Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (24 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

BOOK: Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades
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The other face of the rebellion was this: that some of the more human-like species of Demon themselves were going against the infernal order. They were battling other strains of their own kind, sometimes even joining forces with the Damned, as unthinkable as that was. As a result, it was said that all of the most humanoid races of Demons had been condemned to eradication. From now on, only nonhuman Demons would be created to restock those who were killed in the war (and Demons could indeed perish, since they were not immortal souls as the Damned were). And so this was why Leon felt the mirror-faced, metallic-looking insect Demons were actually robots, instead of imitation flesh and blood like the human-type Demons, and like the Damned. As safely removed from humanity as the Creator could devise.
Thinking of these things now, Leon again tried to reassure his friend. "The rebels will find their way here, Dan. And when they do, they’ll free us. And we’ll
join
 them."
"That’s the spirit," said Dan, but it sounded like he was just humoring Leon. Leon didn’t take it personally. Mockery was Dan’s way of coping.
Leon let his eyes return to the cruel orange embers floating between them. "But I won’t spill a drop of blood myself. I’ve seen way, way too much blood. I’m not going to do that. I’m not that way."
"So what will you do when this big revolution reaches us? Do a news report on it?" Dan deepened his tone of voice. "This is Leroy Brown, reporting live from Hell. Back to you, Stacey."
Leon chuckled. But they both heard the nearing claws of another Demon, crawling on all fours somewhere overhead. He said to Dan, with smile fading, "Where do you want it today?"
"On the end of my dick. Just kidding! Do it on my face, man. My cheek. That way I can press it against my shoulder afterwards, you know, for just a little comfort until it heals."
"I’ll do the shoulder instead," Leon said, stepping closer. "You can do the same thing. Press it against your cheek."
"Whatever. Go for it, brother." Dan closed his eyes and tensed up as Leon touched the end of the incense stick to his bare shoulder. A sizzle, and the smell of blackening flesh.
Leon winced as much as Dan did. "I’m sorry," he kept whispering over and over. "I’m sorry, Dan…"
"I don’t hate you, Leon…don’t worry," Dan said through gritted teeth, still squeezing his eyes shut as they both waited for the prescribed amount of time to pass before the ember left his seared flesh. "I don’t hate you. They can’t make me hate you!"
4: Harvesting and Sowing
Demonic life came in all sizes and forms, and Leon smashed a blood-sucking insect against his own brow. As he wiped its juices away, his fingers ran across the raised B branded upon his forehead. It marked him for his sin: Blasphemer. The sin of blasphemy, as judged, was not merely taking the Creator’s name in vain, but feeling a real hatred for Him in the process. When he had first arrived in Hades, and been told the crimes that had sent him here, Leon had protested that there was a mistake. All of this was insane and unfair. He came from a religious family, had been baptized—and while he had stopped going to church decades earlier, he had never renounced God.
"We know your soul better than you do!" the skeleton-faced Demon official in his metal miter had hissed at him. "You have cursed your Creator. You have despised your Creator. Many times."
"People!" Leon had cried as he was dragged away. "It was people, not God!"
But was that true, really? Wasn’t it really both?
He stood knee-deep in marshy water from which sprouted a forest of bamboo-like stalks, mist rising off the water making them appear as ghostly silhouettes as they receded into the distance. And here and there, vastly larger silhouettes reared up from the marsh, their tops lost in the fog of the sky, though orange points of light glowed dully like a constellation of dying suns. These were the metal towers that supported the great web, and the orange suns were the globes containing the brains of imprisoned Damned.
Leon heard the whack of curved, sickle-type instruments like the one he clutched in his own hand, as other Damned laborers cut down the tall stalks and further chopped them into segments small enough to fit into the woven baskets they carried on their backs. Later, Leon and the other harvesters would insert a stick of this sweet, sugarcane-like infernal plant into a circular opening in the midsection of each Demon. Food, said those who felt this race of Demons was organic (so to speak), but Leon thought it was fuel for mere machines.
Either way, it was yet another humiliating punishment. Being forced to nurture the very entities responsible for their enslavement.
He had hacked a thumb-sized segment of the sugarcane for himself and now withdrew it from his pocket to bite into, sucking out its sweet fluid and then tearing off some of its tough fibers to chew on, before returning to his sweaty labors. It gave him a defiant satisfaction stealing this pleasant sensation, though his mock body did not actually need it for nourishment.
In the distance, beyond the whacking of blades into stalks, Leon heard another sound. He had heard it often enough in life to recognize it.
The crackle of automatic gunfire.
He paused again and listened for more, but none came. Just some Demons, he thought. Their many races seemed to prefer swords, if they adopted any specific weapon at all, but it was not unknown for them to use guns. More likely, though, was that he had heard a hunting party of Angels, drinking beer and shooting at pretty women and fleet-footed children.
But…what if it had been something else?
If there were Demon rebels out there, should he fear them? Should he fear them, even if they were Damned rebels? He had seen the handiwork of many a rebel in his time on Earth. Then again, he owed the creation of his country to rebels. One man’s rebel was another man’s murderer. One man’s freedom fighter was another man’s terrorist. One man’s God was another man’s Satan.
Leon detected movement sloshing his way, and flinched—expecting a Demon to materialize from the fog and punish him for growing lax in his duties. But it was a human figure that came toward him, silhouetted, and resolved itself into a woman. She wore her thick, curly red hair tied back behind her head, her face pale but freckled, short of stature in her black uniform. Like him, she carried a wicker basket on her back.
