Rudolph! (11 page)

"Why?" I shouted, turning around on Ring in a vain effort to see and hear more plainly what the ferryman was saying.

"He made me laugh," the ferryman said. "Once for each day he lay dead."

The boat was almost lost in the fog. "Will you do the same for us?" I shouted after him. "Will you take us back as well?"

The boat was gone, and I nudged Ring to get closer to the edge of the pier. The wood groaned under the young reindeer's feet, and I strained to hear anything over the complaining wood.

His voice came faintly from the distance, almost as faint as the sound of a flower petal falling on cool ground. "There is no hope on this river."

VII

T
he wood pilings and boards of the pier had been a warm oak color
once, but they had been stained dull ochre from an eternity of contact with the yellow fog that swirled along the bank of the black river. The fog had a cloying weight to it, like it was reluctant to let go of my clothes and hair, and it made my skin crawl. What floated over our heads was lighter in color and less dense—a mist more than a fog, for the meteorologically inclined—and somewhere between sky and ground, the two melted into a damp inversion layer. Dasher tried to go airborne as the team assembled on the spongy ground beyond the pier, but he fell back to the ground almost immediately, coughing and choking.

"Looks like we walk from here," Rudolph said as Ring and I joined the group. The reindeer had already powered up their tactical rigs, and several were pawing the ground with adrenaline-fueled eagerness.

"Here" being limbo, aka Not Quite Hell—in much the same way that purgatory wasn't quite heaven. But you could certainly feel that it was close by. The ferryman hadn't named the river, but he had said it was a sister to Lethe; in
Inferno
, Dante and Virgil crossed the river Acheron where they reached the first circle of Dante's vision of hell—the circle where the unbaptized went. Here we would find the souls of those men and women who would have gone to heaven if they had just been recognized properly by the Church before they died. Dante gave the impression that it wasn't such a bad place to go if you had to go to hell.

My eyes were starting to sting, and the fog was making my throat itch. There were indistinct humps and lumps dotting the mist-shrouded landscape, like enormous piles of mashed potatoes that had passed through the twin stages of ‘rot' and ‘decay' several weeks ago.

Clearly, Dante hadn't stuck around for long.

"Well," said Comet, "I guess the limo isn't coming."

He trotted away from the pier, disappearing almost immediately in the miasma.

"Last one there is a rotten egg," he called.

Ring's shoulder shuddered as he fought back bile. "It smells like rotten eggs already," he whined.

I breathed heavily through my mouth. The smell got worse as we moved away from the river, and I couldn't imagine what sort of olfactory torment the reindeer were going through. Especially Ring. If his nose was sensitive enough to have tracked the scent of my sunscreen all the way from the North Pole, well, I didn't want to truly imagine what this place smelled like to him.

"Fan spread," Rudolph called to the team. "Double up and watch to the middle. Let's not get lost in this muck." I climbed down from Ring, and scrambled onto Rudolph's broader back. As soon as I was settled, Rudolph started off after Comet, setting the pace for the rest of the team.

Ring followed, through he kept his distance from the other reindeer. I glanced back and saw the dejected droop of Ring's head. It wasn't just the smell that was bringing his mood down. I tapped Rudolph lightly on the back of his neck. "You could apologize," I said softly.

Rudolph glanced over his shoulder at Ring. "No one ever apologized to me," he said.

"Yeah, and look how you turned out," I said, looking back at Ring. The small reindeer's face was pinched, and his ears were tucked against his head. "Quit being so defensive."

Rudolph snorted, and his next step jostled me enough that I had to grab on or slip off. "What have I got to be defensive about?"

"The kid dunked Ramiel," I said. Loudly enough that Ring heard me. His head came up, and his face was all eager beaver. Rudolph saw it and snorted again, but this time neither Ring nor I felt that he meant it. Ring trotted closer, coming nearly abreast with Rudolph, and I gave him a wide smile.

It felt good. Like I was breaking some rule here in hell, which only made me want to smile more.

We passed the first mound. It was black and sleek like stone that had been melted into a slick bubble of polished curves. There was no sign of Comet, and Rudolph gave the mound a wide berth, but Ring—emboldened by the almost-apology from Rudolph—trotted up to it, leading with his tiny, bouncing nose.

There was a tiny
snick
, and Ring jumped back with a squeak. A piece of the mound was flopping out at an awkward angle. Like a tiny hatch had popped open. Rudolph paused, and we both watched as Ring double-sniffed the dangling bit. "I didn't touch it," he said. "I didn't touch anything."

