Worlds War One

xxxvii [Badia]

Penina stepped forward. She still exhibited a slight limp from giving Seaman Choi her leg, but it mainly was regrown, and Bad wouldn't have noticed if she wasn't looking for it. The Golem bent low and placed the obol containing Callie's soul in an impression made in the flagstone that was the perfect shape and size for the coin. Penina stood up and stepped back.

"It's open," Penina said.

"That's it?" Private Ramírez asked. "They call this place 'the Forsaken Land,' and there are no guards? No padlock? A gateway that opens with a possessed coin? It seems kinda ...unsafe."

"It is not meant to beeee a prison, Quest."

Bad noticed how Private Ramírez swooned whenever Penina spoke with her unique drawl. Bad also noted Saanvi was seeing, and she appeared displeased at the development. Maybe Demons believed love was offensive.

"Is there anything in there that might be trying to get out?" Airman Fox asked. He stared at the flagstone as if it was the gateway to hell.

"Nothing in there would want anything to do with our world, Treyvon," Saanvi assured. "This is a means to get to She'ol. A bridge from here to there. The Forsaken Land is a place older than Earth itself. It borders the other old places. And other new places."

"This is how Johnny Rotten got back and forth from She'ol to Senado Square?" Bad asked. "He led the undead from Macau back through the Forsaken Land?"

Saanvi shrugged. "Possibly," she agreed. "He may have avenues available that I don't have available. He's older than most entities on Earth." Saanvi checked with Autumn. She shrugged. "Even the Ghosts have lived so long that they've forgotten many of the original ways."

"He might have left behind a complement of zombies in the Forbidden Land," Bad warned. "Sentries. Like back in South America. We must beware another ambush."

"I think the undead will be the least of our concerns, Badia," Saanvi warned.

"What are we going to face in there, Nina?" Private Ramírez asked.

Penina's expression featured whorls and indentations. The seasoned scout was puzzled. "I do not know. I have never been there."

"But you're our guide," Airman Fox exhaled, exasperated. "You've never been to the Forsaken Land?"

"It is called the Forsaken Land for a reeeeason," Penina countered. "No one wants to go there."

"No one?" Airman Fox questioned. "What are we walking into here?"

"Something dangerous," Saanvi conceded. "But you're soldiers. Deal with it."

Airman Fox and Seaman Choi and Private Ramírez all checked with Bad. Badia nodded. Into the great unknown. Was it so different from the last two days? This had been one prolonged exercise in the unexpected.

Bad remembered first setting foot in Raqqa. It had been more than a foreign land. The war had changed their world. The very laws of nature had seemed twisted like gravity had worked differently, and time had moved at a strange pace. The people there, both fighters and civilians, had mutated. Prolonged violence had had an effect like nuclear radiation. Bad's tour in Syria had been an experience navigating a living nightmare.

But hadn't there been hints of how life had been before? Badia had caught glimpses of children, fear in their eyes from seeing an American soldier in their street. Fear, yes, but maybe also hope. And small acts of kindness even among endless apathy—a young boy helping an older woman off the streets to safety, a girl darting from an alleyway after feeding a starving dog, graffiti here and there offering platitudes for peace. There had still been glimmers of humanity even among overwhelming discord.

As she descended into the Forsaken Land through a flagstone portal down a rabbit hole in the Lost City, Bad felt less like when she'd set foot in Raqqa and more like she was Nellie Armstrong setting first foot on an unearthly landscape. On the other side, the opening in the flagstone street was a hatch in the ceiling of a limestone cave. Bad dropped down from the world she knew to a place that made her sprout gooseflesh all over. Unlike the fantastical dimension of the Ghosts' Fifth World or the depraved devolution of war-torn Syria, this was a version of reality anchored in our own, yet entirely unmoored from Bad's previous experiences.

She stood in the mouth of the cave. Saanvi appeared flanking her on one side, Airman Fox on the other. The three of them surveyed the land that sloped down and around them off the small hill where they'd exited the cave. Everything was unusual. The heavens above were a scarlet color that made Bad think of "blood skies." Silver streamers that were a version of clouds slithered like snakes through the atmosphere. Light emitted from a cracked aperture in the sky, a tear like a wide lightning bolt the size of the sun, and the zigzag shape of a fat "Z."

The vegetation exuded menace, moved not by the stirring wind but by evil intent. Tall species that might have been the trees of this place stretched into the blood skies, trunks that grew in tripod limbs from the ground up, joining into a single stem that featured branches filled with three-pronged appendages that were the leaves or fruits of this world. A carpet of a color Bad had never seen before stretched across the landscape, a brown/blue lawn like moss maybe—small suckers on the creepy rug appeared to be gulping up air. Or trying to eat whatever came close. To call it "vegetation" seemed misleading. The plant life appeared no more flora than mechanical material. The makeup of the vegetation in the Forsaken Land suggested an amalgamation of plant/soil/machine.

"What place have you brought us to, Princess?"

"I don't know, Badia," Saanvi said, maybe for the first time in her whole life.

"Well, we don't have time to study it." Bad believed sometimes ignorance was bliss—Drill's mind would be in a much better place if he had never learned any of the Ways Things Really Were. "Soldiers aren't scientists."

"Scientists are notoriously wrong, anyway," Saanvi dismissed. "Facts are fluid in the Wider World. Better to be an explorer of possibilities rather than someone who tries to pin down the truth. The truth keeps moving farther and farther away."

"Onward, then," Bad commanded the squad. "Single file."

"And bring Callie," Saanvi added. Seaman Choi reached back and retrieved the obol before he pulled the hatch closed overhead. "We will need her again to open the exit on the other side."

They started down the slope of the hill. Bad was careful to stay on the stony path, although the rocky surface felt spongy and pliable rather than rigid. She avoided the suction-cup lichens that lined the route, contracting little sucker-petals that looked like they wanted to latch onto something. She noted Drill near the back of the line, eyes cast downward at his feet and ignoring everything else.

"You shouldn't've brought him," Airman Fox warned, following directly behind Bad.

She couldn't have done this without Drill. She was using him. Broken and getting brokener, he was still her anchor to get home. Drill would make sure she survived, like in Raqqa. He would bring her back home to Charlie. Back to Mary and Rebecca. She was using him to get home to her family. Even if it meant breaking his mind and driving him insane. She used him. Whatever hells existed in the Wider World where her soul would end up after this life, she would have some serious explaining to do about her abuse of Drill Sergeant Camilo Cabello.