Mortality Bridge (22 page)

On the last word Niko fakes a backfist to the head and Bony’s guard comes up. Niko leg-sweeps Bony’s front leg out from under him and Bony lands hard on his naked tailbone and Niko drives down a left punch. Bony rolls enough to take it on the shoulder and grabs Niko’s arm and pulls him down with him. Now it’s a grappling match and technique is out the window. Gouge and scratch and bite. They might as well be two cats tied together in a bag going over a waterfall. They roll around on the parapet for ten seconds before Niko gets away, bleeding from a cheek and an earlobe and from his forehead where he butted the Australian in the mouth. An eye got gouged in the fray and he’s bruised where Bony grabbed his balls and tried to pop them like grapes. His shoulder wound and the bite on his thigh have opened up again. Bony’s bleeding from the forehead and chest and lip. Left eyelid swollen and two fingers broken.

They face each other once again. Both men panting. Bony wipes his split lip with a forearm. “That’ll get the old pump wuhhkin, eh?” And he jumps in to do it again.

Niko sidesteps and roundkicks Bony in the solar plexus. He hits him with his big toe instead of the ball of his foot and goddamn if he doesn’t sprain it on the son of a bitch’s skinny chest. But at least Bony says Whuh and doubles over.

Niko dances in to finish Bony off but his bleeding feet skid on the stone. Bony mulekicks at Niko’s groin and catches the fresh bite gouge on his thigh. It feels like a branding iron. Niko yells as he falls. He rolls and comes up in a fighting stance and then the leg collapses under him. He tucks tight as Bony stumbles to him and tries to stomp him. Niko’s leg piledrives Bony’s shin.

“Oh that smaahts,” the Aussie yells. His savage grin remains.

Niko stays down. The stone is warm against his naked ass. Bony can’t get in on Niko while he’s made himself a little fortress like a turtle. But like a turtle he is roadkill if he tries to pick up and go anywhere. Stalemate.

It’s been about thirty seconds since they started in on each other. Plenty of time to cause a lot of damage in an unprotected fight. Niko now sees he’s at a serious disadvantage here. Maybe Bony was a Boy Scout Leader in his earthly life, though Niko doubts it because the son of a bitch is enjoying this way too much, but since then the Australian has experienced decades of true and utter ruthlessness. He’s lost the governors that hamper most people. He has no instinct for selfpreservation because he’s already dead. And Niko’s holding back that little bit that’s going to let the Aussie beat him.

Bony makes a third attempt to kick Niko while he’s down. Niko tries again to kick Bony’s kneecaps. The gargoyles decide things have gotten boring and it won’t improperly influence the wager to let the mortal get back up so the boys can finish up their little dance.

The moment Niko’s on his bleeding feet the Aussie goes for broke. Jab and jab then slide up jab and here comes a right with murder in its eye. Niko kicks him in the side and feels a rib break beneath his heel. Bony flies back and hits a merlon. Niko catches him on the rebound and takes him down and slams him facefirst onto the bare rock parapet and smashes his nose like a stewed tomato. The Aussie bucks once and then lies still. For a moment Niko’s sure he’s killed the man and then remembers that’s not possible. For insurance Niko folds the Aussie’s right leg until the heel is against the buttock and then sits down on the upturned instep.

“Finish it,” says Pignose from his makeshift throne of an embrasure.

“How the fuck am I supposed to do that?” The Australian suddenly struggles beneath him. Niko keeps pressure on the leg. “I can ’t kill him.”

“Make him say uncle.”

“Are you—” Niko frowns. He supposes one word’s just as good as the next. He glances at the man beneath him. One skinny arm is struggling feebly to find purchase. Fuck it.

“Say uncle,” Niko says.

“Oh uddy ay.”

“What’s he saying?” complains Batface.

“He says no bloody way,” says Niko.

They sit there a moment in a strange tableau. Wrestlers on a Grecian urn.

“Ood thot, ite.”

“Thanks,” says Niko. “You got me some good ones yourself.”

“Orry out ya glothes. Oodnt elp oyself.”

“Way it goes,” says Niko.

“Look, I want subtitles or something,” says Ramhorn.

“He said he’s sorry about my clothes. He couldn’t help himself.” The gargoyles laugh.

“Well isn’t that sweet,” says Ramhorn. “Maybe if you let him go you two can kiss and make up.”

“I don’t think so,” says Niko.

“Ont tink oh,” the Australian agrees.

“Over the side with him then,” says Batface.

“That side,” adds Pignose, nodding at far side of the Ledge. Niko leans close to the Australian. The naked contact is unnervingly intimate. “Give. There’s no shame.”

“Uck oo, ank.”

Niko sighs. “Where’s my guitar? And my shoes?”

A pause. Beneath him the Australian hawks and spits out teeth and blood. “Lemme ub an I’ll tell ya.”

“I don’t think so, Cisco.” Niko glances up. The squareteethed edge of the parapet is only a few feet away. One sudden rush will heave the Aussie over the side like last week’s garbage. Harder without clothes to grab onto though. Niko must have missed the class where they showed how to fight naked against people who are already dead.

“Loyk to thang ya for the divuhsion. Bit of a chinge from the old ruh-tyne, yknow.”

Pignose strides over to them and glowers down. “If you don’t throw him I don’t collect.” His textured stone wings spread. “And if I don’t collect, you don’t get your ride.”

“Go on, mite. Oyve had my fud an ya bead me fair an zguare. Oy got nothin left to lose unda thize bastids.”

Pignose casually reaches down a massive hand and grinds the Aussie’s mashed nose against the parapet. The Australian screams.

