https://minimalfreaks.co/2024/05/va-klubkids-volume-1-kkr0045/

1. Shero – Berlin Moon (Original Mix) 07:24 120bpm 7A
2. Pepper Levain, Dolly Vara – Wakey Wakey (Original Mix) 02:28 110bpm 12B
3. KARMA SHE – OctoPussyKillerWhale (Radio edit) 03:46 122bpm 10B
4. Haute Dance – Toxic (Radio edit) 03:51 118bpm 9A
5. Joy Wellboy – Sweet Love (Original Version) 04:25 127bpm 10A
6. Sulene Fleming, Shero – Get Along (KlubKid Mix) 05:07 128bpm 5A
7. Dornika – One Drip Two Drip (Original Mix) 02:52 121bpm 10B
8. Shero, Aka Kelzz – Fly (Shero Remix) 05:11 125bpm 1A
9. Shero, JNM The Naked MC – MY FLOW (Original Mix) 05:24 125bpm 5A
10. Shero, Kabeel – SWEAT (Original Mix) 04:41 126bpm 12A
11. Cheriii – Hot and Sexy (Original Mix) 04:35 127bpm 10A
12. Electrosexual, Nicky Miller – Lèvres Roses feat. Nicky Miller (Version de nuit) 05:29 120bpm 8B
13. Shero, Ki Jeal – HUMAN (Extended mix) 06:52 121bpm 5A

im pretty sure it was but i think it was a mix of both sexual and emotional incest abuse. i'm female (nonbinary but my mom thought demons were controlling me when she found out) and i grew up fundie and being taught that being gay is a sin, but my mom displayed some weird behaviors with me that i guess could be considered "gay" in some way.
my mother would walk in on me showering or changing all the time. she has never knocked before entering once in my life, and i always felt very uncomfortable when she did.
im not sure when this started but she would come up behind me and randomly grab my ass and after years i just got sick of it and snapped and told her to stop. she got angry and told me that i'm her daughter and that she can touch me where she wants to. (she has also gotten pissed the one time i brought this up during a conversation where i wanted to be vulnerable with her about past sexual abuse from other people. she was annoyed the entire time i was talking and when i brought her grabbing my ass up she said that i was being dramatic and that it didn't mean anything.)
she has also came up behind me a couple times and grabbed and squeezed my breasts while saying i had squishy boobs or something like that (my memory is a bit foggy because i try to block it out).
she was the one who introducted me to porn, i remember around 9 she found russian porn downloaded on the family computer, and my mother was accusing me of being the one who downloaded it. i did not know how to download videos when i was 9 and i had never heard of porn before that. she was yelling at me as images of people having sex were frightening me and making me make have weird facial expressions, which my mom several years later told me it was proof i did it. my dad told her he didn't do it, i can't remember what my older brothers said, but my mom believed all of them over me and made me watch porn for the first time because of it. i had completely forgotten about this for so long until one day my mom reminded me of it for no reason as she was yelling at me about me hanging out with men when i was 20.
i remember one time my mom took me to roses and made me try on a clasp bra because she didnt like me wearing simple sports bras all the time for some reason, and because i never wear those kinds of bras it was very difficult for me to put it on in the dressing room and she told me that we weren't leaving until i "put the bra on right". we were in the dressing room for about 20 minutes while she silently stared at me struggling and my boobs the entire time i was trying ti put the bra on. i felt very stupid and ashamed and uncomfortable and i hated looking in the dressing room mirror as this happened.
i remember when i was around 15 or 16 or so i grew tired of my pubic hair because it was irritating my autism sensory issues, my mom noticed that i had shaved one day when she walked in on me showering and she got angry and asked me why i was shaving there. she would then proceed to walk in on me showering or changing to see if i was shaven or not a good while after that. she would also sometimes ask me to get something for her while she was showering and when i got it and came back she would open the shower curtain to where i could see her naked and this continued until i moved out.
sometimes she would ask me to sleep with her in her bed when my dad was gone for whatever reason and she would spoon me like how a couple spoons and she would sometimes stroke my waist and hips and thighs and sometimes lightly touched the side of my breast.
when i was 18 i was not allowed to speak to anyone outside of my family, i did not have friends and i was not allowed to walk past the mailbox to do anything even as normal and mundane as going to the grocery store by myself. so when my mom found me texting men on my phone because i was immensely lonely and desperate to interact with anyone except my mom 24/7, she was obviously extremely pissed and took my phone away for quite a while. but i noticed after she ungrounded me when i was almost 19 and gave me my phone back, she had looked through several of the chats where i had sent nudes and sexual videos to men. i don't know why she looked at so many of the chats and my nudes because they were all basically the same and she should have gotten the idea by the second or third chat she looked at. i thank fucking god that i had not accepted by this time i was bisexual and sexting women because i have no idea what my mom wouldve done if she saw me doing a big of a "sin" as that. ironically ive seen her texts with her female best friend and it could very easily be interpreted as homoerotic flirtatious texts.
as for the emotional stuff, my mom would unload her emotional baggage onto me and be very jealous when i displayed behaviors that could be even just slightly indicative that i preferred my dad over her since i was very young, but her emotional dependance on me got bad around 16 or 17. my mom and my dad were fighting a lot at that point in my life, and by the time i was 18 they were not speaking to each other and my mom would constantly come to me for comfort for her broken marriage and other middle aged adult stuff i did not understand. i also think on new years when i was 17 she wanted me to drink a bottle of wine with her to cheer her up. i was constantly being the recipient of information that should be communicated with an adult closer to her age (ie her husband) and expected to handle her emotional distress in an adult almost partneresque way to validate her and her feelings, and she would get angry when i wouldn't know what to say or wouldn't constantly be on her side emotionally backing her up when she was against my dad.
i have since then moved out and i now live on my own, but since im financially dependant on my mom when it comes to insurance and healthcare i can't cut her off, and she still gets angry when she finds out ive been interested in men/a man when its very much appropriate for my age (21) to be so, she tells me i still can't understand romantic and sexual relationships and that i need to listen and come to her when it comes to romantic and sexual guidance. by the way she still wants to control me and see me pure to the point where she wants me to save my first kiss for marriage (that ship sailed a very long time ago).
oh, im just now remembering how one time she found out i had sex with a boy my age when i was 17, and her first response was "well i hope when i kiss you on your mouth you didn't suck dick that same day too!" or something like that.
i have been suspecting that my mom is secretly bisexual and hates herself for it, but is her behavior with me (homo) sexual abuse or is it just sexual abuse from a mother to her daughter and her supposed straight sexuality doesn't really matter because child abuse isn't bounded by sexuality? ive been wondering if an abusive parent is closeted and hates themselves for it can it be a factor in when they choose to sexually abuse their same-sex child as not just a way to abuse and belittle them but as a way of "exploring" their homosexuality without as much guilt, so to speak? that's the best way i can explain it. im not saying closeted abusers are evil because their sexuality drives them to sexually abuse, im bisexual myself and i have no desire to abuse anyone, abusers will abuse in whatever manner they want, but im specifically asking when it comes to nonstraight sexualities because society hasn't discriminated against straight people, so im asking can maybe a parent choose to sexually abuse their same-sex child but not their opposite-sex children because theyre closeted and want the "im your parent i can do what i want" excuse as a way to secretly explore their gay curiousities without as much guilt as say going to a hotel for outright lesbian hookup sex and make their child carry the burden for their guilt? for context i have two older brothers and while my mom did also abuse them she did not sexually abuse them, the sexual abuse and emotional incest was only on me, her daughtesame-sex child.
so i guess i have two questions:

1. was that actually sexual abuse and emotional incest? or was it something else under a different term?
   
2. can being closeted/internalized homophobia be a possible factor in why a parent would choose to sexually abuse their same-sex child instead of their opposite-sex children? just to again clarify, the interalized homophobia and sexual abuse would be the problem, not being queer. i'm very proud to be bisexual and nonbinary and i will not take you seriously at all if you think just being gay makes you predatory. if this question is not the case then i respect that, i just want answers and to try to make sense of what my mom did.
   

Hi Everyone,Makeup lover and ex-shopaholic with lots of barely used items.
Open to offers.
I can send you links to my eBay feedback via PM so please feel free to ask if you'd like this. :)
·All my items are from a pet and smoke free home, are well looked after and have been stored in a cool dark place (drawers in my bedroom) and are now stored in a box, ready for posting.
· All products are full size unless otherwise stated.· Items vary between swatched to lightly used unless otherwise stated. Batch codes available upon request.
· Dispatch within 3 working days of cleared payment via PayPal Goods and Services – I cover the fees.· If I still have the original outer box (I often keep boxes) for any of the products, this will be included.· Prices listed are for the product alone and do not include the shipping charge.
· All items sent within the UK will be sent 2nd Class Signed For (£4.69 for a small parcel and £3.55 if I can send as a large letter in a padded envelope). All items will be well packaged to protect them.
· If you would like multiple items and the total is over £50 this would need to be sent Next Day by 1pm for £10.
· If you are an international buyer, please state your location and I’ll get back to you with a quote for the shipping charge but please expect this to be £15-28 as I send all packages tracked with the correct insurance.
· Any questions, just send let me know and I’ll get back to you asap.
Thanks for looking!
Chanel:
Chanel Baume Essential in Transparent £20.00 https://imgur.com/jDbxNMZ
Hourglass:
Ambient Lighting blush in Diffused Heat £21.00 https://imgur.com/nPjS31R
Ambient Strobe Lighting Blush in Euphoric Fusion £21.00 https://imgur.com/URQTSIh
Ambient Strobe Lighting Blush in Brilliant Nude £21.00 https://imgur.com/ml1Xvpt
Charlotte Tilbury: Brightening Youth Glow £25.00 https://imgur.com/qFuwIWn
Cheek To Chic Swish & Pop Blusher in Sex on Fire £18.00 https://imgur.com/ESL3P9r
Cheek To Chic Swish & Pop Blusher in The Climax £18.00 https://imgur.com/dw62cfE
Instant Look In A Palette in Gorgeous, Glowing Beauty £38.00 https://imgur.com/tTFcOpI
Unisex Healthy Glow All-Year Hydrating Summer Tint Moisturiser £20.00 https://imgur.com/1Ixdp8s
Luxury Eyeshadow Palette in The Glamour Muse £25.00 https://imgur.com/UMdXoV4
Beach Stick Lip to Cheek in Las Salinas £20.00 https://imgur.com/lAtlIDo
Colour Chameleon in Champagne Diamonds – Barely used but nib seems to be more inside (never sharpened) so will need sharpening. £10.00 https://imgur.com/WAL7cwb
Eyes to Mesmerise in Veruschka £12 https://imgur.com/PN360SQ
Eyes to Mesmerise in Star Gold £12 https://imgur.com/yc9VBkj
Glowing, Pretty Skin Palette £30 https://imgur.com/RgjH84L
X Norma Parkinson Filmstar Bronze & Glow Sun Tan & Sun Light £25 https://imgur.com/LI0kzWS
X Norma Parkinson Colour of Youth Healthy, Happy Lip & Cheek Glow £20 https://imgur.com/fGh5lqO
Bronze & Blush Glow £35 https://imgur.com/FaXu1xuInstant Look in a Palette in Stoned Rose Beauty £35.00 https://imgur.com/dcULfQL
Luxury Palette in Green Lights £25 https://imgur.com/X7417qS
Luxury Palette in Pillow Talk £25 https://imgur.com/w9y1X33
Luxury Palette of Pops in Pillow Talk £25 https://imgur.com/1a6Y8By
Laura Mercier: Blush in Rose Bloom £16.00 https://imgur.com/fTPnHkO
Laura Mercier Matte Radiance Baked Powder Bronzer in Bronze-03 £18.00 https://imgur.com/X76ixeD
Laura Mercier Lip Pencil in Chestnut £10 https://imgur.com/qtnXzxB
Face Illuminator in Affection £25.00 https://imgur.com/yJ7PX0d
Face Illuminator in Devotion £25.00 https://imgur.com/HUQqd47
Laura Mercier Amaretto Swirl £10.00 https://imgur.com/PwQHTub
Laura Mercier Vibe £10.00 https://imgur.com/ANiNiXc
Caviar Stick Eye Colour in Burnished Bronze £15.00 https://imgur.com/Sq39EtY
Caviar Stick Eye Colour in Metallic Taupe £15.00 https://imgur.com/bpjlQmR
Tom Ford:
Emotionproof Eye Color in Casino £20 https://imgur.com/h4OUNMv
Emotionproof Eye Color in Brut Rose £20 https://imgur.com/BHL2fSh
Eye Color Quad in 13 Orchid Haze £45 https://imgur.com/v7628qH
Eye Color Quad in 01 Golden Mink £45 https://imgur.com/Hf41wBa
Private Shadow in 01 Body Double Vinyl £20 https://imgur.com/SxtG047
Private Shadow in 04 Iris Bronze Sateen £20.00 https://imgur.com/OwFUCuV
Sheer Cheek Duo in 05 Lissome (Used once but please note this is damaged: the two shades fall out of the pans if tipped upside down – they would need to be glued down if you plan on taking this out and about.) £20 https://imgur.com/KUsUk3e
Dior:
Diorshow mono in 658 Cosmopolite £15 https://imgur.com/6WzBh6V
Bobbi Brown:
Ulla Johnson Eye Palette in Minou £20.00 https://imgur.com/VZVqyYw
Lorac:
Unzipped Eyeshadow Palette £25.00 https://imgur.com/XFM0tFb
Benefit:
Dandelion Twinkle (mini 1.5g) £5.00 https://imgur.com/riLhNaY
By Terry:Compact-Expert Dual Powder in 7. Sun Desire £20 https://imgur.com/Z0Cq1pp
Viseart:
Theory in Cashmere £20 https://imgur.com/QFiFgtg
Marc Jacobs:Eye-Conic Eyeshadow Palette in Steel(etto) £30: https://imgur.com/sv3K75r
Spotlight Glow Stick £20 https://imgur.com/4lkDJ5f
Le Marc Lip Crème in 228 Infamous £10 https://imgur.com/DdU2Iy7
Burberry:Nude Radiance No.01 Fresh Glow Luminous Fluid Base £20 https://imgur.com/JrzwAYN
Fresh Glow Highlighter in White No.01 £20 https://imgur.com/AItL9Dt
NARS:Blush in Torrid £18.00 https://imgur.com/TQSEaPk
Blush in Liberte £18.00 https://imgur.com/diO7MlV
Blush in Behave £18.00 https://imgur.com/lbI813w
Cruising lipstick £8.00 https://imgur.com/6L9egoG
Rosecliff lipstick £8.00 (please be aware this one seems to smudge on the side in the tube when rolled up – see pic) https://imgur.com/xWyvOfm
Riot lip pencil £8.00 https://imgur.com/fM6ojlm
Skin Deep Palette £25 https://imgur.com/SnncRIp
Blush in Amour £18 https://imgur.com/5QaOSZK
Audacious Anna £8.00 https://imgur.com/AY8dmi3
Velvet Matte Lip Pencil in Red Square £8.00 https://imgur.com/f4H6L01
Velvet Matte Lip Pencil in Rebel £8.00 https://imgur.com/dU3PzJ1
Velvet Matte Lip Pencil in Dragon Girl £8.00 https://imgur.com/56EfMMV
Man Ray The Veil Cheek Palette £25 https://imgur.com/0GSCu0g
Paloma Contour Duo £20.00 https://imgur.com/G31JEaO
Hammamet Eyeshadow Duo £15 https://imgur.com/qyVtVCE
Isolde Eyeshadow Duo £15 https://imgur.com/yICbjTc
Natasha Denona:
Camel Palette £30 https://imgur.com/nKP0eyc
Glam Palette £50.00 https://imgur.com/BspUx4T
Guerlain:
Terracotta Limited Edition Bronzer £35.00 https://imgur.com/JgC1P43
Terracotta Sun Trio Bronzing and Contouring Palette in Clair – Light £30.00 https://imgur.com/wcrk5vo
Too Faced:
Natural Love Ultimate Neutral Eyeshadow Collection Limited Edition £50.00 https://imgur.com/XZedaEe
Too Faced Natural Eyes £30: https://imgur.com/c4MCJsI
Born This Way The Natural Nudes £25 https://imgur.com/s1MB6uv
Milk Chocolate Soleil Light?medium Matte Bronzer £18 https://imgur.com/jvX26dG
Too Faced Mini Love Flush 16-Hour Blush in Crazy in Love 2g £4.00 https://imgur.com/9tvRigE
Too Faced Mini Love Flush 16-Hour Blush in Dream Lover 2g £4.00 https://imgur.com/8q4smuT
MAC:
MAC Mineralize Blush in Naturally Flawless £18.00 https://imgur.com/1PcLxf2
Single eyeshadow in Satin Taupe £10.00 https://imgur.com/DohGoWC
Nutcracker Sweet Peach Face Compact Tutu (highlighter) and At Dusk (blush) £25.00 https://imgur.com/T8ylopU
Lip Pencil in Subculture £8.00 https://imgur.com/B2eJjgi
Dusky Rose Times Nine £15 https://imgur.com/WZqEBPL
Satin Lipstick in Faux £10 https://imgur.com/zrvLb3K
Satin Lipstick in Brave £10 https://imgur.com/WrbOnCy
Liptensity in Driftwood £12 https://imgur.com/AmTyk9N
Veluxe Pearl Eyeshadow in All That Glitters £10 https://imgur.com/tkYEVQL
Veluxe Pearl Eyeshadow in Woodwinked £10 https://imgur.com/6Ju1Xca
Nutcracker Sweet Copper Face Compact in Whisper of Gilt and Pleasure Model £20.00 https://imgur.com/p6bkpes
Clinique:01 Hefty Highlight £10 https://imgur.com/DugNJOH
Eyeshadow Duo £3.00 (please note this is more used than the other items hence price) https://imgur.com/Hr1ZrTE
Buxom:Buxom May Contain Nudity £20 https://imgur.com/doupBER
Tarte:
Double Duty Classic Courage Eye & Cheek Palette £20.00 https://imgur.com/uQc48wt
Sex Kitten Eyeshadow Palette £15.00 https://imgur.com/N6HDUW5
Tartelette Tease (please note this arrived with one shade damaged) £10 https://imgur.com/cAf77dN
Tarteist Pro To Go £15 https://imgur.com/qmOGt4W
Mermaid Kisses Mini Lipstick in Sandals £4 https://imgur.com/BKwpJjo
Amazonian Clay 12-Hour Blush in Dazzled £15 https://imgur.com/TRJZW5i
Maneater Eyeshadow Palette £12 https://imgur.com/MdqOZjg
Amazon clay eye & cheek palette, be your own tarteist £20 https://imgur.com/LoT74Va
Amazon clay eye & cheek palette, miracles of the Amazon £20 https://imgur.com/pMRQ81B
Mini Amazonian Clay Matte Waterproof Bronzer in Hotel Heiress 2.2g £5.00 https://imgur.com/jncXcvm
BeccaMineral Blush in Flowerchild £25.00 https://imgur.com/I3xk5PF
Lipstick in Sugar £12.00 https://imgur.com/4cP6zfl
Shimmering Skin Perfector Pressed Champagne Pop £18 https://imgur.com/hg81MeW
Ombre Nudes Eyeshadow Palette: £20 https://imgur.com/1o7zfx9
Kevyn AucoinThe Pure Powder Glow Blush in Dolline £10 https://imgur.com/r4zdXM5
It Cosmetics:Your Skin But Better CC+ Cream in Fair (mini 4ml) £6 https://imgur.com/qFkaQMy
Morphe:
35O Palette £10.00 https://imgur.com/guBfHVl
Milani:
Milani Naturally Chic £3.00 https://imgur.com/sm4sehq
Everyday Eyes Collection 02 Bare Necessities £3 **(**Please note one shade arrived shattered when I received it). https://imgur.com/8rHsj0P
Colour Statement Moisture Matte Lipstick in 61 Naked £3 https://imgur.com/rzfOruY
Zoeva:
Zoeva Naturally Yours Eyeshadow Palette £13.00 https://imgur.com/xRBNMKf
Caramel Melange Eyeshadow Palette £13.00 https://imgur.com/39Zivoq
Cocoa Blend Eyeshadow Palette £13.00 https://imgur.com/5ibgQGn
Violet Voss:
Holy Grail Palette £15 https://imgur.com/FkfWVnf
Urban Decay:
Naked 3 Eyeshadow Palette £25.00 https://imgur.com/XujVYyU
Single Eyeshadow in Diamond Dog £20.00 https://imgur.com/T2XoEwv
Afterglow 8-Hour Powder Blush in Fetish £16.00 https://imgur.com/cEamNe2
Afterglow 8-Hour Powder Blush in Score £16.00 https://imgur.com/WatD1SF
Lipstick in Naked £6.00 https://imgur.com/jugqlFX
24/7 Glide-On Lip Pencil in 69 £4.00 – Please note this is barely used but sharpens unstably https://imgur.com/7VgaIuo
Naked Heat Eyeshadow Palette £20.00 https://imgur.com/1gLp5Wt
Afterglow 8-Hour Powder Blush in Rapture £16 https://imgur.com/Vqfj5dy
Lancome:Star Bronzer in 03 Naturel Bronze £10 https://imgur.com/CXUH1ye
Elizabeth Arden:Eyeshadow Palette £12.00 https://imgur.com/ZlqeALh
Eyeshadow Palette Browns £12.00 https://imgur.com/f2fvWKZ
Blush and Highlighter Trio £12.00 https://imgur.com/fJ25kAQ
Elizabeth Arden Melon £8.00 https://imgur.com/fI0VFDL
Elizabeth Arden Pink Pucker £8.00 https://imgur.com/FRm9nz0
Elizabeth Arden Bold Red £8.00 https://imgur.com/hx0lbG2
Ted Baker:Eyeshadow Trio £3.00 https://imgur.com/6c67YFh
New Look:Pure Colour Eyeshadow Palette in 29 Brown Pattern £3 https://imgur.com/yFPr4us
Sleek:
Blush in Antique £3 https://imgur.com/gEMPmYh
Maybelline:Colorsenational Lip Liner in 140 Intense Pink £2.00 https://imgur.com/ZBRigDS
GOSH:
Smokey Eyes Palette in 02 Brown £3.00 https://imgur.com/pNrm7ig
BareMinerals:
Complexion Rescue in Vanilla 02 £20.00 https://imgur.com/tqDLuhH
Kat Von D:Kat Von D Shade and Light Eye Contour Palette £30.00 https://imgur.com/AVmbNPb
Physicians Formula:
Butter Bronzer £9.00 https://imgur.com/dzUmfhw
Memebox:
Blush in Lady Pink £3.00 https://imgur.com/ItSZGzt
Anastasia Beverley Hills:
Modern Renaissance https://imgur.com/jJIDmLM

