Lawyers in Hell (32 page)

Nichols had one round left in his Desert Eagle and no time left at all.  The hovering samurai crab was descending on the dazed Houdini.  Nichols took careful aim and squeezed.

The crab splattered all over Houdini as it died, and Nichols had a moment to change clips.

Merkerson was flanked by two more crabs that came at him from opposite sides.  He annihilated the wing of one with the Ingram.

It tumbled.  By then, the second was upon him.  Merkerson couldn’t withstand the sudden impact.  He dropped into a monkey crawl, but it couldn’t save him.  Merkerson lost first his balance and then the Ingram and the piton projector.

The creature lunged at his feet.  Merkerson dropped his legs, hanging suspended from the line by his hands.  As the creature made another spiraling pass at him, he hung by one hand and with the other, grabbed his climbing hammer.

Meanwhile, although he had eight more rounds, Nichols couldn’t shoot at the crab or he’d likely hit Merkerson.  Merkerson lodged his climbing hammer in the crab’s carapace on the second lunge and lost that too.  But crab and climber were still too close for Nichols to risk a shot.

As the crab spiraled in once more, Merkerson grabbed a survival knife from its scabbard and punched the razor-sharp knife into the creature’s shell.  The creature slammed into him, breaking his grip on the life line.  Man and monster tumbled, each pummeling the other until they met the writhing surface of the protoplasmic pool.

The pool opened a hundred sudden mouths to consume its prey.

Nichols shouted, “Houdini!  Get your ass back here.  I can’t protect you any better than I did Merkerson.  I don’t have enough ammo for every monster in hell.  Out of there.  Now!  Move!”

Houdini called back, “No, my friend.  Now is a time for daring.  I shall leave this place, but not to return to hell.”  He then stood up and deftly tightrope-walked the entire distance to the third stalactite.

Below, the pool spewed out two more fish-faced gill-men.  Nichols was staring in disbelief after the crazy escape artist, so he didn’t see the first gill-man creeping up the rock face until it was almost upon him.  “What?  You’re hungry?  Want a snack?  Here you go,” Nichols said.  He stepped back and, as the creature’s head popped above the edge of the abyss, he shot it face first with the Desert Eagle.

He was getting cranky, he knew, but enough is enough.  And this carnival was more than enough.  Nichols shot the second creature in the top of the brainpan as it scrambled up the cliff toward him.

Fools in hell are ever at home:  Houdini was now at the final stalactite.  As he prepared a rope to swing the final few feet into the portal, a pair of night-black wings emerged and flew at him.

Nichols was losing count of his rounds, which he hardly ever did.  He thought he had six rounds left.  He fired twice at the demon’s wings from the ledge but his .44 mag rounds didn’t slow its ascent.  And he knew he hit it.  Both times.  So now, maybe, he had, five, maybe four rounds in his clip and two clips on his belt before he was in deep shit here.  When Nichols got home to New Hell, he was going to have a serious talk with Asmodeus, the demon king, about what demonkind was getting up to these days.

The black-winged demon arose at such an angle as to come between Houdini and the shimmering portal.

Then Nichols remembered Pythagoras recounting the Delphic Oracle’s ravings about ‘an opening between worlds, a Demon Gate.’ 
Demon Gate?  For damned sure.
  The portal that shimmered before him was this so-called Demon Gate.

Terrific.  Now he could satisfy Welch’s curiosity and Satan’s need to know – if he lived long enough, or died clean and recycled to Slab A in the good old Mortuary.  He’d even welcome the Undertaker’s halitosis right now.

But there was still Houdini, unarmed except for a knife, who thought he could use the demon gate to escape.  That figured:  what’s an escape artist want to do most of all in hell?  Escape.

Nichols decided he’d shoot Houdini himself:  it would be kinder.

Houdini was now positioning himself high on the stalactite, with his feet on the final piton driven by Merkerson.

Nichols couldn’t risk wasting one of his bullets, and he didn’t have a good shot at Houdini’s head – yet.

