Chapter Seventeen

For several seconds, none of them moved as the burnt and mangled Nazis advanced. But then their mutual paralysis broke all at once, and they turned and began running toward the orange light. Lola knew they had no reason to believe they’d find safety when – if – they reached the light, but it was the only beacon they had to guide them, and they headed for it instinctively.

The Nazis continued making their childish sound effects as they gave pursuit, boots thudding on the cavern’s stone floor. Lola didn’t look back, kept her gaze fixed on the orange glow before them. Her knees, no longer numb, screamed at her for abusing them so, and her breathing became rapid and shallow. She felt lightheaded, as if she weren’t getting enough air, and she regretted never using that goddamn treadmill. She expected to hear the sound of gunfire any moment, feel bullets tear through her body. Or maybe she’d feel the sharp point of a bayonet thrust between her shoulder blades. But while the Nazis continued their pursuit, they hadn’t started firing. She didn’t know why, but she wasn’t about to complain.

As the four companions drew closer to the orange glow, the smell of burning gas became stronger, almost overpowering. They now saw that the light emanated from the base of a large cylindrical object, perhaps thirty feet high. The structure was made of metal, and four wide pipes extended diagonally from the top, bent at right angles, and then continued straight up to the cavern’s ceiling, where they were lost among the stalactites.

It was a furnace, Lola realized, a gigantic one, and the orange glow came from a fire blazing behind a metal grate. This close, the heat was intense, causing the air around the furnace to ripple with distortion. Lola’s exposed skin began to hurt, as if it was being burned, and she wanted to stop, to not go any closer. But a quick glance over her shoulder told her the wounded Nazis were still coming, so she had no choice but to continue. The others in the group seemed to come to the same conclusion, and the four of them kept running toward the furnace, sweat pouring off their bodies, breathing labored as they drew searing hot air into their lungs. Finally, the heat became intolerable, and they stopped, unable to go on. They’d come within fifteen feet or so of the massive furnace, and when Lola looked up at the top of it, she saw a metal chair had been bolted there, with large arm rests and a high back.

It looks like a throne, she thought.

And sitting on that throne – which had to be hot as all the fires of Hell – was Demarcus Eldred. He appeared relaxed, unbothered by the furnace’s heat. He was dressed in a long-sleeved black pullover along with black slacks and black shoes. The more Lola looked at his garments, the less they appeared to have been fashioned out of cloth and leather, and the more it looked like he was garbed in shadow. The most jarring aspect of his appearance was the ring of curved bone spikes that jutted from his head, forming a grotesque crown. Blood trickled from where the spikes had broken through the skin, and lines of crimson ran down his face.

Demarcus smiled.

“Are you enjoying yourselves so far?” he asked. “I certainly am.”

Lola glanced behind them and saw that the soldiers had caught up. They now stood in a line, flashlights put away, weapons in hand and aimed directly at them. Like a firing squad, she thought.

“What’s going on here, Demarcus?” Neal asked. “Is any of this real? What happened to our families? Where’s Kandice?”

He spoke rapidly and sounded desperate, on the verge of giving in to panic. Lola knew exactly how he felt.

The boy continued smiling down at them. When he spoke next, he sounded like an adult addressing a group of children – and not particularly bright ones at that.

“I’m not Demarcus when I’m in the Undercountry. I’m called the Low Prince here.”

Lola had never heard that name before, but it caused her to feel a brief cold chill, despite the furnace’s intense heat. Demarcus – the Low Prince – continued.

“There are numerous ways of looking at the concept of ‘real’. But I’ll make it simple for you. Reality is like ice cream. It comes in lots and lots of flavors. But what you really want to know is if the events which occur in the Stalking Ground – excuse me, the house – will have lasting consequences. The answer to that is yes. Get hurt here, you’re still hurt when you depart. Die here, you remain dead.” His smile took on a cruel edge. “That real enough for you?”

“Is this some kind of fucking game to you?” Martin demanded. “I knew you and your family were a bunch of goddamn freaks, but I didn’t know just how messed up—”

The Low Prince’s smile vanished. He gestured and one of the Nazis – one that had only half a face and was missing his left arm – stepped forward, raised the Luger he held in his remaining hand, and brought the butt end down hard against the back of Martin’s neck. An oof of air escaped Martin’s lips, and he fell to his hands and knees. He stayed there, head bowed, breathing heavily, and Lola knew he was fighting not to pass out.

