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Something Worse Hereafter




Dying is easy. It's staying alive afterwards that's hard.

The dark portals open in front of you. You cross them. It's like a reverse birth, from light to pain and constriction and the darkness beyond. No escape. 

You emerge into smoky darkness lit by a tremulous red glare. Fears of fire and damnation flee with all your memories of another life and leave you empty, vacant, alone.

You smell sulfur, but you lack a name for it. And your new eyes don't know how strange the landscape looks, how the buildings in the distance, looming and dark and diamantine, look like nothing you've ever seen. Like skyscrapers made of wax caught in the flame of a candle. Like architecture writhing in pain. Like maddened claws tearing at the crimson sky.

And then they slither out of the darkness. The creatures. To call them devils would sully a perfectly good word. They are worse than any bogeymen, more heinous than any monster, scarier than any nightmare the living mind can conjure.

They come with open maw, with dripping fang, with tearing claw and screaming hatred. Towards you.

In the new body you haven't even learned you have yet, you fight back. You fight back with your bare hands, your cunning, your monkey-mind, your puny being.

Only the strong survive the slashes and cuts and bites. Only the determined run past that first gauntlet. Only the merciless kill the demons and drink their life force.

Only those who can fight ever survive to enter Hell.

***

"It wasn't always like that," Len said. "It wasn't always sink or swim, survive or disappear."

Beneath our feet, the train rocked steadily on the track. It was an early-twentieth-century type train, with lots of iron work and uncomfortable leather seats. Not that we'd ever taken the seats. No. We stood in the space between two carriages, where one sort of little balcony abutted another and there was a gate between the two. The carriages inside and their seats were always full. Most often with desperate people. And you didn't want to sit amid hungry people when your own life force was full and glowing. As ours was, because we hunted every day.

Len's glowed around his head, its vaguely red shine probably an artifact of the smoky red light that glowed night and day from the sunless sky. Len's hair was blond, a pale silvery tone, cut short. For reasons that evaded me, he'd pierced his left eyebrow. A silvery stud shone there, when he took a deep drag on his cigarette and flung it, still burning, into the darkness around the rails.

"It used to be different," he said. His grey-blue eyes shone, almost as silver as his stud, and his face -- a small face with regular features and a perhaps too-sharp nose -- had a dreaming look that wasn't normal in him. "In the old days."

"How would you know?" I asked, as I reached casually into the pocket of his black one-piece suit for the cigarettes and pulled one out of his pack. He pulled another one out, himself, before I had a chance to put it back. 

"I've read books," he said. And shook his head and corrected, "I used to read books. When I....” His voice trailed off.

We didn't talk about when we were alive. I'd been together with Len for years. Or perhaps millennia or eons or however one should measure time in hell. Hard to tell when no sun rose or fell and the sky was always a smoky red.

But you could count on the fingers of one hand the times we'd mentioned a previous existence. Our relationship had started when we crossed the dark portal together. He'd saved me from the first creature to attack me, and let me get my breath long enough that I'd saved him from the one trying to get him after that.

Acts of kindness are rare in hell. Acts of kindness reciprocated are even rarer. We'd been bonded by those acts -- male and female, him blond and lean and muscular, me rounded and dark haired and vaguely Mediterranean. Friends and hunt mates and lovers.

Friendship was rare here. It was that we watched for each other's back that had allowed us to survive all this time. A kindness in hell.

"You know, the Romans said it was just an arid landscape, where you wandered alone. Or your shade did. And the medieval theologians thought it was possible to escape hell by swimming on tears of pure repentance."

I snorted and sucked in a mouth full of the cigarette smoke. Everyone smoked in hell. I didn't know why, save that it cut down on the taste of sulfur in your mouth, the tang of burning flesh in your nostrils. You never saw anyone burning, but you could smell it all over hell. "And the Romans would know how? I assume the ones writing this would be pre-dead? And the theologians?"

He grinned at me, a flash of white in the surrounding darkness. "Well," he said. "You think it's always been like this? You have to survive to enter and once here you have to keep killing other creatures, and other people -- just to... stay here?"

