Underworld Earth Read online

  This is it. The moment I have craved, begged for and coveted all these months is here. The line between peace and my shattered existence is drawn, a crack in the floor of Death’s gateway. The purple glow between every new crevice and division around us welcomes me home and tells me to prepare for eternal sleep.

  This is the day I have waited for, since the love of my life stood before my eyes, asked who I was, and I realized the true extent of what Tim had done.

  This is my moment to lie down and die. I have no desire to save my friend’s painstaking creation, or the world I’m sentenced to wander forever.

  But for the first time in a long time, I want nothing to do with Death.

  “I won’t lie,” the creature who was a man only moments ago says, towering over me; “I am going to enjoy this, Phoenix.”

  I had no premeditated plan to rescue myself from whatever twisted fate Gabriel has in mind for me; but as his overgrown golden fist is brought down to crush me like an insect, I flick my wrist, casting flame from my free hand. It lands in his eyes, and he shrieks in that terrible tone, stumbling back.

  The black cloud which saved me in Haven pierces the Nephalim’s final form from behind him. It leaves a gaping wound through Gabriel’s chest; but like a bear suffering a single bullet, his massive fist swings again.

  This prompts the locket—the stupid necklace that has forced me to endure one hellish plane after another—to flare. A coat of flames reignites over each of my hands and my entire body launches at the Nephalim. In that moment, I have the properties of water, piercing through him with an outer layer of flames. The black cloud impales him again from the other side of him. We become like flame on oil, passing through a fourth, fifth and sixth time. Reassuming corporeal form after emerging out the other side, Tim and I pierce him again and again, until both sides of the giant Light golem are riddled with exit wounds. The Nephalim buckles, his monstrous knee completely shattering the floor beneath it. It delivers cracks from corner to illusionary corner of the room a billion souls have passed through on their way to the afterlife.

  Shrinking into something closer to his former size, Gabriel wheezes. The shadow cloud assumes the form of a man, solidifying into the face of my friend Death.

  “Very good,” the Nephalim groans. I cannot see his mouth; syllables from the space they should emerge from are greatly weakened in comparison to their former depth. “I have underestimated you, Phoenix.”

  From the level of damage done to the Arcway, I cannot possibly know whether that is a compliment or an insult. The floor creaks as snaking violet seams of light spread to the walls, imbuing all of us in their glow.

  Tim shows little emotion at his collapsing creation. After everything, he is of little concern to me. All I care about is punishing Gabriel for the suffering inflicted on this realm.

  At the same time, I can’t even look at him.

  “Are we done here?” I ask, to an answer of soul-shriveling coughing from the Nephalim.

  “Creation,” he says, “is a fickle thing. When guided, restrained; it can be a phenomenon unlike any other. But when allowed to run rampant, and make its own decisions, creators may never see that power returned.”

  Before I can respond, Tim speaks behind me.

  “If the creator’s duty is complete, what further use do they have for power?”

  “Guidance,” the Nephalim answers. “You would be nothing without it.”

  “Or control,” I counter, drawing a final, ireful gaze. “Because you would be nothing without that. But I’m not gonna split hairs with you, Gabriel. You know what has to happen.”

  “Yes. I have erred. My desire for revenge has clouded my duty of allocating due process. This loss of control, as you say, has ultimately affected my judgement.”

  “So, where does that leave us?”

  The towering being looks up; he hasn’t a human face any longer, for it is warped and masked beneath twisted manifestations of the Light. But for all its attempts to conceal emotion, the body language of one is impossible to hide.

  Remorse.

  “The Breach must be closed,” Gabriel says. “You must eliminate the final names, beginning with Victor Quinn.” He wheezes. “I understand the Atlas has come to some form of agreement with your friend regarding the Knox woman.”

  Revelations aside, I don’t care much for Tim’s girlfriend. But that still leaves a mystery between the names I’ve been given.

  “There’s one you haven’t told me. The seventh one. Who is it?”

