Mortality Bridge (12 page)

“See the block. Closest to us. Over there?” The free arm points. “I see it.”

“On top of it there’s. A tool that. Got dropped there. Bring that back. And you can. Dig me out. With it.”

“A tool.”

“Uh huh.”

“You want me to climb on top of that block and bring back a tool that got dropped there and dig you out.”

“You got it.”

Niko sighs again. “Sam.”

“Listen Niko. You’re mortal. Down here. You’ll need sleep. You’ll need food. Whatever your mission is. You aren’t gonna get. Far without food. Or sleep. And you’ll get filleted. Like a chicken. If you get caught. Sleeping anywhere. In this joint. I can help you. I don’t know. What you’re doing here. But this place is really. Really big. I can help you get. Where you’re going.”

Niko shakes his head. Not negation but resignation. “All right, Sam. Back in a few minutes.”

“That’s the ticket.”

For some reason Niko takes off his coat and sets it neatly on top of his hardcase. He starts away, rolling his eyes at the unseen canopy of rock and still shaking his head.

“Niko.”

He stops. “Yeah?”

“Try to be in. Conspicuous. These blocks didn’t just. Grow here. You know?”

Niko thinks he does know, but he merely nods and sets out.

SAM GAMUNDI. SAMWISE, for Christ’s sake. Of all the people to run into down here, the last I would have expected. When was the last time I saw him? High school? Yeah, he came back for a week or so and stayed with me and my family after he’d moved away with his mom. And even then I hadn’t seen him since...eighth grade? First time I ever got drunk was with Sam. Skipping school and getting into his mom’s gin. Jesus, a gin drunk at fourteen. Watered the bottle down so she wouldn’t know we’d been at it. Caught us anyway. Caught Sam that is. He never narked on me. What did she do to him? Can’t remember.

Dark as hell here. To coin a phrase. Not much to trip over at least. I hope.

First time I smoked pot was with Sam too. Hell we were trouble, weren’t we? Poor Mom and Dad. That time they picked us up from the movies in that old white Ford and me and Sam so stoned we would’ve giggled if you hit us with a shovel. Sam had somehow got his shoelaces knotted together and couldn’t get them untied. Tried to karate chop them and knocked his feet out from under him and landed on his head on the sidewalk just as Mom and Dad pulled up and I laughed so hard I banged my head on the roof getting into the car. Which only got us laughing harder.

I used to wonder what happened to you, sitting tuning my guitar or reflecting on someone else’s story from their youth or just daydreaming on the tour bus during those long stretches of paved America between dates. Were you still alive then Sam? How did you finally die I wonder? Would it breach some etiquette here to ask you? And would you tell me if I did?

That week you came back to visit me at my parents’ house. You’d been Saved. Some Baptist summer camp you’d been to had gotten to you in some lonely fearful hour. You were worried about my life and my soul. The way I was carrying on. Pot speed booze girls coke smokes and never never never any sleep. I called you holier than thou. Saint Samwise. That was a long week huh? That party my band played. Howyadoin, we’re The Spanish Flies. And me getting drunk and scoffing at your thinly hidden disdain. At some point I decided to throw all that contempt back in your judgemental face, only I threw it out through my guitar. A pawnshop Les Paul that’d be worth a pretty penny now I’m sure. And you heard that volleyed contempt all right but you stayed on because I could see you couldn’t believe what was coming out of those beatup Fender amps. To this day I sit amazed six wires on a piece of wood can make a hundred thousand people crazy. That gig got dark and scary, the whole band picking up the vibe and magnifying it, and everybody drunk or stoned or tripping or just plain fuckedup somewhichway. And you better believe they grooved on it, St. Samwise, because they tore that joint apart, throwing bottles and tearing stuffing out of the couch and beating the hell out of each other. You said I was possessed and you ran off while feedback howled up to the bleeding edge and I surfed it all the way and felt maybe just a little bit of bad I’d run you off. But mostly it felt good to be the voice of that crowd’s anger. Good to drive you off in your sanctimony, good to drive those people wild enough to turn on themselves like dogs, good to push the amplifiers to the limit, good to push. And when you walked into Mom and Dad’s kitchen hours later, having walked all that way home, you suffering martyr, I remember looking up still drunk and hunched over a cup of reheated coffee and seeing both your umbrage and your concern, and Sam I think that was the moment I realized something writhed inside me with an appetite for self destruction. And perhaps we kept our distance after that night not because of your unswervable faith but because of the dark mirror you had held before me. And maybe you backpedaled with equal horror from the pleasure you saw me take in that reflection’s corrupt and ruinous bent. I had a demon inside me and I hated him but loved him too. Or maybe I just felt I needed him.

