The Fall of Hades (22 page)

42: THE WASTELANDS

It was a long, tense, furtive undertaking weaving their way through the machines that dominated the 175th floor. Early on, they held their breath against the stink of the acid fumes that formed an acrid mist, swirling in their flashlight beams, and the stench of the freakish bodies strewn around them. A few of these still gave jerks, twitches and inhuman groans, despite the steaming and bubbling of their liquefying forms.

Further in, the bodies, fumes, and bullet holes punched into the machinery were left behind. It became oppressively, heavily quiet. Vee would have preferred to hear at least a few distant cries, just to know the deformed Demons weren’t crouching behind this next rank of machines.

Further in, also, evidence of the damage Adamn had informed her of started to become evident. Sections of ceilings had collapsed, girders and partially fallen walls blocking doorways, forcing them to double back and find alternative routes more than once. They located one staircase leading up to floor 176, but it was totally choked with rubble and impassable.

Several times they almost ran into one of the defective Demons; once, they hunkered down behind a machine with their flashlights doused while something passed on the other side, wheezing and apparently dragging one hard, unusable limb. Finally, however, they found a stairwell of red brick—wide as a courtyard—that was only partly obstructed by heaped debris from a tumbled portion of wall. Iron steps like fire escapes wound around and around the shaft, and they were able to bypass floors 176, 177, 178, 179. Narrow windows were spaced irregularly in the brick walls; oddly, some had bars or metal shutters, while others simply had curtains veiling them—some of the latter with glass broken but others with their cloudy panes still intact. In her rifle’s stark flashlight beam, Vee caught a glimpse of a ghastly white face peering at them from behind a torn shade, but instead of crying out the creature, whatever it was, withdrew in terror.

The stairwell terminated at the 180th level, and here they ventured forth in search of a means of accessing the next floor…and the next.

This level, though, appeared to be entirely caved in by its collapsed ceilings and heavy machinery from the floor above. The only way Vee and Adamn could navigate through it was, at best, hunched almost double, but more often on hands and knees or even crawling on their bellies. Vee wormed her way first, dragging herself by her elbows, sweeping the dark jumble ahead of them with the assault rifle’s flashlight, while Adamn came behind, carrying his own flashlight and with Jay jutting out of the supply pouch he had taken from the Black Cathedral. None of them, including the gun, dared even whisper, so shaken were they still by the confrontation back on the 175th floor.

Now, through a gap in the wreckage to her right Vee could see a ladder bolted into the wall, set back in a recess that seemed to have been protected from fallen debris, and so she changed direction, squeezing like a spelunker under a low slab of concrete with sharp twisted lengths of rebar fringing its edges. She was halfway under this slab, with barely enough room to raise her chin from the floor, when a loud hiss blasted her cheek with rank steaming breath, and she swung the gun—scraping it against concrete—to illuminate a horrible face only a few feet from her own. The thing had a head like an eyeless horse skull grafted onto a limbless grub-like body that she could almost believe had evolved over time to facilitate the movement of such creatures through these ruined areas. The body was wriggling hideously, like a man bound in a straightjacket, as the creature fought to reach her, its jaws yawning wide like those of a python.

Vee fired the assault rifle directly into its mouth, down its gullet, and for a few moments the thing’s thrashings became even more frenzied, though it had stopped advancing. Then, it went still, and through the ringing in her ears Vee heard Adamn call up to her, “What the hell was that?”

“Another freak. Come on, there’s a ladder ahead—let’s get to it before his friends get here.”

She reached the metal ladder, pulled herself to her feet inside its niche. Looking up, she saw light bleeding into the shaft high above. She began to climb, and Adamn was soon following behind her. When they were quite a way up—having already bypassed a door labeled 181—they heard a few wild, warbling calls from the
level below them, so they quickened their ascent.

Nothing came in pursuit of them, though, and they were left alone with their own enclosed, laboring breaths.

43: THE DIVINE GOLEM

The light cast into the ladder’s shaft was deceptive, further away than Vee would have judged. They climbed past stenciled metal hatches that gave into levels 182, 183, 184, 185. They tried none of these doors to see if they would open, or what might lie behind them.

A few of the ladder’s rungs almost pulled out of the wall under their weight, and Adamn slipped precariously once but caught himself before he could plummet.

For whatever architectural reasons the ladder didn’t go all the way to floor 200—no doubt, because this former building of Tartarus had possessed only 186 floors—the shaft came to an end at the door to the 186th level. The hatch lay open, too, blackened and twisted and hanging on only one of its hinges; hence the light that had entered the ladder’s shaft.

There had been a serious fire on this floor. An inferno. They could walk upright—at least in this part of the level—but amongst scorched machinery, charred floors and walls. In a series of large lab-type rooms, desks and work counters were badly buckled from the heat, glass beakers and test tubes half melted as if made of ice that had frozen again. Some computers, resting on the tables or set into walls, had had their screens shattered or melted, as well…though, miraculously, a number of screens still flickered with a snow of pixels or vague, distorted images they couldn’t interpret. Vee swore she saw a man’s face peeking out at her from behind a shroud of static, but she did a double take and by the time she looked back the indistinct face had receded.

