Detective Renshu Karasu drove his Daimler down the single-lane strip connecting his work town Mayville to Hellhole. Desert Bungalows set deep into the crevices of the dunes glittered shattered windows and empty beer bottles across Uncanny Mesa leading up to the Moloch Caldera itself.
As the car neared, the caldera's molten black and red rock crest rose into the dusty violet twilight sky; a sulfurous cloud hovered over it like a vile crown. He flicked open his lighter and lit his cigarette, took a puff and blew it out. The smoke coiled around his long, black Tengu nose before the breeze sucked it out the open window.
One road carved its way in through a tunnel, the only way in or out, Renshu's Daimler being the singular occupant. Darkness swallowed it up once he passed inside. He flicked on his high beams to see past the hood of his car where the light at the end glowed a faint auburn.
Quicker and quicker the maw of light yawned wider until he burst through. More desert surrounded him on either side. In the caldera's center, city lights burned myriad yellow, cretinous eyes through the sulphuric haze congealing into an enormous cloud hanging over Hellhole. It was a city tossed into an enormous basin of a jagged ridge by a god with a cruel sense of humor. The city of suffering.
The headlights flashed on a three pronged road ahead of him. He paused, his black chin crunched in silent debate.
One stretched left, curving along the Caldera's side and whipped away from town. The right meandered into a patchwork of basaltic sand dunes and packed sand, petering off into a forest of warehouses and industrial smokestacks. The middle beelined into Hellhole Proper. He smiled and gunned the Daimler forward onto the middle road.
As he drew near Hellhole, a mountain range hugging the northernmost region of the Caldera's crest caught his attention. Pines formed a craggy silhouette. At the western side of the mountain, farmland and ranches stretched out to the city limits.
He paused the Daimler at a roadside sign, a slab of wood nailed to a plank and staked into the rocky, black sand. Dirty, worn and faded wood made the contents of the sign indiscernible but he managed to squint through the miasmic grit. Barely visible, smudged, white lettering of Bancaster Lake was crossed out in red paint. Just above it, written in sloppy, haphazard handwriting was Hellhole.
With a smirk and a shake of his head, he continued on, driving past a street sign proclaiming the large road he was on to be Belial. Street lamp light bulbs flickered and blinked from inside their broken cages, casting their mustard gas haze onto the derelict street. To his left towered shambled banks and an abandoned business office complex adorned with boarded up windows. A silhouette or two lurked behind tattered blinds and dim lights.
Butcher shops and general stores lined either side of the street. Sidewalk dwellers of scantily clad dirty she-demons and glassy-eyed shufflers eyed him as he passed. Tumbleweed trash blew through the street. Inside an alley he passed, a burly demon rammed a smaller demon into the wall until blood sprayed out the back of his head.
He cleared his throat in response to the last spectacle and reached for a slip of paper clipped on top of the manila folder next to him.
"Captain Virginia Price
Hellhole Police Department
Special Investigations Narcotics Unit
2018 11th Street, Hellhole"
When he pulled onto 11th, the police station was tucked away into the middle of the street. Dim lights cast from the translucent glass of the front doors in striped designs from the bars across them. He killed the engine, took the manila folder, and got out. A chilly November breeze flung the unbuttoned bottom of his black topcoat around his shins.
YOU ARE READING
The Caldera's Vice Prologue
Science Fiction"We don't hand out vices. We hand out an escape from pain." -Silas MaCallister, drug kingpin In Hellhole, the sordid city situated into the volcanic basin of the Moloch Caldera, drug bootlegging reigns supreme. A red demon, Asher Glassberg, witness...
