BURN IN HADES (6 page)

Burning a squal wasn’t as easy as stomping on a cockroach, but just like squashing a bug, a squal dying a second death didn’t mean shit in the grand scheme. More would follow. No one could get rid of them all.

He sprang to his feet, only a short distance to the front entrance where the third squal was most likely waiting outside—unless the poison calabash it had eaten had taken affect. Then he’d have one less squal to worry about. Not taking any chances, he proceeded to the rear exit and raced out that iron door.

A squal met him there.

“Son of a bitch!” Cross threw his head back in exasperation. They tricked him. “I thought’ you’d be out front.”

“That’s-sss what we wanted you to believe,” said the squal.

It stood taller. The curvature in its spine had straightened. Its knees pointed forward and its skin was drier. The moistness seemed to have been sucked out of it. It must’ve been the squal that had eaten the calabash. The poisonous affects were taking place. It would burn soon.

“What if I had went out the front door then?” asked Cross.

The squal shrugged its unusually broad shoulders. “You would have had a much bigger head sss-start.” Slowly, it curled the corners of its slimy mouth upward and flashed its thorny teeth.

Cross darted down the lane to the shivering house. He could trip the unsuspecting squal on the slippery ice inside.

He flung the door open. A green jaguar lying just inside lifted its head and growled.

“Shit!” Wrong house. Cross slammed the door in the jaguar’s face and spun around to flee. Only then did he notice the alley of stone jaguars leading up to the house. He should pay more attention.

The squal raced up the alley towards him. Cross dove out of its way. The squal slammed into the door and broke through it. Jaguars growled inside. Cross scooted backwards on his bottom.

The squal launched out of the jaguar lair as if tossed. It tumbled backwards and landed on all fours in a slide. The squal hissed and backed away from the house.

A handful of green jaguars poured out the house, snarling. They flocked around the squal, attacking it from all sides. A cloud of rustled dust obscured Cross’s view. Gnashing and tearing of skin.

“Eat him,” Cross cheered the jaguars on. “Eat him up!”

They’d have him for dessert. He hopped to his feet.

A couple of jaguars launched into the air, hurled outward from the pack and thumped to the ground on their sides. The rest of the group dispersed into the grounds of the kingdom, leaving three jaguars lying dead with the victorious squal standing triumphantly.

Cross’s heart rose in his throat. He rushed to the blade house, at last. This time he made absolutely sure he had entered the intended building.

He swung the door open, sending a draft swirling into the house nudging the thousands of blades that dangled from clotheslines strung along the walls and the ceiling. The wooden paddles and axes clunked together; the obsidian blades swished and clinked.

He grabbed the first blade closest to him, a flat wooden paddle with triangular obsidian blades around the edges. The clothesline was threaded through its handle and prevented him from taking it.

He yanked on the blade. The rope pulled taught and a blade swung down from the ceiling. He jumped backwards. The blade swung toward the entrance. The squal entered the house and dodged the razor-sharp pendulum.

Cross gripped his new blade and snatched. The rope came with it and dangled from the loophole in the handle. He chopped at the squal. It ducked, grabbed his shin with its hand-like foot and pulled his leg from under him.

His back slapped the ground, widening the gaps torn open by the bat’s talons. The squal grasped his neck with its foot and leaned over him.

“Our chieftain ordered us-sss not to burn you. We are to bring you back in one piece. But sss-some of us-sss wonder if you’re truly worth all the trouble. No one is-sss for certain if we absolutely need every piece of your sss-spirit intact. It’s-sss a mere precaution.” It tightened its grip around his neck.

The largest blade in the house hung over them. Cross followed the line of a rope near him. It led from the floor, up the wall and to the large blade. If he could cut the rope, that blade would drop onto the squal’s head. He needed a distraction.

“It’s true. You need me in one piece,” said Cross, not really knowing for sure himself. He slid the blade back and forth, sawing at the rope as he spoke. “But you don’t have to take my word or it. Take me captive. I ain’t goin’ nowhere. There’s no need to anger your chieftain. He’ll reward you for following his exact instructions.”

