Donny's Inferno (7 page)

CHAPTER 11

D
onny heard the clatter of wheels on stone, and turned to see a chariot roll up. It was drawn by an identical pair of the long-legged imps that Angela had called runners. There was a bench inside where a few people could sit.

“In we go,” Angela said. Donny and Zig-Zag sat on the bench, but Angela stood at the front of the chariot and called to the imps. “To the refinery!” There were no reins to hold. The runners nodded, and the chariot lurched into motion. Its unexpected burst of speed rocked Donny backward. They flew down the path, away from the dome, and turned onto a road that led toward the cavern wall beyond the pillar city.

Donny saw dark shapes ahead on either side of the road. They were like trees at the bottom, with broad leathery umbrella shapes on top, nearly a dozen feet high. Imps were
cutting some down with two-handled saws and piling them into carts.

“Are those mushrooms?” Donny asked.

“Delicious,” Zag replied.

Well, they have to eat something,
Donny thought.

The chariot rolled on. They passed through meadows of black ferns and then a tortured terrain with pools of boiling mud and steam whistling from cracks in the ground.

“What's the refinery?” Donny asked, this time raising his voice so Angela might hear him better. But she didn't answer. She appeared to be deep in thought as she gripped the front of the chariot and stared at the road ahead.

Zig spoke for her. “Fire is everything in Sulfur, young mortal. You have seen how we use it to illuminate the skies, and you have seen the pit where the Flames of Torment once burned. But those are only two of the types of fire we employ.”

“In Sulfur, all fire comes from below,” Zag continued. “We call that the Crude Fire. At the refinery, the Crude is separated into the many useful types.”

It didn't make sense to Donny. “Where I come from, fire is just fire. You can't just break it down into other things.”

Zig nodded, encouraging, and Zag shook his head, bemused. “So I have heard,” said Zig. “The natural laws of the infernal realm are not the same as the mortal realm.
We are almost there—now you will see how it is done.”

They drew close to the outer wall of Sulfur. Donny had started to orient himself to this strange world, using the river that ran through the center. He thought of the river's origin as north, with the water flowing south past the great pit and beyond. And so the side that they now approached—which was within a mile of the river at this point, where Sulfur was still quite narrow—to him, that was west.

A wagon rolled toward them along the road, and the chariot slowed and veered toward the side to let it pass. It was pulled by a lumbering beast that looked like a ­lizard-skinned rhinoceros walking on two legs. The wagon was loaded with barrel-size ceramic vessels, a few of which glowed red-hot.

A small imp was perched on the seat at the front of the wagon, picking his nose with unusual vigor. He wiped his findings on his leg when he saw Angela, and tipped his floppy hat. “You here because of the theft?”

Angela nodded.

“Well,” the imp said as he plunged his finger into the other nostril. “Better get to the bottom of that.” The wagon rolled on.

Zig and Zag glanced at each other with brows raised. “A theft, Angela?” Zig asked. “Has there ever been one before?”

“Not that I remember,” Angela said. “That's why we're here.”

“See?” Zag said to Donny. “You break with tradition, and bad things follow.”

Zig sighed heavily, and rolled his eyes.

The refinery was inside a long curving wall that had been constructed near the side of the cavern. Bursts of fire billowed up from the other side, along with clouds of smoke and steam. Things rumbled, rattled, boomed, and hissed. Donny felt adrenaline course through his veins. Inside that wall, it sounded like two things he had always enjoyed: construction sites and the Fourth of July.

The chariot halted outside, next to a basin filled with water. “Thank you, gentlemen,” Angela told the long-legged imps as they unharnessed themselves and headed to the basin for a drink. “Wait here if you don't mind.”

They stepped down from the chariot, and Angela walked up to a pair of huge black wooden doors. They were tall and wide, reinforced with iron bars, and shut tight. “We close the doors now?” she said quite loudly.

A voice answered from above. “After the first theft in a thousand years, we do. Hold on, Obscura.” Donny looked up. He was getting the hang of not crying out when he saw something strange or awful. That skill came in handy just then, because the person, or thing, who had spoken was a terrifying sight: a gnarly, piggish face with charred, ragged ears, and a pair of goggles pushed high on the forehead.

One of the doors screeched open a minute later. They
stepped through, and Donny's eyes opened wide when he saw the refinery inside.

Dozens of smoldering cones of rock, like miniature volcanoes, jutted from the ground. Some looked extinct, while others had fire, smoke, or steam gushing from their tops. In other places, the imps had dug wide holes in the ground, with ramps that dove into the openings. Flames belched from the depths, and imps hustled wheelbarrows up and down the ramps, oblivious to the heat and fire.

