introduction. He seemed to have some difficulty standing up—and that was when Vera noticed that, from his shoulder down, the entire right side of his body was missing.
“Fuckin’ Flagellants,” one of the guards muttered under his breath.
“Quite true.” The woman behind the desk glared even more sternly at the unwelcome newcomers and tapped a thick ledger on the blood-red wood. “These ones don’t have an appointment at all.”
“Yeah, well, I want to see Cenodoxa,” Pliers said petulantly. “She owes me big for this last haul—”
“The Church of the Fallen Father comes first,” the churchman interrupted. “I’ll have you know that the Holy See scheduled this appointment three months ago, heathen.”
“The doc is a big supplier of yours, true, but who do you think supplies her?” Pliers snapped. “I’ll come in here whenever I damn well please, Brother Half-man.”
The churchman flushed. “Through my sacrifice, I have drawn closer to God than any of you.” He pointed at them angrily and nearly lost his balance on his one remaining leg. “I have touched the divine. I have escaped from the bonds of flesh!”
“You also helped make my steak the other day,” Pliers mocked. “Thanks for the red meat, by the way.”
“That’s enough,” Cenodoxa said, mercifully cutting off the red-faced churchman’s tirade before it could even begin. She strode into the room from a small door behind the desk, casually wiping off her hands with a dark rag. “What do you all want?”
“I have an appointment to discuss the Church’s funding of your experiments,” the churchman immediately burst out as soon as the question had left her lips. He clumsily pulled a packet of papers from the inside of his jacket and laid them on the table. “Prophet Ellie in particular questions your progress—”
“The funding will remain the same,” Cenodoxa said flatly. “Tell Prophet Ellie that I will have another two shipments of material for the Church within the next weeks, and do inform her that my research would progress more quickly if not for all these tiresome meetings with irritating underlings. The Prophet is more than welcome to come here herself, if her legs will permit it.”
The churchman gazed at her in astonished horror as the doctor turned to Pliers. “You don’t have an appointment,” she said.
“So I’ve been told.” Pliers made a pitiful attempt at a flourishing bow. “Doc, I have a favor to ask. I want to show this one”—he poked at Vera with his pistol—“some of your treatment rooms.”
Cenodoxa’s clever eyes danced up and down Vera, carefully assessing her every bruise and flaw. “Why? This one is frail and has little muscle mass. She’ll be seeing them soon enough.”
Capitalist whore. Vera bit her lip to keep herself from shouting the insult out. A true revolutionary picks her battles, she thought. Aw, the hell with it. “Capitalist whore.” She spat a gob of phlegm onto the rug and received a shallow slash across her back with a bayonet for her trouble.
“This one’s special to me, Doc.” Pliers reached over and rustled Vera’s hair. For a brief second, images again flooded Vera’s brain—Pliers’s fifth birthday with his parents, the combination to his locker in high school, his first ra—and then they were gone. “I want her to have some anticipation, know what I mean? It makes it better.”
Cenodoxa glared down at the gob of phlegm on the floor. “Is that so,” she said. “Myra, clean that up.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the secretary muttered. She pushed her way past the fuming churchman and wiped up the spit with a spare rag.
“Your pastimes are your own business, Mr. Bittaker.” Cenodoxa looked up into Vera’s rebellious eyes. “But I don’t like it when little fools make messes that I have to clean up. Very well, I’ll show this one a room. It may scare some obedience into her.”
“I have the perfect subject for you, then!” Pliers beamed. He cast a wicked look at Vera. “She’s a Jap upstairs. Name of Akazome Ogata.”
The woman we saved, Vera remembered. She and Signy had persuaded the man in the stiltwalker to not toss her aside like a broken plaything. Judging from Cenodoxa’s red-stained hands and Pliers’s gleeful giggling, they had only pushed her into a much worse fate. “You bastard—” she raged. This time, the guard behind her didn’t even bother with her back; he stabbed down into her right calf, causing her to fall to the floor with a cry of pain as blood spilled from her wound onto the floor.
“That’s twice you’ve polluted my office.” Cenodoxa’s
flat voice lacked any hint of anger or malice, which somehow made it all the more terrifying. “Fetch me this subject, then.”