"Probably," I said. "Though I think the train is recent. More recent than Rome. Unless hell invented trains."

He chuckled as if I'd made a joke. 

And then the train pulled into what looked like a deep, dark, cavernous tunnel. And stopped. The doors slid open, in a whoosh of vapor and a smell of burning. 

"Time to go," Len said as he flashed me a smile and reached for the weapon strapped to his back. It was no gun known on Earth. It was big and black and bulky, but it managed to have a serpentine and dark appearance to it, anyway. What it did was it sucked the energy -- the life -- out of the demons coming after you. It stored it until you got to your pad, your hangout, your safe place. Where you could then inject that life essence into yourself. And earn another day, another week, another month here. In hell.

***

After a while, the killing grounds become a habit. A routine. Just outside the dark portals, they extend what feels like a couple of miles -- geography here is often a matter of opinion -- through dark sulfurous country. There is the road, and you're safe on the road, as a rule. If nothing else, because there's such a constant stream of people walking down that dark pathway that the chances of anything reaching out and snatching you out of all the others are next to none. This is not the road least traveled.

But step off the road, into the caved-up dirt, the mounded mess outside, and you get surrounded by creatures very quickly. These are the cowardly ones. Not quite the type to try to go and snatch a soul at the dark portals -- where souls are known to fight desperately -- but getting them here, where the souls come already tired, sometimes wounded, bleeding life force and strength. But still vital enough from the other side that their life force will last a demon for weeks.

These are the creatures we hunt -- we, the ones who survive any time at all in hell. 

When you get there, you step off the road and your partner, if you're lucky enough to have one, steps off with you. You're together, each watching the other's back, guns at the ready, scanning the landscape for the monstrous shapes that would come after you. And for human shapes, too, because some people get desperate.

***

Len and I had it down to an art. To be down there at all, when our patterns were full, meant that we enjoyed the hunt, the chase, more than anything else.

Well, at least Len did and I went along with him. There was no point arguing. And it kept us safe. There was a legend that if you stored too much life force some horrible being, some avenger would come after you to balance the scales. An invincible being. But we'd never heard of this happening to anyone we knew or even anyone our acquaintances knew directly.

It was always something that happened to a friend of a friend, a nebulous acquaintance, a fire flicker of legend around the bars and hangouts of hell.

And, as Len always said, every time we crossed the road to get to the killing fields, "Every one we get is one less. One less to attack the newcomers."

Put like that it was almost our civic duty. If there were civic duties in hell.

We jumped off the road, together, me watching his back, his watching mine. The feel of the ground underneath was like that of a freshly plowed field in summer. The memory came to me, sharp and sweet, of a plowed field and the ground warm beneath, and of me, barefoot, running through it.

I had no idea how old I'd been or when this had happened. Memories are fragmentary here. Another reason you don't talk about your living days much.

But this one came with a feeling of male hands around my waist, with the memory of a kiss. I'd have sworn it was Len. I'd have--

"Look out," Len yelled.

I'd been distracted.  The movement of the ground beneath my feet threw me and I fell on my back as a gross green thing -- all fangs and claws and purple venom -- slithered from the depths to loom over me, its little yellow eyes gloating at my helplessness, before it took a bite. Before it sucked in my life force. Before it left me, empty and discarded, like a shell, by the wayside. Gone. Dropped into oblivion.

I heard the whoosh, as Len activated his weapon, and then the thing contorted. For a moment, it looked like the gun was going to suck all of the creature -- flesh and all -- into its dark vortex. But then the creature withered and screamed. I saw the halo of life force leave it.

What remained slumped to the ground, giving me barely the time to roll away from where it thumped, making the ground tremble.

"What was that?" Len asked. "What were you thinking?"

I shrugged. "Memory," I said. "From before."

He gave me a worried gaze.

But a dark thing with too many eyes crept up on us. And I vacuumed it away.

***

Our room was small and not particularly nice. Just a room with a wooden floor, a metal bed, a sagging armchair and two French doors that served as windows, opening only to balconies too small for us to stand up in.

