Lucifer's Lottery

stunk, and when he craned his neck over the Egress’s rim, the entire city below stunk as well.

More teetering buildings and gas-gushing smokestacks. Bizarre creatures darted quickly up and down decrepit skyscrapers. Anywhere he might look, some figure was seen jumping out of a high window. Gerold gaped closer at the streets themselves. Sewer grates belched flames; masses of figures—Human and otherwise—clogged trash-strewn and blood-splattered avenues. Long, clattering cars putted about as well as carriages drawn by fanged, malformed creatures that sufficed for horses. Clay men loomed on every corner, sentinel-like as they scanned the masses. Any and all free space between buildings were stakes on which severed heads had been planted. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands. Additionally, piles of dead bodies lay everywhere, while squads of forced laborers trudged to the task of flinging the bodies into carts and wheeling them away. Gerold was too nauseated to ask . . .

“We’re getting close,” Krilid said. He handed Gerold the Monocular. “There’s the security perimeter . . .”

Gerold gulped with a dry throat when he elbowed up and looked through the glass. A heavily walled clearing existed amid the center of the District, the size of a football field. In each corner, Mongrel Demons and Human Damned were being tortured on racks or boiled in oil vats, and the resultant screams rose and fell like some mad, dissonant background music.

It was not the walled perimeter itself that stole Gerold’s breath and constricted his stomach, it was the perimeter’s most salient feature.

The fucking thing is HUGE, Gerold thought.

A hulking statue over 500 feet high spired from the middle of the perimeter. Muck-black like tar mixed with excrement mixed with mud. Its contours had been meticulously shaped to heighten its overall hideousness; Gerold thought of King Kong dunked with pitch. But the face . . .

The face—

Gerold threw up over the side when he zoomed the Monocular in on its face.

“Yeah, don’t look at it too long,” said Krilid. “I’ve heaved a couple times myself, thinking about that face. They put an Unutterability Hex on it—what you see is a cross between the most horrifying faces in Hell all wrapped up in one . . .”

“What is it?” Gerold gagged, noting that all those delicious crayfish he’d eaten earlier were now raining down.

“It’s called a Demonculus,” the Troll told him. “The most powerful weapon to ever be invented here.”

Gerold blundered with the word. “A Demonc . . .”

“It’s like a 666-foot voodoo doll that they’re going to bring to life with their round-the-clock sacrifices and spook-show sorcery.”

“Bring . . . to life?” Gerold gasped. “That-that . . . thing? ”

Smirking, Krilid nodded. “See all that mist all over the place down there, that looks like it’s glowing?”

“Yuh-yeah . . .” The mist sparkled like sheets of fireflies.

“That’s the Hell-Flux. It’s air that’s charged with occult energy, and those transformer-looking things with the coils sticking up are Electrocity Generators. Those are the things that convert horror, pain, and agony into a tangible force. The sacrifices maintain that force, but a little while ago, sixty-six million people were all slaughtered at once all over the city by Mutilation Battalions. A lot of that power was used for the Spatial Merge that brought you and all that lake water to the Reservoir, but the overflow was diverted here, to dump into that.” Krilid pointed to the immobile Demonculus.

Gerold stuttered. “Wuh-wuh-when will they bring it to life?”

Krilid raised the antique rifle. “Now.”

The rifle was fitted with its own Monocular, in the fashion of a sniper sight. “But one more thing has to happen before they can activate the Demonculus. It needs a heart. Only then can it come to life to do Lucifer’s bidding.” The Troll sighted the rifle. “Look down at the thing’s chest now.”

Hands trembling, Gerold did so. A strange fenced platform was hovering near the immense creature’s chest, a platform held aloft by hot-air balloons of some sort. Gerold noticed that a hole seemed to have been bored into the dead thing’s chest. Several unspeakably ugly demons busied themselves on the platform, one unsheathing a knife, another lifting up a pair of bolt cutters. But there was another figure there, a human, with bottomless eyes and a beard. He was taking off a jacket that shined like polished chrome.

“That’s the mission target. His name is Master Builder Curwen—he’s an Archlock of the highest conditioning —Lucifer’s smartest Sorcerer, and it’s his heart that will give the Demonculus life.”

Gerold shot the Troll a funky look. “But how can—”

“They’re gonna cut out his heart and put it in the chest cavity,” Krilid said, sighting the rifle and cocking the hammer, “so I have to head-shot the guy before they can do that. Then . . .”

“Then what?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute . . .”

BAM!

Krilid bucked back when the rifle went off. A gust of black smoke spewed out of the muzzle. But when they both looked back through their Monoculars . . .

“Oh, shit!” Krilid yelled.

“You missed!”

Hundreds of feet below them, alarms began to sound.

The demons on the platform were frantic now, and so was the bearded man. The bolt cutters were brought to bear . . .

Krilid fumbled to reload, but Gerold saw another rifle leaning against the wall. He grabbed it.

“Let me do it, man. You can’t hit an elephant’s ass with a bass fiddle.”

“There’s no scope on that!” the Troll yelled.

Gerold elbowed up. “Hey! They already cut the guy’s heart out—”

“Then don’t shoot Curwen! Shoot the heart!”

Gerold frowned at the nearly impossible instruction. He lined the V-notch up to the breech post, cocked the hammer, then took a breath. Meanwhile, as Curwen’s body convulsed on the platform floor, his opened chest cavity welling blood, a dog-faced demon grabbed the severed heart and began to reach upward. He meant to put the still-beating heart into the hole in the giant thing’s chest.

“Hurry!” Krilid yelled, still fumbling with his powder.

Gerold let out half a breath—

BAM!

The rudely large bullet shot the demon’s hand off with Curwen’s heart still in it. Both hand and heart plunged to the ground.

“Great shot!” Krilid celebrated.

Gerold felt a twinkle of pride. “Yeah, not bad, but . . . now what?”

“Now what?” Krilid smiled. The Nectoport soared down, the force of its movement nudging the balloon platform away. “Now’s when you get to decide if you want to be a hero.”

“What?”

“Look, we’re banking on you saying yes—”

“Saying yes to what?” Gerold snapped, annoyed.

The Egress of the Nectoport sucked right up to and over the ragged hole in the Demonculus’s chest. “What do you want more than anything, Gerold?”

Gerold needed no time to reflect. “I want to walk.”

“Well, look, there’s no way we can send you back to the Living World, but you were going to kill yourself there anyway.”

“What are you talking about?”

“But we can make it so you can walk again . . . or I should say you can.”

Gerold was about to blurt out another objection but then—