It doesn’t look like regret to me.
There’s a choked sound.
I look over at Elephant Man. I’ve never seen a Hellion cry before. It’s disturbing. The mood in the back is changing. A second ago everyone was whooping like it was their team won the Super Bowl on the same day they hit the lottery. Now nothing.
A wave of memories.
Crawling out of Hell to save Alice, only Alice was dead and there was nothing and no one there to save. Then there’s Candy. I told her I’d be gone for three days. It’s been a week now and I don’t know when I’ll figure a way out of here, if ever. I see the arena. The early days Downtown: Most Hellions had never seen a live mortal. The months of flat-out torture, games, and fun fair experiments on me for a paying audience. Then the arena and learning to kill. What’s worse: Committing murder or learning you’re good at it? Mason killed me and he’s kept on killing me every day for years. I’m going to be here forever. I’m never going to leave.
Geryon is curled up like a baby, shaking, his hands over his eyes. The troops in the back are worse. They’ve been on edge for months, ever since Samael left and Hell went balls up. Whatever this is, it’s broken the weak ones. There’s a line of them in the road behind the truck. They went out to feel the rain and never bothered getting back in. We could go back for them but what’s the point? The ones that haven’t shot themselves already are sawing on their throats or wrists. Black blood flows in the gray rain. The second Unimog moves slowly, trying to avoid the bodies.
The truck stops. Elephant Man puts his head on the steering wheel. I know what this is. The memories flow like poison from a cobra bite but I’m still here. Eyes still open. The fire burns my gut but it doesn’t kill me. It’s familiar. An old friend you never wanted to see again but still someone you know. I pull Elephant Man from the driver’s seat and shove him into mine. Slide behind the wheel and hit the accelerator. This is the ring that’s supposed to put the final nail in my plain pine coffin? Regret? Memory? I spent eleven years down here dining and dancing to bad memories and regret. I’ve had my shots for the memory, measles and rubella regrets. I’m fucking immune. Okay, not immune. My hands shake and my throat’s dry but I thought Hellions would laugh off three-hanky flashbacks. Instead they’re crying like a school bus full of little French girls whose ice cream all melted.
Half a mile on, the clouds break. The rain fades to a drizzle and sputters out. A few minutes later the second truck pulls up behind us. Geryon points to a stand of bare trees.
“Henoch Breach is at the top of the next hill. We should rest here for a few hours.”
“Okay by me.”
After we’ve pulled into the trees and everyone is out of both trucks, I do a quick head count. We haven’t even reached Margaritaville and already lost a little over half our troops. The “fuck this shit” human part of me wants to turn around right now and head back to Pandemonium. What do I care that Samael promised these demonic knuckle draggers to scare the monsters out from under their beds? Then the Lucifer part of me pipes up. No matter what, I can’t look weak. Like a pathetic mortal. If I’m going to ride this out and stay alive, then I’m king high ballbuster. I took on God and almost did the old man in. A few grumpy horns and hoofs types and a petting zoo full of rabid Pokemons? I’m Satan. I can deal that and play “Smoke on the Water” while getting a lap dance on a runaway train all at the same time.
Some of the soldiers unload supplies from the Unimogs. Food. Guns. Ammo.
The nearby trees are bare. The whole glade looks dead. The trunks of the trees are twisted up to branches that look like snakes made of finger bones. Soldiers gather fallen limbs into a pile to start a fire.
“Why don’t you send up a fucking flare and let the monsters know we’re coming?”
They stop and look at me.
“No fires. No camp sing-alongs. No square dancing. Have something to eat and drink, quietly. When we ring the doorbell on that castle up there, it would be swell if it was just a little bit of a surprise.”
Without a word they do what I say. Toss the branches aside and settle around the trucks, passing out cans of food rations and bottles of Aqua Regia.
“I want to thank you.”
I didn’t notice Geryon coming up beside me.
“You had no reason to save me. I’d told you the story. You didn’t need me anymore but you saved me all the same.”
“Don’t worry. It wasn’t anything personal. I just don’t believe in leaving my crew behind.”
“All the same, I owe you my life.”
Elephant Man comes over with a bottle of Aqua Regia. He hands it to me and I take a pull. Pass it to Geryon.
“So tell me the rest. What does the city of traitors have to do with all this?”
Elephant Man goes back to the other troops while Geryon and I settle on a log passing the bottle back and forth. The booze helps me forget that we both still smell faintly of Hellion shit.
“It doesn’t even have a name,” he says. “Lucifer didn’t want to give them any cause for pride, so he gave them a place but no identity other than as a land for the shame of the lowest among us.”
“I thought that used to be me. Nice to know there was someone even more fucked up. So what does being a traitor mean down here? I mean, you’re fallen angels. Doesn’t that make all of you a bunch of traitors?”
Geryon half turns his head toward me then away again. I guess it’s not worth the argument.
“The early days after the fall were hard. Some didn’t survive the fall itself. Others went mad. There were murders and suicides. Lord Lucifer, Samael, gathered the fallen and just as in Heaven, he became our leader. He urged us to build and create our own civilization. One to rival even Heaven. He saved us. Still, with all that, there were some who refused to follow.”
“Because he fucked things up so badly during the war?”
I pass Geryon the bottle and he shrugs.
“I’m sure they told themselves they had reasons, but it was really simple greed. Some had escaped Heaven with weapons and riches. Enough, they thought, to mount a new war. Lucifer knew this would destroy us, so he attacked them first. The ones who survived he exiled here.”
I can’t help but hum a couple of lines from “Town Called Malice.”
“What did they do all the way out here?”
“Through the tunnels they lived in they mined the mountains. They grew spices and created rare potions from local plants. In short, even in exile, our Lord made them earn their keep.”
“Is the town still there?”
By the trucks the soldiers have broken up into small groups. Good. We did the same thing after a bad day in the arena. It’s not something you think about, it just happens. You fall into the orbit of friends and familiar faces. You don’t even have to like each other. You just have to be there to remind each other that you survived and that this is real. I’m sure there’s a scientific name for it. The old fighters just called it Tea Time.
Geryon says, “No one knows if the town exists anymore. Hell has fallen apart so badly since Samael left and with the beasts on the road, we’re the first visitors out this far in years.”
I take another hit off the Aqua Regia and recork the bottle. This isn’t the time to drink as much as I want to.
“I guess one way or the other we’ll know tomorrow.”
“I hope they’re all gone,” says Geryon. There’s an edge to his voice I haven’t heard before. “One set of monsters is enough.”
“Amen to that.”
N ight and day are kind of abstract concepts out here in the hinterlands. Hell exists in a kind of perpetual bruised twilight, but in Pandemonium and other towns there’s an agreed-upon cycle for morning, noon, and night. Out this far the only difference between 12 A.M. and 12 P.M. is a slight color change in the sky. Still, after eating everyone sacks out. A lot of the troops fall asleep. There are guards posted but this far out all they’ll probably see are desert rats and sand fleas.
Around what I think might be midnight, the trees start to move. It begins with a rustling. It sounds like wind but I don’t feel anything on my skin.
The camp comes awake around me. The troops heard the sound too. Hellions look around for the noise, the breeze, or whatever, as puzzled as I am.
The first scream comes from deep inside the dead grove, followed by another on the edge. One of the