“Fucker,” Martin whispered.

Lola figured this would earn him further punishment but the Low Prince either didn’t hear him or, more likely, decided to let it go. He gestured again, and the half-faced Nazi returned to his previous position.

Alex looked up at the Low Prince. “Please, Demarcus – Low Prince. Don’t hurt us.”

The Low Prince regarded her for a moment, then in an almost apologetic voice said, “I’m afraid that’s the reason you’re all here. To be hurt. Hurt bad.”

“What about our families?” Neal said. “Are they here too?” He sounded half-hopeful, half-fearful.

“They aren’t in the Undercountry,” the Low Prince said. “But it’s a big house – especially since we remodeled. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were around here somewhere.”

Lola hated the idea of Spencer being trapped elsewhere in the house, presumably being forced to deal with other members of the Eldred family in who knew what manner of nightmare scenario. Spencer was strong in his way, but in other ways he was still the little boy whose father had sexually abused him. She feared he didn’t have what it would take to survive this place. She wasn’t sure that any of them did.

Martin had remained on his hands and knees since being struck, but now he started to rise. Neal took hold of one of his arms to help steady him, and Martin acknowledged this with a nod before looking upward at the Low Prince once more.

“If you’re going to kill us, just do it and get it over with. At least we won’t have to listen to your bullshit anymore.”

Alex gasped at Martin’s words of defiance, but Lola wasn’t surprised. She might not like Martin much, but the man had balls to spare, that was certain.

“Killing is easy,” the Low Prince said. “It’s the buildup to death that’s the most fun – and the most nourishing.”

Lola had no idea what the boy was talking about, but he gestured and the darkness surrounding them was replaced with bright light. The change was so dramatic that Lola had to squeeze her eyes shut. Then, slowly, bit by bit, she opened them. The light still stung her eyes, but at least she could see now. The lichen spread across the cavern’s walls and ceiling blazed with light, and the cavern seemed much smaller than it had when they’d been stumbling around in the dark. Maybe it had only seemed big to them then. Or maybe the cavern was as big as the Low Prince wished it to be at any given moment. At any rate, Lola could now see the cavern’s walls all around them, and off to their right – on the other side of a grass-covered plain – was a long set of wooden stairs. At the top of them was a closed door. A basement door was a basement door, but Lola couldn’t help thinking it looked exactly like the one in her house. The stairs were much larger, though, stretching at least a hundred feet upward, maybe more. The grassy plain wasn’t empty. There were buildings on it, one- and two-story, little more than bombed-out ruins. There were vehicles – jeeps and motorcycles, mainly – most of which had been damaged or overturned. Worst of all, though, were the mangled remains of soldiers in green uniforms. Hundreds of them, all dead, scattered across what was obviously a battlefield.

Lola knew what she was looking at. This was a life-sized recreation of the tableau Spencer used to set up on the pool table in their basement when he was a child. The implication was obvious. The Low Prince wanted them to play War.

“You want out of the Undercountry?” the Low Prince said. He gestured toward the stairs. “That’s the way – the only way.”

“What if we refuse to play your game?” Neal said. He sounded more scared than defiant, but Lola gave him points for trying.

“Then I’ll command my Nazi friends to finish you off right here.” He grinned. “And I’ll tell them to take their time. I’ll give you a five count to decide. Head for the stairs or die right now. Your choice. One.”

Alex immediately started running.

Smart girl, Lola thought.

She knew there was no way she could keep up with her bad knees, but she wasn’t going to just stand there and let a bunch of Nazi zombies have their fun with her. She started running after Alex, moving much more slowly than the girl, but moving nonetheless.

“Two.”

Lola didn’t look back to see if Neal and Martin were going to follow. She hoped they would, but whatever they did, it was their choice. If they chose to remain behind, a cold-blooded part of her thought, maybe the Nazis would be so busy killing them that she and Alex would have a better chance to get away.

“Three.”

She heard Neal shout “Fuck!” and start running.

