Hellbound

by Matt Turner

  37

  Simon lashed out with his great sword, reducing three more of the burning heretics to little more than a cloud of dust. It wasn’t enough, though; for every one of the corpses he cut down, two more appeared, and the heretics had managed to gain a foothold on the building’s yawning roof. Inch by inch, they steadily pushed him back with their sheer weight of numbers.

  “Butcher,” they whispered through their clacking jaws as they stumbled toward him, skeletal arms outstretched. “Butcher!”

  “It’s no use,” Amaury shouted. His guns were empty and he had been reduced to just using his knives; he was already bleeding fiercely from several wounds where the heretics had managed to claw and bite at him. He barely managed to dodge one of the corpse’s swipes at his face and ducked underneath its arm to slash a knife across its throat. The skeleton toppled to the roof with a crash as its vertebrae spilled out, but still the mob of the dead advanced, steadily shrinking the small circle that the de Montforts had. “Harpy, get help!”

  Podarge glanced up from the smoldering skull that she had been eagerly pecking at. The dead man on which she perched paid no attention to her as he slowly shuffled through the burning crowd. “Help?” the devil cawed.

  “Yes, help, goddammit,” Amaury screamed at her. He buried his hand in the rib cage of the skeleton he had just downed, ignoring the flames that bit at his fingers, and wrenched the decapitated body forward so that it slid just behind Simon. “What are you waiting for? Go!”

  “Rude,” the harpy muttered, but she reluctantly stretched out her ragged wings and flapped away into the skies above.

  Simon brought his great sword down, again and again and again, on the silent hordes, but he was steadily losing ground and he could feel even his great strength flagging with every blow. “I have an idea,” he gasped out as he wrenched his great sword free of a particularly large skeleton, tearing it in half from navel to forehead. “Stand back.”

  “Wait, no—” Amaury tried to say, but Simon had already brought one of his feet to crash against the roof with a mighty slam. The entire building trembled with an echoing CRACK—and in an instant, nearly half the structure fell away, taking hundreds of heretics with it.

  Simon’s scream of triumph barely lasted a minute, for as the dust cleared, he saw the horrifying sight below them. In the rubble of the half-demolished building, the burning skeletons were re-gathering. But now, instead of climbing up the walls, they clambered on top of one another. Within a few seconds, those at the bottom of the vastly growing pile were crushed into a loose pile of bones and dust, but it did not matter, for the foundation had been laid. A great burning ramp of human bone climbed up toward them, paving the way for the thousands of corpses that trudged up it.

  “God damnit,” Simon spat. “These bastards were a hell of a lot easier to kill the first time.”

  “Don’t do that! What if we had fallen?” Amaury snapped. “There’s still poison gas down there!”

  Simon wrenched up his great sword again. His arms were trembling from the exertion, he noticed; it took a significant amount of concentration on his part to ensure that his exhausted muscles remained still. “There’s no help coming, son,” he quietly said as the mob climbing the bones of the dead drew nearer. “It’s just us.”

  These dead looked different from the ones before; they still wore scraps of tattered armor and had a collection of motley blades and weapons. A rare few even still had a few pieces of roasted skin clinging to their bones. Faydits, Simon realized. They’ll be much more difficult. He shifted his stance and waited for the heretic warriors to come. They had killed him in life; he wouldn’t let them defeat him in death.

  “Not quite just us.” Amaury grinned and reached for the bag that he kept Manto’s head in.

  Before Simon could ask what he was doing, the first of the Cathar faydits leapt onto the shattered roof, a mace raised in its skeletal hand. Simon easily disemboweled it with a single swipe of his great sword, but it had bought just enough time for another dozen of its fellows to follow in its path. It would have been easy to give in to despair as their blades carved into his flesh and tore the great sword from his bleeding fingers, but Simon had faith in his son.

  Show me what you have, Amaury, he thought as one of the heretics, bearing the face of a grinning skull, swung a steel-studded club directly at his head.

