004

Being eaten alive wasn't a fear Frank knew he had, but fairly early into the proceedings, he realized it was now at the top of his list.

He sank headfirst into a sea of undulating muscle, too cramped to move, too tight to breathe. The godling had no teeth, which spared him the pain of being chewed to pieces, but also meant he was alive, and screaming, as he slid down its gullet. Wet walls pressed him from all sides, squeezing so hard his ribs popped. He felt like food product extruded through a factory line, like the pink goop that becomes chicken nuggets.

With a final peristaltic heave, he slipped through the beast's throat and into its belly, landing face down in a pile of warm slime. The world was a lightless cave now, wet and cramped and reeking of rot. He pushed himself to his knees, his skin tingling from a slick mucoid coating, and felt around to get his bearings. His hands brushed up against strange objects hidden in the wet folds of tissue: a rusted helmet, the jawbone of some inconceivable animal, a sharp-edged jewel the size of a baby's fist.

When he breathed, shallow and painful from the freshly broken ribs, he found the air thick with stomach acid fumes that singed his nose. There didn't seem to be much oxygen in here. He'd probably pass out before digestion started, which was strangely comforting in the moment.

"This is it, huh?" he muttered. "Trapped in the belly of the beast."

Belly of the beast.

Those were Dad's words again. Funny how often they seemed to come to him in this place. Of course, when Dad used the term, he'd been warning him about the dangers of Hollywood, not an actual beast.

You're heading into the belly of the beast, Frankie. Don't let them chew you up out there. Remember who you are. Remember where you come from.

He'd laughed at the time. He hadn't even signed with an agent yet, and Pop was already afraid the Hollywood machine was ready to grind him up. He meant well, of course, and they'd managed to make it out of that particular conversation without screaming. But there had been ten more just like it that hadn't gone as smoothly. The subtext of those fights was always the same.

What do you think is waiting for you out there, Frankie? (Why can't you be more reliable?)

What's waiting for me here? (What's reliable? Driving a bus for thirty-five years until my lumbar spine snaps like a stack of Pringles, and the doctor threatens to cut my toes off if I don't get the diabetes in check?)

Your family. (That bus put a roof over your head and paid for your fancy degree. You're ashamed of me, and you have no right to be.)

What about work? (I'm not ashamed of you. I just have a dream.)

Danny'll get you a gig down at the Union Hall. (Once again, your older brother will save your ass.)

I don't know if I'm ready for that. (I don't need Danny's help.)

Just think about it. (Be more like your brother.)

Sure thing, Pop. (Fuck Danny.)

And, Frankie, do me a favor. Be safe out there. (If those bastards in California try to eat you alive, make them sick to their stomachs.)

Frank laughed bitterly.

"I hope I give you heartburn," he said aloud, to no one. "I hope you shit your brains out for a week. You hear that, you ugly bastard?"

A muted gurgle from the dark was the only response.

And then came a voice in Frank's head, a voice he had never heard before, deep and thick, humming with power like a high-voltage line.

Are you scared?

"Who said that?"

The only one left with you here, in this dark place.

Fank was lightheaded now. He sank back against a slimy wall.

"Who are you?"

I am the Grey, called the Allflesh, the Skin Lord, the Whisper in the Blood.

Frank was breathing fast. The air, which before had only singed his nose, now burned his throat and seared his lungs. He was fading.

"What do you want from me?"

One thing.

Frank coughed and spat, trying to clear his throat. He felt like he was breathing bleach fumes.

"What?"

Reach out your hand.

Frank held up his hand, and an impossible figure took shape in the gloom. It was a shadow of perfect grey, limned in darkness. Its touch was like cold fire.

"It burns."

Like clay in a kiln.

The throbbing behind his eyes picked up again.

"What's happening?"

Lie back. It will be over soon.

Pain erupted at the base of Frank's skull, like an icepick jammed up his brainstem. White spots flashed across the dark of his closed eyes. His ears hummed with a piercing whine, faint and very distant, and after some time he realized this was the sound of his own scream.

***

The godling lay at the lip of the bridge, deep in the languor of its recent meal. Eating was the only reprieve from pain it ever truly experienced, and even that was fleeting. Already, mere minutes after devouring the man-thing, its belly had begun to ache again, a deep discomfort that grew and spread and ... burned?

That didn't seem right. Hunger did not burn.

And burning had never felt so cold.

Suddenly, the godling roared as icy fire washed up into its throat. It thrashed about, long neck whipping through the air, trying to choke down this flame that would not die. It curled forward, opening its beak to spit out the pain, but something caught in its throat. It smelled like man-thing, and like something else as well. Something older. Briny.

