Mash Up

by Gardner Dozois

  So, long story short, that’s why I say you probably haven’t ever made my acquaintance personally outside the pages of some lurid book. But at the same time, my portrait in those steamy pages being so reality-show, it hardly counts even if you read the thing.

  Of course, another way you mighta gotten to know me actually is if you’ve ridden my scow. But out of all the trillions of creatures in Hell, that number amounts to the tiniest fraction of souls. There’s just so many beings in the infernal regions that the chances of any two bumping up against each other is smaller than the odds of me jilling off and cumming just at the exact second a meteor destroys Earth by landing precisely in my busy lap.

  Which is why you coulda knocked me over with a feather off the Angel Jegudiel’s wings the day I stood at the head of the Shadows’ boarding plank and saw my big bruiser of an ex-husband, Jad Greenlees, strolling onboard, handsome as a dragon and twice as surly. (And I should know dragons, having had a one-night stand with a Jap one named Uwibami, on the sorrowful rebound from Tom.)

  Now, last time I had seen Jad was just about three days before I died. And he had been slightly instrumental in me buying the farm. Maybe even more than slightly. Not that I held it against him anymore, having come to the realization that the fault was truly all mine. Knowing Jad as well as I did back when I was mortal, I shoulda been more careful.

  The way it happened was like this.

  The Virgin Berth was in port for a week, and I had wanted to make a little extra money. My eye was snagged by the Facebook announcement for a Demolition Derby up in Pensacola, at the Five Flags Speedway, just three hours or so down Route 98. I had done Demo Derbies before, and, if I say so, was pretty damn good at them. I figured I had a good shot at taking one of the prizes.

  But right that moment, I had no suitable vehicle to enter. So I resolved to get Jad to let me take his old beefed-up Dodge Charger to compete with. It was the least he could do, seeing as how it was my earnings that had paid to kit out the car in the first place. Letting him have the souped-up beater after our divorce had been pure niceness on my part. And I knew he wasn’t using it for anything anymore, since he had made some real money and bought hisself a cherry-clean 1985 IROC-Z. So over to Jad’s I went.

  Standing on the beat-up shady porch of Jad’s shack, I could hear a lot of instant frantic rustling around inside, in response to my knocking. Not wanting Jad to flush all his merchandise and then blame me, I hollered out through the ripped screen door, “Hey, shithead, it’s just me!” The scrabbling and shuffling stopped, there was a whispered conversation featuring a female voice I didn’t recognize and a male one I knew too well, and then my former hubby appeared on the far side of the floppy copper mesh.

  Jad looked kinda like Magnum, PI—one reason I had first fallen for him—except for considerable extra inches around his middle, a chewed-up ear from a particularly evil bar fight—the same brawl what left a scar kinda like Harry Potter’s on his brow—and a trademark expression of baffled confusion, irritation, and suspicion arising from a far-less-than-Advanced-Placement level of intelligence.

  Now he scowled. “So it’s you.”

  “Generally I follow mighty close behind my voice, jerkoff.”

  “Whatta ya want? I’m busy.”

  “Yeah, I bet. Cutting your coke, no doubt. You’re not still using that de-worming shit you stole from the vet, I hope.”

  Jad had the grace to look embarrassed. “Not since I lost myself several dead customers, no. Made the skin fall right offen them in hunks.”

  Jad’s ramped-up involvement with drug-dealing had been the primary reason for our splitting up. I just couldn’t reconcile even my sketchy set of ethics with the stuff he was pushing. It had been all right when we first married, and he was only selling grass and Scooby Snacks. But I drew the line when he moved into bath salts and all that other deadly junk.

  But all that was in the past, and any hurt or loss I felt for what we had had and thrown away was moderated by an equal sense of relief and freedom at being single again.

  I explained my errand to Jad, and he brightened up, obviously relieved that I didn’t want any weightier favor. For a moment, I could see the fun-loving, easy-going, carefree, considerate guy I had married. Then the woman’s voice called out to him to hurry up, and his attitude changed to worry and haste, pissed-offedness, and anxiety. I recognized the voice.

  “Is that Scamp the Tramp O’Dell in there?”

  “So what if it is?”

