Ignoring her comment, Roger replied evenly, "I was a soldier…killed in what I’m told you people now call the first World War."
Michael smiled. It was the first time Roger had seen the expression on him. "I was in the Gulf War."
"The what war?"
Michael snorted. "I’ll tell you another time. So…a simpler gun for you, huh? I recommend a shotgun; very good for close combat."
Combat, Roger’s mind echoed, with a quaver.
"Roger, please, please don’t." Davina held onto his arm. "They’ve already taken my child…I can’t lose you, too!"
"He’s my child," Michael spoke up. "Mark is my son—just so you know."
Davina flashed her eyes onto him, blacker than twin gun muzzles. "He’s as much our son as he ever was yours."
"Listen…" Michael began.
"I would prefer a .303 Enfield," Roger broke in. "But a shotgun would do."
Michael again showed Roger that little smile, then turned to instruct the Demons.
And so, it was a 12-gauge pump-action Ithaca that the Angel took from one of the Demons and passed into Roger’s hands. He was seated as he examined it, but his severed leg had already almost fully reconstituted. "I suppose I expected a break-open style shotgun."
Michael reclaimed the weapon, showed him how to work the slide, and fed a series of shells into it before he handed it back. "You just stick close to me. I’m hoping they’ll be too afraid to oppose an Angel. But…they may have the attitude of that octopus thing, and think this isn’t for us to interfere in. And then they may try to stop us."
Roger rose from the chair, and looked past the Angel at Davina. "I can’t bear the thought of it either, my love. Our dear boy inside that thing. In their hands…"
Her lower lip was trembling badly and she turned to face the wall, arms tightly crossed as if to hug and console herself, but said nothing more. And a moment later, she gave a little nod.
"Hey. Can you really do this?" Michael asked.
"Yes," Roger said without hesitation, sounding a bit insulted, but Michael persisted.
"It’s been a long time for you."
Roger held his stare, took in a long breath. "There was a German soldier…maybe ten years younger than I. We found ourselves face-to-face. His Mauser was covered in mud; had jammed. My Lee-Endfield had run empty. But I still had my bayonet, and he did not. As he tried to clear the round, I sort of thrust the rifle at him without aiming. The bayonet went into him directly under his right eye. It forced the eye out, onto his cheek. The blade slid out and he sort of turned away, stunned…and began shrieking. My German isn’t very good, but I know the word ‘Mutter.’ He just staggered off holding his face, crying that word again and again like a child. Which he was, really."
"And what did you do?"
"I walked after him…and I stabbed him in the back. He fell, and I stabbed him again. And the crying stopped."
"Yes," Michael said, nodding. "But—did you kill him then because you hated him, or because you pitied him?"
Roger flicked his eyes away, and to Michael that was enough to answer the question. The story, meant to illustrate his toughness, had betrayed his compassion—simply in the fact that he recalled it so vividly at all. But he muttered, "These things aren’t men. They don’t even have mothers." He thought of the way his Davina had been used. "Not really…"
"Yeah. But they have a Father," Michael said. "And I could care less." He hadn’t taken his eyes off the other man. "So—are you ready to get our boy back?"
The British man met the American’s stare again, startled by his phrasing.
"Let’s go," Roger said.
««—»»
As they started off down the street, Roger and Michael glanced back to see the two skeleton beings carrying out the mummy-wrapped package of their fallen leader, to load upon the animal-drawn metal carriage. Roger felt relief that the things were not remaining with Davina, while Michael felt a funny twinge of regret. Had the Demon helped him out of sympathy, or merely out of spite for his Father? Either way, the Demon had been judged to be too human-like…and in doing so, his Creator had only proved Himself right, by pushing the creature into a human-like act of vengeance.
