The knife slid across the old man’s face, caught in the cheekbone—I jammed my body weight into the blade to force it—the knife glided into Harold’s eye, and he did not stir too much in his bed; a single energetic spasm came over his legs while he gargled on spit and then he was nothing. I yanked the knife free and wiped it against my pant leg and the new corpse lay still there in his bed.
The underground was quiet, dark in corners save the electric overhead lights, and the room was small; it had been no great task to sneak into the underground through the backways of the hall of Bosses; even with the greater paranoia that had caused them to better equip their guards.
By his bedside was a bottle, half finished; I uncorked the thing, took a sniff and then a drink and sat on the bed by the dead man’s legs. The room was nothing extravagant, but it was quieter, safer than anything on the surface. The metal walls were worn from time, but thick and hard. Over a vanity across the room sat a mirror and I caught myself in it; a wild man, half melted and missing an ear, stared back at me. Some revenant.
There’s a fact to humans: there is a delirious amount of cruelty that can be derived from a mass of us, but one on one, a person does not want to die—they do not want to kill either. If a person can flip that switch in their brain, if a person can kill without hesitation, even when skill is accounted for, the willpower to do awful often trumps all else. John taught me that.
Moving quietly to the door, I peeked into the hallway, scanned left and right, and saw no one in either direction. The overhead lights had a nauseating effect and buzzed. I cast a glance back to the corpse on the bed—a dark radius formed on the pillow where the head lay and I ducked into the hallway, shutting the door closed behind me.
I was reminded of the psalm: They surrounded me on every side, but in the name of the Lord, I cut them down. I didn’t know about any of that; if there was any great plan, I wasn’t privy to it, and that was probably the point anyway. It was a compulsion to do right for all the wrongs I’d committed—though revenge was a factor, I imagine that I’d gotten it in my head that it was right to murder the men that ran Golgotha. Dave would’ve wanted it done. Gemma tried to kill her father and I finished that much for her. Andrew was kinder, but sometimes (maybe) violence could be done in the name of those that abhorred it.
What would Sibylle have done? I know.
I stalked down the hallway; Harold’s chambers were directly off a larder and beyond that were the sleeping quarters of servants—there wasn’t a guide or a map and I’d never been invited to tour the place. I pushed through the stark and labyrinthine hallways. The metal walls shone dull in the light, worn from centuries of people brushing against them—the floors too were worn thinner center line. COI emblems, plain and stocky fonts were stamped into the metal in places where one section met the next and though the lettering was thinned, it was unmistakable.
I pushed deeper, further from Harold’s room, further from the kitchen and the entrance and the sleeping servants, and the air grew thicker and hotter like I delved into the depths of a creature’s stomach.
The lights flickered and I kept to one side of the hall on the chance that I happened by some passerby; I could bolt or position the wall to my back. That song the flutist played in the tower square came back to me and I recalled the song was played when I was quite young. It’d been a tune Tandy the foreigner had played, and I refused the impulse to hum the tune to myself in that quiet hall and kept my eyes ahead. From an intersection of halls, I watched someone pass from left to right and I froze and waited and listened and when no alarm sounded, I went on and peered around the intersection’s corner to see the back of some person disappear around yet another corner, a servant most likely. Possibly a guard. It happened so quickly that certainty was impossible.
Murdering Harold was easy enough, but taking the life of a half-dead geezer wasn’t anything to brag on. Maron would not be so easy; even with his disease, would I find it so easy to put a mark on him? And why Maron? I could leave him to rot with the skitterbugs. It would likely be death. No, I had to be sure. I had to see life leave him and know it was done.
My steps came with a more profound purpose than ever before and though I moved quickly, quietly, I felt no hesitation.
With some trial and error, I found the sleeping quarters of Brash and upon pushing in through the door, I saw a light was on in the room and stopped there in the doorway for a moment; the form on the bed remained still. I went through and shut the door closed and watched the sleeping man and briefly thought of sparing him, but the fact of the matter was that if any of them had a shred of moral fiber, they would have left Golgotha or they would have given up their positions or led the place with a modicum of virtue; what of Lady? Lady had done great evil too. Was the evil done to her in return enough? She’d lost her mind. There in the bed slept a man without a conscious and I took the knife to him just as I had his brother and with the overhead light on, I saw his left eye open in a millisecond of bewilderment as the blade entered his brain through the right socket. Something strange happened with this man, he grabbed onto my arm, seemed to whisper something, and even once he passed on, his hands remained clamped to my forearm like the muscles had been locked there.
I shrugged the dead man off and exited into the hall. It shouldn’t have been so easy. Two brothers. If I’d had the want to, it should’ve been done long before.
