Flash Fiction #5: Hellbound

It was in one of the seven circles of hell, perhaps the same one the sour looking Fowler woman had damned him to rot the day of his execution, that Ray Davis first realized the denotation of agony. No, no that was wrong, not just agony; but of slow, methodical, damn near gleeful, torture. And it stung at every nerve ending every second of every breath.

It was hell, this place, no doubt about it. Not quite what he had imagined, but what else had he expected? An audience of cheery, appreciative celebrants? Raptures? No, perhaps not quite that. Then what? He didn’t know, not that it mattered.

This was hit lot now and that was all that really mattered, forever bound in unimaginable perpetuity. To be done and undone forever more.

The needle marks on his arm where he had been pumped full of toxins and god alone knew what had all but faded to red, pinhead, dots, and his ears no longer burnt with the Fowler woman's acidic tones as she screamed and begged for his eternal damnation from behind the Plexiglass. She had been full of bile that day; only a step away from becoming the clone of what he had become over a much longer passage of time. The irony was unavoidable, and just a little comical.

He still remembered the moment the world went out.  Colour first steadily fading from vivid hues then, secondly, to dreary monochrome as darkness (it was death, he knew) bled out from the edges and removed the sight of the world from his baby blues. A brief moment of sound followed that, of jubilant voices and curious questions, until they too steadily dissolved into dark and nothing remained. The last dregs of the real world seized from him.

When he next awoke, if you could call it waking, he found himself in the worst place imaginable. It was a hell, this place. Not a world of fire and brimstone as religions would have had the world believe, but of infinite stonewalled rat runs – a maze composes largely of excrement and piss – where tooth and nail would be fought and lost for a millennium to come.

In the dark of those godless rat runs, at the very periphery of his vision, shadows moved and eyes burnt.

He was not surprised, not by any stretch of the imagination, and he knew for the likes of him that this was home. He would have preferred somewhere brighter, certainly, but he had long since accepted his lot. There was no heaven for people like him ... nor would there ever be.

Oh, but the pain ....

He clutched at his stomach, remembering the last moment before he was undone and remade, and half expected to feel something boiling there. The tip of a blade or a broken wound unfolding, but there was nothing. And that was his punishment.

Now, standing at the beginning of the rat run again, having been remade whole, his body still reeling from the last, he heard the shadows move. The sound was subtle, nothing more than a tic of sound. There one minute, gone the next.

It was the sound of feet scuffing the godless ground, he knew.

And then, laughter: light and playful.

And as bored as he had become of the repartition demanded of him, he ran. He ran without ever looking back, aiming for the porthole of light that surely lay at the end of the maze, and fought against the burning in his lungs which came with so many relentless hours (it felt like days) running through the place.

And the laughter went on.

A nightmare cacophony.

Goddamn kids, he thought with mounting bitterness, they always did make my life a goddamn misery.

He was about to turn left, never having remembered turning that way on previous runs before,  when his foot snagged on something and he was sent sprawling to the ground with his arms pushed out.

He rolled onto his back and watched as darkness clotted knitted shapes together. First one shape ... then two ... then three ... until he lost count and saw only empty, hateful eyes.

Children’s eyes, no less.

 “I’m sorry!” He yelled, waving his hands in front of him as if to ward off the thing he knew was to follow. “I’m sorry!”

But it was too late. They had teased themselves from the darkness and were upon him at once. Their mouths sharply drawn snarls of yellowing teeth; their eyes bulging, their intention utter.

He screamed again, and in hearing the sound of his own distress reverberate around him, he knew he was lost.

The children had at him with claws and knifes and rocks until they had shredded, cleaved, and shattered him utterly. Indeed, it seemed the more he screamed the harder they toiled upon him. Laughing as the monster was once again undone.

They left no part of him untouched.

Everything they knew about pain, he now knew.

And yet ... yet he felt so utterly deceived. He had never worked on them so feverishly in life, not since the Winston boy, at least. Not since he first realised the error of his ways having experimentally plucked the eyes out of a child’s head without first rendering them unconscious.

They bore down on him one last time, and he screamed as they began raking at his eyes. They poured over him in ceaseless masses he could never have hoped to highhandedly dislodge. And slowly, so very slowly, the world faded to black. His agonies utter and his resurrection a certainty.

Goddamn kids ... goddamn lousy kids.