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.
The broken mirror of his demon’s face gazes earnestly at the human tide before them. “That’s an awful lot of people.”
Niko glances at him but Nikodemus seems sincere.
“Then again, it’s a lot of awful people.”
Niko slows the car. “Lock the doors.”
“Whyyyy?”
“Lock the damn doors.”
“Okay okay. You don’t have to yell.” Nikodemus locks the doors and gazes out the window as Niko stops the Black Taxi. “I don’t think this will do much good if all these people get hold of us.” He glances behind them. “The headlights are getting closer.”
“I need a minute.” Niko rubs his eyes and face and temples with shaky hands while the engine thrum fills the car.
Sixty seconds later Nikodemus says Okay.
“Okay what?”
“Okay it’s been a minute.”
Niko sighs. “I think I liked you better when you were mean.”
“I was mean?”
“If we left the car and I held onto Jem could you fly us to the top?”
“To the Upper Plain? I don’t know.” Nikodemus peers upward through the windshield. It’s like trying to see the Man in the Moon while standing on the lunar surface. The wall is so big and so close it can’t be seen as an object.
“Haven’t you flown it before?”
“I don’t remember. I guess I must have.”
Niko frowns at the steering wheel. “I can’t do this. I can’t drive up that.”
“You drove across the Rift.”
“One epic deed a day’s my limit.”
“We can take turns.”
“Are you crazy? They’ll tear us apart. If we can even get through them.”
“They’re afraid of demons aren’t they?”
“So.”
“Well.” Nikodemus shows his needle teeth.
“What, you’re going to scare off a hundred million people? Even you aren’t that ugly.”
The feral grin deflates and Niko realizes he has hurt his demon’s feelings.
“Why don’t we at least try flying?” Niko says. “If you get tired we could glide back down.”
“You said the demons chasing us are allowed to stop me and distract you. I think both of those will be a lot easier for them if I’m holding onto you in the air. And if you drop the jar the whole thing’s over anyhow.”
“Oh.” Niko tries to imagine Nikodemus engaging in some kind of aerobatic dogfight while burdened with Niko. Guess not. He narrows his eyes at the epic ebb and flow of ruined souls before them. He breathes deeply. “All right. We drive.” He’s scared off his ass. Resignedly he puts the Black Taxi in gear. “This is going to take days.”
Nikodemus leans back as best he can in what for him are the cramped confines of the passenger side. “Bitch bitch bitch,” the demon says.
AT A GUESS it took four days. Lacking day or night it was hard to tell and the car clock made it worse by running backward. Mostly Niko drove while Nikodemus crouched on the hood like some nightmarish ornament, a cargoyle shouting and lashing his tentacles to clear the way. The docile dead obliged like sheep. Rarely getting past first gear Niko would drive until he was falling asleep at the wheel and then Nikodemus would take over while Niko tried to sleep in the back seat curled around the haircracked mason jar and getting so used to the soul unmooring shriek of the Black Taxi’s horn that sometimes he would pop awake because it stopped. His dreams were filled with faceless cordwood bodies he drove over as they reached out cold dead unavailing hands.
The car stopped often. When the surging dead would not or could not yield. When it became impossible to tell whether the car was heading up the Ramp or toward its edge. When Niko had to deal with unavoidable human functions. For the latter Niko was at first afraid to leave the car, certain that the jealous dead would set upon him. His fears proved groundless and he did his business unmolested in their midst. Having come so far the dead were numbed past caring by their torment, crazed by the irrevocable certainty of eternal perdition, hopelessly resigned so deep into these regions of despair that they were become more cattle than human beings. Hell itself had worn them to the nub. Ceaselessly the mutilated and afflicted dead jostled and swarmed and pushed with no more will than snowflakes in an avalanche. They never looked back and neither did he. Not once did he see any of them try to buck the tide. Even those forced over the edge by the swell and press of their fellow sufferers fell with a complete indifference awful to behold.