The Fall of Hades (17 page)

“Distressed.” Vee sat up straight in his chair, and touched the center of her head gingerly with her fingertips. “You might say that, Harry.”

30: THE PRODUCTS OF FAITH

Four entire levels—97, 98, 99,100—had been settled by those who called themselves the Mujahideen. Even if Harvinder hadn’t told her so in advance, it would have been evident to Vee right away that they were students of the Qur’an. Here, her worst expectations of a netherworld were made manifest, and then some. Throughout the colony, the air was a ceaseless cacophony of chants (
Allahu Akbar!
) and the screams of Damned prisoners of other religions being beheaded over and over again, though their bodies were never used as meat, apparently not being
halal
…of thieves having their hands strapped to boards, and their fingers then chopped off with swords…of young girls having their clitorises ritually excised (though of course they grew back anyway)…of brides little older than the Prophet’s nine-year-old wife Aisha being beaten and raped by their middle-aged husbands.

Acid that Vee suspected was of the same type used by the drone Demons in their unmaking pool was sprayed on women’s faces for the slightest infraction (for ease, men often carried acid squirt guns in holsters) and the women regrew their melted flesh until the next offense. In a ritual of manhood (though they would never grow to be men), twelve-year-old boys were given trussed up Demons both humanoid and inhuman to behead, and not being as adept as the adults, hacked sloppily at stub-born neck bones while the Demons’ cries were reduced to the abattoir sounds of squeals, wheezes and grunts from riven windpipes.

More than a little distressed at finding themselves Damned, these people had assumed their women were somehow to blame for this disfavored state, and so every woman on a rotating basis was processed through an automated beheading factory adapted from existing Demonic machinery, in what was essentially mass produced honor killings. By their reckoning of time, the rotating schedule worked out to be monthly, corresponding with the abhorred menstrual cycles of their women’s former lives. This ongoing sacrifice might not make their exploded deity take notice and deliver the Mujahideen, but it apparently helped them vent their inexhaustible hatred a tad.

Vee spent many tense days stealing her way through this region, the most threatening she had encountered, darting quickly here, inching slowly there, often lying in wait for hours until the coast was clear to gain a bit more progress. She tried sticking to air ducts and little-used catwalks, the less patrolled passageways, but finally on floor 100 arrived at a point where she saw little chance of continuing unobserved. If Adamn had known a safer, easier way through this turf but hadn’t shared it, then she was going to have some words with him when she reached
Freetown.
If
she reached Freetown.

She decided the best way to proceed now was openly, but concealed under a burqa, and cursed herself for not thinking of fashioning one for herself back in Naraka. Consequently, she came close to killing a lone woman in a long black burqa whom she watched from a hiding spot. After all, wouldn’t the woman regenerate anyway? And why have qualms when this woman might very well turn Vee over to the men if she spotted her? But Vee couldn’t bring herself to do it, couldn’t be a hypocrite when the suffering she had seen inflicted on women in this colony filled her with more rage and sickness than anything she had felt since reviving from her catatonia.

As luck would have it, she was later able to steal a burqa from a laundry basket instead. This one was a beautiful blue color, patterned in the style of the Afghan
chadri
, with a mesh covering the hole for her eyes.

All the better, since her eyes were blue—but then again, the colonists included everything from white-skinned Chechens to dark-skinned Somalis to Asian-eyed Indonesians, all brought together in a brotherhood of faith that had endured from primitive times into the modern world Vee had known, and from that time until now, unchanged. But it was a brotherhood that almost made her wish she’d never left the colony of
Los Angeles. Almost.

The burqa’s loose folds helped her cloak Jay as well, the gun pointed downward, as she navigated through a n
etwork of hallways and interconnected chambers both small and immense, trying to keep in mind pathways and landmarks Jay had told her to look out for when they’d been alone, based upon the blueprints he had gleaned from the Research and Development computer system. She mingled with crowds, but was never accosted, never challenged…until she was alone in a certain corridor, not far from the point where she hoped to ascend to level 101.

Here, a patrolling soldier with a slung assault rifle called to her from behind. She pretended not to hear him, but he spoke again in Arabic in a tone that was both threatening and seductive at the same time. He hastened to catch up with her, reached out and took her arm to jerk her around to face him.

