The Fall of Hades (14 page)

25: THE KITCHEN SINK

When Vee peered out through the grate, cupping a hand over her nose and mouth against the eye-watering fumes, she realized she was still one level below the rim of the acid bath.

The high ceiling of this level was the mesh floor of the one above, with which the lip of the circular cauldron was level. The main body of the vat itself, however, was suspended below this platform. A system of pipes ran down from its belly into the floor, and Vee had the impression of being a mouse inside a cabinet below the kitchen sink. There was even a U bend in the trunk-like central pipe, though she imagined it wasn’t to prevent the rising of sewer gas, as with a kitchen sink. Smaller pipes intersected with this major pipe, besides, and she couldn’t make sense of any of it. She spied huge valves, and at the base of the central pipe, a control panel of some kind with arrays of lights and pressure gauges. The floor under the huge basin was a quilt of mismatched metal plates, obviously patches to repair damage from slops and spills of the acid from above.

On the high mesh platform, Vee could vaguely see the drone Demons as they silently went about their business, guarding the edge of the unmaking pool and breaking up, with their iron pikes, the primordial ooze that ceaselessly struggled to coalesce and resume the forms of humans.

She took further stock of her surroundings. On this level, beyond the drainage (and replenishment?) pipes, a huge window ran along a nearby wall, but it looked only upon the solidified lava that was flush against it.

A ladder was bolted into the same wall, leading up to the mesh platform, but she noted that halfway up there was a small metal hatch set into the wall beside it. Access to a utilities shaft, perhaps?

Vee tested the vent by pressing against it with both palms, but it was screwed into its frame. There was room enough for her to maneuver her body around, and once she had slipped her boots back on, she planted her feet against the grille and pushed. It didn’t give. After a few moments of reluctance, she bunched her legs then shot them out, pounding her heels against the grille—one, two, three, four times. She winced with each crash she made. Finally, the screws wrenched free of their sockets and the grille was dislodged. It fell onto the floor outside with a tinny clatter.

Vee peeked out again, up at the platform, but couldn’t tell if any of the entities above had taken notice of the sounds far below. She slipped from the shaft, retrieved the grille and pushed it back into its frame as best she could.

She straightened, turned, dashed across the open floor and reached the cluster of plumbing. The fumes were stronger than ever, burning her throat despite her covering hand, her eyes streaming. She leaned close to the control panel, trying to make sense of its switches and knobs.

Jay whispered to her. “If you open a valve, the acid might well drain away somewhere, but then the Damned within it could end up worse off than they are now. They might end up in some other tank from which they will never have a chance to escape.”

He had a point. A number of horrible scenarios flashed through her mind. She envisioned a great clot of sludge becoming mired in a narrow stretch of pipeline somewhere, the Damned souls as they sought to regenerate compressed against the confines of the pipe and each other’s bodies, reforming just enough to feel pain.

Vee wagged her head at the instrument panel. “Don’t they have label guns in Hell?”

“I can’t figure it out, either,” Jay told her discouragingly. “I tell you, we should go now. We can only make things worse for them…and for us.”

“Please let me think,” she said.

Vee looked up at the mesh ceiling again, the shadowy indications of the insect Demons. She flashed another scenario: her climbing the ladder to the platform, throwing one or two grenades, then mowing down the remaining drones in a wide crescent of gunfire before they got their bearings. Yet even if she could take out the thirty or so drones surrounding the pool, there were surely many more on this level and maybe the neighboring floors as well.

But her thoughts lingered on the grenades. Three of them in her handbag from Hell…

“Vee!” Jay hissed. “Behind you!”

Vee whirled, saw that someone had entered the large chamber: a tall figure in a long white lab coat and black trousers, and an incongruous mass of writhing black tentacles in place of a head. At first, she feared her clamor had attracted attention after all, but then noticed the scientist carried a clipboard.

She ducked down behind the base of the control panel, but to her dismay the Demon was coming in her direction. Its shoes clicked importantly across the concrete floor, and then upon the layers of overlapping metal plates.

The scientist leaned over the control panel and put a hand of tendrils out to the knobs, and as Vee popped up to its right it wheeled toward her in alarm. She doubted it could cry out, but a Demon of its station surely needed to be able to communicate and she wouldn’t put telepathy past it, so she struck as quickly as she could—swinging her combat knife down in an overhead arc directly into the hollow of the jugular notch, above the clavicle. Or, where she would have expected a clavicle to be. Instead, the momentum of her strike carried the blade further, carving downward with no bones to resist or impede it. She split the front of the being open, and it fell back away from her with arms pinwheeling. As it struck the floor, it came apart. It was as if a nest of hundreds of snakes, twined all around each other, had been stuffed into a scarecrow sack of human clothing, and now spilled free. The headless, snake-like forms slithered frantically in all directions, some coming at her either blindly or with mischief in mind.

She stomped a number of them and they thrashed wildly in death, while the rest spread out and disappeared into the shadows.