  I shook my head. “Man, Jad, I thought you had more sense and good taste than that. She is ten kinds of nasty layered on top of a heap of meanness. What can you possibly see in her?”

  Jad leered. “She fucks like a cageful of tigers getting their first meat after a week’s worth of carrots. And she helps me in my job.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, except to offer up that they truly deserved each other. Jad took it as a compliment. Then he scooted past the door, opening it just slightly as if afraid I might try to sneak inside. But nothing coulda been further from my desires.

  We went out to the side yard where the Charger sat on its cinderblock-chocked trailer, covered in leaves and bird poop. I insisted on spraying the car somewhat clean with the garden hose before I took it.

  “What’s become of you, Jad? You used to love that car and take good care of it. Don’t you give a shit about anything anymore except selling drugs?”

  “That and pussy. Except not yours. Now, c’mon and hurry. I got things to do.”

  Burning mad and biting my tongue, I backed my old Ford Ranger up to the trailer and let Jad hitch them up without even getting out of the cab.

  And that was my fatal mistake. I shoulda inspected what Jad had done.

  Jad fucked up installing the safety chains. First off, they were too heavy a gauge for the load. Then he secured them not to the rig but to the frigging Charger itself! So a few days later, when I was barreling down Route 98 and the trailer coupling separated from the ball mount on my truck after hitting a bad bump, I suddenly found myself connected to a loose, airborne automobile—the Charger— that had leaped off its runaway trailer, shredding all four tires when it landed. The drag caused my Ranger to careen from lane to lane, sideswipe the Jersey barrier, roll over, hit the pillar of a billboard, and explode in a fiery Hellball, sending me straight to my new job as Captain of the Ship of Shadows.

  For a time, I would ask myself if Jad had rigged the setup deliberately to cause my death. But ultimately I figured, naw, it was just bad luck and circumstances. That trailer was hauling fine till we hit the bump, and there was no way Jad coulda predicted that. It was just sheer hurried incompetence on his part, and lazy inattention on mine. My death had been just fallout from his lameass haste.

  So before too long into my infinite stay in these realms, I forgave Jad Greenlees for my death, and even managed to resurrect a few—very few—happy memories of our time together to comfort me occasionally in my daily rounds.

  Which is not to say I did not have some mighty conflicted feelings churning inside me as I watched the big bastard climb that gangplank!

  For once, Jad was not swaggering. In fact, he seemed kinda bummed and stomped-down, looking like a dog what had got its boner knot caught between two fence slats. He wasn’t dressed in the usual High Ghetto style he favored. In fact, I recognized the suit he wore as the kinda cheap secondhand clothes Hell handed out to newcomers, sorta like the suit prisoners got back on Earth when they were released. His head hung down and he looked only at his shuffling feet. He didn’t even do a double take when Humbuzz, my purser, took his ticket. And if you’re a human who doesn’t jump when you first encounter one of the Bee People of Venus (far as I know, they lived about umpty-ump millions of years before humans even existed), then you’re some kinda superman, and Jad was never that.

  Once onboard, Jad started to head for the ladder down to steerage, so I knew two things: he was traveling some distance, and he truly had no chancres. Nobody rides ste
erage if they can help it, it’s so dismal and stinking, full of screaming ogre babies and their bone-gnawing parents and ignorant Neolithic shitkickers. And most passengers just crossing from one shore to the next like to stay up top and enjoy the hot, clammy, coal- and sulfur-scented breezes, for whatever relief they offer.

  I felt so sorry for the boy I stepped right into his path to halt him. He bumped into me, muttered an apology, and tried to sidestep me. But I hailed him by saying, “Hey, Scarface, dontcha have any time for old friends?”

  Jad looked up, and, with no small effort, his expression changed from grim and glum to bogusly boastful. I almost regretted making myself known. But if he was riding any distance, we woulda come face to face sooner or later anyhow.

  Jad’s voice sounded rough, as if maybe he had spent the past month of Sundays crying in his beer. “Well, sweetcakes, fancy meeting you here! I thought for sure that your holy ass woulda brung you straight to the Other Place.”

  “Holy ass only next to your sinful carcass. How’d you end up here anyhow?”

  “My meth lab blew up.”