It wouldn’t have been unusual for an Angel to be seen walking along the streets of a city in Hell carrying an assault rifle in his hands, but to see a Damned man striding beside him (with a faint limp) openly carrying a pump-action shotgun would be quite the shock—had there been anyone on the street to witness it. The citizens were still keeping themselves out of sight, though the Skull’s crew seemed to have taken aboard all the prisoners they intended to. But Roger glimpsed a figure ducking behind the edge of a second floor window, and realized he was at least being peeked at around makeshift window shades, and through cracked doors, by his bewildered neighbors—perhaps alarmed by his actions, perhaps stirred.
"That brand on your forehead," Michael said. "It stands for your sin…"
"Atheist," Roger stated.
"And your wife…uh, girlfriend. H?"
"H is for Hinduism."
"Does Mark have one on his head?"
"Yes. A U—unbaptized."
Michael made a hissing sound. "His mother—my first wife—wouldn’t allow it. I could shoot myself for listening to her. Not that it would kill me, now. It’s my fault…my fault, for giving in."
"As you said, we don’t make the bloody laws. You mustn’t blame her. Or yourself. It isn’t his father’s fault…it’s his Father’s fault." Roger nodded his head upward, as if at something hovering unseen above them. "Anyway…if it’s anyone’s fault that Mark is inside that place now, it’s mine. I didn’t protect him well enough. I shouldn’t have let him go into that alley ahead of me. I should have said we’d stay in the alley for an hour or so, until the Skull’s crew had finished rounding up their prey."
Michael looked over at him as they strode side-by-side. "Now it’s you who’s talking shit…because it seems to me, you and your lady back there have been doing a very good job of looking after him. Thank you."
"Guilt," Roger mused aloud. "Yours. Mine. His. He torments himself, you know, over what happened to you and your second wife. The fire he caused."
"He torments himself," Michael repeated, making a wincing expression. "I’ve got to reassure him. I have to show him that Dawn and I still love him—could never blame him for that." After several more steps he said, "When we first got to Heaven, I guess my wife and I were…humbled. We tried to accept our fates, our Father’s judgment…to trust in the system. We settled in a town called Nepenthe. I chose it because it has features that reminded me of places Mark loved. A park, with trees. A mall. Huh. Heaven’s full of shopping malls. Anyway…it wasn’t any solace. It only made my loss sharper, until I couldn’t take it any longer. How can they call it a Paradise, when I’m grieving every day because my only child is trapped in Hell? How can I call that place my home for eternity, without him?"
They turned a street corner, and found themselves at the end of that long, wide avenue as open as a plaza. At its other end, the huge bone orb rested in a little crater of shattered flagstones. In dropping, it had even caved in the front of a brick building facing onto the plaza. Not only had Iblis Al-Qadim prompted it to land, somehow, but that hinged skull-plate had lowered open, a hatchway. Steam was billowing out from inside. How long before those aboard the craft were able to override the mental command the governor had given, or repair whatever damage he might have caused? Might the craft be borne aloft again at any minute?
Michael tossed Roger a glance again, and the British soldier looked blanched, the shotgun drooping heavily in his hands. But the man’s wounded stride didn’t waver, and Michael felt an odd affection suffuse him. Who was he to question his resolve, or abilities? He had obviously killed more men than himself in battle, in a war more earth-shaking than his own, which Michael was a bit crestfallen to know Roger wasn’t even familiar with. The affection Michael experienced was like that he had felt for other
warriors, walking beside him many years ago. Like the affection he might have felt for a brother.
Together, they reached the lip of the hatchway…together, walked up through the steam’s obscuring clouds.
7: Unholy War
Just inside the shell of the Skull, the two humans encountered three Kilcrops bent over a series of valves, one of which was leaking steam around its edges and another dripping a greenish fluid. At the sight of the men with guns, they froze with their hands on the great valves’ wheels. One of them held a large wrench, but didn’t raise it as a weapon. Despite their surprise and paralysis, the naked creatures—bony and sunken-faced as starving children—suppressed cackles and giggled behind their fixed grins.
