by G A Chase
“No, thanks.” When her opponent came at her again, Sere launched herself up toward the mangled remnant of a metal bracket that had supported a balcony and swung forward like an acrobat about to do a flip.
The demon had anticipated her move. Instead of wrapping her legs around his scrawny neck and spinning his head like a cap off a cheap bottle of beer, Sere felt his teeth sink deep into her inner thigh. His twin swords crossed like scissors slicing up her body. Instinctively, she pulled hard at the rusty metal beam, which snapped off at the brick wall. Now I have a weapon. She arched her body and twisted hard away from the gleaming blades. Their crash into the stream of muck drove his sharply rotted teeth deeper into her flesh, but she managed to pin one of his arms under their bodies. In his disorientation, she grabbed his free wrist, pulled hard at his spindly, desiccated arm, and by driving her heel into his shoulder socket, wrenched his arm from his body. The blade he was holding fell harmlessly at her side.
No longer in her grasp, the demon turned away from his removed limb in her clutches and jumped to his feet. He angled his remaining weapon up from his crotch. “Was it good for you too? I was due for an arm upgrade anyway. Too bad yours are so small.”
She tossed the bony arm across the water, grabbed the sword, and stood to face him. “You can add as many accessories as you like to that hooptie body of yours. They still won’t give you any skills. You’re like a car that’s been so heavily modified it no longer drives without getting stuck in potholes.”
“We’ll see about that.” He swung wildly at her head.
Her taunting had worked. While he focused on the sword she used to parry his attack, she pulled the rusty metal bar from behind her back and impaled him through the gut. “I’m not so easily sliced into deli meat,” she said as she spun away from him and pulled the shaft out of his body.
“That’s two for you.” His bravado was betrayed by raspy breathing, which indicated his true condition.
“Come on, bony boy.” She aimed the sword at his neck. “Make your move, and lose your head.”
Harvesters never considered the cost. A fight with one was always all or nothing. Sere knew better than to take his injuries as weaknesses. Though he was down an arm and losing blood at an alarming rate from his gut, the wounds would only drive him to fight with increased ferocity. He came at her with eyes ablaze, teeth bared, and sword swinging haphazardly through the air as if he were fighting off a swarm of mosquitoes.
Defense was never Sere’s position of choice. She rushed at the demon with equal zeal. There was no safe, easy play. She slashed backhand at him with her iron bar. His sword cut her from shoulder to wrist but not before she’d landed her rusty bar into his ribs. The force of the blow, along with his blade being at her side, opened him up to the kill cut. She continued with her determined spin and slashed down with the edge of her sword against the demon’s neck. His head rolled from his shoulders into the muck just before his body slumped to the ground.
Sere dropped her weapons, bent over, and put her hands on her knees for support. Blood flowed down her arm and dripped onto the demon’s upturned face. “Disintegrate, you asshole.” His head and body sank into the slop like meat falling off the bone into a thick roux.
From across the street, the woman who’d been weakened from the mosquito stared at Sere with wide, frightened eyes. Sere could practically hear the hellish sermon that played in the woman’s mind: This is what one gets for stepping out of the preordained path of righteousness. Doppelgängers who showed free will and broke away from Professor Yates’s projections of the real people in life either became harvesters or were sliced up for the harvesters’ pleasure.
Sere brushed the gore from the decapitated harvester off the front of her slicker. “You lose, asshole.” Though blood coated her arm, in hell’s nightmare, so long as she won, she would heal.
She picked up the two swords as her winnings and headed toward Jackson Square. Artists never were much good at following society’s ideals, and that made the area in front of Saint Louis Cathedral—with its street performers, musicians, and painters—the perfect place to find a pieced-together sentient mannequin willing to talk. She glared menacingly and pointed the swords at anyone who crossed her path.
