BURN IN HADES (15 page)

Cross’s foot sank into the barren wasteland of Sheol. A hazy river of fire snaked before him. The underworld had led him deathly close to the pits of Hell where he belonged.

Countless bowl-shaped pits littered that area of the underworld like prairie dog holes but on a much more massive scale. Some of the craters were the size of towns, while others couldn’t swallow anything bigger than a modest-sized house, which was still huge in its own right. All of the gaping holes in the ground drank and spat fire, joyously.

His foot sizzled with heat. Molten earth bubbled from a sinkhole and touched his boot. The pain in his burnt foot took away from the squirmy feeling in his stomach as his insides threatened to feed on him. He hadn’t had any food or drink in several periods of sleep.

He skipped forward over the fiery, blue hole, and then hopped to his other foot to avoid a second dip in the land. Several depressions in the terrain surrounded him. The ground beneath him snapped and split off from the rest of the land, carrying him into the river of fire. He leapt back across to the more solid foundation. The flaming stream carried the chunk of land around a bend where a hellish pit swallowed it whole.

Waves of torrid air carried nasty screams from the pit: yells of curses, anger and zero remorse. He’d thought those souls would’ve wanted forgiveness for their sins or something. He always expected them to be crying for help and salvation from the torture. Instead, they were filled with unrelenting hate, and their hate motivated his hate.

He hated the Raven. She was the reason he ended up there. If he ever came across her again, he would clip her wings and push her off of the highest mountain.

A bright light distracted him to his left. The A’raf rose above the trees of Limbo, and the brilliant light of paradise bloomed mightily. His final destination now laid only a few sleep cycles walking distance if he trekked through part of Sheol again, but after barely making it out of the desert, he decided to take the long cut around. There was still the matter of how he was even going to break into paradise. It seemed that the end of all his problems was closer than ever, and at the same time much more elusive.

A wicked snarl exploded behind him. A hellhound had cornered four defenseless creatures against a river of fire. Even though the four creatures outnumbered the hellhound, their fragile bodies would be no match for the dog when it started tossing them around. The tallest of them stood no higher than a child. They were shorter than Cottontail was.

The hellhound loomed over them like an angry grizzly hungry for frightened sheep. Its matted hair gave it an appearance of being covered in puffy scales. Its lizard tail didn’t have spikes at the end like Gimlet’s, but the saber-like teeth protruding from its muzzle made up for that lack of weaponry. The four weaklings trembled in its shadow.

Cross expected to find beasts like hellhounds so close to the pits of Hell, but those meek creatures didn’t belong there. The clicking sounds they made reminded him of his draggles.
Were
they his draggles? If so, it was their own stupid fault they had followed him. The hellhound probably would have attacked
him
if they hadn’t been around.

He turned his back on them, but then thought of Kate and how she had selflessly saved him from the rifleman. She made a huge difference in his life. Meeting her that night was the most positive thing that had ever happened to him.

He faced the draggles again. They were backing away from the hound. Cross was still undecided if he should risk a second death helping them. He was so close to paradise. He had already achieved several impossible goals: He’d defeated squals, evaded the Rudimen, survived the Raven and escaped Sheol. He refused to become a Nothing after all that.

A draggle reached out a claw to him as though pleading for him to help. The hellhound chomped down on that arm and gobbled the draggle up in one great swallow. Seeing death was a part of being dead, but watching that innocent draggle get eaten by the vicious monster made the whole world feel wrong to him. He was a jerk for not helping them, just like he was an idiot for giving up on Cottontail so fast. She and that draggle paid for his lack of effort with their afterlives.

“Hey!” He tossed a stone at the hellhound. It bounced off the saddle strapped to its back. The hellhound spun towards him. The reins at its head whipped.

He could tame it. Judging by its saddle, someone else already had. Hellhounds usually only obeyed demons and devils or more powerful deities. They responded to torture and abuse, which wasn’t his style. Still, he’d managed to domesticate a cornurus, and they were more deadly than hellhounds—who were menacing in their own right. But he had the benefit of surprise when he snuck up on Gimlet, and this hellhound was now galloping towards him, jaws full of bone crushing teeth.

He positioned himself to flip onto its back like the old Bronc Busters of his day. The hound lunged. He grabbed the saddle and swung himself up to mount the beast. He slipped his feet into the stirrups, yanked the reins.

The hound’s head went up. It bucked. If Cross were alive, he’d be too old for the game, but death had given him new life. He reached for the beast’s head to give it his magic touch.

It threw him. He kicked free of the stirrups, let his body go limp, and hit the ground rolling. A soft spot in the ground vomited blue flame near his shoulder.

The hound pinned him under its paws. Acidic saliva dribbled from it jaws onto his chest, burning. The draggles mounted the beast and sank their teeth and claws through its matted hair into its flesh. The hound twirled to shake them off, but they hung on for their puny afterlives.

Standing upright, the tops of the draggles’ heads barely reached his knee, but they fought for Cross as if they were giants. The hound shook them off and mauled one of the draggles, but fortunately didn’t eat it.

Trying to tame the hellhound was too risky with the draggles around. The innocent little creatures would get hurt more.

He crawled from beneath the hound, drew his obsidian blade and chopped at the hound’s neck. A gash opened between its kinky hairs. The hound barked and snapped at Cross.

He swung the blade. The hound caught it between its teeth and stripped it away from him. He backed away. The stream of lava met his heels. Chunks of earth broke off and fell into the flame.

A crack slithered between his legs, forked and then branched. Molten froth cooked the hound’s paw. It whined and lurched backward.