“The Crude,” Zig said. He pointed at one of the smaller cones nearby. It looked like a witch's hat made of stone, as tall as a telephone pole. The fire that flowed from its top was like no fire Donny had ever seen. It glowed with neon intensity, bursting with yellows, oranges, and reds that bathed every surface with rippling multicolored light. The flames rolled and curled at an unnaturally slow pace, like a form of matter somewhere between liquid and gas. He could have stared at it for hours, but there was too much else to see.

The larger cones within the walls were surrounded by scaffolding, ladders, and old machinery, with tubes, stoppers, and spigots embedded at various heights. Imps of all sizes crawled up the wobbly scaffolding. They turned valves with fat wrenches, checked dials, and hoisted ­vessels with chains and pulleys. The vessels, which looked like they were made of black glass, were everywhere, in stacks against the wall and loaded onto carts.

“Holy smokes,” was all Donny could say.

The being who had spoken to them before came down along a staircase that hugged the inside of the wall.

“Hello, Flint,” Angela said.

Flint jabbed a thumb at Donny. “That a mortal?”

“You can talk to him as if he's standing right there,” Angela replied. “Which he is.”

“Hmmph,” Flint said. “Didn't mean to be rude.”

“That's okay, sir,” Donny said. Flint was amazing, if a little disturbing, to look at up close. He seemed to have spent his entire existence in the flames, because his whole scaly body was scorched, blasted, and scarred, except for where goggles protected his eyes. He wore a heavy leather apron, also blackened by soot and fire.

“Show me what happened,” Angela said. “Donny, you seem enchanted by the refinery. Z, do you mind?”

Zag sighed. “Yes. We will instruct him.”

Angela and Flint walked away toward a smaller building within the walls. Donny heard the beginning of their conversation.

“What type was it, Flint? Not annihilation, I hope.”

“No, Obscura. Destruction, but a very specific type, heavily refined.”

“How strange. What do you mean, specific type . . . ?” They wandered out of earshot.

“Well, mortal, would you like to know about the refinery?” Zig asked.

“Oh,” said Donny. “Sure. Please!”

He soaked up what Zig-Zag told him. Apparently, the process was similar to what he'd learned once in school about oil refineries. When the cones were capped, the fire separated into layers. Then, by tapping into the cone at various levels, the engineer imps isolated the different types of fire.

“Depending on where the holes are drilled,” Zag explained, “you can extract the Flames of Torment. As you know, those once filled the Pit of Fire. Or you can extract the Flames of Destruction, which can eat through flesh or stone. Or the Flames of Illumination, which bring light but not pain or heat. Or the Flames of Annihilation—the most deadly and powerful of all.”

“How is that more deadly than destruction?” Donny asked.

“Annihilation,” answered Zag, “is the end of all things. If I burn you away with the Flames of Destruction, your mortal form is gone, but your soul remains. But if I destroy you with the Flames of Annihilation, you are gone forever. No body. No soul.”

“Yes, that would be worse,” Donny agreed quietly. “Um, does anyone ever actually get annihilated?”

Zig and Zag looked at each other. “It has happened,” Zig said.

“When the punishment deserves it,” said Zag.

Zig frowned. “Annihilation is never deserved.”

“Typical weak-spined drivel from you, brother,” Zag said. “When the crime is sufficient, the guilty should be removed from society so they can cause no further harm.”

“And typical cruelty from you, brother,” said Zig. “Who are we to decide when annihilation is the solution?”

“Criminy,” Angela said. “Are you two at it again?” Donny hadn't noticed her return. She smirked at Zig-Zag and folded her arms. “Put your debate on hold, boys. I need to think on the way back.”

CHAPTER 12

A
ngela asked the runners for speed, and they obliged. The chariot rumbled along so fast that Donny clutched the edge of the bench, afraid of bouncing out.

Back at the pillar, Angela hopped out and walked a few paces ahead, muttering quietly to herself. Donny walked with Zig-Zag as the two heads traded angry looks, still inflamed from their debate. They didn't look open to conversation, so with questions piled up in his brain, Donny trotted ahead to walk beside Angela. He hesitated to say anything, because she looked so deep in thought, but eventually she peered at him from the corner of her eye. “Strange doings, Cricket.”

“What exactly was stolen? Do you mind if I ask?”

She exhaled through her nose. “The Flames of Destruction. We use it to build things, because it cuts through stone. But it was also used in the war.”

“Did they steal a lot?”