  Gabriel chuckles as my eyes drift to the floor, creaking more with every subsequent syllable of our parting conversation.

  “Gabriel, please tell me!”

  It is too late. A violent force pulls me backwards as ground beneath the Nephalim’s body gives way. Seams of light become a gaping sinkhole, falling away in a hundred pieces. Whatever wraps around my midsection like tentacles pulls my vision skyward, dragging me back to where Tim stood behind me. An indigo geyser pours up from the sinkhole’s depths, and I scream, fighting sheer strength pinning me to the slick floor’s remains. It is futile trying to call Gabriel back, with all the universe’s knowledge at his disposal.

  I should have listened to him.

  Opening my eyes, the gateway between life and death is gone, imploded on itself, and I sit up between the bodies of Victor Quinn’s crew sprawled on the road. In the town square where I saved Samantha Wallace—a symbol to the depravity Haven has become—a similar sinkhole to the one in the Arcway took its place. It leads to the Earth’s center, casting a purple glow that matches the Shroud’s tinge of sky from within.

  The world hangs by a thread, Harper, the Nephalim once told me, and whether you choose to help or not, it will be you who has to look upon it for the rest of your time. I would think twice about what kind of scenery you want to live with.

  From what I saw, Gabriel took the final name to the grave, and I have failed to undo the Breach.

  Unless the man who became Death can piece it together for me, the world may be lost forever.

  Samantha

  Once upon a time, the future was bright. It was full of promise and hope. The idea it could all go to shit was an apocalyptic scenario worthy of any pulp fiction novel—the kind my darling husband used to read on our vacations, earning my ire for a little escapism he coveted whether travelling or not.

  Once upon a time, my beautiful baby boy was alive, and kissed me on the cheek every night before bedtime, even if he didn’t feel like it. He knew it made me happy.

  The risk to myself is forgotten now. Both those men are gone, and I am alone—a wounded mother bear. The reward for killing Victor is, by far, the only good that could come of this twisted scenario.

  Haven’t I already done this once?

  The widening sinkhole has grown large enough to swallow suburbia behind the Strip. It ceases widening further but vomits a purple curtain into the navy-blue night sky. The tank Victor’s crew stole from the nearby Air Force base is gone, absorbed by the gap below. Beyond its precipice, foundations of other buildings buckled in the dirt beneath them, forcing collapse. An apartment building has toppled onto a set of houses with the misfortune of being built behind it. The Row is a pile of rubble, and most of the Rifton projects were swallowed in the disaster’s spread.

  If most of the people who once lived in Haven weren’t already dead, they are now. The downtown core holding the courthouse, a police station and other administrative buildings are wiped from the horizon under a soundtrack of snapping beams and crashing supports across my hometown.

  Victor is the last man standing, and I get the pleasure of killing him.

  Memories of the original timeline are still cloudy; there are few I care to recover beyond those of Tim’s disappearance or Nathan’s original death. I don’t want to envision the old Haven I clawed back from paramilitary guerillas, or a world my husband left me for some whore from the Islands.

  But they are a flood; of the man who trained me to take lives,
whom I stabbed in the neck on the marital mattress of self-loathing Derek once left as a consolation prize; of my surviving Haven and being called to a hospital in the middle of the night to identify Nathan’s adult corpse, crushed beneath a tractor trailer.

  No happiness lingers in those memories, and so I will forget them.

  I will kill Victor—even if it costs my life.

  Haven’s leader chooses to make his final stand in the Industrial District, well away from the chaos of the Strip. I can follow him using a combination of bullets, footprints and debris as he fled the collapse of his leadership, and the failure to protect his crew.

  The district espoused by Lord and Western Streets is home to not only factories, but the storage facilities between them. Haven began as a shipping hub before its incorporation as an actual town in the 1950s. Town council saw little value in redevelopment; thus, this dilapidated area became home to chip wagon owners and roadside merchants hocking their goods and services to people passing through Haven from the north.

