Suicide Girls In The AfterLife (4 page)

Chapter 10

   A second later the elevator comes to a stop and the doors open onto a floor that doesn’t look very different from mine. A little more rundown, but that’s about it. The four of us tromp out and then split up, knocking on doors and trying to get people to join us in our little rebellion. Mostly people just give us weird looks and politely refuse. A couple times we have doors slammed in our faces. A few of the guests won’t open their doors at all, but yell curses at us just the same.
   We go down to the next floor and find it to be even more raggedy than the previous one. Here the wallpaper is peeling off the walls and the carpets have stains and cigarette burns and the room doors are all dirty. The lights in the ceiling fixtures flicker sporadically and on more than one occasion we find ourselves in almost complete darkness.
   Again, we have no luck and pile back into the elevator, both Ago and Jane 62 becoming increasingly nervous.
   When the doors open on the next lower floor, we see that it is in even worse condition than the last. The ceiling leaks and the hallway is strewn with trash. There’s shouting coming from behind several of the doors, as well as the sound of people weeping. I go to knock on the door of room 256 and the only response I get is something thrown and smashed against the other side of it.
   At the far end of the hall, two guys come running out of a room, one chasing the other with a huge meat cleaver and screaming, “I’ll chop your fucking head off, you prick!” The first one plows into Katina, almost knocking her over and then barrels down the hallway towards me. I flinch as they race by and then they run into another room, slamming the door behind themselves.
   “Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea,” Katina calls down to me.
   I open my mouth to agree, but the door behind me suddenly swings open and I turn to see an older woman standing there in a slinky red robe. She looks somewhat like Marilyn Monroe, if Marilyn had lived to enter her mid-fifties and drank hard liquor every day of her life. She’s smoking a cigarette in one of those long cigarette holders and looking at me from beneath eyelids painted a ridiculous shade of blue.
   “What’s this you’re yelling about, honey?” she asks, exhaling smoke through her nostrils.
   “Uh…” I hesitate, but then tell her about what we were doing. She listens silently, smoking, without expression.
   “Sounds like a real gas,” she croaks, when I finish. “I ain’t got nothing better to do.”
   By now, the others have joined me and are regarding this woman with blatant skepticism.
   “What’s your name?” I ask, out of politeness.
   She grins at me, showing off her yellowed crooked teeth. “The name’s Lithia, darlin’. And who might you all be?”
   I introduce myself and everyone else.
   “Pleased ta meet ya,” she greets everyone in turn. Then: “Yep, I reckon I’ll come along for the party. I’m sick to death of this hellhole. You’re all from above, eh?”
   I tell her that Katina and I are, but Jane 62 is sort of an employee of the hotel and Ago is from Purgatory.
   Lithia nods. “Gotta be better than this shit. You see where they put me? Only a floor or two above Hell, that’s where. Those fucking bastards. I was a Rockette once upon a time and this is how they treat me! Look at these yams!” She sticks out one of her legs and wiggles it seductively. We all make sounds like we’re impressed but, really, it just looks like a leg. A little scrawny if anything.
   The two guys who were chasing each other fly out of their room again, this time the previous chaser is now the chasee and his meat cleaver is buried deep inside the back of his head.
   We watch them go by, all of us horrified, except for Lithia. “Oh, don’t mind those two,” she says. “They’re just playing.”
   “Maybe we should get off this floor,” Jane 62 suggests. “I think I’ve seen enough of the lower floors for now.”
   “Great idea, missy,” Lithia says. “Lead the way. I’m right behind ya.”
   “Don’t you want to put something else on?” I ask.
   “Nah. This is all I got anyway. What I was wearing when I did the ole…” She points a long-nailed finger to the side of her head and mimes shooting a gun.
   “Suicide, huh?” Katina says. “There’s a surprise.”
   “Suicide-murder,” Lithia says with a tone of pride. “That no good bastard had it coming though, I can guarantee you that.”
   None of us care to ask her to elaborate, so we just smile and nod and then head back towards the elevator, Lithia bringing up the rear in her bare feet.
   When we get into the elevator, though, we quickly discover that it won’t go back up. All the buttons to the upper floor remain dark when we push them.
   “It’s because of her,” Jane 62 says, pointing at Lithia. “It won’t let us go back up with her in here.”
   “Well, don’t that beat all,” Lithia says mildly, dragging on her cigarette. Even though she keeps smoking, the cigarette doesn’t seem to be getting any shorter.
   “What should we do?” I ask no one in particular.
   The elevator suddenly jerks to life, going down.
   

