The Fall of Hades (4 page)

At night, when he walked his dog, he would hear a group of three teenagers loitering around in the plaza. They skateboarded in warm weather, or just seemed to drift aimlessly in winter weather, never varying their outfit of black hooded sweatshirts no matter how cold it was. One of these boys frequently made a loud whooping sound like that of a police car siren coming to life. Adam swore he heard this call every night that he walked his dog. The cry, the boys, unsettled him. He supposed he should feel sorry for these lost souls; their home life must not be all that inviting.

But in this age of the Internet and endless wonderful video games, it just didn’t seem …natural to Adam that they shouldn’t want to remain indoors.

Within only months of the glorified strip mall having opened, he had noticed a giant white penis spray-painted on the back of one of the buildings.

It was a masterpiece of cubist art; just as Picasso’s people even in profile exhibited two eyes on one side of their face, like a flounder, so did this penis in profile have two testicles on one side. The further one even looked larger than the nearer one. Adam was certain one of the feral boys had rendered this graffiti. His ultimate achievement as a human being, no doubt, but in the end was it any less meaningful than anything else that would burn to ash?

The Akita was excited to see him, snatching up her toy. He stroked her head and spoke baby talk to her, her face turned up to him adoringly, as if he were her God. But he felt like a God who had let her down. Her small brown eyes shone lovingly in her black mask, her love unlike anything most human beings—or even celestial beings—seemed able to muster.

The Creator of the universe wore a mysterious black mask, too, Adam thought, but His eyes could not be discerned through it.

He brought in all his supplies. He supposed they could go down into the basement together, for all that was worth. The radio hadn’t gone off, and it soon played John Lennon’s
Imagine
.

When he was finished, he took his dog out for a walk. It was close to dusk now, and he wanted them inside before it got dark. As if those teenagers would turn into radioactive zombies, in search of tasty prey.

He heard that characteristic whooping call. But more than that, when Adam walked his dog into the enclosure of the mall village—only a few cars, maybe deserted, in its lot—he saw that dozens of giant white penises had been sprayed across the brick walls of the condo structure, the stores, even across the store windows. And all of the penises pointed in the same direction. All of them arrows pointing to Hell.

*  *  *

Funny how you could adapt to just about anything, even the pain of having your decimated body remade. But as the line progressed, the wails of the Damned became less banshee-like, subdued into whimpers and moans of existential despair more so than physical anguish.

Adam couldn’t see what lay at the end of the ponderous queue, but he would twist around occasionally and look back to see how far removed he was from the portal he had come through. He was surprised that it was still not that far behind. Then again, the expanded entry point was huge, as long as the proverbial football field. A kind of metal frame had stretched the portal wide, resembling nothing so much as a gigantic, overly baroque, Industrial Age surgical retractor holding open a gaping incision. There were hooks that seemed to clamp right into the air itself, and the portal truly was like an immense wound in that vivid red blood streamed and twined down the hooks and arms of the frame as if some unseen membrane were bleeding. A torn veil between the worlds of the living and undead.

Though now there might not be any living left on the other side of it.

Intense white light filled the mouth of the portal, the masses of fresh souls it disgorged mere silhouettes, maimed and grotesque, shambling through its glowing haze.

When he’d been closer to the frame, Adam had noticed a point in the left side of the structure where two vertical struts joined at right angles, forming a long corner. Blood had been trickling down this corner for some time now, so that it had begun to coagulate into a scabrous mass over which fresh blood still dribbled to soak into the barren ground. Weirdly, this had made Adam think of something from his childhood. Well, he had been in Junior High then, but just as introverted and miserable as he had been since his first year of school. He would often gaze out through the window of the science room, and stare at a projection of the school where rain water unintentionally channeled down its corner had caused a broad green stain of moss or lichen—maybe his science teacher could have enlightened him if he’d asked—against the red bricks. Adam would lose himself in his imagination, wondering what infinitesimal life might be thriving, might even have evolved, in that vertical green line. He even daydreamed that he was some microscopic entity himself, living within what would seem a verdant Paradise at such a minuscule scale, whatever occurred beyond its borders of no importance to him.

Green line. Red line. Like a border between life and death.

A line to be crossed.

*  *  *

Adam and his dog waited in the basement, listening to sometimes frantic news reports on the radio, but these channels became fewer and fewer in a sea of static until he switched the radio off and played CDs instead (though not John Lennon’s
Imagine
). They left their shelter often to go upstairs so he could use the toilet or get something else out of the fridge. He peeked around the curtains at the night but it seemed so still that he might have thought the news reports were something of the order of Orson Welles’
War of the Worlds
broadcast.

He knew better than that, though. Out there,
Tokyo might have been flattened like Hiroshima. The Eiffel Tower a mound of steaming metal, the faces scrubbed from Mount Rushmore in a return to raw virgin stone.

Everything returned to their original elements. But he didn’t mourn these lost wonders, these pinnacles of human achievement. Wasn’t every stone of the picturesque Great Pyramids stained with the blood of the men who had hoisted them in place? No, it was the tiny, overlooked details of existence that he mourned, things that only he would have known or cared about—often bittersweet but all the more poignant for that. Twisting a strand of his mother’s hair around his finger. The adoring eyes of his dog in their black mask. The green line of moss that perhaps no one had ever consciously seen, except himself, though it lay right outside that window every day and might even be there still, even more wide and vividly green.