Tourists sat on the steps of the church, looking like human remnants a gator had thrown up. A street performer mockingly danced and yelled at the spectators. Observing the entertainer’s short female arms, beefcake shoulders, well-endowed breasts, child’s legs, and mangled face, Sere couldn’t guess its original gender. Paintings in blood hung from the square’s rotting iron gates. Towering above the scene were the chained-shut wooden doors of Saint Louis Cathedral.
She ducked under the cast-iron portico of the block-long apartment building to watch the action from a shadowy doorway. “This is pointless. The hell mouth isn’t in the Quarter, so being here puts me no closer to understanding where the other end of the connection is in life. If it were here, there would be a full-on demon invasion. Why would I dream up a place that’s no use whatsoever?” She squeezed her eyes shut, hoping that when she opened them again, it would be to wake up from her nightmare.
The rains of hell were still howling in Sere’s ears when a gutter waif stumbled into her. The girl couldn’t have been much older than a teenager. “Sorry you had to wait. I didn’t dare approach you after the fight in case someone was watching. The goddess Sanguine told us to keep an eye out for you. I had to be sure it was really you before making contact. Can’t be too careful these days, but after seeing you willingly go up against a harvester and survive the encounter, I knew you must have been sent from the beyond. To defeat evil, a hero must embrace personal injury. That’s how I knew you weren’t a typical doppelgänger. What do you need?”
Sere faced away from the girl in an attempt to avoid unwanted harvester attention being paid to her companion. “Something has crossed out of hell, but I don’t even know where to look. The access between our dimensions has been uncovered on this side.”
“The goddess hears your plea. Help will find you. You’d better leave now.” The girl turned from the shadows and disappeared back into the storm-drenched streets.
Sere woke up to a loud splash and a wall of water that drenched her. Even in her sleep-hazed post-nightmare state, she knew that the gator she’d grown up with in hell’s swamp had arrived.
“Damn it, Lefty!” She slid off the log and shook the water out of her hair. The thirty-foot alligator took up most of the width of the river. “You could have just nudged the log or something. You know how I hate being splashed by that tail of yours.”
The monster turned toward the shore and set his muzzle next to her feet like a repentant puppy. The creature’s nostrils ejected swamp moisture so hard it penetrated her jeans clear up to her thighs.
“It’s good to see you too.” She never could stay mad at him for long. “But how many times have I told you? You can’t swim out of the deep swamp toward the gator-hunting grounds. Now that the stories about you have grown beyond mere rumors, those redneck assholes won’t rest until they have your hide.”
The river monster nudged Sere’s boot as if that was supposed to be an explanation of his actions. The show of emotion made her squat down to rub the prehistoric-looking creature’s snout. “I miss her too.” Sere rubbed the large scales of her boot that perfectly matched those of her reptilian companion. “At least she’s always with me. I wish I could have fashioned you a memento as well, but it’s not like you carry anything with you.” Between her boots, saddlebags, and helmet cover, Sere had tried to utilize as much of the old gator’s hide as she could reasonably keep with her.
Lefty swung his head back into the river and swam far enough out that he could edge his tail up beside Sere like a boat ramp.
“I guess there’s no harm in going for a little ride. After all, I did ask for help finding whatever is out here. It’d be rude to reject the offer when it comes in the form of such a gallant gator.” Sere skipped along the point
y scutes of the reptile’s back the way she had as a child. When she reached the animal’s massive shoulders, she lay on her back with her head between Lefty’s green-and-gold eyes.
The animal’s fifteen-foot-long tail made for powerful, quiet, and smooth locomotion through the calm water. The gentle rocking of his body massaged his scutes into Sere’s back muscles. She stared up at the sky as he swam beneath her, just as she’d done so many days growing up in hell. The ancient hell gator that had protected Sanguine was more a pet to Sere than a guardian. Fellow creatures from hell. No wonder I bonded with you.
3
Lefty stopped his gentle rocking and floated calmly. Water sloshed up along his bulbous body and roused Sere from her enjoyment of the early afternoon.
