Letters From Hades

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "He’s stupid," sneered another man. "He’s new. Look at his clothes. He still wears the uniform. He still carries the book bag like a good little school boy. Stick around, school boy! Learn something!"

  "Fuck you," I told him. "Thanks," I said to the black man. "Sorry," I said to the woman. Then I was bolting to my feet and running through the field of heads…weaving between them and leaping over them so as not to injure anyone. Though my concern was comical, really.

  The haze of the forest fire began to spread across the caldera now, helping to mask me from whatever this Harvester was. Unfortunately, it might also be masking the Harvester from me.

  I stumbled on the rocks scattered by the volcano. I skirted around scraggly bushes set aflame by lava bombs. Here and there human heads were alight, flickering orange through the smoky mists. My lungs burned as I gulped at air full of stinging smoke and poisonous sulphurous gases.

  Ahead of me the curtains of fog thinned…for the moment I had outrun the worst of the smoke…and I could see across the caldera again. I didn’t seem to be much closer to the volcano’s foothills. And to make matters worse, there was a wave of lava flowing across the plain in my direction, a bright orange. Oddly, though, I saw no streams of lava on the flanks of the volcano itself.

  Well, I would veer to the right a bit, away from the coming wave, and hopefully still reach the outermost of the foothills before the molten rock spread in that direction as well. I launched myself forward again, trying to ignore the chorus of pleas that swarmed around my every footfall.

  I ran. I ran. I ran. My legs ached, my seared eyes streamed, I thought my heart would explode (if it did suffer cardiac arrest, it would probably heal pretty quickly, but I didn’t want the inconvenience). The volcano did, at last, seem taller to me. That meant it was closer. Pausing to look back the way I had come, I saw the reverse view was lost in low-lying smoke, but I judged myself to be about halfway across the circular plain. And while looking back, I heard the crack of a gunshot in that smoke. Another. A third. An Angel, I decided, not sure whether any Demons themselves used guns. I could picture a robed Angel wandering amongst the rows of heads, untroubled by the choking air, idly shooting down into them.

  Encouraged by my progress, I continued on. The Harvester’s sound dwindled and was lost behind me. There were more gunshots but at least none in front of me. But after I had covered a lot more ground, my fears about the spreading lava came back to me. It looked like my path to even the outermost of the foothills was going to be blocked, soon, after all. I wondered how thick the lava was and how far I could run through it before my melting shoes and then melting feet brought me down. I couldn’t afford to let that happen. I didn’t want to be entombed on this plain myself. I pitied the heads that were being covered in that advancing orange surf.

  I tried to pick up my pace. I must beat the lava to the foothills. I must…

  With an explosion of porous pumice and glittering obsidian, pulverized into glittering sand, the floor of the caldera burst open a short ways ahead and to the right of me. I thought it was an eruption of some lesser vein of the volcano. But then I saw a great hulking form lurch up over the lip of the hole, streaming that gray-black grit down its sides.

  A Harvester.

  It was facing away from me, and I was grateful for that as I skidded to a stop, wondering which direction I should flee in now. The thing pulled itself out of the pit on rows of wheels that rippled independently like the legs of a caterpillar. It was an armored black thing, seamed with rust, dented and scratched, and though I couldn’t see its front I heard the whine and swish of a blade or blades that swept across the ground.

  I heard screams. Screams abruptly choked off with a gurgle. Replaced by another row of screams. Another row of gurgles.

  It was harvesting the heads. When it had gone a little ways, I saw the gushing stems of the severed necks in its wake. Blood geysered and misted the air. There was a thunking rumbling inside the machine that I realized were the heads being gathered into some large receptacle.

  There was no cab on the front of the huge machine, and unless the driver was hidden inside it as if it were a tank, I decided the Harvester was more robot than vehicle.

