Behind the Bitmask Page 14

  “Charlotte! Did you study for your chemistry test?” he snarled. My head started vibrating, my teeth ripped themselves violently from their sockets, they rocketed towards Sigmar, and I suddenly woke to screams that weren’t my own. They really weren’t! And then, from my rude awakening, a realization – the ceiling was covered in a dark red, spiky residue that I’m certain hadn’t been there when I went to sleep. It stopped screaming when I gave it a nasty glare, though.

  My phone’s battery seemed to be less than full. Had my charger gone bad? It must’ve been listening to my thoughts as the charge percentage indicator on my phone jumped up a few points in about as many seconds. Huh. I decided I needed to get out of this place before the walls became spikes, or the floor grew chains, or something otherwise trapped me in whatever dark fate I could dream up. I probably also needed to get out of hell as a whole, before the entire dimension contorted itself to my expectations and filled itself with horned demons and rivers of flame.

  I grudgingly extracted myself from the den to face an unending short grass prairie. Calling this part “hell,” at least, was kind of a misnomer. If you could tolerate the extremes of the Dakotas or Montana or similar, you could eke out a decent living growing durum wheat and maybe hunting the local herbivorous hellbeasts on the side. I know some people aren’t into rural life, but even I’ll tell you it’s better than an eternity of burning and torture. I’m guessing Terminal gave a lot of thought to his escape plans; otherwise, I could have very easily ended up somewhere like the Giant’s Entrails – that’s one of Sigmar’s administrative divisions. It’s a realm of pulsating flesh and organs that began to rot and decay once Sigmar killed its owner. He once told me it would probably dissolve into mush within a decade – more if he sent optimistic minions with dreams of building a fortress to stand guard. Other hells, for want of a better term, showcase rivers of sulfuric acid and mercury, enormous electric storms (remember the realm of Aux?), unending blizzards, mountains of onerous paperwork, and other unnatural wonders. The way things were going, these wonders were in mortal danger.

  As I wandered further, and gradually lost track of how long I’d been in hell, I finally began to miss the comforts of home. My gravest problem was that I couldn’t portal back to my apartment’s bountiful closets. It’s just my good luck that I went into hell in casual clothing, though – I don’t think my usual fare would’ve withstood the harsh environs. Still, I began to smell after a while, so I gradually blundered my way to a thrift store. As I perused, and as I deliberately tried to ignore the synapses in my brain demanding I nab the fancy black dress hanging on a wall, I began to notice things I could actually use. I thought I’d stop with the hiker’s backpack and canteen and make sure I didn’t overdraw from a convenient ATM. Then, I very nearly walked into a sword. I needed a moment to regain my bearings – some foolish employee had placed it in the hands of a mannequin posed like a swashbuckler. Was this for sale? After inspecting it further I saw a $250 price tag tightly wrapped around the pommel. My heart beat with elation, for I had found new protection. It wouldn’t help me against Sigmar, but it could spell the difference between life or death were I to meet highwaymen on my journey.

  A few more days passed before the high of my shiny sword wore off. It just didn’t have that new sword smell anymore. But still, I was wandering aimlessly. I was unable to get much useful information out of the locals, my funds were steadily depleting from keeping my food and drink supplied alone, and I was still certain Sigmar had sent people to track me down. I was beginning to develop lean muscle mass to an extent that I hadn’t since high school, and my stamina was improving every day, but I couldn’t keep this up forever. I needed a way home, a really good weapon, a good friend, anything. But time stretched on, and I kept wandering.

  I regularly had to purchase food and beverages to keep myself alive in this harrowing time, and today, the only store that accepted Earthside credit cards was constrained by a run down, poorly-lit cabin that stank of mildew and grime. I could feel the warping of the floor under my feet as I browsed the wares the owner had decided to offer that day. Right now, I had to decide whether I wanted to grab a packet of nominally familiar and allegedly edible lutefisk (!?) or an unidentifiable, brightly-colored comestible with an unfamiliar chthonic script on its box.

