Armageddon??

by Stuart Slade

  Abigor shrugged. “It was a long time ago. Two or three million of your years. We had found this planet and on opening a gate back to our home a mistake was made and we opened a gate to here. A place like Heaven but unoccupied except for unimportant creatures. We took it for our own. Then, Satan wanted it for his kingdom, separate from Yahweh’s Heaven. Yahweh wanted both. Satan rebelled and about a third of us joined him. The war went on for a long time but Satan won, Hell became his kingdom and Yahweh kept Heaven.”

  “That’s not the way our stories told it.” Petraeus was grimly amused.

  “They were written by Yahweh’s people weren’t they?” Abigor grinned. He’d been watching The History Channel on television.

  Outer Ring, Seventh Circle of Hell What amazed Aeanas the most about his time in Hell was the fact that he remained sane. He knew his name. Remembered his family. His wife, his two sons. Remembered dying. Knew that he had been in Hell for a long time(though the exact length of time remained elusive). And his torment never drove him insane.

  Perhaps that was the most insidious aspect of Hell: they protected your mind from shattering. From becoming a shell with no feeling, no thought, no mind. After all, what use was there to torturing the mindless husk? The joy in the demon’s faces came when they saw his terror, his fear, Aeanas could see this. If he had no mind, he might scream, but would he really feel the pain?

  So, Aeanas feared them every time they came exactly as much as he had when they first set themselves upon him. Throughout the ages of screaming agony in the river there had been no emotion associated with his sufferings. How did it feel to have his skin seared from his body, his eyes boiled in their sockets, his genitals burned away? He could never grasp these; such memories danced just out of reach.

  That was the rub. If he could remember what it felt, perhaps he wouldn’t fear the demons so much. But in the heat of the moment, any kind of mental preparation he had made vanished into a cloud of palpating terror and pain. He always begged not to be thrown back into the river, a simpering weakling, utterly without shame or pity. He screamed the same pathetic, high-pitched scream that he let out every time his body hit the flaming lava, the kind of blameless, ringing screech that only mortal injury and mortal fear can evoke.

  Except it wasn’t mortal in this place; each time he escaped from the river, Aeanas was made whole again. Somehow. He really didn’t have time to think about it, because the respites between tortures seemed fleeting and ephemeral at best. Sometimes he saw others tormented as he, but that really didn’t matter.

  He was dead.

  This was Hell.

  And this was how he was going to spend eternity. Each soul-rending abuse seared him but did not destroy him. The memories were not his to cherish. He would never know the wondrous oblivion of insanity. He was instead doomed to repeat every torment as though it was his first, though he knew this wasn’t the case.

  So, as Aeanas sprawled on the bank, writhing from his burns but never dying, he was in the full grip of panic. His eyesight was only coming back and he would have screamed if he could, if his lungs had not been seared to uselessness. Breathed if he could. Instead, the hard earth of Hell smashed into Aeanas’ flailing form. He nevertheless attempted to scramble away. From what, he couldn’t say, because he couldn’t see more than a few feet. And he couldn’t get very far, because he still couldn’t breathe. Then, at once, the choking fume and heat were gone. Reflexively, he gulped in air. The sulfur-laden fumes did nothing good for his lungs, but breath was breath. Based on his fuzzy past, he expected perhaps a barrel of molten rock to be poured over him it didn’t happen. He opened his eyes, and he saw a hand. But this hand wasn’t scaled. It had no claws. It was a human hand, as his own. Following it up, he saw its owner: a man, naked, stood before him. In his far hand was a spear—no, a trident, but beyond that, the visage of Hell faded to a blurry, ruddy nihility.

  Aeanas reeled and tried to scrabble away. What new torment was this? But the figure snatched Aeanas and hauled him to his feet.

  “It’s alright!” he said in a language that wasn’t Aeanas’. But yet, he understood it. How could that be? “What’s your name, soldier?”

  Aeanas gulped. His throat, long charred by the heat and flames, was already feeling better. “Aeanas,” he replied finally.

  “Anus?!” another voice shouted. A similarly-naked figure, also carrying a trident, stepped under the tree, into the range where Aeanas could see clearly. “Your name is Anus?!” The man roared with laughter.

