| Chapter9-To Hell ... | Chapter11-... And Back |
"What we need to do is get into hell proper. ... We'll use the rabbit hole. That should be easy enough. I'm pretty sure that even though the rabbit hole doesn't seem to be where I paid to put it or built according to the spec I signed off on, that there will be side tunnels that will take us directly to any of the major landmarks in Hell. If not, we'll find another way in. There are a million roads into hell.
"Then, we need to get to and into the Pentagram building. Not a big problem. We'll, take a commuter bus to the building. The bus is slow, noisy, and uncomfortable but the worst that can happen is that a wheel will fall off and we'll have to wait a few hours in the heat, smog and dust for another bus. If people in New York City can do that every working day, we can handle it.
"Into the building? We'll just merge with the crowd. We're supposed to have security badges, but the badge readers screw up so often that the guards just ignore bad reads -- going in anyway. I can conjure up some plastic that will pass for a badge from a distance.
"Then we need to get to my office. Can't take the elevator. It'll want a working badge. But there are stairs. You up for five flights, Liz?"
"I reckon I can manage that somehow." Liz drawled. She stifled a yawn.
"Where do I fit in?" Asked Rex.
"I don't think you can." Said Satan. "Aside from Cerberus at the Styx crossing, there aren't any dogs in hell. They don't like the heat, or the smells, and they make the demons nervous. So I think you stay here and maybe do a little general surveillance work for us."
"OK by me. Do we have a way to communicate?"
"Of course. A secure, triply encrypted, high speed leased line. Of course, it only operates at about 7% of the data rate I'm paying for, but that should be good enough. Besides which, I'm charging it to Donald Trump's credit card, so I figure it's only about a 7% chance that Comcast will ever get paid. Nice symmetry there, eh?"
"OK, back to the Pentagram. We get to the top floor. In at that point, we have to improvise. My office used to be right in the center of the building. But I doubt they're still using it as an office. Too big a chance that I left cameras or bombs or who knows what in that area ... which I did of course. Problem is that they shielded the whole area, so I wouldn't be able to use my devices unless I was inside the shield. And I'd have to be pretty dumb or pretty desperate to use them, because they've no doubt found half of them and arranged an alarm if someone tries to use them.
We'll pose as repairmen. Hell has just as much modern technology as Heaven and it works about as well, so techs of one sort or another are always bustling through and working on stuff. I think we'll be technicians that fix door entry systems. We'll fix 'em OK. When I'm through with them, they'll let people into the fifth floor complex. But they won't let them out. Unless they are us. Does that make sense?
Liz had some reservations rooted in the difficulties they'd had initially getting into the rabbit hole and bunker. But she decided that bringing that up wouldn't be productive and allowed that the plan made sense.
"OK," she said. We have the ring and we're in the Pentagram parking lot about six steps ahead of the forces of law and order. What then, kemosabe?
"Depends on how hot the pursuit is. If we get in and out without detection, we'll just hop a bus, ride it for two stops, locate the nearest entrance to Hell -- it won't be more than a hundred yards or so in that neighborhood and stroll out. Once we're on the surface, we'll call Rex and he can get us a cab back to the rabbit hole.
"If we are detected, I'll release 50 decoys dressed like us. We'll duck into a convenience store -- there's one every 25 meters -- lock the staff in the freezer -- change our clothes and general appearance, and improvise a way out.
"These decoys, and our spare clothes? How will we carry them?
"I'll bring my backpack. Of course if I have to use it near the Pentagram, they'll detect the persuasion field, but with sufficient chaos by the time the locate where we were, we'll be somewhere else. I'll create a lot of chaos.
The trip into hell turned out to be much as Satan had promised. Liz and Satan left the bunker dressed in generic repairperson garb. Indeed, the logos on their shirts said "Generic LLC" in white letters on a white background. Liz assumed (correctly) that would change somehow if the need arose.
They said goodby to Rex, exited the gate to the bunker, then did a radio check with Rex. Loud and Clear. They then walked to the rabbit hole. They stopped a meter or so from the drop off. Satan grinned and said "Hey, everyone. Watch this."
He reached into his backpack and hauled out a small olive green package. "World War III Bulgarian Army surplus", Satan explained. Satan pulled a tab then siezed the rope that dangled forth. He tied it to a rung of the rebar ladder they had used on their trip into the buffer. He made sure the knot was firm, Then pulled another tab. The packet bulged then bulged more. The packet ripped open. Its contents expanded to nearly fill the rabbit hole. Judging from the hissing and crackling noises, it continued to expand upward for quite a while. When things settled down, the device -- whatever it was -- hung in the rabbit hole straining at the rope tied to it. Below it hung a flimsy looking frame with two equally flimsy appearing chairs.
"Instant micro-blimp" Satan explained. "We just let out some Hydrogen and it descends slowly down the hole while we look for side tunnels. Pretty nifty, eh?"
"Hydrogen? Isn't that the stuff that destroyed the Hindenburg?"
"Well, yes. It can be a bit touchy. But it's not toxic and it's pretty safe as long as you don't smoke."
"Beels, I don't smoke."
"I know that. This would be a great time not to start."
Gingerly, Liz stepped onto the blimps' platform which turned out to feel remarkably stable and solid. Satan followed. The blimp began to slowly descend in accordance with the laws of physics specifically the subparagraphs addressing gravity, mass, and bouyancy. No gas release required. Shortly a rough hewn tunnel appeared on their right. Satan stepped off, then held the blimp in place while Liz followed. Satan reached up and announced "The Smoking Lamp is Off".
He turned a valve. There was a loud hiss as the gas in the blimp escaped. Satan captured the deflating gasbag and, with a certain amount of profanity, managed to stuff it and its platform into his backpack.
He then produced two powerful flashlights and the two of them proceeded down the tunnel.
"Shouldn't there be a checkpoint where they check our passports or something?" Liz asked.
"You don't need a passport to go to hell. And why would we discourage immigration? When it comes to infernal punishment, the more, the merrier. Heck, a few travel agencies even offer tours although I can't think why. Anyone who finds Hell entertaining need only wait. In due time, they'll pass away, then they'll almost for sure get way more entertainment than they bargained for.
They walked on in silence for perhaps an hour. The tunnel sloped downward a bit. The footing was good. The walls and ceiling were apparently solid as virtually no debris lay on the floor. The air was supringly fresh. All in all, a pleasant enough, if quite uninteresting, stroll. Finally Satan paused. "I think we're near the end. Listen carefully and you'll hear the echo of our footsteps coming from the tunnel in front of us."
Liz listened and took a few steps. She heard nothing. "If you say so Beelsie. I don't hear anything, but you're probably right. How much further?"
Satan fished a large watch out of his backpack. He wound it and took a step. Then another. Frowning, he said. "Two second round trip delay, so about 340 meters?"
The watch went back into the backpack.
Liz counted steps. At 483, Satan stopped again and played his flashlight around. That's it. They have blocked the end of the tunnel."
"Does that mean that we have to go back and find another tunnel?" Liz, who was entertaining doubts about whether this mission was a good idea, asked hopefully.
"Most likely not. They probably did a quick and dirty job of blocking. We'll just remove whatever barrier they put up. It's not like there's much pride of workmanship amongst either the demons or the residents of this place. Whatever is down there will probably be flimsy at best."
"But won't the demons and/or 'residents' notice?"
"Maybe. But if you were running this place, who would you send to open a blocked tunnel? Workmen, right? And what are we dressed like?" Satan started walking again. Liz, not having a lot of choice in the matter, tagged along.
The end of the tunnel turned out to be a framework of thin wooden strips in front of what looked like a solid rough-hewn wall. Satan ripped a few strips of wood off without much effort, then punched his arm -- one finger extended -- into the barrier. His finger and fist went well into the wall. "As I expected. Paper mache. Why don't I get the wood off while you dig the phony rock out?"
