Mortality Bridge (20 page)

Another flare streaks from the Battlements.

He can hear the goddamned thing behind him now. The figure burning in the sky lights up the plain below and Niko risks a backward look. Big mistake. The mulchosaur is about five hundred yards away and gaining.

Niko puts on speed. He feels energy drain from him like an unplugged barrel. In the orange flare of light he sees two hundred yards ahead the slithering figure of the mulchosaur that ate the running man. Niko heads toward it. The way they’re built he thinks they’re blind and wonders if they can’t stop running. Perhaps they simply prowl the plain before the Battlements and vacuum up whatever fallen burned souls they encounter. In his bruised and addled mind an insane notion forms.

The overhead light grows brighter as the flaming soul arcs down. Niko’s bare feet pound among the immolated dead who salt the ashen plain, scatter bones and ashes, stub on crackled flesh, step once on a protruding knob of bone.

The mulchosaur ahead is by far the closer of the two, which is good because this one isn’t running after Niko. Its path runs perpendicular to his own. Niko veers to intercept.

A stitch prongs Niko’s side. His thighs and chest are burning. His calves are still knotted from having run hours before, just inside the gate. He wheezes. His cock slaps his thighs as he runs. A demented corner of his mind wants to laugh.

The mulchosaur ahead of him slows down and makes an oddly trainlike chuffing. Maybe Niko’s wrong about the eyes.

Niko dares not look to see how close the mulchosaur behind him is. Its close clacking is alarm enough.

The overhead flare has grown quite bright and the mulchosaur in front of Niko lifts its crescent head and gamely tries to catch the falling flare of burning soul. It doesn’t make it and the human meteor slams the side of its broad head. Sparks explode and the mulshosaurus rolls like a trailer on a freeway coming off the hitch.

The mulchosaur writhes and kicks manifold short legs as it struggles to right itself, stopped for perhaps the first time in its existence. Its chuffing noise has gained a keening overtone. Niko runs toward it. The clacking sound behind him is a pressure on his naked back. Niko is flagging and nearly blind with fear. He wills his legs to run, his arms to pump, his chest to breathe.

The mulchosaur in front of him ripples like a gardenhose and flips upright. It does not run but lowers its scoop head to the smoking body that slammed into it. It seems uncertain or maybe stunned from the blow. Maybe it’s not used to having meals delivered.

The rapid clacking is now on Niko’s heels. Niko ignores the screaming in his monkey brain and runs straight at the confused mulchosaur and jumps up and runs across its back. Rough alligator hide beneath his naked feet and reek of spoiled food. Two running steps and he jumps off and stumbles and falls and lies there watching as the mulchosaur chasing him plows into the one he just ran across. A sound like silverware in a Disposall. The wounded mulchosaur keens and whips around and clamps its everbiting jaws on its attacker.

Niko fights to stand but cannot move or even breathe. Smell of shit and rotten meat. Get up. Get up.

His insides unclench and he takes in a wheezing breath and lumbers to his lacerated feet. The mulchosaurs are rolling on the ground, jaws locked on each other’s hide like dogs, bodies lashing and legs kicking. He can hear their meat tear off the bone.

Grand as it would be to stay watch the battle royal Niko doesn’t even want to be in the same time zone when one of these puppies wins and starts directing its attention elsewhere. Niko turns and beats a raggedy retreat.

NIKO’S RUNNING ON fumes. Both feet are cut and scraped and blistered and his right heel throbs where he has bruised it on a protruding bone. His feet are literally dragging and every step is like walking in a swimming pool full of broken glass.

Now that being eaten is no longer an immediate concern the Taiko drummers in his head are back for an encore and he thinks he might be sick again. The blurred vision seems to have gone though. Boy howdy.

Dry tongue swabs cracked lips. His armpits and groin are chafed where sweat has dried to salt and rubbed. Niko doubts he has enough fluid left to sweat.

He trudges like a zombie toward the Battlements, indistinguishable from the damned.

Sometime later Niko comes back to himself as if breaking from a daydream to find himself surrounded by the naked dead not two hundred yards from the Battlement wall. They converge on this place like ants around a sugarcube, a continual fatalistic march that files beneath the massive wall toward the river of blood that gouts in a continual loud hiss through the broad arch in the Battlement wall and over the Ledge like a severed artery of the world itself. The dead press close among each other unconcerned about their nakedness, faces sullen and lethargy all that lives within their eyes.