  “Cool it, DeVanzo,” the first man snapped. Again, Aeanas was forced to marvel at the fact that the two were speaking an entirely different language than his own. The first man continued: “He said, ‘Aeanas.’ That’s Greek, right?”

  Aeanas nodded, then asked with some timidity: “Who are you?”

  The first man started. “Oh, right! Name’s Tucker McElroy, from Tennessee originally, though most recently I found myself in the molten river a ways that way. This uncouth gentleman’s name is Artie DeVanzo, from New Jersey.”

  Aeanas nodded blankly. New Jersey? What was that? Where was Old Jersey?

  McElroy regarded Aeanas for a moment, then said, “Say, you ain’t a new arrival, are you? How long you been here, son?”

  Aeanas shrugged. “I…could not tell you. A long time, I am sure.”

  “Well,” DeVanzo said, stepping in, “how did you die?”

  “I was struck in the heart with an arrow,” Aeanas said. “Then, I believe my throat was cut.”

  McElroy whistled. “Ain’t that a way to go. What was you doin’? Hunting? I didn’t know they did that over in Greece.”

  Aeanas shook his head, his puzzlement now building into a frustration. “Of course not. I was in battle!”

  McElroy did a double take. “Battle? Just how old are you, anyway? Shit, no one’s used bows and arrows in battle for five or six hundred years!”

  DeVanzo then interjected. “What battle were you in? Where was it?”

  “It was in Greece, at Thermopylae,” Aeanas said warily. Were these demons, trying to trick him into revealing something? What could they be after?

  McElroy’s eyes went wide, as did DeVanzo’s. “Holeeeeee shit,” McElroy said. “You died at Thermopylae? The Thermopylae? King Leonidas? Xerxes? The Persians? The Spartans?”

  Aeanas nodded. “Yes. Do you know of it?”

  McElroy snorted. “It’s only one of the most famous battles in history!”

  Aeanas shifted his weight. He fear was actually abating. Were they trying to lull him into sedation? “Why?” he asked McElroy in typical laconic bluntness. “It was a simple delaying action. What makes that so famous?”

  DeVanzo sputtered, “You faced a million Persians! And there were only three hundred of you!”

  “Wrong,” Aeanas corrected immediately. “Thespians more than double our number stayed, and we had the Thebans.”

  McElroy shook his head. “That don’t matter none! We got ourselves a genuine Spartiate!” McElroy was now speaking to the other man, DeVanzo. “Man, I can’t wait to bring him back to base! A Spartan hoplite from Thermopylae! One of the three hundred!”

  “Yeah, and the oldest member of the resistance!” DeVanzo chimed in. “I bet that’ll give Ori a thing or two to chew on!”

  “Ori’s another old revival,” McElroy said to Aeanas by way of explanation. “He’s a warrior called a Samurai, from a place called Japan, that…well, shoot, it’d be outside what you’d know as the world!” The two men laughed easily together.

  “Stop!” Aeanas roared. They would get no more from him; they would confuse him no longer. From this moment forward, they paid for information in blood.

  He surged at McElroy and wrapped his arms around him. With fluidity that came with years of practice, he wrenched the man bodily into the air and slammed him to the ground. Most importantly, as he rose, he snatched up the trident and advanced on DeVanzo. DeVanzo was obviously some kind of fool; he wasn’t even holding his weapon properly. Wit
h three swift motions, Aeanas swatted the trident aside, forced it from his grasp, and had a point at DeVanzo’s throat.

  The man instantly raised his hands, and Aeanas jammed it in hard enough to draw blood. He then rotated around DeVanzo so that he was standing side by side with still-dazed McElroy. Through clenched teeth, he hissed: “Explain yourselves, else I will destroy you both!”

  And much to his surprise, both men smiled broadly.

  “You know, we could actually use you!” McElroy shouted, brushing the reddish dust from his body. A cut on his knee bled feebly. “Alright, here are your answers: as you’ve probably figured out, you’re in Hell. You’ve been dead for over 25 centuries. That’s 2,500 years. The world as you knew it does not exist anymore! You understand? Everyone you ever knew is dead, and probably here, being tortured. You have a wife? Kids? They’re somewhere out here!” McElroy gestured wildly at the Hellscape surrounding them. “And they’ve suffered exactly as you have for that last 2,500 years! Do you hear me?”

