Vivisepulture (39 page)

     In this utterly alien world, Jay had served as a most useful guide; the Virgil to her Dante. But to add to that he also shot bullets, being a mecha-organic rifle grown from bone, with a single eye and a pair of lips set into his side, and the sentience of a Demon. To top off his usefulness, he could jack into the Mesh. And it was through the Mesh that Jay himself had learned of Freetown. For Vee, who couldn’t recall anyplace from life or afterlife that might have felt like home, it sounded as good a destination as any.

     Vee had gained the many floors of her ascent by any number of means – from crawling up through ventilation ducts to riding freight lifts, from metal spiral staircases to opulent marble staircases. Presently she ascended to Level 120 by shimmying up a thick bundle of cables that ran through a concrete shaft. Corroded rungs were set into the side of the shaft, but after one had pulled out of the wall in her hand she had decided the cables were safer. Also set into one wall were a series of lights, about every third light still providing illumination. The Construct’s technology had been added to over the centuries, but many systems had never run down even without repair or modification after nearly two thousand years. That said a lot about Demonic technology – but then again, it was only an illusory corporeality anyway, like Vee’s own body.

     Illusory or not, by the time she reached the top of the shaft and passed through the soaring heights of Level 119 into Level 120, Vee was gulping make-believe air and sweating make-believe perspiration inside the form-fitting second skin of her rubbery black jumpsuit. Her shortish, reddish hair was plastered in spikes across her forehead.

     She poked her head up through the opening warily at first, poking up the blunt muzzle of the bone gun with her, but she saw no one about. For all the many Damned, Demons and Angels who made their home inside the Construct, they were so dispersed and the Construct so unthinkably immense that anywhere you went within it seemed desolate. Sometimes Vee felt that she and the gun were the only beings in the entire structure. Sometimes she wished they were.

     There had been a metal plate in the floor covering this opening at one time, but it had been unfastened and set aside before her. She was grateful; though she had a few simple tools in the pouch slung over her back, it would have been awkward if not impossible clinging to the rope of cables and unfastening the cover herself. Plus, if those skull-faced Demons had continued tracking her and were to follow her up the shaft, it would have been all the more unpleasant trying to get that cover off.

     She pulled herself out of the hole and to her feet, turning this way and that alertly. However peaceful Freetown might truly prove to be she couldn’t as yet say, but she had not only encountered hostile Demons since awakening from her coma, but hostile tribes of Damned and Angels as well.

     She was in a room so long and wide that three of its walls were lost in the murk. The nearer fourth wall was composed entirely of huge windows that had once let in the glow of Hell’s churning red sky. Now, outside the windows was only solid volcanic stone flush right up against the panes.

     A forest of riveted metal support columns lay around her in all directions, and the ceiling – low in this particular room, not reflecting the true ceiling of Level 120 – was similarly crisscrossed with support beams. But other than that, and puddles on the floor where water had leaked through the ceiling here and there, the room appeared absolutely empty. It had the look of a construction project that had never been finished. She was surprised one of the larger, more ambitious tribes hadn’t staked out this open territory in order to build a community.

     She had opened her mouth to express this thought to Jay – and to ask if he had any idea what direction they should take from here to find a means of continuing their ascent – when she caught her breath.

     She smelled the Demon before she saw it. It was a scent of incense, burnt into the entity’s flesh. Up close she knew the scent would be choking. She didn’t want to get close enough to experience that.

     A moment later and she could hear its approach, too, but by then she had already ducked behind the nearest support girder, wide enough to mask her long lean body. Peeking around its edge, she stared into the dark haze of the distance where the lights were too far-spaced or feeble to illuminate. A pair of white eyes beamed from the shadows, followed gradually by a hulking dark shape that began to form from the gloom.

     Jay had told her that when the more human-like races of Demons had begun sympathizing with the rebellious Damned, Hell’s response had been to mass produce less anthropomorphic Demons. This was one of them. It was a bulky thing, so wide it barely passed through the spaces between the metal pillars. It looked like a great soft body partly hatched from a hard chitin exoskeleton; a horrible synthesis of obese human and predatory insect. It was sepia in color, though its scorpion’s forelimbs shaded to black.