  Most buildings in this part of town are long shut down by shoddy domestic policies that forced manufacturers into outsourcing. Warehouses closed shop as more goods were imported, and the buildings themselves were left to stand in humiliation when nobody volunteered to demolish the relics leftover from America’s glory days.

  Clutching a rifle stolen from one of the sprawled bodies back at the Strip, one foot slowly moves in front of the other. My eyes catch on fresh signs of my quarry—a creaking door here, a set of panicked footsteps there. Tracks in the mud lead me to a two-story structure at Lord Street’s western end.

  The warehouse is dark as I enter it. Standing just inside the frame and to the left until my eyes can adjust over semi-automatic sights, my boot takes its first step past the interior’s threshold.

  A flurry of gunfire greets me from the catwalks above; bullets spray the ground, and were it not for my prior training, I would have been immediately taken out. I roll left, away from the downstream pounding concrete floors. They penetrate walls and light fixtures, sending plaster and broken glass onto the floor below.

  Taking cover behind a metal pillar, I wait until Victor’s clip is empty, and he is forced to reload. When the ear-shattering sound drops off, I pop out from behind the pillar, returning fire. One either hits or grazes him, and he yells out in pain.

  He’s down, and I have won, or am blissfully close to it.

  “Give it up, Quinn!” I scream as my own clip goes empty, forcing a reload of my only spare.

  “Come and make me!”

  The voice is on a different end of the catwalk. It circles, trying to flank me on the other side of my lonely little pillar. Shadows above my head lend doubt to every glance as I revolve around the pole, peeking out from its varying corners.

  Every change in direction is a risk.

  “This is my town, lady,” Victor says from above, every word punctuated by soft-stepping boots. “I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, just walking in and destroying everything I’ve worked for!”

  No bone in my body has patience to argue the merits of a dictatorship with anyone, let alone a tyrant. Scurrying around the beam, hoping I don’t misjudge the shadows over my head, I raise the rifle, holding my breath.

  “But then again... that's the problem with this country these days, ain’t it?” the voice above me muses. “Maybe the women have too much power! It’s gone to their heads, you know? Maybe... it’s that everybody thinks they can take what’s not theirs, and tough shit to the people who built it, right?”

  Spotting a glimmering object in the low natural light, his higher vantage could be the key to my victory. Reaching over a small span of concrete flooring, Victor must see my hand, because he sends a storm of bullets raining down. It is only a spurt compared to the earlier bursts, but grazes my hand wrapped around the discarded monkey wrench. Gritting teeth through pain, the bloody mess of flesh and knuckles pulls it back. Practice of my breathing hearkens back a decade or so to when I learned the technique.

  The future's so bright for us, honey, my husband once said, clutching my hand in a sterile delivery room up the road. Seventeen months before we piled in the car and left Haven forever, nurses showed me how to breathe, as other nurses monitored the black hole between my legs.

  Once upon a time, those words were true.

  “Given up?” Victor yells from above. Even before he spoke, I had decided to waste no more time. Hesitation will only help my enemy win, as the man who trained me how to kill people once instructed.

  The future's so bright for us, honey.

  The wrench lobbed at the ceiling twirls through the air. The burst of light from Victor’s rifle pinpoints his location on the catwalks, opposite from where I’m pinned down.

  Spinning around the pillar in one fluid motion, I pull the trigger.

  The sound of Victor’s body impacting the concrete floor follows five strenuous seconds of wondering if I won. They are some of the longest I’ve ever experienced, only because I’m not sure he’s been hit until hearing the dull impact of breaking bones. Peeking out from my cover, I keep the rifle pointed straight ahead, slowly making my way to the spot where he lies on his back, choking on blood.

  But before I can gloat—taunt him in the final moments of life or sink in relief that Haven is free—a set of footsteps draws my immediate attention.

