Through the In Between, Hell Awaits

by Robert Essig

  Austin’s eyes went wide. “You didn’t . . . ”

  “Time is non-existent here. The body can sustain an eternity of suffering. Death is obtainable, but frowned upon. What you’re used to on Earth doesn’t apply.”

  From his vantage, Austin couldn’t see for sure whether the filthy, bloodied woman was indeed that of Audrey. He went into something that was more of a trot than a run, flinging tiny rocks into the air with each footfall. It was indeed Audrey. His anger rose to plateaus he’d never experienced before.

  “You’re sick,” said Austin.

  Baz nodded. “But she’s high up enough to be safe. For a while.”

  “But the sun! She’ll burn to death.”

  “No. She’ll endure pain—a lot of pain—but she won’t die unless she is killed on purpose, and even then it’s very hard to do. The land cannot kill as on Earth. Starving will not kill here. Dehydration will not kill. Time does not kill.”

  “She’ll die up there. You’ve got to get her down.”

  “You want her down, you find Dagana.”

  Austin tilted his head to the sky looking at Audrey. He didn’t try to communicate with her. That felt useless. Returning his gaze to Baz, he said, “Why can’t you find her? You found me. What’s the difference?”

  “She was sloppy, but usually she’s very careful to hide her tracks. I don’t spend time on Earth like she does, and she doesn’t spend time here like I do. She wants a monarchy. I think that’s why she abandoned me . . . our tribe.”

  Baz shifted his gaze toward Audrey. She whimpered as if she could feel his eyes upon her. He said, “There’s your incentive,” and then snapped his fingers . . .

  . . . And Austin flashed back to Earth. The sudden return shocked him with brightness, sounds of the roaring road, and the brain-scramble of being thrust into a car at seventy miles an hour one second after standing in a wasteland.

  The tires screamed across two-lane blacktop as he nearly lost control swerving into the oncoming traffic. There weren’t a lot of people on I-80, but there was someone right then, a big someone—an 18-wheeler!

  The horn blared, and for a split second, Austin could see the bearded man in the driver’s seat of the big rig, eyes wide and mouth agape. He could even see the cherry as the man’s cigarette fell from his mouth.

  Gripping the wheel with everything he had, Austin cranked it to the right and pulled his vehicle back into the northbound lane, just in time to avoid becoming a driver’s ed video.

  Heavy breaths and pouring sweat, Austin palmed his forehead and said, “What the fuck is happening to me?”

  He remained on the road, though his focus was corrupted by the mind altering experience of visiting the In Between. The image of Audrey strapped to a crude torture device, roasting in the sun was seared in his mind. He didn’t know her all that well, but he knew she was the one for him, that if he could satisfy Baz with the finding of Dagana, he would finally settle down with this woman and raise a family, eventually take over the hotel chain—something he, at times, never thought he would obtain during his stint on Earth.

  Austin calmed as he listened to the soothing sound of highway beneath his tires. He thought of Audrey, hoped she wasn’t suffering but knew damn well that she was. He didn’t even know how to get to her, and that made him nervous and angry. Baz was evil, and Austin had no way of knowing whether he was a man of his word. He was inclined to have doubts, but he had no choice other than to search out Dagana.

  As he entered the Sierra Mountains, he felt lost, as if the small lead he obtained had petered out. He looked for anything out of the ordinary, but nothing triggered his mind. He hardly knew who he was looking for, and he hadn’t a clue where to find her. She could be anywhere.

  As he filled his tank at a gas station (nearly five dollars a gallon!), Austin decided to ask about the cabin where the rock band had been found mutilated. That was his only clue, therefore that would be the best place to begin his search. He figured that was the biggest story the mountains had seen in quite some time.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the gas station attendant, “I saw that on the tube this morning. Crazy story, don’t you think? That kind of thing doesn’t happen out here. These mountains are pretty quiet during the off season. No troubles at all.”

  “Do you know where the cabin is where the murders happened?”

