It was an anecdote that his network had not allowed him to relate. Leon had interviewed a father who had found the murdered body of his son, his head hacked open by a machete. A chunk of the boy’s brain lay apart from the body, and there were ants feeding on it. The father said he felt strangely angry at the mindless ants for the way they desecrated his boy, more angry at that moment than at the men responsible for the crime. The father had picked up the fragment of brain to deny the ants their meal, had brushed them off it. And he had saved that piece of his child in a bottle, where it had shriveled like a holy relic, the remnant of a saint. It was a strange thing to keep in order to remember one’s child, but Leon wondered if maybe the father felt his son’s memories of him resided in that scrap of his mind.
Leon lifted his eyes from the stalk, as he fed it like a pencil into a pencil sharpener, to the mirror that was all the Demon had for a face. His own face framed there, serving as the Demon’s. Why? So he would hate himself? A symbol, to show him that he was responsible for his own damnation?
Later, during the rest period that those in this level of lessened punishment were allowed, Leon was told why that woman had had her skull split. She had explained the reason herself to her fellow Damned, now that she was mostly mended already.
The reason the Demon had struck her was that she had seen her face in the mirror, and out of a strange compulsion—a defiance she had not planned—she had stuck her tongue out at herself.
6: Trojan Horse
Gunfire awoke Leon Brown, and he thought he was in Sierra Leone in Liberia in Rwanda in Somalia in New York City. He opened his eyes, sat up on his bunk in the barracks of the Damned. The man who had the bunk above his jumped down, and Leon asked him, "What’s going on?"
"The rebellion!" another man cried, delirious with excitement, as if mere bullets could blast them a hole in the wall of Hades itself. "They’re here!"
They? Who were they? Demons? Damned? Both?
More and more gunfire, from everywhere at once.
A man burst into the barracks, with a submachine-gun in each hand and a revolver tucked in his waistband. "Here! Hurry!" He passed one submachine-gun to the man nearest him, and the pistol to a woman. Another man lunged into the structure after him, with two sawed-off pump shotguns and two semiautomatic pistols.
"Where did all this come from?" Leon shouted.
"A bunch of rebels infiltrated the area yesterday!" one of the men dispensing weapons said. "They pretended to be harvesters, but they had guns in their baskets!"
Salim, Leon thought. Megan. And others he hadn’t met.
But why hadn’t they told him, when they had talked with him? Maybe they hadn’t been ready to reveal themselves yet? Or was there a vibe about him that had made them feel he was untrustworthy? Or at least, ineffectual? The latter was even more insulting.
A shotgun was offered to one older man, but he backed off with his hands in the air. "Don’t involve me! We’re almost phased out of this sector, anyway."
The man offering the gun looked incredulous. "What are you, crazy? We can overthrow these bastards, make them pay!"
"Yeah? Are you going to overthrow the Creator, too?"
"He’s probably a spy," a woman snarled, glaring at the older man. "Is that it, Marty? You one of their spies?"
"What, you wanna shoot me? You want to shoot me, too?" The man named Marty spread his arms wide. "I’m not a spy, but I’m not a fool, either. You can’t do anything except make them angry!"
"Maybe you aren’t a spy," said the man with the shotguns, as he pushed past Marty to approach Leon. "But you’re definitely a coward." Now he offered the sawed-off twelve gauge to Leon instead. "Here, man, come on."
But Leon only stared at the weapon, too.
"What is this?" the woman exclaimed.
"Their spirits are broken," the man offering the gun said in disgust.
The woman snatched the shotgun herself, with a withering look at Leon.
"I just hate violence, okay?" Leon said. "I don’t want to be like they are."
"Are you saying we’re like they are?"
"I’ll come with you. I’ll help free the others. But I’m not killing anything."
"They’re just Demons! They don’t have souls! Anyway…I think these Demons are just machines."
So, Leon wasn’t the only one of that opinion. Still, he wouldn’t take one of the weapons.
But when those who had armed themselves with guns—or with the bamboo legs of tables and bunks—poured out of the barracks, Leon went with them to do what he could. Even so, he felt a bit removed from the action. Like a reporter, just tagging along.
Ineffectual.
7: The Rescued
The streaming prisoners branched off in several directions. Leon veered toward the maze where Dan was crucified to the wall. After all, Dan had been assigned to him. It was Dan he would free.
But just outside the maze, a man plunged out of the mist straight at him, moving swiftly despite his hobbled gait, a sickle in one fist and a wild grin on his face. At first Leon didn’t recognize Dan, because he had only ever seen him bolted to that wall. Blood still streamed from the stigmata of his wrists and ankles.
"Leroy Brown!" he blurted, stopping before him. He held the sickle out to him. "You better take this, brother. My wrists are still killing me; there’s nothing I can do with it until I heal a little bit."
Leon looked down at the tool. Maybe because he had used its like before, he accepted it.
Dan said, "You were right, man. I didn’t believe you, but you were right."
"Right?" Leon said numbly.
"The rebels! They’re here! We can fight these monsters!" He pointed beyond Leon. "Come on. Let’s go to the towers."
