The Franklin fishtails and the right rear fender smacks the creature’s opened jaw. It’s like hitting a wall. The heavy car rebounds and Niko grabs the mason jar and jerks like a doll. He protects the jar but hits the dashboard with his shoulder and then feels another booming impact followed by a chorus of highpitched keens over rhythmic clacks. An entire pack of the creatures is after him.
Niko has managed to keep his foot on the gas and the Black Taxi is still moving at a good clip when it plows into something huge but yielding. Niko’s shoulder hits the dash again. For a few seconds he beholds nothing but raw white pain and he cries out and makes himself sit up and then he sees that most of the windshield and the driver’s window have turned nearly opaque brown. A nauseating stench from the floor vent fills the car. The stuff on the windshield looks like mud. Niko finds the wiper knob and pulls it and the wipers smear the chunky brown pudding to a paler ale that thickens dark and lumpy at the end of the wiper’s arc. The front left side of the car is covered with a muddy brown batter writhing with thick stringy worms and chunked with stuff that might be bone. The smell is sickening.
It’s digested mulch. The Black Taxi has plowed through a bank of excreted remains human and otherwise. Mulchosaur shit. The car is covered with it. Gobbets of it fly off into the slipstream. A worm-riddled clot slithers along the driver’s window by his head. It looks like one of those chocolate turtle candies. Niko’s stomach lurches. Saliva floods his mouth. He tries not to look but how can he not? He grits his teeth and pushes the vent knob. The hood is caked with cooking shit. Close behind him he is sure an always starving pack of two-ton food processors clacks and keens and cranes enormous crescentshaped mouths toward him.
Drive.
The heaps of blackened dead are thinning now. Even the most Olympian gargoyle throw can carry only so far. Up ahead and to the right is the giant rock near the stone altar that serves as the source for the lake of blood. Niko swings wide of it and the landscape shifts like a bad acid trip to bring into view the vast and convoluted line of bureaucrats waiting decades for their absurd fate. Niko wonders where Franz is out there.
Fleeting glimpses of punishments and atrocities all about him on the plain. Blurred sufferings and flashes of torment. Myriad sadisms enacted without origin, outcome, explanation. I have walked through this.
Niko drives among the toppled statues of forgotten icons carved in living stone dissolved by acid guano. Demon workcrews cover giant transfixed shapes like army ants to chisel and carve and hammer while manlike batshapes flock the pestilent air. Niko slows to thread through the massive ossuary. Headlamps pick out pale quarried flesh lying cracked and broken and bleeding from a thousand lightning fissures. Icon faces worn to anonymity across geologic time. Beneath the tires a steady crunch of marble gravel, broken chunks of broken souls. The ruddy light that dyes the bone of their hard flesh is generated by the massive bonfire fueled by burning hides of skinless nazis staked and branded on the gritty ground. Here I played dark melodies for genocides and their tormentors, here spoke with a titan. Here a demon lost her soul on my account. The whole despairing landscape is a kind of journal, ink of blood on every page narrating woe and loss, despair and pain. Drive.
IN THE STAGNANT air above him claw rakes wing and barbed tails twine and grapple as his newly christened demon fights alone unseen and desperate, moved by what strange urge his mortal counterpart may never know. The air about the dark combatants beats and shudders and corrosive blood rains down upon the damned. Far below the living airwar two small white lights glide steadily across the grim and sunless plain.
HERE THE DECAPITATED stagger clutching their own heads. Blind they trip and fall and drop their burdens and their groping hands recover the wrong ones and collaborate to reconnect their proper selves. Here are screaming children pierced by rods to march in perfect lines. Demons flaying women to the bone and past. Now the lengthy wooden platform hung with populations of the skewered hugging their greased poles. Bowels lanced by splintered wood. The Franklin’s headlights pass them soundless by like some portentious comet. Crows the size of men pluck out men’s eyes with sharp hooked beaks and toss blackfeathered heads to gulp them down like olives. Eyes that see throughout their own digestion. The lips of flatterers sewn to the rectums of diarrhetic misers.
The Franklin shudders from some impact on the plain behind and once more Niko stops himself from turning to look back. A creeping feeling grows between his shoulderblades and as it strengthens he decides to trust his intuition and yanks the steering wheel left right left.
A giant granite block slams the ground he might have occupied had he not dodged. From high above come indecipherable curses. God damn it. They’re not allowed to stop me. Are they? No. The deal was clear. They’re just trying to get me to look back.
Wait a second. The granite blocks?
Sure enough the plain is dotted now with slabs of granite dropped upon the running damned and left to weather away in a place that has no weather. Now the plain looks like an unkempt graveyard for some vanished race of giants. Sam Gamundi lies beneath one of these nameless markers. Digging and digging as he always will, world without end amen.
On impulse Niko honks the horn. The sound that emerges is the bellow of some ancient sea creature decrying its own extinction, an awful nightmare alarm calling to the very soul to strip itself from mortal flesh and prepare to be delivered from its bound estate. Niko shudders in his very core.
Did you hear it out there Sam? Did you know that it was me? That I’m returning with Jem’s soul in hand? I think you did. And I think that you will bless and curse me at the same time. As always.
Now a thin white line out on the dimlit distance like a scar. Can it really be the marble wall? Demarcating here and there? Niko blinks and rubs his eyes but can’t be sure. The white line blurs and fades and as it does a sound grows round the Franklin, rustling at first like swishing taffeta but quickly growing louder and more sibilant.
What had he encountered before running into Sam? So much has happened. So much is jumbled.
Strong gales buffet the heavy car. Streaking sand illuminated by the headlamps looks like rain. But this rain would not drench, this rain would flense—
Twisters. He remembers now. Enormous dustspouts scouring a baked plain intaglioed with the polished bones of the patient dead.
A stuttering rumble shudders the dirted air and a terrible coil dances past the car and lowers an undulant finger toward him like a mindless searching god. Flayed bodies flail within the spinning redlit gray, sailors drowning in a maelstrom. Constantly they bash each other and stain patches of the living wind a brief dull red.
The back end of the Franklin saws. Niko lets up on the gas and turns the wheel in the direction of the threatened spin. If the tornado touches him it could lift this car and sling it tumbling and set it smashed and crumpled on the plain with Niko pulped inside it and the glass shards of the mason jar catching the last fading glints from the feather’s dying glow.
The tires sing across a sea of polished bone as Niko swerves around the roaring serpentine. The tornado lurches and then lifts. Niko evades it and heads toward the false horizon of that thin white line. A wrenching groan behind him like some alien god sobbing in its tortured sleep. The air itself is humming now. It glows and sparks with static from the rubbing sand.