The Hell Season (23 page)

“Brand him,” said Ron as he knelt down next to the unconscious man. “Here.” He used a finger to tap Edgar directly in the middle of the forehead. That’s where the number thirteen was drawn.

Ron stood and backed away, said in a voice close to a shout: “Anyone else not want to participate in our little game here?”

Game?
thought Thomas.
What sort of game is this?
Thomas wanted to confront him, to demand that he explain the point of all of this. But he said nothing and neither did anyone else.

“Good,” said Ron. “Now if there are no more interruptions we can get this unpleasantness over with as quickly as possible.”

The numbering continued. Dana was twenty-two. Tanya, twenty-three. Gerald was fifty-four. Angie, seventy-six. When everyone but Ron and Thomas was finally marked, Ron turned and walked the short distance to the pickup truck from where he’d made his speech the previous day. This time he did not climb up and stand in its bed. Instead, he opened the passenger side door, leaned and removed something from inside. When he returned Thomas could see that he had an ordinary brown paper lunch bag in his hand.

“See this?” asked Ron as he made his way along the line of people, the bag held high above his head. “There are numbered sections of note cards in here. If your number is pulled from the bag you will report immediately to the hole. Each morning we will meet out here. Twelve numbers will be drawn. Those people will spend the day working on the project. The work will be hot and difficult and very tiring. We are on a strict schedule here but not an unnecessarily grueling one. With a dozen people working hard each day, we should have no trouble reaching our goal. To make sure that everyone is sufficiently rested when his or her number is called, no one will ever be required to work two days in a row. For the time being, this is the only purpose that the lottery will serve. When the project is complete that may change. But I’m getting ahead of myself…”

Thomas did not like the sound of any of that, particularly the last part. He knew, though, that how he felt didn‘t really matter a whole hell of a lot.

“Let the game begin,” said Ron. He walked over to Thomas, held the bag out to him. “Draw the numbers.”

Thomas just stared at his supposed friend for a few moments, looked him in the eyes, tried to figure out what strange thoughts were swirling within the mind behind them, to gauge the depths of the man’s insanity. Why would he make him do this, single him out like this? To alienate him? For what reason?
There probably is no reason. Nothing more than a whim. The guy is nuts, after all.

*

Day by day, piece by piece, the project took shape.

There was a metal cage attached to the hook at the end of the winch’s line, retrieved from the depths of the pit that apparently had a bottom after all. Several times a day, the winch would unwind and the cage would descend into the hole. Then it was reeled back in, pivoted around to solid ground, guided down to the broken pavement near the edge of the hole where it would come to rest. The demons would bark and a human would open the cage. Inside there would usually be an odd shaped piece of metal, heavy enough that it would require several workers to lift and set it on the ground near the hole. Sometimes there were other things: bundles of steel spikes bound with strips of leather, or various sizes and shapes of hammers and shovels and pick axes.

That first week, a metal ring was constructed around the circumference of the hole, the pieces of metal placed side by side and joined together, snapped into place like sections of some monstrous jigsaw puzzle. Each part of the ring was engraved with strange designs, indecipherable runes that hurt the eyes to look upon them. When studied with a certain level of concentration the runes started to make sense, a message to emerge, only to be forgotten when the viewer was even minutely distracted, the moment’s clarity replaced with a mild headache and an ill feeling in the pit of the stomach.

The days passed slowly, seemed to go by at a torturous crawl for the workers. But they did pass. The heat was a constant and oppressive thing. There was no shortage of people passing out from exhaustion. When this happened, certain tactics were used by the demons to assure that the person was not faking it. Then another number was randomly drawn and the person who bore the corresponding mark was summoned to the abyss and the project which was steadily advancing there.

Ron refused to divulge any information regarding the project. Thomas had tried on several occasions to get him to talk about it but he would only smile and say, “In time all will be revealed.” This did little to comfort Thomas. He felt guilty for being singled out, for not having to suffer as his fellow survivors did, especially when he saw Dana and Tanya taking their turns. Even if he tried to pitch in and help, a demon would approach and prevent him. “Why me?” he asked Ron. “Why not Tanya? You’ve known her longer and I’m sure she’s been a better friend to you.”

Ron’s expression turned dark at this. “A friend, yes,” he said. And then, much lower, as if to himself: “But never anything more.”

Thomas didn’t bring it up again. He figured if he could get some info on the project, was able to share it with the others then it would be better than doing nothing, that it would help assuage his guilt. Ron never breathed a word of the project’s ultimate purpose, however, never offered the slightest clue.

A month passed. Walkways now extended from the metal ring out over the abyss like ten foot planks on a pirate ship, six of them placed equidistantly around the hole, a seventh, slightly wider one, positioned between two of these. Seven. Thomas figured that the number held some significance. Two workers had fallen into the abyss during this phase of the construction as the heavy sections, with the help of the winch, were maneuvered into place. The two who fell never returned.

“It is over,” Gerald said to Thomas one day. “You have missed your opportunity. There will be no more Reborn. We are the first and the last.”

“Thank God for that,” said Thomas before walking away, the memories of his time spent on the cross still too fresh in his mind.

There were a few deserters. During the morning roll call, when the survivors were lined up in front of the store, their numbers checked to make sure everyone was present, it was discovered on two separate occasions that the sequential string of numbers was, in fact, broken. Ron, furious at this, would send a pair of demons—“Noses like bloodhounds on ‘em,” he told Thomas—out into the town in search of those who had managed to sneak away during the night. Inevitably, by evening the demons would return, deserters in tow, the humans looking fearful and crestfallen, no doubt confident that wherever they had been hiding would have been effective enough to keep them safe and undiscovered. But they had been wrong.

