Death came easy when you were shot through the fucking skull.
Ade had learnt that the hard way. Well, she had learnt it the easy way first in biology class a while ago, but now, now she knew it, knew for certain that when you blew a person’s brains out, whatever simulacrum of a personality, a being, a self and a consciousness it holds is blown away too, splattered across the wall in a beautiful pink mess.
Or did she?
She was thinking, wasn't she? I hadn't even noticed. How could she, it was her natural state of mind, never keeping still, never clinging to one moment, always in a race against space and time to figure out the secrets of both before her body succumbed to them.
But it shouldn’t matter what the state of her mind used to be if it was currently hollowed out. Should it?
No, no it should not.
And yet here she was, not moving, not breathing, seeing, hearing or even living. But she was thinking… Somehow.
Whatever this was, she knew it wouldn’t last. Or was that her hoping it wouldn’t? Afterall, as much as she enjoyed her own company, an infinity in this equally infinite void would drive her insane. So she thought of what mattered, the most important thing on her mind, frankly what would be the most important thing on just about anyone else’s mind in her position.
What she could have done to prevent her death.
She toyed with the idea, gnawed at it and tinkered with all its edges, vertices and faces until finally coming to the conclusion she’d already found just seconds before the trigger was pulled.
There was nothing I could have done to prevent this.
Perhaps if she were someone else it would have brought her peace to know this. Ade wasn’t someone else. It made her blood boil, made her mind thrash, she wanted to scream, kick and fling shit at the wall until the heat death of the universe.
But that wouldn’t happen, not just because she didn’t have a body to do the flinging or the shitting anymore, but because she could feel her consciousness slipping from her. Her earliest memories were blurs, obvious facts became hazy and names tangled into one another like bundles of yarn in a storm.
Whatever this was, this state before death, it was coming to an end, and death proper would follow soon.
Frantically she began reaching for her memories, not the ones she loved but the ones she despised, for she knew hate was a stronger motivator than love could ever be. She clung onto everything she loathed about the world, everything she loathed about herself, the stupid way the human spine was designed, the way her moron neighbour always made horrible puns that only he found funny, rabbits, what was up with them anyway, with their stupid eyes and big ears, always listening in for something.
Finally she hated the fact that she was dying and there was nothing she could do to stop it anyways.
It didn’t matter. in time it all spilled past her mind like water through fingers and she couldn’t even remember the name of those stupid hopping creatures she hated so much.
Soon she couldn’t recall what anything was, but she knew what hate was, she’d cling to that like a lifebuoy in the middle of a raging ocean. Whatever those were.
Ade was dying, but she’d die hating.
She waited to forget that too, but didn’t. What washed over her instead was a voice, like ice itself sinking into her veins and nesting its sharp edges against her heart.
[Abandon all hope ye who enter here.]
She barely had time to process those words before everything came flooding back, names, places, emotions, colours, faces and rabbits, fuck rabbits, they stormed into her mind like lightning and took residence all at once.
Agony! She suddenly knew that was what she was feeling, fuck it might have been all she was feeling. And then she was falling. It was an odd thing to know, she had no skin to feel the wind across her skin or ears to hear it roaring past but she knew it all the same. It was that plummeting feeling people got right on the cusp of falling asleep, hypnic jerk they called it, well it was one long sustained moment of that.
And then, like all sufferers of hypnic jerk, she woke up.
Light flooded her world, and the first thing she saw was a cloudless crimson sky shining its harsh rays into her eyes. Eyes, I have eyes again!
“She’s awake.” A voice called out and she turned to find a man kneeling over her body, face bunched up in concern.
Ade did the only reasonable thing and poked him in the eyes before rolling away and scrambling up to her feet with all the grace of a cornered rat.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Her question was answered by the groans and hissing as the stranger stumbled backwards, rubbing his eye. “Shit!” was his verbal reply and that didn’t tell Ade much other than the fact that he was in pain, so she searched for her own answers.
He was wearing a reflective orange vest, a yellow safety helmet and thick heavy brown boots. A construction worker then. The stranger was a white man in his mid forties, but she didn’t have to deduce that, she just had to use her eyes. “You didn’t answer my question.” She pressed. Mid Forties or not, he was still a man, and it was best to know if he was hostile or not before he had both eyes working properly and was within strangling distance.
“We’re not trying to hurt you.” He said.
