Lucifer's Lottery (22 page)

“This particular barrack, by the way, is the major supplier of fetuses to the aperitif bar we visited upon earlier.” Howard leads on down the reeking corridor of sheet iron. “The women, once beheaded, are taken to a Decapitant Camp. You’ll recall the Luciferic Initiative I referred to earlier? It’s officially titled the Beheadment Initiative—the law of the land now. Human women deemed attractive enough for Preeminent classification must
all
be beheaded, and the process functions twofold. It’s a constituent of their punishment, and while the wares of their wombs supply the lucrative gourmand market, their heads provide an exclusive construction component.”

Again, you scarcely hear Howard, your attentions fixed instead on the troop of headless women shuffling out of the complex. Moments later, several hunched Imps in laborers’ garb exit the complex as well, each pushing wheelbarrows
full
of Human female heads. As the barrows pass, the eyes on the heads all hold wide on you.

“Why, why, why?” you plead.

“It’s elementary, Mr. Hudson. Lucifer
loathes
the Human Damned, but this unadulterated hatred burns exponentially hotter for the Human
Female
Damned.” Howard pauses at a trapdoorlike window in the iron wall. “This may afford you an acceptable view . . .”

He raises the square metal viewing port and holds your gourd-head up to look.

Beyond the Barracks stretches a region of barren land that must encompass several square miles. The parcel is circumscribed completely by a high fence laced with barbs and within they trod aimlessly in a vast circle: tens of thousands of headless women.

“The idea enthralls Lucifer, that they walk headless for eternity, while their heads live on elsewhere and with equal permanence.”

You’re too appalled to even react now, but you have the creeping impression that there are worse things waiting to be seen . . .

“The
Beheadment
Initiative?” you question, dazed from the sight. “A
law
that all beautiful women come here to be decapitated and . . .”

“All beautiful
Human
women, Mr. Hudson. Lucifer is quite nonchalant about
Hellborn
females. His utter hatred for Human women in particular is plainly explicated. You see, it was a
Human
female who destroyed his original abode, the 666-story Mephisto Building. This cunning female—whose name it is forbidden to speak or even think—undermined Lucifer’s most powerful defenses and turned his monumental edifice of evil into a pile of rubble, and she did so with
white
magic, not black.”

You gulp. “So now he takes it out on every drop-dead gorgeous woman in Hell?”

“Yes, and to quite an effect. Remember when I inferred: two birds with one stone.” Howard smiles. “Be patient, Mr. Hudson, and you’ll learn more in due time.”

Metal pots along the corridor sputter with burning pitch. You watch the shadow of your own hideous head bob as Howard leads you down a labyrinth of squalling hallways and, at last, into—

“This is the initial processing point. The consignment we just saw entering? Here’s where they come first,” Howard explains.

You peer in through the ragged metal doorway . . .

All sixty-six women have been laid on a wide conveyor belt, with hip and neck girds to keep them in place. Midway along the belt stand two Imps in white lab coats. One wields a pair of scissors the size of hedge clippers and perfunctorily cuts off a woman’s head while the other places the severed head between the woman’s legs for further transport. At the next work station two more demonic surgeons slip metal tubes into each of the woman’s breasts and the breasts—amid a wailing motor noise—quickly deflate.

“As you can see, first the heads are removed and then vacuum-powered cannulae are inserted into the breasts, to draw out the valuable mammary glands, which are sold to Surgical Salons for implanting—”

They chop off their heads and liposuck their tits
, the grueling fact sinks in.

“—after which they’re conveyored to the next available Impoundment Block,” Howard finishes and reembarks down the corridor.

Every so often, as you’re taken deeper into this nefarious network, wheelbarrows full of mongrel newborns are rolled briskly past by more Imp and Troll laborers. You don’t have to ask where they’re going.

“And here,” Howard announces after a long spell of walking, “is a typical Block in full swing . . .”

