The Hellsblood Bride

by Chuck Wendig

“Come on. Inside, inside.”

  *

  The salumeria isn’t like her butcher joints. Those are clean, white, austere: the workshops of a craftsman, places to work more than places to sell. This is the opposite of all that. Dark woods and twists of iron. A chalkboard on the wall listing specials: Finnochiona, Chorizo Secco, Duck Mousse with Port Wine. Cheeses, too: Kunik cheese, Cowgirl Camembert, Friesian Blue. Farms listed next to each meat and cheese: Blue Sedge Farm, Malinari’s, Four Little Pigs Ranch. All local. Mookie knows a couple of them—he’s gone there to get his own pigs to butcher for his own efforts, meager as they might be, at producing his own charcuterie.

  There again is that sense of a different life for him. Like long ago he chose between two doors: one he could see and one he couldn’t. He chose the life of a thug, a brute, a head-smashing, wrist-snapping, knee-crushing force of nature. And now all this time he keeps trying to go back to that other door, where behind it is a Mookie who lives upstate, runs a small farm of heirloom pig breeds. A Mookie who uses the cleaver at his hip to make something, to feed people. Instead of what he uses it for now.

  Karyn stands there. Coat off. A winter blush to her pale cheeks. Lips still painted as if with the nuclear goo inside a jar of maraschino cherries. Her hair now: cropped short, so short it’s almost to the scalp.

  She scowls, puts a plate down with a rattle. Circles of red meat. Squares of pale cheese. He’s not sure what he’s looking at—his gut tightens and his teeth grind like millstones. Christ, how long has it been since he’s eaten? Feels like forever.

  “That’s what you want,” she says. “You came to eat, so eat.”

  She stands nearby, arms folded over her apron.

  “You’re pissed,” he says.

  “You know I am.”

  “Still.”

  “Still.”

  Mookie grunts. “I told you I was sorry.”

  “It’s cliché, but you know sorry doesn’t actually do anything, right? It’s like a birthday card a month after the day has passed. It’s just a, a, a… a token, a word that makes you feel like you did something but that doesn’t do anything to fill the hole inside of me. I liked her, Mookie. I liked Lulu. And now she’s dead.”

  “I didn’t kill her. I tried to save her—”

  “You didn’t pull the trigger but you and your daughter were like a pair of twisters competing to see how much wreckage you could make. You used me to find out information on my own girlfriend, and then surprise, surprise, she ends up dead.” She sniffs and wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, then pulls a curved knife with a dark wooden handle: a cimeter knife. For carving into big roasts. Like Mookie.

  “You’re right.” She is right. Shit. “I’ll go.”

  He turns.

  “Wait,” Karyn says. In a soft voice after a sigh she says, “You’re bleeding.”

  “It happens.”

  “Into the back. Let’s go. Your plate can wait.”

  *

  Gauze and duct tape: the sign of someone who works with knives all day.

  “You have a lot of scars,” Karyn says, biting off a strip of the tape. She sticks a square of gauze to the spot where the Mole slashed him with the glass shiv, then tapes it to his skin. She gives it a couple slaps. “More than I knew about.”

  Mookie winces. “Yeah, well.”

  “You have your gal now,” she says. Spoken with some bitterness. “Shouldn’t she be doing this for you instead of me?”

  “Kelly. Yeah.” He stands up, stretches. The sound of his bones is like a tomb door levered open with a crowbar.

  “One of the Girls,” she says. The gang, she means. Get-Em-Girls.

  “Was.”

  “Like Lulu.”

  “Yeah. They knew each other. Kelly says she was nice, real nice.”

  Karyn chews a lip. “She was. But…” It takes her a second, but then it comes out, a purging of poison, a blister lanced. “It wasn’t your fault. I blamed you, but Jesus, shit, she was in a gang. Not like a funny-ha-ha When You’re a Jet gang, but a knife-carrying breaking-and-entering type. Maybe your daughter helped bring the hurt to her door faster, but it would’ve happened anyway, right? She lived fast and loose, like a wheel about to come off a race car, and…” She draws a deep breath through her nose. “I just got hurt because I felt like you used me during all that. I just wish you wouldn’t have done that.”