  “That, human, is a delicacy we like to call a cheese and bean burrito. It is something of a local specialty. You’ll not find such food anywhere on Earth,” explained the shopkeeper.

  “I beg to differ,” I responded. “I could walk into any grocery store in Minneapolis and purchase a dozen if I so desired.”

  “I don’t think you’re in Minneapolis anymore.”

  For once, he was right. The owner of this shop was, as far as I could tell, a twelve foot tall cyclops crammed behind the counter in a way that looked excruciatingly painful. He didn’t seem to mind, but with his yellowing teeth, scraggly beard, and coarse-cut toga, I got the feeling he didn’t get to see the world all that often. A nametag crudely pinned on the toga proclaimed his name was Polyphemus. That’s...not a standard American name, to say the least. He reached behind the counter and pulled up out what, on closer inspection, was a handful of salted peanuts.

  “I am certain you will find some sort of victuals to your liking here. I have refined tastes.” He started placing the peanuts in his mouth one at a time. Chthons need to work on their advertising and sales techniques.

  “I’ll take the burrito,” I told him. I didn’t have time to inquire as to what any of the other items in the store were. “You can heat these things on a campfire, right?”

  The cyclops shrugged. “You wouldn’t happen to be some sort of anarcho-primitivist, would you? I have never tried this product in anything other than a common microwave.”

  I shrugged back at the cyclops as I passed him my credit card. Maybe three bucks isn’t a lot to pay for a convenience store burrito, but I had no income, and every purchase took me closer to bankruptcy...or at least crippling debt. Suddenly, the cyclops’s wide burst wide open with newfound shock.

  “Awfully big sword for such a little girl. Were you planning to poke my eye out and rob me blind?” he said.

  Chthons are either really bad at humor, pickup lines, or threats. I’m not entirely sure which.

  “Look, I’m trying to lay low, and that means staying away from what passes for civilization in these parts. Last thing I want is to be assassinated in my sleep,” I said. Suggesting I was wanted was probably a lapse of judgment, but I had a sword and the cyclops didn’t seem ready to attempt anything. Luckily, he returned my card and burrito to me in a timely fashion.

  “Fascinating. Were I interested in picking a fight with the United States, I would certainly turn you over to the authorities. Fortunately for you, they seem to have fled,” he responded. What kind of municipal government just cuts and runs?

  “Rumors have it that Sigmar the Conqueror is coming to take over the plains. This is prime agricultural land. If he were to tame it, he could grow enough food to feed another army-”

  Oh shit. I am not ready for this. I can’t breathe. I can’t fucking breathe. I need air to live and my lungs have turned on me-

  “What on Earth is happening to you, human?” said a voice at the edge of my consciousness. My hands are liquefying.

  “I do not believe Sigmar poses much of a threat to us as long as we lay low. I, for one, have no reason to antagonize such a powerful lord of hell,” continued the voice. The rest of my body is freezing. I have to do something. After a desperate struggle, I managed to stabilize my breathing.

  “That’s not going to work for me. I was one of his generals, and then I tried to kill him,” I then said. Polyphemus’s eye shot wide open.

  “For a human to challenge a titan is a grave error. I expect little else from your species,” he said once he’d recovered from my story, but I don’t know if he believed it. I decided that maybe it wasn�
�t a good idea to tell him about the fate of Hyperion.

  “Right now, I’m just trying to stay safe and not get murdered,” I ended up continuing. It seemed neutral. I really needed to be on my way at this point, but something about Polyphemus seemed safe, or at least not immediately hostile. It was probably the English fluency. I’d encountered many languages I couldn’t comprehend while wandering through hell, so anyone who understood what I was saying was to be cherished.

  “For you to survive much longer would be a momentous feat.” In formal logic, we have the concept of a proposition being vacuously true – i.e, while it’s technically correct, it has no useful meaning. I wish I had the time to describe this to Polyphemus, but we needed that time to stare awkwardly at each other.

  “I think there is one course of action that might save you, though,” Polyphemus suddenly said. “I know of a titan some distance from here who has forsaken the old ways and embraced human culture.”

