6 April 1610
When the soldiers had first found Colonel Miguel unconscious on the barrack floor, they had recoiled in some fear of the figure. Marked on his temple with some ferocity was an imprint of the face of Christ as if the Colonel’s skin was a grisly imitation of Veronica’s Veil. Where the imprint punctured the skin, it gave the impression that the eyes were shedding tears of blood. It was not until the revived Colonel explained that it was no miracle but the harsh blow of someone pretending to be their priest.
“We’ve searched the area—some of the men working around the chapel haven’t been found,” one of the lieutenants reported, “and we haven’t heard back from the men we sent to the village either.”
Colonel Miguel grumbled as he stood in the middle of the courtyard. The smoldering inferno that had started at the ammunitions store was finally beginning to die down in the coming of the dawn’s luminescence. Tired and overworked soldiers sat exhausted against posts and beams as their work was finally nearing completion. “Keep a shift guard up and send someone to check on the village,” the Colonel instructed, “the rest can get some sleep.”
“Colonel!” someone shouted from across the yard. Colonel Miguel audibly grunted as he turned towards the man coming at him.
“What is it?” he asked the messenger who scarcely had breath left in him.
“H—Herr Gehirn… he’s coming up the river in his iron boat!”
Miguel’s face contracted and the bloody teardrops flowed from his wound once more at the news. However, it was not just fear that gripped him. Their plan was not perfectly executed, indeed, but his heart pumped blood into him for more than that reason. The soldiers around him as well, like those risen from the dead without their glorified bodies, stumbled into a mockery of an upright posture and dragged themselves closer to the Colonel. Herr Gehirn coming would also mean that the next shipment of their precious drug might be arriving.
Hungry moans could be heard like an infernal chorus and the blaze on the ammunition building ceased to be diminished as the workers abandoned their posts to similarly stumble forward in the direction of the river. Sleeves were already being rolled up and tongues of these half dead men rolled against their lips in anticipation.
---
José was watching from his undisclosed vantage point as the villagers began surrounding where the captain of the troupe, his lackey, and the detained woman were standing in the middle of the village clearing. Although the sun was already beginning to rise, José could see that most of the villagers had not slept at all but had instead watched the gruesome scene from their huts.
“Stay back you savages!” the captain shouted at them holding up his pistol. The men surrounding him, however, were still enough that one might have thought his statement echoed back at him from the human wall. The Captain had thought about handing the girl back to them, but he feared that there would be no escaping the incensed group now. Fear started to creep along the wrinkles of his battle weary face.
José still squatted paralyzed behind his hiding spot and aside from the wailing of the young girl, only the grated and fearful admonitions of the captain filled the morning air. He had to do something, he thought. Arturo was already… The thought of his friend drawing most of the men away forced him to congeal into a ball of a young man as he pulled his knees into his chest. Arturo might be dead by now and those men would be coming back… Then Arturo’s sacrifice would have been for nothing.
The leader’s voice trembled as he and his lackey pressed back to back in the contracting circle of angry villagers. The girl that was with them was squeezed against his arm and his chest armor violently as she cried out. “Stay back or this girl will die!” he shouted to the circle around him.
“We will not let you leave here with her,” one of the old men said in Castillian, brokenly.
“Then she’s dead!” he challenged back at them. The ferocity of his voice and the tightening of his arm against the girl’s neck made the people around them remember their previous cowardice just enough to give them pause to press forward more. It was a stalemate. There would be no way out. If the villagers pressed on, the girl would die. If he released her, he would die.
José trembled and half of his mind was occupied with thoughts on how to carry out what Arturo begged him to do: save the girl. Simultaneously, images of his family back home—his comfortable hacienda, his younger brother, his hard working father, all of these things conflicted inside of him and swirled in his chest. The feelings seemed to move invisibly out of his eyes making them turn left, right, up, down, like one of his brother’s leather balls caught in a spring’s swell. There was no choice, his thoughts gasped into his brain as he shut his eyes. He would exchange himself for the girl, perhaps. Yes, that might work.
By then, a gunshot cracked through the air and the shouting of the crowd accompanied it like thunder after a blinding flash of lightning. José’s trembling stopped and his body ran cold. He nearly lost consciousness, but forced himself to look forward at what his indolence had done. He did not know if what he saw comforted or disturbed him. From the path leading to the camp, a man had approached with his pistol still in the air fresh from the discharge. While the villagers made way back to their huts, the soldier who had come from the camp was shouting frantically.
“Herr Gehirn’s arrived with our shipment!” José could hear the soldier. The young lady was immediately discarded to the ground where her father rushed to her aid while the soldiers turned to run up the hill. Whatever garnered their attention, it had subdued their lust for now.