  “Yeah. I did. And I’m kicking the stuffing out of myself over it still.”

  “Don’t.” She shrugs. “It’s fine. We’ll be fine.”

  “Okay.” The two stand there swaddled in ill-fitting silence for a long time, too long, long enough to suggest that things aren’t fine, not yet, not ever.

  But then she says, “You still got that cleaver I gave you?”

  “Saved my life more times than I got fingers and toes.”

  “Good. Let’s go eat some meat.”

  Whew.

  *

  “I’ve never had this,” Mookie says of the Finnochiona salami. “That’s fennel in there, yeah?” He sniffs it and takes another bite. His eyes close, and for one moment, everything feels right in the world. Good food does that to him. A bite of food made with love and passion is like cutting a hole in the shit-blanket that is the world so he can fall through it for the span of a few moments. Separate from the scum parade.

  “A little fennel pollen,” Karyn says. “You know the story of Finnochiona?”

  “Hnnh-nnn,” he says, shaking his head, tasting salami grease on his teeth.

  “A starving thief stole a salami from a stand at a fair long ago in some town in Italy, and hid himself and the salami in another stand where the man was selling fennel. The meat took on the flavor of the fennel aroma. The thief went on to make his own meats and open his own stand.”

  Mookie thinks of doors and choices. Another life.

  Is that door closed for good? Maybe it ain’t.

  Karyn shrugs. “Gonna try a sbriciolona next.”

  “I don’t know that one,” he mumbles around a cheek-pocket of meat.

  “Same idea—salami and fennel. But crumbly. Drier.” She shrugs. “In some parts of Italy I guess there’s a dessert of the same name.”

  “I gotta up my game.” He pops a glob of gorgonzola dulce in his mouth. Cheese isn’t his passion, but he loves the dark, surly, funky stuff. Shot through with veins of blue—suddenly he wonders if that’s why he likes it so much.

  “You should go home.”

  “Huh?”

  “You have your lady there. You haven’t been home in a while, have you?”

  He clears his throat. “Been a few days. How’d you know?”

  “Showered recently?”

  Oh.

  She says, “You smell like that cheese.”

  They share a laugh. That feels good.

  “I guess I should go home.”

  “You should definitely go home.”

  “We good?”

  “We’re better.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  4

  I don’t know what the worms want. That’s one thing I can’t feel. They came up through the gates—the ones we opened with the Ochre, oops—and now they’re just sitting there. They wanted a city empty of people, I guess, to make their playground. And now they can’t have that but they haven’t gone back down into the Expanse, either. So they’re just curled up in the gobbo temples. Bathed and cared for. Fed. But why? What do they want? And how soon will they try to get it?

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  Mookie’s tired enough—and hey, maybe dumb enough, too—to see the pile of suitcases next to the bar and think, Whose are those? And even when he sees that one’s pink like bubblegum and the other’s got a zebra pattern going on and the third one’s black but has a pair of electric blue skates hanging from it, he realizes whose they are but he still thinks: Kelly thinking of going on some sorta trip?

  The timing couldn�
��t be better, or maybe worse, because as he’s standing there scratching his head like a bewildered silverback, the door to the upstairs apartment opens and here comes Kelly.

  The sight of her sucks the wind out of his sails. In a good way. In the best way. In the way where it’s an excuse for him to stop and sit and bob quietly in the sparkling sea that is her. She’s got skin like a saucer of milk, and lips that taste like candy.

  She pulls on a winter jacket. Unsticks a Bowie knife—her Bowie knife, a knife with a silver skull and a sharp edge he hasn’t seen in a while—from the bar-top and tucks it into a sheath at her side. It’s then she sees him.

  “Mook.”

  “Hey, Kell.”

  She looks him up and down. “You been gone a while.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “You said sorry last time you did this. And the time before.”

  “I’m close now. Real close. I had the book but—”

  She walks over to him. Tall heels click hard against the wood, each one biting back any further conversation. When she’s right up on him and he smells the pomegranate lip balm and the vanilla perfume, she says, “I’m glad you’re trying to help Nora. But you’re chasing dragons, sugarplum. A book that you don’t even know can help her? Sounds about as strong as a mouthful of cotton candy.”