“Four.”

“Goddamn it!” Martin sounded mad as hell, but he started running, too.

“Four-and-a-half. Four-and-three-quarters…. Five!”

The undead Nazis roared with excitement, sounding more like beasts now than something once human, and the sound of heavy boots thudding on the cavern floor filled the air.

Martin and Neal caught up with Lola easily, and Martin kept going, flying past her. Neal slowed to match her pace, bless the damn fool.

“Don’t…go slow…for me,” she panted. Her knees felt like they were on fire, and she had a difficult time focusing past the pain. “Get to these stairs and go find Kandice!”

Neal glanced behind them, then turned his gaze on the stairs, clearly torn.

“Go!” Lola shouted. “If you find Spencer, help him!”

That last bit did the job. Neal was a good man, the kind who put others before himself. The only way he’d abandon her was if he thought he had to in order to help others. Still, he hesitated a moment longer. But when the Nazi zombies began firing their weapons, his indecision vanished and he hauled ass.

Lola was relieved. She didn’t expect to live long enough to reach the stairs, but she felt confident that Neal would do his best to take care of Spencer if they ran across each other. Lola winced every time she heard the crack of gunfire behind her, each time expecting to feel a bullet slam into her back. She thought she heard some rounds go whizzing past her, but it could’ve been her imagination. She knew it didn’t matter if the bullets missed her. The soldiers would catch up to her and then they would go to work on her with their bayonet blades and hand knives. Whatever tools they used to kill her, she’d be just as dead in the end.

Lola was the last of the group to reach the grass. There was a clear line of demarcation between the cavern floor and the plain, but it wasn’t until she stepped onto the latter that she realized it wasn’t grass at all, but rather thick green felt.

Like the surface of a pool table, she thought.

She heard another crack and immediately felt a burning line of pain stitch itself across the skin of her right shoulder. She cried out and nearly stumbled, but she managed to remain on her feet and continue running. She’d been hit. How bad, she didn’t know. Not bad enough to bring her down, though, and that was all that mattered right then.

The gunfire continued, but no more bullets struck her. Lola wondered if their pursuers weren’t really trying to hit them, if they were instead trying to scare them, keep them on the run, draw out the game for their master’s amusement. She could see no other reason why the undead Nazis hadn’t killed them yet.

The bodies of dead green-clad soldiers littered the ground, and Lola had to be careful to avoid them. One wrong step, and she’d trip, go down, and then her pursuers would be on her. She wouldn’t last long after that. She tried not to look at the dead men – their ravaged flesh, their spilled blood – but she couldn’t help it. The sight of so much violent death sickened her, and she wondered if the dead soldiers were real or if they were illusions, nothing more than life-sized realistic-looking versions of the toys Spencer had once played with. She remembered what the Low Prince had said about things being real. Reality is like ice cream. It comes in lots and lots of flavors. She supposed these soldiers were as real as they needed to be to fulfill the Low Prince’s purpose, no more and no less.

When she felt the pain in her chest, she put it down to being out of shape. She hadn’t run in decades and she’d never had to run for her life before. It was only natural that her body felt the strain. But when the pain worsened to the point where it felt as if her chest was on fire, she realized something serious was happening to her. Her mother had died young of a heart attack, and heart disease ran on that side of the family. Lola had never shown any sign of it before, but then she’d never exerted herself like this either. The pain increased, each beat of her heart feeling as if someone was pounding her chest with a sledgehammer. Her breathing became labored and her vision blurred. She couldn’t run anymore, slowed to a walk, and she knew the Nazis would quickly catch up to her, and game or not, they’d finish her. She hoped they’d make it quick. The prospect of dying didn’t sadden her. For years, she’d lived as a virtual shut-in, so it was like she was halfway dead already, and although she felt guilty for this, it would be a relief not to have to worry about Spencer’s problem anymore. But she did regret abandoning her son, feared that without her help, the darker side of his nature would assert itself and take control of him. And if that happened, he’d hurt who knew how many children?

I’m sorry, she thought. But whether she was apologizing to Spencer, the children he would harm, or both, she didn’t know.

