Lawyers in Hell

by Morris, Janet

  No, Clarence Darrow thought, there is no doubt. His client was truly a master of the dark arts.

  Heads You Lose

  by

  Michael Z. Williamson

  Captain Joseph McCarthy shouted, “Ready men, this is a combat drop. Hostile territory.” Over the angry buzz of engines in the C130, McCarthy was hard to hear.

  Lieutenant Roger Upton Howard, III, Esq. rolled his eyes at that. He says that every damned time. We know it’s hostile. It’s hell. We’re lawyers.

  In life, Roger had never imagined he’d wind up like this. It was a joke, then: Sell the devil your soul. The lawyer asks, “What’s the catch?”

  The catch was, hell was real, and he hadn’t even signed a contract. Those vague maunderings about ethics were all it took. Was it right to defend drunk drivers and petty crooks he knew were guilty? Apparently not, since the universe had seen fit to have a drunk driver crush him. Death had been close to instantaneous. He recalled a moment of pain, and then waking here. Here, pain was part of the scenery, and it seemed eternal. He couldn’t say how long he’d been here, just ‘a lot of days.’

  Then Roger stopped reminiscing, because it was time to jump. The light blinked, and McCarthy shouted, “Hook up!”

  This was hell: he couldn’t die permanently, and every drop was terrifying because there were endless new ways to suffer.

  The Coordinating Legal Airborne Platoon (CLAP) shuffled forward toward the paratroop doors, and Roger’s guts and sphincter clenched. He joined the shuffle, hit the door, and jumped out over the choking clouds of hell – or, more accurately, Ashcanistan.

  The ripcord tugged his canopy open. He didn’t realize his leg straps were loose until they suddenly drew up and yanked his groin. He gasped, flinched, and tried to separate them. By then he was directly over Henry J. Summers, II. He dropped, scrambling through Summers’ canopy as it blocked the air. They didn’t quite tangle, and Roger made it into the open.

  That was worse.

  Now he could see that the denizens of nearby Kabum were expecting them. They didn’t like lawyers in death any more than they had in life: What price repercussions to the already damned?

  A rocket ripped past him with a roar of white noise, and ripped HJS, II’s canopy into flaming shreds. The elderly poet and civil servant plummeted faster and faster as the rushing wind fanned his chute to flames, then embers. Roger tugged a riser to slip away from those glowing sparks. He didn’t want to catch on fire.

  In moments, flak started bursting around them, spit from crude but functional anti-aircraft guns. All Roger could do was shudder as they dropped. Then they got in range of rifle fire, catapults, javelins and arrows. He pulled the release on his ruck and prayed to no one in particular. He’d never known how. At least he’d known how to parachute; he’d been in the 82ndAirborne. Most of these poor bastards jump-qualified the painful way.

  The earth below was a cratered landscape: hell’s Ashcanistan had been a battleground for eternity. The sky above twisted in nauseating lavender and green moirés.

  Then they were landing in heaps on the rocks. Some caught on promontories. Others bashed into cliffs and tumbled into sharp valleys. Roger was lucky. He descended smoothly into the bottom of a shallow gully.

  Two monkeys hopped to the gulley’s edge and threw…. He grimaced as feces splashed across his chest and spattered his chin.

  He overheard one of the primates say, “Not like that, Phil, you clumsy monkey….” Then Roger hit the ground, landing on a sharp rock, and his knee …

  Electric jolts shot through his leg. He heard and felt his knee pop. He collapsed to the ground, whimpering.

  General S.V. Benet (not the poet, but his grandfather), hopped over to shout at him, and a poor trooper nearby, whose leg was blown off.

  “Pick up your leg and get moving, Horace!” Benet shouted. “And you, Howard, on your feet and –”

  A bullet grazed Benet’s throat, then two ripped his uniform, scoring his torso, and tumbled by. “Bloody repeaters!” he gargled in a spray of blood as he bounced away on his pogo stick.

  Roger drew the metal frame from his ruck and assembled his own pogo stick, ducking as bullets whacked past. Then he crawled over to help Horace with his. The poor man was on his first jump and in excruciating pain.

