by catt dahman
Dana and I talked a while as we fell.
“I wonder how long we will fall?” Dana asked, “it’s not bad since we’re going slowly, and it’s calming. It is very curious, though.”
“No clue. What is vegemite? Do they eat it in Australia? I wonder if that’s what we’ll eat there.”
Dana shrugged, “I think it’s a fungus. They like bar-be-cues, so maybe we’ll find decent food, but why are you worried about Australia?”
“I keep thinking we’ll fall all the way through and come out on the other side of the world,” I laughed, “I guess that’s impossible but so is everything else in my life right now.” It was unlike me to worry about food or Australia or to show curiosity about falling.
“This is unreal, isn’t it? I keep thinking we are in a dream.”
“I know,” I said, “it makes no sense and feels unreal, but I know I have worked my butt off for weeks. I think I’m kind of nervous and scared of what we’ll find in hell.”
“I know. Monsters. And Danny said dinosaurs. Weird. I don’t want to be eaten by a T-Rex or anything.”
“We’ll watch out for them. Danny seems to know his business even if half the time he acts like a rabbit.”
“He does. Strange. Virgil likes you.”
“Don’t go there…not interested…just wanna get this done, save the world, and go back to normal. I like normal.”
Finally, our fall slowed, and there was a bottom; we landed softly. Corey fell down because he wasn’t expecting the trip down to end but got up again, brushing himself off, “Did you feel like we would fall forever?” he asked, “that was fantastic. Did you see all the stuff as we fell? I watched a half a dozen movies, I think.”
“I didn’t see movies,” I said, “I just rested a lot.”
Coral nodded, “I slept good.” He stretched and yawned. He did look well rested. Dark circles had vanished from beneath his eyes.
There was a room before us. We went in.
We looked around the hallway and saw a few dusty chairs, a table, a door, and lights, besides cupboards along the walls.
Danny carried a few bags, and from one, he removed bottles of water and sandwiches of roast beef. I knew Coral made them because in the aluminum foil were garlic-dill pickles, and in a last baggie was a sour apple.
We ate every crumb.
A small zipped pouch contained a meal for the cat, and he ate his, then sat, and washed himself.
Danny encouraged us to use the restroom behind the door. It was more of an outhouse as the bottom of the toilet was a dark hole. I heard squeaking below and imagined rats.
I had a fear of falling in or dropping something into the pit. After I washed my hands, I walked back to where we gathered.
A window was near the door, and I went over to peep out. The glass was smudged with some haze, so I tried to rub it away but only smeared it more. Luckily, I had a tissue and cleaned off an area so I could see outside.
I don’t know what I expected, but first view of hell was a shocking view.
Chapter Nine: First Sights of Hell
I saw a narrow street outside where people walked. Some of them looked normal, but others had horns, lizard tails, or monstrous features, all monsters from the worst nightmares.
I saw concrete and steel beams, everything in grey and shades of grey. Angles. Sharp angles filled the street, making the buildings look cold and impersonal.
They were industrial looking without plants, yards, or anything that might make them look welcoming. Between buildings, monster-looking vendors ran stalls and sold things I couldn’t imagine, nor did I want to.
Alongside the streets were deep canals filled with something I couldn’t quite make out and ugly steel bridges crossing the canals so the people could get from the middle of the road to the doorways of the buildings or houses.
Two females caught my eye. They wore red, very short shorts and seven-inch platform heeled shoes. When the females turned to the side, I saw breasts the size and firmness of honey dew melons, tightly packed into black leather halters. One had a head full of flowing red hair, and the other had white-blonde hair, cut super short and styled like a boy.
Danny looked out from the side.
“Prostitutes?” I asked.
“Yes. Female ones. Lice-hookers.”
“Huh?”
Danny nodded, “They are gorgeous in body and face, and few men can resist them. They’re expensive, as well. But when a man buys one and tries to enjoy himself, lice by the billions flow from the skin, popping out all over, and the lice swarm the victim.”
“That’s horrible,” I said.
“They were not careful before and didn’t think about the criminal element they were spreading, and now they are tormented by lice. Poetic justice is key here.”
“And what happens to them? The men?” I asked.
“The lice run up their noses and down their throats, and they suffocate in a terrible way. The lice feed on them, too. Then, the men die, but this is hell, as you know, so the poor sods come back to life afterwards.
Most will grab another lice-hooker right away even though the men have suffered. They are suffocated and eaten alive by their own lust, so to speak.”
“Why do they do it, knowing that?”
“It’s hell. Forever.A miserable suffocation and lice creepy crawling; it’s better than the same thing every day, same misery, same unhappiness. It’s a new torture, and that’s worth something.”
I didn’t agree, but that was my own belief. As I watched, both women were bought, and they vanished across a bridge and into an alley with the men. I was glad I didn’t have to see the billions of lice emerge.
“That’s disgusting,” I said,
“Sadly, that’s one of the less horrible things you will see here. Sex trade is very popular here and even greatly encouraged.”
Since my eyes had adjusted, I could see more of the canals now. They carried sludgy, filthy water filled with nasty debris and bones.
