The Fall of Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Tim had pulled off his own helmet, maybe to let her see his once familiar face, and tears of pain streamed from his eyes. “No, Rebecca, please, don’t do this! I love—”

  “Nothing personal, Tim,” she assured him, as she sent a dozen rounds into his face. He went limp, too. It would take a while for him and the others to regenerate, by which time she hoped to be far from here.

  She collected the assault rifles from the men and dropped them into an open crate. Their pistols went in next, though she kept one of these—a 9mm M9 Beretta—and slipped some extra magazines for it into her pouch. She also found several M67 hand grenades on Earl, spherical and green like some deadly fruit, and decided to take these despite reservations about using them. She just hoped her former self’s instincts would stand her in good stead if need be..

  Confident now that she wouldn’t be shot in the back, she walked over to where Johnny lay writhing.

  “Ahh!” he wailed. “You shot my balls off, you bitch!” He was cupping his groin with both hands. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”

  “Been there, done that, you stupid Demon-fornicating fuck.”

  The winged Demons stood motionless, having chanced no attempt to flee despite the fact that Johnny had let go of their chains. Stooping down, with one hand Vee removed the Demon wrangler’s helmet. He spat a wad of blood in her face. She pressed the muzzle of the Beretta under his chin and a chunk of skull hinged with skin flipped open at the top of his head, like a miniature version of the incinerator hatches.

  Vee patted him down, in a zippered pocket in one leg of his pants discovered a key ring. She took this, and the Ka-Bar combat knife he had used to open up the wounded Demon, buckling its sheath to a strap on the outside of her right leg..

  Vee faced the Demons, keys in hand. She jingled them meaningfully, and then moved in uncomfortably close in order to unlock their collars.

  They held still for her, golden eyes unblinking and unfathomable, as she tried several keys with trembling hands before finding the right one. She unlatched their collars, dropped them to the ground, and then selected another key as the entities held their wrists out in front of them.

  As she unlocked the manacles around their wrists, she spoke to them.

  “This doesn’t mean we’re friends. Your kind tortured me in ways I don’t want to ever remember. But I don’t want you freeing my father.

  Understand? I want you to go as far away from these people as you can.

  But I’m sure you want that, too.”

  Now freed, the tall Demons regarded her enigmatically for only a moment more before they turned and sprang away toward the maze of stacked crates, ever silent, surprising Vee by dropping down on all fours and bounding with the grace of big cats. She supposed she could have simply killed them, to prevent them from being recaptured and used to liberate her father. Was it sympathy after all, and was it wise to allow such weakness in such a hostile world? She hoped the creatures wouldn’t make her regret her actions later.

  “Rebecca,” a coarsened, wet voice blurted behind her.

  Vee saw that Roper had gotten his own helmet off, and propped himself up on one elbow while he clamped the side of his neck to control the bleeding. His white uniform was almost entirely soaked crimson from his multiple wounds, his face blanched but quivering with the strain of self control.

  “Are you fucking crazy? Why did you do this?”

  “I’m sorry, Charles,” she told him. “I won’t stop you from looking for my father and freeing him, but I won’t be a party to it, either.”

  “But why? ”

  “I’m not who I was,” was all she’d say. She started moving toward the labyrinth of boxes, in the direction the Demons had taken.

  “Lady,” Roper rasped again. She looked back at him, and he said,

  “You keep this up and pretty soon you won’t have a friend in Hell.”

  Vee patted Jay’s polished bone form. “I got all the friends I need right here.” Then she too sprang away and trotted off into the shadows.

  20: THE PURSUIT

  AsVee wove her way through the canyons of piled crates, she half expected the loosed Demons to spring out at her from around a corner and do what Demons were supposed to do. But then she remembered Jay—not that she could expect every Demon to be like Jay.