Bloodlust is something spoken of, but something I cannot sympathize with—I’m sure it exists as I’ve seen it, but all I felt was total numbness.
I came upon a guard in the hall; it happened so quickly as I rounded a corner that we immediately grappled with one another. He, being larger and more agile, easily put me against the wall and held a forearm to my neck; the guard pummeled into my abdomen with his free hand and did so with such force that I went weak and breathless. The knife I’d carried clattered to the floor and amid my gasps, he furiously printed his knuckles along my ribs. I lost my legs, and he came after me; blindly I kicked and felt my right foot connect with something. He groaned and I blinked away the tears that’d gathered in my eyes—the man cupped his hands between his legs. Without conscious command, my hands scrambled along the floor in search of what I’d lost and glimpsing victory, I took the knife in both hands and pushed upward viciously just as the man gathered himself for another assault. He fell onto the knife and there, faces so close that we could kiss, I recognized the guard. It was the chaperone from earlier. It was the wall man that had allowed me freedom on that night of the riots. If he’d killed me all that time ago, he wouldn’t have been there on my knife.
He said nothing, but his eyes spoke of surprise and terror.
I shook him off and he casually took to sitting where the wall met the floor, holding the wound beneath his sternum. He tilted his head back as though to scream and I quickly stumbled to land the knife in his throat; blood hissed then pumped from around his collar and he put his hand to his fatal wound slowly, catching it without stopping the flow. The young man—he was so young—blinked deliriously and watched me as I stood over him like the foul creature I was.
My silent pace intensified. Blood was all over me. The willpower to do awful often trumps all else. Could a person do awful things in the pursuit of goodness? Was it possible? Heroes don’t talk about blood too much. There’s nothing in those tales about watching a man die like that. A man that knew nothing beyond what was presented. There was a time and a place where that young man might have been anything. The wall men might’ve been complicit, but there was no justification I’d use to comfort myself. There I was, covered in that man’s blood, a knife wielding maniac in an underground bunker on the hunt for something. What was I hunting? Was it a tale of retribution or was it a stubborn hope?
The left side of my torso burned in pain from the altercation, and I pressed along the wall as I moved for support and kept my breathing as quiet as I could. Maron had to die. That was all there was to it.
Even if I died, I had to correct the mistakes of my past. How could I sit there at the end of it all and take judgement? It had to be done.
The halls erupted with a mechanical siren-like screech and I ducked into the nearest room—it was a dark storage closet. Composing myself, the sounds of boots thudded around just outside of the room, I listened hard, and while the footsteps receded, I held onto the knife with a death grip in total preparation to launch myself in the direction of any poor soul that poured through the door.
The walls in the closet were lined with shelves of miscellaneous things: chemical cleaners, brooms, rags. I propped myself against an empty wall and watched the door and tried again to listen—no foot thuds, but there was the sound of the alarm. It drowned out anything else so if there was anyone nearby, I couldn’t be certain of their location anyway. I went from the closet and moved quickly; I’d hoped to find Maron’s room long before triggering any alarms—surely, he’d already be off and commanding some group of wall men in search of the intruder.
Was it one of the Bosses they’d found, or had it been the guard? Probably the guard. Maybe they wouldn’t find the Bosses for some time. Ahead, at another intersection, a group of men trundled across the halls, and I lowered myself into a crouch but none of them spied me in their peripheral as their focus seemed ahead of them. The halls were madness, and I felt the sweat well up around my collar and I expected a gunshot to take me out in a moment. That would be the end of the journey for me! I’d catch a bullet from somewhere unknown and then bleed to death on the floor of the underground—maybe they’d erect my corpse over the wall or crucify me.
The underground’s layout became a series of hopeful guesses; each turn was like that. Push on straight? Left? Right? Who knew?
My ribs ached.
The lights of the underground shut off and I was momentarily frozen like an idiot, staring into the blackness like the blind.
I stumbled forward, and I latched onto the wall by my right side and followed it by touch alone. The smell of gunpowder met me and perhaps it was only then that I noticed the scent; the underground was the place where they manufactured munitions and stored them too. How large of a dent had Dave put into their operation? I had hoped that whatever charge he’d managed would have put the Bosses out of commission for good; I knew that wasn’t the case, but maybe their production had been severely hampered. I’d seen it for years; the laborers trolleying crates of ammo out for the wall men from the recesses of the hall—everyone knew, but very few had any hand in the production of Golgotha’s ammo. The smell, as pungent as it was in the darkness of the underground, reminded me greatly of my childhood and of how I’d learned to fire a gun with John—Jackson tried to help, but he wasn’t good with violence and so had given up any thought of it (it almost always made him ill). I recalled Sibylle and how she nodded approvingly at me on the range alongside all the others which practiced in the shotgun infantry. In that underground darkness I shook the memories away and the more recent predicaments of life came to the forefront. As much as gunpowder smelled like childhood, it smelled like death too and I kept waiting for the sound that seemed a permanent accompaniment to gunpowder: screams. In that bastardly darkness, the sirens sounded like the cries of death, and I pushed on and on.