In the next lab room, they came to a startled stop when a clutter of debris resting alongside one carbonized wall abruptly reached out a clawed arm, clutched at the floor, and dragged itself a few inches forward. A blackened head like a huge metal flower lifted, turned in their direction, but the robot Demon’s single eye had been burst by fire, leaving only an empty socket. Still, the crippled thing seemed to be aware of their presence. They stole into the room guardedly, Vee training her weapon on the creature as they crept past it. One of its limbs was tipped with a gun, and might it still fire despite the damage the Demonic contraption had endured?

Yet the mechanical Demon only pivoted its head slowly to follow their progress, while continuing its own, putting out that feeble claw again to drag its ruined body a little further. Vee was tempted to shoot the thing, not to eliminate a threat but to put it out of its misery. But she didn’t, and they reached the opposite doorway unharmed and left the creature behind them.

There was another such creature in the next room, however. This one sat on the floor with its back against a wall, into which were set rows of computer monitors and control panels. Some of the screens, and buttons on the control panels, still glowed despite the ravages of flame. The explorers had been alerted in advance that something was active in here by a continuous, rapid rattling sound, and they now understood what it was. This machine Demon was jacked into a port in one of the instrument panels. Its red eye stared into space as if entranced, while its seated body jerked continuously with violent spasms. Vee wondered if electrical current were flowing into the convulsing robot, and asked Jay if he thought that might be the case. Poking up out of Adamn’s pouch, the Demonic gun replied,

“No—its system is reacting to whatever it’s experiencing via its interface.”

“It’s in the Mesh?”

“This archival technology predates the Mesh, but it did form the foundation for it. It could be that this being has found a back way into the Mesh through its interface. I can’t tell from out here.”

“Well I’m not hooking you up to find out…it isn’t important.”

“I hadn’t asked you,” the Demon replied stiffly.

“I know you, you Mesh junky.” Vee smiled, and gestured for Adamn to resume moving.

Onward through a few more rooms, these without any robot Demons and with no functioning equipment. When their progress was blocked by a closed hatch, Vee opened it warily for fear of attack. What she hadn’t anticipated was an attack on her olfactory sense. Quickly, she clapped a hand over her nose and mouth.

“Jesus,” Adamn whispered behind his own hand, “what is that stink?

It smells like a storage room for roadkill.”

With no great enthusiasm, they stepped through the threshold into a chamber that was radically larger than the series of labs, with a ceiling that defined the limits of level 186 and made them angle their heads back to look up at it. The ceiling, crossed with girders, was buckled and bowed and had actually given way in some places; machinery from above had dropped to the floor below, or hung suspended from thick tangles of cable.

The right side of the chamber was lined with metal warehouse-style shelving, still packed with steel drums and piles of cinders that must have once been wooden crates. A robot Demon that was configured like a fork-lift, no doubt utilized to access these high shelves, stood immobile beside them, its head hanging. It looked like it had been sprayed with bullets in addition to having been swept with fire.

The left side of the room had shelves, too, but these supported rows of glass cylinders like those Vee had encountered early on, several of which had contained the tick-like Demons with their surgical forelimbs.

These dozens of glass tubes were all empty, however, even of the greenish amniotic solution of those other breeding cylinders, maybe having been stocked here until needed.

At a wide break about midpoint in these left hand shelves stood two mammoth cylindrical glass tanks that reached from the floor almost to the ceiling itself. Both tanks were filled with what Vee first took to be a milky white fluid, until she realized it was some sort of solid matter. The tank on the left was intact, but the one on the right had sustained damage from a dislodged girder, its fallen end resting against the tank’s ruined cover. Great cracks ran down the sides of the tank, but up until now it had held together.

A thin film of Essential Matter covered the floor around the base of the tanks, a stark white contrast to the surrounding black charring. Thin, drooping white stalks had grown up from this patch. Vee noticed more of the weeds growing from the upper surface of that half fallen girder, as well. The Essential Matter must have drifted down through the rift in the ceiling, from the floor above.

“What’s in the bottles, Jay?” she asked as she and Adamn reluctantly started walking down the wide center pathway between the flanking metal shelves, still shielding their lower faces. The stench was intensifying, and now Vee understood why. The smell came from whatever was in that second, compromised tank. Either that was its natural odor, or exposure to the air had caused the matter to spoil. Or decompose.

“It’s raw material for the formation of Demons,” Jay explained, Adamn having positioned the gun for a better view of the tanks as they approached them. “Blank, undifferentiated cells waiting for their programming, as it were.”

“It’s like dough,” Adamn told her. “Or clay.”