  Aeanas lowered the trident. McElroy went on, “But things have changed. The situation has changed. We’re fighting back, both here in Hell, and on Earth. We’re gonna free as many soldiers as we can, and we’ll all fight against Hell. Most times, it’s modern soldiers, but hey, I can’t wait for the guys back on Earth to hear that we got Spartan warrior and a Samurai fightin’ with us. Won’t that be a trip?

  “Anyway, Aeanas, we are the Hell’s People’s Liberation Front, and we want you to join us.” McElroy held his hand out.

  Aeanas paused, but just for a moment, then passed the trident back to him. “Good,” McElroy continued. “We could probably use some more people proficient in your type of fighting. Word is that our cell won’t be getting supplied with modern weapons for a while, so for the time being, we’re stuck with more… primitive means of defending ourselves and killing ba—demons. Plus a trick or two we’ve learned over the centuries.”

  Aeanas then did something hadn’t done since the day before he died, over 2,500 years ago: he smiled. “So they can be killed.”

  “Betcher ass they can,” DeVanzo crooned. “How do you think we got these tridents?”

  “So,” McElroy continued. “Will you join us? Maybe teach us how to throw a demon like you just did to me? Or maybe how to correctly hold a spear? In return, I’ll show you some things that you’d call magic.”

  Aeanas laughed. “Has anyone said no?”

  Chapter Forty Five

  F-111C, Koala Flight, Approaching Hellmouth

  “Koala Flight this is Hellmouth Air Traffic Control. Come to course three-three-fiver, altitude three thousand feet for Airstrip Delta Approach. You are cleared to use Runway 31.”

  “G’day cobbers. Everything bonzer down there? Throw another shrimp on the Barbie for us.” Squadron Leader Mackay’s weapons systems operator gave him a pained look. “Don’t blame me, that’s how the septics expect us to talk. Don’t want to disappoint them now do we?” Mackay flipped back to the ATC frequency. “Don’t get in tizzy about us landing, we’ll go straight through.”

  The voice on the air traffic control net sounded slightly strangled. “Koala flight, be advised, it is against regulations to fly through the Hellmouth. Please land and your aircraft will be towed through.”

  “May be against your regulations mate, not against ours. Anyway, you can’t tow an F-111 like that. Nose is too long and the weight distribution won’t hack it. We’ve got to fly though.”

  Mackay’s WSO looked appalled. “Sir, that is utter bullshit.”

  “Charlie, I know that and you know that but do you think the liability-obsessed septic down there knows that? Its been almost twenty years since the USAF mothballed it’s Pigs, that kid wasn’t even a lecherous gleam in his father’s eyes back then. He’s not going to take the chance of these birds getting damaged on his say-so. He’ll let us go through, our responsibility, you watch.”

  “Koala Flight, this is Hellmouth air traffic control. At your request, you are cleared for flight transit of the Hellmouth.”

  “Told you.”

  The four F-111s, three strike aircraft loaded down with air-to-surface ordnance and an RF-111 with a full surveillance fit, dipped down and started to skim across the sand dunes towards the black ellipse of the Hellmouth. The book said that the ellipse was 800 feet high and 1,200 feet wide which gave the F-111s plenty of room to make their transitions. Beneath them, the desert was covered with armored vehicles, some parked in long lines, others forming convoys through the Hellmouth. The F-111s were low enough to see the commanders of the tanks and armored infantry carriers sitting in the turrets, to see them look up as the scream of the jet engines grabbed their attention. Some waved and Mackay rocked his wings in response.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” Charlie Cartwright was awed by the armored vista spread out beneath him.

  “Nobody has, not since the Second World War and not so often then. Every armored formation in the world must be closing in on this place. That’s the pattern, armor comes here, infantry stays at home to protect the people back there. You see the roads and pipelines being built as we came in? Hold one, here we go.”