In first grade, his mother had frequently dressed him in a little red sweater, and he recalled plucking bits of fluff from it and releasing them to float to the classroom floor, a masochistic ritual in that he wanted to cry watching them drift away, bits of himself that he didn’t want to remain there; he wanted himself in his entirety to be home, home with his mother. If all matter was never destroyed, only transformed, where were those bits of fluff now? What would his own matter soon become?

No one would ever remember about those floating red dandelion spores of fluff. He had never told anyone. Of course, unless he had written about such things to share with others, they would never have been remembered even had there not come an apocalypse, would have been lost with his death in any case. But there would have been
new
people, with their
own
memories.

He was glad he had been incapable of having children, now. Was glad it was only a dog beside him, waiting to be turned to ash with him when the very air caught fire around the globe.

But would his concrete storage box survive the firestorms? Would his boxes of books, sketch pads of drawings, photo albums and record collections become a nest for hardy, adaptable insects…mutant insects? A breeding ground for a whole new evolution of creatures (like his mossy green line)? He would like that. Wouldn’t that be a better legacy than leaving these collections to human survivors?

A rumbling vibration through the cement basement floor, like a train rushing past the house. But what trains would be running now? Trying to outrun the bombs as more and more were launched, all that could be launched, falling even toward obscure little towns?

Adam crouched down and called to the Akita. He hugged her against him and she loved it, lapping his face. Lapping the tears off his cheeks.

Making him laugh and swipe his arm across his face and wonder where—if there were an afterlife—the souls of animals went to. In a fair and just universe, his dog would walk beside him in Heaven, for eternity.

*  *  *

His dog’s soul had simply ceased to be. Animals were lucky that way.

The soul of the young black woman pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with him had fully reconstituted now, so that she appeared as she had in life. Adam saw that she was very attractive. He hoped he hadn’t reconstituted enough to become visibly and embarrassingly aroused by her. They didn’t realize that formerly the Damned would be issued black uniforms upon their arrival at the head of their queue; these new souls would go forth nude as infants. To expedite matters, the Damned were no longer being branded on the forehead, either, or shipped off to educational facilities such as Avernus University. The only part of the ritual that was being maintained was that every soul had to undergo a moment or two of intense scrutiny from those bubble-headed officials with their gleaming black exoskeletons. Where normally only a few would wait at the head of the line, here there was a whole regiment of them to process the Damned.

Adam said to the grim-faced Asian man on his right, “I know there’s no day and night here, but I’d say a couple of days have passed already.”

To his left, the attractive young woman said, “And I know we’re dead and all, but I’m thirsty and hungry. I’m so hungry I could eat one of those giant termites.”

Adam didn’t want to admit that he was hungry, too, from the scent of cooked human meat.

The black woman had told him she was from the city of Worcester, a few towns over from Eastborough, and the Asian man had lived in Boston’s Chinatown, so this group was from the same general region.

Thus, Adam often craned his neck in search of his mother, brother or sister but saw no familiar faces even now that most of the faces around him had reformed.

The young woman said, “Hey, so what’s your name?” Her voice was shaky as it tried to sound casual. Still, she had calmed a lot from her initial hysteria. “I’m Ciara.”

“Adam,” he told her.

“Huh. A-damn,” Ciara joked.

He looked at her blankly for a few beats until he got it. “Yeah,” he snorted. “Adam.”

*  *  *

Some of the drone Demons carried compact black submachine guns.

These might have been identical to an earthly model, but Adam wasn’t gun savvy enough to know. Not all the Demons carried them, though; were they that troublesome to produce? Occasionally as they patrolled the outer edges of the line—and Adam was not far in from the right side—the insect-beings would strike the Damned with the wire butts of these guns, either to keep them from lagging, or carrying on too loudly, or for no apparent reason at all other than that they were Demons. Sometimes, some of the Damned would try to bolt from the line, make a run for it, out of sheer mindless panic more so than from design, and this was when the Demons would open fire. Adam cringed every time, expecting to be strafed along with whoever the Demons were targeting. Several times, though, he saw the guns jam, and the blank-faced Demons worked at the weapons to try to clear them. The Damned didn’t get far, though, as other guns soon cut them down, after which they would be dragged back to the line and roughly hoisted to their feet, their wounds soon to begin healing but the pain excruciating until it was done.

Maybe the guns were not only hard to come by, but substandard. And Adam had the impression that was not the only thing amiss here.

On one occasion when a Demon sprayed a Damned making an attempt at escape, the creature accidentally struck one of its own kind in the line of fire. The insect’s white body was broken into chunks, dry and tattered, with no apparent blood or organs inside, white dust even puffing into the air—as if it were a figure made of papier-mache. Other Demons came to regard it emotionlessly for a moment or two, and then—the perpetrator among them—carried the remains off to the side and laid them down, maybe to be properly disposed of later, or maybe left to decompose. For as the line inched along, slow as a glacier, Adam saw that this being did not regain its feet and begin to regenerate as the Damned did. It didn’t so much as twitch with reanimation.

Others noticed this, too. Ciara whispered to him, “You see that? That thing isn’t getting back up again. They aren’t like us…see?”

“They can be killed,” Adam muttered, as much to himself as to her.

“We’re already dead—we’re immortal. But they’re not.”

And these Demons seemed substandard to him, like the malfunctioning guns. He sensed it, without even knowing that this was one of the new infernal breeds created to replace the more human-like races, which had increasingly come to sympathize with the Damned, to the point where many of them had even thrown in their lot with the Damned in widespread rebellion. This insect race was like a rushed or indifferent sketch by a Creator distracted by other things. Without knowing the particulars yet, Adam intuited that Hades was in a kind of crisis, or decline.