  Exactly how that could be anyone other than Sigmar was something I couldn’t figure out. Polyphemus dove under the table again and returned with a paper map that smelled slightly of salt and oil.

  “My store is in sector C4. You want to get to sector G10, where the Lord of Vice has set up court,” he explained, pointing haphazardly in the general direction of various squares on the map.

  “You want me to take my chances with a ‘Lord of Vice,’” I muttered.

  “Believe me, he has fallen so far into debauchery that he will not have any interest in deflowering a mere human. It should take you about a week to get there, even if you spend many hours concealed.”

  I stared awkwardly at the map. Something other than the route I would have to take was bothering me – it didn’t long for me to figure it out.

  “Rand McNally is mapping hell. What are these worlds coming to?” I muttered.

  “Cartography is another one of our hell’s great traditions,” responded Polyphemus. Forget everything else – chthons need to stop taking credit for everything humanity Earthside has accomplished. Still, I was in no mood to contest this obvious bullshit, at least with the vague threat of Sigmar’s armies hanging over me. I left Polyphemus’s store in a hurry and began plotting a route to the southeast.

  I have no idea how many people live in hell, but there’s clearly enough life down there that people have seen fit to build cities and actually live in them. In the course of my wanderings, I’d encountered some villages and towns of varying size and civility (and Polyphemus will attest to this), but as I trudged through a nightmare of rust and iron, I came upon a shining light in what felt like an eternity of darkness. I was low on supplies, and my mind had apparently decayed to the point that I automatically assumed any sort of luminosity was morally good, so I immediately resolved to investigate it.

  The first sign that this could be something other than the usual terror was that the decaying metallic landscape gradually gave way to human-friendly vegetation. It hadn’t been that long since I’d seen grass and trees, but despite the still poor lighting, all the plants were thriving. After a while, I saw a few lamps and sprinklers interspersed with the foliage. Further on, some brave soul had gone even further towards civilizing the landscape and set up a paved road with sidewalks and bike lanes. By this point, the glimmer of light I’d once seen had separated into a veritable constellation of neon signs mounted on tall buildings – still too far away to distinguish, but comforting to even consider after I’d spent so much time away from Minneapolis. As I took to the sidewalk, I saw a small wooden sign with the words, “YOU ARE ENTERING THE REALM OF AGNUS, THE LORD OF VICE” printed on it in an assertive font. A smaller sign a few feet later told me to, “enjoy your stay,” almost as if it didn’t want to risk overwhelming the first and more grandiose one’s sentiments.

  I had made it.

  I didn’t know who Agnus really was (beyond accusing the titan of sin, Polyphemus had been vague), or if the civility the entrance to his lands were projecting was genuine, but anything had to be better than Sigmar, so I continued to advance on the city. It came up on me very abruptly – one moment I was following the isolated road, and the next, I was passing by upscale electronics stores at the bottom of skyscrapers. If it weren’t for the preponderance of chthons making purchases and otherwise participating in urban life, or the sickly green tinge in the sky, I would think I was back home on Earth. Overall, it seemed a place worthy of attention even by human standards, and I figured it would at least be a good place to restock my supplies.

  I quickly noticed a sign advertising a Corner Grocer that was apparently having a half off sale on pineapple. Even if I didn’t know what the original price was, the idea of having tropical fruit was sorely tempting after sampling some of the things that passed for cuisine in this realm. I walked into the side alley that apparently hosted its entrance, when I bumped into something huge, and on closer inspection, hugely unsettling.

  “Did you really think you could hide from us forever, you damned traitor?”

  I’d always found the concept of Nicholas troubling, from his enormous bulk of toned muscle, to his tendency to refer to himself in plurals, to his affinity for drab business suits with hideous neckties. Apparently, he was also smart enough to track me down here, which made everything much worse.

  “No, I didn’t,” I responded, “But I’m surprised you weren’t able to get Terminal back on your side. You guys running out of cash or something?”