Your now-numb eyes look in to behold the spectacle: a long, low-ceilinged room containing exactly sixty-six gynecological beds, complete with stirrups. Each bed is occupied by a squirming, decapitated woman, legs forced apart and ankles locked in the stirrups. Most of the occupants display varying stages of pregnancy, and the few who don’t are being vigorously copulated with by a variety of sexually enhanced Demons, Trolls, and Imps. Many possess genitals like veined batons of meat, while others brandish odd, ridged tubules of flesh with nozzlelike coronas. Several even have penises with
faces
on the end.

“Each Impoundee is subjected to fornication on a fastidious level, until pregnancy shows. Then they merely wait out their term until the process begins again. And as for their
heads
, well, I’m sure by now you’ve taken proper note . . .”

You have. The severed head of each “Impoundee” is evident, placed atop a pole set back several yards between the subject’s spread legs.

“It simply wouldn’t do to merely use their bodies as production vessels; it’s very important to Lucifer that the conscious head of each woman be forced to
watch
the entire process; in fact, our Master
delights
in that particular effect. Not only is each woman forced to watch herself be raped by monsters, she is forced to watch herself
give birth
to monsters. Over and over and over again.”

“How long . . . do they have . . . to stay here?”

“For sixty-six full terms,” Howard enlightens.

One woman, bloated as if to pop, shudders on her table, while her accommodating head screams in agony. The belly quakes, then collapses; a basket on the floor catches the squalling newborn and afterbirth. Not a minute passes before the viscid monster-fathered infant is tossed into a wheelbarrow, and not another minute before a heavily genitaled
Sex-Demon steps up to begin the fornication period anew. Meanwhile, the head of a woman several beds down is shrieking like a machine with bad bearings, the medicine ball–size belly tremoring. When a lab-coated Imp with goggles comes to inspect, he calls out, “Womb-Press, rack forty-nine,” and then instantly a great piston-backed droning is heard. Overhead, on a geared rail, the oddest device clatters along: like an inverted metal salad bowl stemmed by a greased screw. Eventually the “bowl” positions itself directly over the squirming woman’s great, bloated belly.
Oh, my God
, you think when its function finally occurs to you. The screw begins to turn, lowering the bowl until it presses tight against the monster-filled belly.

Lower. Lower. Lower.

You close your eyes for you cannot watch the entire process, but you do hear the escalating shrieks and then the finality of the great
SPLAT!

When your eyes reopen, the dizzy, headless woman is no longer pregnant, and already the demonic newborn is being spirited away in a barrow.

“Take me the fuck out of here!” you yell.

Howard rolls his eyes, scratching at some tiny red pocks on his face that appear to be ingrown hairs. “Really, Mr. Hudson—was the profanity necessary? And, truly, I regret your distress, but it’s necessary that you recognize the systematics that exist here. You must
perceive
Lucifer’s ultimate ideal of pursuing an order of faith antithetical to God.”

“Fuck that shit,” you cuss again, and now even you are shocked by the sudden use of the vulgar. “This sucks. None of this makes any sense—”

“Excellent! You’re beginning to comprehend!” Howard enthuses, taking you out.

“It doesn’t make any sense at all for Lucifer to go to all this effort to do all this evil stuff!”

Howard continues to beam. “Exactly! Because, antithetically speaking, the absence of logic is the
perfect
logic in a domain that must exist contrary to God!”

Your confoundment dizzies you when Howard finally wends you back outside into the creeping scarlet daylight, and as you move away from the Barracks, the wails of newborn Demons and the shrieks of women in labor follow you like an atrocious banner.

Still, details bother you, and now that the shock of your witness is past, you slowly observe, “They use their babies for the ‘gourmand market,’ and they use their mammary glands for demonic implants, and once they’ve had sixty-six babies, their headless bodies are sentenced to eternity in the Decapitant Camp. Have I got it right so far?”

“Quite,” Howard confirms.

“So . . . what happens to their heads? Earlier, didn’t you say something about—”

“An exclusive construction component!” Howard continues to be pleased by your attentiveness, but then—

The black static veil crackles and surges and—

Here we go again
. . .

—you psychically plummet into the next stop on the tour . . .

“This, Mr. Hudson, is the second bird from the stone,” Howard intones.

You stare out, mortified, mystified, and transfixed all at once . . .