  “Hold your leg in place,” he said. “It’ll heal, re-attach. And hurt. Lots.” He made sure the kid held the leg in place, while he assembled Horace’s stick.

  “Now, up,” he said.

  How they managed, he didn’t know. He never knew. In short order, though, they were astride their metal steeds and bouncing ignominiously across the rockscape, joining up with others and forming a loose column. Satan had decreed that CLAP’s ground transport would be pogo sticks only. It was undignified, inefficient, liable to make one puke, and excruciating on injuries. Every bounce sent spikes of agony through his balls and up his spine. The only positive aspect was that the pogo stick’s bounding, irregular motion made the rider harder to hit.

  He caught sight of Henry, barely recognizable, a mashed sack. He cringed in fear and revulsion. Cringing hurt, too.

  Just behind him, Horace said, “Sir, my leg is healing already, like you said, but it’s healing crooked.”

  Roger nodded, looked over his shoulder and said, “Yeah, sooner or later it’ll get shot off again and maybe it’ll heal straight next time.” It would heal. After all, pain would be less effective if one got used to it.

  He felt sorry for Horace. The poor guy had it worse than the rest. He wasn’t even a lawyer. He was an accountant.

  *

  The transit to the site was worse. Whenever you felt at your lowest in hell, the minions of hell found a way to make it lower. Your only option was to do nothing, sit still, and ferment. Except that didn’t work well, either. Something would come along to displace you or crush you or otherwise deepen your suffering.

  CLAP’s deployment here would make things worse, not better. Hell wasn’t supposed to be fair, or even unfair. There was some kind of algorithm at the head office as to how fair or unfair hell was supposed to be, when. Said algorithm probably changed regularly. Everything else did.

  So CLAP rode pogo sticks in Ashcanistan, because the sticks caused the troopers more pain. They’d had camels once, in Sinberia. In Hellaska they’d had fast dirt bikes, but no Arctic clothing. CLAP’s missions were recorded in the scars on his body: some healed crooked; some wouldn’t heal, and just oozed.

  That fucking Benet: He was as atrocious in afterlife as he’d been in life. While alive, Roger had never heard of Benet. Apparently, it was his brilliant idea to issue single-shot rifles at the Little Big Horn and at several other battles during the Indian Wars, insisting (despite evidence and pleading troops) that “aimed single shots” were better than repeating weapons. The locals here had hellish copies of AK-47s, RPGs, that Russian .50 caliber machine gun whose designation Roger could never remember. ‘That Fucking Benet,’ as everyone referred to him, insisted they use .45-70 Springfield rifles, single shot. The rifles were accurate enough, except when gravity or the laws of explosives suddenly changed, but the CLAP were routinely slaughtered by peasants with better weapons. And That Fucking Benet would never learn. “Aim better!” was his only advice.

  All Benet did was tell you to aim better. McCarthy ran everything else, constantly ranting about Communists. He was doing so now, voice shifting and syncopating as he bounced along. They could hear McCarthy through the speakers in their helmets. CLAP had the highest tech gear imaginable, sometimes….

  “Remember … that the Commies … had a huge … operation in ... Afghanistan …. Probably did … here, too … Be on the lookout…. We’ll need to ask … that question of anyone … we meet.”

  Seemingly, the local damned would never run out of ammo. However, while progress was infuriatingly slow, pogo sticks did make the CLAP harder targets.

  Certain ways to approach indigs don’t seem like invasions. Of course, in the best traditions of ar
mies in hell, they didn’t use those. Who could one complain to in hell? In fact, their task here was to “ensure that unfairness escalated.”

  Given the idiots in charge, unfairness would certainly escalate. Roger pounded across the landscape, the pain in his knee like a red-hot rod, jabbing through the side of the knee joint. He kept Horace slightly ahead of him, watching the poor kid grimace rhythmically in agony. It always sucked to be the new guy. Although Roger wasn’t that seasoned, himself.

  He had no idea how long he’d been here. Why think about eternity? He hadn’t been here long enough to get philosophical about the stabbing pain or the stupidity. Though he wasn’t sure one ever did. The discomfort changed regularly, so you never got used to it.

  Roger dove for cover: a trained reflex. He was in the air before his mind told him there was incoming fire. But his body knew … as it knew he was about to smash into hard desert and sharp rocks.

