Night In A Waste Land (Hell Theory Book 2)

by Lauren Gilley

  Morgan – the only name she’d offered, a human name, and surely not the name of the angel possessing the body – had been given a set of fatigues: black tac pants, and gray shirt, lace-up boots. They looked comical on her small frame, her knobby elbows resting on the desk where she sat paging through a book, pale hair fallen in a curtain to shield her face.

  She lifted her head only once Rose had closed the door, fixing her with those wide, strange, glowing eyes. Her mouth twitched in brief greeting. “Hello.”

  “I brought you something to eat,” Rose said, stepping forward to set the tray on a clear corner of the desk. Lots of sugary things, because conduits burned calories so quickly: a dish of chocolate pudding, a slice of cake, a handful of granola bars, canned peaches, and, a nod to nutrition, a congealed scoop of tuna salad in a little plastic bowl.

  Standing this close, Rose could feel the faint buzz that the conduit put out into the air; it was like being able to sense that a TV was on in another room, without being able to hear it. A hum in her joints and back teeth. A prickling at the back of the neck.

  Morgan said, “Thank you.” She closed the book, and set it aside – an old bird-watching manual, Rose saw, from the cover – and reached for the tray. All of her movements were precise and unhurried, just like her speech. The voice and body of the child she had been before, and the tone and mannerisms of an ancient being who would live to see eternity, and who did not flitter or rush.

  “Do you need anything?” Rose asked, surveying the cell. No windows, no furniture save the desk, chair, and cot, its covers pulled up and tucked in with military precision. Books were stacked on the desk, and beneath it, and along the wall. “I don’t know how much more reading material we have around here.” The base’s library was shameful, and mostly military manuals and dry history texts.

  Morgan had already devoured half the dish of pudding. She said, “No, this is all I require.”

  There was no reason to stay, but Rose did, for some reason, shifting her weight side to side, watching the girl possessed by an angel neatly plow her way through thousands of calories of food without spilling a drop or getting one crumb on her shirt.

  Without looking toward Rose, she said, “You’re curious.”

  Busted. “Well,” she said, because she couldn’t very well deny it.

  Morgan set her spoon down and turned to sit facing her, an elbow propped on the back of the chair. “You mistrust me, though – you mistrust all conduits. And you don’t like them, either.”

  “You said them instead of us,” Rose hedged.

  “There are conduits, and then there’s me.”

  “You’re special, then?”

  “Yes.” Said without any boastfulness or condescension. A simple statement of fact.

  Rose held her gaze unflinching, though it took an effort. Sweat prickled between her shoulder blades, and the truth spilled out, unbidden. “A conduit was responsible for the disappearance of my–” She cut herself off. She didn’t have words for what Beck was. Boyfriend sounded paltry and childish. Lover sounded like something from a book. Everything was the only suitable word, and it got stuck in her throat.

  “I see,” Morgan said. “That would create animosity.” She gestured with one tiny hand toward the cot. “Would you like to sit?”

  This wasn’t the first time Rose had come to the cell; she’d brought food, and books, and carried messages from Captain Bedlam. She continually volunteered, every time it was announced that someone needed to act as conduit liaison. She hadn’t examined her reasons for it, so she paused, now, and regarded the cot. Wondered if it would somehow feel different to sit down somewhere where an angel-possessed body slept each night. Did conduits toss and thrash? Have nightmares? Sweat through their pajamas?

  “You may interrogate me,” Morgan said, placidly.

  Rose let out a frustrated breath and sat, quickly, before she could change her mind. The backs of her legs tingled, but she knew that was only her imagination, and not conduit cooties seeping through her clothes.

  “I don’t want to interrogate you.”

  “But you have questions.”

  “Lots,” Rose said with a sigh.

  Morgan made an inviting gesture.

  Had Captain Bedlam known she was here now, being invited to ask questions, there would have been a list involved. Important questions about conduits, their vulnerabilities, the hell beasts and demons. Questions about the war, the potential scope of it. The captain would have wanted to know why Morgan was here, willingly, ready to help them.