She did face him, bringing the Ka-Bar knife out from within her robes in the same movement and burying its blade in the side of his neck. Then, just as she had witnessed from the experts here in the colony, she drew the blade around the front of the man’s throat, until blood gushed out of his gaping neck in huge flopping sheets as if poured from a bucket. She spun the man around and sawed at him from behind, pulling back on his hair as he made vomit-like gargling sounds of protest. She let him drop then, barely squirming and half decapitated, enough damage to keep him from regenerating too soon.

Now, though, her hands and burqa deeply stained, she again sought out an air duct or such in a panic of being discovered. She just might have to shoot her way to the staircase leading to level 101, fight every patrol that stood in her way. Fight all the Mujahideen, in their great numbers, even if—unlike the drones—they were immortal. And behead the Demon-decapitating twelve-year-olds, too, if they came along with the rest.

Behead those larval monsters gladly. If she’d had a nuclear weapon in her pocketbook from Hell, she’d use that, too, just as terrorists in the mortal world had brought about the Big Bang with their suitcase bombs.

But there was an air duct, and there was no further opposition. By the time the man she’d half beheaded could relate what had happened, Vee had left the Mujahideen behind—but her relief was tempered with despair at the victims she had left behind with them, beyond her powers of salvation. It had been demonstrated to Vee that not all the Damned had been consigned to Hades unjustly; that some of the Damned would be evil by any standard, except their own standards, which were warped in ways that only religion could accomplish.

31: THE ROAD TO FREETOWN

Like the floors immediately below the region of the Mujahideen, several floors immediately above it were largely unoccupied. Vee could certainly understand it, though she felt it was a mistake, only giving the Mujahideen more room to expand in the future. As she continued further up, though, she encountered other settlements large and small, the equivalent of cities and tribal villages, though nothing quite of the scale or ambition of
Los Angeles or Naraka. She briefly stayed in a town mostly inhabited by Africans, and these mostly Ghanians, who proved friendly (even overly friendly, as nearly every man in the colony seemed to fancy her for a wife), but she fled desperately from another area—labyrinthine and all but lightless—prowled by packs of baboon-like Demons with bat wings and spiral scars branded across their bodies, repeatedly firing Jay behind her to break up their loping, pursuing charge.

Level after level was gained, some
times swiftly, other times arduously. Level 110…115…120…

There were times when she felt
Freetown would forever be beyond her reach. Another intervening floor, and another, and there would always be one more. But at last, with her snug uniform so tattered that she’d lost one sleeve at the shoulder, and most of one hip lay bare—with all but maybe one more burst of Jay’s ammunition remaining—the time came when Vee found herself emerging from yet another, vertical ventilation shaft onto the level that towering, red-stenciled numbers labeled 128.

32: THE GUARDIANS

But it seemed a dead end. The room she found herself in was not all that spacious, taller than it was wide, and there were no doors or any other features besides the stenciled numbers. That is, aside from scorch marks on the floor and the walls, which looked to be made out of some thick amber-colored plastic, or resin. Vee moved close to the wall upon which the numbers appeared, but couldn’t see through the translucent material, it apparently being too dark on the other side. Still, the scorch marks hinted at fire—or explosions. Had hostile forces, like the Mujahideen, tried blasting their way into the confines of
Freetown here?

If they had indeed tried entering through here, then that must mean they had a reason to believe they could.

Even as Vee thought this, the entire wall on her right started to slide upward with a subdued sound. Two entities were gradually revealed, at the mouth of a metal-walled hallway, and Vee had not seen their like before in Hades. They appeared to be automatons; bulky, tall, intimidating—all the more so in that their multiple insect-like limbs included several that terminated in automatic weapons. The robot on the left was chiefly made of a black material like chitin, though chrome-bright joints, pistons and gears showed through gaps in its glossy exoskeleton. Its broad flat face, ringed in long horns, put her in mind of the skull of a prehistoric Styrocosaurus. The exoskeleton of the machine being on the right was instead fashioned, or grown, from ivory-hued bone, fissured with sutures.

Its joints and undercarriage were of brass, its wide flat face like a shovel blade. Their bodies were configured somewhat differently, their only identical feature being a single large eye, set in a deep socket, in the middle of their otherwise blank faces—these eyes with a blood red iris, like Jay’s.

Recognizing this kinship, Jay spoke up, “They’re Demonic sentience housed in mechanical bodies, like me. The final line of Demons produced in Tartarus—the most removed from human or even organic form.”

“I can see that. And I hope you can convince them we’re friends.”

“I don’t know if these two can speak.”

