The plural demon nods both heads to indicate Franz, who leaves a cheap folding table with his stamped forms in hand and approaches the dais with a demon walking to either side of him. The demons smile as Franz chatters excitedly all the way up to the dais. Franz stands where they indicate and fidgets as a third demon approaches with a graywhite softball-sized object in both hands. Franz frowns but holds his ground, more curious than afraid it seems.
The demon to Franz’s left points at the starless sky. Franz looks up and as he stands there craning skyward the demon to his right reaches out with a baling hook and unzips Franz from crotch to throat.
Franz’s face fills with surprise and then with agony. He stares in pain and disbelief as his entrails spill onto the dais. He feebly grabs for them then sways. The demons catch him and lower him to the freshly wetted stone. Franz’s blood flows down the groove and into the lake.
The third demon gently sets the softball-sized object into Franz’s chest cavity and begins sewing him up with a large curved suturing needle while the other two hold his struggling arms and legs.
Niko glares pure venom at the twinheaded demon beside him.
Sinister grins and mimes pushing an object into a body while Dexter pretends to sew it shut. “Wasp nest,” says Sinister.
The suturing is quickly finished and the demons hoist Franz to his feet. Franz is white and wildeyed.
The third demon pats Franz on the shoulder and then punches him in the stomach. Franz gapes like a landed fish. His face wears a horror Niko’s never seen, and he begins to scream as the outraged wasps sewn up inside him swarm.
The demons on the dais laugh and shove Franz off. He falls and rolls and howls and claws at his crude stitches.
Dexter/Sinister laughs and points and wipes tears from his eyes. “I think Franz has anz in his panz.”
“Vive le Franz! Vive le Franz!”
A roar fills Niko’s ears and a white heat fills his belly that could spill over and become anything, take any form at all. He turns and hurries away.
ON THE OTHER side of the rock outcropping the lake of blood cannot be seen again. Only the evercrawling line, the names called from the bottomless list, the neverending plain. See them shuffling in their slaughterhouse line, crawling out there on the plain like mewling wounded babies, scraping under granite blocks like entombed cadavers falsely dead, gathered sheeplike at the Ledge. How many have lived and died since humanity began? One hundred billion? How many of that number tortured in this loathsome place? Sandgrains on a bloodwashed beach. Souls every one, all doomed, all damned, all lost. Judged and found wanting and consigned and then forgotten by what dread remorseless will. You cannot save them. Cannot even save yourself. For without even believing in a soul you bartered it away decades ago and cast its lot with every pathetic pilgrim you will see in this forsaken place. As always you have bartered. As your story says you always will.
But Jemma. Perhaps not doomed. Not damned. Not lost.
DEEP IN ANGRY reverie he stalks toward the thick dark river winding toward the Battlements on the Ledge and does not hear the naked footfalls running at him from behind or sense the knotted fist until it hits the back of his head. He hears but does not feel his head hit ground.
XII.
ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
HE JOLTS AWAKE at screaming overhead. Two sparking orange flares arc out from the Battlements. Niko blinks and shakes his head. There’s only one flare but his vision is doubled. The screaming flare grows nearer. Niko rolls onto his knees and vomits. Catherine wheels spin burning behind his eyes. The scream claws through his brain. The blazing comet’s coming awfully close.
Niko rolls onto his back and shuts his eyes. Let it hit me, I don’t care. Let it end the whole charade. The ground is evertilting like the downside of a full-on drunk.
The scream cuts off as the burning object slams onto the plain hard and close enough to send a shudder through the ground. Niko tries to lift his head to look but soft things tear inside his skull. His feeble fingers trace the contours of a large hard swelling at the base of his skull. His hand moves like it’s remote controlled and the batteries on the control unit are failing. His fingertips are moist and warm.
He gives his hand the day off and it relaxes behind him. He looks like a man lying pleasantly on the ground communing with the night sky.
He shuts his eyes again and moans. Concentrates on warm wind playing on his skin and then realizes that skin is entirely what it’s playing on. His clothes are gone. Shirt jeans jacket shoes filthy socks and even underwear.
His right hand flops onto his chest and spiders to his throat. The locket’s still there. Clothes are much more valuable here than jewelry.
Guitar?
He manages to raise his head. Smoking lump on the ground there. Sweet smell of cooking bacon. Nope. No guitar. Guitar go bye bye.
Get up. Get up.
Okay. All right. I’ll get up in exactly one minute. Just gonna rest my eyes first.
AND STARTLES AWAKE. He pats his naked body. Everything seems to be there. Except his clothes of course, yuk yuk. Feels like history’s worst hangover. Which is okay right now because that’s twice as good as he felt a few minutes ago and the pain means that he isn’t dead.
Doesn’t it? I mean, a blow to the head and then darkness and then you wake up hurting and naked in Hell. You don’t gotta be Einstein to figure that out, buddy pal.
Can we sit up? An experiment will satisfy this question, Doctor.
Niko flops to one side and raises up on one elbow. At this point on our evolutionary chart the primordial sludge attains a rudimentary awareness of the outside world. He pauses and breathes hard until the Bastille Day in his head subsides. Okay. On our feet now. One. Two. Two and a half.
Three.
He’s on his feet and turning about when he realizes he’s about to be sick. Now the primate has discovered upright posture and his hands are free to manipulate tools and so begin the conquest of his world. He gets back on his hands and knees and comes awake standing and staring out across the plain at nothing. Blinks and shakes his head and rubs his eyes. Touches the spongy knot on the back of his head. Looks stupidly at the dried blood on his fingertips nearly black in this furnace light.
Something like a skinny pig with unnervingly human eyes is licking up his vomit a few feet away. Niko doesn’t even have the energy to yell shoo so he ignores it though its smacks and slurps and wet splatches threaten to make him sick again. Which would likely be just fine with Mr. Pork Lean.
A bundle of smoking rags lies on the ground ten feet away. Niko takes a step toward it and when he doesn’t fall down dead he takes a couple more.
The ragbundle is the charred body of a man. Cracked black skin above crackled fat. Clumps of burned hair mottle a seared scalp punctuated by white bone. Cloying smell of fried pork and burned hair. Niko’s stomach clenches and he turns away. After a moment he turns back.
A few miles away are the Battlements. Several miles of long straight wall built on the endless line of the Ledge itself. The river of blood terminates there at a broad arch leading through the Battlement wall. An enormous congregation of the dead is gathered there, corralled by the river and the wall itself. On either bank of the river of blood the damned condense along the base of the wall. Niko tries to spot anyone wearing clothes or carrying a guitar but the light is too dim, the distance too great, his vision too blurred, the damned too many.