The blood on my hands from the guard which began to dry to me, became gummy and I continuously brushed my palms down my pants. In a moment, I stopped in the dark hallway, open space in front and behind alike and I froze there, went to my knees and it was there that I felt the most like the worthless old man that I was. What had my life come to? It would have been better if I’d died; if I could have sacrificed myself to bring my family back, I would have without a moment of hesitation.
A flashlight leapt from behind and in a startled run, I ran and again found myself in darkness. I prayed in my ragged steps where the metal floors became uneven and though I seemingly received nothing in the darkness, no answered prayers, I found myself praying harder still and I wished that all those years of prayer from before counted for something—prayer is quiet and without answer and that time was the same, but I came up from it, swaggering on unsteady legs with a new outlook. It was the animal outlook, survival—nothing else.
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The hallway which I took became even more uneven, more slanted without reason and that is when I came to a stop in the passage—great boulder rubble stood in my way. In reaching the collapsed passage, I pushed against the ramp of rough stones and crimped metal and in time, I understood what I was touching. Dave had destroyed this passage—he’d done well. I went back the way I’d come and took another way and before long, through that wild network, I found more blockages.
The alarms went off and I sat in the dark by the newest cave-in and listened and heard nothing and I breathed easier and whispered wishes into the dark that I could do the one thing that I came for. I had to set things right; it had to be me, because no one else was left to do it.
Between blinks, with it being as dark as it was, I could not even tell when my eyes were open. My whispering came into a full fervor, and I spooked myself with the words, “But he that endures till the end.” I snapped from the prayer.
Harlan, said the thing in the dark, It’s been a long time.
I held my knife out in front of me but did not dare to push into fight—I’d be flailing totally blind. “Who are you?” My voice remained a hush.
You’ve come a long way, but you’re no wiser than when I found you the first time.
“You?”
It’s me. There was a long pause and while the creature did so, I shimmied myself further up the wall to stand, kicking the rubble at my feet from the cave-in. It was not so much a presence in the same way that a person stands before another in the darkness, it was something different; it was all around, and the voice spoke from all places. You’ve come so far, but I wonder if you know what it was that you traded for that day. I squirmed away from the words; they felt totally accusatory. The voice laughed; I felt a hand touch me there in the darkness, but I didn’t fight it. The veil between life and death is thin. When one is passing through it, it’s hardly more solid than that—or maybe when someone is directly there on the cusp between. I brought him back to you. You loved your little brother more than anything, of course. It’s natural for you.
“So?”
So? You mean to destroy the gift? You mean to sever the connection I reconnected? It meant a lot to you that day. What’s changed?
“You brought him back wrong.” The air all around me was ice cold. Mephisto—certainly that was the demon I was dealing with in that black underground—did not have the jovial style with which I remembered him by.
Hm? I brought him back to you just as he was. But I think you should question that day, Harlan—when the veil is as thin as it was, it is difficult to see which side you’re on.
“Quit your tricks!” I hissed.
No. No tricks. Not intentionally. Not from me. There are jinn and demons that utilize tricks like what you imply, but not me. Every time that you have been there on the edge of it, every time that you have casually thrown your life into turmoil, our deal has held steady. Why is it that you’re able to walk among my kind? Think. You are feeble and weak. You should be dead. Without me, surely you would be. Again, I will say: the veil was thin. You wanted me to bring one person back to you—the person you loved most. The one person you loved that did not die that day.
“What?”
You didn’t see his body? Right? Harlan, you were on your way to the other side when I found you—everyone was waiting for you there. Everyone but your dear brother. He was on this side. I brought him to you. Boy, you are a boy still it seems, you were half dead when I found you there in that pit of stinking corpses. I brought you back. No one else.
“No. Bi-Maron’s all wrong. You!” My voice grew embittered, “You brought him back wrong! It’s your fault!”
The voice, all around, sighed and it felt like my head might explode from the exhale. The demon’s hand squeezed my shirt and pulled me close to it—I felt the wet off its breath though I could not see him. You loved him as a boy. Men grow and change. Blame the world or blame his soul but stop blaming me for what he is. He is as he chooses—the same as you. I smell the blood on your hands even now. If a man does evil, a demon must be blamed—is that your thinking?