“You got it, Doc.” Pliers giggled. He winked at Vera. “See ya soon, darlin’.” With a jaunt in his step, he merrily left the door through which he came.
“We may as well begin the tour now,” Cenodoxa said. “Get up.”
Vera tried to stand up, but the stabbing pain in her calf was so great that it made her cry out and fall back down.
The two guards, the churchman, and even the secretary chuckled, but Cenodoxa’s face was made of cool iron. “You are wasting my precious time. Get up, or I will perform on you instead of your friend.”
“Bitch.” Vera groaned, but with a massive effort, she somehow forced her way through the pain and regained her footing. The doctor turned around and purposefully strode for the other door, forcing Vera to painfully keep up.
The churchman and the two guards silently fell into line behind her.
“I will take you to Room A,” Cenodoxa said as they entered a dark stone hallway that stretched out into blackness before them. “It is a relatively simple mechanism, but early results appear promising.” She stopped at the first door on the right and began to unlock a series of deadbolts and chains. “The idea for this one came to me from a Sister in the Church of the Fallen Father. Her name eludes me…”
“Sister Tarpeia,” the churchman said from behind them.
“That’s it,” Cenodoxa said, although whether she was referring to him or the door that suddenly swung open, Vera had no idea.
The guards shoved her in after the doctor, and once again Vera found herself surprised at her surroundings.
They were in what looked like a laboratory. Piles of papers and notes were scattered across a handful of workbenches further decorated with strange tools and implements. Light flickered down from several torches mounted on the walls, bathing everything in an eerie glow. Several bookcases—also made out of that strange wood—stood in the center of the room, their shelves lined with hundreds of large glass bottles, each containing a chunk of what was undeniably flesh that floated in a small sea of green liquid. The smell of rotting meat was so rank that it brought tears to her eyes.
“There is only one constant in life.” Cenodoxa strode to one of the bookcases and pulled one of the glass vials from it. “Tell them, Brother.”
The churchman cleared his throat. “Death.”
“And there’s only one constant in death,” Cenodoxa finished. “Do you know what that is, prisoner?” She gave Vera a pointed glare as the mushy thing in the vial began to splash about.
Vera could feel her throat tightening at the repulsive sight. “Life.”
“Correct. But here, my research, funded by both the Kingdom and the Church, seeks to break that final boundary.” Cenodoxa carefully placed the vial back on the shelf and pulled down another. “Here, I seek to make the damned finally die.”
“To be finally released from Purgatory and to embrace the love of God,” the delusional churchman said.
One of the guards rolled his eyes.
Cenodoxa paid no attention to either of them. “My other rooms focus on the body,” she explained. “Electrocution, poison, shooting, burning, stabbing, impaling, hacking—every possible way to kill a man, but I have found no success there, and I suspect I never will. If there is even a scrap of body left—no matter how minuscule—the healing process will eventually kick in, and the subject will gradually regenerate. It may take millennia—I have one subject who has only grown back his little toe in the last two hundred years—but it always happens eventually. The ones who still have mouths inform me that the subject retains awareness. I am assured it is an uncomfortable process.
“The source of life lies in the brain,” she mused to herself. She carefully held the vial up to the light, exposing the gray mass that dwelt within it. “Destroy that, and there is no hope of existence…or so I thought. But it is a tricky beast. Tear it into a thousand pieces and separate them—nine hundred and ninety-nine will rot away, but there is always one that endures, retaining consciousness and allowing the subject to heal.”
“And that is where this one comes in!” Pliers sang out merrily. He shoved a terrified-looking woman—Vera recognized that it was indeed Akazome Ogata—into the room. “Which one are you using today, Doc?”
Cenodoxa strode to the far wall and flicked some sort of switch. Stark bright light suddenly illuminated the darkened corner, drowning out the flickering candles and revealing the great slab of iron that jutted down from the ceiling. “The steam press today,” she announced. She pulled on a lever. Somewhere in the walls, the clamor of machinery began. “I have a theory on the structure of the East Asian cerebellum that I want to test.”
“Right-o,” Pliers said merrily. He lashed out with one of his boots at Vera’s bleeding leg as he passed her, knocking her back down to the ground.
