The Fall of Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  At least his mother would be with Adam’s younger brother at the end.

  He talked with his brother briefly, too. They made their voices brave, calm, but Adam heard his brother’s voice crack when he said he’d try calling back later. Like his sister, he knew this was their goodbye.

  The Boston TV channels went out. Adam lived in Eastborough, Massachusetts. He pulled back a window shade to look out at the late afternoon sky. Was the sunset unnaturally red and tattered behind the town’s silhouetted church steeples?

  Adam felt a numbness that he supposed was akin to his mother’s weary acceptance. After all, hadn’t the past couple of years been one drawn-out, personal Armageddon for him? Two years ago, his wife had asked for a divorce. They had always argued, but the primary reason she gave was that she wanted children (they had found that Adam was infertile). Adam had suspected that she was having an affair with a coworker, however, and so one night he had gone through the motions of heading off to his graveyard shift job but had sat in his car down the street watching the house. After seeing the suspected party admitted into his home, Adam had waited a bit and then let himself in, to find his wife favoring her coworker with a sexual act that did not involve her appetizing vagina and would surely not result in the production of children.

  He had wanted to keep the house, so he had refinanced and taken out an additional fifty thousand dollars so as to pay his wife for her share of the equity. But later, he had found it hard to support mortgage payments of almost two thousand dollars a month, and after a year of this had decided that he must throw in the towel. With the house market as poor as it was, the best solution seemed to be a “short sale,” letting a realtor step in and negotiate with the lender to take over the house, so that Adam might walk away free of his debt (if free of any profit), rather than let things go into foreclosure. Adam had moved into a studio apartment in town, and rented a storage unit for most of his belongings. He had thought the process would take a month or two at best, yet here it was already nine months, and the short sale people hadn’t managed to attract an offer that would satisfy the lender. And during all this time, Adam had moved only a fraction of his belongings from the house to his storage unit. Tomorrow he would deal with it. He’d devote next week to it. And yet the house still sat there only partly emptied, as if he still lived in it. His life felt fragmented between the house, his apartment and the padlocked box.

  Worse, he and his wife had a dog, a beautiful white Akita with a black mask. She was generally a sweet, loving animal, but she was an Akita, and one time his wife’s new boyfriend had teased the dog by trying to snatch away a grape it was nosing around and the dog had bitten him, the wound requiring stitches. The boyfriend wouldn’t permit Adam’s wife to take the dog, so Adam had kept it for as long as he had hung onto the house. He couldn’t have it with him in his studio apartment, however, nor could he find any affordable apartment in the area that would allow a large dog. So for all these nine months, the dog had continued to live alone in the abandoned house while Adam sent e-mails and made phone calls, trying to find a place—a kennel, a shelter for unwanted animals, some organization—that would take the dog in, help find it a new home. But with her history of violent behavior, no one wanted to take such a risk. So twice a day, in the morning and night, Adam walked over to his house and took the dog out to do her business. He might stay long enough to wash some clothes, refill her food and water bowls, then he’d leave her alone again, with a radio on for company. She would often snatch up one of her ragged toys as he left, and play with it by herself, still hyped up by his visit. But he wondered how long that enthusiasm lasted as the lonely hours dragged on until his next brief visit.

  As he gazed out the window Adam thought of his dog alone in the house, maybe with the radio channel no longer playing. Outside, distantly, he heard people gathered in the center of town singing. Right now they were singing John Lennon’s Imagine. He wanted to laugh at that.

  The utilities were still on in the old house—if unpaid. He told himself he hadn’t wanted the pipes to freeze, and he needed electricity to wash his clothes, but the truth was he worried about his dog. She needed to be warm. Needed to hear that radio.

  There were still some cans of food over at the house, but Adam packed his car with much of the contents of his fridge and cupboards. He took a last look around his studio apartment, gathered up a scrapbook of family photographs but took nothing more. He shut off the lights, expecting never to return to the studio apartment again.

