Caitlin Kittredge: Dark Days

“They shut down the stations weeks ago,” Pete said. She looked up at him, pulling Lily tight against her. “Jack, what are we going to do?”

Jack didn’t get to tell her he had no fucking idea. A cluster of looters appeared at the far end of the alley, and the leader let out a sharp whistle, pointing at Jack and Pete.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered. He could see it now—they’d be beaten, anything useful would be taken, and then if they were lucky it would end there. If they weren’t, they’d be taken or killed, or left alive but too weak to fight off the demons that hid in every dark spot in the city.

It was Pete who acted while Jack was still frozen. She shoved Lily into Margaret’s arms. “Run,” she told Margaret. “Get to a truck, and go with the evacuation. We’ll find you.”

“But Pete…” Margaret’s eyes filled up with panicked tears.

“Don’t argue!” Pete snapped. “We will find you, but you need to take Lily and you need to run.”

Margaret turned and fled, Lily wailing. Jack looked at Pete, panic forming a bubble in his chest and making his heart thrum. “We should have stayed together,” he said.

Pete turned back toward the looters, who were taking their time. They knew Jack and Pete had nowhere to go. It was either the gang, or the demons out on the main road. Magaret could find her way to the army, as long as they bought her some time.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

Jack felt the panic burst abruptly, replaced with something that felt like a blade to the gut. “We’re not going to meet them, are we?”

“Maybe,” Pete said. “But the important thing is we give them time to get away.”

She didn’t look upset or afraid, but then, Pete never did. She was strong. If it weren’t for him, Jack thought, she probably would have survived even this without a scratch.

He threw a leg-locker hex on the first looter, but there were more and more of them, and he and Pete got pushed, slowly, back toward the body of the Mini. Jack was about to say fuck it and hex up a fire that would incinerate every last looter when one sprang forward and grabbed Pete, pulling her forward into the forest of grasping hands and cold, frenzied faces.

Pete screamed and kicked at the looter, but before Jack could do anything, a shot rang out, snapping off the walls of the narrow alley. The first was followed by another volley as three soldiers with machine guns advanced, mowing down the looters until none of them moved.

Jack caught Pete as she swayed, and he didn’t understand for a moment why she was falling. The looters hadn’t had blades, just tire irons and cricket bats, things left over from when they’d been rational people, before the advent of the demons and the dead had driven them over the edge.

Then he saw the two blossoms of red on her shirt, and he started screaming. Pete fell, and she didn’t move, didn’t breathe, didn’t do anything. Her eyes stayed open, but she didn’t look at him, and there wasn’t enough breath left in her lungs to say anything.

He’d never imagined this. That it would be quick, unexpected, that one moment Pete would be in his arms and the next she’d be gone, just another body out of the hundreds he’d seen in the preceding weeks. He’d never imagined that Pete would die before him.

Jack wanted to stay with her, right there on the bloody pavement, but the soldiers grabbed him and forced him onto a truck. He fought them. They’d killed her, and now he was alone. Finally, one of them hit Jack on the skull with the butt of a rifle, and he tumbled into the merciful void of nothing.

Belial was watching him when his eyes flickered open. “It’s a little weird when you go out like that, just so you know,” he said. “People are staring.”

Jack sat up and immediately wished he hadn’t. “You might want to move unless you want me redecorating that ugly suit of yours,” he told Belial.

The demon pulled Jack to his feet and hailed a cab. Once they were inside, he looked Jack up and down.

“You going to tell me what you saw?”

Jack pressed his forehead against the glass. “No.” The gunshot still echoed in his ears, and he could still see Pete lying at his feet, silent and bloody.

Belial shrugged. “Suit yourself. But it might interest you to know that what you’re seeing isn’t certain.”

“‘Always in motion is the future?’” Jack grumbled.

“More like, you’re going to come down to the Pit with me and we’re going to convince the Princes that they can’t bargain their way out of this,” Belial said.

That made Jack sit up. His head was still thick and muzzy, but a day trip to Hell was the one thing worse than the visions that had started knocking him on his arse. “I don’t fucking think so,” he said. “The last time I was there, if you’ll remember, the Princes didn’t exactly take to me.”

“I’m one, and I certainly don’t,” Belial said. “But you’re tied up in this now, whether you like it or not.”

Jack wanted to argue that this was a demon’s mess, and that Belial could piss off, but much as he hated to admit it, Belial was right. He was tied up in it. The things he was seeing couldn’t be written off. If there was even a chance that what he’d seen could happen, he couldn’t do anything but try to help Belial stop it.

Pete and Lily weren’t going to end up in the place he’d seen. He wasn’t going to be that man, drifting through the end of the world with nothing to anchor him except the fact that his heart was still beating.

The cab stopped at the entrance to Regent’s Park, and Belial stepped out. Jack followed him, and Belial held out his hand. “Let me do the talking,” he said. “Things with the Princes haven’t exactly been smooth since all this kicked off.”

“You mean you found someone besides me who thinks you’re an insufferable twat?” Jack said. “Imagine that.”

Belial heaved a deep sigh. “The day the first human crawled out of the mud was the day the rest of the universe went to shit,” he muttered. “Just stick with me, and try not to get both of us turned into furniture, all right?”

“Sure,” Jack said to himself. “Sweet-talk the Princes of Hell. What could be easier?”

Jack hated the way the air smelled in Hell. The City belched smoke from its furnaces and factories, and the heavy, hot winds borne out of the surrounding white bone deserts invaded his nostrils with the worst elements of both a garbage tip on a hot day and a vigorously burning tire fire.

He hated the sounds, too. The clanging of the heavy iron trains that ran on tracks fifty stories above the cesspits at street level. The snarling and hissing of the elemental demons that prowled every alley and dark byway like packs of especially hungry dogs. And the screaming. It was like flies buzzing, after a time—the screams of tormented souls floating from every corner of Hell.

Belial’s new quarters, as a Prince, were two thirds up the tallest spire in the City, the triple-towered fortress that, to Jack’s eyes, had always resembled a pitchfork. Jack wondered if that was on purpose. Demons weren’t known for their sense of humor.

“Nice place,” he said, looking around the flat. Twenty-foot ceilings and black glass floors aside, the space wasn’t what Jack had imagined for a ruler of Hell. Everything was black or white, and aside from a rug made from the hide of some furry white creature that had three curling horns sprouting from its lifeless head, everything was made of stone or glass.

“It’ll do,” Belial said. Jack examined himself in a mirror framed in interlocked skeletal hands. He didn’t bothering asking if the bones were real.