The sound came again—a metallic
snick
like shears closing—and I saw the dangling piece move.
Scissoring
. "Move," I shouted at Ring. "Get back!"

The little reindeer jumped sideways as the piece of dark material twisted and struck at the reindeer's flank. I saw it more clearly now: the upper half was a curved blade; the lower half was a jagged jawbone. The pincer snapped at Ring—
snick, snick
—like a pair of sharp scissors slicing cleanly through a yard of cloth.

Where there had only been one pincer, there were suddenly many as the mound exploded into a writhing mass of demonic crustaceans. They wriggled and crawled over one another, their large pincers reaching and snapping for the small reindeer. They had long flat bodies and thin legs like stalks of rotting asparagus. If they had eyes, I didn't see any; all I saw were enormous mouths with rows of sharp teeth and pairs upon pairs of arms. The larger sets—the ones that ended in the snapping pincers—were meant to grab prey; the smaller ones had three digits and resembled T. Rex arms—they were responsible for grabbing and shoving food into the mouth. These creatures had been evolutionarily optimized to feed their eternal hunger.

"We got company," I shouted at the other reindeer as Rudolph backpedaled from the tumbling morass of hungry demon crabs. Ring leaped into a short glide as an eager monster dashed for his flashing legs, and its outstretched pincer snipped off a piece of a back hoof. Ring stumbled as he landed, and Rudolph's gait slowed to let him catch up.

An eager crab outdistanced the rest, scuttling and snapping for Ring, and Rudolph intercepted it. He reared, and put both hooves right in the center of the crustacean's shell. One of its pincers nearly caught Rudolph in the neck, but the big reindeer bore down, and there was a loud crack as his hooves broke the shell. The crab screamed—a human enough sound that my skin went all goose-bumpy—and all four thrashing arms went limp. Rudolph leaped free of the dead crab, his front hooves dripping with a pale slime, and with a hissing noise, the body of the crab started to melt.

"Okay, that's gross," Ring said. He had stopped when Rudolph intercepted the leading crab, and he actually leaned toward the melting corpse, his nose working.

The rolling mass of crabs was close, and my jaw dropped with surprise as one of the crabs actually pounced. Rudolph wasn't as surprised as I. He dropped his head, spearing the crab on the points of his horns, then he shook his head ferociously a few times. The crab tumbled free, leaking from the holes in its shell.

"Run, you idiot," Rudolph snapped at Ring.

Ring snapped out of his naïve curiosity and started running. Rudolph trotted backward, which I greatly appreciated. I'm sure it was because he wanted to keep an eye on the crabs, but it also meant his horns were between me and them. I was trying to count them all, but they scuttled over each other with such alacrity that it was hard to keep track.

Another one leaped, and before I could warn Rudolph, a missile shot overhead and intercepted the flying crab, turning it into a fiery shower of crab bits. The crab-mob veered to the right, boiling over another mound. More crabs geysered, the second mound joining the mob from the first, and then all of them swarmed after us again.

"Oh, great," I said. "They have friends."

Another missile streaked past, and this one hit the front rank of the crab-mob, making a hot, noisy mess of crab beasties. Cupid appeared beside Rudolph and me, miniguns whining and chattering. The leading edge of the mob bucked and wavered under the assault, bullets shattering shell and pincer alike.

"Did you miss me?" he shouted over all the noise.

The rest of the team appeared out of the fog, falling into a tight formation around us.

"Where did they come from?" Comet wondered. I was glad to see the fog hadn't eaten him whole. "I didn't spot anything on my pass."

"Ring woke ‘em up," I said. "The mounds. They're just crabs. All molded together."

"Oh, boy," Comet said. "There's a lot of those mounds up ahead."

Donner and Prancer dropped back from the rest of the team. Donner laid down a thick line of orange foam between us and the crabs, and when he came back for a second pass, the crab mob had already rolled over the line of expanding foam. Prancer opened up his flamethrowers. The foam ignited with a roar, and the black mob scattered. The surrounding fog was lit by dancing bits of fire as the burning crabs fled.

"Running away or going for reinforcements?" Vixen wondered. "Anyone want to guess?"

"Let's not stick around and find out," I suggested. As Donner and Prancer rejoined the line, the team reoriented themselves and picked up the pace. We had no idea how many mounds there were, but no one was interested in doing a survey.

Clinging to the harness on Rudolph's back, I kept an eye on the tiny fires. One by one, they went out. "Ah, team, I think we have a problem . . ."

