Wrath James White presents Poisoning Eros I & II (29 page)

One of the women was already near death from a slash
across her femoral artery that had emptied most of the blood from
her veins and was still hard at work pumping out the rest of it. A
sheet of blood poured from the bridge to the concrete below where
Gloria had once watched street performers break dance for tips. The
dying woman’s lover, a long, lean, redhead with small breasts but
wide hips and a firm plump ass that porn producers would have loved
for anal scenes, was still licking her pussy, sucking her clit,
trying to bring the woman to one last orgasm before she died.
Gloria looked at the cut on the redhead’s thigh. It was too
shallow. She had missed the artery.

“She’s gone,” Gloria said, startling the woman from
her rapture.

“Gloria!” The redheaded woman scrambled from between
her lovers legs and knelt down between Gloria’s thighs. She began
licking Gloria’s clit. Gloria looked down at Red’s lover, whose
eyes had begun to glaze. Her chest had ceased its rise and fall.
She was dead.

“Did you love her?”

The redhead stopped licking Gloria’s cum-drenched
snatch for a moment and looked up at her.

“Huh?”

“Did you love her?”

“We were in love. We got married last year in San
Francisco. You know, before they repealed the law.”

Gloria didn’t know anything about the law. She had
still been in hell when the Supreme Court had given gays the right
to marry and then when the constitution had been changed to outlaw
it again. Even had she been on earth, she doubted she would have
cared. It was a human thing and her humanity had been surgically
excised by the Masters.

“Do you love me?” Gloria asked.

“I do. Of course, I do. You are my goddess.”’

“Will you let us both go to hell alone?” Gloria
asked, pointing to the feeble wound on Red’s thigh.

“I-I can’t. I’m afraid.”

The NYPD were closing in on them with their guns
drawn.

“Stop! Stop right there!”

“Don’t you fucking move! You in the costume! Don’t
fucking move!”

“Hands in the air!”

“Get down on your knees!”

“Come with me,” Gloria said, ignoring the cops
swarming around her like gnats, reaching out her hand to the young
lesbian.

The redheaded woman was still on her knees, smiling
up at Gloria. On the bridge, it looked as if every cop in New York
had assembled. There were hundreds of guns pointed at them.

The woman nodded. “Take me. Take me with you. I
can’t do it myself.”

“Don’t do it! Hands in the air! Hands in the air!
Don’t you fucking do it!”

Gloria raised her talons and slashed them across the
redhead’s throat, severing her trachea, esophagus, and cervical
vertebrae, sending her head spinning off the bridge to the concrete
below, her long mane of crimson hair twirling into the
darkness.

The bullets began to hail down, pounding into
Gloria’s flesh. She took more than a hundred rounds before she
finally dropped. A demon has so few vital organs, and nearly every
part of her was expendable, replaceable. Except for that one tiny
spot in the prefrontal lobe that housed her soul. Out of hundreds
of rounds fired from the policemen’s semiautomatic guns, a single
bullet found that sweet spot. There was a moment of darkness and
then an explosion of flames as Gloria found herself hurtling toward
hell.

Gloria descended into hell, plummeting into the Lake
of Fire, liquid fire burning her flesh without incinerating. The
searing heat stung her skin as she swam to shore, where the beach
for as far as she could see was filled with her followers. Vlad was
nowhere in sight. So much for waiting for her. No doubt he’d run
off to warn the Masters. She wondered if they had even needed his
warning. They must have had some way of monitoring her movements on
Earth.

The demons who usually preyed at the edge of these
waters for fallen souls found themselves overwhelmed. The lake of
hell had overrun its banks and millions upon millions of souls were
emerging from the flaming sea.

The sky was black with souls hurtling into the
boiling lake of protoplasm. Even the angels who normally patrolled
the skies had retreated, as many of them had been pulled down into
the Lake of Fire by the sudden deluge of souls. The lakes flooded
hell with a tsunami of the damned. The humans were attacking
anything they found that was not human, forcing those demons caught
in the tide into the flaming waters. The war had begun.

