“I think we have to operate on the principle that it’s going to get pretty damned dark before the dawn comes.”
“Or maybe we’re just whistling past the graveyard?”
Doc treated Jim to a bleak look. “Just don’t whistle, okay? I wouldn’t want to listen to it.”
As they moved quickly down the tunnel, the red light grew brighter; along with it came an intense sense of foreboding. The end of the tunnel brought no end to the apprehension. When it opened out onto a high ledge above a vast lake of liquid fire, Jim and Semple both stopped in their tracks, though they knew their pursuers had to be only minutes behind them.
“How the fuck is any of this going to help us get out of here?”
Doc pointed to something far along the ledge. “I think that may be the answer.”
“What?”
“That.”
Semple peered into the distance, shading her eyes against the glare from the burning lake. “Are you talking about that bridge?”
“You see anything else that could work?”
“But that bridge isn’t complete; it looks like they never finished it. It only goes halfway across the lake.”
“And we have to cross it.”
Semple halted and planted her hands on her hips. “Are you out of your mind, Doc Holliday? What happens when the bridge stops?”
“We keep on going.”
“And fall into the lake of fire?”
“Hopefully we go on and up and out. The end of the tangible bridge being the jumping point for the wind-walk.”
“Hopefully?”
Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes. The heat from the burning lake was causing him to break out in a sweat. “We just have to take it on trust. Doc’s right, there’s no other way.”
But Semple was digging in. Jim hadn’t known her that long, and most of that knowledge was carnal, but he was already starting to recognize her capacity for resolute stubbornness. She was quite prepared to face down Doc Holliday if need be. “I bow to the fact that you’ve been around the Afterlife far longer than either me or Jim, but I’ve crossed a few bridges in my time and I’m pretty well versed in their symbolic content. I have to assume that a bridge that only goes halfway is exactly what it claims to be, a dead end. With the accent on dead.”
Doc gave her a hard look. “I wouldn’t spend too long bowing to my experience. I can hear the bad guys coming down the tunnel.”
With no other alternative, they scrambled along the ledge toward the elegant stone arch of the ambiguous half bridge. Semple shook her head even as she ran. “I still think we’re doing the wrong thing.”
They were almost to the bridge when the pursuers came out of the tunnel. Bullets peppered the rock walls above the ledge, but none came close enough to be a threat. The posse was shooting on the run, more as matter of brute psychology than out of any serious intent to do harm. In no time they would catch up with Jim, Semple, and Doc, and the fugitives would be in the bag. Doc didn’t even bother to fire back. In four more paces, he was on the bridge. Jim was immediately behind him. For a moment Semple balked, then two more shots hit the rock wall and she started forward again. “Damn you both. This is insane.”
“You want to fall into the clutches of Kali?”
“I don’t want to fall into the burning lake.”
“Trust that you won’t fall.”
“I can’t just walk off into empty air like Daffy Duck.”
Jim and Doc held out their hands. “We’ll do it together.”
Semple grasped their hands. With Jim and Doc on the outside, and her in the middle, the three of them stepped into nothingness, with only the lake of fire beneath them. In the last second, Doc laughed out loud. “Entering the Dragon Ride-if the damn thing exists!”
How easy to survive?
What has happened to my creation?”
Anger and alarm were Semple’s first response as she grew to human form out of the rolling swirls of orange Day-Glo mist in which she, Doc Holliday, and Jim Morrison had made their vaporous, billowing reentry from the Dragon Ride. She sprang to her feet before Jim and Doc were even fully formed and looked around furiously at the ruins of her onetime kingdom, as yet unaware that she was jaybird-naked. “I thought there’d be damage, but never anything like this.”
Jim was now also fully formed and he, too, had come through without a stitch of clothing. Doc, on the other hand, was clothed and correct-except, mysteriously, for his boots, each now on the wrong foot. As he irritatably tugged his left boot from his right foot, he glanced at the nude and bemused Jim. “Were you two having sex in the middle of all that?”
Jim looked at Doc and blinked sheepishly. “What makes you say that?”
“I heard some sounds just as we were being transformed into fog.”
Semple turned and glared at Doc. “Then you should have been minding your own business, shouldn’t you?” Her clothes were now assembling around her out of thin air. Not the red dress she had worn in Hell, but a midnight-blue, semi-military ensemble with a pencil skirt, padded shoulders, and epaulets that matched her current belligerent mood. Now that she was back home, Semple seemed to be building up a head of rage at everything around her. Jim’s time-honored leather jeans and loose shirt also appeared; only the white tuxedo jacket he’d been given at the casino had vanished along the way. The three of them had arrived in the same mosque-like chamber with the high-domed ceiling, black marble floor, and ruby glass where Semple had once amused herself by torturing her prisoners and slaves.
In some ways, it was an apt reentry point, although right at that moment Semple was too angry to see it as such. Her blood was boiling at the ravages to which her glorious construct had been subjected. The marble was cracked and shattered, and part of the dome had fallen in, littering the already-damaged floor with rubble, smashed mosaics, and broken beams. The air was filled with dust, smoke, and the stench of cordite, indicating that some of the damage had been caused by indoor explosions since Semple’s departure. The gaping hole in the dome now let in an eerie, green-death light that had never been any part of her original design. Breathing hard, she repeated her question as though expecting someone or something to provide her with an answer. “What have they done to my beautiful home?”
The sounds of automatic weapons fire and a muffled explosion from another part of the environment supplied an answer of a sort. Doc finished switching his boots and warily eased to his feet, at the same time drawing the Gun That Belonged to Elvis from its shoulder holster. “They still seem to be going at it.”
Semple kicked angrily at the rubble and turned to face the two men. “It’s fucking Aimee.”
Doc frowned. “Your sister did all this?”
“She did some of it when she blew me into Limbo, but I think the rest of it’s the work of Bernadette and her rebel nuns. I’ll lay Vegas odds that the inevitable uprising has risen, and this is collateral damage.”
Jim and Doc looked at her with unhappy frowns. “Rebel nuns?”
“Uprising?”
“Collateral damage?”
“Don’t we even get a chance to recover from the Dragon Ride?”
The Dragon Ride, although a close relative of the more familiar wind-walking, had been an arduous and exhausting experience. The violent psychic buffeting and energy shifts, the nightmare apparitions and hallucinations, all left Jim’s and Doc’s minds feeling folded, spindled, and mutilated. Semple might have complained of being equally ripped and crumpled, except that she was running on the adrenaline rush of a foul fury. Partway through the nerve-wrenching experience, Jim had wondered if perhaps some joker of yore, with an arcane, Hell-spawned sense of humor, had deliberately arranged for the ancient escape route to be as harrowing as possible, passing as it did though the death-stinking, blood-soaked interior of the Pyramid of the Moon, the hideous fetid lair of the Great Decapitator of the Moche, and through interstellar space, amid death rays, particle beams, and bad science fiction as Battlestar Galactica fought off an attack by the Cylons under Count Baltar.