The Fall of Hades (12 page)

21: THE BRIDGE

A screeching sound brought Vee’s dreams to a jarring halt. The dreams, already vague and scattered to begin with, receded behind the barrier of fog from which they had stolen. She opened her eyes.

Her head rested on her bent elbow, and her body lay on its side on strong metal mesh. Raising her head, she saw Jay lying a little away from her, but the gun was face down, on its left side, so that his eye must be staring through the mesh into the blackness below. Why not an eye on both sides of his body, she wondered groggily; wouldn’t that be more useful for keeping enemies in view? Not to mention his inability to see straight
ahead
of him.
Great design,
she thought;
not so much Colt as Dolt
. Had he heard her rouse? His organs of sight and speech were obvious, but come to think of it, how the heck did the thing
hear?

She sat up further, stretched as she looked around her, and remembered with a start that she hadn’t laid down for a long nap no matter how refreshed she felt. She was in an elevator, and it had come to a jolting stop.

She put a hand to her neck, but the awful wound had entirely healed, though further exploration found her hair caked hard with dried blood.

“God, I need to wash my hair,” she muttered. How long had she been out?

“Madam?” Jay said against the mesh.

She got to her feet and picked the bone gun up, turned it over so they could see each other. “Who stopped this thing?” she whispered.

“I don’t know; it could have been anyone on any of the levels who wants to make use of one of the platforms. Or perhaps the mechanism has jammed on its own.”

“What floor are we on?” she asked, looking out at the chamber the platform had come level with. “Shit,” she then said, when she saw a floor-to-ceiling number 79 stenciled in white on the wall. “I’ve been thinking about level 42.”

“Why level 42?”

“
Johnston told me about a group called the Enmeshed. I thought I’d like to have a look at them.”

“Ah, the Enmeshed, yes!” The normally laconic gun sounded almost excited. “We can disembark here, then, and search for a way to descend again to that level.”

“Yeah, I know—you’re anxious to get back into the Mesh, huh?

Whatever happened to your curiosity about experiencing the tangible world again, face-to-face?”

“That was before all this shooting.”

Vee snorted. “Wasn’t that what you were made for?”

“I am aware of the Enmeshed, of course, from my own long submersion in the Mesh. They spend most of their time there, but you would also spend some of your time awake on guard duty. I should think it would be the best of both worlds for you. As I have said, you may find that being in the Mesh is the closest thing to dreaming.”

“It sounds like the closest thing to being dead. It’s hiding. Maybe in the end it will be the best place I can find to settle, but I’m not ready for that yet.”

“You just said you were interested in them.”

“Interested. But I’m interested in seeing more than them, too. We’ve already passed 42, so we continue up. Don’t worry, Jay, I haven’t forgotten what I promised you, but we have all the time in the underworld, right?”

She thought the Demon actually sighed, but in a patient voice he said,

“Well, if you seek to explore aimlessly, we can do that, but if you want to observe another major colony in the levels above, then I might suggest
Freetown to you. I’m aware of them, too, from their Mesh presence, though they don’t dwell within it as the Enmeshed do.”

“
Freetown?” To Vee that didn’t sound encouraging, despite the name.

The only
Freetown she knew of was from her mortal existence, one of the things she remembered about the world at large while the details of her own life remained walled up alive, held hostage by her own subconscious.

Freetown
had been the capital of Sierra Leone, established by freed African slaves. She had recollections of news stories about the descendants of these freed slaves maiming and killing each other with their ubiquitous machetes.

“
Freetown is a settlement of Damned and several races of persecuted humanoid Demons, but it would seem there is a minority of Angels that dwell there also.”

This sounded a lot more encouraging, but then
Los Angeles had Damned, Demons and Angels commingled, too. Vee’s interest was piqued enough for her to want to investigate, but she needed to remain cautious.

Hope for the best but expect the worst. “What level are they on?”

“Level 128.”