Houdini was waiting for something, too.  Poised.  Ready for … what?

The black-winged demon flew to within five feet of him and Houdini jumped directly at it.  His feet landed squarely on the demon’s massive shoulders, between its wings.  Pushing off from the demon’s shoulder he vaulted into the portal – and was gone.

Vanished without a trace.  Not even a disturbance of the portal to show he’d ever entered it.

The demon wheeled smoothly about, seeking new prey.

Four or five bullets in his gun; two eight-round clips on his belt.  Big demon that seemed immune to gunshots.  Nichols did the math.  With great effort, he slung the catatonic Powell over his shoulder and ran for the inside of the tunnel.  Somewhere back there was Powell’s plasma rifle, lost in the melee.  If Nichols had had that rifle, the argument with the big black demon could have gone differently.

Then the black demon was on top of him before Nichols could react.

Flailing its spiked tail, the demon impaled the unknowing Powell, disemboweling him as he ripped the unconscious man from Nichols’ back.  Nichols stumbled in the gore and his legs went out from under him.

He landed flat on his back.  “Hey, Joe, come give me a hug.”

The demon came on.

Cursing in Satan’s name, lying in his companions entrails, Nichols emptied the remaining rounds in the Desert Eagle’s magazine into the demon’s face, shooting two-handed.

Nichols had been right:  he had only had four rounds left, not five.

The demon reeled, the shock of the weapon knocking it back, and it tumbled from the cliff.  The eviscerated body of Powell, still skewered on its tail, sped its descent into the proto-soup below.  Nichols discarded his empty magazine and slapped a full one into the Eagle, whistling “Hey, Joe” softly between his teeth.  With his hackles risen, determined not to look behind him in case looking at the protoplasm pool triggered the creation of the beasties, he grabbed the camera and scrambled up the tunnel as quickly as he could.

When the tunnel was once again nothing more than a crawlspace, nothing had flapped or slithered or bounded after him.

At a safe distance beyond the tunnel’s mouth (if there was such a thing), he lobbed a frag grenade behind him.  When the tunnel mouth didn’t collapse, he lobbed a second, then a third, until there was enough rubble to block the opening.

Bottled up tight – at least for now.

He had one magazine in his Desert Eagle and one in his belt.  The plasma rifle was long gone, left on the ledge, dropped over the edge, or grabbed by crazy Powell.  He took only the memory card from the camera and ditched the rest.  He still had a climbing hammer, his survival knife, plenty of line, carabiners, plain pitons, his spelunker’s helmet, clips for the Uzi he no longer had, three more grenades, some det cord and the comm link.  He used the fiber-optic line to send the data he’d recorded and an encoded message through the fiber-optic line to Achilles – ‘Code 2:120/Code Red/Code Black.’  Then he began climbing back to the beach.  Though his back was wrenched and both his legs hurt like hell, he might make it out of here yet.

Or at least had a damned good chance of it.

Just then heard a noise behind, and looked back:  three gill-men had broken through the rubble blocking the tunnel’s mouth.  And behind them rolled a Jeep-sized spherical glob.

*

Nichols’ signal for emergency pickup pleased Achilles, who was tired of drinking no-proof Saki with off-duty Japanese crew members and hoping for a little action, although he was startled by Nichol’s request for a Code Red/Code Black.

In the Huey, Achilles grinned as he laid the special backpack on the seat beside him … just as Nichols had requested.  Then he started his safety check, preparing to return to the island.

*

Nichols was running as fast as he could, but each stride across the sand made his angry leg muscles burn more.

Somehow he must keep ahead of the gill-men chasing him, with a weird ball of amorphous flesh behind them.  A well-placed round from his Desert Eagle might stop one of the gill-men, but then they’d be reabsorbed into the sphere.

The gill-men with their spherical caboose relentlessly pursued him.  He was out of grenades and nearly out of adrenaline.

Nichols considered escaping into the surf.  But the surf was black and oddly viscous along the beach.  The waves rolling near shore resembled the protoplasm in the pool.  He couldn’t risk it.

