The Blue Blazes

CHUCK WENDIG

THE BLUE BLAZES

PART ONE

SALT & SMOKE

PROLOGUE

They have a name for it, in myth. Katabasis. The descent. To descend. Mythically speaking, into the Underworld – the so-called “Harrowing of Hell.” Inanna passes through the seven gates to see her sister. Izanagi’s wife Izanami is burned to death while giving birth to the fire god, and so he travels into the land of Yomi to defy death. Eurydice is envenomed by a nest of vipers after fleeing a satyr’s attack, and upon her demise her lover Orpheus descends into Hades to rescue her from that subterranean place. The Katabasis has its opposite, the Anabasis, or the ascent. But one’s ascent is not guaranteed. Izanami turns to a monster and refuses to go home, so Izanagi is forced to close the world of the living from the land of the dead to keep her from dragging him back to be with her. Orpheus betrays the one rule he is given and looks back at his bride as they flee, thus sealing off the worlds and losing his love. Inanna finds that despite the costs she has paid, another secret price will be extracted: she must choose someone to enter the Great Below and take her place. And so it is with the Underworld: you may enter its depths and walk into the dark, but something is always taken from you. And it remains ever-uncertain whether your entrance will be mirrored again by your escape.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

1

They want what we have. The denizens of the Great Below care little for the humans of the Infinite Above except as providers, as resources, as dogs or toys or tools. They rape and kill and feed. They drink our pain, supping at it like we’re each an endless goblet of wine and blood. But we are not endless. We can be used up. And they don’t care, for they are predators and parasites to the last. This is why the intersection of our world and theirs is found most cleanly in the places where the mythic and monstrous Underworld clashes with the more criminal one. For the criminals – organized crime and violent gangs and the whole miscellaneous lot of murderers and human monsters – feed on us the same way. Another set of parasites and predators. And so it falls to these criminals, the most selfish among us, to act against the terrors that lurk and writhe in the darkest chambers of the Earth’s own ugly heart.

– From the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

This, then, is Mookie Pearl.

He’s a high wall of flesh stuffed into a white wife-beater stained with brown (once red), a man whose big bones are wreathed in fat and gristle and muscle and sealed tight in a final layer of scar-tissue skin. At the top of his ox-yoke shoulders sits a head like a wrecking ball with black eyes and shorn scalp and a mouth full of teeth that look like white pebbles fished from a dark river. He’s got hands that could break a horse’s neck. He’s got Frankenstein feet and a Godzilla hunch.