The draggles scampered over to Cross. One of them handed him the obsidian blade. In a burst of wild inspiration, he hacked at the fissure in the ground. It spit blue flame, singing the hair off his exposed skin.

A shelf detached from the land with him and the draggles on top it and a blazing gouge separated them from the hellhound. All they needed to do was guide their raft to the other side of the bank to escape.

Cross stooped to use the blade as a paddle. The hellhound leapt onto the raft. The force of its landing pushed the island hard, and their floating land mass crashed into the bank on the other side and then spun away from safety.

Cross picked a draggle up. It didn’t seem to weigh anything at all, almost as if it didn’t exist. He tossed it over the raging stream and onto solid land. He grabbed the next two draggles and tossed them at the same time.

Now the distance had grown too far for him to jump to either side. The draggles crawled along the side of the river on all fours as he and the hellhound bobbed on the slab of rock down the center of the river of flame.

The weight of the stupid dog tipped the island. Lava grabbed the edge and ate its way up the raft. The hound scrambled up the center and bumped Cross.

His heels at the edge of the island, Cross slashed the hound in an attempt to make it back up or die—whichever came first. It crunched its jaws in the air as though it only intended to scold him and not bite him.

They both returned to the center of the island and displaced their weight evenly. The raft flattened out and they sailed around a crest. Hellish screams from the pit grew louder and more hateful.

“Great plan,” Cross said to himself. “Now what?”

The hellhound growled at him. It was a sarcastic growl, bordering on laughter, as if it understood his words. He had never communicated with a hellhound before, but most creatures he encountered could understand him. Why not hellhounds? The mockery in its snarl was what shook him though. Then he realized where he was being lead.

“You’re escorting me to Hell aren’t you?” he asked the hellhound. “You used the draggles as bait. You could have burned all of us easily, but you didn’t because the underworld wants me in the pit.”

The hellhound chirped bird-like toward the pit. Up ahead, the river emptied into the crater in glopping splashes. Inside the moaning mouth of the pit, Cross spotted a horizontal breast of rock. It jutted out the wall on the opposite side of the lavafall, but was too far to jump to. He would never make it across. Another wild idea cooked in his mind and he would only have one shot.

“Well, if the underworld wants me there so bad,” he said, “Let’s not dilly-dally.” He slipped the obsidian blade in his holster and crawled onto the hellhound’s saddle. The hound bucked in surprise. He yanked the reins upward and caressed the hound’s head. His magic touch calmed the beast just as their island sailed up to the drop.

Cross snapped the reins. The hound galloped the short distance of the island and leapt off into the abyss. At the crest of the jump, Cross flung himself off the saddle and glided across the chasm, reaching for the narrow ledge. He dropped faster than anticipated and snagged the ledge by the tip of his fingers and dangled.

The hellhound tumbled into the pit of Hell, howling. Spirits in the pit latched onto the hound and pulled it down further. Corpses swam in the pool of lava. They were themselves made of fire. The pit belched flames and consumed the souls in it. The souls in turn ingested the belched lava. The fires of Hell weren’t meant for killing, only maiming and torturing and the foul stench of charred flesh suffocated him in the oppressive heat.

The spirits screamed at Cross and berated him. They told him how much they hated him and how envious they were that he hadn’t joined them, how he deserved the same torment. They taunted him with threats that he would soon suffer just like them. They would drag him down and keep him forever. They even chastised each other and pulled one another down into the pit as each tried to escape their own fate. The ones who weren’t held back began to climb towards Cross.

He clambered as fast as he could up the jagged wall. The rock carved into his palms with each grip. He fought through the searing pain and willed himself to keep climbing. He neared the summit, but the slits in his hands had widened and enflamed with pain. He could no longer pull himself up without feeling every slice in his palms.

The spirits latched their miserable arms around his legs, the bottom of his slacks burst into flames, and they yanked him downward. He stomped their faces and crushed their skulls. But more of the Hell spirits followed.

He was just about to give up when six hands grabbed him from above, hoisted him up and patted out the fires on his clothes. He coughed the smoke out of his lungs. The draggles stood over him, blinking the eyelids behind their big black eyes.

How they could have lifted him so easily? Even though there were three of them to carry his load, they were as thin as starved children, almost made entirely of bone, and they weighed nothing. He sat up and patted them on their brainy heads, trying to avoid squishing the tender zones or getting a prick from their horns. His palms were mush and soaked in blood.

“Thanks,” he said, bandaging his throbbing hands with strips of his shirt sleeve. The cloth quickly soaked up his black blood. His fingers felt fat and numb, and his palms scorched as if he was holding a ball of flames. Pain was something he had grown accustomed to though.

“So, you’re the draggles, huh?” he asked his saviors.

Their innocent faces tilted above their stringy necks like a dog listening to its master, but not understanding the command.

“That’s just what I call you because I don’t know—you can understand me, can’t you?”

They hopped around in place like bunny rabbits.

“But you don’t talk.”

All three of them spun around in a circle.

“Why do you keep following me around? Did my mother send you?”

They hopped up and down and then proceeded to sniff him all over. They seemed just as curious of him as he was of them. One of them examined the obsidian blade, poking his claw through the hole in the center.

“The Raven said there were five of you, but there were only four of you before the hellhound—” He stopped himself as the three remaining draggles drooped their sad little faces downward. Something must’ve happened to number five when he wasn’t around. Their misfortunes were all his fault. Bad things always happened to everyone who had the even slightest connection to him.

“That’s too bad about your friends.” He stood up and brushed himself off. “I should’ve—it’s all my fault. If I had—you just take care of yourselves, okay.” He walked a few steps along the river. Their claws pittered behind him.