  No Demons, but she did see a number of furtive figures—Damned, no doubt—peeking down at her from atop the castles of crates. So this warehouse area wasn’t entirely untenanted after all. The further she jogged, however, anxious to put as much distance between herself and the Angels as she could before they were able to pursue her, if pursue her they intended, the more she saw signs that there had been some intense fighting here in the past. The crates began to show bullet holes, and then appeared blackened with soot. At last, she found that a great many boxes had caught fire and been reduced to an expanse of black cinders, punctuated here and there by scorched metal boxes and drums, ash billowing up under her tramping feet.

  Now there appeared great conveyor belts—none of them operating—that slanted down from openings in the sky-high ceiling, and others that angled up from below, to connect with horizontal belts of steel rollers. A number of these conveyors passed straight through this level, from ceiling to floor, or vice versa, without even stopping here. Rusted hand trolleys waited to load or unload whatever materials had once been stored here.

  A sound caused Vee to freeze, startled, and she looked back over her shoulder. At first, she thought the cry had come from the direction of the elevator, but when it came again—somewhat closer this time—she realized it originated from the level above. Something that was approaching one of the openings through which conveyors descended to this level.

  The cry had been like the high-pitched scream of a hawk.

  “Shit,” Vee hissed.

  “We’d better be going,” Jay advised her.

  “You think?” she said, and then she was bolting.

  So Fred had sent more of his Celestials to tail the party at a distance.

  Had Roper’s plan to use the elevator as a shortcut delayed their arrival?

  Had they followed the sounds of gunfire or the piercing cry of pain of their comrade, and were they now calling back to let it know they were coming?

  Vee cursed the change in terrain, the charred rubble of wooden boxes offering her little in the way of shelter. She was out in the open here, the destruction spreading to all sides. Then, a chatter of automatic fire, and puffs of ash went up a little to her right in a string. She veered sharply to the left. Another distant rattle, but she couldn’t tell how close the projectiles had been to her this time.

  Ahead she saw a small cluster of blackened metal drums that might shield her, but she was reluctant to stop fleeing, reluctant to have to face her pursuers. The Celestials forced her hand, however, when bursts from two weapons at once stitched the floor to her left and nipped at her heels like an angry dog. She threw on a last spurt of speed, charged the barrels and vaulted up onto their lids, dropped down on the far side. An instant later, the loud metallic ping of bullets ricocheting off them, or punching right through. Vee tucked in her head to let the worst of the fusillade taper off, and then she popped up with Jay braced over the top of a barrel.

  There—still small with distance but ominous, running straight toward her position with what seemed incredible swiftness: a pair of Celestials with automatic weapons in their hands. If they had been wearing robes like the two Roper’s team had murdered, they had cast them off in the interest of speed and wore only white loincloths instead.

  But not only that; a third Celestial with one of their long-bladed swords in hand had diverged to the right, toward the edge of the burned area, no doubt with the intention of circling around to cut her off from behind. And might there be others, too, that had already branched off to move in on her from multiple directions? She mustn’t let them pin her down here.

  She squeezed Jay’s trigger, sent short streams of bullets toward one
of the sprinting Celestials, then shifted and fired at the second figure. To her surprise, given the distance, this one went down hard, rolled like a fallen racehorse in the jagged cinders and ash, struggled to rise again. Its partner never even glanced back at it, and discharged its own weapon on the run.

  A bullet actually flicked Vee’s hair. She sighted on the wounded Celestial and let fly a more prolonged blast, Jay shaking in her hands. The curved bone magazine, which doubled as the gun’s front handle, ran empty with a small click, but by then the wounded Celestial had stopped its struggles.

  Vee ducked back down as bullets clanged against the drums, and rummaged in her pouch with nervous hands for a fresh magazine.

  Another barrage of bullets, more sustained than any previously, and she knew that the oncoming Celestial was trying to keep her locked down to give the third (and others?) time to tighten the noose around her. She couldn’t allow that. Rather than pop up again as might be expected, she threw herself onto her side and fired from around the curve of the farthest barrel. The Celestial was shockingly closer than she had judged, almost on top of her. But it was to her advantage, as she directed a chain of bullets straight into its bare, bony torso. It kept coming, as if heedless, until it actually crashed against her wall of barrels…and then slumped down into the ash, its eerie blue eyes still open, still glowing, unchanged in death.

