“Oh God. Uh—” I stammered. I wondered what Mayor Wayworth had said about me, and to whom. “I sorta burned it. But—”
Hank’s throat ripped open, and his reality-rumbling voice filled all space in the restaurant. “What?” Blood spattered from the ragged wound. The Twins continued eating their pancakes.
Hank stomped toward me shaking dust bunnies free from the ceiling fans.
“But I got something else,” I said. “Mayor Wayworth was there talking to Squeak and—”
“Do be quiet! What’s in the bag, then? I hope it’s good, or else I might convince the Twins to let me tinsel the buffet with your intestines before they drag you to Hell.” He stopped only a few booths away, a confused look across his throat and face. “Did you say Wayworth was talking to Squeak? Oh, that’s juicy.” The last words caused the concrete beneath the building to quake. The Twinkle Twins stopped eating, their forks frozen halfway between plate and mouth. “What do you have in that bag?” said Hank from his kinder, posh mouth, his throat still open in awe.
At that moment, I could have squeezed coal into diamonds between my ass cheeks.
Hank looked over to the Twins. A silent conversation, which I was not privy to, flowed among the three of them. The Twins nodded to Hank, and he replied with a nod of his own. I wanted to nod and feel involved in deciding my fate but didn’t dare. I’d heard that the Twins like to disembowel folks with their teeth if annoyed.
The Twins turned and smiled at me in a smooth, synchronized motion before evaporating in a puff of smoke.
Hank returned his attention to me, both mouths smiling. “Let’s see it then.”
My glutes relaxed to a much more comfortable orange-juicing pressure. I set the case on the table next to my overloaded buffet plate and opened it like a giant oyster to get at a prized pearl. Hank approached, reverently. I lifted the heavy bone fez from within. In my head, I heard trumpets and an angelic chorus as I held it out to him.
“That is lovely.” Hank spoke each word deliberately with his polished voice, making the moment feel even more regal. “Not what I sent you to retrieve, but lovely, nonetheless.” Hank inspected me in silence. “I may let you live after all.”
My whole body relaxed, every muscle went from taut and strained to slack as I fell, involuntarily, back into the seat.
It was then that a squad of mercenaries in cheap rental tuxedos burst into the dining room from both the front entrance and the kitchen. They formed a defensive barrier around Hank and me before rushing forward in a highly trained martial assault. I watched in confusion as Hank made short work of the spiffed-up goons. Definitely not Squeak’s guys—too highly trained. Squeak could never afford such a crew.
“Mmm,” moaned Hank. “This should be fun.”
Hank was nimbler than any morbidly obese man ought to be, but he wasn’t a man. He shoved me into my booth. I clapped the bowling ball bag shut and hugged it in my lap, watching the carnage rise in intensity around me.
The goons were large men, but still, they stood no chance against Hank the Hole. Like an unfurled bloody flower, inhuman appendages sprang from beneath his finely pressed suit edges and burst the ivory buttons and stitching. Some of these appendages were large like monstrous squid tentacles, others were small feelers, searching for targets the larger arms could grab. Hank was a mass of living spaghetti flinging gore in all directions, blindly ripping men limb from limb. I could only imagine how the carnage looked from outside the restaurant, blood and viscera splashing up against the insides of the windows.
The first man to charge Hank and me screamed in pain as one muscular tentacle grabbed him around the shoulders and another gripped him around the calves. The gristle and sinew popped and gave way as Hank stretched him farther and farther, finally surpassing the breaking point of flesh. The man’s screams transitioned from shrieks, to gurgles, to nothing as he pulled apart. The two halves sprayed gore in all directions but somehow missed my plate of noodles and fried pork.
Hank’s remaining arms, tendrils, mouths, whatever, dispensed their own destruction to the multitudes who dared continue their failed onslaught. He cackled in murderous glee from both his demonic and British mouths. A hell of a moment, if only I’d had some chips. Everything’s better with a bag of chips.
“Okay, that’s enough!” a shrill voice cut through the din.