Chapter 11

   “Uh oh,” says Jane 62.
   “We’re fucked,” Ago agrees.
   Katina starts laughing yet again and everyone looks at her like she’s crazy.
   “You have a weird sense of humor,” Ago tells her.
   She makes a face at him, but then bites the inside of her cheek in an attempt to quell her giggling.
   The elevator door opens, this time with a strange hissing sound and the scent that wafts inside is unmistakable.
   “Oh, man,” Ago says, pinching his nose closed. “Brimstone!”
   Katina loses her struggle and busts out laughing. She’s practically falling over, she’s so hysterical.
   Outside the elevator, the sounds are not nearly as identifiable as the smell. There is the sound of screaming, but it’s hard to tell if it’s human. Could be animal.
   The hallway in front of us is even more dark and gloomy than the floor above us was. So dark that you have to squint to see anything at all.
   “I’m not going out there,” Ago says, punching the elevator buttons, trying to get the door to close.
   Katina pushes past us, and goes out into the hallway. “This isn’t real,” she yells at us, grinning like a lunatic. “This can’t be real! Don’t you guys get it? It’s like…a dream or…”
   A shadow—moving fast—slams into her and explodes on impact. At the same exact instant, any meager light source out there is extinguished.
   Out of all of us, Ago is the one who screams.
   “What in the name of holy hell was that?” Lithia asks.
   I jump out of the elevator to the place where Katina just was, expecting to have to run in either direction, either to avoid something or to search for her. Instead, I trip on something and almost fall. I manage to keep my balance but from somewhere in the gloom on the floor Katina yells, “Ouch! Watch where the fuck you’re walking!”
   “Sorry,” I say, reaching down to where her voice came from, offering her a hand up.
   “Trust me,” she says. “You don’t want to touch me. Oh, fuck, it smells like….it smells like shit! That thing that hit me was made of shit!”
   The lights flicker, threaten to go out again, but stay on, at least for the time being.
   Katina struggles to her feet and sure enough, she appears to be covered in shit. Smells like it, too.
   From inside the elevator, Lithia says, “Oh yeah. I heard of those dung devils before. Never believed they really existed but I guess they do.” She chuckles dryly, takes a drag off her cigarette and then starts hacking. She coughs so long and loud that Jane 62 exits the elevator with a disgusted look on her face. Not an easy accomplishment, considering she barely has features.
   From behind a nearby door, someone lets out a wrenching scream that makes us all jump.
   “This is where people get murdered over and over again,” Jane 62 says nervously.
   Ago cringes in the corner of the elevator and says, “This hotel blows. I’m glad I’m not paying to stay here.”
   “Oh, you’re paying sweetheart,” Lithia coughs. “We’re all paying plenty.”
   As if in response to Lithia’s statement, the elevator begins to shake violently, bouncing around the two of them still inside. Ago falls down and then scrambles out on all fours, his eyes rolling with fear. Lithia seems less alarmed and manages to keep her balance, stepping out into the hall with the rest of us, a sour expression on her face.
   “Piece of shit,” she growls at the elevator.
   The moment it’s empty, the box ceases its shaking and the door slides shut with a clanking thud. Ago immediately begins punching the up button and says, “Sorry, ladies, but even Purgatory is better than this.”
   But the elevator ignores him, refusing to open, and then it is promptly forgotten as a tremendous wind blasts us, blowing our hair and reeking of crap. We all turn as one to see the dung devil, easily as tall as me, round the corner, heading straight towards us.
   A shit cyclone, splattering the walls and everything in its path with feces.
   “That one is bigger,” Katina shouts, turning and fleeing in the opposite direction. It doesn’t take the rest of us long to follow suit, bolting down the hall with the dung devil at our heels, stinking of a Hell we never knew existed.
   In the lead, Katina abruptly slams to a halt and dashes inside the nearest room, which is, thankfully, unlocked. We all make it inside and slam the door just as the shit twister is passing on the other side.
   “Hey, sorry about barging in, man,” Ago says turning to face the inside of the room. “We were just—aw, fuck!”
   The room we’ve just jumped blindly into is littered with dead babies…or, rather, pieces of dead babies. A tiny arm here, a foot over there, various heads, all in different stages of decomposition. Baby parts strewn over the floor, the bed, the desk. There are pieces nailed to the walls and ceiling, like props in some especially gruesome movie. The man standing in the center of the room is naked and holding something in his hands at crotch level, his hips pumping back and forth.
   I blink rapidly, certain that I can’t be seeing what I think I’m seeing, but Katina’s gagging assures me that my eyes are indeed telling the truth: the guy is standing there fucking a baby’s head, slamming his dick into the neck stump over and over, his eyes screwed shut and sweat pouring down his face in rivulets.
   “Jesus, God,” Lithia whispers and Katina starts to scream.
   