The punishment for desertion was severe. Each of those who had been caught was forced to strip to the waist then led across the parking lot to the side of the road, the women doing what they could to cover themselves with their arms and protect their modesty. Telephone poles stood some distance apart there, planted in the stretch of grass-covered land separating the lot from the street, standing like unnaturally straight and limbless trees. Each deserter was led to a pole, told to wrap his or her arms around it in an embrace, then the wrists would be bound tightly together with a length of clothesline so that the deserter could not pull away. A demon would then approach with a vicious looking cat-o-nine-tails that had been brought up via the winch and the cage, and the deserter would be whipped viciously across the bare skin of the back, the flesh torn and shredded, the person left to stand there in agony during the long hours of the night and the even longer hours of the following day, baking in the stifling heat of the blood red sun. After twenty-four hours, the victim of this awful punishment would be freed and allowed to skip just one of their randomly scheduled shifts at the hole in order to recover.

After the two groups of deserters were captured and punished in such a way, the line of people that formed in front of the Wal-Mart each morning never had a missing number again.

By late August, all the days and weeks of forced labor were showing definite results. Whatever was being built there, whatever its purpose, gave the appearance of something nearing completion. It was, understandably, a major point of conversation on the night of August the twenty-third. Speculation was running wild. Thomas did his best to remind people that that’s all it was: mere speculation. No one knew for sure what events the building’s completion might trigger. Although, the chances of anything good coming of it...

“Because, what
has
been good since all of this insanity began?” Thomas heard someone say.

He was standing inside the Wal-Mart amidst a group of people that included Dana, Tanya, Angie and a few others he’d become acquainted with in recent weeks. They each held paper plates with pieces of cake and scoops of ice cream on them. The time had come for another group birthday celebration, the day on which almost exactly one-third of the survivors came into the world. Why the three shared birthdays was anybody’s guess. There were a couple amateur numerologists among the survivors who’d added and multiplied, subtracted and divided the numbers of the corresponding dates in ways to assign them some significance. Most of those who spent any time studying the equations, however, came to the conclusion that you could combine numbers in any countless ways to make them mean pretty much whatever you wanted. So no one had any real idea as to the significance of the dates. Although it was generally accepted that mere coincidence wasn’t much of an explanation either.

Thomas’s group was over near the checkout counters, a short distance from the main living area. A few dozen people were nearby, drinking various alcoholic beverages and trying to make a party of it. The mood was noticeably subdued, though, especially in comparison to a past birthday celebration. There was a palpable undercurrent of anxiety to the proceedings, a sense of uncertainty. Some momentous event was on the horizon, no one doubted that. And not one person there was eager for it to arrive.

“Well, we’ve made some new friends, haven’t we?” It was Angie who spoke.

“There is that,” said Thomas after swallowing a mouthful of cake. He looked over to where a larger group of revelers was passing around a bottle of what looked like vodka from this distance. Two months now since he’d had a drink. The realization surprised him more than a little bit. Who knew he had it in him? Julia would have been proud of him. He wondered if he ever would have found the willpower to give up alcohol if circumstances hadn’t unfolded as they had. No telling. Too bad it had taken such a traumatic situation to reveal the strength he never knew he had residing inside of him.

Thomas saw none of the Reborn participating in the celebration. They were probably out by the hole or gathered in their own section of the store. As long as they were away from him he didn’t care where they were. He still couldn’t forgive them for what they’d done to him. Even if, in their own twisted way, they’d seemingly had his best interests at heart. It’s just that their actions had been so premeditated, would have involved so much suffering on his part.
Had
involved quite a bit of suffering as it turned out. What he’d done to Gerald had been an accident. He would have never
knowingly
hurt him. Not for any reason. Even if it meant, in some incomprehensible way, that he could get Julia and the kids back? That he could have his old life returned to him? That the memory of what he’d endured these past several weeks could be wiped from his mind? Like it had never really happened at all?

“I think we’re running out of time,” this from Patricia, the woman who’d tried to convince him that the Bible held all the answers to his questions. While Thomas had been lost in thought she had quietly made her way over next to him. Her sudden appearance startled him a bit as did her words.

“It’s all coming to a head,” Tanya chimed in. “Everything that we’ve been through, everything we’ve endured. It’s all pointing toward something momentous. I only wonder how many of us are going to be around when it goes down.”

After that it wasn’t long before the conversation returned to the inevitable topic, that being the purpose behind the project they’d all been forced to work on. Well,
nearly
all of them.

“I think it’s obvious,” said Patricia, a stern and knowing look on her face. “It’s a temple. We’re going to be forced to worship there, to pay homage to the dark powers that have taken control of this world. We’ve already been marked.” She held out her arm for those present to see the number fifty-eight burned into the skin there. “The temple will only help to sway us, those who are too weak to resist its temptations, all the way over to the side of evil. We must remain strong in the face of this, the ultimate challenge to our eternal souls. Those who do not will be lost to the Lord. For all time.”

Spoken like a priest to the flock
, thought Thomas. Looking around he saw a few of those gathered nodding their heads in agreement. He’d finished his cake and ice cream, saw that Dana had too. And now he was finished with this conversation.

“Excuse us,” he said then reached out and took Dana by the hand, led her away from the checkout lanes, over to one of the store’s front exits, past the generators humming their steady, tuneless song, and out into the night.

They stood there in front of the store saying nothing. Dana raised her eyes to the moon overhead, bloated and round and red as the sun. She still hadn’t spoken much since her recovery from the coma. Right then Thomas didn’t mind. He took in the silence, invited it to smother the myriad doubts and worries and hopeless thoughts that seemed to plague his waking hours these days. And for a moment there, a fleeting fragment of time, he almost succeeded.