  But Rose said, “My – the person I lost. He was standing in a pool of blood. He stabbed the conduit who’d opened it, and there was a flash, and then they were both gone. What” – her breath shivered in her lungs – “what happened to him?”

  Morgan didn’t blink as often as a human. She blinked now, and said, “It was a hell portal.”

  “I thought so.”

  “He went down inside it, then.”

  Rose had known that, but it still sent a shaft of pain through her chest to hear it confirmed by one of the few creatures who could know for sure. She nodded, and wet her lips, and tried to come up with something to say.

  Morgan said, “Was he alive when the portal closed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he lives, still.”

  Rose swallowed around the lump in her throat. “In hell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can he be brought back?”

  “Yes.”

  Rose felt her brows go up, shocked. She started to reply.

  Morgan said, “It is not an easy thing. It requires sacrifice, and great strength of will. It requires a token – a hell token.”

  “You saw my dagger.”

  “Yes. Who will you kill to offer for his return?”

  “That’s not the tough question you think it is.”

  Morgan cocked her head, glowing gaze seeming to pierce through skin and skull, like she could see the inner workings of Rose’s mind. “No. I don’t suppose it is. Not for you.”

  “Do you know how to draw the pentagram? All those symbols? Would you help me?”

  Morgan blinked slowly. “It’s not something I have ever done. It goes against my purpose.”

  Rose gritted her teeth, and fought not to bare them. “What purpose?”

  “Angels are not a monolith. We all have different strengths, and different callings. It goes against everything I am to open a portal and pull something out. I tend to put things back in.”

  “You won’t help me, then.”

  “Did you expect me to?”

  “No,” she admitted, shoulders slumping. “Not really. But I had to ask.”

  “It pains you terribly,” Morgan said.

  Rose sent her a look that said duh.

  “I am sorry for your loss, but I would be poor help.”

  “Meh. I’m not used to having help anyway.”

  “There are other methods, though. Simpler, and more likely to be successful.”

  Rose stared at her, assessing. “Why do I get the feeling you aren’t going to come right out and tell me what they are?”

  Another twitch at her mouth, in what might have been an attempted smile. “Your hunger for the answers will fuel the process. Keep searching. A heart as focused as yours will find what you seek.”

  Frustration sat heavy in her belly; she’d known not to hope, but it had flared anyway, just a little spark of it. Having it doused hurt like a broken bone. She tamped it down, pressed it beneath the rock sitting on the sad stack of her emotions. Snorted. “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “A what?”

  “Nothing. Maybe I’ll find one and bring it to you, sometime.” Rose stood, and brushed nonexistent wrinkles from her tac pants.

  A thought occurred, as she headed for the door. “Are you ever going to tell us your real name?”

  “When the time is right,” Morgan said, peaceably, and turned back to her lunch tray.

  ~*~
/>   Their next op started hum-drum, and ended spectacularly fucked up.

  A passing helo had picked up a high heat signature in a rural, forested, mountainous part of Kentucky, and Gold Company was called in to handle it. The idea was that the conduit – or conduits, judging by the flare of heat on the infrared – needed to be neutralized now, before they got into a heavily populated area.

  A plane took them to Kentucky, to a tarmac where rain was bucketing down, and white mist was lifting off the grass, shifting like ghosts between the close-set trees. Their helo, an ancient Blackhawk, sat with lights blinking, rotors turning, slinging water that stung her face where it wasn’t covered by goggles.

  She glanced toward Lance, whose jaw was set in that firm, square line that meant he was eager for the job ahead, but that his stomach was probably cramping. She had to shout above the whir and thump of the rotors. “Isn’t the weather too bad?”

  He shook his head, and spared her a quick glance from behind his own goggles. “There’s a storm moving in. We’ve gotta do it now, or we’ll have to wait forty-eight hours before the pilot’s willing to go back up.”

  They climbed aboard, secured their gear, strapped in, and the Blackhawk lurched up off the tarmac and took to the sky with a heavy, unsteady gait that propelled them up into the rain and over the tree line.

