The Fall of Hades (13 page)

23: THE PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS

Replacing Jay’s eye on the screen was a kind of large, circular pool, more of a gigantic cauldron, Vee decided, its rim raised up a little above a floor of metal mesh, while the bulk of the cauldron’s body was below this raised floor. Spaced along the circumference of the pool were maybe thirty or more of the Demons she had seen in the memories of the man named Adam, with their white, grasshopper-like bodies and small bone horns on their heads. They carried long iron pikes, and her first impression was that they were stirring the steaming, yellowish broth that filled the vat. Well, some were stirring, to break up sludge that formed on the surface, but most were jabbing, as if trying to spear fish. Vee’s eye-brows knitted over her nose as leaned in closer to the screen.

She started when something like a flayed, horribly maimed seal threw itself out of the cauldron onto the mesh floor, its gelatinous body steaming. Two of the insect Demons speared it simultaneously, and levered their pikes to topple the blob-like form back into the broth. The thing thrashed as it sank—or melted—away.

A thick, quivering scum accumulated around the edge of the pool, though there were also floating islands of this. The pikes broke up the scum near the rim, but the islands were beyond reach, and occasionally the beginnings of living forms would rise up from these mounds, flop and writhe, before tumbling down into the liquid again or being reabsorbed into the general mass.

Vee continued to watch, as through a doorway two more Demons arrived dragging a slight young man between them. He was naked, his head hanging limp, all resistance beaten out of him. He barely seemed to notice as they manhandled him to the edge of the pool, and shoved him over the edge.

His body sank, steam rose up and briefly a flailing arm before it slipped back under.

Acid, Vee realized with horror. And those flopping little desperate attempts at life—they were the souls of the Damned, trying to regenerate, but being prevented by the ring of Demons that guarded the acid bath.

“Fuck
me
,” Vee breathed. “So whose memory is this we’re seeing?”

Jay’s voice from the speaker replied, “This is not a memory; it is a security camera view of events transpiring now, two floors above us.”

Vee hissed something that wouldn’t even become a word.

Jay went on, “This tub was once probably used to dispose of expired or faulty matter. Later, I’m certain it was used during the campaign to liquidate all the humanoid Demons, beginning with the ones in the process of being grown in this city. Even the humanoid staff of Tartarus, themselves. But now, it would appear these drones are trying to diminish the ranks of the Damned, either out of revenge or simply because the Damned in their numbers—and being immortal where they are not—pose a continuing threat to them. It could be, too, that they are merely operating on mindless programming.”

“It’s horrible…it’s just too horrible. Please tell me these Damned aren’t formed enough to have nerve endings that can feel pain.”

“I couldn’t say. But their souls are surely in distress.”

Vee looked up at the shedding scales of the blistered ceiling. This grand nightmare, only two floors above her head?

“I’ve got to try to do something,” she said, mostly to herself.

“Do something? Do what?” Jay almost sounded shocked, and exasperated. “Do you see how many of these drones there are? It’s a hive of them.”

“I’m immortal—they’re not.”

“Don’t let it go to your head. They’ll throw you in that acid, too, and you’ll be an immortal smear on its surface. Don’t be foolish, madam. Do you think you can save every beleaguered soul in Hades?”

“How many people are in that soup already? Thousands, maybe?

They could’ve been in there for
centuries
—and those monsters are hunting down and adding more all the time. It has to stop.”

“Very well; someday you can lead an army back here to rescue them.

But for now…”

“What is it, Jay? Are you afraid of getting killed yourself, or are you afraid I’m going to kill your Demon buddies? I thought you said you have no politics.”

“I do not. But that also means I do not subscribe to your politics. I have acquired a rough blueprint we can follow toward the upper levels—level 128, and Freetown. I suggest we stick to that plan.”

Vee glared at the screen again. The bullet hole was positioned over the center of the acid bath like the heart of a whirlpool. A vortex that sucked her in.

“All I need for you to do right now is help me find my way two levels up,” she said in a flat voice.

“I am sorry, then. I will not print out the blueprints. I will not share that information. I can not take part in these actions, because they are in no one’s best interest. Not the Damned, because you can’t possibly do anything for them, not my own, and yes, not these Demons’ either. And certainly not in your own best interest. You want me to help you? I will help you find
Freetown.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Vee cursed. “I’d like to think you’re worried about me, but right now I don’t know about you, Jay. You’ve gotten pretty cocky since I first met you. You were afraid of me then, but you saw me help those two purple Demons back there and now you think I’m soft. Or else it’s you who’s soft. A cowardly, pacifist gun.”

