Inferno. Part 12

We left concrete for dirt. When we topped a gentle rise, the ground was suddenly all erosion gullies, hard red and yellow clay studded with gravel and gashed by flash floods. We had to scramble in and out of them. Some had water at the bottom, water filthy with broken bottles and bottle caps, used condoms, floating grease, occasional bursts of brightly colored dyes, chemicals that burned our sandaled feet. Nothing grew here; there were dead stumps of trees and dried brown vines reaching upward like dead old women's fingers. Strange smells moved on the air: incongruous whiffs of automobile exhaust, acids, burning oil and rubber.

Billy grunted. "I don't see no trees, Benito. Where'd you put the d.a.m.n trees?"

"We should have reached the Wood long since. I do not understand. But we must go on."

We scrambled out of the gully and looked downward. We had a vista of h.e.l.l.

It looked like h.e.l.l on Earth. Nothing grew. We had to shout above a continual racket. In the distance rectangular shadows showed through the gloomy half-light and thick smog. Buildings? Factories?

I said, "Progress has caught up with your woods, Benito."

A clattering sounded nearby, within a cloud of roiling smoke. A woman ran out of the smoke, terror on her face, hair streaming behind her. She wore a torn evening gown with diamond brooch and earrings, high-heeled shoes with jeweled ornaments. She ran holding the skirt high.

Billy shouted and tried to stop her. She dodged him and ran on. The clattering grew louder, and a bulldozer roared out of the smoke. A man ran just ahead of the blade. The dozer trailed smoke, and it was gaining on the fugitive. There was no driver.

Billy was in the bottom of the gully, curled up, his head wrapped in his arms. When the monster was past I went down to Billy. He was muttering to himself, and when I touched him he twitched galvanically. He leapt to his feet in fighting stance.

"I was never afraid of no man that ever lived," he said. "But I was scared of that. What was it?"

"Bulldozer. For moving dirt."

Billy stared into the smog, his face wondering. "You could tear down whole mountainswith things like that."

"We did," Corbett said. "There's more than one way to be a violent waster."

Billy frowned. "How's that?"

"Pollution. This must be the place for people who ruin the environment." Corbett's face showed his disgust. "They did this to the Earth."

"But who gets chased by them things?"

"Real-estate developers, I guess. Housing-tract speculators. We shouldn't have too much trouble here."

Corbett looked at us. "Or do we?"

I'd always been a conservationist myself. If Big Juju's poetic justice ran true to form, I'd be safe enough.

Or would I? Had I fallen by accident? I'd certainly put myself on that window ledge. If a bulldozer buried me here, would I become a tree?

"Let's go," said Billy. "This place gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s."

We moved off by tacit consent.

"Where we going, anyway?" Billy asked.

"Past this round there is desert," Benito said. "A fiery desert, too hot for life, with flame falling from the sky. I know of only one way to cross it, and that is the way Dante used. A stream runs through the desert, the overflow from the lake of blood. It cools the desert as it moves through it."

"Miraculously," I said. I'd intended it to be contemptuous, but it hadn't come out that way. I'd seen too many miracles, all unpleasant.

Benito nodded. "Of course. We must find this stream, or we cannot cross. It runs through the Wood. Comrades, we must find the Wood." He turned left and walked on.

"Why this way?" Billy laughed. "You ain't got any idea where that Wood is."

"No, but we must reach it if we walk far enough. It is only a matter of time."

Yeah, we had plenty of that. And h.e.l.l was a series of concentric circles, G.o.d only knew how big around. It might take years, and so what?

"Why not go the other way?" Billy insisted.

Benito shrugged. "Dante always turned left on his way down. But we will turn right if you like."

"Naw. It ain't important."

CHAPTER 17

The noise, the smells, the desolation continued. The d.a.m.ned were here, placed by a macabre humor. Phantom heads rose from oil pools. Some were pecked incessantly by oil-smeared birds. A river ran past like an open sewer, and men and women lined the banks, mourning. The wails were constant in our ears, wails and roaring motors and clanking machines.