  “I need to help her—”

  “You help her by going to see her.”

  “I been to see her.”

  “When? Ballpark it for me. Last time you went down there.”

  “I… goddamn, Kell, I dunno.”

  “Three months. By my calendar, three months.”

  Has it been that long?

  “She’s down there in the dark and you’re up here chasing your tail. And I’m left alone to run the bar—a bar that doesn’t have any money or any real patrons except a few regular drunks and I don’t have money coming in but you sure spend a lot of it on Blue and so here we are—”

  “I need the Blue, Kell. I need it to see.”

  “My daddy needed whiskey, too, or so he said.”

  “It’s not like that. I’ve never been a Blazehead.”

  “Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t, but the louder you say you aren’t, the louder I hear you tell me that you are.” She reaches up and runs the pads of her fingers over his cheek—then lets her nails trace delicate lines down the architecture of his jaw. “We just aren’t gonna work out, big fella. We had a good time. But you and me, we aren’t the settling type. We’re two trains parked next to one another, and now it’s time to leave the station again, go where the tracks take us.”

  “No, whoa, hey, c’mon. We’re good for each other.”

  “We collided. It was fun. That’s it.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  She reaches up, plants a kiss on his cheek.

  Then Kelly walks past him, starts gathering up her bags.

  “Where you gonna go?” he asks her.

  “Away. Back to the city.”

  “Back to the Girls."

  She offers a small smile. “Maybe. I hear we might have some options that we didn’t have before now that…” She doesn’t say it because she doesn’t have to. Now that the Organization has lost its grip.

  He moves to block the door. “No. That ain’t what’s going on out there. It’s blood in the water, Kell. It’s sharks and piranha and fuckin’ barracuda. Everybody’s out for a taste now. It’s dangerous.”

  “You think I can’t handle myself?”

  “I didn’t say that—”

  She comes up. “You gonna move, or do I need to make you move?”

  With one hand she touches his arm. Gentle. Soft. Way you’d pet a persnickety cat. But her other hand—well, that one goes to her side. To the knife hanging there. It’s the move of a cop letting you know: I’ll shoot if it comes to that.

  Mookie steps aside.

  “Go see your daughter, Mook.”

  She gives his bicep a squeeze.

  And then she takes her bags and leaves. Only the scent of her—berry and vanilla—lingering behind like a memory that won’t quit.

  Mookie stands there for a while. Five minutes. Fifteen. An hour. He doesn’t even know. And then, at the end of it, like lightning striking out of nowhere, he grabs one of the barstools and pitches it into the shelf behind the bar. Glass breaking. Liquor pouring.

  6

  My father. Mikey “Mookie” Pearl. Where is he in all of this? I haven’t seen him in months. And here I was feeling charitable toward him again. He came down a few times after he found out my mother—his ex-wife—died. I’d never seen him cry before, and okay, he wasn’t like, a blubbery rubbery snot-slick mess or anything, but his eyes were wet and his voice shook like he was the little Dutch kid with his finger in the cracking dam, and right then, right there, I felt like I was his daughter again and he was my father. He swore he’d help me find a way out. But then his visits trailed off. He still sends stuff down from above. Bottles of clean water and food and propane for this little camping stove I have. Once in a while I get a chocolate bar. But he doesn’t come down anymore. Skelly did. Sorry. “Kelly.” But not him. It’s been three months. I guess he’s not going to help me get the hell out of hell. Fine. I think I’ve found someone else who can help me, anyway.

  — from the journals of Eleanor Jessamyne Pearl, Living Dead Girl

  *

  It’s not Hell like in the books or the bibles, but it’s Hell just the same. A subterranean tangle beneath the streets of Manhattan. Dug up by the Sandhogs on accident; like popping the cork on a bottle of nightmares. All manner of things came running up out of the dark: the Snakefaces, Trogbodies, and a tide of vicious, tricky gobbos. Those who die above the streets sometimes end up below them, wandering the dark as ghosts or, once in a blue moon, the living dead. Then you have the Half-and-Halfs, those bred half from the blood of man, half from the shadow heritage in the Great Below. All this, plus new monstrosities and mutants every day. Reaper-cloaks. Cankerpedes. Redteeth. The Headless. The Skinless.

