The Fall of Hades (5 page)

So, he thought, it wasn’t just the
United States that had gradually gone all to hell.

*  *  *

Once in a while one of the administrative Demons would walk alongside the queue, with or against its flow, maybe as the team at the head of the line rotated its duties. Adam saw them for the first time this way, since he had not as yet sighted the end of the line where these entities sat at their ranked desks. The queue had still advanced so little that he could see the portal behind him even now, however distant. Could still make out that vertical red line in a corner of the frame that pinned it open, the long streak of blood both crusted dry and fresh-flowing. Noticing it once more, he had an odd thought: that maybe in the future he would recall gazing at that red line, as his mind had sought to distance itself from his suffering, just as when he would gaze out the window of the science classroom at the stained green line of moss. Was he even now accruing new poignant memories, that would hold some importance to him later on? That would haunt but bolster him somehow—define him even, if only to himself—in the eternity that he faced?

Eternity
, he thought. Eternity…
here
. Mortals had wished to live forever, fought and feared death, since the first mortal had drawn breath. But there had been a better reason to fear death than the cessation of life. They should have feared the
continuance
of life, in the state of immortality.

Adam turned to watch one of the passing officials as if it might enlighten him on cosmic justice, but none of the Demons seemed able or wont to speak English; this was another development meant to keep Demons from sympathizing with humans. These towering officials with their black cephalopod heads and arthropod-like skeletal bodies were an updated, less anthropomorphic replacement of their predecessors.

This one swept Adam with its scorching gaze. Yellow eyes with goat-like pupils that glared at him with contempt, with loathing. That judged and condemned him. Damned him, as if the wrathful, vengeful Creator Himself gazed out through those inhuman eyes. But Adam didn’t feel humbled, didn’t feel ashamed. That accusing glare, however brief, only stirred his outrage, and after the Demon had passed he shook his head and muttered, “No…no.”

Ciara turned to him. “What?”

“Whatever I did, I don’t deserve this. I don’t. What did you do, Ciara?

Did you mug and beat to death somebody’s granny? Did you strangle a baby? This isn’t right. It isn’t fair.”

“I know that. It isn’t fair.”

“Okay, so I didn’t go to church. Does that in itself make me an unworthy person, who has to suffer until the end of time?”

“I stopped going to church when I was a kid. Now I wish I kept going!”

“No, Ciara, fuck that shit. It isn’t right!”

The Asian man on his other side said, “I’m a Buddhist. Maybe that’s why I’m here.”

Adam faced him. “And are you sorry you’re a Buddhist?”

The man hesitated, as if afraid his punishment could become even worse.

“No,” Adam said, “don’t be sorry. We aren’t wrong.
This
is wrong.

This
.”

He wagged his head again, as if it were harder to believe in the rationale behind the punishment they had been sentenced to than to believe in the reality of Hades itself.

Listening in on their conversation, which wasn’t easy to avoid, packed as they were in the line, a man behind Adam said, “Didn’t we suffer enough in life? I always thought
that
was Hell, and after life we’d at least be able to rest. If not go to Heaven, at least just disappear.”

“My wife left me for another man,” Adam said. “I couldn’t keep my house. I couldn’t even keep my dog. And I burned to death in a nuclear war, knowing that my mom and my brother and sister and every innocent child and animal on the face of the Earth was dying horribly at the same time. No…no way.” Wagging his head more violently. “This is enough.

I’ve had enough. I didn’t go through all that just to end up like this. No.

No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

And with that, Adam began to press past the Asian man to his right, began to squeeze his way out toward the far right edge of the queue.

“Adam!” Ciara hissed. “What are you doing?”

“They’ll shoot you,” said the Asian man.

“Let them,” Adam said. “I’m already dead.”

The others blocking his way, seeing what he intended, did not try to stop him, perhaps curious to see how far he would take this. They moved aside as much as they could to permit him to pass. And in fact, when Adam reached the edge at last, one young man said, “Fuck it, I’m going with him!”

When Ciara saw others were beginning to follow Adam and the young man, she started insinuating her way toward the edge of the line, too. A current began to become diverted from the main current. A mumbling of voices arose.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the Demons took notice. The two nearest drones came scurrying, one with a metal spear in its four sets of pincers and the other with a submachine gun. Seeing the gun, a couple of the mumbling rebels lost their nerve and bolted away from the mass. The Demon with the gun was confused about whether to spray the bolting individuals or the main body of rebels, but decided on the latter and opened up on them, sweeping the gun’s muzzle back and forth. At the same time, the one with the spear jabbed at those ahead of the rebels, who were looking back at the commotion in surprise, lest they break formation, too.

Screams, blood, chaos. Adam felt bullets smash his shoulder and jaw.

His mouth filled with blood, which he swallowed and choked on, and though he knew he couldn’t die he instinctively went into a physical panic. The others behind him bore him up and along, though. He couldn’t see behind him, but he could tell the new current was swelling. It felt like so many bodies were crowding behind him that the entire queue would be diverted in this new direction, away from the high-ranking Demons who waited to appraise their souls.