  He shouted and groaned, “Contact, right!” Others yelled the same warning simultaneously.

  Roger found his cover, rolling behind a slight hummock. He skinned a shoulder: the new pain counterpointed the pain in his knee; every movement felt like fire.

  His military training came to the fore. The designer of the ALICE pack he wore should be somewhere here in hell, wearing one for all eternity; and that dumbass Springfield rifle he carried was a bitch when you had to roll on it.

  He pulled its sling from around his shoulder and opened the breech, then fumbled for ammo. He had twenty cartridges, which That Fucking Benet had determined were all one needed, if every shot counted. The man predated suppressing fire.

  Unfortunately, the enemy didn’t. The locals were pouring out fire from a hell-made Russian-style Dushka, and he thought he recognized AK fire.

  Between bursts, Roger heard Benet shout, “… precise, aimed shots …” and gritted his teeth. In his opinion, they needed a machine gun to lay down fire, then maneuver, suppress, and riddle every enemy in sight. This ‘aimed shots’ crap was not going to work – again.

  He wriggled out of his ALICE pack, with the frame gouging him as he did. They had no body armor, of course. Most couldn’t die permanently; obliteration was a mythical fate, or at least very rare. If you did die, you were recycled through the Mortuary and usually sent right back to your unit. So CLAP wasn’t issued body-armor. Why carry the extra weight? Why bother?

  Why bother with anything?

  Then someone started screaming as he was hit.

  That’s why.

  He slid his pack up near the ridge of his little hummock, raised his rifle carefully, and tried not to flinch as he shot. He didn’t shoot at anything in particular. He just felt better doing something, instead of nothing.

  Benet whacked him stingingly with a swagger stick and shouted, “What are you shooting at, trooper?”

  “A general,” he snapped.

  Poor Benet was condemned to try to lead lawyers, accountants and philosophers into battle for all eternity. A more prestigious post in the regular military always eluded him. That didn’t make the jackass pleasant.

  Ba-boom!

  The explosion blew a huge ball of dust into a rising cloud, followed immediately by a concussive slam that shook the ground and punched his ears. Overpressure slapped him with hot gas and ammonia. The ba-boom would be the calling card of the Supervising Legal Airborne Group (“SLAG”), dropping aerial judgment on the opposition.

  Then it got quiet, very quiet – and not only because he was partly deaf: there was no opposition left alive anymore.

  The deafness was always temporary. Hell liked its residents to experience every sensation to the fullest, like that Britney Spears song playing incessantly at full volume for a week. He’d never get that insipid tune out of his mind.

  Benet had been blown flat and no one was disposed to help him get up.

  Helmet off, Captain McCarthy took over, slicking his hair self-consciously: “We are here to provide the damned with the benefits of modern legal judgment and, I hope, to promote the American way of life. I –”

  “Shut it, Tail-dragger Joe, America ain’t no part of perdition,” someone shouted.

  McCarthy spun, then must have decided to ignore the heckler. With a muscle ticking in his jaw, he shifted his speech to practical matters: “Before we start, let’s find a building and organize our files. Thurmond, go ahead, please.”

  Catcalls went up throughout, though they’d all known this was coming.

  Crusty sergeant Thurmond bounded away, two flankers at his heels. It was hard not to respect Strom Thurmond, even if he was a stubborn old womanizer. The man had volunteered for the Airborne in WWII while in his 40s; then served in the U.S. Senate until he was over a hundred.

  Roger grabbed his ruck, gingerly easing it on his blistered and battered shoulders. He found his pogo stick (sadly, still functional), and joined the rest of CLAP, bouncing into town. His slung rifle banged his shoulder and head with every leap, until he was in a murderous rage.

  Up ahead, Sergeant Thurmond picked a convenient building from several still standing, made of low, thick brick, on the near edge of this once-sprawling hive of scum and villainy. Within a hundred yards, Roger gave up bouncing. Holding the stick over his shoulder like a ladder, he sprinted for the designated headquarters through jolts of pain and tumbled through its doorway in a tangle with Horace – and McCarthy, who never waited to be last.