The surviving goons stopped their attack and retreated to the walls and toward the exits, getting as far away from Hank as possible. A pigeon strutted between the crowd of over-polished black dress shoes, like a hot-shit rooster. “Dammit! That’s enough! Hank, you’re a reasonable demon. I’m sure we can come to an agreement.”
“Ah. Squeak! You interrupted my evening exercise. Oh, do keep these tasty morsels coming. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real workout,” said Hank, reabsorbing all of his projected tendrils and returning to his rotund human form, his suit undamaged and impeccable. “I rather enjoyed that. But, I think there’s someone downstairs who would like a word with you.”
Squeak lifted his wings in indignation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who wants to talk to me? I’m here to pick up my property. That fucker there,” he said, pointing at me with a wing, “stole something from my chapel, and I want it back.”
“Oh, he stole something. He stole something from your conspirator. The Twinkle Twins are off to bring him in.”
I was enjoying the show. It was wonderful to watch the will drain from that possessed pigeon body as I crunched through a fortune cookie.
Hank continued. “You and Mayor Wayworth will make a fine couple down in the bile pits. But I’m a gentleman. If Little Rob-Robb is ready to testify in audience with Lord Baal, we can cut this bit of butchery short.” Hank turned to me. “What do you think? Ready for a little trip down under?”
Squeak turned on his little pigeon feet and started bolting for the door, attempting to take flight, but failing to lift off the blood-strewn floor. “Open the door, peons! Let me outta here!”
“You’ve always been a craven shit,” said Hank. He then switched to his rumbling demon voice dosed with ample influence. His throat freshly torn open, blood running out over his crowded shark teeth, he gurgled, “Bar the door!”
All of the surviving goons, now under Hank’s sway, moved to block Squeak from escaping. Even the men bleeding out on the floor and missing their lower halves pulled themselves across the abattoir, their viscera dragging behind as they tried to comply with Hank’s order.
Squeak flapped his wings in a final attempt to escape, when one of the mercenaries grabbed him.
“No! You can’t do this!” Squeak screamed and squirmed.
I giggled as I cleaned the last bits of pork fried rice from my plate.
“Oh, I wouldn’t laugh, Little Rob-Robb. I’m still sore about not getting my prize,” Hank said in his prim British voice.
I clammed up and watched as the goons handed Squeak over to Hank.
“Thank you kindly.” He then turned to address the room and switched back to his demon voice dosed with enough influence to turn the Pope into an orphanage arsonist. “I am done with you.”
The remaining mercenaries still standing—about twelve of them total—pulled their pistols and blew out the backs of their own skulls, adding their blood, corpses, and gray matter to the already gore-flooded restaurant.
Hank again closed his horrible throat-mouth. “What a mess. This should confound the local authorities for a while.”
Squeak continued his futile squirming. “Fuck your mothers! Fuck your fathers! Fuck your mother’s fathers! Fuck all of you!”
“That’s enough of that.”
Hank thumped the pigeon with a middle finger, knocking the bird out. He plopped the rag-doll bird in his jacket pocket. “Pack up the fez and come along.”
As I stood, Hank clapped his hands. This triggered the bones of the massacred to liberate themselves from the dismembered bodies littering the floor. They clicked and clacked, stacking th
emselves to form a bloody bone arch between us and the buffet. A human skull slotted itself in the top as the keystone. A slight puff of a fiery breeze—carrying the stench of burnt hair in combination with the taste of orange juice and toothpaste—tussled my sleeves.
A thin, filmy blackness with the sheen of Hellfire spanned the gateway. With the bowling ball bag gripped in my white knuckles, I followed Hank through the portal. We descended from the mortal plane to the citadel at the center of Pandemonium. There we attended Squeak’s trial before Lord Baal.
The trial? You want to hear about the trial? Well, nothing surprising happened. The mayor got away. That poor fucker is freezing his nuts off doing hard labor at a monastery in northern Scandinavia, living on caribou and beans.
I fared well. Hank took all of the credit, saying he sent me as a mole to uncover Squeak’s plot with the mayor. Hank decided to let me live, but only if he could call in a favor at a later date. Of course I agreed. You can’t say no to a demon of his stature.