The tanks were just ahead of them now, but the stink was too great for them to want to move in for a close inspection; their destination was the doorway at the far end of the chamber. But Vee glanced again at the tanks curiously as they drew level with them. This near, the twin cylinders towered even more imposingly.

And then Vee noticed something, a kind of
shift
within the damaged tank, and said, “Hey…” a moment before the terrible howling began.

She flinched back so violently from the giant cylinder that she crashed against Adamn and sent him stumbling, as well—as a huge mouth big enough to swallow both of them opened in the side of the white, rubbery matter contained within. The mouth worked against the glass barrier as if to chew its way through, though it presented no teeth within its dark maw.

Yet it was another mouth, above the first, that had begun the howling, and a few moments later several more mouths yawned open and added their own shuddering roars and ululating wails to the deafening assault. Vee and Adamn went from covering their noses and mouths to clapping their hands over their ears, as they backed further and further away from the base of the cracked container.

Vee thought she even saw a white, rudimentary attempt at a giant eye form in the side of the great amorphous mass of cells before the orb lost its form. Mouths would close without leaving a trace, and new mouths open elsewhere to resume their raging, disharmonious chorus.

But when they had backed across the room, almost to the opposite shelving, the cries gradually died down to merely—if it could be called merely—deep moans and sob-like sounds. The mouths opened and closed, flattened against the glass, but less frantically. Vee and Adamn slowly lowered their hands from their ears, and Vee took up her assault rifle but kept its barrel pointed down so as not to alarm the substance within the cylinder again.

“What the fuck?” Adamn hissed, looking as though he might vomit from fear.

Vee again regarded the girder resting against the lid of the container, the weedy growths that had sprouted along its length. “It’s the Essential Matter,” she said, nodding at her own intuition. “It trickled down into the jar from above. It rooted in that stuff. Jay, you said this protoplasm or whatever it is was waiting to be programmed. Well, I think it has been programmed with something, accidentally.”

Another long, bass deep moan made the floor vibrate beneath their soles.
“Whatever it is, I just hope that bottle can hold it,” Adamn said. “We’d best get moving, Vee, before it gets stirred up again and breaks out of there.”

But Vee was mesmerized, as she watched a new mouth stretch wide and let loose another short, forlorn bleat. It sounded like the lonesome call of the last dinosaur.

She said, “It’s like the Creator, isn’t it, Jay? The way you described Him to me…the way He was before He blew Himself to bits. Confused.

Tormented. Enraged at everything—all the war, the chaos. Enraged at Himself.”

“Are you suggesting we’re seeing the accidental rebirth of the Creator?” Jay said, from Adamn’s pouch.

“Maybe that’s what I’m saying. Or at least, an aspect of Him could have been seeded in there. It’s richer soil than anything the Essential Matter has encountered. It’s primordial soup.”

“Madam,” Jay said, in a wary tone, “I fear your buried self may be surfacing.”

Vee tore her gaze from the bottled golem to look back at the Demonic gun’s solitary red eye. “What do you mean?”

“You’re hoping for His return. You loved Him once. You want to love Him again.”

“I’m not loving anything. I’m only suggesting a possibility.”

“Perhaps you’re being too imaginative.”

“So what if I am? And so what if I was to be hopeful? Those are human qualities. But maybe you can’t relate to that, Mr. Spock.”

“Human,” Jay said. “Yes. Forgive me, then, for not being more human.”

Vee drew in a long, calming breath. “I’m sorry, Jay.”

“No need. How can you hurt my feelings? I’m not human. But if you ask me, the best thing we could do—if we had the time, and the ability—would be to kill that thing in there.
Especially
if it’s the Creator. It seems to me, we might all of us be better off for it. Humans and nonhumans alike.”

“Why?”

“We’ve been more free since He’s been gone.”

“Seems to me things haven’t been any freer or any better…just the cards got shuffled, is all.”

Vee wanted to say that killing this entity wasn’t for them to decide, even if they did have the means. She wanted to say that such an act could be the greatest crime of all eternity, an act that in some way might bring down upon the head of every being in existence a doom from which this time there would be no phoenix-like rebirth. But she knew Jay might also be right. She knew that she knew too little to say more, so she didn’t.

“Let’s
go
,” Adamn urged them both.

“All right,” Vee said. “Let’s go.” She motioned with her gun toward the far doorway, and they resumed walking toward it. But she threw looks back at the cylinder, saw how only one or two mouths would gape open now, as their groans and laments became fewer and more subdued. She again believed she saw an eye blink into and out of existence, and then the white matter went inert. Returned to its troubled slumber.

They had reached the door, which stood open, and since Vee had lingered a second or two for a final glance back at the quieted golem, it was Adamn who started across the threshold first.

But Charles Roper, security commander of
Los Angeles, stepped into view on the other side of the doorway, leveled a craftily improvised flamethrower weapon, and blasted Adamn point-blank with billows of holy, purging flame.