by Adam Ingle
Muscle Big was in the middle of telling Fat Big an elaborate joke. Mestoph leaned back against the wall, took a deep breath, and tried to make the sign of the cross just in case that kind of thing worked down here, resorting to the spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch mnemonic to do it properly. He pulled the pistol from the inside pocket of his trench coat and popped around the corner just as Muscle Big got to the tongue-twisting punch line.
“So I got a fuck for a duck, a duck for a fuck, and a buck for a fucked-up duck,” he said as Mestoph squeezed the trigger.
The gun made a spitting noise that sent a dart into Muscle Big’s neck. Fat Big guffawed, while Mestoph made a judgment call and spit two darts at him. The poison in the darts acted fast, and the two security guards dropped to the floor in a stupor that Mestoph hoped would last at least an hour.
Mestoph stepped forward and took a closer look at the two guards on the floor, noticing that Fat Big not only still had a smile on his face but that his eyes were still open. Muscle Big was staring straight up at the ceiling as well.
“Shit, I think I killed them,” said Mestoph, mostly to himself.
He nudged Fat Big with his shoe, but there was no grunt and no movement other than the undulation of his stomach in response to the nudge. This already wasn’t going as he had planned, but he could only shrug and move on. He was committed to his plan now, whether or not it was a good idea. He wished the two Bigs good luck in their re-sorting by the galactic computer and hoped they ended up with better jobs the next go-round. Then he dragged their bodies into a shadowy corner of the Hall of Records. It took a considerable amount of time, considering they both weighed at least 300 pounds each, being almost double Mestoph’s weight individually. Once the bodies had been stashed and searched—the Demon pocked the sixty bucks he found in their pockets—he surveyed his surroundings.
The Hall of Records was an enormous room that rested deep in the boiler-room warm bowels of Hell Industries’ HQ. It was like a never-ending version of the Parthenon, complete with monstrous Doric columns that ended long before they could ever dream of reaching—not to mention finding—the ceiling. The epic frieze that rested atop the exterior columns depicted a concise history of Hell. The frieze extended farther than Mestoph could see, but at the front of the hall it showed the fall of Lucifer on one side and the building of the first structures of Hell, all of which were anachronistically medieval looking, on the opposite.
Aside from billions of trivial and uninteresting Hell Industries documents, the Hall of Records also contained every Omen that had ever been passed since the creation of man. From Omen 001, the temptation of Adam and Eve, they were all represented here. A swarm of Imps kept everything clean, if not orderly, but they kept bankers’ hours. Once the little hand reached six and the big hand reached twelve, they scurried to their little holes and did whatever Imps did in their spare time. It was now three a.m. in Hell, and the place was deserted.
Hanging from the empty blackness that was, presumably, the ceiling were signs that designated the various areas of the immense hall or gave general directions to other sections. The nearest sign hung, seemingly from nothing, over a pentagonal counter and declared it to be the Information Desk. Dozens of smaller signs hung from the Information Desk sign with little info icons and arrows pointed in various directions with numbers beside them. Mestoph assumed the number was a distance of some sort, but had no idea if it was paces, miles, or even light years. The hall was so immense, any and all seemed possible.
Mestoph walked up to the Information Desk, hoping to find a computer or map. He was surprised to find instead a nude, corpulently obese person was seated—or possibly even standing, for all he knew—behind the counter. Multiple layers of fat draped down on top of each other and pooled around the inside of the information desk to the point that Mestoph wasn’t sure the creature had legs or feet. He stared at the creature for several seconds, trying to figure out how to address it since he couldn’t and didn’t want to figure out what sex it was.
“What are you doing here?” it asked in a voice both guttural and nasal, which was more feminine than it was not.
Mestoph walked around the counter and noticed that her surprisingly dainty wrists were chained to the desk just within reach of a keyboard. The chains were completely unnecessary, as the woman had to be at least a thousand pounds and wasn’t going anywhere without a crane and a miracle. It was Hell, however, and he was sure the shackles were more psychological than practical.
“Um, yes. Uh. Excuse me…miss?” He stumbled over the last part, still uncertain, “Yes, I’m looking for the Omens section.” Mestoph tried to instill a little more confidence at the end than he had started with.
The woman screwed up her eyes, and he couldn’t tell if it was doubt or hyperopia.
“And why the fuck should I help you?” she asked in a flabby voice full of contempt and a definite Southern drawl.
“Maybe because it’s your fucking job.”
Mestoph was trying to out-bitch a classically trained bitch. After a few seconds, he realized she just wasn’t going to reply to him at all. She continued to stare in his general direction and nonchalantly scratched at an enormous fold of fat hanging from her chest that he realized was actually one of her breasts.
“Do you know who I am?” asked Mestoph, trying to hide his disgust.
The woman squinted in various ways, indeed trying to figure out who he was. She gave up and squeezed both eyes tightly closed to reset whatever focus she had left.
“All I can tell is that you’re short and you ain’t white. You could be Sammy Davis, Jr. or His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular and the Most Ubiquitous of all King Of Scotland,” she said, spitting it out in one long, uninterrupted stream as if she were vomiting the words. She panted heavily, sweat forming on her brow as she finished.
