Tim Marquitz - Echoes of the Past

“What’s gone?” Katon asked, coming into the room.

I spun around, gun in hand. My breath ached in my lungs. “Karra. CB can’t find her; can’t reach her.”

“Is that normal?”

“No. I’ve never known CB to be out of touch with her. She’s his master.”

He looked to Chatterbox and then back to me. “He’s still animate, so my guess is that she shut down the connection from her end for some reason. You piss her off?”

“No more than usual, I imagine.” I thought back and couldn’t remember having done anything that would cause her to shut me out. Then again, pushing for her to stay home with daddy when she was more powerful than me was probably a kick to the parts for her. “Shit…maybe.”

Katon rolled his eyes. “Maybe she and Scarlett are off vacationing, lounging around the pool and bitching about how frustrating you are.” He cracked the tiniest of smiles. Even he didn’t believe that.

As much as it stung, though, it was entirely possible. I turned back to CB. “We’ve got to go check something out. Keep trying to reach Karra. We’ll be back soon.” With everything going on, I couldn’t worry about Karra, too. Scarlett was a pit bull, capable of tearing a guy apart limb by limb, but she was gullible, naive in a way that made her vulnerable because she wanted to believe in the goodness of people.

Karra was none of that. She wore her paranoia on her sleeve and didn’t walk down a dark alley without nuking it from orbit first. Besides, she had Longinus camped out in her house, and he sure as hell wouldn’t let anything happen to her. I’d take the Anti-Christ against any of the muck-a-mucks present in our universe right now. No alien slime ball would dare to stick anything even remotely probe-like near Karra without her father snapping it off and shoving it someplace horribly uncomfortable and quite indecent.

“Let’s go,” I told Katon, doing my best to block out my anxiety.

He nodded and told me the coordinates Rachelle had provided. I felt bad involving her only a few days into her mourning, but the world was an inconsiderate place. Bad things still happened, and they didn’t care much for your state of mind. That didn’t make me feel any better about it, but it sounded good. At least it was Katon that hit her up for the info, and not me. He wouldn’t rile her up any.

Once I knew our destination, we went to the gate and plugged it in, and off we went. It was a place far across Hell; a ghetto so to speak. It had been largely abandoned after Lucifer moved on, free will and open portals to exotic locales pretty much taking a toll on the population of the down under. Outside of a few folks who believed the rest of the world to be a greater Hell than the real one, and the wandering dread fiends heading to and from the fields in their endless drudgery, it was a pretty deserted area. We wouldn’t have to worry about our hubcaps being jacked. That wasn’t necessarily the case before, but now, we were pretty safe; all things relative.

I made sure my gun was loaded and secured the extra clips, and we hit the gate running. Rather than land right on top of anyone, I chose a portal that was a little further away. It took us a few minutes to get there, but it made more sense than popping in without knowing what we were getting into. We made our way through Hell, doing our best to stay out of sight. It seemed to work pretty well. There was no one along the path I’d chosen. After a few minutes, we were just around the corner from the location Rachelle had pinged.

As we drew closer, I could smell the tangy scent of charred wood and a hint of burnt hair. Katon leaned against the wall and peered around the corner. He turned and looked at me with widened eyes.

“The place has been bombed,” he whispered.

I shrugged. “That would be me. I gave Mihheer a going away gift as he hightailed it into the portal.”

Katon shook his head and looked back around the corner. “I don’t hear or smell anything alive in there.” He drew his sword, a replacement for the one he had crafted out of the Spear of Longinus, and let it hang loose in his hand. Katon didn’t wait for me. He slipped around the corner, silent as a shadow, and made for the room.

I followed after. The hallway was filled with rubble and bits of smoking char. Wisps of black ash fluttered in the air by the entrance, and the wall across from the room was covered in blackened soot and pitted and scarred by flying debris. Rubble littered the floor. I’d made a mess.

For a few seconds, I felt pretty good about the wreckage I was seeing, and then it hit me: Scarlett could have been in there. I hadn’t given it a thought when I’d chucked the fireball behind Mihheer. I guessed he was heading to his master, but it didn’t click until right now that I could have killed my cousin. A cold chill settled over as I walked at Katon’s back. I certainly didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking. If Scarlett was dead in the room, I’d probably just turn my gun on myself before Katon had the chance to kill me. That’d be my luck. I’d save her from Gorath by taking her out myself.

Katon crept to the entryway and glanced inside. My breath stuck in my lungs. I let it loose when he waved me forward and didn’t turn and try to take my head off.

Inside, the room looked a ton worse than the hallway. There was carnage everywhere, rubble scattered across the room and tiny flash fires still burning in what I presumed had been bookshelves before I dropped the bomb on them. The walls, ceiling, and floor were scorched obsidian except for an area about thirty feet around. Katon pointed at it and I nodded.

“Shield,” I said unnecessarily. Gorath or Mihheer had blocked the blast well enough that the floor hadn’t been scored by it. That meant they hadn’t been either. I sighed as we went deeper into the massive room to find it dead-ended. The air thick with a rank odor, I looked back to Katon. “Why do I smell French-fried-dog?”

“Because your effort to end my servant’s life injured a few of my newfound associates,” a deep voice spoke from the doorway.

Katon and I spun about, our weapons raised. There stood Mihheer alongside another fellow I could only presume to be Gorath. Piled balls deep behind them were a gaggle of werewolves and a number of the shadowy black vampire soldiers that had made the run at Heaven. My pulse masquerading as a techno beat, I looked to Gorath and let my senses loose. He didn’t strike me as a world-beater, but I knew better than to judge him by his current state. Besides, he’d come with an army of fangs and fur. That alone was a big enough threat.

I was surprised to see he didn’t look as alien as Hasstor, or even Mihheer. In fact, he looked a lot more human than I expected. He was tall, easily close to seven feet, and built wiry. He wore black robes with no markings of any kind, and his wild, jet black hair hung damn near to his knees as it spilled over his shoulders. Only his eyes and skin marked him as inhuman. Mottled green with gray spots kind of like a radioactive Dalmatian, he’d look right at home in a plague ward or a zombie flick. His eyes shimmered with a bright yellow-orange, just like Mihheer’s. They were probably related in a cousin-brother-uncle-sheep kind of way.

“Where’s Scarlett?” Katon asked, straight to the point as always.

Gorath grinned. Obsidian teeth made his mouth look as though it were a black hole, a wiggling yellow slug in its midst. “Ah, is that what she is called?” He laughed, the tone setting the hairs of my arms on edge. “She wasn’t conscious long enough to tell us her name.”

Katon advanced and the mass of werewolves and vampires stepped past Gorath to block the way. Even with all of them filing into the room, the hallway was still full. Unconsciously, I started counting the bullets I had. I didn’t have anywhere near enough. Even Katon hesitated. As much as both of us wanted to put a fork in Gorath, it didn’t look all that likely.