“Yo, Miss. You ever heard of Dante’s Inferno?”
This was a change. Martin was usually more interested in talking about a movie he’d seen or the video game he’d been playing since their last session, not epic poetry.
“Yes, I’m familiar. Are you reading it in school?”
“Nah, not the old one. It’s a video game. You play this guy that goes through hell to get his wife back, he’s got this badass sword made of skulls and shit.”
“You should try the poem if you like that.” It was no use correcting the language of some kids; you wouldn’t get anything done in the allotted time if you kept pausing to address every “and shit.”
“Yeah, maybe, but what’s cool about it, and what scares me, if we’re being honest,” Martin said, and paused, choosing his words. He was a sixteen-year-old with a teardrop tattoo who’d spent more time in juvie than he had in middle school, but he still liked to talk about his fears a lot. It had taken her six months of posturing and dead ends to get him to open up enough to use that particular f word.
“It’s a scary game?”
“Not really, more stupid and gross than it is scary. But there’s this idea that as you move on, you go deeper into hell and the levels, they’re all based around the different crimes you do to get to hell, and as you get further and further, the stuff the people did to land themselves there gets worse and worse and the place gets more fucked up.” He paused. “You think that’s true?”
“What’s true?”
“That it’s not just you do bad things and you go to hell, but that you’ll have it worse once you get there depending on all the shit you did? Like misdemeanors versus felonies and shit?”
“I don’t know, what do you think?”
“I think I don’t want it to be.”
That was one of the last times Martin had shown up for his appointment. A few more slips and the judge had decided to charge him as an adult. It had made the papers, hit some review boards, but nobody seemed to take too much umbrage with the decision, not even Nikki.
If they’d been fighting their way out of hell, then the man who’d taken ahold of Dane was Cerberus, the guardian at the gates. His skin was a mass of scabs and burned tissue, speckled over with fresh pinpricks of red blood where new wounds had opened in his skin, just from talking and moving his head. He must have been in extreme pain.
You wouldn’t know it from his laughter, though. It was a sound that she’d forced herself to reevaluate; crouched at the bottom of their piled-up boxes, she was able to hear the laughter so clearly because the door had gone still. She whirled to check that it was still intact, that they hadn’t broken it down. It was still there.
She turned back and could see both of them. When Dane tried to run, he’d made it three steps before being overtaken. It was enough distance from the front of the building that the two of them were framed perfectly by the window, as if Nikki was watching a one-sided wrestling match on TV.
Dr. Dane gasped. The scarred man was toying with him, choking him until he went red and then releasing his grip momentarily, letting Dane suck in air before reapplying pressure.
“Doctor? See Pee Arrrr?” The man giggled, his own jellied blood mixing with the spittle at the corner of his mouth and landing on Dane’s scrubs, dotting the blue fabric a dark purple. Every time he was allowed a breath, Dr. Dane would buck. As he struggled, the back of Dane’s head smacked into the resident’s nose, or at least where his nose would have been, had it not melted off in whatever accident had given him his terrible scars.
“Nice, be nice now,” the man said, crimping his fingers around Dane’s neck a little too tightly, cracking it loud enough for Nikki to hear over her own muffled scream. She pressed her fingers over her face so she wouldn’t be heard. Maybe they didn’t know she was down here, maybe that’s why the banging had stopped, because they figured they’d caught the only escapee.
The resident removed his scarred hand from Dane’s throat. Two of his fingers were connected by a thick webbing of burned tissue, melted and then healed together. Whatever had given the residents their strength hadn’t necessarily been an upgrade for this man.
Dr. Dane tried to breathe but managed only to exhale, a gurgle first, followed by a mouthful of blood. The man had kinked the doctor’s esophagus, and from the sound of his shouts, he hadn’t meant to.
“No!” the man yelled, letting go of Dane, who dropped to his knees, while the burned resident beat his own head with his fists. Self-injurious behavior was something Nikki was familiar with. A few of her kids had fallen on the autism spectrum or had other developmental delays and would flagellate if their sessions began to dwell too heavily on their mistakes; if they felt powerless and worthless and felt they needed a physical reprimand.
The man beat at his thin hair until his own knuckles were bloody and it looked like he might knock himself unconscious. Do it, Nikki pleaded. He stopped and put his hands out for balance, then glared down at Dane. The doctor was clawing at the ground, not moving anywhere fast.
The burned man’s expression shifted as he watched Dane. She’d seen that look, too. The look in the old man’s eyes was the kind that made you depress the button on your phone, the silent alarm that would call for security. The scarred man was looking for someone else to blame for his mistake.
He stomped down on Dr. Dane’s back, the kick ferocious enough to make the man’s chest sink into the gravel. Dust flew up and his rib cage may have even gone concave. Blood poured from his mouth now, but his eyes moved with a fluidity that told Nikki he was still alive.
He wouldn’t be for long. At least she hoped.
With his foot still planted on Dane’s back, the doctor’s eyes seemed to connect with hers in the darkness. She didn’t mouth it, didn’t dare, but she wanted him to know that she was sorry, that she knew he’d only been human, that she might have made the same selfish decisions; Don might have, too, if he’d lived.
Slipping his fused fingers into Dane’s mouth, his other hand grasping at his hair, the man wrenched Dane’s head up. The crack that followed did not end after one pop, but continued until Dane’s body was folded backward, a right angle that ended with his head flat against the man’s knee. There, face to dead face, the man let loose a primal scream that tore at his ruined lips.
He was yelling at Dane, scolding him for dying.
The mutilation continued, but Nikki didn’t watch it. She curled under the boxes, searching for Paulo’s hand, finding it and holding it.
“It’s okay, you’re here,” he whispered to her. He could have misspoken, meant I’m here, but he probably hadn’t. He meant that she was here, still alive, and because of that there was hope.
Until the rattle of keys filled the basement, a metal-on-metal scratch from the other side of the door.
Oh Jesus. They had a set of keys. They’d had them this whole time.