Leon glanced behind him. Distantly, he saw the ghostly outline of the nearest metal tower looming into the ceiling of fog. "The towers?"
"Yeah! We have to free them, too, right?"
They ran side-by-side. They joined several others racing toward the tower, which became as wide as the base of a lighthouse. Rungs that the Demons used to mount it were welded to its black iron flank. Dan waited for the others to crawl up the side like ants, and then waved for Leon to follow them. "I’d better go last, with these hands."
Leon obeyed his instructions, too dazed to think for himself. He began climbing, keeping the sickle in hand. He glanced down and saw that Dan was making his way up, albeit slowly. And he still had that rapturous, mad grin on his face.
Much of the gunfire—automatic bursts, blasts from shotguns—came from above him, and when Leon was high enough for the "living" web to be visible through the haze, he was shocked at what he saw. Damned with guns, at the very tops of the towers or clinging to their sides, were not just shooting at the spider-like Demons crawling along the webs. They were shooting out the spheres of luminous orange fluid. The brains within, with their eyes like the horns of snails, were either blown into gobbets, or slithered whole out of the shattered globes to plummet far below.
But after the initial shock, Leon realized this was their way of freeing the brains from the containers that would not allow them to regenerate. Now, the prisoners would be able to reconstitute from their mutilated state, as Leon himself had done after his stint in one of the iron towers.
He continued climbing, until he came level with the lowest strands of the vast web. One of the spider-things was scurrying nimbly toward him along its tightrope. Below Leon, Dan cried, "Cut it! Cut the cord!" But Leon could not raise the sickle. Could not slice the strand, because it was the attenuated body of a Damned, with nerves that felt pain. He knew that only too well…
Thunder from someone’s twelve gauge. Sprayed with buckshot, the Demon was knocked off the web and vanished into the clouds of fog below.
Leon climbed on. He did not know why…what he could do. The Damned were being freed with bullets, the Demons killed with bullets. But he had been swept up in the furor. Maybe he was just here to witness. There must always be witnesses. It was
a sacred responsibility—was it not?
That’s what he told himself, as he reached the top without having shattered a globe with his blade, without having severed a cord along which a Demon moved.
The obelisk tapered toward its summit but still provided a flat surface, and up here a man was firing bursts from his submachine-gun at another spire in the distance. He was so absorbed in this, and Leon absorbed in watching him, that they didn’t see the Demon pull itself up onto the platform until it had lashed out with its multi-bladed limbs. With a shriek, the machine-gunner toppled over the side and plunged out of sight. The Demon then turned its mirror face Leon’s way—and surged at him, arms slashing.
Leon raised his left arm. A chop from the Demon sliced his forearm to the bone. He fell onto his back, struck the rear of his skull on the floor in so doing. The Demon jumped over him. It pinned his head down with one pincered claw that gripped his hair. The other foreleg cocked itself back and he saw a corkscrew-like digit click into place. He saw his own face hovering above him.
Not his face…not his face…he couldn’t be grinning like that! Blood splattered on his skin, and his tongue wolfishly lashing over his lips, like that…
An explosion, like a bomb going off. Deliriously, Leon thought a plane had flown right into the side of the metal tower. The Demon suddenly flew off him, as if it had jumped away. A man stooped over Leon in its place, a shotgun in one hand. With the other, he helped Leon to his feet. He recognized the black man. Salim.
"You must be the good Mexican," Leon mumbled.
Salim frowned. "Mexican? Are you daft? I told you…I’m from Darfur."
Dan was there, too, taking his other arm. Together they supported him, while he recovered his senses.
The three of them surveyed the scene before them. They couldn’t see any more orange suns through the mist. No more Demons scrambling along those strands of the web that had not been hacked away.
"Can you make it back down to the ground?" Salim asked Leon.
"Yeah…yeah," he said, but he was still a little disoriented as he stooped to retrieve the sickle he had dropped.
8: Bloodlust
As they reached ground level, a line of the Damned was marching past them. The group was bloody and torn, but there was a triumphant gleam in their eyes. Toward the end of the miniature parade, Leon recognized the woman who had glared at him back in the barracks. She was carrying a bamboo rod against her shoulder, and bound to its end by its hair like a hobo’s sack was a severed human head. Leon recognized this person, too: the old man named Marty. His eyes rolled frantically and his mouth moved like that of a fish, opening and closing without a sound. There were some other living heads being carried, too. Displayed as traitors.
The woman spotted Leon, and her eyes hardened. She looked like she was about to point him out to the others. But then she apparently noticed the sickle in Leon’s hand, and she nodded at him, as if in approval. She tramped away with the rest.
Leon realized he was wagging his head. Numbly wagging his head.
A thudding sound of bodies colliding and an inarticulate cry close behind him made Leon spin around, to see that one of the Demons had descended the tower, head-downwards like a fly, and launched itself onto Salim. It had him on his back, striking madly at him, perhaps recognizing him as one of those who had smuggled the rebellion into the heart of this particular Demonic enclave.
"Shit, shit, no! You bastard!" Dan was shouting, crouched as if he might jump upon the Demon’s back, but knowing he would have no chance against its strength.
