Nightville

You couldn’t catch a train there. You couldn’t take a boat or a plane or a taxi. You couldn’t ask a travel agent how to get to Nightville; they didn’t even know the place existed—at least, not on a conscious level. There were no maps, no dotted lines, no secret trails through the hills. There was only one way into Nightville, and that ticket came at one hell of a cost.
If you found yourself in this city, staying out in the open was your safest bet. Out in the open, where the blinking lights of the neon signs illuminated the dark streets in erratic flashes of FUN HOLE and FUCK A REAL ANGEL and LIQUOR. Out in the open, all the dregs of this city paced the cobbled avenues from bar to drug den to hotel room to Rape Alley and back again. Night after night, the same damn thing. You recognized some faces from previous nights, and you recognized some faces from years back. Even the residents who had just arrived wore that same glazed expression: one part dumbstruck, one part awestruck, three parts scared shitless.
Most of the residents here were just waiting to be charcoal, so they took advantage of the backlog in paperwork to get lost in this city without borders. Some of the lucky ones would move out of this place some day, make it up to the Big Time. But most of these fuckers, they were just plain wicked. They were just waiting around till the warden pulled the switch on them, and they weren’t real happy about that.
It was always too warm and too wet in Nightville, and always goddamned dark out. The whole place felt like the ass-end of a stomach problem after a six-mile walk. I finished what I could of my rice noodle and tendon soup, paid the bill and walked out onto the sidewalk. I lit a Pall Mall and scoped the street traffic for a familiar face but a recent flood of recession suicides had come to town and turned this foul city into an amusement park of wide eyes, dropped jaws and deep regrets. They usually just paced the streets from one side of the district to the other, never stopping, never asking for directions, never proclaiming their innocence.
But seeing a hundred of these sleepy new skins walking these streets was a hell of a better sight than seeing the usual bunch.
Amongst the fresh crowd of pale-faced arrivals, a set of soft eyes broke free from the gloom and locked with mine. You don’t usually get that much with the recent ones; usually takes a few weeks to comprehend things. He walked toward me with his mouth wide open, eyes wide open…and that’s when I noticed the cut marks up and down his wrists. Another waste who couldn’t cut the day-to-day up in the Cool Skinny.
He got within a few feet from me and stopped and stared up at me, a million things to ask but nothing coming out. Couldn’t have been older than twenty.
“Where…am I?” he asked.
“Look at your arms.”
He looked at his pale white arms and noticed the dozen or so thick incisions carved up and down his wrists. You could tell by the sudden change in his expression that he suddenly remembered what had happened, the actions he had taken to get himself here. He examined his yellow T-shirt with the large red stain over the stomach, and he tried to pat away the dried blotch of blood as if it was spilt popcorn after a motion picture show. He then stopped patting and looked back up at me.
“It won’t come off. I think I’ve ruined it.”
“Damn shame, son,” I replied.
“What am I doing here?” he asked as if finally waking from a long sleep.
“You Catholic?”
“No. I was…when I was a kid.”
“Then you know what happens when you kill yourself,” I replied rather coldly, having repeated the same “welcome to your new eternity” message probably a thousand times since taking this job.
“It’s real?” he asked unbelievably. “I’m in…Hell?”
“It’s real, but you’re not in Hell, kid. Not yet, at least.” I tossed the cigarette butt into the street and started my walk toward Redemption Boulevard. I glanced back to find him still standing there. “You’re in Nightville.”
* * * *

Nightville had no morals, no honor system, no right and wrong—just a couple of laws and a handful of us trying our best to enforce them. And it really didn’t make much of a difference having us Law Men roaming the streets. We were just security guards in a warzone, candles on a burning boat. This city went on forever, quite literally, and the only inhabitants of this sweaty cesspool were the filth from Heaven, the gems from Hell, and everything else that wouldn’t fit into either. You mostly had your wrist cutters, your perverts, your molesters, your murderers with various motives, all awaiting their day of judgment in front of the Big Time. But there were also some decent folks down here who were merely victims of modern times, fatalities of living in an overpopulated world where the daily death rate outnumbered available caseworkers 500 to one. The system of judgment created by the Big Time was thousands of years old and made for a population of mortals that was never supposed to be as big as it was now. Somehow, no one had seen it coming; no infinite wisdom had foreseen a world where billions and billions of mortals lived, breathed and, eventually, would die.
Good, bad, indifferent, it didn’t really matter how you got to Nightville. Until the Big Time gave you a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, you waited out your time down here, somewhere between Heaven and Hell.