  That figured. Jad had trouble remembering not to nuke his tinfoil-wrapped leftovers. Putting potentially explosive chemicals in his hands was asking for disaster.

  “Anybody else screw the pooch with you?”

  Jad got crestfallen again. “Just Scamp.”

  “Oh? How come she’s not lovingly by your side right now?”

  Now Jad looked mad. “One of these high and mighty demons done stole her from me!”

  I got the story from Jad in confused bits and pieces. Seemed like he was still in that period of disorientation and disbelief that hits everyone when they first arrive in Hell, and only evaporates when the damned soul has fully reconciled itself to its fate.

  Upon their flindersization, Jad and Scamp’s joint entry interview had been conducted by Supreme President and Earl Rampant Glasya-Labolas, one of the mightier potentates of Hell, who outranked my own mentor Marquis Decarabia by about several hundred thousand ass-kissings and ritual face-in-the-mud abasements. Glasya-Labolas’s form was that of a giant coondog with rainbow griffin’s wings, and he loomed ’bout as big as your average Redneck Riviera McMansion.

  Turns out that the Earl Rampant had taken a shine to Scamp the Tramp as new meat, and she had no doubt encouraged the demon in her slutty fashion, once she saw which side of the Hell waffle had the molasses. Glasya-Labolas had done the dirty deed with Scamp right then and there in front of her outraged boyfriend. (Don’t ask how a sewer-pipe-sized dog dick fits into a normal-sized human pussy; physics is mighty variable in Hell, not to mention biology.) Jad had been so enraged he had very foolishly attacked Glasya-Labolas, all to no avail of course. Except that Jad had ended up on the demonic shit list.

  Glasya-Labolas had flown away with Scamp on his back, to his castle known as Dark Epcot, about nine thousand miles downriver from where the Shadows was now docked. And when Jad had recovered himself and tried to fit into the Hell economy the only way he knew how, by drug-dealing, he had discovered that the only job any of the established drug lords would give him was the low-paying one of lookout or mule—quite a comedown from his mortal rank. A few months of that treatment and he had got to feeling lower and lower, until about the only thing he could think to do was to voyage to Dark Epcot and apologize to Glasya-Labolas and ask to be forgiven.

  This was why he had booked steerage passage on my ship.

  Telling his story seemed to alleviate some of Jad’s funk, as sharing troubles mostly will, even in Hell. In fact, he began to act like his old cocky self and presume on our prior connection.

  “Christ, Karen, you’re looking extra damn hot, like some kinda Hollywood Pirates of the Caribbean bitch.”

  I hadn’t even thought twice about my outfit, but I realized after Jad commented that it was indeed pretty piratically smoking. I wore a paisley scarf tied around my hair like Little Steven on tour with Bruce. My boobs were covered with a lurex tube top in red, over which I featured an unbuttoned denim vest. My Daisy Dukes left nothing to the imagination, and I wore Vivienne Westwood ankle-high pirate boots. (A girl’s got to splurge now and then.)

  “Why, I guess that’s about as much of a gentlemanly compliment as I could ever expect from you.”

  I made the mistake of smiling at Jad then, and so he felt obligated or entitled to grab my ass.

  That’s when I let him have it in the face with my tail.

  You should picture about four feet of thick scarlet scaly garden hose, normally coiled up tight to my butt, that ends in an arrow-shaped knob of flesh about as dense as Mike Tyson’s fist. I can unfurl that sucker and whip it around faster than a snake. My tail constituted those “papers” Marquis Decarabia had said he was gonna give me as token of my new job.

  Jad flew back about ten feet and landed on his ass against a bulkhead. Several of my crewmembers came running. And most of them, even the humans, looked scarier than Humbuzz. They helped Jad up, but kept his arms pinned. He looked dazed as a manatee in a marina.

  “Humbuzz,” I said, “how far does his ticket take him?”

  “Fishgrunt only.”

  I turned to Jad. “That’s not even halfway to Dark Epcot. How’d you plan on getting the rest of the way?”

  Jad acted properly humble, though I knew he’d be burning up underneath. “I dunno… Work at something, I guess…”

  “Well, how’d you like a job as stoker on this ship? Join the Black Gang and work your passage off. I need someone, and the experience might do you good. It’s manual labor, but it’s not too hard or dirty. And you get to bunk with the crew.”

