Furnace (19 page)

“Here I come,” a high-pitched voice mocked me from the hallway. Laughter echoed down the long corridor, pinging off each girder and doorway along the way.

Who the hell was that?
I wondered.

It definitely wasn’t the voice of a Kalak or any demon I’d encountered on Furnace so far. Worst of all, it sounded vaguely familiar. Human. Female. The longer I thought it over, the more certain I was that I knew the voice.

Mom?

“I’ve got a present for you,” she giggled.

I backed away with my eyes wide, too stunned to position myself for a quick bolt as soon as the door opened and the corridor was exposed. I was trapped in indecision. Did I attack right away based on the assumption that it couldn’t
really
be my mother, risking that it somehow
was
and I would be inflicting some measure of physical or psychological damage across trillions of light years?

I didn’t decide fast enough. The door slid open and suddenly I was staring up at the most absurd manifestation of my mother I could ever have imagined. Stranger, even, than the sight of her severed head bouncing over the dusty surface of Furnace like a tumbleweed. The body before me was that of a heavy Kalak runner: one of the biggest and strongest among their ranks. It had the same greenish-yellow scales, broad shoulders, and massive hands gripping one of their infamously bulky assault rifles, but the creature’s head narrowed into my mother’s twisted visage beyond the black and gray hood. She was grinning wide at me and waving the barrel of the assault rifle back and forth, but her teeth were stained black just like the clown demon’s and black roots of infection stood out in the veins across her face.

“My boy,” she cackled. A long glob of black drool dripped from the edge of her mouth and burned a hole in the steel floor. “It hurts me to see you like this.”

Another figure stepped through the doorway. This time, it was the woman from Europa. The navigator who’d explained the new jump theories from Sol Facility.

I was more fundamentally shaken by her sudden appearance than my mother’s, likely because I’d already seen my mother’s head on the surface and she’d been lurking in the back of my mind ever since. The navigator was so far out of left field for me that it took a moment to realize it was her, although part of that could have been because, like my mother, her form was nearly unrecognizable. Her skin was charcoal black like the Watchmen, except hers looked like it had been burned rather than born. Long, flapping gills lined her ribcage before merging with an open wound on her back where an ugly red creature nested and growled at me.

I whispered her name in horror, still unsure whether or not it was truly
her
since only the eyes seemed to match the woman I’d loved.

“You’ve been out at sea too long, Mikey,” my mother hissed. She took another step toward me and I carefully maneuvered to the other side of the room. It brought me within swiping distance of the burned fish-creature, but since it hadn’t addressed me yet and was less physically imposing, I considered it the lesser of two evils.

My mother wasn’t deterred. “It’s time to come home,” she said.

I almost believed the pain in her voice. She reached out to me with her left hand, tucking the assault rifle to her hip with the right.

“No,” I said firmly. I was still too shocked to bolt for the door, but I was getting my head about me again and calculating the odds that I could dart through both of them with my heavy limp.

“It’s not up to you,” the charred fish navigator told me. “We’re taking you home.”

Both of them moved toward me at once. The red creature hovering over the navigator’s shoulder growled again and flashed its pointed, yellow teeth.

“You’ve been gone too long, Mikey,” my mother opined. “We all miss you so much. Your father’s inconsolable. You’ve never even met your niece!”

“I miss you,” the navigator whispered. “I dream about you every night.”

I shook my head slowly, trying not to gag at the smell wafting from her as the creature nesting in her back shifted within the open wound. My mother’s face twisted into deeper rage with each step I took away from her.

“COME HERE!’ she suddenly screeched.

I lunged out of her reach and slammed back into the side of the Kalak torture-bed. The impact made me cry out but falling also helped me narrowly avoid the nails of the creature on the navigator’s back. It also put me between the two of them, which afforded me a new opportunity. I didn’t hesitate. With all the force I could muster, I locked my left leg around my mother’s ankle and swept my right along the ground. She fell to the floor hard enough that I heard bones crack somewhere in her upper body, but she was already getting to her feet by the time I released and drove my shoulder into the navigator’s midsection. I pushed her just far enough out of the way that I could slip through the door without either of them catching me, then punched the controls as hard as I could and watched them slide away.

“BOY!” my mutant mother screamed as she rushed for the door.

She hit the steel just as it slid completely closed. Hard enough to make me flinch a few steps into the large hallway before my knees caught me.

