I was never a very good person in life. I cheated on my wife, cheated on my taxes, stole from my business partners, beat my kids any time they looked at me wrong and overall just acted as a general scumbag. In hindsight, I see it clearly. I wish I could start over and do it all again.
One night, on my way home from my law firm, a freak ice storm covered the highway. I had four-wheel drive and didn’t think about the falling sleet and hail, until a truck in front of me began to slide, then jack-knifed and flipped, landing not even ten feet in front of my SUV. I had no time to react. I slammed the brakes at the very last millisecond but ended up going into the side of the trailer at seventy miles an hour, without a seat belt on. The last thing I remember was time slowing down to a crawl as I flew through the windshield, shards of safety glass glittering like stars all around me in the winter air. Then it was blackness.
I awoke, screaming and hyperventilating, in the same blackness, but without any pain. In the darkness, I felt my body, running my hands over my arms, legs, chest and face. I didn’t seem to have a single broken bone or laceration. I was even in the same expensive Armani suit I had been wearing during the accident. It seemed miraculous that I had somehow survived unscathed, without even a tear in my suit.
I stood in the darkness, putting my hands out in front of me and stumbling around in short, hesitant steps. After a few minutes of this, I ran into a wall. The wall felt warm and seemed to vibrate under my fingers. I pushed on it, and my hands went into it, like pushing into silly putty. I began to rip away pieces of the wall and throw them behind me, and a shaft of light pierced through the hole I had just made.
The light illuminated the cavern I was in, showing a floor of cobblestones soaked in layer after layer of dark red, clotted blood. The wall itself looked like the guts of some massive creature. It had long shards of white bone running through the top and bottom with smaller pieces of bone connecting them. The rest was some light red and vibrating tissue, like intestines that had been unspooled to form a never-ending, solid wall.
I looked down at my hands, and saw with horror that dozens of black, maggot-like worms squirmed all down my wrists and hands. With a yelp and a jump backwards, I frantically tried to shake them off, but I could feel hot stings coming from my hands as they bit me, over and over. After a few minutes of writhing and rubbing my hands together, I got them all off. I could feel my heart beating out of my chest and instinctually kept checking the rest of my body to make sure I didn’t miss any more of the biting, blood-sucking maggots.
The soft, fiery light that came through the hole I made in the living wall showed me a door on the opposite side of the hall from the wall. From what I could see, it had a straight hallway that went off into the darkness. Having no other good options, I started walking down the hall, the miniscule light quickly fading into nothing. I put my hands out in front of me and felt the smooth, stone walls. I walked in a straight line for what felt like hours before seeing a glimmer of red light, at first only a tiny pinpoint. As I walked towards it, it grew and grew, until I realized I was staring at a door that must have been twenty feet tall, surrounded by polished white bones on all sides. The bones that composed the framework of the door were so massive they looked like they had come from a blue whale, as if someone had taken the ribs off of one and fused them together into an archway.
All I could think of as I approached this door was my wife, my child, my job. Everything that I identified as me, everything that gave me meaning. Despite having cheated on my wife many times, I still loved her deep down. After all, I had protected her from the knowledge of what a poor husband I was, simply out of love for her. I had never let my five year-old child suspect that his father was involved in anything illegal or immoral. My love for them had made me protect them from all the things I had to do to guarantee us a better life, and now I just wanted to see them again, to be with them. I knew I was basically a good person, and I just wanted another chance to prove it.
I kept their faces in my mind’s eye as I walked through the massive archway. It looked big enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. I saw flickering light coming from the other side, and, taking a deep breath in, stepped over the threshold. What I saw horrified me and shocked me into stillness.
I had walked into an open field, the dark red and black clouds above blocking out any sky. The light filtering through them cast everything in a bloody glow. The field itself looked at first like a farmer’s field, with finely-spaced rows of soil plowed into perfect lines. Growing out of the earth stood many squat brown plants covered in thorns. Out of the tip of each one, a large egg sack clung, weighing the plant down and bending many of them to the ground. The egg sacs were pale and unbroken, filled with fluid and dark silhouettes in each one. I saw beings writhing, one adult-sized silhouette in each sack, some putting their faces up to the wall of the sack in a silent scream, others trying to reach their arms or legs out through. But the sturdy covering of the yolk just bowed out with their arms and legs and didn’t pop. It looked as if the people inside the eggs were all drowning.
I quickly began speed-walking between the lines of horrifying plants, wondering whether the plants fed on the people in the sacks or whether it just fed them and gave birth to them. As I passed the first row, one of the sacks burst and a torrent of fetid, rotting fluid burst out, dumping a beautiful, naked woman at my feet. She had long blonde hair and green eyes, flawless skin and a tiny, upturned nose. She heaved in a deep breath, as if she had been drowning, before looking up at me.
“Oh God,” she said, “please don’t hurt me.” I shook my head and helped her to her feet.
“Why would I hurt you, ma’am?” I asked.
“Everyone here hurts me,” she said, starting to weep. Her fingers shook as she sobbed, bowing her head in a pathetic way. I grabbed her arm.
“I promise you, I will not hurt you. I am one of the good guys. But I think we should get going,” I said. “We really need to find a way out of here.”
“Out of here?” she asked, crying and laughing at the same time. “There is no way out of here! Don’t you know where you are?” I shook my head. “This is Hell. I don’t know if it is Hell in the Judeo-Christian sense but it is close enough. Everyone here is dead.”
“I don’t feel dead,” I said, rubbing my hands over my suit, my face, my hair. “Everything seems intact.” She nodded at this, her crying quieting down as she focused on my face.