Their bodies are a cornucopia of affliction. Most of the damned are missing fingers, hands, arms, toes, feet, legs, eyes, breasts, penises. A woman slit from pubic bone to sternum and gutted like a fish clutches looped and trailing organs to her bleeding wound. A length of gray intestine drags the dirty ground. The legless drag themselves along. The footless lurch on filthy bleeding stilts of truncated legs. The onelegged hop like strange plucked birds. One woman clamps her severed arm beneath the one remaining. One man hunches forward like an inchworm on his everbleeding stumps of wrenchedoff arms and legs. A teenaged boy seems to be walking on his hands until Niko sees that his arms and legs have been severed and reattached in each other’s place and the joints bent backward like an ostrich. One man waggles an obscene tail of someone else’s severed arm whose hand has been inserted in his anus. Cockroaches continually crawl from one woman’s vagina. A fat and diarrhetic woman walks with a thin man bent behind her, face against her jiggling buttocks, lips sewn to her rectum.

Many of the trudging dead are cut and always bleeding. Some are diseased and covered with festering boils, buboes, blisters, scabs, hives, chancres, shingles, gangrenous wounds, burning rashes, melanomas, leprosy, warts, elephantiasis, suppurating burns. One man’s hairless body is covered head to foot with an elaborate maze of scars. Another woman is tattooed with moving screaming faces that cannibalize themselves by eating at her flesh. Most are gaunt as concentration camp inmates, skin stretched paperthin on fragile frames of jutting bone. One armless woman walks upon the hilts of knives embedded in her feet and screams with every step. Behind her a flensed man gleams with staples stamped into his exposed muscles. Another poor soul seems to have been turned inside-out, veins and organs pulsing on the outside, exposed eyes turned inward, filthy with dirt and bleeding from torn snags. One man’s eyes are pulped meat on his cheeks from the eternal pecking of a crow embedded in his forehead.

The river of dead washes around a pale enormous person beside the flaring base of the Battlement wall, a figure so obese it is impossible to tell whether it is a man or a woman. Doughy folds of fat quiver like thick gelatin as the sagging face strains with the effort to drag itself forward like some gargantuan nocturnal fungus.

The closest thing Niko sees to a single soul helping out another is a line of corpsewhite figures each with right hand on the shoulder of the one in front. Strangely hunched and jostling one another as they shuffle forward. One looks straight at Niko who stares back at raw and empty sockets. The man looks away and the blind continue leading themselves.

The sweatshop air is filled with oddly monklike murmurings of lamentation, an eerily lulling accumulation of moans and sobs.

What keeps Niko going now is the knowledge that in the face of those he sees around him his thirst is merely thirst, his hunger simply hunger, his aches a reminder he is still alive. His pain is of a very different sort than theirs and theirs will never end.

The Battlement wall is a dozen feet high, angled turrets and squared merlons carved from the living rock of the Ledge itself. It will always be a work in progress, for Niko passing the Battlement’s beginnings sees thousands of squatting workers grading the plain and continuing the carving of the fortress wall along the stark line of the Ledge. Their only tools are metal spoons.

Scrutinizing demons pace behind the workers and bash the indolent against their insufficient works until their brains spill out across the rock, then hurl them down to lie like savaged ragdolls until they are recovered enough to pick up their spoon and resume their neverending labor.

One demon holds a worker by his throat in one hand and inspects a spoon in the other. The spoon has been worn down to a slim wedge. “How can you get a new spoon when there’s metal left on this one? You can’t have a new spoon until you’ve worn the old spoon out.” He jabs the worndown spoon into the dangling man’s eye and throws him back to work. With horrifying calmness the man pulls the spoon haft from his eye like a stopper and ignores the ichor that spills to his face as he patiently returns to scrape again forever.

High up on the crenellation huge stone gargoyles hunch. Beneath their frozen grins and leers the ceaseless stream of naked dead flows toward the rushing river of congealing blood. The ground continues for a dozen yards beyond the near end of the arch set into the Battlement wall to form a small pathway that follows the red river through the wall on this side, presumably ending at a sheer dropoff of the Ledge. The dead stream toward it in such numbers that those close to the edge continually spill into the coagulant river and are swept along to pour out on the other side, a bloodfall spilling into some abyss like tubercular spittle.

