Free The Fall of Hades by Jeffrey Thomas Page B

the shotgun-wielder could launch another blast. She saw a figure in a white uniform, wearing a goggle-eyed helmet with a perforated snout like a gas mask, start to duck back down behind a droning ventilation box of some kind.
    He wasn’t fast enough; the chunks of bone hit him in the face before he could complete the move. One of the goggle eyes was punched in and the top of the helmet split open, as did the skull within it. The exhaust from the ventilation machine sent a poof of misted blood curling gracefully into the air before it dispersed.
    The man’s amplified screaming from behind the machine incensed the person who had been calling to her. “So you’re an Angel, huh, bitch?”
    Trying to ignore her own blood as it wound down her neck and below her high collar, Vee bellowed hoarsely, “You shot me first, fucker! Okay, if you don’t believe I’m an Angel, I’ll go!”
    “Too late for that now, lady—you shot one of our boys!”
    “Fuck your good ole boys, you redneck fuck!”
    A few moments of silence, apart from the wailing curses of the wounded man, before the voice finally came back again. “If you’re not a Demon, then stay where you are and put your weapon down. We’ll move in and talk to you.”
    “Oh yeah, right…and why should I believe you don’t mean me harm now?”
    “Because now I think I believe you, lady.”
    “Why now?”
    “Because a Demon wouldn’t say ‘good ole boys’ and ‘redneck,’ I figure.”
    Vee digested that, and thought it was probably a good thing these expressions had come back to her so readily from her forgotten life. Still doubtful, though, she yelled, “You can come, and we can talk, but I don’t feel comfortable putting down my gun, sorry!”
    “Too late for that,” said a voice close behind her.
    Vee spun and on instinct fired Jay as she did so. Her semicircle of bullets, like the swing of a scythe, knocked down two of the four white-uniformed, helmeted figures that were rushing her. Their torsos were thick with body armor, however, and a half-second later all four were firing their own weapons in unison. Assault rifles sprayed her in zigzags, and a shotgun blast sent her crashing back into the tree-like pipe. She slid down it, ragged and pumping blood from over a dozen holes, her nose caved in and blood flooding down the back of her throat. Jay clattered beside her as her arms went limp.
    Before Vee lost consciousness, she tilted her head up groggily to blink at the lead figure as he stood over her.
    “You sure were pretty,” he drawled. “Well, you will be again. But for now—” and he extended a handgun, put a bullet into her forehead “—that’s for shooting poor Earl in the head, bitch.”

11: THE HOLDING TANKS
    She opened her eyes to see lazy tendrils of blood swirling before her eyes. In the next instant, Vee’s body was in an instinctive panic, her eyes bulging and legs thrashing, even though there was no way she could actually drown.
    She floated in some nearly gelatinous solution, contained within a large glass cylinder, the inner surface of which she began to thump with her palms. Through the glass she could see that hers was one in a row of such containers. Most of them appeared empty, but in the cylinder to her immediate left floated what was undoubtedly some species of Demon.
    The naked flesh of its body was eggplant purple, its head devoid not only of hair but of any facial features apart from its metallic golden eyes, which stared back at Vee inscrutably. More acclimated to its prison than she, it hung in its fluid calmly, or at least fatalistically, very slowing fanning wings with a translucent patagium stretched across long, finger-like bone struts. The utterly alien entity was both terrifying and beautiful.
    Vee broke eye contact to look up at the hinged cover to the tank, and she started beating at this next. As if in response to her efforts, the level of amniotic fluid began to drop, and Vee pressed her face up into the gap