“Everyone comes in like that,” she said. “Until they catch you, torture you, burn you, rip you apart. Then when your body is too spent to feel anymore, they bury you in these fields. These plants grow overnight, encasing your body in a sac and bringing it up to the surface, where it starts to feed you and revive you. After you’re healed enough for another round of torture, the fruit of the plant bursts.”
“But who brings you to these fields? Who is in charge?” I asked. Her pupils dilated, her eyes wide, she whispered the answer.
“Angels.” At that moment, a bolt of lightning shot down from the red sky, bursting open dozens of plants nearby and showering us in a mixture of blood, amniotic fluid, thorns and leaves. I grabbed her arm.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “We can talk more when we get somewhere safe.” She laughed at this, as if it was the most absurd thing she had ever heard, and we began to run.
“By the way,” I said, gasping between breaths, “my name is Jay.”
“Angela,” she said. At the end of the field, I saw a paved road. It had countless potholes and cracks running through it, and some parts of it had been wiped out and fallen into a stream that ran parallel to it on the farther side, but I was still glad to see some sign of a trail.
“A road!” I cried, pointing in excitement. “Maybe that road leads somewhere out of this hellhole.” She shook her head in amazement at my stupidity, but I ignored her. I had to hope there was some way out, that this wasn’t just a never-ending landscape of horrors under a blood-red sky.
The road seemed to stretch out in both directions forever, fading into each horizon in a perfectly straight line. I could see parts of the road were entirely missing, and it looked like some bridges had collapsed farther down in the direction I was looking, so I turned the opposite way and started moving, holding Angela’s hand as I went. Her presence gave me some comfort. She even reminded me of my wife to a certain degree, as they both had very light skin and an overall Irish cast to their faces.
“If this is Hell,” I said, “then why are you here?” She looked up at me, surprised by the question. Heaving a deep sigh, she looked away.
“No sense in keeping secrets here, I guess,” she said. “We are just going to get captured and tortured to death again anyways. That’s all it is here. Just a never-ending cycle of pain and death. A lot of these people completely lose their minds.” She rubbed her hand over her eyes, as if her head hurt her.
“I always wanted to be an actress, but I grew up having no money. I met an older man who said he believed in me, and that he wanted to take me to LA. But we needed money to get from the East Coast to LA and to live there while I looked for work. He convinced me to rob a bank with him to get it. Needless to say, it didn’t work out very well. He got spooked and murdered two of the tellers before a security guard came out and shot him in the head. I grabbed his gun and killed the guard, took the money and ran. When the cops caught up with me, I pulled over slowly, put the gun to my temple and pulled the trigger. I had absolutely no intention of going to prison for the rest of my life. I was just a stupid kid, really.” I couldn’t believe this angelic, innocent-looking young woman had participated in murders. It shocked me to my core.
“If this is Hell,” I said, “I don’t really feel I belong. Yes, I did some bad things, but I never killed anyone, never put a gun to anyone’s head, never even killed an animal.” She looked up at me sharply.
“You’re only lying to yourself,” she said. “No one innocent comes here. But I don’t really care what you did, to be honest. We are both trapped here, and that’s all I need to know. There is no hope. Just don’t betray me. Our only chance of surviving longer is to stick together and trust each other.”
As we ran, the fields began to fade and what looked like an old, dilapidated Western town began to take their place. I saw people hanged by their neck from the street signs. Overall it seemed the safest place in the area, however, so I began to pull Angela over in that direction.
There was an old saloon with swinging gates, and we walked inside, wary of any traps. In the corner, I saw what looked like a medieval knight with massive white wings flowing out from his back. He held a man’s mouth open while another man in a full suit of glowing blue armor poured molten lead down his throat. The man screamed for a moment, then the lead ate through his neck and he collapsed to the ground.
“Angels,” Angela said to me. Their heads turned towards us, but there were no faces there. It was just an empty black void under a platinum helmet, one that seemed to glow from its own inner light. They approached me, and I grabbed Angela.
“Please, please, take the girl and let me live!” I screamed, my heart bursting with anxiety in my chest. They looked at each other then back at me. “Tell me how to get out of here and she is all yours. I’ll hold her down while you burn her alive or cut her to pieces. Please. I just want to see my family.”
To my utter astonishment, they nodded at me. One spoke in a deep, slow cadence, his voice sounding like thousands of voices of different pitches all mixing and echoing over each other.
“You can ride the lightning up to Earth,” one said. “The lightning connects us to those calling on magic, those who call on demons or try to contact ghosts. Any who are weak and small can be overwhelmed by those who ride the lightning up to them and possess them. But you will always return to us in the end.” I nodded, throwing Angela in their direction and turning to run back to the field.
Lightning was crashing down all around me now, bursting egg sacks and plants every few seconds, but I was no longer afraid of it. I looked up at the sky and saw a swirling whirlpool of red and black, and stood under it as a bolt struck me directly in the center of my head.
I felt myself being sucked up at an incredible speed and saw, above the clouds, a deep void. I fell into the void and saw through another set of eyes.
Two teens played with a Ouija board in a graveyard, giggling as if it were a game, surrounded by black candles.
“Demons, we call on you to answer us!” one of them with a high voice shrieked. As his mouth opened, I rushed into it. His eyes widened in shock as I pushed his soul out, sending it spiraling back into the void I had just emerged from. I now had complete control of his body.
“Hey man,” the other kid asked me, “are you OK?” I nodded, smiling, looking around at the clear sky and feeling relieved to be back.
“Never been better, buddy.”