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Back Happy Hour In Hell
Chapters (60)
  1. DAW Books Presents
  2. HAPPY HOURINHELL
  3. Copyright page
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. prologue
  8. one
  9. two
  10. three
  11. four
  12. five
  13. six
  14. interlude
  15. seven
  16. eight
  17. nine
  18. ten
  19. eleven
  20. twelve
  21. interlude
  22. thirteen
  23. fourteen
  24. interlude
  25. fifteen
  26. sixteen
  27. seventeen
  28. eighteen
  29. nineteen
  30. twenty
  31. twenty-one
  32. interlude
  33. twenty-two
  34. twenty-three
  35. twenty-four
  36. twenty-five
  37. twenty-six
  38. twenty-seven
  39. twenty-eight
  40. twenty-nine
  41. thirty
  42. thirty-one
  43. thirty-two
  44. thirty-three
  45. thirty-four
  46. thirty-five
  47. thirty-six
  48. thirty-seven
  49. thirty-eight
  50. thirty-nine
  51. forty
  52. forty-one
  53. forty-two
  54. forty-three
  55. forty-four
  56. forty-five
  57. forty-six
  58. forty-seven
  59. forty-eight
  60. epilogue

Asphodel Meadows was more open than Abaddon, perhaps because the great stone ceiling seemed farther away here, and it was certainly less dry and desolate, but it made up for dry with boiling swamps that could only be crossed by walking on bobbing, leathery leaves, some of which looked (and were, it turned out) more like Venus fly traps than lily pads. We spent days in the weird, twilight swamps, sloshing through mud and kicking our way through thorny vines, dodging murderous flora and fauna and generally besieged by ugly buzzing insects the size of sparrows. To add to the charm, many of the brackish ponds in Asphodel Meadows were surrounded by the bodies of the damned, purple and bloated but still twitching. Poison didn’t kill you in Hell, it just made you suffer and suffer and suffer.

What terrible thirst had driven them down to drink from such obviously unsafe waters? I patted the canteen-bag Gob had stolen for us somewhere back in Abaddon, which we had filled the last time at a clean but unpleasant-tasting spring bubbling up at the edge of the Meadows. The bag had clearly been made from the innards of something or someone I didn’t want to think about, but right now the water in it was all that kept us from joining those bulging near-cadavers, some of them split and venting gases but still not managing to die. I couldn’t exactly feel good looking at these victims of thirst, but I sure could feel grateful I wasn’t one of them.

I was afraid I was beginning to understand Hell.

The flat leaves felt as treacherous to walk on as floating plywood, not to mention that plywood doesn’t bite, but it kept us out of the frothily poisonous water. The fly traps generally left us alone—we were probably a bit too big to digest—but a few of the bolder ones decided we were worth a try. I pulled Gob out of one of them as it folded on him, just before the pencil-sized spines that served as the thing’s teeth sank into his flesh. His leg was all covered with hissing goo. The stuff splashed me as well and it burned like battery acid. When we staggered off the last leaf a few moments later and onto a patch of comparatively dry ground, we immediately threw ourselves down and rolled in the mud like water buffalo, desperate to stop the pain. It took a long time to rub the toxic sap off us, but even so, Gob barely made a sound. That amazed me, since pieces of his skin were coming off his leg in tatters. It was obvious that the crybaby got kicked out of most people down here pretty quickly.