Good stuff, he thought in a detached, lofty way. Old tech. Dependable.
He reached the trees among a peppering of shots trying to find him, a tisssip passing by his ear and singing grand elation in his feet.
He crashed into something sharp, felt a biting cut in his left leg, and rolled downslope into a hollow. Shots snapped by overhead. More distant screams. He brought the rifle up to cover the trees, but no one advanced toward him.
He crawled back up the slope and saw that what had cut him was a small crashed aircraft. Its shell of slick shiny aluminum gave him back his own face, and he was surprised to see he was heavily bearded, with long scraggly locks of brown hair.
The aircraft was light, carrying cameras and a small pilot's seat that would have fit a monkey. On its stubby nose it carried an odd emblem: a swastika
from which bloomed a vertical trident. Satan's pitchfork?
Rounds cut through the nearby trees, ricocheted spang off rocks, but Markham was transfixed by his own mysteriously transformed self. When he had died in Hell before, he had only a thin beard and short, servicable hair. Now, reborn, both were long.
He felt this must mean something, but before he could think it through, a figure broke from the nearby trees and ran toward him. Markham brought the rifle up and sighted along the barrel and then saw that it was the Englishman.
"Thought-I might-join you," the man gasped as he slipped on pine needles and crashed into the gully.
What're they doing out there?"
"You confused them. They expect ordinary people in Hell to take whatever comes along."
"Huh." Somewhere a machine gun opened up, raking the trees above with heavy fire.
"Not surprising, is it? Most are frightfully confused and numb. They've been so quite a long while."
"How do you know?"
"I've talked to a few in Greek-I learned a smattering of it at university."
Yeah? What do the Greeks say?"
Rounds thumped into the branches.
"Oh, not only Greeks. All the older ones had to learn Greek."
"Older ones?" Markham studied their situation. How could they get away?
"Oh, Egyptians, Babylonians, even hunter-gatherer types from prehistory."
"They're here?"
"Indeed. They may be the majority."
Markham remembered his estimate of the population. Fifty, maybe a hundred billion. "This isn't a solely Christian Hell, then, huh?"
"Not at all. The Babylonians think they're in some sort of staging area. Any moment a winged chariot trailing a glowing sun will descend and make this into a lush forest, they say, a heaven rich in date palms and fresh springs and easy women."
"Heaven? This?"
"Compared with scratching out an existence in a bleak dry plain, using a wooden plow? Yes."
"Not my idea of even a pleasant weekend."
"Nor mine. I say, what are you planning?"
"Nothing."
"When you dashed away, I thought-"
"Well, I didn't think. I just wasn't going to get my brains fried."
"Nor I."
"Why didn't you do something?"
"I am not the, ah, active type."
"Who are you?"
"A philosopher, Bert-"
"Fine, look, we've got to maneuver away from-"
Something napped lazily overhead. As Markham looked up he saw it bank and turn, a thing ponderous and scaly and unmistakably interested in them.
Its head was huge. Yellow eyes, with fractured red irises like shattered glass.
They peered down at the men from behind a pig snout with inflamed fleshy nostrils. Below these, flaring red-rimmed holes that dripped a bile-green pus.
Where a mouth should have been there was a crusted band of hairy warts, sickly white cysts and brimming brown sores. Its head was shaped like a bulldog's, blunt and squat and massive. As Markham watched, it hovered on languidly flapping wings and surveyed the area, its head swiveling completely around, as if on ball bearings. Then it fixed upon them again, selecting them from all it could see. Its eyes locked with Markham's. A moment passed between them, the yellow eyes flashing with malevolent lust and appetite, the fevered ancient communication of carnivore and prey.
It began its descent. The vast body was scaly, triangular, and its six-fingered claws grasped the air in anticipation. It brought bony arms up for the attack, sharp nails of crimson clashing and scraping together.
It came down on unseen currents, heavy and lumbering, its skin like aged brass. Then its swollen neck opened and Markham saw that he had been wrong: the apparent skull was only the upper half of some grotesquely misshapen head.
The neck yawned greedily, showing orange teeth that came to glinting points.
Muscles knotted, splitting the mouth into a thin, rapacious grin.
"My ... word," the Englishman whispered.
"Yeah."
The thing was heavy and inexorable. It looked aerodynamically impossible, a huge mass suspended aloft on gossamer wings of coppery reptilian sheen. And it thrust these wings forward and back as though it were batting at the air, not trying to skim through it. The things could move easily and swiftly while high up, but descent seemed difficult.
It doesn't seem to be maintaining an airflow over the wing surfaces, Markham thought. More like using the wings as oars. Maybe Bernoulli's laws don't work in Hell. But then something else must...
Slow but sure, it came.
"Run!" the Englishman cried.
"No, somebody'll just shoot us." Markham tried to think clearly.
"They'll be aiming at that."
"They already are."
They heard the thunk of bullets hitting the side of it. The leathery hide buckled in waves, spreading away from the impact, and then oozed back into place.
"No penetration," Markham said thoughtfully.
"If even machine guns can't puncture it, I fail to see what we-"
"Say, right-puncture. That's it."
"That's what?"
"It isn't flying at all. The thing's a damned balloon."
The Englishman named Bert looked doubtful. "It is a supernatural beast. You cannot assume the same laws-"
"Hell I can't. Or do you want to wait for it to come down here and eat you?"
"We should run."
"It moves sideways too fast." Markham assessed the monstrous bulk coolly.
"Even if we got across the clearing, through the machine guns, it would keep up."
"Then what-"
"We let it come to us."
"We're hopelessly-"
"Get some dried pine branches, quick."
The thing filled the air, ponderous and making a slobbering noise of greedy anticipation. The mouth split wider, purpling lips bulging, teeth gleaming a vibrant orange. Its eyes glowed with stupid energy. From the leering lips came a snakelike hiss. Abruptly the thing bellowed a high piercing attack note, a sound like a dozen blaring trumpets filled with spit.
The two men gathered some branches and squatted in the lowest part of the gully. The demons flexed rippling muscles and its distorted head lowered to bite.
"Got a light?" Markham asked.
"A what?"
The Englishman fished a worn book of pasteboard matches from a pocket. It tore when Markham opened it. He tried three of the thin matches and each time the head crumbled away.
He felt wind fluttering his hair.
"Where'd you get these?"
"I ... off a ... dead person."
"Oh great. Been out in the rain-" The fourth match lit, flared, and then the beating of monstrous wings blew it out.
"Stand over me!"
"But-it's so-"
"Do it!"
The spindly man stooped over Markham and the fifth match split in two. Markham cupped the sixth-and last-match and struck it carefully. It burst into welcome orange and he quickly touched it to the pile of pine branches. They caught.
Flames jumped through the pile, aided now by the fluttering wind of the beast.