Damned

As the towering tornado demon reaches to snatch a screaming Babette, Leonard shouts for her to dive. Cupping both his hands to make a megaphone around his mouth, Leonard shouts, "Dive and dig!"

So that you might learn from my ignorance, it's a tried-and-true strategy when escaping danger in Hell to dig into the nearest available terrain. Hell offers scant cover, no flora to speak of—except for the inexplicable accumulations of Beemans gum, Walnettos, Sugar Daddys, and popcorn balls—thus the only consistent, ready manner in which to conceal oneself is to tunnel until completely buried, in this case by the vast accumulation of castoff fingernail shards.

Distasteful as this might sound, for this piece of advice, you owe me.

Not that you're ever actually going to die. Perish the thought. Not with your hours and hours invested in aerobic exercise.

On the other hand, if you do find yourself dead and in Hell, menaced by Psezpolnica, do as Leonard would recommend: Dive and dig.

My hands burrow into a hillside of loose, cascading parings, and with every inch I dig a steady landslide of the same avalanches down upon me, prickly and itchy, abrasive but not entirely unpleasant, until I'm completely interred, Leonard interred at my side.

About my own death, my death-death, I remember very little. My mother was launching a feature film, and my father had gained a controlling interest in something— Brazil, I think—so of course they'd brought home an adopted child from... someplace awful. My brother du jour, his name was Goran. He of the brutish, hooded eyes and beetling brow, an orphan sourced from some war-torn, former-socialist hamlet, Goran had been starved of the early physical contact and imprinting required for a human being to develop any sense of empathy. With his reptilian gaze and broad pit-bull jaw, he arrived forever and always as damaged goods, but this only added to his appeal. Unlike any of my previous siblings, now apportioned to various boarding schools and long forgotten, I found myself quite smitten with Goran.

For his part, Goran had merely to cast his churlish, ravenous eyes upon my parents' wealth and lifestyle, and he was determined to curry my acceptance. Add to those factors one overly large baggy of marijuana supplied by my dad, plus my impulse to finally smoke the nasty herb, if only to bond with Goran, and that's the sum total I'm able to recall about the circumstances of my fatal overdose.

Currently, lying fully buried in a grave of fingernails, I listen to my heartbeat. I hear my breath rushing in my nostrils. Yes, without a doubt, it's hope that makes my heart continue to beat, my lungs to breathe. Old habits die hard. Above me, the ground heaves and shifts with every step of the tornado demon. The parings trickle into my ears, stifling any sound of Babette's screams. Stifling the clicking din from the Sea of Insects. I lie buried here, counting my heartbeats, resisting an urge to dig one hand sideways in search of Leonard's hand.

In the next instant my arms are pinned to my sides. The fingernails press in close, tightly around me, and I'm lifted into the stinking sulfurous air, rising into the flaming orange sky.

The fingers of a huge hand are clasped around me as tight as a straitjacket. This giant hand has been thrust into the loose soil and has plucked me the way one might pull a carrot or radish from its buried slumber.

Ye gods, I might be the privileged, wealthy, insulated scion of celebrity parents, but I still know where babies and carrots come from... although I was never entirely certain where Goran originated.

Soaring into the air, I can survey it all: the Sea of Insects, the Great Plains of Broken Glass, the Great Ocean of Wasted Sperm, an endless array of cages containing the damned. Below me spreads the whole geography of Hell, including demons wandering hither and yon to gobble hapless victims. At the highest point of my ascent, a canyon of wet teeth await. A wind of rank, wet breath buffets me with a stink worse than the communal toilets at Ecology Clamp. There heaves a monstrous tongue carpeted with taste buds the size of red mushrooms. All of this ringed by lips as fat as greased tractor tires.

The hand brings me to the mouth, where my arms stretch to brace against the upper lip. My feet push against the lower lip, and like a fishbone I hold myself too wide and rigid to be swallowed. Under my hands, the lips feel surprisingly plush, leathery like a banquette in a good restaurant, but very warm. Like touching the upholstery of a Jaguar someone's just driven from Paris to Rennes.

So vast is the demon's face that all I can see is the mouth. In my peripheral vision, I'm vaguely aware of eyes above me, broad and glassy as department store windows, except curved outward, bulging. Those eyes, fenced by the black pickets of huge eyelashes. I'm conscious of a nose the size of a mud hut with two open doorways, each door hung with a curtain of fine nostril hairs.