Mortality Bridge (42 page)

“Now you’ve done it,” says Nikodemus.

“Slide.”

“I was just getting good at this.” But Nikodemus slides and watches Niko put the car in gear and get them moving again.

Niko drives in silence for a moment. They’re closing in on the bottom of the Ramp and Niko heads a bit away from the Ledge. Soon the Franklin speeds past more dead than Niko thought had ever lived upon the earth. The untold millions of bodies of the Meat Pie Mountains heaped upon each other like an obscene snowdrift against the obsidian of the Ledge.

“I see you’ve started remembering things.”

“I have?”

“You’ve called me buddy pal at least three times.”

“Buddy pal. What’s that?”

“Pet name.”

Now the Franklin is pelted on the right side. Niko and Nikodemus hastily roll up the windows. Entire disenfranchised populations wander torn and broken sobbing here, robbed of self and hope and dignity. Tearing at themselves or at each other as they wail and as they curse their births and lives and deaths. They see the headlights speeding by and hurl insults and stones and handfuls of verminous shit and bile. How many of their number were delivered to their mournful estate by the very carriage that now speeds by?

In the distance to the left are buildings and the ruins of buildings. Dim light renders them soft and indistinct as underwater relics.

“What are those?” says Niko.

“I seem to recall Gorgons.”

“What, do they live there?”

“They turn people’s bodies into stone and the bodies are cut into bricks and the bricks are fitted to make the buildings.”

“Cute.” Niko gazes across the unlit distance at the houses of pain reared and tumbled there. Here they think in geologic scales. Punishments meted out across whole epochs.

And then there’s no more time for rumination because they’re heading straight toward the Ramp.

NIKO CAN ONLY gape at the scene before him. A ceaseless torrent of the damned disgorges from the foot of the Ramp, flooding ever forth like a living river of insatiable army ants destroying everything in its relentless path. From the Ramp’s terminus the dead eventually scatter all about the Lower Plain as they head on to the endless variations of their future punishment. The base of the Ramp where they are thickest is a pullulating sea of wretches.

Behind this carnography of wounded flesh the Ramp itself angles upward, and even though the angle of its rise is slight it covers such a distance along the Ledge’s face that it rises and recedes until it disappears into the measureless dark. A road wide as a fourlane highway carved from out the naked rock by hands wielding crude implements, a work begun back when this cliff was made two thousand years ago, and every inch of it seething with naked festering bleeding scabrous broken rended suffering sobbing maimed humanity herded pushing stumbling running trudging crawling fighting falling crushed and crushing in an endless current streaming down its length to join the wounded nation at its base.

Niko blinks and shakes his head as if to ward off bees. The writhing masses here before his inundated eyes. Suddenly nauseated he is filled with revulsion and blind mortal panic and something like religious terror in the face of his own insignificance, in the face of every body’s insignificance. Teeming billions suffer here while hidden hands direct the reins of infinite space and eternal time. How can a mortal mind contain a single brush stroke of this horrible vast canvas? What overwhelms me now is but a fragment of the whole. But could I absorb the naked entirety of this place I would be struck gibbering mad. Had I seen this going in would I have gone? Did Geryon spare me this on purpose when he flew me to the Lower Plain? This is what I’ve set myself against. I must be out of my fucking mind.

The broken mirror of his demon’s face gazes earnestly at the human tide before them. “That’s an awful lot of people.”

Niko glances at him but Nikodemus seems sincere.

“Then again, it’s a lot of awful people.”

Niko slows the car. “Lock the doors.”

“Whyyyy?”

“Lock the damn doors.”

“Okay okay. You don’t have to yell.” Nikodemus locks the doors and gazes out the window as Niko stops the Black Taxi. “I don’t think this will do much good if all these people get hold of us.” He glances behind them. “The headlights are getting closer.”

“I need a minute.” Niko rubs his eyes and face and temples with shaky hands while the engine thrum fills the car.

Sixty seconds later Nikodemus says Okay.

“Okay what?”

“Okay it’s been a minute.”

Niko sighs. “I think I liked you better when you were mean.”

“I was mean?”