  It was a short drive; just a few streets away. He soon came in view of a shopping plaza that could be seen from both his apartment and his house, built within the past two years. It had proved an overambitious project; a building containing luxury condos anchored one end of it, and only two or three of these had been occupied. The plaza was laid out in imitation of a quaint little village, and was very pretty, if very desolate—only a third or fourth of its store space had been rented. It was like a microcosm of his country, a broken down ghost town already fallen to economic apocalypse before the bombs had even started flying.

  At night, when he walked his dog, he would hear a group of three teenagers loitering around in the plaza. They skateboarded in warm weather, or just seemed to drift aimlessly in winter weather, never varying their outfit of black hooded sweatshirts no matter how cold it was. One of these boys frequently made a loud whooping sound like that of a police car siren coming to life. Adam swore he heard this call every night that he walked his dog. The cry, the boys, unsettled him. He supposed he should feel sorry for these lost souls; their home life must not be all that inviting.

  But in this age of the Internet and endless wonderful video games, it just didn’t seem …natural to Adam that they shouldn’t want to remain indoors.

  Within only months of the glorified strip mall having opened, he had noticed a giant white penis spray-painted on the back of one of the buildings.

  It was a masterpiece of cubist art; just as Picasso’s people even in profile exhibited two eyes on one side of their face, like a flounder, so did this penis in profile have two testicles on one side. The further one even looked larger than the nearer one. Adam was certain one of the feral boys had rendered this graffiti. His ultimate achievement as a human being, no doubt, but in the end was it any less meaningful than anything else that would burn to ash?

  The Akita was excited to see him, snatching up her toy. He stroked her head and spoke baby talk to her, her face turned up to him adoringly, as if he were her God. But he felt like a God who had let her down. Her small brown eyes shone lovingly in her black mask, her love unlike anything most human beings—or even celestial beings—seemed able to muster.

  The Creator of the universe wore a mysterious black mask, too, Adam thought, but His eyes could not be discerned through it.

  He brought in all his supplies. He supposed they could go down into the basement together, for all that was worth. The radio hadn’t gone off, and it soon played John Lennon’s Imagine.

  When he was finished, he took his dog out for a walk. It was close to dusk now, and he wanted them inside before it got dark. As if those teenagers would turn into radioactive zombies, in search of tasty prey.

  He heard that characteristic whooping call. But more than that, when Adam walked his dog into the enclosure of the mall village—only a few cars, maybe deserted, in its lot—he saw that dozens of giant white penises had been sprayed across the brick walls of the condo structure, the stores, even across the store windows. And all of the penises pointed in the same direction. All of them arrows pointing to Hell.

  * * *

  Funny how you could adapt to just about anything, even the pain of having your decimated body remade. But as the line progressed, the wails of the Damned became less banshee-like, subdued into whimpers and moans of existential despair more so than physical anguish.

  Adam couldn’t see what lay at the end of the ponderous queue, but he would twist around occasionally and look back to see how fa
r removed he was from the portal he had come through. He was surprised that it was still not that far behind. Then again, the expanded entry point was huge, as long as the proverbial football field. A kind of metal frame had stretched the portal wide, resembling nothing so much as a gigantic, overly baroque, Industrial Age surgical retractor holding open a gaping incision. There were hooks that seemed to clamp right into the air itself, and the portal truly was like an immense wound in that vivid red blood streamed and twined down the hooks and arms of the frame as if some unseen membrane were bleeding. A torn veil between the worlds of the living and undead.

  Though now there might not be any living left on the other side of it.

  Intense white light filled the mouth of the portal, the masses of fresh souls it disgorged mere silhouettes, maimed and grotesque, shambling through its glowing haze.