---
Riku reacted quickly and, despite the blast of hot air pressing against him, held onto his pillar with one arm and pulled at the rope with the other. The initial shock of the rope reaching its length rocked at his clinging body with a snap followed by both Riku and Raul gasping in pain.
Raul was now halfway between the pillar and the floor below and cutting the rope now would probably be fatal. The young man held with both hands onto the cord and attempted to stabilize himself after the disorienting plummet. The pain around his waist where the rope was tied around was excruciating especially after the descent nearly broke his back, but he managed to burn his palms against the rope in time to save his posture.
“Can you pull yourself up?” Madeleine shouted over the hurricane.
“I’m trying!” Raul shouted back as he tugged. “Try to pull up at the same time and wrap it around the pillar!” he instructed Riku.
“I—ca” Riku tried to say before grimacing painfully. Madeleine looked towards Riku at the final pillar and understood what the problem was: the trembling in the Finn’s arm and the strange positioning of it—he had dislocated the joint when the rope tensed. He wouldn’t be able to do anything.
“Let go of the rope slowly!” Madeleine instructed Riku, “Holding onto it with a broken arm is not going to help anyone!” Riku reluctantly and painfully lowered his arm and let the rope dangle freely while still tied to his waist. It was now his lower body that kept Raul from falling to his death.
There was still enough length that it would take minutes for Raul to make his way back up especially in the unstable torrent of the winds. With one arm already broken, Madeleine thought, Riku can’t hold onto the pillar for much longer. While in her thoughts, a massive object landed to her side. As she turned, she caught a glimpse of Willem before the man leaped once more to Riku’s pillar. “Willem…” she called out, but she also noticed that her pack was slightly lighter and that the Dutchman had landed on Riku’s post carrying something in his hand—her parasol.
Willem Van Axel clung onto the winded side of the pillar and wrapped his legs around the stone. Allowing his upper body to bend backwards until he was up-side-down, he reached out for the rope and began knotting it around the end of Madeleine’s umbrella. Satisfied with the twists, he let the contraption open and it immediately caught the draft. It would have never worked with a regular device, but Willem knew well that the young spy’s favourite toy had a lining of strong leather inside the fabric and steel hidden inside the wood. Much like Madeleine herself, the strength of the device was disguised by the deceptively beautiful exterior.
The wind did most of the work and, with Riku as the anchor, Willem was able to pull Raul back up towards the top while the umbrella kept rising higher and higher as the rope gave more slack. Once Raul was secured, both young men had to use their combined strength to pull the parasol back before shutting it and releasing it from the rope.
Raul made the leap to the ledge once more but this time armed himself against the push of the wind by smashing himself against the side of the corridor and holding onto the loose rocks on the side. Once his feet were off the ledge and into the corridor itself, the hurricane force ceased. Riku was next and Raul helped him to make the jump with careful attention to the dislocated arm. Madeleine made her way to the final pillar and, with an impressed smile on her face, leaped simultaneously with Willem to safety.
Once all four sat exhausted on the floor of the corridor, Madeleine leaned over to Riku. Her hands felt along the edges of his sweating shoulder until she could see the structure within just by the contours of the unnatural positioning. “We… should fix this before moving on. We won’t know when we can rest next,” she explained to Riku who nodded with a grimace. Raul was the next to come over and offered to his friend a rolled up cloth which Riku hastily placed between his teeth.
The snap was a simple one, but Raul could feel Riku shudder as he held the young man down. The cloth in his mouth bent at the bite and formed a jagged frown. With the deed done, Madeleine similarly sat along the wall and let out long breaths of fatigue. Willem sat opposite from her and held his side with some pain. Fresh redness seeped into the bandage probably from all of his theatrics. New torches were struck by Raul as the torches they left behind in the previous ledge to guide their jumps were now out of sight inside the corridor.
“Let’s rest here for a while,” Raul suggested as he passed around some water. He also looked down the sloped corridor until the bend below obscured his view.
---
The only thing blocking the four from the next circle at the end of the descending corridor was a stiff doorway that seemed more like a relic of whatever ancient Mayan ruin it was built on. It gave way relatively easily, but it was not without punishment. The fetid stench of the adjoining chamber assaulted noses and eyes relentlessly—it was the smell of rotting garbage. It was something they were prepared for, however. Madeleine had warned them prior that the next circle was the one reserved for gluttons. Wasteful and disgusting in their excesses, the damned of this circle writhed shallowly in a massive dump. “They did nothing in life except produce garbage and so they must spend the rest of eternity in garbage…” Madeleine had explained earlier.
The stench was obscene but the four stepped into the ring hallway anyway. Their boots met uneven ground and their torches, revealed for them a floor with shallowly covered mounds of garbage—probably intentionally ‘preserved’ waste that was left to fester and rot by the construction teams. Assortments of spoiled food, greasy rags, equipment, as well as the discarded offal of various animals already turning brown and green were strewn about in between the mushy pigment of dirt.