“Mike!” the navigator pleaded. I could hear the red creature clawing at the door and pictured its nails snapping off from the pressure. The pain wouldn’t have stopped it, of course. If anything, it would only have made it angrier. I didn’t plan on sticking around to find out.

Feeling a swell of panic materialize in my chest (a sensation which had been blessedly absent in the prison cell), I swung around to start my escape and ran head-first into the chest of the hooded Watchman.

The impact sent me reeling. I could feel the thin veil of reality stretching again, this time so far that my mind was momentarily blinded by the realized depth of my ignorance, and then I tripped over the cathedral steps and the world came back into focus.

I was back where I’d started, at least in terms of the Watchman. I guess the cold marble should have been comforting since it meant I’d somehow wrenched myself free of the demon’s control, but the shock of seeing both my mother and the navigator twisted into monsters suddenly crashed into me like a rogue wave.

No
, I told myself.
You don’t have time for that now. Fight it.

I was distantly aware of the red-masked demon crouching over me inquisitively and extending his right hand, presumably to grind more poison into my eye, but I wasn’t about to give him the chance. I threw my fist forward into the center of his mask, and when my knuckles immediately screamed with agony, I drew back and hit him again. He didn’t fall—not completely—but the force knocked him on his heels and gave me room to regain my footing.

“No!” I roared.

I became a cyclone of wild blows from both fists and feet. Most landed but many were also glancing. Blood from my stripped knuckles shot over my venom-ravaged cheeks, but for once, the pain only spurred me on. I was becoming one of them, I thought. Using the pain to lash out. Maybe that’s what the demons wanted all along. To change me into a creature that fed off of pain like them. The more I think about it these days, the more I’m convinced that they care more about turning the things you love against you. Making you question every aspect of your life. Bringing evil into every innocent relationship you’ve left behind, so that if you ever return to them, you do so with the weighted cynicism of memory. You’ve seen what Hell looks like, and you’ve seen how things that seem innocent and comfortable can be warped into your most terrifying nightmare.

I wasn’t going to let the Watchman kill me, if only because he was the one who’d put those thoughts in my head. He’s the reason I know what my mother would look like if her genes were spliced with a Kalak runner.

I punched and kicked until he lay motionless on the dusty street, and then I pulled the SX pistol, knelt on his chest, and blew a hole through his temple. He didn’t resist at all, and I didn’t feel any better after re-holstering the SX and staggering to my feet. I guess I knew even then that he’d gotten what he came for and had known the consequences for a job well done.

Once I’d gathered my breath, I turned back to the cathedral and continued on without looking back.

TSCHARIA

The marble cathedral steps were worn from frequent use, which seemed out of place considering the environment. Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe the demons had stolen the building from another species they’d tortured and killed. In any event, it was more plausible than any of those demonic assholes frequenting a house of worship, no matter what indecencies the so-called ‘religion’ practiced. It was too much order for creatures like them. Too specific, if that makes sense. And though they occasionally displayed some group-think and general cooperation with each other, they didn’t strike me as the type to conform beneath one banner.

What about the clown, then?
I wondered.
Maybe I’ve got them all wrong and they’re actually extraordinarily misguided zealots of a religion older than Earth itself.

I didn’t really give a shit either way. It was a nice enough distraction from my perilous reality, though, that I didn’t soil myself at the belated notion of stumbling into a service when I opened the doors. And if it turned out that a few demons were seated in the congregation worshipping an unknown deity (maybe the clown thing) in their own peculiar way—like raping and beheading innocents in the name of their god—I would either feign allegiance to that deity or collapse on the spot depending on convenience. I didn’t care which.

I stood before the large wooden doors with my right hand on the latch for a few moments, studying the grooves along the panels and the inscriptions overhead. Most of it was gibberish to me, but I recognized one word in particular straight away because it was written in English.

TSCHARIA
,
the inscription read.

Sha-rye-uh
, I mouthed.

The word sounded familiar, but it took me a few seconds to place where I’d heard it last.

The bastards in the masks
, I realized.

The demons had chanted the word when they’d nailed Aziza to the crisscrossed pillars in the corpse fields. It was also inscribed on the city walls amid a similar grouping of indecipherable symbols.

Tscharia
, I thought.

I was familiar with the concept of morality as law and also the curious way morality had been interpreted in the Second Dark Age, but I didn’t think the two words were necessarily related. The abominations of Furnace had no moral law—at least none that made sense to me—so I wrote off the repetition as coincidence. Or, more succinctly, a combination of symbols in an alien alphabet which coincidentally resembled the word
Tscharia
in English.

