Page 24 of Pain

He shook his head. “Not really. And it feels like hours because it has been hours, but in Hell time, it’s been like twenty minutes. Time is fucked up here. There’s no explanation for it. Sometimes an hour can feel like a day, and sometimes a day can feel like an hour.”

“Well, that’s just fucking lovely.” I shook my head and continued on. The sun beat down against my skin until it felt crispy and I had to drape my T-shirt over my shoulders to keep them from burning.

We kept moving. Kept walking. And eventually, the mountains did get closer, until they were looming above us, not nearly as rolling and benign as they appeared from a distance. They were towering and craggy with a flat face that didn’t look climbable unless you were a gecko.

I slid into Drak and Zandren’s minds just a little, feeling their hopelessness which seemed awfully similar to my own. No way could we scale that. Zandren glanced at me when he felt me in there and tossed me a smirk before wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Whatcha lookin’ for, Little One?”

“Just an idea of how we’re supposed to get up over those,” I said, my eyes travelling up, up, up until I couldn’t see the top any longer.

“We’re not,” Maxar said matter-of-factly. “We go through them. There’s a passageway somewhere here. We just need to find it.”

“It’s getting dark,” Zandren noted. “Will we have to make shelter for the night?”

“I fucking hope not,” Maxar said. “You don’t want to know what creepy-asscreatures roam the deserts of Hell at night.”

“Wh-what?” I stammered. “What kind of creepy creatures?”

“I don’t know,” Maxar said, his eyes wide. “And you don’t want to either. All I’ve been told is that you need to do your very best to only cross the desert during the day. Otherwise, you won’t make it out.”

I met Zandren’s gaze and for the first time since I’d ever met the bear, he looked genuinely terrified. Fair enough, this was my first rodeo in Hell too. And with any luck, it’d be my last.

“We need to find the passageway,” Maxar said, a thread of immediacy in his tone as he headed to the left along the base of the mountain range.

“Should we spread out?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. We stick together no matter what.”

So, we did. We meandered as far down the left side of the mountain range base as we could, then back to the right. And with each footstep, the sky grew darker, the setting sun casting our frames into long, black shadows over the dirt and up the face of the range.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and my skin prickled in fear as a sense of impending doom settled over us. We each felt it. We were racing the clock. A fucked-up clock to boot, and it was winning by a wide margin. We hadn’t found the passageway yet, and it was almost dark.

The tendons in Maxar’s neck stood out as he ramped up his speed, walking faster in search of the entrance. Drak was quiet since I made him remove his shirt, and Zandren kept a watchful eye on the desert behind us.

We were working as a team.

A deep, rumbling growl rolled through Zandren, and he dropped to all fours.

We all paused, spinning around to face what he must have sensed.

“Wh-what is it?” I asked, my voice trembling almost as much as my hands.

“I caught a scent,” he said, his voice low. “I can’t describe it though.” He sniffed some more. “Blood … copper … iron, and …death,” he growled the last word.

The ground beneath us vibrated like the plates were shifting, and rocks from the cliff face tumbled and rolled down, scattering across the cracked earth.

“Watch out!” Maxar shouted, lurching forward and shoving me out of the way before a boulder bigger than my head nearly crushed my skull. “You’ve gotta keep your wits about you here, babe. Everything is trying to kill you. It’s like Australia, but not as pretty, and with no wombats or joeys to snuggle.”

I nodded, my heart pounding painfully against my ribs. “So, more like Florida.”

He smirked. “Exactly. Florida without the beach, and bigger, scarier monsters than crocs and gators. Same kind of crazy people though.” He rubbed his hands up and down my arms. “You okay?”

I nodded again. “Yeah.”

He released me and resumed his search for the passageway entrance.

My nerves were shot. Everything inside of me shook with fear as the sense of doom just grew thicker and more suffocating by the second.

The ground shook again and my stomach lurched to my throat. I reached for the first hand I could find—Drak’s. Swallowing, I glanced up at him, licking my lips.

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