Mortality Bridge (19 page)

THE LANDSCAPE ON the other side of the enormous rock outcropping is completely different. Rounding the rock with the demon beside him Niko pulls up short as he sees an enormous dark lake that cannot possibly be here. It should have been readily visible to the shuffling line but it had not been. The Ledge and Battlements are nowhere in sight. In the murky distance rises a low mountain range that ought to be a flat and featureless plain. It’s disorienting. On the near shore of the placid lake is a low dais of black stone that overhangs the lake. A palmwide groove runs down its center. The ground around the dais is soaked with blood. The tiny waves that lap the shore leave dark red stains. The lake is a lake of blood. This then is the source of the dark river coursing toward the Battlements.

The plural demon nods both heads to indicate Franz, who leaves a cheap folding table with his stamped forms in hand and approaches the dais with a demon walking to either side of him. The demons smile as Franz chatters excitedly all the way up to the dais. Franz stands where they indicate and fidgets as a third demon approaches with a graywhite softball-sized object in both hands. Franz frowns but holds his ground, more curious than afraid it seems.

The demon to Franz’s left points at the starless sky. Franz looks up and as he stands there craning skyward the demon to his right reaches out with a baling hook and unzips Franz from crotch to throat.

Franz’s face fills with surprise and then with agony. He stares in pain and disbelief as his entrails spill onto the dais. He feebly grabs for them then sways. The demons catch him and lower him to the freshly wetted stone. Franz’s blood flows down the groove and into the lake.

The third demon gently sets the softball-sized object into Franz’s chest cavity and begins sewing him up with a large curved suturing needle while the other two hold his struggling arms and legs.

Niko glares pure venom at the twinheaded demon beside him.

Sinister grins and mimes pushing an object into a body while Dexter pretends to sew it shut. “Wasp nest,” says Sinister.

The suturing is quickly finished and the demons hoist Franz to his feet. Franz is white and wildeyed.

The third demon pats Franz on the shoulder and then punches him in the stomach. Franz gapes like a landed fish. His face wears a horror Niko’s never seen, and he begins to scream as the outraged wasps sewn up inside him swarm.

The demons on the dais laugh and shove Franz off. He falls and rolls and howls and claws at his crude stitches.

Dexter/Sinister laughs and points and wipes tears from his eyes. “I think Franz has anz in his panz.”

“Vive le Franz! Vive le Franz!”

A roar fills Niko’s ears and a white heat fills his belly that could spill over and become anything, take any form at all. He turns and hurries away.

ON THE OTHER side of the rock outcropping the lake of blood cannot be seen again. Only the evercrawling line, the names called from the bottomless list, the neverending plain. See them shuffling in their slaughterhouse line, crawling out there on the plain like mewling wounded babies, scraping under granite blocks like entombed cadavers falsely dead, gathered sheeplike at the Ledge. How many have lived and died since humanity began? One hundred billion? How many of that number tortured in this loathsome place? Sandgrains on a bloodwashed beach. Souls every one, all doomed, all damned, all lost. Judged and found wanting and consigned and then forgotten by what dread remorseless will. You cannot save them. Cannot even save yourself. For without even believing in a soul you bartered it away decades ago and cast its lot with every pathetic pilgrim you will see in this forsaken place. As always you have bartered. As your story says you always will.

But Jemma. Perhaps not doomed. Not damned. Not lost.

DEEP IN ANGRY reverie he stalks toward the thick dark river winding toward the Battlements on the Ledge and does not hear the naked footfalls running at him from behind or sense the knotted fist until it hits the back of his head. He hears but does not feel his head hit ground.

XII.

ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

HE JOLTS AWAKE at screaming overhead. Two sparking orange flares arc out from the Battlements. Niko blinks and shakes his head. There’s only one flare but his vision is doubled. The screaming flare grows nearer. Niko rolls onto his knees and vomits. Catherine wheels spin burning behind his eyes. The scream claws through his brain. The blazing comet’s coming awfully close.

Niko rolls onto his back and shuts his eyes. Let it hit me, I don’t care. Let it end the whole charade. The ground is evertilting like the downside of a full-on drunk.