Just quick addendum: this will actually be three parts. Is it bad news though? Not really. If you're reading this that means that part 3 is already published and available to read, because I will be publishing them at the same time. Basically, as I recall all of this, I didn't realize how much there was. Not the biggest deal in the world, but luckily I realized it's really just better to break it into a third part before I released it. So anyway, here's not one but two new parts, concluding this initiation into my personal transformation.
On a perfect mid March morning, I woke up to the sun breaking. I heard birds chirping. I took a shower, did my morning workout routine, took another shower, and put on my outfit. Then I did my makeup. It was 73°F. I remember this day clearly as I remember all the events of the game clearly. Down to the last vivd detail. I do this because this marks a powerful point of symbolic and honestly even literal shifts inside myself and my life itself. The weather had been nice the previous few days, and I smiled when I thought about the game. "The game" being this thing I brought up in part 1: "dress thrills". I was about to play it for the first time. The idea was, I had to dress as slutty as I thought I could get away with without looking like I did it on purpose. To learn to really walk that line. I hadn't necessarily gone out of my way to "dress down" so to speak, except sometimes for my husband, which was always meant to be obvious signs for him anyway. This was supposed to be subtle. How was I going to pull this off? Up to this point I don't believe I've ever given a description of myself. So I'm a 5ft tall blonde woman in her late fourties. I weigh around 120lbs, and the running joke with my friends and later even my mom was that all my body weight was in my ass. Basically I've always been a short skinny girl with a fat ass. I have a pretty face, I've aged pretty well. My complection is more pale, but I tan easily. I have a pretty happenin rack for my age if I do say so myself, I'm a low C. Them ol gals still ain't what they used to be, but i think they're doin great. Anyway, as for my self description, just use your imagination for anything else you'd want to know. So, as I was saying, I was excited when I got dressed. All I was basically going to do was tell a buncha burley boys to haul boxes and totes downstairs from one corner of the basement to the other. Regardless, I had to dress practically. So I wore some high waisted blue jeans. They were elastic blue jeans (jeggings) that hugged my ass tight, to the last outline, and I knew it. Then I wore a low cut top that hung just above my midriff enough to be a tease but not show too much. My top was just revealing enough. My makeup wasn't done super detailed or anything glamorous, but I was still on point. My hair was tied back into a ponytail and I had my white cloudfoam Adidas on because them thangs are comfy. I also put on a cheap bracelet I had sitting around. I had maybe worn it twice before but I'd had it a few years. It was a little rhinestone bracelet in the shape of a halved plumb, pit in view, with little pink and purple and green stones sparkling. As I pulled it out of the box I found myself appreciating it again, even if it was a bit big on my wrist, so I threw it on real quick. I heard the ring of the doorbell. I walked toward it with a mild anxiety, and suddenly became more aware of my ass and it's bounce as I stepped. I took a deep breath and remembered I was getting a bunch of work done for free either way. I felt a bit better. I opened the door and looked up to see the six man crew ready to help me out. Joe was in the front and Brandon right behind him. "Joe!" I greeted him genuinely happily and opened the door. His familiar face warmed me up. "So good to see you!" I walked back and signaled them in. Joe of course was the first one in, so as the boys trailed in behind him I gave him a little hug. It already felt a little too natural for both of us. It was very brief but I fought not to wrap my leg around him. I swear I felt a quick twitch in his right hip. I think he fought something too, in the half second. "We're happily here to help" he said, with his usual wry smile and well meaning look. He's a "helper" if you understand. He spends most of his spare time volunteering to help people somehow anyway. He really wants the best for people. I smiled ear to ear just knowing he was here to offer help with no expectation of anything: just a good man. A gorgeous one. A moment later Brandon trailed behind him and we hugged too. That moment wasn't as discreetly intense, but I'm pretty sure I felt something there too. Now Brandon for a time would call me by my last name, and because Valantine's day has become my favorite Holiday, I'll go with the name "Valantine." So he says, after our hug, "We're ready any time you are Mrs. Valantine". I already felt a bit overwhelmed. Then I realized there were four unfamiliar faces standing there. The ones I'd also.....noticed.....while flickin my bean at Joe and Brandon out in the yard. I hadn't even been introduced to them. "Well I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I don't think I've met your friends." I said, barely succeeding in keeping my voice natural and stable at the time. So, standing almost side by side behind Joe was Jason, David, Josh and John. Joe and Brandon introduced me to each of them. Jason was a redhead who stood about 6' tall. He has a more youthful looking face than the rest of them, but some stubble jutted out of his chin quite masculinely that day. He has a leaner frame. David is a bit shorter than the rest, at about 5'10", with black hair. I noticed he was stacked THICK. His frame is like a refrigerator or something. Very broad shouldered, not at all fat, but uh, "dense" all the same. He had a short and well trimmed beard and sunglasses on. Then there was Josh, who was a baffling 6'5" tall. He had on a white wifebeater and blue jeans. He had brown hair, and his frame wasn't skinny, but he isn't super thick either. Almost like a swimmer. Then there's John. He's a six foot tall blonde who's also thick like Dave. Well, not quite so much, but a similar kind of frame. They were all athletes, and they all looked like it. I saw some very nice shapes in that moment. Some of them, well, they were the kind of shapes that bulge. After the introduction and some small talk I won't bore you with, I led them down stairs into my basement. I swear I could feel them looking at my ass bounce while I walked. I got a little more turned on than I already kind of was. I directed them to a pile of totes while we casually talked. They began to move what was honestly a lot of storage containers for all kinds of things over to the other side of the basement. It was something that needed to be done, but they had no idea they were also kind of doing this for my amusement. I felt a little bit guilty, but also realized this was an opportunity for me to make my creme de la creme play. Telling them that this was my home and I'd feel terrible if I didn't carry something, Joe insisted I just stand back. Not to be told not to help, I in an unusually chipper voice told him I was going to anyway. That's when I approached a large ceramic lamp sitting off to the side. I made sure to take a serious posture to pick it up, squatted, and just before I picked it up I popped my ass out just enough to look natural, and enough for those boys to notice that I do squats regularly. Then I gripped it, slowly picked it up and even rose to the tips of my toes. I quickly came down on my heels from my toes and felt my ass bounce. I knew they all saw THAT. All the same, I carried it over to the other side, feeling my ass give a little jiggle with each step, and put it down with a little grunt. They thought I had no idea that I had given them a nice little show. After that Joe asked me to take it easy and just enjoy some convo. I gratefully agreed and told them I was gonna run to the bathroom real quick. I went upstairs, almost closed the door, leaving a little crack, made some footsteps across the floor and walked in place for a moment in front of my bathroom. The truth is it must have looked funny. Then I crept back over to the basement door and listened. I faintly heard Brandon say, in a low voice: "I know she doesn't know what just happened, but if I could I'd SPANK that ass" There was stifled laughter. Then Joe goes, just as quiet: "Yeah she's a good woman but she's kind of aloof. All the same kid that goes without saying." Then the voices trailed off. Suddenly someone went "HOW old did you say she was?" I smiled. Then I couldn't make much more out. I went back down stairs after a few more moments trying to listen, nothing else really coming through. When I got down stairs we carried on as normal, but I could see some of their faces were a little red. Then Josh pointed out my mother's old sewing machine. He asked if it still worked. To be honest I don't know much about those things, but I saw another opportunity. So I go "while that thing is something like 100 years old, they say that if you keep it well lubricated and taken care of, it should last a long time." And I could tell how it hit their ears, then I pivoted. "Can you imagine life in the 1920s? Even how people viewed their outfits and clothes? What medicine was like?" And that led into a bit more conversation. All the same after they were done I served them all some tea, talked for about another half hour, and saw them on their way out. They had gotten most of the storage moved but there was a bit more that could be done. All the same... By the time they left, I was soaked. It was time for payoff. I won the game. I stripped down, got into my toybox, strapped in and had the MOST fun. I saw Brandon, Catherine and Tony the next morning at church. I was sure to tell Catherine just how helpful they were and thanked Bran again. Brandon had told her there was still a lot that could be done at my place, which was true enough. They let me know later if I needed Brandon and his friends or maybe even Joe on Saturdays for a while, well, they could look into doing workouts at my place. Joe knew I used to teach some fitness classes out of my home and that I still had a large workout space with a home gym. So we agreed and later Joe confirmed the following Saturday they'd come do some more work for me after a workout in my home. So there was another chance for dress thrills, after all, why wouldn't I joint them? I won't go nearly so into detail for this day, but when they had finished what was left with the storage, which is all I had them do that day, we got our workout started. I remember I told them I was going to change first. I had been wearing a tame blouse and some slacks, but when I came back down I was wearing a short black pair of spandex gym shorts that stopped juuuust under my cheeks. Then I put on a sports bra that shows just enough cleave, and my black ASICS. As i walked in the room i took off my plumb bracelet, i had been wearing it again, and i set it to the side. When we got started we formed a couple rows and I stood in the front. Behind me was Josh, John and Dave, Joe to my right, myself in the middle, and Jason to my left. Needless to say once we started moving the back row got the first whole part of the show. But we did things where they basically all got to see. I even got to lead the workout for a while. I jumped, I pushed, I lunged, I squatted and I thrusted. I could feel them all tense up a bit from time to time when I looked at them, and I could feel them all look at me when I wasn't looking. I served home made cookies and lemonade when we were done. While we were talking and snacking i invited them over the next weekend to swim instead. We could get more done and all but it was just my way of showing gratitude. They agreed, and just before they left I said in an ever so naturally aloof way: "I had such a good time boys, thanks for giving me such a good workout!" With a smile as honest as pie on my face. About 30 minutes after they left I ended up spending some really good quality time with my wallbanger. Then we have yet another opportunity, yet a third round of dress thrills. They came back the next Saturday to swim. I wanted to take things to just the next level of risk. To kick it up a notch. My last two outfits might have been risque, a bit on the line, but still though, they made sense. Or at least didn't raise too many questions, even if my outfits had answered alot of questions without speaking a word about them. Now we were about to swim. If there's ever an excuse to be basically naked, it's while you're swimming, right? Right. Okay, so I wore a multi-cam bottom that had a natural shrink up and around my ass, stopping mid cheek. My top was multi-cam too, but basically was just a strip of cloth that barely covered muh tatas. It was so small in fact they almost might as well have been out. My nips and airies mighta been covered, but not much else was. I was a little afraid they'd pop completely out that day, but I was careful and thankfully they didn't. I also had my bracelet on. When they rang the doorbell this time, I wasn't as nervous as I had been the previous two times. I know I didn't say much about it, but it was a whole process. I felt relaxed and even comfortable in my body at that moment though. I will give more detail later, but in those moments of small talk I already had created a bond with them. They were all good, smart, and hard working.....and hot. Especially Joe and Brandon. They made me feel safe too. So, instead of answering the door in a pair of trunks and a tank top with my bikini underneath like I planned, I just answered the door in my bikini. I opened the door. They were all in their trunks with either white Tees or tanks. "Hello boys!" I said with the mildest amount of seduction in my voice. I immediately hoped they didn't notice. Then again I kinda hoped they did. As they all came in, Dave being the last and closing the door behind him, I go "water's fine out back" and began walking straight to the back sliding glass door to the pool. I was like the pied piper. They didn't say anything, I could just feel the concentration as they followed me out the door. It didn't take long to break the silence though. I just picked up a pitcher of tea and offered glasses, and we got to talking naturally and it was quickly almost like they forgot I was basically naked. Almost, but not quite. Because they couldn't and I knew it. It was actually a little bit chilly out to swim that day, but for some reason, nobody seemed to mind. I pretended I didn't notice my nipples hardening slightly through my top. I had set up a volleyball net and I watched them play. They all were showing off for me. Watching them all strike the ball as their muscles rippled, young and strong. Hearing them talk about sports, hearing them laugh, I soaked it all in and enjoyed it. And I swam with them, and splashed and got splashed, and played as you'd expect in the pool with a group of friends. In the meantime I was able to speak just fluidly enough and play just dumb enough to convince them I had no idea there was anything, uh, "wrong" me with having so few clothes on. In truth nobody brought it up, even though clearly everybody but me obviously noticed. At a point in time Jason really quickly lunged toward me in the water and I jumped back a bit. I saw Brandon in my peripheral as I started to move back, and let my left hand barely "slip" onto his groin. I laughed with Jason really hard because that really was a jump scare for me, and Bran thought I hadn't noticed at all what happened. I noticed though. It was impossible not to. Now there was no question: Brandon had a magical creature in his pants. The Leviathan...a magic meat dragon. After a while I went inside to grab a drink, and as I backed up from my fridge I legitimately hadn't noticed Joe behind me, waiting so he could also get a drink. So I opened the door and stepped back fairly quickly, just out of habit, when I felt my ass just absolutely CRASH into Joe. And I'm not talking about like "oh its so hot you ran into Joe" no. I mean I felt his hip bones crash into my back bone right before my bumper ass simultaneously knocked his big ass all the way down and I myself lost balance and also fell backwards. And I hit the ground hard too, like WHAM. But to be honest I was mostly just shocked and had the wind knocked out of me. I wasn't in much pain. I looked over at Joe, who was a little out of breath too. We were both fine, but the look on his face was crazy. According to him mine too, and I'm positive he's right. After a second or two of eye contact on the floor, he goes "I ever tell you I love your plumb?", referring to my bracelet. We both began to laugh and laugh and laugh. It wasn't the words themselves, it was how he said it. He sounded only a little flirtatious, but more so reassuring. It was a good little moment. I made us each a Bloody Mary and we went back outside and had a good time. I could have sucked his dick while I was making his drink though, I remember thinking that distinctly. And so after yet another night of fun and play I sent them all off. Then I had another euphoric jack off session to them. I won again. Another good night in my toybox. I got to talking to Catherine and she asked me if there was anything else that could be done, and I said while there was plenty, unless she'd have him do some property work for me then honestly there wasn't much I could think of. She knew exactly what I was talking about. My husband and I owned a country house with some acreage a few hours south of town. She also knew of the work I was talking about too. I had mentioned it once before in the past. There was a lot of brush and some fallen trees that needed to be cleared, some maintenance on a shed and some other minor things. Bran said he didn't see why he and his friends couldn't. His mother said she had no idea if his father would let him out of town that weekend. But low and behold I got a text from Cathy, her husband encouraged it. "That kind of work will be good for him." Joe had experience doing that kind of work, he'd be able to oversee them besides. We were in early April at this point, and it looked like I had an entire weekend of my little game booked with the boys, who were all coming. They were Bran's best friends. I was SO excited. Too excited. Quietly excited. But all the same I felt something turn in my mind, some kind of feeling things were about to change. I also felt an intuition to just lean into what I was doing anyway. I felt myself, yet again, dismiss my own apprehension. I didn't think much more about it. Suddenly in one week I would be embarking on an adventure. At the time I thought of it as an adventure with new friends, and a personal adventure of private (if not outwardly inappropriate) gratification in liu of my derelict husband. What I didn't realize is that this would turn into the adventure of my lifetime. One week. Not even, not really. But basically. One week.