Oh, we had enough life force-- that was the only real currency in hell -- but we'd got this room years ago and we'd been oddly happy here. We didn't count on happiness in hell, and we were afraid of doing anything to spoil it.

So now we sat, in our narrow little room, in what looked like a nineteenth-century rooming house. It was in a section of human-style architecture and most of the buildings here were just like that -- vintage nineteenth, eighteenth, early twentieth century. For a moment I wondered if the only buildings in hell were the ghosts of buildings that had once existed on Earth. But the thought slid away from me. What could a building do to end in hell? And what had we done, Len and I?

I looked at my lover who sat on the bed, stripped to the waist, the ratty white bedspread gathered around his lower body, hiding just enough. His life force aura shone brighter than ever, brilliant and golden.

We'd shared the energy of the monsters we'd captured. Between us, it was enough for... a long time.

I was naked, standing by the window, looking down on the all-too-human cobbled street. Someone, sometime, had put in gas lights, which added their quivering, wavering yellow to the immutable shining red of the sky. "Do you wonder what brought us here?" I asked Len. I turned around.

"The train," Len said, automatically, while he reached from the bed for his underwear, which we'd dropped to the floor sometime before making love.

"Idiot," I said. "I meant here. To hell."

He gazed at me -- or rather, at my breasts -- and smiled. "There were a lot of things that could have done it," he said, and shrugged. "But I'm thinking in my case, probably concupiscence."

"Yes?"

He sighed, dropped his underwear on the floor again. "Lust," he said, and leapt out of the bed, towards me. His lips searched mine, his hands ran over my body.

Power-shots always made Len amorous. 

Sometime afterwards, we lounged on the bed, together, my head on his chest, black hair against the pale skin. He stroked my hair absently with his long, thin fingers. A memory or something like a memory of his doing this while I lay on a plowed field came to me -- a memory, a dream or a piece of imagining. I didn't know which.

"What was that, back in the killing grounds?" Len asked, as if only then remembering.

I shrugged. I didn't want to explain, the ground under my feet, warm from the summer sun, the male hands -- Len's? -- on me, the feeling, the heady feeling of a beating heart, of being alive.

This flesh we had here, this new body, was of some serviceable substance. I enjoyed Len's touch and I liked our lovemaking, and his mouth on mine, and his warmth on my skin. But it wasn't the same. My mouth still tasted like sulfur and nothing made my heart beat faster. 

And then there were the horrors. The things that could happen if you ran out of life force. Oh, I'd never experienced it, but I had seen others suffer it. The pain, the craving, the mindless hunger. In that state, people -- souls? -- here who would attack everything, everyone, in search of energy.

And those who were too timid, those who were too scared to kill demons or other humans, did the most degrading things for the life force to survive one day to the next. Outside our window, across the street, a big neon sign scrolled, advertising "Boys, boys, boys" and "Girls, girls, girls" and then other, darker promises. Its red light came through our window and stained our floor like blood.

"Why do we fight so hard to stay here?" I asked. "Why do we have to fight so hard to stay in hell?"

Len's hand stopped, halfway through stroking my hair. I felt the muscles of his chest move as he shrugged. "Because we're afraid. As the play said, something worse hereafter.” He paused, then spoke dreamily, like someone describing a cherished fantasy. "I mean, if we knew for sure that there was no life after this... if there were nothing... just silence and darkness and oblivion, don't you think most of us would gladly go to that rest? That most of us would gladly die again and rest in peace?” He paused. His long fingers trailed down, caressing my face with a butterfly touch. "But what if what's after this is so horrible, more horrible than anything we can imagine here? The true hell where everything is torture and there's no pause, no love, no comfort. Do you know what happens to the things we kill? To the people who vanish for lack of power?"

"No."

"Neither do I," he said, and reached for his cigarette pack, on the bedside table. He gave me a cigarette, took another one for himself, and lit them both.

I took a deep breath of the smoke and nicotine. Cleaner than the sulfur and burn in the air.

We knew hell. We knew the hurts, the fears, the monsters. We did not know what would happen if we let ourselves go. If we slid away.

I smoked, and stubbed my cigarette, and slept, with my head on Len's chest.