Leon pushed Dan out of the way, drew back his arm, and swung his sickle down squarely into the Demon’s jagged spine.
Red blood squirted out of the wound he left. It was a shock to Leon. Yes, he had seen red blood on the Demons during this battle, but he had seen red blood on them so many times before. He had thought it was the blood of the Damned, as it always was. But now he realized that they had red blood of their own. That they were not machines, mere robots, after all. Alive, in their way. Just as he was alive, in his way.
The thing made no sound, but jerked its mirror face around at him in a fury that needed no voice, no face of its own. Anonymous and distant and hidden, like the Creator of all this. Leon swung the sickle again, into that mirror. Shattering it.
The Demon fell off Salim, and Leon kept hacking at it, again and again, ignoring the pain in his own slashed left arm. Dan helped drag the badly lacerated Salim to his feet, and Leon went on smashing the creature with the tool’s heavy curved blade.
He crouched over it, panting. It lay quivering on its back. It was dying. Blood ran from a dozen deep gashes. It had regurgitated a greenish ooze of partially digested sugarcane from the orifice in its midsection. It was pathetic, vulnerable, lying there. Spread-eagled like a beaten woman waiting to be raped. So with one final, extra-powerful swing, Leon buried his sickle’s blade into the center of its bony black chest.
He grinned, gasping, felt the thing’s splattered blood trickling down his face. It dribbled onto his upper lip, and unconsciously he licked the drops away with his tongue.
And then, even though the thing’s mirror face was broken, he saw his own face reflected. In his mind. The mad, lustful leer glowing through the war paint of gore. The wolfish tongue…
"You bastards," he croaked. It was the Demons’ final humiliation. Final punishment. Once, they had forced him to feed them, care for them. And now, they had forced him to kill them. To break his vow. To spill blood.
Tears welled up in his eyes, at what they had made him do. As if this creature had planned it; yet another psychological torture. He wanted to strike it again, he was so filled with trembling rage, but he only tugged his sickle out of the dead thing’s heart. It would not regenerate, as he would. It was dead forever. And that made him hate it all the more. Because it made him envy it.
"Damn you," he sobbed at the creature. "Damn you…"
9: The Rebel
Leon, Salim and Dan eventually caught up with the group they had seen marching past—this time with Leon and Dan supporting Salim between them, since he was the most badly wounded, with one hand almost severed and one eye gone from a gouge to his face. They had waited a little bit, until he was able to walk, until he was not moaning terribly with the pain. By now, Dan’s stigmata was nearly gone and the wound in Leon’s arm had become shallow.
They found that the group had congregated at the area where once they had fed the queues of Demons, and even more Damned had joined them. There were tables upon which they used to pile the freshly cut segments of those sweet-tasting, bamboo-like stalks. But now, on one of these tables a row of glass containers had been set. They were spares of the globes that had formerly been mounted in the hollows of those black iron minarets, in which brains like Leon’s own had been stuffed and an orange fluid added to prevent the brains from regenerating until they were released again.
These globes had been inverted, with their black rubber seals at the top instead of the bottom. But the entire rubber collar on each globe had been pried off to make the opening wider. This had been done to accommodate the larger objects that had been forced into them. Not just brains, but an entire row of human heads. More than a dozen of them.
Marty was one of them, and all of the heads possessed mouths that worked as if trying to breathe or speak, eyes that blinked and followed the movements of their captors.
Leon turned to see that someone had stepped up to Salim, and put a hand on his shoulder. The red-haired woman, Megan, concern on her face. He smiled at her bravely through his agony.
Megan switched her gaze from Salim to Dan. She motioned with her head toward the row of glass spheres. "Are these the people you felt were working with the Demons?"
Dan looked over her shoulder. "I guess," he said reluctantly.
Leon was still staring at them. He was reminded of tales of the French Revolution, and the guillotine. How it was claimed that every so many heads lifted from the wicker basket had eyes a
nd mouth still moving. A few horrid seconds before the life went out of them. But here, the life would not go out of these heads. Not ever. For all Leon knew, one of these Damned might even have died during the French Revolution, only to find himself here in Hell. This place where all mortal suffering was rewarded with more, and more, and more. Eternal, no real death, no oblivion, no forgetting, a suffering always alive and eating the brain from inside as the Demons ate at the outside. There were two Hells. This infinite macrocosm. And the microcosm within one’s skull. Both could not be escaped from…
He stepped forward uncertainly, unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.
He stepped forward with the sickle in his fist, its scimitar blade painted in Demon’s blood. Dan started to say something to him. And the woman who had glared at him in the barracks looked up, recognizing him as he approached the table.
Leon reversed the sickle in his hand. And when he struck the first glass sphere, it was the back edge of the harvesting tool and not its blade that shattered it. The luminous orange fluid spilled out like a pregnant woman’s water bursting, and from the fanged glass womb rolled Marty’s head. It dropped off the edge of the table and lay on its side, gasping soundlessly for air. The eyes turning up toward Leon. But Leon had moved on to smash the second glass globe.
"Hey! Hey!" the glaring woman shouted. She and others surged toward Leon.
Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Page 18