I swallowed, pressed my back hard into the wall which I leveled myself against. “Why now? Why’d you tell me now?” It was impossible—I caught my words frozen; everything was frozen—I couldn’t even breathe. A finger thumped me in the dark, directly across my forehead.
It’s funny. The hand left me.
“What if you’re lying?” I asked.
A pause followed and then I faintly heard, Meh, trail down the hall and then I was certain I was alone again.
Man, or no, Maron needed to die; I pushed off the wall and trundled into the labyrinth again, leaving the cave-in and Mephisto—his words—remained.
In the quiet, without the sirens, without the bells, I was able to more clearly hear whenever someone was coming in the dark and I made a routine of stowing into the nearest room whenever I was forced to; the search was still on for the intruder—me. They came, jack boots stomping madly, and I would hear them come and go on and finally, the lights came alight, and it was no longer that I watched the passing guards go in the dark with their beams of light or their lanterns and more than anything, I hoped to find the exit—what then? It would be guarded, surely. I’d hoped to do in Maron in silence, much as I had with the others, but I knew that if I saw that man, even if it meant my own demise, he would meet me on the other side without much waiting. Then we’d both burn in hell.
The expression of surprise on his face that I imagined kept me on and perhaps that was bloodlust. Perhaps I did feel it then.
I came to an overlooking hallway and stepped quietly in hopes that my own feet would not rattle off the metal hall in the same way the wall men’s boots did. The narrow passage was suspended over a larger open chamber and to the right was a line of thin tall apertures where I could see lines of machining tables arranged beneath where I stood; mixed in by the machining tables were reloading benches and barrel drums and the surfaces were coated thinly in potassium nitrate—the place was empty of workers. Within the chamber, along the furthest wall was a wider passage which led deeper into the earth by way of concrete stairs and along its broad arch there were webbing cracks and I thought again of Dave; moving along the suspended passage, I felt the things—rods or stilts—which held the hall over the chamber protest and they gave off a metal groan while I furthered through and again I was in solid ground where I was certain there was dirt all around me.
To the right was a stairwell which spiraled down, and I quickly surmised it led down to that large production room; lickity split, I moved from it and took my chances on the current level. Moving deeper was not on the docket. In that wild push through the twisting underground—a facility which must’ve easily matched Golgotha above—I felt surrounded, not only by the earth, but by whatever dark presence might lurk there. Any person that found comfort there couldn’t be wholly a person.
Of course, I was hell spawn; I stopped in the hallway, looked back then forward, and continued.
I wished I’d taken the shotgun, but I’d incorrectly assumed that stealth would be the greatest weapon.
The underground winded for an hour or less and though I retraced myself more than I’d have hoped, I came to a set of ascending stairs and took them; no one saw me, and I saw no one. Perhaps it would be an easy thing to sneak directly out of the hall of Bosses—if they’d removed the full force of the facility then I could be hopeful; I recalled the intricate metalwork of the entrance and upon coming to the big door, I pushed through and found myself in the basement of the hall and there was no one present. The sound of feet overhead was distressed, and I cramped low and ascended further from the basement—a damp earthen room with metal beaming and low light.
I remained surprised at the lax nature of their pursuit until I found myself in the concrete hall which led to the kitchens; it had been the way I’d gained entry. Through the windows, I saw it was still night-dark out and I tip-toed swiftly through the kitchen and I heard the shouting which came from the next room over. I rounded the counters, absently examined the pots and pans and stoves and found the door which led to the great room where the Bosses gathered to convene or dine and through a crack I gambled to spy, and witnessed through the crack that the big table had been pushed to the far side of the room and that the remaining Bosses with their wall men had gathered the servants in that big room; each servant—twenty in total—was on the floor in two lines and stripped of clothing. The poor sods kneeled while they kept their eyes averted to the place between their knees and Maron was there and so was Frank and Paul and Matt.
Boss Harold—I thought of the man and stiffly imagined how Gemma would respond if I told her I finished her father; would she thank me or would she be angry with me? While watching the Bosses lord over the subordinates, I surmised to never tell. Let her believe she did the job.
The big chamber was lit with the lights along the wall and the flames of those lights wavered in a macabre way that distorted the shadows cast on the expressionless faces of those that knelt.