“All right, then, we’ll give it a look. We only have 49 levels to go to reach it.” Vee looked straight up the vertical black tunnel of the elevator shaft. “We could wait some more to see if this thing starts moving again…but, hm, I’m not crazy about being at someone else’s mercy. If this is being done on purpose, say by Charles’ men, they might trap us between floors or something to ambush us.”

“We’re quite some distance removed from Los Angeles by now,” Jay reminded her.

“Still…why don’t we get off here and go on foot? Like I said, we’re in no hurry, right? This being eternity and all.”

Vee stepped off the platform, and into another channel through which rails like train tracks had been laid. But the tunnel before them was not like that in which she had glimpsed the boar people, this one being well lit by metal-shaded globes overhead. In addition, its metal walls, crisscrossed by riveted iron beams and struts, bore tall arched windows on either side. Their thick panes, maybe something like lucite or clear plastic, had discolored to a dark amber color, no doubt from the molten lava that had cooled to solid volcanic rock against them.

They had only taken a few steps forward when Jay remarked, “Ahh, I know where this is, now. This was a bridge connecting the building we are leaving to the Research and
Development Tower. The R&D Tower was the tallest single structure in Tartarus—two hundred stories.”

“Well, we know the Construct has at least two hundred levels, then.”

“I was created in this building, in Organic Weapons Systems. The technicians would trap Damned souls inside similar weapons, too—usually they had been pacifists in life, rendered into weapons so they could suffer from knowing the harm they were inflicting on their brethren. This is the kind of device I believe you first took me for. But I had no prior existence, as I’ve said, and the Damned weapons had no Mesh access.”

There was a hint of pride in this latter information.

“That’s good, then,” Vee said as they crossed what once would have been an elevated, enclosed bridge between titan skyscrapers. “Maybe I can find some more ammo for you, because I’m running low.”

“Well, if this is the 79th floor that would have been within the area devoted to the design of infernal animals.”

“Oh yeah? Such as?” Vee asked as she stepped over and around what looked like discarded office furniture thrown onto the tracks: chairs, a file cabinet, a metal desk that had been flattened by a passing train or some other such conveyance.

“Anything from creatures the size of earthly elephants, to hunt and attack the Damned—though many such beasts, of course, ended up being used by the Damned as a food source—to blood-drinking insects.”

“Ah, right, and those crab things that were nibbling on my father.”

“In fact, if memory serves, on level 79 in particular they developed infernal microorganisms to afflict the Damned with illness.”

They had crossed over to the Research and Development Tower now, and the tracks ended at a closed metal shutter again labeled with the number 79. So, their path in this direction was blocked. However, to their right a series of stairs were set into the side of the deep rail channel, leading up to a train platform and a metal door set into the wall. Vee mounted the steps, went to the door and pulled on its latch. It opened with a rusty creak.

“What’s this, then?” Vee whispered, peeking tentatively into a corridor beyond.

“These are…”

22: THE LABORATORIES

After so many chambers built to Brobdingnagian scale, the corridor that stretched off before them seemed cramped, confined, poorly defensible. Despite how high up in the Construct it was, the hallway had the feel of a passageway in a bunker, its plaster ceiling arched, its walls built of cinder blocks, and all of it painted an institutional green, no doubt providing a soothing environment for the development of new infernal diseases. But the paint on the walls was blistered, and that on the ceiling even more so, hanging down in dense tatters like a canopy of leaves. Set into either wall were more metal doors, heavily corroded, some standing open and others off their hinges. The floor of the corridor was littered with more office furniture and other debris, moldering papers and shreds of the fallen ceiling paint. Widely spaced bulbs lit the corridor, and Vee could see where it intersected with others further ahead.

As she started forward through the layer of rubble and rubbish, she tried to picture what kind of Demon might work in these research labs and offices. Surely nothing as primitive as those boar people, but it couldn’t be anything too human—not after the turn of events Jay had described, when the Creator had mandated the elimination of all humanoid Demons because of the sympathy many of them had developed for the plight and rebellion of the Damned. Maybe, she decided, something like those globe-headed administrative beings she had seen in the memories Jay had culled from the Mesh, from that mortal man named Adam.

