End Times V: Kingdom of Hell

by Shane Carrow

  We’ve been over this again and again and again and I’m fucking sick of hearing about it. He’s going to die! They’re going to kill him! Our job is to make sure it’s as easy as possible on him! And if you think that’s an easy thing for me to say then fuck you! Fuck you!

  I closed my eyes on that distant world. I felt the colour drain away, felt the warmth disappear, heard the arguing phantom voices in my mind slowly fade to nothing.

  I woke up in the cell.

  My fingers – or rather, the stumps where my fingers had been – were excruciating. The ragged bandage was soaked through with blood. A sticky red trail led over the edge of my mattress, across the concrete floor, joining the larger red stain in the centre of the room.

  Not my blood. The dead soldier’s. Rickenbacker. The man who had been dragged into this room and shot in the head in front of me.

  I gathered my thoughts woozily. I’d come to the weak conclusion that this jail cell was probably, in all likelihood, on a rational basis... real. It was the other world, the “normal” one, that was false. Dreams, hallucinations, memories. That’s all it was comprised of.

  So I’d suffered some kind of memory loss. My mind was in a fragile state. I may have been, by some definitions of the term, crazy. That was a fact.

  And I didn’t like that. I was not in a good position, obviously. Rickenbacker – that soldier, whom I must have known – he’d been shot right in front of me by another soldier who wanted me to tell him something.

  So that was the second fact: I possessed information some people wanted. They were willing to torture me to get it. Apparently that hadn’t worked out, so now they were executing other people in front of me.

  Fact three: If I divulged that information, maybe I could stop them killing people. Maybe they would let me go.

  And that was the problem. I had no idea what they wanted me to tell them. I couldn’t fucking remember anything, for Christ’s sake.

  And then there was the journal. The thick, grubby package of paper, tied and stapled and folded together, stuffed underneath the mattress. Covered with my own handwriting, in a few different shades of ink. I’d gone through a few pens. Been writing it for a long time.

  It was a record. Of whatever had happened to me between now, and the hazy, blurry point of my last memory, of my ordinary life in Perth with my dad and my brother and my friends. That was another fact I was sure of: those were memories, not fantasies. I really had been there, once upon a time. My name really was Matt and I really had lived in Perth with my dad and my brother. And now… I was here.

  The missing link – the answer as to how I started there and ended up here – was probably in the journal.

  I didn’t want to read it. The very thought filled me with nauseous dread. Because if I read it, I was sure I’d remember. This cell would become irrevocably real. And this was not a good world to be in.

  But I didn’t really have a choice, did I? The alternative was to continue in this crazy, semi-lucid tide of dreams and reality. Of sunny, happy memories interspersed with hellish visits from a torturer. That wasn’t a solution. That wasn’t going to get me out of this problem. Before I could escape, I needed all the facts. I needed my memory back.

  I opened the journal.

  There were a group of loose papers tucked into the first page. A faded Polaroid photo – of me, I realised with sudden shock, with my arm around a girl. We were sitting in the booth of a diner, with the window behind us showing a view of a few dusty buildings, a pub with a sign calling it THE AMBER HOTEL. The girl had blue eyes, sandy brown hair, a few stray wisps hanging down over her forehead. We were smiling.

  Flashes of memory: ellie. Some whispering voice at the back of my head, stirring my recollections. Yes. Her name was Ellie.

  Roadmaps. Western Australia, South Australia, New South Wales. A few scribbled notes on a piece of notebook paper, detailing IOUs from a card game. The debts ran in excess of $1 million. Either the players had a lot of time on their hands, or they were gambling with the sure knowledge that they’d never have to pay any of it. My own name was on there: Matt. Other names, too: Rahvi, Dresner, Lomax. Rickenbacker.

  Another photo, a printed A4 this time, cheap ink and paper. A whole platoon of soldiers posing in ranks in front of a huge mound of snow – no. Not a mound of snow. Some kind of structure, almost entirely covered in snow, but with the occasional piece of metal sticking up. Weird shapes; curves and fins. And not just soldiers, either. Civilians, dressed in parkas and snow pants. A pair of little kids, no older than ten. Familiar faces – a guy wearing an Akubra, a guy with a hunting rifle slung over his back, a guy with a face framed by a huge bushy beard.

