Chapter 9
The trip through the “Coastline World”, as Valentine had dubbed it, was long and excruciatingly uneventful. At first, the bumpy, sandy landscape seemed to have its own sort of beauty, but since it was monotonous, and did not lead to an ocean or cliffs as it seemed to promise, mental exhaustion kicked in long before they were physically tired. Even the ghosts were tired, since on Earth they had no need for rest or even sleep, the act of genuine walking seemed new to them.
Only Rune and Valentine appeared upbeat, Rune was probably only acting positive, to keep the morale of the others up. Val was weirdly cheerful, it was not beyond the scope of her personality, but this was not as usual, even Valentine should have had a limit, since she was obviously human. But her “happy” was superhuman, she should have been thoroughly taxed. Her secret power was only due to her excitement at seeing real, live zombies.
After a couple of days, Kiki asked Rune if they were just going around in circles, Rune assured her they had not, and pointed ahead at what passed as something exciting. There was a modest bluff ahead for them to encounter, it was hardly even a hill, but it looked like a mountain compared to the slight mounds that littered most of the planet.
Climbing it was more of a workout than it would have seemed, but the weak force of mild enthusiasm made it easier. After reaching the peak, the group noticed the bluff terminated in a cliff-like drop off. "Wow! Scenery!" Kiki exclaimed.
Rune held her hand up, palm open. "You got a question?" Kiki asked.
"No," Rune said, "It means for you to . . . Stop."
Kiki gave out a dirty look, since she was unaccustomed to taking commands, but she swiftly resigned to following that order because Rune seemed to be the only other person to know what was going on. Rune definitely had a handle on the Ghostworld. "I think I see a gate . . . er, a portal to another world down there, it looks like the Desert World, but I'm too far away to be sure. We better scout ahead.” Then she motioned to Shizuko. Shizuko ran up securing a shoulder-to-shoulder position with Rune, lining up nearly perfectly and in the same movement they crouched, scuttled down the steeper face a little ways, before dropping to an army crawl. The pair was perfectly in sync as if they were choreographed commandos.
The rest of the party dropped down to sit, feeling the exhaustion. There was no apparent passage of time at that locale, since the light source was consistently dim-ish. It seemed to take forever before Rune's head to popped up from behind a tuft of grass. Her expression was no where near cheerful. "Oh fuck." She whispered loudly.
"That's not the Desert world down there, it's freakin' Hell! Literally, guys, it is the actual place called Hell.”
“That's just a story my dad used to scare me. Bible nonsense.” Valentine said.
“No, it's growin' up in my neighborhood” Kiki added.
“No.” Rune was being firm, “It's as real as shit. Most religious cultures believe in it, because it exists. Everything is true about Hell, it's a place of fire, like Gehenna, or sorrow like Hades. My grandpa called it Yomi-no-kuni but that's not fully accurate, because of Heaven. There is though, a Realm of Hungry Ghosts like in Tibetan Buddhism, but it's an entire universe, not like how the Ghostworld is just a distant system in our same one--”
“What do we do?” Dean asked
“Or do we even care?” Kiki asked
“We certainly do care.” GG had not spoken much since her initial lengthy monologue, we have to avoid it, like go way out of our way avoid that is--”
Rune cut her off, but agreed, “Right Autumn. There's demons guarding the passage, and the portal itself, ones that are stronger than what I can defeat. It might add a day to circumvent . . . but it'd be worth it, demons can kill us, forever kill us that is. Even ghosts. Or drag us, physically with them, which is worse.”
“We will go around, then.” Nikki said, as everyone's jaws dropped. Kiki was the only one who had ever heard Nikki's voice.
Nikki cemented it. If things were so dire that she had to say something, then shit just got real. Everyone heeded her words. The group backtracked a couple of miles, but they needed rest. Rune stopped them when she thought they were a safe distance from the demon encampment. Shizuko was by far the toughest among them, so she took watch, sitting next to Rune so as to wake her up at the slightest hint of trouble. Everyone else fell fast asleep quickly.
