Once Upon a Time in Hell (14 page)

"A miracle?" he laughed again. "What does the word even mean? Something you can't explain? You're walking through miracles, son. Nah... We need you lot as much as you need us.

The worlds this side need belief, experience, that precious transience you lot have. Don't ask me why He made it that way, you ask anyone in the know and they just give you that guff about 'moving in mysterious ways'. You'd think we had all the power, I mean... what are you but little pink butterflies, flapping about doing fuck all for seventy years and change? But no. We remain beholden to you. It's your belief in us that keeps everything solid, your fear that sharpens our teeth. Major miscalculation on His part if you ask me."

"I suppose you would say that, though, wouldn't you?" I replied. "Living here. This isn't His place is it?"

"They're all His places, pinkie. He's the boss of everything. You mortals, the Host, every level of demonic entity, we're all His in the end. They say He always has a plan, not sure I believe it though. Anything about life ever strike you as planned? If you ask me it's a case of too much power and not enough idea what to do with it. We'd be better off without Him." "Stop talking about Him," shouted the old man. "I've told you before, you're asking to be heard."

I nodded towards the old man. "He's just told me we should change the subject, he seems to think we're asking for trouble if we keep mentioning you-know-who."

"You really got an invisible friend or are you just insane? I don't mind either way, I've spent time with some real crazies. They’re fine as long as you know how they tick. I rode with this guy once, sweet as pie, but if you ever mentioned fruit he'd lose his shit and start killing folks left right and centre."

"Fruit?"

"Fruit. Fucking hated the stuff. Sent him off the deep end, every time."

"I'm not mad."

"He used to say that too, then someone would mention a banana and “Whoa... limbs everywhere."

"I'm really not though."

"So how comes I can't see or smell him?"

I explained the best I could, repeating what I had told Meridiana earlier.

In the end Biter shrugged. "Best way to hide being mad I ever heard, but I'll go along with it as long as you don't try and kill me."

H
OPE
L
ANE HAD
wanted little more from her life than change. From the day she had left her home town, a place that kicked her in the ass every day of her life, she had had no greater ambition than to live a life that was not the one she had originally been dealt. In the first instance, that had seen her change one prison for another, falling into the service of Obeisance Hicks, travelling preacher and crook. He had relied on her utterly, reducing her to a slave—not, she felt, be cause of the colour of her skin, Hicks hadn't much cared about that, rather because he could. If she had been white he would have treated her no better. Her life on the road with Hicks had been difficult, putting up with his drunken rages, his occasional advances and the fact that she could end up hanging at the end of a rope. If the gullible audiences he preached to recognised her as part of a con to relieve them of their money she had no doubt they would have strung her up with pleasure. People didn't like to be fooled, most especially not in the name of God. For all that, she would not have traded her new life for her old one. The reason why was simple: Soldier Joe.

Hicks had picked the war veteran up in a run down hospital outside Tucson. When spared the potent medication Hicks forced down him—a cocktail of veterinary drugs that he had bought cheap while on the road—the man could be terrifying in his delusions. He would scream and shout at invisible demons, believing he was still under cannon fire or fighting to keep a bayonet from piercing his belly. The hospital had been happy to get rid of him.

"There's nothing we can do for him," the jaded doctor had admitted. "He's a casualty of war, he just hasn't laid down and died of it yet."

But there had always been more to him than just that. Whether it was a result of his injuries or something he had always carried with him, Soldier Joe was a stigmatic, blood flowing from wounds in his wrists. To an imaginative man like Hicks this was an opportunity of the highest order and he had been selling vials of calf's blood from the back of his cart (once a piece of rough theatre had convinced all onlookers that the blood came from his troubled messiah) ever since. The one thing Hicks hadn’t been willing to do, however, was look after the medical needs of his meal ticket. He was not a man who took naturally to the care of others. So it was Hope Lane, a woman who had always relished the protection of others, that had become Soldier Joe's nurse.