***

I was in a room, but it wasn't my familiar room, in hell. There was a moment of disorientation before I realized it was a room in the other world. A room in the world before -- a frilly, girly room with a pink curtain and pink, frilly bedspread. The casement window was open to soft spring breezes. The air didn't smell of sulfur and the sky outside was blue, with the spring sun shining high up, and a bird singing somewhere.

But the only person in the room sat on the edge of the frilly bed and cried. On her hand was a note. Even from here, I could recognize the angular, exact handwriting. Len's.

And I could recognize the person crying too. Myself. Myself as I'd been once -- softer and younger and somehow more vulnerable. Alive. Someone who'd never held a demon down and watched it die as its life force left it.

The two recognitions felt like a blow.

And then I remembered Len, in a uniform. He'd come through my village. His regiment had been quartered there.

The name of the country, the exact time, the war and what they were fighting or fighting for, all of it had disappeared into an oblivion of forgetfulness. But I remembered Len, his hair soft as silk under my hand. And memories of a dance, and a kiss came back to me. And the memory of the plowed fields, warm against my naked back. And Len's body, smelling of clean sweat overlaid with alcohol. And the smell of the just-harvested crop warm and earthy in the air.

I remembered his body against mine, the lovemaking of which our lovemaking in hell was a pale shadow.

And then the letter. I remembered that letter. It would have been easier -- also cleaner -- if he'd simply plunged a dagger into my heart.  But the letter. He'd told me that he was leaving. Leaving for the front. He'd been called up. And he thanked me for the good times. The good times.

I'd thought he would marry me. Those silvery eyes, that facile tongue, that body that wrapped itself around mine as if he meant to protect me from the world, from anything bad ever happening to me.

In my dream, the girl on the bed went on crying. And I thought of the heartbreak, the sheer, searing heartbreak. And I--she'd missed a period.

He'd marched to war.

Villages are unforgiving. In a city one can hide lost honor and lost hope. But the only city she knew -- the only city I knew -- was a ruin, shattered by the war. It was a den of conflicting armies, a battleground. There, death or worse than death would meet her.

And here, her life was as good as gone.

In my dream, she went down the stairs of the quiet, comfortable house, to the garden, and got the rope and tied it securely to the branch of the old peach tree, and made a noose. I remembered the rope against the neck, the sudden drop as she jumped from the branch and the frantic moment before her neck snapped -- will against instinct, a moment for regrets.

And then the portals. Len and I had arrived at the same time.

***

The window broke. I woke, startled, lost, and rolled off the bed, without looking, without thinking, screaming, "Len, wake up, damn you."

Dimly, against the blood red background of the sky, I saw creatures like men-bats -- dark creatures with vast, leathery wings and only a sketch of a face, like features seen out of a nightmare.

They looked like men or like birds, or like bats, and I was on my knees, scrabbling on the wooden floor, scooting backwards away from them, trying to escape, trying....

My mind had accelerated, and asked questions I could not answer. Who were they? Why were they here? Sometimes you could be attacked in the street or in your lodgings, but Len and I had never been. You heard of things like that, but--

One of the dark creatures reached for me, and I reached backwards looking for my gun. I found the cold metal of it with relief, and I grabbed it hard in my hand, and I swung around, catching the thing in the face.

It made a sound like a vulture screaming, and it let off a stench like a two-week-rotted corpse, but it backed away a little.

And I scooted backwards, holding onto the gun, lifting it, reaching for the trigger and the controls.

Len had wedged himself behind the bed, with his own gun. I heard a whoosh, and one of the bad guys vanished.

I scooted beside Len. "Who are they?" I yelled. "Who are they? Why have they come?"

"Nemesis," he said. "Or harpies. I've heard of this. When you kill too many of them. Too many... demons."

"Yes?" I asked.

"They come for you," he said.

And the space behind the first row of beings that had come into the room was packed -- shoulder to shoulder packed with them.

Len was sucking them into his gun, one at a time, making them implode. But more were coming in, more were taking their place.

We had no chance. No chance at all.

