BURN IN HADES

by Michael L. Martin Jr.

  Her breasts were swollen and tender to the touch. She adjusted her top several times and couldn’t seem to get it comfortable. She lay on her back in the gritty sand, her eyes closed and inhaled the decayed scent of the corpses that littered the beach and also waded in the lake of serpent venom. Unfortunately, not even their torment lifted her from the depths. The slithering inside her womb dominated her thoughts.

  She merely watched in envy as the serpent, Níðhöggr, roamed the beach and sucked the skin right off of spirits. Oddly, it left their heads intact, staked on spears, and it ignored the heads as though it was forbidden to touch them. This was strange to her because the worm-like beast wasn’t known for its obedience, unless the orders came from the Master.

  Maybe she was meant to witness this abnormal behavior. That’s possibly the reason the river had brought her there, specifically. But she still didn’t understand what it meant, if it even meant anything at all. She could almost hear the Master’s voice scolding her for lying down and pestering her to get up.

  It wasn’t the master’s voice though. It was hers. She picked herself up. She had work to do.

  Manauia had claimed that Clem Balfour came to Kurnugia with the Tribulation, but Diamond Tooth discovered a peculiar sight in that realm. Like all the gates of the underworld, the impenetrable kingdom walls had collapsed. Yet, hearing about it was not the same as seeing it for herself. What was once a thriving city of enlightenment was now just another torched realm.

  It still vomited the familiar scent of boiled radiators, however. The fragrance brought back memories of her search for wisdom and guidance from the elders. There, she had learned the arts, sciences, and philosophies that had once flourished. Kurnugia used to be the most advanced realm in the underworld. With its ever-growing towers of metal and glass, it had once held the highest population in the underworld, and the advanced architecture once housed the most intelligent beings in the underworld.

  Now, all of it was deserted and reduced to rubble, a war-torn junk heap. If she had a heart, she would no doubt feel sad from all the nostalgia. She felt nothing except the critters squirming heavily inside her stomach. They were growing.

  Debris cracked under her feet as she paced through the vacant city searching for any indication of the Tribulation’s presence, but her footsteps were the only sign of life in the devastated streets.

  She paced by broken chairs and scattered items left behind in haste, shrouded in dust to become relics for future generations. She climbed split ladders, rusted and stained clumps of junk, and she crossed pools filled with rotting wood planks instead of the usual sacrificial blood.

  Paintings had peeled away. Automobiles had rusted over, their rubber wheels deflated. Nothings sat in the seats of some of those vehicles, frozen in the position of fleeing. One of the burned souls cowered beneath the protective arms of the other, both of their mouths gaped open in terror.

  Chunks of metal jutted out from the ground, sharper than her tiger claws. Phallic structures of twisted metal that once reached into the scorching skies now leaned on their neighbors, weak and dull, straining to remain upright. All their bodies were corroded from bouts of acid rain, and their windows shattered from explosions.

  The condition of the city reinforced what she had suspected for some time. The underworld was changing. The deities had evacuated their respective realms, souls were burning in record numbers and the Nothing was spreading. She was determined not to be around to see the final stages of this transition. She owned the key that unlocked Clem Balfour’s door.

  The musty odor of the underworld had never bothered her before. She had even sought pleasure from the stench, but the deeper she ventured into the city, the more it tore her up inside. It wasn’t just that it stank, which it did, but it was more than that. The scent was too strong. Mucus accumulated in her throat and the urge to vomit crept up. She took a few deep breaths to quell the nausea, but each inhale brought in more of the sulfuric smell.

  If she hadn’t paused for her illness she would have walked right past the half-melted trebuchets of the Tribulation. She found the weapons outside a crumbling edifice that had been made into a poor man’s fort.

  She prowled inside, probing for life and found a room with no ceiling. Smoke swam in the sky across the dead sun, giving the illusion that the black eye was winking. A Tribulation flag waved in the wind beside a large cauldron that steamed in the center of the foyer. It smelled of salty barbot soup.

  “Welcome, my friend.”

  Diamond Tooth spun towards the speaker and aimed her bagh nakhs. The crusty soldier didn’t flinch.