Crabs started boiling out of the fog from all directions. Comet and Cupid each took a side with their miniguns; Dasher and Dancer kept our route open with tactical missile strikes. Donner kept up a steady stream of naphtha foam behind us, and Prancer and Vixen made sure it all burned bright and hot with their flamethrowers. Blitzen had some sort of short-range laser system that drilled neat holes in crabs who thought they could fly. Rudolph trampled any that got past all that.

But they kept coming, wave after wave of scuttling black bodies, their pincers rattling and snapping at us.

"Hole!" Ring shouted, and the team veered as one, dodging a dark spot that opened suddenly ahead of us. Comet was on the outside edge of the team, and he leaped over the hole instead of going around it, and as he passed over, a stack of crabs spewed out of the hole like a jet of dark vomit.

Comet kicked at the pair of crabs snapping at his hooves, as small slots along the underside of his pods opened. A handful of oblong canisters dropped out.

Like the ones Ring had been carrying.

The canisters exploded, a burst of hot light that illuminated the crater in the ground, and jets of sparkling white smoke shot upward, making a brief hole in the mist overhead. Shards of crab carapace scattered through the air, and a piece whizzed past my head. It sizzled as it went by, the accelerant from the grenade still eating at the crab shell.

The ground around the hole was littered with gouts of white-hot flame, and the rim of the crater was on fire. A thin stalk of crabs climbing over each other struggled to grow tall enough to reach past the fiery rim of the hole, but it leaned over and touched the rim before it could grow tall enough. The crabs scattered, falling back into the crater, and as I watched, the hole started to shrink, a wound closing on itself in an effort to stem the pain. The fires weren't going out on their own; they were going to be smothered.

Dasher played wingbuck as Comet did his run and jumped over other holes. On our right, Cupid and Dancer did the same. We kept running and gunning across the first circle of hell. I scooped up a jagged piece of lower pincer somewhere and hacked about myself with it on the few occasions that Rudolph found himself in pincer-to-hoof combat with the crabs.

My internal compass was all screwed up; it had been since we had boarded the barge, but Rudolph ran like he knew where he was going. Single-minded. Focused. Running on a straight line away from the world of sunlight and snowfall, deeper and deeper into places of darkness.

Comet, our perpetual point deer, spotted it first: the white line that marked a change in terrain. It wavered through the fog, like a mirage of a damp oasis in the desert, and the crabs, as if they could sense the edge of their realm, redoubled their efforts to bring us down.

Everyone switched to full auto. There was no point in trying to conserve ammo.

VIII

T
he white line turned into the edge of a sandy desert. I had never
been so happy to see sand dunes in my life, but my elation was cut short as a bubbling wall of crabs started to rise between us and the desert.

"They're cheating," I whined. "How did they get in front of us?"

"It doesn't matter," Rudolph snapped. "We go through regardless."

I did a quick check on the other reindeer. Donner and Blitzen were the only ones still wearing their rigs. The rest had ditched theirs as they had run out of ammo. "How?" I asked. "We're running out of options. Blitzen's not punching reindeer sized holes in anything, and Donner's foam isn't a projectile weapon. I can run faster than it can spew."

"We go over then," Rudolph said, galloping faster.

"But—" I squeaked, and then caught myself.

What other choice did we have?

Rudolph whistled at the rest of the team and did the herky-jerky galloping two-step that signaled his intentions to the others. Cupid looked at me, wide-eyed, and I merely shrugged.

Donner slowed slightly, cutting across our back trail, his nozzles spewing orange foam. They ran dry, and he did a weird shimmy, popping the restraints on his rig. The whole thing came apart and bounced along behind him. The rig was overrun by the crabs, and it self-destructed after five seconds, going up with a teeth-rattling
whomp
. The line of orange foam Donner had laid down went up too, creating a wall of flame. The tsunami of crab crashed into the burning wall, and some of the crabs spilled through, their shells slick with sizzling fire, their pincers burning like the torches of an angry medieval mob. The wave crashed, creating several firebreaks in the wall, and crabs poured through.

The wall of crab ahead of us was leaning as if it was going to fall over on us as soon as we got close enough to be smothered. Just as I thought it was going to topple, Blitzen fired his laser weapon, cutting a line through the crabs just below the smeared mist line. A surgical slice. Crabs fell, no longer connected to the wall, and the ones that still had working legs started to scuttle in our direction.

Rudolph's chest heaved as he sucked in a lungful of air, and then he jumped. I did the same—sucking in air, that is—and I held on tight as he went airborne on a steep climb.

