“All that we hope is that when we go,
Our skin and our blood and our bones
Don’t get in your way, making you ill,
The way they did when we lived.”
-Morrissey, ‘There’s A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends’

GOING DOWN IN FLAMES

By Meriades Rai

October 31st – The Last Day

Okay. This is the difficult part.

I’m not the kind of girl who finds it easy to open up, even to friends – which, consequently, I don’t tend to have many of. But, if you want to understand everything that’s happened to me these past twelve days, you’ll need a certain insight into what was going through my head at the time. I realise that. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Just one thing. This stuff I’m going to end up telling you about me, about my past, about the way I felt before everything went up in smoke? It’s to help you establish a mental picture of the situation, not of me. You aren’t my shrink, and you have no right to analyse me or dissect me, or think you know me. Got it? Good. Just make sure you remember that.

And be in no doubt, this is all just a fraction of who I am. You may think you see fire when you look at me, but believe me, you’re barely scratching the surface. There’s an inferno burning way down in the depths that you can’t even begin to imagine, and a lot of that was there before I got mixed up with angels and demons and the souls of the damned. What went on with the bike? Well, let’s just say, that was a particularly nasty accident waiting to happen…

October 20th – The First Day

Ever seen Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid? Paul Newman and Robert Redford. Mm. I swear, the stifling summer nights I spent laying in bed as a teenager and looking up at the stars through my skylight, offering up the most unsound prayers to some kind of God who took pity on young girls whose hormones were just beginning to bloom like fields of flush-red poppies. I wish I may, I wish I might. Imagination is a powerful thing. But, I digress. The reason I mention that particular film right now is because of the ending.

I wasn’t born when that movie originally played, but I caught it at theatre when I was thirteen, in a double bill with The Sting. Jesus, that seems a lifetime ago. The Royale, in my hometown of Dalton, Massachusetts. Me, Betsy Cray and Mindy Anderson. When those end credits started to roll we all just sat there, stunned. Then we all began to cry, at the same time, like it was choreographed, or we were a skiffle of sad bitches at a Mariah concert. Afterwards we hung around in the park with sodas and fries and wondered if there was anyone who didn’t cry at the end of Butch Cassidy, especially the girls. None of us could remember much about the plot of The Sting, considering it was all so complicated, and because we were still thinking about Newman’s eyes and dying tragically beneath a Mexican sun. I saw The Sting again recently, and half of it is still over my head. I lost contact with Betsy and Mindy a long time ago, when I left Massachusetts behind with a sack load of other, more unpleasant memories.

Now I’m halfway up a mountain and ass-deep in trouble, and I think of that film for the first time in years. I kick open the door of the cabin where I’m boltholed like a rabid mink, and rush out into the cold, crisp air of the Appalachians, waving my Magnum and yelling incoherently. I’m scared, more than I’ve ever been, but I’ve always been stubborn and foolhardy and more than a little wild. Just like Butch and Sundance, I’m going to go down fighting. And, just like Butch and Sundance, I’ve no idea just how desperately I’m outnumbered until I see the horde of enemies encircling me like a pack of hungry wolves, and it’s only then that I realise… that I’m going to die. The only difference is, I’m not in the land of sombreros and tequila.

Which is a shame. At least then I wouldn’t be freezing my ass off.

At first I don’t really understand what I’m looking at. These creatures – Seekers, that’s what Johnny called them back in the cabin – aren’t animals, but they certainly aren’t human either. They’re something in-between. My senses are numb as I stumble against the porch railing, my boots skidding in a dark pool of what some function in my brain absently recognises as blood. They have eyes, and ears, and mouths, but their heads are misshapen and these features warped, like melted wax; they have bodies, similarly twisted, with spines that stretch and bend at impossible angles; they have limbs, long and thin, with more joints than expected, and huge hands and feet that erupt in a mass of wriggling, sharpened claws. Most of all, no two of them – and they number more than twenty, perhaps far more – are alike.

They remind me of something, these fiends. Not spiders or insects, although there are definite hints of that. Because they are emaciated, with pale and blistered flesh clinging slickly to their malformed skeletons, they are also reminiscent of the starving children in poverty aid commercials one tries to uncomfortably ignore when they appear in the television ad breaks during CSI. It’s only when they move – scuttling, quickly yet awkwardly, more side-to-side than back-and-forth – that I think of crabs. The way their claws slither and snap like pincers makes the semblance all the more evocative.

I’ve never lived by the ocean, and I rarely eat seafood. I’ve never had any kind of hang-up about crustaceans before. You’ll forgive me if I start now.

