Authors: Edward Lee
“Ten to the bartender.” Hudson finally said something coherent. “Yes.” He felt flushed, prickly.
Here goes. Monsignor Halford better be right
. . . He looked in his wallet. “I only have sixty dollars on me. Is there—”
“An ATM?”
DO ME
finished his question. “At the bank—”
“—right across the street,” the other hot, wet whisper brushed his ear. “You could be back in five minutes.”
Hudson felt disconnected from himself when he stood up. “I’ll be right back . . .”
GAG
gave his buttocks a squeeze when Hudson rushed out. He crossed the parking lot with a drone in his head. Darkness had arrived like an oil spill; the old sodium lights painted glowing yellow lines across the cracked asphalt. His anticipation revved his heart.
I’m going to be in the seminary
soon, but in about five minutes I’m going to be standing in a dump bar’s bathroom with my pants down in front of two hookers. Oh, God
. . .
He quickstepped past a dollar store, then crossed the street to the bank. Six people stood in line before him at the ATM, mostly half-broken rednecks or old people.
Come on, come on
, he thought, tapping his foot. When he glanced across the street, he saw
GAG
and
DO ME
watching him through the glass door.
With my luck someone else’ll pick them up while I’m waiting in this line!
Finally Hudson got his turn and withdrew five twenties. He grimaced at the receipt where it read
AVAILABLE BALANCE:
$6.00.
“Damn it,” he sputtered, and then he stood there for a time, spacing out.
Put the money back in the bank and go home!
his alter ego yelled at him.
You don’t need to do this! Look at yourself! You’re a scumbag! You’re a whoremonger!
But he could, couldn’t he? He looked at the cash. He could redeposit it right now, save it for the things he needed rather than wasting it on this experiment in lust. But—
Instead he put it in his pocket and left the machine.
On his way back his mind was clogged with the lewdest images. Even as the block letters flashed behind his eyes—DON’T BE A CRUMMY PERSON BY PURSUING YOUR TEMPTATIONS. DON’T LIVE A CHUMP-CHANGE LIFE—Hudson couldn’t see them.
The drone dragged him on. He had no awareness of making the mental decision to stop, but when he realized he had, he found himself several yards from the dollar store where a skinny woman in a dirty sundress and lanky hair was having a conniption at the front door. A pair of scrawny little kids with dead eyes stood next to her. “Fuckin’ bullshit! I can’t fuckin’ believe it!” she was yelling at herself. “It’s not supposed to be this fuckin’ hard!”
Hudson wanted to move on, to the tacky delights that awaited. Instead, he said, “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah!
Everything’s
wrong! I got two fuckin’ kids to feed so I go in there to buy food”—she held up a plastic card with an American flag on it—“and the machine says my food credits are all used up. My fuckin’ husband maxed out the card out before he split yesterday. Instead of paying the power bill, he spent the money on crack; then he maxes out the card and leaves town! Fucker leaves me with two kids and no food, and even if I
had
food, I can’t cook it ’cos I got no power, so I gotta buy Pop-Tarts and canned spaghetti, but I can’t even buy
that
’cos my fuckin’ piece of shit husband MAXED OUT MY CARD!”
The woman looked close to a psychotic break. Meanwhile, her two children looked up at Hudson, stared a moment, then looked away.
The woman’s eyes were red now. “Mister, could you give me five or ten bucks? Please? This shit’s fuckin’ killin’ me.”
“I—” Hudson began but didn’t finish.
“My fuckin’ food card doesn’t renew till the sixth—that’s over a week from now. I’ll have to feed my kids garbage till then.”
“I—” But Hudson thought,
I could give her twenty bucks and still have plenty for the whores
. . .
“Aw, fuck it!” she wailed. “You guys are all the same! Don’t wanna help anybody. Ya think I’m gonna buy
drugs
with the money. Shit! Does it look like I’m tryin’ to buy drugs!”
“I—”
The woman shoved both of the kids. “Come on, we’re going home . . .”
“Wait,” Hudson said. She turned and glared at him. Hudson took everything out of his wallet and gave it to her. “This should help,” he said.
She looked cockeyed at the $160. “Aw, fuck, man! Thanks!
You saved our asses!” She yelled at the kids. “Come on, you little crumb-snatchers! In the store! They close in ten minutes!”