  38

  For a single moment, time slowed to a crawl across the broken city of Hell. None of the players sensed the true magnitude of their actions. For a few precious seconds, the fate of billions trembled in the balance.

  In the depths of the disintegrating, burning Titan, Vera plummeted toward the great chain of flesh below, a mad laugh on her lips.

  John squeezed his eyes shut and held as tightly to Legion’s thrashing body as he could.

  Simon watched as the studded mace swung closer and closer to his face. In just a fraction of a second, he knew it would split the front of his skull open, spattering his brains out like a crushed fruit.

  Behind him, Amaury raised up Manto’s decapitated head and slammed it down onto the broken vertebrae of the headless corpse.

  Seth jammed his burning blade into the depths of Legion’s maw, but as fast as he chopped and sliced, more tendrils of flesh and grasping limbs reached for him.

  Farther back on Legion’s body, Lao desperately tore the sack off his shoulder and reached for the precious contents inside.

  ELIE hurtled down through the air, staring at the airship collapsing beside it. It could have pulled its parachute a long time earlier, but it wanted to make absolutely sure that Vera remained within the great tomb that fell from the skies.

  Salome and Giles rushed away from the fight on the back of Leviathan, terrified of the impending destruction of the airship.

  Legion cursed and raved and giggled and screamed and wept and squealed as they tore apart John’s tree-like body and reached for Seth. Victory was so close—the heaven-man was right there; they could taste the golden fields on his breath, could hear the Gates of Paradise creaking open! They would become God—no, greater, for there would be nothing else but them. In the end, Legion would simply be.

  In the depths of Judecca, Eve watched and waited in breathless anticipation. “There is only one God of Hell,” she muttered under her breath.

  Cain’s chains rattled in the blackness. “There is only one God,” he corrected. His golden eyes gleamed expectantly in the shadows. First, rebirth. As much as he longed for it, he was looking forward to what came after that even more.

  39

  Vera’s mad laughter died away as a thought came to her. Seth. The howling wind seemed to briefly become quieter as she remembered his gentle face. Are you serious? she asked herself scornfully. Soft-hearted idiot, who gives a fucking damn what he thinks? If she’d had her way, the goody-two-shoes would still be her slave, and they’d be well on their way to conquering Hell.

  …And yet, when he’d found out about her deception, he hadn’t immediately abandoned her, or given her a fate worse than death. That was far more than what Vera would have done if she were in his shoes. That’s because he’s a naïve idiot, she thought, but still the image of his face persisted. His piercing eyes, his strong jawline…

  “Goddamn it,” Vera swore, more furious with herself than she ever had been. “Fuck!” She wrenched herself forward, but the blade embedded in her chest sent another blazing shock of pain throughout the rest of her body. No use, she thought in despair.

  Only now the image of his face became even more vivid, as though she could almost reach out and touch it. I’m trusting you, Vera, he had said, and now his words burned even more than the blade. For the first time in her life, Vera Figner knew exactly what she had to do. Not a doubt existed in her soul; she had to make it to Seth, Hell itself be damned.

  She closed her eyes—but instead of reaching out to others, as she usually did, she looked within herself. Her cheeks burned with shame as she probed the inside of her soul and saw
the great swamps and fetid lakes overflowing with hateful monsters that endlessly spat and clawed at one another. All the sins she had ever committed, all of the lives she had ruined… Vera had never imagined that there would be so many.

  But her precious time was running short; she moved on, and at last, on the periphery of her brain, she found the complex system of nerves that regulated the sensation of pain. With a victorious smirk, Vera switched it off.

  A burst of pure adrenaline coursed through her body as her eyes snapped open. “Motherfucker!” she screamed as she wrenched herself free from the wall. The blade carved a hole through the center of her chest, scraping against ribs and vertebrae as it ripped out, but at last she was free, and she desperately scampered across the cockpit—now at a sixty-degree angle—as she rushed for the open door that ELIE had leapt out of. Blood slipped and pooled under her feet, and she very nearly crashed down to the floor, but she was just able to make it to the door and hurl herself out into the air.

