by Chuck Wendig
Nora yells, “Stop!”
Sirinas pauses. Tilts her head like a praying mantis trying to understand rock-and-roll music. “Stop?”
“Let him... Jesus, let him talk.”
“But he is weak. He will jabber and mewl and—”
Nora stands up. Feels the train shake beneath her feet. Walks to the Half-and-Half and pulls a switchblade—the same one given to her by Skelly what feels like a lifetime ago. One quick button click and the blade is out and she holds the blade to his eye—
He whimpers. Looking alternately from the Snakeface’s icepick to Nora’s switchblade.
“Tell me what you know,” Nora says.
“I... I... my friend, my friend Shelley, he’s... he was like me, you know, a fr-freak, but he joined this group, this cult, and they told him that they could, ahhh, could make him normal again. They said he would be like everyone else, and I found that sad but he found it very attractive and next thing I knew they came for him one night. We were in the Riverside Shanty and they came up over us and put a bag over his head and they didn’t have... I swear they didn’t have any skin—”
“The Skinless,” says an earthquake voice from the fore of the train.
The hulking hunchback in the white sheet stands up and turns toward them. His face looks like a frozen mudball peering out from a snowbank. He sneers and flashes a set of flinty hematite chompers. He begins to storm toward them.
“Who are you?” Nora asks.
“Hrothk,” he answers.
He stomps forth, the train shuddering with each step.
“I saw them,” Nora says. “At Yonder. They came for me.”
The golem harrumphs. “They follow the False Prophet. Oakes. The Skinless King. On his flesh is their Holy Book writ. They are a lighthouse signaling the rocks ahead of the boat—the End of Symmetry, the Grave Imbalance, the Malformation of Sacred Proportion that the True Prophet Aristovilnus warned us of—”
“Feh,” Sirinas says, spitting on the ground. “You and your cults.”
“We are no cult!” the golem bellows. “We are a sect of warriors who have served at the behest of the Symmetry since time immemorial—”
“Pawns!” The Snakeface hisses. “Pawns of the Glasstower family. They point you like a gun and—”
“Shut up!” Nora screams.
Everyone does.
“I don’t care about any of this. What I care about is getting to Oakes. You—” She points the knife at Norky. “You’re going to tell me what you know. Everything. And if you hold anything back—”
The train starts to slow. The squeal of wheels. The tremors of applied brakes.
“Next stop,” the Conductor says, appearing as if from nowhere.
The train-faced man steps to the door as they creep to a halt.
Outside the windows and the door on that side, Nora spies massive rectangular tunnels carved out of what looks to be white rock—
“Salt mines,” Norky says in a small voice. “We’re near Cleveland. I think.”
Nora sees a rusted metal sign with tin-snip letters bolted onto it:
EUCLID CREEK STATION.
The Conductor, in that clipped, precise way of his, calls out that very thing: “Euclid Creek Station, all aboard.”
The door hisses open.
A gobbo stands there. It’s a paunch-bellied, rubbery thing in a pair of cut-off sweat pants and a child’s heavy coat, and it waggles a 13 token like it’s a foam finger at a sports game.
“Where to, gob?” the Conductor asks.
No words get to clear the gob’s throat.
Two thud-thumps above their heads and then a shape swings down from the roof of the train. It lands behind the gob, and in a blur of motion, something heavy cracks down on the goblin’s skull, shattering it like a Christmas ornament filled with puddle slush.
The gobbo falls away, twitching, burbling.
And Burnsy stands up, twirling a socket wrench.
He picks the 13 token up out of the goblin’s convulsing fingers—
And hands it to the Conductor.
“Hey, kid,” Burnsy says to Nora, and steps onto the train.