“It doesn't take a lot. The stuff is potent. It goes through rock like scissors through paper. But yeah. A lot was stolen. A bunch of barrels.”

“Didn't anybody guard it?”

“Three guards. All vanished. Either they were in on it, or . . .”

“Or what?”

Angela shrugged. “They could have been burned away by the same fire that was stolen. There was plenty of scorching, that's for sure. I think they're goners.”

Zig spoke up from behind. “It's the Merciless. They're coming back.”

“You don't know that,” groused Zag.

“Who else?” replied Zig. “And can it be a coincidence that Havoc returned from his ‘expedition' just in time for this?”

“So quick to accuse,” said Zag.

“Boys . . . ,” Angela began, but she didn't say anything else. Instead she looked up, because the sky suddenly had brightened, as if stadium lights had been flipped on. She shielded her eyes with her hand. “What the Sulfur?”

Great billowing clouds of illumination spread in every direction. All of Sulfur turned red and gold as the shadows sharpened.

“What's wrong with that?” asked Donny.

“It's the end of the day, not the beginning,” said Zig.

“Remember when you saw the clouds released this morning? They should never be released at night,” said Zag.

Angela frowned and puckered her lips. “I can't deal with one more issue right now. Z, can you go find out what happened?”

“Of course,” said Zig and Zag together. They headed down the path toward the source of the cloud, bickering along the way.

Donny stared up. The clouds pulsed with orange light as they engulfed the enormous stalactites and left only the points sticking out below. “Kind of pretty,” he said.

“Hmmph,” Angela replied. Her brow was deeply furrowed. “I like the night.”

They stood quietly for a while. Donny sneaked a sideways glance at Angela, who wasn't even looking at the clouds anymore. She stood with her arms folded, tapping one toe, eyes focused on nothing. Finally she came out of it with a toss of her head. “I want you to know something. Come with me.” She walked off briskly and headed up the road that spiraled around Pillar Obscura. Once again Donny raced to catch up.

CHAPTER 13

T
hey circled the pillar, far above Angela's rooms, and gained altitude quickly. On Donny's right, there was a low balcony carved out of the rock at the ramp's edge. On his left, in the pillar itself, they passed the occasional doorway and window. Some openings had wooden or metal doors, or leather curtains. Some were completely open and revealed simple dwellings inside, mere niches in the stone.

“Who lives in those?” Donny asked.

“Imps,” she replied.

Donny stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and looked again at the swollen clouds. They began to drip fire. Giant blobs formed at the bottoms, tethered by strands that thinned and snapped, and then the luminous bubble that broke away fell slowly, twinkling and withering to nothing before it touched the ground.

“Are you all right to keep going?” Angela said. “Need a piggyback ride or something?” She tapped her back.

That sounded kind of wonderful, but Donny would never admit it. He fought back the grin that wanted to creep over his face. “I'm fine. Let's go.”

The flying creatures that Donny had seen before were at eye level now. Dozens glided about, in and out of the fiery clouds, while more clung to the sides of the ­lower-hanging stalactites. One swooped by, close to where they stood, and Donny got his first good look. It was batlike, as big as an eagle, with a slender body and humanoid head with a pointed crest. The membranous wings were pointed and thin, with tiny hands at the tips. “What do you call those?” Donny asked, pointing.

“Gargs,” Angela said. “They're harmless.”

His legs and lungs burned as they climbed beyond the last of the doors and windows, until the spiraling path ended at last on a simple flat lookout. Donny had not seen Sulfur from such a height before, and more of it was visible than ever, bathed by the harsh light.

Angela seemed to appreciate the vantage point as well, because a minute passed before she spoke. “Zig-Zag told you about the war?” she said.

“A little.”

“Did he tell you why it happened?”

Donny tried to remember what he'd heard. “There was a disagreement about the Pit of Fire. Reformers wanted
to do something different with the dead people. But the other guys—you call them the Merciless?”

“They came up with that themselves. No mercy for the dead.”

“Okay. They didn't want anything to change. So there was a war, and the reformers won.”

“There's more to it than that, obviously. Do you know who started the reform?”

“No.”

Angela raised her hand over her head. “That's who.”

Donny stared. A strange feeling swept over him and left him weak in the arms and legs. He had gotten the sense that Angela was an important figure in Sulfur, but he never imagined just how important. It made him wonder why she wasted her time with a nobody like him.

“Really?” he said. “Why . . . I mean, how? What did you do?”

There was a low stone railing at the edge of the lookout. Angela sat and slid her legs through the space below the rail and let them dangle. Donny sat the same way beside her.

“You know how the Pit of Fire used to be,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Zig-Zag told me.”