She peeked into one of the laboratories, deemed it safe, ventured fully inside. This lab, and she was sure the rest, had been ransacked. Computers had been shot up, their screens bullet-riddled, and other apparently torn out of the walls and carried away. Banks of gauges and meters were similarly smashed. In a corner, papers were spread so thickly that Vee suspected they had been used at one time as a bed. There was only one monitor screen still active, larger and maybe made of sturdier stuff, set into a wall. It showed a blizzard of static, but occasionally the snow would clear enough to reveal a black field against which scrolled red text written in Latin.

“There are Mesh ports here,” Jay pointed out. “Would you like me to dive in and have a look around, to see if I can access enough of a former blueprint to get us more efficiently to level 128? If the printer is still working, I can print you out a hard copy map that might be useful even if it is dated.”

Vee gave a dry laugh. “If I let you in, I’m afraid you won’t come back out again.”

“Madam,” Jay chided, “if you disconnect me, I have no choice but to reemerge.”

“So you say.”

“If you’d rather I didn’t, then…but I thought it might be of help to you.”

Vee found it amusing that she didn’t want to hurt the feelings of a Demonic gun. “Okay, whatever, let your little dolphin have a look, then.

Where are these ports?”

Jay indicated a socket set below the frame of the large, active monitor on the wall, and Vee pinched the end of his retractable interface cable, drew it out of his body and plugged it into the port. She then swept aside some broken beakers on a work station below the screen and laid the gun down.

Within moments, a huge closeup of Jay’s mouth filled the screen—with its full, almost-feminine lips—though it was veiled behind that sizzling static. “I’m in,” he said from a speaker, but despite the size of the image his voice was faint, ghostly with remoteness. “I will see what I can find.”

“I’ll be here.”

His mouth faded, leaving only the static though the scrolling Latin text was gone. Vee poked around the room for a few minutes, and then, restless, returned to the hallway, wandered to another open laboratory and ventured inside.

This one was in much the same shape as the last, though there was a unit mounted against a wall that she recognized as an emergency eyewash station. She went to it, bent over it, stepped on a pedal and was rather surprised to see two bubbling jets of water rise above its basin. Vee tasted a little of it, found it rusty but acceptable, and drank ravenously. Finally she straightened, feeling lightheaded and nauseous from having filled her belly so much and so quickly after having trained it to ignore its yearning for sustenance. When the nausea had mostly passed, she bent down over the sink again, but this time to wash her face, which felt like one big scab of dried blood, and her gore-encrusted hair. She wrung this out again and again, until the water she squeezed out of it was clear at last. Slinging her wet hair back from her forehead, she then turned to explore her surroundings further.

A file cabinet lay on its side, papers disgorged from its open drawers.

She knelt down to examine some of them. More Latin, but also text or formulae in characters she didn’t recognize as either Arabic or Devanagari, though it resembled these somewhat. As she dropped them to the cluttered floor, a slight breeze against her face caused her to lift her eyes and take note of a ventilation grille behind the cabinet, close to the floor. Stringy, grass-like vegetation had pushed through the slots—vegetation of a leeched white color. Something indigenous that had found its way into the air circulation system, now old and dead, or…a product of Essential Matter?

Vee moved the cabinet a little, stepped over it and hunkered down closer to the grille. Using the edge of her stolen combat knife, she managed to unscrew the grille’s four corners, and then pry it out of the wall.

The weedy vegetation grown through the slots was torn free, but there was a lot more of it back in there. Not enough to clog the opening, but the growth looked dense along the floor of the shaft. And all of it lacking pigment. Yes, Essential Matter that had blown through the ventilation system, and in accumulating had taken root somehow.

Vee rose, returned the big knife to its sheath, and gasped when she saw a huge eye with a blood red iris staring at her from a computer screen that had silently come to life, despite the bullet hole in its screen. “Shit, Jay!” she cried. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Sorry, madam, but you startled me, as well. I didn’t expect to find you in here, but it’s fortunate that I did. I’ve found something I think you should be aware of.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll show you.”