The pain worsened to the point where she could no longer walk. She stopped to kneel, the green felt that covered the plain instead of grass providing some cushion for her bad knees. They still complained, but that pain was nothing compared to that which raged inside her chest. Her vision swam in and out of focus, and when she saw Martin, Neal, and Alex running toward her, she thought she was hallucinating. Martin had put on a backpack of some kind. No, not a backpack. Two metal canisters hung on his back, held in place by leather straps around his shoulders. A rubber hose stretched from the tanks to a gun-like device he held in his hands, a long, thin thing that looked like a combination of a handgun and a rifle. Alex carried a knife, and Neal held a rifle with a bayonet. She wondered where they’d found the weapons, and then she realized there were weapons all over the battlefield, ones that the dead soldiers had carried and no longer needed.

“Get down!” Martin shouted.

Lola fell forward. She was in too much pain to catch herself, so she smacked against the felt surface of the ground and lay there, her heart struggling to keep working.

Martin reached her first. He took several more steps past her before stopping, shouting, “Fuck you, Nazi bastards!” and activating the flamethrower.

Lola heard a whoosh as a stream of fire jetted from the gun in Martin’s hands. She felt the warmth of the flames, smelled a hot chemical tang. So far, the Nazis had chased them in silence, but now they shrieked as flames enveloped them, their cries of pain high-pitched and inhuman.

Neal and Alex reached her then, and they helped her get to her feet. She turned to look at Martin, saw him move the flamethrower’s gun back and forth as he continued spraying fire onto the zombie soldiers. All of them were ablaze, writhing and screaming as the flames devoured them. Despite the agony in her chest, Lola smiled. Fuck you, Nazi bastards indeed.

Beyond the mass of flames, Lola saw the Low Prince standing atop the giant furnace that served as his throne and watching the action. He didn’t look upset that his soldiers were being barbecued. In fact, he was grinning.

“Come on,” Neal said. “We’ll help you up the stairs.”

Neal and Alex began walking, each of them holding on to one of her arms, helping her move forward and stay on her feet. They held their weapons in their free hands, although Lola couldn’t see how Neal could possibly wield his rifle one-handed.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked, worry in her voice. She looked past Lola to Neal. “She’s so pale!”

Lola spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m…all right. Don’t worry…about me.”

“You don’t sound all right,” Alex said.

“Let’s just get her to the stairs,” Neal said. He sounded worried, too, and Lola figured she must look like hammered shit for both of them to be so concerned. More because she didn’t want to keep worrying them than because she cared whether she lived or died, she did her best to calm herself, to slow her breathing, to will the pain in her chest to lessen. In response, she felt the tightness in her chest begin to ease. Maybe it wasn’t a heart attack after all. Maybe she was only experiencing a severe panic attack. Whichever the case, she was grateful, and soon she could manage to walk on her own, more or less, and didn’t need to be virtually dragged by Alex and Neal. This allowed the three of them to increase their pace. They weaved around dozens of dead soldiers, moved past the ruins of bombed-out buildings until they reached the end of the green felt and stood at the bottom of the stairs. The stairs stretched so high, and beneath them was a mass of impenetrable shadow. Lola thought she saw something shift within the darkness, and while she hoped it was only her imagination coupled with stress, she feared it wasn’t.

Martin continued blasting the zombies with fire until the flamethrower’s tanks ran out of fuel. But the device had done its work, reducing the Nazis to a burning mound of charred flesh and bone. Martin slipped off the now-useless flamethrower, dropped it to the ground, and started running toward them. Just before he reached them, Lola saw him take a pistol from the hand of a green-uniformed soldier. He checked to see if it had rounds left, then – satisfied that it had – he joined them at the bottom of the stairs.

“Let’s go,” he said, and then the four of them began making their way up the stairs. But they’d only ascended a short distance when Alex cried out.

“Look!”

She pointed behind them, and they turned to see several of the Nazi zombies – still very much on fire – rise to their feet and begin staggering forward. The undead soldiers carried no weapons now, maybe because their burning hands were incapable of grasping anything, or maybe because their flaming bodies were weapons in themselves. They no longer had any individual features, were just dark silhouettes wreathed in fire, and they stood so close together that their flames merged, making them look like a living, moving bonfire.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Martin said. He aimed his pistol and started firing at the mass of flames. Neal let go of Lola’s arm and shouldered his rifle awkwardly, as if he’d never fired a gun before. He aimed and squeezed the trigger. The gun went off, but if he managed to hit any of the zombies, there was no way to tell. And even if he did, Lola thought, what good would it do? The damn things were already dead, weren’t they?