  When he’d been closer to the frame, Adam had noticed a point in the left side of the structure where two vertical struts joined at right angles, forming a long corner. Blood had been trickling down this corner for some time now, so that it had begun to coagulate into a scabrous mass over which fresh blood still dribbled to soak into the barren ground. Weirdly, this had made Adam think of something from his childhood. Well, he had been in Junior High then, but just as introverted and miserable as he had been since his first year of school. He would often gaze out through the window of the science room, and stare at a projection of the school where rain water unintentionally channeled down its corner had caused a broad green stain of moss or lichen—maybe his science teacher could have enlightened him if he’d asked—against the red bricks. Adam would lose himself in his imagination, wondering what infinitesimal life might be thriving, might even have evolved, in that vertical green line. He even daydreamed that he was some microscopic entity himself, living within what would seem a verdant Paradise at such a minuscule scale, whatever occurred beyond its borders of no importance to him.

  Green line. Red line. Like a border between life and death.

  A line to be crossed.

  * * *

  Adam and his dog waited in the basement, listening to sometimes frantic news reports on the radio, but these channels became fewer and fewer in a sea of static until he switched the radio off and played CDs instead (though not John Lennon’s Imagine). They left their shelter often to go upstairs so he could use the toilet or get something else out of the fridge. He peeked around the curtains at the night but it seemed so still that he might have thought the news reports were something of the order of Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast.

  He knew better than that, though. Out there, Tokyo might have been flattened like Hiroshima. The Eiffel Tower a mound of steaming metal, the faces scrubbed from Mount Rushmore in a return to raw virgin stone.

  Everything returned to their original elements. But he didn’t mourn these lost wonders, these pinnacles of human achievement. Wasn’t every stone of the picturesque Great Pyramids stained with the blood of the men who had hoisted them in place? No, it was the tiny, overlooked details of existence that he mourned, things that only he would have known or cared about—often bittersweet but all the more poignant for that. Twisting a strand of his mother’s hair around his finger. The adoring eyes of his dog in their black mask. The green line of moss that perhaps no one had ever consciously seen, except himself, though it lay right outside that window every day and might even be there still, even more wide and vividly green.

  In first grade, his mother had frequently dressed him in a little red sweater, and he recalled plucking bits of fluff from it and releasing them to float to the classroom floor, a masochistic ritual in that he wanted to cry watching them drift away, bits of himself that he didn’t want to remain there; he wanted himself in his entirety to be home, home with his mother. If all matter was never destroyed, only transformed, where were those bits of fluff now? What would his own matter soon become?

  No one would ever remember about those floating red dandelion spores of fluff. He had never told anyone. Of course, unless he had written about such things to share with others, they would never have been remembered even had there not come an apocalypse, would have been lost with his death in any case. But there would have been new people, with their own memories.

  He was glad he had been incapable of having children, now. Was glad it was only a dog beside him, waiting to be turned to ash with him when the very air caught fire around the globe.

  But would his concrete storage box survive the firestorms? Would his boxes of books, sketch pads of drawings, photo albums and record collections become a nest for hardy, adaptable insects…mutant insects? A breeding ground for a whole new evolution of creatures (like his mossy green line)? He would like that. Wouldn’t that be a better legacy than leaving these collections to human survivors?

  A rumbling vibration through the cement basement floor, like a train rushing past the house. But what trains would be running now? Trying to outrun the bombs as more and more were launched, all that could be launched, falling even toward obscure little towns?

  Adam crouched down and called to the Akita. He hugged her against him and she loved it, lapping his face. Lapping the tears off his cheeks.

  Making him laugh and swipe his arm across his face and wonder where—if there were an afterlife—the souls of animals went to. In a fair and just universe, his dog would walk beside him in Heaven, for eternity.

  * * *

  His dog’s soul had simply ceased to be. Animals were lucky that way.