The godling coughed, the sound wet and rattling. The skin just below its jaw tented, like a finger poking against cellophane. And then its neck split open.

A geyser of blood erupted from the wound, followed by a leaf-shaped blade.

The blade sliced down the beast's serpentine neck, flaying skin and flesh, as the godling pitched forward, suddenly too weak to support its own head. Its exposed skull struck the vertebral bridge and shattered, the sound like a cannonball smashing through a pane of glass. The cow-shaped body bucked, its army of limbs reaching for the sky as one, and then it fell still and lifeless.

Frank crawled out from under the mound of gore, leaving behind the sword he'd found inside the monster, the blade bent and broken and looking like it had seen its last kill.

"Thune?" he called, spitting to clear his throat of blood and bile.

"Here," came a cry from further up the bridge. "Over here."

Frank headed toward the sound.

"I thought that beast had killed thee," Thune said.

"Makes two of us." Frank found Thune face down near the edge of the bridge. He picked him up by the hair, Thune's head spinning around to face him.

"How didst thou manage –" Thune's voice caught as he saw Frank's new form.

He was massive now, six-foot-three, and piled with lean muscle. He looked anthracite-hard, like the chiseled sculpture of a god, his proportions just the tiniest bit exaggerated. His hair was black as squid ink, and his skin was gunmetal grey, with brief iridescent flashes of violet and teal under the shifting lights.

He was draped in a sable loincloth and wore black leather sandals and greaves and vambraces of spiked bone. A black leather war belt sat from his hips to the bottom of his rib cage, the belt trimmed in blue fur and set with a giant skull as its centerpiece. The skull had two curved horns and was ringed by tentacles, the skull of no beast that had ever swam or flew or walked upon the Earth.

"What didst thou do?" Thune said.

"There was something in the godling."

"What didst thou do?"

"I ... I don't know." Frank tried to piece together what exactly had happened, but there were holes in his memory. A brownout is how he'd describe it in his partying days, just shy of a full blackout. "It was talking to me. And then ... then I think it tried to eat me."

Thune made an unpleasant noise with his tongue.

"I was on fire," Frank said, "and I was cold too. I felt like I was wrestling for my life. I used to playfight with my older brother when I was a kid. He was so much bigger than me, it was like fighting a full-grown man. But that was easy compared to this."

"And then?"

"Then I had a headache. It was like a thunderclap inside my skull. Suddenly everything just stopped. The burning, the cold, the struggle. And I heard a voice." Frank started to speak but stopped as he felt a chill up his spine. "It said ... your flesh is my command."

Thune's eyes moved up and down, taking in Frank's new form. Although those eyes had spent the last five hundred years bearing witness to every horror known to man, they seemed to hold a glint of fear in them now.

"Something else is new about thee," he said. "Canst thou feel it?"

"What?"

"Do you remember before, when thou accused me of speaking thy barbarous tongue?"

"You mean English?"

"As I told thee, I do not know thy speech. We were able to speak only through my mentalist abilities, a form of telepathic translation."

"And now?"

"Now thou art speaking Argosian."

"I don't know how to speak Argosian."

"It seems things have changed. Undoubtedly this has to do with thy new form." Thune squinted, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. "And just what is this body?"

"I don't know," Frank said. But that was a lie. He knew what he was now. He just couldn't bring himself to say it.

As crazy as this place was, he could comfort himself by knowing he didn't belong here. He was a stranger in a strange land, Alice through the looking glass, a dumbass Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's bugfuck court. This world was insane, no doubt about it, but he was not, because this place had nothing to do with him. Until now. Now he'd introduced a piece of home, a piece of himself. It had no business being here, and yet it fit perfectly.

What would Sarge do?

It was the first thought that came to him when he was under attack from that grey shadow. The answer was obvious. Fight. Give it hell. Scratch and claw and bite if you have to, but go down swinging.

No sooner had he resolved to do just that than the struggle stopped. The thing he was wrestling – the Allflesh it had called itself – seemed to submit like a broken horse. And much like a beast of burden, once it was tamed, it was his there to help.

Like Armand and his brown glass vials of testosterone.

Larger than life, Frankie.

That's what he'd needed to be to win the part of Sgt. Skulltaker, and that's what he needed to be now. The Allflesh made it so.

The transformation wasn't perfect. No doubt, a little something got lost in translation. His new height and weight were closer to Sarge's appearance in the comic books than anything he could hope to replicate onscreen. And the suit was a radical new design.

