Chapter 78: Inner Voice, Part 5

As he walked through the corridors, a sudden pain flared in his skull for no apparent reason. Sam quickly realized that this wasn't an ordinary headache. It felt like his head was going to burst—but this time, he meant it. He clutched his head, dropping to his knees, convinced it would explode between his fingers. That he'd reached the end.

Out of nowhere.

With no explanation, no way to avoid it. He didn't understand. Maybe it was just the curse of having bad luck. He was too stunned to feel anger, too pained to think at all.

Sam slumped against one of the corridor windows. He heard a crack, and only seconds later realized it had fractured.

His experiences were that detached from his perceptions.

Sam kept sliding down, slowly dragging along the wall until he hit the floor. His legs couldn't bear his own weight. Even holding his head up was too much for him. His head wasn't going to explode, but darkness was already consuming his mission, relentlessly.

Was he going to die?

Even though Heaven was on his side and had an interest in his survival? Was he going to die like this?

After so much effort. So much blood, sweat, and tears.

For nothing and to no end—would he die?

It was a maddening thought. No, he had lost his mind long ago. But the darkness of what might have been death was soon illuminated by the flames of hell. Though he'd never seen it before, he had no doubt he was in that place.

Had he really died, just like that, and fallen into Satan's clutches?

Sam rose slowly, with great effort, leaning on the scorching ground, which felt like rock inside a volcano. Yes, he could almost feel the magma just beneath the thin layer. Everywhere he looked, there was only fire, rivers of magma splitting the stone in two, filling cracks in the ground.

Black chains swayed from the stalactites on the ceiling, embedded deep in the stone, moving to the rhythm of a strangely cold wind. It should have been impossible for a cold wind to blow here. But the cold wind burned as much as everything else, piercing him to the bone.

The dead emerged from the ground, crawling, slowly rising. Not skeletons. They couldn't be called that. The dead still had too much ruined, rotting flesh hanging off their bodies to be called skeletons.

In any case, they were enemies.

Sam tried to reach for a weapon, a sword or a pistol, as if he needed one. That was his thought, relaxing, smiling. As if I needed one. But when he called upon his ice magic, it didn't respond. That power hadn't even failed him with the shackles War had placed on him. But this was, without a doubt, hell. Satan's realm, not the real world. He supposed the old man was the one who set the rules.

He didn't need a weapon. His body was a weapon in itself. But what if he lunged at the dead and found that his power failed him at the last moment? Then he would be overwhelmed. Those things would tear him apart or drag him down to the depths, into the fires of hell. No, he quickly decided he couldn't risk that.

Sam turned around and began to run. Backward. Away, as far away as he could. A fallen tree lay in the path. He had no idea how it had gotten there since there wasn't a single tree in sight. He hadn't heard it fall, but still, he couldn't be sure it hadn't been there from the start. He slid underneath the tree to get past. He could have jumped over it, but he slid underneath. He thought that would significantly slow down the enemies, at least assuming they didn't have the coordination to do the same.

But then he glanced back and saw them displaying surprising agility and strength: though they were little more than bones, they leapt over the tree, slid, and rose quickly, barely slowing their pace as they continued the chase.

Great, thought Sam. Great, athletic skeletons. Athletic dead.

Well, at first, they had looked more like zombies, but as they ran and leapt, the flesh was peeling from their bones. Soon, they'd be nothing but skeletons. Though, of course, the difference didn't matter. The only thing he had to do was run. Get out of there as fast as possible. But he already knew that running solved nothing. That was why he had risked his neck to defeat War and Hunger, even though it hadn't gone entirely well. Besides, he couldn't escape. This was hell.