“Our chieftain is female,” the squal snapped, with a hiss of hot breath and stringy drool.

Cross kept sawing. “My mistake. You all look alike. I can never tell. I have to say though, you’re better looking than the others. Not my type—no squal is—but you’re the most attractive squal I’ve seen so far. Still not sure if you’re male or fe—”

The squal clasped his throat cutting off his air supply. Its gaze landed on the rope Cross was cutting. It followed the rope up to the large blade.

Cross hacked the rope. It snapped. The large blade rained down.

The squal released Cross. Both of them rolled out of the way. The large blade staked into the vacant floor and would have skewered them both together as one kabob.

Another blade stabbed the floor inches away from Cross’s ear. Hatchets swung back and forth from the ceiling.

Cross clung to the wall. He followed along the wall, cutting more ropes as he went until it was raining knives, daggers and swords. Neither the squal nor Cross was concerned with each other now. They both dodged for their afterlife.

A battle axe swung down and lopped one of the squal’s arms off at the shoulder. Black blood spouted out the wound. The squal roared in pain and collapsed.

Cross didn’t bother waiting for it to burn, and by the protection of the Great Goddess, he managed to dodge blade after hailing blade and rolled out of the house uncut.

Immediately outside, another squal met him. It had a gaping hole in its neck and no bottom jaw. He’d assumed that Slackjaw had died a second death after the bat tore its jaw off.

The squal wheezed through its torn open neck. Black blood gushed out of it and clumped to the ground.

Cross groaned. “Why won’t you hurry up and burn?”

Something hard bashed Cross in the face. He wiped the splattered calabash juice off his forehead, making sure none of it slipped into his mouth, and gazed up the hill at the tree in the court.

Bolon-Hunahpu was laughing as only a skull could. Cross could almost hear its annoying jaws clunking together. The branches swayed backwards and shot forward in a snap just as the squal lunged at Cross. A bushel’s worth of calabash smacked the squal in the back. It toppled face first into the ground, knocked out cold.

Bolon-Hunahpu waved its branches side to side. It was a goodbye wave. They’d probably never see each other again.

The skull yelled across the land: “Catch up with Cottontail for me!”

Cross raised his hand to wave back. Slackjaw began to gather itself to its feet. It stumbled. Cross raised his obsidian blade and lopped off the squals head. The head rolled down the hill and the body dissolved into the nothing of second death.

Cross crossed himself—
The Mother, the Maiden, and the Crone
—and spotted his pet cornurus.

“Where you been, Gimlet?” he said as he raced over to her.

Unlike trees, his cornurus never talked. But that didn’t stop Cross from holding full conversations with the bulky half bull, half lizard. He found comfort in talking to someone who couldn’t talk back. Gimlet couldn’t lie to him or take advantage of him. He preferred the companionship of animals because of their loyalty. He always knew where he stood with a beast.

Gimlet grunted and turned her entire grey body just so she could look at him. Her fat head left no space for a neck and her mouth wrapped wide enough across her face that she always appeared to be grinning, an expression most idiot spirits mistook for friendliness.

Half of a giant rodent dangled from her lips. It was most likely a Sisyphean hodder. They were stout-bodied rodents about the size of prairie dogs, and Gimlet’s favorite food.

“I knew I should have tied you up to something,” Cross scolded his pet. “I’m over here running for my life, looking everywhere for you, and I find you chowing down on some hodder. You didn’t even check to see if it had any objects, did you?”

Gimlet slurped the rest of the Sisyphean hodder into her mouth and licked her lips.

The one-armed squal stumbled out of the blade house, bleeding out its wound. It collapsed near its headless companion.

Cross mounted Gimlet and gave her a swift kick. They galloped down the graveled road, through the ruined gates that once protected the kingdom and into the jumbled obsidian landscape on the outskirts of Xibalbá.

After racing at top speed for what seemed like hours, Gimlet slowed down. She was the toughest pet Cross ever had, but the sharp terrain must’ve be painful on her hooves. And she also had to carry both of their weight. He pulled her to a stop.

He now had rope to tie her, but there was nothing to tie her to. The land where they were taking their break was barren and lifeless. Cross stepped into the center of four crossroads, each made of a different colored stone.