Working at a steady pace it took them roughly three minutes to create a door sized opening. They made their way through. Satan hauled a camoflouge colored sheet of fabric out of his backpack along with a large stapler. He quickly and deftly fastened it over the hole.
The found themselves in a dingy alley in back of a row of concrete buildings of varying heights painted in varying shades of unevenly faded pastel colors that probably hadn't been all that cheerful even when new. The sky was grayish orange overcast. The air was unpleasant and made Liz's eyes water. "Patterned on 20th century Los Angeles." Satan said.
No one was around. Satan looked about and spotted a rusted dumpster that he rolled in front of the tunnel entrance. "That should hold them for a decade or three. By which time the tunnel, rabbit hole, and bunker should be pretty irrelevant. At least I hope so. And even if they find the tunnel sooner, they'll probably end up following Quartermain's route down the tunnel and into Wonderland since there's no obvious way up the shaft to the bunker."
"I thought Hell was jammed to the gunalls with unhappy souls. Where are they?" "It is. But we patterned this part of the afterlife on Los Angeles. At this hour, or any hour for that matter, 60% of the clients are in cars they can't afford trying to get to someplace else and most of remainder are someplace else and prepairing to go to yet another place. And every trip takes hours because we've laid things out so that most of trips are cross town and traffic is paralyzed everywhere.
"Couldn't they just use public transportation and work, or read, or nap while they are travelling about?"
"They could. And a few do. But it's all buses. And they are even slower than cars, because they have to pull over, block traffic, and let passengers on and off every block whether there are passengers or not. It's a rule. And our buses leave something to be desired as you are about to discover. And just like L.A. the buses mostly run East-West so if you need to go a few miles South, you have to take a bus from where you are to one of the few North-South streets with buses, transfer, then transfer again to an East-West bus. A trip that looks like 5km on a map can actually be 30km and take half a day. It's brilliant"
"How about walking?"
"A few do. But mostly only if their cars run out of gas or break down. Walking is considered peculiar at best. Subversive or criminal at worst. The demon police stop walkers and check their papers every three or four blocks."
Satan pulled his watch from his backpack and checked the time. "5:45. We'd best get moving if we plan to be at work on time."
They proceeded down the alley, turned right away from the looming rock (and paper mache) wall through which they had entered Hell, and walked to the corner of a fairly wide traffic choked street. Satan looked about and pointed to a pole topped with a rectangular white plate depicting a stylized red tortise. "There's the bus stop." Satan said. The Red Tortise is the logo a Netherworld Rapid Transit."
Liz looked around. "I don't suppose you have one of those bus stop benches -- with or without logo -- in your backpack for us to sit on while we wait?"
"Of course I do. With logo if you so wish. But I don't think it'd be a good idea to deploy it. It would be the only one in all of Hades. Bound to draw attention."
So they stood. After a while a bus with two flat tires wobbled by belching smoke. A sign on the front proclaimed that it was Out Of Service. Minutes later a second appeared also smoking profusely. It said Express. It did not stop.
"I thought that the buses stopped at every corner." Said Liz.
"The real ones do. Those two were just props to annoy the residents here. The Express buses not only don't stop at every corner, they don't stop at any corner. Neither do they ever carry passengers."
"Let me brief you on this. First of all, There's no such thing as a First In-First Out queue in hell. If anyone else shows up at this stop, just let them on. Otherwise, you'll be battling over who gets through the bus door first. Once on, you're supposed to either show a transit pass or pay a few credits for a ticket. However, the drivers are demons. They are universally illiterate and their math skills are at the 1 ... 2 ... many level. If you had any credits they wouldn't be able to count them or make change. So any official looking piece of paper will get you on the bus. Your badge should work fine. Just wave it at the driver. There aren't any seats on our buses, so you'll be standing the whole trip. If you see a ceiling strap, try to grab it. It'll be helpful because the ride is kind of jerky and no one has actually fixed a pothole in our streets for decades. But those are probably all taken already. Your next best bet is a wall stanchion. But make sure it's firmly attached. They aren't always. On the bus, don't make eye contact with anyone, and ignore anything not life threatening, no matter how peculiar, that happens around you. When we get to the Hexagon parking lot, just mill off with the rest of the mob. I'll be right with you.
Another Out of Service chugged by. And finally yet another bus appeared that actually stopped jerkily with a loud squeal and peculiar thunk from its underside. Its sign -- handwritten -- said "Hexagram -- Local". They boarded the bus
There were, as advertised, no seats. A dozen or so leatherish looking straps hung from the ceiling in no particular pattern. Liz, who would have well over an hour to study the bus's inards, would later realize that the functioning straps were what remained of an originally much larger assemblege of straps arranged in three rows 20 or 25 deep stretching to the back of the bus. All the usable straps were, as Satan had projected, taken by bored looking individuals in drab business attire. Even the male passenger's neckties were muddy shades of green or brown. There were many more passengers packed rather tightly toward the back of the cabin.
"Look, there's a stanchion. Let's grab it." So saying, Satan stepped past Liz and siezed the U-shaped, tarnished fixture on the wall of the bus. He twisted it with some enthusiasm. The wall of the bus flexed then snapped back into place with an audible click. "We're in luck." Satan said to Liz who had joined him. "Probably was installed by one of the subcontractors in Elysium rather than by one of our workcrews. Not much pride of workmanship in this place."
The trip was as unpleasant as Liz had been led to believe. The bus had no detectable springs. The potholes were many and deep. The exhaust pipe seemed to be leaking toxic gases into the passenger area. The temperature in the bus was quite high. The traffic was horrendous and the bus did in fact stop at every corner becoming ever more crowded as the trip progressed. But arrive it eventually did, wobbling to a stop and disgorging its huddled masses onto a courtyard in front of a massive building.
Liz and Satan exited with the mob and proceeded into the structure as part of a river of humanity. Liz caught a glimpse of several ineffectual security checkpoints accomplishing nothing whatsoever in the way of controlling ingress to the building. The entrance hall debouched into a huge lobby with dozens of hallways forking off. The mass of individuals entering the building was spliting into a dozen streams. "Headed for the elevators." Satan said. "They'll have to line up and got single file through a pass check, metal detector and deliberately annoying full body search before they can go to work. Takes maybe 45 minutes unless you get here early. The demons beat anyone who is tardy, We probably couldn't get through the pass check without magic so we won't be joining them."
Satan grabbed Liz's hand and guided her toward an unmarked hallway somewhere toward the middle of the complex. Once they were in the hallway, Satan stopped, put his back to the wall and breathed deeply. "Well, we're in. So much for the easy part of the journey."
Liz, who had, perforce, joined him, said. "THAT was the easy part? Beels, you left out quite a few things when you told me the plan, didn't you?"
"Well, yes. Didn't want to bore you with excessive detail. That's Basic Marketing 101, doncha know?"
"So, the next step is to find a stairway?"
"Yep. I think there's one over there." He pointed to a dirty brown door.
"These are, like, ordinary stairs? No trapdoors that dump you into the furnace room? No trolls? Just stairs? And only five flights? And they only have 20 of so steps, not 20,020? And the steps are only like 8 inches high (translator's note--20cm when translated from American), not 10 or 20 feet (3 to 6 meters)"
"Yep, no wildlife except maybe some normal sized cockroaches and a mushroom or three. Just stairs. And only five flights. It's just a six story building. And only about 20 or so steps per flight -- I think a bit more for the first flight and a bit fewer for the rest. Might be a bit dusty, that's all."
"All these people, and the stairs are dusty? Don't they ever use the stairs?"