Chapter 12

   The screaming is what breaks the man’s trance and he opens his bloodshot eyes to look at us, and then he adds to the screaming himself. “I can’t stop!” he wails as his hips keep pumping, the muscles of his ass clenching and unclenching. “I can’t stop! Can’t stoooop!”
   I feel my stomach lurch and reach behind me to open the door. Dung devil or not, I’m getting out of this nightmare.
   I manage to make it into the hallway before I puke into a slimy trail of shit that travels up the hall and around the corner. The path of the dung devil.
   The others are around me a moment later and someone pats my back. I look over my shoulder to see Jane 62 watching me and shaking her head. “Humans,” she says. I wait for more but then realize that is her entire statement on the subject: just “humans.” Her face remains expressionless, but her tone is one of sad disgust, and I can only turn back to the task at hand and continue throwing up my guts.
   “We have to get off this floor,” Ago says, sounding a little green himself. Katina is freely weeping now, Lithia supporting her with an arm around her waist.
   “There has to be stairs,” Jane 62 says. “In one direction or the other.”
   “Maybe we should split up and look for them,” Ago suggests.
   “No!” Katina and I shout at once. We exchange a glance and know we’ve both seen all the same horror movies where splitting up is never a good idea.
   Ago looks vaguely annoyed but says, “Okay. But either way, we’d better get moving before another one of those shit storms comes around.”
   “They’re the tumbleweeds of Hell,” Jane 62 says quietly, almost to herself.
   Lithia ignores her and says to Ago, “Before the lights go out again too.”
   “Right.” He looks down the hall, first one way then the other and finally shrugs. “Does anyone have a preference?”
   I also look in both directions before pointing to our right. “So far, the dung devils have been traveling that way. I’d rather have them at our back than run into them headfirst.”
   Everyone agrees that this makes sense, so we start off that way, leaving the dead baby fucker’s screams behind us.
   We round the corner and pass a few more doors with weird sounds emanating from behind them, but we keep moving until we see a figure approaching from the opposite direction. The distance and flickering lights make the person hard to make out at first, but it quickly becomes clear that it’s a tall thin male, walking slowly, his face tipped towards the floor, apparently watching his shoes.
   No one says anything at first, all of us silently dreading whatever it is that we might run into next, but the closer we get to the approaching man, the less threatening he seems until finally he looks up and, seeing us, stops.
   “Don’t ask me for any favors,” he says, “because I’m fresh out.”
   Ago and I look at each other warily but continue walking with the others behind us. “Is this the way to the stairs?” I ask the guy.
   He makes an irritated sound. “What the fuck did I just say? Are you fucking deaf?”
   Now that we’re closer, I can see he’s just a skinny Goth guy, dressed in a black see-through net shirt and black pants. His hair is jet-black and spiked and he’s wearing black nail polish.
   We reach him and stop. “There’s no need to be rude,” I say. “It was just a question.”
   The Goth snorts at me, then looks over my shoulder at Lithia. “You got another one of those smokes I could bum?”
   “No!” she snaps at him with such ferociousness that we all look at her. “Why don’t you ask one of your minions?” she asks him. “Or is there no cancer in Hell?”
   Puzzled we all turn back to the guy, who looks genuinely wounded. And tired. There are sagging gray bags beneath his eyes, which happen to be painted with thick lines of black eyeliner. “Fine.” He waves a dismissive hand. “Fuck you too.”
   “Why don’t you introduce yourself to everyone, Lucy?” Lithia says. “No need to be shy.”
   “Wait,” I say, looking the skinny guy up and down. “You’re Lucifer? As in…” I stop myself, remembering how he doesn’t like to be called the devil. “As in, er…the dark prince?”
   He makes a face at me and sighs heavily. “Not what you were expecting? My pitchfork is in the shop right now.”
   I frown. Who would have thought that Satan would be so snotty?
   “Wow,” Katina says, fully recovered from the sight of dead baby bits. “Damn, you’re fucking hot!”
   Lucifer looks at her and smiles slightly. I’m suddenly alarmed to see that he is actually amazingly handsome, if you can get past all the make-up and ridiculous outfit. He looks like a movie star when he smiles.
   “You’re pretty hot yourself,” Lucifer tells Katina. “What’s your name?”
   “She’s fifteen,” I bark at him, as if he would care.
   The smile slips off his face and he regards me with obvious dislike. “Who are you? Her mother?”
   Pushing past him, I ask “Is this the way to the stairs? We’re in a hurry.”
   Lucy laughs bitterly. “In a hurry, huh? To go where? To do what? Don’t you morons get it? You’re stuck here now. With me!”
   “That’s bullshit,” I say. “They said we couldn’t leave our own floors, too, but we did.”
   Ago gives me a nudge and whispers, “Knock it off, Pogue. You don’t want to piss him off. He’s the devil, remember?”
   “I heard that!” Lucifer shouts. “Oh, screw you guys. This is what I get for trying to be nice.” He squeezes by everyone and continues on his way down the hall.
   “He was trying to be nice?” I wonder aloud.
   Katina chases after him, asking, “So, what do you do for fun around here?”
   The rest of us give each other worried looks and follow behind the two, watching as Lucy drapes an arm around Katina’s shoulders. “Oh, you know,” he says. “A little of this, a little of that. Want to see my room?”
   “NO!” I shout, catching up and tugging at Katina’s wrist. “She does not want to see your room. Come on, Katina. This guy is a loser.”
   “Not to mention the anti-Christ,” Lithia adds from behind me.
   Lucifer lets out a huge sigh, as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders. “Don’t be jealous. You can come too. All of you can. Besides, we’re here already.”
   A door opens in the wall where before there was nothing, leading into a room lit with a warm golden light.
   “Fucking cool!” Katina barges forward, completely fearless, and crosses the threshold. My breath catches in my throat, waiting for whatever horrible thing is about to happen.
   But nothing does.