Jeffrey Thomas, Voices from Hades Read Online Free

seemed satisfied with her answer. It shambled on down the hallway, and Maria pulled herself to her feet, blood still running off her lip. She had refused to cry, however. She prided herself on holding her tears even when she had no control over the flow of her blood. But the wound would heal, so that more wounds could take its place. Hadn’t it been the same, pretty much, when she had still been alive, before she was raped and murdered?
    Maria continued on her way. But not to the mess hall. She felt vaguely apologetic as far as Russ was concerned, but she had lost her appetite.

    ««—»»

    When she reached the enormous chamber in which she had been assigned a place to sleep, Maria realized that the explosion she’d heard earlier had occurred in here.
    This chamber was circular and disturbingly organic, its ceiling lost in gloom but apparently taking the form of a dome. Honeycombed into the curved walls were row upon row of elliptical openings like slots in a mausoleum waiting to be filled. Formerly, this had been a tank in which were nurtured a species of Demons since discontinued. They had been one of the more human-like breeds, and perhaps it was because of their human traits that a number of them had rebelled in the infernal city of Oblivion. Most of these Demons had been killed by now, but there were still those that had escaped the purging.
    Her own little cocoon space was in the third tier, and she kept a few belongings inside, which no one had ever deemed worthy of stealing. There, she would rest between shifts, curled like a fetus, reborn—or aborted—every day in an endless cycle.
    But today there had been some unknown mishap, and from the room’s obscure heights, torrents of a thick, orange-colored gelatinous fluid were raining down to plop and puddle. Fortunately, the floor was subtly concave and the ooze was draining slowly toward a grille in its center. The foul-smelling matter put Maria very much in mind of the gruel they were fed in the mess hall—the only sustenance they were given—though that substance had a chemical-sharp citrus smell and taste, like slurping orange-scented dish detergent.
    The irregular deluge went largely ignored by a few weary laborers who had also skipped mess hall and preceded her into the chamber, and who now climbed toward their cramped sarcophagi. Maria stared up into the leaking darkness only a few moments herself before navigating between aggregations of the viscous slime toward her section of the wall. Having arrived at it, she hoisted up one leg to begin the ascent to her own depression.
    She hesitated, however, as her eyes were attracted to where some of the rotten-smelling matter had flowed down the wall and accumulated in a particularly large, glistening heap. She saw that there were several bones protruding from it; some ribs, and the bat-like struts of a wing. Not the bones of a human; humans reconstituted, their bodies were notional, they could not be killed. Demons, however: they could die. But there was more than the bones. One spot in the mound was subtly but definitely pulsing. Also, Maria could just discern a muted gurgling sound with an unsettling, familiar quality.
    Holding her breath against the reek, she crouched by the edge of the pile, and from it drew a loose leg bone. She then used this to probe the slime in the area where it was undulating. There was resistance as she prodded a mass buried within it. And then, a tiny arm thrust up through the jelly, its stubby fingers wriggling.
    Maria used the bone to paddle away as much of the slime as she could around the arm. Then, leaning forward carefully, she reached out and took hold of it. It was slippery, and cold, and she was repulsed by the fingers that squirmed against her wrist, but she pulled…and in standing, she extracted a body drooling streamers of muck. She held the thing out at arm’s length to examine it. Pudgy legs pedaled the air sluggishly, eyes squinted open in its sliding mask of ooze,