Lawyers in Hell (39 page)

Roger stolidly led the party from CLAP forward, edging through the throng.

Gandhi noted them approaching, faced them, and inclined his bald head.

“Mister Gandhi,” Roger said, “or do you prefer
Bapu
?”  ‘Bapu’ was Indian for ‘father,’ and the whole nation had once called Gandhi that.  But Gandhi was complex, and also demonstrably racist.  Nor was Gandhi a pussy.  ‘I do believe,’ he once wrote, ‘that where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence.’  So Roger figured that between the racism and the exhortation to violence, canny old Bapu had earned his way here, just like everybody else.

Little Gandhi was all beatific smiles.  His cohorts stood nearby but made no move to interfere.  “I answer to either.  How may I help you?”

In the midst of this mayhem, Gandhi tried to be reassuring:  Roger could smell roasted flesh, hear the wails, and yet the leader seemed undisturbed.

Benet asked, “Mister Gandhi, sir, is the mob going to be a problem?”  CLAP moved in, creating a wall between their target and the
danse noir
on the steps.

“The ‘mob’?” Gandhi asked, still beaming.  “Right must battle might, or lose all legitimacy.  They are but supplicants for decency, presenting a rational request to the demons.  This ‘mob’ is not a problem, though certainly the demons may decide to make them such, for their own purposes.”

“Well then, sir, we were sent to bring you.”

“‘Sent’?  Ordered?  You do not yourselves choose to come for me?”  He tsk’d knowingly, and Roger understood it was an attempt at debate.  Among doomed screams and demonic violence, this tableau was bizarre, even for the netherworlds.

Benet looked confused and annoyed.  McCarthy looked apoplectic.

Roger stifled a grin.  That sight was worth enjoying.  Pleasure in hell was hard to find.

Benet faced the little Indian and said, “Come with us, or face unimaginable pain and suffering.  I personally try to avoid pain and suffering.”  Benet must think Gandhi didn’t understand.

Gandhi said, “You could choose to endure it, however.  You could choose not to participate in hell’s charade.  New Hell, they call this place, but nothing is new here.  If people refuse to take part in Satan’s games – that would be new.  If all souls do that, the devil, by any name, becomes powerless.”

Incorrect, but inspiring.  Torment didn’t require assent on the part of the tormented:  you like it, you don’t; you run, or you fight.  Didn’t matter:  this wasn’t a world to win by intimidation and press manipulation, by inspiration or steadfastness.  Right and wrong didn’t matter here:  Erra and the terrifying Seven were ripping their way through all the hells, sent from Above, meting out injustice to innocent and guilty alike.

So Gandhi
didn’t
get it.  He was doing in afterlife what had worked for him in life, like so many others.  Kabum was a part of the greater underworld, in all its manifest complexity.  No debater’s trick or fillip of law could change that.  Roger admired Gandhi, the way you’d admire a diorama.  It took exceptional strength of character to behave this way in hell.  Or sheer insanity.  Impressive, either way.

McCarthy muttered, “Damn commie.”

Gandhi heard McCarthy and responded:  “Indeed not.  I am no communist, nor a capitalist, a monarchist, nor any other type of statist.  I am myself, and only myself.  You serve another, by choice.  I serve myself, by choice.”

Realizing that Benet was confused and McCarthy about to burst a blood vessel, which in hell meant literally and messily, Roger stepped in:  “Bapu Gandhi, we have been asked to find the most honest man in hell.  Your name was mentioned, and I took the liberty of presuming you might be he.”

Gandhi laughed in delight, in a low resonant tenor.

“Oh, young man, I can make no such claim.”

Modesty, but perhaps false.  All men lie.  “No?”

The wizened elf sighed and smiled and said, “I was once a lawyer.  I lusted and lied to protect my sordid dalliance.”  Ghandi shrugged.  “I manipulated truth for effect, for my nation.  I made statements deemed racist.  I do not regret any of it, even now, but I am here because I was not as honest as I was effective.  And I am in New Hell, subject to Satan’s will, when Naraka is the place of torment, or proper hell, for Islamists and Hindus and Sikhs and Jaines and Buddhists –  Yama should be my judge, not this Father of Lies who rules in New Hell.  The underworld’s mistake, or my own?  No matter.  Here I am, among the other New Dead, liar that I am, opportunist that I am, with the flock that died believing my lies all around me.”

McCarthy asked, “Who, then?”