If the smell and sight did not curl the adventurers’ tongues, the sound of their boots sinking slightly into the filth might have wrecked their constitutions to the breaking point. Nonetheless, each pressed forward going left once more and navigated through the ghastly mess. “Your uncle has some twisted sense of humour,” Willem complained while covering his mouth and nose with a cloth, “I can see how hurricane winds can stop us but this is just annoying…”
Madeleine did not bother responding lest she involuntarily do something unladylike. It was true, however, even the terrible smell would only be a minor deterrence. There was something she was missing…
Walking silently through the slush, they diligently made their way around the ring until a dimmed sight began to catch the light of their torches around the bend. Closer and closer they approached it with distracted eyes. Iron was the first thing they could discern; iron that reflected dully the glare of their torches. Walking further and they could see it in plain sight now. Crowns of the black metal with jagged peaks mirrored each other thrice forming a triplet of jaws from one end of the hall to the other. Framing these teeth was a skeletal frame of the machine held to counterweights and gears behind the three mouths. Two protrusions on the floor curved into sickles to make sure that nothing could pass except in pieces or swallowed into one of the three throats of metal and point.
As if to give some kind of grisly jape to the whole contraption, a veneer was afforded to it made up of unprocessed bloody skins of hogs to hide its malice. Right next to it was the entrance to the next corridor hollowed out as a doorway on the inside wall. Unfortunately, it was then that the beast which had lain dormant suddenly came to life. The ticking of gears marked the slowing seconds like a clock until it raced to a tremendous pace. Iron creaked and metal clashed—the jaws of the deathly triple mouths snapped in turn and the claws on the floor slashed at the ground. “Cerberus…” Madeleine muttered dumbfounded.
That’s what she had forgot: to live in the disaster of waste was not the gluttons’ only punishment… the monster Cerberus with its three heads—an apt symbol of the ravenous and hungry nature of the sin—did to the sinners what they loved most in life: eat! The claws which sliced the meat of the sinners was the inversion of the delight of those in life who took pains to slice their prime cuts of animal with and now, in Hell, they would receive just that. Dante’s imagination had made the delicious taste of food became the vomit inducing atmosphere of Hell and those who did the slicing in life were now sliced in death.
Pablo sliced the solid pieces of cocaine into more manageable portions with his razor. Now that the Foundation was satisfied with his transaction, he had time for ‘recreation’ as it were. Looking at the mirror on his table, the dim light allowed him to see himself darkly. His handsome face—save the scar—was half plastered with sweat and his tongue quivered in anticipation of the next few minutes.
The portion of the money he had received from the Foundation’s dealings had brought him enough ‘supplies’ for perhaps three or four months—depending on how fast he wanted to use it. A quick rush of air and the powder entered into him. It took only a few seconds before his thoughts melted into his blood. Leaning back into the sofa of his seat, he descended…
His senses heightened and for the first time the blunted noise of the stereo crept into his ear like a throbbing insect nesting rebellious tones along his lobes. His nose, just so recently invaded, could now discern the almost unbearable stench of the other people in the room. In the dim light he could make out the outlines of those others who, in this darkest of rooms, did partake in this ritual of consumption. They were not so much beautiful to look at as much as they were pieces of meat laying about on couches with their partners sensually appeasing their hunger for euphoria. Their sweat stung at his nose and somehow he had a sudden disdain at the idiots around him.
But there was a flood of apathy that overtook him and he laid his head back once more to look at the ceiling. “Where am I?” he asked himself with a chuckle.
“Roxas!” a voice called out. Pablo immediately shot his head up. No one’s called him by his last name in a while.
“You…” Pablo managed while trying to sit back up. His first instinct was to snort another line even in the presence of the figure in front of him as if at any moment the precious Diamond Dust would disappear from the greedy hands that tried to greet him for a shake—a shake that he refused. His eyes avoided the glare given to him.
“I heard you were free again now that the Foundation’s gotten what they wanted,” the voice told him.
“Get lost,” was Pablo’s response.
“I’ve got one more job for you. If you do it,” and here the voice chuckled, “you’ll be able to see
her again.”
The razor that was delineating another streak of white froze above the mirror. With heightened senses, Pablo Roxas could feel something metallic make an impression against his chest as if the thing he had been hiding underneath his shirt had depressed into his skin at the voice’s insinuation.
The figure rested on a seat next to him and wrapped controlled fingers around Pablo’s frozen wrist before placing it aside. “Now, it’s time for you to share some of this,” the voice continued. There was a grin from the other at Pablo’s tacit consent; this little wasteful exercise wouldn’t be hoarded this time.
Chapter C: Hoarders and Wasters (coming soon)
