The Fall of Hades (3 page)

5: THE GUN

The woman, who henceforth thought of herself as Vee, lurched back from the keyboard, crouched for action, looking this way and that. She expected to find one of the skeletal Demons risen and confronting her, not so dead after all, but this wasn’t the case. It was only a moment before she espied the true source of the moaning. She had spotted the gun before—a two-handled thing like a compact rifle, with a blocky front and short shoulder stock—hanging in a bracket on the wall just above the computer station, and she had meant to take it with her if it still functioned. But she hadn’t noticed, before, that a segmented cable ran from the gun into a port in the side of the computer. And she hadn’t noticed that a living eye with a red iris stared out of the left side of the gun, because until now that eye had been closed.

An eye also stared now from the computer screen, entirely filling it.

She saw that the eye on the screen moved just as the one in the gun’s flank did. The same red iris. Both eyes blinked.

“Why did you wake me?” said a rusty-sounding voice, croaking from disuse.

Vee hesitated, then stepped a little closer to the mounted gun. When it had spoken to her, she had noticed for the first time the lips set into the left side of the weapon—a vivid pink against the gun’s white body—as they moved. The eye, situated toward the front of the gun, and the pink mouth, situated more toward the back, were both recessed in circles like sockets in the gun’s material, which Vee now understood was shaped from bone, not really white but ivory-hued like the computer keys. The bone was grooved with striations, like those in something that had
grown
, and even bore squiggly sutures here and there like those demarcating the plates of a skull.

“Sorry,” Vee said, at a loss. But then, “Who are you?”

“I am the weapon you are viewing. I have a serial number: J611821.”

“All right—but what are you? Are you…someone like me, in there?”

If she wasn’t remembering her life, at least some shards of her afterlife were reassembling themselves, her memory in this case sparked by this surprising encounter. And the reason she asked if the speaker might be a soul like herself was because of the images that were coming back to her now. She recollected that prisoners of the Demons were sometimes tortured by having a portion of their body removed (the rest of it destroyed in some way that it couldn’t regenerate from, the body always tending toward regeneration from its largest fragment, favoring the head), this fraction integrated into some object from which it couldn’t escape until these torturers reversed their surgical artistry. A street might be paved with flagstones stretched with skinned and cognizant (if mute) human faces.

(And she had a mental picture of insects like huge crimson millipedes appearing from gutter grates to swarm over the faces, in and out of mouths, nibbling at nostrils from the inside and out.) A troop of Demons might wear boots made out of “living” skin, the tortured subjects not only humiliated in this way but feeling the grinding tramp of each foot fall, a human eye centered atop each boot like a decorative bauble. She recalled that an eye seemed to feature in most of these hideous artworks, as if that were a prerequisite for binding a soul in this manner.

But the gun replied to her question, “No. I am a Demon.”

“A Demon? What did you do to be imprisoned in this form?”

“I am not imprisoned; this is the form in which I obtained consciousness. I am a living instrument.” The gun didn’t have to qualify this statement to stress that it meant “living” in the sense that any consciousness could be thought of as alive in the afterlife. “You have been isolated here a long time, haven’t you? I recognize you. Did someone release you?”

“I freed myself. But my memory is mostly gone. I don’t know my name, or even my father’s, in
cell
U
. Do you know our names?”

“I do not, offhand, but I do know that your father was hidden away here because he was greatly hated by the Demons who utilized me. He was an evangelist in life, do you recall that?”

“Vaguely.” Those murky visions of her father on television. Later, Vee standing at his side, with other white-robed followers.

“Yes, in life an evangelist, his sermons transmitted across his land.

Because of this, in Paradise he was a high-ranking Angel, and he came here to Hades leading an army of other Angels like himself who volunteered to take part in the Great Conflict, and subdue the rebellious Damned and Demons alike.”

Angels. Damned. These designations resurfaced dimly in her mind.

“So then, am I Damned or an Angel?”

“You are an Angel. You fought at your father’s side, a captain in his army.”

“Me?” Vee couldn’t reconcile this information with her current psyche. Was she capable of such zeal? Apparently so, but she didn’t feel any yearning to reclaim her former position, or the fervency that had engendered it. Leading people, belonging to a group unified by an ideal?

