The Fall of Hades (24 page)

46: THE HEROES

Vee closed the doorway’s hatch behind her; it latched but didn’t lock. The horrible cries, and horrible stink, were deadened. She hoped the blob wouldn’t force the hatch open with pressure, then squeeze its body through into the rooms—the rest of the Construct—beyond. She hoped that when her father and his men had met their maker, so to speak, they had been so thoroughly digested inside the mobile sea of cells that they could never again reform their own bodies. But she also hoped, in that event, that they did not in any way program the cells as the Essential Matter had. Bring their own brand of corruption to its simple, pure rage. People had always made God in their own image figuratively, but Vee thought that men making their own maker literally might be the most frightening thing imaginable.

They retraced their way through several empty rooms until they had returned to the chamber in which a mecha-Demon sat on the floor with its back against a wall of control panels and computer monitors, still convulsing and rattling as when they’d encountered it before. Vee let Adamn slip down to the floor in a similar position, his back also propped against the wall, then rushed to where a rubber-sheathed cable from the automaton was plugged into a jack. She tugged it free and the cord snapped back inside the Demon’s mechanical frame. It slumped forward into its own lap like a marionette with its strings snipped, going still after who could say how long.

Vee rested Jay on the floor, saw that his eye was still rolled up white but his lips were no longer moving. “Please,” she whispered. “Please not yet.” She took hold of the end of his own retractable cord, pulled out its length and inserted the tip into the wall jack.

The monitor directly above this instrument panel held a faint glow, showed gray static with occasional black bands crackling through it.

When she plugged the gun into the jack there was a burst of loud hissing and the picture rolled several times like a badly tuned TV channel. But then, a return to the softly fizzing, dimly glowing field of gray static, a sandstorm safely locked outside a thick window.

“I’m sorry, Jay,” Vee said, looking down at him again. “I’m sorry I ever pulled you out of there.” She fought back tears as she rested her fingertips against the blackened bone.

A few feet away, Adamn had managed to stand up on his own. He was slowly healing, but still a scorched effigy of himself. He tore away the last rags of his clothing and dropped them to the floor, a cicada molting its old shell. Vee went to him, helped support him again. As she did so, she saw Adamn looking past her, over her shoulder. “Vee,” he rasped.

“What?” She turned to look back at Jay lying on the floor below the wall and the sizzling monitor.

A red glow emanated from the screen, the static having gone from gray to crimson. Vee left Adamn leaning his back against the wall so that she could draw closer to the monitor again.

There was a barely distinct object moving beyond that red sea of static. Actually, moving
through
the red sea of static. It had a sinuous, fluid motion, and it was white. A white dolphin, swimming away into the static, receding from sight.

Vee smiled, and this time allowed the tears to come. The picture rolled again, and the gray static returned, but she knew that Jay had made it into the Heaven of own choosing. Once more remembering that song by David Bowie, she whispered,
“We can beat them, For ever and ever.”

47: THE KEYHOLE

They searched through the more demolished areas of level 186, and eventually found another means of continuing their ascent of the Construct. As he recovered, Adamn’s physical discomfort turned to a sense of discomfort at his state of undress, and Vee teased him about it. Once, when he was clambering up a ladder ahead of her from the 192nd to the 193rd floor, she reached up and pinched a buttock, telling him he was climbing too slowly.

Everything above the 194th level appeared to be completely squashed flat, so that they no longer ascended by climbing stairs or ladders but by crawling up through the rubble like ants through impromptu tunnels, squeezing into any claustrophobic passage they could find, not knowing even that they had passed from the remains of one floor to the next unless they chanced upon a broken slab stenciled with the number 195, a fragment of wall reading 196. They ventured into crevasses and crannies so tight, or amongst heaped moraine so precariously balanced, that they wouldn’t have attempted it had they not been immortal.