  And me. And Aaron.

  jagungal, endeavour

  I stared at the photo for a while. Where had it been taken, and when? What were Aaron and I doing with these people? Where was I now?

  I tucked the loose papers back into a bundle. I turned to the first page of the journal. I read the first two words before the lock and my cell door started to clank open.

  I shoved the journal back under the mattress, and put my back to the wall. I was breathing heavily. Terrified. I knew what was going to come through the door this time, and it wasn’t any better.

  The soldiers came in first, blank-faced men with assault rifles on their backs who took up a position on either side of the door. Then the officer. The man in full dress uniform, with a crew cut, with his markings of rank on his arms. A general. What was his name? I’d remembered when he shot Rickenbacker, I should remember now, damn it, something Slavic or German, started with D…

  draeger

  Yes. General Draeger.

  “Good morning Matthew,” he said. “Feel like talking today?”

  “I don’t...” I croaked. “I don’t know what you want.”

  “You know what I want,” he said in a no-nonsense tone.

  “No,” I said. My voice was weak, my throat killing me. Apparently I’d been doing a lot of screaming over the past few... days? Weeks? How long had I been captive here? “I can’t remember,” I managed. “I don’t know where I am.”

  Draeger exhaled slightly; a weak fragment of a laugh, an expression of disbelief. “Bring him in,” he called out.

  Another soldier pushed another captive into my cell and kicked him to his knees. Dressed only in black underwear, his hands flex-tied behind his back, duct tape over his mouth. His torso was a mess of scars, of burns and cuts and bruises. His face was swollen and bleeding. His body was criss-crossed with bandages and gauze. They’d been torturing him, and then patching him up. Keeping him alive as long as possible.

  Like me.

  But he was different from the last poor soul they’d dragged in. Rickenbacker had been panicking, skittish, hyperventilating. Not that I could blame him – I’d felt the same way, and I hadn’t been the one with the gun to my head.

  But this guy was perfectly calm. His breathing was level. He kneeled on the floor, eyes locked firmly onto mine.

  The soldier who’d dragged him in left him on the floor, kneeling between me and Draeger, and then left the cell. The steel door swung shut behind him. The two guards on either side of the door continued to stare rigidly ahead.

  Draeger pulled a semi-automatic handgun from his hip holster. “Corporal Joseph Rahvi,” he said. “Special Air Service Regiment. Service number: 13361622. Date of birth: December 27, 1986. That was all he gave us. A true soldier.”

  “Listen,” I managed. “Listen, I want to help you, I want to give you what you want, but I don’t know what it is! Please! My mind’s fucked! I can’t remember anything!”

  Draeger lifted his arm up, pressed the gun against the back of Rahvi’s head. “Where are the PAL codes?” he asked calmly.

  Rahvi snorted air out of his nostrils, and stared me in the eyes, shaking his head. Don’t tell him.

  “I don’t know!” I screamed. “It’s in the journal! It’s in the journal!” I scrambled forward, reached under the mattress wit
h my good hand, pulled the journal out and held it forward like an offering to the gods. “Please! Just look!”

  Draeger snatched the book out of my hands and flung it against the cell wall, loose paper fluttering behind it and sinking onto the blood-stained concrete floor. “We’ve been through that already!” he snarled. “Don’t play games with me, Matthew! You have until the count of three, and then I kill him! One!”

  “No! Please!”

  “Two!”

  “I can find it! I can find it! Please, just let me remember, just give me time...”

  “Three!”

  The gunshot was deafening.

  One of the guards, standing by the door, had raised his rifle and shot the other guard in the head. His body spun, splattered blood across the wall, collapsed to the floor.

  Draeger turned, astonished. Lifted his pistol towards the guard, who was already moving towards him, swinging the rifle butt up into Draeger’s gun hand. The pistol went flying out of the general’s grip and the rifle butt came around again and smashed him in the side of the head. Draeger collapsed onto his hands and knees, stunned, and the soldier brought the rifle down a third and final time onto his skull. The general collapsed into the dried pool of blood, unconscious.