  The terrain climbed, and the helo with it, chugging and struggling to find an updraft that wasn’t there and couldn’t help them. The trees were mostly pines, short and sickly, but plentiful, with the occasional white skeletal hands of a hardwood reaching through the yellow-green needles. The mountains thrust up into the underbellies of the clouds, and between them, the land folded in on itself, canyons and ridges with sharp trees along their spines like the knobs of vertebrae.

  Gallo was on the infrared, and as they lumbered over a ridge, and a large bowl-shaped swath of forest greeted them on the other side, he said, “Down there.”

  The helo dropped low enough to allow them to rappel down, and then lifted up and away, scheduled to return in an hour. Rose watched it disappear, head tipped back, raindrops splattering her face and her goggles. Her chest was tight – tighter than normal, a heavy sense of unease she couldn’t shake. This op made no sense: conduits didn’t linger out in the middle of nowhere. What destruction could they wreak there?

  They did a weapons check, and Lance fired off a sequence of hand signals. They split up.

  The rain fell steadily, a quiet susurrus like a veil around Rose as she swung wide of the heat signature. An occasional fat drop would plink off her helmet, or the barrel of her rifle; they pattered on the carpet of old leaves and needles underfoot, a papery skin that gave way to sucking mud with every step. It wasn’t possible to be silent, in that way, and she could only hope that the hiss and shush of the rain drowned out the sound of their approach.

  The helo hadn’t been able to land because the trees grew too close together; she had to turn sideways more than once to slip between trunks; rough bark snagged at her sleeves.

  She ducked around an unusually fat pine and spotted a set of tracks in the leaf mold and mud of the forest floor: large tracks, heavy boot prints with thick tread.

  Rose wasn’t supposed to – Lance would have scowled – but she slung her rifle across her back and drew two of her knives instead. The clean steel gleamed faintly in the gloom, a shine like bared teeth in the gloaming. Her pulse picked up, a ready tick-tick-tick, and the adrenaline that flooded her veins – a tolerable amount – came from anticipation, and not fear.

  She followed the tracks, lengthening her stride so she stepped in the conduit’s prints, rather than leave her own. Seven strides took her around one of the rare hardwoods, its trunk full of knotholes like eyes in the pale bark. Another seven strides led her down into a creek bed, where rainwater rushed up to mid-calf. The tracks disappeared on the bank, but she no longer needed them: a conduit stood in the middle of the thickening stream. A man. Heavy-bodied, muscular, wearing a hunter’s clothes: canvas pants and jacket, a baseball cap with the brim pulled low. He held an old bolt-action rifle in one big hand.

  He turned his head, slowly, and she saw the bright flare of his eyes through the water dripping off the bill of his cap.

  Rose tensed, settling in her hips and ankles, prepared for action.

  The prickling awareness, that turned-on-TV static across her skin, touched her from behind, and she ducked to the side.

  Just as something heavy whistled through the air where her head had been.

  The water dragged at her legs, pulling her off balance; she overcompensated, but swung her arms, caught herself, and twisted around, upright, knives at the ready.

  The second conduit was a woman, a large one, and carrying a woodsman’s axe. That was what had cleaved the air where Rose had stood moments ago.

  Dressed like the man, in rough, sturdy hunting clothes and a cap, the woman hefted the axe and gathered herself for an approach – or maybe an outright attack.

  Water sloshed as the other conduit moved toward them – and he had a gun.

  Rose took a split-second to weigh her options. Took a deep breath. And dropped.

  It was a controlled fall. She slipped down, belly-first, ducked beneath the water, stretched out her arms, and swam.

  It was cold. The shock of it nearly left her gasping, but she bit her tongue and held her breath in, that precious last sip of oxygen. The current helped her along, even stronger as she treaded deeper down into the hollow the runoff had carved through this fissure between hills. Her goggles were fitted, and waterproof, and she could keep her eyes open. The water was dark, and murky with mud from the bottom, but she saw two shadows like tree trunks planted ahead – the conduit’s legs – and she struck as she passed him. She felt the knife bite flesh; felt the judder through her arm as the blade found bone. Felt the splash and displacement of water as he fell, the tendon severed, his balance compromised.

