Giving Him Hell: A Saturn's Daughter Novel (Saturn's Daughters Book 3) (27 page)

The ground rumbled again. More predictable screaming. Leg spilling blood and hurting like hell, I belly crawled behind the tub, to lift up the back of the tent and peer out. The steam geyser was impressively tall, forming vapor clouds that floated over the water. Cracks had begun to spread through the harbor mud from the cloud’s source near the rusted-out chimneys of the old plant. Even as I watched, one stack bent, crumpled, and toppled in heaps of dust and ash, spraying the area with who-knew-what toxic waste.

I was glad the DGs had moved the vagrants to safer ground.

Milo stuck his head outside the canvas but retreated, returning to sniffing the tub. I’d quit calling him a bobcat and call him dawg shortly.

I didn’t see the blue blob anywhere on the bleak muddy terrain between the tent and the water. Where had it gone and could I go too?

A
pow
like a bomb exploding shook the ground again, and the geyser abruptly spewed muddy, rust-colored water. A hail of bullets rained over my head just as I was considering grabbing my cat and running.

Before I could choose between demented landscape or guns, the ground cracked under me, and I slid in.

Twenty-six

I blacked out—again.

When I woke up, I was lying in dark nothingness—again.

Shades of Hell’s Mansion haunted me. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, provided I had hand or face. If I was in hell alone, I would freak, so I was aiming for reality. I dug my fingers into dirt I could crumble. Real.

The agony of my bullet-riddled thigh proved I had a body this time.

With that wake-up call, I breathed deeper. While waiting for my wildly racing pulse to slow, I clinically assessed the state of my health, then studied the ceiling in hopes of finding the rabbit hole I’d fallen through. Given the chaos I’d created, I prayed I’d simply crashed through cracking dirt and not a portal to hell.

I’d had a lot of hard experience and knew freaking wasn’t a good choice. So I concentrated on sensations. I could hear water dripping. That seemed like a good sign. Hell wouldn’t have water, would it?

My head hurt as if someone had coshed my skull with a steel bar. Or a rock. My back was definitely lying on rocks. I gingerly scooted my hip off a sharp one and let the shooting pain in my leg subside before moving again.

I couldn’t hear or see Milo. Anxiously, I listened, but no kitty protests. I prayed he’d had the claws to stay above ground.

I lifted my hand and patted my face. I could feel skin. That seemed pretty promising too. If I was real, I could climb out of here.

A wailing shriek echoed off the stone walls around me.
Crap, crap, frigging crap
 . . . I was down here with the Force. I expected red-eyed bats any minute.

Panicking, I sat up fast, and almost crumpled over in pain. Grabbing my leg, I carefully scooted backward and away from the direction of the ghostly wail.

My back hit a wall. I still couldn’t see a thing. I patted around, discovering loose dirt and hot rocks, damned
hot
rocks. Hot enough to make a sauna. I groped around them anyway, burning my fingers but looking for a purchase upward—not that I could see any gaps above my head. I just knew that if I fell
down
, I needed to go
up
to escape.

My heart beat like a timpani again. I was stronger and less afraid when I had Max or Andre at my side. On my own, I wanted to shout in terror and weep, except I couldn’t hear anything from above, and if I couldn’t hear them, they wouldn’t hear me. Besides I had this vague notion that loud noises might shake loose more debris.

Painfully, I pulled myself upright. I felt bruised and shaken, but I seemed to have all my body parts. Definitely not hell, I reassured myself, just underground somewhere.

Leaning my torso against a wall of dirt, I reached as high as I could but couldn’t feel a ceiling. I groped along the wall on my right but it was blocked by that barrier of hot rock. Holding my right hand to the hot wall and reaching out with the left, I couldn’t touch anything. I tapped my foot as far as I could reach without releasing the wall. The floor seemed solid. I just wasn’t brave enough to let go.

It made sense that I must be directly below the place I’d fallen in, so I should try to climb back out where I knew there had to be an opening. Unfortunately, I saw no light above me, and I’m no rock climber. Even if I were, I’d need gloves to manage the rocks without third degree burns. I groped about for handholds but clumps of dirt fell off in my fingers.