First Chapter Previous Chapter
TRAGEDY at Concert Hall.
NIGHTMARE performance by renowned violinist and orchestra.
66 DEAD & 100s INJURED in CONCERT MASSACRE!
For an entire month, the media incessantly buzzed about Gabrielle Vilonte's last performance, a relentless stream that wore on Mr. Vilonte's nerves. Reporters bombarded him with calls, clamoring for an exclusive interview. Fed up, he had silenced his phone for days, ignoring every text and call, and stowed it away in the glove compartment. Thankfully, public interest had already shifted to the next headline. The bizarre event was now a distant memory in people's minds. Except, of course, those who experienced it.
Sleep became a nightly struggle. Most nights brought a jolting awakening, leaving him trembling so fiercely that his bones rattled and teeth chattered, while his heart threatened to burst from his chest. The recurring nightmare haunted him relentlessly—the terrifying vision of blood-red waves closing in, his senses overwhelmed as he tumbled blindly and helplessly. His survival was nothing short of miraculous, requiring only a brief stay of a couple of nights at the hospital.
George had insisted he stay with them until Mrs. Vilonte and Gabrielle emerged from their coma at the hospital. Despite the kind offer, Mr. Vilonte politely declined. While he cherished the idea of being surrounded by his family's warmth during such a challenging time, he found solace in the comforting embrace of Sara's soft, ample bosom. While he often disagreed with Mrs. Vilonte's choices, particularly concerning their finances, he was grateful he had yielded to her insistence on hiring a personal assistant.
"Take a deep breath and exhale slowly,” Sara instructed, her hand gently stroking his sweaty, naked back.
He followed her guidance, and as he did, he felt the nightmare fading away, replaced by the soothing sound of her voice. The terror that had gripped him was gradually replaced by a warmth that flowed down his throat, spreading a comforting heat throughout his belly.
"I don't know what I'd do without you," he sighed, pulling her into an embrace. "I wish we could stay like this forever."
"I wish the same, but we should go visit the hospital," she replied softly, gently pushing him aside as she rose from the bed to gather her clothes scattered on the floor.
He sighed again, sinking back onto the bed, overwhelmed by the prospect of abandoning its warmth to face the demands of the day. The thought of rejoining the world outside felt daunting. What finally persuaded him to rise from the bed was Sara's assurance that she would join him on the visit to Mrs. Vilonte, fulfilling her duties as the family's loyal and diligent personal assistant. But, in separate cars, of course.
On the way, he stopped to pick up a bouquet of flowers. Upon arrival, he warmly greeted the nurses and medical personnel he had come to know. They returned his gesture with sympathetic gazes and a small smile. As he entered Gabrielle's room, he found Eric already asleep in a chair by her bedside. Mr. Vilonte's heart sank at the sight. Despite the uncertainty surrounding her condition, he found solace in the fact that her baby remained safe within her womb, miraculously unharmed.
He arranged some lilies in a vase beside her, and pressed a fatherly kiss to her forehead before departing for his wife's room that was at the end of the hallway. Mrs. Vilonte lay peacefully, her complexion a little paler than usual. Gently placing roses on the nightstand, he pulled up a chair by her bedside, ready to share the latest updates.
With a soft voice, he relayed a few light-hearted news - George's pediatric clinic continued to thrive, their granddaughter landed a role in an upcoming school play, and Gabrielle’s condition remained in stable condition, but she had yet to awaken. Once he exhausted his list of news, he veered into trivial chatter about the weather, the traffic delays he encountered en route to the hospital which explained for his lateness (though in truth, he had persuaded Sara to join him for an intimate moment in the shower earlier), and his disappointment with the soggy cafeteria sandwich he bought.
He breathed a sigh of relief when the door opened and Sara waltzed into the room, dressed in her business casual attire, every bit the dedicated assistant his wife had hired. Without saying anything, she walked over to his chair, resting one hand on his shoulder while the other caressed the sparse strands of hair on his balding head. Her touch sparked a warmth within him, kindling a fire that surged through his body.
“Do you think she'll ever wake up?” Sara asked.
“We can only pray,” he replied, then under his breath added, “that she doesn't.”
How he wished things in his life were different. He glanced at his wife, then shifted his gaze to the pillow beneath her head. A thought crossed his mind – it wasn't too late. He could grasp the pillow and silence her forever, altering the trajectory of his life for the better.
“I wonder what's going on inside of her head,” Mr. Vilonte wondered aloud, “Do you think she's dreaming or is it all just darkness?”
XXXXX
In a realm beyond the physical plane, Mr. Vilonte’s words echoed through the forest. Mrs. Vilonte, catching wind of his voice, raced forward barefoot. Her elegant dress shoes, now trapped in the mud, disappeared into the earth. Her gown had become torn and muddied from her struggles against the clutches of vines and twisted branches.
Stopping for a moment, she pondered the possibility of deception, the voice perhaps a sinister ploy by the otherworldly entity, taunting her with the mimicry of her husband's voice.
"Please, let me go home!" she pleaded, her words falling on ears that only responded with mocking laughter.
You love her…you love her… you want her to wake up…no, you loved her. Do it now. Or it's never.
She was sure it was his voice, drawing her towards him and she followed its trail.
XXXXX
When Sara stepped out in search of snacks, he stood by his wife's bedside, peering down at her sleeping figure. Inch by inch, he maneuvered the pillow from beneath her head, his hands trembling with each deliberate movement. Just as he was about to place the soft weapon over her face, he hesitated, clutching the pillow tightly as he paced the room, engaged in a fierce debate with himself.
“You love her. No, no, you loved her.”
In over thirty years of marriage, he found himself reminiscing only about the initial five years, a period suffused with warmth and happiness. The following decades, however, that love had withered away over time like a neglected rose, starved of nourishment.
If he didn't take the chance now, he may not have the opportunity to do so. He returned to her bedside, clutching the pillow. The weight of his decision bore down on him. Just as he prepared to act, her eyes flickered open, their intensity locking with his own. He gasped, stepping back in alarm and stumbling over the chair.
With a sudden jolt, Mrs. Vilonte shot upright, unleashing a piercing scream that shattered the silence of the room. Frantically, she attempted to flee her bed, only to crumple to the floor, her legs betraying her after a month of disuse, unable to bear her weight. She resorted to dragging herself with her arms, making her way towards the door.
As the initial shock began to subside, Mr. Vilonte hastily regained his footing and hurried to his wife's side.
“Isabella..." he gasped, stretching out a trembling hand to touch her shoulder, but she swatted it away.
She struggled to rise to her feet once more, using the wall for support as her legs shook beneath her. The knot of her hospital gown had unraveled, leaving it to drape loosely over her fragile, naked form.
“Gabby! Where's Gabby?” She cried, her eyes were wide and filled with terror.
“Her room's not far from here, just down the hall.”
“I have to see her.”
“No, no, what we need to do right now is to get you back to bed. I'll go get the doctor.”
“You don't understand!”
“What is it that I don't understand? Tell me!”
“The baby…”
“What about the baby?”
“It's not what you think it is.”
“What? What are you talking about? What are you trying to say?”
Mrs. Vilonte let out an angry cry of frustration. “We must put a stop to it. She's going to give birth to something…”
“Something, what?”
Without answering him, she seized the door handle and yanked it open. Despite his attempts to restrain her, she broke free from his grip, landing a sharp blow to his face with her fist. A dazzling flash of white and gold stars burst across his vision like fireworks.
A deafening scream tore through the air, its intensity reverberating down the hallway, freezing everyone in their tracks. The sheer force of it sent shivers of nausea and fear rippling through each person present. The scream jolted Mr. Vilonte out of his daze, a surge of fear flooding back as he realized it was coming from his daughter's room.
He raced to the room and found Eric cowering in the corner, his expression filled with horror as he stared up at the ceiling. Mrs. Vilonte stood nearby, her discarded gown lying on the floor, a pair of scissors clutched tightly in her hand, likely grabbed from the nurse's desk. She, too, gazed upwards. Following their line of sight, Mr. Vilonte's heart nearly stopped.
Crawling along the ceiling like a twisted spider was Gabrielle. She gnashed her teeth like a feral beast and with a guttural hiss, she leapt towards the window, breaking through the glass.
“Gabby, no!”
Mr. Vilonte rushed to the window, crying out in pain as the glass cut into his skin. Through the broken pane, he watched in disbelief as Gabrielle, somehow still alive after her jump from the fifth floor, dashed across the parking lot, dodging cars with uncanny agility.
XXXXX
“Slow down!” Sara screeched, her fingers tightening around the grab handle.
But Mr. Vilonte didn't hear her. He remained steadfast, his foot firmly on the gas pedal, propelling the vehicle forward on the freeway in a desperate attempt to catch up to the police car ahead.
Within the span of an hour, his world was once again upended and crushed by the merciless force of the universe. Gabrielle's escape from the hospital triggered a frantic response from the hospital staff. Wrestling the scissors from the hands of a hysterical and furious Mrs. Vilonte, they pinned her to the floor. Meanwhile, a nurse administered a sedative to calm her down, allowing them to carry her back to her room.
The police were called to locate Gabrielle, prompting him to join the frantic search alongside them. Sara, just returning from the cafeteria with snacks in hand, found herself swept up in the chaos, following him to the car and demanding an explanation.
He slammed on the brakes with a forceful stomp, jolting them forward and then back in their seats. Ahead, several vehicles were stacked up. The police car he had been tailing collided with one of them. Hastily unbuckling his seatbelt, he got out of the car and navigated through the wreckage of the mangled vehicles.
“Gabby!”
He spotted his daughter standing amidst the tumult of the freeway. Upon hearing her name, she turned to face him, her expression clouded with confusion.
“Dad? Why am I here? What's going on?” her voice was laced with fear.
“I don't know. But let's get you out of here.”
“I want to go home,” she sobbed.
“Of course, we'll go home, right after the doctors check you over.”
As Gabrielle moved towards him, the ground beneath them began to tremble, its intensity mounting with each passing second. Cracks spiderwebbed across the asphalt beneath her feet, and long, sinewy vines emerged from the fissures, wrapping themselves around her and pulling her down into the depths below.
Mr. Vilonte sank to his knees, overwhelmed by devastation.
XXXXX
Although the haze of sleepiness had partially lifted, she felt the weight of drowsiness still clinging to her body, like a heavy anchor. Attempting to move her hands, she discovered they were bound by leather cuffs fastened to the bedside rails.
The room lay cloaked in darkness, with only the faint, silver light of the moon filtering through the window blinds, casting a gentle glow across the space. Except for the corner by the door. A sudden drop in temperature sent shivers through her bones. A presence was in the room, and it was standing in that dark corner, watching her.
Mrs. Vilonte stayed silent for a moment, refraining from saying a single word or making even the slightest sound. She clenched her teeth, attempting to suppress a whimper, but it slipped past her lips nonetheless.
A pale foot stepped out of the darkness, then the other.
She sucked in her breath at the sight of Victoria, who greeted her with a sinister grin. Her eyes were as dark as coal. Her teeth jagged with saliva dribbling down her pink lips. Without moving her mouth, Victoria's voice echoed in her head, “The price is high, your soul to keep, give me more to eat!”
Raising her hands, she held up a beating heart, giving it a firm squeeze. Instantly, Mrs. Vilonte was struck by a violent pain in her chest. She was engulfed by wave after wave of agonizing pain, rendering her unable to scream until a brief moment of respite allowed her to catch her breath, prompting her to cry out, "If you want to kill me, do it now! Go ahead, kill me! Rip my heart out. But please, just do it quickly. I can't bear it any longer.”
The entity cackled. "Death will not come easily for you. Instead, you shall endure a long and torturous existence, my dear. A life abundant with suffering and despair, with the sweet release you crave remaining distant for many years to come.”
Its talons closed around the heart giving it one final squeeze.
Mrs. Vilonte erupted in a roar of agony, her body contorting as she strained against the restraints. A nurse burst into the room, switching on the light. Once the lights flickered on, the pain dissipated, and her body eased back onto the bed, her wrists raw from the restraints. Observing her labored breathing and the sheen of sweat across her forehead, he checked her vitals and inquired about her sudden scream and whether she experienced any lingering pain.
She moved her head from side to side. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you,” she said, choking down a sob.
“Oh, I'm sure everything's going to be fine, Mrs. Vilonte,” the nurse reassured with a gentle tone, offering comfort.
“Can you stay with me until I fall asleep?”
“I would, if I had time. I'm sorry I've got other patients to attend to.” And after a final check on her vitals, he turned off the lights and left the room.
Mrs. Vilonte cast a wary gaze toward the darkened corner, a sense of apprehension prickling her skin. A solitary tear traced its path down her cheek.