11
One often believes that the Hell beneath his feet is the only Hell. And that’s true, to a point: the Shallows of an area are particular to that area, as are, in part, the Tangle below it. Each captures a flavor of the geographic region of the Infinite Above—so, beneath Manhattan, you will find abandoned subway cars and subway signs; you’ll find smashed hilal food carts and parts of NYC cabs. But beneath all that is the Ravenous Expanse and that is a channel far deeper and far wider—a space that extends to all the world. Below the crust. Below the seas. And this Expanse connects many of the Hells forged out of the subterranean undercities and caverns: the salt mines beneath Detroit and Lake Erie, the Shifting Prison beneath San Francisco, the Xibalba beneath Cobán, the Mountain Kingdom beneath Tianmashan. Believing your Hell is the only Hell is the sin of geographical Narcissism: “My town makes the best pizza.” “My city has the finest museums.” “Where I live is the best.” “Where I live is utterly the worst.” It is a sin I was guilty of. But then I was set free.
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
“Burnsy,” Nora says, shocked.
The undead stuntman grins, his blistered rictus stretched into a tight, painful-looking smile. He starts to step past the Conductor—
But the Conductor plants a hand on his chest.
“You did not procure this token,” the Conductor says, his crisply chiming voice unfailingly polite and chipper. “Please exit the train and return when you have procured a token through the correct channels—”
“Hey, fuck off, Trainface,” Burnsy says, trying to step farther into the car.
But the Conductor’s arm stiffens and prevents him.
“Sir, if you do not embrace this opportunity to leave the train of your own volition, you will be made to leave the train and in such an effort I cannot guarantee your continued corporeal survival—”
“Nora, listen,” Burnsy says, as he’s pushed back toward the door. “Your father’s gone but I’m here to help.”
“Please exit the train,” the Conductor says.
“Burnsy, just go,” Nora hisses. “This doesn’t involve you.”
“He took care of mine so I’m gonna take care of his. So wherever you’re going, I’m coming with—” He grunts as he’s shoved back toward the door.
The door that now opens.
And closes. Again and again. Like the chomping mouth Nora found it to be when she first tried to get on the train. Burnsy slides toward the crushing door.
Nora protests: “Hey!”
“Please exit the train,” the Conductor says, and now the voice has lost its polite lilt. It sounds glitchy, mechanical, and worst of all, angry.
Burnsy ducks the Conductor’s arm—
But Train-face wheels around fast, inhumanly so, and clips Burnsy with a hard back-hand. The undead stuntman smashes forward into a metal pole, tumbling into a seat and clutching the back of his head as he yowls like a car-struck cat.
“PLEASE EXIT THE TRAIN!” the Conductor rages. Then he grabs for Burnsy’s heels, dragging him off the chair and—
Nora buries the switchblade in the thing’s face.
She slides it right between the bars of its cattle-catcher mouth.
Something crunches. She pushes harder. Her shoulder burns with effort.
Norky shrieks. Sirinas laughs a mad laugh.
The Conductor emits two hard blasts of steam from his ears—Nora turning away before they can scald her—and pauses. His token-eyes blink.
Then he closes his free hand around her neck. It’s like being squeezed by a pair of giant needle-nose pliers. Air, cut off. Fluids pooling in her head like it’s a blood balloon. She gags. Tongue feeling fat. Feet now dangling off the ground as fingers of shadow reach in at the edges of her vision and—
&nb
sp; The ripple of a white sheet.
“No,” she hears someone—the Golem Knight, Hrothk—say.
Then a deafening boom.
The Conductor’s head goes missing, hanging off his neck in a dangling mess of red meat and wrought iron. The body drops, landing in a corpse-shaped pile of rattling subway tokens. All of them with the number 13 cut out.
Nora finds herself sitting on one of the seats. Rubbing her neck. Ears ringing. A miasma of gunpowder smoke-stink in the air.
The pistol at the end of Hrothk’s arm is not held in hand so much as it is the hand: a revolver with a barrel as big as a soup can, its cylinder hanging pregnant toward the fore of the barrel. No grip exists—just a stony configuration of quartz spires that rise from the dark stone arm of the shooter.
Smoke drifts from that mouthy barrel.
He tucks it back under his white cloth.
“Oops,” Hrothk says.
