Sometimes a member of this destitute parade would grab onto a doorhandle and sometimes even get the door open. Nikodemus kept forgetting to lock the door going on and returning from cargoyle duty. Twice one of them actually made it into the car. Once a teenaged boy with buboes that opened to show little teeth, once a tiny Inuit woman who sat quiet and still upon the seat. Niko was so surprised by her sudden appearance and then so fascinated by her calm centeredness that he had gaped at her and done nothing. In the midst of all this horror she had seemed a saint. Niko was content to let her ride along with them, though where she thought she was going was anybody’s guess, but Nikodemus yanked her from the car.
Continually the car ran over fallen trampled souls too injured to regain their feet. Their regeneration set back even further now by two tons of bulldozing vintage sedan. Niko tried to tell himself it wasn’t the same as hitting them in the mortal world. They could not die and they would heal. But their pain was still pain, and the first forty or fifty made him feel awful. Soon they were just speedbumps.
Several times Nikodemus left the car and flew away to return hours later bearing water in a smooth scraped swollen bladder that had to have been a human stomach. Desperate and dehydrated Niko drank the cloudy water anyway, his body grateful even as his mind resisted.
Nikodemus also brought handfuls of raw food. Niko tried not to think about what he might be eating as he chewed and swallowed without looking. The alternative was starvation, and he had learned as many had before him that when faced with real and lasting hunger and no certain end to it in sight a man will eat anything put before him that might give nourishment without killing him and not complain. Niko ate and drank and did not complain.
During all this upward crawl the Black Taxi never ran out of gas. The aircooled engine never overheated or stalled or stopped or even missed or knocked. Odometer and tripmeter turned and turned and turned.
Whatever had been following them was lost now among the crush and press of millions of dead in the miles between. Or perhaps their pursuer had left them to their epic and mundane labor. There was only one place they could emerge after all. Easy enough to have cohorts waiting at the head of the Ramp.
At first Niko could not help staring through the windshield at the continuous exodus parting before the Franklin’s prow. As if entranced by some overstocked aquarium of grotesqueries. Vacant faces and empty eyes, tribes of Adam, tribes of Shem. A diaspora of the penitent damned everfleeing the holocaustic closure of their mortal lives. At first he sought among their drowned expressions faces he had known upon the living earth but glimpses of their anguished faces were too fleeting for his memory to fit a name. They trudged and stumbled past the Franklin as it made its salmon trek upstream and the only impression made by those endless permutations of recombinant DNA was a palimpsest of handprints on the windows of the car.
Nikodemus did not talk much when he was in the car but instead watched the passing faces, brooding and introspective.
Niko wondered about atmospheric pressure. The Ramp rose higher from the Lower Plain than Everest rose above sea level but the temperature remained hot and dry and the air pressure did not decrease. How could that be? If the millibars were normal on the Lower Plain they should be breathing near-vacuum by now. And if they were normal on the Upper Plain, the Lower Plain should have been dense enough to crush bone.
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.
XXVI.
STONES IN MY PASSWAY
“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.