Hellraisers

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  “Look at him go,” she said. “How much did you give him?”

  “Enough,” said Herc. Then, a heartbeat later, “To floor a goddamned bear.”

  He snorted, and the laugh spilled out of her before she could clamp her teeth shut. They coughed together, both of them trying to cover up their giggles. Man, was it good to laugh, though. In this line of work, you never knew which joke was going to be your last. That thought made her remember Forrest, laughing at some joke about a penguin the night before the mission. Had he known he’d never laugh again? She swallowed loudly.

  “I’m sorry, Herc,” she said, croaking out the reluctant words. “About yesterday, about what I said. I…”

  I what? An apology wasn’t going to bring the boy back to life. It wouldn’t bring any of them back. They were down there now, drenched in the eternal fire of hell. Couldn’t she hear them screaming?

  “Suck it up, Pan,” he replied, watching her out of the corner of his eye. “There’s no room here for sorrys, not anymore. You do what you do, you are what you are.”

  A kid, she thought, suddenly feeling her age, not even old enough to drink and yet here she was driving events that could change the world.

  Or end it.

  How long had it been, now? Four years? Almost. And how different would things have been if Ostheim had never sent Herc to her cell that day, if he’d never offered her the chance to start again? She’d be locked up tight, thirty years at least. Maybe even death row.

  That’s what happened when you took a life.

  “We need you,” Herc said, seeing the expression on her face. “Not many people can do what you do, remember that. We need you. They need you.” He gestured out of the window with a broad sweep of his hand. “Things are heating up, Pan. The Circle’s attacks are growing bolder. They don’t give a crap about the rules anymore. Something big is coming. So stop apologizing and get back in your ice cube.”

  Herc was right, things really had been heating up. And they were paying the price, too. Eleven Engineers dead this year alone. She used her fist to smudge away the breath from the glass. The cops were trying to heft the kid up from the road but he was squirming and flopping like a landed fish. Everyone had their phones out, snapping away happily. Even in the deranged carnival that was New York you didn’t often see a half-naked guy drunk off his face trying to fight off the police.

  “This is gonna be everywhere,” she said. “Twitter, Instagram, you name it.”

  Herc shrugged, and she looked at him.

  “The first law,” she quoted. “The world must not know. Funny way of going about it.”

  “Desperate times,” Herc said.

  She looked down again to see the cops manhandling Marlow into their car. It swept away, siren bleeping.

  “You better go get Ostheim on the comm,” Herc said when it was out of sight. “We’re gonna have to move soon.”

  “No rest for the wicked, eh?” she said, snorting another laugh, this one with absolutely no humor in it.

  “No rest for them, no rest from them. What’cha gonna do.”

  “What about the other Engineers?”

  “Truck and Nightingale are en route,” Herc said, checking his watch. “The jet should land in a couple of hours. Hope and Bullwinkle have ten days left on their contracts, nothing to worry about.”

  Unless Ostheim leaves it to the last second again, she thought but didn’t say.

  “I need to get back to the Engine,” she said, feeling the familiar itch in her gut, her bones, her soul. It was always this way. Once the Engine got inside you it was an addiction. You couldn’t go without it for long—even when it almost cost you everything. She scratched at her skin, hard enough to hurt, to take her mind off the ache. “I need to make a new contract, I have to be there.”

  “Not up to me, Pan. It’s Ostheim’s call.”

  And Ostheim was the last person she wanted to talk to. She’d failed her last mission and the aftermath had destroyed a hospital. She’d pretty much broken every rule in the book and her employer wasn’t going to go easy on her.

  “Don’t look so worried, kid,” Herc said. “Cover-up team is in full swing. The world won’t know. Ostheim’s already planted evidence that it was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell; the video’ll be on CNN within the hour.”

  “You think the kid will talk?” she asked. Herc turned to her, cracking his knuckles. His burned, scarred face twisted into something that was probably a smile.

  “He’d better,” he said. “This whole operation is counting on it.”

  Pan frowned. “What?”

  “Nothing.” Herc coughed, scratching at an invisible fleck of dirt on the glass.

  “What operation?”

  “Operation, um, Live Bait, I guess is the best way of describing it.” He must have seen the look Pan threw at him because he shrugged. “Ostheim’s idea, not mine. Anyway, it’s not like you actually liked the kid.”

  True, Pan thought. But not liking him was one thing, and throwing him to the wolves was something very, very different.

  0.37%

  “Oh sweet merciful Alabama cheesecake, would you look at this—it’s off the chart.”

  The detective held up a Breathalyzer printout, shaking his head so hard his thick gray eyebrows looked in danger of falling off. Marlow was so exhausted he could barely keep his head up, feeling like he’d downed a whole crate of Jim Beam. He’d puked three times already, twice in the back of the cruiser, apparently, again inside the holding cell. He didn’t really remember how he got here, only something about an elevator, tall buildings, then he’d been facedown in his own drool. He’d been expelled from school, way back, but everything between then and now was just salt in water, impossible to see but leaving a nasty taste in his mouth.

  “Kid, you have to be the drunkest skunk I ever seen. Point three-seven blood alcohol level?”

