Yuri’s mama always made eggs and shkvarky (chopped and fried pork fat) for breakfast. As he sat on his bed the scent of fried pork wafted into him from the kitchen. They lived very good in Pripyat. Tato worked at the power plant nearby. He promised Yuri they would go and ride on the big ferris wheel in the city’s amusement park. Many people left the city on buses days earlier. Yuri wasn’t even sure how many days had passed. The city stood empty outside his window. Work kept tato a long time. Sometimes mama would turn on some music and dance around the apartment, or tell Yuri stories to help him go to sleep at night. She would sit next to him and stroke his hair with her thin fingers. Mama was so pale.

Adrian wandered through the decaying apartment block. The silence of this place was maddening. Most of the doors to the apartments were left open in haste to leave. Debris lay everywhere. Strips of paint peeled down the walls. The Geiger counter in his hand clicked away melodiously. Adrian donned a white protective suit, but even that was only so protective. He still needed to be careful what he touched. The more the Geiger clicked, the more radiation was present. Adrian felt hopeless when he reached the final apartment on the top floor. The door was shut. He carefully turned the knob and pushed the door open a small crack. A soft noise came from inside, “Tato?”

Dear God, Adrian thought. Speaking through the door, afraid of what he would find, “Bzovsky?”

Through the crack in the door, Adrian could see piles of discarded food tins.

“Yes. Where is my father?”

“Yuri?!”

Adrian was surprised to be talking to Bzovsky’s child. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but he died in the Chernobyl disaster years ago. How come you didn’t leave when everyone was evacuated on buses, and where is your mother? We just found this discrepancy in our census records.”

Tears welled in Yuri’s eyes, but when he put his hand up to his face, the skin of his cheek stuck to it and sloughed off. The pain wasn’t new. “We were waiting for him.”

Adrian opened the door the rest of the way with his foot. The smell of rotted flesh and excrement filled the space. On the floor of the kitchen was the decaying corpse of Yuri’s mother.

Oh God. Adrian’s heart pounded. She must have left the apartment to do the scavenging, killed by the radiation. Adrian noticed that parts of her were missing. Had Yuri eaten her? He fought the bile back in his throat.

He walked down the short hall into Yuri’s bedroom. Yuri’s face was melting off. Radiation had devoured him for six years. He was only twelve years old now. His right cheek had withered away to the jaw.

“Oh God, we have to leave this place. I can get you help. There’s nothing for you here.” Adrian said. His voice cracked in deep anguish, extremely frightened by the sight of Yuri.

“I want to stay.” A sadness filled his eyes.

“Mama will not be able to find me if you take me away, and tato will never come home.”

Adrian left the apartment, and called his supervisor.

“I checked on things here… and the entire family is dead.”

I found myself in a strange gray room with no entry or exit. Inside the room was a hooded figure behind a massive gray desk with only enough light to illuminate us.

“Welcome, welcome. We’ve recently renamed hell to The Deeply Deep, and you’re going to be sentenced to an eternity there for beating a horse to death with a spoon. The name change is part of our rebranding strategy to make Hell seem less unwelcoming. We are, after all, just below where most people already are. We’re not even sure how you managed it. Spoons aren’t exactly blunt objects, and horses are relative sturdy creatures.”

I gave the hooded figure behind the desk a long, hard stare. “It was an oversized spoon. And the horse was really just a foal, no bigger than a pony.”

“Where does one even get an oversized spoon?” It tilted its head quizzically.

“From VastMart. It was decorative, you know, for the kitchen.” I explained.

It sat behind a desk with a quill and ink, busying itself on a long piece of parchment. I wasn’t sure if I should be looking at him, speaking, or doing something else. I felt uncomfortable just standing there.

“What do you suppose hell will be like?” I asked the figure. The color had left my face long ago, and I knew for certain I had died.

“Remember, it’s the Deeply Deep now. Oh, we try to fit the punishment to the crime, so there will be a bunch of horses there with spoons to bash your brains in for all eternity.” It said matter-of-factly.

“More than just the one horse?” I grasped my chin with my right hand, thinking deeply about the equity in that.

“We try.” the cloaked figure said flatly.  “I think you’ll find that just as life isn’t fair, death can be even less so.”

“We have a program if you don’t like that option,” It added, scribbling away on the parchment.

“Of course I don’t like that option! What’s the program?!”

“Why’d you kill a baby horse with a spoon anyway?” It set the quill down on the desk.

“I thought the horse was already dead.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No, it was sleeping. I was drunk and thought it would be funny to beat a dead horse because of the idiom. Had I known it was just sleeping, I wouldn’t have done what I did.” I gazed down at the floor, shamefully.

The cloaked figure took the piece of parchment and ripped it into several pieces that disintegrated into dust.

“Well, unfortunately, it seems that you murdered this horse, therefore you don’t qualify for the aforementioned program, but you do get to roll a D20 to determine how much damage you’ll take for eternity.” It skipped a glowing black 20-sided die across the ash-colored desk towards me.

Staring down out at its 20 different possibilities, none of which were 0, my heart beat quickened. The best I could hope for in this situation was a low number. I closed my eyes, clenched my teeth, picked up the die and held it in both of my hands, praying silently for all the luck that I could muster. I jostled the die inside my palms and shaking it into my right hand, I released it onto the desk. It bounced once, twice, and then once more before settling on the table. I could not believe the final outcome. The die had landed on the largest possible number. “Re-Roll!” I yelled, indignantly.

Just then a door appeared in the side of the wall. And several hooded figures with scythes drifted into the room and escorted me away. The matter was hopeless. My fate of eternity sealed by a mere roll of the die. “Please, once more! Any number is better than 20!” I pleaded.

“Enjoy your accommodations in the Deeply Deep!” the hooded figure yelled through the doorway.

Back in the gray room, the hooded figure tossed the die in the air, it landed on the desk. The figure didn’t even need to look at it to know that it landed on twenty again.

It always lands on 20 here, in the Deeply Deep, it thought amusingly.

It turned to the other wall, calling out, “Next!”