If the ground shook again, I could be buried alive.

I tried to test for a slope under my feet but couldn’t determine any. I might have stayed there for days, paralyzed in terror, except I caught a glimpse of Cookie Monster blue down the tunnel or whatever this was.

“Help?” I tentatively called, both hands now clinging to the wall at my back.

The blue hesitated.

“How do I get out?” I asked, praying I wasn’t hallucinating. I was starting to hate irony.

You see me?

I didn’t hear the words with my ears so much as inside my head. Wicked weird.

“Yes, you’re blue. I followed you here,” I said aloud, not knowing if mind-speak worked for me.

No one else sees me. I’m not really real.

“Okay, then how are you talking to me?” This was more entertaining than shivering in terror or dodging bullets. Even my leg quit shaking.

My own personal hallucination seemed to ponder my question.

I hear Others,
it said slowly
. I learned your words. They are crude and not very effective. I am . . . projecting . . . those words that seem to relate to what you’re asking.

Okay, I must have hit my head when I went down. Was I dreaming? I shivered and remembered Andre’s dream world, the one he said was another dimension beyond our own. Had I crossed the veil to where our comatose patients had once gone? No one had mentioned dirt tunnels or talking blue doughboys.

“Can you lead me out of here?” I asked.

If I could do that, I would leave. This is not a happy place.

I’d second that. At least, the Force had stopped wailing. “I saw you above ground. How did you do that?”

More hesitation.
I project images, I think. I try so very hard to see what is happening outside this dark wall.

“The blue blob is just an image?” I asked warily. “That’s not you?”

Blue blob?
I thought I heard amusement, but that could just be me projecting.

“That’s what I’m looking at right now—blue with sort of a round head and sort of a torso and sort of appendages. But pretty formless otherwise.”

I am not very good at making myself look like you. Blue is this color? I like it. Sometimes, the bowl above is that color.

The bowl above? The
sky
. This was freaky. I swallowed and tried to wake myself up, but I was still feeling hot rocks and smelling . . . ozone. Could I hope this was all natural and not the dimensions caving in?

This was the polluted Zone, and I was talking to a blue blob. Forget natural.

“The sky isn’t quite that color. How are you seeing it if you’re trapped down here?”

The projection—the blue blob—helps me see outside. And the other things, the . . . wires . . . and pipes, I think you call them. They are not quite satisfactory but better than dark. I have only just learned to make this form. It is very hard.

“You speak well, so you must hear things well?”

Yes. Man has run pipes and wires, and I can hear through them better than I can see. There have been many pipes lately.

Pipes. That might be promising, if I wasn’t crazy. “Can you show me a pipe?”

They are not safe,
it said sadly
. The . . . element . . . that confines me is meant to imprison. The heat is corroding the element. It is mixing with your chemicals and earth. The pipes are taking these things away. This weakens my prison, for which I am . . . grateful. Is that the right word? But the pipes rattle and explode with gas. I cannot think this is safe for you.

Pipes, gas, explode . . . Magic gas clouds, steaming geysers, chemical floods. Saunas. My brain was still working. It calculated likelihoods and admired the extent of my subconscious if I was dreaming up these explanations.

“What are you?” I had to ask.

More hesitation. The blue blob became a little less clear, and I got scared again. I kind of needed someone to talk to besides my head. I eased a little closer in its direction.

I am dangerous on my own world.

Again, I detected—or injected—a note of sadness to its thoughts.

“Dangerous?” I inquired warily.

I ask questions. I am curious. I play instead of work. I like pretty blues. This is all very bad where I come from.

I tried not to snort. “Yeah, they’re bad here, too, but not dangerous. Not usually.” A misfit in the Zone, how appropriate. “Where is your world?”

This time, it didn’t speak but sent me images of a cloudy planet orbiting an orange sun. I’m not an astronomer. I hadn’t a clue. I just knew it didn’t look like Earth. No rings, so it didn’t look like Saturn either. “How did you get here?”