“If we left the car and I held onto Jem could you fly us to the top?”

“To the Upper Plain? I don’t know.” Nikodemus peers upward through the windshield. It’s like trying to see the Man in the Moon while standing on the lunar surface. The wall is so big and so close it can’t be seen as an object.

“Haven’t you flown it before?”

“I don’t remember. I guess I must have.”

Niko frowns at the steering wheel. “I can’t do this. I can’t drive up that.”

“You drove across the Rift.”

“One epic deed a day’s my limit.”

“We can take turns.”

“Are you crazy? They’ll tear us apart. If we can even get through them.”

“They’re afraid of demons aren’t they?”

“So.”

“Well.” Nikodemus shows his needle teeth.

“What, you’re going to scare off a hundred million people? Even you aren’t that ugly.”

The feral grin deflates and Niko realizes he has hurt his demon’s feelings.

“Why don’t we at least try flying?” Niko says. “If you get tired we could glide back down.”

“You said the demons chasing us are allowed to stop me and distract you. I think both of those will be a lot easier for them if I’m holding onto you in the air. And if you drop the jar the whole thing’s over anyhow.”

“Oh.” Niko tries to imagine Nikodemus engaging in some kind of aerobatic dogfight while burdened with Niko. Guess not. He narrows his eyes at the epic ebb and flow of ruined souls before them. He breathes deeply. “All right. We drive.” He’s scared off his ass. Resignedly he puts the Black Taxi in gear. “This is going to take days.”

Nikodemus leans back as best he can in what for him are the cramped confines of the passenger side. “Bitch bitch bitch,” the demon says.

AT A GUESS it took four days. Lacking day or night it was hard to tell and the car clock made it worse by running backward. Mostly Niko drove while Nikodemus crouched on the hood like some nightmarish ornament, a cargoyle shouting and lashing his tentacles to clear the way. The docile dead obliged like sheep. Rarely getting past first gear Niko would drive until he was falling asleep at the wheel and then Nikodemus would take over while Niko tried to sleep in the back seat curled around the haircracked mason jar and getting so used to the soul unmooring shriek of the Black Taxi’s horn that sometimes he would pop awake because it stopped. His dreams were filled with faceless cordwood bodies he drove over as they reached out cold dead unavailing hands.

The car stopped often. When the surging dead would not or could not yield. When it became impossible to tell whether the car was heading up the Ramp or toward its edge. When Niko had to deal with unavoidable human functions. For the latter Niko was at first afraid to leave the car, certain that the jealous dead would set upon him. His fears proved groundless and he did his business unmolested in their midst. Having come so far the dead were numbed past caring by their torment, crazed by the irrevocable certainty of eternal perdition, hopelessly resigned so deep into these regions of despair that they were become more cattle than human beings. Hell itself had worn them to the nub. Ceaselessly the mutilated and afflicted dead jostled and swarmed and pushed with no more will than snowflakes in an avalanche. They never looked back and neither did he. Not once did he see any of them try to buck the tide. Even those forced over the edge by the swell and press of their fellow sufferers fell with a complete indifference awful to behold.

Sometimes a member of this destitute parade would grab onto a doorhandle and sometimes even get the door open. Nikodemus kept forgetting to lock the door going on and returning from cargoyle duty. Twice one of them actually made it into the car. Once a teenaged boy with buboes that opened to show little teeth, once a tiny Inuit woman who sat quiet and still upon the seat. Niko was so surprised by her sudden appearance and then so fascinated by her calm centeredness that he had gaped at her and done nothing. In the midst of all this horror she had seemed a saint. Niko was content to let her ride along with them, though where she thought she was going was anybody’s guess, but Nikodemus yanked her from the car.

Continually the car ran over fallen trampled souls too injured to regain their feet. Their regeneration set back even further now by two tons of bulldozing vintage sedan. Niko tried to tell himself it wasn’t the same as hitting them in the mortal world. They could not die and they would heal. But their pain was still pain, and the first forty or fifty made him feel awful. Soon they were just speedbumps.