  They were sitting in a small interview room, Marlow’s hands cuffed to the table, one wall filled up by a mirror that was actually a window. The entire room was filled with a haze of booze and BO. The fat old detective dropped the printout on the table, looked over his shoulder at the uniformed cop behind him. She was in her thirties, maybe. Cute.

  “You ever seen anyone this drunk, officer?” he asked her.

  “Not outside of St. Patrick’s,” she replied. The detective sat back, rubbing his hairy chest through the opening on his sweaty shirt. He coughed, reached into his pocket as if going for a cigarette, then pulled his hand back and stroked his white-flecked lips instead. Marlow shifted uncomfortably in the orange jumpsuit they’d given him. His head was starting to pound, a demolition ball swinging between the two sides of his skull.

  “Since when,” he started to say, then coughed, trying to clear his throat. The paramedic who’d accompanied them to the station had given him a couple of puffs on an inhaler when he’d asked for it, but his windpipe showed no sign of reopening. “Since when has it been illegal to be drunk?”

  The detective smiled, showing a row of crooked, tobacco-stained teeth.

  “Oh, it ain’t illegal to be drunk, kid,” he said. “If it was, then I’d be locked up every Friday night and not let out until Tuesday morning.” He laughed at his own joke. “But you, you were drunk and disorderly. The old Double D.”

  “I—”

  “Criminal damage to a city vehicle,” said the detective, counting off on his chubby fingers.

  “Come on—”

  “Assault on a police officer.”

  “I puked on him, I didn’t—”

  “Conspiracy to deploy a terrorist weapon on the city of New York.”

  This one shut Marlow up like a punch to the gut. He sat there, his jaw just about hitting the table.

  “Conspiracy to what?”

  “That’s what I want you to tell me, kid,” the detective said, craning forward as much as his belly would allow. “Back in the cruiser you had a hell of a lot to say for yourself.”

  “I did?” Marlow said,
trying to think back. He couldn’t even remember being in the car. “Look, I can’t—”

  “‘Touch me again,’” the detective said, lifting another sheet of paper and reading from it, “‘and I’ll kill you.’ There’s more after this, but I don’t really want to have to read it in front of Officer Settle here. You’ve got quite a mouth on you, kid.” He cleared his throat, scanned down the page. “Aha, this is the interesting bit. ‘You want to say that again, you bleeping bleep? I’ll tear you a new bleephole like I did to those things back in the hospital. I’ll shoot your bleeping bleep off and make you eat it, I’ll blow up your car and your house and your dog. I did it before, just today, I’ll do it again, just you wait, you horse—bleeping bleep.’” The detective gently laid the paper down, clearing his throat. “There’s quite a bit more, all lovingly transcribed by the officers who carted your drunken ass off the street. But the gist of it is pretty damn clear. You were there, yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” Marlow said, his head reeling. He lifted his hands to rub his temples but the cuffs snapped tight, rooting them to the table. He swore under his breath. What was his mom gonna think? She’d have been waiting for him last night. She’d be worried sick.

  “That tells me all I need to know,” said the detective. “How the thing that surprised you was the date, and not the ‘there.’”

  “The what?” he replied, trying to get his brain around the conversation. “Where?”

  “Where indeed,” the man said, dirtying the water even further. Marlow lowered his head until his chained hands could reach it, massaging his temples. There was something in there, now that he thought about it, a place full of fire, of screams, of gunshots, of exploding cars, of monsters. But that couldn’t be right. He pressed his fists against his eyes until his vision was a snowstorm of color.

  “The hospital, right?” he said a moment later, looking up. “Staten Island. The parking garage.”

  The detective and the cop shared a look, the woman’s hand straying down to her holstered weapon as if to check that it was still there. When the man looked back at Marlow there was nothing nice or welcoming left in his expression.

  “So, you were there.”

  “I…” Tread carefully, Marlow, said his brain. “It was a bad day. I was trying to buy something to drink.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “I live on the island. I’d just … just been kicked outta school. Was planning on drowning my sorrows, y’know? Then I heard the explosion.”

  “You weren’t there when it went up?” the detective asked.

  “No,” Marlow said, his thoughts becoming clearer. “No, I was inside a store. Clerk had a shotgun, I grabbed it. Thought it was, I don’t know, terrorists or something.”

  “And?”

  “And…” And what? Girls coming back from the dead? Walls and floors that moved. “Look, this is going to seem weird.” He coughed, both of the cops leaning in close. “The parking garage was full of … There were these things. They were alive, but not … Look, you kinda had to be there.”

  “You wanna start making some sense, kid?”

  “They were … monsters,” he said, the word out of his mouth before he could stop it. And it was like a locomotive, dragging everything else behind it. “They were made of stuff, like walls and cars. But they looked like … like animals. They had claws, and teeth. I fought one that was part of a truck, and some floor maybe. So there were other people there, dressed in black like soldiers. I think they were dead, apart from one, this big old dude, like really ugly. He had a gun, he was shooting these things. And a girl too, she was … Well, y’know, she was pretty cute, but she had a crossbow, and she was…”

  He realized the detective had raised a hand and his words slowed to a halt. The man released a spluttered sigh.