"Only during fire drills, and I don't recall having a fire drill for maybe 50 years. Maybe if I get back in charge I'll schedule one The last one was really entertaining. 18 slip-and-falls. 6 heart attacks. 13 people crushed in the jam at the elevators. Fixed em all up of course. No medical discharges from this place."
'A bit dusty' turned out to be, as Liz had feared, a monumental understatement. The dust in the stairwells came up high on her ankles. The stairs were, if anything, worse. On the other hand, the stairs and stairwells appeared to be undisturbed by wildlife of any sort. No tracks, trails or burrows. The stairwell was dead quiet, No scurrying of tiny feet. No slithering. No ominious clicking of relays. Breathing with a bit of diffculty, Liz and Satan trecked up the five flights of stairs. At the top, Satan held out a hand and halted Liz.
"Now we need to get into the hallway without being observed. Not that folks around here are what you'd call observant. But we can't really take the chance. We need to get a few tools out so we can pretend to be fixing the door. I'll take care of making sure the door locks after we get through it. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to peel the plastic off the gooey stuff on the back of this thing and stick it on the wall next to the door." The thing he handed to Liz turned out to be a sensor of some sort with a card read slot, a bunch of buttons and several blinking lights.
"What does it do?"
"Nothing, actually. With some wires and a compatible set of door lock hardware, it'd be an access control device of sorts. On good days anyway. But since it won't be connected to the door lock, it's like a lot of digital junk. Just eye candy. Might keep some human or demon busy for a while trying to get it to unlock the door. Fat chance. Not only will the door be locked, it'll be glued shut.
"Let me check your outfit. And you should check mine for anything out of place." They looked each other over. Liz noted that a bright red Doortech LLC logo now appeared on the chest of both their overalls. Liz stood with the potemkin door openning device in her hand. Satan reached into his backpack and hauled out two toolbelts festooned with assorted screwdrivers, drill bits, and wrenches of various sorts and such. They put the belts on. "Ready?" He asked.
"Sure. At least as ready as I'll ever be. ... Ehrrr ... Not quite. Can you get the wrapper off this miserable thing?" Liz handed Satan the door openner and a plastic strip she had mistakenly assumed somehow provided access to the device inside its clear plastic cocoon. Satan then spent several minutes twisting, prying, and cursing before selecting a hammer and chisel from his tool belt and, with considerable effort and some slight damage to the device, carving it out of its wrapper.
Satan handed the liberated door opener to Liz, reached down, and slowly opened the door. Liz stepped out into the, fortuitously, empty hallway, turned and carefully applied the door opener to the wall. Satan followed her out, made several spurious adjustments, then squirted something at various locations around the door perimeter. He then stepped back, closed the door and admired their work. "Let's go, that way." he said and led her off to their left.
The corrider stretched off apparently forever in both directions. The walls were a sort of dingy white, There were openings on both sides every 10 meters or so. They all had dingy gray doors. The doors were all closed. The lighting was greenish harsh flourescent. Quite bright actually, but not very attractive. No pictures on the walls. No fire extinguishers, water fountains, bulletin boards. Nothing. It was depressing.
"This is really quite depressing. And all these doors? Are there people behind them?"
"Indeed, there are people. Tens of thousands. In tens of thousands of cubicles. With tens of thousands of worn desks with sticky drawers. We're the second largest consumer of mass produced worn out desks with sticky drawers in this universe -- after only the US government. As for the corrider. It's supposed to be depressing. And the lack of ammenities saves us big bucks. The accountants tell me that our home office burden rate is lower than anyone thought possible."
"What's a home office burden rate?"
"Some sort of accounting thing. I don't really understand it, but it seems to be something along the line of all the expenses of maintaining an employee over and above wages. (Wages=0 in Satan's case). Lighting, heat, paperclips, etc, etc,etc. Anyway, it's really low. And low is good. The accounting demons are very proud of our home office burden rate."
They continued to stride down the apparently endless hall passing innumerable closed doors and occasional cross corriders.
"Beelsie. This damned hall semms to go on forever. Does it end? And how do you even know we're going in the right direction?"
"Of course it ends. And sooner than you probably think. As for directional sense. I've got one. Some people have one, most don't. I've got a little map inside my head and I can see where we are, where we've been, and where we're going on it. We're making good time. And you should be able to tell by checking the ... oops, I forgot, you won't get your afterlife welcoming briefing (AWB) for a 100 million years or so.
"If you'd had your AWB, you'd have gotten a pair of ruby red slippers. You just put those on, turn three time widdershins and click your heels together twice. That turns your near-infrared vision on. Turning it off is the reverse. Three turns deosil and click your toes twice. Just as intuitive as a smart phone really. Anyway, if you had your infra-red vision on, you could read the room numbers as we pass the doors and you'd see the sixth field counting down. That's the radial distance to the core complex. It's at 115 ... no, 114 and decreasing at a healthy rate."
"Beels, Just how many of these turn, heel click, whatever combinations are there?"
"Well, it's like computers or smartphones or Chinese characters. There are a lot. And the list keeps growing. Counting hand gestures, eye blinks, finger snaps, coughs, wand motions, incantations in any of 17 Asian languages, Parseltounge commands, a few outliers and all the combinations, about 65000. Becoming really adept takes maybe 1300 years. Give or take. But most folks learn enough to get by in a few months. Two years at the outside. And the slippers are really just a prop to assist beginners. Once you get basic competence, you can stash them in your afterlife junk box (AJB) and never drag them out again. Of course, with all those controls, false invokations can be something of a problem. Cough three times and sneeze while waving your left foot and you find yourself enmeshed in 16 kilometers of sticky spider silk. That sort of thing. But you won't have to worry about that till your Afterlife Wizardry System (AWS) is activated. You'll get your AWS set up and your AJB at your AWB."
Liz snorted. "More than I wanted to know.". She started counting doors as they strolled along. 110, 109, 108 ... When they got to 7 and the hallway ahead still seemed to stretch forever, she became concerned. At 3, she became very concerned.
"Convincing, isn't it?" Said Satan. Just an illusion. "Images projected on a stationary layer of fog. We can, and probably will, just walk thru it. But first, give me a second to make sure there's no welcoming committee on the other side."
So saying, Satan waved a hand to stop Liz, stopped himself, flopped down on the floor of the corrider, fished a odd looking device out of his backpack that turned out to be pretty much a pair of goggles with a long, flexible, thin tube mounted on one side. Satan then slithered along the floor for a meter or so and very slowly slid the end of the tube along the junction between the endless corrider's wall and floor in front of them. The end of the tube disappeared. A few seconds later, Satan stood up, stuffed the gadget back into his backpack. "Coast is clear. Come on."
He grabbed Liz's hand and led her down the hall which turned out to be, as advertised, a illusion. A brief feeling of clammy dampness as they walked through the fog layer -- much like San Francisco on any random evening -- and the vista in front of them changed from endless hallway to a dead end with halls proceeding at right angles to the right and left.
Satan led Liz through a bewildering maze of hallways. Right. Two quick lefts., Up a short stairway. Through a firedoor. which Satan glued shut. Down another short stairwell. Several more turns. Satan slowed and stopped.
"Almost to my office" he said. "Or rather where my office used to be. Didn't think it would still be there, and I'm pretty sure it isn't. Let's stop on listen for a minute."
The stood still and listened. At first things seemed dead quiet. But then Liz detected faint noises. Distant clattering and scraping. No particular pattern. And some other noises. Faint. Hard to catagorize.
"What is it?"
"I'm not sure. Not an office I think. Maybe a movie theatre. Or a busy storeroom. But probably not either of those. Let's get closer."