We looked into some of the huge buildings and pulled back out fast. Inside the noise was overwhelming. Here a sizzling hum of electricity, there a scream of metal grinding on metal, elsewhere a roar of flame. There were more of the d.a.m.ned in those buildings, and they were hard at work.

Our way led through one of the immense factories. Not a head lifted to see us pa.s.s. Incomprehensible widgets pa.s.sed on an endless belt, and men and women screwed on nuts and tightened them and fitted the bottoms and the handles, endlessly. We followed the endless belt for miles until it went through a wall. On the other side more of the d.a.m.ned were taking the widgets apart. Machinery hummed, and conveyors took the parts back to the other side of the wall.

We left the building to find oil derricks raising and lowering their heads like giant prehistoric birds. We crossed a strip mine, and Benito pointed out that it was laid out very like h.e.l.l itself: a vast series of descending circular terraces. But there was nothing at the bottom except stagnant water.

A towering oil-fueled power plant of spidery framework and miles of pipes and valves poured power into a cable thick as my waist. Transmission towers took the cable downhill.

I peered along its length, but the murk defeated me. How did they use electricity in h.e.l.l? But outside the power plant was an athletic man chained to a wheelless bicycle set in concrete in front of the exhaust pipe of the generator. Black smoke poured around him, almost hiding him from view.

As we watched he began pedaling furiously. The hum of the gears rose to a high pitch-- and the generator inside died. There was a moment of quiet. The man pedaled with sure strokes, faster and faster, his feet nearly invisible, his head tucked down as if against a wind. We gathered around, each wondering how long he could keep it up.

He began to tire. The blur of his feet slowed. The motors inside coughed, and black smoke poured out. He choked and turned his head away, and saw us.

"Don't answer if you'd rather not," I said, "but what whim of fate put you here?"'

"I don't know!" he howled. "I was president of the largest and most effective environmental protection organization in the country! I fought this!" He braced himself and pedaled again. The hum rose, and the generator died.

Billy was completely lost. He looked to Benito, but our guide only shrugged. Benito accepted everything. I knew better. This couldn't be justice, not even Big Juju's exaggerated justice. This was monstrous.

Corbett had to be guessing when he suddenly asked, "You opposed thermonuclear power plants?"

Tbe guy stopped dead, staring as if Corbett were a ghost. The dynamo lurched into action and surrounded him with thick blue smoke.

"That's it, isn't it?" Corbett said gently. "You stopped the nuclear generators. I was just a kid during the power blackouts. We had to go to school in the dark because the whole country went on daylight saving time to save power."

"But they weren't safe!" He coughed. "They weren't safe!"

"How did you know that?" Benito asked.

"We had scientists in our organization. They proved it."

We turned away. Now I knew. I could quit looking for justice in h.e.l.l. There was only macabre humor. Why should that man be in the inner circles of h.e.l.l? At worst he belonged far above, with the bridge destroyers of the second ledge. Or in Heaven. He hadn't created this bleak landscape.

I couldn't stand it. I went back. Benito shrugged and motioned to the others.

Within the cloud of blue smoke his face was slack with exhaustion. "It wasn't just the problem of where to bury the waste products," he told me. "There was radioactive gas going into the air." He spoke as if continuing a conversation. I must have been his only audience in years, or decades.

"You got a rotten deal," I said. "I wish I could do something."

He smiled bravely. "What else is new?" And he started to pedal.

I glared at the nothing sky, hating Big Juju. Carpentier declares war. When I looked down, Benito was fumbling through saddlebags attached to the stationary bicycle.

The man cried, "What are you doing?"

Benito took out papers. The man s.n.a.t.c.hed at them, but Benito backed away. He read, "Dear Jon, I could understand your opposition to us last year. There was some doubt about the process, and you expressed fears all of us felt. But now you know better. I have no witnesses, but you told me you understood Dr. Pittman's demonstration. In G.o.d's name, Jon, why do you continue? I ask you as your sister, as a fellow scientist, as a human being: why?"