Repeatedly they had to retrace their path and find another avenue when they encountered an impassable dead end, sometimes after what must have been hours of progress. Several times, after much strenuous and frustrating effort, they nearly gave up trying to access the next level altogether, almost relented and turned back toward Freetown, until they would find at last just enough of an upwards slanting gap in the debris to worm their way through.

At what could have been the compacted ruins of either the 197th or the 198th floor, a hand thrust out of the wreckage close by Vee, its fingertips brushing her cheek. She flinched back, brought up the 9mm pistol she had been carrying in one fist while she crawled, and saw a face sandwiched at an angle between two slabs, the mouth squashed so that the person’s words were badly slurred.

“Get me out of here…please…please…been here so long…please…”

“Adamn,” Vee said helplessly.

He moved up beside her to look. “We can’t dig him out ourselves…but maybe if we could ever get the robots up here. Even then, we’re talking a whole lot of work.”

“I’m sorry,” Vee told the face lodged in the shadows. “We’ll be back later on. We’ll come back for you in the future.”

“No you won’t! “ the Damned man wailed after them, his hand grasping at the air as they resumed their squirming passage. “No you won’t! You won’t!”

“Adamn,” Vee groaned.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”

Up through a vertical channel, like a chimney, and finally into a space open enough for them to stand in. What they did, however, was lie beside each other on their backs, smeared with concrete dust and blood, panting from their exertions like exhausted lovers. “I’m so thirsty,” Vee moaned.

“Please don’t even say that,” Adamn said.

“What’s that?” Vee sat up, frowning at the ceiling. She regained her feet, reached up and poked a finger at a tiny breach in the little cavern’s ceiling. With her nail, she dug out some pebbles, and light gleamed in the opening she had widened. “Adamn,” she said in an urgent whisper, “I think it’s sunlight.”

“Sunlight?” He got to his feet as well. “Vee, come on, that’s crazy.

Even if this is the top of the Construct, there wouldn’t be any sun out there. This was Hades. The sky was a ceiling of lava.”

“Lava that all fell in the deluge. Until there wasn’t any more ceiling.”

“But a sun…come on now. It must be a lighted room…another level, still.”

“Boost me up,” she said.

“Okay, wait, hang on.” He shoved a block of masonry over for her to stand on. Stepping onto it, Vee found her head almost touching the ceiling, and she probed some more at the gleaming hole, worrying at it with the muzzle and front sight of her handgun. Watching her, Adamn asked,

“What is it?”

Vee stood on tiptoes, tilted her head back awkwardly in an attempt to bring her eye right up to the hole. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Adamn.”

“What? What?”

“Look.” She stepped down from the block and they switched places.

Soon enough, it was Adamn who was exclaiming, “Oh my God. Oh man…that can’t be!”

“We’ve got to get your robots up here, for sure,” Vee told him. “All your digging crew.”

“Yes…God yes, absolutely! We should go back for them right away!”

They discussed what they saw out there, took more turns peeking at it, and Adamn speculated on how he might direct excavation efforts up here without the use of his burrowing Black Cathedral.

Once again peering out the hole at what lay beyond, Vee said, “I don’t want to wait for all that, Adamn.”

“What do you mean? You want to go back and see if we can find another way up here? A bigger hole, maybe?”

“No. I had another idea.” She turned her face toward him. “Remember that terrorist you told me about, who tried to sneak his way into Freetown?”

Realization dawned on Adamn’s face, mixed with a look of horror at the implications. But the horror lessened, and he had to wag his head in wonderment, as Vee jumped down from the block and started unzipping the front of her jumpsuit. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t want to ruin my clothes, do I?” she explained. “I want them waiting out here for me when I come back.”

“Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea, after all,” he said, looking her long straight body up and down as she stepped out of her garment like a snake shedding its skin.

But his expression became more horrified again, as he saw Vee fetch her combat knife, kneel down in front of the stone block as if before a miniature sacrificial altar, and spread her left hand flat upon it. She looked up at him. “Are you ready?”

