He was still raving when Baby Bear grabbed me in his heavy claws and dragged me out.
I squeezed the torn end of my arm as tightly as I could while they dragged me back down those scream-echoing corridors, but I was losing blood very fast. I could feel my wrist bone digging into my good hand, but beyond that incredibly strange and painful sensation, I knew the rest of my body was slowly packing up its signaling apparatus and surrendering. As we reached the lifter even the wails of the tormented became muted, and the grotesque faces of Polly Parrot and her gang grew mercifully blurry. I felt a new pain, as though my stump was being sanded with broken glass: Baby Bear was licking the bloody wound. I slipped in and out of consciousness as we waited. It might have been a minute later, it might have been an hour, but the lifter finally arrived, groaning like an overloaded truck bumping down a steep hill. When the door opened, they kicked me a few times, then pitched me inside.
Already blood was pooling underneath me. The vibration of the lifter had almost shaken me senseless, and I seemed to be entering a long, black tunnel, crawling away from light and hope. I slapped my good hand against the wall, and as my other wrist started spurting again I tried to call out my destination. The words came in little wet blobs of sound, like bloody mucus: “The . . . Red . . . City.”
The lifter shook even harder, rattling me like a bug in a killing jar. Then the black tunnel of my thoughts collapsed around me.
twenty-one:
terminus
“. . . FISTULA, POOR Meat, Heartbreak Soup, and Phlegethon Docks . . .”
I awoke to the sound of the lifter voice announcing the terrible places we were approaching and passing in quick succession. The pressure in my head was easing, although that was no longer the worst of my problems. As I struggled to make sense of things, the voice announced several more stops along the fiery River Phlegethon, during which time I managed to pull myself into a sitting position with my back against the lifter’s shuddering wall. My blood sloshing on the floor looked as though it might reach an inch deep if it ever puddled in one place. I felt like a smashed hourglass.
To my dull surprise, several more passengers had joined me while I was unconscious, an array of mixed sweets that altogether made for quite a diabolical little chocolate-box: beast-things, blob-things, and even a few almost humanoid shapes, mostly better dressed than what I had grown used to seeing. I couldn’t look at them long, since my eyes wouldn’t focus properly, but these more upper-crusty travelers seemed to have ranged themselves as far away from me along the lifter wall as possible. Under other circumstances I would have found it amusing, citizens of Hell fastidiously trying to avoid a little blood. Of course, not a single passenger offered to help me or even looked at me with anything deeper than casual distaste. As you might guess, Hell is not big on empathy.
When my head stopped spinning so damn fast, I tore a strip from my robe and clumsily tied it around the ragged stump of my wrist to slow the bleeding. If I had been in a human body, perhaps even in one of my enhanced angelic bodies, I would have been long dead, but this demon form was sturdy, at least in terms of blood loss. With the pressure easing, I would actually have felt healthier than I had in hours if I hadn’t been so weak and dizzy.
Then again, I had to admit, maybe I’m just feeling better because I’ve almost bled out. Maybe this is what it feels like to die in Hell—the nicest thing that happens to you all day.
I didn’t really think I’d be allowed to die, of course. I would either be recycled into some permanent garbage heap of misery or, if I was deemed important enough, get swept up and shuttled off to the infernal body shops for replacement, which would be worse, since they’d probably notice when their meters all read, “ALERT! UNDERCOVER ANGEL! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!”
The lifter kept banging to a violent halt and then just as violently starting up again as people got on and off, more all the time as we rose higher—Phlegethon Heights, Lower Mandible, Brokebone, Shrill Hollows, and a raft of others I was too fuzzy to understand properly. When we started to get to the Lethe levels, starting with the Lower Lethe Basin, I pulled the makeshift bandage tight just a few inches below the wound, preparing to run, or at least crawl, toward safety when I got to my destination.
Upward we shot, through more Lethian stops, then on through a number of the lower suburbs of Pandaemonium. Memories implanted by Lameh told me the Red City itself was stacked many levels deep. The announced stops were all enticing—Ass Crack, Disgust, Filth Lake—but I finally heard the words I’d been waiting for, Styx Loch. See, the waterways of Hell all twine around each other like the strands of a DNA molecule, or at least that’s how I picture it in my head. And though the River Styx surrounded and also flowed through the bottom-most levels of Erebus and Tartarus (and for all I know might have lapped gently at the hooves of the Adversary himself down in the ultimate darkness) it also cradled the uppermost levels, and that meant we had almost reached Pandaemonium.
Even through the delirium and weakness, something struck me. An oddity. You’d have expected that if the Adversary and the most important work of the infernal regions were in the deepest pits, that’s where those courting power would have built their homes. Instead they were all up here, as far from those terrible depths as possible, as if Hell’s most important lords still somehow, at least dimly, hoped one day to climb back toward the light. Maybe Riprash had grasped something important.
The announcer voice went silent for long moments, then said in a flat, doom-laden tone, “Terminus.”
With a final seizure and a creak like a nail being dragged out of a hardwood coffin, the lifter ground to a halt. Doors hissed open in a puff of steam. The rest of the passengers, now somewhere close to two dozen, all tightly pressed together except in my bloody part of the car, shuffled out. I was terrified the door might close on me and the lifter drag me back down again, so I didn’t even try to rise but simply scrambled out on elbows and knees, doing my best to keep my bloody stump from touching anything. The shock was beginning to wear off and the pain was incredible, as if the raw end had been plunged into a bag of salt. Believe me, they may not let you die in Hell, but they’re quite happy to let you suffer to the extent of your capacities and beyond.
The Terminus was immense. You could have plugged a couple of Grand Central Stations into just the lifter station, but it was also the hub of a network of pedestrian tunnels, roads, and (as I discovered to my surprise) railways. The trains fanned out from the central terminus, and as I staggered up the stairs I could see some of them waiting on their tracks—long, low things like millipedes, dull black metal with windows so narrow they might have been gun slits and probably were. I had no time to marvel, though, because every second I was staggering lost in Pandaemonium was a second I was vulnerable to being grabbed by one of the roaming bands of thieves and kidnappers or picked up by the Purified, the elite Mastema guardians of Hell and the only creatures who owed allegiance to the Adversary above all his lesser supporters. Still, although the Purified might not dance to the music of Eligor and Prince Sitri and the other bigwigs, they would definitely agree that Bobby Dollar was persona non grata in Hell, and my express ride back to the Punishment Levels would have me under torture as quickly as if Grand Duke Eligor personally caught me in his bedroom.
The Purified were uniformed in semi-modern military gear the color of thunderheads, each one wearing a sort of black spiral on the tunic, like the view from on top of a tornado, perhaps an image of the metaphorical Pit we were all in. This somber gray and black motif was made cheerier by splatters of deep crimson, apparently individual to each soldier. In their bulky metal gear and the strange casque helmets that hid their faces, the Purified could have resembled a Victorian writer’s idea of astronauts but for their distorted bodies, which had only “big and strong” in common, along with the astounding variety of weapons they carried, including the first guns I’d seen in Hell.