the building and went inside. The rail was made of wood and stretched from one end of the building to the other. It made Chad think of the hitching posts cowboys tied their horses to in Western movies.
Chad glanced around, saw no one watching, and tossed the leg irons away.
Three other slaves were shackled to the rail. One was a black woman of Cindy’s approximate age. The slave closest to him was a frail young man. Chad’s stomach clenched at the sight of him. He was dying. There was a wound of some sort along his side, a raw lip of swollen flesh. It pulsed with infection. He was feverish and glassy- eyed. He laughed, mumbled, and swatted at bugs that weren’t there.
Hallucinating, Chad realized.
The last slave was tethered at the far left end of the rail.
A small girl child.
Six, maybe seven years old.
Chad ground his teeth. A single word hissed through his clenched mouth: “Evil.”
The word captured the attention of the dying slave. For a moment, a moment Chad sensed would be all too fleeting, the man’s eyes were clear and focused. He looked right at Chad and said, “You’re new.”
Chad nodded. “I am.”
A sad smile touched the man’s face. “I’ve been here four months.” He frowned, and his eyes went momentarily dull before clearing again and locking on Chad. “Or maybe four years. I forget. Don’t have a lot in the way of advice to give you, friend. You’re pretty much fucked.”
Chad laughed. “I figured.”
“Just keep your head down.” The man nodded, affirming the truth of his own statement. “Whatever they do to you, don’t fight back.” He lifted an arm and gave Chad an unobstructed view of the wound that was killing him. “Ain’t worth it.”
Chad looked away. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
“And you have to see Lazarus.”
Chad frowned. “Who?”
But that was the extent of the conversation. The doomed slave went back to swatting invisible bugs and mumbling half-coherent condemnations of God and, obscurely, Johnny Carson. Chad stopped listening to him and took in his surroundings.
So this was Below.
The place where The Master’s banished people were forced to live out what remained of their bleak existences.
Below was a huge cavern. The ceiling, high above him, was like an earthen sky. The place was lit by dozens of klieg lights. The rutted track that served as a road for the transport trucks was bordered on this side by the parking lot, the SCD building, and a scattering of other, vaguely official-looking buildings. Across the road was a row of more primitive-looking edifices. He heard a buzz of voices beyond those buildings.
The carnival whistle sound came again.
As did sounds of strange commerce and conflict.
There was a lot wrong with this place-a colossal understatement-but he realized it was a functioning community with a social order and, probably, some sort of rudimentary economy. It would fascinate a sociologist.
Chad, however, was repulsed.
Cindy emerged from the building thirty minutes later, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
The incongruous smile had a contagious quality that reminded him of…
Dream.
Chad blanched.
He’d been trying not to think about Dream. He hoped she was safe in a hotel somewhere, snuggling in for the night, blissfully unaware of his dire predicament. Logic told him this was probably the case. They had a car. They would be safe in the car.
He had to believe this.
Anything else was too dreadful to contemplate.
As Cindy drew nearer, he noticed a glint of silver at her throat. When she reached the hitching rail, Cindy turned her neck up, displaying a necklace to him. “You like?”
A piece of metal fashioned to resemble the fifth letter of the alphabet dangled from the necklace, glinting in the artificial daylight.
The dying slave was staring at Cindy, his gaze riveted to the necklace. Lucidity again touched his feverish visage. “Cunt. Emancipated cunt.”
Cindy hit him in the throat and he went down, folding faster than a glass-jawed stumblebum absorbing a blow from the heavyweight champion of the world. He lay unconscious on the ground, his arm dangling from the hitching rail.
Chad gaped at her. “My God …”
Cindy unlocked the chain shackling him to the rail. “Had to do it.” Her voice was low, barely audible. “I start accepting disrespect from slaves, we’re both in trouble.”
She led him across the rutted track. He stepped in a puddle of engine oil, winced, and shook oil from his sandal, then he joined Cindy on the sidewalk-like path of polished stones on the opposite side of the road.
He caught up to her and asked, “That guy back there, the sick slave, he said something about a guy named Lazarus.”
Cindy stopped abruptly. She put a hand on his chest, stilled his next question with a forefinger to the lips. “I’m taking you to Lazarus now.”
Chad frowned. “But who is he?”
Cindy’s answer only deepened the mystery. “I don’t know who he really is, Chad. I only know his real name is something else.”
She smiled. “Some people, Below’s more gullible denizens, think he’s God.”
God, Chad thought.
What a perfect irony.
He was in hell.
And God was here with him.
What might that mean?
And what was this strange, niggling feeling at the back of his mind?
He thought of a jigsaw puzzle with a thousand pieces, the pieces slowly, slowly fitting together, revealing long hidden secrets, pointing the way…
Out of here, Chad thought.
And followed Cindy around a corner.
Eddie couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“You must be kidding. We can’t kill that thing.”
Giselle’s smile hinted of secrets unrevealed. “But we can.”
She was at her writing table again, still nude, gloriously nude, and he wanted her again. Oh, how he ached to be inside her again. Eddie forced his gaze away from her body. She too easily distracted him, and he did not want to be distracted now. What she was proposing was madness. He couldn’t do what she wanted. He just couldn’t. Couldn’t she see it was tantamount to suicide?
And Eddie wanted to live.
He hadn’t come this far, struggled this much, to voluntarily lay down his life. So tell her that, he thought. Be blunt. Lay your cards on the table. He paced the room, puffing intently on one of Giselle’s handrolled cigarettes.
“I don’t want to die!” he told her. He knew what it sounded like, but he didn’t care. “Call me a coward, go ahead. You won’t hurt my feelings. Goddamn, Giselle, you don’t survive Below without developing one bad motherfucker of a self-preservation instinct.”
He stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray on the table. He made himself look at her face, not the slopes of her breasts or the breath-quickening swell of her hips. No, better to seek sanctuary in the relative safety of her face. Her lovely, exquisite face. “I’m just a man, Giselle.” His voice was quiet, solemn, devoid of the previous
