Answers, Assumptions, and Anger.

“Good, you're awake.”

Bentley turned to see Chrysanthemum, her head partially peeking in through the door so that only everything above her nose was visible.

“How long have I been out?”

Chrysanthemum slipped all the way into the room and began counting on her fingers.

“Let’s see… today is Wednesday so 1, 2— 3 weeks, it’s been about 3 weeks,” she said. She was sporting a dark purple pantsuit, a black beret, and the same pearl necklace she’d been wearing last time he saw her. Bentley on the other hand was wearing some silk pajama-like hospital outfit and what felt like a diaper underneath.

“3 weeks?” Bentley’s arms tightened against the IV tube attached.

“I know it’s a lot to take in but we had to keep you under while our people worked on you,” Chrys said, “As you’ll notice, all of your injuries have been healed and you should be able to move your arms freely again.”

Bentley raised his arms, clenching and unclenching his fists. He took a deep breath of the sterilized air.

“She’s right. No pain.”

“Also, we obviously couldn’t let you see the way to this place before you’d agreed to anything,” she added.

“You need to get me back as soon as possible,” Bentley said, ignoring her statement, “I have a—”

“A little sister? Don’t worry, I know. We ran a background check on our way here. She is well taken care of. One of our best doctors and a security guard are there keeping tabs on her,” said Chrys.

“That’s not the problem. Who’s gonna read to her if I’m not there? Who’s gonna brush her hair? Not to mention that I can’t make money to pay off our bills while I’m stuck here,” Bentley said before pulling the IV tube free from his arm and sitting up in bed. An overwhelming soreness overtook his body and he toppled back down onto the pillow.

“That’s actually part of what I want to talk to you about,” Chrysanthemum said, ignoring Bentley’s futile struggles to get out of bed.

“But I ha—”

“Bentley,” she yelled in a stern tone like a sergeant giving orders. She smoothed out the legs of her pantsuit and cleared her throat before continuing in her usual gentle voice. “I promise we’ll get you home soon but you wanted answers and I’m trying to give them to you.”

Bentley nodded.

“So,” she continued, “What is it you want to know?”

“First off, where am I?”

“You’re in a treatment room at my organization's headquarters, we have about five of them for agents that come back from the field injured.”

“And what organization would that be exactly?”

“Well I’m sure you’ve already figured it out to a certain extent but we’re in the business of killing creatures like the one you and I fought.”

“Right. You called it a Cerberus and said there were tons of them,” Bentley recalled.

“Exactly, we call them Cerbs for short but basically our job is to exterminate any creature that enters Earth through the gateway.”

“You’re losing me already, I don’t know what you mean when you say ‘the gateway’, the gateway to what?”

“It’s been called many things throughout history. Whether it’s Hell, Sheol, Hades, The Underworld, you name it. They all mean the same thing. About two years ago, a hole or gateway of sorts opened up. We’re not sure what caused it or where it’s located, but all of the sudden these Cerbs started to spill into our world. At first, they would show up months apart, but recently they’ve been getting progressively more frequent. This leads us to believe that the hole is widening and will continue to widen until Earth and Hell come completely sloshing into one another like some big screwed-up melting pot.”

“And I’m just supposed to believe that?”

“Unless you have a better explanation for that thing you saw,” Chrysanthemum said with a shrug of her shoulders. Bentley couldn’t refute the fact that the creature he had fought was beyond supernatural. He decided he had no choice but to accept what she was saying at face value. After all, he couldn’t imagine that she had anything to gain by lying.

“How did you figure out that these things were from Hell and not just some science experiment gone wrong?”

“Well, we have someone very unique on staff,” she said.

“Unique in what way?”

“It’s hard to explain, it’s better that you wait until you meet him,” Chrysanthemum said, “All I can say is that on the night the hole opened up, he was gifted with a certain insight.” Bentley had no clue what she meant and decided that he probably was better off waiting until meeting the eccentric employee for himself after all. This whole conversation was starting to make Bentley’s head hurt. All he wanted to do was sit in silence for a little bit and admire Chrysanthemum’s new outfit. He knew that he had come too far to not get all the answers he was looking for though.

“So if Hell exists, then does that mean… y’know… does Heaven exist?”

“We’ve yet to confirm that,” she said coldly, “We have no evidence to support their existence. However, if Heaven, God, and Angels do exist then they clearly don’t like to meddle so we can’t count on their help.”

“So do you and your agents just go on fighting the Cerbs until Earth and Hell eventually merge then? Isn’t that just delaying the inevitable?”

“In that case isn’t living at all just ignoring the inevitability of death? Life would be pretty depressing if everyone thought like that. None of the people here are very big on sitting idly by as the world ends, so our job is to hold off these things until hopefully someday we can find the gateway and close it.”

Bentley felt immediately embarrassed to have asked such a question. After all, he had a sister who had been in the hospital for two years now, fighting a disease that stumped even the most renowned doctors, the same disease that had taken his mother. How could he bring up something so pessimistic as inevitability? He quickly rerouted the conversation to hide his shame.

“One more question, you said that you’d never met a civilian who could see the Cerbs

before… so why can I see them?”

“That one I don’t have an answer for. All of the agents here including myself had to get something similar to Lasik eye surgery to be able to see the creatures, but I’m assuming you never got a procedure like that.” Bentley shook his head, confirming that she had ascertained correctly.

