All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (24 page)

“
Oh,”
the other half answered.

“
P.”

“
Oh.”

The chant grew
progressively louder until it echoed across the plain like a soccer
match jeer. The ground trembled with it. Trevor looked at the angel
unconscious in his arms and wondered if giving her to them might be
the only way to save himself.

The creature behind
him didn’t give him the opportunity to give the idea serious
thought.

The screech it
emitted was loud enough he almost dropped Poe to cover his ears and
protect his brain from scrambling. The soul-mob fell instantly
silent.

It took a few
seconds for the ringing in Trevor’s ears to subside, leaving
silence. He swallowed hard, the sound of saliva squeezing down his
fear-constricted throat the first sound his ear drums comprehended.
Then the cadence of his heart beating frantically in his chest.
Finally, he felt as much as heard breath chuffing behind him, like a
bull preparing to charge.

Trevor’s body
stiffened as he realized he could no longer ignore whatever stood
behind him. Facing it might mean his death, but if that was the
case, then not facing it would likely yield the same result.
Wouldn’t it be better to know it was coming than stand blindly
in fear of it?

He thought so until
he saw it.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

The bag over my
head smelled like someone’s high school gym shorts—ones
brought the first day of school and unwashed until the last. I did
my best not to inhale the stench as two men gripping my arms hard
enough to hurt pulled me away. On the bright side, the bag smelled
marginally better than the crowd of zombies.

My feet skittered
across the ground finding no purchase to impede the men, so I gave
up, stumbling along as they dragged me. If I fought them, I’d
end up out of breath, gasping, and I didn’t want to increase
the taste of crotch already entering my mouth, so I decided to
reason with them instead.

“
I
think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

No response.

“
I’m
here to throw rocks like everyone else. Let me go punish that bitch
for giving a speech. The nerve of her.”

No response.

Try something
else.

“
You’ll
regret this. I’m a friend of Azrael. Let me go and I won’t
tell him what you did.”

“
Shut
the fuck up, Ric.”

Very few people
remembered to call me Ric, no matter how often I insisted to the
world not to call me Icarus, but recognition eluded me at first. I
was never very good at the ‘guess who’ game. In fact, it
usually pissed me off.

“
Who’s
there?”

The hand holding my
right arm tightened its grip, gave me a shake.

“
Shut
up and keep walking.”

He’d
spoken enough words for me to place the voice and, although most of
the words I’d heard him speak through the years were
alcohol-slurred, I knew who it belonged to
.

“
Is
that you, Marty?”

A grunt.

“
Dude,
it’s been months. How’ve you been?”

Truth be told, I
didn’t much care. The last time I saw him, he tried to beat me
to death. Not his fault, I guess, being possessed and all, but he’d
also said some uncomplimentary things about me when he thought I was
dead, so I owed him. Asking a Hellbound dead guy how things are
might be a subtle jab, but a jab nonetheless.

He didn’t
answer.

“
Is
Todd here, too, then?”

“
Hey,
Ric.”

“
Shut
up, Todd.”

I smiled beneath
the bag. Todd had never been the smartest one in the group. Maybe I
had a chance of figuring out what was going on.

“
Where
are you guys taking me?”

“
Someone
wants to see you,” Todd answered.

“
Will
you shut up?” Marty’s voice betrayed his annoyance. He
shook me again. “You, too. No more questions.”

“
Okay.”
Not a question. “I’ll just keep to myself under this
stinky bag.”

Someone wants to
see you.

There were only a
few people in Hell who might desire my company, none of whom I
looked forward to seeing. They began with people I didn’t like
much and the list went downhill from there. I didn’t get a
good feeling from this.

Where’s
Piper?

We walked in
silence for a long time, the scrape of our feet on the ground and my
captured breath rattling against cloth the only sounds. I should
have been nervous, scared, but distracted myself by watching my
steps kick up puffs until the ash-covered sidewalk disappeared,
giving way to parched orange earth scattered with black rock. I
kicked at pebbles but quickly grew bored and my mind wandered back
to my bleak situation.

