Mortality Bridge (21 page)

Something punches the side of the little girl’s head. She breaks her kiss without a sound and blood sprays from her mouth and from his leg. Some desperate inner voice protests the disconnection like a distant caller on a phone not wanting to be hung up on. Unaccountably he feels an overpowering desire for a taste of whiskey.

Niko glimpses cold and spiteful laughter in those ancient child eyes and then the little girl is lost among a forest of legs. Whatever struck her and tore her loose is gone as well. Niko in his rapture had no certain sight of it. Leathery tendriled fast and gone.

Niko compresses the wound on his thigh. It’s bleeding but not gouting. At least she didn’t open up an artery. He feels embarrassed and foolish as he limps along. His leg is warm and tacky with blood along its inner length. Her saliva must contain some kind of anesthetic and anticoagulant. Like a tick.

A fresh wave of revulsion sweeps him. Now more than ever he wants his clothes, wants to mark himself apart from these poor lost defiled souls, to have a barrier however thin between himself and them.

He takes his hand off of his wound and stands on tiptoe and cranes about and feels fresh blood flow down his naked leg. Much more bleeding and he won’t have to worry about dying of thirst. The man with his clothes is lost from sight. Niko frowns. Where could he have gone? He was only ten yards ahead, he couldn’t have already made it to the river.

Niko stands as high as he can and then jumps up and down, feeling foolish but needing whatever vantage he can gain. With each leap his quadriceps feels as if it’s being ripsawed where it was bitten. The wound gleams nearly black in the faint reddish light.

Niko stops jumping when an enormous muscled arm lowers and grabs the woman beside him by her long and filthy hair and snatches her up. The dead around him pay no mind but Niko’s gaze follows the woman until he sees the thing that clutches her. One of the carved stone gargoyles sitting on a Battlement embrasure. The gargoyles are alive. Made of stone and yet alive and moving. The other gargoyles look on eagerly as a granite muscled arm cocks back to bring the woman near a tapering stone ear where she dangles like a living earring and does not struggle or protest or even set a hand upon the quarried fingers holding her by the hair to mitigate her pain. Her face shows nothing at all.

The gargoyle holding her has a face like a caricatured nightmare bat. He glances at the gargoyle to his right who has blunt square teeth in a round face with a snout like a pig. Pignose draws a tremendous deep breath and holds it and nods at Batface. The gargoyle to Batface’s left grins to show stone teeth below an elongated snout in a head with curling horns like a ram. In a voice like a tuba he shouts Pull.

Batface lets fly and the woman spins end over end out into space. Pignose stands with stone cheeks bulging like a trumpet player blowing. He grabs a finial protruding upward from a merlon and leans out over the oblivious damned. He opens his mouth obscenely wide and vomits an enormous stream of burning stinking napalm that jets out like a flamethrower and the tumbling woman ignites and screams and streaks across the sky trailing sparks.

“Ooooh,” says Ramhorn in his foghorn voice.

The others cheer while Pignose wipes his blockteethed mouth with the back of one scaly arm and bows with mock humility.

This then is what has intermittently lit the plain all this time.

Batface’s stone arm lowers again and clutches like a penny arcade crane. Stone muscles bunch as the granite arm lifts its prize into the air. Not a naked prize like all the others. This prize is wearing filthy jeans and a torn black T-shirt and a light jacket.

“Son of a bitch.” Niko hears his own voice yell against the choral tide. The heedless dead part round him.

The gargoyles pass the oddity among themselves and sniff at his clothes like dogs and frown and scratch themselves and poke and prod the man who is not complaisant like his confederates among the dead but screams and even takes a swat at one of the gargoyles leering at him. The fist hits stone and the man howls louder. The gargoyles laugh. Even though this is the man who struck and robbed him Niko can’t help but admire his defiance. But admirable or not the son of a bitch is wearing Niko’s clothes.

Niko cups his hands by his mouth and shouts a name. He shouts it louder, trying to be heard above the crowd and constant hiss of bloodfall. Shouts a third time, and above him the conversation and laughter die. Niko finds himself the subject of huge-eyed scrutiny. A great scythe-nailed stone hand lowers and clenches Niko’s bloodmatted hair and lifts. Oh what has he done. Niko presses down on the giant fingers so that his weight is supported more by his hands than by his hair but it still hurts a lot. An enormous batlike face swims into view. Niko shouts the name once more and Batface frowns. He looks at Pignose on his right who’s using a woman’s sharpened thighbone to clean his granite nails and looking mildly bored by the woman’s piercing screams. The man wearing Niko’s clothes has gone limp.