  Then Vee was up and running again, crossing the carbonized field of debris.

  Not far ahead, another of those conveyor ramps angled up toward the ceiling. A decision had to be made. This storage area seemed to go on into infinity; a wall of seared but intact metal crates as big as a freighter’s shipping containers was taking form at the far edge of the burnt tract, and who could tell how much more the warehouse extended beyond that? No, Vee decided on the ramp. Again, that instinct for ascension.

  Vee hit the conveyor belt without losing momentum, her lungs filled with fire, the muscles in her thighs feeling torn fiber from fiber with her efforts. She found herself panting in gasps, “My body’s not real…my body’s not real…”

  More gunfire; it marched up the incline beside her, outdistanced her a little. A fourth Celestial at least, then…and this one with a gun. On the broad ramp, she felt exposed, and wondered if this had been such a good idea, after all. It was still such a long way to that opening in the ceiling.

  Vee saw the Celestial with the sword coming in from the left, below and ahead of her. She fired as she ran, but missed, and the being was wise enough to swerve under the ramp itself where she couldn’t see it for the moment.

  Gunfire clattered behind her, and this time a bullet struck her left shoulder blade, shattering it like a dinner plate. She cried out, pitched forward onto her front. Grimacing with agony, she rolled onto her back, so much pain coursing down her left arm that she could only hold Jay with her right.

  A Celestial with a submachine gun was already racing up the ramp.

  Its gun shifted slightly and Vee seemed to gaze straight down its oncoming barrel. But she triggered her own gun, singlehanded, and a tight cluster of bone projectiles chiseled away an upper quarter of the Celestial’s unnaturally beautiful head. The entity blundered sideways, and plunged over the side of the ramp to crash below.

  Vee regained her feet with a long, shaky groan. She almost fell again immediately as she turned, but caught herself and resumed her ascent—though now only managing a drunken half-jog. Blood pulsed from her wound, inside and outside the second skin of her increasingly ventilated black uniform.

  Her mind could barely form the question: where was the one with the sword? It had enough trouble just commanding one foot to continue on in front of the other.

  She knew she couldn’t be killed, but if she continued to accumulate lead like this she thought she’d soon be rattling when she walked, or be too heavy to walk at all.

  She twisted to steal a fearful look back down the slope, even this movement excruciating. No, she couldn’t be killed, but she sure didn’t like pain. And she certainly didn’t want to be secreted again in another hidden torture chamber for another millennium or two.

  Still, no more Celestials behind her. Had the one armed with only a sword wised up and decided not to be a kamikaze?

  Time seemed to stutter along like a scratched and damaged reel of film, missing frames of consciousness. In an almost somnambulistic trance, Vee glanced back to see the trail of blood drops she was leaving; it seemed to dwindle away forever like the dotted line of a desert highway. She faced forward again and lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, her mind sobering considerably when she realized the opening in the ceiling was not that much further, at last. Inspired, she picked up the pace of her jogging despite the thudding vibrations her footfalls sent up into her mending bone.

  She was up, and through. The belt ended in a bed of those metal rollers, as did other conveyors that terminated around her, but this level—at least in this vicinity—bore an altogether different type of character. Its walls and floor were composed of a glossy black material like chitin, with the iridescent sheen of oil. The high vaulted ceiling was ribbed, looking like the interior of a cathedral as built within the belly of some fossilized leviathan. There were more of those metal freight cars standing about, rusting, and a deep channel recessed into the floor which contained rails like train tracks. Staggering ahead as she got her bearings, Vee followed the tracks with dazed eyes and saw they disappeared into the again organic-looking mouth of a tunnel.