Nora grabs her switchblade from the token pile, then leans down and helps Burnsy up. He pinches his jaw and slides it left and right—the bones crack and teeth grind. “Christ on a Girl Scout Cookie, that guy’s slap felt like a broadside from a snow plow. So, is this gonna be a problem or—”
The train shudders.
And starts to move forward again.
“I guess not,” Burnsy says.
“And so our journey continues,” Sirinas says with a smile.
“What?” Norky yells, reaching into his runny, melty-skin ears with fingers as if they’re Q-Tips he’s using to clean them out. “I can’t hear you!”
Sirinas stares down at him like he’s naught but a dungball, then walks away. She takes a seat as if none of this bothers her, not one bit.
“You all right?” Nora asks Burnsy.
“Hey, same question to you, kid. You good?”
Her answer is unexpected.
She hugs him.
It feels weird and gross and unlike her and also it feels really good. Burnsy makes a quizzical sound—like gurk?—probably because he’s thinking that a hug from her is like a hug from a lawn mower or boat propeller. Just the same, she doesn’t let go.
“Dad,” is all she says.
“He might’ve made it,” Burnsy says.
She blinks back tears, then pulls away.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think he did.”
“He’s a tough sonofabitch.”
“Not that tough.”
Burnsy gives her a sidelong glance. “Really? He saved you from death at the very bottom of Hell itself and together you both rode an ancient god-worm through the Great Below like you were a pair of rodeo cowboys.”
“We didn’t ride it, exactly. Dad used his meat cleaver and—”
“Yeah. See? Kinda proves the point: tough S-O-B.”
She stiffens. “I can’t think of him as still being alive. Because that means I have to go back. And I have something to do.” He can’t be alive, that big dump ape.
Cannot. Be. Alive.
“And just what is it that you need to—”
The train lurches forward, gaining sudden acceleration.
Jarred, everyone looks around at one another. Hrothk grunts.
“Oh, god, oh, Jesus,” Norky says, mumbling a small prayer after.
Nora can again feel her body moving faster than the feeling in her gut. The train wobbles. Rocks on its track. Kachung kachung. Kachung kachung.
She stands up, but holds onto the bar above her so she doesn’t fall.
Outside, striations of glowing fungus whip past.
The doors at each end of the subway car hiss open simultaneously.
And at each stands a Conductor. No—not one, but several. One at each door, but others waiting behind. Token eyes spinning. Locomotive mouths blasting steam and glowing with the pulsing red of a tended coal fire.
“YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE SANCTITY OF THE 13,” the one closest to Nora bellows.
The other blares: “ALL OF YOU, PLEASE EXIT THE TRAIN.”
The doors to the outside begin again opening and closing.
Chomp-chomp.
The conductors begin to flood the car.
Nora screams.
Sirinas is first to move—she goes full-Snakeface, dropping all pretense of humanity. Her serpent limbs grab hold of the railings and draw her to the ceiling. Tentacles lash out. Grab heads. Twist and smash them together. Blood and iron.
Hrothk is up. Hand-gun out—click BOOM click BOOM click BOOM—him pivoting, white cloth rippling. Conductors drop, limbs pinwheeling as they fall through the blood spray of their cohorts. A haze fills the car. Shells ting against the ground.
Norko screams.
Nora isn’t a fighter. This isn’t what she does. Her weapon is a tongue made sharp against the whetstone that is her mind.
“I have a token!” she screams. “I’m supposed to be—”
A Conductor rushes her, roaring in that glitch-shrieking metallic voice, “EXIT THE TRAIN, EXIT THE TRAIN, EXIT THE TRAIN.”
She ducks. The Conductor’s hands crash closed in the space above her head, denting a steel pole into a bent S-shape. The Conductor grinds his gears in rage.
Suddenly, Burnsy is in her face. “We have to get off this train.”
No, no, no.
“This is my ride,” she hisses.
“We don’t have any choice!”