Maron took a ball-peen hammer which was handed to him from one of the wall men and began walking the line of servants; they flinched at the tap of his boot as it passed them. Boss Maron had his cowboy hat flicked back on his head, so the lines of his forehead shone. Without warming, he planted the hammer into the skull of a servant—a woman with a shaved head—and when he pried the hammer free from the servant’s head, it left a coin-sized hole there and she spasmed, reaching out with both hands to grab onto Maron’s pantleg; he kicked the hand away and no one gasped or said much beyond the grumble of the wall men which flanked the Bosses.
“Where’s the one that did it?” Maron commanded over the lowered heads.
No one said anything; no one knew anything. Maron dropped the hammer and it landed with a thud. Even in the lowlight, the viscera there on the weapon shone. Maron shouted without saying anything, kicked the ribs of a young man there on the floor; the injury shriveled him like a bug while he held his sides. The woman with a hole in her head continued to seize. I wanted to burst through the door, I wanted to strangle the Bosses, I wanted to scream in the faces of those they perpetrated against and ask them why they allowed it. I willed myself against it, left the crack and pushed through the backdoor of the kitchens and disappeared into the dark alleys.
Rounding the hall were wall men, decked in fatigues with slung rifles, but whether by Mephisto or the luck of God, I was able to creep around the hall, taking to poorly constructed stalls or crates or low sandbags.
While moving, creeping the way that I was, my left knee began to throb in protest. Only once I’d disappeared into the bustle of Gologtha did I stop to massage my aching joint. I found a place beneath the overhang of catwalks which connected apartments. The pain went from a pulse to a full excruciating stab only once I’d removed my weight from it. I hid in the dark under a catwalk, put myself against the wall of some building, and attempted to overcome it with sheer willpower. It did not work, and I was frozen there, knee locked into its spot while I stared up through the catwalks at the night sky. My sides ached, my leg ached.
A child, a small girl, ran in play with a streamer through the narrow alley and froze upon seeing me sitting in the dark shadows to her left. She crept closer and I muffled my pain long enough to say, “Go away!” She eeped and ran off with the streamer gliding by her shoulder.
“Fuckin’ c’mon,” I slammed a fist against my right leg. “Let’s go! I’ll do it! Just get me there!” I pushed off the wall and I’m sure that if anyone were to have seen me like that, covered in the dried blood of the wall man, muttering to myself, they would have probably turned heel fast. “I’ll do it! Get me there!” I started out limping from the place I’d sat and then I stiffened my left leg and used it more as a peg, so my walking took on a stilted gait.
I passed the open circle of the hydro towers and saw the low lights of the city and knew that the denizens of Golgotha would be in for a terrible awakening. Those that slept in the night would surely come up rudely and those still awake would be lost in the confusion. I marched through town, towards the front gates and kept to the shadows where possible, but if I were to be shot dead, it would not have mattered.
The cracking echo of singular gunfire rang out—I flinched momentarily; certainly they’d started executing those in the hall and I ignored it and felt anger pile on me and I spat and wavered to where the wizard wagon was parked and slung open the rear hatch and withdrew the Browning shotgun—I loaded the object, gathered ammo into my jacket pockets, then sat it leaning against the tire of the wagon while I reached in to grab tobacco and rolled a cigarette and lit it. I smoked and lifted the wizard mask from the compartment and wore it like a visor and looked to the spot beside, where horses were lined; they hardly stirred—some laid with their hooves beneath themselves. I peered back toward the general direction of the hall and slung the shotgun over my shoulder with its strap. Another gunshot rang clearly through the night, and it was my fault. More lights came alive across the black buildings. A few wall men over the gate which led to the wastes angled in the direction of the noise and shouted something after me, but I was only a shadow and disappeared.
Biting the inside of my cheek till I found blood, I headed in the direction of the hall of Bosses.
“I was made in the image of God?” I was in a fit. “I’ll do God’s work. Or won’t it be Mephisto?” I, irritated, pointed to the sky while skulking through town, “Why?” No answer.
The flutist I’d seen the day prior stood in the moonlight by the hydro towers, slanted against Felina’s dead brothel. He played Twinkle Twinkle and paid me no mind as I passed.
The faces of those inflicted with skitterbugs took notice of me—those desperate strangers lying in the street with blackened limbs or half destroyed eyes looked up from their rotting at seeming amazement from my presence. It was the disease. I could not be sure they truly saw me.
Dirt twisted under my footfalls as I came to the foot of the stairs that led to the hall and flanking the front doors were a pair of wall men. They’d be on me like stink on shit.
I staggered up the stairs and they each moved from their position, weapons half-readied, and I lifted the shotgun to the one on the left; the bead lined up with his chest and I squeezed the trigger then pivoted right to aim again.