  “Do me the honor of making it quick.” He was soft spoken and stood stoic like the living dead—reanimated human bodies absent of souls.

  Diamond Tooth lowered her fists and relaxed. He wasn’t worth burning. “I’m looking for a man named Clem Balfour,” she said.

  “I’d like to find a spirit named Nìködemos. He’s the Anarchist Colonel that decided to burn everyone except me. I want to know why. But alas, some quests are best left alone.” The soldier tossed uncooked barbot wings into the stew.

  Diamond Tooth removed a bottle of devil’s water from her sack and offered it to him. He took the bottle and drank.

  “Balfour has only one ear,” she said. “He’s with the third.”

  “If he’s with General Simeon, they’ve already left for Pulotu about thirty periods of sleep ago. Nìködemos’s frontline is right on their tails, and Yomi lies ahead of ‘em. Those poor devils are burned by now.”

  “And what if they haven’t burned?”

  The man drank from the bottle of devil’s water. “Lady, you must not have heard anything about Camp Erutrot. It’s one of those Anarchist torture camps you’d better hope you never end up in, especially in your condition.”

  “My condition?”

  “The Anarchists are ruthless. They won’t care that you’re with child.”

  She had ignored the odd extra weight she carried around for fear of the absurd truth. She couldn’t be pregnant. Only beings that were created in the underworld were able to breed in the underworld, and it had only been a few weeks since her encounter with that tree. She couldn’t have been showing so soon, and she refused to be pregnant by the seed of a damn tree!

  Slowly, she peeked down at her stomach with just her eyes. Her chin followed the downward motion of her gaze. She gasped.

  “Something wrong?” asked the soldier.

  She placed her hands over her melon-sized belly. The things inside her kicked. Her knees buckled. The soldier rushed to her side and braced her up in his arms. She shoved him away.

  “I just think you should be careful,” he said. “It’s bad enough what they do to the men in Erutrot, but it breaks my heart how they treat the women and children. There was a time I’d pray for them,” He peered down at his feet, “but the Great Goddess doesn’t seem to be listening these days.” He returned the bottle of devil’s water to her.

  She gently pushed it back toward him and gestured at her pregnant stomach. “Keep it,” she said. “It’s yours.”

  On her way out of the fort, she vomited. Everything ached, from her head to her back, which was soaked with sweat. She slogged through the field of twisted metal, dragged her heels through the rubble, and slid her hand against any stable surface in an attempt to hold herself upright.

  Fluid gushed down her leg and she halted. A wave of cramps tightened through her back and abdomen. The pain was even worse than breaking her spine. She wailed in misery. Whatever was inside wanted out right now. It clawed at her stomach. She collapsed in a corner and went into labor.

  HEATED BREEZES CARRIED BLACK ASH INTO CROSS’S FACE, guiding him deep into Gehenna—one of the only dark places in the underworld. But the night sky in Gehenna was sleight-of-hand. It was a false nighttime, as it simply burned with black flames. Glowing embers twinkled within them like shooting stars.

  He stumbled into a desolate town bathed in the black blaze. Even thoug
h the fires ate gleefully away at the ghost town, the buildings remained standing as if there was an agreement between the two of them. The eternal flames consumed just enough wood to stay alive but not enough to level the town.

  Pieces of a metal bird rested in the road. Its beak was separated from the rest of its body, which had windows on the outside and seats on the inside, like some kind of flying coach.

  A bottle rolled across the dirt road towards the mangled metal beast. A creature the size of a prairie dog was pushing it. It was completely hairless with green skin. It was a Sisyphean hodder, Gimlet’s favorite food. Sisyphean hodders spent their meaningless afterlives scavenging the underworld, collecting objects of the dead like pack rats.

  Cross would have followed it back to wherever it hid its objects, but he had built up thirst stomping through the desert and escaping Hell. And the bottle the hodder was rolling up the road contained some kind of brown liquid. It could have been devil’s water, but if not, it would have to do. He hadn’t drunk anything since before the Raven dropped him off in Sheol.

