Liars Truth

by Dorian Scott Cole

  Chapter 2

  The People We Sometimes Wish Were In Hell

  Lightning flashed. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA, Uuunk!"

  John arrived on a lightning bolt, and landed in a smoking heap. "What the hell was that?!" he yelled. "That hurt!" He looked around, dazed. "I’m too busy to be dealing with this stuff. Did somebody give me a bad drug?! Where’s my assistant?!"

  John’s vision began to clear. He could see greyness. Just dark grey and dark red light. "Did the doctors paddle me?" The place was full of ashes, seemingly devoid of sunshine and happiness.

  He stood. Lava pits boiled everywhere, belching smoke and horrible gases. He coughed and covered his mouth with his sleeve. The horizon was red with fire. Burning embers fell and glowed all around. He ducked, but none hit him. "Crematory?! Oh, God! This place is frightening."

  As his vision cleared, he could see people glumly sitting around. Some lay around moaning, some were tearing at their hair and flesh. Each brushed glowing embers off of themselves, which were immediately replaced, like being attacked by a cloud of mosquitoes. "This is not good."

  John could just make out a path. He scanned the landscape to get his bearings, in case he wanted to come back here. There were no significant points to identify the place, unless you counted misery. He began to walk down the path.

  He walked for what seemed like hours. Maybe days. There was no sense of time. Maybe he should have just sat still so someone could find him, but he knew it was pointless. Somehow he was getting his just deserts.

  The misery all around him made him think of the people he had failed. He could have focused his career as Governor on easing misery and making people’s lives better. But there were so many other really important things to do. All of those campaign promises… well to be honest, they were just tools for getting into office – he hadn’t really intended to work hard on any of them – not that he didn’t care. He simply never had time… or the inclination, to be honest.

  Yeah, he would give a beggar a dime… if he could prove he wasn’t just on the take and had actually tried to work. Everyone could get a job if they really wanted. Besides, he flew in different circles. What could he have done for any of them anyway? Useless slobs – way too many of them. Too many to even count… except during election results. They mattered then.

  What was that? If he strained, he could see someone ahead on the path. He could hear them shouting. Maybe he could find out something about where he was. Coming toward him was a man, nude, trying to stay ahead of a terrible monster. The monster was three feet taller than the man, and huge, with 3 feet long pointy horns like a ram. Her mouth looked big enough to eat his head. She was covered in scales, had furious red eyes, and her hands ended in long pointed claws that gripped a whip she repeatedly stung him with.

  "Cower, you sack of crap! Cower before me. Kiss my feet. Get up off your lazy ass and do something before I knock you into Hell. Oh, you are in Hell. Lucky you! Move, you SOB, move!" the monster screamed at him.

  They paused in front of John, and he shrank away. The man continued trying to run, as if on a treadmill, but couldn’t get anywhere.

  "Don’t let me stop you." John grimaced and backed out of the path.

  The man wailed, "Just let me rest a moment!"

  "What did you do to deserve this?" John stammered.

  The monster morphed into a middle age woman. "This monster beat me, raped me, and shouted at me, day after day. Now I’m his monster!"

  "Please, help me! Throw me into the Lake Of Fire so I’ll be gone. Anything is better than this!"

  The woman morphed back into a monster, then swung at the man with her claws and connected, leaving a long bloody scar. He went down, then from a crawl tried to move ahead.

  "Did I say you could rest?! Move your lazy ass before I rip your balls off again!" Suddenly the man was released and tore out of there, the monster right on his tale.

  "Rip them off again?" John shuddered and continued walking, a fresh perspective on suffering now firmly planted in his head. "I never did anything like that to my wife. I hope." Suddenly his head flooded with memories of times he wanted sex and she didn’t, and he pressed on. Times he shouted at her for not wanting the same things he did. Times he forced her to campaign for him, even though she hated it. He looked around at the people sitting and moaning. Was that to be his fate? Would someday he just stop walking, sit down, and let himself mourn? Surely not. He didn’t deserve this fate. Maybe he was just in a coma and this was just a bad, guilt ridden dream.

  He walked on, contemplating the things he had done to his wife. Badly burned and in a coma, her chance at life was probably gone. Had he been a good husband? On balance, maybe he hadn’t been nice. Maybe the good wouldn’t have outweighed the bad. What about the jewelry he gave her? And the vacation trips. And the spas – hadn’t he treated her right? A large presence at the side of the road startled him, and goaded him from his reflections.

  A very tall man with a huge head stood there, his neck stretched out and his head slowly moving in circles like an owl. His huge eyes bulged from his head. He looked this way and that, and seemed to be unable to focus on anything.

  "Stop staring at me!" He yelled.

  John continued to gaze in wonder at the strange sight. "How did you get like this?"

  "I was a rubbernecker. I slowed down thousands of cars a day on the Interstate to look at accidents. I even caused accidents. Now all I can do is look, and I can never see what I want to see."

