BURN IN HADES (33 page)

The red giant led the group into the center of the compound. “Form a single file,” he said.

After all the prisoners fell in a line, standing shoulder to shoulder, the red giant read off a list of names, to which prisoners answered “present” if they heard their name called.

Cross gawked at a woman in black. Her back faced him as she was talking to a group of Anarchists. What made her presence unusual was her uniform. It was much different than the rest of her peers. Her tight-fitting pants hugged her curvy hips and her never ending legs extended out of heeled boots. Her perfect blond hair seemed untainted by the filth that surrounded them. But the soldiers didn’t seem interested in her beauty. They listened attentively to whatever she was saying to them as though she held some type of authority over them.

“Clem Balfour?” the giant called out and waited for a response. “Clem Balfour, answer present.”

The woman in black pivoted her head around. Her hands were fitted into bagh nakhs. It couldn’t be his old friend. He hardy recognized her in her new alluring look.

He elbowed the Raven. “Is that Diamond Tooth?”

“Yeah,” said the Raven. “And you better be Clem Balfour.”

“Clem Balfour,” the giant called out for a fourth time.

Cross raised a finger. “I’m here.”

“Clean the wax from your ears,” said the giant, “and say ‘present’.”

Diamond Tooth stepped over to them.

“Say present, Balfour.” The giant plucked Cross as though he was a gnat. The force knocked him backwards a few steps and felt like a boulder bounced off his chest. It knocked all the wind from him, but he remained standing.

“I got this one, Ignatius,” said Diamond Tooth.

The giant snapped his heels together and stood in the soldier’s position of attention with his broad chin up, his Herculean chest out and his rocky shoulders back. A soldier raced up to Diamond Tooth. “Sergeant, the captain wants to see you immediately.”

Diamond Tooth nodded and said to Ignatius: “Corporal, see to it that these two are handled with extra special care.”

Chapter 15 - Chasing the Most High

Diamond Tooth’s eyes hurt just looking at the commandant’s shiny house
. It sat in the center of the compound, looking as out-of-place as paradise in the underworld. It remained the one negative spot on the entire camp with its pleasant shutters, welcoming white fence, and tree swing in the backyard. Add children and a cuddly dog, and it would have been the perfect home for a family. It was the kind of structure that was built for her to destroy.

She entered the house. The commandant lay in his bed, hacking up black phlegm.

“I want you gone, demon.” The commandant jumped straight to point. “We no longer have use for your services.” He coughed violently, and wiped the black blood from his lips.

“You’re doing well,” she said.

“I cannot fault my superiors for wanting to win.”—cough—”This is a war after all.”—cough—”And acquiring your unique skills was merely a step in that direction. But now that I’m in charge, I will see to it that the prisoners are treated as prisoners. The cruelty ends today. They are not to be humiliated, or robbed,”—cough—”or tortured, or murdered. Not on my watch.”

“Your men don’t get such good treatment in Camp Abaddon.”

“That’s the rumor you’ve been spreading. But even at war,”—cough—”I refuse to believe that the Tribs would commit such violations against the code. We may disagree on controversial matters, but they’re not evil souls. Even if they were, I don’t give a goddamn what they do in Camp Abaddon!”—cough—

Of course, neither did Diamond Tooth for that matter.

“Your influence,” said the commandant “is corrupting the original Anarchist agenda. You make us look like a gang of thugs and terrorists.”

“I can’t make anyone do anything they don’t already want to do,” said Diamond Tooth. “Your gang willingly chooses to perform in this circus. I’m just the enjoying the show.”

“Enjoy it no longer,” he said. “As long as I’m commandant”—cough—”I will no longer permit any such—”

“Anarchy?” said Diamond Tooth. “Because that would be all kinds of ironic.”

“The Nothing is eating my legs,” said the commandant, “and it is spreading, which means I won’t last very long,”—cough—”but I pray I can manage to have enough time to banish you,”—cough—”and all those who discredit,”—cough—”and dishonor the uniform of the Anarchist movement.”

She could’ve burned him right then and there and then tore down his hideous house, but she had an entire compound of tortured souls to feed off of. The commandant’s dying breath would be a grain of sand on a beach.

“I wish you luck,” she lied and left the house.

Some people just have a terrible attitude toward everything
. Some souls had forgotten where they were. The underworld was a place of pain and suffering, not pleasure and comfort. The afterlife would be more tolerable once souls embraced that idea and stopped resisting it. Their efforts were futile. She was only doing what she was placed in the underworld for. Evil was her purpose for being.

She stood in the middle of the compound admiring her evils. The confined prisoners held in the bunker for breaking her absurd rules, the raping of the woman in their barracks, the cooking of flesh in the fire pits, and the cries of the children being stripped away from their mothers and burned all filled her with only a temporary state of euphoria.

A pleasant warming sensation draped over her as if she had melted. She basked in the suffering of the detainees all around her. The effect it had on her being was like swimming in milk and soaking her feet in honey. Her insides were fuzzy, her skin was comfortably numb, and her worries wiped away. A bridge over troubled waters. Ecstasy without the emphatic feeling towards everyone else. It was heaven and bliss and a wave of non-stop orgasmic rhythms. It was the love she never had. An escape from reality. A surreal dream while awake. She felt ten feet tall and death proof. A surge of enormous energy pulsed through her bloodless veins, promoting an urge to fearlessly do the first act that came to her mind, to go harder, to go stronger. If someone were to chop off her head she would simply laugh it off. The experience was both amazing and scary.