“Ready to…?”

“You know what I’m talking about. Come on, are you ready?”

He braced his bare feet, in both hands holding the acid gun they had brought with them. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

“Don’t be squeamish; you should be used to the mechanics of Hell by now. Anyway, it’s going to be a lot worse for me than it will be for you.”

“In one way, it will.”

Vee poised the knife’s blade over her pinkie finger, seemed to pause to collect her breath or her will, and then bore her weight down on it and started sawing. Adamn grimaced, winced as he heard the metal rasping against bone, then the crunch as it made its way through the joint.

“Ow…ow…oh shit…fuck,” Vee was chanting through gritted teeth.

When the blade scraped against stone, she rapidly stood up with the severed digit clutched in her hand, blood in ribbons wound around her pale arm. She mounted the block once more, standing in a little puddle of her own blood, and pushed the finger into the hole in the ceiling. Through the hole. It dropped, unheard, somewhere on the other side. Then, she looked down at Adamn, her face tensed with pain and anticipation, and hissed, “Do it!”

“Vee…”

“Do it!”
she snarled.

Adamn brought up the acid gun and pulled its trigger. He sprayed her white, naked body up and down, as if using a garden hose to clean a statue atop its pedestal.

She screamed. How she screamed. She toppled off her pedestal to the floor, and he stepped around the block to spray her some more. What was left of her tried to crawl away, despite her orders. Soon enough, though, the pathetic mewling thing that had once been her body could do nothing but curl in on itself like a fetus. A fetus in a reverse conception, being unborn, waiting to disappear.

48: THE FRUIT RESTORED

A voice called to her. Was it the voice of her own mind? She opened her eyes.

Above her, a sky not so much overcast as cloaked in steamy white clouds that diffused the light of the sun—if there was a sun behind them. The sky’s uniform white glow made darkish, translucent silhouettes of the intervening canopy of foliage spread over her. Notched fronds like those of palm and banana trees. Closer to her face, ferns crowded about her. She felt their feathery touch all across her body, and realized she was lying on her back on the ground. She propped herself up enough to see that she was nude, and that her body was white, pristine. She sat up further and looked around her groggily.

The air was heavy with humidity. The surrounding abundant vegetation was tropical, even prehistoric in aspect. And all of it lacked pigmentation. All of it, absolutely white.

The scaled or ribbed trunks of trees, whiter than birch bark, swept up from the undergrowth like the half-buried bones of extinct monsters, that had somehow sprouted lush new life. Cycads abounded, with their explosive bunches of leaves, stout trunks and evergreen-like cones; all of it pure white. The jungle was like a photographic negative or a weird infrared photograph. The effect was almost wintry, as if every leaf and blade and vine, every stalk and branch and trunk had been encrusted with snow, but the air was steaming with heat.

Pollen floated in the air around her, like dust motes. No, not pollen, she realized, and then her awareness came washing back whole. Drifting spores of Essential Matter.

A forest grown from Essential Matter, extending to the limits of her vision in every direction.

“Vee,” came that voice again. It was not inside her head, though she couldn’t see its owner. A man’s voice. Adamn.

“I’m here,” she croaked, the first words from her new throat. She had slept through her entire regeneration, as if the weariness of her former body had carried over to this new minting.

She stood, wavered only a second before she felt more firmly grounded.

“Thank God,” she heard Adamn say. “I was worried something had gone wrong. Or you’d wake up without any memories again. What’s it like up there?”

“Beautiful. Scary beautiful,” she said. She looked behind her, down at the ground. It was uneven, rocky, being as it was a broken landscape of rubble, but a thick white moss covered most of the stone and appeared to form a fertile bed into which or through which the other vegetation had put down roots. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Here. To your right.”

Vee turned some more and saw the blade of her knife flashing, where Adamn had thrust it up through the hole and moved it to catch the light.