Maybe it was the ages of isolation she had experienced, and the erasure—purification?—of her mind that made the notion actually seem repugnant to her now. In any case, she asked the gun, “What’s this Great Conflict?”

“You have indeed forgotten a lot. And in a sense, slept through much besides.”

“So you were one of those who captured me and my father and held us here. We couldn’t die because we were already dead, but we could be contained and punished.”

If the gun felt any nervousness or defensiveness, its uninflected voice did not betray it as it replied, “Yes, but I am only a tool, designed and created as such. I am not trying to exonerate myself, only to inform you of simple facts.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t plan on taking revenge on you. It looks like someone already killed my captors, though when they came through here they either missed my father and me or else they just didn’t care about freeing us. Do you know what happened then?”

“I do not, at least in my personal memory. I was engaged in the Mesh at that time. I can withdraw into the Mesh again and try to access that information if it’s there somewhere.”

“The Mesh?”

“It is a system of information recording and exchange, that can be accessed through machines like the one you summoned me with, or directly entered by entities like myself who have been designed, or have been adapted, to do so.”

“It’s the Internet, then.”

“That was the model. Damned humans helped allied Demons in developing it. It had been begun at the time of your capture but has been refined since. My function was twofold; I was created as a weapon, but also as a portable information source for the Demonic soldiers who carried me and my kind. There are abundant access ports throughout the Construct through which the Mesh can be entered.”

“The Construct?”

“Ah, so much you have missed. Or are missing. I could answer your questions until the end of time, it seems.”

“Please help me. I know you were an instrument of my enemies, but I mean you no harm. And I’m sorry I pulled you out of the Mesh. I didn’t realize.”

“It’s all right, madam. I have been lost in the Mesh a long time, but it is a pleasant place to be lost, like sleep filled with dreams, though the dreams are more like the dreams of others that I am privy to. When you are through with me, if you kindly return me to the Mesh I will be grateful, but it will be…interesting to encounter this more tangible world face-to-face again.”

Vee didn’t want to remind the gun that it had no face. She said, “So you are willing to help me for a time? As a weapon, too, until I can find a weapon that isn’t sentient?”

“Very well. I am a tool and have no personal politics. Anyway, the lines of the Great Conflict, never less than complex to begin with, broke down more and more over the span of time it covered until there were no longer armies, only tribes. But I think it would help to educate you on the basics of how mortals entered into Hades—what is was like before the Construct. For that is the name we know Hades by now.”

“Why?”

“First, the basics, if you will. I know this will not enlighten you on your own entrance into the afterlife, because you were one of the Creator’s blessed followers and thus became an Angel upon your earthly demise, but it will still be educational, I think. It is a recording I encountered in the Mesh and stored in a file because…well, because I found it interesting. I relive it and other interesting recordings I have plucked out of the Mesh, when I want to be entertained by dreams as my consciousness floats adrift there. They are like bright fish in an ocean that sustains me. You do recall oceans?”

“Yes, but not in association with any personal memories.”

“Ahh…if only I could say I had known oceans. But that is what the Mesh provides me—the opportunity to experience, as if they were my own memories, things I never could otherwise. Such as mortality. Or having a body like yours. When I move throughout the Mesh, I often use an avatar form of my own creation, and that is an albino dolphin. It is a creature that intrigues me. No limbs and simple in form, like me, but free to move of its own will.”

“It sounds like a blessing and a curse, being what you are. Do you ever resent the form you’re in?”

“It is the only form I know. Mostly I feel fortunate, because of my access to the Mesh, though even in the generally placid Mesh there are sometimes frightening and dangerous entities roving about, minds that can overpower other minds.”

“So what is this recording you think might educate me?”

“Educate you in part. I will go on further from there. It is a recording of the memories of a Damned man. A mixture of memories from his childhood, his mortal adulthood, and his advent into Hades.”

“How or why was this recorded?”

“That I can’t say. High-ranking Demons with the ability to scan his mind with their own might have captured him and done so, or connected him directly to the Mesh and plumbed his mind that way. Or, he may well have connected to the Mesh himself somehow. I’m not sure at what point the recording was introduced to the Mesh, only that it represents a time period long ago, before the Construct, and when the Great Conflict was still very new.”