The space in her chest where her heart never was clubbed to life. She threw her hand over her breast and being clutched for any semblance of a soul. She closed her eyes and imagined herself wrapped up in the Great Goddess’s arms and carried off like a baby, rescued from her dreck of an existence. With a simple turn of her head, Diamond Tooth could seemingly kiss the goddess, but cruelly, Magna Mater remained just out of her view at all times.

And with all her might, the Great Goddess cast the demon away like the unlovable cunt that she embodied. She plunged down to the forsaken wasteland of the grimiest pits scattered throughout the underworld and was smudge in the snow.

Evil was the devil’s drug: part pleasure, pure pain, one hundred percent addiction. Her tolerance for sinning was so fortified that none of it was enough anymore. Not the torturing, nor the beatings or the starvation, neither the slaving, or laboring, or the unethical experiments, nor the murders in the infirmary were enough to sustain her. Bigger was no longer better. More turned out to amount to less.

She could no longer thrive off of those evils against the damned. No longer could she depend on the sins of others, and her own efforts were becoming hit or miss when it came to getting the high she needed. But she required it all in order to function on a basic level, just to not be sick. The sickness was the worst. She needed the sins more than anything. Sins and nothing else.

Without them, she was nothing. It started out as the best feeling in the world, but now it repulsed her. There was certainly nothing else like it, but it was no fun at all. No matter how much fun she tried to make it out to be, secretly, she hated it. Hated herself. And in a twisted act of fate, her hate fed her love for evil, fueling even more hate. Like the serpent Uroborus eating its own tail, she would forever chase this high until she escaped the underworld.

The real nirvana came from feeding off the living. At least, that’s what her Kurnugian elders used to say. Nothing else compared to it. Nothing. And leeching off the dead no longer sustained the desired effect she required to simply exist.

She paced over to her cabin where her eldest demon, Raec, and the red giant, Ignatius awaited her. She sat down behind her desk. The Raven’s top hat sat in front of her. She lifted it up. The rope dart was gone. She glared at Raec. He bowed his head. His ram horns curled around his ears.

“Apologies,” he said. “We used it to test out theories regarding the blanket.”

“I don’t care about the blanket. I explicitly told you not to touch the rope dart.”

Raec fumbled with the blanket, trembling. He spread it across the table, knocking the top hat to the floor. “In here,” he said. “We figured out the blanket’s ability.” He leaned in to the blanket and said in a shaky voice, “Show your contents.”

About twenty objects popped out of the blanket along with a bushel of calabash. Diamond Tooth palmed one of the green, bottle-shaped fruits. She just couldn’t escape that damned tree.

“You didn’t drink from these did you?” she asked.

Raec shook his ram-horned head.

“Good.” Diamond Tooth spread the objects across the table and sifted through them. The Raven’s rope dart sat in the pile.

“If all you wanted to do was test the damn thing, why didn’t you use that ugly top hat?”

Raec bowed his head and said nothing.

“Quit that stupid bowing!”

Raec stood up straight as told. Diamond Tooth sat the rope dart aside to inspect the remaining objects. A make-up kit lay under an obsidian blade, which had a hole punctured through its flat part.

She opened the make-up kit and found it empty of any cosmetics, but stitched on the inside of the lid was the name, Tivoli. She sat the makeup kit aside with the Raven’s rope dart and the bushel of calabash, and picked up the top hat from the floor.

“I’ll keep these,” she said. “Take the rest to the others.”

“As you wish, Mother.” Raec returned all the remaining objects to the blanket, and slipped out of the side window. His spaded tail slithered behind him.

Her first born was reliable, but all too eager to please. She tossed the calabash into the air, caught it. “Balfour and I have a date,” she said to Ignatius. “Send him in.”

Chapter 16 - Revelation of Charles Hill

The red giant shoved Cross into an old, dimly lit shack
and slammed the door behind him. A fireplace crackled beside a table where Diamond Tooth sat at the head. Her hair was done up and makeup plastered her face. He had always thought Diamond Tooth could be a heart stopper if she had kept her appearance up, but she never did until now. She looked even more stunning than he ever imagined she would.

“Come on in, Bullethead,” she said in her dainty voice. She flashed her white teeth as if genuinely happy to see him. “Have dinner with me.”

Cross paced over to the table, hesitantly. His stomach growled upon seeing all the food sprawled across the table, but he had always known Diamond Tooth to be a curly wolf. She was nothing like the Raven, who was only hard on the outside. The demon’s pretty face was the only thing soft about her.

She was the kind of woman who was so beautiful on the outside that the inside had no choice but to be ugly. It couldn’t compete. That’s what made her so deadly. Men who fell for her fell apart in life.

In comparison, the Raven was a better catch. She was a different kind of beautiful. She was less dazzling and more subtle with her allure. A man could settle down with her. And after getting to know the Raven, he’d be more welcoming with the fallen angel if her feelings ever softened toward him. He kept her in his thoughts as he met the table.

“I cooked it myself.” Diamond Tooth scooped contents of one large bowl into a personal sized bowl for him. “Someone brought in a spoon that can stir Nothings into rice. I know how much you love the wings, so I saved that part just for you.” The buttons on her shirt struggled to hold the shirt closed and threatened to expose her chest with the slightest movement. She slid the smaller bowl over to him. “Sit down. Eat.”