  He skipped over to the little guy, snatched the bottle up, and shook the dangling hodder off. It plopped into the dirt. Cross poured the devil’s water down his dry throat.

  The plump hodder pulled itself to its feet. Its ratty face squinted. On all fours, it stood even shorter than the draggles, but when standing on its hind legs, it reached up to Cross’s knee.

  It wore a shirt and a vest, both of which failed to close around its round green belly. Its bowtie barely held the shirt together. And its suspenders were stretched to capacity, straining to keep its pants around its pear-shaped waist. It looked like Humpty Dumpty, but green.

  Cross peeked inside the flying coach. Rows of seats lined the mangled beast, and they were all covered with junk and piles of debris. The hodder scrambled up a beam and held his palms in Cross’s face.

  “Nothing in there for you,” it said.

  Cross nudged the little guy out of the way and climbed inside. Yellow cups hung from the cabinets. Things cracked and broke under the weight of his boots. His leg sank through the objects up to his shin. He braced his hands on the seats that lined the aisles, keeping himself balanced as he stumbled over slippery objects, clumsily.

  Nothings sat in some of the seats, while most of the other seats were covered in objects of the dead, the accumulation of months’ worth of hoarding. Never had he seen so many objects in one place. He felt like he had discovered the treasure of the Forty Thieves.

  He sipped more devil’s water in celebration of his find, and after a long belch of smoke that shot from his mouth, he climbed over mounds and heaps of objects up to a counter. In a glass display, a figurine rode on a toy horse and blew his bugle. The horse’s shoes clicked as it strolled back and forth on the shelf mechanically.

  Cross tapped on the glass. The little man aimed his pistol at him. Cross put his hands up playfully. The figurine shot. The bullet ricocheted off the glass, leaving a pebble sized nick.

  Cross laughed. “Easy there little fella.”

  The hodder vaulted up on the counter. “Can I help you?” it asked.

  Cross placed a pair of eyeglasses on his face. His sight zoomed in onto a boil on the hodder’s pointy nose. The hair sticking out of it made it resemble a puny island with a tree. He snatched the glasses off his face and cringed. He sat the glasses back on the counter and picked up a pink parasol. The lace cloth wouldn’t shield a soul from the heat of the sky, but when he opened it, rained poured out the underside of the canopy and sprinkled his arm with cold droplets. He closed it.

  “Why would anybody need an umbrella that rains on them?” he said.

  “You don’t like fresh water?” said the hodder.

  “What good is fresh water gonna do me?” He dropped the girly umbrella and fingered a button on the counter.

  The button sprouted legs of thread, taking on the semblance of a spider. It crawled up his finger and onto the back of his hand. He turned his hand over as the button crept into his palm. He leaned in for a better look at the spider button and nudged it gently with his fingertip. It raced up his arm. He slapped at it and missed. The button scrambled around his arm and up his shoulder. When it reached his neck, Cross swiped and swatted at it.

  A collar formed around his neck, over top of the shirt he was already wearing and the two shirts mended together. Thread knitted itself down his shoulders, arms and around the rest of his body until a crisp new shirt appeared on him, fully replacing his old tattered shirt. The spider button climbed up his chest and knitted itself into the top of the collar.

  Cross adjusted the collar, folder his cuffs and brushed the sleeves down. “How do I look?”

  The hodder simply stared at him with an annoyed expression.

  The button was definitely a keeper. Clothes were hard to come by in the underworld. Now all he needed was a bath. He needed more than just supplies, too. He needed something he could use to break into paradise. He swept the remaining objects off the counter.

  “Weapons?” he demanded of the hodder.

  “Then you will leave?” it asked.

  “Show me what you got.”

  The hodder stared blankly at all the objects on the floor. Some were broken from Cross stepping all over them. It shook its rat ears and hopped off the counter.

  “I’ll show you where I keep the best ones.” It escorted Cross over to the weapons area. A Nothing sat beside an empty aisle seat.

  “This seat taken?” Cross asked the Nothing. It said nothing. Cross laughed, sat beside it and reclined in the soft cushion.