The rounds from Martin’s gun had no more effect on the flaming corpses than Neal’s. They kept coming, leaving smoldering footprints on the felt behind them. Lola didn’t understand how they could still move. Even if they experienced no pain, wouldn’t the flames cause enough damage to their limbs to make it impossible for them to move? Inside this house, she supposed the line between possible and impossible was a hell of a lot fuzzier than in the world outside.

The burning zombies were only twenty feet away from them now, and they continued lurching toward them. Alex had remained at Lola’s side when the men started firing, and while she looked scared, she also looked determined.

“I have to help them,” she said. Despite her brave words, there was a quaver in her voice, but this didn’t make the girl seem any less brave to Lola.

Alex looked at her. “Will you be all right by yourself for a little while?”

Lola’s chest still hurt, but the pain was much less than it had been, and while breathing remained an effort, she still managed to draw air into her lungs. She tried to smile, but the best she could manage was a lopsided grimace. She didn’t have enough breath to speak, so she nodded. Alex looked skeptical, but the zombies had closed to within ten feet of the stairs now, and Lola knew that Neal and Martin couldn’t fend off the undead bastards by themselves.

Alex helped her sit on the steps, then she turned and joined the men, knife in hand. Neal was out of bullets, leaving him with the bayonet blade as his only weapon. Martin still had his gun trained on the oncoming zombies, but he was no longer firing, and Lola feared he might be out of ammunition as well. Alex stood with them, gripping her knife tight, but Lola didn’t know what good the blade would be against creatures that could withstand gunfire and flames. She couldn’t allow the three of them to throw their lives away defending her. If Spencer was somewhere else in the house, as the Low Prince had suggested, then he would need help to survive – and the more help he could get, the better. She needed these three to live, for Spencer’s sake, if for no other reason.

She grabbed the staircase’s railing, intending to pull herself to her feet and try to speak, to tell them to leave her behind and get the hell out of there. She thought Martin would agree readily enough – the man could be a real prick – but she wasn’t sure Alex or Neal could leave her. She hoped she could make them see reason, assuming she could get any words out at all.

Her first attempt to stand was a failure. She was too weak, too dizzy. Before she could make a second attempt, she heard a sharp crack of wood breaking behind her. She looked over her shoulder and saw that Kenneth – naked, head dented, face smeared with blood, lips split, front teeth knocked out – had burst up from beneath the steps. Now she knew what the thing was that she’d sensed as much as seen lurking in the shadows under the stairs. Like the troll in ‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’, she thought. Who’s that trip-trap-tripping up my basement stairs?

The pain in her chest returned full force, and this time she welcomed it. She prayed her heart would give out before Kenneth could get hold of her, cheating the child-raping bastard out of his revenge.

Kenneth’s eyes shone with madness as he pulled himself halfway out of the hole he’d made. He reached out and touched her chest, just below her neck. The instant he made contact, her pain vanished and she could breathe normally.

Kenneth grinned.

“You can’t escape me that easily,” he said.

Then he grabbed her wrist and swiftly withdrew into the hole in the stairs, pulling her down into the darkness with him. It happened so fast she didn’t have time to scream.

* * *

Neal gripped the rifle tight, ready to use the bayonet on the zombies if they tried to ascend the stairs. Sweat poured off his body, and he told himself it was due to the walking corpses’ flames. Maybe that was part of it, but he knew he was also sweating because he was fucking terrified. He’d never been in a fight of any kind in his entire life. He’d always managed to avoid them or talk his way out of them. But a few moments ago he’d been firing a goddamn WWII rifle at a bunch of burning Nazi zombies – without any effect – and now he was intending to defend the stairs against them with only a blade. What the hell was he thinking?

