Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

“Hey. Wake up.”

“Mnmn.”

“Niko. Come on, get up.”

Niko opens bleary eyes to find himself on the back seat curled around the mason jar as if he’s cold and it gives forth some form of heat. He sits up and his injuries are tallied and handed to him in one lump sum. An invisible knife is wedged between his ribs. His shoulders throb and his feet ache and his neck is stiff. “Whadissit. Jus laid down.”

“You’ve been asleep for two and a half hours.”

This wakes him up a bit. “Are we there yet?”

“Not quite. But we have company.”

“Um gotta pee.”

“Can’t help you there, buddy pal.”

“Who, who’s behin us?” Niko feels as if he’s trying to think thoughts his brain is too small to contain.

“I don’t know. Headlights.”

Niko blinks. “A car.”

“Niko, you have to wake up. I’ll never get this thing up the Ramp. It’s all I can do to drive it straight with nothing around us.”

“Nnkay.” Feeling drugged unsteady he carefully sets the jar on the front seat beside Nikodemus and climbs over the seatback like an old man. Nikodemus’ bulk takes up most of the space in the front of the sedan. Riding shotgun for a moment Niko collects his wits and stares at the obsidian Nothing filling the windshield. “Where the hell are we?”

“Coming up on the Ramp.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“That’s the Ledge. It’s so big you can’t see it all. Here.” He turns right and the Franklin angles more obliquely toward the infinitely wide upthrust fault. Now Niko sees the distant knife edge of the Ramp itself against the vast undifferentiated black of the Ledge’s face, angling down until it merges with the Lower Plain. The Meat Pie Mountains begin as small hills at the foot of the Ramp, undulating ever taller off into the starless distance. Beyond that a dull glint from the sluggish surface of the sea of blood.

Nikodemus steers them straight toward the Ledge again and once again the view is vacant black. It looks simultaneously as if the car is floating motionless in an empty universe and as if it’s constantly about to hit a wall.

“Go straight again. That’s making me sick.”

“Screws up your perspective doesn’t it?” Nikodemus turns the wheel. “I see what you mean about the car. It doesn’t like being driven.”

“Mmm. I wasn’t kidding about needing to pee.”

Nikodemus grins and holds out the mason jar.

“Aren’t you a fucking riot.”

“You could try peeing out the window.”

“Look, I’ve learned I’m capable of a lot of uncivilized things. But I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”

“Do you want me to stop?”

Niko clamps his knees together. “How far back are they?” Nikodemus’ head swivels far enough to break a human neck. “Eleven and a half miles.”

“I don’t think I can hold it till the next gas station. Better stop.” Immediately Nikodemus whips a tendril around the shift lever and puts the car in neutral and hits the brakes. They’re still creeping along when Niko jumps out and tears open his fly. And stands there waiting and feeling foolish.

“I thought you had to pee.”

“Quit staring.”

The demon looks puzzled. “Whyyyy?”

“Stop looking at me dammit.”

Shaking his gargoyle head Nikodemus lets the clutch out with the Franklin in gear and the big car bucks like a bronco and stalls. Nikodemus lets it roll a few feet. Brakelights make the patch of plain look like the surface of Mars. Nikodemus starts the car but forgets to take it out of gear and the Franklin lurches and stalls again.

“Oh heck” from inside and then the engine starts.

Niko finds himself staring at a pristine vintage car idling on the floor of Hell while he holds his penis in his hand and tries to pee. Yessir, I’m on me a heroic epic type journey.

Something monstrous shrieks nearby. Niko jumps back and pees on his own shoe before he realizes it’s Nikodemus leaning on the Black Taxi’s horn. Niko shouts God damn it and his knees buckle as the ground quakes and a roaring spreads across the sunless sky.

As quickly as it came the tectonic spasm passes. Niko runs for the car.

“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.