Planet Purgatory (9 page)

I stared at the Rubik’s Cube in my hand. “What the hell am I doing?”

“What’s wrong, dear?”

“I can’t stay here. I need to leave.”

I stood up and grabbed my gun and my backpack. Rosie, though, was nowhere to be found.

“Where is she?” I demanded.

“What do you mean?”

“Rosie! My dog! Where is she?”

“But you don’t have a dog.”

I ran into the front hall, the old lady hurrying behind me. “You’re confused. You need to calm down. Come back into the living room and finish your tea. I’m sure you’ll feel better once you’ve rested.”

I was livid. The woman had put a spell on me. She was a witch, or more likely, a demon, and I ran down the little hallway to a set of wooden steps leading into a basement. That’s where Rosie was, I could feel it.

“You can’t go down there! The steps are old and brittle!”

Ignoring the old woman’s pleas, I sprinted down the thoroughly sturdy stairway only to stop in my tracks. Rosie was there, all right, hanging by her hind leg from a meat hook, her throat slit, little droplets of blood adding to an already sizable pool of crimson spreading out on the concrete floor beneath her. The Eggman was there, too. He wore an old bloodstained apron atop his overalls, and he picked up a nasty looking meat cleaver from a nearby table and moved toward me, his dark-stained eyes peering down at me with murderous intent.

I panicked. Usually I’m able to keep my wits about me in dangerous situations, but not this time. With my lungs filled with the stink of Rosie’s blood, I sprinted up the stairs, knocking the old woman into the wall before escaping out the front door and disappearing into the night.

I ran until my lungs gave out, and I hid behind a tree, waiting for the light to return while I cradled my gun in my lap. I dared not sleep. Not that I could have; I kept picturing Rosie’s lifeless body hanging from the meat hook, the tang of blood still fresh in my nose.

I was so angry with myself. How did the old woman do it? Was it witchcraft? Mind control? I was always so careful, especially when it came to Rosie. It was as though lying on her carpet, playing with that Rubik’s Cube, she’d turned me into a little boy.

I felt defenseless without Rosie. I had my gun, but sitting there alone, surrounded by those terrible trees, I wondered if I should return to Harkness. In fact, I had already started for home when the image of the Scavenger popped into my head. He traveled this road all the time. By wagon, yes, but in many ways that would make him a bigger target than a man walking alone. I could hide. Not only that, my
SYS
gun made any weapon he had look like a peashooter in comparison.

I kept seeing him and his crooked smile, and that’s when I decided I would turn around. I might not survive my quest to find the
SYS
building, but I wasn’t giving up. Not with so much at stake.

Stripped of Rosie’s beastly presence, it was as though my senses, particularly my hearing, were amplified. Every crack, every snap, every rustle made me stop and point my gun into the trees. It was exhausting. Yet I continued, confident that sooner or later, something bad was going to appear.

It took about three hours. I’d just finished eating a piece of cheese and was opening a new bottle of chikka, when I spied a group of six men off in the distance. They were too far away to see clearly, but I knew the moment I saw them that they were going to be trouble.

The first thing I did was look over at my dog, who wasn’t there. The next thing I did was drink some chikka. Finally, I lit a cigarette.

I must have spent ten minutes watching them. They knew I was there; there was no doubt. The question was, did I turn around and hope they didn’t follow, or did I take my chances and meet them head-on? Going into the woods wasn’t an option.

And so I continued, hoping that whoever they were, they’d have no interest in a man traveling alone.

But as I drew closer, those hopes quickly vanished. There was something definitely off-putting about them. It was their skin — even from a distance I could see it was a blue-gray.

They followed my approach with fiendish interest, staring at me through bloodshot eyes while the largest of them moved to block my way.

“Well, well, well. What do we have here?” He would have sounded menacing were it not for his laryngitis. Fortunately for him, his frightening appearance more than made up for his ailing voice. He looked like a corpse, with mottled blue skin and a bruise running the entire side of his face. But he was strong. I could tell by the way he carried himself. They were all like that, walking corpses, and they surrounded me, leering at me with the eagerness of extras in a vampire movie.

“I don’t want any trouble,” I said, keeping my gaze low.