“That’s not the answer to my quest-” Ade caught herself. “We?” She spun around to three figures behind her. The trio couldn’t have looked more different from the man, one an asian man in a well tailored suit, the other a middle eastern woman in a hijab and the last was yet another white man, big as a bodybuilder with arms bathed in ink.
Their eyes held a weariness that Ade knew was mirrored in her own. These people were as frightened and confused as she was, quite possibly even more so if that was even possible. Well, all were, save from the asian man, he looked as calm as a dead ocean.
It wasn’t him that spoke up first however, it was the boulder of a man instead. “Try that with me and you won’t have fingers to poke with.” He warned.
“I would never.” She informed him honestly. It would be common sense to knee him between the legs instead.
“Lets not fight!” The construction worker urged, stepping past Ade and in-between her and the other three. His gaze fell on Ade, sympathetic now. “We all suddenly awoke here like you.” He said.
That raised a burning question to the forefront of Ade’s mind, one that had already been ignited since the moment she first opened her eyes. “What exactly is here?” She asked, looking around.
What Ade saw was a thing of stories and nightmares.
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The land was a barren thing of hard black earth, dotted with great outcroppings of rock that jutted high into the sky as if trying to flee from the very ground they emerged from.
Volcanoes coloured the landscape, each one large, each one active, their mouths leaking magma that ran down the rock like the pus of some festering god. They formed a long network of rivers and streams that dominated the world around her.
She was suddenly aware of the heat licking her skin, the sweat running down her brow and the choking hotness of the air. To say she was terrified would be an understatement, it looked like- well, it looked like fucking hell.
She tried to be rational about it, like the atheist she was, but she had eyes and those eyes had seen depictions of hell and where she was standing looked quite similar to it.
“Guess I was wrong about religion then, she breathed.”
She nearly jumped as a screen appeared before her, reddish in colour and semitransparent.
“Good lord.” The construction worker whispered and a brief glance told Ade he was looking at a screen before him also. It seemed everyone had one in front of them, they were all equally shocked from the looks of things, all save from the Asian business man who stared at his intently.
Ade looked back at hers to find that it had text written on it.
[Welcome to Limbo!
This Game is sponsored by Dresel, Dresel, good for your teeth!
Goal: Survive 24 hours.
Event: All players are scheduled for smiting in the next 6 hours. For each Actgonian or Player killed, a random member on your team will be marked exempt from smiting.
An Actagonian will appear in 150 seconds, would you like a knife to aid you?]
“Yes!” She said and the hilt of a knife emerged from the screen. Ade decided to be stunned later, grabbed the knife and pulled at it. It came out freely, a small, crude and rusted thing, but it was better than fucking nothing.
It seemed everyone else decided the same thing for they all had their blades tightly gripped between their fingers. Ade had done many things, been in a fight was not one of them, but she fancied herself a quick learner.
“We’re in Jahannam, we’re in Jahannam!” The Middle Eastern lady screamed with disbelieving eyes, falling to her knees and sobbing. The effects of her words were profound on the group for they all seemed to take in the landscape with new and darker eyes.
This was dangerous, hopeless people were useless. “What’s your name?” Ade asked instantly.
The woman ceased her crying to look up at her, she looked stunned at the question. “B- Basma.” She answered. “Basma Abboud.”
“Basma Aboud,” She repeated. “Sunni Muslim yes?”
Her face creased in surprise. “Uhm, yes.”
“I can tell.” She said, grinning. She in fact could not fucking tell, the Sunni were just the largest branch of Islam and she’d guessed right. God, she loved the magic of probability.
“Well, Basma, I’m Adeyemi, Nigerian, Yoruba and an atheist.” She introduced herself, grinning. “Yes, I know, I know, you can tell me you told me so later, but for now we’re going to be very busy surviving.”
Basma looked sceptical, but that meant she was busy considering the possibility, rather than her own death.
“And how exactly are we going to do that?” The construction worker voiced what were likely her concerns.
Ade whipped her head to him, “Name.” She demanded.
“I-”
“If you’re going to interrupt a conversation between acquaintances, at least introduce yourself.” She pressed.
“Phillip-” He began, awkwardly, “Phillip Brown.” He couldn’t have sounded more American if he tried.
“Now, miss Adeyemi-” He began. “I don’t mean to put you down here, but how can we survive this? We don’t have any idea about what’s even going on.”
“Firstly Phil, you can call me Ade, we’re all friends here, secondly, I do in fact know what’s going on, or at least have an idea, I mean, they made it rather easy for us.” She began.
A scoff came from behind her and she turned to find it came from the big man. She spoke directly to him now.