“Please, no,” Akazome begged in a voice that was hardly louder than a whisper. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she fruitlessly dug her heels into the bloodstained floor.
“Help me with one, will you, fellas?” Pliers asked.
One of the guards kept his rifle trained on Vera, but the other seized Akazome by one of her wrists and dragged her to the far side of the room. Once there, the two men beat her to the ground and chained her arms, legs, and torso to several manacles that extended from the floor. The great iron weight—it had to be three meters long by two meters wide—loomed just over the terrified woman’s head.
“Maybe this experiment shall be my last,” Cenodoxa said. “Maybe I can finally isolate the source of the human soul and kill it.” She shrugged. “Anything is possible with science, after all.” She pushed the lever a little further, and the heavy iron weight began to slowly descend from the ceiling. The hydraulic pump lowering it hissed and spat steam like a raging banshee.
“My daddy once told me a story,” Pliers said over the hiss of the steam. “Back in the War, they had a special name for the Japs. Zipper-heads, they called them. That’s what they looked like when the tanks were done rollin’ over them, you see.”
They had placed Akazome so that she was facing upward.
“Listen to those screams,” Pliers knelt and whispered in Vera’s ear. “Do you know whose fault this is?”
“For the love of God, please!” the woman screeched, louder and louder as the press slowly descended closer and closer. “I’ll be good. I’ll do anything. MERCY—”
“It’s yours,” Pliers said breathlessly. His voice was ragged and straining. Beads of sweat popped on his glistening forehead. His every muscle was taut with anticipation. “I only picked her because of you. Don’t close your eyes, whore. This is your fault.”
Vera did not close her eyes. The press made contact. There was a snap as Akazome’s nose shattered, then an instant of horror as her skull bulged under the pressure, a sudden explosion of blood and brains, and then the press slammed against the stone floor as if her head had never been there to begin with.
“The body will be in our next shipment, I trust?” the churchman asked, eying the headless corpse that lay on the ground.
“It’s separated from the head, so it’s only meat now,” Cenodoxa said. “It will be in the next shipment to the Church.” She reversed the controls, lifting up the press, and began to scoop up the gore in her hands.
“Only one more thing to show you, bitch,” Pliers gloated. He yanked Vera up by her collar and dragged her out to the hallway again. She offered no resistance; even the pain in her calf was long gone, obliterated by the sheer cruelty of what she had just seen.
Once again, images of Pliers’s life flashed before her in response to his rough touch. As shell-shocked as she was, she had no will to fight them. Instead, she let the random blurs and memories swallow her up.
Little Lawrence Bittaker, age five, at the first birthday party he can remember. The memories are foggy and blurry—there was a clown, a cake, pin-the-tail-o
n-the-donkey, and a woodshed.
She flashed back to the present, as Lawrence—or was his name Pliers? It was difficult to remember—dragged her back up the foul-reeking staircase.
“Titubaaaaa!” he called out as they stopped at another iron door that they had passed on their descent. “I have a visitor for you!” There was a howl of rage from behind the door as he unlocked it and pushed Vera inside.
Lawrence Bittaker, age seventeen, at the junior prom. These memories are clouded less by time, more by drink. He is drunk and angry that his date has abandoned him—females seem to have a way of doing that, he thinks in a moment of mingled fury and self-pity. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a pretty girl slipping away from the dance floor, heading for the parking lot. Probably forgot her purse or something, he decides. For a moment, he hesitates—and then he decides to follow her.
A lone woman stood in the room before them. A snarl of pure hate came on her face at the sight of Pliers, but the dozens of iron weights chained to her prevented her from doing anything but one repetitive motion—cranking a meter-tall gear attached to a vast network of pipes and machinery that snaked into the ceiling and walls, leaving barely any room to breathe. The work seemed to be excruciating; cords of muscle jutted out from beneath her bronzed skin, every centimeter of which was utterly soaked in rank sweat. Her breaths in the hot, stifling air were shallow and ragged, and jets of steam and boiling water seemed to spill from the pipes at random, scorching and burning her even more.
But there was a blazing fire in her emaciated face, one that hated with a passion Vera hadn’t dreamed even existed. “Hale,” the thing that could have been a she-devil croaked. “Hale.” With every crank, it repeated the word with more venom and malice.