bottle would have knocked most people unconscious, but I have… let’s call it a ‘special set of skills’. Or maybe a very hard head. Either way, I was dazed, but not unconscious. I looked up at the grinning face of the psychopath I’d been tracking for too long now. He raised the bottle and I had just enough sense to duck back, so the sharp edges cut rather than mangled my face as he slashed again. The blood ran into my eyes, blurring my vision, I tasted it in my mouth and the sharp pain burnt a ferocious path along my nerves.
The hell with this.
Before the bottle could strike again, I launched myself up and slammed him back into the concrete wall behind him, knocking the wind out of him. Even though he was fighting to catch his breath, he continued to struggle frantically. It was probably at that point that he realized his mistake; he’d treated me as he would any other attacker.
You can’t turn off pain (not even I can do that), you can’t even turn it down, but you can get used to it. Which isn’t to say you don’t still feel it or that it doesn’t still hurt (it definitely does!), but if you’re used to getting hurt, then it doesn’t have to slow you down, you can push through it and just keep going. I’d had a lot of practice getting hurt.
It also helped to know I would heal.
I always healed.
Grabbing the hand in which Atkinson held that bottle, I smacked it repeatedly against the wall until the bottle dropped and shattered on the ground below. Now disarmed, he stopped struggling.
“Alright, alright! I’ll come quietly.”
I didn’t let go of him, but I stopped hitting him–it was always easier when they cooperated.
But Edward Atkinson wasn’t the type to cooperate. As I backed off a step, he stamped on my foot, and threw an elbow into my chin.
He was grinning again. He was enjoying this. Clearly.
Truth be told, escaping Hell isn’t as hard as it ought to be. No one ever really thinks about it, but Hell is run by Demons, and while Demons enjoy torturing the souls of humanity’s most wicked, they don’t have a great work ethic beyond that, on account that they’re Demons. Demons are happy enough to torture souls, but when it comes to the boring stuff like security, they’re less… eager. The walls that border the vast (some say endless) plains of Hell are poorly guarded, and the guards that are posted there don’t really care, but it’s not as if they can be fired; they’re Demons.
In many ways, it’s actually surprising more people don’t escape Hell; it’s easy to get out and it’s a famously unpleasant place (a reputation it really lives up to). In reality, Hell mostly polices itself. The vast majority of the Damned know they deserve to be there and are almost grateful to be absolved of the guilt that ate away at them in life. They want to be punished, because they feel they deserve it and they know their punishment is finite. They don’t enjoy it, of course, but once they’ve suffered enough to expunge their evil deeds, they’re able to leave, so they figure it’s probably best to just get their punishment out of the way. Simple human guilt guards the walls of Hell far better than its actual Demon guards.
Those who do escape aren’t just the ones who realize how long and unendurable their punishment will be, but also those sociopathic enough not to accept the fact that they deserve it. There are people who, no matter what terrible things they’ve done, just can’t accept that they’ve done anything wrong. They don’t understand the division between right and wrong, just and unjust.
To put it another way; only the worst people escape from Hell, and Edward Atkinson was one of those.
He ducked as I punched, grimacing as my fist smacked into the wall. Throwing his arms around my waist, Atkinson tackled me, shoving me back to the ground, pinning me and raining blows on me with a berserk fury. By this point, he probably knew he was going back. This was just Atkinson being Atkinson. I grabbed him by the wrists and twisted him over, spitting out blood as I went.
Atkinson reared up at me again, writhing like a snake. He wasn’t bulky, there wasn’t a whole lot to him in the way of muscle mass, but he was wiry and had no sense of