  "Oh. And I suppose you rushed to the front of the line of traffic and slowed the entire line to a stop while you barged in? Um, just like I did." John said it with guilt. He was the governor, a man above the rest. The long line of traffic wasn’t filled with important people like him - they could wait.

  "Don’t ever slow down people on the Interstate. You’ll spend five-hundred years just like me."

  John shrank like the man had just shot at him. "Is there a judge around here? Lawyer? Someone I can talk to?" John heard his own voice and it sounded like begging, desperation. He needed to get hold of himself.

  "This place is crawling with lawyers. Now stop staring at me! I can’t stand to be stared at like some freak accident."

  John hurried on. Things were looking grim. If being a rubbernecker was all it took to get here, he was sunk. He might just as well go sit next to a lava pit. How had he done this? Eye of a needle type thing. But he couldn’t believe he deserved this. He trekked on, shaking his head, muttering in disbelief for hours. At each lava pit he passed, he looked at it and rejected the idea. No, he didn’t belong here – he just didn’t belong here. Why hadn't he stayed with his mother?!

  Ahead stones were being thrown back and forth across the road by some kind of insane teams. Was this fun? People were getting hit. Knocked to the ground, they would yell in pain, then get up and throw the stone even harder at whomever hit them. Back and forth it went. Why? What insane punishment drove this?

  As he drew closer to the gauntlet of stones, he noticed a man and a woman lying in a bed of ashes. "Who are those people throwing rocks at each other?"

  The man responded callously, "Those are the worst of the bill collectors, spammers, hucksters, cheats, telemarketers, deadbeats – everyone who tried to bully, trick, or cheat anyone."

  "Why don’t they just stop?" It seemed totally ridiculous to John. Just make an agreement and stop.

  The man laughed. "I’ve been watching them for years. They know stopping is a trick, so they throw harder."

  "This is insane. I don’t belong here. How do I get out of here?!" John pleaded again, his frustration no longer in check.

  The man laughed again. "Great question. Let me rate that for you. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s right up there with the meaning of life." The two snickered at him.

  "Ask a question, I get comedians. Are you from New York or LA?"

  The two looked shocked. "Second City, can’t you tell?!"

  The woman broke
into a comedy routine: "If I dug you a grave six feet deep, how much dirt would be in the hole?"

  None, John thought. Too obvious.

  "Just you, dirt bag!" The woman replied.

  "Ooooooooooooh," John moaned.

  The man looked at her like she was nuts. "That joke will never play well in the major markets."

  She continued, "Don’t you just love picnics? Let me tell you. If you open your picnic basket here, the worms crawl back out. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha."

  Again the man attacked, "That’s not funny – it’s pathetic! There was no sex in it. It’s children’s comedy."

  She continued with indifference to the man. "You know the difference between a picnic joke and this guy? A picnic joke is worth something! My mother was right about you!"

  The man grimaced as if pained by the remark. "You want to know what a real picnic is? Waiting for this woman, with her endless stupid jokes, to disintegrate into ashes."

  John interrupted, again pleading, "Please, there was a big mistake and I took a wrong turn."

  The man settled back in the ashes. "We all took wrong turns, if you know what I mean."

  John looked away in time to see a bicyclist riding toward him. He moved beside the bicycle’s path. "Wait, stop! Stop! STOP I need to ask you something." The cyclist kept coming at full speed. John grabbed the handlebars of the bike and stopped it. The shirt, flowing in the wind, fell down on the seat.

  "Sorry to stop you, but how do I get out of here?" John looked over the rider. There was no top half of the body, just a flowing shirt of air, now collapsed on the seat. John searched through the shirt looking for a body, head, and arms. "Uh, never mind."

  The biker rode off, and pointed his leg to a sign post at an intersection. The signpost was labeled: Attractions. Pointing one direction: Lake Of Fire; Hopeless Leap; Outer Darkness; Endless Walk; Mastiffs of Hell. Pointing the other direction: Love; Grim Reaper Appeals; Persephone; River Styx; Charon’s Ferryboat; Elysium; Arcadia; Asphedolus; Paradise; Heaven.

  After examining the sign post, John started walking in the more positive direction. Maybe he could find someone who would listen, someone who would get him back to his mother’s loving arms.

  John blanked out the suffering and misery around him, and focused on making his case. He was a lawyer. He could persuade juries. Surely he could convince Grim Reaper Appeals, if this wasn’t all just an illusion, and he wasn’t convinced it was real. People had bad dreams. Vivid dreams. Vivid bad dreams with terrors that seemed as real as anything real. Any moment he could wake up.

  The path seemed clear, so he stumbled on blindly, mentally preparing his defense, and occasionally bursting out in loud argument, opposing his imagined reactions from the Grim Reaper. Each time he did he thought he was losing it. But so what? He was in an insane place.