  The airship continued to hurtle to the ground beneath her as she extended her arms and legs in an attempt to slow her descent. I’m free, she thought in triumph. And it was at this moment that Vera remembered she did not have a parachute.

  Vera’s shriek of utter panic was suddenly cut off as something dark and ragged rushed through the smoky air toward her. Razor-sharp talons stabbed into her shoulder blades as above her, something unfurled its wings—and quite suddenly Vera’s crazed fall became more of a controlled glide toward the ground below. I can fly? she thought dumbly.

  “Lucky you skinny,” a hoarse voice croaked in her ear. “Else Podarge not catch you.”

  “The fuck?” Vera craned her head back and caught a glimpse of the disgusting vulture-thing that had seized hold of her.

  The bird’s surreally human face crinkled with amusement at Vera’s gaping mouth. “Podarge brings help,” it squawked. “You want help, skinny-bones?”

  “Y-yes,” Vera stammered. “Er, thanks.” She stole a glance at the city below them and gulped. In spite of the strange bird’s wings, the ground was still approaching at an alarming rate. The airship continued to plummet down toward Legion’s bulk—and then, beside it, Vera saw the distinctive white cloth of a parachute being unfurled in the wind. She was certain that the entire crew of the airship had bailed out, which left only one possibility. ELIE.

  Vera pointed at the parachute below. “Bird,” she began.

  “Podarge,” the strange creature corrected.

  “Um, Podarge—that parachute, take me there,” she ordered.

  Podarge flapped her wings once in a gesture that was almost human. “Okay,” the bird-thing cawed, and then it let go of Vera.

  “Not what I meant, goddammit,” Vera howled as she hurtled to the ground once more, but her words were lost to the shriek of the wind. In an instant, she was nearly upon the parachuting figure. It glanced up, and Vera had a glimpse of a single red eye—and then her body slammed into the silken chute, warping it. For a mad moment, the two of them plummeted like rocks, but somehow Vera’s body slipped to the side, and before she could fully process what was happening, she became tangled up in a complicated knot of rope and fabric.

  ELIE jerked back in astonishment. “I impaled you,” it yelled. “How?”

  Vera lashed out with her foot, allowing the violently twisting and gyrating of the half-collapsed parachute to give her blow even more momentum. It crashed into ELIE’s iron face with a hollow gong. It did not slow the Prophet for a moment; Vera could feel the bones in her feet crack as ELIE seized her foot in its iron grip and gave it a nasty twist.

  “Down,” ELIE snarled, and it took hold of Vera’s leg with both hands and violently tore her out of the tangle of ropes. Vera screamed and scrabbled at the ropework of the parachute, trying to find some purchase before she was thrown to the ground below, but it was no use, for the Prophet’s grip was too strong.

  With one mighty tug, ELIE wrenched her free of the parachute, and Vera could feel herself falling to the ground once again. She had a brief glimpse of ELIE’s iron body rising beside her, and with one final desperate act, Vera clawed out with both her hands.

  Vera’s aim was nearly perfect; one of her hands wrapped around the harness around ELIE, bringing her body to a screeching halt an instant before she would’ve fallen once again. Her other hand uselessly scratched against the exterior of ELIE’s iron mask—all except for her pinky finger, which plunged into something wet and pulpy.

  ELIE let out a horrific scream as Vera stabbed her finger deep into the depths of the mask. “I’ll blind you, devil,” Vera bellowed at the slab of expressionless metal. Blood poured from the single hole carved into it as it spasmodically twitched and jerked. “How’s it feel, BITCH?”

  Once again their minds touched, but this time Vera was prepared for the unnerving experience; although she did not understand most of the strange caverns and clanking machinery in ELIE’s mind, she was able to process the Prophet’s next attack. The blade—which was, according to ELIE’s dispassionate analysis of the weapon, apparently coated with some sort of neurotoxin—that should have torn Vera’s head from her body sailed through empty space as Vera let go of the harness and dropped farther. She barely had enough time to wedge another finger into ELIE’s eyehole before she jerked to a stop once again, now barely held above the ground by only two fingers. The metal of the mask began to stretch and warp from the pressure of her weight.

