BooksBarbecue
Back Happy Hour In Hell Save as PDF
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

I STRUGGLED, OF course. Shit, yes, I struggled. I heaved at the chains until every nerve and muscle in my body felt like it was going to burst through my skin, but the links were too heavy and thick even for demon-strength. I tried to pull my hands out through the shackles themselves, but although I tugged until my gray flesh tore against the metal cuffs, in the end I just couldn’t slip them free. If I could have bitten off my own thumbs to make it work I would have—I was that desperate, because I knew that Niloch and his torturer would have me screaming my real name and mission within an hour after starting on me, and then the pain would really begin. But my chains held my hands out at either side of my body, far from my mouth. My legs were free, but my bottom half wasn’t going anywhere without the rest of me.

I was slumped in defeat, exhausted and probably bleeding badly when I heard, or perhaps felt, a whisper of sound in the dark cell.

“. . . And may his every work come undone, and the stink of his shame follow him wherever he goes.”

“Who’s there?” I’ll leave out the pathetic quaver in my voice. “Who said that?”

After a moment of charged silence I heard it again, a little louder this time. “You . . . you can hear me?” The voice was female, or seemed to be, but of course you can’t trust anything in Hell.

“Who are you?” I asked. “Where are you?” Was it another prisoner in a connecting cell? Or just another torment, although more subtle than most of what Niloch had shown so far?

“Who am I? Now there’s a question.” I could almost smell her sour amusement. “When I was, I was Heartspider, the commissar’s favorite.” Again the impression of a laugh, bitter and not altogether sane. “But there have been several favorites since me. If you look around, you’ll see what’s left of them.”

“I can’t see. It’s too dark.”

“Not much left of them anyway. Piles of bones in the corner. Picked clean, for the most part. Niloch’s sticky little torturer gets what’s left, but he’s a messy housekeeper.”

I didn’t want to think about the bones. “But you? Where are you?”

“One of the piles.”

It took me a moment, but then I understood. “You’re . . . you’re dead.”

“Nobody dies here, you poor fool. If they ever cleaned up I could at least go on to do my suffering elsewhere, but instead I’ve been trapped in this place for longer than I can remember.”