“I can speak,” said a voice behind Vee. Though she wouldn’t have wanted to startle the mechanical Demons into action with any sudden movement, she couldn’t help but wheel around with Jay leveled. She was too reminded of how she had been snuck up upon from behind when engaging the guardians of
Los Angeles.

And as in
L.A., the men who had sneaked up the same ventilation shaft that she had were human soldiers, attired in black with camouflage patterns in shades of gray. Two of the men wore full-head black helmets, but their leader—the speaker—wore a black beret. He was attractive, if severe, with dark hair, a dark goatee and intense dark eyes. The handles of the soldiers’ black semi-automatic pistols and black assault rifles appeared to be made from the same gray translucent bone that comprised the computer center in Naraka. Handsome weapons, like the man who addressed Vee, but with his steely menace, too.

“Easy, there,” the man warned her, his own rifle pointed at her. “Take it slow.”

“You, too,” she said, trying to sound as calm as he.

“You’re Rebecca Phelps, correct?”

“I’m Vee.”

“Okay, Vee, as you wish.”

“So Adamn told you I was coming. And you’ve been waiting out here for me all this time?”

“No, just them.” He nodded toward the formidable mechanical Demons, behind her. “But we saw you approaching on our security cameras. I’ll take you inside now, if you want, but you’re going to have to turn over your weapons.”

“Standard routine.”

“Right.” The man kept his own gun pointed toward her, but not as rigidly—a more polite form of threat—while one of his men went to take Jay from her, her sheathed knife, and her pouch.

“And you are?” Vee asked the leader.

“I’m Michael Palladino, security chief of
Freetown.”

Great—another Roper? At least he wasn’t likely to be as religious a security commander. Vee said, “Let me guess…in life you were killed in some war or other.
Vietnam?”

“I served in the Gulf War, but no, actually, I died in a house fire. I’m willing to tell you more…along the way.”

“Are you bringing me to see your leader?”

“Sort of.
Freetown is governed by an elected board of officials, but there’s a man we go to for advice and consultation. We asked him to be our leader, but he never wanted that. He’s still important to us, though—the father of the revolution, I guess you’d say.”

“Okay, well,” Vee spread her right arm, “lead on.”

Michael gave the mechanical Demons a look, and they parted to let the group enter into the metal-shielded hallway. The ambery plastic door slid down again behind them, and the Demons remained to guard it.

The party of four passed through several more doors, these all metal and each one guarded by two human soldiers, who saluted Michael when they saw him coming. Along the way, since Michael had offered, Vee asked him more about himself, hoping to win his trust.

“My family died in the fire with me, and my wife and I became Angels—like you, Rebecca—but my son Mark was Damned, because my ex-wife never let me baptize him. So my wife and I came to Hades to find him.”

“But you got trapped here before you could take him to Heaven with you?”

He looked over at her. “We weren’t allowed to take him with us. They wouldn’t let a Damned person into Heaven…even an innocent child.” The bitterness is his voice was palpable. “So my wife and I chose to remain in Hades with him.”

“Wow. You must really love him.” Vee envied having such a father.

“So do his foster parents, Roger and Davina. They’re a Damned couple who took Mark in and protected him, like their own son, until I came to find him. So we ended up living together, all of us, like a big happy family. A big happy family in Hell. We were in a city called Apollyon, but when the Conflict escalated the city was razed by Demons, and we fled all the way here, to Tartarus. But at least we were able to stay together.”

“That’s admirable.”

“And what about yourself?”

“I’m sure Adamn told you people. I was held prisoner by some Demons for so long that I lost my memory. My father was a prisoner with me.”

“Yes. Pastor Karl Phelps. We’ve been seeing his messages since he showed up back in
Los Angeles. He’s calling for your head, it looks like.”

“His followers have turned him against me. Plus, he lost his mind when he was a prisoner.”

“Hm. So you say. But it could also be a very elaborate scheme between the two of you, to make us trust you and take you in.”

“What?” Vee stopped where she was. “Are you joking? What am I, a suicide bomber infiltrating your city?” She held out her arms. “Go ahead and frisk me, Mr. Palladino.”

One of his men raised his hand. “I’ll do it, sir.”

“Can it, Leonard.” Michael tipped his chin toward the door ahead of them. “Come on, let’s go, okay? I’m sorry. I’ll keep the speculations to myself.”

“No, please, let’s get them out in the open.”

“I said I was sorry. Let’s go.”

Begrudgingly, Vee allowed herself to be led onward, through one last door, and then they emerged into Freetown.