BRANT

As he lay at the bottom of the airshaft Brant came to the realization that human beings are incapable of imagining hell while they're alive.

Having been raised Catholic, he had spent a fair amount of time trying in the past.

In Sunday school when the teacher was trying to tell them why it was so important to live a virtous life. as a young man trying futily to stop himself as he fell deeper and deeper a life of drugs and crime. As a man, bellied up to some bar, envisioning the fate he was sure waited for him just beyond the horizon - at the bottom of the next bottle or in the magazine of some other slimeball's gun.

But he knew now that all that time spent musing on what hell might be like was wasted. Every human has a mental failsafe that keeps them from even imagining true discomfort.

He now knew that the amount pain that was possible on earth, much less in the underworld, was so much more than any person could imagine without experiencing it for themselves.

The pain was insufferable.
Excruciating.
Like a being pricked by million flaming needles all at once -
vor being caught without your skin in a sandstorm of broken glass.

And he hadn't died...

He had fallen thirteen stories through a stainless steel tube. A set of ducts that met each other every 50 feet or so in a diagonal junction, polished to a featurless, gleaming, surgical finish. After the first wrong step there had been nothing for him to do but slip-thump, slip-thump, slip-thump, through a descending infinity of steep, slippery z shaped junctions - feet first, flailing for purchase while he still could.

Now Brant's body was bent and broken, crumpled in on itself, limbs curled and folded like a pretzel at the bottom, suspended on a grate over a fan that threw flashing shadows in the dim light of the chamber where he now lay.

And he hadn't died...
Why hadn't he died?

The lower half of his body must have cushioned the upper just enough to keep him alive, and protect his important parts enough to keep him from dying - but that was it. He couldn't move, he couldn't scream, but he could still breathe.

The light flickered through the fan, and all was quiet except for the wet sound of his own breathing. Brant waited for his time to finally come, he prayed for it...
The minutes like hours slowly ticked away.