***

"More expensive living quarters are warded," I screamed at Len, while I activated my gun and got one of the intruders. It hissed as its life force got sucked away, but its body just disappeared, like a soap bubble.

Another one took its place. There was no difference at all.

Holding my gun, sucking at the life force of any being that got too close, I got up and started backing towards the door.

Len cackled. "Yes," he said. "But even spells and wards can't keep these things away. From what I've heard and read, they're like the balance keepers of hell. You can't be allowed to get too much life force"

"Then why did we?" I asked, as I swept another the bastards and another took its place and--

"Because then there were fewer of them," he said. "I had to fight the good fight."

I thought of the village, his promises, our whirlwind romance. "No," I said.

I scrabbled for the door behind me, ready to open it, ready to run out into the hallway beyond. Where Len could follow me or not, as he pleased.

He'd gone off to war and left me a note thanking me for the good times. He'd gone without asking, without caring what would become of me once he'd left.

"Catrina," he yelled. "Don't."

Just as he yelled it, I felt it, behind me, through the wood of the door -- claws scratching. And the sound like a bird-bat-human crying beyond. 

 I leaned against the door, but I'd unlocked it, and I could feel the pressure there.

There were too many of them. Too many of them all around. Some had wedged between Len and me.  I was grabbing all of them I could, but it was never enough, and more and more came.

"Catrina," Len screamed. I couldn't see him.

"Yes," I said, my voice calm and distant and no more belonging to me than the crying of that girl on the bed, long ago. So, this is how it ended. How I found out what was there, hereafter. What we'd been fighting so hard to evade.

"I'm going to reverse power on the gun," he said.

It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. I remembered, vaguely, dimly, the explanation the person -- demon? -- in the weapon shop had given us. Something about power being reversed, creating an explosion of power, igniting the life force of everything it touched. Like powder and gasoline, I remembered the thing saying.

I remembered it because at the time I'd wondered exactly what it could mean, and whether the creature talking about it had used fire and gasoline at some time, in life.

Matches and gasoline.

"Take cover," Len's voice yelled, from beyond the wall of slick, black, reptilian bodies.

I threw myself down. There was a flare. 

And screams, and a smell like a charnel house, or an open coffin.

I opened my eyes, and only one creature stood in front of me. Just one, looking disoriented.     

I lifted my gun and sucked it up into it. And then looked around the room, where all the rest of them had vanished. Soap bubbles in the air.

"Len."

He sat in the middle of the room, his head and shoulders against the metal of the bed. And he looked all right. No wounds, no hurts. Just the pale, muscular body I'd come to know so well, in this world and the one before.

But the silver eyes that focused on mine were strangely opaque and scared. Very scared.

"I was a stupid boy," he said. "Oh, I'm sure I could have married you," he said, as if I'd asked him a question. "But I didn't know how to. I didn't know how to ask for permission from my commanders. And I had no idea what I could do with you when I went back home." 

His voice faltered, as if too full of tears or as if he were too short on breath. "My parents would have been very bewildered if I brought a foreigner home. Funny, I don't even remember what they looked like, but I remember that."

His life force, around his head, was almost gone. Pale and vague like the gas lights outside the window.

"And so I left. I was so scared.” He shrugged. "I was so stupid. First battle, next day, and I was dead. And then...."

"You've known it all along?" I asked, creeping near him, on my knees, reaching for his hand, which was cold and clammy in mine.

He nodded. And smiled, a faint smile. "There are things I forgot, but none of them were you, Catrina."

His hand reached up, weakly, and tangled in my long black hair. "None of them were you."

The silver-grey eyes were distant, lost. His life force was burning out. He'd ignited it when he'd killed the demons. Fire and gasoline.

I grabbed at his wrist. "Len, don't leave me again."

And then I realized what he was doing. This time, he hadn't left me. Oh, there were things he might have done. He could have reversed that gun power and thrown it, as a grenade, to the midst of the things, and he'd probably have survived.

Probably.

But he'd chosen to ignite his huge life force reserve, to make himself into a human bomb, so that all the creatures would be wiped out. So he could save me.