     Its glowing white eyes slowly turned this way, then that, sweeping the girder forest. Was it patrolling its territory? Hunting? Or merely pacing this vast room in a mindless state to pass the hours of eternity, like a sleepwalker, just as she herself had lapsed into catatonia in the Construct’s dungeon? It didn’t matter; whatever motivated the creature, it was a being she didn’t care to encounter – certainly not one of the Demon races she expected to find living in Freetown.

     Could she cross the room column to column, waiting for its head to swivel in another direction each time she needed to advance? But how wide was this room; how long before she found a doorway? After her arduous climb, she didn’t want to backtrack to the shaft and descend, then have to seek out another means of gaining this level. She might run into those little skull-headed Demons again; out of the frying pan and into the fire. Anyway, if this Demon were to look into the shaft while she was descending, though it was far too large to follow her inside it might still find something heavy to drop down on her, or even snip the cables free with its pincers.

     No, she would take her chances crossing the room, advancing toward the creature as it advanced toward her until they’d passed each other. Its bulk and slowness were to her advantage. When she saw the Demon turn its burning eyes away from her, she darted to the next closest girder. That incense scent was stronger. She only hoped the Demon couldn’t sniff her out, too.

     Vee had advanced a half dozen girders and was growing more optimistic about stealing past the Demon without it becoming the wiser, when she heard Jay whisper, “Madam! Behind you!”

     Pressed close to her present shelter, Vee looked over her shoulder. Through the metal tree trunks she caught a glimpse of eyes like very distant headlights, moving slowly at an angle from left to right. Another wandering Demon. She was lucky Jay had spotted it; with him, she had three eyes.

     The one in front of her was shambling nearer. How much sooner before the one behind noticed her? And how many more Demons might be patrolling this great room? A dozen? A hundred? This could well be why the space hadn’t been claimed by would-be colonists.

     Vee glanced around the floor, looking for a plate covering another shaft entrance. Unless one were hidden by one of the scattered pools, there didn’t appear to be any. Scattered pools…from leaks in the ceiling. Vee cast her eyes to the ceiling. A system of open latticed joists. Yes! She could crawl along the lower portion of the beams, above the heads of the Demons until she found a safe spot to return to the floor…a spot with an exit from this chamber.

     The rivets in the girder were large, distended, and she planted one foot on the lowest of them to boost herself up. She needed both hands free to take hold of the girder’s rusting, flaking edges, so she had quickly secured Jay through the straps of her pouch, across her back, just as when she’d climbed the rope made of power cables.

     Vee made it to the top of the column and immediately pressed herself flat across one of the iron beams, a surface just broad enough to conceal her. The Demon that had been ahead of her began to pass directly below her. It stopped suddenly, swivelled its head, appeared to be sniffing at the air or listening. Vee held her breath – not that her body actually needed to take breath in any case.

     Finally, as if reluctant to give up the scent, the Demon gave a deep, irritable grunt and continued on. Answering grunts came rumbling from three or four other directions. Vee congratulated herself on taking this approach instead of the former.

     Not that it was easy inching along on her belly, the beam’s surface interrupted in the center by the angled latticework that connected upper and lower portions, crowding her movements. And she did her best not to let the bone gun scrape noisily against the metal. It would be a slow, stealthy process. She was still learning patience, having to accustom herself all over again to the notion that the immortal didn’t need to hurry.

     She soon came to one of the spots where water had leaked through the ceiling, maybe from a fractured pipe somewhere above. Here, the concrete of the ceiling went from water-stained to actually fallen away, chunks like miniature islands scattered in the puddle below. When Vee was under the irregular hole, she lifted her head and tried to peer into its depths. Her thoughts were rolling. If she pulled herself up inside there, would the going be easier? Or would the risk of falling through another weak spot be too great? Maybe she’d be able to keep to straight lines where the ceiling joists lay beneath her.