  Jad was too dumb to be suspicious of my offer. He musta thought I was just all full of womanly pity.

  “Well, okay, I suppose. Gee, thanks, Karen, that’s mighty white of you.”

  “All right then. The boys will take you down and show you the ropes.”

  As Jad walked off, nursing his jaw, I had to smile again.

  The boiler of the Shadows ran on condensed succubi screams that came in the form of gleaming silver bricks slick to the touch. Handling one brick was enough to give any male an instant hard-on—and stiffen the clit of many a female too. By the end of each shift, after handling hundreds of those bricks, Jad would ache like somebody was amputating his balls with a butter knife.

  His only likely partners in relieving his needs, those willing Neolithic and ogre gals in steerage, were going to have no end of Greenlees loving on this voyage.

  With Jad squared away, I turned my attention to my duties. We were docked at Scrope, and due to cast off in the next half hour or so, heading cross-Styx for Halfhead. As you can imagine, schedules drift pretty regularly in Hell—demons ain’t concerned with making no trains run on time—and ferry passengers come to resign themselves to reaching their destinations at any old hour, happy and satisfied with the service if arrival occurs on the same day promised.

  Now, every ferry on the Styx ran a shoelace pattern: scoot diagonally across the murky waters from one settlement or town, shack or city, to the opposite bank’s destination, unload and load, then angle off toward a downriver or upriver dock on the shore you had set off from just prior. Every straight mile of travel up or down the Styx was attained only by multiple miles of cross-river churning. The necessity to serve every community, however small, in this zigzag fashion meant a leisurely pace.

  But that was fine with me. No pressure, no rush, just piloting Shadows lazily under the dirty furnace skies, thinking my thoughts, however elevated or gutter-drenched, watching for snags in the form of behemoth corpses or floating war debris, blowing the big horn to alert smaller craft, steering clear of larger ones, aware all the while that at any moment some subaquatic leviathan outta one mythology or another, flashing six heads, each sporting a mouthful of fangs big as my leg, could breach and threaten to swamp us. Every day brought news of one ferry or another stove in and capsized with greater or lesser loss of life. (Where did the dead and damned go when they died?
You really don’t want to know!) But that’s why the Shadows boasted some sweet honking deck artillery fore and aft. That, and for dealing with local Illustrissimos and Dominions who might’ve gotten a little too big for their goat bottoms and decided to levy some unfair taxes or cumshaw or fees. My patents from Marquis Decarabia were, document-wise, as powerful as my tail. But some small-pond jokers were just too bag-of-hammers dumb to know when to kowtow without a few hundred 50mm shells from a chaingun upside their heads.

  So before much longer we were underway, sluicing through the small floating corpses and frothy fecal scum, plastic soda bottles, and slicks of glowing chemicals, maneuvering just like a bottom-heavy mechanical swan paddling through a tub full of acid-wash and tie-dye colors and jeans.

  Darkness never really falls in Hell, but most creatures operate on some kinda wake-and-sleep cycle that approximates Earthly days and nights. So by the time we had gone from Scrope to Halfhead, and then back across to Shriektown, it was getting on toward the end of my working day. I gave the orders to tie up for the night, made sure a watch was posted, checked that our new cargo of Trojans, gin, pineapples, and roofing nails was secured, and retreated to my cabin.

  On the way to my rest, I thought I heard wild yowls betokening sexual release of a mixed appreciative and flinching nature wafting up from steerage. Among the grunts and bellows and hollerings was a certain species of mating call I had come to know intimately, from being pressed beneath their source back in Apalachicola. I think my grin lit up a circle of deck planks around me.

  Lying in bed on my belly (I do miss sleeping on my backside), I thought how much fun I could have accompanying Jad all the way down to Dark Epcot and witnessing his meeting with Supreme President and Earl Rampant Glasya-Labolas. My usual run of the Styx didn’t extend so far, but us captains were always swapping routes just to liven up infinity a bit, and I had no doubt I could bring the Shadows all the way to Dark Epcot. As sleep overtook me, I made the decision to do it.