"I want you to... go on," he said, his voice faint and distant, like a breeze through trees, like the echoing steps of a retreating regiment. "I will find out, now, if there is something worse...."

I'd taken the way out once, rather than face disapproval and dark glares, and fingers pointed at me. I'd forfeited my life to save my honor.

What had I done to those I'd left behind, to the family I didn't even remember?

I'd destroyed their lives to escape.

And now Len would destroy himself for me.

***

The guns are not needed. They're a refinement. They're a way of storing power, of trading power, of giving it to someone beyond the person who harvests it.

In fact, when Len and I got them we got them on credit, on promise of giving our first harvest to the shop keeper. And we had.

But before that we had killed creatures and gotten their force.

Which means, you can give your force. To someone. And someone whose life force is burning so low that they're near oblivion, can't help but take it.

***

"Catrina," Len said. It would have been a scream, but he simply didn't have the strength.

I brought my hand down squarely over his heart. When drinking -- or giving away -- life force, contact close to the heart helped.

Len tried to dislodge my hand with his. I could feel his nails scrabbling feebly at my skin, but he was too weak to do much damage.

He probably thought I was going to kill him, to take away the very little energy force he had left. To send him faster to oblivion.

As what?

A revenge against the foolish young man in that other world I only dimly remembered? 

He was my hunt mate.

"Idiot," I told him, tenderly, and, with my free hand, smoothed back his hair.

And then I willed my life force into him.

***

There is this about life force transfer. Once you start taking it -- particularly if you're weak and near the end of your reserve -- you can't stop.

I heard it time and again, in the train to the killing grounds or on the street, or in the dim, dark bars where those like us who could no longer taste anything, gathered to pretend to drink liquor and try to revive our memories of what would never return.

I'd heard how someone had started stealing a little life force off a friend, just to stabilize themselves, and found they couldn't stop, until the friend was gone, disappeared. Dead again. Gone to oblivion

No, once you start taking life force you can't stop at just a little.

***

Even after he realized I was giving him my life force, Len struggled at first. Famished for life force as he must be, with his life force almost burned to nothing, he tried to push it away.

The young man might have been foolish. The young man might have been selfish. He might have deserved hell. But my friend/lover in hell was neither foolish, nor selfish.

"It's okay," I told him, and continued pushing. Pushing the life force at him, until he couldn't help but take it.

His body absorbed my life-force, his hand grasped mine. His lips formed my name. His eyes shone with regret and fear.

And this time I wasn't wasting my life. I was giving it for someone else. I was trying to pay back, somehow, to erase the hurt to those people I'd left behind, those people I couldn't remember. The child whom I'd never given a chance to be born.

To pay back to Len for the years of love, the millennia of care, the eons of watching my back.

This time I would not leave someone else to pay for my mistakes. I'd have died without Len's help that first day. It was right I should go now, to whatever worse fate could wait me after hell. It was right I should go and let Len live after me.

For a moment we merged -- me and him. I was Len, he was me.

His mind, clear and protecting and mine -- fearful, desperate, clinging to his.

But love shone in both.

And then I started fading, dimming, mind and memory and thought going, going, going, like a tide receding on a shore.

There would be oblivion, now, I thought.

But Len struggled. He tried to shove the life force back. It wouldn't come back. It just leaked, out of both of us, into the surroundings.

For a moment, I opened my eyes and saw him there, still pale, his silvery eyes still opaque.

"Not this time," he said. "Not this time. I will not let you go and face trouble alone. I am not that foolish."

"Foolish enough," I told him, and my voice was a whisper of wind on trees. "Foolish enough. Now we'll both go.” I felt the life force seeping out of us. I was vaguely aware of creatures coming into the room, called by it.

I felt Len's hand close around mine.

***

And we're in water. Warm water. I start dog paddling, without thinking.

Len is swimming beside me, looking bewildered.

Above the sky is blue and -- on the horizon -- there's a clear white light shining brightly. Not the sun, but what the sun would be if it were supernatural.

Len raises his eyebrows at me. He lifts his hand to his mouth, tastes. "It's salty," he says.

Like tears.

We swim towards the light.



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