  “You for real?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m telling you the truth.” Marlow sat forward, hands out as far as they could go. “Seriously, it’s what happened.”

  “Mr. Green,” the man said, and Marlow was shocked to hear his name. With no wallet on him, or phone, how did they know? “I’m not gonna waste your time anymore, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste mine. You’ve been with us before.” Ah, that was how. He’d been arrested a couple of times before, nothing major, just being tanked up and loudmouthed. “Both times off your trolley. You’re getting into some bad habits.”

  “I swear,” said Marlow. “I didn’t actually get around to drinking. These people, they took me. That’s where I’ve been all day. I mean all two days. They injected something into me, it must have been alcohol. They did this.”

  “Yeah, and the only reason I get wasted on the weekends is ’cause Officer Settle here keeps spiking my coffee with rum. That right, Settle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Funny how my wife don’t believe that story neither.”

  “But I can show you where they—”

  “But nothing.” The detective stood up, flattening his hands down his creased shirt. “You were drinking, I believe that much. We found the store, one dead guy, crushed by a collapsing ceiling. So you saw what was going on, a ton of people witnessed the hospital going up in flames. But let me tell you something, kid.” He slammed his hands down on the table, his greasy face looming in, his breath full of coffee and cigarettes. “We drag you in here again, you ever make a threat against one of my officers again, you puke within twenty goddamned yards of a city vehicle again, then you’ll be wearing a jumpsuit for real, and not just because you left your pants at home. Clear?”

  “I—”

  He smashed his palms against the wood, hard enough to shunt the table into Marlow’s chest.

  “Clear?”

  “Yeah,” he wheezed. “Yeah, I got it. No more drink.”

  The detective eyeballed him for a moment more, then turned on his heels and smacked on the door. A second later a bolt was pulled back on the other side and it squealed open, the sound grating down Marlow’s spine, reminding him of the screams of the creatures. He shook it off, waited for the policewoman to walk over and unlock his cuffs.

  “If you want to collect your possessions you have to go to the front desk,” she said as he massaged the blood back into his wrists. “But given that all you had on you is your undershorts, I’m guessing you’re good to go.” Marlow stood up, muttering his thanks. She glanced at his jumpsuit and smiled, and it was the first kind expression Marlow had seen since this whole thing started. “But maybe go anyway, we might be able to sort you out something better to wear.”

  WHO THE HELL IS STEELY DAN?

  It wasn’t exactly what Marlow would have called “better.” A pair of baggy green shorts. A white T-shirt that was three sizes too big for him, the front plastered with the name STEELY DAN in big red letters. He had no idea who or what Steely Dan was but he was pretty sure it wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to be seen in. To top it off—or bottom it out—the only footwear they had in his size was a pair of leather sandals that had been worn so often they had somebody else’s footprint permanently mushed into them. They were surprisingly comfortable, but seriously—he figured he’d have more street cred walking home in his underwear.

  Where do they even get this stuff from? he thought as he made his way out of the station, hopping down the steps with a hand up to shield himself from the glare. They probably kept the worst bits and pieces of clothing from the drunks and the dead guys just so they could pass it over to people like Marlow.

  He looked left and right, not quite sure where he was. Somewhere in lower Manhattan, he figured, where the jumbled streets weren’t numbered and there were lots of storefronts with Chinese lettering on their signs. It was quiet for the time of day, just a scattering of people, all of whom looked like they’d rather be cooling down in an air-conditioned apartment or office right now. Only one of them caught his eye—a girl fifty yards away—and Marlow’s heart did a cartwheel in his chest. She was familiar, his age, dressed in jeans and
a sweatshirt and a coat, of all things. She had to be dying in there.

  Marlow turned away, trying to work out where he’d seen the girl before. At school, probably. So why was there a feeling in Marlow’s gut? Like he’d just been kicked hard. He glanced back. She was there, still as a stone, unblinking eyes locked on Marlow.

  Twenty yards away.

  He hadn’t seen her move and Marlow suddenly felt as if he were on a roller coaster car that had reached the top of the slope, that quiet moment before the drop. He reached out, placed a hand on the nearest tree just to stop the world from spinning. Something was wrestling with his intestines, discomfort radiating out from the very center of him, making his spine tingle.

  He clamped his eyes shut, and when he opened them again the girl was gone.

  You’re going mad, Marlow.

  He pushed himself off the tree and started walking, no idea where he was going. The sun was right overhead, beating down on the city like a hammer on an anvil, and he was sweating after half a block. The air—as fresh as it ever got in New York—was good, though, helping to clear his head. The world was still spinning, but slower now. He didn’t know what they’d shot him with, but it must have been strong. He peeked over his shoulder. No sign of the girl.

  He waited for a truck to rumble past, followed by a couple of honking cabs, before crossing an intersection. The whole thing felt like a dream now, because of the alcohol, fading away like the last few scraps of a nightmare. Here, in the sun, in the melting pot of the city, surrounded by people going shopping, going to work, going to school, the thought of monsters and soldiers seemed ridiculous, impossible.