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One
of my squatters who acted as a cabdriver and went by the name of Edwin usually
kept his yellow cab at the corner of Pierrepont and Hicks. All I could do was
hope he was there now. As I ran thunder exploded beside me as if bombs were
being tossed at me, but what was coming my way was a hell of a lot deadlier and
scarier than any bomb.
I
didn’t look back as I ran. I knew I’d see more of Brooklyn melting away and
being replaced by a desolate mountain terrain, and in the middle of all this Al
Zaoud and his horde of murderous cutthroats would be riding their demon
stallions at full gallop. In my mind’s eye I could imagine those horses’ eyes
shining bloodred and froth pouring from their mouths and steam blowing out of
their flaring nostrils. I knew they still had to be a half mile or more away,
but I couldn’t shake this sensation of them being directly behind me. I could almost
feel on the back of my neck the pungent steam that they’d be exhaling; a steam
that would smell no different than burning sulfur.
I
wanted to kiss Edwin full on the lips when I saw him sitting in his cab where I
hoped it would be, and given that he resembled a bloated bullfrog with a really
bad complexion, that was saying something. I jumped in the back of his cab and
told him to start driving. “Go over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan and head
uptown towards the Bronx,” I ordered him breathlessly. “And there’s an extra
fifty for you if you ignore the speed limits.”
“Unusual
weather we’re having,” he stammered out dumbly, his reflection in the rearview
mirror showing a dead fish paleness to his face, his eyes wide open but with
little life in them. Squatters have a defense mechanism where they go catatonic
whenever they’re confronted with the fact that the reality they’ve adopted
isn’t real. He was close to shutting down, but I didn’t have time to pull him
out of the driver’s seat and take his place. I looked behind me and could see
that the Brooklyn landscape was erasing quickly. Al Zaoud and his horde were
close enough now that I could make out the severed heads tied to their horses’
manes.
“If
you don’t start driving now I’ll put a bullet in the back of your skull,” I
yelled at Edwin. “I swear to God I will!”
“Jesus, what’s the rush?” he muttered half
under his breath. Even if he looked directly at Al Zaoud and his murderous
horde he wouldn’t acknowledge their existence. But he pulled away from the curb
and headed toward the bridge and away from Al Zaoud. He wasn’t going nearly
fast enough but at least he was moving. I reached over the back of his seat and
pinched the top of his right ear and gave it a hard twist.
“Ow!”
he cried.
“Give
it more gas or I’ll bloody rip your ear off!”
He
gave it more gas and the tires squealed. Al Zaoud was still gaining on us as
more of my Brooklyn faded from sight, but at least we were moving now at a more
reasonable speed. At least we had a chance. If Al Zaoud’s reality causes a
ravine or mountain to materialize in his path, that would slow the bastard down
enough where I might be able to escape him. Still, though, the buffer between
us was disappearing quickly, and if something didn’t change it would only be a
matter of seconds before I’d be pulled into his godforsaken reality.
“You
better damn well floor it! And if you as much as touch the brakes I’ll fucking
kill you!”
“Jesus,
Mike, what’s gotten into you?” Edwin cried, but the taxi leapt forward as he
pushed down on the gas pedal. The car did a little side-to-side jig as he
almost crashed up, but he got it back under control and had it speeding over
the bridge. We were maybe three quarters over it when the other end of the
bridge faded away, replaced by Al Zaoud’s hellish world. I watched as one of
the zombies jumped from the middle of the bridge but never made it into the
East River as he disappeared beneath the rocky terrain that replaced my reality.
I guess given a choice of being drowned in the river or crushed under tons of
rock and soil there wouldn’t be much of a difference as far as that zombie was
concerned
Edwin
had the cab shaking again as he almost lost control for a second time. “I’m gonna
crash up with the way you’re making me drive,” he cried out.
“Don’t
you dare slow down!”
He
didn’t slow down, but he started blubbering. “The cops are going to throw me in
jail and take away my hack license. I don’t know what I’ll do without my hack
license. Jesus, Mike, you’re killing me here.”
I
laughed at that. A nervous, excitable, near hysterical laugh. It wasn’t me that
was going to be killing him. If Al Zaoud caught up to us, it would be that crazy
medieval warlord killing him for all eternity. And besides, my reality didn’t
have any squatters acting like cops, at least none that I’d ever seen, so he
had nothing to worry about on that front.
“Let
me deal with any cops, you concentrate on getting us the hell out of here.”
“What’s
the rush? For Chrissakes, what’s the rush?”