They walked about 30 paces. Satan stopped again. The sounds were clearer. There was a ceramic rattle from someplace ahead(?) and to the right(??) Satam snapped his fingers. "Of course. It's a snack bar. They've turned my office into a cafeteria."
"You let the inmates, or whatever you call them here, take breaks in a cafeteria?"
"of course not. It'll be for the staff. Demons, Fallen Angels, That sort of folk. The residents get a soggy peanut butter sandwich and a mushy apple at their desk once or twice a week. It's not like starvation is lethal here. Where would the souls go after they died?"
"So, what's your plan?"
"I think maybe we'll send in a drone or two and get a better idea of the layout. Maybe an owl or a bat. So many of those around these parts that they won't draw much attention."
So saying, Satan reached into his backpack and hauled out two somewhat battered folding chairs that he set up next to the wall hallway wall. He invited Liz to take one. Which she did. He sat in the other and returned to fishing around in the backpack. Out came a laptop computer which he turned on and set on the floor. "Monitor" he explained.
His hand went back into the backpack. He probed around and winced. "Moray Eel. Touchy critters. Territorial. Great for underwater work, but not what we need here."
Searching further, he smiled. "Yes, those will do nicely." He pulled his arm out. His hand was empty containing neither bat nor owl. Instead, lined up with military precision on the back of his hand were four moderately large mosquitoes. They stood on five legs with the sixth cocked in a salute.
"Advanced technology. Mini-sub-micro camera and audio implants. 13GHz 9G audio and visual links. Good for 200 meters or so. Audio isn't too great because we have to filter out the buzz and that takes out a lot of speach frequencies as well. But the video link is really good and that's what we're interested in."
"But what happens if the people in the cafeteria swat one?" Liz asked. "Won't the wreckage of a mechanical mosquito make them a bit suspicious?"
"Not a problem. These are real mosquitos with implants. Sort of zombieish, but they have some free will and full live mosquito reflexes. Ever try to swat a mosquito in flight? The big problem is the critters sometimes take it into their tiny brains to drink a little blood while they're in the neighborhood. Then they are vulnerable if the suckee is quick. I don't expect to get them all back. Attrition rate on missions like this is typically about 50%. But all the swatter sees is a squashed bug and maybe a little blood -- theirs."
So saying, Satan waved his hand and the four insects lifted off and proceeded down the hall in left-hand finger four formation. Simultaneously, the monitor came to life with four screen quadrants showing bugs eye views of a rapidly receding corrider. Liz quickly lost sight of the tiny creatures. But Satan -- his eyeballs slowly and creepily extending was able to track them all the way to the end of the hall where they made an acrobatic right turn and vanished. Satan tucked his eyeballs back in his face and turned his attention to the monitor.
Liz looked at the four screens which revealed different,constantly changing, jerky, and somewhat blurry views of a large room. She found that somewhat uncomfortable and borderline annoying.
"If you're feeling a bit seasick, you might want to look at something other than the screen. The blur is because the mosquito's eyes bounce up and down every time they flap their wings. Which is maybe 400 times a second. The TV can't really keep up with that. The jerkiness is because the little critters are constantly scanning for prey. Most humans find that combination kind of disturbing. Especially multiplied by four. It just gives us quasi-dieties the munchies. In any case, I'm the one that knows what the room used to look like, so you probably can't help the mission much on this part."
Liz thanked Satan and looked away. She quickly found that staring at the ceiling instead of the screens wasn't all that interesting, but it didn't make her feel queasy. And that was better. Satan meantime focused and the screens muttering things like "Really?" ... "They did that?" ... "What the?" ... "hmmm".
Satan reached into his toolkit/backpack/satchel and hauled out a garish yellow, orange and red plastic bag. He tore a corner off the bag, shook a handful of yellowish flakes into his hand and gulped them down. All the while looking at the four jittering images. "Devils Tonails." He explained. "Textured fungus spores twice fermented, with seasonings, preservatives, artificial sweetners, high fructose corn syrup, and fillers, rolled into flakes, deep fried, and dipped in Tabasco. Quite delicious as well as mildly addictive."
He offered the bag to Liz who shudderd and declined. Satan continued to watch the screens and continued to mumble while he stuffed the ultra-processed fungus chips into his mouth pretty much non-stop. They tended to make his mumbles unintellligible, but since the mutterings hadn't made much sense without the fungus chips, Liz figured that little was actually being lost.
Satan crumpled up the now empty snack bag and tossed it into his backpack. Then the reached into the pack and hauled out another bag. Which he proceeded to consume. That was followed by a third pack. Then a fourth.
Finally, Satan mumbled indistinctly, "Oh, I see." He typed something and the four images simultaneously made a tight right turn and raced back across the room. Satan stood up, held his backpack open and watched the screen as the four mosquitos raced through a doorway, turned down a hall and careened toward the maw of the open backpack. They flew in. The screens went blank. Satan emptied the final snack bag into his mouth, tossed the bag into his backpack and wiped his forearm across his lips. He then closed the backpack and hit the Escape key on the keyboard. The screens faded out and were replaced by a screensaver.
"OK, here's the way it is. They have indeed ripped most of the walls out of my old office and converted it into a cafeteria/bar/pool hall. Fortunately or maybe not so fortunately, they left a couple of decorative termite mounds in place. The ring used to be in a safe under a planter that was half way between the termite mounds. The planter's gone. Been replaced by some sort of vending machine.
"What we will need to do is get everyone out of there. Then I'll move the stupid vending machine out of the way, hopefully the safe hasn't been plastered over, but if it has, I'll unplaster it. Then I'll blow the safe which is probably booby trapped. Fortunately, those rings are pretty much indestructable unless there is a volcano handy. Then I'll go in with this artificial arm, pluck the ring out, and set it on the floor. You herd the ring into the carrier and sling it around your neck. Trouble is that by then we'll likely have triggered about four dozen alarms. What we do next is get out of here. Fast. I'll lead. You follow.
"Clear?"
"I guess." Said Liz. "But how are 'we' going to clear those people -- or whatever they are -- out of there?
"Good question. Got any ideas?"
"Fire alarm?"
"Something along that line perhaps. But not a fire alarm. That bunch out there thrives on fire. If there were a fire, they'd probably use it to toast marshmallows. Or Devils Toenails. DTs are outstanding when they've been singed over an electrical fire and pretty good over other sorts of fire. Or you can microwave them, but you have to be careful that they don't explode.
"Given our clientele and our general environment, we don't bother with fire alarms down here. In fact there aren't any sort of alarms. Budget problems. Seems like there's always a dozen things that need doing more than installing air pollution alert gizmos or whatever the fad de l'annee happens to be."
Satan thought a while then snapped his fingers. "yeah, that might work. What we (which is to say I) are going to do is hijack the loud speaker system in the building. First I'll call for a work party for a holy water leak in the infirmary. The infirmary is on this floor not far from here and we actually do have a holy water tap there because sometimes redeemed souls are in pretty rough shape by the time they see the light. We like to deliver them to the Afterlife Portal coherent and with all the blood and other stuff rinsed off.
"Then, after about ten minutes, I'll put out a kind of panicky call for all available work teams to come to the infirmary -- stat. And a couple of minutes after that, I'll play a recording of the Retreat bugle call. The clients will know it's far too early for the workday to be over. But they've been conditioned to follow orders no matter what. So they'll all drop what they're doing (in most cases nothing) head out at once. Then I'll play the Pay Call bugle call and that bunch out there will head for the bank at the other end of the building. It that point, the coast should be clear as long as we stay away from the infirmary.
"Then, hopefully, we can just stroll out, collect the ring and join the flock fleeing the building. Think that sounds OK?