“Hey,” calls Batface, shaking Niko like a kitten. “This one knows Gery.”

Pignose doesn’t even glance at Niko. “No kidding.”

“Yep. Knows his true name.”

This gets Pignose’s attention. The gargoyle flicks the remnant woman over the far side of the wall and she screams as she falls out of sight. Pignose rises to his hooves to stride across the parapet, stone wings flaring in the breeze of his motion. He bends to examine Niko. “Never saw it before.” The breath that washes over Niko’s face would blister paint.

“Should I toss it back?”

Stone wings ripple as Pignose shrugs. “Might as well light it up. Why’s the other one wearing clothes?”

“Who knows. Different jurisdiction?”

“Well they’ll burn good anyhow. Oh what’s this one yelling now? I can’t make it out.”

“Hold on.” Batface shakes Niko again and Niko yells louder. “Clearer, how bout,” the gargoyle requests.

“Fly me down,” yells Niko.

Pignose leans toward Niko until his head fills Niko’s vision. He grins and Niko becomes quite aware of the human gore slathered on the gargoyle’s granite teeth. “Tell you what,” Pignose says. “Since you’ve had the bad manners to yell somebody’s true name to everyone here, I’ll fly you all the way to the far wall.” The pigsnouted head turns right. “Asmodeus. You still got that slingshot?” And turns back. “Now what is it going on about?”

“It says,” says Batface, “This has been willed where what is willed must be.”

Pignose’s granite eyes narrow. “Oh for crying in the sink.”

“Look, what’s this all about?” says Batface. “Do I toss it back or do we make it a crispy critter? My arm’s getting tired.”

The others laugh and Ramhorn calls him a pussy.

“It’s a bad angle,” Batface insists, and they laugh again.

Pignose purses stone lips at Niko. “Go ahead and put it down. That this has been willed stuff is one of the old keys. It’s mortal.”

“Mortal.” Batface holds Niko before him and frowns as he inspects him like a new kind of Ken doll. “No fooling.” Shaking his head he sets Niko on the parapet.

Niko starts to say something to Pignose but the gargoyle holds a finger up for him to wait and turns his attention to the man wearing Niko’s clothes who has apparently passed out from the pain of trying to tear his hair out of his scalp to free himself. Now Pignose nods at Batface who draws the limp clothed figure back while Pignose takes a deep breath—

Again Niko shouts Stop, stop.

Batface lowers the man and inclines his monstrous head at Niko. “It’s really starting to get on my nerves.”

Pignose glares at Niko, cheeks bulging enormously. He lowers his head and spews his noxious fiery breath. Screams renew from the dead below and an awful smoke and bacon smell wafts up.

Pignose wipes his gleaming chin. “What is it now?”

Niko points. “Those are my clothes. He stole them from me.”

“Do I look like a cop to you, meat pie? I don’t give a fat rat’s ass if they’re the Pope’s pajamas.”

“Please, I’d like them back.”

“Ooh, please it says,” Ramhorn says to Pignose. They curtsy and bow to one another like courtiers and then Pignose grins unpleasantly at Niko. “What are you willing to do to get them back?”

Niko hesitates.

“Guess he don’t want em that bad,” says Batface, dangling the unconscious dead man.

“What do you want me to do?” calls Niko.

The gargoyles frown thoughtfully and glance among themselves and shrug. Then they grin and set the clothed man down on the parapet. “Wake him up,” Pignose tells Batface.

Pignose turns to Niko and smiles. “You’re going to fight him for your clothes.”

THE FAR SIDE of the Battlements is a sudden raw dropoff that could be two hundred feet or two hundred miles, Niko can’t tell as he gazes over the edge because a pure and famished darkness swallows the face of the cliff below a hundred feet. To his left the warm red river vomits from the arch to become a spraying frothing bloodfall that disperses into fine red mist to rain upon whatever horror lies below, ferrying its tumbling voiceless cargo to some lower deeper fate.

A ramp is carved into the Ledge. It begins on the near side of the arch and angles down until it disappears into the bleeding dark. A sick parade of thoughtless dead marches downward without end, so many dead no floor of ramp itself is visible, so many that they spill over the edge of the ramp and tumble down the sheer face of the Ledge. Ravenous darkness swallows the ramp as it descends. The blind abyss is filled with screams and earthen rumblings and a distant thunder, the deep arrhythmic grinding of a factory of despair.