Several times Nikodemus left the car and flew away to return hours later bearing water in a smooth scraped swollen bladder that had to have been a human stomach. Desperate and dehydrated Niko drank the cloudy water anyway, his body grateful even as his mind resisted.

Nikodemus also brought handfuls of raw food. Niko tried not to think about what he might be eating as he chewed and swallowed without looking. The alternative was starvation, and he had learned as many had before him that when faced with real and lasting hunger and no certain end to it in sight a man will eat anything put before him that might give nourishment without killing him and not complain. Niko ate and drank and did not complain.

During all this upward crawl the Black Taxi never ran out of gas. The aircooled engine never overheated or stalled or stopped or even missed or knocked. Odometer and tripmeter turned and turned and turned.

Whatever had been following them was lost now among the crush and press of millions of dead in the miles between. Or perhaps their pursuer had left them to their epic and mundane labor. There was only one place they could emerge after all. Easy enough to have cohorts waiting at the head of the Ramp.

At first Niko could not help staring through the windshield at the continuous exodus parting before the Franklin’s prow. As if entranced by some overstocked aquarium of grotesqueries. Vacant faces and empty eyes, tribes of Adam, tribes of Shem. A diaspora of the penitent damned everfleeing the holocaustic closure of their mortal lives. At first he sought among their drowned expressions faces he had known upon the living earth but glimpses of their anguished faces were too fleeting for his memory to fit a name. They trudged and stumbled past the Franklin as it made its salmon trek upstream and the only impression made by those endless permutations of recombinant DNA was a palimpsest of handprints on the windows of the car.

Nikodemus did not talk much when he was in the car but instead watched the passing faces, brooding and introspective.

Niko wondered about atmospheric pressure. The Ramp rose higher from the Lower Plain than Everest rose above sea level but the temperature remained hot and dry and the air pressure did not decrease. How could that be? If the millibars were normal on the Lower Plain they should be breathing near-vacuum by now. And if they were normal on the Upper Plain, the Lower Plain should have been dense enough to crush bone.

To pass the time he concocted science fictional solutions involving massive airpumps and recirculating vents carved through the Ledge by some long-vanished race to equalize the pressure. And then he looked around at the endless stream of immortal souls made flesh to be forever punished, at the interior of the car that never ran out of gas and that he knew to be somehow alive, at the perfectly inhuman version of himself hunched and pensive on the hood with wings tucked tight and tendrils wrapped around mahogany knees drawn to massive chest, at the cracked jar that contained the glowing essence of Jemma’s soul. And he laughed at himself until he cried and then wiped his eyes and wondered if he truly had gone well beyond the pale.

Blind black wall to the left of them, blind abyss to the right, the staggering dead between. They rode a tightrope between solid nothing and empty perdition and they played out this numbing odyssey so long that it became hard to remember a time they had done anything else, which was almost literally true for Nikodemus whose smoothed mind had done little else, when the end hove into view.

THE STEERING WHEEL saws and Niko’s arms jerk back and forth as the Black Taxi jounces over yet another fallen soul. Nikodemus asleep in back, sorting through the desecrated attic of his memory. The demon has stopped his icebreaker shifts because a fine red mist of blood is falling steadily on all and sundry now, windborne from the bloodfall somewhere up above. The dead flow past and passed. Niko plods forward and lays on the horn and drives over the fallen and occasionally turns on the topmounted wipers and thinks about how horrible it is that you really can get used to anything. How repetition drains an act of meaning. Of consequence. I wash a load of dishes and it’s boring. I wash a thousand loads and it’s something my hands do while my mind wanders and I no longer see the dishes. I kill one man and never forget his face. I line men up and shoot them by threes and fours all day long for years and only want a beer at the end of the day. Drive across a thousand suffering souls in Hell and just want airshocks and allwheel drive.

All those demons at their labor. Tormenting the damned for as long as there’ve been people. Their numbing work unending. Bored senseless and craving variety. Torture their only entertainment. Some are numbed to drones by their inflictions, some become creative just to ease the monotony of another working day. Most of it a gray undifferentiation of repetitious sadism. And Niko understands that in his journey up the Ramp he’s found within himself some hint of what the demons feel. Truly there are things about yourself it’s best to never know.