Your black bible and your suffering jesus. My black Les Paul and my suffering blues. You find salvation your way, I will find it mine.

Only—what hope of redemption or salvation or even some small reprieve is there for anybody if our own St. Samwise lies crushed and suffering beneath a granite slab on the outskirts of what deranged god’s mad Hell?

Ah, Sam.

NIKO’S FINGERS JUST clear the top edge of the granite block when he jumps. He raises himself up and clears the edge. He climbs up and rolls onto his back and stares up at the solid blackness and then scrambles to his feet. He looks around the surface of the smooth granite cube, looking for a...tool...that got dropped there.

It’s so damned dark. Then again, the cube is only ten feet square, and anything that would help dig Sam out from under his own particular Lego block from Hell ought to be fairly easy to—

He steps on a bump and bends to find a metal rod. He picks it up. It must weigh fifty pounds. About eight feet long. Projections on the bottom end. Some kind of shovel? He turns the rod over and regards the arrowheaded trident splayed above his head.

Pitchfork.

IT RINGS DULL and steady as it drags behind him on the hard flat plain. Niko is trying not to think about what the pitchfork implies when behind and well above him he hears something flapping. He turns and sees motion just as whatever flies above him yells Bombs awaaay! in a guttural delighted voice like whirring blades chopping meat. Then twin descending cartoon whistles as of plummeting bombs.

A large gray square occults the sky.

Shit oh dear. Niko bolts, realizes they may have taken his running into account, and cuts left. He runs as fast as he can, left arm pumping and the trident jouncing along. Behind him comes a deep slam he feels in his chest and an earthquake tremor that shudders through his feet. Niko glances back at a granite block that wasn’t there a moment ago.

From the sky come curses. There are two voices up there. Niko has a moment to take in jaundiced lantern cateyes and mottled membranous leather wings and impossible combteeth fangs that bristle as the demons grin wide enough to split their heads. Dangling legs that end in talons. Upcurved warty penises the size of Niko’s arm.

One of them yells Booooo.

It isn’t easy running fulltilt with a fifty pound pitchfork. It’s easier when you think something the size of a minivan is about to plummet down from the Great Unseen and flatten you like a fruit rollup. Niko runs.

Sam is waiting—no shit—when Niko returns. “Thought they got you,” he says as Niko draws up panting.

Niko drops the pitchfork and puts his hands on his knees until he catches his breath. “Can I expect much more of that?”

“If you were. One of us. I’d say. Definitely. Safe bet you could. Expect more of that. Forever. But with you still alive?” Sam turns his free palm up. “Reckon I don’t know. The rules there. Pardner.”

Niko grins albeit grimly. Sam had always done a creditable John Wayne. “Found your toadsticker.” He holds out the pronged iron rod.

“You are. The man.”

“How do you plan to get out from under there? Dig?”

“Thought you might.”

“Sam. Look.” Niko looks around and then squats down, feeling absurd. I’m in Hell! I’m talking to a dead guy! And he’s squashed under a fifty ton block! “We were friends, Sam, a long time ago.”

“Setting me up. For the brushoff. Mister Rock Star?”

“If I were dead and stuck down here forever with you I wouldn’t think twice, Sam. But the clock is ticking and the longer I hang around the less my chances are, and this ground is hard as rock and it’d take days to dig you out of there.”

“Half an hour.”

Niko scrutinizes the unnerving spaceless juncture of granite and ground from which part of Sam emerges like some inflatable Sam doll flattened there, the rough depression beneath him meticulously scraped for how many patient painful years like a dribble of water carving out a canyon. Half an hour? “No way.”

“Half an hour, Niko. I swear to. Well, I swear. Look, I’ve dug down to. About my belly button. My arm won’t go. Any lower because. My back won’t bend. It’s just my hips. And my legs. Taking the weight. Under here. If you use that. Pitchfork. To jab out a. Shallow trench about. Down to my knees. I think you can. Work it in. From an angle. And lever me out.”

Niko stares. “Are you out of your fucking mind? I’ll probably stab you as much as the ground. And do you know what it’ll do to you if I lever you out of there?”