Who gives a damn?
I thought. The name didn’t matter. What interested me was the other symbols above the door, how they were apparently related to constellations even though the sky was barren of starlight.

Is that a map?
I wondered.

The navigator in me was interested enough in the crude symbols that I forgot where I was for a moment, which only made the jolt back to reality more jarring when a scream shook the city street.

I can use this
, I thought, quickly scanning the symbols to see if any of them were remotely familiar.

I couldn’t be certain that the symbols were
stars, or that the word
Tscharia
represented the planet where the
Hummel
had crashed, but I didn’t have any better theories and I doubted the
Hummel’s
crew had come up with answers while I was away, assuming they were still around.

Another scream. This time, the wind howled in response.

Move.

I decided to revisit the issue once I’d poked around the cathedral for more evidence of where I was and how to navigate the
Hummel
back home, then pushed the oddly circular latch of the door handle and shouldered my way inside.

The interior was dark. The staggered rows of pews, the off-centered altar, and the general dishevelment of the décor all gave the building a funhouse effect. The theatrical atmosphere was only dampened by the human corpses that were nailed to the walls, hung from the rafters, and heaped before the altar. A collection of severed heads was arranged in a loose circle at the center of the room.

I wasn’t surprised. Accenting rooms with mutilated bodies and streams of blood was par for the course on Furnace, more or less. It was alarming to see so many
human
corpses, though, since I was sure none of them had come from the
Rockne Hummel
or any other fleet vessel. In fact, the bodies that were actually clothed seemed transported from another time. An era long forgotten in modern Earth politics except among archivist androids with exceptional memory processors. Medieval or earlier, by my guess. No one on Earth dressed in those tattered clothes anymore. Not even tribes in lesser populated regions. In fact, poverty-stricken colonists on other planets wouldn’t even have made such inefficient garments unless it was for a dramatic production, which didn’t seem likely, either. By my admittedly foggy deductive logic, I figured that meant the bodies had been taken from another time altogether, though how they could have possibly survived so long—even on Furnace outside the normal rules of physics—was beyond me. Mind you, that’s a very rough assessment from a navigator with no real background in ancient history, but their attire was at least reminiscent of the Two Dark Ages and the way they’re depicted in historical vids.

Luckily for me, the building was otherwise deserted, and though the exterior was in far better shape than most buildings within the city walls, it didn’t look like anyone had ventured inside for at least a few days.

If they were brought in that long ago, how are the bodies still intact?
I wondered, limping toward the heap of corpses for closer examination.

As I knelt down beside them, hoping to answer the furious swirl of questions inside my head, my attention was abruptly drawn away.

I stopped moving mid-squat. “Hello…” I whispered.

Beyond the altar and beneath a realistically (which is to say, revoltingly) rendered sculpture of a beast defiling a woman stood a large throne. The woman’s vacant eyes seemed to lock onto me and nothing at the same time. The effect was chilling enough to make me shudder, but it wasn’t until my gaze wandered to the throne that my breath stopped completely and my muscles tensed.

Not again,
I thought.

It was the clown demon.

His head hung between his shoulders so that his chin rested against his chest and his horns stood out prominently. He wasn’t looking at me.

Yet.

I backpedaled toward the door the moment I saw him but my legs tangled and I wound up falling into one of the wooden pews, as though the clown had pushed me himself.

I don’t know how things would have turned out if I hadn’t fallen and instead rushed out to the street. Probably I would have died, since a horde of monsters searched the city for me even then. At the very least, I never would have learned what Tscharia was or why I’d been brought there. I didn’t piece it all together until I reached home again, but I wouldn’t have been able to at all if I’d left prematurely.

I sat in stunned silence for a few moments. Watched the clown demon slouch in his throne. Picked distractedly at my scabbing wounds. Bought time. Every once in a while, I scanned the cathedral to be sure we were alone, ignoring the presence of the human corpses altogether. There wasn’t another demon in sight as far as I could tell, though. I think it was meant to be that way, I thought. In the end, it had to be just the two of us. He had a plan for me—I knew that much already—and I thought there was a chance he’d let me live as long as his bloodthirsty disciples scattered across the planetoid didn’t spoil our party.