“That’s good, because neither do we.” His breath reeked of rot, and I think he knew this because he made a point of talking at my nose. “So what you got in your bag?”

“Nothing much. Just some cheese and something to drink.”

“I smell chikka,” rasped a demon behind me.

I glanced at my knapsack. “You like chikka? Because I’ve got a bottle in here you can have. Just give me some room and I’ll —”

With a jerk, my knapsack was ripped from my shoulder, and I could only watch as a demon held up a pair of my remaining bottles of magic beet juice.

“He’s got three bottles in here!”

“How’d you get three bottles of chikka?” demanded the leader.

“I make it.”

I don’t think they believed me, and the one demon popped open a bottle, holding it below his nose before taking a swig. “It’s chikka, all right. And it’s bloody good!”

The first demon walked up to me, bumping me with his shoulder. “Tell me the truth. How’d you end up with three bottles of chikka?”

“I told you. I make it.”

He narrowed his bloodshot eyes, shifting his attention to my rifle. “And what’s that? A flare gun?”

I nodded. “Never know when you need to gain someone’s attention.”

The demon smiled. “I bet you’d make good eating.”

“I bet he would,” echoed another.

Once again I was surrounded.

“I’ll tell you where I store my chikka. I’ve got dozens of bottles. You can have them, if you promise to let me go.”

They must have really liked chikka, because their eyes widened.

“Dozens of bottles? Really?”

“It’s probably closer to a hundred, now that I think about it.”

“Is it close by?” asked the leader, draping his arm around my shoulder.

“It’s just down the way. Not even a mile from here. It’s where I got these from.”

And so we started down the road, the one demon’s arm still draped around my shoulder, the others following greedily behind.

“You really got a hundred bottles?” asked the leader in that broken voice of his.

“It’s probably more than that. Hell, it might even be two hundred.”

And then he stopped. “Okay, now you’re just messing with me.”

I tried to think of something to say, something plausible to ensure my survival, but I couldn’t, so I shot him in the face. Blew his head clean off. And before the remaining fiends could gather themselves, I shot a second one and ran into the trees.

I didn’t even think about where I was going. I just ran, hurdling logs and downed branches until a tree root reached up and caught the tip of my boot, sending me face-first into the dirt. Adrenaline’s a funny thing, because I popped back up and continued my escape, unaware I’d bashed my knee on something hard. I just kept running until my leg gave out on me. Suddenly I was a cripple, and with the sounds of my undead pursuers growing louder, I scrambled into a hole at the base of a rotted-out tree.

I sat with my knees tucked under my chin, listening to the cracks and rustles of the demons as they searched the surrounding area.

“He’s here somewhere! I can smell him!”

They were closing in, and I was about to exit my hidey-hole and engage in what I knew would be my last stand when I heard a girl’s voice through the tree wall beside me.

“Looks like you’re in a bit of a pickle.”

I was sure I was hallucinating. But then I heard the voice again.

“Come on, then. Don’t just sit there. Crawl inside, or you’ll wind up somebody’s dinner.”

“Crawl inside where?” I whispered.

“In here. Just push the wall. Quick, before they see you!”

I didn’t hesitate. I pushed the wall, and sure enough it gave way, revealing an earthy passage barely big enough for a child, let alone an adult.

“Hurry!”

I’ve never been one for enclosed spaces, but with footsteps coming perilously close to where I was hiding, I wriggled my way inside, taking care to keep my gun in front of me. But it was too tight, and with my injured knee unable to bend, I became stuck, my boots up to my calves completely exposed.

Oh, my God! I’m trapped!

I could feel the weight of the earth upon my back and shoulders. Unable to breathe, I was trying to push my way back out when a pair of tiny hands grabbed hold of my wrists, and in a sudden burst of strength that nearly saw my arms tugged from their sockets, I was pulled onto an earthen ledge, where I found myself face-to-face with what I could only describe as an imp.

She was small, like a child, with long pointy ears that poked out at right angles. Her hair was a lustrous black, her skin an unnatural orange. But what struck me most were her eyes. She had no irises, just pupils, and she stared at me with an intensity that it was a wonder I didn’t burst into flames.

“Who are you?” I panted.

