Luke flexed his ankle and swore. It hurt, but nothing was torn or broken. He took off his boot, wrapped the ankle with the carry strap for support, then laced his boot back up. It still hurt, but he could probably run on it if he had to. He stripped off his jacket, grunting at all the little slivers that had blown back in his face. There were fewer of them than he thought there were, but still enough that it took him some time to pluck them all out. A few of the cuts bled, but not enough to worry about. He put his jacket back on, and ate his crackers while he looked for his helmet. He didn’t find it, but he did find the half-used clip he’d thrown at the bone chimes. A fair trade. He took out his compass. The cover was busted, and the needle was bent up at a useless angle. Luke swore then gathered a couple of big stones.
Keeping an eye on the corpse Luke panned the water and counted. There were seven little sandbars, each with a tuft of thick grass growing on them. He bounced a rock in his hand, and threw it. It landed on the first island with a dull thud. He threw the others, plopping a few lobs into the water for good measure. Nothing came roaring out of the depths. No mysterious ripples broke the surface. Luke nodded, and built himself a smoke. He took care not to spill any of his tobacco before putting it back in the little pouch that kept his makings dry. He flicked his lighter, and heat lightning lit up the treetops. Luke waited for thunder, but it never came.
He considered his situation. He was hurt, and a little shook up. He had no way to keep his direction straight. He was running out of light in a hurry. He could bed down where he was and hope he made it through the night, or he could keep going. He took a look at the dead thing and imagined what would have happened if it had found him in the dark. His lips writhed. Luke looked back the way he’d come, toward the clouds of flies and the bloody trail they were eating away to nothingness. No one was coming, but if he went back that way he’d be no better off than he was now. He checked what was left of his gear to make sure everything was buttoned up and strapped in.
“After a while, crocodile,” he said, flicking his smoldering roach at the thing that had lived and died in the Golgotha. Luke drew his pistol and started picking his way around the rim of the water.
He paused below the arch and looked up at the body. It was older than the first one, and it had rotted faster. It had both arms, and they were spread wide in welcome. Either that, or it was getting ready to drop on him when he wasn’t looking. Luke pursed his lips, and took a long drink from his canteen. There was another legend scratched into the left tree, faint enough that he had to lean in close to see it.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” he read. He looked back over his shoulder, then back at the dark doorway. He crossed the threshold.
Luke found the first stone with his bad foot. It was the size of a brick, and cocked at an angle like a sinking ship. It was the color of hospital sheets, and jagged cracks ran the visible length of it. Rounded and pounded by wind and rain the stone stood defiant; the tip of some buried pyramid lost and forgotten for centuries. Luke limped past, barely giving it a thought except to remember to pick up his feet.
He found more. At first there were only one or two, but they grew into clumps of a dozen or more. The clumps grew more frequent until he was on something that resembled a road. The trees parted, and Luke picked his way over the undisciplined-soldier course beneath a sky as black and empty as a Sunday chalkboard.
Nothing moved. No birds scuttled through the trees, and no snakes slithered after them searching for tasty eggs. Nothing stalked through the empty spaces, or pawed through the dead leaves carpeting the ground beneath emaciated bushes. Ragged cobwebs the size of burial shrouds hung from skeletal branches, and wrapped sacs the size of severed heads hung like sticky, tumorous pendulums. The road was dead, and its corpse was unquiet beneath Luke’s feet.
He smelled the river before he saw it. On top was the musty scent of stale rain, but beneath there was something else; a sharp tang like spoiled eggs in a burn bin. It crawled up Luke’s nose and squatted there, adding a touch of brimstone to every breath and making his eyes water if he sucked in too much air. The trees thinned and twisted, thinning like an old man’s hair. Ancient slabs of stone leaned against each other, fringes of thatched roofs still clinging to a few of the lean-tos. Scrimshaw sigils half-erased by time and the caustic air decorated some of the buildings as well, and shifting shadows lived behind their broken lintels. The darkness watched as he passed, and Luke picked up his pace.
The road ended atop a rise between two decaying stone columns. The eroded stumps were each two feet taller than Luke, and wide enough that his whole squad couldn’t have held arms around one of them. Tiger grass grew knee high, and hieroglyphics faded to near-invisibility spiraled over their surfaces. Beyond the leaning towers was a land of mist and darkness that glowed with witch fire. A red moon rose over the horizon, painting fingers of land in scarlet, and the slow-moving water a deeper, darker crimson.
The place was wrong. It looked wrong, it sounded wrong, and it smelled wrong. There were no sulfur swamps in their patrol area. There were no rivers big enough to make a clogged drain like this one for at least a hundred kilometers in the opposite direction. No one in the area had reported stone landmarks to the map crews, and nowhere in the entire fucking country from bombed out tunnels to defoliated drop zones was ever this fucking quiet. It was like a library, in a church, in the middle of a graveyard, on Mars.
Luke flicked off his torch and belly-crawled over the rise. His ankle pulsed like a parade-ground hangover, and his canteen was nearly empty. His skull felt naked, and his eyes throbbed as he tried to see through the murk. The skin between his shoulders puckered, and his gut wouldn’t unclench. Everything in him said there were eyes out there, and whoever owned them was none too friendly. He glanced back the way he’d come, but saw nothing but darkness. When he turned back he saw something scrawled over the stone below the grass line. Luke held his kerchief over the torch to cut the glare, and leaned in for a closer look.
Now Entering Spook Central, the stones proclaimed in letters that had been written in an unsteady hand. Below that, the printing slanting the other way, was the missive Kilroy was here. Luke touched his tongue to the pad of his thumb, and ran it over the last e. It smeared, and when he sniffed his thumb there was no doubt about what the words had been written in. They were fresh, but not that fresh. A gunshot rang out somewhere in the darkness, and Luke’s shoulders twitched. He remembered Baxter telling him once that if you heard the shot you weren’t dead yet, and that if you weren’t dead it was time to get a move on before you were. Forward or backward, Luke couldn’t stay where he was.
The world came in flashes. Luke was halfway down the hill, scooting on his ass like a little kid and trying to look everywhere at once. Then he was at the bottom of the hill, bent over like a runner getting ready to put his feet in the blocks. He was scuttling through the grass, breathing through his open mouth, trying to hear something other than the slamming of his heart. He zigged and zagged over the open land, keeping his head down and his eyes wide open in the dark. He felt with his feet and his fingertips, slithering and scrabbling over ground he could barely see. He used the torch sparingly, kept its flashes brief, and managed not to run into anything. The fourth time he flicked the switch there was a crack in the near distance, and the torch exploded.