Free City Infernal by Edward Lee

want to go to sleep.”
    “If you’re still not feeling well tomorrow, you’re gonna tell me, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll get your old doctor out here right away.”
    “Dad, she’s in D.C.”
    Her father shrugged. “Then I’ll charter a goddamn helicopter and fly her out here.”
    She managed a giggle. “You would. I’ll be fine. I just need to go to sleep.”
    “Okay. You call me if you need anything.”
    “I’ll be fine,” she repeated. “Sorry to be such a pain in the butt.”
    “Yeah, but you’re my pain in the butt. Remember that.”
    “I will. Go back and watch your game. I know how much you love to bitch about Leon Flanders or whatever his name is.”
    The comment instantly set him off. “That lazy, no-effort, non-football-playing son of a bitch! He missed twelve tackles in the first half!” He walked out of the room and back down the hall, his complaints fading. “Jesus Christ, I’m a fat old man and I could tackle better than that talentless bum!”
    Well, Cassie thought. At least he’s back to normal.
    She rubbed her eyes.
    But what about me?
    She dawdled about in her room, exhausted yet wiry with fret. She turned off the lights, stripped and donned a short nightgown, and next she was walking out the French doors onto the gable-sided terrace. Night-sounds pulsated—crickets, peepers—and then a warm wind stirred. She looked out over the moonlit landscape and saw no smoking, luminous city. Just open land and forests which extended to the crisply edged mountains.
    What did you expect?
    Sighing, she walked back in and went to bed.
     
    Sleep pulled her down like muggers sneaking up from behind. She felt stuffed in a black ravine as nightmares hulked overhead.
    First, as always:
    Lissa’s face, twisted into a mask of insane hatred.
    And the death-rattle voice. “My own sister ... How could you do this to me?”
    Then the gunshot and the hot blood splattering into Cassie’s eyes.
    No, please....
    More fragments of nightmare plodded over her. Yes, she lay immobile in a ravine—or an open grave.
    Her mouth felt sealed shut.
    She could smell malodorous smoke, could hear muffled cracklings of a roaring fire. Again, she saw the city under the scarlet sky.
    The city seemed endless.
    Distant screams careened to and fro, like sirens miles away. But with each frantic beat of her heart, the visions lurched closer....
    The city raged before the infernal terrascape, a firmament of inversions whose highest edifice winked at its peak like a beacon of luminous blood. Cassie’s vision trailed away on stinking, hot winds, shooting through abyssal avenues and abhorrent boulevards as though it were a scream itself. In one avenue, a troop of man-like things with chisel-slits for eyes shouldered into a crowd of haggard people, and with inhuman three-fingered hands, these same things began to select victims for whatever purpose there was on this horrid night. Faces were dragged by fingers hooked into eyes. Wan mouths opened to scream ejecting innards and blasts of blood. Heads were prized apart, raw brains rowed through by the fat taloned fingers. One man was being seared with prods of white-hot iron, another was eviscerated with one fast swipe of a talon. The guts were then summarily shoved into the victim’s mouth as he was being forced to eat. Women faired worse, stripped to emaciated nakedness and plundered for sexual possibilities that defied all human imagination.
    Dark chuckles fluttered as the endless workings of this place ground on and on.
    Horrid as the images were, Cassie received the notion that these were things she was supposed to see.
    The eye of the nightmare blinked, then focused more closely on the details of this evil street. Screams were exploding now; Cassie thought of famine-riots in some collapsing Calcutta-like city in the Third World. The vaguely-human wardens plodded on in their nameless duties, tearing into the crowd. One woman was singled out, hauled forward by the hair and thrown