Sweet Pandemonium

Chapter 1

Ire strolled down the erupting volcanic slope, already in her two-piece swimsuit - though she kept her boots on for protection against sharp edges or flesh-eating failures hiding in the ash. The rotten-egg smell of sulfur was thick in the air, but the plumes of smoke over the river valley were thin, and the Harpies were mating across the valley. It was perfect tanning weather.


She approached the steaming river Styx, beach chair in one arm and bag slung over a shoulder. Once she settled her chair in a spot, she pulled out the bottle of wine and cigar that she had gotten from Terry’s last week. A distant peak erupted with a great boom and the hellscape hummed underneath her feet. Ire ignored it - her own mountain harmlessly oozed lava past her beach and into the void-like river. She clipped the tip of her cigar off before she approached the lava flow and leaned in, puffing the end to life. A sour, acidic cloud with an arsenic aftertaste filled her mouth. It would pair well with her wine: a dark red that tasted strongly of ass crack. She spat the taste out of her mouth and looked out over the Styx; mile-wide and Satan-only-knew how deep. Charon was sailing by that very moment, a few dozen souls huddling behind him on his long, narrow boat. He lifted his hat hat up and waved at her through the river steam. She waved back before flopping into her chair.


She pulled a wine opener out of her bag - little more than a wide rusty screw with a wooden handle - and just began turning it open when she heard the shriek.


Ire froze and scanned the hazy sky. Nothing there. Still, she extinguished her cigar in an ash bank and set her wine down beside it. Her boots crunched in brimstone as she stood, drew a sidearm from her bag, and slowly scanned the horizon. A fresh mass of fumes drifted across the river from a belching volcano down the valley. She reached into her bag, still looking up, as she pulled out her gas mask. It was tricky pulling it on with her gun in hand, and she fumbled her fingers around a strap.


Ire felt more than heard the Harpy swoop in behind her.


She snapped her gun behind her and she shot it straight through the creature’s forehead. It tumbled through the air and crashed to the ground in a plume of ash. She spun again and saw more emerge from the fog as it crossed the river. Three shots from her gun dropped all of them. A fourth dove from the right while she was distracted and knocked her over, bronze claws digging through her exposed arms and knocking her mask from her head. She snarled at it and fired twice through its chest, scrambled to her feet and killed it with a final bullet. But the cloud was on her now, and her mask skidded into the boiling shallows of the river.


Ire ran to it, but the straps and plastic warped in the water with a hiss. Ire gagged on the foul air and fell to her knees, quickly wrapped in a blanket of hot, toxic air. She could try holding her breath, but surely more harpies would come as she suffocated. She liked this Circle, but she would go out on her own terms.


She took deep breaths; it only took three before her sight spun into nothing.





You need me.


Ire jolted awake on a hard, cold surface, perhaps concrete, though she couldn’t see anything in the dark. She lay there a moment before she methodically pushed up onto her hands and and knees, then slowly to her feet. It was musty down here, the air utterly cool and still; she was unquestionably underground.


A series of clicks and gentle sighs alerted her to the presence of many creatures.


Moving among them would lead to agony and reset, but then again, standing still would lead to the same. Ire decided to go out on her own terms again, and slowly tip-toed forward. There was a strange cry, like a man trying to scream as he was being choked, and the soft scratch of bare feet padding on the floor. The hairs on Ire’s arms stood up.


She hear a door open, and she spun around to see stairs washed in light, the shadow of a man as wooden steps creaked under his feet. “Who’s ready to eat?” he half sang. He was answered by a storm of rustling feet.


Failures. It was a basement full of them.


There was the click of a switch and a bare light bulb flickered on over her head. Ire took a sharp breath. There was one barely four feet in front of her. Longer than an alligator, its rows of human legs undulated as it walked. Its back was covered in warped faces that moaned up towards the ceiling, its snail head coiled around to study her. Something wet stroked her leg, she raised it just in time as a jagged toothed mouth snapped at her, a second failure with no eyes and long feelers crawled at her.


The owner’s feet and legs came into view before he stopped. “Who’s there?” There was the click of a shotgun.


Ire suddenly fought the mad urge to laugh. She’d go out on her terms all right.