“We’d better be quick,” Vee said. She fished a grenade out of her pouch, and quickly surveyed the system of pipes. After jumping up onto the control panel itself, she wedged the grenade between the spokes of a horizontal valve positioned at the area where the thick central pipe broke into its U bend. Then she asked Jay, “You said you know about weapons.

How much time do I have once I pull the pin?”

“The M67 grenade has a fuse of 4 point 2 seconds.”

“That long, huh?”

“It has a blast radius of 45 feet, but it can throw shrapnel 700 feet.”

“It gets better all the time.”

A clatter of running feet. Across the room, from the same doorway the scientist had emerged from, came three drone soldiers carrying submachine guns. Even from here, Vee could see the foremost drone’s white body was swarming with black snake-like creatures: some of those that had made up the scientist’s body.

Vee expected the drones to open fire, but it occurred to her that they were afraid to rupture the pipes. This gave her the seconds she needed to hook her finger in the grenade’s pin while she steadied it with her left. When the pin came out, the grenade’s safety lever flew off. She let go of the grenade, leaving it there on the valve, jumped down from her perch and bolted toward the ladder fastened to the wall, sprinting for all she was worth.

As she left the shelter of the pipes, the drones let loose with their submachine guns. Bullets whined off the concrete floor, but before the Demons could correct their aim the grenade detonated with an ear-clap-ping boom.

Vee didn’t look back, but drew her head into her shoulders in anticipation of shrapnel whistling into her back. None found her, however, and she launched herself into the air, caught hold of the ladder and began climbing madly.

Vee was well up the rungs when she allowed herself a look behind and below her. What she saw was more dramatic than what she had expected or hoped for, and mesmerized her.

The pipe had burst at a welded join in the U, and acid was gushing from the tear in the metal as the vast basin above emptied, splashing the metal plates below and spreading rapidly outward in every direction. Once past the plates, the acid ate into the concrete floor itself, making it look like Styrofoam being melted by fire. The waves of acid chased the drones as they tried to flee, but their legs began to dissolve right under them and they went down, their bodies disintegrating altogether as they were swept along.

The acid slapped up against the nearby walls, making Vee advance a few rungs higher. Where it lapped the walls, the concrete there became deeply pocked as it was eaten into, also. She saw with amazement that the glass of the giant window, too, was rapidly liquefying, looking like a great melting sheet of ice. Before the rising fumes became too much to bear, forcing Vee upward toward the small metal hatch, she saw that even the volcanic rock outside the window, outside the Construct, was being eaten into by the acid that splashed up against it from the force of the cascade.

She hoped that as the acid continued to spread across this level, thinned and eventually evaporated, it would leave behind the human traces it carried in places where they could reconstitute fully. At any rate, she had given those prisoners as much of a chance as she could, and even without Jay prompting her, knew that she could do no more. Especially with the frantic running she heard on the platform above her, the frenzied activity as the drones up there scrambled to investigate the damage that was draining the tank of acid.

Vee climbed the last rungs to the hatch positioned halfway to the ceiling, and almost said a prayer under her breath as she put her hand to its latch, fearing it would be locked. But the hatch opened easily, and she ducked into a low-ceilinged narrow passageway between formal levels, so long it trailed away into darkness. Walls, floor and ceiling had been formed from sheets of brass but were now crusted a vivid aqua color with verdigris, maybe brought about by long proximity to the acid. Vee plunged forward down this weirdly beautiful tunnel, onward and away.

26: THE UNBORN

Byno means did Vee make the journey upward in a straight line.

The Construct—formerly a Demonic megacity—however towering its greatest structures, was wider than it was tall. When Vee couldn’t find a more direct route to a higher level, she was often obliged to cover a great deal of ground laterally before finally discovering a viable means of ascent. Thus, she crisscrossed back and forth between the many former buildings of Tartarus, sometimes merely connected by bridge-like walkways, other times the buildings expanded so that they lay flank to flank with each other, or with their separating walls removed altogether.

She occasionally encountered single rooms so immense that their far walls lay beyond the extent of her vision, misted with distance, rooms that themselves might contain a small town.

On the 83rd level, Vee encountered a building that she had never been inside before, and which seemed to lie on what
would have been the furthermost border of the city. She entered it through a tube-like corridor of black metal, lit by fluorescents, which finally gave ingress into a large round chamber. But it wasn’t a mere chamber; Vee stood on a circular mesh platform, and leaned over its railing to gaze below. A circular shaft, burrowing its way downward in a straight shot, a well into darkness. She tipped her head back to look upwards and saw a mirrored effect there, realized she was in the center of a great circular building, inside its hollow core. A metal spiral staircase twined around the inner surface. It wasn’t this that gripped Vee’s attention, however, but the building’s inner surface itself. Apparently, an unbroken tube of thick glass. And beyond the glass?

She stepped up to a section of the curving glass, and furrowed her brow in confusion. Water or some other fluid, certainly, was trapped between the outer and inner walls of this cylindrical tower, and lights spaced along the framework of the spiral staircase cast glaring illumination across the glass. But Vee cupped her hands around her eyes, and pressed her forehead against the cool surface to peer into the murky interior.