“Okay. Got you.”

“How the heck are you going to get back down here again?”

“We’ll figure it out. Right now I just want to explore a bit.”

“Come on, Vee, don’t you be getting yourself lost, now.”

“If I get lost, I’ll find my way back eventually. We have the time for that, don’t we?”

“Yeah, but you’re up there, while I’m stuck in this hole.”

“You’ll have your chance, I’m sure. We all will.” She started away, stepping tentatively at first as she traversed the dips and rises made by heaped slabs. Hard surfaces and jagged edges were cushioned by the spongy moss, though fangs of shattered concrete and punji sticks of rebar did jut up from it in places.

She waded through ferns, pushed between drooping branches and dangling loops of twisted vine. Something like Spanish moss hung from tree boughs in ragged curtains like masses of cobwebs. If Adamn were to call out to her now, she was already too far away to hear him.

The stands of trees thinned out and she found herself at the edge of a sizable clearing, a sea of shoulder-high elephant grass that stirred in waves in a languid, hot breeze. On the other side, though, the dense trees resumed, their masses of leaves like earthbound clouds, limiting the extent of her view. Did this forest cover only the top of the Construct, or the surrounding deep bed of solidified lava as well? Did it blanket, had it transformed,
all
of creation?

Vee learned that not all that swam in the air around her was Essential Matter. She found herself brushing away a curious winged insect that hummed away too swiftly for her to get a good look at it. And even as it fled, a movement amongst the trees across the clearing drew her attention.

She held her breath, as if the barest sound might give her away, as the long neck of a brontosaurus-like creature reared up into view. The wavering flexible horns atop its featureless head told Vee it wasn’t a dinosaur, however, but something like a gigantic albino slug.

She had the intuition that the creature would be harmless, but nevertheless she turned back into the jungle to follow another direction.

Deeper she went, surely lost, but not afraid. Instead, what occupied her mind was a tug of war of desires. On the one hand, she was desperate for them to share this discovery with the people of Freetown as soon as they could. On the other hand was an equally desperate impulse to hide this revelation from the rest of the Construct for as long as it could be concealed. This was a world unto itself, here, with life that had been evolving and flourishing for some time. It didn’t need them. Did she dare to think it could ever be
for
them?

When after much random exploration she had begun to feel tired, her bare feet sore and skin flushed with heat, and guilty for leaving Adamn alone this long, she decided to work her way back to her point of entry.

She hadn’t had anything, like her knife, with which to mark a trail, but even if she had she wouldn’t have wanted to defile the bark of a single tree in this virgin world.

It was during her efforts to return to Adamn that she chanced upon the fruit.
She spotted it from a distance even through the branches, the fronds and creepers, because the fruit was a vivid red amidst all this whiteness.

Like a beacon, it drew her.

Vee approached the base of the otherwise undistinguished tree from which the fruit hung. She saw no others depending from its branches.

Were there any others at all in this jungle? If not, how had she managed to stumble upon this single specimen, unless it had somehow called to her, attracted her in a way she wasn’t conscious of?

The fruit, she saw, was large—big as her fist—but irregular in shape.

Her brow furrowed as she stared up at it. Were those raised, squiggly markings on its skin…veins?

Vee understood, then, that the fruit had grown in the form of a blood red human heart.

The heart-shaped fruit was just above her head. She could pluck it if she wanted, and she reached up to at least touch it to see if it were actually hard inside, or as soft and pulpy as it looked. To see if those veins were really pulsing, as they appeared.

But before her fingertips made contact, Vee stayed her hand. Slowly, she lowered her arm.

At that moment, the warrior Vee thought she might very well want to insure that no one ever touched this fruit, even if she had to stand here, gun in hand, and defend it from every last soul and Demon and Angel in Hades, unto eternity.

Whether or not that would be possible, or even necessary, one thing she knew for sure.

She herself would not touch it. No…this time, she would not touch it.