He tried raising Achilles via comm link, but the line was jammed by someone or something.  If Achilles hadn’t received his original distress call, Nichols was fucked.

Too tired.  Lungs aching.  Despite his pursuers, he had to stop, catch his breath.  He couldn’t outrun those things forever
.

So…. 
Nichols took off his helmet and began emptying the powder from his remaining Uzi rounds.  Fingers shaking, he cobbled together a fragmentation bomb, using his helmet, the brass, the spikes and the detonation cord.

He threw it like a bowling ball.  It rolled toward the gill-men and the blob, and exploded between them.  Pieces of blob and gill-men showered the beach.

As Nichols was already running toward his extraction point, slowly and erratically, black shadow covered him. He looked up and saw a bat winged demon.

If it had a face, it was smiling. It swooped down, smashing into his back with its claws.

The impact knocked him to the sand. Its claws had torn his clothes. Blood ran down his back. Trying to catch his breath, he grabbed his pistol.

The demon dived at him.

His lives flashed before him. Bullets ripped the air. The Huey’s thirty millimeter Gatling fire center punched the creature and pushed it backward as it tumbled to the beach. Nichols shielded his face from the Huey’s sandy rotor-wash.

He could see Achilles in the cockpit.  Scrambling into the chopper, trying to catch his breath, he gasped, “Did you bring it?”

Achilles replied, “As the devil is my witness.”  He slapped at the backpack beside him.  Achilles was too savvy to ask what had happened to the rest of Nichols’ team.

Nichols grabbed the backpack and cradled it, sliding into the second seat, then began to prepare its contents.

When it was prepared, he gave Achilles the coordinates and got ready to lean out the door.

*

A mushroom cloud blossomed behind the Huey.

Achilles cursed as its electromagnetic pulse took out several electronic systems, including the Huey’s stealth capability.  Panels sparked as backup systems tried to compensate.

The thirty-kiloton nuclear munition had done its job and they were still aloft.  Almost home free.

When the
Yamato
came in sight, Nichols was counting his cuts and bruises.

As Achilles tried to raise the
Yamato
on the comm link, he heard a single scream in Japanese in his helmet’s headset,
“Umibōzu!”

As they watched, a huge tentacle wrapped itself around the great battleship and pulled it into the sea.

Achilles said flatly, “We may not have enough fuel to make it to safety.  Closest landfall is the mainland.  Some call it TazzMania.  Or the ice floes of the south polar region.  Nobody home to help us, either place.”

“Try TazzMania and hope we don’t have to swim part of the way.”  Nichols started ditching anything expendable, to lighten the Huey’s load.  If he drowned, he’d make it back to Slab A and the Undertaker, which was the best death he’d been offered today.  Then Nichols buried his helmeted head in his hands waiting for whatever would come to pass.

*

On Halloween night, a delegation from the Society of American Magicians held its yearly ritual, encircling the grave of their past president, Harry Houdini.

Every year they kept this vigil, on the anniversary of Houdini’s death, in hopes that he would send them a sign from the great beyond.  A lawyer representing the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), no friend of the Society, attended, assuring that the magicians played no tricks.

The ritual’s climax was to break a wand in half.  As the ranking magician stepped forward, flexing his wand dramatically, Houdini’s grave was encircled with light.

The magicians reflexively covered their eyes.  Within the circle of light, a figure appeared.   An intense and familiar figure:  Harry Houdini.

Houdini reached forward.  Snatching the wand from the ranking magician, Houdini held it before his face and bowed deeply.

The crowd of magicians muttered and ramped, awaiting the inevitable speech from the triumphant Houdini or whoever had staged this grand illusion.

Before Houdini could straighten up, the night sky cracked apart in a burst of light; a hole opened; from the bright hole came two huge black talons.

The lawyer from CSICOP lunged forward and grabbed Houdini around the waist as those talons pierced Houdini’s shoulders.  The talons lifted Houdini up into the sky, the lawyer still clinging to his waist.