The clown never moved from his throne, though, and after a while, I started feeling a bit more comfortable. Maybe ‘comfortable’ isn’t the right word, I guess, because I was still just about shitting my combat-suit in terror. But I wasn’t about to turn tail and flee again. Part of me was tired enough of the whole goddamned business that I
wanted
the creature to engage me, if only because I knew he would give me the answers I needed. Maybe not the ones I
wanted
, but answers that would provide me a fuller perspective of the stakes—and potential loopholes—of my captivity on Furnace.

“Why am I here?” I finally asked.

My voice was even weaker than I remembered. The fluid I’d ingested in the alley hadn’t turned out to be the miracle elixir I’d hoped it was, after all.

Minutes passed in complete silence. I was content waiting. It may not have been the cheeriest of surroundings, but I felt oddly safe under the hidden gaze of the demon. The idea that he, out of all the creatures on Furnace, might have some capacity for discernment, some shred of rationale behind his actions, was comforting in its own way. He might eventually order up the same torture I would receive at the hands of other demons, but at least it would come with a measure of consideration. For better or worse, he would make a calculated decision. Otherwise, I would have been dead the moment he bit through my helmet, not whisked away to some private sanctuary with a bone-chandelier where the prying eyes of his disciples couldn’t reach me. The demon ghost with the smeared, bleach-white face appeared to have a vested interest in me, and until I demonstrated that I wasn’t worth his time or bother, I thought I could count on his peculiar protection.

What the hell is wrong with me?
I wondered.
How fucked is this place that I’m looking to the clown demon for protection when he caused this shit in the first place?

The dose of perspective sobered me enough that I squirmed uncomfortably over the wooden pew. I felt a chill building in the small of my back again.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

I didn’t really expect an answer and I didn’t get one. He didn’t move at all.

But the bodies nailed to the walls
did
start to move, so subtly at first that I wasn’t sure where the creaks, moans, and rustling sounds were coming from. I rose to my feet slowly, trying to avoid eye-contact with the shadows in my periphery so I could pretend that the dead humans weren’t actually moving.

It didn’t do any good.

Panicked, I limped to the altar as fast as I could. I was determined to get answers before the end, no matter what ‘the end’ turned out to be.

“Why am I here?” I asked again.

My voice was still hoarse, both from thirst and the hooded demon’s grip. By sheer force of will, however, I managed to shout my next question.

“What the fuck do you want from me?” I yelled. The words faltered on my tongue as my vocal cords cut in and out. “What do I have to do to leave?”

There was a loud crash behind me. One of the undead bodies had fallen to the floor from twenty feet above the ground.

And then another.

And another.

They started dropping every couple of seconds. The impacts were so forceful that my bones rattled from head to toe.

“Answer me!” I shouted, stepping around the bodies and severed heads in front of the altar. I worked my way through them until I was covered in shadow just like the clown demon.

Except it wasn’t really him, and I should have realized it long before then. There was, indeed, a throne and the clown’s visage had been rendered imposingly upon it, casting judgment on a congregation of dead and undead alike. But it was just a bronze statue. Slightly elevated, yet otherwise completely lifelike and built to scale.

Damn damn
damn
!
I thought.

Every second I remained in the cathedral brought me one step closer to a confrontation with the resurrected corpses that lined the walls and piled before the altar. And for what? A good fight? Bullshit. Yet again, I’d risked my life to beg answers from an inanimate object. Not much different than home, I guess.

I turned and saw a few undead humans had either crawled or limped to the cathedral entrance. They began streaming down the aisle ceremoniously. There was nowhere to go. They hadn’t noticed me yet but were blocking the only exit anyway. There was no telling what they would do if we made contact, or whether or not they would even be able to
find
me with their degraded senses. I figured a couple millennia was a long time to stay in shape. Most of them probably weren’t getting around so well.

I didn’t want to find out whether or not that was true, though. Somehow, the idea of undead humans—a comfortable familiarity suddenly corrupted by the Hell planet—was more unsettling than the monsters themselves, if not more terrifying. I knew how the people were
supposed
to look and act, but instead saw the moaning, mutilated wraiths that they’d been twisted into. Numb to the world around them.

Maybe I was more afraid of them because I knew I was staring at my future if I didn’t escape the planet before natives destroyed the
Hummel
. Maybe it would even be
those
undead humans who broke it down. Posing as living beings so the crew took pity on them, then offering themselves as sacrifices to the clown god as they sabotaged their brethren. Maybe they envied our vitality. Maybe they wanted to prevent the rest of us from returning to the lives they’d missed. Maybe they just wanted to please
him
.