In the cabin from which I’ve just emerged a man named Johnny Blaze lies dying. My name is Rebecca Lockwood, and I’m a special agent with the FBI, working in the Missing Persons division out of the New York field office. Hi there. Johnny’s whereabouts have been undetermined for the best part of two weeks, and his family have been understandably concerned. I tracked him here, to part of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, not because I’m wonderful at my job – even though I am – but because, when all is said and done, he wasn’t especially difficult to find. Usually agents operate in pairs, but my regular partner is currently suffering from influenza and the office is short-staffed as it is. That, and sometimes I can be… difficult to work with. Whatever. I reasoned that Johnny wasn’t liable to pose any threat, and that there was nothing about his situation that suggested it would be dangerous to trek up here alone. I saw that he had a history as a drifter, and supposed that he and family life had proved to be incompatible. It happens. A lot.

Something else that happens quite a lot is that my impatience encourages me to make some poor decisions. This was one of them. Too late to dwell on it now, but I have a boss back in the city who will be more than happy to lean into my face and bark ‘I told you so’ in the unlikely event he ever has the chance to.

Whatever the Seekers did to Johnny – he spoke of some kind of ‘infection’ – it’s left him incapacitated. He’s given me a key to a motorcycle, which is currently parked up beneath a copse of pine trees on the edge of the clearing where the cabin is situated, some thirty metres distant. The key is made of bone and is unnaturally cold in the palm of my hand, like I’m clutching an ice cube. The bike is gorgeous, a customised Harley that’s all midnight blue steel and gleaming silver chrome, and possesses a certain brooding, menacing quality to it that’s hard to frame with words. Just staring at it is giving me gooseflesh, let alone the thought of riding it. But I haven’t got a choice. This is my only chance of escape, I know that, however slim it may prove to be. Johnny has sacrificed what remains of his life to give me this opportunity.

I hurdle the porch rail and sprint for the bike. Thirty metres. I manage ten before one of the Seekers is on me, grappling me to the ground with a brute strength that doesn’t correspond with its size.

I feel my breath lashed from my lungs as I sprawl, face forward, on cold, hard earth. I grunt and attempt to roll, drawing the Desert Eagle in my right hand towards me. Something clubs me across the shoulder, and after a second or two of excruciating pain I feel the arm slowly begin to go numb. There is a bony weight on my back, pressing painfully into my spine in more than one place. I hear myself whimper and huff, kicking out aimlessly like an animal in a trap…

…and then there is hot, fetid breath on my cheek, and a voice in my ear like splinters of bamboo being slowly inserted beneath bloodstained fingernails.

“We won’t go back,” it hisses, as something wet and sticky dribbles on my skin. “Never go back! The Seraph has promised us salvation…”

I know that the creature on my back is hideous and violently dangerous, and I’m already terrified, but then something else happens that pushes me over the edge. I feel part of it – its hand, its claws – clutch at my hip and dig in, pulling at my clothes. I scream and buck, my body suddenly revolting against what it perceives as invasion even though the beast is likely just trying to get a firm grip so that it can flip me over onto my back. All the better to have its way with me…? Well, to hell with that. I’m not sixteen any more. Not sixteen.

Filthy, evil bastard.

I shift my weight, and for a second my arm is free. I whip up the Magnum and squeeze the trigger, aiming blindly but praying that at this range it will be impossible to miss. Sometimes, prayers are answered.

The recoil of the gun is savage, the retort a deafening bark. The creature squatting on me shrieks, an ungodly sound, and flies backwards, limbs flailing. I feel blood, hot and thick, spatter across my face and in my hair. Some of it trickles over my top lip, and it tastes unspeakably foul. I half wretch, but at the same time instinct is taking control and pulling me to my feet.

To my left, two more of the Seekers are approaching me, claws outstretched and hideous mouths gaping like fresh wounds, exposing clusters of jagged teeth. To my right, one more, closer than its fellows. I whip the Eagle towards this one and fire again, and the beast’s distended chest explodes in gouts of dark, oily pulp. I duck and roll as one of the creatures on my opposite flank leaps at me; it misses me by inches, smacking into the ground where I had been standing a moment previously, grunting with the impact. I jam the barrel of the Magnum into the back of its swollen skull and pull the trigger, without flinching.

One second later, I’m on my feet once more, and scrambling for the bike. This time I reach it, although a shrill voice in my head is screaming that my efforts are in vain. There’s no way I’ll be able to work my quivering fingers to slot the bone key into the ignition, fire it up, then gauge the weight and body of the bike beneath me to the extent that I can tame it. I haven’t ridden a bike since I was twenty-one, and even that was no Harley. No, I’m just prolonging the inevitable. Right?