She smiled at Leon as she approached him. She was attractive; he thought he should recognize her, since she was obviously at the same level of decreasing punishment as himself…but he didn’t. "Hello," he said to her in a cautious whisper.
"Hey." She nodded. "Taking a little break?"
Her question made him suspicious, but why? Did he expect her facade of skin to tear open like a cocoon, a mirror-faced Demon emerging from inside her? He realized he trusted no one anymore. Not even his fellow Damned. His life as a live man had showed him that fellowship often merely consisted of hacking people up alongside your fellow sadists. Causes were excuses for hatred. And hatred was the way people expressed their unhappiness for existing at all.
"Just catching my breath," he told her. "Did you hear that? The gun?"
Stopping near him, the red-haired woman grunted, "Mm. Maybe someone tried to escape?"
"The Demons around here don’t use guns," he said. And shouldn’t she know that?
She shrugged again. She was playing with the weight of the sickle in her hand. "You’re right; they don’t. They aren’t really much better armed than we, are they?" She gave a lazy swipe through the air between them. Leon tried not to look concerned that the blade might touch him.
More sloshing, behind him. Leon felt oddly reluctant to take his eyes off the woman, and not because she was attractive, but he half-turned to see another figure moving toward them through the swampy water. A tall black man, his skin a darker shade than Leon’s. He wore the standard black uniform and basket on his back. Carried the standard sickle in his hand.
"Hello," the man said. That one word, spoken in a deep rich voice, gave away an accent. An African, though he would need to speak more at length before Leon might hope to identify the accent specifically.
"How’s it going?" Leon asked, wary. He didn’t recognize this fellow worker either.
The man joined them, nodding to the woman in familiarity. Well, at least the two of them recognized each other.
"I’m Leon," he said, switching his tool to his left hand so that he might extend his right. "I don’t recall meeting either of you before." He was going for a casual tone.
The black man switched his sickle, too. His grip was strong: solid meat. Not a hollow flesh sleeve hiding a bony Demon arm. "I’m Salim."
"Salim." Leon still couldn’t place the accent. "Where are you from?"
"Darfur. I was killed there, in the genocide." The man seemed to be watching Leon’s face for a reaction, watching him as if he might even recognize him from TV.
Darfur. Leon knew about
that
 genocide; hadn’t the death toll already been 400,000, at the time he died in his safe little apartment in New York? Children with their heads bashed in by rifle butts, men castrated and then shot, women raped—by the Arab Janjaweed militias brought in by the Sudanese government to do their dirty work. He had wanted no part of that story, had even turned down the assignment offered him, no matter what his superiors thought of him for doing so. He had drawn the line at Darfur.
Was it a coincidence that he should run into a victim of that genocide here? Not with 400,000 dead, at least, Leon thought. In fact, he was surprised he had never before encountered one of the victims of the holocausts he had covered in his career. But Hades was big. So big.
"I’m Megan." The woman shook his hand, too. Though she didn’t have an Irish accent, with her name and her red hair he cynically wanted to ask her if she had died in some old IRA bombing, but he didn’t.
Despite the introductions, Leon still didn’t trust them. He knew there were those Damned who worked closely with the Demons, as spies and snitches and betrayers, in order to minimize their own punishment. But these two seemed suspicious of him, too. Did they fear the same thing?
Leon returned his attention to Salim, and saw that the man had caught a flying insect that had been feeding on his blood. He pulled off one of its wings, and then the other. The Demonic creature’s legs writhed. He flicked it away, then wiped the thing’s blood on his trousers. Involuntarily, Leon touched the smear of blood on his own forehead. He had told his friend Dan that he would never spill a drop of blood here in Hades. But he had, hadn’t he? When he’d crushed that tiny primitive Demon against his head just minutes ago. Yes, some of it had been his own ingested blood. But not all of it.
The tall African craned his neck, gazing off into the swaying forest of tall shoots. "We should move on…before the Demons catch us talking."
Megan nodded, and then looked at Leon again. "See you around."
"You two stick together?" he asked.
"You don’t approve of interracial relationships?"
"No, no…that wasn’t what I was thinking."
She smiled. "We aren’t a couple, anyway. We just like working together."
Looking back as he started away, Salim said to Leon, "Maybe you can work with us, too, sometime."
Leon stood watching the strangers as they vanished again, like ghosts, into the fog.
He found himself listening for more distant gunfire. Waiting, and listening.
5: Feeding and Digesting
As he pushed a segment of stalk into the orifice of the Demon before him, Leon surreptitiously kept an eye out for Salim and Megan. Shouldn’t they be feeding the harvest to the Demons, now, too? But he saw neither of them. It confused him, and inflamed his suspicions, as unformed as they were.
Leon tried not to feel disdain, specifically, for the man who’d called himself Salim. It made Leon feel a kind of shame, but it was hard to avoid. He had seen so many men who looked just like Salim with blood on their hands, bloodlust in their eyes. It was hard for him to think of any of them as victims, now. Then again…he had seen men who resembled himself on his assignments, as well.
A scream, and he jerked his eyes to the right to see that a woman had been struck down by the Demon she had been in the process of feeding. What had she done to enrage it? Turned her head to look away, too obviously? Pushed the stalk in too roughly? Or was there any reason at all, beyond that she was here in Hades? Diminished level of punishment or not, their masters didn’t want the Damned to become too comfortable in their station.

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