“All right, then, how will you show me this? Will I have to enter the Mesh with you?”

“You are not adapted to do that, and there is no equipment here of the type to adapt you, so I will show you on this terminal’s screen all that the man saw for the duration of the recording, and you will hear all he heard.

His thoughts, however, I can experience but you can not. I can only relate them to you verbally, during and after the recording, to share with you anything you might miss.”

“Okay. Thank you, truly.” Vee seated herself in the chair from which she had removed the Demon whose clothing she had donned. “What should I call you, by the way? Do you have a name?”

“Only my number, J611821.”

“Um, that won’t do,” Vee said. “I’ll call you Jay.”

“As you wish,” said the gun with its impassive equanimity, and then its magnified eye vanished from the computer’s oval screen and was replaced with images from a distant past.

6: THE END OF THE LINE

The end of the world overtaxed even the resources of Hell. Heaven, Adam couldn’t speak for, as he had never seen it. Never would.

Portals were interspersed throughout Hades, through which the Damned would arrive. Typically these consisted of a smallish chamber lined with white ceramic tiles, into which the Damned would materialize in the mock physical form they would inhabit for the remainder of eternity. These chambers usually only delivered one soul to the netherworld at a time. There would be a metal hatch with a wheel in the center, and this valve would turn and the hatch open and a Demon or Demons would take hold of the newly deposited soul and drag him or her out into a new reality that fortunately turned a good number of them instantly insane.

After this, the Damned would line up in long queues, at the head of which sat a number of administrative Demons with black, mantis-like bodies but huge bulbous heads like that of an octopus, and yellow-glowing eyes that drilled into the very core of each person brought before them. Maybe they were census takers or record keepers, or perhaps they judged the dead, for after their scrutiny each prisoner was branded on the forehead with a letter that indicated the principal crime for which they had been damned. Then, carrying a new black uniform they had been given, the Damned were herded off into trains that would transport them to an institution at which they would be schooled in the ways of Hades, and instructed in self-disgust, self-recrimination. After graduating from this infernal education, these lost souls would be turned loose to wander the limitless landscape of Hades, seemingly free, but only free to experience this region of sorrows rather than that.

When the world was destroyed, however, too many souls poured into Hades to be processed in such a leisurely fashion.

At first, Adam could make little sense of what they had done to enlarge this portal so as to better accommodate the influx. He could make little sense of anything at all, other than the pain that filled his body.

“Pain” was too slight a word to convey what he felt, “agony” insufficient; there had been no word in his mortal life to express it. When they materialized within a portal, the Damned took the form they had been in at the moment of their death. Thus, the logjam of newly Damned now squeezing through this floodgate to Hell bore the wounds of debris thrown from nuclear blasts, or burns from radiant heat, varying in severity depending on how far they had been from the epicenter of the explosions. Many had been vaporized entirely. They manifested as little more than a spot of jelly, primal cells that rapidly divided until the mass gradually took a human shape—seemingly an accelerated birth—though the process felt like an eternity to these individuals, as every one of their nerves was alight with fire, and the other souls trampled upon them as they were nudged out of the mouth of the portal by the masses of more and more new souls appearing behind them.

Adam might have toppled to the ground and writhed there, had the bodies of his fellow sufferers not borne him up and along in a living current. He was blind at first, but his eyes regenerated swiftly—which was not a merciful thing, as it allowed him to see the condition of his body. Not that he needed eyes to tell he was a walking cinder, with red cracks at his joints as if his core were molten. He wanted to shriek his anguish, but his vocal cords were charred. The air was full enough with screams already, a deafening wailing—like the single howl of one vast, burnt and bloody cater-pillar-like beast—so when he was finally able to add his own voice to the cacophony he couldn’t even be sure his throat was emitting anything.