The men moved past them carefully, and left them behind in the steam. Michael said, "Maybe I should’ve killed them so they wouldn’t raise an alarm. But the gunshots would’ve done the same…"
Their path branched off into different directions immediately. Narrow corridors, some with walls of metal but one with walls apparently carved or grown from the same bone substance as the craft’s exterior. A metal ramp rose toward a higher level over there, but over here was a flight of metal steps, and then they saw a metal spiral staircase in the distance, in the light from a caged gas jet in the wall. Roger was about to ask which way they should choose, when they both heard an echoing, haunting cry. It was a woman screaming, apparently off down that bone corridor. They headed that way.
They moved through a mist not so much of steam, now, as incense. Whereas in the more mechanical sections of the Skull bluish gas jets burned along the walls, in the long bone corridor there were organic-looking sockets or hollows in the wall in which burned candles or the incense they smelled. As they proceeded, they heard more reverberating banshee shrieks, from both men and women. So far, none of the cries sounded like the voices of children.
Toward the end of the bone corridor there were two rounded doorways on either side, facing each other. Michael and Roger exchanged looks, then Michael swung into the threshold on the right while Roger did the same on the left.
Michael saw three white Xs floating in the murk of a smallish room. They were the spread-eagled nude bodies of three women, their wrists and ankles shackled to a trio of metal hoops hanging on chains, the ends of which were lost in the darkness of a surprisingly high shaft. When they saw the Angel, they whimpered and sobbed, no doubt thinking he was here to enjoy their torments along with their Demon captors. Their weeping alerted a grotesque tick-like creature, the likes of which Michael hadn’t seen before, bent over a table spread with gleaming metal instruments that it didn’t even seem to require, since its various pairs of arms looked sufficient for any torture it might devise. The entity whipped around, and just from the way it raised its bladed forearms—and from the way its nearly translucent belly was a bottle filled with blood, and the way the three women dribbled blood from various puncture wounds on their bellies and thighs—Michael decided to pull his trigger, and the M16 was set to fully automatic, and the stream of lead caused hunks of chitin to spring into the air like shattered pottery. He drove the tick against its counter of tools, which spilled over it as it fell dead…blood gushing from the broken bottle.
Understanding now that the Angel was not here to partake of their punishments, the women began babbling at him, pleading to be unshackled. "Just shoot through my wrists and ankles," one women begged, wild-eyed, "I’ll heal…it’s okay…shoot me down, please!"
Her request stunned him, until he was shaken by the sound of a shotgun blast, and he spun toward the doorway. "I’m sorry—forgive me," he mumbled too softly for the women to hear.
In the opposite room, Roger had found an elderly man lashed down onto an iron bedframe. The man’s decapitated head had been placed on a shelf several feet away, but rubber hoses and segmented metal cables had been inserted into the stump of its neck, connecting the head to the trunk. The head’s eyes streamed tears as the old man watched two ticks that had bent over him, one with a tubular proboscis plunged into his thigh and the other snipping off his fingers with one of its pincer limbs.
Despite the horrors he had been witness to—and himself suffered—over the decades, Roger was dazed by what he saw. It was Michael’s gunfire that shook him out of his stupor, and even as the two ticks jerked upright at the sound, Roger fired at the one on the right with his shotgun. The weapon jolted in his arms, but the tick jolted even more—exploded across the wall behind it like a water balloon full of gore. The one on the left flew at him, arms spinning, so fast that he barely had time to swing the gun in its direction. He stabbed the thing with the barrel as if there were a bayonet at its end. The blow was only enough to make the Demon stagger back a little, but it gave Roger time to pull the trigger again, and the point-blank eruption of fire and OO buckshot obliterated the top half of the monster.
Roger whirled with the shotgun leveled as he heard a third presence behind him, but he was able to restrain himself from shooting when he saw that it was Michael. "Come on," Michael, the seemingly older of the two men, directed him, and they stepped back into the corridor and emerged from its end. Roger heard the old man’s severed head calling after him.