Lord Baal offered me the mayor’s fez, but I declined. Owning that hat is dangerous.
Instead, Hank gifted me with the hat of his house, even though I’d failed to retrieve the altarpiece, as requested. It was perfect—a green-and-yellow John Deere hat with a Budweiser bottle cap bent over the edge of the bill.
Lord Baal also offered me a couple other boons, which I did not turn down.
First, he put me in charge of Dad’s bookie business. I don’t do any of the work; I’ve got underlings for that.
Oh, and my second boon? Hank the Hole acted as a personal escort for Dad and his card-playing buds to my personal toothpaste, orange juice, and burnt-hair room in Hell for a weekend. Since then, Old Boss Robb has left town. I think he’s working as a mule for the mafia back east.
Best of all? No one calls me Little Rob-Robb anymore—except for Hank, because he’s an asshole. They all call me Boss Robb, and they all tremble before me as I walk the criminal underground wearing my John Deere cap from The House of Flies.
J.W. DONLEY, or Joe, was raised in Oklahoma and currently lives with his wife and son in the Pacific Northwest where the foothills of the Cascade Mountain range meet the Salish Sea. He enjoys writing in the weird, horror, and fantasy genres. Growing up he loved reading R. L. Stine’s Goosebumps books as well as classics like Frank Herbert’s Dune and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. In college he discovered Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, which in turn led him to King’s short stories and later to books like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and authors like Clive Barker and Laird Barron. Joe’s short story “Gustav Floats” appears in Dim Shores Presents: Volume 2, published in 2020. When he isn’t writing or reading, Joe enjoys landscape photography, hiking, and fiddling with his fountain pens. You can find him on Twitter as @JWDonley and on his website (JWDonley.com).
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Illustration by P.L. McMillan
“6.14.497 A.C. This is Professor Gabriela Richmond beginning audio log for the Neo-Cairo region excavation. We have landed at the entrance of the drill site, which is near the northeast corner of what remains of the city limits. The tunnel descends sharply into the bedrock at a five percent grade. To recap, the underground structure was initially discovered by First Officer Maxwell Hart’s team during a standard surface scan. Speculation leans toward a tectonic shift bringing the location within range of scanners.”
Gab clicked off her tablet and slipped it into her pocket. She surveyed the jagged, broken land that spread before her under an ash-laden sky. From the archive, she had learned that Egypt had once been a place of shifting sands, oases, and endless blue skies. After the tectonic seizures of the Calamity laid waste to the Earth, most cities were reduced to skeletal husks as the bedrock beneath jutted up in thick, shattered cliffs and the once dormant super-volcanoes erupted in a hellish symphony around the world.
The resulting chaos had been as thorough as it had been unexpected. All human life fled. All animal and plant life perished.
Now the Earth was an echoing orb of howling winds, stormy skies, acid rain, and dead seas.
Gab’s three students, handpicked from the Advanced Pre-Calamity Anthropology class she taught, had already descended into the complex and waited for her in the first room. Gab was loath to go down into the depths. She had heard reports of crews from the other stations risking subterranean missions, but it was a general consensus on Space Station 18 that all visits should be above ground only. However, this expedition was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take three of her most talented students to an unexplored site, where they—and she—could make their futures by possibly discovering something new.
Her assistant, Lee Renford, nudged her shoulder playfully. Around them, the winds screamed through shattered buildings, around rusted cars, and over hulking rubble.
“Come on, Gab, let’s get this over with. I’m still of the opinion that it will be nothing but junk down there, a verified dump of Pre-Calamity garbage,” Renford said.
“Hey, we still get paid either way!” she replied, her heart kicking up a notch with excitement.
The entrance was located in a deep fissure between looming concrete mounds, the remnants of Pre-Calamity structures—stores or restaurants based on the vague outlines.