The scream cuts off as the burning object slams onto the plain hard and close enough to send a shudder through the ground. Niko tries to lift his head to look but soft things tear inside his skull. His feeble fingers trace the contours of a large hard swelling at the base of his skull. His hand moves like it’s remote controlled and the batteries on the control unit are failing. His fingertips are moist and warm.

He gives his hand the day off and it relaxes behind him. He looks like a man lying pleasantly on the ground communing with the night sky.

He shuts his eyes again and moans. Concentrates on warm wind playing on his skin and then realizes that skin is entirely what it’s playing on. His clothes are gone. Shirt jeans jacket shoes filthy socks and even underwear.

His right hand flops onto his chest and spiders to his throat. The locket’s still there. Clothes are much more valuable here than jewelry.

Guitar?

He manages to raise his head. Smoking lump on the ground there. Sweet smell of cooking bacon. Nope. No guitar. Guitar go bye bye.

Get up. Get up.

Okay. All right. I’ll get up in exactly one minute. Just gonna rest my eyes first.

AND STARTLES AWAKE. He pats his naked body. Everything seems to be there. Except his clothes of course, yuk yuk. Feels like history’s worst hangover. Which is okay right now because that’s twice as good as he felt a few minutes ago and the pain means that he isn’t dead.

Doesn’t it? I mean, a blow to the head and then darkness and then you wake up hurting and naked in Hell. You don’t gotta be Einstein to figure that out, buddy pal.

Can we sit up? An experiment will satisfy this question, Doctor.

Niko flops to one side and raises up on one elbow.
At this point on our evolutionary chart the primordial sludge attains a rudimentary awareness of the outside world
. He pauses and breathes hard until the Bastille Day in his head subsides. Okay. On our feet now. One. Two. Two and a half.

Three.

He’s on his feet and turning about when he realizes he’s about to be sick.
Now the primate has discovered upright posture and his hands are free to manipulate tools and so begin the conquest of his world
. He gets back on his hands and knees
 

and comes awake standing and staring out across the plain at nothing. Blinks and shakes his head and rubs his eyes. Touches the spongy knot on the back of his head. Looks stupidly at the dried blood on his fingertips nearly black in this furnace light.

Something like a skinny pig with unnervingly human eyes is licking up his vomit a few feet away. Niko doesn’t even have the energy to yell shoo so he ignores it though its smacks and slurps and wet splatches threaten to make him sick again. Which would likely be just fine with Mr. Pork Lean.

A bundle of smoking rags lies on the ground ten feet away. Niko takes a step toward it and when he doesn’t fall down dead he takes a couple more.

The ragbundle is the charred body of a man. Cracked black skin above crackled fat. Clumps of burned hair mottle a seared scalp punctuated by white bone. Cloying smell of fried pork and burned hair. Niko’s stomach clenches and he turns away. After a moment he turns back.

A few miles away are the Battlements. Several miles of long straight wall built on the endless line of the Ledge itself. The river of blood terminates there at a broad arch leading through the Battlement wall. An enormous congregation of the dead is gathered there, corralled by the river and the wall itself. On either bank of the river of blood the damned condense along the base of the wall. Niko tries to spot anyone wearing clothes or carrying a guitar but the light is too dim, the distance too great, his vision too blurred, the damned too many.

The smoldering figure at his feet gives forth a groan and opens singed and lashless lids. Pale blue eyes are filled to bursting with pain. “Can. Can I do. Anything?” Niko croaks.

The charred head shifts an inch. A single word grates from the ruined throat. Niko thinks the word was time.

THE TWO MILES to the Battlements are the longest Niko’s ever walked. Every step an act of will. His ears are ringing and his vision sometimes blurs but seems to be improving. He’s hungry and parched and his throat tastes of sour vomit. A drink of water would fix everything right now he’s pretty sure. Yes sir a good old-fashioned sweaty glass of tinkling icewater with a twisty slice of sunshiny lemon would take care of just about all his worldly and spiritual needs. Can’t you just taste it? Wouldn’t it just make your mouth water if you had any saliva left?

Niko’s having trouble concentrating. The ground is hot beneath his bare feet. Walking naked in the open feels just wrong. Now there’s nothing to prevent him being mistaken for just another of the damned. It figures this would happen at the very time he’s most unable to deal with it.