  It didn’t seem daunted by the encroaching wave of lava, either, as it was headed right toward it. And when that thought hit me, that’s when I darted forward…chasing after the machine…and leapt up onto the back edge of it. I scrabbled for purchase and caught hold of some incomprehensible mechanical features on its scabrous iron skin.

  I rode the Harvester toward the lava. I would ride it through the lava until we reached the foothills (at which point I assumed it would turn around and head neatly back the other way as if systematically plowing a field or mowing a lawn). At least I hoped it would follow this straight line all the way to the foothills. As I rode on it I tried to tune out the horrid clashing/cutting sounds it made, the cries of terror, the blood fuming in its wake. The gore wafted over me, speckled my face, reeked in my nostrils. The devouring beast churned and chugged under me and my shaken guts wanted to heave. But there was nothing I could do for these masses…I could only concentrate on my own safety. Relative, of course, to the fact that I could never be killed. For long.

  The Harvester hit a large cooling rock that had been cast by the volcano, and as it rode over it I was nearly pitched off its back. I had to fight to keep from sliding off, clawing for new handholds. When finally I hoisted myself back up, I saw that the volcano’s bulk nearly blotted out the sky, and the foothills were very close. I also saw that we had reached the wave of lava and it was pouring around the automaton’s wheels. But now I realized that it wasn’t even lava after all.

  They were crabs. Bright orange in color, and each one of them tiny like the ones I had shooed off several of the heads…but there had to be millions of the things, a writhing carpet of living entities, with sharp little pincers to pull out hair and snip at skin and nibble at eyes. Maybe lava would have been better; I pitied the rows of trapped victims anew. I saw evenly spaced, crab-covered lumps in the orange carpet that I knew were human heads enshrouded with the things. I hoped the blades of the Harvester would reach them soon.

  Though the Harvester was crushing multitudes of the crabs, a number of them were finding their way onto the machine with me. Though I have always loved animals, I slammed them with the heel of my fist or stomped them with a foot, and enjoyed it.

  We had nearly reached the edge of the plain, but the rows of heads had ended (or else been eaten away by the crabs) and the Harvester began to turn. I had to get off it now, and make a break for the foothills. There was still a swarming covering of crabs between me and the cliff-like edge of the caldera, but I would have to cross it on foot…and right now…

  I leaped down from my unwitting transportation, luckily didn’t lose my footing and fall, then I was tearing across the crunching bodies. I almost slipped several times. I actually did hear their many little claws snapping and snicking at me like fingernail scissors. What was worse was the loud hissing, rustling sound their bodies made by their sheer numbers. Several latched onto my pant cuffs, or tangled in my laces, but I reached the cliff and pounced onto a rocky ledge, seized another, scrambled up the side like a spidery thing myself. And when I hurled myself onto the black sand above the rim, I brushed and tore away the hungry little parasites. Stomped every one of them. Though I didn’t study any of them closely, they each looked like they had a kind of stylized demonic face formed by the contours of their horny shells.

  After one last look across the crater-like amphitheater…covered in mist in which fires flared, rumbling with several Harvesters, ululating with the moans of the undead, crackling with stray gunfire…I turned away and headed into foothills that seemed heaped from glittering black sand.

  I climbed the side of one low hill, my feet sinking and sliding under the shifting ash. I figured it wasn’t ash so much as pyroclastic flow, that had run down the volcano’s slope like a mudslide or avalanche. Was th
e town of Caldera beneath my very feet even now?

  When I crested the hill I found a hollow below, and there protruded the flat roofs of several small buildings. Some jutted up in their entirety, starkly white against this ash like pulverized obsidian, while other roofs were half exposed, or only showed one piercing corner like the prow of a sinking ship. Lumps in the black blanket suggested roofs that were fully submerged. I descended, half-sliding, the ash getting into my boots, into the hollow and found myself standing atop one of the taller roofs. So tall that its top level of glassless windows was just above the level of the ash.