In the beginning, those who bore him up did so mainly by accident, with the press of their bodies, oblivious to him in their own pain. But as the wide column crowded forward, some of those who had been less injured—killed by radiation poisoning, for instance—consciously helped their more afflicted comrades along. Alternating between staggering, shuffling and stumbling, his naked flesh still scorched but his joints at least now flexible, Adam felt his arm being taken and turned his head a little (an excruciating mistake, as he heard his crisped flesh crackle) to see that an Asian man was lending him support. The man’s face was too grave to offer a reassuring smile, however, and he had a bullet wound to the temple that had already healed to a mere depression. Self-inflicted, of course.

“Why?” cried a young black woman pressed to the other side of Adam, too absorbed in her own distress to lend him similar aid. “Why?
Why?
”

Adam didn’t know why he might have been damned to Hades, either.

He had never committed any notable sins. Trifling theft as a child. The usual extent of lies. He had never raped or killed, beaten a woman or child or animal. But he would learn that only the very devout, of a single particular religion, would be permitted entry into Paradise. And thus, the gates to Paradise, though also necessitating expansion, were far less numerous and far less choked than these that gave entrance to Hell.

At first, he thought they were survivors of the apocalypse, evacuating town in mass exodus. But when he could see again, he saw that the sky was capped impossibly with a ceiling of molten lava. He saw distant mountains, glassy and black as obsidian, and
volcanoes disgorging billows of yellow fumes, and on the horizon, an immense and towering city, its uppermost spires even piercing and disappearing into the glowing ceiling of magma. And then there were the creatures, the
beings
, that flanked and herded the wide and seemingly endless river of naked, sobbing humans.

These beings were a little shorter than Adam, like giant albino locusts with folded wings, walking on their hindmost pair of legs, while their upper limbs carried black iron spears or a variety of clubs that they used to prod and threaten the people along. The insect entities had two small horns atop their heads, with blank bony masks for faces, and soulless eyes like pink glass spheres that glowed dully from within.

No, Adam understood, especially when he saw the Demons. They were not survivors. But they were not really dead, either.

*  *  *

Like most Americans, Adam watched the beginning of doomsday on television.

They weren’t sure precisely who had set off the explosions simultaneously in
Washington, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, but it went without saying that it was terrorists, probably using nuclear weapons concealed in car trunks, or even suitcases or backpacks. Apparently there had been more bombs set off in other countries, as well; after it began, it was hard to keep track of who was doing what. It appeared, though, that once things were well underway, and there was no going back, nothing more to lose, anyone who had missiles to deploy unloaded them on the enemy they had always most longed to attack. Pakistan launched everything they had at India, for instance, but not before India ensured that Pakistan would disappear from the Earth. It went from politics and religion to mere spite in the end. A desperation not to go down alone. A drowning man, Adam had heard it said, loves company.

(15th Century Qur’an commentator Al-Suyuti had written that in Paradise, “The penis of the Elected never softens…Each chosen one will marry seventy
houris
, besides the women he married on earth, and all will have appetizing vaginas.” But soon the terrorist martyrs would be standing in queues in Hades alongside their victims, looking around in dismay as if to say, “Hey—where are the appetizing vaginas?” Only to have a Demon’s iron pike poke them in a most unmanly fashion.) As he watched a growing number of TV stations turn to static, outside Adam heard a few distant but unmistakable bursts of gunfire. Now that there was nothing left to lose, long-simmering hostility was no doubt being vented on a more domestic level. Neighbors shooting longtime annoying neighbors. Wives shooting longtime abusive husbands.

Adam had called his sister. They had talked and cried together. He had told her he would call again, but he wondered if that would be possible, or even if he could find the strength to do so. He had called his mother.

She had cried in a softer, more fatalistic manner—her voice washed out and weak, as if she had already been consumed and it was her ghost he was speaking with. As they spoke, he recalled vividly—like a flash of memory in a dying mind—standing beside her rocking chair as a young child, and twisting a strand of her hair around and around his finger while she watched TV. Her hair had been long and dark then. Years later his wife would be fond of his habit of absentmindedly twisting a strand of her long dark hair around his finger, too. That is, back when she had still felt any kind of fondness for him.

At least his mother would be with Adam’s younger brother at the end.

He talked with his brother briefly, too. They made their voices brave, calm, but Adam heard his brother’s voice crack when he said he’d try calling back later. Like his sister, he knew this was their goodbye.

