Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

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.

Niko is so deep within this rumination that the Battlements have been in view awhile before he notices them. What makes him finally straighten on the seat and draw a quick breath is a familiar sight from what seems long ago. A tiny distant flare of orange rising briefly out to limn the feudal Battlement walls as yet another burning soul is hurled to streak out shedding sparks and screaming high across the Upper Plain.

“WELL WELL WELL. Look what the cat dragged in.” Pignose grins through the windshield. “What’s the matter, fellas? Cat got your tongue?” Batface leers through the passenger window.

“Let’s let the cat out of the bag.” Ramhorn’s face appears upside down from where he lies prone on the buckled roof.

The Black Taxi is parked below the Battlement walls just past the head of the Ramp and near the shore of the Rio Rojo gouting blood out over the Ledge. The corralled dead so thickly streaming past them on the way to their prolonged descent it seems as if the car is moving forward but it is not. It is stopped, and Niko and Nikodemus look out at the stone gargoyles who have flown from their Battlement perches to land on it. The fenders press against the tires. The car so weighted down it cannot move. Any of the gargoyles could peel back the roof like the lid on a can of Vienna sausages. This respite merely toying before the kill.

Nikodemus looks more thoughtful than alarmed or even worried. His tendrils wrap each other like caduceus snakes entwining and disentangling. Nikodemus’ version of wringing his hands.

The tendrils part and Nikodemus looks out the windshield at Pignose waggling his fingers with his thumbs in his ears to the large knuckles and sticking out a gray stone tongue at least a foot long. “They’re forbidden to do anything to you,” says Nikodemus. “It’s me they want.” And with surprising grace and speed he jumps into the back seat and wraps a tendril round the doorhandle. Realizing what his demon is about to do Niko starts to turn back to grab him but then stops and balls his fists and yells in frustration because he can’t look back. Nikodemus yanks the handle and pushes open what truly is for him the suicide door.

BATFACE IS CAUGHT by surprise when Nikodemus surges from the car and knocks him off the runningboard. Pignose and Ramhorn gape stupidly as Nikodemus bats aside the damned like bowling pins and spreads his wings like a dark thing flowering. Half a dozen running steps and then he’s kicking air and canting forward with legs spraddled like a swimming frog’s. His leather wings beat furiously as he arcs above the ever congregating dead.

The Black Taxi groans and nearly bounces when the two remaining gargoyles push off from it. A loud bang sounds behind the car. Niko thinks it’s a shotgun blast, someone behind them firing at the flying gargoyles like a demented skeetshooter, until he understands that the Black Taxi has blown a tire. Batface regains his stone feet and glares at Niko and raises a warning claw at him before turning away and launching into the air to join his confederates in pursuit of Nikodemus. Niko stares a moment as the sea of the dead closes around the car again.

Then he becomes all frantic motion. Put the car in gear and lean on the horn and lurch away. The naked dead before the car jump back but can’t go far before they run into the wall of their own kind. Niko drives about ten clear feet and then plows into them. The first two fly backward like circus acrobats. The next slams the hood and clings there after the bumper breaks her shins. She claws the black metal and pulls herself along the hood toward Niko. He swerves and she rolls to one side and away. Tires bump across her soft body.

Jouncing on the yielding logs of bodies the car can’t pick up speed. At fifteen miles an hour there’s time for many of them to get out of the way but not all. But it’s run them down or join their ruined ranks. He keeps his foot on the gas and grips the wheel and clenches his jaw and plows through them.

Soon the car breaks free of the clustered damned and emerges onto open plain with both frogeyed headlamps askew. One beam projects directly down in front of the car and the other angles up to light a shaft of air. The left front fender is bent down into the tire which sends up smoke and a stench of burning rubber. The right rear tire is blown and the car feels sluggish and handles even more reluctantly than before. All four whitewalls redstained rings now like the smoldering irises of demons. The hood and grille and front bumper are covered with blood that cooks on the hot black metal with a slaughterhouse reek. Fine red droplets constellate the windshield. Niko leaves them be. Turning on the wipers will only smear the windshield and leave him blind.

The dead still flock toward the arch that opens onto the head of the Ramp but here they are spaced apart enough that Niko can avoid most of them.

Now the Black Taxi limps across the dimlit plain at twenty miles an hour, right rear tire flat and cockeyed headlamps a lighthouse beacon blazing Here I Am. The only light the distant glow of the enormous nazi bonfire. The flaming bodies that streaked out from the Battlement walls to light the plain are absent now that all the gargoyles are off pursuing Nikodemus.