Gordon shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. But Kharon said that I can’t let you come back, or it will be me walking those coals and hanging from a cross. Believe me, I’d much rather that be you than me.”
Mark made a decision. He crawled to his knees and nodded at Gordon, holding his hand up. “I’ll go,” he said. “Just let me stand up.”
Gordon ran a hand across the sweat of his balding scalp and shrugged his enormous arms. “You have five. Four. Three…”
Mark jumped up and ran. He bolted past Gordon and aimed towards the row of figures he saw still standing far in the distance. The Watchers hadn’t moved. His heart pounded and his breath came hard after all the running he’d already done, but now he felt a sense of victory. He’d ducked the asshole with the whip and the flogger, and he was going to blow past the asshole with the fucking druids from hell down by the doorway and get the fuck out of this goddamned place.
Mark loved Rae, but faced with the glowing fire of the pit…he realized…maybe not quite enough to voluntarily walk through fire for her. Sometimes those love songs about doing anything for your lover exaggerated just a bit.
Sorry, he said in the depths of his heart. I’d like to walk the line. But I can’t.
He ran, until the rough stone disappeared from beneath his bare feet.
Mark hung in midair for a second and then fell five feet to the bottom of a stone pit. The pain was instant.
“Shit!” he screamed, as his leg twisted beneath him and his raw skin slammed against the stone floor at the bottom of the trap. Something trickled underneath his ass, and then he felt a burning sensation.
Gordon looked over the top of the pit. “I’ve got news for you, pal,” the large man said. “The pit is no better than the fire. They pipe acid down this canal every few minutes. And if it touches you… Well…”
Mark could already feel his skin blistering from where a few drops had touched him. He clawed his way up, careful not to step on any of the wet parts of the stone ditch.
He looked down the channel and saw there was more liquid coming, just as Gordon promised. A thin trickle flowed at the center beneath his feet, but down the way…the crest was growing.
“How do I get out?” Mark asked.
Gordon pointed to indentations in the wall a few feet away.
“You can go forward, but you can’t go back. Kharon told you that. If you don’t get out of there in the next couple minutes, you won’t be going anywhere.”
Gordon was right. Already the thin trickle of yellowish liquid at the very center of the brick canal had grown to a six-inch creek. And it was growing every second, the bitter scent of its acid growing with it. Mark watched as it cascaded over the edge of a brick that he’d been standing on just a minute earlier. He shifted his feet and straddled the bottom of the acid canal, making his way over to the wall with the carved stairs.
When he reached it, he quickly pulled himself up and out of the canal. The burn where he’d been touched by the liquid felt like flame, and his skin there was beet red. Behind, the rush of acid sounded like an ocean, as the deadly liquid filled the canal. He stared at the canal and shook his head in disbelief. He’d walked across this place before, and the ground had been flat. Now…there was no way back to Kharon except through the river of acid. And no way forward except the pit of fire. This place was like a Rubik’s Cube, and someone had just shifted a row behind him.
“You have thirty seconds to walk the coals, or I’m going to take all the skin off your ass,” Gordon said. “And frankly, again, I’d rather you stayed right here. I’ve had a shitty week, and I wouldn’t mind taking it out on you.”
“Not interested,” Mark said, daring for a moment to look away from Gordon’s toothy smile to the waves of heat that swam above the orange light beyond. If he took a running start…could he vault himself across the fire in just a handful of steps that didn’t ruin his feet forever?
“Ten, nine, eight…” The rake of steel cut into Mark’s back, and he yelped.
Gordon laughed. “Feel good?”
It didn’t feel good. Mark could feel hot wetness seeping down the crevice of his armpit.
The only way to Rae was forward.
Mark clenched his teeth, stared at the rock path on the other side of the coals, and made his decision.
He ran.
The first step was awful. Sizzling, horrible pain lanced up his calves and Mark screamed. But that was before his other foot set down on the burning coals. He almost fell face-first into the fire, but somehow, that human instinct that says “never give up” kicked in and Mark instead raised his burning right foot and forced it down again onto the fire, propelling himself forward.
Never give up, he screamed in his head, but his feet and calves screamed something else.
They screamed agony.
Mark cried and yelled and felt his skin blister and crack as the pain shot up his heel and toes. The fire was unbearable and yet, if he slowed or stopped, his entire body would be engulfed…face, arms, privates… Mark stayed on his feet three more hideous steps and then the pain was too much. He put his left foot down and it collapsed beneath his weight. But that just made the agony worse.
His knee fell to the fire and Mark put out his hands to stop himself. That’s when the pain really started.
“Oh God,” he cried as the skin of his hands seared and burned, and the hair on his legs curled and smoked, and the fire began to eat him.
He screamed so loud he felt something crack in the depths of his throat.
The wave of heat turned his vision to flame. But Mark refused to die. With some hidden vestige of strength he used the pain to throw himself upright again, and, screaming at the top of his lungs, planted his foot hard on the coals once more, and then again…
The stone path on the other side of the bed of coals felt almost cold as Mark threw himself upon it, shaking and quivering with burning pain. He screamed and cried, and rolled across the stone, every movement opening a deeper pain in his body. He could feel his flesh still bubbling, suppurating, dissolving from the heat he had just forced it to endure.
“Oh God,” Mark cried, as every part of him screamed in agony.
Something shifted behind him, rock grinding against rock. Mark struggled to turn, to look back. He could see Gordon standing on the other side of the fire, watching. And he could see the path that he now lay upon. The path behind him was disappearing. Brick by brick, the perimeter that bordered the fire was letting go, slipping into the pit of coals. He had escaped the fire, but it was not letting him go that easily.
The fire was moving towards him, brick by lost brick.
Mark struggled to move forward, but every movement was fresh agony. His entire body was burned, and his feet and hands and knees still felt as white-hot as when they were on the fire. The pain was hideous and he lay down for a moment, just letting the agony take him. But then the rocks beneath his feet dropped away, and the heat of the coals blossomed up to embrace his feet and ankles.
The pain was hideous and immediate. His feet were in an oven.
Another row of bricks disappeared, and the heat embraced his calves.
Mark slapped his blistered hands to the rock and pushed his body forward, crying the whole time. His breath came in fast, horrible gasps but he forced himself to keep moving. Dull grinding crashes continued behind him, and he knew that the coals were gaining ground. His only hope was to reach the stairs ahead and to pull himself up and out of this hell. He crawled forward, inch by inch, gradually increasing his speed until he was at the wall. The rocks continued to give out; the fire pit was now just a couple yards away from the wall.
Mark looked up at the stairs and saw that they did not actually continue down to the ground. The last step was a good ten feet above the stone floor.