The Boston TV channels went out. Adam lived in
Eastborough, Massachusetts. He pulled back a window shade to look out at the late afternoon sky. Was the sunset unnaturally red and tattered behind the town’s silhouetted church steeples?

Adam felt a numbness that he supposed was akin to his mother’s weary acceptance. After all, hadn’t the past couple of years been one drawn-out, personal Armageddon for him? Two years ago, his wife had asked for a divorce. They had always argued, but the primary reason she gave was that she wanted children (they had found that Adam was infertile). Adam had suspected that she was having an affair with a coworker, however, and so one night he had gone through the motions of heading off to his graveyard shift job but had sat in his car down the street watching the house. After seeing the suspected party admitted into his home, Adam had waited a bit and then let himself in, to find his wife favoring her coworker with a sexual act that did not involve her appetizing vagina and would surely not result in the production of children.

He had wanted to keep the house, so he had refinanced and taken out an additional fifty thousand dollars so as to pay his wife for her share of the equity. But later, he had found it hard to support mortgage payments of almost two thousand dollars a month, and after a year of this had decided that he must throw in the towel. With the house market as poor as it was, the best solution seemed to be a “short sale,” letting a realtor step in and negotiate with the lender to take over the house, so that Adam might walk away free of his debt (if free of any profit), rather than let things go into foreclosure. Adam had moved into a studio apartment in town, and rented a storage unit for most of his belongings. He had thought the process would take a month or two at best, yet here it was already nine months, and the short sale people hadn’t managed to attract an offer that would satisfy the lender. And during all this time, Adam had moved only a fraction of his belongings from the house to his storage unit. Tomorrow he would deal with it. He’d devote next week to it. And yet the house still sat there only partly emptied, as if he still lived in it. His life felt fragmented between the house, his apartment and the padlocked box.

Worse, he and his wife had a dog, a beautiful white
Akita with a black mask. She was generally a sweet, loving animal, but she
was
an Akita, and one time his wife’s new boyfriend had teased the dog by trying to snatch away a grape it was nosing around and the dog had bitten him, the wound requiring stitches. The boyfriend wouldn’t permit Adam’s wife to take the dog, so Adam had kept it for as long as he had hung onto the house. He couldn’t have it with him in his studio apartment, however, nor could he find any affordable apartment in the area that would allow a large dog. So for all these nine months, the dog had continued to live alone in the abandoned house while Adam sent e-mails and made phone calls, trying to find a place—a kennel, a shelter for unwanted animals, some organization—that would take the dog in, help find it a new home. But with her history of violent behavior, no one wanted to take such a risk. So twice a day, in the morning and night, Adam walked over to his house and took the dog out to do her business. He might stay long enough to wash some clothes, refill her food and water bowls, then he’d leave her alone again, with a radio on for company. She would often snatch up one of her ragged toys as he left, and play with it by herself, still hyped up by his visit. But he wondered how long that enthusiasm lasted as the lonely hours dragged on until his next brief visit.

As he gazed out the window Adam thought of his dog alone in the house, maybe with the radio channel no longer playing. Outside, distantly, he heard people gathered in the center of town singing. Right now they were singing John Lennon’s
Imagine
. He wanted to laugh at that.

The utilities were still on in the old house—if unpaid. He told himself he hadn’t wanted the pipes to freeze, and he needed electricity to wash his clothes, but the truth was he worried about his dog. She needed to be warm. Needed to hear that radio.

There were still some cans of food over at the house, but Adam packed his car with much of the contents of his fridge and cupboards. He took a last look around his studio apartment, gathered up a scrapbook of family photographs but took nothing more. He shut off the lights, expecting never to return to the studio apartment again.

It was a short drive; just a few streets away. He soon came in view of a shopping plaza that could be seen from both his apartment and his house, built within the past two years. It had proved an overambitious project; a building containing luxury condos anchored one end of it, and only two or three of these had been occupied. The plaza was laid out in imitation of a quaint little village, and was very pretty, if very desolate—only a third or fourth of its store space had been rented. It was like a microcosm of his country, a broken down ghost town already fallen to economic apocalypse before the bombs had even started flying.