  The hodder dove into a pile and dragged out a dagger. “A tickler?” it said and brandished the dagger for Cross to inspect. Cross shook his head.

  The hodder dropped the dagger and dove into another pile. It yanked a stick out and threw the arrow over his shoulder. “How about this nib?”

  “Where’s the bow?” asked Cross.

  “Bow?”

  Cross waved the explanation away. He was a terrible archer anyway. His old friend Otaktay had tried to teach him archery, but the string would always slap his forearm. He only used a bow and arrow when he had no other weapon.

  “What else you got?” he asked.

  The hodder tumbled over, trying to lift a tribal spear made of bone. The fat rat tipped over the edge of the counter. Cross launched out of his seat and caught the butterball.

  It shoved Cross’s hands away and brushed its vest off. Its green cheeks flushed with purple. The hodder propped the spear up as though its near tumble had never happened. “This tosskew perhaps?”

  “No.” Cross sat back down.

  The hodder paused as if to give Cross an opportunity to think. When it appeared to have gotten the hint that Cross was picky, it huffed and dragged an axe out. Cross massaged the back of his own neck, reminded of his near escape several sleep cycles ago.

  “Keep going,” he said to the hodder.

  It puffed its chest and vaulted an Ankou’s scythe up to the counter. “A reaper saw would fit you perfect,” he said.

  “Do I look like I collect souls?” said Cross.

  “All you big spirits look the same.”

  “Not what I’m looking for.”

  The hodder’s shoulders slouched. It dove into a pile and came back a little slower, this time hauling a sword, straining and grunting.

  Cross rose out of his seat. “Need help?”

  “I’ve got it,” snapped the hodder, slapping way any assistance. The pits of his shirt now seeped sweat. “Your swopp has a hole in it. This one’s in better condition.” It lifted the sword over his head and took a long deep breath.

  Cross picked up the sword, avoiding the sight of his reflection and swung the blade around. Thin slices of the air fell to the ground and evaporated. Too sharp. He was liable to slice himself before he could cut another spirit with that sword. Plus, he wasn’t a swordsman. He was more of a shooter. He sat the sword down. A twinkle caught his eye mirrored inside the sword. T
he reflected glimmer came from an object high on a shelf.

  “What’s that up there?” asked Cross.

  “Nothing,” said the hodder, protesting a little too much.

  Cross reached for the shiny object. The hodder raced up to the shelf and amazingly beat him to the object. It slapped Cross’s hand away. Cross raised his hand to return the slap.

  “Alright,” said the hodder. “If you must. Let me.” The hodder squeezed a pistol out from between a clump of objects. Some dropped to the floor and broke. Then the entire shelf spilled to the floor. The hodder scrunched his ratty nose and growled under its breath.

  Cross held his palms up. “I did what you said. I let you get it. Not my fault.”

  The hodder lifted the pistol with both his arms and wobbled. “This boomer is a cull tee—”

  “Colt,” said Cross. “And I think I’ve found what I was looking for.”

  He caressed the shiny Colt Single Action Army. It resembled the Peacemaker he had owned in his previous life.

  The day Charles acquainted himself with the Peacemaker for the first time began like every other day. He carried firewood into the mansion. He removed the ash from the fireplace in the parlor and lit the firewood for the long awaited arrival of Mr. Carson. The boss liked a toasty home in the winter and the November air snapped that morning. Charles dusted the artwork, shined the chandeliers, and wiped down the dining table and centerpieces.

  “Be careful with those,” said Mrs. Carson. “They’re worth more than you.”

  She always warned him of how precious everything was, as if he hadn’t heard her the first hundred times. He hadn’t broken a thing the entire year he’d been living in the mansion. Even if he did break anything, he’d fix it. He fixed everything else around the ranch.

  He sat her beloved amphora down on the table gently. “Yes ma’am,” he said.

  Mrs. Carson was equally a nice lady and an old croaker when she wanted to be. At least she was kind enough to play the music box while he cleaned—even if it was more for her pleasure than for his, he still enjoyed it. The upbeat tune carried throughout most of the mansion and made work seem easier and go faster.