Tour of Duty: Stories and Provocation (28 page)

BA-Boom!

The massive explosion blew a huge ball of dust into a rising cloud, followed immediately by a concussive slam that shook the ground and punched his ears. Overpressure slapped him with hot gas and ammonia. The explosion would be the calling card of the Supervising Legal Airborne Group, SLAG, dropping aerial judgment on the opposition.

Then it got quiet, very quiet, and not just only he was partly deaf. There was no opposition left alive anymore.

The deafness was always temporary. Hell liked its residents to experience every sensation to the fullest, like that Britney Spears song playing incessantly at full volume for a week. He’d never get that insipid tune out of his mind.

Benet had been blown flat, and no one was disposed to help him up.

Captain McCarthy took over, with his helmet off, slicking his hair.

“We are here to provide the damned with the benefits of modern legal judgment and, I hope, to promote the American way of life. I—”

“Shut it, Taildragger Joe, America ain’t no part of perdition,” someone shouted.

McCarthy spun, snarled, seemed to realize there was nothing he could do about it, and gritted his teeth. His speech shifted to practical matters.

“Before we start, let’s find a building and organize our files. Thurmond, go ahead, please.”

Catcalls went up throughout, though they’d all known this was coming.

The crusty old sergeant bounded away with two flankers. It was hard not to respect Strom Thurmond, even if he was a stubborn old womanizer. The man had volunteered for the Airborne in WWII while in his forties, then served in the U.S. Senate until he was over a hundred.

Roger grabbed his ruck, gingerly easing it on his blistered and battered shoulders. He found his pogo stick (sadly still functional) and joined the rest of the CLAP bouncing into town. His slung rifle banged his shoulder and head with every leap, until he was in a murderous rage.

Up ahead, Sergeant Thurmond had picked a convenient building from several still standing. It was of low, thick brick, on the near edge of this once-sprawling hive of scum and villainy. Once within a hundred yards of it, Roger gave up bouncing. Holding the stick over his shoulder like a ladder, he sprinted for the designated headquarters through the jolts of pain. He tumbled through the doorway in a tangle with Horace and McCarthy, who never waited to be last.

Benet, the jackass, was at least was man enough to wait outside until they entered, counting them. His bushy beard fluffed with every word.

The bombardment and confusion seemed to have given them a hiatus. Troopers stood watch at the high windows. Medics treated casualties.

Roger waved one nurse away: he didn’t need a clumsy lawyer-medic looking at his knee. The knee was intact; little would improve it; and, with no anesthetic, treatment would be agonizing.

Speaking of which, Henry Summers looked pretty bad. Half his face had been shot off. Now the remaining face was healing, crushed and twisted, with a drooling smile that exposed broken rear molars on the right side. Missing teeth and crushed bone made his jaw asymmetrical. Added to the wrinkled ruins of his leg and torso, Henry’s situation was nightmarish.

Henry would adapt to it. Roger would get used to it. Eventually. But not quite yet. Roger dropped his eyes and busied himself with his gear.

Everyone was preparing for the next phase of their mission. They carried the necessary legal codes with them, in those brutal ALICE packs. Roger reached for his, safe in a lockbox with sharp corners, then bound in an accordion file, sealed with a Perdition Seal that whoofed into flames when he released it so he could access the several binders within. The acrid smoke from the seals was something he was used to. He wondered if that would change shortly.

Each of them carried two hundred pounds of documentation. All documents must be accounted for, because those were their only references: the infernalnet was, of course, unreliable, even if they could get signal out here. Pages were always out of order. Any file might contain any page, in different fonts and spacing, so it was hard to tell which followed which. It was an administrative nightmare.

Right then, McCarthy screamed like a girl, and kept screaming.

“Nooooo! Eeeaaaaeeiii!”

They all stared at him. Had McCarthy melted down again? On McCarthy’s pants were telltale stains of wetness at the crotch. Wonderful.

“Sir?” someone asked. “Captain?”

McCarthy hummed or cursed to himself and nobody else spoke or moved for far too long.

Finally, Benet stepped over and lifted the cover letter from the dirt floor of the makeshift headquarters. Smoothing out the wrinkles caused by McCarthy clutching it like a doll, Benet read aloud:

“The operative legal code of the day is that of the USSR, nineteen sixty-five.”

McCarthy was curled on the ground, whimpering, “Commies . . . commies . . . commies . . .”