No doubt some would have mocked her for the deep attachment she developed for her charge. After all, it was not a love that could easily be returned, Soldier Joe was barely aware of her existence and couldn't, therefore, be said to have any feelings for her whatsoever. Hope didn't think about it. She felt what she felt and that was that. And when she should have died in the snows outside Barbarossa, had her broken man not lifted her in his arms and carried her to safety? They both owed each other their lives and if that wasn't a foundation for love she didn't know what was.

Now, it seemed, he had brought her somewhere else.

She stood on the streets of Wormwood, looking out across its empty buildings. There, not five feet away, stood Soldier Joe, his wounds dry, his eyes clear.

"Where am I?" he asked her, looking around and scratching at the thick stubble that had grown on his cheeks in the time since she had last shaved him. "I was... in the snow I think? And then..." He looked at her, not with the confusion that so often came hand in hand with the drugs but with a genuine curiosity, one that held a clarity of thought behind it that she'd never seen in him before. "You were there, I think?" he said. "In the snow?"

"I was," she replied, moving up to him and reaching for his hands. He pulled away slightly, leaving her feeling awkward and a little stupid.

"I know you," he said, but there was no conviction to his voice.

"I'm Hope," she said. "I've looked after you for... well, a long time."

"Looked after me?"

"Yes," she didn't quite know how to address that subject. Was this sudden sense of self awareness permanent? Was he healed somehow by being here? Or was this just a passing moment? Would he be returned to his broken mind and body any moment? "You were hurt," she said, "in the war... and you needed looking after because there were some things you couldn't do for yourself."

"The war," he said, nodding, "yes. I remember the war. The Confederates hit us on the river, trying to push us back into the swamps. We managed to move north but the artillery fire..." He raised his hand to his head, his fingers going towards the wound he had sustained there; a wound long gone, replaced by long hair. "I was hurt."

"That was a long time ago, you're much better now." Again she reached for him, again he pulled away.

"A long time ago..." He moved across the street, climbing up the boardwalk and positioning himself in front of the window of a general store. He looked at the reflection he found there—a man with long hair and a beard, styled as a messiah for the appreciation of dumb rubes.

It was someone he didn't recognise. "Who are you?" he whispered.

"The war's over," said Hope coming up behind him. "It was over a long time ago. But you were hurt really bad, a bullet to the head."

"How long?"

She didn't know if she should answer that, afraid of the effect the answer might have.

Still, she couldn't lie to Soldier Joe. "Twenty years. A little more... I'm sorry, you've been sick a long time."

"Twenty years?" He turned to look at her. "I'm only eighteen..." And then he realised the nonsense of that, the fact that he had lost more than half of his life to a mental fugue. "I got old..." he said, looking back at his reflection.

"I'm sorry, it's one hell of a shock, I know. I wish I could..." What? Make it not have happened?

"Where is this?" he asked, looking around. "Where is everyone? How did we...?"

His legs began to give out and Hope grabbed him, a panic flaring up in her. Not yet! Don't let him fall back into the broken man he had been. "Come here, honey," she said, struggling to carry him over to the edge of the boardwalk where he could sit down. "Just sit a minute."

"Too much," he said, "can't take it in."

Oh L or d, she thought, but we've barely even begun. H ow am I going to tell him about this place?

"You were taken from the hospital by a man," she said. "Not a good man. And he used you, as part of his business. But he kept you confused. Gave you powders, drugs."

"I thought you said you took care of me, that doesn't sound like good care..."

"I did my best." She pushed away the surge of guilt she felt a that. "I made you as comfortable as I could but your head..."

"Yes," he replied, "my head." He reached up to touch it again. His fingers found the rough skin at his temple; the point the bullet had entered.

"You were never right," she said. "It damaged you too much. You didn't know who you were, where you were... You didn't really know anything. But I tried to make it better for you when I could. Tried to make you comfortable." She thought about the cage that Hicks had kept him in, locked up like an untrustworthy dog. "Coming here has changed all that. Coming here has brought you back."