  I stared at the scene in disbelief. The interior of my cell was now even more splattered with blood, with the stink of it, with the noxious scent of gunpowder. My ears were ringing. Rahvi had stumbled over the general’s prone body, patting it, searching it. The soldier who’d done the shooting was twisting the lock on the cell door, pulling it open as fast as he could. Then he stepped out into the corridor, dropped to one knee, and fired at some target down the hall. Five or six shots from the Steyr Aug, and then he stood up, ducked back into the cell, and slammed the door shut. He pulled a knife from his belt and tossed it over to me. “Cut Rahvi loose,” he ordered, as he knelt down beside the body of the other guard he’d killed. He grabbed the man’s radio, opened the cell door, threw it as far down the corridor outside as he could and then closed the door once more.

  I was dumbstruck, struggling to keep up with what was going on. The knife had clattered onto the floor beside me; I hadn’t even tried to catch it. Rahvi fumbled for it himself, with his hands still bound behind his back, and started awkwardly cutting through the flex ties.

  The soldier by the door had his own radio tucked under his armpit, and with his hands he was fiddling with something else. It was a mobile phone, I realised, a cheap looking burner – but he wasn’t speaking into it, he was using the radio. “University personnel, come in all university personnel, this is Sergeant Stevens calling in a 10-89.”

  The radio crackled. “Copy that sergeant, this is Captain McArthur, what is the nature of the threat?”

  “I put C4 in your radios,” the soldier said, and pressed a button on the mobile.

  There was a heartbeat – then a dull, loud booming through the walls of my cell. Many distant explosives going off, in the tunnels and corridors around us. On the surface, somewhere above.

  Rahvi had managed to cut through his flex-ties, and he reached up to rip the duct tape from his mouth. He struggled up onto his feet and then crouched beside me. “Matt,” he said. “Matt, are you okay?”

  I turned to look at him. My mouth was still agape. Rahvi glanced up at the soldier by the door, who was rifling through the body of the other dead guard. “Jesus Christ, sarge,” he said. “Good to fucking see you, but you cut that pretty close.”

  The sergeant didn’t reply. He pulled a knife and a sidearm from the dead soldier, and turned the body to slide his rifle out. “Is Draeger alive?”

  Rahvi checked his breathing. “Yeah,” he said, “but not for long.” He reached for the general’s pistol, lying by my mattress where it had been knocked.

  “No!” the sergeant yelled, whirling around and aiming his rifle at Rahvi. “Drop the weapon, corporal! Drop the weapon!”

  Rahvi lowered the pistol, but didn’t drop it. “This man tortured us for weeks,” he growled.

  “I don’t care,” the sergeant said flatly. “He’s a hostage. Don’t touch him. That goes for you too, Matt. Understood?”

  He paused, and looked at me properly for the first time. Realised that I was sitting motionless, in shock. “Matt? Are you okay?”

  “I... I...” I swallowed, and looked at both of them. I was breathing rapidly. “What the fuck is going on? Who are you? What the fuck is going on?”

  The sergeant came over and stood before me. “It’s me, Matt,” he said. “Sergeant Blake. And that’s Corporal Rahvi. You remember us, don’t you?”

  Images flashed through my head – the sergeant on the deck of a huge ship, pointing at a distant green headland. Sitting in the dark womb of a helicopter with a headset on. Pinned beneath a truck, aboard a cargo plane, and all around us was fire and chaos…

  “I don’t...” I gasped. “I don’t know...”

  Blake looked down at me, at the welt of scars across my torso, at the blood-soaked bandage wrapped around the spot where two of my fingers had been severed. “I don’t think he’s in a good state of mind, sarge,” Rahvi said, as he pulled Draeger’s boots and pants off.

  “We’re going to get you out of here, okay Matt?” Blake said. “Just do what I say and we’ll get out of here okay. Do what Rahvi says.” He turned to the corporal, who was now wearing Draeger’s pants himself. “He’s in your charge. We don’t have a lot of time to get out of here and we are going to have to move very fast.”

  “Yes sir,” Rahvi replied, lacing Draeger’s boots up on his own feet. “When we get a chance I’d like to hear about how the hell you managed to get in here.”

