Shaking his head, he walked over to the stairwell, pulled out his keycard, then slid it over the electronic lock. As soon as the door was unlocked, it immediately swung open and hit him in the face. Dave cried out in pain as he was sent sprawling backwards onto the tile flooring of the corridor. He ran his hand along his face and felt a bruise on his forehead. As he readjusted his now slightly bent glasses to find out what just happened, a teenage girl stepped out into the corridor from where the stairwell was.
“Sorry about that,” Tara said to him.
Dave was wide eyed as he pulled himself up. “W-who are you?”
Tara shook her head slightly. “My name doesn’t really matter. I need to access your database.”
Dave clenched his fists. “You are not authorized to be here, little girl. Who do you think you—”
His words were cut off in mid sentence as Patrick Gyle came into the corridor carrying the unconscious security officer over his pale shoulder. Dave’s mouth was wide open in a silent scream.
Gyle placed the stunned security officer down onto the floor as he started to walk towards the goggle-eyed systems administrator. “Don’t do anything stupid. We just want access to the database.”
Dave started to piss in his pants. He pointed a trembling finger to the door leading to his office.
Tara pushed the office door open and peered inside before glancing back at him. “Is there like a password or something?”
Dave shook his head slightly. “N-No, it’s a-already o-open.”
“Okay,” Tara said before ducking into the office suite. She quickly sat down on the padded chair and noticed that the administrator had left a query search running. She was pretty familiar with computers at school since she always stayed after dismissal and did extra studies in the computer lab. She typed in Timmy’s name but it came up with zero results. She then tried different variations of his name along with the Olsen surname but she still didn’t get anything. When she searched for six year-old male orphans that were adopted by families she ended up with several thousands of names. After sighing out loud, she got an idea and started going through other databases. That was when she noticed a file marked Valhalla. When she opened it up and did a search, it immediately got a hit on Matthew and Melissa Olsen. They were listed as internees in the Fort Leavenworth camp compound. Her heart started to race. Timmy was close. She could feel it. They would be reunited soon enough.
The urine that had stained Dave’s trousers had already cooled and it was uncomfortably chilly when Tara walked back out and into the corridor. Gyle just kept standing there like a monstrous statue, as he kept staring at the terrified man with his lidless, bloodshot eyes.
“Okay, I got something,” Tara said as he looked over at Dave. “Where is Leavenworth Camp Number Two?”
“T-that’s a-a n-new camp they s-set up at Fort Leavenworth. At t-the woods n-near the national cemetery,” Dave said nervously. His urine had a sour, acidic odor and it made his nostrils flare.
Tara looked at Gyle with concerned eyes as she gripped several pages of printed paper in her hands. “I couldn’t find Timmy in the database, but I found the Olsens, and that’s where they are. Maybe they could help me pick my brother out from the names on the list I printed.”
“That’s good enough. Let’s get going,” Gyle said to her, before turning to look at Dave once more, as he pointed to the unconscious security guard lying on the floor. “I took out this guy when he wasn’t looking and turned off the video cameras in the security room. So that means he won’t remember me. But you will. If you tell your superiors what happened here, I will come back for you. You will erase our queries from your records and you will not talk about this ever again. You get me?”
Dave nodded. His shrill, squeaky voice was now like that of a scared little child. “Yes. I-I p-promise n-not to t-tell.”
Tara figured he was too scared to tell the others. There was a sudden blur, and both the teen girl and the creature were gone. It was as if they never even existed and it was all just a figment of his imagination. The only thing that hinted it wasn’t a dream was the unconscious guard and an ice cold, sticky coating covering his crotch and legs. Dave’s mind just couldn’t take it anymore.
He fainted.
11. Lord of the Lies
Otherworld
The landscape was an endless expanse of dried lava flows, like the undulating bark of a smooth, black tree. Gigantic mountain peaks could be seen in the distant horizon, their jagged, vertical walls of black basalt seemed like an insurmountable barrier to the damned that inhabited this blighted place. The sky had a reddish glow that cast its accursed illumination on the ground, as if the heavens itself was on fire above.
The old man gripped his tattered cloak closer to his frail body as he pointed a bony finger at a nearby mountain range. “There is a pass near that base, I believe. That is the one spot where we can get to the river and onto the next layer.”
A gust of wind tousled Valerie Mendoza’s dark brown hair. She neither felt cold nor warmth from it. “It seems like we were walking through that pile of crap and then all of a sudden, the ground changed and now it looks like we’re in a totally different world. What is this place?”
“This layer is called Gulam,” the wanderer said. “The realm of the gluttons. Come on.”
They started walking. Valerie could not get a sense of time, it was as if all the clocks in the universe had stood still, and yet it felt as if all the seconds, hours, days, and years were all happening at once. She sensed it would take forever for them to get to the base of the mountain, since it never seemed to get any closer, yet it somehow felt like they had been steadily moving towards it for days on end. Time and distance seemed meaningless now.