  Crouching, I eased myself through one of these windows into an unlit, sparsely furnished room. The wind had blown so much ash into it that its floor was covered, dunes blown halfway up its crude walls, which had the look of stucco or baked white clay. But there was a rough door made of purple-colored planks across the room, and when I pushed it open I found myself in a narrow hallway that had only the barest sifting of ash across it.

  The hallway was lined with more doors made from that bruise-colored, decay-colored wood. And behind one of them, I heard a low moaning.

  I knew a Demon would not be moaning, but a Demon might be in there causing the moaning, so I looked around me for a weapon of defense. There was nothing, really. So I crept to the door as stealthily as I could, and pressed my ear against it. The moaning was clearer, but I heard no other sounds. No sadistic chuckling, no growling, as from the pathetic baboon devils. No sounds of blows or chopping. I decided to risk it. Steeling myself for the possibility of my own pending moans, I cracked the door open as quietly as I could manage and peeked into the chamber beyond.

  There was only one occupant of the room. A female child, on the floor. No, the head was so disproportionate to the body, even for a child. A dwarf, perhaps…

  I opened the door all the way, stepped over the threshold, and heard the woman on the floor gasp. I nearly gasped myself.

  We knew we were both of the Damned. She didn’t scream, but looked up at me with glassy-eyed anguish. I looked down at her with as much pity as I could squeeze out of my exhausted soul. The woman’s head was of normal size, but her body was as tiny as that of a five-year-old. A five-year-old made emaciated, cadaver-thin, naked and withered. Without strength to hoist herself up onto the room’s dusty bed, she had pulled off its blanket and made a nest for herself. She dragged a fold of it across her, more I think out of shame for her deformity than for her nudity.

  "I was harvested," she explained, her voice distorted: squeaky and thin, "but my head was deflected off the blade before it was sucked in. It rolled aside and I was forgotten. When enough of my body grew back, I dragged myself here. It was horrible, worse than being buried. The crabs tried to eat me but I got away." She turned her face to show me where half of it had been nibbled to the bone but was forming new muscle and skin. "I don’t know how I ever made it in here, but I did." She let out a jagged, sorrowful sigh. "My body is coming back…but it hurts so bad…it hurts worse than losing it…"

  "I’ll find you some clothes," I whispered, and I began to search the room. In the next room, I found some and returned. I put them into a pillowcase and set that down beside her. "Do you want me to help you into something now?"

  "No. I’m all right for now. I’ll grow into them. Soon. But it seems to take forever…"

  The room was gloomy, without a window, so I had left the hallway door open to let in the barest dregs of light. Still, I wanted to write in this journal and wanted more light to see by. I set out on another search, and found a glowing lantern in one of the rooms. The gelatinous fluid inside it was not oil, was not even aflame, but it gave off its own cool, orange-hued luminosity even having been buried all this time. I don’t know what the slime is or where it was collected, but I’m grateful for it. When I returned to the woman I was now able to close the door and see well enough to write. Sitting down on the floor beside her, I opened this book across my lap. The woman respectfully did not ask me questions as she watched me write, but against her will let out the occasional moan as her body gradually fleshed itself out like an embryo growing at a remarkable rate.

  Day 36.

  The woman’s name is Caroline, and she used to live in Caldera, though her building is entirely buried she says. She was thirty-nine when she was killed in a shooting spree at an abortion clinic. She’d been accompanying her sister, who was the one having the abortion; she has no idea whether her sister was killed as well. She believes that the killer probably went to Heaven because he had devout faith whereas she did not. I gaped at her when she said this, but she shrugged her lengthening shoulders and said, "Hey, I don’t make the rules."

  In the building where we took refuge I have found a bottle of homemade wine that is still good (rather, still preserved; it’s as syrupy and sickly sweet as cough medicine), a few strips of dried meat of some kind, tough and salty, and several stray crabs that had worked their way in here as we did; I killed them and experimented with their taste, finding them edible as well. Again, we don’t need to eat to survive (we’re beyond survival), but our bogus bodies crave it.