  Blake was stripping the boots and clothes from the soldier he’d shot. “Getting in was the easy part. The hard part is getting out.”

  He hurried over and pressed the clothes into my hands, and my flailing mind grasped onto the idea like a drowning man grabbing a life buoy. Getting dressed was easy! I knew how to get dressed. I pulled the pants on, and the thin grey shirt, and then the camouflage jacket. The collar was splashed with blood. I tried not to think about it.

  Rahvi had stripped the general of his clothing. Now their fortunes were reversed – Rahvi was wearing a full dress uniform, and Draeger was in his underwear, bleeding from the back of the head where Blake had struck him. Rahvi had also taken the dead guard’s Steyr Aug, and slung it over his back as he helped me to my feet. I felt dizzy, and doubled over suddenly as I threw up, splashing thin ribbons of vomit over the blood on the floor.

  “You okay?” Rahvi said. I nodded weakly. He turned and looked at Blake. “What do we do with Draeger? Matt can barely walk. We can’t carry both of them.”

  “It isn’t just going to be the three of us,” Blake said. “Wait here. Secure the prisoner.” He produced a packet of cable ties from his pocket, tossed them at Rahvi, and then opened the door and disappeared out into the corridor.

  Rahvi knelt down by Draeger and quickly snapped the ties around his wrists. Then he grasped the general’s hair and lifted his head up from the floor, pushing one eyelid open and peering at the pupil. “With any luck the sarge gave him brain damage,” he muttered.

  Rahvi pushed something towards me, and it took me a moment to realise it was the gun – the general’s handgun, pressed against Rahvi’s head only moments earlier. “You think you’re okay to use a weapon?”

  I stared at it. “I don’t... I don’t know.”

  Rahvi nodded. “That’s okay. Just let me know when you do.” He tucked it into his own holster, and hefted the Steyr.

  Suddenly Draeger gave a moan. Rahvi knelt down beside him again. “Feeling better, asshole? Get up.” Draeger groaned again. “I said get up!” Holding his rifle in one hand, Rahvi grabbed the general under one armpit and dragged him to his feet. Draeger slipped on the bloody floor and stumbled. Rahvi pushed him up against the wall, where he slumped against it, still groaning.

  “Out into the corridor,” Rahvi ordered, and pushed him ou
t through the open cell door. Draeger complied. I don’t think he even understood what was going on. Rahvi glanced back at me. “Matt! Come on! Stay close!”

  I looked up at him, broken out of my trance. “Right,” I said weakly. “Okay.” I pulled myself to my feet and headed for the door. At the last second I stopped and turned. The journal was lying on the floor where Draeger had flung it. I went back and tucked it into my jacket. As I was leaving I saw something else lying there: the Polaroid photo, of me and the girl. I grabbed that as well and then followed Rahvi out into the corridor.

  Outside was confusion, shouting, disorientation. It was strange enough for me to even be outside the cell, finally, in that entirely hypothetical world I had spent so long imagining. It was even stranger to see so many people out there too: dozens of bedraggled, filthy men, as confused and disoriented and covered in torture scars as me and Rahvi.

  They were the other prisoners. While Rahvi and I had been waiting in the cell, Blake had freed them. Now he was striding down the corridor with a bundle of rifles under his arm, weapons he’d taken from dead soldiers further up the hall. Looking up there, I caught a glimpse of ragged bodies lying on the ground, a mess of blood all over the place, heads and hands simply missing. They’d been holding their radios to their ears when the C4 went off.

  Blake was addressing the prisoners. “Maybe you haven’t seen combat before, but that’s okay,” he said loudly. “I have an escape route planned and if we stick together we’ll be fine! But we need to move fast!” The select few he was handing rifles to, I realised, were men he knew. And as I looked at them I felt a few hazy memories myself – faces I’d seen somewhere long ago, somewhere warm and blue and tropical, faces I was used to seeing in black combat fatigues or wetsuits.

  clearance divers, the little voice in my memory said. navy spec ops.

  But there were other people who weren’t familiar with him, weren’t part of our group, whatever kind of group it was. There was even a girl there, a red-headed teenager with a plaster cast around a broken wrist, a terrified look on her face.