From surface level, the eight-meter-tall tunnel sharply descended, its walls burnt by the intense heat of the drilling laser, which had cooked the sand into brilliant, iridescent glass. Stepping into the threshold, Gab’s foot displaced sand, sending it tumbling down the severe slope. As she reached up and switched on her headlamp, Renford gave a theatrical bow, indicating Gab should go first. She couldn’t help but smile.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said and took her first step into the darkness.
The temperatures dropped as Gab crept down the slippery slope, wondering what the air would smell like beyond her mask. Wondered what history would taste like—burnt stone maybe, dust, sand, age. Something thick, grainy, and lingering. Her breathing echoed back at her as her light illuminated the strange ribbing the laser had created as it had melted the earth.
In her chest, Gab’s heart thundered with an unfamiliar excitement. The last new site on Earth was discovered over twenty-five years ago, when Gab was a student herself. Last time, a bunker was found in the area of Earth once known as the United States, in the state of Utah. Gab wasn’t chosen to go, and that resentment still burned like acid in her memories, especially since the team had found seven dusty human remains and a multitude of Pre-Calamity artifacts, including several intact books.
Now it was her chance. Her moment.
The tunnel continued downward, the air grew cold and clammy. Gab shuddered but also relished the dramatic change in temperature. On the space station, the climate was controlled. You never shivered or needed to bundle up. It was an experience, something to cherish, this temperature pushing against her boundaries of comfort.
For a while, their boots scraping against the tunnel floor were the only sounds. Then the tunnel bottomed out and widened. It was here that the drill had pierced the side of the structure, allowing Gab and her team access to the site. Renford and Gab stopped at the threshold, their lights casting strange shadows across the walls. Gab sucked in a breath of bottled air. She could feel her hands growing sweaty in her gloves, feel them trembling. Needing his strength, Gab looked at Renford.
“This is it,” he said, and she smiled.
He took her gloved hand in his and, together, they stepped into the structure, into the past.
Once inside, they found themselves in a tall room with walls built from cyclopean blocks of limestone and basalt, engraved with hieroglyphics. These images depicted people bowing to towering humanoids with animal heads. Framing these bas-reliefs were hieroglyphics telling a story that Gab could not decipher with her limited knowledge of Pre-Calamity languages.
“This stuff,” Renford said, breaking the quiet, “is all so weird. Is this something the ancient Earth people liked?”
�
��From the reports, it looks like this is prehistoric,” Gab replied. “I’d estimate it to be over six thousand years old based on the sample the previous team collected. It’s fascinating really. How did the primitive humans build something like this?”
“I still don’t understand why Commander Mason thinks there might be something of use down here. If it’s really so old, there’ll be nothing but dust.” Her assistant yawned.
Gab let go of his hand to step closer to one of the walls, her boots crunching sand that hadn’t been disturbed in kiloyears, and examined a scene depicting a cat-headed figure directing humans to dig. She turned to the only door in the room, where she heard the sound of distant voices, and led Lee into a narrow hallway, at the end of which shone a hazy yellow light.
Gab followed it into a medium-sized antechamber hewn into the rock, where her three students were waiting for her—Wayne Berry, Ardal Mendoza, and Carla Sloane. They had set up a small floor light, which sat in the corner of the chamber. It was battery-powered, and each unit held eight hours of light.
“Everyone ready?” Gab asked.
“Are we going to find dead bodies down here? Cause I’m not okay with that,” Mendoza said, his voice muffled by his helmet.
“I can’t believe we get to see something the previous generations never found,” Sloane said.
“Everyone, stay alert. I want us to be thorough, but most importantly, careful,” Gab continued as she took the lead.
Opposite the entrance hallway was another aperture, leading deeper. Gab stood on the threshold, and her light revealed a primitive staircase that twisted sharply to the right out of view. The steps were nearly nonexistent, worn smooth by the feet of thousands of Pre-Calamity humans and covered by a treacherous layer of sand. Keeping a hand on the wall, Gab focused on her feet and the floor beneath as she crept downward. It soon became evident that the staircase had been carved in a tight spiral, and as she descended farther and farther, she felt like she was riding on a drill straight into the heart of the Earth.
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