  In my explorations I also found spare clothes for myself, and folded them into my book bag. And in one of the rooms that had a window, I saw bones stabbing up from the floor of black ash. Ribs, the top of a skull. I knew it wasn’t the skeleton of a human, because a human here would regenerate from even the most atrocious mayhem. And then I realized I was also seeing several long bones segmented like finger bones. They were the struts of a baboon Demon’s wings.

  I rushed back to Caroline, bundled in her blanket but able to crawl up onto the bed now, to tell her what I’d seen. She stared at me a moment as though I were thick, then said, "The Demons can die. They can be killed. They aren’t immortal like we are."

  "No one told me that!"

  "They don’t advertise it in school. But we’re immortal because we’re souls. Demons don’t have souls."

  Now it was my turn to stare at her. "Why don’t we all just band together, then? Fight them? We have the advantage!"

  "The Creator can make more and more of them to replace those lost!" she hissed in a whisper, as though the Creator Himself would burst into the room in outrage at my suggestion. "And there are the Angels, too, don’t forget…and they are immortal."

  I just wagged my head in awe. The creatures of myth could die, rot, be picked clean by crabs…but here I was, an undistinguished human, and as eternal as Apollo.

  Day 37.

  While we slept together on the bed, discreetly back to back, Caroline woke abruptly from a terrible nightmare. (We didn’t need sleep to survive, either, but our bodies craved that also.) I sat up, raised the lantern from the floor, and asked her what was wrong.

  "I have two daughters," she sobbed, turning toward me, her face—fully healed—like the theatrical mask of tragedy in the starkly shadowed lantern glow. "My two babies…I don’t know if they’re still alive or not. I don’t know how old they might be now, if they are alive…"

  "It isn’t fair," I muttered, almost to myself.

  "Fairness is a human invention," she said bitterly.

  I rested the lantern on a wobbly bedside table made of that purple wood, and I held her. She held me back, her tears wet against my neck. A few minutes later, her mouth was wet against my neck. I shifted my body closer to hers. She was still naked under her blanket, her body almost entirely reformed. I grew hard, pressed up against her.

  We made love. And while we did, we both cried.

  Day 38.

  Today Caroline and I set out together for the city the buried African-American man told me about, which Caroline informed me is named Oblivion.

  Caroline, I could see more clearly in the diffused open light, is very short and somewhat overweight, her face pinched and pained, though I could tell under kinder circumstances she would have been attractive. This morning (morning being a subjective term, as there is no day or night here) it bothered her that her tangled red hair was
unwashed, and that seemed to be what she most looked forward to upon reaching Oblivion; there would be water there. "But it doesn’t grow longer than the length it was when I died," she explained. "I can shave it all off and it will grow back in a few weeks, but never any longer than it was. Same with my nails. You must have noticed you don’t need to shave."

  "Yeah."

  "And I still have my tattoo." I’d found last night that she has a bumble bee on the back of her right shoulder, which she got when she was twenty-six and drunk. "Astral ink, I guess."

  We’d entered into another forest, but not as thickly wooded as the one I’d come through to reach the volcano, and there was even a broad dirt path through it which we followed, though keeping alert in regard to Demons and Angels. Also, the trees had leaves shaped like oak leaves, some with massive trunks as thick and wrinkled as the legs of dinosaurs, whereas the other forest had been of evergreens. Everpurples, anyway. These trees all had purple leaves. The grass and bushes that bordered the path were also in dark shades of purple, though some shrubs edged toward deep blue and others were almost fully black.

  As we walked, Caroline asked me, "So how did you die?"

  Without looking at her I said, "Self-inflicted shotgun wound."

  Peripherally I saw her look over at me. "How old were you?"

  "Thirty-three."

  "Why’d you do it?"

  "I thought I had nothing to live for."

  "And why did you think that?"