Krilid rubbed fatigue from his oblong eyes. He waited, sitting on the luminous rim of the Nectoport’s mouth within the sooty cloud he’d found at the prearranged coordinates. He still felt himself psychically recovering from the sheer vision of the Vandermast Reservoir.
Just a great big empty black hole in the ground
, he tried to convince himself. Why should the sight of the place fill him with such dread?

They haven’t told me everything. When will they? This isn’t fair
. . .

He was serving God now, after all, but could God hear prayers from Hell? No salvation would be in store for him upon his Hellbound death, so . . .

Do I really need this?

But when he wiped his brow, which the Head-Bending had transformed into a warped cone, he remembered his true motives.

One way or another, I’ll make them pay for what they did to me, and if I die trying? So what?

When one was unfortunate enough to be
born
in Hell, there was not another Hell to follow in afterlife. Only the sweetness of nonexistence . . .

Krilid made a mental note not to forget that. His mood improved at once.

BAM!

More reflex than the awareness of danger flung his runneled hand up to fire the sulphur pistol. Blackish glop and curls of tentacles flew all about, some of the glop slapping him in the face. Frowning, he wiped it off on his sleeve.
Great
. . .

He’d almost sensed rather than seen the repulsive Levatopus that had crawled out of the clouds. Had he been a second late, the gravity-defying encephalopod might have wrapped about his head and driven its beak through his skull, to suck his brain.

Like a candle, he’d blown out his Hand of Glory—it would be needed later, and evidently there was a shortage of them. “Frugality of resources,” Ezoriel had phrased it. “Not one of God’s gifts to us may ever be used unwisely. Gifts taken for granted offend the Lord.” Krilid figured that was the Fallen Angel’s way of saying the Contumacy itself as well as all the other Anti-Luciferic Units were sucking wind and shit out of supplies.

His Troll’s belly squirmed; he was famished, and worse, thirsty. He smirked to himself for not retrieving the pieces of the Levatopus before they’d floated away. He could’ve squeezed the juices out of them, which were better than nothing. But then a bleak joy kindled in his nine-chambered heart at the familiar humming and then the verifying sound—

Sssssssssssssssss-ONK!

—and then a terrifying CLAP! cracked in the air along with several blindingly bright flashes like a camera flash, only the light was a gooey green.

The open mouth of another Nectoport now hovered just before Krilid’s.

The grand figure moved forward, and the lightlike voice: “Grace be unto you, Krilid.”

“And you, too, Ezoriel.”

Try as he might, the more Krilid stared at the Fallen Angel’s face, the more impossible it was to actually see. He could see the tall, chiseled body and its toned muscles, plus the straps of armor, and even the burned stubs of Ezoriel’s long-gone wings sticking out over his shoulders. Just never the face.

The perfect Human hand reached over into Krilid’s Observation Port, proffering a small vial. “Fresh, distilled water for you, Krilid. I regret the paltry volume, but . . .”

Krilid’s eyes nearly popped out of his warped head from the delight. “Aw, wow, Ezoriel! Thanks!” He took the vial and gulped it down.

“Only seven ounces,” the Angel’s voice sparkled, “but just as Lucifer finds such nefarious function in the number of his name—six—
blessed
fortune is found in the
perfect
number, seven.”

Guess that means it’s good luck
. Krilid nearly felt drunk from the immaculate water. “God, that’s good.”

“God—oh, yes. His gifts are great.” A pause in the auralike voice, then a sniffing sound. “You expended a round?”

“Yeah. Levatopus. The clouds are crawling with the things.”

“I believe it’s their egg-laying season. But have no fear. God protects those who serve him.” Next, the Angel’s unseen eyes seemed to veer toward the Hand of Glory. “Ah, you haven’t forgotten the necessity to be austere with your implements. God smiles upon such disciplines.”

Does he?
Krilid wondered.
Does he really? Does God even give a shit about me?
“Sure, Ezoriel, but you know, I could use some more rounds for the pistol and rifles.”

Again, the Angel’s hand crossed the Port and handed Krilid exactly one gold bullet.

Krilid laughed. “Oh, don’t empty out the entire arsenal just for me!”