Liz pondered the question. "Well, this is your turf and you understand it a lot better than I do. But honestly, the plan sounds kind of complicated. Is there a Plan B to fall back to if things go wrong?"
"Plan B is that I throw whatever is impeding our progress into a fiery pit.
"Plan C is that I turn this backpack into a purse. I climb into it and hide under the usual clutter of combs, lipsticks, used tissues, dead ballpoint pens, and such. You wander around clutching the purse and looking dazed and confused. They'll likely throw you out of the building. Once you're clear of the building and in some quiet alley, you haul me out and we'll work things out from there.
Liz thought for a while, and nodded. "OK. We might as well do it."
Satan reached into the backpack, He produced a donut and a cup of coffee that he handed to Liz. Then he hauled out a kitchen timer and set it for ten minutes. Next he dug out an ambiguous metal box with a micophone projecting from the top. He pushed the microphone button producing the customary howl of electrons suddenly awakened from deep, restful slumber. "Now hear this. Plumbing team A report to the infirmary. Holy water leak reported. Repeat. Plumbing team A to the infirmary. NOW!!!"
Liz sipped her coffee while Satan watched the timer. When the timer reached zero, he picked up the microphone. "Now hear this. Now hear this. ALL repair teams to the infirmary. STAT!!! Whatever you're doing, drop it now and get moving."
From the cafeteria, There was a scraping of chairs, followed by the sound of several sets of running feet.
Satan pulled an old fashioned windup record player from the backpack. He turned the crank a few times, then produced a vinyl record, triggered the microphone and placed the pickup arm on the record. The mournful sound of a bugle issued forth. There was stunned silence. Then the distant throb of mass of humanity stirring into motion.
Satan waited a moment or two, produced another record and played it over the loudspeakers. More bugle music. Pandemonium from the caeteria. Ceramic cups coming to rest on saucers. Forks and spoons dropped on the tables. Chairs banged. Dozens of feet moved into motion. Then silence. After two minutes, Satan waved Liz into motion. Liz dropped her coffee cup into the backpack and the pair started off.
They proceeded cautiously down the hall as far as the door into the cafeteria. Satan once again did the creepy extended eyeball trick, this time extending both eyeballs nearly 30 cm and using them to scan the cafeteria. After 30 seconds or so, the eyes popped back in. Satan said, "The coast seems to be more or less clear. Let's go on in. I'll deal with any interruptions."
The cafeteria turned out to be a large dingy room with faded beige walls -- some a bit moldy. Somewhat battered aluminum frame chairs were scattered about as were scratched formica tables covered with discarded dishes and cutlery. In the back of the room were stacks of comparatively clean dishes. A huge caldron heated by a wood fire that apparently served up some sort of hot beverage. There was a long counter with some mostly empty tarys of ambiguous substances that quite possibly were foods of some sort. None of the offerings was familiar or remotely appatizing. It wasn't clear who or what cooked the food(?), bused and washed the dishes, swept the floors. There was not a living creature in sight except a bedraggled vaguely human supine form by the exit door that had apparently been trampled in the rush to evacuate the room.
Satan walked over, moved the battered and unconscious demon out the door, and hung a "Closed for Cleaning" sign on the outside of the door. He closed the door, and somehow spot welded it shut. "We'll be leaving through the service entrance." He announced.
Liz checked her pockets and found some unfamiliar coins. She could do with a snack. She examined the vending machine. It was full of yellow/orange/red packages of Devel's Toenails to the exclusion of anything else. There was no obvious coin slot. Liz shrugged, Wouldn't have mattered. Satan opened the top of the backpack, grasped the kitchen refrigerator sized vending machine and somehow managed to stuff the entire device into the backpack.
The floor where the vending machine had stood was covered with the same drab flowery patterned linoleum as the rest of the cafeteria. A bit dustier and perhaps a bit less faded. Satan sighted on the two termite mounds. He produced a bulky pocket knife. "Swiss Army--24th Century" Satan explained. There appeared to be about 70 blades. He selected one, and carefully inscribed an X in the flooring. "X marks the ring."
He then proceeded to remove fist sized chunks of flooring around the X using a bewildering selection of blades and other tools all of which folded tidely into the knife. Liz was particularly impressed with a tiny rotating saw that screamed with a high pitched whine and seemed to cut thru anything in its way with ease.
Under the linoleum was a layer of termite tunnelled wood that Liz supposed might once have been floor boards. And under that was dirt. That seemed odd to Liz given that they were to the best of her belief and knowledge on the sixth floor of a high rise building. But dirt it was. Lots of it apparently. Liz got down on her knees and started scooping dirt out while Satan continued to chop chunks loose. They continued for a few minutes until Satan connected with something hard and metalic which turned out to be the top of a solid looking container. Satan assured Liz that they were almost there. They were clearing the dirt away from the box when Satan looked up.
"Drat. I hear voices back by the service entrance. Looks like we'll have company. Dust yourself off, scoot behind the counter, look like a food server, and we'll see what we have to deal with."
Liz did as instructed. Once behind the counter, she looked down and found that her workpaersons overalls had morphed into a white smock. Her head felt odd. She figured correctly that is was now topped with a chefs hat. She looked over toward the hole. Neither the hole nor Satan were visible. Instead the spot was covered by the vending machine. She looked around. In a fridge, she found a delicious looking pizza. "How much time do we have?" She inquired of the vending machine.
Satan's muffled voice replied from the machine. "Somewhere between 20 seconds and ten minutes. Depending."
"Why not?" said Liz to herself. She grabbed a frying pan off the wall, plunked the pizza down on top of it. Put it on a stove. And turned on the flame.
She then picked up a spatula from the counter and prepared to serve man, or demon, or whatever was presumed to be entering the cafeteria.
Sure enough she heard voices somewhere in the distance carrying on a spirited conversation. The voices got louder and she was able to distinguish two speakers. They were speaking in some British dialect that was hard for her to follow. And what she did deceipher didn't make all that much sense. Shortly the speakers appeared from somewhere in the back of the cafeteria. They turned out to be a bipedal walrus wearing a coat and a diminutive man carrying a wooden tray containing a hammer several saws and an assortment of other hand tools. But the showstopper from Liz's point of view was that they were only about a meter (3 feet in American) tall.
The twosome moved into the center of the cafeteria while industriously chatting about a variety of subjects. The walrus broke the rythym. "They charge for food in this misgotten place. I'm down to tuppence-ha-penney. You have any brass?"
"Not much more than you." the man responded. How about we split a cup of coffee and a couple of bags of DTs? When it gets dark we'll go down to the beach and try to scare up some oysters."
The walrus headed for the vending machine while the man came over to the counter and ordered a mug of black coffee. The mug was no problem. There were a dozen arranged on a drying rack next to the sink. Liz grabbed one. The coffee however. There were no less than three large caldrons boiling on the back wall. The were clearly labelled in arabic, or persian or maybe sanskrit. Something squiggly. Luckily, it occurred to Liz to look at the drain areas under the caldron taps. She picked the darkest of the three and filled the cup with something that looked like used motor oil. Hot used motor oil. She turned and started back toward the serving counter. Looking across the room, the walrus was standing on tip toe feeding coins into the vending machine coin slot. Then he wasn't. The vending machine was gone and in its place was Satan who was stuffing the Walrus into his back pack.
"Grab the carpenter." Satan yelled.
Without really thinking, Liz launched herself over the counter landing on the open mouthed carpenter. She grabbed his arm and held on tight. Satan showed up almost immediately. backpack in hand. He inverted it and slid it over the small man who was just beginning to protest. The man vanished.
"Are they dead?" Liz asked.
