Haunting Hell A Novel in Progress
Handwritten Pages ripped from a Diary
Found Med Center Section 3B
Last year when the daffodils finally popped out of this forsaken earth, months later than they’re supposed to appear, yellow against the drab grey and green of the trashriddled mud, I prayed to a god for the first time in my little life. Fell to my fucking knees, hands clasped above my head, and begged him for death at hands other than my own. I started at a whisper and ended at a scream, wished for that to be endless too, but it did in fact end, ended with blood foaming in my numbed raw throat as my head slammed into concrete, eyes blurring the daffodils into smeared stars of the timeless night courtesy of the guard’s boot.
I’ve never understood why supposedly disturbing the peace is always met with an even more violent disruption.
After a month in a cell decorated with mildew and mushrooms that I licked off the wall till I spiraled into hell, where I was ringed with laughing imps, twisted black horns sprouting like daffodils from bloodred heads, and found the god who didn’t kill me sitting on his throne of broken bodies, yellow skin bare in the sweltering heat, I spat in his face, and he flinched and forsake me forevermore, and then I was released back into the world with a pamphlet tucked under my arm telling me all about the glorious mental health facilities of the City Center, whips and chains and all.
Chains and all.
The next month the rains switched from most of the time to all the time and the daffodils drowned, bowed their yellow heads and withered in gooey brown rot, and the pigeons’ wings grew slick and shined, and the wall on the near horizon became an invisible
inhabitant of the mist. So I lay in my bathtub, vertebrae pressing against the grimy porcelain, prayed to a new god, begged her to let me die at my own hands, stuffed my mouth with writhing maggots from the food storage I no longer touched, the ones that oozed green when you squashed them between your fingers, the ones I had seen make that cat, that hissy street cat I wanted to capture, wanted to taste, go all squirrely and loud before falling stiff in the gutter with the grey water and muck, and prayed and prayed to her to let me choke on this filth, to spew green, too, the only guaranteed thing left in this city. Except I survived that, too, for the god, she knew I was destined for a hell and not her softly illuminated heaven. That the sins of my mortal flesh were too numerous for any kind of heaven, so hell it was, except try as she might, she couldn’t imagine a hell more hellish than my little mortal life, so I was left alive and vomiting till my vision speckled black and the walls swayed and pulsated around me.
A few months after that, after weeks of only prowling these streets when the stars hung in the sky beyond the clouds of endless rain, I was unlucky enough to crack open my eyes after only an hour of thin and crusty sleep to find sun outside my window. Sun. I hadn’t seen that in months. I don’t think any of us had. The rats in my walls certainly hadn’t. They told me so. And there was something else, too. A something I couldn’t ignore, the clawing and pawing of a new god at the seams of my life. So on that day of sun, I pulled myself up and out to the street, and I sat in the middle of the main street, let the passersby stare as I stripped to my gnarled and stained skin and prayed to this new god, once again, for a death. This god, oh how sweet they were. They were willing to listen to little old me! They wanted to help me! And as the pavement grew hot for the first time in a long time and kissed and sucked at my skin, caressing and adhering to my aching body in ways no human ever has, the god mulled over my fate. I felt them hem and haw as the guards
swarmed, screaming and flailing and reaching for things in belts, things I couldn’t see. I didn’t move, comforted by the promises of my god, but by the time they had agreed to let me meld and melt and drip into their endless afterlife, and the bottomless black eyes of the guards’ guns were pointed right at my heaving heart, and at my skull, and at my spine, their collective spittle flecking my thighs and stomach and head and back from the force of their yelling, their out of sync, cacophonous yelling, it was too late. My so-called and self-proclaimed savior was on her way, med badge rattling on its clip on her collar, arms splayed and flailing, screams rivaling the guards’, making their attention swap to her, arms all raising those bottomless eyes to the sky. Tears welled up in my own eyes, rolled down my face to wet the pavement as together my savior and the guards scraped me up and I begged the god to alter the course of what was happening, but they merely shrugged, made it clear I was no longer their problem as I was carted away.