“I have a choice! I’m staying!” But even as she screams it over the din, she can taste the copper tang of the lie that it is. She resists the thought, wills herself to stay rooted, tries to ignore when Hrothk thunders “NOW!” and grabs the crushing subway car doors to jack them open. She feels her feet moving—her body’s choice, not her mind’s, a survival instinct she knows she has but suddenly despises—and before she knows it, she’s got her feet planted on the edge of the train as the golem holds back the gnashing, protesting doors. She expects that right outside the train will be a wall—jagged rock and ruinous stone hoping to sand her face down to the skull—but Hrothk was right to seize this moment, because they cross over a massive rust-red trestle, the train rocketing through a wide cavernous space, with a lake the color of milk far below.
Vertigo seizes her.
But it doesn’t matter.
“Time to go,” Burnsy yells in her ear.
Then he gives her a shove.
And Nora, like her father, like Icarus, like so many who flew too high and fell too far, tumbles down through open space.
12
We do not know precisely when the Great Below was carved from the karst and the schist. Which came first, the god-worms or the ground in which the god-worms squirmed?
— from the Histories and Mysteries of the Riven Worlds, by John Atticus Oakes
*
The world, a flurry of bubbles. All muted but the drumming of a heartbeat thudding hard in milky waters.
Nora turns in the emptiness. Suspended there. Like she’s floating in outer space.
Her lungs burn. Her head throbs.
But it’s peaceful here.
Ugh.
Nora doesn’t like peace. To her, peace is just the moment before everything goes to shit. Other people, they don’t get that. They are afforded peace out of ignorance. They think, here it is, here I am, happy, content, all is calm. But they should be using that time to prepare for what’s coming. Mom and Dad fighting—Mom clawing four scratches across Mookie’s cheek, and Mookie turning their television into a pile of sparking, smoldering scrap. Somebody trying to pick on her at school. That gang of shitbirds from down the street who always thought they could take what was hers. Peace is just the pause before the axe falls.
Down here, it’s peaceful.
And that gives her no good feeling at all.
Nora launches herself to the surface.
*
She sits on the bank, wringing out her socks.
Way above her head—hundreds of feet up—the cavern ceiling is lined with sword-like protrusions, white like icicles, each the length of three tall men standi
ng atop one another’s shoulders. Dark shapes fly between those stone swords. Bats. Or maybe something stranger.
Below all that is the trestle. Which, Nora now realizes, is made of bones. An endless array of them: she sees the skulls of humans, dogs or wolves, antlers. She also sees a serpentine spine the size of one of the god-worms. Like a dragon’s backbone.
And then she wonders, Can they be killed?
Didn’t they kill one of them already? When that one worm—Vithra—took the form of the Big Boss with the Red Hot Sauce, Konrad Zoladski, they blew his ass up with Burnsy’s quad packed with explosives. That thing did die, right?
Down here, everything is lit in the glow of the subterranean lake.
And the bunch of them now drag themselves from the water to the craggy shore.
Sirinas stands, storms over. Red hair matted to her skin. Her Snakeface visage flashes behind the illusion of her face: serpent eyes, kaleidoscoping, dilating.
“You screwed me,” she spits. “And not in the good way. Now my journey to vengeance has been halted.” Her wrist flips—the icepick blade flashes, thrusts out so as to hover an inch away from Nora’s eye. She doesn’t flinch.
Hrothk—his white cloak now lying on the shoreline as water streams from his crags and crevices—is already pointing his weapon at Sirinas’ head.
“No,” he says.
Norky whimpers, hiding his face in his hands.
Burnsy eases himself up alongside the conversation. “Hey, Sriracha Sweatpants or whatever your name is? Ease off with the Mister Pointy. We can talk this out.”
“It’s all right,” Nora says, standing slowly. She lifts a hand and eases Hrothk’s weapon away. Then she stares down Sirinas. “This isn’t my fault. It’s his.”
She points to Burnsy.
His eyes go big as meatballs.
“What?”
Nora nods. “You showed up and everything went to Hell. You fucked us all, Burnsy. You think you’re my big brother but you came tottering up like my little brother, trailing after, desperately wanting to play—”