Welcome to The Oblivion Cycle universe, a vast setting spanning all of time and space and so much more. While many stories may shed perspective on this grand cosmic vista, there are also tales of adventure and sacrifice, romance and terror, grimdark corruption and scientific progress. To become immersed in the setting is to let the chaos of creativity flow through you, to let go of what is probable to discover what’s possible. I have created TOC for one reason, to inspire and entertain any who will listen. So please feel free to join me on this great adventure as I push the boundaries of what is possible and expand the limits of our creativity together. For more information on the setting and its lore there is a subreddit for TOC at TheOblivionCycle and a Discord server dedicated to it here [ https://discord.gg/uGsYHfdjYf ] called ‘The Oblivion Cycle Community Server’. I hope you find the following story entertaining and once more, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy.
+ E1:P1 + E2:P1 + Previous Part + Next Episode +
__________________________________________________
Continued From E2:P6
Balinski watched the feed from inside the mobile command center with Siyel. The operatives were efficient and clearly knew their craft as they moved through the building quickly and methodically. Establishing clear lines of cover and overlapping fields of fire as they moved from room to room. It took them less than a minute to clear the entire ground floor, an impressive feat for any group.
The feed switched as they received a report, “Ground floor clear, no sign of hostile or any other recent activity. We are moving to the rear of the structure, there seems to be another floor below this one. No obvious entrance, stand by.”
Siyel glanced at him and then nodded. “Standing by, we have a canine unit available if you require.” She covered the mic with her hand and glanced at him and Caesar. “You wouldn't mind?”
Balinski shook his head, “I don’t mind. But you are going to have to convince her to move.”
Caesar knew she was being talked about now and raised her large furred head from his feet. Siyel looked at her and asked in a respectful manner, “Caesar, would you be willing to help my officers locate a hidden entrance?” Caesar seemed to balk slightly before glancing at him.
“Don't look at me, the lady asked you.” Caesar gave a small undignified grunt and then stood slowly.
Siyel smiled. “Thank you Caesar, I promise I will make it up to you.” The cyberhound gave her a pointed look that told her she was going to hold Siyel to that promise before she trotted over to the door.
As she did the ramp door opened remotely and she hopped out of the vehicle. The voice over the comms replied not a second later. “Yes, a canine unit would be incredibly welcome. How long until you can get them…” they paused. “Oh, that was fast. Hello there, er, what is this unit’s designation?”
Siyel grinned and replied smartly, “Her name is Caesar and she is a lot smarter than she looks. Treat her like one of your officers, she will know what to do.”
The man’s voice replied, the screen showing a feed of Caesar sitting in front of the man with her cybernetic jaws lolling open. A hand entered the view making a gesture towards her, “Hey you there, Caesar. We need to locate some manner of entrance to a lower level. If you could.. sniff it out?” Caesar barked and nodded her head before putting her nose to the ground and sniffing about in an over exaggerated manner.
Balinski chuckled. “She can be such a ham at times.”
Siyel nodded in response but remained silent. Of course, her microphone was still live. The feeds followed the enhanced husky as she moved from room to room, with each one checked off the list she seemed to narrow down the scents she was looking for. After only a couple minutes she was pawing at a large double-decker washing machine in the back of the store. Her muted growls being broadcast across the feed.
Two officers were then directed to take hold of the machine and they collectively managed to wrench it out of place. Balinski had to give a low grunt as the wall behind was revealed to have a metal doorway situated behind the machines. “A secret door, who would have guessed.”
As the man stepped through into the relative darkness the feed started to fizz, the black and white flecks of static appearing all at once across the screen.
The atraxses woman on the other side of Siyel seemed to murmur in annoyance once more before turning to Siyel and speaking in a gruff yet oddly feminine voice. “We are losing their telemetry. It would seem that there is some sort of faraday meshing in the sub-basement that is blocking all our signals.”
That was bad news, it meant that the team would be entirely cut off from anything but direct line of sight communications. He stood, not knowing what to do but feeling the overwhelming urge to do something. Siyel put out an arm and dragged him back into his seat, well, he allowed her too. There was no way she could have budged his heavy cybernetic frame if he hadn’t wanted her to.
She shook her horned head at him and gestured to the consoles. “They will be fine. They are highly trained officers of the law, you know?”
She was right, but he hated sitting impotent along the sidelines. Watching was anathema to him, as a man of action he liked to be stuck right in the middle of the action. He winced as his bruises stung, yeah.. that had been going just swell for him so far.
The waiting was an agony, but after another few minutes several of the officers including Caesar exited the dead zone and messaged back to Siyel, “It looks all clear. There is nobody here, one casualty. Civilian. They were already dead when we found them, they look like the owner. Please advise?”
She pounded one of her fists on the counter top and hissed in frustration. “Be advised, I am coming in with escort. Leave the body where you found it, I want to get a look at the place myself.” Siyel tossed off her headset and donned a navy blue police windbreaker. With a toss of her short black hair she gestured to him, “Are you coming?”
Balinski stood and glanced at the atraxses woman, she seemed perfectly content to stay where she was and so he just nodded and placed the headset he had been using down upon the counter. He had to duck slightly as he exited the Beast behind Siyel, they walked along the street quickly towards the activity up ahead. He chanced a glance behind them and could just make out a police cruiser manning a barricade that was blocking traffic from this part of the road. That was smart, limiting both coverage and innocents in any potential crossfire.
Siyel was walking just to his front and left, he watched the back of her head as they neared the site. He was wondering once more what it was that was making this entire debacle feel so personal to her. As if she felt his eyes on her she glanced at him and frowned causing him to snap his eye back forwards. He thought he heard a chuckle but he couldn't be sure, and by then they had reached the laundromat.
The man who’s feed they had been watching stepped forwards and gave her a salute before looking Balinski up and down with a skeptical look. “This is.. your escort?”
She nodded and reached out, smacking Balinski on the chest. He jumped slightly at the unexpected contact. “Yes, this is Balinski Katars. Void warden. He saved my life no fewer than three times during the attack last night, I trust him with my life. Anything you can tell me you can also tell him.” Balinski’s remaining eyebrow rose at that, that was a heavy statement indeed. He was a little shocked to hear her speak of him so positively.
It wasn’t as if he had expected her not to respect him, but to hear her so clearly express her trust in him made his heart flutter again. That same strange feeling crawled through his stomach and mind. He cleared his throat and nodded to the man, extending a cybernetic hand. The black digits whirring softly as they articulated into a friendly gesture.
“Hello, pleased to make your acquaintance officer.” The man gave his hand a quick shake and then stepped towards the structure, his Colt-Franz LMR v.17 held low and to the ready in case of any threats.
The walk into the building was short and tense. He looked around for any signs of danger while simultaneously keeping an eye on Siyel. She seemed to observe everything at once. Of course she would be good at this, she had been on the force for nearly a decade already, the woman was in her commanding position for a reason after all.
As he rounded a corner he was surprised by a large fluffy object rocketing into him, it was Caesar. Her cybernetic legs propelled her high into the air as she jumped straight into his chest and rebounded off him.
“Ooouff!” he wheezed as she gave a series of happy little barks and wagged her tail. He shook his head and then stood straight again as Siyel and the other officer walked around the corner.
Siyel smiled and waved to the pup, “Hello Caesar. Thanks for helping us. Good girl.”
Caesar smiled wide, her cybernetic jaws straining as she just sneezed and then strutted up to Balinski’s side where she looked up at him expectantly. He rolled his eyes and then leaned down to give her head a quick scrub. “Oh all right, good girl. But you only get this one for now.”
He opened a concealed pocket in his trench coat and plucked out a single small biscuit from a resealable bag with the stylized cartoonish picture of a croc noppin on it. The happy looking lizard-dog was smiling with a thumbs up under the brightly colored letters that spelled out ‘Happy Chompers Noppin Treats’.
He held it up, waggling the small treat above the excited pup’s head. She barked and made a jump for it, snatching the cookie from his hand with surprising precision before scarfing it down maniacally.
He shook his head. “What do they put in these things?”
Clearly it was something that drove the poor pooch bonkers for them, he flicked his eyes back to the others and followed them as Caesar followed at his heels. Siyel entered the dark tunnel of the secret entrance and Balinski followed. The passageway was dark, no lights evident as they followed the stairwell down to a lower basement floor that looked to have been converted from some manner of undercity utility chamber.
The walls were bare brick and there were tunnels that branched off into the depths, most of them far too short for a being to stand comfortably. In the center of the room were several smashed tables, their dromemite surfaces warped as if by high heat and the contents of a large wooden crate scattered around the floor.
Balinski took several steps closer to the scene and saw that just beyond the mess was a large figure, their form unmoving and surrounded by a pool of dark orange fluid that glinted in the fluorescent light like tiny gemstones. It was a gre’vahn, they had been stripped naked and beaten to death it looked like. And from the look of the wounds the death had been rather recent as well.
He covered his mouth at the grisly scene as he walked around to the front of the body. Siyel followed and then exclaimed in disgust.
“What in the lords mercy!” she turned away, her normally rosy features turning a pale shade of lavender as she had to take a second to recover.
Balinski himself was only a little better off, but he still felt his gorge rise at the sight. The large centauroid woman’s cat-like features had been smashed in, strips of tattered meat and the sparkling glint of shattered quartzoin visible through the mess that was once her face. What's more the woman's breasts seemed to have been cut from her mutilated chest and there were obscene slurs carved into the blood matted fur of her lower abdomen. From the deep scratches and gouges in the concrete floor around the woman’s corpse it looked as if the cutting may have been done while the poor woman was still alive.
He turned away now, the scene far more grisly than any of the mutilated and ruptured corpses he had seen in the war. This was not just a dead body, but the sheer cruelty and savagery of the act itself seemed to fog the very air with its insufferably evil brume.
He coughed weakly as he doubled over and had to take several steps away. Images forced themselves unbidden to the forefront of his mind and almost knocked him to his knees with their potency. Images of a tall furred alien in a blood stained coat and mask, a large surgical saw in one hand and a strip of chewed leather in the other. A voice echoed in his thoughts as if from a nightmare, ‘I’m sorry, but I need to remove your broken limbs. I am sorry.’
The psychosomatic pain of his cybernetics lit up like bonfires of sensation in his mind at the memory and he nearly blacked out from the neural overload, bet something stopped him from falling off the edge of that abyss.
A small whine sounded from his left and something soft butted into his side a few times in quick succession. He reached out near blindly and dragged Caesar close, hugging the cyberhound tightly and taking several deep calming breaths.
By the time he had recovered enough to stand Siyel had also regained her composure. She turned to the grim-faced human officer who had led them into the room and passed a hand over her horns. Her tail flicked in discomfort as she looked at the body again, “Lords Gavin.. You could have fucking warned me at least. That is, not good..” she finished simply.
Gavin nodded. “Yeah, well.. How do I accurately describe this? I guess I could have said the situation was FUBAR.”
Siyel nodded her horned head and then walked around the body to the other side before stopping again and averting her eyes. “Fucking perverts.. I hope.. no I just don’t.” she looked up at the ceiling as Balinski walked to the scattered packages on the floor.
As the other two talked quietly about the nature of the crime, he knelt and picked up one of the unruptured containers. It was a small vial of slightly silvery grey powder. He gave it a gentle shake and cycled through several different modes with his cybernetic eye before he spotted flecks of blue in it that glinted in the harsh white light. They were tiny, barely visible even to his enhanced cybernetic vision. He knew almost immediately what he was holding.
He stood and turned to Siyel holding up the small vial. “I know what this is.”
Gavin nodded and muttered, “yeah. It’s occusmite. Not exactly helpful in this instance.”
Balinski shrugged, “Sure. Unless you know who manufactured it.”
Siyel took a step in his direction, pointedly not looking at the broken body in the center of the room. “How on Jureillo do you know who manufactured that batch? There are illegal occusmite manufacturing rings all over the city.”
He tossed the bottle into the air before catching it a few times, weighing it in his hand as if it was important to his next statement. “Well, what I know is that the labs that make the good stuff, like this batch here.” he rattled the vial, the tiny tinkling sounds it made barely audible. “Tend to have signatures in them from the manufacturers. Something to mark their work and prevent counterfeiting. All a part of the business you know?”
She nodded. “Of course! And this batch is marked? How can you tell? The point of the marking is to be as indetectable as possible.” She walked over to him now, the nerivith woman was only a few centimeters shorter than him. Tall even for her own people. She was nearly able to look him in the eyes as she implored, “And who manufactured this batch?” She seemed to plead with him. Her violet eyes enraptured him as she stared into his very soul.
He coughed after a moment of silence and shook his head slightly. He held up the vial to the light and shook it. “It took me a bit of cycling through different color spectra, but I eventually noticed tiny flecks of blue in the 393 nanometer range specifically. That marks it out as unique and a product of the Psychosis Division.”
As he finished speaking she sacked her fist into her palm. “I knew it. This has all the hallmarks of the Pit Vipers. But they couldn't have come up with such an elaborate plan on their own, there had to be something guiding them.” She whirled around to the other officer. Pointing at them with a long fingered hand, she instructed commandingly, “Officer Gavin, I want you to run a sample of this to one of the technicians. Then call for a group of Tunnel Trawlers. I want these tunnels checked out.” The man gave her a crisp salute and then scurried away.
As his heavy footfalls receded it left Siyel alone in the room with only him and Caesar. She once more seemed to slump slightly, her normal stoic demeanour slipping like a mask. “I don’t know if I can do this, Balinski.” She walked towards one of the less damaged tables and leaned against its edge, her arms folded under her breasts as she looked over at him.
Balinski frowned. Where was this uncharacteristic emotion coming from? “I don’t believe that for a second Siyel. You are the best police officer I have ever seen, and I am not saying that just to make your head bigger.” She smiled slightly at his remark, but he continued. “Look, the truth of the matter is that this woman was likely killed before the raid even started. Those scumbags hopped themselves up on some fresh ockie and then had a rape party to get themselves in the mood.” Not to mention that the gre’vahn female had likely been at least tangentially aware of the criminal activity in the basement of her building.
He saw her shake her head. “No, I know that. But.. if I can’t help the people of this city then what good am I?” Her voice wavered slightly and he had to remind himself that he was talking to one of the highest ranking police officers in the city. She was an SC-3, in charge of countergang activities across the entire city.
That meant that this particular case must have some significance to her then, if she had been following it as closely as she had. He sidled over and leaned on the table next to her, pushing his already strange relationship with her to the limits of what he felt comfortable in a professional setting.
He gave her a hard look as he removed his hat and held it in both hands. “Look. I'm new to all this police stuff. I got my contract straight from the government as a sort of pity gift to a war cripple. They would have given me anything I wanted to make up for leaving me in that hell hole for…” He swallowed hard and changed the subject with a deep breath. She looked over at him, her expression changing ever so slightly. Her hard violet stare becoming slightly warmer in his own twisted imagination. “The fact of the matter is that I could have become anything. I chose to become a Warden. I wanted to help people, just like you do every single day. I saw injustice every day on the battlefield from corrupt officers and incompetent officials. I don’t see that when I am helping you, you are doing the work that nobody else can. Not because you have too, and not because it is easy. You do it because you care deeply for the people of this city. The people that are saved from injustice every single day by your task force operatives.” he had to pause for breath.
She took the opportunity to reach up and place a pink hand on his shoulder. “Thanks for that. I might not want to hear it, but I guess I am doing the work that others won’t. Thanks for reminding me.”
He nodded, his mouth snapping closed. He glanced down at her hand, the hand that was lingering slightly longer than was strictly necessary for the sake of comradery in that moment. He cleared his throat as Caesar whined. Siyel chuckled and removed her hand, reaching out to scrub the pup’s head.
Seeing her there wearing one of her rare smiles, it made him realise. He was indeed fond of her, surpassing that of simple friendship. He closed off the thoughts though, she had never shown any feelings towards him but mutual respect and so it was not his place to do anything different. “I think we can probably head back up now.”
As he moved to turn away he felt her hands grab his arm. Balinski jerked and looked back over his shoulder in surprise. She looked at him earnestly and then checked the surroundings before lowering her voice. “This is likely one of the very few times I can talk to you without fear of being overheard, Balinski. I’m being watched, somebody knows my every move I feel. There are ears everywhere.” his eyes widened at her words. What on Jureillo was she talking about?
She continued quickly, “I can’t say this up there. But I need you to catch the one responsible for this. Not for the city, for me… Will you do that for me, Balinski? Please?”
He looked at Siyel and felt something inside his mind shift. She had shown a side of herself that he had never seen before. He had seen her angry, he had even seen her panicked before. But he had never seen her look so desperate, every instinct in his body told him she was telling him the truth. And he had no reason not to trust her.
Balinski glanced down at Caesar who was looking at the pair with poorly veiled curiosity on her doggy features. He looked back at her and nodded. “Consider it done. They won’t escape justice again.”
She seemed to relax instantly and then released him before taking a deep breath and regaining her normal stoic composure. “Good, that's.. is good.” She placed her hands in the small of her back and stretched, pushing out her chest and causing a series of crackling pops. “Oough. It never gets any easier, trust me.” She gave him another nod and then started off towards the stairs.
Balinski started in surprise again as he felt something brush one of his hands, it was her tail. The dark tuft of hair on the end of her long sinuous appendage fluttering as it flicked away. She didn’t seem to react, it might have been unconscious or it could have been intentional. He would have no way of knowing and he sure as hell wasn’t going to ask her about it.
He just shook his head as she exited the room. What was he getting into? “Caesar, stop that.” he said as the insufferable pup kicked one of the glass vials across the floor. “That’s evidence tampering. I could report you to the field office for that.” he joked. She didn't seem to get the joke as she flattened her ears and gave a short whine.
He shook his head. “Oh you big baby. You know I wasn’t actually mad at you. Come on, let's get out of this place.”
He gave another glance to the body in the center of the room and burned the sight into his memory. He would find those responsible and make them suffer ten-fold for every atrocity they had ever committed. He grinned cruelly as he thought of just how he planned to make them pay for their crimes.
He strode out of the building and stopped on the edge of the street. He looked up at the sky, the orange colored sun was nearly directly overhead. As if to make a point he heard a small growl from his middle and had to chuckle as Caesar copied it.
He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah, I’m hungry too. What do you say we go and hit up a McDoinks Bugerhut? I'll get you an order of frine nuggets, does that sound fair?” She hopped up and down a few times before giving him a very positive woof.
He nodded, the dark thoughts that always scratched at the corners of his mind held at bay for another day. As long as they were together he could take on the world. He reached down and scrubbed her head, she was his best friend. And nothing would ever change that.
End of Episode 2
Continued in Episode 3 -Pulling at Treads-
==End of Transmission==