  The soul of the young black woman pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with him had fully reconstituted now, so that she appeared as she had in life. Adam saw that she was very attractive. He hoped he hadn’t reconstituted enough to become visibly and embarrassingly aroused by her. They didn’t realize that formerly the Damned would be issued black uniforms upon their arrival at the head of their queue; these new souls would go forth nude as infants. To expedite matters, the Damned were no longer being branded on the forehead, either, or shipped off to educational facilities such as Avernus University. The only part of the ritual that was being maintained was that every soul had to undergo a moment or two of intense scrutiny from those bubble-headed officials with their gleaming black exoskeletons. Where normally only a few would wait at the head of the line, here there was a whole regiment of them to process the Damned.

  Adam said to the grim-faced Asian man on his right, “I know there’s no day and night here, but I’d say a couple of days have passed already.”

  To his left, the attractive young woman said, “And I know we’re dead and all, but I’m thirsty and hungry. I’m so hungry I could eat one of those giant termites.”

  Adam didn’t want to admit that he was hungry, too, from the scent of cooked human meat.

  The black woman had told him she was from the city of Worcester, a few towns over from Eastborough, and the Asian man had lived in Boston’s Chinatown, so this group was from the same general region.

  Thus, Adam often craned his neck in search of his mother, brother or sister but saw no familiar faces even now that most of the faces around him had reformed.

  The young woman said, “Hey, so what’s your name?” Her voice was shaky as it tried to sound casual. Still, she had calmed a lot from her initial hysteria. “I’m Ciara.”

  “Adam,” he told her.

  “Huh. A-damn,” Ciara joked.

  He looked at her blankly for a few beats until he got it. “Yeah,” he snorted. “Adam.”

  * * *

  Some of the drone Demons carried compact black submachine guns.

  These might have been identical to an earthly model, but Adam wasn’t gun savvy enough to know. Not all the Demons carried them, though; were they that troublesome to produce? Occasionally as they patrolled the outer edges of the line—and Adam was not far in from the right side—the insect-beings would strike the Damned with the wire butts of these guns, either to keep them from lagging, or carrying on too loudly, or for no apparent reason at all other than that
they were Demons. Sometimes, some of the Damned would try to bolt from the line, make a run for it, out of sheer mindless panic more so than from design, and this was when the Demons would open fire. Adam cringed every time, expecting to be strafed along with whoever the Demons were targeting. Several times, though, he saw the guns jam, and the blank-faced Demons worked at the weapons to try to clear them. The Damned didn’t get far, though, as other guns soon cut them down, after which they would be dragged back to the line and roughly hoisted to their feet, their wounds soon to begin healing but the pain excruciating until it was done.

  Maybe the guns were not only hard to come by, but substandard. And Adam had the impression that was not the only thing amiss here.

  On one occasion when a Demon sprayed a Damned making an attempt at escape, the creature accidentally struck one of its own kind in the line of fire. The insect’s white body was broken into chunks, dry and tattered, with no apparent blood or organs inside, white dust even puffing into the air—as if it were a figure made of papier-mache. Other Demons came to regard it emotionlessly for a moment or two, and then—the perpetrator among them—carried the remains off to the side and laid them down, maybe to be properly disposed of later, or maybe left to decompose. For as the line inched along, slow as a glacier, Adam saw that this being did not regain its feet and begin to regenerate as the Damned did. It didn’t so much as twitch with reanimation.

  Others noticed this, too. Ciara whispered to him, “You see that? That thing isn’t getting back up again. They aren’t like us…see?”

  “They can be killed,” Adam muttered, as much to himself as to her.

  “We’re already dead—we’re immortal. But they’re not.”

  And these Demons seemed substandard to him, like the malfunctioning guns. He sensed it, without even knowing that this was one of the new infernal breeds created to replace the more human-like races, which had increasingly come to sympathize with the Damned, to the point where many of them had even thrown in their lot with the Damned in widespread rebellion. This insect race was like a rushed or indifferent sketch by a Creator distracted by other things. Without knowing the particulars yet, Adam intuited that Hades was in a kind of crisis, or decline.