  The attendant eyed Austin suspiciously. “What are you, some kind of journalist? You’re not one of those freaks who goes looking at crime scenes, are you. I’d feel awfully weird directing someone to a massacre for the sole purpose of . . . watching.” The attendant smirked and slid his hand over the tightly pulled back remnants of his long, greasy hair. “Oh, I know what you’re up to. You’re one of those freakin’ . . . whatchu call ‘em? Papa-Yhatzee, something like that?”

  “I’m not paparazzi. I’m with the press,” Austin lied. “Well, I’d like to be with the press. I’m an aspiring journalist. I do freelance work. This is a huge story that I can probably sell to the tabloids. But I’ll pitch it to Time first, of course.”

  The man nodded his head. “Of course,” he repeated.

  “The quicker I get there the better chance of me getting the story. Mind pointing the way?”

  Austin was laying it on a bit thick, but the attendant bought it and gave him decent directions. Austin didn’t know what he was going to do when he got there. The place would be swarming with police and media and a whole lot of yellow caution tape restricting his view of the crime scene, and there was no way he was going to bullshit the police the way he did the gas station attendant.

  Nearing the cabin there was quite a scene. It was worse than he had expected, and being a cabin, there weren’t close neighbors, so it was going to be difficult for Austin to attain an inconspicuous front. The fact that he wasn’t sure what he was looking for would enhance him standing out in the crowd, which primarily consisted of media, cops, and paramedics. The paramedics must have been there since the initial discovery because they were standing around doing nothing after they discovered that everyone inside the cabin was dead. Austin figured there would be forensics people there, CSI types and detectives, all trying to get an upper hand on a fresh mystery. Maybe that was TV bullshit. Austin had a pretty good idea of what happened there, but no one would listen to him anyway were he to inform them.

  He pulled his car to the side of the rode behind a long line of cars, some of them with flashing red and blue lights. Stepping out of the car, Austin decided he was going to have to play this one safe and claim he was passing through and couldn’t help but take a look-see. His appearance may seem strange to the police, and he didn’t want to stir their suspicions (not to mention stir questions of DUI concerning his vodka-laden breath).

  He just wanted to view the bodies to see if they were crawling with the things he had seen on the body in San Diego.

  27

  After returning from the In Between, Acronos and Dagana regressed into their revamped human façade as Zack and Jenny. The Ned-thing, however, was in such a disfigured state that there was no way for it to attempt to take on a human veneer. They decided that when they hit the road they would have to conceal him from prying eyes.

  “I’m laying down some ground rules,” said Jenny.

  Zack nodded his head with a somewhat scornful grimace. He had never been one for rules or restrictions. It was one of the more liberating aspects of leaving his mundane life behind and hitting the road.

  “First off and foremost, I don’t want you going to the In Between without me. Until you can prove to me that you know how to handle yourself and have no problems coming and going through the realms, I am going to have to treat you like a child and hold your hand as we jumps the realms. I had hoped you would have been more competent that that, but you’re not impressing me.”

  “You need to teach me how to harness the power. I can feel it, but I can’t seem to control it.”

  Jenny nodded. “That’s dangerous.”

  Sitting
in Ned’s cabin, they hungered quite badly, but Ned told them that a meal would arrive if they hung around for a while. The Ned-thing didn’t say much; it couldn’t due to its impediment and the shock of such a brutal becoming. It just laid there on the couch soaking the cushions with pus and bodily fluids that seeped from its maggoty form like a festering sore that never scabbed over.

  “All you have to do is feel it. It really is that simple.” Jenny looked Zack in the eyes and slowly hers began to fill with stormy clouds that turned into dark gray spheres of obsidian. “See. I think it and it is done. You can do the same.”

  Zack stared into Jenny’s colorless eyes, and just as she was clearly beginning to lose her patience again, his eyes began to change into the reddish-gold spheres his becoming left him with.

  Jenny smiled.