Little Gandhi shrugged his skinny shoulders.  “Only the press thinks it knows who is honest.  Walter Cronkite is somewhere in New Hell.  He is a most trusted judge of honesty and keeper of opinion.  He haunts the battlefields, beyond the minefields.  He would be a good bet.  If one wanted to bet in New Hell.  What is there to lose, in afterlife?”

“Very well.  However, we must bring you along as well, just in case.”

“With respect, I refuse to comply.”

McCarthy motioned to Benet.  Benet drew his saber and swung smoothly; he’d had much time to practice his technique here.

The anti-communist crusader looked down at the head of Gandhi, rolling on the ground, and said, “I should think it was obvious, and now demonstrated, what one could lose.”  He wore a shit-eating grin.  “Yama, Kali, Satan – whoever you wanted to invoke –  What an asshole.”

Gandhi’s head came to rest, face up.  Gandhi’s face smiled wanly at them as his body, vomiting blood, collapsed next to his head.  His eyes tracked his corpse, calm and resigned, as his head was stuffed into the sack Thurmond had in his hand.

Roger felt nauseous.  McCarthy had enjoyed the beheading.

Then they looked around them.  They stared hard at Gandhi’s followers, who stared back, silent and ominously unmoving.  CLAP wasn’t supposed to use violence, except in self-defense.  Self-defense might be needed any second.  Roger had only his slung, single-shot rifle, no long bayonet at his side like That Fucking Benet.

Another Indian moved through the crowd as if he were parting the waters of the Red Sea:  Gandhi’s assistant or his successor:  Roger couldn’t tell which.

This Indian guy took a deep breath and said in a booming voice, “Bapu will come back to us in time.  Meanwhile, we shall continue our sagratyha.”  He turned and walked up the steps, heedless of the writhing wounded around him or even the final twitches of Gandhi’s body in its pool of gore.  The devotees followed.

So they weren’t even going to bury their beloved leader, just leave his body on the steps.  Roger was shocked; he didn’t understand it.

Benet said, “So we proceed to the battlefield beyond the minefields.”

Roger understood that.

*

The minefields were easy to find.  South of town was a large, vacant area, pocked with craters.

They dismounted, stacked arms – well, sticks – and approached carefully, stepping from existing crater to existing crater.  They stepped over a Bactrian’s corpse, newly dead; the corpse squished and slid, its skin loose from the meat beneath.  Roger nearly retched.

Behind and to the right, a muffled blast threw a shifting shadow.  Roger wheeled in time to see somebody flail in midair, then fall, and explode as the damned soul landed on a live mine.  Pieces blew skyward and fell to the minefield again, and some hit more live mines and were cast heavenward again, only to crash back to earth....

Seeing someone fall from the sky and smash on the minefield brought Roger a moment of clarity.  The human body was intelligently designed, if the purpose of the design all along had been to easily inflict maximum pain and damage.  So maybe life was just hell’s kindergarten.

Benet interrupted Roger’s epiphany:  “Howard, get on that gadget of yours and find where this Bronchitis fellow is.”

“Walter Cronkite.  Famous reporter, and actually very well respected.  I do think he’s a good bet, sir.”

“Well, get on with it.”

This being New Hell, at the critical moment Roger had trouble manipulating his phone, with its intermittent connection, the shifting sunlight and a sack with a wiggling head in it nearby, as well as a staring, belligerent McCarthy and a confused, frustrated Benet cleaning his saber.

After a few minutes of swiping, typing and cursing, he had video.  Cronkite looked good, as he had at his prime, which was about when Roger had been born.

“He’s reporting live from the eastern front, where a battle is.”

“Which battle?” McCarthy wanted to know.  “Battle against Commies?”

“Who knows?  There are so many battles.”

“Well, let’s proceed.  Back out the way we came, then a blister break.”

Roger tried not to think about blisters.  Blisters in hell were worse than blisters in life.  They infected, oozed, scarred over abscessing pockets.  He could feel them blossoming inside his stiff leather wingtips, and along the edge of the upper.  They’d pop and peel.  You could ignore the burn, and the layers of skin coming off.  The necrotic-tissue damage was something else.

You wanted to be first for treatment.  Treatment hurt a lot, but was over quickly.  The later patients got to anticipate the pain.  Shrieks from each victim primed the next to expect agony.  Benet always went last and, to his credit, never uttered a sound.  That Fucking Benet had never commanded in battle, but he did have courage.