Demons were pouring from the tunnels. They hacked
through the human souls like scythes through wheat, but the humans
were relentless. The demons attacked savagely, fighting with hatred
and rage behind them, propelling them, giving them strength.
Hundreds of thousands of demons attacked with studded clubs, planks
of wood fitted with razors and knives, with carved-out skulls of
past victims, bloody flesh still dripping gore, with anything they
could grab and use as a weapon. But they were horribly outnumbered,
and as Gloria herself had discovered during her tour in eternal
torment, souls in hell regenerated.

There were millions of humans, and those who had
just arrived with Gloria had not yet learned to fear the inferno
and its masters. They were on a mission. They were determined to
wrestle hell from the demon’s grasp in honor of their infernal
lord, Gloria. And they learned quickly to attack the demons in
hordes and relinquish them of their weapons.

The demons who wouldn’t give up easily, like those
caught by the shore, were soon overrun by the masses of newly-dead
humans engulfing them like toxic waves from the flaming sea. Those
in the way were trampled, torn to pieces, disemboweled,
dismembered, pulverized beyond recognition despite their remarkable
strength. The overwhelming force from the sheer
number
of
humans shattered the ranks of demons. But the destruction done to
them was temporary, because like the humans they had attempted to
annihilate, the demons were spirits and could not be permanently
destroyed.

And some believed they would ultimately be
triumphant, that Gloria’s insane coup was a
temporary
insanity. But those who fought back did so in vain. They quickly
discovered there was no victory, not for hell, not for them. And
maybe they were right, they figured, and this was temporary. But
even so, it made no sense to stick with the losing side. When this
entire mess was finished, they’d lick their wounds and pledge
eternal loyalty to the victor. It didn’t matter to them who that
might be.

The humans embraced them, converted them, made them
loyal followers of Gloria. For now, at least. It suited the demons
well to spend their days this way.

Those who refused to succumb were dragged off into
the caverns deep within the bowels of hell.

Time to make an example of the non-believers, it was
decided. One demon with a ring of baby skulls adorning its belt was
dragged across the dirt, his claws digging into the ground in a
feeble attempt to gain purchase. His enormous antlers, filed down
into dozens of deadly points was torn from his head. He was knocked
down and he crashed to his knees, roaring as he fell, his knotty
forehead smashing into the cave wall, a tusk snapping off, the
thick scorpion tail protruding from the center of his spine
snapping and cracking wildly until it was chopped off with an
axe.

The mob descended on him and at first he held them
at bay, smashing in their skulls with swipes from his massive fists
but they kept coming and coming and when they retreated they took
pieces with them. Like biting insects, relentless, pervasive,
taking at first nips of flesh to aggravate until they were
retreating with larger pieces, and then with more vital pieces …
gnawing, chomping, grinding away limbs, chunks of its distorted,
freakish face, and they fled with these pieces, scattering them
throughout the caves, dropping chunks of the demon into the
bottomless pit of the Lake of Fire.

The armless, legless, dickless torso demon began the
arduous task of searching for his stolen body parts, unable to
regenerate without them. It wobbled uselessly, like a turtle
flipped on its back, trying desperately to move through the cave.
After some time, the demon realized he had moved maybe an inch. He
wanted to scream his rage, to demand they bring back his stolen
body, but they had ripped out his tongue and vocal cords as
well.

Torso demon began his endless trek through the
passages of hell and wondered who the fuck he was being loyal to
and whether or not it was worth it.

*

Led by Gloria, humans and newly recruited demons,
hell spawn, wraiths, fallen seraphim, fauns, nephilim, ghosts, the
innocent and the damned thrown together in a stygian cesspool of
primordial ooze seeping from the filthy walls swarmed the chambers,
overtaking and overthrowing everything in their path.

The catacombs were soon littered with body parts of
hell’s denizens torn apart in the fight, unable to find their own
scattered limbs and organs to regenerate, and littered too with
those too afraid to fight, too afraid to join the cause, swept up
in the maelstrom and destroyed by the very force of it. Some feared
the Masters more than they feared Gloria and her endless masses and
they refused to succumb no matter what they were threatened
with.

And some reminded Gloria what a fool she was,
believing she could defeat the Masters—and Satan himself.