  There was a moment of quiet in the cabin, Zack practicing his ethereal powers by transforming his eyes, then his head, and then even his whole body in the monstrosity of Acronos. Jenny watched and finally began to have a hope that she could form her own army of In Betweeners to combat her fellow sentinels. But they would have to move, and soon. She had that unmistakable sense that Baz was on her tail. She was careful, but he was one slick bastard, and she knew that her demise was his number one priority.

  There was a commotion at the front door. The handle jiggled and the sound of a key chain loaded with keys and trinkets jingled on the other side. Someone was unlocking the door.

  Zack shifted, but Jenny waved him away with her hand and said in but a whisper, “Calm. They can do nothing to us. We’re about to eat.”

  Zack relaxed and then the door opened. A woman walked in barely looking at her surroundings, followed by two children; a little girl of about nine and a boy that couldn’t be a day over five.

  When the woman saw the thing on the couch, she screamed. Her children reacted in a similar fashion, dropping their bags on the ground and running for the comfort of their mother. Zack took this opportunity to stand at the front door so they couldn’t make an escape if they tried.

  The woman went into hysterics and began hyperventilating. She dropped to the floor where her children crowded around her, more shocked and upset with their mother’s breakdown than the fact that their father was lying on the couch in some twisted distortion of life that hardly resembled a human, not to mention the fact that there were two intruders watching them break down.

  The woman’s eyes locked on Jenny’s. Her face was wet with a copious shedding of tears, her eyeliner running down her face in squid ink trails. She then looked at Zack who stood like some bouncer, guarding the front door.

  “Why did you do this?” asked the crying woman through sobs and whimpers.

  “If only you knew,” said Jenny. “Your husband was Ned, right?”

  The woman nodded. Her children sobbed and sniffled.

  A grim, wheezing laughter came from the sluggish thing on the sofa. The laugh was very human, and very much Ned. It was a sadistic laugh that his family had probably not heard before. It was obvious by the children’s laughter just as the door opened that they were expecting their father, probably wearing a flannel jacket and blue jeans, maybe sipping a cup of coffee. They had no idea of what waited for them. Either way, they would have walked into Hell, the children’s laughter ceased at their mother’s scream.

  “I want—” said the Ned-thing. “I . . . want them.”

  The woman yelped. She turned her glassy, terror-stricken eyes from Jenny, who looked like a perfectly harmless girl next door, to the thing on the couch. By the look in her eyes, it was clear that she recognized the voice that emanated from the slimy beast. Her open jaw twitched and trembled as if she wanted to say something but nothing would come out.

  The Ned-thing stared at her from his sideways vantage on the couch. His queer face grinned revealing a crooked series of teeth like tiny shards of glass embedded in his putrescent mouth. His newfound hunger elicited a small flood of rancid drool that seeped from his mouth like pus seeped from his worm-like body.

  His wife stared. His daughter peeked at the thing as if she too recognized her father’s voice, but she kept burying her face within the folds of her mother’s clothes, too afraid to witness the ugly thing on the couch.

  Ned’s wings were suddenly produced from his back with a sickening sound like peeling a decomposed body from a linoleum floor. The floppy, leathery folds of flesh opened and closed clumsily like a bird of prey with a caught feather. He was flexing his muscles, for his wings were his new mode of personal transportation, and getting him across the room to devour his family was enough to encourage him to stretch his wings, so to speak.