He was also stubborn, after a century and more, about those stupid single-shot rifles.

Roger wondered about Gandhi and his obsession with passive resistance and Benet with his single-shot rifles.  Neither could help you in hell.  So was hell meant to break the damned of their sinners’ habits?  Satan never offered explanations.  The CLAP handled petty cases to no useful end, for eternity; and, with the endlessly shifting legal codes, botched most of them.  Like that hell-kitten named Lucky.

When they stopped to lunch and to treat their feet, their shrieks and screams seemed to please the locals.  Hawk-nosed men and gray-eyed women in indigo watched in delight as lawyers suffered.

When Roger’s turn came, their company’s combat medic punctured Roger’s festering sores and poured alcohol over them.  Roger tried not to howl when the alcohol hit his liquefied flesh.  He flushed and sweated; his brain spun; nausea washed over him like surf.  Then he spun down a deep dark tunnel into unconsciousness.

In his nice black comfy place, a shoe prodded him.  “Howard, wake up.”

He groaned, tried to rise and failed with the pack holding him back, rolled on sharp rocks and stood.  His feet were numbed now, so he felt the pokes in knees and elbows all the more.

There were no showers or clean suits in hell, either, and his tie was too tight.

They bounced endlessly across the craterscape.  The water in his canteen tasted like a combination of mud and urine.  In coldest weather, they got moldy iced tea.  In extreme heat, it was sometimes boiling Drownin’ Numbnuts coffee with curdled cream no sugar, and a dead mouse.  He’d like water.  Clean, safe water.  Just once.

Without warning, sniper fire ripped from cover across the wasteland.

Henry fell over, making whistling noises, his shoulder blown apart.  Thurmond grabbed his shoulder and held it so it might heal reasonably straight.  Three CLAPpers returned fire and, despite the single shot nature of their rifles, the massive .45-70 rounds succeeded in scaring away the enemy.

They bivouacked under a shivery chill vault, red like clotted blood with heaving violet and pink swirls.  Not pretty like an aurora.  Just disorienting and vomitous.  He shivered miserably for hours on end, trying to recall black starry nights and crescent moons smiling at him.

The next morning they munched their rations and moved out.  His feet were lumps of rancid meat in his shoes at this point, and his knee had stopped hurting, and stopped bending.

Far ahead, though, was a defensive line of rocks, sandbags, mortars and other weapons, and thousands of Ashcan troops trying to protect their little piece of hell from an onslaught of Chinese and Zulu and punk kids.

“Damned commies!” McCarthy muttered deliberately loudly.  “If we can find something to charge them with, I’ll haul them in for hearings.”

Roger really wished McCarthy would forget communism.  Even communists were victims in hell.  The past of a sinner paled before his netherworldly sins.  The damned butchered hapless victims because they could.  Because they always had.  Because they always would.

Roger had never been a hero.  He’d been too clever by half for that.  But in hell, if he could find some heroic path, he’d take it.  If it could get him out of hell.  But then, heroism isn’t about premeditation.  Holding “hearings” of alleged communists was about premeditation.

Ahead, though, was a small civilian truck bristling with gear.  It didn’t look like a ‘technicals’ truck; he saw no machine gun rising from its bed.  As they got closer, Roger identified its fancy satellite dish and antennae.  Not irregulars, then:  too much expensive gear.  They dismounted and proceed on foot, pogo sticks under their arms.  It felt strange to walk, to see a stationary horizon.  What twist of physics let them pogo so well, without falling and exacerbating their injuries more?  Or was it just personalized torture for men who’d enjoyed limousines and first-class travel?

A short distance away, someone stood in front of a camera, a pop-filtered microphone trained on him, pointing to the outgoing fire.  It was definitely Cronkite:  handsome and dignified.  He seemed in fine shape.

Then when he turned, Roger realized that Cronkite was shot to hell.  His camera-loving face was perfect, unmarred, yet battlefield butchery covered his body.  Par for the course in Ashcanistan, but anywhere else in hell he’d be dead and recycled by now.

Cronkite’s voice was deep, resonant, familiar:  “Greetings, Soldiers.  Are you here with the Forced Unified Central Kabum Emergency Resistance…?”

Cronkite’s next words were drowned out by mortar fire and the basso whoosh of a round incoming.

The round landed far behind them.  Roger flinched but didn’t duck.