“I promise you. She won’t.”
I hesitated, then took my hands off her pulsing wound, backing away.
There was a CLICK, then a BANG! like a gunshot.
Cynthia’s head rolled off her shoulders and off the catwalk, smoke curling up from the remains of her collar.
“Explosives in the collar,” Luther said. “Instant, and fatal. I told you she wouldn’t bleed to death.”
I felt like screaming, crying, and collapsing from exhaustion, all at the same time.
“Don’t mourn her, Jack. She tried her best to kill you. Cynthia was always cutthroat in her career, always out for herself, but I never expected her to take it to heart like that.”
“How is this crazy game of yours supposed to end, Luther?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Maybe I’ll surprise you, by jumping off this tower.”
“No you won’t, Jack. You’re a fighter. I haven’t broken you. Yet.”
A disgusting waft that smelled like sewage swept over me.
“What is that?” I asked.
Already, I could see a viscous sludge creeping around the curve of the water tank across the catwalk, some of it dripping through the metal grate, most of it moving along at the speed of molten rock.
“I would get down off the tower if I were you, Jack.”
“What is it?”
“What does it smell like?”
“Shit.”
“Cynthia was at heart a flatterer. She exploited people with language. In the second bolgia of Dante’s eighth circle, flatterers were steeped in human excrement, as Cynthia soon will be. I’d start descending if I were you.”
I hurried back around to the ladder, dodging sewage that was streaming out of a pressure valve and expanding to cover the catwalk.
Using the railing, I carefully lowered myself down onto the ladder.
There was plenty of fear, but no hesitation this time. I descended as fast as I could manage and was halfway down when the first gob of excrement landed flush on the top of my head.
I only froze for a second, then continued to down-climb as sewage trickled down out of my hair, along the sides of my face, between my eyes.
It was raining now—a literal shitstorm—fat brown drops falling all around me, specking my arms and head, slickening the metal rungs. There was a temptation to look up, to see what was coming, but the prospect of getting any in my eyes—or worse, mouth—kept my head down for the duration of the descent, until I’d reached the tower’s concrete base.
I finally touched solid ground, covered head-to-toe in human waste, and when I stepped off the lowest rung of the rope ladder, my legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the fractured concrete.
Every muscle in my body trembled uncontrollably, and I couldn’t close my hands into fists—the tendons so stressed from gripping the rungs.
I lay on my side, moaning, and I could’ve stayed there for hours, but the sewage was dripping all over me.
I grabbed the rope ladder, used it to haul myself onto my feet.
My knees quivering.
I gazed off toward the west as the sun sank over this corpse of a town, and felt my soul grow cold. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I would be able to take, but I knew there was a lot more to come.
Luther had recreated Dante’s Inferno, just for me.
And there were six circles of hell still left.
• • •
I stepped down off the tower’s foundation and crawled back through the hole in the fence.
The rain had stopped, and in the puddles of standing water, I glimpsed unbroken reflections of the sky.
In the wake of the rain, water still poured out of a gutter on a building up ahead, and despite my complete exhaustion, I hobbled toward it as fast as I could until I was standing under the waterfall.
For several minutes, I let it pummel every square inch of my body until it had rinsed away the filth.
At last, I stumbled away, clean but soaking wet and already beginning to shiver.
In the last five minutes, the clouds had gone from pink, to purple, to blue, to a dark, steel gray that would be sheer black in a matter of minutes.
The prospect of being in Luther’s playground after dark added an entirely different component to the terror.
“Can you still hear me? Does the earpiece still work?” His voice startled me.
“Yeah.”
“See the factories in the distance?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Start walking toward them.”
The factories—what little I could see of them in the fading light—resembled a steampunk skyline. Soaring chimneys, vents, buildings behind buildings. A labyrinthine maze of vacated industry.
After five minutes, I emerged into a parking lot dotted with light poles, most of which had long since toppled or snapped in half, succumbing to years of rot.
The downed electrical wires lay serpentine and thickened with rust—long brown worms frozen mid slither.
An intense chill descended over me.
I felt a cold draft funneling through a tear in my windbreaker where Cynthia had sliced the fabric with the knife.
I was coming up on a three-story brick building—the first in a series of many which, from the top of the water tower, had appeared to interconnect.
“See the double doors?” Luther asked.
My heart rate quickened and it wasn’t merely from the exertion.
“I see them.”
“Head on through. Hope you remember the code from the water tower. Shame if you had to climb all the way back up there in the dark.”
Earlier
He hurt.
He hurt like hell.
The pain meds they’d stashed away were supposed to last for two weeks. But it had only been two days and they had already gone through half of them.
They’d gotten in last night, cold and hungry, down to fumes in their gas tank. Once more they were forced to sleep in the car. Donaldson was constantly being woken by Lucy’s snoring. It wasn’t her fault—along with her nose, part of her septum was missing. Still, more than once that night he’d considered murdering her.
An especially pleasant thought, because not only would it slake the bloodlust that had been building up inside him for years, but it would also mean he wouldn’t have to split the meds.
But he’d sat on the urge.
If everything went according to expectations, he’d get to kill someone today.
Kill someone in a much slower and more painful fashion than boring old strangulation.
Besides, in a twisted kind of way, that girl was growing on him.
Donaldson had never spent this much time with anyone in his entire life. Especially someone he understood on such a base level. He and Lucy had the same needs, same hopes, same fears.
It was truly a match made in hell.
When they woke up that morning, the duo spent the day exploring the deserted town. That fat bitch, Violet King, had sent them here, but hadn’t been specific on where to go. So they had been driving around, cold, hungry, in pain, and growing increasingly frustrated.
By dusk, they hadn’t found anything.
That’s when they’d run out of gas.
Donaldson was revisiting his thoughts of strangling Lucy when they saw the explosion on the other side of town. It was followed sometime later by several gunshots.
They closed in on the action on foot.
“You’re going too fast, D.”
Lucy’s limp had gotten worse, and if she moved any slower she’d be walking backwards.
“We’re so close, Lucy. Don’t give up now.”
“I can’t keep up.”
“Then don’t come,” he snapped. “See if I care.”
“D, please…”
Donaldson stopped. He’d never heard Lucy use the P word before.
He turned around, looked at her, saw the pain etched on her face—
—and he felt bad for her.
Donaldson couldn’t remember sympathizing with anyone, ever. Countless people had begged him for mercy, and all that had done was turn him on.