  Jenny grinned in a way that made her innocent looking veneer maniacal. It was Dagana peeking, just slightly, through the flesh, as if she was so hungry and so thrilled by what the Ned-thing was doing that she couldn’t hold the sentinel inside. Her eyes faded to black spheres as she watched, more than happy to allow the Ned-thing the first kill, and pleased with his ardent bloodlust. She had wanted Zack to have the same reaction when he went thought his becoming, and he has thus far been nothing short of disappointing, however she had high hopes for her new companion. When his odd, misshapen body took flight in the cabin, she literally squealed with joy, and before she knew it, her façade was shattered and Dagana was standing in the room. The little boy saw her, alerted by her joyous squeal, and screamed bloody murder at the sight of a true monster, something he had seen only in cartoons. He ran, the little boy did. He ran right into the clumsy thing that had been his father. The Ned-thing slammed into the boy knocking him to the floor. The wormy body fell atop the boy. The ends of the wings were lined with claws like treble hooks of which latched onto the boy’s flesh. He screamed even louder than before, and then his mother lurched for the Ned-thing screaming for it to get off her little boy, but its salivating mouth had already found its strength and bit into the boys head just as easy as piercing the skin of an orange. The boy’s body trembled in fits as death stole over him. The Ned-thing unlocked its talons and directed its energies toward the woman, what it had once called its wife. She was so stricken, her vision so blurry from crying, that it latched onto her with its wing-hooks and sunk its teeth into her chest, seeking entrance to the beating gem that was her heart. He wanted it not only due to his savage lust for human delicacies that was born within after his becoming, but for the blood lust he lived with as a human. He had to hide it then; now he was without shame.

  Zack watched the Ned-thing in amazement, as if he couldn’t believe the maggoty thing could move like that, or perhaps he was jealous that he had taken so long to truly develop that kind of voracity for human flesh. Either way, he found it effortless to transform into Acronos and without Dagana’s cue, he leapt on the little girl and ripped her to shreds. His display was fueled by rage, fear, and fury, and he may have overcompensated a bit, but her warm flesh tasted divine as he bit and chewed and swallowed.

  Dagana, delighted now with both of her minions, knelt before the twitching little boy and finished off his brain before disemboweling him and consuming his steaming intestines.

  The room was once again silent save that for squishy noises as hands searched through viscous blood and muscle and entrails for choice morsels. As it turned out, Dagana was an organ meat fan while Acronos was partial to fatty tissue and muscle. As for the Ned-thing, well, it was devouring arms from the fingers up to the shoulder, bones and all.

  After the flurry of rage and emotion left Acronos, he stood to witness the full implication of their massacre, eyes wide at the sight of the armless woman the Ned-thing had been working on.

  Acronos burped. A piece of flesh escaped his esophagus with stomach acid and blood. He re-chewed the bit and swallowed before he said, “I think you should be called the Inhuman Mouth.”

  Dagana rose from her position and shuddered. She looked at the Ned-thing and considered Acronos’ proposal for its name. Of course, she had named Acronos, and she would also name the Ned-thing, though s
he would be diplomatic and allow Acronos’ suggestion to remain.

  “We’ll call you Chops the Inhuman Mouth.”

  Chops looked up from its meal of devastation and grinned, accepting the name they gave. Something about Chops lingered from his life on Earth as a human—he had been a quiet man of few words, and that he remained. Whether from a difficulty in speaking due to his physical impediments or that he didn’t really have anything to say, it was the way it was. But he would prove to be a dutiful soldier—that they would discover shortly after they left the cabin and hit the road.

  28

  As it turned out there were several lookie-loos at the murder scene, even fans of Death Fraud—probably the kind of people who followed the band from town to town. The fact that the bodies were that of Death Fraud was supposed to be kept from the public until further investigation, but as soon as the media found out, they couldn’t keep their mouths shut.

  The bodies were still in the house, untouched but heavily photographed and studied for clues. There was a cop trying to get the onlookers to move on, but no one was paying the man any mind. They all wanted to see a dead body show and that was that. The fans of Death Fraud wanted to verify that their favorite band was indeed dead. There were tears, there was anger, and there was a boatload of disbelief. It was a strange scene to say the least, but that made it much easier for Austin to snoop around, even if he had to remain on the public side of the caution tape.

  “I can’t believe it,” said a longhaired man with a death Fraud T-shirt: an above average fan mourning the loss of his favorite band.

  “They’re all dead, huh?” said Austin. He knew he couldn’t fit in with the longhaired fans, but right now they were all lookie-loos, and thus the playing field was even, and they would be able to talk with one another without preconditioned prejudices.

  “I can’t believe it,” the same man said again. He looked to be on the verge of tears. Austin wondered if knew or had even ever met any of the members of Death Fraud.