  “Believe me when I say Terminal’s going to die, too. Sigmar’s personally going to skewer his head on a pike!”

  My relations with Nicholas during my employment under Sigmar hadn’t been great; it’d started off poorly with the fudge incident and ended with me ridiculing him for being dumb muscle at every opportunity I could get. Every laugh I got kept Sigmar’s attention away for at least a few minutes. Now, though, Nicholas’s frustration had nowhere to go but what I was hoping would be his only chance to kill me. I ripped my sword out of my backpack as quickly as I could. It wasn’t as imposing as the longsword I’d used to take down Sigmar’s giant eagle way back in the day, but it balanced better, it was sharper, and it didn’t disappear into nothingness when it got too far from a server farm. Finesse wasn’t going to matter here, since as far as I know, Nicholas couldn’t fly…

  But apparently he could jump like a hero as he lunged at me bare handed. It wasn’t going to do him much good; I lashed out and rolled away at the same time, demonstrating a maneuver I had ample time to perfect during my wanderings. When I finished, Nicholas was missing his left hand, and the blade of my sword was spattered with blood. I raised my sword to properly strike him down, but he grabbed the blade with his right hand.

  “Mov eax, 4, int 80h,” he intoned in a voice that betrayed none of the pain (I hoped) he was feeling. His left hand flew out of a nearby dumpster and cleanly reattached itself to his wrist.

  “Your attacks are useless! Sigmar has granted us error correction and backup restore capability!” Nicholas boasted. At least he wasn’t smart enough to enchant himself, but I still shuddered with fear. He wrapped his newly-repaired hand around my blade, as well; I tried to extract it from his grasp to no avail. I even tried levering myself back and forth in a futile attempt to saw through his hands; even if he just reattached them I’d still have better control of my sword – but no. Daemonic runes glowed around his body, and suddenly my hand was glued to the hilt! Then, the rest of my arm seized up, and he was free to swing me around like a mannequin.

  If the roles were switched at this point, I would’ve tried to end the fight quickly, perhaps by swinging the blade at a nearby wall over and over until blunt trauma claimed my body. Nicholas had a less effective idea – he simply walked towards the wall and gradually, almost gently pressed me up against the bricks.

  “How does it feel knowing I’m going to impale you?” he snarled. I didn’t want to dignify that with a response.

  The
idiot hadn’t even accounted for my other arm, which was free to root around in my left pocket for a small knife. My throwing technique was hampered by the growing pressure on my sternum from the pommel, but I still managed to embed the knife in Nicholas’s exposed throat. In his surprise, he let go of the sword, breaking the gluing enchantment and allowing me to drop to the ground. I knew that I only had a few seconds before he extracted the knife and possibly used it against me, so I was determined to make each one count.

  I very briefly considered another attack, but given the repairs Sigmar was enacting, I decided the better course of action was to run and regroup, similar to how I’d handled Sigmar, if not for nearly as long. Since Nicholas was blocking my way out of the alley, my only choice was to retreat around the corner and into a dead end. This didn’t feel right, but I just needed some time to figure out how to deal a decisive blow and get around Nicholas’s augmented durability. I suspected stabbing him in the brain would disrupt Sigmar’s connection. I had a few seconds tops, so I tried to banish the distractions from my mind and focus on channeling any non-computational magic I had access to into my sword. I couldn’t actually cast spells without a computer, but I was willing to try anything.

  As suspected, Nicholas charged down the alley like an enraged bull, hands outstretched and head slightly forwards. His overconfidence in his healing factor was about to backfire spectacularly. I had a brief moment to position myself, and then I charged forwards. The sword pierced straight through his stupid eye, through his brain, and passed bloodily through the other side of his skull, at least judging from how deeply my blade had penetrated. He immediately lost his footing, but he still had enough forwards momentum to knock me to the ground with such force that it shattered a bone somewhere in my right leg. That wasn’t good. He then collapsed into the wall behind me face first, jamming my sword even deeper into his skull and liquefying his brain even further…but he still wasn’t dead.