We hit the mist, and my eyelashes curled. Tears bled from the corners of my tightly closed eyes, and every inch of my skin was doing the frantic spider dance, shouting
Get it off! Get it off!
My chest ached, and I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold my breath. Rudolph kicked his legs, knocking something away, and then . . . 

Rudolph passed through the apogee of his leap, and I felt the change in the air as soon as he started descending. My skin stopped freaking out. My lungs stopped panicking when they realized they might actually get good air soon, and when I felt Rudolph land on solid ground, I opened my eyes.

We were through.

The second circle of hell was an endless desert. We went from spongy fog-shrouded darkness to orange sky and pure white sand. There was no sun, just a sky the jaundiced color of a rotten orange, and the sand looked like it had been heat steamed of all color over the course of several millennia.

I gasped for air, and started choking as my lungs filled with hot air.

So that much was true: it
was
hot in hell.

"A towel wouldn't have been enough," Donner gasped as he landed behind us.

My gaze was drawn to the line between the two circles. The wall of crabs was coming down as the crabs lost their cohesion. The burning ones kept crawling forward, and as soon as they crossed the line, they flash-burned to ash, creating a thickening haze of drifting ash.

Of the team, only Rudolph was unaffected by the temperature. Blitzen was still wearing his rig, and while the reindeer moved a little more sprightly without the weight across their backs, I could tell the heat was taking its toll.

"Let's get moving," I said to Rudolph.

Rudolph nodded and moved out, trotting on a course perpendicular to the line between the circles. We kept to the ground. While flying would get us off the hot sand, it took concentration and a reserve of energy that none of the team had. Tongues dangling, the rest of the team followed Rudolph and me across the second circle of hell.

Dante claimed this circle was the prison of the lustful, where they were held captive by winds created from their own lecherous desires, but as we crested dune after dune, I started to think that Dante had gotten this one wrong. A wind had blown here once, because sand dunes didn't arrange themselves, but it hadn't blown in a long time. The sand was pristine and unmarked—not unlike the beach sand at the Le Grand Courlan Spa Resort.

The boatman had warned me against trusting Dante. The first circle certainly hadn't been as dull and boring as the poet had led me to believe. Unless the crab creatures were some demonic interpretation of being unbaptized, but I wasn't sure how you went from "Whoops, I forgot to get dunked in the river" to "OMG! I am teh hungerzz!"

"Maybe Dante got it backwards," I mused out loud.

"How's that?" Rudolph asked.

"Dante said the first circle was where the lost souls went. The second was where the lustful were imprisoned. But it sort of seems like he got them reversed," I said.

"Great," Comet groused. He was near enough to have overheard our conversation. "So the map is wrong."

"I never said it was right," I countered. "It's a metaphor. We interpret hell in our—"

"Bla bla bla," Comet interrupted. "This isn't a poetry—"

His leading hoof disappeared into the sand. He stumbled forward, trying to catch himself with his other hoof. That leg sunk into the dirt as well, and he barely managed to avoid a full face-plant. He struggled to pull himself out of the sand, but the ground shivered around him, sucking him down.

"Grab him," Rudolph shouted as he pranced close to the sinking reindeer. I wrapped one hand through the harness straps and leaned over, straining to reach Comet's rack.

The dune was shifting around Comet, trying to bury him at the same time it was sucking him down. The ground beneath Rudolph's hooves remained firm though, and I managed to wrap my hand around Comet's antlers. "I got him," I said to Rudolph, who started to back up. Comet stopped thrashing, and I groaned as the tug-of-war between the quicksand and Rudolph stretched me tight. I was suddenly aware of just how sweaty my palms were.

Donner charged over, sliding to a stop next to Rudolph, and he locked his antlers in Comet's, adding his incredible strength to Rudolph's. It was enough to overcome the pull of the sand, and Comet slid out so quickly it was almost as if something had spit him out. The dune quivered, grains of sand tumbling in a narrow wave, and then stopped.

I looked, and looked again. But I couldn't tell where the quicksand began. It all looked the same. The other reindeer crowded around, wondering what had just happened.

"It was right there," Comet said, nodding at the sand. "Something grabbed me."

"Where?" Blitzen said, his nose cautiously stretched toward the ground.

"There!" Comet said, and when Blitzen stopped moving, he amended his answer. "No, to your left."

"Here?" Blitzen tapped the sand lightly with his hoof, and nothing happened. He moved his hoof to the left and tapped again. "Here?"