Someone in the nightmare march ahead stands out from all the others. Niko stares at it for several seconds before he understands that the figure is distinguished from the other sheeplike dead because it’s wearing clothes.

NIKO PUSHES AND worms his way through the dense crowd toward the lone clothed figure. It’s his coat all right. Also his jeans. Who else’s would they be? No sign of his guitar. There is no avoiding touching the dead around him. They press like mindless cattle heedless of their nakedness, of their stink and affliction. Their flesh rubs cold against him. Niko is brushed by pustulant sores and diseased limbs and bleeding wounds and excrement. He is groped and prodded and pushed and hit. An unidentifiable amalgam squishes beneath his bare feet as centuries of accumulated filth work into his cuts and well up between his toes to dry and cake. He moves amid the vesper moaning, the steady lament sung by the streaming chorus of the damned. Their voiced despair sounds oddly orchestrated, as if the trudging throng are opera players singing to an unseen host upon a boundless stage, a choir murmuring a requiem conducted by some unseen hand.

Some among the shambling dead sense Niko’s living warmth and seek it out as if by leeching from him they will gain some flavor or forgotten grain of life itself. They reach to feel the press of living flesh and Niko struggling through the prison of their mutilated flesh cannot avoid their terrible caress. He keeps a hand up near his face to ward away their jealous hands and presses toward his clothed objective. Around him voices break the mass eternal to beseech the mortal visitor in every tongue in which a cry of pain was ever uttered. Whatever pity Niko feels toward the suffering legions is blighted by disgust now that he shares in their corruption. He feels the stirring of an old selfloathing. So your compassion is just luxury then. Well and good to sorrow for the distant sufferers until their tragedy afflicts you.

The wearer of his clothes is only thirty feet ahead now but Niko has to close the gap through human quicksand. The jacketed figure strangely unmolested. Niko would have thought the damned would fight like dogs to take away the stolen clothing not so much because they need it as because they long for evidence of earthly life, mementos vivi.

Cold fingers clasp his ankle. He tries to pull his leg away and something drags. He looks down to see in flitting spaces between the teeming dead a small and beautiful little girl not more than ten years old who hugs his leg and gazes up at him with wide brown eyes set in a milkwhite face framed by long straight raven hair.

Startled by a sight of beauty Niko stops. He slaps away a blindly groping hand and bends down to the little girl. To ask her what? Are you lost little girl? Where’s your mommy? Do you know where you live? Can I help you? It’s likely she’s been down here longer than Niko’s been alive. But she’s a little girl. Unmangled and whole and clutching at his leg, and despite whatever abominations her odd calm eyes have seen her face remains unsullied as a newly minted doll. No sane and mortal eye could look upon her and not wonder how a god could so renounce its own.

So Niko bends to her, about to ask he knows not what, but feels his breath grow still and give no voice to wonder as he looks into her eyes, her calm gaze patient as the rock around them and as ancient, that roots him to this spot as sure as any certain love or venom. Looking into the little girl’s eyes Niko feels a flush throughout his body. Her cool dry hand against his leg.

Still holding his gaze the little girl slowly leans to set her cheek beside her hand against his naked leg. Her dark skin smooth and cold as the shell of a nut. Her eyes unwavering as she turns her head to kiss his thigh. His heartbeat louder than the din around him. The little girl closes her eyes and opens her mouth and Niko feels her cold dry tongue against his thigh. Pressure of her teeth upon his skin. Distant nip of pain. And then white blindness as her mouth clamps on his thigh. He arches his back and shudders and cries out. It uncoils from the pit of his stomach and locks his muscles, it’s centered around the little girl’s mouth fastened to his thigh, her mouth now hot and cool cheek warming and face growing flushed, her lips reddening as red overflows to run down her chin and trickle down his leg, his lifeblood coursing like magma in the cold stone tunnels of her empty veins. Niko knows she’ll take it all, drain the burning life from him in trade for the few hours’ warmth it will provide her, surcease from the mausoleum of her flesh. She’ll kill him and he knows it and he knows that it will feel so good if he’ll surrender to it, so good if he will let her take him from his anguish.