“You’re not supposed to submerge, you silly creature. You’re getting me all wet.” She rolled onto her stomach to see what had disturbed her pet’s swim through the bayou. Instead of the expected thick green swamp water, they were floating into a small clear-blue lake. Hell’s gate.
“Just stay where you are. There’s no reason why this has to turn ugly.”
The trembling voice from the shore made Sere bolt up from Lefty’s back like a surfer preparing to ride a wave. She crouched into her attack stance. Someone was watching her from the tall grass beyond the sandy beach. She slipped her hand down to her boot. Goddamn that bartender. He still has my fucking knife.
“Who are you? Show yourself before I sic my alligator on you.”
She hunched low on Lefty’s back as a thin young man stepped out of the tall grass. “Please don’t. Professor Yates sent me.”
“Andy? What the hell are you doing here?”
Professor Yates’s teenage assistant from hell stood with his arms in front of him like a boy who’d just been caught skinny-dipping. “I’m supposed to give you this.” He kicked a backpack at his feet.
Hell’s swamp creatures, like Lefty, were native to the demonic realm. Sere respected those original inhabitants. Then there were the projections of real people and animals that Professor Yates had created to fill the French Quarter. As hell’s guardians, Sanguine, Kendell, and their friends had needed a make-believe population to convince Baron Malveaux that he wasn’t alone, but to Sere, the human puppets were little more than toys for her amusement. Not all of them, however, belonged to her. Joe had used some of the mannequins as sparring partners in his training sessions, and Kendell and the band had occupied their doubles for their personal music gigs when performing for young Sere. Professor Yates, however, took his games too far in giving the mannequins he used a degree of sentience. They didn’t have souls but were endowed with a degree of self-will. These fleshy automatons gave Sere the creeps.
“You have no business on this side of the divide. Someone could have seen you. This had better be fucking important, or I’ll kill your real just to watch you disintegrate, Artie.”
The boy’s face turned beet red. “Don’t call me that. Just because my soul wasn’t pulled from the dead like yours was, that doesn’t mean I’m artificial. I am self-aware.”
Sere sat back down on the gator’s back, feeling like a guru explaining life to a fool. “Sentience without a soul results in only self-interest.”
“That doesn’t even make any sense. You’re just trying to justify your need for the team of people who’ve given you life. Queen Sere, who thinks her servants should always bow down and be grateful for the scraps of self-determination dropped from her table.”
Lefty let out a crackly roar that rippled the water and silenced Andy.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Sere said. “Without that basic connection to others, you have no ability to empathize. Like all demons, all you care about is yourself. My prehistoric gator has more understanding of compassion than you do.”
“And you’re some great expert? Until you left hell, your entire experience with living people could be summed up in less than ten individuals, and each of them was fawning over you like you were an orphan picked up off the street.”
“First I was a queen, and now I’m an orphan? Sere the orphan queen. I kind of like that.” Philosophical arguments with a toy doll never got Sere anywhere productive.
“No, what you are is a psychotic bitch.”
Even without her knife, Sere could list a dozen ways of decapitating the doppelgänger without even thinking about it, but Professor Yates hadn’t sent Andy so that she could exercise her assassin’s skills on him. “So you’re the little pipsqueak that set off the green-glow hell alarm? Why go to all the trouble?”
Andy crossed his arms over his chest as if he’d done something clever and was about to be patted on the back for it. “This bag is full of shotgun shells. I made them myself under the professor’s supervision.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. Anything made in hell would have dire consequences in life. “You’re going to make me ask you why? It would be a lot easier if you’d learn to tell me what I want to know so I don’t have to keep asking dumb questions.”
He looked around as if hesitant someone might be listening in. “I wasn’t the first one to set off the green glow.”
Sere stroked Lefty’s back like a jockey subtly directing a racehorse. If you just took one of the kid’s legs, it would probably grow back. “You’re starting to piss me off, Artie.”