She smoothly stepped around the sightless creature and grabbed it by a feeler. It chomped sightlessly at the air and wriggled to get free, a high pitched whine squeezed from its form. That sound seemed to wake the whole den.


The man’s broad silhouette stormed down with a curse.


Ire spun and hurled the failure at him like a hammer. A direct hit! The creature’s mouth latched onto his face and he gave a muffled scream as he toppled backwards. “Nice meeting you!” She called as the big one turned and charged with a gurgle, more than a dozen failures came in from all sides and above, and their mouths shredded her skin and flesh within seconds.





You need me.


Ire awoke standing up - she hated resetting standing up, when her legs didn’t know yet that they were supposed to bear her weight; she was always struck with a nasty vertigo. The air was thick with the snap and rustle of branches in a gale; she winced as her bare skin was lanced by tiny projectiles. She already knew she was in the Writhing Wood. It figured she would reset here while wearing a fucking bikini.


The air was thick with green pine needles and cones, hurled through the air not by any wind but by the lashing of gnarled branches and jerking trunks. Just over the sound of timber she could hear the screaming; she ducked low to avoid a swinging branch and crawled on the ground, wincing as the needles lodged into her arms. She couldn’t make out the faces of the people fleeing through the trees, but she knew who they were: men who had cut down rainforests, dumped plastic into the sea, polluted soil and were generally dicks to mother earth. A man bellowed only a few feet away; she turned and couldn’t keep from smiling as she recognized Teddy Roosevelt, his gleaming teeth bared as he fearlessly took an axe to a tree. Maybe he was here because of that canal Nixon had told her about?


Before she could wonder much more about it, a branch swung low and caught her chin in an uppercut. She flew up and backwards, her teeth leaving her mouth in a spray. Through the stars that clouded her vision, she just barely saw the branch that came down for a brutal finishing move.





You need me.


“Fire!” a man shouted, and she felt the merciless punch of four bullets strike her stomach, leg, and shoulder. She toppled face first into a manicured lawn. What did those internet trolls call this? Spawn killing, the term came to her. If nothing else, she would get a look at who shot her, if only so she could get revenge down the line. She rolled over as dirt sprayed where her head had been.


The sky here was a desolate dark red, pockmarked with ugly yellow stars. An orb-shaped, yellow-stone house stood a hundred yards away with statues of elephants and lions framed the lawn, the high windows and ground lights made it look very afro-futuristic. All around her, the lawn was littered with dozens of corpses, target practice like her. This had to be Futile Heights.


She only had seconds, so she focused her gaze. There, twenty yards away at a makeshift firing range, a coffee-skinned man with his head shaved and piercings in his ears, five other men standing around him, all armed with pistols, save for one, a man with too large eyes and a cartoonish grin. That thing was undoubtedly the demon that dragged her here. She heaved herself up and struggled for breath, memorizing his face.


“Try again ‘Chukwu!” A man laughed. “Get her right on the nose!”


‘Chukwu. Ire could remember that. She gritted her teeth, the marksman fired, and the bullet passed through her nose, her naval cavity, and out the back of her head.





You need me.


Water and weeds now, too warm, clutching around her. She now burst upward through a thick blanket of algae. She wiped the grime from her eyes; all she saw was a nearby shoreline and tall grass before the topography disappeared behind a veil of thick fog. Fuck, any one of a million uncreative demons could have made this Circle.


It was no easy task struggling through the weedy water and film of muck on the surface, and she was exhausted by the time she’d reached the grass along the edge. The effort, combined with the stress of resetting four times in rapid succession, left her on her hands and knees, short of breath and struggling against a wave of nausea. Still, she managed to rise to her feet and take a few steady breaths.


Then she took a single step forward, and plunged into a thick pool of sludge. “Balls,” she sighed in frustration as the grass and mud consumed her with a single slurp.





You need me.


Her face was against a sticky bar, a hard wooden stool held her up. She groaned and rubbed her head as a crush of people around her laughed, argued, and gossiped. “Hey, a new face,” a man greeted. “Morning friend, you’re at Star Man’s Grave.”


That Circle didn’t ring a bell. Maybe it was new. She winced and peeled her face away from the counter and turned to focus on the man speaking to her. He was very cute - though not her type - blonde hair draped over his ears as his arms folded up into his sweater.