Dean was roused by hot breath on his neck. To his blurry eyes, the figure was GG, but her hands were actually touching him. “I was just teasing about us not being able to touch.” She said
Dean accepted that explanation, GG was just waiting for the right moment. She was straddling him but she seemed to have a preternatural weight to her, he felt like he was being ground into the sand. She grabbed his shoulders, hard, and started getting very rough. She closed into what should have been a kiss, but Dean felt like the wind was knocked out of him. His energy started to feel completely zapped, and he could not help but close his eyes.
Without warning, the weight was gone. Dean could open his eyes only to see Rune standing over him, katana in hand, and there was a viscous black liquid on the blade. It looked like motor oil. He looked to the other side, and he saw GG's body lying motionless, missing her head. Then he saw the head.
“You killed Autumn!” Dean shrieked.
“Look again,” Rune said sternly.
He did what she asked. The body now looked different, more voluptuous. The body was akin to Kiki rather than GG, and the face, though attractive, looked like neither one. On closer examination, he noticed that the thing had vampire fangs, and there was long hair. It was not so much hair as spaghetti noodles made out of kelp, mixed with random weeds.
"It was a succubus, dummy." Rune said.
"Sweet, you killed it, Rune." Valentine said.
"Actually, I didn't kill it, but destroyed its present form, because demons . . ."
Rune turned her head suddenly, "Shit."
Several small humanoid creatures came running from around a boulder, some of them looked like barely held together things made of glue, others were reptilian like small raptor dinosaurs, and yet others were like lizards with an exoskeleton. The latter had little horns and a goatee, like a cartoon version of Satan.
"Demon larvae." Rune yelled, having hacked apart a half dozen of them before she finished those words.
Dean kicked one of the gooey ones, it splattered in every direction. He was surprised and satisfied, and smugly glanced over at Shizuko, who was ripping them apart with her bare hands. He did not have much time to get cocky before four more larvae knocked him down.
Autumn and Nikki Lyn were an impenetrable wall, blocking the small demons from getting at Valentine, who was screaming, "Where's my sword."
There was a flash in the back of Kiki's head, a realization that there was one other secret she had kept from Valentine. She had killed a guy.
It was back in Las Vegas, she had just adopted the name Kiki when she was fourteen, because she was messing around with a much older man. Illegally older. He seemed like a sugar daddy, at first, and Kiki thought she had it made. He had a couple of nice cars and dressed well, and bought Kiki clothes to match his look. Everything seemed nice, Kiki could even bee seen in public with him, when she had makeup on she looked about twenty-three. Things did not take long to go south, Kiki was sexually involved, but one night, she just need a break from sex. That did not stop him, though. He started ripping at her clothes, becoming increasingly rough. Kiki knew she was being raped, so she screamed. The man wrapped duct tape around her mouth and head, and tried to turn her over to bind her wrists, but she had that sharp knife tucked in her go-go boots and stabbed him in his throat once, and stuck it into his chest several times. The man collapsed on Kiki and blood spurted all over her for a couple of seconds before she shoved him off of her.
Kiki ran into the apartment building's lobby, coated in someone else's blood, out to a crowd of shocked onlookers. She ripped the tape from her mouth but could only whisper, "I killed him."
After the police cuffed her, and took her to an interrogation room; some suits walked in, letting her know they were FBI and they would exonerate her. It seems the man in question was on the FBI's radar for a while as a person of interest in a case involving a string of unsolved deaths. If Kiki had not killed him, he would have raped and murdered her.
That memory flashed into her head for only a few seconds before crystallizing into blankness. She could take care of herself. So she deftly plucked each one of the demonoids off of Dean, beheading them with her trusty knife.
"That's all of them." Rune announced, plunging her katana into the sand to cleanse it. "But we better move on, and quickly."
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