The Battlement wall is twelve feet thick and solid rock so far as Niko sees. He takes his time because it’s about to become his arena as he fights a dead man for his clothes. The dead man is awake again and naked now. Niko’s clothes are draped across an embrasure near the waiting gargoyles. Jacket shirt pants and even underwear but not his shoes and socks. Niko insisted the clothes be removed so he can meet his opponent on equal ground. And why fight to get them back if they’re torn to uselessness by the fight itself?

Niko stretches out and gazes down the far side of the wall, covertly sizing up his opponent. The man is not some kind of bruiser. He’s tall and bony and welldefined, which is even worse. Tall and bony guys are hard to fight. For one thing they’ve got range. It hurts to block them. It hurts to hit them. It hurts a lot when they hit you. Then there’s the fact that Niko can’t kill the man because the man is already dead.

Bony just stares at Niko without expression as Niko stretches out. Pale blue eyes and thinning brown hair. Scalp encrusted with blood where he tried to pull his hair out to escape Batface’s clutch. Smoker’s teeth in yellowed disarray. He doesn’t look afraid or worried or eager. He probably just doesn’t care. After all he’s been through down here this is probably a resort massage.

Niko’s heart is pumping madly and his palms are sweaty and he’s breathing way too fast. The man’s indifference is more worrisome than if he were chomping at the bit. Niko makes himself take long deep breaths. His thirst is unbelievable. He feels his very skin demanding water. Even his eyes feel dry.

The gargoyles lean against the merlons and wager on the outcome. Niko’s not sure he wants to know who’s favored or the odds.

The gargoyles are becoming impatient. Before they can yell at him Niko straightens from his hurdler’s stretch and gives Pignose the nod and says Let’s dance.

“Bout time.” Leaning against the wall Pignose folds his burly arms. “No rules, boys. Come out swinging till ya can’t swings no more.”

Ramhorn mimes pulling a bell cord. “Ding ding,” he says basso profundo.

Bony walks calmly to the middle of the parapet and looks Niko in the eye and extends a hand. “No hahd feelins, mite,” he says in a thick Australian accent.

Niko takes the hand to shake and Bony yanks him in and unloads a left hook to the side of Niko’s head. Or where Niko’s head would have been if he hadn’t gone with the pull and ducked. Niko continues the motion and pushes up on Bony’s hand to raise the Aussie’s arm and glide under it and turn away from him as he does. He straightens quickly and turns the arm to lock it and bend Bony over and then comes down hard on the upturned elbow joint with his own elbow. Bony yells but the joint doesn’t break so Niko tries again. As he comes down Bony lets off a kick to Niko’s shin that glances off but doesn’t exactly tickle and then Bony jerks free.

They square off.

Bony stands a little hunched with hands up to protect his face and upper body, left shoulder leading. A boxing stance. Niko’s arm-bar has hurt Bony’s elbow but not enough. He’s probably acquired a stratospheric tolerance for pain.

Bony sees the way Niko’s sizing him up and he grins pure enjoyment. “Yer a goer then eh? Cmon then. Cmon.”

Niko waits in his stance. Bony’s a boxer, he’s Australian, and there’s something oldfashioned about him. Niko’s willing to bet he never saw martial arts in his life or since. Which means there’s a lot he won’t be expecting.

Niko assumes a boxer’s stance.

Bony nods. “That’s it mite. Now cmin eer an get slapped loyk a gull.” Bony begins to circle, still grinning as he bobs and weaves and feints and jabs. He’s out of range, just trying to intimidate. He fights flatfooted, European style. As Bony circles he begins to spiral in toward Niko, slow and subtle but the taunting jabs are getting closer. Niko hasn’t bothered to block any yet.

“Not much chance a gettin the sun in yer eyes, eh?” Bony feints and bobs right. “You look loyk ya been out in the sun ricently. Eh? That royt?”

And Niko realizes Bony hates him for his mortality.

Bony jabs again and rushes in to unload a right cross. Niko stops him cold with a sidekick to the knee. It hurts like hell because the sole of Niko’s foot is so cut up from running from the mulchosaur. He tries to follow through with a backfist to the head but Bony sidesteps and dances back. Niko’s kick had been an inch too high. Probably charliehorsed Bony’s quad pretty good but Niko doubts a charliehorse is going to send the Aussie running home to momma.

The Aussie looks surprised at the kick and perhaps as well at the way Niko moves. “So that’s how you ply, eh? Leave it to a Yank ta kick loyk a sheila.” He spits into his hands. “Bloody septics.”