No, there was more. The plants that grew between the rocks were vicious. The vines tripped. The bushes stabbed. Only the trees seemed harmless. Then a sharp wind blew, and I realized the trunks weren’t extra thick like I’d thought. Those were blackened bodies hanging from their limbs that now rocked and jiggled in hell’s breeze. And the awful thing was, they were aware.
So were the walkers. Nobody within range of my sight sat and rested. They all moved among one another, never conversing, but often talking to themselves. It reminded me a little bit of a busy New York sidewalk, except everyone was looking down, watching the rocks.
Then I began focusing on the individuals and the sense of community dropped away. Right in front of us a woman continuously combed her fingers through her long blond hair. When she got to the tips she yanked hard enough to jerk her head sideways. Every few seconds she took the hair she’d pulled out of her skull and stuffed it into her mouth.
“Why’s she doing that?” I whispered to Raoul.
He shrugged.
“Don’t you know?”
“It’s not like their sins are tattooed on their foreheads.”
“Look at her. She’s crazed. They all are.” To our right a thin, black-bearded man bent down, picked up a rock, and began shredding his shirt with it. When the material fell from his shoulders in tatters he began again, this time on his skin. I tried to swallow, but nothing went down.
My eyes moved to another man, the first I’d seen who’d paused in his forward motion. He looked straight ahead. For half a second his eyes cleared.
Everyone within a hundred yards stopped. Crouched. Let out a collective groan that knifed straight into my gut and twisted.
Flames shot from the sky, engulfing the man. As soon as he began screaming, the fire spread to the people surrounding him, as if a large demonic fist had reached down with a red plastic can and sprayed them all with kerosene.
I’ve seen more horror than I care to remember in my twenty-five years. But nothing had ever come close to this. Maybe I could’ve stood just the screaming. Or just the sight of fifty people burning. But not — “Raoul, the smell . . . ”
He reached into a pack at his waist and pulled out two white ovular tabs that resembled smelling salts. “Stick these in your nose.”
I did, and they helped. I wondered what else Raoul had packed in his Let’s Go to Hell kit. Better not to ask.
Around the burning people, everyone else continued with their business.
A woman bit steadily on her middle finger. I noticed she’d already chewed her thumb and forefinger off at the first joint.
A man fell to his knees every few steps, leaving a bloody trail on the rocks behind him.
Two teens, identical twins, took turns lashing each other with branches they’d torn off one of those not-so-innocent trees.
Though I’d just come from a bath, I wanted to go home and shower. And watch
Pollyanna
. And cuddle with my infant niece. Anything to be reminded that good still existed somewhere in my world.
“I knew hell was like this,” I told Raoul bitterly. “Insanity’s last stop. Where there’s no help. No relief. Just unrelenting madness.”
“For you and these people, yes. For others, it’s something entirely different.”
“But everybody’s in physical form here?”
“It’s part of the punishment,” Raoul replied.
As Vayl had mentioned, I’d traveled outside my body a few times. What a rush. But once I’d stayed away a little too long. Nearly all my ties to the physical world had faded. I remembered how hard it was to rejoin my flesh, how constrained I’d felt, almost trapped. I could see how, having once broken all earthly boundaries, being forced back into a body could make it seem like a prison. Even holding tight to my Get Out of Jail Free card, I was ready to leave.
“Can you tell me what we have to do here?”
“Our scouts have reported rumors of a conclave to be held there, beneath that guard tower.” He pointed at the nearest hanging tree. Wait a minute.
“Raoul, what is hell to you? What are you seeing?”
Things I never wanted to witness again, his eyes told me as they met mine. “A POW camp,” he told me hoarsely. “Torture, starvation, and deprivation all the way to the horizon.”
Big reaction from Dave’s people. Not surprise though. Maybe they’d suspected it all along. I searched their faces as I spoke.
“I wondered if that was how he’d died. But I hadn’t known him long enough to ask. I had other, more palatable questions. Like who would be qualified to scout the activities of hell’s minions? And what did any of this have to do with me? But according to my note, we didn’t have time for chitchat.”
“You said he was wearing camo when he came to get you,” said a short, wiry man with a full black beard who introduced himself as Ricardo Vasquez. “Was that all?”
I knew what he was getting at. “No, he had a black beret with a Ranger tab on it.”
Murmurs around the room. My savior solider, who’d taken watch at the window, said, “You want to find the gates of hell? Walk into any POW camp and you’re there.”
“Damn right, Natch,” the amazon agreed with a sharp nod of her head. Rage, that’s what these people were feeling. I realized if I ever decided to storm the place, maybe stage a massive rescue, I could count on these folks to back me up.
I went on. “Raoul assured me the citizens of hell couldn’t see us since we weren’t of the place, only in it. And it sure seemed that way as we picked our way to a ring of footstool-sized rocks that surrounded a three-foot pit of golden-orange bubbling magma. The walkers kept away from the pit and the ring. Could they sense what was coming? No. They just didn’t want to get hit by the streams of lava that came shooting out of the pit at random intervals. But it seemed to have some sort of rudimentary intelligence that allowed it to strike with agonizing accuracy every time.”
“Remind me that these people are bad guys,” I begged Raoul. “They deserve what’s happening to them, right?”
He shrugged. “Most do. But remember the reaver, Desmond Yale.”
“Who’s that?” asked a guy I’d been trying not to stare at, just because he was that pretty. His name, he told me the first second he had a chance, was Ashley St. Perru. He came from Old Money, meaning his mom was a bitch, his dad was an asshole, and his sister couldn’t leave a store without dropping three grand first. He’d left home in search of a family and found one in the middle of nowhere. Go figure.
“Cole’s first official kill,” I said, nodding toward our interpreter. Even without looking at him I could see the shadow that experience had left behind his eyes. It wasn’t an overwhelming force anymore. Just a part of his past that made him older and wiser and, somehow, easier to be with. “But he wasn’t a cinch for us to take down. He was a soul-stealer, like the ones we fought just now, only a savvy old pro. His job had been to nab the innocents and shove them into hell to suffer right alongside the deserving. Ultimately he and his buddies had come to help start a war.”
“You know a lot about reavers, huh?” commented Dave, his eyes narrowing.
Are you putting my people in unnecessary danger?
that look demanded.
I decided it would be best to ignore him for now. I went on. “Just as Raoul mentioned Yale, the first of the attendees crawled out of the pit. As soon as I saw those clawed, skeletal fingers I knew this creature was the same one that had pulled the reaver’s body through the doorway he’d created from the heart of a dead woman. When the creature had fully emerged my stomach lurched, she looked so much like pictures I’d seen of concentration camp survivors. Except her skin was the bright red of a poison ivy rash and a hump of flesh stood in place of her nose, as if her Maker had seriously considered endowing her with a trunk and then changed his mind very last minute. And then there was that third eye. Except when the lid opened, the socket glared red and empty. She moved to one of the rocks. More creatures emerged from the pit after that, one after another, so quickly I lost count until they finally all sat down.”