Ive been on a marathon with Paul's discography and I decided to rank his albums based on how much I enjoyed each. I went only with what are considered Paul's main solo discography, including Electric Arguments and his albums with Wings. For fun I also highlighted my favorite songs on each album and songs I feel are underappreciated (not singles, not played live regularly, etc) and then made a ranking with the songs I thought were the best from each album.
*Give My Regards To Broad Street - 9 Favorite Track: No More Lonely Nights
26 Kisses On The Bottom - 4 Favorite Track: My Valentine Underrated Track: Inch Worm
25 Flowers In The Dirt - 5 Favorite Track: My Brave Face Underrated Track: Lovers That Never Were Demo (cheating ik)
24 Press To Play - 5.5 Favorite Track: Press Underrated Track: Talk More Talk
23 McCartney III - 5.6 Favorite Track: Seize The Day Underrated Track: Slidin'
22 Choba B CCCP - 5.8 Favorite Track: Cracking Up
21 Run Devil Run - 6.1 Favorite Track: No Other Baby Underrated Track: Lonesome Town
20 Electric Arguments - 6.5 Favorite Track: Dance 'Til We're High Underrated Track: Travelling Light
19 Wild Life - 6.5 Favorite Track: Tomorrow Underrated Track: Love is Strange
18 Pipes of Peace - 6.6 Favorite Track: Pipes of Peace Underrated Track: The Other Me
17 London Town - 6.8 Favorite Track: With A Little Luck Underrated Track: Famous Groupies
16 Red Rose Speedway - 7.3 Favorite Track: Little Lamb Dragonfly Underrated Track: Single Pigeon
15 Driving Rain - 7.4 Favorite Track: Heather Underrated Track: Tiny Bubble
14 Back To The Egg - 7.5 Favorite Track: Arrow Through Me Underrated Track: Getting Closer
13 Wings At The Speed of Sound - 7.7 Favorite Track: Silly Love Songs Underrated Track: Beware My Love
12 New - 7.9 Favorite Track: Queenie Eye Underrated Track: On My Way To Work
11 Egypt Station - 8 Favorite Track: Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link Underrated Track: Domino
10 McCartney-8.2 Favorite Track: Maybe I'm Amazed Underrated Track: Hot As Sun/Glasses
9 Off The Ground - 8.5 Favorite Track: Off The Ground Underrated Track: I Owe It All To You
8 Chaos And Creation In The Backyard - 8.6 Favorite Track: Too Much Rain Underrated Track: English Tea
7 Memory Almost Full - 8.7 Favorite Track: Only Mama Knows Underrated Track: House of Wax
6 Flaming Pie - 8.8 Favorite Track: Calico Skies Underrated Track: The Song We Were Singing
5 McCartney II - 8.8 Favorite Track: Coming Up Underrated Track: Frozen Jap
4 Venus And Mars- 8.9 Favorite Track: Listen To What The Man Said Underrated Track: Magneto And Titanium Man
3 Tug Of War - 9 Favorite Track: Tug Of War Underrated Track: The Pound is Sinking
2 Band On The Run - 9.3 Favorite Track: Let Me Roll It
1 Ram- 9.7 Favorite Track: The Back Seat Of My Car Underrated Track: Eat At Home
27 My Valentine 26 Seize The Day 25 No Other Baby 24 With a Little Luck 23 Dance 'Til We're High 22 Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link 21 Cracking Up 20 Press 19 Arrow Through Me 18 Only Mama Knows 17 Tomorrow 16 New 15 Calico Skies 14 Off The Ground 13 Little Lamb Dragonfly 12 Pipes of Peace 11 My Brave Face 10 Coming Up 9 Listen To What The Man Said 8 Silly Love Songs 7 Heather 6 No More Lonely Nights 5 Maybe I'm Amazed 4 Let Me Roll It 3 Tug of War 2 Too Much Rain 1 The Back Seat Of My Car