He began pedaling again, ignoring us.

"You knew?" I demanded. He pedaled faster, his head bent.

I leaned down and put my face close to his.

"You knew?" I screamed.

"f.u.c.k off."

Big Juju wins again. Too much, but appropriate. As we walked away, Jon screamed after us, "I'd have been nothing if I gave up the movement! Nothing! Don't you understand? I had to stay as president!"

We plunged on. Once we caught lungfuls of something unidentifiable. We were getting used to that by now. This time we wound up at the bottom of an erosion gully, kicking and twitching, unable to control our muscles.

"N-n-nerve g-g-gas," said Corbett.

We lay there for hours. Days perhaps. Eventually the wind s.h.i.+fted, and our legs could work again. Benito and Corbett scrambled up the side of the gully, came back for Billy and me.As usual we were the last to heal.Big Juju's biological engineers hadn't done as good a job on us.We scrambled to the top.

Beyond the gully we saw trees. That was all we could see through the sniffles and the tears and the dark, smoky air: a sharply bordered forest, some distance away.

We began to run. Trees. Real living things! Or close to it; nothing was really alive in this terrible place. But trees! We ran, wearing fierce grins, noses lifted as if the air were already sweet...

Closer, they were not so inviting. Gnarled trunks, black leaves... Not Mother Nature herself could have called them pretty. Clumsy birds flapped above them. The forest ended abruptly at a border of flat ground. No, not ground. I stopped at the edge, confused.

The others ran heedlessly out onto the flat black borderland.

It was a road. Blacktop, and a white double line down the center. I called, "Hey, wait a..."

Things roared past and drowned my voice. Too fast to tell what they were, but I knew the sound: the whip of air, followed by a shriek of brakes. I screamed, "Run!"

Corbett was already running for his life. Benito and Billy stared at me; then Benito just took my word for it and ran toward me. Billy looked where I was looking-- and for him it was already too late.

They looked like black Corvettes, 1970's models, but they were lower-slung and more rakish-looking.

They'd stopped and turned and were coming back, accelerating hugely, leaving opaque black clouds of smoke. Billy made up his mind to run; he turned, and they were on him. Billy flew high, hit hard, and rolled like a beanbag: no bones.

I started swearing. The cars roared away-- two of them did. The third turned hard, right off the road.

It rolled over once and landed upright and came for us, bouncing and rattling, but accelerating. Its headlights came on blindingly.

I stopped swearing and looked for cover.

"What are they?" Benito screamed.

"Cars. No drivers," Corbett told him. "I saw. Empty race cars. They must guard the forest."

I looked for cover: something to hide behind, or even a jumble of broken rock too rough for a car.

Nothing. The black demon bore down on us.

"There!" I pointed, and ran.

It was an oil slick, depth unknown, and it would b.l.o.o.d.y well have to do.

I ran straight into the pool. My foot landed on something that jerked away and sent me sprawling. When I pulled my face out of the oil another black, dripping face looked back at me. "Sorry," I said.

"That's okay. We all got our own problems here," said the stranger, and he sank beneath the oil.

Benito was waist deep and wading deeper. Corbett hesitated at the edge, looked disgusted, looked behind him... squealed and dived sideways. I ducked under.

The glare of headlights was branded on my closed eyes.

A wave of oil splashed over me. I lifted my head, and there it was: a rakish black sports car, hubcap-deep in the oil pool. Its motor was a demon-snarl; its wheels spun frantically. It found some traction from somewhere: it edged backward, found more traction and surged out of the pool just as Corbett went over the door in a flying dive.

The horn screamed in rage. The car backed, then turned in a tight circle. I think it was trying to roll over. It never made it. The motor died, the killer car rolled to a gentle stop.

Corbett stood up in the driver's seat, grinning all over his face. The keys dangled from his hand.

Benito and I waded out, streaming oil.

Corbett had the hood of the murder car up and was inspecting the motor. "I used to race a little," he said. "I can probably drive this. What do you say, shall we cross the desert in comfort?"