“Huh?”
“You know, the former President of Uganda.”
“Umm, yeah. I’m not Idi Amin. Or Sammy Davis, Jr.”
“Well seeing as them’s the only darkies I give a shit about, I couldn’t give two fucks who you are,” she said.
Mestoph, who’d had his hands in his pockets this whole time, ran his finger over the trigger of the gun and strongly fought the urge to shoot her between the useless, rheumy eyes. The truth was that he only had nine darts left in the clip, and aside from the fact that he might need them yet, he also wasn’t sure nine would be enough to kill the super-sized cunt. Nothing less than death was worth wasting his time.
Then something piqued his interest.
“Why just those two? Of all the black people in the world to put aside your blind hatred for, why Sammy Davis, Jr. and Idi Amin?” asked Mestoph.
“Cause they cracked me up. Them’s were some crazy-ass ni—”
Mestoph had spent some time working both sides of the Civil Rights movement during the late 50s and early 60s. In one town he would enrage the nervous and ignorant white locals by sleeping with their wives until they ended up murdering him, which gained the movement sympathy and traction. In another town he would make waves by inciting the civil rights workers into a fury that would lead to rioting, pillaging, and general violence. This would make the supporters of the movement look militant and act as a justification to the way white people treated the African Americans.
To Mestoph, this was just another day on the job. He didn’t see himself as a race traitor since he didn’t really have a race. Sure, he was black, but he wasn’t of African descent. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t even human. It wasn’t until Mestoph spent time in the Mississippi delta during the Freedom Summer of 1964 that he got a taste of what it meant to be black in America.
During that summer, he was working for the Council of Federated Organizations in Clarksdale trying to register black people to vote. The delta area of Mississippi was unusually hateful and aggress
ive toward blacks, even considering the generally racist mentality of the Deep South at that point in history. Working to give black people confidence and respect by way of registering them to vote created an unbelievable amount of unrest, which made the area ripe for Satan to pick up a few good souls. Mestoph was there in the guise of an educated black man from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had always been relatively well spoken and even managed to stay polite and mild mannered during his time there. Despite keeping a low profile, he was still a target for some of the members of the local KKK, who also happened to be members of the sheriff’s department.
He was alone one night, trying to finish up some paperwork at their makeshift office in the locker room of the Coahoma County Agricultural High School gymnasium, when the lights went out. Moments later, he was hit over the head with what he assumed was a baseball bat, and then it was lights out for him as well. When he woke up, he was in a wooden chair with his wrists and ankles bound by barbed wire.
Over the course of the next three days, Mestoph was repeatedly tortured until he passed out. Every time he woke up, he was greeted with water, some kind of slop that looked like it was meant for farm animals, and three men in crisp white robes and pointy white hoods. By the time he passed out again, those robes would be covered in blood and sweat, but they were always nice and clean when he came back around.
The thing that confused Mestoph during the three days he was beaten, burnt, prodded, and stabbed was that they never asked him anything or make any demands. They didn’t tell him to get out of town or even threaten his friends and family—not that he had any. The only thing they said, just before each punch, kick, cut of a knife, or sizzle of a brand, was the word nigger.
Finally, after three days of nearly continuous torture, with breaks only for him to regain consciousness and his assailants to regain their strength, Mestoph died. It wasn’t the first time he’d died, and not even the first time he’d been tortured to death. It was, however, the first time he ever wanted revenge. Satan pulled him off the job, likely sensing his new personal stakes in it, and he never got a chance to pay a visit to those three cheerful white guys who killed him.
“—ggers.”
Before he even realized what had happened, the gun was out. His hand was as steady as it had ever been, and he felt disconcertingly calm as he stared down the barrel of the gun. He followed it to the dart that was sticking out of the woman’s eyeball. Her eyes crossed as she tried to stare at the dart, and then she looked in Mestoph’s direction and began to laugh. If was a condescending laugh that was so deep and guttural it sounded like it should be coming from a man the size of a building instead of this woman who weighed as much as a dump truck.
Rage overtook Mestoph’s calm, and he leaped onto the counter. He planted one foot on what he could only assume was one of the gelatinous woman’s many breasts, leaned down and grabbed her by the hair in one hand, and jammed the dart with the palm of the other until it was lost in her cavernous head. He saw a slight twinge in her face, and then the pupil of her remaining weepy eye dilated. She now had the same vacant stare as the two security guards.
“Guess I’ll find it on my own,” Mestoph said, jumping down and dusting himself off.
Three hours later he regretted killing the woman at the information desk, racist or not. He had been wandering the Hall of Records, and now not only did he not know where the Omens were, but he had no clue where he was either. He had seen a sign with an information icon—the little italicized “i” inside a circle—over an hour ago and had followed the arrow, which had a “3” beside it. It had definitely not been three paces, and he was beginning to feel reasonably sure it wasn’t three miles either. He was on the verge of following his old rule of thumb of just taking left turns until he got to where he wanted, which had served him surprisingly well over the last three millennia, but was spared the need when he finally spotted a small circular information terminal up ahead.