“I am only being logical where you are being impulsive.”

“Maybe I liked you better when you were afraid.”

“You may like me or dislike me as you please,” the Demon said cooly.

“Nobody likes a disobedient gun.”

“If a gun is all I am, then you may pull my trigger all you want and I can’t stop you, but I don’t have to talk with you any longer.”

Vee spun away from the screen. “Okay, so don’t help me, then. But I’m coming to get you now—and I’ll find my own damn way up there.”

She strode to the open doorway of the laboratory, stepped out into the corridor, and stopped short only several feet away from a strange white figure, shorter than herself. It whirled in her direction, the pink globes of its eyes luminous. Up close, she saw that the exoskeleton of the locust Demons had a rough, spackled texture, looking oddly more like plaster than glossy chitin.

In one of its four upper limbs, the creature carried a kind of metal truncheon, that it swung at Vee’s head viciously, though the creature itself—without any features below those huge eyes—made not a sound.

Vee ducked under the swing. Jay was in the other room, and the Beretta was inside the stitched-skin pouch slung over her shoulder, but the Ka-Bar combat knife was in its sheath on the outside of her leg. Still in a crouch, Vee drew the knife and lunged forward with it, punched the long blade into the creature’s thorax. One of the multiple arms seized her hair in its pincers, and another clawed at her cheek, raking her skin deeply, but she pulled the knife out, drove it in again, and again, snarling as she did so. The Demon tried to bring its iron club down on her head, but she blocked its arm with her forearm, stabbed the knife in one last time and then the two of them fell away from each other. Vee dropped back onto her rear, her hands braced behind her, while the mute entity crashed onto its back, kicking crazily with all six limbs until they gradually stilled, gnarled in the air like the fingers of a giant skeletal hand. The pink glow of its eyes faded away, leaving its orbs dark as dead light bulbs.

Vee got up, bent over the thing to retrieve her knife from its mid-section, saw how the overlapping wounds she had inflicted had torn the creature open. Its interior was like the paper layers of a wasp
’s nest, no viscera—or much of anything, really—inside, though she had obviously inflicted enough damage somehow to kill the insect golem.

Lest the Demon be too soon discovered, Vee sheathed the knife and then took hold of its legs, dragged its scarecrow-light body into the laboratory in which she had left Jay. She then turned to see his Cyclops eye watching her actions from the static-shot screen.

“We had best be going quickly,” his distant-sounding voice advised.

Was his tone a touch chilly?

“Why?”

His eye was replaced by a security camera shot of a cluttered corridor, two patrolling drone Demons advancing along it, both of them carrying those black submachine guns she had witnessed in the recorded memories Jay had unreeled for her. Jay’s voice said, “This is a corridor that adjoins the one directly outside. The drones are headed in this direction. If you move quickly, we can return to the elevator and hope that it’s resumed working.”

“And if it hasn’t?” Vee asked, and then she froze, as one of the drones stopped abruptly in the corridor and turned its face up toward the camera that was obviously set close to the ceiling.

The image flicked back to Jay’s eye. “Stupid of me,” he said. “It noticed that the camera had become active. Really, we need to go.”

“Right,” Vee said, but she had another idea. She disconnected Jay from the Mesh and let his interface cable snap back into his gun’s body.

Then, she darted back into the corridor, but instead of heading toward the bridge that crossed over to what had once been a neighboring building, she plunged into the other laboratory she had investigated. She dropped down to the floor, dragged the fallen file cabinet closer to the ventilation shaft she had uncovered, and then crawled into the shaft itself, through the thick, dry bed of weeds that grew up from its floor. She reached out awkwardly and pulled the file cabinet a bit nearer to the opening, to hide it from a casual observer, and then faced forward again to scurry deeper into the shaft’s cramped darkness, its cool breeze stirring up the musty smell of the colorless vegetation she crushed under her palms and knees.