  In the opposite direction the tracks ended at the edge of another elevator shaft, this one even larger than the one that had carried Roper’s team downward. Its chain of spaced platforms, however, were rising through the body of the Construct rather than descending.

  Her attention was called back to the tunnel by odd noises: snuffling and snorting, and then a weird squeal like that of a pig. Vee could now see eyes gazing back at her from the tunnel’s maw, shining red with reflected light.

  It wasn’t a difficult decision, choosing which way to go. Vee started toward the great, open elevator shaft, keeping mindful of those grunts and squeals and multiplying red eyes behind her.

  She couldn’t tell which of the other openings in the floor the white, phosphorescent figure leapt up from. Vee barely had time enough to turn her head and see the sword with its long straight blade cocked back for descent. She sprang forward, toward the elevator, but not quickly enough: the blade was swung in a whooshing arc, hacking halfway through her neck, scraping her cervical vertebrae.

  Stunned, Vee clamped a hand over the wound, as much to keep her head from lolling off its base as to contain the blood that geysered between her fingers. She did not turn and try to fire Jay with her other hand; she thought only of that elevator, the rising platforms…and stumbled onward, legs weakening as her blood fled her body, consciousness threatening to flee along with it.

  Vee crumpled, rolled languidly onto her back, Jay too heavy to raise in her fist. She expected to see the Celestial standing over her, drawing back its arm for another blow. A blow to finish the job, and then it could bag her head as a living trophy and take it back to Pastor Johnston to do with as he pleased.

  What she saw, though, was the Celestial being dragged backward by four arms, the arms of two tall figures with skin the color of eggplant. One of the bat-winged beings had seized the wrist of the arm that wielded the sword, and the Heavenly warrior’s other arm, as well. The second figure had grabbed a fistful of hair, jerked the Celestial’s head back, and was drawing across its throat a bladed instrument like a scalpel.

  Vee rolled over again, gathered her legs under her and pushed herself back to her feet, still pressing one hand to the side of her neck, her mouth hanging slack and drooling as if the muscles that controlled it had been severed. She lurched again toward the elevator, reached its edge and almost teetered over the brink while she waited for the next mesh-floored platform to rise. And here it came now, wide enough to carry a house. It came level with the edge of the shaft, and Vee all b
ut threw herself onto it. Again, she fell onto her back, and felt herself being carried upward.

  With the help of her clamped hand she was able to lift her head a little, just enough to see the two Demons pulling the Celestial toward the black tunnel, where those strange sounds rose to a slaughterhouse cacophony, hungry lurkers waiting for the butchers to finish their work. A few of these restless Demons stepped close enough to the mouth of the tunnel to be vaguely seen, appearing like bristly black boars walking on hind legs, their wrinkled tusked faces just human enough to be horrifying.

  Vee saw the two torturers looking at her over the shoulders of their struggling victim. Two sets of golden eyes in faceless faces, unreadable, locked with her own.

  Then the platform carried her up, up, until she could see them no longer. She heard a gurgling cry, like a hawk drowning in its own blood, and then those numerous pig voices in a rumbling, ravenous stampede.

  Vee’s head fell backward then, hitting the floor, coming half off, her blood dripping down through the mesh and raining far below.

  “Madam?” she heard Jay say. “Madam?”

  But then she heard no more.

  21: THE BRIDGE

  A screeching sound brought Vee’s dreams to a jarring halt. The dreams, already vague and scattered to begin with, receded behind the barrier of fog from which they had stolen. She opened her eyes.

  Her head rested on her bent elbow, and her body lay on its side on strong metal mesh. Raising her head, she saw Jay lying a little away from her, but the gun was face down, on its left side, so that his eye must be staring through the mesh into the blackness below. Why not an eye on both sides of his body, she wondered groggily; wouldn’t that be more useful for keeping enemies in view? Not to mention his inability to see straight ahead of him. Great design, she thought; not so much Colt as Dolt. Had he heard her rouse? His organs of sight and speech were obvious, but come to think of it, how the heck did the thing hear?