While Benet alternated between cajoling and kicking the worthless old radical, Roger sorted his papers, leaving appropriate gaps where pages were missing.

Crooked-legged Horace and Rehnquist, the CLAP’s paralegal, came around to sort, stack and box. Boxing was necessary to keep the papers in order, but the boxes were held together with duct tape that had degraded in this dusty, gritty hell of hells. Horace and Rehnquist did the best they could. Roger snuck his phone behind his raised knees. Perhaps there might be some brief infernalnet connectivity. Worth a shot. He slid out the keyboard and pulled up DisgraceBook, on the off chance of connecting. He recognized no names. He had fifty invites for IQ tests, questionnaires, and suggestions of people to dis. He clicked on the first one of those.

The page came up on his screen, where a grizzled old man leapt naked out of a bathtub. The nude senior snagged an old Garand rifle from the corner, hurling enough invective to merit notice even in hell, and rasped, “Get off my page!”

Roger snapped the phone closed.

Quiet persisted until a relief platoon of infantry arrived to assist with insecurity. They remained outside for the most part. He avoided meeting them, but caught a glimpse of them when their lieutenant came in to talk to Benet.

Infantrymen spent the afterlife getting shot up. One—with dark, curly hair and a Greek accent—was horrifically scarred. Disfigurement was part of this hell. Roger wondered if he’d eventually end up like the Greek. He tried not to be disgusted by the poor guy and dreaded lunch.

As always this year, lunch was a stiff stick of jerky and a piece of dry bread. So was breakfast and dinner. He sighed as he chewed slowly, wondering when the menu would change, and to what. Last year they’d had only raw tuna, past its peak. One ate because nerves and habits compelled it—if you could. Some guys in hell had no stomachs; some had no anuses. Some starved to death, becoming more and more helpless and easy prey in the process. . . .

“Howard, wake up,” someone snapped, too loud.

He jerked upright. He’d been napping against the wall, and now had a crick in his neck.

McCarthy glowered at him and moved on.

“Yes, sir,” Roger said to his back.

Next to him, mashed-up Henry said, “Get ready.” Roger knew what Henry meant. He turned away, trying not to look at Henry’s twisted face. Poor bastard.

Get ready—to work. Hell might have too many lawyers, but none were in residence here. The locals wanted their grievances heard. The CLAP would hear every one, rendering injustice as best they could.

Horace limped outside on his bent leg, carrying a roster, so the locals could lodge their complaints and seek resolution.

The good part was that the shooting had stopped. The bad part was the cases ranged from sad to bizarre to disquieting.

McCarthy grabbed the first dozen and read them off. Then . . .

“Next we have a classless action lawsuit by the remaining eight lives of a hell-kitten for attempted genocide of mice; suit brought by the tabby hell-kitten (striped wings and all) called Lucky, who wanted to grow up; with a countersuit by a certain desert hell-fox, who determined that life number three was the tastiest and he had been unfairly deprived of it. Howard, can you handle this?”

“Yes, sir. I can.” You knew you were in hell when you were a lawyer defending talking animals with manners no better than drunks. “Yes, sir.”

McCarthy read on: “A Mohammed (. . . why is every third male in hell named Mohammed? . . .) alleges that a prostitute did not give him, and I quote, ‘a poetically succulent release,’ and did give him several nasty diseases. She says because in hell orgasm . . .” McCarthy hesitated over the word, “. . . is commonly unattainable, and the diseases were the weekly special, she’s innocent: she only provides a service. Benedict?”

“I can do that, sir.”

“A certain former presidential candidate, Democratic (presumably a Communist), insists an election wasn’t run fairly. Regulations say that elections in hell are supposed to be unfair. I’ll take that one.”

Roger felt sorry for everyone in that case. McCarthy would rant.

Benet said, “And here’re our primary mission orders.”

You could hear a feather drop as he ripped open the package. These were never good. A flash and a strong whiff of sulfur attested to its authenticity.

Benet scanned them, sighed in relief, and read aloud: “We are to bring back the head of the most honest man in hell for deposition.”

“It’s a trap!” McCarthy scoffed. “An honest man in hell?”

Roger muttered, “
Certainly neither of you
.” Nor himself, but he was honest enough to admit it.

