The Pit: Watchmaker's Hell Book One

Chapter 1 - Marcus and His Team

Marcus, Lauren & Regan (and Max and Heinrich)

Beginning of the Road, Hell

2011

MARCUS SAT ON AN OBLIGING boulder with his head bowed while his two teammates argued.

"Why are we here instead of in the City?" Regan hissed to Lauren.

Regan was a tall beauty with striking brown eyes. The question was issued at Lauren but meant for Marcus. Miles away, a battle raged in the City. But Marcus insisted that he, Lauren and Regan need not participate. Instead, they waited outside the Pit for news.

Both Lauren and Regan looked exactly as they had when they died. When a person dies and enters Hell, their soul is placed into a copy of their still earth-bound body, right down to the clothes and anything held in their hands. The new body is an idealized version of the original. Regan died in her sleep and was therefore stuck for eternity in a pajama set with PINK written across her butt. Lauren died in a hunting accident, but only the dark green field jacket on earth bore the ugly hole of the charge that entered her heart. Standing in Hell, the copy jacket she wore bore no such hole. Even without it, her outfit betrayed the manner of her death, beginning with said field jacket, including the old worn white and pink trainers and culminating with the shotgun she always held open on the crook of her right arm.

"If we were needed," Lauren told Regan, "we would be there."

"But—" Regan protested.

"Quiet." Marcus ordered. His voice was low and steady. An outsider might have found it nonthreatening. Even though Regan had joined Marcus' team three months earlier, she knew better. Instead of continuing her dangerous line of questioning, she flopped onto the ground at the edge of the only road in Hell.

"Marcus knows every route into and out of the City — every possible plan of attack and defense. " Lauren leaned her head back against the smooth side of Pit Mountain as she spoke. "If we were needed, we would be there."

Technically, they were needed. Marcus knew his side would lose the current battle. He wanted to lose. It would tell him more about his enemy than if he won. And he knew far too little of what his enemy was capable of. He had told both women earlier that he needed to run battle plans in his head to predict the outcome. It wasn't true. Instead, he wanted a few moments to collect his thoughts.

Marcus had died two thousand years earlier and was greeted with an entirely different Hell than the one Lauren and Regan would encounter. The Pit, the entrance for all who are condemned to Hell, was full of tents and fighting. The Gauls controlled half of it, but Marcus' people, the Romans, believed they could overthrow them thanks to reinforcements of dead as a result of Rome's current civil war. Marcus gradually took over the campaign. Over the course of 50 years, he took control of the Pit only to finally exit the place and find the rest of Hell in a similar shit state. The great desert that overwhelms Hell's landmass was just as filled with tents and conflict over territory. It would take another 150 years for Marcus to assume control of the whole place. In the 1,800 years since, Marcus managed Hell through representatives. The man currently running the City, Julian, was hand-picked by Marcus, as was Otto Mueller, the man who ran the Camp that stood between Pit Mountain and The City. Meanwhile, Marcus spent most of his time in the Pit, recruiting.

There was no running Hell without an army, though in public he never called them that. Instead they were his 'team,' a term that bred more camaraderie. For the most part, the team members thought of themselves as free to come and go without permission from Marcus, an illusion he found both amusing and useful. He maintained this illusion in public until his leadership was challenged by some fool member of his team or some newcomer. Then he would rally his team- members like the army they hadn't realized they were and convince them that the aggressor was an enemy to their peace and order before sending them to sacrifice their eternal lives for his power.