The hole was gone.  The light was gone.  Houdini was gone.  And so was the lawyer.

The bemused magicians looked at the grave, at the sky, and then sadly at one another.

No one would ever believe them.

     Appellate Angel

by

Edward McKeown

Arkiel, the angel, stood and tucked his wings behind his suit jacket, picked up his briefcase and left his quarters, headed for the Hall of Injustice.  In hell, court was held every Sinday:  there was literally no rest for the wicked, including, unfortunately, him.  Arkiel was an angel sentenced to hell; he worked here.  Being cast down was harsh punishment, he felt, for teaching humans forbidden knowledge, taking a woman to wife, begetting a nephil, and then, eons later, indulging in a few weeks’ dalliance with a visiting succubus.  Mating with human women and teaching forbidden knowledge weren’t the worst things an angel could do.  There were the minor downcast, fallen angels such as he, watchers and helpers of humanity, and then there were the great fallen angels who’d contested with the Highest…. Arkiel wasn’t all-powerful.  The demonic temptress had been on earth, carrying a message when he’d chanced on her in a valley he was watching.  After that, well … succubi were what they were and while Arkiel had never been a human, his animus was male.  At the time it had seemed worth the risk.

Now, on another dreary Sinday, their spectacular pleasures seemed fleeting compared to his continuing punishment.  He opened the door of the transients’ compound and stepped into hell proper.  Before him lay Pandemonium, stretching out to the horizon.  An enormous city, where all the taxi drivers were from NYC, all the trains were run by Slamtrack and the potholes had been known to eat vehicles and occupants alike.  The street shimmered in the heat; moans and shrieks filled the air.

His chauffeured black limo waited for him at the curb.

Gravelog, his scaly-skinned demon driver, opened the door and Arkiel slid inside.  As usual, the rehabilitated demon said little.  He saved his voice for the relentless, and for him, joyful task of howling abuse at the other denizens of hell during the commute.  With demonic driving, they made it in record time to the courthouse, a massive, columned, white-speckled granite edifice from whose upper floors unsuccessful litigants were often defenestrated.

Arkiel got out of the limo and walked up the front steps, nodding to the uniformed guards who stared vacantly at the damned souls queuing up for court.  The officers passed him through.

“Have a hell of a day, counselor,” said one sergeant, a ghastly soul with haunted eyes who had died only days before full retirement.

Arkiel sighed.  The sergeant always said that to him.  A bailiff let the angel into his assigned courtroom.  He took his seat and unpacked his brief at the prosecutor’s table.  His paralegal was absent today, but Arkiel was well-prepared and needed no help with today’s case.

The doors swung open and Arkiel’s plans for an early lunch flew out the window as the androgynous demon, Yoko, one of hell’s highest-ranking advocates of evil, walked in.  The demon wore an impeccably tailored suit and too much jewelry.  It was followed by its client, an Aztec priest in his ceremonial robe of flayed human skin – in hell, the skin was his own. 

Trailing them was a succubus, and like
all
succubi, she was enough to raise the dead, in every sense.  She wore a pin-striped jacket and Arkiel couldn’t tell if she wore tights on her fantastic legs or merely dye.  Her tail with its heart-shaped tip floated behind her; she was erotic perfection incarnate:  only the best for Yoko, hell’s ranking demon of lust.

Yoko gave him a jagged smile that suggested the demon knew every detail of why the angel had been assigned here.  The three seated themselves on the defense side.

The doors behind the dais opened and in floated a softly glowing ball the size of a man.  Its dull gray surface resembled the clouds of a summer storm.

A bailiff and a skeletal clerk followed it.  “All rise,” the bailiff intoned.  “The Appellate Section of the Grand Court of Hell, Pandemonium Division, is now in session.”

Arkiel stood, leaning forward on the table in front of him, grateful for loose trousers.  The succubus smiled and winked at him.  He concentrated on thoughts of ice and snow, remembering his last case in Niffelheim.