The Demon’s gun ran out of bullets, and that was when a few of the people broke from the line and charged it, tackled it and brought it down.

Buoyed up in his agony, his left arm hanging useless and his chest painted in blood, Adam saw that one of these attackers was the Asian man, and he rose with the submachine gun in his fists. Someone else had taken a pouch from the Demon, and found fresh magazines for the gun inside it. He helped load one of them into the Asian man’s submachine gun.

After that, everything changed quickly.

One of the official Demons came running with more drones, but it was a mistake for creatures who were themselves mortal. Adam saw the official go down under a volley of bullets, its bony armor cracked and punctured. As it lay kicking and thrashing, Ciara came up beside it, somehow with one of the metal spears—which she thrust through its sack-like head, pinning it to the ground. The creature’s death throes were an electrified frenzy. “Ack, ack, ack-ack!” Ciara said. “Yeah, I seen you motherfuckers in
Mars Attack
s.”

More guns, spears, bludgeons were appropriated. More people flowed into the new line. People from ahead, in the former line, started turning back to join it as well. And outnumbered as they were, more Demons fell, not to get back up again as the Damned did.

Adam lost track of Ciara and the Asian man, but others held him up as they moved ahead. For lack of any particular direction, they marched toward that city looming on the horizon, perhaps because it was at least somewhat terrestrial in appearance. From this remove, at least.

They did not know that this was a city called Tartarus, any more than they knew that the sky above Hades had up until recently been covered over with a curtain of gray clouds, but that these clouds had burned away to reveal the inverted molten sea behind them, as Hades underwent changes that not even the Demons comprehended. The Damned had no idea that this city of
Tartarus was one of the principal centers for the mass production of Hell’s Demons. Though, preoccupied as it was with exterminating and reprocessing the older races of Demons, and spawning new ones, Tartarus was just as oblivious to this encroaching army as they were to it. For now, their destination didn’t matter, even if the terrain ahead and the things that dwelt there were terrible. At least, it was the direction
they
chose.

Soon, the bleeding lessened so that Adam no longer felt suffocated, and the pain diminished to something bearable. His arm could move again. No longer needing to be upheld, he had fallen back a little. No longer the leader of the new line, just another cell in its growing body, but that was okay. It was okay if most of them didn’t even know he was the one who had begun this. He was just glad to have his legs moving under him of his own free will.

Somewhere behind him, Adam heard a familiar, loud whooping sound like that of a police car siren coming to life. Though that sound had always irritated, even unnerved him, he found himself grinning now—his first smile in Hades. Because he knew that for good or ill, there would soon be giant white penises painted on the walls of Hell.

7: THE CONSTRUCT

There was a door in the control room, but Vee found it locked when she attempted to open it. She had disconnected Jay from the computer now and carried the gun in her hands. The weapon said,

“Ah, there’s a button on the keyboard to unlock this door.”

Vee turned back to the keyboard, and punched the key that Jay indicated. It was labeled ESC, for “Escape.”

Shouldering a pouch of crudely stitched skin she had taken from one of the skeletons and filled with magazines of ammunition for Jay—each bullet grown from bone—Vee said, “One escape down…who knows how many more to go.”

“And just where is it you want to go?” Jay asked her as they set out through a series of twisty, cramped corridors, their low ceilings and close walls lined with pipelines and conduits thick and thin like the control room they had left behind.

Was it still an objective to find someone to free her father, or was he too irretrievably lost in madness? She decided not to think about it right now. He had waited this long in his delirium, hadn’t he?

“I just want to—see what there is to see,” Vee said.

And so they continued on through the seemingly interminable maze of corridors, some so narrow she had to stoop and squeeze through them, others now so open and large they felt like subway tunnels. Lights were set into the curved ceilings or even the walls or floor at intervals, though some of them were flickering weakly or had even gone black. And as they traveled, the woman and the weapon kept up a steady conversation.

“You saw a taste of the widespread rebellion that was already sweeping Hades then,” said Jay about the stolen memories he had shared with Vee. “There had been rebellion stirring among the Damned for some time, but there was a certain incident that seemed to set off a chain reaction among the Demons as well. A Damned man who called himself Dan Alighieri rescued a female Demon known as Chara, whom he found tortured by Damned rebels and crucified to a tree. The man and Demon fell in love. Soon, other Demons of Chara’s type fought alongside the lovers against formerly human Angels like yourself, and a breed of Celestial beings that entered Hades to help quell the uprisings. As a result of all this, it was decided to totally eliminate that particular race of Demons, though soon enough the order was given to destroy
any
race of Demon—and there were many—that bore predominately human characteristics. New Demons were created to replace them, at such places as the great factory city, Tartarus. Tartarus was the city you saw in the recording, that the Damned started marching toward.”

“Oh! So they didn’t know they were going from the frying pan into the fire.”