The imp placed her index finger to her mouth, clearly focused on the sounds of the fiends still searching for me outside.

“How many?” she whispered.

“Four. Maybe five.”

We remained crouched on the ledge, fear and the pain in my leg conspiring to thicken time into an agonizingly slow drip.

“Looks like they’re not leaving until they find you. Oh, well. Better to get this over with.”

Before I could react, she slipped into the hole, leaving me no choice but to listen as the little creature confronted the monsters outside.

“He’s in here,” I heard her say.

My stomach went into my lungs.
The little devil! She ratted me out!

Readying my gun, I waited for the inevitable invasion. But then came the sounds of a struggle. It was horrible. They were ripping her apart, her childlike screams reaching inside my gut, making me sick. And then, silence. It wasn’t much later that I heard the telltale scrabbling of someone traveling through the passage. It was one of the fiends. Its undead face popped out of the tunnel; I was about to shoot him when his head dropped on the ledge like a deflated volleyball. No body, just a head, the imp emerging soon after, looking completely untouched.

“Shall we move somewhere more comfortable?” she asked.

Grabbing the monster’s head by the hair, she leaped off the ledge into what could only be described as an earthen living room. I was frightened, but after a bit of searching, I found a ladder and, despite my injured knee, climbed to the ground.

It was a strange little place; cozy, if you ignored the severed head on the floor. There was a fireplace complete with a mantel, a shelf with some rocks, and a half-dozen red velvet pillows thrown about the room.

I sat against the wall, slowly stretching out my leg. I was sure I’d broken something, but I didn’t want the imp to know how much I was injured. Speaking of the little devil, she was squatting on the balls of her feet, watching me.

“So, how did a human wind up in my tree? And what did you do to make the
Dhatura
so angry?”

“Dhatura?”

“The ones hunting you. What did you do to make them so angry?”

“I killed one of them.”

The imp’s eyes shone with surprise. “How?”

“I shot him in the face.”

This made the imp laugh. “I see you shot another one as well. Not bad, for a human. Tell me, what is your name?”

I hesitated. “David.”

“David. Oh, I like that,” she said, grin widening. “There was a great king named David.”

Her words were like a spark in my brain, and for a moment, just a moment, I forgot about my leg. “King David. That’s in the Bible! Do you know other things from the Bible?”

“Maybe.”

She was so strange. When I first saw her, she looked like a child, no more than nine or ten years old. But now she seemed older, wilder.

“What’s your name?” I asked, in an attempt to keep the conversation flowing.

“Flea.”

“That’s a strange name.”

“Is it?”

I forced a smile, unable to think of anything clever to say in return. The truth was, I was in agony, and I was adjusting my position when I spied some familiar bottles stacked in a pyramid in a corner.

“Is that chikka?” I asked, heartbeat quickening.

Flea glanced at the bottles and then at me. “It is.”

“Do you think I can have some?”

I thought she didn’t hear me, but then in a surprising display of agility, she hopped over and passed me one.

I held it briefly against my chest, and after pulling the cork out with my teeth, I swallowed some, prompting the imp to take back the bottle.

“Sorry, but I need more,” I said, holding it tight.

I guzzled half the bottle and closed my eyes, allowing the warmth of the chikka to numb the pain in my leg. When I opened my eyes again, Flea was watching me, a strange smile upon her lips.

“Well, it’s been nice knowing you,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Humans can’t drink chikka. It’s poison. I can’t even drink that much.”

“Really.” I glanced at the bottle, and with a wink, polished off the rest.

Now I felt better. My leg was still injured, and I was still plenty frightened, but the purple chikka haze allowed me to view everything from a more tranquil state of mind.

I glanced at the severed head staring blindly at the ceiling. “So, uh, what happened to the rest of them?”

“Oh, they’re dead. Or as dead as something that is already dead can be.”

“You killed them? All by yourself?”

The imp shrugged. “They were weak.”

“But there were five of them.”

“There could have been ten, I wouldn’t have cared. I don’t like Dhatura. They’re weak. That’s why they hunt in groups. It’s like that with most creatures here. The weak exist in groups. It’s those that live on their own you really need to worry about.” Again she grinned, this time running her tongue along her teeth. “Does the chikka not affect you?”