Danny whispered that was sewer and that bones were common to see in the sludge. The toilet we used flowed into the open sewer.
“There is a shop there that can give you a few minutes respite from torture, but the price is a treasured memory, and you lose it. You will find some down here who remember very little, only enough to keep their punishments keen, but they have traded away everything that might have given them any balm.”
Danny motioned to show us a small vial of something he was holding. “You need to use this powder. Snort it.” Danny pulled the small vial from his pocket, showed it to us, and set it on the table. He treated it as if it were delicate and expensively rare.
“Coke?” Corey asked, a little excited.
Danny shook his head, “No. It’s very, very valuable down here. It’s made of one-eyed demon bones, and those are hard to find.
You are carrying many gemstones now, but the little bit of powdered, one-eyed demon bones I procured is worth a hundred times your gems. It is horribly costly. I umm…paid a lot for it,” Danny unconsciously touched his eye patch.
“Danny, tell me you didn’t….” My knees felt watery with the thought of his trading an eye for the powder. How painful that would be both physically and emotionally.
“An eye is worth a lot, Alice. I traded it for the powder. I had to. All of you need to sniff a pinch; it will dull your sense of smell so that instead of all the foul stenches, you’ll get just a bit of them.”
I was wordless over the fact that he had given his own eye to procure the powder for our comfort and to ensure we did the best we could. It was a terrible sacrifice.
Dana asked, “Why do we need it?” She inquisitively looked at the powder, ready to do as Danny asked.
“Because the smell alone down here drives most people insane for hundreds or thousands of years, the important, wealthy people have the powder so they don’t suffer the reek.”
“Umm. They could just stop having open sewers and clean up? Then, no one would need the
stuff,” Pax said. He sniffed the white powder and said he didn’t feel a thing, “They could bathe and do common sense things.”
“You’d get a tax for not littering. Contributions to the State of Decay are very serious things here. People can be arrested and tortured for not using the sewer system enough,” Danny said. “The State of Decay is very important, and everyone shows public support. If you vomit into the street, you are likely to get applause.”
I looked at the canals and shivered. Yuk.
The sky was reddish grey and polluted, probably just how they liked it here. On the table, I saw a bottle with a little tag.
Drink me.
I looked to Danny. I poured the wine into the glasses I found in a cupboard, not clean ones, but dusty ones that fit right in with the other dust and dirt. Sniffing powder and drinking unknown wine, it was a wild time.
Danny said the wine would mask our auras so that people wouldn’t easily be able to see that we were alive and not supposed to be in hell. The entire dead and alive thing was very confusing to me. People here were dead in our world and alive here. My friends and I were alive both places.
“The story we will use is that you are new here in hell, so you can get by with reacting in horrified ways as you begin to understand the misery here. We will say I am your guide.
Some may try to frighten or disgust you because they score points for that. Some may be very pitiful, but don’t let your sympathy go too far as they can’t be helped at all.”Danny pulled on white gloves that hid his strange fingers.
He spoke and looked different now, and I wondered why he was in disguise down here. It was a question and some random thoughts I had that I filed away for later.
Chapter Ten: I Am New Here in Hell
Walking out of that room into the street was one of the most difficult things we had ever done. All of us looked at one another with dread as we stepped out. Faintly, I could smell rot, smoke, and other scents that I couldn’t quite place, but they were fleeting anyway.
Walking over the bridge, I willed myself not to look at the sludge. Into a canal, Danny poured out a bag of rodents’ skeletons, some with their scaly tails still fresh. He said it was for the owners of the house and to keep them from being taxed for not contributing to the State of Decay.
I didn’t ask who owned the house.
The cobblestones were black and set with concrete all around them, but Danny told us that the stones were made in factories that belched out the black smoke. The lowest class of the people worked at the factories.
“And they make the stone?” I asked.
“Oh, no, Not at all. Those who make the stones are a step higher. The lowest class is drained of blood several times a day, and they die, and then they come back, and they are drained again.
Their blood is to help form the stones. It’s really an unappreciated job. Envision being on a rigid table with a needle inserted into your vein. In a few minutes, your blood runs out a tube and into a fissure in the floor. Down below, they process your blood to make the stones. In time, you die. In a few moments, you awaken, alive again, and the blood runs out a second time. A third time. All day long for twelve hours.”
“Who is the low class? How did they get to be so low here?” Pax asked.
“People trying to sell their souls for power and money when they were alive are automatically regulated to the low strata when they die. They expect to have everything they want but are tricked.
BBDU is a master of lies. The low people are somewhat like mosquitoes, little people that aggravate with big aspirations. They aren’t evil enough for a big, important position here, but trust me, there are millions of them, silly little wannabes.”
“I guess if people knew what would happen, they wouldn’t try to sell their souls,” Annie said. “That’s horrible.”
“In the factories, some people have bone taken from them.Humans or demons either are fine. They cut off the legs and arms, and then the workers chop up the body and remove the bones.
The grout work between the stones is dust and bone, and that is what the workers want the bone for. When they finish flensing, the head goes on a shelf.”
