The six newcomers followed the woman along the banks of the Styx. She moved swiftly and surely, as though she'd been along this way a thousand times before. As they waded through the mud, she spoke back over her shoulder: “You're lucky they put you here in this part of the Styx. This ring is ten miles across; you could have been walking for several days to get to Dis.”
“What’s Dis?” Jade Kim asked.
“Satan’s capital. His palace is there, all the administration is run out of there as well. It surrounds the whole of hell like a wall.”
“And you’re taking us there?” Kim’s voice was loaded with suspicion.
“Of course,” said the woman. “That's where the resistance is headquartered.”
“Tell us about the resistance.”
The woman smiled. “It’s hard to know where to start. You see, the resistance has a long history; it's been around almost as long as I have.”
“And how old are you? And, who are you?” Kim’s growing suspicion and dislike for this woman made getting an answer very urgent.”
“I've been dead for ten thousand years.” The woman laughed at the expression on their faces. “Why are you so surprised? Once you're dead, you're effectively immortal; aging is slowed by orders of magnitude, and you're healthy and robust so the torment doesn't put you under. As for who I am, you may have heard of me. My name is Rahab. That’s right, that Rahab” The woman’s voice was bitter. “I betrayed my country to help the Israelites and their god and he tossed me down here anyway.”
“So, if there’s been a resistance for all these years, why hasn't hell been overthrown?”
“It can’t be. This is it, there’s nothing more. We can’t overthrow the order here. All we can do is try to disappear, save ourselves from torment. That's not as hard as it sounds, Hell is a big place, and it takes a long time to move around in it or communicate. I've just finished a two-month walk from Dis down to Cocytus, up to the first ring, and back. The fact that there are constant patrols is a real problem, and though they don't really go out of their way to look, if they see anything untoward, they light on it immediately. And one demon is more than a match for four or five people.”
“Then how did we manage to take down that baldrick?”
“To be blunt, you got lucky. He came down for a spot of torture and fun, and you surprised him before he could react. If he'd seen you guys free before you were on him, he'd have called for some help and then zapped you with lightning from a distance.”
Once again, the members of Tango-one-five exchanged glances. The picture they were getting was that the so-called resistance wasn’t resisting at all. At best they were an escape group, an underground railway that tried to keep themselves away from the pits that made up the rings of hell. It seemed as if the people here had accepted the line that this was the ultimate end of things, that any effort to change it was doomed to futility.
Kim looked around. They were on the edge of the river, if it could be called that. It was more like a rippling strip of clear water through the mucky water surrounding it. Ahead of them, through the vile, thick mist, they saw a tall, stone tower looming. Rahab turned and put a finger to her lips, then sank lower into the mist, crouching into the mud. She moved forward slowly.
Kim followed suit, but kept looking around. The tower moved closer and closer, and she looked up. At the top, suddenly, an flare burst into existence with a foomp. The light from the signal fire lit everything around them in a dull orange glow, making the mist look a bit like tomato soup. Abruptly, their guide ducked under the muck. Kim caught a glimpse of a towering silhouette looming through the mist before she followed suit – except, she didn't duck all the way. Instead, she sank down as far as she could go while keeping her face above the surface of the mud. Simultaneously, she shrank back toward a clump of stringy, greasy grass.
The baldrick passed within five feet of her. It was mounted on what looked like an oversized rhinoceros with a scorpion-tail arched overhead – A rhinolobster, she recognized it an instant later from that last mission in Iraq, which was wading through the swamp. Looking neither left nor right, the baldrick reined his mount forward when it sniffed and started at something, and kept moving until the mist had swallowed it. The baldrick itself had been huge, twice the height and probably four or five times the weight of the one they'd killed back there.
Rahab surfaced from the mud as the rest of the Tango flight members came up for air. “If you'd attacked him, you'd have had no chance,” she said. Though that was all, the words had clearly been aimed at Kim who had her own thoughts on the matter.
It was very easy to think of ten thousand reasons why something could not be done, it took a different mindset to think of the way it could be achieved. Kim had her own ideas there, she’d thought of two ways of taking the mounted patrol down already, although much depended on what could be found locally. She’d seen the black outcrops that spoke of coal and coal meant powdered carbon. This whole area was volcanic, and that meant sulfur. Now, if there was only some saltpeter around, they had the start of an IED. “Keep a look out for yellow deposits.” She whispered to her people.
“Ahead of you ell-tee. Already been looking. There’s some in the rocks. We’re two for three so far. And there’s some pretty crystals that might be good for fragments.”
They moved on for a while before Rahab broke silence and asked, “So, what are things like back topside?”
McInery piped up. “We were all pilots in the 160th SpecOps in Iraq when the Message came. Lost a tenth of the regiment, then didn't do much of anything until the hellmouth opened in western Iraq and we got sent out to take a look at the baldrick advance. Took down the command structure of a regiment, then got outrun by harpies and taken down.”
The woman was smiling bemusedly. “You lost me at 'Message',”
Kim exchanged glances with McInery. “You don't know about the Message?”
“No, not about this Message. It wouldn’t have been the first you know.”
“Basically, God said that heaven was closed, and told everyone to lay down and die. So those people who really believed laid down and died, and the rest of us had no idea what to do. Then the Navy shot down some bald… some demons and showed us they could be killed. So we started to fight. Doing pretty good too.”
There was a bridge coming up out of the thinning mist now, next to the road they'd been wading beside for some time. Rahab turned and said, “Stay low and follow me single-file.” She crouched and moved beside the road to the base of the bridge, then slipped underneath. The members of Tango flight followed suit. There, bolted to the base of the bridge, was a rope that stretched across the river beneath the arch of the roadway. The woman took hold of the rope and started pulling herself hand-over-hand across the river. Kim looked at McInery, shrugged, and followed.
On the far side, Rahab crouched and hissed, “Okay, this is the most dangerous part. The walls that separate the fourth and fifth circles of hell are right up on the other side of this embankment, and they are constantly manned. The guards are vigilant and they will see you if you poke your head up, so you stay low and follow me as fast as you can.”
Kim nodded. SERE – still in the “evade” part. Rahab turned and, crouching, ran to a rock outcropping sticking up several dozen meters away. She looked around, then beckoned. Single-file, the escaped soldiers followed, making sure to stay crouched. They followed her from formation to formation, putting distance between them and the bridge as quickly as possible. At one large boulder, they stopped, and Rahab pointed back. Just at the edge of vision, the bridge stretched back into the mist covering the far shore of the Styx; across it snaked a long, black column of baldricks. It was following the road up the embankment to the plain and across that to the city, whose high walls were visible even here. When they moved on after a short rest break, the column was still marching with no end in sight.