I didn’t bother answering him as he continued to blubber away, but I did let out my breath when I saw that we caught a break. A ravine appeared between us and Al Zaoud. It wasn’t steep enough to stop him for long, but it would slow him down, maybe enough for me to escape him.
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I started walking
west on Montague Street so I could see whether the Manhattan skyline was still
there, and it was, at least mostly as I remembered it. I’m sure some of the
buildings were wrong, but it still seemed very real to me even though I knew it
wasn’t. After I stood gaping at the skyline for what seemed like an eternity
but was probably only minutes, I headed south toward Coney Island. I don’t know
why exactly but I guess I wanted to see how much of my version of Brooklyn
existed. I knew many of the street signs I passed weren’t right—they were from
other neighborhoods, and some of them from other boroughs. And then there were
other street signs that were too blurry to make out. But none of that mattered,
because by then I knew where I really was. Still, though, I kept walking. At
one point, I stopped to look at my reflection in a storefront window and
realized that I was wearing a cheap suit and a fedora. When I was alive I never
wore a hat, and almost never wore suits, and certainly never the fifty-nine
dollar variety that I had on. At the time I was murdered I was wearing jeans,
tennis sneakers, a polo shirt, and a leather jacket, which was what I usually
wore when I worked my job as an investigator. Still, on seeing my reflection in
that window, the suit, scuffed up shoes, and hat seemed right
I was somewhere
in Bay Ridge when this man who looked like he’d been dropped in from the eighteenth
century wandered into view. I was never much of a history buff, but that was the
way he looked given his blue satin waistcoat, frilly silk shirt, and
knee-length breeches, as well as his overall shaggy appearance. As he shuffled
toward me, he looked almost like he could’ve been an extra from a zombie movie,
although one set several hundred years in the past. His expression was a rictus
of fear, and there was only deadness in his eyes. I gave him a wide berth as he
ambled past me and watched as he staggered to the front of an eight-story
brick building. He stood transfixed for a long moment, and then all at once
started clawing at the brick wall and violently smashing his face against it,
and he did this quietly without ever uttering a sound.
I picked up my
pace after that trying to put some distance between us, and it was only seconds
later that I left Brooklyn and found myself someplace entirely different.
Instead of the Brooklyn streets where I’d been walking for hours, behind me now
were meadows and a mountain range that was of such lush greenness that it
seemed more like a painting than anything real. The sky that had been a grayish
white in my version of Brooklyn was now a deep blue, and the sun that had
earlier been missing behind New York smog and clouds was shining brightly
overhead. Off in the distance were groves of a tall and thin variety of pine
tree that I’d never seen before, as well as other types of trees, shrubs, and
plants that were foreign to me, and up ahead past rolling meadows was a
sparkling ocean made up of different shades of blues and aquamarines that were very
different from anything I’d ever seen of the Atlantic Ocean from Coney Island.
I trekked across
the meadows toward the ocean, and as I got closer I could see palm and coconut trees
along a crescent-shaped beach, and in the middle of this a person lying on a
lounge chair.
I had to climb
down a steep incline of rocks to get to the beach, and as I did this, I could
see that the person was a woman wearing a floral-patterned beach cover-up, her
hair a perfect silver. There was an empty lounge chair next to her, and between
her chair and the other was a small drink stand on which sat a glass containing
a brownish-orange drink with a hibiscus flower floating in it.
She heard me
approaching and turned her head toward me. She was wearing sunglasses so I
couldn’t see her eyes, but her expression at first was one of disinterest. That
changed as she smiled thinly at me, and with a wave of her hand, invited me to
sit next to her. She looked ageless yet not young with perfect, unwrinkled skin
and a slender, attractive body. If it wasn’t for her well-coifed silver hair,
she could’ve passed for being in her thirties. After I settled into the lounge
chair next to her she held out a manicured slender hand and introduced herself
as Olivia Danville, her accent sounding as if she came from England and was
from money.
“Mike Stone,” I
said.
When I took her
hand I expected to feel something cold and clammy. After all, we were both
dead. I was surprised to find how warm and dry her skin felt.
“Where am I?” I
asked.
That caused a
wan smile to form over her lips. “Where do you think you are, Mike?”
“I’m guessing I
wandered from my version of hell into yours. Yours isn’t bad. We’re on a tropical
island in the Pacific?”
“Very good,
Mike. Yes, my reality, or hell, ended up being Kapalua, Maui. We’re on probably
the nicest beach on the island. Not the biggest by any stretch, but the prettiest.”