“This was about sixty years ago. Lucifer had already been gone for decades, leaving the council in charge. That pit—what a horror show. So many bodies. We would constantly have to expand it because the souls piled up and
spilled over. Crazy stuff went on down there. Every once in a while, a soul would get tossed right out of the pit. You know, off the end of a swinging pitchfork or something.

“Normally, I didn't like to go near the pit—it made me sick, honestly. But that one day, there I was, and a soul landed right at my feet. I looked down at that poor sucker, who I would guess was a peasant from maybe the seventeenth century. All of a sudden the guy got a weird smile on his face. A fire imp ran up, ready to spear him and toss him back into the flames, but when he got there—there was nothing to spear. Nothing but a glob of twinkling lights.”

“Like I saw on the river,” Donny said.

“You saw the souls before they take shape? Good. Yes. It was exactly like that. The soul of that peasant returned to its immaterial form. It floated for a moment, and then it drifted like it was a feather caught in a breeze. I followed it because I had to see where it would end up. It floated to the river and then downstream. All the way to the end, where the river disappears into another hole filled with mist.” She turned and looked Donny in the eye. “And that was when I realized: we might be doing something wrong. That soul was ready to move on to whatever came next. But we had kept it here for who knows how long. You understand what I mean? The flames weren't just tormenting souls. They were
trapping
souls.”

“What did you do?”

“First? I ordered the imps to throw more of the dead out
of the pit. Before long it happened again—poof! Another soul went on its merry way! Not all of them, of course, but enough of them to convince me that I was right.

“Of course, what I wanted was completely radical. I was proposing that we extinguish the pit and use another means to punish the souls that allowed them to move on when their time had come. I wanted to put a stop to the endless, mindless torment, and I had a pretty good idea how. I knew there would be resistance. Was it even worth it to try? So, I went topside for a while, just to clear my head and think about it. And when I traveled the world and took a good look around, I realized that something amazing was happening.”

She paused, and the moment of silence begged the question from Donny. “What was happening?”

She pushed her hand through her hair and smiled. “Humanity was getting better.”

“We were?”

“Absolutely. Are you a history buff?”

“Sort of,” Donny said. He wondered if watching ­
Gladiator
counted.

“Well, then you should know. For as long as you knuckleheads have been around, you've been murdering, mutilating, terrorizing, persecuting, and enslaving one another.”

“Speaking of enslaving,” Donny said. He raised his hand to display Angela's mark on his palm.

“Oh please,” she replied. She waved him off. “That's for your protection. See how long you last in Sulfur without it. What was I saying? Oh yes. You people. Somewhere along the sad trajectory of your rotten history, you started
improving
. Don't get me wrong—loads of horrible things still happen around the globe on a daily basis. But as bad as you are today, you're a bunch of pussycats compared to your ancestors. Genghis Khan murdered tens of millions. Alexander was mostly great at slaughter. Caesar was a homicidal thug. Show me an empire, and I'll show you a bloodbath. And do you know what they all did it for? The loot, mostly. And personal glory, as if butchering and plundering is something to be glorified.

“You'd never know it from your news shows, Donny, but humanity has gotten nearly respectable lately. More educated. More rational. More tolerant. Less prone to war and atrocities and mayhem.

“There was nearly a major exception: back in the sixties you came darn close to blowing yourselves off the planet. It seemed so inevitable that we were trying to figure out how to expand the pit to accommodate all the new bodies we were expecting! But you pulled back from the brink—and, by and large, you've gotten more peaceable. Then, finally, you people did something so amazing that I knew the time had come.”

Again Angela let the silence linger. Donny didn't wait so long to ask this time. “What? What did we do?”

She threw her hands up. “You went to the
moon
, for crying out loud. You sent people in a rocket to the moon, and they walked around for a while, stuck a flag in it, picked up some rocks, and flew back home. Do you even appreciate how outrageous, how audacious, how supremely wonderful that was? I bought a bunch of newspapers. ‘Man Walks on Moon!' ‘One Giant Leap for Mankind!' And I brought them to the council. ‘Look at this!' I shouted. ‘Look what these numbskulls have accomplished! And what about us? Down here, nothing has changed at all! If Earth can make progress, why can't Hell?' And that was when the debate truly started. All I got back at first was ridicule, scoffing, and two scoops of outrage. But slowly I won some converts. And something else worked in our favor. The imps in the pit? Turns out a lot of them weren't too happy with the work and would be delighted to put out the fires.