“Let Satan show himself!” Gloria exclaimed. “Let the
almighty Morning Star join in the fight. Goddamned coward.” She
spat in the dirt.

Buried deep within the passages of hell—a section
Gloria had not seen before, not surprising considering the vastness
of Hades—she began to discover various rooms, each filled with
tortured souls in various stages of experimentation.

She freed those willing to join her—or those at
least willing to lie and promise their eternal devotion in exchange
for their freedom from their current state of misery and torment.
She wasn’t foolish enough to believe these converts were suddenly
true devotees, but she had the strength and the numbers, and they
would all fall into place or be destroyed. There was no third
option, and she wasn’t concerned.

The few stubborn idiots too foolish to lie were left
to their various tortures. A disemboweled demon forced to slowly
eat his own intestines, pulling through the lanky length of fiber
and muscle and tissue like sausage through a skinny casing, sucking
it back, devouring the ruined meat. Beside him, a human man watched
helplessly while strapped into a chair as the ebola virus slowly
ate away his flesh, leaving behind gangrenous holes oozing diseased
pus, the putrid smell making him gag, the sight of his flesh
dissolving into puddles of blood and liquid tissue making him
vomit. Others were stretched on racks until joints popped out of
their sockets, until flesh tore; eyes were repeatedly gouged out
with scalpels the moment they regenerated, flicking the base,
slowly carving out the ciliary muscle until a slight pop! was
followed by unremitting pain, blood flooding the cheeks, filling
the nostrils. One eye, the other, regenerate, repeat. Face covered
with gore, screams bursting from chests until exhaustion set in,
until they’re unable to utter another sound. Orifices stretched to
unrecognizable proportions by medieval instruments. And this
still
was the better alternative to joining Gloria, some
believed. She found their stupidity, their lack of faith
mind-numbing. When Satan got wind of this, they taunted through
agonized moans and shrieks, all hell’s gonna break loose—so to
speak.

And somewhere in the back of her mind this worried
Gloria, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that now. She
would face Satan when he finally decided to join this fight. She
was quite surprised he hadn’t joined in by now. What the hell was
he waiting for?

Down another deserted corridor Gloria led another
contingent. The rest of the massive crowd had been instructed to
wait. Traveling through narrow tunnels with a massive force behind
her was beginning to get a bit claustrophobic. Besides, they
weren’t actually
getting
anywhere. They had destroyed
everything in their path that they hadn’t absorbed. As far as
Gloria knew, the only thing left in her way were the Masters. And
Satan. Maybe Vlad, depending on which side he was on now, but that
didn’t worry her. Vlad was a spec in the grand scheme of
things.

Beyond the antechamber a figure was outstretched as
if in welcome, suspended from the rock walls like a monarch
butterfly stretched out on a board. His face was contorted into an
unnatural grimace. Here was a creature who had faced inexorable
pain and suffering. Gloria couldn’t tell if it was a human or a
demon, it was so badly disfigured. She couldn’t help but feel a
twinge of compassion for it. She was surprised she still felt any
positive
emotions and wondered if she should be concerned.
Compassion was a human emotion after all, something she shouldn’t
still experience? Did this somehow make her more human? No, she
decided. She was a god and could experience any fucking emotion she
desired. If she felt any twinge of compassion for another creature,
so be it.

“Cut it down,” she instructed, but before anyone
moved a rustle of air from the suspended figure made her look
up.

The thing wasn’t dead, as she’d suspected it was.
Slowly its eyes opened, and in them Gloria recognized something
strange and beautiful: compassion. Impossible for a demon but this
was definitely not a human. It was too big, too powerful. And just
as slowly it began to move, slightly raising its badly beaten head.
A delicate rustling began to grow in force, swelled from a gentle
breeze to a gale force wind. Its gigantic wings expanded, until
they were wrapped around the things horribly beaten body. The
wings, once magnificent, were filthy, torn, shredded remnants of
their former glory, streaked with dirt and piss and shit, trampled
and stomped until they barely resembled wings anymore. This thing
had once been an angel. The angel exhaled deeply, as if unfurling
his wings brought him great relief.