24: THE SHAFTS

She crawled in utter darkness, wincing at the crunching/rustling sound her progress made but there was no avoiding it. Soon she became aware of occasional slithering motions across the tops of her hands that did not seem to be merely tickling stalks of the vegetation. In her head flashed images of the huge red millipedes she had recalled nibbling on Damned imprisoned as flagstones, but Vee had the intuition that these were instead something generated from the Essential Matter, simple creatures like those barnacle-things she had seen, except mobile. She shuddered, but despite her revulsion hoped she wasn’t squishing any of the creatures, in case they were indeed something born of the Creator’s essence.

The only light that entered the shaft, far-spaced and feeble, came from other ventilation grilles that looked into illuminated rooms. More labs and offices, stripped and trashed, a few even with bright urban-style graffiti on the walls like the “tagging” of youth gangs.

Then the shaft came to a dead end, which Vee discovered by bumping her forehead into a metal wall. She cursed under her breath, thinking she might have to backtrack (and move backwards to achieve this) until a subtle breeze made her realize that a vertical shaft opened above her head.

She was able to stand and stretch her back, and stare upwards into the shaft, dimly lit by the light of more grilles. There was no ladder affixed to any of the sides, and the grilles were too widely spaced to use for handholds.

Fortunately the shaft opening was low enough that she was able to climb up into it by bracing her hands and feet against the sides. To gain better purchase, she had removed her tall, heavy boots and crammed them partway into her pouch, or her “pocketbook from Hell,” as she now thought of it. Once into the shaft, she braced her back against one side and bare feet against the other, and began pushing herself laboriously upward, this enterprise causing her to grimace and curse more to herself. But again, fortune was on her side that she didn’t have to climb up this chimney-like branch of the ventilation system very long before encountering the opening to another horizontal section. She maneuvered into it gratefully, further grateful to find that its floor was devoid of any vegetative growth, cool bare metal alone under her palms.

Progressing forward again, she was able to slide her lower body across the smooth metal plates rather than crawl, and found this caused the plates to creak less under her weight. Again, some of the grilles spaced along either side permitted some degree of light into the shaft. Behind the grates, more of the same: research units emptied or turned upside-down by looters, salvagers, or in the heat of ancient battles.

But one grille she paused to glance through made her recoil sharply, before leaning closer again more stealthily so as to gaze into the room beyond…a room that was neither trashed nor unoccupied.

A figure in a white lab smock sat in a chair in front of a handsome computer with a translucent amber-like casing through which one could view the machine’s brass mechanisms, black rubber hoses and the orange-glowing embers of its circuitry. The figure’s form was entirely anthropomorphic, at least appeared so in its smock and the white dress shirt and dark pants it wore underneath, except for the jarring effect of its head.

From its white collar sprouted a bouquet of squirming tendrils, black and glistening, as if some kind of sea anemone had been grafted onto a man’s neck. But Vee saw that the hands were in keeping with the head: numerous boneless tendrils spread across the computer’s brass keys.

More unsettling yet was that another of these beings occupied the room, apparently at rest, though at first she had thought it was dead or the victim of some torture. This figure hung upside-down, bat-like, from a pipe running across the ceiling, the tentacles of its feet coiled around it.

Weirdly, its arms were flat against its sides, as if to keep its lab smock from turning inside-out, but the Medusa-like tentacles of the head hung straight down, motionless in sleep, and had swollen perhaps with blood to twice the thickness of those of the seated figure.

Vee heard the plate under her knees buckle a little, and drew back from the grate as a single tendril of the seated figure swivelled in her direction like a periscope. She held her breath, didn’t dare move even to withdraw further. After several moments, however, the worm-like appendage relaxed its rigidity and returned to its normal undulations, along with its neighbors.

Vee inched away slowly, slowly, then returned to her sliding advance.

Well, now she knew, anyway, that the simple drone Demons were not the masters of this territory, that somehow some of the Research and Development Tower’s scientists still survived, still maintained equipment, maybe even continued in their diabolic experimentations.

Further on, the shaft ended in a T, merging with a crosswise shaft. It was like a fork in the road. From the right-hand branch came a cool, pleasant breeze. From the left issued a stink like ammonia that made Vee’s eyes sting. Acid fumes, she realized.

“The vat is to the left,” Jay told her softly.

Vee had already deduced this, but nevertheless said, “Thank you, Jay.”
And though she hadn’t been sure she still wanted to find the acid bath—had only been intent on not being found by the Demons’ patrols—she took the left-hand branch.