"No, They're on a beach somewhere in there probably chatting up a mob of oysters. We try not to do permanent harm to entities, even weird ones, around here. It'd mess up the afterlife bookkeeping something awful if souls that had already been dispositoned started turning up at the afterlife intake center. I'll haul them out and set them on their way in an hour or three. Now let's get that ring and get out of here."
They returned to digging and quickly extracted a heavy metal box. Satan tapped a code on the top of the box and cocked his head. Listening. There was a faint clicking of gears within the box. "OK, it's disarmed ... probably. You might want to step back a few paces. Just in case. And get that carrying case out. We don't have a lot of time."
Liz stepped back, grabbed her necklace, fished the ugly amulet out from inside her overalls, and opened it. Meanwhile Satan gingerly lifted the lid revealing a simple and not terribly attractive gold ring. Satan handed Liz a pair of tongs he extracted from the backpack. "You can probably safely handle that ring without the tongs. But why take chances?" Unnoticed, Liz's pizza was turning black and emitting a thin strand of evil looking smoke.
Liz took the tongs. She picked up the ring which buzzed like an angry hornet as soon as it was touched. She dropped it into the amulet. The ring buzzed even louder. She snapped the amulet closed. The buzzing was cut off. She stuffed the amulet back into her clothes. She handed the tongs to Satan who dropped them into the backpack. Satan then reached into the backpack with both hands and pulled the vending machine out. He kicked the dirt, metal box, and floor scraps back into the hole and put the machine back in more or less its previous position. Sirens and ringing bells could be heard in the distance. He turned to Liz. "I had to use way more magic than I'd hoped and We've probably tripped a dozen alarms. Time to make tracks.
Satan headed for the back of the cafeteria at a modest jog with Liz following. "Pace yourself. We've got a fair distance to go and not all that much time.
Satan led Liz through the serving area and kitchen and out a door into one of the ubiquitous featureless corridors. The alarms were louder now and more numerous. The pair turned right and raced along past featureless doors -- all closed. Suddenly, Satan braked, and yanked a door open. Stairs. They descended five flights as quickly as the could, and exited into another apparently infintiely long corrider. The alarms at least were silent here. Liz had no idea how Satan was navigating the corriders. They travelled along turning from time to time. Faintly she could hear alarms at this levels starting up behind them. Finally, and thankfully, from Liz's point of view, Satan braked to a stop. He cocked an ear and announced, "We're almost to the lobby. Get that silly thing off your head."
He grabbed the chefs hat off Liz's head. Her serving gear morphed back into repairman's overalls. "Get set. When I signal you, we move out fast. Stick close. Things are going to be confusing."
Satan put the backpack on the ground and stretched the top opening to manhole cover size. Liz looked in and could see stars, galaxies, comets, and other stuff milling about. A bunch of carrots swept by. An anvil. Several large fish. A pitchfork, Colorful birds flew about. Satan reached in and hauled out the walrus and carpenter. With a cockney accent, he instructed them to stand aside and follow him out when he started moving. He then stood back and waved his arms. Overhead, alarms started screeching. Out of the backpack marched pairs of full sized Satan-Liz simulations in a wide variety of outfits--firemen, forest rangers, mounties, nurses ... The men all had backpacks and carried swords of various kinds. They marched in step over to the wall and stood at attention in orderly ranks. When the last of them, there were at least 30 pairs, had joined the formation, Satan pulled a cavalry saber out of the backpack, closed the top of the backpack, slung it over his shoulder and, waving his saber, commanded "Charge!"
Liz and Satan raced into the lobby followed by their unlikely sword wielding assemblege. The lobby was full of people in office dress standing in in long orderly lines that twisted back upon themselves. Many thousands of individuals in all were trying to exit thru five or six checkpoints manned by demons who were, despite their inability to read, checking each and every departee's pass and ID. A slow process.
Hearing the cries from the assault, the departees heads swivelled. Their eyes openned wide. Their jaws dropped. They turned back toward the door, broke ranks, and rushed the exits forcing the handful of demons manning the checkpoints thru ahead of them. The lobby crowd surged into the parking lot with Liz, Satan, and the apparitions or whatever they were near the back of the mob. Satan turned and yelled "Company Halt!!!" "Company At Ease!!!" "Company Dismissed". The apparitions stopped, hung their swords from their belts and wandered off in woman-demon pairs and a few quartets. The walrus and carpenter, presumably handicapped by their short legs were nowhere to be seem. Most likely still back among the stragglers fighting their way out of the building. Liz and Satan were quickly swallowed up in the flocks of office workers milling about outside the building.
Satan and Liz slowed to a sedate pace and walked along with thousands of other souls into the parking lot. Their workman's uniforms had morphed into drab business suits. The saber was gone. The backpack had become a briefcase.
"No point in waiting for a bus. The buses mostly won't show up until the normal quitting time. I think our best bet is just to stroll into town, find a gateway, and get the hell out of Hell. We'll worry about how to get back to the rabbit hole once we're out of here."
"How far is it to town?"
"Not Far. Maybe 500 meters (A long quarter mile in American) to the first buildings. A little more than that to commercial areas where we can probably find a gateway."
"Didn't you tell me earlier today that pedestrians are suspect around here?"
I did, and they are. But this is not a normal day in Hell. I expect we'll find enough fellow walkers that our behavior will be considered eccentric, but nothing more. Anyway, most of the way will be thru parking lots for this place, and we'll have the company of workers heading for their cars most of the way. And the rest of the way will be the most chaotic traffic jam you've ever seen. We should be fine.
They set out though the already congested parking lots where many hundreds of vehicles were jockying for position in order to get through a few narrow exits where the vehicles would then attempt to merge into immobile traffic on the access roads. Horns were honking, fists waving, there was a tangible aura of frustration laced with profanity in the air. As Satan had projected there was a lot of foot traffic as well.
"Beels. Those apparitions or whatever they are you turned loose. What happens to them?"
"I honestly don't know. I know next to nothing about them. I didn't conjure themy'know. I ordered them from Amazon. I assume that when the warranty expires in about 71 hours, they will fade away, or sue me for abondonment, or morph into sheep or something. As they say in Gdansk, Not my circus. Not my monkey."
"And the Carpenter and Walrus?"
"Those I don't understand. Wish I did. They're Wonderland manifestations of course. But what are they doing wandering around the Hexagon Building? If I/we didn't have other pressing issues, I'd be extrordinarily curious about how they got here and what they might be up to."
They continued across the parking lots accomponied by glares from frustrated immobilize drivers. Several times, they had to climb over the hoods of cars -- an action that did nothing whatsever to ease tensions. Once Satan merely openned the rear door of an aburdly large vehicle occupied, like virtually all the vehicles in the parking lot by a single individual, a polite greeting and apology to the driver as they slid across the rear seat exiting on the far side was greeted with a string of what was almost certainly profanity in some unknown tounge. Eventually they came to and managed to cross, a highway that was empty inbound and paralyzed outbound.
On the far side of the highway was a desolate wasteland of dingy stunted trees, poison oak, diverse and numerous cacti, and windblown trash quite similar to any part of Southern California not covered with houses. "Hades Central Park. Our only sanctioned Hades Heritage Site." Satan informed Liz.
There were, as Satan had predicted, a number of individuals in business atire trudging thru the pervascent smokey haze toward a collection of buildings a modest distance down the road. The buildings turned out to be much of what one would expect on the outskirts of any town. A decaying and likely abandoned barn on the left. A decaying although possibly still active warehouse on the right. An ambiguous factory spewing clouds of noxious smoke. A mostly abandoned strip mall empty and vandalized except for a gift shop. (Who in hades bought trinkets at a gift shop? Liz wondered). Half a dozen houses sagging and in need of paint.