Who wants to see
me? Azrael? Probably. Father Dominic? Bad. Someone else I’d
pissed off over the years? A long list. Red guy with horns and a
tail?

I shivered a little
and decided debating who wanted to punish me was detrimental to my
state of mind. Time to find some other distraction.

“
So,
this Hell place is pretty nice. Warm little vacation spot.”

No response but I
thought I felt the angry look Marty shot Todd keep him quiet.

“
I
really expected it to be dirtier, nastier. All-in-all, it’s
not bad. No Disneyland, but it’s not exactly third-world,
either.”

Marty shook me
again, this time without words-of-warning, and I stumbled. Todd’s
grip kept me from going ass-over-tea kettle, as the British say. I
don’t even drink tea.

“
You
know, I feel bad about how you guys got here. Horrible what happened
to you, but it’s not my fault. What a maniac, that priest.”

Feet scraping on
ground.

“
He
tried to kill me, too, you know.” Then, more to myself: “Of
course you know. You helped.”

“
We
had no choice, Ric,” Todd’s disembodied voice responded.

“
Enough,”
Marty snapped and pushed me hard.

My one left foot
caught behind my other left foot and down I went. Before I could
recover, one of my escorts lashed my wrists together behind my back
with something that felt warm; it pulsed and moved. My stomach
churned.

“
Marty--”

“
Shut
up, Todd. He’s on his own from here.”

“
Whoa,
whoa, whoa. What do you mean ‘on his own’?” I
scuffled my feet against the orange earth, pushing myself to a
sitting position. Mission finally accomplished, I waited for them to
respond.

No one spoke. A
minute passed.

“
Guys?”

The thing binding
my wrists pulsed, slithered, held still. As if gym shorts over the
face wasn’t disgusting enough, I had to touch a snake, too. So
much for all the good things I said about Hell.

“
Come
on, guys. Let me go. I promise I’ll be good.”

I thought I heard a
furtive step, maybe a whisper, but couldn’t be sure—blood
pounded too loudly through my head.

“
Guys?”

No doubt about the
footsteps this time. Two sets of feet hurried away making no effort
to conceal their movements.

“
Marty!
Todd! Don’t leave.”

The footsteps
receded, leaving me alone.

I hoped.

From the beginning,
I’d felt some fear being in Hell, but the longer I spent, the
less it bothered me.

Until now.

I scrambled to my
feet, blind and unsteady. The world swirled and tilted beneath me
and I swayed with vertigo; the meager contents of my stomach tried
to find their way up my esophagus and out, but I convinced them
otherwise. I stumbled forward a couple of steps to keep my feet
under me where they belonged.

The rank taste of
the air I gasped through the stinking hood in an attempt to relieve
my claustrophobia brought nausea back, but breathing eventually
succeeded in calming me. I stood, head sagging, staring at the tops
of my shoes. They needed polishing, but that would have to wait for
a more opportune time—I had to get the hood off first.

I bent quickly at
the waist and jerked back to standing. The stinking material slapped
against my face but didn’t come off. I bowed again, shook my
head back and forth to work it free. It shifted a little but stayed
put.

“
Damn
it.”

Given the locale,
it was probably too late for such a sentiment to be granted.

I lowered my ass to
the ground and sucked a sharp breath through my teeth as a jagged
rock dug into my left cheek. Hell gets you any way it can. A few
seconds of butt-shuffling brought enough comfort for me to draw my
legs up, lower my head and hold the edge of the hood with my knees.
I smiled, confident and satisfied, and pulled my head back, but the
shroud slipped from my grip.

Shroud.

An ominous word I
hadn’t thought of until this point.

They put shrouds
on dead people.

The idea really
shouldn’t have bothered me—I’d already died once.
But I didn’t want to end up here for good.

I tried again, and
again the material slipped from my grasp. I rolled onto my side,
grunting, attempting to pin hood between shoulder and ground but
only succeeded in banging my head on the same rock my ass met
moments before.