Sarge had fought in World War 2 and survived Vietnam and taken his brand of vigilante justice to the lawless streets of 90's America, but he'd never looked like this, like some warrior from a sword and sorcery book cover. Skulltaker's gunmetal grey tacticool gear was gone, replaced by this unnatural hero's flesh. The shade was the same, a formidable grey with hints of deep blue, but instead of merely coloring his clothes, the Allflesh had dyed his skin. It was a strange choice but one that worked, all things considered.

The skull logo was still front and center though. Good for brand recognition.

It was a clever adaptation. And maybe that's what scared him the most. Because if this little piece of home fit into this world so well, that meant he fit, too.

Didn't it?

"Thou art beholden to power beyond thy ken," Thune said gravelly.

"I was dead otherwise."

"There are fates worse than death, Frank Farrell, as I warned thee."

"I made my choice. Now do you want out of here or not?"

"Yes, let us head back inside to the hidden tunnel."

"No," Frank gestured across the chasm to the far side of the bridge, "we're going right out the front door."

"The rope bridge is destroyed."

"We don't need a bridge."

"Dost thou intend to jump a hundred feet?"

"No, that would be insane." Frank nodded to the stalagmite rising between the broken halves of the bridge. "I'm gonna jump to that rock."

"That is fifty feet away."

"Better get a running start then."

He wrapped Thune's hair through a loop in his war belt, tying it securely.

"What is the meaning of this?"

Frank jogged down the bridge, starting at a steady pace and picking up speed as he moved, hitting a full-on sprint as he approached the edge. Thune screamed as they reached the lip of the bridge, a wheezing, frightening yell swallowed by the void. Frank planted his feet, leg muscles bulging, and launched into the air.

The wind roared in his ears, the abyss stretching endlessly below him. For a second, he was weightless, like a god who had cast off the chains of gravity. He sailed a full thirty feet before his momentum slowed and he arced back toward the ground, the stalagmite drawing closer and closer, waiting to smash him like a bug on a windshield.

Gallows Leap

Form: Vigilante

Ability Type: Movement

Psychoplasm Cost: Passive

Increase your High Jump by 5 feet (standing) or 7 feet (running).

Increase your Long Jump by 20 feet (standing) or 25 feet (running).

Psionic Reserve: 100/100

He caught hold of a rocky protrusion as he fell, his big hand clamping down like a steel vice, and swung a sandaled foot up onto a narrow shelf. He scrambled across the stone, climbing with the ease of a monkey. At the summit, he turned toward the far section of the bridge, his long black hair whipping in the phantom wind from the abyss and his heart beating mightily. God, he felt so free, so strong.

"Please," Thune cried, "Wait –"

Frank leaped again, and this time it was his turn to scream. He loosed his best Tarzan call, his voice echoing in the cavernous space, refusing to be subsumed by the dark, sending all manner of shadowy creatures scurrying.

He landed heavily on the bridge, the bonework groaning beneath his solid frame, pieces of mortar collapsing into the pit below.

"Thou hast ... overcome ... thy fear," Thune said.

"Seems like." Frank had forgotten all about his problem with heights. The fear was gone, and so were the pains from trekking through this dungeon, the ripped feet, the busted ribs, the singed lungs. He was reborn, alive in a way he hadn't been in a long time.

Why was Thune so worried about him? Sure the fire from the Allflesh had burned at first, but now he felt warm and good. And if this is what it meant to bond with that thing, then it was worth any price.

Passing through the red brick archway, he stepped into the temple's grand entrance. An empty throne a hundred feet tall was carved directly into one of the limestone walls. The throne was covered in millions of flies, an angry, buzzing swarm so thick it seemed like a cloud of smoke. He could barely glimpse it through the haze, but there was a form under that living canopy, something man-shaped and gigantic sitting atop that impossible seat.

Snorting like a bull, he cleared the flies swarming his nose and then passed through this unpleasant veil, coming to a pair of black stone doors that led outside, a thin beam of daylight peeking between them. He pushed, leaning his body into the effort, and the doors gave with a scraping rumble.

The sun outside was blinding. It took a few seconds for his eyes to clear. When they did, he saw the entrance to the temple was set in the side of a limestone cliff, with carved steps leading down to a yellow sand floor.

The raiders were camped at the base of the steps, ten of them in total, all dressed in weathered cloaks of green and blue and white, all wielding spears and bronze sabers.

"Tomb robbers," Thune said.

"They can have the tomb."

"It is worse than that, I fear."

"Worse how?"

"These men are eaters of the dead," Thune said. "Cannibals."