  Benet, the jackass, was at least man enough to wait outside until everyone entered. Counting them, his bushy beard fluffed with every word.

  A hiatus between bombardment and confusion. They seemed safe, for now. Troopers stood watch at the high windows. Medics treated casualties.

  Roger waved one nurse away: he didn’t need a clumsy lawyer-medic probing his knee. The knee was intact; little would improve it; and, with no anesthetic, treatment would be agonizing.

  Speaking of which, Henry Summers looked pretty bad. Half his face had been shot off. Now the remaining face was healing, crushed and twisted, with a drooling smile that exposed broken rear molars on the right side. Missing teeth and crushed bone made his jaw asymmetrical. Added to the wrinkled ruins of his leg and torso, Henry’s situation was nightmarish.

  Henry would adapt to living with his disfigurements. Roger would get used to looking at him Eventually. But not quite yet. Guiltily, Roger dropped his eyes and busied himself with his gear.

  Everyone was preparing for the next phase of their mission. They carried the necessary legal codes with them, in those brutal ALICE packs. Roger reached for his, safe in a lockbox with sharp corners, then bound in an accordion file, sealed with a Perdition Seal that burst into flames when he released it so he could access the several binders within.

  Each of them carried two hundred pounds of documentation. All documents must be accounted for, because those were their only references: the infernalnet was, of course, unreliable, even if they could get signal out here.

  Pages were always out of order. Any file might contain any page, and the pages were differently printed and spaced, so it was hard to tell which followed which. It was an administrative nightmare.

  Suddenly, McCarthy screamed like a girl and kept screaming: “Nooooo! Eeeaaaaeeiii!”

  They all stared at Tail-dragger Joe. Had McCarthy melted down again? On McCarthy’s pants were telltale stains of wetness at the crotch. Wonderful.

  “Sir?” someone asked. “Captain?”

  McCarthy hummed or cursed to himself and nobody else spoke or moved for far too long.

  Finally, Benet stepped over and lifted the cover letter from the dirt floor of the makeshift headquarters. Smoothing out the wrinkles caused by McCarthy clutching it like a doll, Benet read aloud: “‘The operative legal code of the day is that of the USSR, nineteen sixty-five.’”

  McCarthy was curled on the ground, whimpering, “Commies … commies … commies ….”

  While Benet alternated between cajoling and kicking the worthless old radical, Roger sorted his papers, leaving a
ppropriate gaps where pages were missing.

  Crooked-legged Horace and Rehnquist, CLAP’s paralegal, came around to sort, stack and box. Boxing was necessary to keep the papers in order, but the boxes were held together with duct tape that had degraded in this dusty, gritty hell of hells. Horace and Rehnquist did the best they could.

  Roger snuck his phone behind his raised knees. Perhaps there might be some brief infernalnet connectivity. Worth a shot. He slid out the keyboard and pulled up DisgraceBook, on the off-chance of connecting. He recognized no names. He had fifty invites for dates with succubi, Insecurity Service surveys, and suggestions of souls to bedevil. He clicked on the first one of those.

  The page came up on his screen, where a grizzled old man leapt naked out of a bathtub. Hurling enough invective to merit notice even in hell, the nude senior snagged an old Garand rifle from the corner and rasped, “Get off my page!”

  Roger shut off the phone.

  Quiet persisted until a relief platoon of infantry arrived to assist with insecurity. They remained outside for the most part. He avoided meeting them, but caught a glimpse of them when their lieutenant came in to talk to Benet.

  Among the New Dead, infantrymen spent the afterlife getting shot up. One – with dark, curly hair and a Greek accent – was horrifically scarred. Appalling injuries were part of this hell. Roger wondered if he’d eventually end up looking like the Greek. He tried not to be disgusted by the poor guy and waited for lunch.

  As always this year, lunch was a stiff stick of jerky and a piece of dry bread. So was breakfast and dinner. He sighed as he chewed slowly, wondering when the menu would change, and to what. Last year they’d had only raw tuna, past its peak. One ate because nerves and habits compelled it – if you could: Some guys in hell had no stomachs; some had no anuses. Some starved to death, becoming more and more helpless and easy prey in the process….

  “Howard, wake up,” someone snapped, too loud.