The road they had just traveled spoke: “I will take you north.” The gravel rumbled and chunks of obsidian stone rolled down the hill.

The obsidian road was lying. They had just come from the west, not north.

“I will take you east,” said the shimmering white road.

Because of the obsidian road’s lie, Cross disbelieved the white road immediately. He never trusted anything that talked that wasn’t supposed to talk anyway. He ignored them. His old friend Sinuhe had told him that paradise was always in the east.

Cross faced the shinning white light deep in the peaceful east. In the vast distance he could make out a hint of the great wall that divided the paradises from the rest of the underworld. Its heavenly light teased him from afar.

To his left in the icy north, the vaporous gloom of Mount Mictlan towered above the smaller but more numerous Metnal Mountain range. The Inferno loomed to his right, miles away in the hazy south. Its orange glow raged within the stormy black clouds where thunder stomped and lightening stabbed.

“I will take you south.” The east road shook its sharp red stones.

“I will take you west,” said the south road with a toss of its friendly yellow stones.

All the roads lied. Years ago, he would have baffled as to why they would try to confuse him, but he had learned that it was more insane trying to figure it all out than to simply accept the underworld’s chaotic nature. The underworld begat inconsistency when a soul needed consistency the most. It rewrote its laws at will. Every time the underworld started to make sense to him, something so strange would occur that it would challenge everything he had learned. He’d given up trying to fathom its many mysteries and came to terms with its devious ways.

He said nothing to the talking roads and weighed his options. The Inferno was known to be the dead center of the underworld—emphasis on dead. Even when the mountain of fire was in its dormant period, no soul or spirit, not even the deities, would purposely journey there for fear of meeting a certain second death. Any of Cross’s bounty hunters would have expected him to run directly to paradise and not towards the Inferno.

When Gimlet was ready to move on again, Cross mounted her and guided her down the south road—the real south road—toward the terrifying mountain of fire.

Since the obsidian blade didn’t come with a sheath, Cross fashioned himself a makeshift holster out of the rope it had come with. He tied the two ends of the rope together and wrapped it round his body. The rope hung over one shoulder, circled around to his back and crossed his chest. The flat side of the wooden paddle lay along his spine and the grip pointed upwards for easy access. It was a crude, dangerous and far from perfect construction, but it was best he could do with what he had.

For stretches of road there was nothing but deserted land surrounding him, just like on the frontier. Plateaus of black glass rose up blocking his view of the Inferno and the light of paradise. In some areas there wasn’t much of a road to follow. The yellow stones were broken and patchy in spots.

Eventually, the bumpy road ended at a river not filled with water, but with a yellowish brown substance. It flowed smoothly and slowly and seemed thick enough that if Gimlet galloped her fastest, her flat hooves could possibly pass right across the surface.

He drew her away from the smelly river to give her a running start then gave her a good kick. The bull-headed lizard held fast and huffed, refusing to budge.

He leaned over his cornurus and whispered into the chipped horn protruding out of her ear: “I don’t want to go in that stinking river either. But you know where I
do
want to go? Paradise. Don’t you want to go to paradise, Gimlet? I hear they have all the hodders you could ever eat.”

That was only a guess. Having only been to paradise once, and his stay had only lasted about an hour before he was kicked out, he couldn’t have been sure. It was feasible. Paradise had everything else. Why wouldn’t they have hodders? Those rodents infested every corner of the underworld.

“Run your fastest,” he told her. “I think we can make it all the way across without falling in.”

He rubbed the top of Gimlet’s head and the cornurus raced toward the river. At the last second she hesitated. She slid and they both plopped into the gooey river with barely a splash. Cross wiped the gunk out of his eyes and held his breath. The liquid reeked worse than Gimlet’s rear end. She snorted and blew the sticky muck out of her nose and mouth as she plowed them through. The river came up to her belly.

To make matters worse, inky rain began to fall from the black clouds as soon as they climbed out of the river. The combination of the black rain and yellow puss sticking together made them look like bumblebees, especially Gimlet with her round, fat behind. And both of them smelled like a hundred outhouses.