As they moved further the buildings became more numerous and more densely packed. motels, crack houses, convenience stores, apartment blocks, several tired casinos. Liz noticed several bus stops identified by the tortise logo of Hades Rapid Transport. They walked past a movie theatre with fading and flyspecked posters of 1970s blockbuster movies in dust covered windows, and a department store with empty showcase windows. Next came a block with three bars, two bodegas, a pool hall, a pawn shop and a barber shop with its tricolor insignia slowly rotating. "There, that's the place. Almost every barber shop in the universe has a portal to Hell in its back room. And a portal to hell is also a portal out of hell."
They crossed the street and entered the barber shop. Satan reached into his briefcase, and hauled out some shiny gold coins which he dropped in the lap of the sleepy looking proprieter who was napping in the middle of the three chairs. Otherwise, the shop was empty. "You haven't seen anybody all afternoon, capice?"
The barber nodded. Satan waved toward a door at the back of the shop. "Anybody back there?"
"Naw, sombody or other comes out every six weeks or so. Usually looks beat up or stunned, Nobody goes in. Especially not me."
Satan yanked the door open, took Liz's hand, and led her into a modest room with a card table. Half a dozen dust covered folding chairs were stacked by the door. A large mirror graced the opposite wall. Satan led Liz around the card table, confidentally walked into the mirror. And bounced off. "Damn. They've turned off the portal."
"I reckon they've turned them all off. Didn't think they'd do that. I wonder if they understand that they need the portals for soul intake. Turn them off and in a few hours, they will have soul transports backed up half way to Ganymede. It'll take days if not weeks to sort things out and get things back to normal. And then there's the lawsuits. Man oh Man, this is going to be epic. Glad we won't be here to enjoy it."
"But Beels. If the portals are all blocked in both directions, how are we not going to be here to 'enjoy' the experience?"
"Well. Fortunately for us, there are a number of paths to/from Hell that aren't exactly portals. There's the tunnel we came in through for example. And there's the route I took out weeks ago although they've probably found that one. But one comes to mind that no one has used for millenia. It's nearby and hopefully, it's forgotten by everyone but me.
Satan started toward the door into the barber shop. Then he stopped, cocked an ear, put his finger to his lips to caution Liz. His cocked ear extended and plastered itself to the door. Satan listened attentively, then relaxed. "Demon patrol. At least two demons. They bought the barber's story that he hadn't seen anyone all afternoon. They told the barber to sound the alarm if anyone the slightest bit unusual showed up. We'll give them a minute or two to move on and give the barber a big and well earned bri ... ehrr ... tip. Then we'll be on our way.
"Won't they be looking for us in these business suits?" Liz asked.
"You're right. We'll just have to change disgueses. Something different. Something unexpected. Can't be any of the ones they've seen" Satan snapped his fingers. " I got it. Would you rather be the Walrus or the Carpenter?"
Liz sputtered. "You can't be serious?"
"You're right. I'm kidding. This time of day, half the souls on the street will be wearing these business monkey-suits. Probably our best bet. Fortunately, it's not far. About eight blocks and most of those backstreets that'll likely have few police and lots of office workers headed home for an exciting evening of TV, booze, endless commercials, and popcorn. We'll fit right in as long as we look tired, bored, and unhappy."
The road to hell ends at a pair of dingy glass doors hiding a dimly lit lobby tucked in between a TrashMart store and the South Hades Pornography Wax Museum.
"That's it?" asked Liz.
"That's it." said Satan. "You expected something more?"
"Well, I did expect something with a bit more grandeur. And shouldn't it say 'abandon all hope ye who enter here' above the door?"
"That's at the other end of the tunnel. There's a little sign over there that says 'Admission by invitation only'. But maybe we could put something a bit more symbolic over the door. How about 'There's only one way out of here. This isn't it?"
"Maybe something with more pizazz. We can work on that." She scribbled a note in her notepad.
She walked toward the door, but the devil restrained her. "Not a good idea for me to go in that way. They can't stop me, but they'll know I've been here. For the time being, I'd rather they were busy tracking surrogates over in the East end. We'll go in through the TrashMart ... unless you'd rather go in through the museum." He leered at her suggestively.
Liz thought it over. " ehrr. How extensive is the museum?" she asked with studied casualness.
"Very. The models are live, not wax. And this is really Central Hades, not South Hades. But our Truth in Advertising Law requires that at least one statement be true, so there is certainly a lot of pornography. Your trip to Hell really isn't complete without it. He turned toward the door which was set back between what Liz saw to be an enormous pair of brass .... ulp
"Not on your life." said Liz. as she turned and marched toward the sliding doors of the TrashMart.
Inside, the TrashMart was revealed to be huge store with aisles of merchandise stretching into the distance. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people drifted about pushing shopping carts. Muzak drifted from speakers. "Wow!" said Liz, I never expected anything like this in Hell ... Except for the Barry Manilow, maybe. If you don't mind my asking, what's so painful about this?"
"Well, I have to admit that I was skeptical when the idea was presented, but the slide show was really convincing. The merchandise here is cheap and shoddy. A lot of it is broken out of the box. Most of the rest, won't last long if you try to use it. And most of it is stuff nobody needs anyway. The prices look cheap, but after you take most people's salaries and take out withholding, insurance, taxes, fees, late charges, compulsory donations, and the like there isn't much left. This place and places like it takes every bit of that and puts the clients in debt to boot. And we keep hundreds of thousands of good solid capitalist souls working 12 hour a days seven days a week for starvation wages to supply merchandise. It's really great. Lots better than slave labor. Do you know what it used to cost us to feed slaves? And the medical bills .... One little untreated scratch and next thing you know, you're burying a capital asset. Capitalist workers? Bury their own dead, and there are 20 replacements lined up the next morning looking for the deceased's job. You just can't imagine how tough slave owning is compared to capitalism. I love capitalism.
"Take this for example." The devil grabbed a can of beer off the top of a pyramid of cans and handed it to Liz. "Costs us next to nothing to make. Costs this rabble" he waved his arm expressively " a half days salary for a case." Liz looked at the familiar looking can. Something was not quite right. The name ... something about the name. She studied it. The first letter. The first letter was wrong. "Cudweiser. CUDweiser? CUDWEISER!!! Bealsie. You didn't!"
The devil looked sheepish. "Well, yeah. We did. Grain doesn't grow too well with no sun, and there was all this cow urine sloshing around with no good use for it. But we ran taste tests first. 83% of the American beer drinkers couldn't tell the difference between cow piss and American beer. And of the 17% that could, 68% preferred the cow urine. Can't blame 'em. I wouldn't drink either, but if I had to make a choice, I'd probably go with the Cudweiser."
"What about the non-Americans?"
"They agree almost unanimously. Being forced to drink American Beer is one of the worst punishments of Hell. Retribution quotient for this stuff is 9.932. It's about a ten thousand of a point behind being tossed into a fiery pit, but the braintrust says that isn't statistically significant.. Want to stop for a brew or two? I'm in kind of a hurry, but we'll need to take a break sometime. Might as well be now."
Liz ignored him and marched on into the store.
Their journey through the store was uneventful until they got to Sporting Goods where one of the customers was shooting up the Department. The first shot took out a cash register in a cloud of sparks. The second whanged past the Devil's head and destuffed a monstrous purple dinosaur in the the Toy Department. The devil pushed Liz into the pet department aisle and dived after her as another round took out a fully loaded goldfish bowl dowsing the devil with water and goldfish. "That tears it." muttered the devil. "They can sell guns and ammo in Houston if they want to, but from here on out Hell is gonna have gun control! Who needs this?"