Horace said, “Evil and honesty don’t have to go together. The only hurt I caused was some fractional percentage of shortage to the IRS. It benefited my clients. I was not very evil in that context, but I was certainly dishonest.”

McCarthy asked, fairly lucidly, “Who are we going to find here who’s evil but honest? Peter the Great? Julius Caesar? Those Greeks from that famous battle?”

Horace said, “I can get on the infernalnet and see who’s here.”

“Do that. You young kids know how that stuff works.”

“Yes, sir,” Horace agreed, though he was fifty at time of death. “Young” in this case meant “more current.”

The next morning, in a red-painted mudbrick hall, domed and spired, Roger conducted his trial as barrister for the tabby hell-kitten named Lucky, using the legal code of the UK, 1923, complete to powdered wig. Standard procedure, most days, but today the minor demon serving as judge was glorying in his role.

“Your Dishonor, we—” Zap! Lightning singed Roger’s butt. “Your Dishonor, we object—” Zap! Zap! “My Lord Judge, we propose—” Zap! Zap! Zap!

At noon, the code switched to that of King Kamehameha of Hawaii. Roger steeled himself for horrors to come. The Hawaiian death penalty was even more terrifying when you knew you couldn’t die permanently from it.

Mercifully, he was able to argue the winged hell-kitten’s case well enough for it to be dismissed before the Kamehameha rules kicked in. He doubted that poor little Lucky would really enjoy his victory, since after his eight more legally-mandated lives were lived, the hell-kitten faced innumerable lives with no legal protections: the restraining order against the hell-fox would lapse.

That evening, back in the CLAP’s compound, now wired and sandbagged, they chewed their jerky and discussed their mission.

Benet said, “Satan wants the head of the most honest man in hell. By specifying head, should I assume he wants it
sans
body?”

“I believe we must, son,” Sergeant Thurmond drawled in his scratchy voice; ancient skin wrinkled around his beady eyes. “I always take His Satanic Majesty at His word.”

“The next question is: who‘s the most honest man in hell? Accepting that ‘good,’ ‘honest’ and even ‘kind’ don’t necessarily overlap, who would meet the criterion of ‘honest’?”

Roger thought about that. Nearly every damned soul in hell thought he was doomed unjustly to eternal torment; they sinned and died and sinned more and died again; the damned dead never learned; new sinners arrived constantly. Everybody in hell lied constantly, if only to himself. So could there even be a soul in this area of hell who was honest?

Horace said, “I have it: Ghandi.”

Roger tried to smile but smirked instead. “Gandhi. Of course.”

McCarthy muttered, “That swarthy little Communist bastard.”

Roger didn’t think Gandhi qualified as communist. The father of nonviolence as a political strategy, yes. Liberal, certainly. Pacifist, mostly. Of course, McCarthy accused everyone of being a communist.

Benet said, “I have only heard the name.”

Roger said, “In India, Ghandi promoted passive disobedience against tyranny. He helped lead people to independence from the British. Nonviolent. Persuasive. Unassailably consistent in his beliefs.”

Benet snorted, but said, “He certainly sounds promising. Where do we find him?”

Horace said, “I believe he’s right downtown, protesting something.”

Hardly surprising.

The day turned cold; its chill bit Roger’s lungs. He wished for an overcoat. Benet had that wool uniform, which must be horrible in the heat—certainly it smelled that way—but would be wonderful now.

They met no resistance on their way “downtown.” Factions abounded in Kabum; after their landing the day before, they were just one more clutch of damned souls from everywhere. Distant battles raged, as residents of hell fought over metaphors or territory or eye-color or infernal affiliation: men made hell familiar, and war was familiar to every soul from every era.

They walked downtown. Roger preferred the blisters from his boots to yesterday’s parachuting and pogo-sticking. Streets here were convoluted and narrow, and of course their maps were wrong. So they walked in the general direction of downtown, among mudbrick facades and teetering high rises with blown-out glass, guided by eye and ear and instinct to where the damned were congregating.

They found an open plaza surrounding a parliament building: in it was a flagpole; on the pole flapped a tattered flag showing a black devil dancing on a red mountaintop: the symbol of Ashcanistan.

Only the flag was familiar. Roger wasn’t familiar with Kabum. They’d not been briefed for this foray. On the whole, the town felt ancient, but then there were the gutted Soviet-style high-rises with shacks between them . . . stupidity from every age, chockablock on the streets.