Just as the zombies reached the bottom of the stairs, he heard wood breaking behind him. Neal, Martin, and Alex all turned toward the sound, only to see a bloody, naked man had emerged from under the steps behind Lola. What was he? Another fucking zombie? Before Neal and his two companions could act, the man took hold of Lola and swiftly pulled her with him down into the hole in the stairs that he’d created. They were gone within seconds.

“Lola!” Neal shouted. He forgot about the fire zombies and rushed up the steps to the broken section where the bloody man had dragged Lola away. He peered down into the hole, but all he saw was thick, impenetrable darkness.

Martin and Alex were watching him instead of the approaching zombies, so when the closest took a swipe at Martin’s unprotected back with one flaming hand, he connected and Martin screamed.

“Fuck, that hurts!”

Martin hurled his empty gun at the zombie that had burned him. The weapon struck the flaming corpse in the head, bounced off, and fell to the ground. The blow had no effect on the creature, and Martin and Alex rushed up the steps to join Neal. Martin reached around to gingerly touch his back, and when his fingers came in contact with the burned area, he drew in a hiss of air.

Neal, crouching by the hole, looked up at the two of them

“That thing took Lola. We have to get her back.”

Neal started to put one leg into the hole, Alex grabbed his arm to stop him.

“Don’t do it,” she said. She looked on the verge of tears. “Please.”

“She’s right,” Martin said. “You saw the thing that grabbed Lola. She’s probably already dead.”

“You can’t know that,” Neal said. “Not for sure.”

Alex looked as if she might say something more, but then she stopped and looked back down the stairs, her eyes widening with fear. Neal turned to see the Nazi zombies had collapsed at the foot of the stairs, the fire evidently having damaged them to the point where they could no longer function. That was good. What wasn’t so good was that their flames hadn’t died out. If anything, they seemed to blaze even brighter than before. And that’s when the first couple steps caught fire.

“Oh shit,” Neal said.

The flames spread rapidly, moving much faster than they should have. This place has its own physical laws, Neal thought. Here fire grew bigger when its fuel source was nearly spent, and it spread to anything combustible near it, and it spread fast, like an animal desperate to propagate its species before it dies.

The fire raced toward them, and Martin grabbed hold of Neal’s arm and hauled him roughly to his feet. Neal lost his hold on the rifle, and it fell to the steps and skittered down toward the flames.

“Move it, dickhead,” Martin said. His voice sounded calm, but his face was pale, his eyes wide with fear.

Neal didn’t want to abandon Lola, but he didn’t relish the prospect of burning to death, either. He nodded at Martin, and the three of them started upward, careful to jump over the hole the bloody-faced man had made. The fire followed close on their heels.

Sorry, Lola, Neal thought.

Maybe Martin was right, maybe she was dead. Part of him hoped so. Because if she was still alive, who knew what the bloody-faced man was doing to her right now?

Smoke billowed upward from the burning staircase, stinging their eyes and making them cough. Neal was the first to reach the basement door. He feared it would be locked, but the knob turned easily. He took one last glance behind them and saw that the stairs were almost completely aflame now. He shoved open the door and dashed through, Alex and Martin quickly following.

We made it! Neal thought. And then, At least three of us did.

* * *

The Low Prince stands atop the furnace, right at the edge, watching as the flaming stairs collapse into a heap of broken, burning lumber. Kenneth and Lola aren’t harmed, though. They’re no longer beneath the stairs. They’ve gone to play elsewhere. He feels nothing for the zombie Nazis, who ended their undead existence as little more than kindling. He made them from a part of himself – a very small part – and their loss means no more to him than a nail clipping means to a human.

He is pleased with how the scenario he’d created – one plucked from both Lola and Spencer’s memories – turned out. Neal and Martin had left the Undercountry without weapons, but Alex took the knife, just as he intended. And it isn’t just any mere blade. It’s a very special one, and he placed it specifically where one of the humans – in this case, Alex – would find it. or rather, where it would find her. Things are going precisely according to plan. Well, his plan anyway, his and his sister’s. All he needs to do now is wait.

He’s sated from his meal, stuffed to the gills with negative psychic energy he drained from the four humans. He returns to his throne, sits, and sighs contentedly. He imagines what it will be like when he and his sister rule the family, and he smiles.