Hudson watched blankly as she pushed her kids back into the store. The woman fully entered, but then stuck her shabby head back out.
“Hey, man.” She smiled. “God bless you.”
I hope so
, Hudson thought. “Good night.”
He turned and headed down the sidewalk. Behind him, from the bar,
DO ME
and
GAG
screamed at him.
“What did you
do?
”
“You
ASSHOLE!
”
“Scumbag motherfucker!”
Hudson looked at them in the doorway and shrugged. He cut across the sodium-lit bank parking lot, then headed through the alley toward his cheap cinder block efficiency.
I guess this is hopscotch of the new age
, he thought, taking awkward steps around the used condoms and discarded hypodermics that littered the asphalt. Behind him, in the distance, he would still hear
GAG
and
DO ME
cursing. Then he laughed when it fully sunk in:
I almost picked up two prostitutes a week before I enter the seminary and take initial vows of celibacy
. . .
A minute later he was home, not really knowing if he felt good or awful.
Smoke the color of spoiled milk gusted from the intermittent censers as far as the eye—be it demonic or Human—could see.
What an interesting color
, Favius mused, mystified. He stood on the southernmost ramparts, proud to know that a large part of this security sector was under his command:
sixty-six meters of a multiple-square-mile construction reservation recently dubbed the Vandermast Reservoir.
Its depth? Sixty-six feet.
The reason that Favius marveled at the hue of the censer smoke was simply because of the
contrast:
out here, in the black-sand expanse of Hell’s Great Emptiness Quarter, everything, like the sand, was black. The walls of the Reservoir itself were black, as were the sub-inlets and enormous inflow pipes. The causewalks, too, were black—constructed of basalt bricks—and even the barracks were black. Very little of the scarlet sky could be viewed just then, due to the blankets of black clouds. Favius noted only a single rift in said cloud cover, which revealed a sickle moon.
A sickle moon, yes, that was black.
Hence the sickish-white smoke rising from the curtilage of untold censers amazed this steadfast servitor of Satan. The churning wisps of contrast broke the endless visual monotony of what he’d been looking at for longer than he could remember.
Bronze-helmed and breast-plated, Favius had long ago earned the rank of Conscript First Class. This rank he’d earned faster than most due to his predilection for logic, efficiency, and unhesitant brutality. In life he’d served the in the Third Augustan Legion, circa AD 200, slaughtering women and children in a village called Anchester during Rome’s occupation of Angle-Land. Now, in death and damnation, he was a loyal member of Grand Duke Cyamal’s Exalted Security Brigade. Since time was not measurable in Hell, Favius had no way of calculating how long he’d actually been serving this post, but it had to have been the Living World equivalent to hundreds of years.
The notorious Exalted Security Brigade were sworn on their damned lives to guard by all means necessary the six-billion-gallon facility. Directly under his command were a
hundred foot soldiers and countless Golems, all who coalesced to form a living and not-so-living security shield. This far out in the Quarter, infiltration and/or vandalism against the Reservoir was unlikely, but no chances could be taken.
If this project were not very important
, Favius knew,
my expertise would not be needed here, and nor would the Brigade’s
. . .
Sword always in hand, Favius turned and gazed out at the bleak and awesome sight: the Reservoir’s empty pit. He remembered when the Emaciation Squads had first broken ground with mere shovels, digging out and carting away the sinking black sand and corrupt soil. Surely millions of these workers had toiled themselves, literally, to nothingness, and when their labors had reduced them to sunken-faced twigs, they were buried alive
beneath
the unholy Reservoir’s soil, where they would twitch and mutter and think—forever.
All in the service of their detestable Lord.
I am so honored
, the Conscript’s voice creaked through his mind. Only the most loyal, the most trusted, and the most heinous of Lucifer’s soldiers were granted such esteemed duty.
A noxious breeze trailed across the Conscript’s helmed face, and at once he smiled. The breeze carried the rich, organic stench of the Mephistopolis, the place he dreamed of returning to once his duties here were done. He longed to rape, to maim, to slaughter: his natural instincts. And just then he dared to wonder,
How much longer?