  The ellipse was approaching with frightening speed but Mackay wasn’t aware of having passed through it. The blue sky and brilliant yellow sun had simply gone, replaced by the murky redness of the Hell environment. Mackay could feel the engines starting to labor as they gulped air through the filters that kept the worst of the dust out. The Pig was shaking slightly as the filters vibrated in the airflow, casting off the dust before it could choke them.

  “Watch those engine temperatures like a hawk Charlie. If they start to climb, we’re out of here. You got the nav beacons?”

  “Both of them. Realigning navigation computer now.” One of the purposes of this flight was to establish a comparative base between the Euclidian geometry of Earth and the non-Euclidian environment of Hell. Once that was done, navigation computers could be reprogrammed and another problem facing humans trying to fight in this, the strangest of all battlefields, would be solved. As they were all being solved, just taking one at a time.

  “Koala-Three here. Cameras are rolling.”

  “Roger, Koala Three. Any electronic emissions?”

  “Ours. The spectrum’s full of them. Radar, comms, you name it. Nothing hostile or unidentified.”

  “Friendly aircraft, this is Dysprosium Air Traffic Control. Please identify and file flight plan.”

  “This is Koala Flight, three F-111C and one RF-111C on armed reconnaissance flight to Dis and the Hellpit. We’ll let you know the course as soon as we figure it out. This place just isn’t right.”

  “You’re telling us Koala Flight. Good luck.”

  The F-111 flight soared over the Martial Plain of Dysprosium, heading towards the Phlegethon River that represented the front line of the human advance into Hell. That advance had stopped temporarily while the infrastructure needed to support the next phase was being established. More importantly, there was a lot of evidence that a huge new Hellish Army was moving up against the troops digging in along the river. That was one of the things the aircraft had been sent in to check. In the meantime, the Russians were digging in, establishing a defense in depth. The central portion of it was underneath them now, a sea of platoon-sized strongpoints, the arcs of fire of each interlocking in a maze of death and destruction. Mackay couldn’t see them but he knew the gaps between the strongpoints were filled with minefields and razor wire. Backing the whole defense position up was the artillery. The Russian artillery didn’t have the flexibility or precision of its American equivalent but then, Mackay thought, the septics didn’t line their guns up, wheel to wheel, for 30 kilometers either.

  “We’re in hostile airspace now Control.”

  “We have you on radar, be advised, you are the only friendly aircraft in the area. You can take it as read, if it flies, its hostile. You’re cleared to shoot.”

  “Thank you Control. Be sure to tell the ai
r defense guys on the ground we’re here.”

  “Already done Koala Flight. If they open up on you, it will be in a friendly manner.”

  “Reassuring that. Charlie, warm up the AIM-9Zs. Be good if One Squadron gets the first air-to-air in Hell. Give those upstarts in Six something to chew on.”

  “Koala-Three here, take a look below us. I think that’s the hostile army we were told to watch out for.”

  “You think?” Beneath them, the ground was covered with demons moving towards the Phlegethon River. Far, far too many to count, they turned the ground black with their number. Some were harpies, they tried to climb and challenge the racing F-111s but they lacked the speed and the ability to climb fast enough. “Control, confirm sighting of hostile force moving on the Phlegethon. Rhinolobsters, baldricks, harpies, you name it. Better tell our Russian friends to keep their powder dry.

  “Roger, wilco. For your information, its not just gunpowder they Russkies have got back there. Any sight of Dis?”

  “Ahead of us now. High stone walls, as far as the eye can see which isn’t far in this clag. Looks like an old medieval castle, not the Hollywood version, the real thing. Like they have in Wales. We’re going to try and break some glass now.”

  Mackay dipped his aircraft and headed for the walls of Dis. The terrain following radar was working perfectly as he skimmed the wall, barely a hundred feet over the crenellations. Inside was a town that looked something straight out the middle ages, a tight mass of buildings separated by narrow alley-like streets. There were baldricks down there, ones that looked up in stunned shock at the monsters that had suddenly crossed the wall and were screaming defiance at all around them as they passed low over the roofs. The demons stood and watched long after the Pigs had gone, awed by the sight and realizing that things were never going to be the same in Hell again.