There was a bright beacon of light emanating from its top, it and Mestoph realized he had probably passed a dozen of those in the distance since he had set out to find the Omen. He sighed but gave it no more thought, as it wasn’t going to solve anything. He was at this one now, so everything would be okay. He hoped.
Even when he zoomed out the map to its limits, it seemed endless. There was a blinking info icon in the center to show where he was, and a quick scan told him he was nowhere near the Omens. They didn’t even show up on the map. There was a search box and an on-screen keyboard, so he typed in “Omen” and tapped the search button.
The terminal queried for a moment, asking him politely to “Please wait while we determine the best route.”
He waited several more moments, tapping his feet in impatience. The terminal cycled through a few pleasant phrases, starting with “Please wait while we ask a friend.”
Mestoph sighed.
“Please wait while he asks his mom.”
“Come on, you piece of junk!” Mestoph shouted at the screen
“Hmm, she didn’t know either. Let me check previous queries of the same nature. I appreciate your continued patience.”
“I’ll show you patience when I tear you apart once piece at a time and dance on top of your mechanical corpse,” said Mestoph through gritted teeth.
The message stayed on the screen for several minutes. Finally said it changed to “Fuck if I know” and went back to the main map.
At this point Mestoph was tired, sore, thirsty, and feeling frayed by the stress and murdering. He kicked the machine repeatedly, yelling, “Tell me where the Goddamn Omens are or I’m going to find your friend and his mother and turn the mother inside out to use as a condom to fuck your friend and then rip his dick off and watch him bleed out and then use his dick to piss on you until you short circuit, you overly polite piece of shit!”
There was a deep rumbling and the map on the screen instantly drew a short green line that pointed directly behind him. Mestoph turned around and saw that a large stainless steel and glass capsule had popped up out of the floor only a few feet behind him. A door swished open from the previously seamless tube to reveal a plush white leather seat that was lit by a soft, warm glow. It looked like something out of a 70’s architecture and design magazine. Mestoph stepped in and sat down, and the door whispered closed. There was a momentary sucking sound, and then the capsule dropped away into the floor with a whoosh.
The capsule hurtled at an amazing speed through a system of thick, transparent glass tubes, which sprawled, branched, and forked like a hundred cans of silly string had exploded. The seat was built like a Ferris wheel bucket so that no matter how many loops, curves, and switchbacks the tube took, Mestoph was always right side up swaying lightly but smoothly with the motion. It was a good thing, as he imagined vertigo and vomit would have hit him within a few seconds otherwise.
The pneumatic tube took Mestoph deeper and deeper into the depths of Hell Industries’ sub-sub-sub basements, until he finally broke through what was obviously the bottom of the bottom—except the capsule kept going. It descended through the strata of basements and bedrock, into a vast sea of magma dotted with small islands of rock or hardened lava and rock columns that had been created from the meeting of unimaginably long and snaking stalagmites and stalactites.
Mestoph imagined that this would have been the part of Dante’s tour of the Inferno where he pointed off into the distance asking “What’s over there?” and Virgil would just say “Fuck if I know. Now, let’s check out that gift shop.”
The freefall had gone on for long enough that Mestoph was no longer marveling at the endless expanse of tidal lava and was instead wondering if he had chosen unwisely when he had jumped into the capsule. He breathed on the glass and played a game of tic-tac-toe against himself. Before he could finish his game, he realized that he was running out of tube. He had been hurtling downwards toward the endless ocean for long enough that when it suddenly became obvious that the pneumatic tube ended a
nd he was about to plow through the glowing surface and deep into the sea itself, it came as something of a shock. In a panic, Mestoph jumped to his feet, though he wasn’t sure what that was going to do, as the tube hit the surface of the magma.
Nothing happened. In fact, the capsule hardly jostled as it dove beneath the molten sea; the glass windows were unscathed, and it was still the same pleasantly cool temperature it had been up in the Hall of Records.
After a few moments, the capsule entered another tube through a door that dilated like a camera shutter, and the familiar hiss of suction returned. When he was sure he wasn’t going to be flash-fried, melted, or suffer some other gruesome lava-related death, Mestoph sat back down and finally breathed again. Calm once more, he sat down and tried to pass time. He was still too nervous to touch the glass, which was glowing a bright orangey yellow, to finish his game of tic-tac-toe. It wasn’t necessary anyways, as moments later the tube pulled into what could only be described as a small subway station. The glass slid open and Mestoph stood back up and stepped out.
The station was about fifty feet wide, seventy feet high, and a hundred or so feet long with walls that were covered in glossy white acoustic tile for the first third and then curved into a barrel-vaulted ceiling. In the center of the vault was a long, narrow glass window that ran the length of the station and allowed the bright glow of the magma to shine. Although it was bright, it didn’t throw light very far. For that reason, and possibly to complete the subway station feel, the place still had fluorescent lights. In the center of the platform were two sets of three interconnected orange plastic chairs, placed back to back so that each set of three faced the opposite direction.