“One by one, we picked up more votes in the council. It was funny how it went. Some of them simply agreed with me. Some of them thought that if we extinguished the pit, it would get Lucifer's attention and he'd come back. It took years and plenty of arm-twisting, but we gained momentum.”

Donny could see the pit from there. It yawned across the landscape, ominous even without the flames and writhing figures. “So you guys just voted on it?”

“It never came to that,” Angela said. “Once the Merciless saw that change was inevitable, they went a little crazy.”

“Crazy how?”

“Oh, they called us traitors, started riots, assassinated a bunch of us. Finally they decided that they wanted to split away, form their own realm, and take all the souls with them. Apparently, the bigger a change you try to make, the more violently the other side reacts. Anyway, things escalated, and pretty soon we had a war on our hands. You can still see the damage. Look there, and there.” She pointed to other pillars like the one they were on, where the base was surrounded by rubble, and straight below to the ruined section near her own home.

“Now, look that way—all the way across. See the far wall with the jagged peaks?”

Donny looked. Far away, beyond the pit, the river, mushroom forests, and miles of strange stone formations, lay what he thought of as the eastern side of this cavernous world. Out there stood mountains with narrow tops—really a series of colossal stalagmites that had merged together in a range that ran for miles.

“We call those the Dragonbacks,” Angela said. “Now look there, between the two tallest peaks, at the bottom. See the dark space?” Donny looked at what seemed to be the mouth of a cave. In front of that opening was a wall of stone.

“Inside those mountains there are enormous passages and caves,” Angela said. “Those are the Depths. We don't even know how far they go, or how deep, or what's down
there. When the Merciless lost the war, that's where they retreated. We built that wall you can just make out from here, and we keep an army there to guard the cave. But we haven't seen them since.”

Donny looked again at that opening, so dark in contrast with the harshly lit peaks around it. “What do you think they've been doing all this time?”

Angel tapped her chin with one finger. “According to Havoc and his fraudulent expedition, they're searching for Lucifer, and they've gone so deep, they can't be found. I don't buy it. I think he's gone there to scheme with them. The Merciless care too much about their precious pit to give up. They're either plotting a comeback, or they're biding their time, hoping that things change in Sulfur. That last thing is what worries me the most.”

“Why?”

She brooded for a while. “Now that years have gone by, some on the council wonder if we did the right thing. There are thirteen members, you know. Right now if it came to a vote, it would be eight to five in favor of keeping the pit extinguished. But a couple of council members could be swayed.”

“Why would they change their minds?”

“Different reasons. It might be nostalgia. They miss the fire, the heat, and the howls. Or Havoc is winning them over. Havoc thinks what we're doing is an abomination. He preaches that we've abandoned our traditions and our duty.
As far as he's concerned, roasting mortals in the fire is the only reason we exist.”

“But eight to five is still pretty good,” Donny said.

She frowned at that. “Do the math, Donny. If two members change their votes, we lose everything we've fought for.”

Donny looked up at the billowing, incandescent clouds dripping fire. They were so bright, he had to squint to see them. Angela had just stuffed his brain with an overwhelming feast that would take a while to digest. There was a long silence, both of them lost in their own thoughts.

One of the gargs swept past them. It dove steeply from above and chirped as it passed. Two more dove by, and then another. “Odd,” Angela said. She stood and shaded her eyes as she gazed into the cloud.

A terrible screech, as harsh as nails on a blackboard, rang down from above. The noise alone was enough to make Donny cringe. “What was that?”

“Hope it's not what I think it is,” she said. A dozen other gargs left their perches on the stone and rushed away from the cloud in a panic. Donny glimpsed a larger shape inside the cloud as it swooped by.

Another garg dropped from the cloud, but this one was injured, one of its wings in bloody tatters. It flapped awkwardly and lost altitude fast. Unable to glide like the others, it aimed for the pillar and a place to land.

“What do you
think
it is?” asked Donny. He got up and backed away from the edge of the landing.

The thing revealed itself, dropping out of the clouds. It was a larger, nastier version of the gargs, gray and black except for the red of its mouth when it screamed. A serrated horn jutted from its snout, and the talons on its feet looked like knives.

“That is a shreek,” Angela said.

The shreek closed in on the fleeing, wounded garg. The smaller creature just made it to the pillar. It grabbed the rock with its hands and feet and tried to squeeze into a crevice. But the shreek soared by and raked it with those awful talons.

The garg toppled off the pillar and fell limply past them. The shreek arced past the ledge where Donny and Angela stood, so close that Donny ducked low. With nothing else to throw, Angela took off one of her shoes and flung it at the creature. “Hey! Knock it off! Go back to the Depths!”