Sitting legs akimbo, soaking wet, surrounded by flopping goldfish, the devil started to twiddle his thumbs. Liz interrupted. "A fiery pit seems appropriate," she said smoothly, " but won't that tell the people that you don't want to know where you are where you are?" More shots rang out. In the distance a motor could be heard starting
The Devil stopped twiddling his thumbs. "Ignoring the peculiar syntax of that last sentence, I suppose that you are right." More shots. Crashes and crunches approaching from the back of the store. Motor noise louder. Another shot.
"What the hell is that? yelled Liz
"Store Security. ExPhiladelphia Police. Sherman Tanks. They'll handle the problem without nukes -- I think." More shots. Another motor started. The crashing got louder and nearer. Screams pierced the air. "Liz, m'dear," said the devil. I think we should make tracks. That way." He pointed. "You're already dead and I'm immortal, so being run over by a tank won't kill us, but it won't be the high point of our day." The two skittered off keeping low as the noise behind them rose to a crescendo. As they made their way through household appliances and automotive, the noise faded. They slowly straightened up and returned to a more normal demeanor.
"So," said Liz, "Where is the exit from TrashMart to the River Styx? And why is there an exit to the Styx?"
"The entrance is back of the tire department, and it's there because my predecessor got taken by a fast talking defense contractor. They convinced him that the entrance tunnel had to be wide enough to accommodate the entire population of Earth after the Battle of Armageddon. Slinkley, Fradulence and Skuzz managed to dig four miles of super wide tunnel before someone got around to asking exactly how we were going to get the whole population of Earth across the Styx. When they went looking for SF&S, all there was was an empty office. Six weeks later we got a postcard from the Pliedes that said 'We don't have a clue how you will get them all across the Styx. Maybe you can teach them to fly.' No extradition from the Pliedes. SF&S took 27,000,000 shekels with them when they left."
"Anyway, we chose to make the best of a bad deal and used the wide part of the tunnel for the store and the museum.
Satan and Liz made their way to the back of the store without further incident -- their journey punctuated by the occasional sound of cannons and a distant flickering light that Satan strongly suspected came from Molotov cocktails improvised from Coleman lanterns.
Satan led the way through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY into a maze of corriders twisting between somewhat unsteady looking stacks of tires. They could hear the ratcheting of impact wrenches, hammering, cursing and other sounds indicting work was being done somewhere not too far away. But the sound echoed wierdly through the twisting passages and there was no way of telling how near or in what direction the presumed shop/garage lay. They saw no one. Satan led Liz confidentally through a dozen or more twists and turns, eventually arriving at an unmarked door which he yanked open. They found themselves in a subway sized tunnel. Liz looked back. Stenciled on the door was a sign in tiny faded print "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here."
"We're out of Hell?" Liz asked.
"Technically, yes. Unfortunately, we're in a sort of DiMilitarized Zone about a kilometer wide on both sides of the Styx. We're not all that safe here. Pragmatically, we should be OK if we can get across the Styx. The Styx Ferry is that way." Satan pointed and the pair jogged off down the tunnel.
After ten minutes or so, they rounded a corner and found themselves on the trash strewn bank of a dark and unpleasant looking body of water. There was a dilapidated dock. Tied to it was a tired looking vessel. An elderly man in sailor's garb sat on a piling smoking a pipe. A large dog of indeterminate species slept curled up near his feet. As the pair approached the ferryman, the dog's ears perked up. It raised not one, but two heads and gazed skeptically at the intruders. A third head remained on the ground. But it opened its eyes and stared as well. One head bared its teeth and emitted a low growl. The second however, shook its head, stared intensely, relaxed. The three heads conferred silently as canids of the same pack are wont to do. A consensus was reached. The dog lurched to its feet and walked over to Satan wagging its bushy tail enthusiastically.
Satan scratched the ears of all three heads and produced three good sized bones from his backpack. The heads each took one. Satan introduced the beast to Liz. Satisfied, the beast turned, trotted back to its station and laid down to focus on its bones.
Satan then led Liz over to Charon and introduced her. After the social niceties, Satan said. "Charon my friend, I know you you usually don't take passengers outbound, but we're in a bit of a bind and we were wondering if you'd make an exception. You'd be adequately compensated of course. Heck, I'll even help row."
"You're in a bit of a bind all right. I don't know what you two did. But whatever it was, it must have been something spectacular. It's on all the channels. But they all have it different. The official story is that a raiding party of arcangels tried to douse the fires of hell and almost succeeded but for the brave actions of an outnumbered handful of demons. Fox News says that the Communist Chinese were in town recruiting an army of mercenaries to invade Kansas, but something went wrong. The Times says there was a labor uprising that was brutally supressed. The Guardian blames the climate crisis. And so on and on and on.
They've shut down all the portals and every known entrance to Hell. They're searching hovel to hovel. They've got packs of Hellhounds out. They don't intend to let you two out of the nether world.
"I'd like to help you out. But a bunch of suits came by here about 20 minutes or so ago and informed me that there are a few problems with the ferry. Permits are out of date, not enough life jackets, and half of those aren't properly certified. Hull needs scraping and painting -- like any hull growth can survive in the Styx waters -- which also disolve paint in minutes. Needs a new navigation system. Etcetra, etcetra ... etcetra. 167 items in total. I expect all that will go away onc you're in custody. They made it clear that if you make it out and they even suspect I had anything to do with it, Hell's only official Naval person will be on the beach and the Navy's only ship will be converted to toothpicks. I can't risk that.
"I think your best bet might be the sets."
"I thought of that." Said Satan. "But the entrance to the sets is about 30 meters from the Hall of Injustice. And surely there are guards there,"
"I'm sure you're right. Probably bunches of them. But if you think back many millenia, this very beach where you are now standing was a set for some sort of beach party gone horribly wrong scenarios. Slashers. Bloodthirsty pirates. Weird monsters creeping out of the water. ... And the exit onto the beach is about 5 meters back up that tunnel you just popped out of."
"And every exit is also an entrance."
"Right. And much as I'd like to have a long chat with you, I think you'd best be on your way. Remember. If you don't make it out and the question comes up, you haven't seen or talked to me since that party in 1517 celebrating the Protestant Reformation. Not even an Antichristmas card. Nada,
"Oh. And Cerbrus thanks you for the bones." Charon waved and returned to his piling. Liz and Satan turned and rentered the tunnel. A few steps in there was a crevice in the right hand wall behind a massive and quite ugly stalictite. Satan took Liz's hand and led her toward it. Liz looked back toward Charon and waved. Charon saluted snapppily. Cerebrus wagged his tail.
"What are these 'sets' we're headed for?" Liz asked.
"Well, it's kind of complicated. Originally, they were like movie sets. Places where scenarios were created to instruct/tempt the living. Both Heaven and Hell needed, or thought they needed, something like that so we set up a joint project and built a bunch of them. Your basic cabin in the woods, elegant ballroom, victorian office complex, a private railroad car travelling across an apparently endless plain, a factory, a street scene, etc, etc, etc. Then, later, we -- both sides -- needed some space for laboratories investigation stuff we didn't want to be readily accessible to our clients. So we built those in amongst the movie sets. Or we converted a rarely used set to other purposes. Waste not, want not.
"There are literally thousands of the damn things and more being created every year. They cover a volume of space between Hell and Heaven and down to the depths of the Earth and upward into the nearer parts of the galaxy. They're cross connected in weird and wonderful ways. It has turned into a huge four (or maybe more) dimensional maze. Difficult to navigate. But it can be navigated and we don't seem to have a lot of choice about navigating it.
"The good news for us is that if navigation is hard, following anyone who can get ahead further than line of sight is next to impossible. They'll possibly try once they decide we're well and truly gone. But their chances of finding us are pretty close to zero. Our chances of eventually getting through are much better."
They came to a door. Satan opened it and they walked through.
| Chapter9-To Hell ... | Chapter11-... And Back |