The gods have been silent ever since, crowded around and watching as I sit here in this cornerless white room, day in and out, chains and all.
Chains and all.
Official Hunting Log of Connor Purler,
Handwritten in Human-Leatherbound Notebook
It’s gettin harder and harder to get permission to go outside this damned City, even with the huntin license and Beyond Wall Permit all squared way and whatnot. I only got out there today cause Gil was on guard duty and Gil has a soft spot for me for some reason. Hell, I have one for Gil too, but admittin that is a little too sweet for my tastes. I guess there’ve been too many ‘official safety reports’ statin that leavin The City is dangerous. Deadly. If it’s so goddamn deadly, how in God’s name am I still alive then? Answer me that. Huh? How in the goddamned fuck am I still livin, ya good for nothing office sittin pricks? But a course they cain’t. It’s just plain bullshit. All a it. They just want to pen us in so they can charge us more to live and die. I’d be even more hateful bout it if they weren’t right about some a the things. Even I can admit goin outside a the Wall and survivin is one thing, but livin out there is another. No human that is still a person can do that. Only animals live outside, animals I’ve seen bitin and fuckin and screamin under the open sky not givin a fuck about who sees or hears. Free or not that just ain’t what humans do and I cain’t be convinced otherwise. Blood soaked and joyous in the face of it all, even as a gun is leveled at their senseless heads. Even as their populations drop. Well, recognizable populations, that is I guess. There’s somethin changin out there. I can feel it as I walk those crumblin used-to-be streets, weavin through the vines and bushes, bracin myself to waddle through boot-suckin muds just to try to make a shot at one of those scrawny bodies. They give me the fuckin creeps, but to this day I’d rather come home with one of them slung over my shoulder, hollowed out and gutted, leakin blood and god knows what else, than those deer with the thoughts behind their eyes and mutants brewin in their
veins. I swear they can hear a man’s thoughts and it sets me to shiverin every goddamned time I cross paths with one. Anyway, I only encountered five humans out there yesterday, all huddled together, rear ends coated in the mud as they squatted in the edge of a pool of water all rainbowed and shinin with who-knows what. God knows what? Hell, maybe not even. But those humans all squatted, only one a them was big enough even consider takin down. I aimed at it, but somethin spooked em all, sent em runnin off into a nest of oncewas-buildins before I could shoot, and I had to return emptyhanded. It’s likely that would have happened even if I had gotten it. Quality of meat laws are getting tighter. Illnesses out there are gettin wilder. Bodies in here are getting leaner. And the minds, Christ Amighty, they’re getting meaner.
Next week, when Gil’s on duty again, I’ll try again. I’ll just keep tryin again.
Recovered From an Antique Computer in The Outskirts
Believed to be a Journal Entry Typed by Cherlize
Sometimes, when the wind catches in the tunnels the right way, it wails like the sirens in The City used to.
That’s what mother used to tell me. She never lived behind that wall. No. She lived like I do. Tended to our people like I do. Tallied their deaths like I do. She lived like I do. Mostly. Except sometimes she traveled behind that wall. Sometimes heard those sirens eternally wailing about the end of the world. Eternally, as though the end was, and still is, something stretched out, eternally suspended. Now it’s not in sirens. It’s in infinite raindrops, in slicks of mud, in twisted bodies, in mutated critters with eyes glistening with knowledge of something unknown to us, something satisfactory and sacred. It’s in scarred and ruined land, in rainbowed water, in dead eyes forever staring upwards, staring beyond.
Our death is long overdue. Humanity, I mean. I don’t think we were meant to last this long. I think we’re clinging to something long dead and rotten. Somehow it doesn’t make the deaths easier. I wish it made the deaths easier. In the end, do the dying wail like the siren-mimicking-winds too? Or do they go silently, having embraced what they knew was always meant to be?
And what will I do? Some days I toy with finding out. But then I remember I’m needed. That no one else feels the links between us all as strongly as I do. That no one else will check on all the living nor track down and tally all the dead.