And what about his guitar? He can live without the clothes. He can probably even manage without the shoes, though his cityboy feet are hardly primed to pound along the grit and filth and bone upon a baking plain. But what are you supposed to do without your axe, champ? How you gonna rescue the fair maiden now, Parsival? Maybe you can talk the head honcho into a round of scissors paper stone. Best two out of three, be a sport.

His big toe stubs a rock and he cries out and stumbles. Niko glances down and sees that it is not a rock at all but a blackened lump he would not recognize as a charred human being had he not just spoken with a similar creature. He apologizes to the lump and wipes his toe upon the ground. He realizes the surrounding plain is dotted with similar lumps of charred remains in various stages of reconstitution, some writhing or crawling about, some with speech regained but able only to scream, many just shapeless burned lumps waiting to resume their former shape to meet whatever punishment awaits them next.

A woman runs screaming past him and looks fearfully over her shoulder. An obese tumescent creature runs drooling after her, footwide tongue flopping to its jiggling belly like an obscene and slathering necktie. Its long translucent fingers tremble toward her as the pair runs by. Niko barely registers them. Just one damned thing after another. A tiny voice inside him, that little demon all his own he lived with all those years, is prodding him again. Why bother? it asks reasonably. What’s the point now? You’re barefoot and dick-naked, buddy pal, and your one bartering tool is as missing as a conscience in a cathouse. It’s not like any of this was gonna work anyhow, wetbrain. You’ve been a lame horse from the getgo. Pack it on up, move it on out, bring it on home. Go back to the world and grieve and live the rest of your augmented life and honor the bargain you made. I gotta admit you gave it a great try. Who else could’ve gotten this far? But now’s the time to let it go. She’s gone. She’s dead, asshole. The only way you’re gonna see her again is by getting your stupid ass killed down here and joining her.

Niko slaps imaginary duct tape over his demon’s lulling mouth. Fuck you. I’ll get there or I won’t. But I’ll have to be stopped because I will not stop so long as I can move. One step at a time, like the bumper stickers say.

Another fireball launches from the Battlements and screaming streaks to light the plain, shifting shadows from the grubbing creatures scavenging. The river of blood glints darkly in the moving light on high. Rio Rojo.

Footsteps pound toward him from behind. Despite his aching head he turns, paranoid from his last encounter. Two hundred yards away and running toward him is a teenaged girl. Ghostly pale and whippet thin. Her hair streams back and bloody footprints dot the plain behind her as she sprints. “Run,” she yells at Niko. “Run.”

Niko frowns. “There’s nothing chasing you,” he calls back. His head pounds harder from his shouting.

She’s a hundred yards away now and still running. Niko peers across the dimlit plain. There’s movement everywhere but so much of it is indecipherable against the unimaginably huge and perspectiveless plain.

The girl is running by him now. He turns to watch her pass. Athletic and trim and not an ounce of fat. Her breasts do not bob and her buttocks do not jiggle. The soles of her feet gleam with her blood.

To the far right is another running figure whose path will intersect the girl’s close to the fortress on the Ledge. Niko squints. Something’s chasing this runner, something low to the ground and wagging forward with deceptive speed. It closes on the distant runner. The thing is wide and long, waisthigh and dark. It edges up and stretches forward and passes the runner, and when it passes the runner is no longer there.

The running girl cries out. The long dark shape now stands between her and the Battlements, and she veers.

Behind Niko comes fast rhythmic clacking like a nail caught in a tire. He turns to see one of the long dark creatures running fulltilt toward him, twentyfive feet long and ten wide, manylegged and sidewinding but fast as a man on a bike. Mottled craggy hide and eyeless head shaped like a crescent held low to the ground like a vacuum attachment. The creature is some kind of living woodchipper.

Niko turns and runs like a cheetah with its ass on fire. Instincts old as mammals themselves scream at him to climb a tree and become very still and small. There’s not so much as a blade of grass in sight, only flat hard ground he cannot dig. His heart jackhammers and his head feels like it’s going to burst and he cannot possibly maintain this speed for long.