The skeletal clerk, dressed in black, frowned.  “Are counsels present and ready in the matter of Hell versus Huemac?”

“Demon for the defense is ready,” Yoko said.

“The prosecution is ready,” Arkiel said.

“Oral argument having been requested,” a somber voice rolled from the cloudy ball atop the dais, “counsel for the defense may proceed.”

“Oh, Great Demonic Being –” Yoko began in wheedling tones.

“‘Judge’ will do,” said the ball.

“Ah, yes, Judge.  We merely wanted to demonstrate our respect for this high court of hell.”

Arkiel sighed – it was going to be one of
those
cases.

“We come before you, in the final act of this longest-running case on the docket,” Yoko said, “to finally make an end to these persecutions of my client, Priest Huemac, wrongfully convicted –”

Arkiel shot to his feet, ignoring the stirring in his trousers, which was adding to his damnation with every thrill he felt:  lust was sin for an angel, and Arkiel was living the doom. 

“Objection.  My learned colleague seeks to distort the record.  There is no question of guilt in this matter, only severity of the sentence.  It is uncontested that Huemac slaughtered four thousand, one hundred and fourteen men, women and children in ritual human sacrifice.”

“Ah, but the defense,” Yoko said, advancing around the table, “contends that those are merely facts and separate from the issue of guilt.”

“Counselor Arkiel,” the judge said, his glow brightening, “please remember this is an appellate court with no jury to sway.  Displays of righteous anger only waste the court’s time.  I will hear this.”

Wonderful,
Arkiel thought,
the great glowing gasbag is in a mood today.
  “Yes, Judge.”

“Judge,” Yoko resumed, “my client is a man of true faith.  His people looked to him, with approval – with
approval
, mind you – to explain the world to them, for protection from the elements, from their enemies, from the supernatural.  It is true that, as with so many earthly religions, the early practices were somewhat … sanguinary.  But whose fault is that?  What power is it that blocks the eyes of men to the truth and misleads them?”

“That would be demons like you and your master,” Arkiel interjected.

Yoko sighed theatrically.  “Judge, could you remind the learned advocate of the concept of a rhetorical question?”

“Counselor Arkiel, please restrain yourself.”

“Yes, Judge.”

“But to address the point raised,” Yoko continued, “even my dark master is a creation of heaven and operates under the mandate of the Creator.  All the Almighty need do is raise its little finger to lift the curtain hiding the truth, and we demons would be ended.

“I submit that my client,” Yoko turned to the Aztec, placing one clawed hand on each of the small, dark man’s shoulders, “is a good and devout man, a pillar of his community, indeed at the apex of his society.  He was falsely led, by a religion he merely inherited from his parents before him.  Through innocent error and the primitive state of his culture, he did not know better.  The requisite evil intent for the severe punishments of hell is simply not there.  We beg this court to overturn this sentence and release my client from further torment.”

“Counselor Arkiel?” the judge said.

Arkiel rose, trying to hold back his anger.  “‘A pillar of his community?’  Indeed, he took members of that community, tied them to pillars, and had their intestines pulled out.  ‘At the apex of his society?’  Too true.  He stood at the apex of their ziggurats and with a piece of sharpened rock, ripped through their living skin, cracked their ribs and dug out their internal organs before their dying eyes, for no purpose –”

“He did not know that,” Yoko said, leaping up.  “He thought he was warding off famines and drought –”

“Silence, Counselor Yoko.  You’ve had your say.”

“Your Honor,” Arkiel said, pacing before his table, “if the universe has one immutable law, it is that to kill without need, slowly, with the intent of causing pain, as did this man –” the angel jabbed his finger at the dark-eyed priest, “– is inherently evil.  The youngest children quickly learn that to hurt others is wrong and wrongs are punished.  Only adults seek to find justification to excuse evil behavior.

“Counselor Yoko would have us sympathize with this butcher of humans.  I ask you to take a different perspective.  You are a man, a woman, or even a child, seized by men dressed in jaguar skins for no reason other than being too close to the land of this priest.  Sometime later you are dragged in front of a blood-maddened mob to the top of a ziggurat.  You are thrown onto a slab before a crowd hungry for blood and entertainment.  Then this… this… priest, begins to vivisect you … and smiles while he does it.”

