The happy demon does a little dance and tells the others to pay up. Niko hurries on into the woods.
NAKED BODIES SHACKLED hand and foot against the boles of fledgling trees of some lost species never named. Many of the dead seem barely inconvenienced by their long confinement as they talk casually among themselves. Others are stretched taut and lengthened over the course of many years as the trees to which they’re bound have grown and slowly pulled apart their chained and moaning decorations in the agonizing grip of the slowest imaginable rack. Manacles on taller trees hold only stumps of tornoff limbs.
Demons with tackhammers and awls patiently transcribe entire narratives onto the trunks of certain trees. The bark shudders at every stroke and Niko sees that these trees have an eerily human shape. As if long ago the seeds of human beings were planted and grew elongate and distorted. Some bear fruit that demons pluck and eat to conjure muffled sobs from deep within the rooted flesh.
Demons with enormous axes chop at other trees that exude blood instead of sap. Scabbed stumps sprout limb saplings born again from parent trunks. From the deeper forest comes a hornet whine of chainsaws, a grating keen of buzzsaws, a chortle of woodchippers, pounding of hammers, intermittent chopping. The vibrant tone of human wood filed down to powder.
Several times Niko glimpses odd apparitions. Waisthigh Boschlike naked chicken creatures mostly leg and running blindly through the woods. He can’t figure out what they are until one such strange and awkward thing slams against a tree and falls back kicking and convulsing to regain its footing. Against his better judgement Niko goes to help the flopping thing only to pull up short in utter horror at the realization that the creature is a human being. A woman rendered unrecognizable as such because her spine has been snapped and bent double and her entire head shoved up her ass. The flailing arms find purchase on the ground and hoist the contorted body upright. The extruding pelvic bones and lower back are cut and bruised and scabbed and swollen where she has sprinted into trees.
The woman scampers off like some kind of maimed blind spider. Niko does not follow.
THE SOUND OF powertools flaying wood grows louder as Niko presses on and soon emerges from the peopled wood and stops before an appalling sight. Ahead on the denuded plain thousands of demons work the living lumber and drive teams of shackled damned to chainhaul soul-encasing logs to a low enormous building, itself made of timber rough and doubtless conscious. The logs go into one end of the building and emerge from the other as eightfoot lengths of finished four by fours. The air smells heavily of sap and blood, sawdust and rotting meat. The building is both slaughterhouse and lumber mill. A slaughtermill.
A wooden platform runs the slaughtermill’s length, and beside the platform runs a railroad track emerging from the thinning forest on Niko’s right. A signal at the platform’s end glows steady green. An odd jewel of color in this monochromatic red.
The railroad signal’s green turns flashing red, a color nearly white in the ochre light. Niko feels the rumble grow until its thunder fills the world. A great sculpted black iron locomotive howls braking from the wood of the gluttons with a sound like a nation of fingernails clawed across a vast clean chalkboard plain. The locomotive’s front is shaped like a frenzied gargoyle head with a great maw gaping to devour whatever lies before its bound life screaming on the rails. Its behemoth breathing carries across the clearing as it bellows to a stop beside the platform. A load of naked dead disgorges like fleas abandoning a corpse, to be rounded up and herded along by whiphanded demons who direct them to piles of finished beams. The dead are made to pick up two beams each and drag them along a twinrutted trail etched deep into the plain by centuries of just such wooden beams dragged likewise. Niko feels dread certainty about their fate as his gaze follows the rutted path into the distance where inverted phonepole crosses crowd the flat horizon.
The train bleeds forth a ragged thousand of the damned, then winged demons search the cars for those who cower fearful in the dark. What wretched bodies they prise forth are carried struggling high into the weighty air like baggage. The demons chortle and cavort and dogfight one another, playing chicken and making diving airplane noises as they bash the bodies against each other in the raven air. When they tire of this the demons dive toward the gaping head of the locomotive and feed the limp pulped bodies to the waiting train like offerings to some allconsuming god of industry. The venting engine steam turns bloodred like the spout of a mortally harpooned whale.
Soon the train is thrumming again, a neverending growl like some entropic engine of the night unraveling the fabric of nature itself. Niko feels the locomotive’s urge to tear along the track and devour all that lies along its fated way. The boiler builds up its head and begins a labored breathing. Slaved wheels spin to grate sparks from the rails beneath. Demons scatter powdered bone onto the rails. The wheels gain traction and grind on. The angry god of locomotive shudders and convulses waking. Boxcars jerk into motion as the gaping metal maw once more eats up the neverending miles.
Niko is up and running before he is aware of what he’s doing. Running awkward with the guitar case in hand and free fist pumping. Running toward the leaving train and watching thick red smoke vent from the locomotive straining deeper into Hell. The demons on the nearby platform have their whip hands full with this new trainload of tormentees but Niko clothed and carrying a guitar case and running fullout is bound to attract attention.
And he does. A demon looks up from lashing a sobbing girl’s naked bleeding back and sees Niko making for the rear of the train and frowns. He cracks his whip about him to clear a space and gets a running start and spreads his leather wings and takes to the irontainted air.
Niko veers more sharply toward the train. He glances over his shoulder at the demon on the wing. It’s going to be close. At the last moment he cuts left to run in the direction the train is going. The train has picked up speed and sobs along faster than Niko can run with the guitar case. Only a few feet now. A freightcar with an open doorway glides into view. Niko throws caution to the winds and his case into the door. The case bangs the edge and spins into the deeper darkness of the car. Niko jumps in after it. His shins bark the boxcar’s edge and he pitches forward and his arms and chest slam the filthcaked wooden floor. His hands scrabble and slide and catch. His body cants toward the spinning metal wheels that want to mill him into pulp.
Something thuds onto the boxcar just above him. Niko looks up and sees the demon clinging to the side of the train like a browneyed bat. Its arms are tapering tendrils, leathery whips coiled around freightcar handles and protrusions Niko could never reach.
Niko glances frantically. Metal walls, the freightcar’s dark interior, the edge of the opened door.
The demon grins and draws a tendril idly back and flicks it forward. The serrated tip brushes Niko’s forearm and the searing pain makes his arm jerk free. He flails, he hits the door edge, he catches it. Bearing Niko’s weight the freightcar door is sliding shut. His ribcage scrapes along the bottom edge of the car. The ground rolls by just beneath him like a giant sanding belt. Niko fights to get a leg up without losing his grip.
The demon’s tendril wraps above the doorway and the demon swings over Niko’s head and into the dark car. He wraps his wings around himself and watches mutely from deep within, shadows shrouding his indifferent face as Niko struggles for his life beneath him. Niko glares pure hate into the demon’s face. The son of a bitch just stands there. The train rocks and Niko’s legs fly out and his hand slips off the freightcar door. The demon’s tendril whistles through the air and wraps his wrist. Niko’s hiking shoes scud ground and then the demon leans back and lands him like a largemouth bass. Niko convulses gasping there beside his scarred guitar case on the filthy freightcar floor. The wind knocked from him by his fall. His wrist seared where the living whip has branded it.