By now you should have a good idea of what you can expect from Hell. You know to kill the first person you see when you fight your way out of a birthing sac. You know to find clothing, tools and shelter. You know that no matter what you do, how well you do, someday it’s back to being fresh meat.
Dis is the biggest city you can imagine. Tribes fight and die for territory and taking a wrong turn is a fucking death sentence. You’ll get a feel for where you should and shouldn’t go eventually, develop the kind of street smarts you need to stay a resident for more than a day.
Even so, there are places in Dis that you should know about. Let’s do a little sightseeing tour of Hell, maybe the advance warning will do you some good.
Skin Street
Allow me to tell you about the first time I saw Skin Street. I dropped out of my birthing sac onto the road, stood straight back up and got myself ready to fight. Nobody was there. Not one single person was out on a street that stretched for miles in either direction. I relaxed a little and took a look around.
Most of the streets in Dis are a labyrinthine network of buildings. You spend most of your stay in Hell paranoid that, just around the next corner, there’s someone ready to beat you down. Skin Street isn’t like that. It’s a single straight line with only the rain and the darkness to hamper visibility.
I felt more vulnerable there than I’ve felt in any other part of Dis. You ever walked into a wide, empty space and suddenly felt exposed? Yeah, imagine also being naked, unarmed and in Hell. Still, I knew what I was supposed to do. The first step was to find some clothing.
That’s where I learned how Skin Street got its name. Every building, every busted street light and gas lamp was decorated with flayed skin. I’d been in Hell long enough by that point to not be too freaked out but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t affect me. In a fucked up kind of way, it reminded me of Christmas. Y’know? People hanging wreaths and lights from their houses, that sort of thing. I remembered the time I’d spent with my family … with my kids on Christmas morning.
Feelings like that get you killed. I pushed them back down and pulled some scraps from the nearest building. If somebody was going to leave clothing material lying about, I may as well take it, right?
I didn’t know it at the time but every step I took on Skin Street was being watched. When the attack came, I didn’t even get a glimpse of the guy. Bang! My skull fractured from an expert swing of a club. Whoever hit me went for my eyes the second I hit the floor, stuck his fingers right into my sockets. I was blind and crying like a baby when he started to peel away my skin.
Here’s the thing, some people are fucked up even by Hell’s standards. The loners, serial killers, stalkers and psychos all make their way to Skin Street in the end. Most of the damned use the whole body of a kill but the Skin Street people like to take trophies. They leave their ornaments out as bait for the ignorant, skulking in the shadows and waiting for the best moment to ambush.
If you find yourself on Skin Street, you’re going to have to think fast. Forget clothing, just grab a rock, piece of wood or anything else you can use as a weapon. Stay out of the shadows, keep checking behind you and get out of there as quickly as you can.
Perdition Farms
You’re going to be chased in Hell, that’s unavoidable. At some point, you’ll stumble into somebody bigger than you or you’ll find yourself outnumbered. Forget about a fair fight, if somebody can take you down without you fighting back, you bet that’s what they’ll do.
It’s easy to lose focus when you’re running for your life. You can forget to pay attention to your surroundings. That, my friend, is a big mistake.
The outskirts of Perdition Farms are littered with billboards. They promise free food and safety to anybody fucking stupid enough to believe them. The tribes that fight over that particular territory like to herd people off the streets and into the industrial complex they call home.
The good news is that those tribes won’t kill you. The bad news is that they’re big fans of taking people alive. They’ve got a project you see, been working on it for as long as I can remember. I couldn’t tell you who originally decided that Hell should have organised food production, only that the idea stuck and that over the years, countless tribes have taken it upon themselves to try and make that dream a reality.
Get yourself captured by them and you can look forward to a bit of slave labour.
For the most part, the Perdition Farms tribes try to make use of the birthing pods as a source of food. They force their slaves to harvest them from the walls, grind them up in industrial vats, mix them with blood, body parts, rainwater and anything else that could conceivably make a broth.
The life of a slave is short, brutal and disgusting, particularly when those slaves are then used as guinea pigs for the latest concoction. You see, amniotic fluid can be drunk if you’re desperate, though drinking too much is guaranteed to make you empty your stomach from every available orifice. The flesh of the sacs is a different matter though.
I couldn’t tell you exactly what the birthing sacs are. Some people say they’re actual flesh while others swear they’re more like a fungus. What I do know is that they repair themselves over time. Eat some of their flesh and over the next few days you’ll grow a new birthing sac inside you. It’s a small mercy that you won’t live long enough to see it break through your skin. You’ll be dead shortly after your stomach bursts.
If you’re lucky, your days as a slave will end when the tribe decides they want some real meat. They’re not stupid enough to test their broth themselves, not when there’s no shortage of slaves in Hell.
Look, I can’t force you to stay out of Perdition Farms. I can only offer advice. In my opinion, if you think you’re being herded there, it’s better to take whatever’s to hand and cut your own throat. I’d take fresh meat status a hundred times before spending another day on the farms.
The Boneyard
So maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey. I’m the kind of nutjob who’d join a cult. Is there anything in Hell for me?”
If that sounds like you, the Boneyard has you covered. You see, there’s a certain kind of religious fanatic who really does belong in Hell. I’m not talking about the old dears who bake cakes to raise money for the new church roof here. I’m talking about the guys who went to war because God commanded it, who burned women for supposedly consorting with demons and who saw nothing wrong with fucking the odd kid.
When those people get to Hell, they’re too thick-headed to make sense of what happened. Why face reality when you can pretend it’s all just a test of faith? They find likeminded folk in the Boneyard.
I’m told that at one time, the Boneyard was a cathedral surrounded by a cemetery that stretched from horizon to horizon. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know. These days, it’s a shanty town of temples and churches built from materials scavenged from the streets. Everywhere you look, you’ll find wild-eyed zealots preaching their own twisted version of redemption and gangs of masked men on the prowl for fresh converts.
Mortification of the flesh is the main pastime in the Boneyard. If you listen to the cacophony of sermons, you’ll be informed of how the flesh is wicked and must be purged of sin. How lucky we are to be given such a holy duty, how fortunate to be given the opportunity to redeem ourselves before God.
The people of the Boneyard have had a long time and plenty of fucking practice when it comes to mastering torture and degradation. I’m not a good person. I’ve killed, raped and cannibalised but I can honestly tell you I’d never have been able to dream up some of the shit that goes on in the Boneyard.
I wandered in there by accident once and I’ve never been able to get what I saw out of my brain. I watched a woman, naked and bound, forced onto her knees and violated with iron rods. A preacher sewed his own eyes and lips shut in front of a crowd before sawing off his manhood with a piece of slate. A boy of maybe fourteen was publicly crucified, a girl was drowned in shit, an older man had sharpened flint pushed under his fingernails … I could list off a hundred other atrocities done in the name of redemption.
Stay away from the Boneyard. The people there decided that Hell just isn’t hellish enough for their liking.
Forget about redemption. Forget about God. The only way out of Hell is by riding a pillar of fire and taking over a living body. Focus on that if you want to escape. The damned can’t offer you salvation. The damned only offer pain.