“I was saving that seat, girl,” a smooth voice announced on her other side. “But, uh… not much space left here anyway. This place just gets tighter and tighter.” Ire blinked and turned towards the man on her other side, his afro, mustache, and bandana instantly recognizable. She looked between them both, actually a little starstruck.


“What’ll you have?” The bartender, who’s smile, slim pale suit, and mismatched eyes sent a thrill through her body. This was too good a moment, to be smack dab in the middle between Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and and the Thin White Duke. Yet even now, she could hear Keith Moon getting into a violent fight with someone behind her, and instinctively she knew that this moment was fleeting. She had to try anyway. Maybe, just maybe, she would get Bowie’s number in time.


She opened her mouth just as a glass stine shattered over her head, and her neck snapped against the countertop.





You need me.


“Goddamn it!” Her shout boomed over the flat and frozen wasteland. Ice whipped about her in the howling wind, and she dropped to her knees and clutched her naked arms around her chest. She was still in a bikini after all, and her skin went numb in seconds. It had been quite some time since she had reset six times over like this, and it was plain to see a seventh time was inevitable. She pulled her knees up from the hard-packed ice, leaving some skin behind in little stains. A moan rattled through her lips as she stumbled forward, her boots her only protection. A frozen plain like this had to have a crevasse she could fall into. She shuffled forward, wishing with all her might that she could fall into one and get it over with.


After only a few steps, her wish was granted, and she plummeted with a crack into a thin abyss. “Thank you!” she yelled out to no one in particular. But she called out too soon; she hit an icy shelf and her leg cracked underneath her. She lay there, broken, already frostbitten, but still clinging to this Circle.


She mumbled curses for the next few minutes as her soul painfully trickled away.





You need me.


For a wild moment, she thought she had to be dreaming. She was lying on her cot in her own, small cave, familiar posters for David Bowie, Charlie Parker, and Rasputin on the walls. The earth rumbled in that familiar volcanic way, and she slowly sat up, aching in a vaguely hungover way.


She tiptoed to the edge of the cave and peered out.


There was the meandering styx and the neighboring mountain as it belched smoke. Shit, her body and the harpy she shot were even still by the shore, with seven harpies gathered around in an eager feast. Ire laughed breathlessly. This was almost worth the lost conversation with Bowie.


She snuck back and quietly dug through her cabinet on the wall, pulling out an AR-15 and loading it before creeping towards the entrance. She knelt low to the ground, took careful aim, and let loose.


Her vengeance came in bursts of three, the greek monsters dropped with each shot, and they screeched in confusion as she cut them down from seven to one. That one flapped away ungainly, large holes in her wings. Ire smirked as the sole survivor wavered in the air, before plummeting into the steaming, pitch black water.


Her bag had been rummaged through, but the Harpies had left the guns mostly untouched out of disdain, and her cell phone was still in the side pocket. Her chair was still intact. The wine had even been left unopened under a small pile of ash, the corkscrew still lodged in halfway. Ire whistled as she finished opening it and drank from the bottle. Now it tasted like ass crack and victory.


Today might not be half bad after all.


The booming opening of Giuseppe Verdi’s Dies Irae blared from her phone. Ire stared at the caller ID; Terry was calling. She strongly debated answering it, then figured the old man would just keep calling until she did. She suspected he was allergic to voicemail. She sighed and answered with a flick of her thumb. “What?”


The old man’s voice scratched into her ear: “Stop by my house as soon as you can. This could not be more important.”


“Well, whatever it is can wait until I’ve worked on my tan lines.”


“This is no joke! I can’t talk about it over the phone.”


“Why not? I keep no secrets from Azazel. By the way,” she turned and looked up at the smog filled sky, “if you’re listening Azazel, I still want to know when we’re starting that podcast… hello?” She stared at her phone, irked to see Terry had hung up. There was a real likelihood the Demon Lord had been eavesdropping on their call just now, which made it all the more frustrating that Ire would almost certainly not hear back about her request for a podcast.


Dies Irae sounded from her hand again. She groaned and answered. “What?”


“Wear pants this time!” Terry hung up again and Ire rolled her eyes before storming off to her cave. The worst part was, she really didn’t have anything better to do.