Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades (26 page)

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Authors: Jeffrey Thomas

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Red blood squirted out of the wound he left. It was a shock to Leon. Yes, he had seen red blood on the Demons during this battle, but he had seen red blood on them so many times before. He had thought it was the blood of the Damned, as it always was. But now he realized that they had red blood of their own. That they were not machines, mere robots, after all. Alive, in their way. Just as he was alive, in his way.
The thing made no sound, but jerked its mirror face around at him in a fury that needed no voice, no face of its own. Anonymous and distant and hidden, like the Creator of all this. Leon swung the sickle again, into that mirror. Shattering it.
The Demon fell off Salim, and Leon kept hacking at it, again and again, ignoring the pain in his own slashed left arm. Dan helped drag the badly lacerated Salim to his feet, and Leon went on smashing the creature with the tool’s heavy curved blade.
He crouched over it, panting. It lay quivering on its back. It was dying. Blood ran from a dozen deep gashes. It had regurgitated a greenish ooze of partially digested sugarcane from the orifice in its midsection. It was pathetic, vulnerable, lying there. Spread-eagled like a beaten woman waiting to be raped. So with one final, extra-powerful swing, Leon buried his sickle’s blade into the center of its bony black chest.
He grinned, gasping, felt the thing’s splattered blood trickling down his face. It dribbled onto his upper lip, and unconsciously he licked the drops away with his tongue.
And then, even though the thing’s mirror face was broken, he saw his own face reflected. In his mind. The mad, lustful leer glowing through the war paint of gore. The wolfish tongue…
"You bastards," he croaked. It was the Demons’ final humiliation. Final punishment. Once, they had forced him to feed them, care for them. And now, they had forced him to kill them. To break his vow. To spill blood.
Tears welled up in his eyes, at what they had made him do. As if this creature had planned it; yet another psychological torture. He wanted to strike it again, he was so filled with trembling rage, but he only tugged his sickle out of the dead thing’s heart. It would not regenerate, as he would. It was dead forever. And that made him hate it all the more. Because it made him envy it.
"Damn you," he sobbed at the creature. "
Damn you
…"
9: The Rebel
Leon, Salim and Dan eventually caught up with the group they had seen marching past—this time with Leon and Dan supporting Salim between them, since he was the most badly wounded, with one hand almost severed and one eye gone from a gouge to his face. They had waited a little bit, until he was able to walk, until he was not moaning terribly with the pain. By now, Dan’s stigmata was nearly gone and the wound in Leon’s arm had become shallow.
They found that the group had congregated at the area where once they had fed the queues of Demons, and even more Damned had joined them. There were tables upon which they used to pile the freshly cut segments of those sweet-tasting, bamboo-like stalks. But now, on one of these tables a row of glass containers had been set. They were spares of the globes that had formerly been mounted in the hollows of those black iron minarets, in which brains like Leon’s own had been stuffed and an orange fluid added to prevent the brains from regenerating until they were released again.
These globes had been inverted, with their black rubber seals at the top instead of the bottom. But the entire rubber collar on each globe had been pried off to make the opening wider. This had been done to accommodate the larger objects that had been forced into them. Not just brains, but an entire row of human heads. More than a dozen of them.
Marty was one of them, and all of the heads possessed mouths that worked as if trying to breathe or speak, eyes that blinked and followed the movements of their captors.
Leon turned to see that someone had stepped up to Salim, and put a hand on his shoulder. The red-haired woman, Megan, concern on her face. He smiled at her bravely through his agony.
Megan switched her gaze from Salim to Dan. She motioned with her head toward the row of glass spheres. "Are these the people you felt were working with the Demons?"
Dan looked over her shoulder. "I guess," he said reluctantly.
Leon was still staring at them. He was reminded of tales of the French Revolution, and the guillotine. How it was claimed that every so many heads lifted from the wicker basket had eyes and mouth still moving. A few horrid seconds before the life went out of them. But here, the life would not go out of these heads. Not ever. For all Leon knew, one of these Damned might even have died during the French Revolution, only to find himself here in Hell. This place where all mortal suffering was rewarded with more, and more, and more. Eternal, no real death, no oblivion, no forgetting, a suffering always alive and eating the brain from inside as the Demons ate at the outside. There were two Hells. This infinite macrocosm. And the microcosm within one’s skull. Both could not be escaped from…
He stepped forward uncertainly, unconsciously, like a sleepwalker.
He stepped forward with the sickle in his fist, its scimitar blade painted in Demon’s blood. Dan started to say something to him. And the woman who had glared at him in the barracks looked up, recognizing him as he approached the table.
Leon reversed the sickle in his hand. And when he struck the first glass sphere, it was the back edge of the harvesting tool and not its blade that shattered it. The luminous orange fluid spilled out like a pregnant woman’s water bursting, and from the fanged glass womb rolled Marty’s head. It dropped off the edge of the table and lay on its side, gasping soundlessly for air. The eyes turning up toward Leon. But Leon had moved on to smash the second glass globe.
"Hey! Hey!" the glaring woman shouted. She and others surged toward Leon.
"Stop!" a man’s voice shouted.
Everyone turned. Salim stood tall despite his severe wounds. And Megan left his side, to cross toward the table. She moved between Leon and the crowd. They still had guns and lengths of bamboo and sickles of their own in hand.
"Leave him be," Megan told them. "He’s one of
you
."
Leon watched the stalemate for a moment. Would the next war begin so soon? The war between Damned and Damned? It was inevitable, wasn’t it? It was the way of things.
But the crowd recognized the woman as one of those who had come amongst them to sow the rebellion, and free them, so they did not move on Leon. They watched him, as he resumed breaking the containers and liberating each head so that it could fully regenerate again, into a whole person.
And with each person he freed, it was like he freed another part of himself, bottled up and trapped inside him. Something demoralized into numbness, something beaten into submission, something terrified into helplessness. With each bottle he shattered, with tears in his eyes, he felt his own wounds healing. For the first time in what seemed all eternity, he felt like a whole person, himself.
Jeffrey Thomas is the author of the following books from Dark Regions Press:
The Fall of Hades, Voices From Punktown, Thought Forms, Nocturnal Emissions
and
Doomsdays
. Other of his books include
Punktown, Blue War, Deadstock, Health Agent, Monstrocity, Letters From Hades
and
A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Dealers
. Some of his short stories have appeared in such books as
The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Year’s Best Horror Stories, The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction
and
The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.
 He lives in Massachusetts, and his blog can be found at:

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