I used a toe of my boot to rub the grout, shivering, “And then? What happens to the heads?”
“The head might stay on the shelves, fully aware, eternally. They feel the pain of losing their corporeal bodies, of course.
When there are too many, they might be tossed out into the canal or garbage or kicked about as a ball; parts of the head might be used for other things; the eyes could be food or used in potions for magic.”
People shouldn’t try to bargain with their souls. I said that.
“Meh, you can’t tell anyone anything. No one takes warnings seriously,” Danny told us, “you should know that by now.” He pointed out the way we were to go, with a caveat that we were about to face a specific hazard here in hell. We were about to have our first fight.
“Why doesn’t anyone just clean them out for good?” Pax asked, looking at the bunch of hooligans awaiting us.
“Pax, Pax, Pax. It’s hell, remember?” Dana said, “It only makes sense a bunch of bullies would be in hell.”
Down the alley where we had to go, a large group of boys and girls stood around, smoking dope, drinking something red and thick, and laughing loudly. The boys were all pimply-faced, big, and dumb-looking. They hawked snot and spat globs on the walls until the walls shone with their noxious bodily fluid.
Most wore jeans that showed their butt cracks; ugly, washed-out tee shirts; and big, black, biker boots with metal riveted into the edges to match their belts. The boots looked enormous on their fat feet.
The girls were divided. Half were rough-looking, snapping gum angrily, and smoking. They had mean, piggy eyes, wide doughy faces, thin lips and were unattractive; the anger and hatred ruined any good looks they might have had. The other half of the girls were nearly the opposite: slender with curves, very pretty and were dressed in cute, flashy clothing such as skinny jeans, brightly colored blouses, and fashionable sandals. They had perfectly coiffed hair, straight and bouncy, and they texted one another constantly, giggling and exclaiming loudly.
“Bullies,” Annie sniffed, “What about the pretty ones? Who are those cute girls with the bullies?”
“Mean girls,” I said.I knew who they were. Those were the ones who singled out other kids in school, wrote malicious, spiteful things on their social pages, and took unflattering videos that they shared and laughed over.
In high school, a picture taken of a girl in the shower or in her underwear often went viral as the mean girls shared it. They posted criticisms of the girl’s physical attributes, laughed at her in the halls, left her hateful notes, and generally made every day a living hell.
The girls harassed victims until they broke their intended target’s hearts and souls. How many girls had committed suicide after being terrorized by mean girls?
“Passing through,” Danny said as we walked into the alley.
“I don’t think so. What’s with the stupid clothes?” a pretty blonde asked. Her big eyes were blank with stupidity and mean with spite.
“I dunno. I was gonna ask why you were wearing them,” Annie snapped back. She disliked those kinds of people, ones who purposely hurt others.
“You have to pay if you wanna get through here, or you are dead,” a boy said. As he grinned, a fat pimple broke on his chin.
“Not paying and not putting up with bullying,” Pax said.
“Then, we’re gonna kick your ass. You want me to rearrange your face before we kill you?”
Pax gave us all a funny look as if he might start laughing over all this. The bullies were predictable with everything they said and did.
We wondered how much lunch money they had taken, how many lunches they had stolen or squashed, how many bloody noses they had caused, and how many kids they had made cry on school buses. For the despair they caused, they lived here in hell.
“All of these caused
so many terrors and so much heartache that their victims killed themselves.” Danny said.
I let my jaw drop as Danny told us that. I was angry.
Two fat boys came at Pax, and the fight was on as soon as Pax landed one of his boots in one of the boy’s pudgy, soft gut.
Annie and Dana each took on two of the mean girls since those types couldn’t fight with anything but their foul mouths.Corey jumped a big muscular boy, and Coral began slamming his big fists into the faces of the other scowling boys who came at him with switchblades. One flying back kick later and I was punching and dodging furiously.
My first fighting partner went down as a meaty slab of cowardice, hugging his belly and crying at being given back what he had dished so often.
I grabbed one of the baseball bats the bullies had been threatening us with and swung it as if I were a hitting a homerun. The girl, with short hair, twice my size, and yelling curses, froze like a character in a comic book when the hard wood of the bat caught her under the jaw,“You little bitch, I’m gonna….”
She didn’t finish her threat. Teeth flew wildly, but I already had the bat raised and brought it down on her head. Blood poured onto the cobblestones as she fell down. The stones seemed to suck at the blood, and it soaked in quickly, making the stones glow with deep crimson.
That was interesting.
Stomping across her back, I hit the next girl in her ribs and then in the head.
“Don’t like it, do you? You shouldn’t have brought it,” said Corey as he took the knife away from the kid he was fighting, and to my shock, whipped the blade across the other boy’s throat, leaving him to bleed out. Blood sopped out beneath the boy.
I knew that they wouldn’t stay dead because they were doomed to die, suffer, and then to do it all over again. Still, even if we were attacked first, it was hard for me to slaughter people. I didn’t like killing and, of course, had not practiced that part, but now I had to do it.