     She waited until none of the Demons – and she saw three of them now from her vantage point -- were facing her way, then rose and pulled herself up through the opening, expecting its ragged edges to give way under her weight at any second. She made it up without even an untoward sound, however, and positioned herself over where she knew the joist would be. Then, she looked about her.

     She was in a narrow crawlspace through which a large water pipe ran (and it was indeed rusted through at the point just above the hole in the concrete), plus some thinner conduits and power cables fastened along the space’s confining walls. She could almost rise to a crouch but remained on hands and knees. Just a little light bled in through the hole, and through a few more far-spaced gaps ahead and behind her. Anyway, all she had to do was move in a straight line now. She was very satisfied -- except which direction to follow? She decided just to keep heading in the direction she had already been taking, and started crawling forward on hands and knees.

      Gradually a light source shone up ahead like a beacon, and it became brighter the closer she drew to it -- this time not the weak glow up through a collapsed section of concrete. This light came from the left-hand wall: a solitary fluorescent tube affixed there. Directly opposite the light, a panel was set into the right-hand wall. An access hatch for the crawlspace, no doubt. Vee went into wary mode again, but was also hopeful that this would deliver her into an area where she could walk upright, maybe find a secure shelter in which to rest. Already being dead, she couldn’t die, but she could feel fatigue.

     This access panel was no typical metal hatch, she found when she came up on it. It was a sheet of thick translucent plastic, more a window than anything. Its surface was rippled and frosted to admit light but it couldn’t be seen through. Vee glanced from the plastic pane to the fluorescent tube, back to the window again. Was this some primitive means of security – a stranger’s silhouette showing in the window, while the stranger himself couldn’t see a thing? But Vee had faced more threatening situations since coming out of her long mental hibernation, and her curiosity was too strong for her to bypass the window and keep moving. So, laying Jay down just beside her knee, she tested to see if the window might open. It was not hinged, but neither was it fixed in place; she was able to push the panel out on the other side yet maintain hold of it so it wouldn’t drop noisily.

     She tensed up, expecting a burst of gunfire perhaps. It didn’t come.

     She found herself looking into a small room with a closed door. In fact, it was a bathroom, and directly below the window rested a toilet.

    
A toilet?
The Damned (and Angels like herself, who had invaded Hell to battle the rebel armies of the Damned) didn’t need to eat, but one still felt the craving and enjoyed the process. Fortunately there were various kinds of edibles to be found or produced. But no one in the netherworld needed to void waste. True, some Demons shat, only so that they might rub this shit on restrained prisoners, or collect it in great vats in which to submerge their victims. A toilet for a particular race of Demon, then?

     Vee leaned her body in and as quietly as possible rested the plastic window panel on the closed toilet lid. Then she eased one leg through the window, onto the toilet tank until she could squeeze the rest of her through. A bit tight, but she was slim enough. When she had her feet under her, on the tiled bathroom floor, she drew Jay down, then pressed the window pane back in place.

     She heard no sound behind the closed door. It was wood, apparently, but then there had once been forests and jungles aplenty in the vastness of Hades. It was not the door that filled her with a sense of confusion bordering on wonder…

     There was also a shower stall enclosed by a plastic curtain. The pipe that fed it ran across the ceiling and disappeared through a little hole in the wall, obviously patched into the water system that passed through the crawlspace outside. But when Vee opened the toilet, she found its bowl was empty. So was its tank when she lifted its cover off. Further, the insides of the lid and the tank itself were of a terracotta color, whereas the outsides were glazed white. So the toilet was a sham, then, fashioned out of hardened clay or some other pliable material.

     Clean white-painted walls. Towel racks bearing crude towels. A sink, with a mirror over it. Vee winced at her reflection. She hoped she might make use of the shower herself, if this place proved abandoned. She tried the single faucet on the sink. Cold water came forth, a little tinged with rust. She didn’t doubt the simple drains for the sink and shower contributed to the puddles on the floor of the barren factory floor below.