He glared at her, but instead of reacting further to her insult, he reached into the pack and pulled out a box of shells as if that was supposed to somehow pacify her. “Something else crossed over first. We don’t know how or what. I’m only here because the professor rigged up a tether lifeline from hell so I could enter the gate, but this is as far as I can go. He hoped these shotgun shells would make it easier for you to deal with whatever followed you.”
“So you’re like a little Aquaman toy breathing through a tube.” She nodded toward the bag. “How do they work?”
“Hell’s creatures are reflections of this reality.”
She rolled her eyes. You maybe, but not me. “Stop stating the obvious.”
“Using a bullet created in life won’t kill a doppelgänger, only injure one of us until we can regenerate. I used rubble from the real-bank bombing projected into our dimension to fill these shells. Shoot one of us with these, and the connection to our real will be severed.”
Memories of the night Joe helped Aunt Kendell and Uncle Myles blow up Baron Malveaux’s office in life and free young Sere from the devil’s dominance still haunted her. Even nineteen years later, she still avoided the French Quarter as if it were coated in radioactive dust.
She kicked Lefty in the side to get him to swim toward the shore. “That works if the demon is related to the professor’s projections in the city. Agnes Delarosa was slightly more clever in how she filled the swamps.”
Andy jumped a good six feet back from the water’s edge at seeing the monster zero in on his location. “Professor Yates just wants you to be prepared.”
From the water, she was able to see partway into the open bag. “And what does he expect me to do without a gun?”
“He said Joe would be able to work up a shotgun for you. Please don’t let your gator eat me.”
She patted the river monster’s shoulder to get him to turn parallel to the shore. “How confident are you that those shells will disrupt the virtual projection?”
Andy remained well back from the shore. “It’s just a theory, but Professor Yates said it’d be best if you didn’t have any open wounds while you were handling the cartridges. We were a little short on time for testing. It will depend on your quarry’s size, but there should be enough pellets in each shell to cut the connection of anything weighing a hundred pounds or so.”
Wonderful. So demonic squirrels won’t be a problem. She could tell from Andy’s shaking that he wasn’t telling her everything. “And what happens to the projected body?”
“Matter in life remains as matter.”
Peachy. “So no disintegration as in hell?” Lefty swung his tail
onshore, and Sere stepped off her companion and lifted the heavy backpack. “Professor Yates didn’t by chance tell you I was to test one of these little deadly shells on you, now, did he? Or is that why you didn’t bring a gun?”
Andy hid behind a nearby cypress tree trunk. “Of course not. I’ve been a useful assistant ever since you killed Thomas.”
“That was an accident.” Sere didn’t mean to smile, but she could feel the muscles tugging at her cheeks.
“Bullshit. You cut off his goddamned head.”
Sere felt along the edge of her boot to the empty scabbard concealed in the lining. “Weapons training can be dangerous. Joe wanted to use a mannequin that could think on its feet. Besides, Professor Yates was able to regenerate Thomas.”
Andy stayed well hidden behind the tree. “But without the sentient modifications the professor had given him. He’s just another mindless human copy now. I’d like to keep my personal memories, if that’s all right with you.”
Using her ninja training, she silently stepped along the shore. When she spoke again, it was from beside the tree in a whisper directly in Andy’s ear. “Who’s to say you’d regenerate if I lopped off your head on this side of the barrier?” The boy took off so fast along the shoreline that Sere wondered if his feet were even getting wet. “Don’t let me catch you on this side of the barrier again! I won’t just be playing next time.”
She laughed at the retreating figure and turned back to Lefty. “I’m sure I’ll get an earful from the professor about my treatment of the kid, but he should know better than to send that silly little lab rat.”
The fact that the old inventor’s lab geeks were partially responsible for her immortality only made her more mistrustful of their hidden agenda. Sentience isn’t so easily contained, my dear professor. Lefty splashed water with his tail in the direction of the retreating youth as if agreeing with Sere.