“Counselor, enough theatrics, confine yourself to the case,” said the glowing ball.

“But that
is
the case, Judge.  Counselor Yoko seeks to excuse evil with sophistry, invoking cultural relativism, on the grounds that terror, violence and ignorance were the norm in this priest’s world.  How many other societies, with even less understanding of the universe, developed humane punishments, instead of rituals of institutionalized murder that required them to war with all other peoples to feed their cultural appetite for human sacrifice?

“Plainly stated, Judge, there is no new evidence to consider in this appeal.  Evil has been done and is again admitted by the defense.  This issue has been raised and disposed of by this august court before.  This case is no different from the cases of millions of damned souls in hell who are currently being gassed, shot, starved and worked to death repeatedly, suffering the same torments they inflicted on others in life.  If this court respects its own precedents, it can show no more mercy to this villain than he showed to those under his knife.”

The globe pulsed with more light and less gray. 
“Surrebuttal,
Counselor Yoko, to Counselor Arkiel’s appeal to
stare decis?”

“Surely, Judge,” Yoko rose and said smoothly, “there can be no comparison between those new dead penitents to whom my colleague alludes – who were beneficiaries of the Enlightenment and other moral advancements – and my client’s Neolithic culture.  Look at him.  Can you hold him to the standard of people raised in the age of Einstein, Gandhi, and so many other humanitarians?

“My client was merely a cog in a machine, following orders.  His choices were to comply with the norms of his society or end up on those very same sacrificial altars.  How easy it is for us here, safe, to say how bravely we would have resisted evil.

“‘We would not have wielded the knife.  We would not have fired the rifle.  We would not have turned on the gas.’  Hypocrisy!” said the demon.  “All beings are entitled to survive.  There was no resistance movement for Huemac to join.  Yes, it is easy for us to be brave here.  Even accepting that my client had any awareness that his acts were evil, he had no choice.”

“Well argued,” the glowing judge said.

“If I may, Judge,” Arkiel said.  “Counselor Yoko has indeed argued well, saving the best arguments for last and they merit a response.”

“All right, Counselor, but make it snappy,” the judge allowed.

“My colleague seeks to excuse Huemac for his Neolithic culture, as if kindness and decency are inventions of later societies.  The earliest hominids, who shared their food, and cared for the elderly when they were no longer useful, were more moral than the people of many technologically-advanced countries.

“Man is gifted with choices.  While this fiend in human form, or Torquemada, or Jim Jones may claim the mantle of heaven to exonerate their actions, heaven denies them.  Humans have free will and must lift the curtain on good and evil themselves.  It is ludicrous to claim that any person can believe cutting apart another person is not evil.

“‘I was just following orders.’  ‘I was given the choice of being victim or victimizer.’  Can expediency excuse evil?  Can we exonerate a man of evil-doing because that evil was done while choosing between his own life and the lives of others?

“Each day that choice of self or other is made a million times.  The universe does not protect one from choices, or from consequences.  You’re not automatically rewarded for making the right choice.

“Anne Frank died young; the man who turned her in lived a long life, in the home he denied her.  Yet who would choose to be that man?

“Huemac saved his own life at the cost of over four thousand other lives.  The price was too high.  His enjoyment of the sufferings of his victims, documented by those victims themselves, is too well-established to ignore.

“‘I was just following orders,’ excuses nothing.  ‘It was them or me.’  Well, some sympathize with that argument.  I submit that this case merits no sympathy.  To each soul may come the choice to succeed in a bad cause or be destroyed in a good one.

“This case has been delayed by every conceivable legal device for too long.  Let justice be done now.” 

Yoko rose, black eyes gleaming.  “To paraphrase Melville:

‘Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?  But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I.  By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.  And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea!  Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish?  Where do murderers go, man!  Who’s to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar?’