He could escape because it was like that strange dream that hadn't been a dream at all, when War had knocked him unconscious. When he found himself at Satan's mercy in a torture chair. Sooner or later, he would wake up. All he had to do was stay alive. He couldn't even be sure his life was really in danger. But, of course, he wasn't going to test it. He would do what he could to survive, to stay intact. He had seen too many movies with a similar theme. A glitch of glitches. His mind made it real. If that was true, he couldn't allow them to lay a hand on him. This wasn't some oddity of his condition as the Antichrist, a coincidence or something like that. It was a deliberate attack. He had no doubt. He didn't believe in coincidences, and he never took the most optimistic interpretation of anything.

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As much as he disliked it, his only option was to keep running. The path began to clear. Then it started closing in around him. He had less and less room to move, with trees and other obstacles falling out of nowhere. Sometimes the ground split in two, and he barely managed to leap to safety on the other side, floating above the magma. No matter what happened or how difficult the situation seemed, the zombies followed close behind. Too fast. Too flexible. Soon, they would catch up to him, and then there would be little he could do to fight for his life.

Damn, I need to wake up soon, he thought. Christina, Violet, or one of the workers or servants—someone must have seen him lying around somewhere. Someone must have taken him to bed and started caring for him. He needed to open his eyes and return to the real world. Would he? He had no plans to die, not in this way or any other.

At last, he reached the end of the path, where only a cave remained. But as he got closer, he realized it was nothing but a hole in the wall. A damn dead end.

"Shit, no! How is that possible?" San pounded against the wall as if he could knock it down. He hit it with all his strength, all his rage, but didn't even crack the stone. It was confirmed. He didn't possess super strength, nor did he have a way out. He turned to face the enemies closing in quickly. No way out, no way to win this fight.

The situation was dire. Things could hardly get worse, but of course, they did. Amid the ranks of the dead, rotting bodies, something appeared. An oddly normal figure, except for the pitch-black eyes from corner to corner. Advancing toward him... those black eyes.

He remembered seeing black eyes in Belphegor, an assistant who hadn't lasted long. But Satan's eyes were yellow, like his. He was a yellow-eyed demon.

What does it matter? he thought. You know this isn't exactly real or exactly fake.

Because, undoubtedly, it was Satan, no matter the color of his eyes. Satan approached and kicked him in the chest, sending him flying against the wall, and that did crack the stone. He hit the ground, coughing, wheezing, trying to breathe again. He was suffocating on solid ground, while that thing approached, relentless, soulless, with black eyes shining. This was his end. Perhaps an end dictated by fate. That yellow-eyed demon had created him, and in the same way, could end him. Perhaps even more easily.

"Satan," he thought, "the archangel Lucifer, the morning star, had existed before creation, long before man left the sea, much less came down from the trees. What made me think I could fight something like that?"

It wasn't even a being; it was like a force of nature, a law of the universe as immovable as death. Trying to stop it would be like trying to contain the ocean in a bucket with a hole or to hold back the waves with his hands.

Satan kicked him in the head several times, and he barely managed to cross his arms to protect himself. Even so, each blow shook his body from head to toe. He felt his bones vibrating and felt damned fragile, like a house of cards.

I don't want to die here, he thought. No way.

With or without powers, he could resist, even if it wouldn't do much good. But he would resist. On who knew what number kick, he managed to grab the demon's leg and pull him down, unbalancing him, though he didn't succeed in bringing him to the ground. Then he received his first punch. The pain was as if all his teeth would be knocked loose, loosening his grip on the demon's leg, which slipped free and kicked him in the head again, then several more times in the chest, driving his boots in forcefully.

I don't want to die, thought Sam. I don't want to die like this; someone wake me up.

Satan's black eyes pierced him more deeply than any sword. The black eyes and that pearl-white smile, almost innocent, almost devoid of malice, almost beautiful.

"You will never wake up again," Satan whispered, like a snake. "Never."

Sam trembled from head to toe. No, that's impossible, he thought. I'm not dead. I haven't truly fallen into hell, so sooner or later, I must wake up.

"You are mine, Sammy. You're mine, and I'll keep you here as long as I want."

Inner Voice, Part 5: END