As I looked out
at the ocean I realized it wasn’t just the two of us out there. There were
others in the water. I could make out several bodies that were floating face
down before they sank, and only a minute later an elderly woman’s face popped
up out of a wave before she disappeared for good. Olivia must’ve noticed me
staring at these drowning people, but she didn’t comment about them. Instead
she asked me if I knew how I died.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It would be hard to forget this soon. It only just happened.”
“What do you
mean by that?”
“It was only a
few hours ago that I was fatally shot, and then the next thing I knew I was in
Brooklyn wearing different clothes than what I had on when I died and without
my chest ripped open by a .45 slug. Except it wasn’t really Brooklyn, only a
version of it that I somehow created. And now I’m in your version of hell,
which lucky for you happens to be Hawaii.”
She shifted in
her chair to get a better look at me. I couldn’t see her eyes because of her sunglasses
but I knew she was staring at me intently. She shifted again in her chair so
that she was back to gazing out at the ocean.
“Do you know
what you did to end up in hell?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know
exactly why I’m here.”
We sat quietly
after that for several minutes. When she spoke next it was to ask me why I
thought I ended up in her version of hell. I told her it was probably because
her version was stronger than mine. “Somehow I got sucked into yours, although
I’m guessing if I walked back to where I came from I’d find myself again in
Brooklyn.”
She picked up
her drink and brushed the flower away from her mouth so she could take a sip.
She carefully placed the glass back on the stand. “Your level of awareness is
quite remarkable,” she said. “Out of the billions of souls here in hell only a
tiny percentage have any sense of awareness, and very few of those would know
what you already do this quickly after dying. Do you feel sick yet?”
“I feel fine.”
“Incredible. You
should’ve been feeling quite ill by now.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s what
happens when you’re pulled into a stronger reality, at least for the first few
times in that same reality.”
A larger wave
than any of the others crashed onto the beach, and it washed a man’s crumpled body
onto the shore. The suit he wore was badly torn and he was covered in seaweed, and
from what I could tell it looked like the type of suit someone would’ve worn in
the early nineteen hundreds. His face was hidden from me, but from how
unnaturally bloated and white his hands and exposed skin looked I would’ve
guessed he’d been in the water for months, if not much longer. It probably
shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did when he pushed himself to his
knees and crawled back into the ocean, and he soon disappeared under another
wave.
“Those souls out
there drowning,” I said. “What is it with them?”
“You should be
able to explain that as well as I can.”
Everybody Lies in Hell is now available for purchase.
"In Everybody Lies in Hell Mike Stone's eternal damnation is a private detective's office in a re-imagined Brooklyn. In Hell, the beautiful woman with a case opens a literal Pandora's Box, and Stone is soon inundated by all-too-recognizable evils and lies of Hell's tortured souls, powerful ancient demons and devils, and haunting personal ones. Classic pulp, noir, and horror--think James N. Cain and Bukowski and Palahniuk--are all ground up in a blender and the result is a nasty, wild, and ultimately redemptive novel that only Dave Zeltserman could write." Paul Tremblay
What reviewers said about Outsourced:"Bodies mount up as the double dealing and revenge gather apace. The blurb on the book describes it as a "fast-paced, edge-of-your seat crime novel," and it really does live up to the hype. Add this to your holiday reading list for a piece of escapism." Morning Star
I have two new stories out:
A new Archie story, Archie's Been Stolen, in the latest issue of Ellery Queen.
The kindle version for Everybody Lies in Hell will be on sale Aug. 23rd and can be pre-ordered now!
"This clever depiction of hell explores the lies that people tell, both to others and to themselves... Zeltserman has developed a rich world with a complex protagonist, and the stated stagnation of hellish eternity doesn’t stop his story from moving briskly along." Publishers Weekly
"Everybody Lies in Hell is a wild adventure centered on confronting our demons--literally and figuratively. At once compulsively entertaining and bizarre, Zeltserman has written a metaphysical masterpiece. Hell has never been so much fun." Jon Bassoff
"In Everybody Lies in Hell Mike Stone's eternal damnation is a private detective's office in a re-imagined Brooklyn. In Hell, the beautiful woman with a case opens a literal Pandora's Box, and Stone is soon inundated by all-too-recognizable evils and lies of Hell's tortured souls, powerful ancient demons and devils, and haunting personal ones. Classic pulp, noir, and horror--think James N. Cain and Bukowski and Palahniuk--are all ground up in a blender and the result is a nasty, wild, and ultimately redemptive novel that only Dave Zeltserman could write." Paul Tremblay