I grab the whining voice by the scruff of its neck and give it a metaphorical shake. Screw you, wetback. Now sit down, and shut the hell up.

The Seekers howl and snarl and converge on me from all angles. I’m cursing as I come astride the bike and try to jab the key home. Tears are stinging my eyes, and my heart is painful in my throat. I can’t breathe. There are claws on my shoulders, on my hips. Pulling me, dragging me. The key slips home with an incongruously delicate click.

And then…

And then…

…everything goes to Hell.

Suddenly I’m thirteen years old again, and I’m back in Dalton. Three things happened to me that summer, I now remember. I saw Butch Cassidy at The Royale and half-fell in love with Paul Newman, and some deep, dark part of me knew I would never meet a real man like that, someone so beautiful and ideal. That’s something no thirteen-year-old should be thinking, but I was always a little odd like that. Some people – my therapist, for one – would call it the first actualisation of long-seated melancholic tendencies and the beginnings of clinical depression. I call it realism. Now when I lay in bed at night, alone, listening to the rain and wondering what it would be like to have someone there to listen to it with me, I feel sad but not surprised, or anxious. Realism can work miracles, given the right edge. That edge being bourbon. Lots and lots of bourbon.

The second thing that happened was the death of my father. He was a simple man, an office clerk, giving lie to the myth that every girl in the FBI has a daddy in law enforcement they spend their lives trying to appease. My father was no Paul Newman, quiet and unremarkable, and he died in his sleep after a stroke rather than beneath a hail of bullets. But the pain couldn’t have been any less keen, the loss less devastating. It’s strange how such an everyday death can tear a family apart, one piece at a time… but that’s not important right now.

The third thing that happened was right at the end of summer, my first science class in a new school term. I was a shadow of the girl I had been, everyone said. And it was true. Physically I was frail, mentally it was worse. I drifted, as if caught up in the fug of a constant dream. It was no surprise when I accidentally spilled a beaker of acid on my arm. At the time, my lab partner commented I was so distracted that it took me a few moments to realise I should be screaming as my flesh smoked and spat and began to melt.

I think of all this in the instant that I turn the key in the ignition… and the midnight-and-chrome motorcycle bursts into flame. Depression, loss and physical harm all hurt in their own way, and time doesn’t diminish the pain as people promise it will. But I swear, I’ve never felt anything like this. The fire engulfs me, stripping away my clothes like so many candy wrappers and scorching the bare flesh beneath like sugar to black caramel in a pan. My auburn hair catches like embers in the wind; my eyes pucker and spit and pop; my bones curl and blacken like kindling. I weep, more desperately than at my father’s grave, and I scream, louder than science class. My tears are molten beads of flame. The burning lasts for an eternity.

This is true pain. And I feel. Every. Single. Moment.

Until, eventually, the worst of the agony begins to recede. I am slumped across the body of the motorcycle, which I slowly register is still – impossibly – intact. It’s hot and throbbing beneath me, and when I look I see that the wheels remain ablaze… as, it seems, does my head. Incongruous, but there you go. When I push myself up into a sitting position my vision is assailed by haunting swirls of gold and crimson, crackling softly. It takes me a second or two to realise that this odd sensation is caused by the fact that I’m not staring at fire but rather staring through it.

The air reeks with the stench of roasted flesh and the acrid burr of sulphur, like the striking of matches but a hundred, thousand times more potent. I raise my hands and see that I’m wearing leather gloves, which I certainly wasn’t before. I gaze down at my body, and find that I’m almost entirely sheathed in similar black leather, charred and smoking in patches, and lined with strings of silver studs like pearls. In one gloved hand I’m clenching a length of heavy chain, aglow with licks of fire. In my other hand, the Desert Eagle. It, too, has been burned to black.

I can hear myself breathing, the hiss of escaping methane tinged with the crisp whisper of autumn leaves on the wind. I lift my head, and stare across the clearing. Through the hazy mist of dancing flames I see the Seekers, still surrounding me but now having retreated to a discreet distance. They are afraid of me, I realise. Afraid of what I have become. And with good reason. Now that the initial shock of having my human body incinerated is passing, I’m beginning to remember a little of who – what – I am.

I want to smile. But the face I wear now, an ivory skull stripped entirely of flesh and human features and shrouded in a cocoon of gold and scarlet flames, isn’t really built for that.

“Hellspawn,” I say, breathing smoke. “You want a piece of me?”

The Seekers whine and scour the ground with their claws. I heft the chain and the Magnum, and in the gaping sockets of my burning skull the light of my new eyes burns a livid red.

“Then saddle up, bitches. It’s time to get it on.”