  As the saying goes: there’s more beneath the streets of New York City than there is above ‘em. Thousands of miles of tunnels. A labyrinth of basalt, schist, granite, limestone. Secret rivers. Goblin temples. Burial grounds for monsters that don’t have names. And, of course, the Hungry Ones. The god-worms or worm-gods or whatever it is you choose to call them: truly like worms but the size of small skyscrapers.

  This used to be Mookie’s stomping grounds. Working for the Organization meant being one of the few guys who really knew what was going on down here—and that meant Werth (the old goat) had him working the maze, running Mole crews, digging up Cerulean out of the walls wherever they found it, staving off attacks by goblins, hiding from Sandhogs, and in general breaking legs and crushing heads whenever anybody tried to stand in their way. But all that’s gone now.

  His daughter’s down here, though.

  And he hasn’t been to see her in months.

  Shit.

  Kelly told it true: he needs to see her. So that’s what he’s gonna do.

  He gets on the train. Jersey Transit. Time to head into the city.

  Time to make things right.

  *

  Hell isn’t hard to find. Not anymore. Doorways down into the Great Below are like restaurants in this town—all you’ve got to do is throw a rock. But not every doorway is free to pass through. And all the good ones have guardians.

  Mookie used to be such a guardian. He was a man who controlled a series of quality boltholes to get you down into the dark: places close to the Yonder or Oddments Markets, or near to the Riverside Amtrak station, or to any of the Sandhog tunnels. Any time they found a new good vein of Blue in the schist, Mookie found—and got control of—the bolthole leading to it.

  But it’s been a while. He still knows the doors. It’s just he’s no longer the one with the keys.

  The goal is to get to Daisypusher. That’s where Nora’s been staying since she took the Caput Mortuum and found
herself wedded to this place. Daisypusher: a town of dead folk. Corpses up and walking around—ghosts held fast to the ruined flesh by dint of some incomplete mission or an emotion so strong it tethered soul-to-body. Daisypusher’s on the east side, below the Marble Cemeteries.

  Good thing is, he knows a guy. Janitor at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection across the street. Little Lexie Losev, pot-bellied broom-pusher from Irkutsk. Has a bit of a pill problem, and Mookie used to help him with that. (Well. Help him get the pills, not get clean.) Lexie always let Mookie into the church late at night; then they’d head down into the basement where, if you went behind the old boiler, you’d find a door. And if you had a key to that door, like Little Lexie did, that’d get you into the Undercity.

  And from there, into the Great Below.

  Mookie shows up outside of the church. Stone the color of gun metal. Stained-glass windows gone dark with black ice. He creeps up, opens the set of big doors, steps inside and shakes off the cold—

  And there, framing the Byzantine holy water font, stand two men.

  Mookie gets the measure of them quickly. Mafiya types. Leather jackets bulging with pistols underneath. One’s got dark eyes under dark brows. The other is pale—thinning blond hair like straw, eyes gray and muddy like puddles of slush.

  “Church is closed,” Dark Brows says. “Go home.”

  Mookie grunts. “I need confession. Unburden my soul and all that shit.”

  “Not tonight, bud-dee,” Slushpuddle says. “Find God elsewhere.”

  Two thugs here means the doorway is compromised. Mookie thinks that he could take their advice, go elsewhere.

  But he’s stubborn. A nut that won’t crack. And part of him thinks, They don’t know who I am. So maybe they need a lesson.

  “My God lives here,” Mookie says. “You won’t deny a man his spiritual comeuppance, will you?”

  “Hey, fuck-face,” Dark Brows says, his accent thick like borscht. He pulls back the flap of his jacket, shows the big pistol hanging there like a fish caught in a net. “You go. You go now. Or I help you meet your God lickety-quickety. Okay?”