I yelled and woke with a start. Sweat dripped down my face. My breathing was hard and desperate. I could have sworn I had just been falling. The stickiness of sleep meddled with the cogs of my mind. Slowly my eyes adjusted to the gloom of my bedroom and I found myself alone, safe and warm. No danger here. My heart rate slowed and I chuckled nervously. Soon all fear had seeped from my mind and all memory of my dream had faded. I rolled out of bed and shivered. Quickly I pulled on a sweater and put on my furry slippers. It was cold in this cabin in the middle of the forest. Although internal plumbing and an electric generator had been added, there was still no central heating. This did not bother me much because I always enjoyed having an excuse to light the fire in the living room. I absolutely loved traditional fireplaces.
​
I was whistling happily in the kitchen, sipping on a glass of cold water as I poured fresh coffee beans into my electric grinder. The sound and smell of coffee being ground always left me feeling content. As my coffee brewed in my French press I cracked two eggs into a bowel and began to whisk. Fifteen minutes later I carried a steaming hot cheese omelet and large mug of coffee out onto my front veranda. I stood in the open doorway, surveying the beauty of the outdoors in the early morning light. The air was cold and fresh; pregnant with complex mixtures of pine and lavender scents. I looked up to see the sky was a deep blue and devoid of all clouds. The thin, dark silhouettes of the trees that surrounded the cabin stood silent and ominous in the soft half-light of the morning. White coats of frost sparkled and melted on the grass as the sun climbed and brightened. I could hear the distant sound of the stream and the call of morning birds.
​
I sighed deeply with satisfaction and sat down on my wooden chair. This is what I loved more than anything. More than the city that bustles and bursts with busy human lives. More than squeezing myself between strangers on the underground train. More than the sickening smell of the streets and the soulless lack of any natural sounds. In the city there were no crickets, no owls, no frogs. Out here there was an abundance of beauty. The trees were so patient and still. So very different from the rushed, ill-mannered commuters I had as my usual morning partners. I definitely preferred the trees. I took another deep breath. I blew on the steam that rose from my coffee mug and sipped cautiously. The coffee was rich and delicious and scalding hot. Perfect. I began to eat my omelet letting the serenity of nature continue to wash over me. My mood had not been so elated for many months and I was seriously thinking that I should move here full-time. Currently I was working as an English teacher and had decided to come out here to work on my novel and take a break from the city. From my life. Once my excellent breakfast was complete I walked back inside and decided to start a fire to warm up the cabin. As I stooped to check the small wicker basket near the fireplace, that should contain the dried firewood, my eyebrow arched when I found the basket empty. Huh? I could have sworn it was half-full yesterday. Puzzled but not at all alarmed I picked up the basket. Soon I put on my large, worn black coat and made my way outside.
​
The frosted ground crunched under my large leather boots as I waded through the woods. Finding dry branches for the fire would be fairly difficult at this time of day as most of the ground was damp by now. However, my plan was just to dry them out in the oven before I used them. After spending a few minutes stooping to inspect sticks of various sizes and dampness I finally filled the basket. “Ok, time to go home.” I muttered eagerly as I rubbed my hands together. The air was still cold enough to make my breath visible and I rubbed my hands together. Suddenly I stopped. My eyebrows furrowed. I did not recognize where I was. But how? I had been exploring the woods for days now and not one time had I gotten lost.
​
My eyes darted back and forth and my head swiveled in confusion. Very soon a creeping panic began to climb from my stomach up into my lungs. My heart began to thump loudly. I looked up at the sun, the voice of my old man ringing in my mind, “Learn to navigate by the stars and sun and you’ll never lose your way”. I smiled, remembering his warm eyes and loud laughter. I missed him. I closed my eyes, concentrating. “Ok, that must be East, so that means I should walk…” I stretched out my arm and hand, index finger pointed. I turned on my heel. “North. That way.”
​
After a few moments I found my path blocked by a sudden sheer drop. I was facing an enormous quarry. My face blanched. “What… where the hell did this come from?” Again, panic seeped into my blood. “There aren’t any bloody quarries around here!” I moved forward to peek over the edge and peered down. The drop must be at least fifteen meters! I looked from left to right and saw no stairs or bridges. How the hell was I supposed to get across? My confusion grew and grew. Suddenly I froze. There, lying at the very bottom of the quarry, just near the cliff’s bottom, was a mangled body. The light in the sky was still too young to properly illuminate the quarry’s depths, but I could tell it was a body! My eyes bulged and my mouth opened wide with astonishment. “Jesus! Hello? Are you okay down there?” I yelled. Nothing but cold silence pressed against my ears. Suddenly I noticed a path that I had not seen before. It started to my right and wound down the slope before me. Quickly I started hurrying down towards the person; maybe I could still help? Soon I was at the bottom and I ran up to the body that lay still on the ground. As I got closer and the sun grew brighter I stopped dead. The body that lay crumpled at my feet was – me. “No way. There is just absolutely no way!” I shouted. I trembled as I took a step backward. My foot slipped on a large stone and I felt myself begin to fall to the ground.
​
Suddenly I yelped and my legs kicked out. I blinked in the sudden darkness and found myself on my sofa in the cabin’s living room. “What the hell? It was just a dream?” I said out loud as I sat up. I felt the softness of the couch cushions beneath me, I could smell the citrus scents leftover from the wash I’d given them recently. I stood up, my breathing still fast. The large windows showed a stormy afternoon. Rain pelted the glass heavily and the wind howled loudly. “What the hell? It was just a dream?” I repeated. I checked my watch. It was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. I raked my brain, trying to figure out what was happening. But the details of my dream were fading. “I was in the forest looking for firewood. Then I found that body in that quarry.” It had been so real. I felt quite disoriented. Was I truly awake now? Or still asleep? And that body? What had been so terrible about it? The dream had already seeped away. I couldn’t remember.
​
Still confused I made my way quickly towards the front door. Just as I opened it there was a deafening peal of thunder and a bright fork of lightning lit up the darkling sky. My mouth dropped open. There, just beyond the veranda, as if it had always been there, was the quarry. That cliff! I closed my mouth. “But… how…” Ignoring the icy rain, I walked towards the edge and once again peeked over. In the cold light of another flash of lightening and rumble of thunder, I saw my own body twisted and broken on the ground below. I gasped. My mind reeled. My heart fluttered. “What is going on?” I yelled looking around for some sort of explanation. When I looked back down again my face turned white. The body, my body, was gone. Suddenly I felt the eyes of a stranger on my back. A feeling of dread crept up my spine. A twig snapped. I spun around.
​
I stood face to face with my shadow. But he did not look like me. Not exactly. Darkness coated his body like a skintight suit and I could not tell what he was wearing. He may have even been naked for all I know. I could see most of his face and hair, but his eyes were cloaked entirely in semi-circles of shadow which fell below each of his brows. He seemed utterly unconcerned about the storm. “You poor thing. You poor, wretched thing.” When he spoke, his voice was not mine. It was deep and commanding, yet gentle. His words came out slow and calm, almost lulling, “I caught you as you fell. You have made a half-choice. You can be at peace forever. But you must choose now.” He stretched out a tenebrous hand and pointed toward the edge of the cliff. Suddenly I noticed something new appear in his hands. It was a book. It was my book. The one I had been writing. Had I already finished it? Or had I just started?
​
He turned to one of the middle pages and read, “‘Life is the antithesis of peace. Death is the antithesis of suffering.’” He snapped the book closed and turned again to face me, “How trite. Yet, so often the plainest truths are. All you want is peace, is it not? You are right in thinking that life can never provide this.” A cold smile curled his lips. “Even the living forests you so admire are crawling with suffering and conflict. Even the trees that appear so peaceful, so still, are wordlessly fighting each other for light. Racing against each other to claim their own space. It is the nature of the living to struggle.” Confusion fought with terror in my mind. I stammered. “I…I don’t understand. What is this place? Who are you?” Suddenly the man robed in darkness leapt at me and clasped my wrist, “You know who I am”. Small crimson lights flared to life like ignes fatui in the depths of his sockets. He began to pull me towards the edge. “No! Wait!” I shouted, digging my heels into the wet grass. But he was too strong. He snarled, “Isn’t this what you wanted?” and before I could stop myself I was crying from desperation. Then with a strength that could not be human he lifted me above his head, and threw me over the side of the quarry. Lightning flashed as the air rushed through my hair. I screamed as I plummeted to my death.
​
I yelled and woke with a start. I heard the soft beeping of monitors. I felt the scratchy linens of a hospital bed beneath me. Pain followed swiftly and exploded through my limbs. My voice was croaky and dry as I spoke, “Where…what the hell…what happened?” A nurse rushed to my side. “It’s alright love, you’ve ‘ad a bit of a tumble. Doctor’s got you all sorted. Just rest now”. Her voice was warm and comforting, like a cup of tea.
​
My memory returned to me slowly. My family did not own any cabin in the forest. The day of the accident I had been jogging in the woods and took my usual route near the abandoned quarry. I remember exactly what had happened. For a long time, I have been overwhelmed with my work and underwhelmed with my life. I wanted nothing more than to finish my novel and bail on all my teaching responsibilities. My father had also recently died after a long and horrible fight with cancer and it was the first time I realized that at my age life stops providing and starts taking. I realized that soon all those things, all those people, I could once rely on were not going to last forever. An invisible fire was lit in my flesh and I felt my time was rapidly running out.
​
I jogged far, leaving the city limits. As I stood at the edge of that quarry, panting, my sadness hanging on me heavily, I had, for a moment, contemplated jumping. I had thought about it often before. As I stared down, I imagined my broken body at the bottom of the cliff. Then, like in all my low moments, I let the cold inhumanness of the universe fill me up.
​
With my eyes closed all I could hear was my mother crying over my father’s corpse. All I could hear were the endless calls from the funeral home asking for their money. All the constant knocking of debt collectors on our door. All I could see were the endless medical bills flooding the postbox. All I felt was loneliness. A horrible, unrelenting, unsolvable loneliness. I had no great love, no amazing career, and my writing would never be good enough to publish. All I could feel was the gaping hole my father had left behind. It hurt. For just a moment I convinced myself I did not belong here anymore. My lips trembled. I walked right up to the edge. I felt my sadness swell in my chest. I clenched my fists tightly. I imagined taking a single step forward. It would be so easy. I imagined the air rushing past me. Falling to my doom. I imagined the horrible pain of the impact. But I also imagined the peace that would come after. A peace I craved. I imagined a picturesque cabin in the woods. A beautiful fireplace. A shelter from the city. A place where I could rest. It was in that moment of contemplative despair, before I could fully commit to the act, that the old unstable ground of the quarry crumbled beneath my feet and I had slipped from the edge and fell. Only the shadows were there to catch me.
​
Recovery was slow. My mother and sister came to visit me multiple times and made the stay at the hospital bearable. How many dreams had I had? How much had I awoken and then re-awoken? Could I be sure I was truly awake now? As I pondered this I tried to remember. But all I could recall was that very last dream. Those dark horrible eyes. The terror of that very last fall. In that moment, I had realized what I wanted. Now I felt rejuvenated in a way I had not felt for many years. The exhaustion of my spirit had finally been ameliorated. I actually looked forward to getting out of bed. I actually wanted to go to school again. My passion for teaching was reignited. Soon after my recovery I even managed to get my novel published but did not make much money.
​
Many years have passed since my fall and I’m in my 60s now and retired and have never married. I now know that those dreams were not just dreams. That phantom I confronted has remained with me. Whenever the stresses of life pile up and I become fatigued, he comes to me. He still waits for me. He is real. I see his eyes covered in shadow. Tiny pinpricks of red-light flicker therein. At first, I only saw him rarely; glimpses in dreams. As time went on and I grew older and weary of the world once more I began to see him in the corner of my room every night. What’s worse was that in those moments when I feel the lowest I find myself craving the solitude of that cabin. The peace it brought with it. All this I craved despite the price.
​
Last week I attended my mother’s funeral. It was a small affair, most of her friends having died many years before. I saw my sister there with her husband and children. They are so happy and full of life. I feel a pang of jealousy but also relief. My life was always to be a solitary one. My sister and I cried during the service. When we chatted later we tried in vain to comfort each other. It was then I began to mention the strange man I’d been seeing. But my voice died in my throat as I looked up.
He was there with us at lunch, standing behind me. I saw him in the mirror. My sister saw him too. She yelled, leapt out of her seat and fell to the ground when she saw him. “Oh my God, what the hell is that?” she screamed. Then, just as swiftly as shadows retreat from light, he was gone. “But how? What was? Who was that?” she asked loudly, eyes wide, the other people attending the restaurant had stopped eating to watch us, obviously confused. My sister was pale and I stood to help her to her feet, “Now do you believe me?” Lunch ended there.
​
Flustered and disturbed we returned home. I returned alone to my home in London while my sister returned home with her husband and children to Edinburgh. She seemed a lot less shaken up once she’d met with them at the station. I wonder if she’ll tell them what she saw?
​
Since the funeral I see him constantly now. Often his shadow-hidden hand stretches out and he holds a revolver. But he does not mean to shoot me. No. He holds the revolver’s ivory handle toward me. Sometimes he holds out a hangman’s noose. Sometimes it’s a long, ornate dagger. Most recently he holds out a canister of helium gas. And a plastic bag for my head. Each time he does this I resist him. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I even yell at him to leave. His face remains dark, stony and enigmatic.
​
None of this would scare me quite so much if I had not just realized one terrible detail. What turns my blood to ice from fear is that every time I see him he is infinitesimally closer. How had I not noticed before? Perhaps it was a kindness. Gooseflesh runs down my neck as I see him standing insidiously in my cold bedroom. He is near the edge of my bed now. He is patient and has respected my choice so far. Nevertheless, he holds out that same revolver. That same noose. That same dagger. I tremble with fright because I know I will not be able to resist him much longer. Perhaps soon I’ll know if this was all a dream too.

Hello Hello, my buds, my palls, my friends. I have the first chapter for this week ready for you all. I have three more chapters I am cleaning up and will be getting them out as soon as possible. We are nearing the end of book Two- I hope you all are enjoying as we go.
Lets get this book
-----
Kyroll and Martinez’s day flew by, which was surprising considering they never saw a single stag from their first hide or a half-dozen others they moved to and set up throughout the day.
There were some fleeting glimpses of other smaller creatures, but none they were after or that Kyroll was willing to shoot. That was a shame. One of the animals they spotted was called a Eurila; it was a fat-looking bird that reminded Martinez of a chicken, other than its bright blue and green plumage and the fact that it had four wings.
Kyroll insisted they were in their mating season and should not be shot for the time being. If there were any stags around, the rifle fire would send them running. Martinez had no frame of reference regarding the mating season part but could understand the later warning.
In the right conditions, rifles like theirs could be heard firing for dozens of kilometers, so it was better not to risk it.
By the time they returned to camp, they were under the light of half a dozen moons orbiting Renoral. The hike down from the hills was deathly silent. Neither spoke, neither had fully grappled with their strife.
Martinez still could not fully trust Kyroll. Too many things raised red flags over the trip: The duffle bag, his treatment of Lysa, and the forced, almost plastic way he acted. None of it added up.
Kyroll knew what he had to do, and with them only being out here for one more day, he had to decide what he was going to do. Could he trust Martinez to keep his mouth shut? Was the risk worth it? How would he explain this to Nelya and Lysa? Could he even return to them after ensuring Martinez’s knowledge dies with him?
As Martinez lit a fire, Kyroll secluded himself inside his tent, leaving the Human alone. While Kyroll dug inside the tent, likely changing his socks and underwear, Martinez poked and prodded at the fire.
He looked at the lake and wondered why those beautiful little insects had not returned. It was only then that Martinez remembered Kyroll had not retrieved that metallic orb. Was that thing some kind of insect repellent?
If it was, that was disappointing; having those cherubic orbs dancing on the glass-like lake would be a pleasant addition to the area and add a little life to the otherwise overbearing darkness just beyond the flickering firelight.
After Martinez had sat stationary long enough for the cold fingers of winter to crawl into his boots and claw away any warmth, Kyroll joined him at the fire. He groaned loudly, his knees crackling louder than the firewood as he lowered himself into his chair.
“Here,” Kyroll said, extending his hand across the fire, clutching a bottle of a clear liquid. “It's some homemade liquor.”
“You are offering me a drink?” Martinez raised a brow
“Well, yeah, Vuric. It’s not like I stuttered,” Kyroll shook the bottle.
Martinez could not help but feel like he was being set up here. Kyroll had pulled that bottle out of the duffle bag that other Aviex had passed off to him, and Martinez had yet to get a good look at its contents. For all he knew, that bottle was filled with acid.
“Sure, but after you. It’s your bottle; you should get the first drink,” Martinez said, insinuating some abstract tradition.
With a slight narrowing of his two remaining stacked eyes, Kyroll glared suspiciously at Martinez. After analyzing Martinez, Kyroll shrugged, uncapped the bottle, and took a swig deep enough that it made Martinez’s spine shiver, imagining the burning liquid sliding down his throat. But Kyroll simply inhaled sharply before exhaling and reextending the offer.
“See no poison,” Kyroll coughed.
“I never said it was,” Martinez argued, grabbing the bottle.
“You didn’t have to. Your face said it all,” Kyroll shrugged. I’ve done that before, but I could not get away with it here—it would be too obvious, and Nelya would kill me.”
“Don’t forget about Lysa. She would peal your dick like a banana,” Martinez quipped.
“Banana?” Kyroll replied, tilting his head in confusion.
“It’s a fruit,” Martinez replied, gasping after siping the burning liquid.
The liquor was nothing special, but it was nothing weak by any means. It was more potent than vodka and just as tasteless. God, how do people drink like this?
“Do you have anything to mix it with?” Martinez asked, passing the bottle back.
“Nope. What, are you too good to drink it straight?” Kyroll challenged before taking another sip, but this time, it was far less exaggerated. “Just enjoy that I’m sharing this with you at all. Normally I would have just kept it all to myself.”
“I never said that but just drinking straight booze is usually not my style, plus I have had some issues in the past,” Martinez admitted.
Raising an eyebrow, Kyroll keenly plucked apart what he knew about the Human and what he understood about warriors who fell to the drink. He was not confident about what Martinez meant by issues, but the insinuation was obvious.
Seeing Kyroll's mocking look, Martinez took another steadying drink. “Shut up, like you are perfect.”
Martinez could have used many words to describe the next half hour: unexpected, strange, perhaps out of the blue, but in all honesty, the most poignant descriptor was surreal.
Kyroll was not acting like the man that Martinez had come to know over the last three days. The old Aviex was actually pleasant company.
Kyroll regaled Martinez with tales of when he was just a young lad and first joined the military—his time in boot camp, advanced infantry training, and all the way up until he joined Aviex special forces. At that point, the conversation quickly drifted for reasons Martinez understood—most people in that line of work are tight-lipped.
Martinez had to admit the Human and Aveix training experiences were comedically similar: screaming drill instructors running endless upon endless drills and tests, weeks of never-ending marches, and non-stop corrections of the slightest error. Apparently, looks weren't the only thing that the two species had in common.
As they continued to drink and relax with one another, the moons rose higher into the sky. Martinez started to believe that Kyroll had finally broken down and relented, having finally admitted to himself that unless something soiled Martinez and Lysa’s relationship, the Human was here to stay.
"So tell me, what exactly do you feel about my daughter?" Kyroll questioned, steepling his fingers and leaning forward. "Considering the conviction you've shown, I'm a little curious.
That question was a shift in the left field, which Martinez never expected. Kyroll giving Martinez the dad talk right after telling him about how some of his soldiers once got lost while out in liberty and ended up drunk and naked in another city was a bit of tonal whiplash.
Martinez, of course, had heard about fathers interrogating a potential suitor while cleaning a weapon. It was a staple in hollow flicks. Some of the Marines Martinez knew had done just that with their daughters.
But given Lysa and Kyroll's distance, Martinez assumed they would have forgone this almost cliche conversation.
Casting his gaze towards the serine lake Martinez pondered the idea for a moment, not because he was unsure of his answers but because he needed to gather the words and string them together in a way that would not piss off any father.
No father wants to hear: oh, your daughter has a nice ass, I want to eat chocolate off her abs, or how watching her break alien bones while in a fight turns him unreasonably on. Martinez might be dense, but he was nowhere near that stupid.
" I think Ruh’ha is one of the gentlest, most caring people I know. Yeah, her sense of humor can be cruel at times, but she never crossed any lines with anyone," Martinez started but paused to gauge Kyroll’s reaction.
For his credit, Kroll kept his cards close to his chest, not flinching or looking as though he was dissatisfied with the conversation piece. He was stalwart as Martinez expressed his feelings for Lysa.
Martinez sighed and scratched the back of his head slightly; this next portion was just a little bit awkward, even though Kyroll undoubtedly would understand. "She is amazing, if I was going to put it simply. She's helped me through some rough spots at work and some personal problems. She was right there with me through it all, pressing me on. And since we started staying over together more often, I have had way less nightmares, which is something I enjoy."
As Martinez spoke that time around, he was intently watching Kyroll to see if you could spot any indications of a reaction to him mentioning Lysa or their intimacy. Through the dancing shadows and Kyroll’s hands concealing most of his face, it was difficult to spot, but there was a twinge, a slight flicker, and an unmistakable change in his eyes.
Guilt replaced his usual stoney visage and lingered there for several seconds. Martinez continued to speak and compliment Liza in every way he possibly could.
Kyroll's shoulders slumped and sagged further and further with each compliment Martinez gave Lysa, praising how wondrous and magnanimous she was. It was like each word weighed down on him.
After Martinez had finished, they sat there in silence, Kyroll watching the fire crackle and pop, flames dancing with sparks fluttering away, joining the cacophony of starlight above. In contrast, Martinez wondered if Kyroll was not a cold-blooded killer.
There were a few Marines Martinez knew who had changed after the strife and tribulation the forges of combat we're—.Perhaps Carol was the same.
"Hey, are you all right?" Martinez asks, picking up on Kyroll's look of woe and clearly pondering his family. “You seem different whenever I mention Liza or Nelia. Is something on your mind?"
Kyroll bit his tongue. His spine straightened, and his muscles flexed like he was getting ambushed in some dark alley on Heavalun.
Martinez's acknowledgment meant one of two things to the old veteran: that he was dangerously sharp for someone who was just some knuckle dragger and that Kyroll was getting sloppy.
Maybe the years away from work caused him to be out of practice and unable to keep himself composed. The booze might also have something to do with it, but he doubted it was that.
This Vorick, something about Martinez dug under his skin, stabbed into him like a knife, and fileted him open, leaving his emotions and thoughts to bear. It was like the Human could read his mind.
A sudden reflection, a thought, surged forth in Kyrolls mind: the whispers of someone he had not thought of in nearly a decade resurrected from the deepest point of his mind— the only other human he had ever known.
Emil.
He recalled Emil's rants and raves about his desire to be better, to be an outstanding friend, ally, husband, and warrior all at once. Back when he was subjected to those talks, Kyroll thought it was nothing more than the rantings of a madman, someone I didn't know what they were genuinely asking for and had no semblance of reality.
Emil was ignorant and didn't see the darkness that awaited him while on the team. The Human's optimism would be crushed after a deployment or two.
But he never did change—quite the opposite. Emil changed the team. His thoughts infected the team Kyroll had spent years cultivating, selecting, and preparing for the rigors of what was to be expected of anyone working for the Avex government.
One by one, the team all resigned, having learned from Emil there was more to life than never Ending combat and snuffing the lives of those who had learned too much.
Even Kyroll fell for Emil's advice to support Nelya and the soon-to-be-born Lysa. Back then, he did it without question; all it took was telling Kyroll to be with his wife, to love life and what he had.
Why are humans like this? What was going on? Kyroll couldn't put it into words or dredge up what was crawling through his mind and digging at the chipped, cold heart in his chest.
Fucking Humans, they just did something to him. They dig into him, crawl across his skin, and change him. No, they change everyone around them.
" I'm alright," Kyrol said, hoping to end this conversation and these strange effects. But just like Emil, Martinez was relentless.
"Bulshit, it's obvious something is bouncing around in you're great. Just say it," Martinez insisted.
They held each other's stares, neither willing to be the first to break contact. Each was stubborn and bull-headed. But as Kyroll looked at Martinez through the flickering fire, he didn't see his daughter's ruh’ha; he saw Emil smiling and jokingly telling him to calm down and relax, assuring him that no one wanted to hurt him.
"Fine," Kyroll growled, disturbed by Martinez’s insistence and eerie similarities to a man he knows is long dead. It was funny, almost as if Emil was getting one final laugh out of his stubborn friend's strife, just through this other human. " It annoys me that you and Lysa have what Nelly and I couldn't when we were young."
"Wait, hold the fuck up. You, Kyroll, great warrior, special forces commander, and spy, are jealous of your daughter?" Martinez said exaggeratedly, emphasizing the magnitude of titles Kyroll once held by gesturing high to heaven.
Kyroll grumbled and tried to think of what to respond with, but Martinez was right; he was jealous. He was almost vindictive that Martinez was there for his little Huntress in a way he never could be or could have been. Between work trying to protect her and how shaded his past was, it was never an option. He never could have been forward with her, unlike this Vorick.
“Come on, brother, you should be happy for Lyza. She's healthy and has plenty of friends. We agree to go to a fertility clinic to get some groundwork for us moving forward together. How would you be jealous of any of that? That's perfectly healthy and normal?" Martinez questioned, leaning back and genuinely not understanding why Gyro would ever feel that way.
Perhaps it was because Martinez had only ever known being in a relationship with Lyza, but still, this didn't seem like something one should be jealous of, especially of one's daughter.
Kyroll gripped his pants hard, trying to stay composed. At this point, he was treating Martinez as if it was just Emil on the other side of that fire, calling him on his bullshit and telling him why he was lying to himself and everyone around him to keep himself in his little Happy Box.
"Because she's my baby girl My Little Huntress," Kyroll hissed through his teeth.
Martinez responded just as Emil would have in the past. "That doesn't change anything. The fact that you still think of her as your daughter and she wants you to be her father will help you be better with Lysa. All you have to do is try with her."
Stars damned it, why are humans so damned stubborn, and why did they always seem to have an answer for everything.
" you just don't get it!" Kyroll snapped, standing and pointing at Martinez vindictively, trying to shut out the Human's prodding.
The sudden outburst surprised Martinez, causing him to flinch and raise his hands, expecting Kyroll to jump over the flames and attempt to flog him; neither moved for several seconds, both gauging the other's reaction.
“I'm going to go take a piss," Kyroll said, turning around to escape this scenario.
Before Martinez could respond, Kyroll made it near his tent and paused, looking at the closed flap and then back at Martinez. He opened his mouth about to speak but shut it, shaking his head before vanishing into the overwhelming gloom, leaving Martinez alone.
That pause and hesitation distracted Martinez from the perceived propinquity he and his would-be father-in-law were building, thrusting him back to the reality that the older Aviex despises him.
Kyroll left Martinez alone, and his duffel bag was in that tent. It was time to settle things.
—-
"You mother fucker, get out of my head," Kyroll groaned, slamming his head against a tree hard enough that blood oozed from an open wound, getting deeper with each strike.
Emil and Martinez, why did they both have to make everything so complicated? Normally, this would be easy.
Get the target to trust you enough to get close, drug them up, then dump them somewhere or orchestrate some other method for their demise. It was no different than getting Recaf.
"But why does deciding to kill this one have to be difficult," the old Aviex muttered, leaning his head against the tree.
Kyroll thought back to all he had done, the people he had killed, the missions undertaken, and the names he had erased from history. They were all easy: a quick pull of a trigger, stepping off VTOL, or a few black lines on paper.
Kyroll couldn't see him doing that to Martinez. Even if he erased everything about the human, Lysa and Nelly would know, and they would have to be dealt with.
No matter how he tried to justify or logic the issues away, Kyroll simply couldn't figure out how he could kill Martinez.
He could try to lie to himself that keeping the Aviex history under wraps is for the greater good of the universe. That didn't work, so what if someone else knew he knew, and Nelly knew, and neither of them were supposed to?
Martinez was trying to take away his dear little daughter. He was hardly a father to Lysa, but without Martinez, there was no chance he could ever be a father to her. Everything Martinez says is true; without Martinez's approval, Lysa disappears.
Kyroll slumped into the snow, lying on his back, and looked up at the starry night sky, sighing. "Dammit, Emil, even from the grave, you're still right."
Kyroll lay there until he eventually surrendered to the reality that he had to be better for the sake of Nelly and Lysa. He thought back to one of the last things Emil tried to teach him: You can't fight and kill everything. Too many things need acceptance, care, and nurturing in love.
"Fine, Emil, you goddamn win," Kyroll grumbled.
He would ensure Lysa, Nelya, and Martinez were happy and safe. Slinking back to his feet, he started stepping back towards camp, wanting to start again and truly make this strange life work.
He would start out with Martinez by returning to camp and extending a true gamut of peace. Kyroll just had to make sure Martinez could never see what was in that duffle bag.
------ So what did you all think? next time we have the confrontation beginning and the reveal of everything Kyroll had been planning. please don't forget to updoot, and comment. I will see you all in the comments.
your bud
-Pirate
------
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Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.