“There was indeed fierce fighting in that Demonic city. It was never to be entirely taken by the Damned and their allied Demons, though they were never ousted either. But before I tell you the fate of Tartarus, I must tell you the fate—as much as we can know of it—of the Creator.”

In a shocking transition from claustrophobic tunnel to vast open space, they had passed through a threshold onto a metal ramp that spanned a dark gulf, not only its floor but its ceiling lost in gloom, the huge shaft also seeming to vanish into infinity to left and right. As they crossed the gradually inclining ramp, Vee heard a rhythmic metallic clanging far below them. Some machine still diligently toiling, though perhaps now to no known purpose.

“The Creator was apparently distraught over the rebellion, seeing the long-standing order of Hades thrown into such chaos. He had a crisis, it is told, and questioned His own views of His disfavored children, the Damned and the Demons, even as they questioned their own positions.

The Creator’s essence withdrew in contemplation for a time, and then without warning—He immolated.”

“Immolated?”

“Apparently, He self-destructed. Committed suicide. I suppose it had been a long time coming, perhaps even before the start of the Great Conflict. Of course, the destruction of Earth and all its life must have understandably contributed a lot to His state of mind. It may even have been the final straw.”

“My God,” Vee whispered, and then realized what she had said.

“His essence must have been scattered throughout all of Creation, for you will see particles of His being floating about the Construct even unto this time, dispersed through its ventilation systems.”

“Are you talking about that white ash stuff?”

“Yes, so you’ve seen it. Dwellers here call it Essential Matter.”

“I’ve seen primitive life forms that seem to have spontaneously evolved from it!”

“Really? That I didn’t know. I hope you can show me this. How intriguing.”

At the other end of the long ramp, they stepped through a tall arched doorway and found themselves in a gallery of similarly boundless dimensions, its floor and walls of polished marble—black veined with red—its ceiling and either end again disappearing into blackness. Lining the right side of the great hall were more arched doorways like the one they had just passed through. Some were dark, while light bled in through others.

From one doorway came a whistling icy wind, which blew the tattered remains of what must have once been curtains drawn across it. Lining the left side were tall, narrow windows with arched peaks, but each seemed to have been walled up with cement beyond their thick glass panes.

“Do you have a blueprint of this Construct?” Vee asked.

“There are blueprints of sections of it, accessible in the Mesh, but I greatly doubt all of it has even been mapped. Since you have no particular destination in mind, I suppose one direction is as good as another.”

“But you don’t know where we are now, basically?”

“The Construct has been expanded upon and reconfigured even since I have been adrift in the Mesh. All I know for sure is that you were imprisoned in the basement. We are now at what once would have been ground level.”

“Once?” Vee asked. Without consciously choosing, she turned right into the massive hallway. The hard footfalls of her boots made watery, receding echoes.

“With the Creator’s destruction, the conditions in Hades deteriorated further. The creatures of Hades do not need to eat or breathe to survive, but conditions here imitate those of the mortal realm. Thus, the sensations of creatures in Hades imitate those of mortals. One who does not eat hungers but will never starve, one who is prevented from breathing will gasp for air but never suffocate. So one will naturally seek a comfortable environment. But the decline of Hades steadily threatened those conditions. The air grew increasingly thin, and the ceiling of magma became turbulent and unstable. Soon, frequent rains of lava fell, finally becoming a continuous, unrelenting deluge. Demons could be killed by this, and countless were. The Damned could regenerate if they found shelter, but those who could not reach sufficient shelter were buried under the lava—and that might be the majority of them, for all I know. The lava would cool to volcanic rock, but the continuous downpour kept increasing the level of the rock. Those entombed within it are no doubt still conscious even now, but trapped in that state forever. Ultimately, the level of volcanic rock reached the uppermost heights of Hades, until all of Hades was buried—a fossil.”

Now Vee understood the row of windows on her left, blocked with solid pumice. “If Hades was buried, then where are we now?”

“I told you, there were shelters. I don’t know what other, lesser shelters might have survived out there, but I know the only sizable shelter became the factory city of Tartarus, where great numbers of Demons were once grown and trained. The city you saw in the recording. The city that we are in now. Damned, Demons, and even the Angels and Celestials trapped in Hades by the deluge began to adapt the city’s gigantic structures to preserve favorable living conditions. Teams of workers, though not always working in harmony with other factions, enlarged and connected the massive buildings—utilizing the city’s own technology and resources, often even the mock organic materials once used for the creation of new Demons—until after many years they were all thoroughly interlinked, their boundaries lost, essentially becoming one immense structure that we now know as the Construct.”

“But what about Heaven? Did it decline after the Creator’s destruction, too, or…?”

“We don’t know, and may never find out.”

“Could the boundary between Heaven and Hell have been lost, too?

If we followed the Construct to its uppermost level, what would we find?”

“What do you think, the ground floor of
Paradise?” The gun’s neutral voice almost hinted at amusement. “No, madam, you would find only more rock. Nothing exists beyond here—at least, that we will ever reach.”