It seemed to be a gigantic aquarium, full of weightless organisms, drifting slowly throughout. Countless thousands of organisms. But when she realized what these creatures were, she gasped, and thought that the tower was less an aquarium than it was a titanic specimen bottle.

The constellations of suspended organisms were human embryos and fetuses, of every stage of development; everything from tadpole-like forms to full term babies. They were not connected by umbilical cords, but floated freely in their greenish amniotic solution.

“Jesus,” she breathed, wanting to pull away but unable to. “Jesus Christ, Jay, what are these? Tell me they’re Demons being grown, human-type Demons…”

“No,” he told her. Tucked through the straps of her pouch, he too gazed into the great aquarium. “These are the children of the Damned, who were never born. The Creator felt pity for them, since they never had the opportunity to be baptized, but being the children of sinners or those who themselves were not baptized, they could not be delivered into
Paradise. And so, they were confined in these Limbo Towers, spread throughout Hades. Again, it was deemed unfair for pregnant Damned women to carry them eternally—unfair to the children, not the mothers, given the violent hazards and punishments of those mothers in Hades.”

“No…you’ve got to be kidding me. No, Jay, this is too terrible…this is just too terrible!”

“I understand your concern for them, but before you begin thinking about using another grenade to liberate them, madam, you should consider their situation. These creatures will never grow any older than they are, will never grow to adulthood. Where else are they to go? Are they to flop and flounder on the ground like suffocating fish? Here they float through eternity in absolute ignorance and innocence. Could human beings ever attain anything closer to bliss? This is an eternal womb they never need to leave. It’s rather like being in the Mesh, I suppose, but they dream of nothing, forever. They’re the lucky ones.”

“Lucky?”

“I’m not trying to justify their condition…only reassure you in your anxiety.”

“Reassure me?
Reassure me?
” Vee sobbed these words, realized that tears had filled her eyes. She thumped the heels of her fists against the glass in weak, helpless blows. “Fuck, Jay! Fuck this! Fuck all of this!

What kind of sick monster would create something like this and still consider Himself the Father of humankind?”

“A conflicted being, madam. So tormented that He ended His own existence. A being rather like you, I might think.”

Vee stepped back from the wall at last, and shifted the gun so they could look at each other directly. “What do you mean, like me?” she demanded.

“You both lost your sense of yourselves. You both grew disgusted with yourselves. You both set about destroying who you were. The Creator, through his self-immolation. And you…through your forgetting.

Except that you have been reborn as a new being, in a sense. Whereas He will never do so. Or so it would seem.”

“Maybe I am the Creator, huh?” Vee snapped sarcastically. “Maybe that’s who I really am, huh?”

“If in a way He dwelt within each human being, then I suppose in that sense and to that degree, you are.”

“Now isn’t the time to fuck with me, Jay.”

“I’m not doing that, madam. Again, I am only trying to comfort you, while engaging in a stimulating conversation.”

“Fuck you.”

“I’ll try to be helpful in another manner, then,” Jay said, coolly unfazed. “We can obviously proceed upward from here.”

Vee glanced up again, then moved to the spiral staircase and started to ascend. Around and around the interior of the cylinder, and eventually she saw a huge number 84 deeply etched into the glass itself. She climbed further, at level 85 came to another platform and connecting corridor that obviously bored its way straight through the aquarium from outside.

Resting a moment, she couldn’t resist another look inside the tank. A full term baby floated disconcertingly close to her face, though she was sure the glass must actually be over a foot thick.

She asked Jay, “What about the unborn in Heaven, then?”

“Well, there is a choice given. If the mother would prefer it, she can keep her child inside her body forever, so as to retain her maternal bond, but later if she changes her mind she can do what most mothers choose, which is to have their child externalized. But again, since the child can mature no further, its soul remains at the stage of life it had advanced to at the time of its death. Thus, these mothers keep their child in an individual tank, in much the same state these creatures are in, rather like a pet they can talk to, even handle if they care to remove it from its tank for a time.”

“Fuck, man,” Vee said, her tears drying on her face, replaced with seething disgust, “I think maybe that’s even worse than this. Keeping your baby like a pet lizard.”

She was about to withdraw from the glass again when she saw the baby by her face open its mouth several times, like a fish. Like it was trying to say something to her. She flinched back in horror. Almost broke into sobs again.

Level 86, engraved into the glass. 87. Another platform. And then, at level 88, the staircase abruptly ended, though the cylinder continued upward. No more lights spaced up there, though, the cylinder’s uppermost level now uncertain. Was the ceiling not far above, or did the tower go on for many levels more? Was this the end of the staircase as designed, or had it been cut away by some group above, to prevent others from entering their territory by this means?

Vee descended again to the platform for level 87, and entered the corridor there, leaving the heart of the tubular glass
Limbo Tower—and hoping never to have to enter it again.