The next hallway was wider, running transverse to the one they had just exited, and they entered at its midpoint. From its high ceiling, metal cocoons hung in two rows of a half dozen. They were like iron maidens, and both men wondered if there might even be spikes inside them, or if these were merely holding vessels until their human contents could be properly tortured later on. The cocoons dangled and swayed like a strange crop of fruit, emitting a chorus of sobs and pleas. The two men passed under them, toward another doorway at the right hand end of the hallway.
The left hand end of the hall was nothing but a mass of twisting steam, and the men pivoted around when they heard a clatter of armored feet and the chitter of inhuman voices within its depths. Then, they were bursting out of it: three smaller ticks, not yet gorged and slowed with feasted blood, so swift that even though both men fired upon them simultaneously, the sound of their combined thunder deafening, they only just barely cut the things down before they reached them. The last of the creatures skidded to a stop at Roger’s feet, causing an array of spent 5.56mm and shotgun shells to scatter. Now the air was misted with gun smoke in addition to the steam and incense.
"Who are you?" a voice called from one of the cocoons above. "Are you rebels?"
"We’re looking for a boy!" Roger shouted, not sure which of the containers the man’s voice issued from. "Eight years old…"
"Not that way!" the voice yelled down, meaning the right hand path they had chosen. "The other way—into the steam. There were children in these things just like twenty minutes ago, but the bugs switched our places."
"Why?"
The unseen speaker seemed to hesitate. "It’s their turn."
Michael snatched Roger by the arm. "Thanks!" he called.
"Just kill these fuckers!" the disembodied voice replied.
They plunged into the hot steam, apparently originating from a ruptured pipe above them, and could see nothing for several moments except for three evenly-spaced, orange-glowing smudges along their right side. When Michael got close to them, he discerned three tanks set into the wall, containing a luminous orange fluid in which three human faces—flayed from their skulls—were suspended on wires. Though the staring eyes did not follow him and the slack mouths had no muscles to move them, he knew there was a living consciousness in each of the masks. The bodies they had been sliced from had been incinerated, so when these scraps of flesh were eventually freed they would regenerate into their complete human forms again.
Regarding the faces as they regarded him, Michael was momentarily transfixed with horror, and not for the first time felt a vague kind of shame for being an Angel. But mostly, he was just grateful that he didn’t recognize any of the faces; none was that of a child. Tearing himself away, he left the apparitions behind him.
Roger was the fir
st to emerge from the steam, and as he did so heard a whoosh, a curved sword missing his neck by two inches as it cleaved the air. It was a blue-skinned Apsara, her eyes and tusks gleaming. She reminded him uncomfortably of his Davina: the sensual curves of her nearly naked body, her general facial features, the large eyes and heavy brows and thick black hair, the Demon’s swimming in the air as if each strand had its own independent life. He hesitated for only an instant, but that was too long for Michael, who let loose with his M16. With just a grunt, as if punched in the stomach, the female Demon was slammed backwards into a wall. She left smears of red on it as she sank, her animated hair falling in lifeless curtains to obscure her face.
Michael spotted another Apsara hovering in a doorway, a spear in her fists, but either his gun or the fact that he was an Angel caused her to duck back out of sight before he could swing the rifle her way. Roger approached the open threshold and peeked in, wary of the succubus, but he obviously didn’t see anything encouraging, since he waved for Michael to continue onwards.
The hallway dead-ended in a high curved wall. The two men realized they had reached the opposite side of the Skull, but a spiral staircase with steps that clanged under their boots took them up to a metal catwalk. They crossed this, back into the fog of escaping steam, feeling their way along by holding onto the catwalk’s railing.
Behind them, they heard more feet clanging on the steps of the spiral staircase. These new feet struck the metal with a lighter but sharper sound. In only seconds, there were many of these ringing footfalls…accompanied by the rustling sound of multiple bodies scraping against each other, and a chorus of whispering, chittering voices…
Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Page 14