Throughout my life, I was always a piece of shit. From an early age, I joined a gang and started selling drugs. Anything from weed to heroin to crack sold itself, but on the unforgiving streets of the city, a single mistake could be fatal. I always carried a cheap burner pistol that I could throw away after using it. I know quite a few friends and acquaintances who died from drugs I sold them- some overdosing, others crashing their cars while high. A couple of them committed suicide during opiate withdrawals. One got cut in half by a train while nodding off.
But by seventeen, I had committed my first confirmed murder- a rival gang member and drug dealer who pulled a gun on me first. I had probably killed people before, but I never watched the news after a shooting or a stabbing to see the result. I wasn’t interested in the slightest.
In this case, I had just been slightly quicker than my rival and, a fraction of a second later, his forehead imploded like a smashed pumpkin in front of me, spraying bone splinters and brains all over the sidewalk. He stumbled forward a step before falling forward. His pistol went off in his dying hand, but it went low, the bullet disappearing with a crack into the nearby street. He fell forward with a dull thud, his legs kicking as if he were seizing.
The sidewalk of the dead end street we stood on spun around me for a moment. The many abandoned, rotting houses of the city loomed over us like hanging corpses. My ears gave a high-pitched shriek of tinnitus from the gunshots.
Nervous, I looked up and down the side street. The entire place seemed silent and dead. Then I heard voices nearby and saw lights turning on in the front yards and windows of houses. Without a moment of hesitation, I took off, sprinting blindly away from the crime scene, not caring much where I was going. Someone a few houses down came out, an old black man in his boxers and slippers. He saw me running and called out something in a quavering voice. I didn’t slow down for a moment.
Not long after, I heard the wailing of sirens off in the distance. They were drawing closer by the second. When the street abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac of mostly abandoned and dilapidated houses, I chose one at random and cut across its back yard, jumped over the rusted metal fence and kept on running, cutting across random yards and jumping more fences until I started making my way back towards downtown.
After about five minutes, I got to a street with a lot more traffic and people. Covered in sweat, I walked casually back towards my tiny, cockroach-infested apartment.
I thought I had gotten away with it. I thought I had been able to kill this worthless scumbag without anyone noticing. But there were more eyes glittering behind the veil than I realized at that moment.
I went back home- and that was the night I died and went to Hell.
***
I lived on the first floor in a building with falling-down rafters and a flat black roof like an infected scab. The paint on the outside was the color of vomit, the windows cracked and broken. Moreover, the place always smelled like Mexican food and chemicals, and every night, I would hear gunshots and panicked screams outside.
I sat down at the table and opened a beer. The ancient CRT TV was on, showing some old horror movie from the 1970s. I took a deep breath, relieved. I didn’t expect a thing to happen at that moment.
Suddenly, my door burst open as if someone had fired a cannonball at it. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Standing there, I saw a dozen black police in SWAT gear holding rifles. The laser sights jumped and danced across the floor before they converged on my head and chest. Someone screamed something in a hoarse voice, but I didn’t understand. The words sounded garbled, like the whispering of a demon. Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.
I fell back in my chair in surprise. A single breath later, one of them opened fire. I felt the first bullet crash through my left shoulder, felt the bone shatter and the flesh explode behind it, warm blood running down my back and chest.
The next moment, others joined in. I didn’t feel the bullet that smashed into my head and sent me to Hell. It moved fast, faster than my nerves. It must have moved as fast as death itself.
The blackness descended on me like a cloud.
***
I don’t know how much time passed. It seemed like an eternity, full of freezing darkness and screams that came from everywhere and nowhere. I remember coming awake suddenly, standing before a face formed from blinding white light. I was healed without any signs of wound or blood from the gunshots. I found myself standing naked and alone in the freezing winds.
I was shivering, my arms wrapped protectively around my chest as I stood on a flat plain of cracked, gray stone. The wind whipped around me as if I were in a hurricane, blowing sand and dust across the eternal plains. The features of the endless face constantly melted and shifted, spiraling out with bolts of lightning that cracked and sizzled all around the hurricane of light. The face seemed to stand miles high with eyes that spun like the Sun.
“Where am I?” I whispered in terror. The face of infinite light stared down at me with a blinding intensity. It seemed to see every thought, every feeling, every memory. I could feel it looking through me as if I were glass.
“You are in the Bardo,” the being said in a voice like an exploding nuclear bomb. “I am the one who sees. I am GOD, the creator of the universe and all who live within it. In the end, to Me you will always return. Did you not know you would one day have to stand here?” I shook my head.
“No… I… I…” I stuttered in terror, unable to respond.
“I have seen your evil, for indeed, I am closer to you than your own jugular vein, your own heart. Did you not see the suffering of those who harmed the innocent, those who murdered and stole and lived their lives wallowing in filth? Did you not see them get wounded, shot, stabbed, strangled and imprisoned? Did you not see them die in their evil and return to Me?”
“I did,” I admitted. “Many times.”
“And yet you have fallen into the sickness yourself,” God said in a voice like a rushing waterfall. Fury and anger seemed to seethe from him. Dozens of bolts of lightning flashed out from all sides of that radiant face. “For this, you must be purified. Your soul must be cleansed with fire. For that is the fate of those who harm the innocent- they fall down to the bottomless pit, to the blazing inferno whose fuel is men and stones. The flames eat them all greedily, and then the fires cry out to Me for more.”
My body felt like it was covered with stinging hornets. Excruciating pins and needles ran all up and down my legs and arms. I looked down, seeing a swirling dark hole opening up underneath me in the field of gray stone, spitting out drops of liquid blackness. They splashed upwards, burning through my skin like napalm, but no blood came out. It was as if my body were dissolving into dripping shadows that pulled me downwards. I felt myself slowly falling through the eternal stone plain as unseen hands dragged me away. As I descended, I heard the voice of God one last time.
“Down into the pit you will go, to the valley of wailing and the lake of flames where the damned scream for peace that never comes, to the city of shadows, to Naraka…”
***
Beneath me, the shadowy tunnel descended. I fell through it like lightning. Everything spun around me at an incredible speed. Suddenly, I broke through something, some invisible barrier in the endless darkness. I found myself falling through a cloud of suffocating smoke, and then the world opened up all around me.
A blood-red sky with thick black clouds extended out in all directions. I glimpsed a world of sharp cliffs and rivers of lava that wound their way down mountains of obsidian.
I fell through the middle of the sky at a tremendous speed, the wind whipping around my ears like a hurricane. A scream ripped its way out of my throat, but I was traveling so fast I could barely hear it as the echoes disappeared above me. Below me was what looked like a massive lake filled with blood about half a mile wide, and it was coming up to meet me fast. Many struggling bodies writhed in the currents, trying to claw their way out. I crashed through the surface at an incredible speed, going deep under the warm crimson waves.
The bloody water of the lake filled my mouth and nose with the overwhelming taste of copper and iron. I started trying to swim back up to the surface, frantically kicking and pushing with my arms and legs. I opened my eyes, and the salty blood stung them. It looked like I was peering through a translucent red film into a world of deep-sea abominations. Long snakes with two heads swam all around me, snapping and biting at each other and any legs or arms nearby. I saw them drag people down one by one, wrapping their slick bodies around their struggling victims as they drowned.
I broke through the surface, inhaling deeply. I was worried about the snakes and whatever else was slinking around down there. Thousands of people treaded water in the massive lake, trying to make their way to the shores. The nearest person to me was only ten feet away, a young woman with panicked eyes and wavy black hair. As I watched her, she gave a scream of terror and then was dragged under the surface, struggling and kicking. She never reappeared.
All around me, I smelled the fetid rot of decaying bodies. There must have been thousands and thousands of corpses at the bottom of this bloody lake. Some of them floated on top of the surface, rancid and swollen, their sightless eyes staring up at the fiery sky. The surface of the lake constantly bubbled and writhed, though whether this was from the rotting of so many bodies or from hidden monsters breathing under the surface, I didn’t yet know.
Frantically, I looked around for the nearest shore to get out of the danger. I saw that if I swam past the direction where the young woman had been, I would only have to go about two hundred feet. But my heart hammered in my chest as I remembered her being dragged under, her frantic, panicked struggling. What if the same creature was waiting over there, waiting for someone like me to try to swim over?
There were dozens more people between me and the nearest shore. Most of them climbed out, dripping drops of crimson onto the black volcanic sands of the beaches. I made my way as fast as I could in that direction, deciding to take my chances with the snakes. Otherwise, I would have to swim at least four times as far to get to the next nearest beach, which also swarmed with masses of naked people clawing their way out of the bloody lake.
A small group of people was concentrated only twenty feet away, three men who were swimming in the same direction I was. One started screaming suddenly. A purple tentacle the color of an old bruise broke through the surface of the water. To my horror, I saw it had black spikes that clicked and clacked together all along its massive arms. The spikes resembled long, hollow hypodermic needles.
The screaming man tried to swim in the opposite direction, but the tentacle wrapped around him, pulling him above the water. It tightened like a boa constrictor, the black spikes stabbing into his chest and stomach. Countless punctures opened up all along his body. The black spikes flexed, and his ribcage ripped open with a wet, ripping sound. The man’s screams abruptly cut off as his head lolled. With a sucking sound, the hollow spikes began drinking, consuming the man’s spurting blood with a sound like an inhalation of air. Slowly, almost lazily, the tentacle began dragging his limp corpse under the surface, back towards the main body of whatever monstrosity it belonged to.
The other two gave panicked sobs as more purple tentacles broke through the surface of the lake. Frantically, I started swimming around them, giving them a wide berth. Within seconds, the other two men were dragged under, deep stab wounds opening in their bodies as the hollow spikes drank greedily with loud sucking sounds.
“Fuck!” I cried, horrified. I felt something brush past my leg, something slimy and eel-like that writhed and slithered under the opaque crimson surface. In horror, I felt its slimy skin wrap around my leg, at first loosely slithering, then tightening. Two black faces with white, lidless eyes rose out of the water, the faces of serpents with fangs like switchblades. I saw both heads were connected to a single slithering body, one that wrapped slowly around my legs and arms, strangling me. Screaming, I felt its fangs dig into my neck. As the twin pairs of lidless white eyes stared at me, I tried to fight, tried to raise my arm, but it was far too strong. It dragged me under the surface.
Struggling against the beast, feeling its poison coursing through my bloodstream like lava, I drowned in the lake of blood. The experience of drowning is horrifying beyond all measure- the overwhelming fear and anxiety when you realize you have no air, the sensation of inhaling the bloody water, the sensation of dying. My vision turned black as a suffocating, clenching fist squeezed my heart. It felt like it took an eternity, but it was probably only a couple minutes at most. Death came over me then, cold and filled with small, suffocating agonies. That was the first time I died in Hell, but it would not be my last.
For in Hell, as I quickly learned, you never truly died, but were just thrown back to the beginning.
***
I felt myself falling again through the black clouds, the Lake of Blood beneath me. It all repeated like before. I screamed as I fell through the water at an incredible speed. Eldritch monstrosities were dragging people under the surface all around me. As quickly as I could, I swam towards the nearest shore. I dared not look down, didn’t dare slow for a single moment. A few times, I was nearly swiped by large, writhing tentacles, but they found other shrieking victims nearby to my immense relief.
I didn’t want to die ever again. It was a horrible sensation, though one that I would, sadly, become used to. Death followed me like a shadow, and starting over in Hell was always a nightmare.
I gave a gasp of joy when my feet touched bottom. Running through the rippling currents of blood, naked and gasping, I came upon the black sands of the shore. Looking around the lake, I saw there were four beaches, seemingly placed at each point of the compass underneath the spinning, blood-red sky.
At the end of each of the black sands lay a sparkling silver gate fifty feet tall and hundreds of feet across. The thin strands of silver intertwined like the fine filaments of a spiderweb, spiraling around each other in graceful, curving arches. Embossed over the top were the words, “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” No one seemed to pay the gate any mind. Naked crowds of struggling people stumbled through it onto the streets of Hell, streets that were paved with human bones and stretched off to the horizon.
Skyscrapers made of obsidian with spiraling windows like the murderholes of a castle stretched hundreds of stories up into the blood-red sky. As I staggered out, pressed body to body in the thick crowd of crying, wailing people, I saw ahead of us the second mortal danger of Hell.
There were countless gangs of mostly men gathered on the streets of bone, the desperate soldiers of this apocalyptic wasteland. They huddled together in groups of ten or twelve, attacking and murdering random people who tried to sprint past from the Lake of Blood. They wore crude leather tunics and pants that looked like they were made from human skin. Some wore crude masks of human skin on their faces, ragged patches of flesh that had been cut from the bodies of the dead. They stared out with cold, emotionless eyes through the holes in the dried, leathery skin, surveying the surging crowds like lions surveying their prey.
They held primitive weapons in their hands, clubs and maces made from bone, swords sharpened from obsidian glass and even wooden spears. The wood looked strange and dark, almost like mahogany. Next to them were fires with sharpened spits of roasting human meat. The fat dripped off the dismembered arms and legs sizzling over the flames. It gave off a smell like roast pork that permeated the area, rising up in thick, fragrant clouds.
I followed the surging crowds, watching in horror as the groups of armed men attacked and killed random passersby in the crowd, dragging their limp bodies next to the fires where they stacked the unconscious or dead people in stacks like cordwood. I figured they would inevitably roast their flesh for food or make pale leather armor from their dead skin. I felt myself being pushed over in the direction of the nearest group of armed thugs. A few of the nearest men wore masks made of people’s faces, though those behind them did not, only wearing the crude leather armor instead.
One of them standing only ten feet away met my eyes, his cold killer’s gaze boring through me. The mask of skin made him look like some monster from a horror movie, with its ragged, mutilated edges and garish black stitches. He took a step towards me, raising a short spear made from a human leg bone and sharpened to a blood-stained point.
In panic, I looked around, seeing a young woman in her early twenties standing next to me. She was looking straight ahead with panic and terror in her eyes, not paying any attention to me or the men that crept towards us. With all of my strength, I shoved the woman towards the masked killer. She stumbled back in surprise, falling into the man’s weapon. His bone spear stabbed through her stomach. She looked down at her naked body in horror when the point emerged from her navel, dripping rivers of blood down her trembling legs. As she spit up trickles of blood and collapsed to her knees, I ran. A sickening crack rang out behind me like a shattering of bones, and I knew they had murdered the young woman.
I sprinted away from the gangs of cannibal killers as fast as I could, which wasn’t very fast considering how many naked, screaming bodies pressed in all on me from all sides. I felt myself being carried forward by the surging masses towards the silver gate. Hanging from the delicate silver threads, I saw signs written in many languages. I found one in English and started reading it with rapt attention, even as I was relentlessly pushed forward and elbowed and kicked.
I still remember what it said by heart.
“Rules for Naraka:

1. Those who are damned will be fed from the fountain of life. GOD will ensure your rebirth at the Lake of Blood. Though death may crush you over and over, there will be no rest.
   
2. Stay away from the Screamers, the faceless ones who roam the land. Those who are taken by the Screamers will know endless torment and madness in the caverns deep under the ground.
   
3. When the sirens in the center of Naraka wail, the firestorms are coming. Seek shelter immediately.
   
4. Those rare ones who ascend the silver spire at the end of Naraka may find salvation, even in the city of shadows.”
   

As I was pushed forward, I read the sharp, copperplate engraving scrawled across the silver signs in glowing red letters, trying to memorize every single word. At the time, none of it made much sense, but I instinctively felt that it was immensely important in some way I didn’t yet understand.
Immediately outside the gate, the beach turned into a road paved with bones. Leg bones and arm bones were laid side by side, yellowing and drying under the dark crimson sky. Skulls embedded in the center of the road grinned up at me, laughing at silent secrets I could never hope to comprehend.
Naked and barefoot, I sprinted down the road of bones between massive skyscrapers of black obsidian and gleaming red volcanic rock. People started to thin as the survivors scattered in all directions. I felt the sharp points of bone stabbing into the soles of my feet.
That was the moment the sirens began their eerie wailing, rising and falling in a dissonant cacophony, slower and deeper than any tornado siren I had ever heard. It sounded almost like a whale call, stretching out over the infernal city. They sounded from all around us, seemingly ringing out from thousands of speakers hidden throughout the obsidian towers.
I looked up suddenly. The crimson sky had changed rapidly, forming into a cyclone that swirled overhead in great black and red spirals. It met in a fiery eye at the center. As I looked up, I saw glowing orange hail soaring through the air, leaving behind streaks like thousands of comets. It fell towards the naked masses of tens of thousands of bodies pressed together on the streets.
At that moment, I remembered the rules. Some of the others apparently hadn’t read them during the panic and horror of the escape from the Lake of Blood, and they continued surging forward down the road as fire began to fall like drops of napalm all around us. Wails of agony rose up from those who were covered in the glowing lava. The people in the front of the crowd immediately fell under the heat and destruction of the firestorm. Their hair lit on fire, their skin melted and blackened, and still more fire rained down from the sky, sweeping relentlessly in our direction.
I saw an obsidian skyscraper with a great, open archway only a couple hundred feet away. The nearest of the crowd scrambled to find cover under the safety of the building. I sprinted along with them. As I reached the threshold, I felt the first burning drops of magma land on my back. I screamed as I smelled my own skin cooking and my own hair burning, and then I was through the archway. I fell, rolling on my back, trying to put out the sizzling fires that burned me like some corrosive acid.
I felt rivers of warm blood running down my back as more people ran past me, deeper into the hall. The skyscraper was massive, not only in height but in width. The hallway ran for hundreds of feet, disappearing into doorless thresholds on both sides cleaved out of the obsidian, as if the entire structure had been carved from one enormous piece of glassy stone. In the center of the hallway, it opened up into a spiraling staircase.
I looked up abruptly to see three men wearing masks made of human skin standing over me, each holding primitive bone spears in their filthy, blood-stained hands. They looked emaciated, wasted away, like the walking corpses of a death camp. To my utter astonishment, even through the layer of dried, ragged skin, I recognized one of them. It was in his gray eyes, and the twisting dragon tattoos that covered his arms and chest instantly brought a flash of memory.
“Shooter,” I said as they raised their weapons. “Shooter, it’s me. Remember me? It’s Richie.” He froze in place, looking down at me with widening eyes.
“Holy shit, Richie?” he said, tearing the mask off. “What are you doing here?” It was an absurd question, of course. What were any of us doing here?
The last time I had seen Shooter, he had been sitting a pile of blood in his car. He was one of the designated gunman for the Solid Ones, the gang we had both joined when we were young. The amazing luck of finding another Solid in this place of death was astounding. But, then again, I had known many people who had died, and I had a feeling the vast majority were here somewhere.
“I guess I died,” I said sheepishly, giving him a faint half-smile. The other two men standing by his side lowered their weapons. “Fucking pigs came in and shot me.”
“Ah, yeah,” he said, unsurprised. “They do have a tendency to do that.” He gave a low laugh. I took a long look at Shooter, who was wearing the pale skin of some unknown victim or victims of this place of agony. He reached a trembling hand down and pulled me up from the smooth surface of this strange skyscraper. More naked, scared people continued to stream past us as the sirens continued their infernal shrieking outside. Many of them had horrific burns all over their body, and a few were clearly on the verge of death by the time they had made it inside.
Farther down the hall, another ten men wearing the same garb as Shooter came towards us, holding sharpened swords of obsidian and thick clubs made of bone. Shooter put his hands up.
“Hey, I know this guy,” he said calmly, motioning over to me with an apathetic wave of his head. “He was in the same gang as me! We used to go around having a great time, I’ll tell you. Remember that time we shot at that cop and he pissed himself?” He gave a racuous laugh at that. I smiled as the memory flooded back. Shooter had definitely hit him, though I think I probably missed. I remembered the blood soaking over the arm of cop’s uniform as he lay there, gasping and turning white, his face looking bloodless and shocked. Shooter and I had run away, high-fiving each other and grinning like maniacs.
“Yeah, I do,” I said, grinning. The other men surrounded me in a semi-circle. Shooter knelt down and extended a hand to me, helping me off the ground.
“Well, you’re in good company,” he said. “Here, we can do whatever the fuck we want. What’s going to happen, after all? It’s not like we can be sent to Hell.” He laughed, and that laughter writhed with the insanity and bloodlust that seemed to be eating him from the inside like a cancer.
***
“We still need to take him to the Sergeant,” one of the masked men next to Shooter said. “We can see if he has the right stuff needed to fight with us.”
“What happens when you guys die?” I asked. “I mean, obviously, you restart at the Lake of Blood, but how do you find your way back to your gang?” Shooter shrugged.
“We always find each other again eventually,” he said. “It’s not like there’s any lack of time here. All we have is time- and fresh meat, of course. There’s always more fresh meat streaming in through the Lake of Blood. We can take whatever we need from them…” The wailing of the sirens suddenly ended as he spoke. I looked around, seeing burnt and dying people still struggling into the front hallway of the skyscraper. The smell of burning hair and searing flesh filled the entire area.
“Come on,” one of the men said. His voice was gruff, as if he had been chainsmoking five packs a day since he was a little kid. “The Sergeant is on the top floor. You’ll have to talk to him.” I nodded, knowing they would certainly kill me if I did not join their group.
But at that moment, something much worse than dying, blackened bodies crawled in through the archway. I saw it before the group of men did. Instinctively upon glimpsing it, I knew it was something terrible, something that could only live in the depths of a psychotic’s nightmare.
It stood nearly ten feet tall. Its skin was as pale as a writhing maggot. On its hairless face, I saw no eyes, no nose, no ears, just smooth, bone-white skin. It had thin lips tied together with black thread, the garish stitches poking out from the ragged, bloodless flesh. Its arms and legs looked inhumanly long and thin. Its ribs and spine jutted out as if it were a starving, rabid animal. From all around its body, an inhuman wailing started, as if dozens of demonic voices were shrieking in unison. Yet its mouth stayed firmly closed, still stitched shut.
Its fingers jutted out like railroad spikes, each a foot long. As its screaming intensified, it ran towards us, crushing the dying and injured under its naked, twisted feet. I stared into its pale, bloodless face, and even though it had no eyes, it felt like it stared straight back at me, looking into my soul.
“Don’t look at it!” Shooter screamed next to me, turning his face away. The rest of the men closed their eyes or turned away, backpedaling away from the abomination. “It will take on the shape of what you fear most! It’s a Screamer!” But it was too late. At that moment, something strange happened to the pale, naked body of the Screamer. It rippled like a mirage sizzling off the sands of a desert. Its body squeezed and contorted as the distorted shrieking around its pale, naked body grew louder and more insane.
Thin stalks of black, spidery legs began jutting out of the sides of its chest. Its face melted like wax as glittering compound eyes sprouted from the top of its head. Within seconds, it had turned into a massive spider, a black widow whose head nearly scraped the ceiling twenty feet above us. The red hourglass on its back shone brightly, as if in reminder of the imminent death it brought to anyone it touched.
I hate spiders. I’ve always hated spiders. When I saw that skittering, crawling monstrosity, something in me broke. I sprinted towards the group of men who were trying to do their best to escape without looking directly at the Screamer, hoping that the spider would choose one of them instead of me. But I heard its massive bulk following closely behind me. I could feel its insectile breath on the back of my neck.
Naked and frantic, I sprinted behind the nearest of the men and used the same tactic I had used escaping through the silver gate: I pushed the unsuspecting figure towards the abomination that rushed towards us in a blur, its eight legs pounding the glassy floor with reverberating thuds.
Drops of clear venom dripped from its fangs as it grabbed the struggling man. It bit deeply into his leg, and as the venom dripped onto his skin, it seemed to eat through his flesh like some sort of acid. The man screamed as red streaks rapidly spread up his leg throughout the rest of his body. His teeth began chattering and his pupils dilated as he stared at me accusingly. But he did not die.
The spider grabbed him and dragged him away down the hallway, down to wherever the victims of the Screamers go. I saw a dozen more of the pale, faceless monstrosities rushing in to take his place. The men looked up, and the Screamers erupted into monstrous shapes: giant, slithering snakes, a floating eyeball with black, squid-like tentacles writhing around its central mass, enormous brown recluses and black widows and faceless Grim Reapers who floated over the ground in black robes. The overwhelming sense of fear and panic I felt at that moment still stays with me to this day, and even though this happened a couple days ago and I did eventually make it out of that den of horrors, it still leaves a deep scar across my mind.
As visions from a nightmare approached us, I turned and ran.