Sam grins. “What, you think it can. Get any worse?” He pats the granite looming over him. “Come on, Niko. I can’t bleed to death. I can only bleed. And you’re not. Gonna kill me. Cause I’m already dead. And if it hurts me. Well. Death’s a bitch huh? Half an hour and. If I’m not out. You can go your. Merry way and. I’ll still be grateful. For you knocking. A hundred years off. My downtime here.”

Niko eyes the iron rod. He stands slowly and reverses it until the business end is pointed toward Sam. “You always did talk me into the most unbelievable shit.”

In the dimness Niko can’t tell if Sam’s expression is deadpan or earnest. “You ain’t seen nothin yet. Pilgrim.”

IT TAKES CLOSER to an hour, every second of it nauseating.

The pronged rod is really more trident than pitchfork. Niko sets to work tentatively, pushing the prongs along the depression begun by Sam and jabbing at the hard ground. Soon he sees his trepidation will get him nowhere. Propped on his free arm Sam lifts up to make a space between himself and the compacted ground. There’s still only a few inches’ clearance and it’s hard for Niko to get leverage. On one knee he pulls the trident back and shoves it forward again. The shock of it striking jolts his hands. Sam hisses and grimaces.

Niko hesitates. “Did I hit you?”

“Just ignore me. Okay? I’ve developed. A high tolerance.”

“Okay.” Niko jabs again. Again Sam winces. They continue like this, Niko jabbing and Sam making pained faces and even whimpering once, until Sam suggests Niko scoop out the dirt he has scraped loose. Niko wipes sweat from his brow and reaches under Sam. His position necessarily close and uncomfortably intimate. Sam’s face caked with old blood. One eye nearly bugging out of his head, both cobwebbed with burst capillaries. Smell of rot.

What Niko’s hand encounters in the cramped hot damp space beneath Sam’s flattened body does not feel recognizably human. He scoops dirt back toward himself and his hand emerges bloody. “Jesu—”

“Don’t.”

Niko stares amazed at the fear in Sam’s cry.

“No holy names man. Not here. They’ll be on you. Like a cheap suit. And they’ll make you. Sorry you even know. How to talk.”

“Okay.”

“I know it doesn’t. Mean anything. When you say it. We all got into. The habit up there. But it means something. Down here. Trust me. And they do not. Like it.”

“Okay.” And recommences jabbing with the trident.

Before long Sam screams with every trident stroke, but whenever Niko hesitates Sam begs him to keep going. The head of the trident caked with blood and dirt and gore. Niko puts his hand beside Sam’s ruined face and reaches under the block and scoops out tacky dirt and something moist and filthy. He brushes off the dirt and the object flops in his hand. Sam’s penis. Niko stares stupidly at it and then realizes what it is and yells and jumps backward, flinging it away as if it is a snake poised to strike him. He turns and spews his last earthly meal upon the hard flat ground. When he’s finished heaving and he straightens and turns to Sam to say he’s sorry but he just can’t do it, he can’t do this to another human being dead or damned or friend or stranger, and Sam sees it in his face and interrupts to tell him that it hurts but not that bad, and besides the pain is easier to take when you know it isn’t mortal. That no wound here is mortal. If you didn’t heal they couldn’t keep on torturing you.

It doesn’t make Niko feel any better but it does let him go on. Soon he’s jabbing the trident in as far as it will go, and Sam tells Niko to try using it to pry him out.

There’s only one way to do it and Niko doesn’t protest. He pushes the trident until it grates against Sam’s flattened hipbone and then wedges the iron rod where the bottom of the block meets the lip of the depression and begins to pull. Easily at first, then harder. Sam pulls himself with his free arm, screaming but refusing to let Niko ease up. The trident tip scrapes bone and the rod slides back toward him. Either Sam has moved forward or the trident has ripped across his flesh. Or both.

Niko wedges the trident and pries again. Sam is definitely coming loose. His crushed arm flops into the depression. Sam reaches with his good arm to drag the crushed one free of the block and it flops onto the plain like the boneless limb of a freshbaked gingerbread man. Sam oozes from his stone prison like something excreted. Niko drops the trident and grabs Sam around his chest to pull the rest of him free. Sam’s chest is soft and full of lumps and it gives in the wrong places. Niko feels as if he’s hugging a loose and lumpy sack of flour. Both men yell as Sam pulls free, jellied legs dragging behind him and raw exposed muscle and bone and a loop of intestine coming out his ass and glistening in the pale orange light.