  Then she was by, and rushing on. She kept her head down, clenched her knives tight in fingers rapidly going numb, and kicked and stroked for all she was worth, working with the current.

  When the burn in her lungs became unbearable, she snagged a bit of branch dangling in the water, and hauled her head up above the surface, gasping and sputtering.

  Her surroundings didn’t look familiar. It had been hard to tell how far she’d gone underwater, but the conduits weren’t in sight, and the banks rose steeply on either side of the stream – which was rapidly trying to become a river.

  She took a moment, despite the hard chill of the water swirling around her, to regret the impending lecture: she’d taken her rifle in the drink, and all her gear, besides, Wraith Grenades and everything. Then she took a deep breath, and hauled her waterlogged self up the dangling branch.

  The bank was leaf-strewn, and mud beneath, terraced from years of erosion. But webbed with tree roots, and she used those as toe-holds, and the branch as her lifeline, and she managed to pick her careful way to the top, no longer cold when she reached it, limbs burning.

  She unslung her pack and pulled out her thermal binoculars to scan the area. Nothing at first, and then – a human signature. One of her fellow knights: Gallo, judging by his gait. She dropped the binoculars to dangle around her neck and pulled out her flashlight; fired off a quick signal, and waited. A few minutes later, Gallo stepped between two trunks and came to stand on the edge of the bank opposite.

  He lifted his hands and shrugged in question. What happened?

  She offered the hand signal for conduit. And then held up two fingers, and pointed upstream.

  Angel or demon? he signed.

  It was raining too heavily for her to have caught that distinct whiff of brimstone, but she’d seen the eyes. Demon, she signed back.

  He nodded, lips pressing into a grim line.

  A shadow moved behind him; a figure stepped from the trees. Metal glinted, faintly, flashing amidst the silver raindrops.

  Rose shouted.

  Gallo turned �
�� too late.

  The conduit woman brought the axe down, and took Gallo’s arm off at the elbow, one clean stroke.

  Rose pulled her sidearm – all carbon fiber and polymer, waterproofed – and fired.

  The round caught the conduit dead-center in the forehead. Rose saw the spray of blood and gore that fountained behind her, as the head kicked back, and the hands went limp on the axe. The conduit fell, down for at least a few minutes, as the demon inside the shell fought to repair all the nerve pathways that would allow the body to stand again.

  Gallo had fallen to his knees, clutching the stump of his arm in his other hand; blood spurting through his fingers, spraying down his pants, gathering on the forest floor. He was screaming, a high, wild, animal scream of pain and terror she could just hear above the rain.

  “Frankie!” Rose shouted, already scrambling for the bank. If they didn’t get the bleeding stopped–

  She pulled up short when the low hum of conduit energy prickled up her neck; buzzed in her bones.

  She had a knife in her hand before she turned, and struck before she laid eyes on her target. The blade severed the tendons in the conduit’s wrist; his hand opened, and his rifle barrel dropped to the ground. She saw his eyes flare, some kind of demonic shock, and then she emptied the rest of her magazine point blank into his chest.

  He staggered back, his torso a pulpy ruin, blood and viscera visible through bullet-shredded clothes. He clutched at his wounds with his good hand, the rifle forgotten on the ground, and he glared at her – not with hatred, but with annoyance. He was a hell beast, and she was just a tiny human inconvenience.

  She holstered her gun, and slipped her hand inside her jacket, curled it around the hilt of a different dagger in her holster, and advanced on him with the first.

  When she was within range, he reached out with his good hand and snagged her wrist. She watched the shock and pain bloom across his face. Heard the faint sizzle like bacon fat in a skillet, and saw the smoke boil up between them from the place where he touched her – where he touched one of the trinkets she’d bought at the market in New Mexico with Lance. A cuff studded with silver spikes, hidden ‘til now beneath her jacket sleeve.