“Here’s what I know, this is some sort of game, I don’t know the specifics of how it works but I have the details, the rules say an Actagonian is going to appear and when it does it’s in our best interest to kill it so we’re going to fucking kill it.”
“I-”
“Name.”
He frowned, looked like he was going to argue then spoke. “Dima.” Russian then, well he certainly sounded like it. Interesting.They all seemed to be from different places from earth but it looked like they could all speak the same language. Now such a thing wasn’t impossible, thanks to the British and their rabid colonialist genocides, but it was still something to pick apart. Later, not now.
“Nice to meet you Dima, one can never be short on Slavs.” She smiled. “Now, correct me if I’m wrong but you were going to say something along the lines of, ‘how do we know we can kill an Actgonian, we don’t even know what it is.’”
He frowned in the way she’d become rather used to people doing when she showed off. But he didn’t correct her. “Well I know we can kill it, because as they’ve already told us, this is a game, and what game is fun without an achievable objective? Look, they even gave us tools to make it happen.”
He weighed her as if considering whether or not he wanted to crush a bug beneath the soles of his boots, and right before he chose the wrong option, the business man nodded. “She’s right, whatever’s coming, we have a better chance taking it on together than apart.”
Dima didn’t turn away from her but she could practically see the other man’s words sink into him all the same. “Are all Nigerians this annoying?”
Ade laughed. “Only the West African ones,” She turned to the Asian. “Name?” She asked expectantly.
“I think I’ll pass on that.” He said, as he shifted the blade in his grip, it took Ade a moment to realise he was testing its weight. He handled it with dexterity, moving the metal like it was a fluid between his fingers. Whoever he was, he certainly had experience with killing weapons.
“Very well, then, I’ll call you Suit.” She replied and turned to the rest of the group.” How many seconds left?”
“Ten.” Phillip said, looking at his screen,
“More than enough time to prepare for what’s coming, remember, we’re five, it’s one, let’s jump this motherfucker!” She declared, filling a rush of confidence at her own words.
The group seemed just as invigorated by them as she was. The fear wasn’t gone in their eyes, she doubted there was a chance they ever would be- they were quite literally in Hell after all, but there was hope now and a glint of the primal thirst to survive. They gripped their blades firmly in shaky hands and readied to confront what they were going to stick it into.
All except Suit. He seemed absolutely devoid of terror, devoid of fear, eyes still as calm as a dead ocean’s surface, and now as cold as its floor.
They weren’t left waiting for long. A portal appeared in front of them. How did she know it was a portal, well it looked like a portal, red swirling energy in its mouth and circular in shape. Ade would have liked to say she’d seen weirder things, but she hadn’t, it was a fucking portal and as far as she was concerned that wasn’t a common means of transportation back on earth.
She looked at the timer on the screen.
[An Actagonian will appear in 6 seconds]
Then, 5, then 4 and then 3. Each number less made her wish she had cherished the previous one more. When zero came, the screen vanished and the portal remained.
There was a silence between them, no sound left the group but the rattle of uneven breaths. All ten eyes were afield to the portal. It was Phillip who cut the suffocating quiet short. “What now?” He whispered.
“I don’t kn-” Ade’s words never saw completion, snatched away by the sight of a beast charging straight through the portal. The Actagonian was a large, red humanoid thing, wrapped in muscle and crowned with two great horns. It was a minotaur, she realised, a fucking minatour.
It moved like an arrow and roared as it leapt at Phillip. The poor man didn’t stand a chance. The minotaur slammed into his body, breaking it against the ground with its phenomenal mass.
Phillip’s cries cut through the air like knives through cloth, sinking into the permanent recesses of her mind. Phillip fought and kicked uselessly with what parts of him still functioned. It slammed its fist repeatedly into the man’s head. He was sure to have passed within the first few hits but it took painfully long for Phillips head to come apart, bursting like a watermelon between the two great forces that surrounded it.
Phillip was dead, and like that, so was the entire group's resolve.
They scattered, fleeing in separate directions as fast as their legs could take them.
Ade was quick , a genius even, sharper than the best of the best and better than most could ever hope to be. Her brain moved like lightning, she was told, straight A’s weren’t hard for her and at only twenty she was soon to be one of the leading researchers in biology. So yes, Ade was quick, but her body was slow, and when it saw a man get torn apart right in front of her, the stupid thing’s legs froze up.
It made it easy for the Minotaur to pick its next target, and that was why she wasn’t even remotely surprised when it started charging straight at her.