He looked around. "And where is here?"

"It's a place called..."

"Wormwood. It's a town called Wormwood isn't it?"

"Yes." "I dreamed about it. I remember that. I dreamed about it all the time. And when I dreamed..." His wrists suddenly began to bleed. Jumping up in panic he stared at the impossible wounds. "What is it? What's wrong with me?"

Hope looked around for something with which to deal with the bleeding. "You're fine,"

she said, pushing open the door to the general store and scanning the shelves for anything she could use. "Just wait there while I get something to..." She spotted a stack of bed sheets, grabbed one, and stepped back out onto the street.

Soldier Joe had vanished.

S
OLDIER
J
OE DIDN'T
know what he was running from. Soldier Joe didn't know very much at all.

He just knew that he had to shake off the feelings that were piling in on him, one after the other, before they buried him so deeply he'd never see the light of day again.

As he ran, drops of blood fell from his wrists and pattered into the dust behind him, nourishment to the soil of this impossible place.

He was by no means certain if the things he saw were in his head or tangible presences around him. How could he ever say? Did it even matter? He'd lived in dreams for longer than he'd lived in the real world, he was by no means certain whether one could be said to be more important than the other.

"Praise the Lord!" shouted a fat man stood on the boardwalk next to him, "for he is the bringer of all delights!"

The man vanished, reappearing on the roof of a building to his right. "Can I hear a ho sanna?" he cried.

The preacher , Soldier Joe, thought. Obeisance Hicks. As he ran, he remembered the feel of Hicks' leather belt. When the preacher had been too drunk to successfully lash with his tongue he had used his belt instead. Soldier Joe felt ashamed to have been so weak as to let him. To have lain there taking blow after blow.

He wished he could have the preacher here in front of him now, he would have merrily repaid him for every single indignity.

But the girl had said he was dead. So the man that kept appearing out of the corner of his eye must be an illusion, just one more amongst many.

The girl.

She would be panicking now, of course. It was obvious that he was important to her. She wanted to mother him, to keep him under her wing.

Where was his real mother now? His father? Everyone he had known before he had gone off to fight? So many people lost their lives in war, he knew, but most of them didn't go on to truly appreciate the fact.

"Yea though I walk through the valley of death!" shouted Hicks, standing in the dirt just ahead of him, a Bible in one hand and a mug of whisky in the other.

The valley of death.

He stopped running and looked at his wrists. They had stopped bleeding.

"This is the blood of Christ," Hicks told him, taking a sip of his whisky, "given for you."

Soldier Joe reached out to him, meaning to force that tin mug into his mouth. Hicks was no more substantial than his religious promises.

Wormwood, Soldier Joe thought. What was so important about Wormwood?

The valley of death.

Yea though I walk... He remembered taking tea with a man on a battlefield. A dream. But important. The man had been called... Had been called...

He had told Soldier Joe he would meet God. That was why he was to come to Wormwood. To meet God.

Alonzo, the man's name had been Alonzo.

Where was Alonzo?

H
OPE FOUND
S
OLDIER
Joe stood outside the saloon, staring at the doors. For a moment she thought he had lost the mental clarity he had only just regained, then he turned to her and she saw that he had simply been deep in thought.

"Sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have run. It was just too much. Still is really. But I'm trying, one step at a time."

She took his hands, trying to clean the blood from his forearms. He pulled away.

"Don't. It's fine, leave it."

She looked so upset at the thought that he smiled. "It's not personal. You don't have to nursemaid me is all."

He held out his hand. Cautiously, she took it.

"I like to help," she said. "Someone needs to look after you."

"No they don't. Not anymore. I can look after myself."

Hope tried not to let the fear she felt at that show in her face. After all, she should want him to be well. She just didn't know where that might leave her. "We need to go in there," he said, nodding towards the saloon. "I'm not sure how I know that, but I do, so there's no point in questioning it. I have enough questions without adding to the list."