“The only other person able to see the Cerbs without surgery was the General. Most civilians see them as a natural disaster of some sort, their eyes show them a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake splitting open the ground, but never the Cerb,” she said.

“Who’s the General?”

“He’s the one who founded this place,” she took on a certain glow when she started talking about him, “He is still in charge here and is the only reason we’ve been successful holding off the Cerbs up to this point.” Bentley and Chrysanthemum sat in a long sustained silence after this answer. She waited patiently for Bentley as he racked his brain to see if there were any stones he’d left unturned in his questioning. After what Chrysanthemum deemed was a long enough pause, she adjusted her beret and began to speak again.

“Now, if I’ve answered all of your questions, there’s something very important I need to ask you,” she said, interlacing her fingers and simultaneously twiddling her thumbs. She averted her eyes from Bentley’s gaze and seemed to even blush a little, of course it could’ve just been his imagination.

“Is this it? Is this one of those love confessions I’ve heard so much about? What do I say if she asks me out? I’ve never been on a date, what do you even do on one of them? Should I introduce her to my comatose little sister? No… that feels somehow wrong for a first date. I never thought she’d be the one confessing to me. Dreams do come true. All my pain and suffering has been building up to this moment. I love you too Chrysanthemum!”

Chrysanthemum lost her train of thought, shaken from her focus by the clear anticipation written across Bentley’s blushing face.

“Ummm, Bentley?”

“Go right ahead and ask away! I’m all ears,” Bentley said eagerly.

“Riiight, well I wanted to offer you a job working for the organization,” she said.

“I feel the same way,” Bentley proclaimed the second she had finished speaking. Chrysanthemum nearly fell out of her chair, taken aback by Bentley’s loud and irrelevant response. The pair both sat silently for another pause, this one feeling as if it lasted for multiple lifetimes.

“Wait, I’m sorry what?” Bentley shook his head, his brain finally seeming to catch up to his mouth.

“I offered you a job as one of our agents. You’d help us fight the Cerbs until we’re able to find a way to locate and close the gate,” she said, her face now devoid of any motion, “You seemed pretty comfortable with that baseball bat so I figured we could use your help going forward.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bentley said, still reeling from the lack of a love confession, “It was a miracle that I wasn’t killed by that thing and you want me to voluntarily go out and fight more?”

“Bentley—”

“I have a sister to take care of, an actual job to find, and endless medical bills to pay, and you want me to run around fighting monsters without a care in the world like I’m some Shounen protagonist or something?”

“Bentley listen to me—”

“Do you know what would happen to my sister if I died? She’d be saddled with all the debt from both her and my mom. Instead of waking up to a loving brother, she’d wake up to nobody and a life crippled by medical bills. She might even be better served staying in a coma at that point because she would have no hope for a normal life.”

“Bentley please just stop for a second and—”

“No, you know what, I will not stop for a second. You have no idea what it’s like having to bear the burden of all your family’s struggles. You are gorgeous, have nice clothes, and get to run around pretending that you’re living in some comic book.

“Why am I saying all this? Don’t I like this girl? This doesn’t feel like me,” Bentley thought, but his mouth was already operating independently.

“I bet you grew up in a perfect little upper-class family, never had to work for anything, got to go to University on daddy’s dime, and then happened upon this little job where you could finally feel different from all the other girls who stayed in their hometown and turned into their moms.”

Chrysanthemum yanked something metallic, glinting in the overhead light, from her pocket and in one fluid motion pressed it hard up against Bentley’s neck. His Adam’s Apple tried to retreat further into his throat but had nowhere to go. Bentley looked down his nose at the knife beginning to draw blood from his exposed throat. He wanted to gulp but was afraid Chrysanthemum would take any movement as an invitation to carve his esophagus like a pumpkin. Her blue eyes were crackling with enough electricity to power an electric chair.

“Man, one second you think you’re getting a love confession, the next second she’s ready to slit your throat,” Bentley thought. His own internal attempts to inject humor into the situation did little to dispel his utter terror.

“Don’t act like you know a thing about me,” Chrysanthemum growled. Bentley nodded quickly with his eyes, still unsure if he was allowed to move. She blew a stray brown hair free from her face before continuing.

“Now here is what’s going to happen,” she said, “I’m going to write down what your starting salary would be here and a phone number. After that, my men are going to come in here and escort you back to your apartment. Blink if you understand.”

Bentley blinked like his life depended on it, which it very well might have.

“Good boy,” she said before returning the knife to her pocket, pulling out a pen and a scrap of paper in its place. Bentley’s breathing remained shallow and tense as if the knife was still pressed against his throat. Once she had finished writing, as promised, she reached under the blanket and tucked the paper into the pocket of his pajamas. Bentley was too shaken up to even get flustered by the fact that she had reached into his pocket. She and Bentley shared a moment of eye contact, her electric blue eyes facing down his emerald green ones until he lowered his gaze to a point on the floor. As soon as he had looked away, she snapped her fingers and multiple men in lab coats came flooding into the room. A flurry of hands made their way over Bentley’s body and before he knew it, a washcloth was over his mouth. As he faded out of consciousness, he saw Chrysanthemum look back before leaving the room.

“Coward,” she spat.

Then everything went dark.