Although the landscape didn’t change much, they started to pass by a number of extremely large people that seemed to be imbedded in the lava, only their fat faces were protruding from the solidified rock. A number of creatures that seemed to look like a nightmarish combination of animal and human corpses were hunched over them, as these monsters would vomit over their victim’s open mouths and would use their claws to force the bile down their throats. The unfortunate men and women were trapped, and they would plead at the demons to stop forcing their puke on them, but to no avail.
Valerie forced herself to look away as she kept a tight grip on the pistol by her side holster. “Oh god, I can’t bear to see all this anymore.”
“You must pay them no mind,” the wanderer said as he kept on a steady pace. “They have been condemned for their excesses and this is their eternal punishment.”
Valerie shook her head in disbelief. “This just isn’t fair! So what if they ate a lot while they were alive? Nobody deserves this kind of punishment, not for pigging out!”
“I have the same questions as you,” the old man said. “That is why I wander these other lands. I search for the answers.”
“Did you find out anything?”
The old man shook his head. “No. All I have witnessed is an endless stream of cruelty and malice.”
Valerie grimaced as she sidestepped away from a screaming woman who was embedded in the dried lava. She had nearly stepped on the sinner’s face. “Why do you keep traveling to this sick place then?”
The old man turned his head slightly at her and smiled as he kept on moving. “Something called hope. It is what keeps me from becoming one of the denizens of this blighted land. I like to feel that there will be an answer and I shall find it one day.”
Something huge almost ran into her as she kept her eyes on the wanderer. Valerie cursed as she nearly collided with an onrushing demon. She almost drew her gun but the creature shifted sideways and narrowly avoided her. It was hairless, had a bear-like body and a head of a gigantic, misshapen vulture. The demon barely seemed to notice her as it concentrated on the helpless souls on the ground, using its pawed feet to stomp on their pleading faces, leaving bloody pulps on the igneous rock.
“Pay them no mind,” the
old man said. “They are tasked to punish those that have been sent here. Since we do not belong in this place, they will ignore travelers as long as they are not interfered with.”
Valerie saw the same demon run ahead of them and smash its foot on one helpless soul's face, breaking the man’s nose and teeth as it kept pounding at its victim. “That thing’s killing them!” she screamed.
The old man shook his head as they walked past. “The souls here will get hurt, but their bodies will heal in the blink of an eye. No one can die if one is already dead.”
“So they just get tortured and killed endlessly? That’s insane,” Valerie hissed. “What kind of a justice is this?”
“A kind of judgment of the gods,” the old man said. “It is accepted by the people who dwell here.”
They soon came upon an infinite procession of people. Like the other souls in this world, they were all naked and crawling on the ground on all fours. As they got closer, Valerie realized that each victim’s mouth had been attached to the buttocks of the person ahead of them. It was like seeing one horrific, multi-limbed creature. The excrement that they produced would pass through an endless loop. A number of eyes locked onto hers, pleading for some sort of respite or release from this unimaginable procession of cruelty.
Valerie nearly put her hands over her eyes. “Oh my god, this isn’t happening!”
The old man took her trembling hand as they got closer. “We must stride over them. Come.”
Valerie shrieked as they both stopped in front of the moving, caterpillar-like mass of souls. The old man gently put one foot up in the air and strode over the column as it kept moving. Just as Valerie tried to do the same, a woman who was part of the gruesome procession, tried to grab at her. Valerie cried out as she got entangled on top of the woman, who kept trying to pull her down to the ground as she kept moving. The old man reached out and held onto Valerie as they both were able to pull away. The two of them ran for a bit until they crested a blackened dune and were soon out of sight.
Tears were streaming down Valerie’s face as she knelt down on the solid rock. “Oh my god. How can all of this be real? This is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever experienced!”
The old man stood over her. “I have felt like you when I first ventured to these wastes. We must look beyond the cruelty, beyond the suffering, and we must ask ourselves if this serves a purpose.”
“An endless amount of pain and suffering serves no purpose,” Valerie sobbed. “This is like a world of horror that never ends. No god, no matter how evil, could possibly condone all this.”
“I have had the same thoughts as well,” the old man said. “The more I pondered the problem, the more it seems the purpose of gods may not be to lord over men, but to guide them.”
Valerie looked up at him. Her tears of sadness were now tears of frustration. “Guide us? What kind of a guidance is this? People make mistakes, we’re not perfect. That’s what makes us human. If we’re like children then we should be taught, not punished for all eternity over something we did that lasted for a few moments!”
The old man pointed to another man trapped in the ground. “It seems to me that the demons of this place serve the souls here rather than the other way around. If you look at them, all those damned men, you can see that they feel that they do deserve to be here. You will notice that none of them seem to want to escape from the dried rock that traps them. It seems to me that they chose to be here.”
Valerie got up and wiped her tears away. “That can’t be true,” she said as he walked around until she saw someone’s face embedded in the ground.
The face in the ground had been smashed into a pulp, most probably by a wandering demon. It looked vaguely like a man, but the nose was crushed and bloody so she couldn’t be sure. Bits of teeth were lying in a small puddle of blood near its side. One eye was evidently gouged out, but they could still hear the groans of agony coming out of its mouth.