Such thoughts, he knew, could be deemed treasonous in the event any Archlocks were about—Archlocks, Bio-Wizards, or other servitors skilled in the reading of minds. Favius indulged himself, raising from about his muscled neck the pair of Abyss-Glasses—Hell’s version of binoculars. Instead of lenses, the powerful viewing device was fitted with a pair of eyeballs plucked from the sockets of a
Dentata-Vulture, an infernal creature possessed of superlative vision. Favius’s tar black heart fluttered when he scanned the farthest fringe of the Reservoir, admiring the fencelike barrier of Golems forever watching outward for signs of assault or trespass. Within this impenetrable wall of manufactured monsters patrolled Conscripts of Favius’s class who were overseen only by one of sixty-six Grand Sergeants. Favius hoped that one day he might rise to such a hallowed rank . . .
He snapped to attention at the sudden, encroaching sound: footsteps and the clatter of plate-mail. He held his legionnaire sword in the present-arms position.
Grand Sergeant Buyoux
, he realized.
“Stand at ease, friend Favius,” came his superior’s voice. The Grand Sergeant wore a full smock of plate-mail armor, from knees to the top of his head. Only his poxed face showed through an oval in the hood. He carried a flintlock sulphur pistol, and emblazoned on his chest was the seal of Grand Duke Cyamal—a trine of sixes fashioned via intricately engraved skulls.
“State the status of your post, Conscript.”
“All clear, Grand Sergeant!” Favius barked.
“As always, a good thing.” The corrupt face in the oval smiled thinly. “And now? State the status of your disposition.”
“My heart sings in the unblessed opportunity afforded me, the opportunity to serve our abyssal Lord! I
exist
, Grand Sergeant, for no other purpose than to be of use to Lucifer!”
“Yes, you do, don’t you?” Buyoux’s voice receded as he looked distractedly back and forth over endless causewalks and the great black gulf of the empty Reservoir. “Loyalty is so rare these days. I heard that a full dozen of the Somosan Guard defected to the Contumacy recently,
after
destroying several Hell-Flux Generators and Agonicity Stations in the Industrial Zone.”
“Blasphemy, Grand Sergeant!”
“Um-hmm.” Then suddenly the Grand Sergeant seemed to stare off, not into the as-yet-unfilled Reservoir, but more into his own reflections. Favius
wished
he might read the Grand Sergeant’s mind.
“Have you ever wondered, Conscript?”
“I do not wonder, sir!” Favius snapped. “For to wonder is treason without proper license!”
“Yes, and you may consider
this
your license then, but have you ever wondered when our responsibilities at this ghastly reservation might be at an end?”
Favius shivered. He did not answer.
Buyoux’s voice, now, could barely be heard. “We’d all be mad not to wonder about that, yes? In an eternity where time cannot be calculated? Where day and night do not exist and where the sky is always the same color of ox blood and where the moon never changes phase? Lucifer Almighty.” But then the Grand Sergeant nodded. “No doubt, at least, you’ve heard rumors . . .”
“I’ve heard nothing, Grand Sergeant. I do
nothing
but stand my post and command my rampart, by your nefarious grace.”
Buyoux paced back and forth, his Dark Ages armor rasping. “Things are going well, I can tell you that, and soon? I’ll be able to tell you exactly
why
the Unholy Ministry of Engineering ordered the very construction of this Reservoir in the first place . . .”
Favius stood still as one of the Golems, his ears itching to know.
“Soon, just not now.” Buyoux eyed the muscled Conscript. “For the love of every Anti-Pope, I’ve always wondered why they would build
this
in such a pestilent perimeter of wasteland.”
“The more removed the Reservoir is from the City,
the safer it shall stand against infiltrators,” Favius dared speculate.
Again, Buyoux nodded. His keen discolored eyes suddenly went flat. “And safe it had best remain . . . or we’ll all be fed alive into a Pulping Station, of that you can rest assured.”
Why, though?
Favius did indeed wonder.
Why
had they built this strange place?
“And friend Favius, would your heart sing as well were I to tell you that after what must be centuries, we may be privileged enough to leave soon? To return to the Mephistopolis?”
Favius began to shake, his heart racing. But he did not reply.
“I can tell you this. The last of the Emaciation Squads have finished their toil.”
Favius wanted to shout aloud but, of course, could not. Instead, his exuberance seemed to build up from within, threatening to blow him apart.