Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [105]
“Then how did I get here?” Gerold finally regained enough of his senses to ask.
“I told you, a fluke, an accident, but we foresaw that accident and used it to our advantage,” the Troll said. Now he picked up a long musket-style rifle and began swabbing the barrel out. He chuckled. “You happened to be on that lake at the same exact moment that Lucifer’s smartest occultists pulled a Spatial Merge—”
Gerold winced. “A what?”
“It’s pretty cool,” Krilid said. “There’s no fresh water in Hell, so Satan figured he’d steal some—six billion gallons’ worth—from the Living World.”
Six billion gallons, came the grim thought. “That’s how much water was in Lake Misquamicus . . .”
“Um-hmm. And now all that water is here, in the Vandermast Reservoir. It was built especially for this operation. Satan wants to build an oasis or some shit, so he activated a massive Spatial Merge to bring all that water here—”
“All that water,” Gerold croaked, “and me with it.”
“Yep, and, depending on your frame of mind”—Krilid raised a scarlike brow—“you can look at your situation as a bad thing . . . or a good thing.”
Even in the midst of all this impossibility and all this horror, Gerold laughed. “How can being in Hell be a good thing?”
Krilid raised a Monocular with a bloodshot eyeball where the lens should be. “Just . . . be patient, and you’ll see.”
Gerold was about to crawl forward again, to look back out, but suddenly, the Nectoport’s oval opening flashed blinding white, and inertia shoved him back. Immediately there came the sense of bending, of his body somehow elongating; the strange walls of the compartment he sat in elongated as well.
Krilid tremored slightly, like one sitting on a trolley over bad tracks. He said, “We’re going to the Pol Pot District now, collapsing space.” And, next, the white flash ceased, to be replaced again by more bloodred sky. “Take a look now.”
Gerold dragged himself forward and looked out.
They hovered maybe a half a mile up, through wisps of soot-colored clouds. The clouds stunk, and when he craned his neck over the Egress’s rim, the entire city below stunk as well.
More teetering buildings and gas-gushing smokestacks. Bizarre creatures darted quickly up and down decrepit skyscrapers. Anywhere he might look, some figure was seen jumping out of a high window. Gerold gaped closer at the streets themselves. Sewer grates belched flames; masses of figures—Human and otherwise—clogged trash-strewn and blood-splattered avenues. Long, clattering cars putted about as well as carriages drawn by fanged, malformed creatures that sufficed for horses. Clay men loomed on every corner, sentinel-like as they scanned the masses. Any and all free space between buildings were stakes on which severed heads had been planted. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands. Additionally, piles of dead bodies lay everywhere, while squads of forced laborers trudged to the task of flinging the bodies into carts and wheeling them away. Gerold was too nauseated to ask . . .
“We’re getting close,” Krilid said. He handed Gerold the Monocular. “There’s the security perimeter . . .”
Gerold gulped with a dry throat when he elbowed up and looked through the glass. A heavily walled clearing existed amid the center of the District, the size of a football field. In each corner, Mongrel Demons and Human Damned were being tortured on racks or boiled in oil vats, and the resultant screams rose and fell like some mad, dissonant background music.
It was not the walled perimeter itself that stole Gerold’s breath and constricted his stomach, it was the perimeter’s most salient feature.
The fucking thing is HUGE, Gerold thought.
A hulking statue over 500 feet high spired from the middle of the perimeter. Muck-black like tar mixed with excrement mixed with mud. Its contours had been meticulously shaped to heighten its overall hideousness; Gerold thought of King Kong dunked with pitch. But the face . . .
The face—
Gerold threw up over the side when he zoomed