"Yes," Comet said, struggling upright. "It was right there." He stomped over, ignoring my squawk of alarm, and banged his hooves against the sand. "It was . . . right . . . . It was right here!"

He glared at us. We stared back. Nothing moved on the desert. And no reindeer sank.

"Okay," Rudolph said. "It's a mystery, but let's not dwell on it. Keep moving. Watch your step. You know the drill. We're easy targets when we stand around like this."

My arms ached, and I leaned against Rudolph's neck. His skin was warm, and I could feel a distant quiver in his muscles. He was tired. We all were. "We're easy targets anyway," I murmured. "Anyone watching can see us coming for kilometers."

Rudolph leaped forward suddenly, and my head snapped back as I tried to hang on. He pranced about, bouncing me around on his back. "St-st-st-stop it," I chattered. "What's wrong?"

A tiny whirlpool turned in the sand where he had been standing. It stopped as I watched, filling up and smoothing out until there was no sign anything had happened.

"We're surrounded," Vixen muttered. "They're under the sand." He squawked in surprise as the sand sucked at his front hooves, dragging him down to a kneeling position. The others leapt to his assistance, dragging him out of the quicksand, and he stood gingerly a few meters away from where he had been standing. We all stared at the flat sand, squinting for some sign that something had actually disturbed the sand.

"There's nothing here," Ring said. He nosed my leg and directed my attention to the way we had come. "All it wants is to stay that way."

All sign of our passage across the desert was gone. There were no hoofprints.

What happens to the lustful when they finally give up?" Blitzen asked. "What becomes of them then?"

"Despair," Ring answered.

Blitzen nodded. "They lose hope, and that's when the sand claims them." He pawed the ground. "How long has it been since Dante wrote
Inferno
? More than seven hundred years. None of the souls here lasted that long."

"What? You mean eternity came and went, and we missed it?" Comet was still stepping gingerly, as if he expected the ground to open up at any moment.

Blitzen shook his head. "No, they may still here. For centuries, they were tormented by what they didn't have, and after a long time—a very long time—they gave up. They couldn't sustain that desire any longer, and that's when the sand took them." He tapped the sand. "They're down there somewhere, entombed in this sand by their own hopelessness. An oubliette of eternal despair."

"That's depressing," Prancer said.

Blitzen cocked his head. "Don't dwell on it," he said. "I'm not, and that's why I'm still standing."

"That's only because using words like
oubliette
makes you all tingly," Comet said. He titled his head and tried to shake out some sand that had found its way into his ear. "Okay, Mr. Sunshine, if you're right, then all we have to do is keep our mood up, and we'll be fine."

I stared off at the endless ridges of sand dunes, and Rudolph snorted at me as he quickly pulled a back hoof from the cloying sand. "Sorry," I said. "The idea is a little daunting. We have no idea how long it's going to take to cross this desert."

Rudolph kept moving as the sand kept trying to suck him down. "Knock it off," he growled. "Or you're walking."

"Carols," Ring giggled. "We can sing carols." He pranced around Rudolph. "Oh, you know Dasher and Dancer and—"

"Not that one." Rudolph glared at him.

Prancer nudged the bigger reindeer with his shoulder. "Loosen up, you old stick in the . . . uh, sand," he said, trotting off and nodding for Ring to follow him. "Come on, kid. I'll teach you a new one. "Ambrose the amber-assed antelope had a very shiny ass," he sang in a clear contralto. "And if you ever saw it . . ."

Ring skipped along beside Prancer. "Saw it. Saw it. Saw it," he sang.

I slapped Rudolph's flank gently, starting him out of the mood he was in. "Made of brass," I said. "You'd say it was made of brass. Come on, you know how it goes."

Rudolph exhaled noisily, and the stern flick of an ear in my direction was the only acknowledgement I got that he had heard me. He fell in behind the rest of the team as they followed Prancer and Ring, though he didn't join in with the other reindeer games.

He had a different way of maintaining focus. As always.

After carols came an extensive Elvis retrospective. Throats were past parched as we hit the last years of the King's life, but the reindeer kept on, their voices falling to rattling whispers as they trotted and staggered across the hot sand. I lay flat on Rudolph's back, soaked with both mine and Rudolph's sweat—and well past caring about it.

I had long since given up on trying to keep track of how far we had gone—counting dunes was just asking to get clobbered by a depressing thought. Depression was tantamount to giving in, and we all knew what happened then. The team was tired, and the idea of having to pull someone out of quicksand was almost enough to open up the sand right then.