  “Release me!” ELIE shrieked. Its legs thrashed out, trying to kick her away, but Vera saw the attack coming and used the opportunity to wrap her free hand around the belt of the Prophet’s parachute harness. It was not a second too soon, for the steel slab over ELIE’s face was beginning to come loose—Vera could see tiny cracks beginning to form in the bloodstained metal as it sloped ever-downward.

  According to ELIE’s unnatural mind, it had at least a dozen more weapons on its person: another pair of spring-loaded blades hidden in its iron sleeves, several derringers locked into slots across its armor, a small vial of something called phosgene oxime hidden at the small of its back, a thing called a superconductor built into its chest—

  “I’ll fry your muscles from the inside, organic,” ELIE said in a terrible voice. It raised one of its hands to its chest and tore away a small panel that Vera had not noticed before, revealing a single red button overlaid on a complicated series of wires that snaked away into the rest of the Prophet’s armor. ELIE raised a fist, ready to slam it down. “Now—”

  Vera did not understand the weapon, but she somehow knew that if she stayed attached to the Prophet, her doom was a certainty. If she let go… “Podarge!” she screamed out as she let go of ELIE’s harness.

  But her fingers, still lodged in the Prophet’s eyehole, were stuck. For a horrifying second, Vera dangled from the iron mask, only able to watch in horror as ELIE’s fist crashed toward the red button—and then the front half of the mask finally gave way in a scream of shearing metal.

  Vera was not sure what she had expected to see under the mask—a demon maybe, or some strange automaton with a face of whirring gears and blinking lights. But, as she fell away from the metal-clad figure, she saw neither of those things. The beautiful face of a stunning woman, albeit one with an eye socket gushing blood, gazed down at her from the ruins of the mask.

  The woman opened her cherry-red lips in a hateful snarl that turned her face from angel to devil. “My face!” she howled. “Give it b—”

  Her armored hand brushed up against the red button on her chest, and a surge of electricity crackled across her metal armor. A dozen tendrils of lightning coursed out in every direction, setting the parachute alight, as ELIE let out a final scream. Vera had a brief glimpse of the lightning tearing the beautiful face to blackened ash, and then the light grew so powerful that she had to close her eyes and look away.

  She barely fell a second before Podarge’s talons wrapped around her shoulders again. “Help,” the strange bird cawed.

  A clap of
thunder echoed somewhere above them. Vera strained her neck up to look for the Prophet, but ELIE was no longer there. The only evidence that it had ever existed were a few scraps of burning parachute gently fluttering down from the skies.

  “Jesus,” Vera muttered. “Why do I always get the crazy ones?”

  Below them, a column of fire rose half a kilometer into the air as the airship finally collided with the ground. The entire city of Dis—or rather, what remained of it—trembled as the munitions aboard it exploded in the most awe-inspiring display that Vera had ever seen. A few seconds later, the shock wave hit her, causing Podarge to let out a squawk of discomfort as they bounced and jostled in the tumultuous air.

  When the shock wave had finally passed, Vera stared down at the vast pillar of smoke climbing up from the city. Did it work? she wondered desperately. Did we finish it?

  40

  Despite the thrashing and screaming of the massive abomination pinned underneath the weight of the trunk, John felt oddly at peace as he waited for the airship to come crashing down. “Stop complaining,” he muttered as Legion extended an arm the size of a house and tried to pull itself free. John quickly intercepted it with the jagged remnant of one of his branches, impaling it to the ground. He had barely any strength left; it was only a matter of time until Legion got free once again, but by now the airship was so close that it likely didn’t matter.

  John sighed and let the seconds tick away. The tree trembled as Legion started to rise up. John tried to release a few more roots into the ground to slow down the monster, but it was no use; his strength was utterly exhausted and he could no longer even get so much as a twig to grow. Hurry up, he thought desperately as the abomination shifted its weight and began to wrench itself free. Any second now…