3
"Kiddie toucher!" Sam shouted, shocking Ricky out of his numbing trance. "Get the hell off before we throw you out!"
A chorus of boos had hit the air. Ricky saw the direction of the vocal assault as he felt the bus slowing. Given that the bus was cruising across a non-physical jet-black wilderness, the ride wasn't exactly smooth, and the vehicle shuddered now as its unseen driver changed down noisily through the gears.
A man who had his jumper pulled up to shield his face was standing at the doors, ready to disembark. Ricky was puzzled. Then he saw the bus stop.
It was rather like the kind of train station you'd find at some tiny town. A small building with a single platform seemingly hovering in mid-void and a sign on a post that said: "PAEDOPHILES." When the bus ground to a halt and the doors were flung open, the man waiting to disembark leaped out and landed with a resounding clack on the wooden platform. Immediately, the door to the small building creaked open; beyond lay a darkness deeper than the void, although to Ricky that seemed impossible, and scary as hell. The bus started to pull off. As it passed the man outside, everyone turned to leer and cuss at him. He didn't see his audience, however: his every sense was fixed on that open door and the fate that awaited him inside.
"Dante had it all wrong," Sam said, giving the man the bird out the back window. "He said Hell had nine levels. Actually it has hundreds, each for a different sin. And wow, if Hell's anything like prison, then I'm glad I'm just a lowly bank robber and not a crazy kiddie-fiddler." He looked at Ricky again, playfully punched him on the arm to break the latter's reverie. "So, pal, what was your sin and how'd you die?"
Ricky's brain started whirring. Good questions, both of them.
4
Death must be like getting drunk, Ricky thought, because he had trouble remembering events directly prior to it, just like when he woke the morning after a heavy beer session. He could clearly recall going out on his motorbike to give his wife some space, some time to think, because they'd argued. He had taken the bike through the nearby Blue Bell Woods, which offered a winding footpath that his off-road vehicle would be well suited to, and which would accord him the peace and quiet that he needed in order to think. It had been raining and he would get dirty, but that fact, he recalled, hadn't set him back.
He remembered riding into the woods. He had turned off Parker Street and guided the bike carefully though an old hole in the chain-link fence (a hole fashioned years earlier by, Rumour HQ claimed, a milk float piloted by a sleeping man. After that he had just snatches of what happened. When he tried to remember, he was rewarded only with a mild headache.
He had crashed! It suddenly came to him now, as the bus pulled up at another stop and disgorged four MURDERERS. He remembered clearly a fragment of that event: his bike's front wheel skidding on a rotting carcass of a fox that nobody had cleared off the footpath. The bike and he skidding off the path, through the mud and towards a steep embankment. And there his memories took a commercial break, to return with his awakening in a bus queue in a black void, dead.
5
"This is my stop," Sam said, getting to his feet. Ricky looked out the window, across the black void. The floating bus stop, no different from any of the previous ones, was signposted as THEFT, which he figured must including bank robbery if Sam was getting off.
"What do I do?"
Sam grinned down at him. "You get off, like everyone else. What was your sin?"
"That's the thing - I don't know! I always thought I -"
"Was a good guy, right?" Sam laughed. "Yep, I guess these bus drivers get loads of that - people looking all shocked because they thought they should be at Heaven's door instead of down here with all the scum." Now he turned serious. "Listen, pal, they don't make mistakes. If you're here, it's because you sinned, big time. And you'd better comb that memory of yours real good. Because if you get off at the wrong stop, or if you're still on this bus when it reaches the terminus, it'll be counted as cheating destiny. And that, my friend, is the biggest sin of all. For that, you'll get the penthouse suite here in Hell and you'll share it with Satan himself. And believe me, you don't want that!" He looked up as the bus shuddered to an ungainly halt at the stop. Six or seven people rose to leave. One started crying, pure fear having overcome her. The others moved mechanically, like robots on a pre-programmed course, emotions notwithstanding. Their faces had become the physical depiction of the despair in their hearts.
One of these, Ricky saw, was a man he recognised. Peter Pains, the local town tramp who'd succumbed to the perils of drinking alcohol on cold nights. His death had been four days ago. Four days he'd been here, waiting in that queue, Ricky realised. Waiting to see who would join him; waiting for his eternal fate.
Sam stuck out his hand, and Ricky took it. "Think hard, and take care. And you know, perhaps Hell ain't so strict and they'll allow us all to mingle in a few millennia. Might see you at the party." He grinned; he was taking all this surprisingly well, Ricky figured. "Until then, enjoy eternal damnation."
And with that, Sam was gone. Off the bus, though the small building and into that deeper darkness. Into his portion of Hell. The bus moved on, relentlessly. Ricky's feelings of hopelessness deepened.