Another image, this time of a ball of rock hurtling through space, approaching a planet that did look like the Earth I’d seen from space images. I winced at the impact as it hit rock and drove deep into the planet’s core.

A meteorite. This thing had landed here in a meteorite, maybe back during the Jurassic for all I knew. Boy, this was one fancy dream. I could see Andre’s fascination with other dimensions. Where else could I talk to a space alien? It wasn’t all that strange to someone who had talked to an invisible grandmother through her shape-shifting chimp friend. Call me open-minded.

If this was my subconscious at work, I hoped to find clues in my weird dream that would help me get back to my world—kind of like Andre brought back knowledge of the future.

“I don’t suppose there’s any way I can release you from that rock?” I asked uncertainly. I really needed a scientist with me in this dream.

It erodes slowly
, it said with a fatalistic tone
. I am able to do more now that the imprisoning element is being taken away.

Siphoned off, sucked up, pumped into Acme’s tanks—an element from outer space that could potentially cure cancer. Or bring hell closer.

I started easing along the wall, testing the ground, trying to get closer to the blue thing. Maybe there were pipes or cracks or something I could use to see the outside world. I didn’t want to believe I was in hell. This was too real. My previous encounters had been ephemeral.

The rocks were definitely hot. I wish I’d run out of the office wearing my leather bike gloves.

Was I hearing chanting? Yells of protest? I halted and looked around some more, but I couldn’t see anything. “Any ideas on how I can get back to my world?”

Must you go back? I like having company.

“Yeah, so do I, but my friends will worry. Did you have friends in your world?” I repeated my earlier search, running my hands up the walls to look for holds for climbing.

We do not have friends as you see them. We work. We produce. We rest. We work again.

“That doesn’t sound very jolly. I’d be dangerous there too.”

A sliver of blue neon suddenly illuminated the far wall. Gasping, I applied my back and hands to the wall and studied the opposite side of what had to be a tunnel. Or an old sewer.

I will make it pretty here for you,
the voice offered generously
.

Well, now I knew the source of the Zone’s blue neon. Blob was decorating his world.

“Thank you, but I really need to go home or my cat will starve.” Not likely, Milo was too smart to starve, but that was the best excuse I could conjure. It wasn’t as if I was supporting a passel of kiddies or a dying mother or anything.

The freaky wail finally kicked in again. The shriek bounced off the tunnel walls, and the blue blob abruptly vanished. I couldn’t blame him.

I bit my tongue to keep from screaming in accompaniment. I was glad to have the pale light so I could duck if the bats returned. Goose bumps dotted my arms beneath my coat, and my internal organs started to shiver. Probably not a good reaction considering the heat of this place. I tried to remember first aid courses on shock and blood loss. I could feel wetness dribbling down my leg.

“What is that noise?” I asked in a voice I hoped didn’t sound terrified.

My friendly captor didn’t reply instantly, and when he did, he seemed uncertain
. I do not know exactly. There are . . . beings . . . in another world close to yours. They are not happy. Some are very . . . angry. I do not like that place and do not go there.

“Sensible,” I concurred. Did he just confirm the existence of hell?

I couldn’t keep calling the voice “it.” He seemed male to me—young and immature, like Tim. Although I suppose space aliens might not have gender or even age for all I knew. I was
projecting
, giving a space alien Tim’s familiar character.

The blue light stopped near the wall where I’d fallen through. I couldn’t quite tell if the wall was a landslide of debris from my fall or if it had been there a while. I heard no sounds of frantic digging. No bulldozers.

Whereas, if I crept closer to where I’d seen the blue blob last, I thought I could hear voices. I edged along the wall, terrified the ground would give out from under me again. I should have studied more science. My mother had talked incessantly about the dangers of fracking and geothermal energy from radiation and other underground power, but I’d mostly tuned her out. I just had a notion that if the water and heat were being sucked from underground, that the dirt here could destabilize.

“Do you know who I mean when I talk about Andre?” I asked, just to hear the sound of my voice as I eased down the tunnel, listening.

It is very hard to distinguish one of you from the other, but I know you call each other by names. I have heard of Andre.