  Turning around to meet a presence that makes my heart sink, his face is bloodied and a broken foot drags behind the good one. His beard is matted in crimson and one eye is swollen shut under all the bruising of his left cheek, but the man I know as Frank groans and wheezes, a shaking pistol in his hand.

  Fuck…

  The bursting light from the lethal end cancels out the actual feeling of a bullet breaking through my chest, lodging itself next to my heart. The rifle in my hand collapses to the floor, knees shortly following it. On the winds of his dying strength, Frank falls to the ground next to Victor as my own forehead smacks its dirty surface.

  Once upon a time, the future was bright. A nurse crossed the room with aquamarine walls, carrying a bundle of flesh and nerves inside a striped white blanket to where I sat up in a bed next to my husband.

  In a few years’ time, we would pack our bags and leave everything behind.

  Victor and Frank’s dying forms are lost to me, because all I can focus on is the moment that nurse placed infantile screams in my arms for the first time ever, and I knew what I was born to be.

  This is your son, she said.

  Looking down at the tiny being I created; reaching out and touching his tiny, frail fingers, I looked at Derek, lapsing into something between tears and laughter.

  Have you given any thought to a name?

  They say life flashes before your eyes as it leaves, but it’s only one moment I hold onto. Even in delirium, stemming from the warm, sticky liquid spreading under my ribs as I bleed out, the moment is lucid as anything I have ever experienced.

  Nathan, I said through tears, Nathan Lewis Wallace.

  Nathan, huh?

  Looking to the man I married a few short years earlier, then down at the squirming ball of joy in the crook of my elbows, I nodded.

  Yeah, I said, I like it.

  Derek smiled at my side.

  I like it, too.

  Harper

  I am the unhinged.

  From the moment I became an immortal, cursed to watch the world end several times over, lose the people I love and be dictated to by celestial beings. I haven’t always wanted to die. Maybe it was like a child when you take away a toy they had absolutely no interest in, only to be met with screaming and tantrums when they realized it was gone.

  It has been fifteen years since I left the world of the living. A decade and a half ago, the man who helped me defeat a bitter devil became Death in his place. A year after waking from my own demise, he tracked me down, and asked for help implementing a kinder gateway to the end of life than the one we were greeted with.

  T
hree years after that, and meeting the Nephalim who would endanger the world, that gateway was complete.

  I could not have done this without you, Harper, Tim told me on the Arcway’s completion. Now it lies destroyed, sacrificed to end Gabriel’s reign of terror over humanity.

  Not long before that, walking out of the Shroud on a promise to never return, I made a mistake that would skew my outlook on everything.

  “Are you all right?” Tim asks, appearing behind me.

  The suited man extends his arms, helping me off the ground; not a smudge or stain touches him.

  “Yeah,” I reply, rubbing my head. “Getting kind of tired saving the world from disgruntled gods though. What did he mean about Ramona? And the seventh? How are we supposed to find who that is?”

  Tim shakes his head.

  “Not sure. What I am sure of, right now, is we need to help Samantha.”

  I forgot about Samantha. But she is not my focus now. Looking over Haven, the destruction is worse than anything Gabriel or I could have imagined at the outset. Bodies strewn across the town’s main road, the overturned vehicles, and the pit leading to the Earth’s very center, culminating in a crater of violet light, are my doing just as much as his.

  “I don’t see her,” I say, while Tim joins me in surveying the ghastly outcomes. “But I’m assuming you already know where she is.”

  When there is no verbal response, I turn to face him.

  “Tim?”

  “I don’t know,” he grimaces; none of his previous confidence or arrogance is evident.

  He doesn’t get to mope now. The sneer enveloping my mouth drags its corners down, exposing the underbite that has plagued me since childhood.

  “Snap out of it!” I command. “Tell me where she is, or I will tear this town upside down until I find her.”

  But Tim only shakes his head, repeats that he doesn’t know.

  “Then you better find Samantha. Make yourself fucking useful, and help me, Tim. Because you’ve manipulated me just as much as the Atlas has!”