Hades by Candice Fox

he seemed enormous, his broad shoulders taking in the width of the entrance, his head of cropped brown hair almost touching the top. He was wearing a white collared shirt that had been immaculately ironed.
    “Stop yelling,” he said.
    Martina swallowed a sob. He stood watching, as though waiting for her to say something, to promise she wouldn’t call for help. Deciding that no answer would come, the man walked towards her and crouched before the cage door. She watched through tear-blurred eyes as he took a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them onto his large smooth hands.
    “There’s not a soul for miles around,” he murmured, his grey eyes downcast to his fingers. “No one’s going to hear you.”
    “What do you want?” Martina cried. When he didn’t answer she felt a wave of rage rise up inside her. “What is this, you fucking creep?”
    The man reached into the cage and swiped at her. Martina cowered, but there seemed nowhere to hide from his long arm. She howled as he wrenched her wrist through the cage, her shoulder slamming into the bars as he pulled the limb as far out as it would go. He sat and wrapped his arm around hers. She was helpless to tug at his shoulders and neck.
    “Please! Please!”
    “I’m not going to hurt you, girl,” he said. The alcohol was cold in the crook of her elbow. Martina gagged as the needle bit her skin, her legs trembling under her weight.
    “You’ve got the wrong person,” she sobbed. “My . . . my name is Martina Ducote. I’m a fucking bartender. I’m no one. I’ve . . . I’ve got nothing. I don’t . . .”
    “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you used to do,” the man smiled, capping the syringe full of her blood. “If your records are right, you’re blood type AB negative, you don’t smoke and you’ve never had a heart problem. That’s all I need to know.”
    He released her arm and stood, fitting the syringe into his pocket. Martina screamed as he turned his back to leave.
    “What are you going to do to me? What are you going to do?”

Hades liked long-term staff. He got plenty of interest from youths at the dump—the work required little experience and it paid well, the perfect job for university students in summer or for high school dropouts wanting to build muscle in the sun. Now and then the local council tried to tempt him with benefits to hire mentally disabled people to work in the sorting center or to run the car-crusher, but Hades never took on any of them. He liked a worker he could get to know, someone he could draw in close enough so that they were aware, however vaguely, that they shouldn’t fuck with him. He made sure he knew where they lived, had spoken to their girlfriends or wives over the phone, had their medical records and was familiar with their cars. Hades liked a worker who could be influenced by the other workers around him, who would become one of the fold, steady under the pressure never to go against Hades, no matter what you saw or heard or the strange feelings you got alone in the darkest corners of the dump. Hades paid Christmas bonuses, birthday bonuses, Easter bonuses. He noticed everything—a change of cigarette brand, a new haircut, a limp, a rise or fall in motivation. He took care of dental bills, overlooked criminal records. He was a boss who was only ever present as a round silhouette by the door of his little shack on the hill, surveying everything for a moment or two, trusting that things were being done right. It was an ancient game. Hades had been playing it, in one form or another, all his life.
    Greg Abbott and Richard English were new and this made Hades nervous. The two men came as a package deal from a contractor and seemed to want to keep to themselves—something that further unsettled Hades. They were younger than the other staff, louder and smoked a lot.
    Eric, who often stalked the workers like a restless monkey, seemed to take an instant dislike to them. In the second week