Well, somebody once said fortune favors the brave. I think it was my buddy Sam, shortly before he drank himself to death. (Well, really, he only drank that particular body to death, but that’s another story.) Since I didn’t have a plan, or even any hope to speak of, I figured that I might as well do something, so I quietly slipped Riprash’s huge dagger-sword out of my belt and then, when the lifter lurched to a stop at the next level, I shoved it into Ugly Number One’s side as hard as I could, with all the force of my legs, back, and shoulders. As I think I mentioned, I’m pretty strong as a demon, and I was hoping to shove it all the way through both of them at the same time. As it was, by the time I got it all the way through armor and Number One, I only gouged about a three inch hole in Ugly Number Two, but the collapse of his wounded partner knocked him off-balance, which gave me time to get out one of my guns and shoot him in the head.
The door slid open. The customers inside the lifter stared down at the two dead soldiers with wide eyes. The passengers waiting to get on suddenly noticed them, too. Nobody moved for a couple of seconds except for the quiet rattle of scales shivering together. Not many heroes in Hell, thank the Highest.
“Step out,” I said to the nearest passenger, a woman with no eyes. Just to make sure she understood, I pressed the barrel of my revolver gently against her forehead. She stepped out. The other passengers quickly followed her. I waved my gun at the passengers outside; they got the idea, moving back from the door. When it closed again and the lifter started down once more, I was alone with the two motionless soldiers, each an ugly, lumpy island in a spreading sea of blood.
I knew they weren’t dead in any ordinary sense, although these bodies might never be functional again, but I didn’t want to take the risk that they might regenerate on me, so I stopped the car at a random floor, checked to make certain nobody was waiting to get on, then dragged the two semi-corpses out of the car. It wasn’t easy—it took me the best part of three minutes to wrestle all that weight by myself, and when I got the door closed and the lifter moving down once more, I looked like I’d just taken a blood shower. I probably didn’t smell all that great, either, but I had bigger things to worry about.
You know how when you’re trying to think of something really important, these other, much less important ideas keep jumping into your head like bunnies on crystal meth, boing, boing, boing, anything except what you’re supposed to be thinking about? You don’t? It’s just me, huh?
Maybe it was Eligor’s crab-demon flexing in my skull, or maybe just exhaustion, but as I was doing my best to figure out what I should do next, I kept getting distracted by ideas that really were not very important right at that moment, like if Hell was no more of a physical location than Heaven was, why was it so much more realistic? Why did people bleed? Why did they eat? Why go to all the trouble of making a permanent torture chamber, then giving it its own ecology and unnecessary shit like that? Was that God’s idea or the Devil’s? What agreement did they have, exactly?
Then I’d catch myself and try to start thinking about survival again.
I really only had one choice of an escape route. From what the two dead guards had said, Niloch’s soldiers were looking for me everywhere from Abaddon on up because they’d learned from that Mastema mud-man who’d commandeered my lifter how badly I’d reacted to the Punishment Levels my first time, when I’d freaked out so badly he’d tossed me out for the Block and his freaks to chew on. It might even have been Eligor who passed the information along to Commissar Niloch, just to torment me in a new and interesting way before having the intracubus in my skull shut me down. But wondering whether Eligor was playing me for a fool or not was a game with no useful ending. What was more important now, Niloch and his thugs thought they had me figured out, so my only hope was to surprise them. If they knew for a fact I couldn’t survive the Punishment Levels, well, that’s precisely where I had to go—right where they didn’t expect me. And if I survived that return visit, I just had to pray that Eligor really wanted that feather back badly enough not to help the ones chasing me, since for all I knew, the intracubus in my head was keeping him informed of everywhere I went and everything I did.
And a great holiday, I thought, just keeps getting better and better.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t ask the lifter to take me down to Satan’s Parlor or anything, but only a few levels lower than Abaddon. After that I could climb to the level with the Neronian Bridge. After all, I figured, I’d gone a few levels farther below that when I experienced the Punishment Levels before, and I’d survived more or less intact.
What I probably should have thought of, though, was that the last time I had descended to the Punishment Levels and escaped, I didn’t have an intracubus burrowed into my head like a demonic tick. To say I was astonished when I got down to Itching Stump, still several levels above Abaddon, and the inside of my head began to burn, is probably a bit of an exaggeration—I’m a pessimist by nature and, after all, I was already in Hell—but I was definitely astonished by how much it hurt. It got worse every level down. By the time I was getting close to Abaddon itself, a place I’d already survived quite easily, that red-hot robot tarantula was doing Jazzercise in my cerebellum, and I was twitching like a marionette with its strings caught in a power mower.
Like I said, I probably should have guessed things might be different this time, but what with everybody trying to hack me to pieces or torture me I’d been a bit distracted. So now I had a new crisis: I couldn’t afford to get out of the lifter yet, because Niloch’s troops were working their way upward from Abaddon. But every second I stayed was making me more and more certain that my head was going to explode in a splatter of flaming nerves and brain goo.
As the levels passed, and my limbs jerked and my nerves sizzled, I kept singing cartoon theme songs over and over in my head just to keep myself from thinking about how much I was hurting, but Spider-Man was already doing me less good than the Flintstones had, and I had a feeling I probably wouldn’t even get to start Yogi Bear. Still, I hung on in desperate agony until the lifter sank past the Abaddon stop, then I gasped out the name of the next level. When the lifter ground to a halt and opened, I stumbled out into the deserted little station at Grey Woods and then out into the city beyond the station. Except there was no city.
At that exact moment I was having trouble focusing, what with something inside my head chewing on my neural fibers, but I realized a little later that I was in one of the places I’d actually read about, not in any Camp Zion briefing, but in the words of Dante himself. (We read The Inferno for extra credit, even though it’s mostly made-up. Surprisingly, old Dante got quite a few things right, including the idea of Hell’s vertical arrangement.) If you’ve read him too, you might remember “The Wood of Thorns,” or, more directly, the Forest of Suicides. That’s where I was now. The lifter building here was like a remote stop far out on a suburban train line, one of those little places where you think there couldn’t possibly be enough passengers to warrant a station.
Not only was the station empty, outside the station was a sort of platform, which was really just the edge of the building, and then . . . nothing. Not literal nothing—although this being Hell, that would have been possible too, I guess—but nothing resembling infernal civilization. The woods stretched as far as I could see and were as gray as reported, a heavy, dripping forest of oak and alder and other ancient European trees tinseled with thick moss. In the spots where you could see ground through the mist, it was covered with grass of such a dark green that it appeared nearly black.