Valerie knelt down so that the soul would notice her. “Hello. Can you hear me?”
The face opened its bloody mouth and coughed up bits of blood. “Please, don’t hurt me anymore!”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Valerie said. “Do you want to get out of there? Can you move your arms?”
“I just want to be left alone here.”
“You don’t have to be stuck in there. I know it must be torture but, maybe we can find a way to pull you out of there. Don’t you want to get out?”
The single eye’s pupil kept moving round the eyelid, like a rotating brown planet in a sea of milky whiteness, surrounded by crimson. “I’d rather just stay here. Let me sleep. I don’t want to eat any more vomit and excrement. I feel so full, I’m going to burst!”
Valerie placed her hands along the side of the face and started to pull. Her eagerness to help overcame her revulsions. “Nonsense, here, let me help you.”
The face started screaming. “Noo! It hurts, it hurts, it hurts!”
Valerie grimaced as she squatted and tried to pull the head out, at least. She could feel a slight shifting in the ground. There was a gap between the embedded face of the soul and the solidified lava, all she needed was a bit more effort. “Almost there,” she gasped as she pulled harder.
The soul in the ground was screaming incoherently now as it slowly began to regenerate its missing eye. Valerie sensed the creature’s agony was more due to irritation than pain as she felt the floor underneath it begin to give way.
As she put a little bit more effort into it, the soul’s head suddenly popped out and Valerie fell backwards as she cradled it in her hands. But instead of a neck, the creature had a worm-like, segmented body two feet in length. Valerie fell on her back and the squirming giant maggot with its human face landed on top of her.
Valerie screamed in terror as she quickly threw the thing onto the ground beside her. The soul continued to spout gibberish as it crawled away, its bloated, tube-like body wriggled on the ground. She looked at her blood and pus covered hands and wailed in frustration and disgust.
The old man bent down and helped to pull her up. “I have tried that before and it ended the same way. That soul is damned no matter what you do. It will crawl into another hole and embed itself there,” he said.
Valerie grimaced as she looked at the black fissure where the creature once lay embedded in. “This whole place. It’s too sick. Oh god, I can’t stand another minute here.”
The old man began to walk again. “Then we must keep moving.”
Valerie let out a deep sigh and followed. “I can’t sense Paul here, we need to go faster.”
“Then you must concentrate,” the old man said. “The journey from one part of the otherlands to the next is a matter of will.”
“Okay,” Valerie said. She remembered the time that she was trapped in the muck of the previous world. She had been able to get out by sheer concentration. Valerie gritted her teeth and tried to picture Paul’s face as she kept moving. In a time like this, it would be her memories of him that would be the key to get through this hellish landscape. She needed to stay focused and not get distracted by all the horrific scenes that were occurring all around. If she let all the pain and cruelty affect her, she had a feeling she would become a denizen of this horrific place.
As she sensed Paul’s distant cries for help, the effect was almost instantaneous as both she and the traveler were suddenly walking through a gap across the gigantic mountain walls that towered above them. It was as if their combined wills carried them past the endless dried lava flows and they were now nearing the borderlands to the next world.
“Oh my god,” Valerie said in astonishment. “This is amazing. It’s almost as if we can get from one point to the other by simply concentrating and if—”
She stopped in mid-sentence. The mountain pass was at least several hundred miles wide in between the gargantuan cliffs that nearly blotted out the sky. Once again, they were not alone.
Valerie could see an endless array of circular stone
tables that seemed evenly spaced in front of them as they kept on walking past. Several naked people were tied down in chains and were forced to sit on stone benches, as they faced the pale, marbled tables. There were massive stone bowls on the tops of the tables and they were filled with all sorts of monstrous, squirming toads and insects. These vermin would crawl out of their bowls, making their way to their victims, then crawling up their bloated bellies, where they tried to force themselves into the mouths of the unfortunate souls that were tied down. The human sufferers would try to twist their heads away or clench their teeth to prevent the bloated little creatures from forcing their way in, but the toads and the worms would bite, and chew their way through their victim’s lips, even break teeth just to get in. From there, the assorted vermin would wriggle and eat their way through the intestines, then force themselves through the anal cavities, and then finally through a hole at the bottom of the stone bench, only to crawl back up towards the stone bowls, in order to begin their terrible, endless cycle all over again.
“I find it best to look away,” the old man said as they moved around them.
Valerie’s teeth were chattering. She kept trying to look away, but some strange force kept making her view the unending suffering, it was a sort of combination between disgust and fascination. That was when she drew back into her palace of memory and thought about Paul. As she remembered his gentle smile and the warmth of his arms around her, the recollection of their love allowed her to finally concentrate on moving past the endless, tormented feasts of the damned. Within moments, they were finally moving away from the mountain pass while the ground underneath them became softer, as the dried lava became little sand pebbles.
A World Darkly (Wrath of the Old Gods Book 3) Page 17