Niko takes a deep breath. All right. He bends the Aussie’s right arm sharply up between the protruding shoulderblades and lifts. The downed man rises as if levitating. Niko moves the arm forward and drunkwalks the Australian toward an embrasure. Smooth, steady, don’t stop. Remember you won’t be killing somebody.

It’s still not easy to find it within himself to hurl someone over the edge of a cliff.

He relaxes just a bit on the arm and the Australian immediately comes nearly upright and Niko yanks down and lifts to throw him overboard and son of a bitch if the Australian doesn’t whip around as he hits the embrasure and grab Niko by the both forearms to pull him over the side along with him. Niko drops to the parapet but he scrapes forward until his bleeding shoulder hits an embrasure and he’s wedged against the inside wall. The Australian is leaning out from the Battlement with both legs braced against the outside wall, deathgripping Niko’s arms and pulling for all he’s worth. Niko braces a leg against the embrasure and manages to keep the Australian from pulling him over the edge, but he has no leverage to force the man back. He can’t hold this position very long.

The two men look at one another across the width of stone. The man’s pale eyes are bloodied and his lip is gashed and he’s missing front teeth. His nose is a swollen shapeless ruin dripping blood. And he’s grinning.

Niko’s arms feel as if they’re wrenching from their sockets. His face is hot and his head throbs as if he’s about to blow an artery. “Let go.”

“Not on your loyf, mite.” The Australian strains at Niko’s arms like an angry dog on a leash, each leg on a merlon and holding onto Niko in the gap between. He’s standing sideways above an unfathomable space of writhing darkness, the hiss of the bloodfall loud below. He’s a son of a bitch but he’s a brave son of a bitch.

Niko strains his arms inward to make a narrow X and slowly draws big outward circles, turning his wrists up as he does. For a moment it looks as if he’s making a handshadow of a bat as he follows the direction of the grabbing thumb in a slow elaborate shrug. He tucks his elbows toward his ribcage and brings his hands back toward his own shoulders. The Australian now holds on by little more than thumb and forefinger and it’s not enough. For the first time Niko sees something like alarm on the man’s face. He feels the grip weakening and he pushes his elbows forward to increase the angle.

Now the Australian’s grin holds a different edge. He concedes with a nod and never takes his eyes off Niko. “See ya in ell, mite,” he shouts above the torrent.

Niko moves his elbows outward and the grip slides off and the Australian falls away. He kicks out from the wall, upturned like a man backswimming toward the misty bloodfall far below, and silently he stares at Niko until he’s swallowed by the deeper darkness far below.

Niko turns and slides down to lie against the wall and rubs his burning forearms and looks at Pignose holding an upturned claw out to the rest of the gargoyles. No one else seems to have bet in Niko’s favor.

“O ye of little faith,” Niko mutters, and then he’s still for a good long while.

“PULL.”

Niko wakes to orange light. A weight of stone looms somewhere high above him. He can feel its pressure overhead. Yet he also feels a fragile sense of lying on a slender rampart jutting out into an immense open space. Vertigo assails him and he shuts his eyes. The back of his head is pounding and he’s covered with scabs and dried blood. His knuckles are bruised and swollen and his big toe feels broken. His testicles are lead weights. His arm and leg muscles burn. A tic in his cheek and his thigh. His gums are swollen and his tongue is thick and his breath feels like shimmering waves of heat should be rising from his mouth. His heel is bruised and his feet are cut so badly he’s afraid to stand. How good it is to shut his eyes and sink into the primal mud of sleep. To feel himself drift away from himself.

A tongue not human speaks his true name in a language dead to all but archeologists poring over earthen ruins. The single word a hook to reel him struggling back into the hopeless world.

Niko opens his eyes to see a huge and alien face peer down at him with eyes of purest aqua. Pupils shaped like plus signs. The eyes blink and Niko startles even more awake.

“Here.” An enormous hand offers Niko’s neatly folded clothes. Niko accepts them dumbly and stares at the proffered hand. A mass of writhing digits too slim and articulated to be called fingers. The skin seems made of smooth and glossy marble with a faint intaglio of slightly darker veins.

Feeling half in dream he sets his clothes upon his naked lap and looks up at the looming face before him. Violently carved yet in its lineaments there lives a kind of beauty. Ruinous terrible and cruel but beauty all the same. What emotion it contains embedded in its frozen features.

The monster is bald as a cueball. Faint blue veins roadmap its scalp. Ivory horns curve like baroque newels. And in the rough hewn setting of the monster’s face the adamantine of its eyes. Cold stone eyes of some dead blind idol carved and revered and then marooned by aliens who abandoned their world in some forgotten exodus. To look at them is to lose sight of their dreadful housing. The plus sign pupils give no hint of soul behind them.

Looking at the monster’s aqua eyes he feels a sudden oceanic pull.

The monster Geryon kneels until he’s only double Niko’s height. “Do I know you?” His voice is startling normal but those unnerving pupils throw back nothing Niko can read.

“I don’t think so.”

“I understand you know my true name.”

Niko nods. He tries to stand and finds he hurts too much and lacks the strength. Geryon holds out an everchanging hand. Reluctantly Niko clutches it and is surprised to find he touches cold unliving stone as Geryon easily hoists him to his feet. Niko’s head swims and he drops his bundled clothes and sways forward. Geryon catches him up and sets him like an infant on an embrasure and supports his back with one hand until Niko nods that he’s not going to fall off.

The monster steps back but watches him carefully. “I understand you want a favor.”

Niko nods. It hurts. “You’re very understanding.”

From down below a funhouse whipcrack snaps before a ragged scream.

“I understand you would like a ride down,” the monster continues, oblivious to the noise and Niko’s sarcasm.

“Yeah.”

That aqua scrutiny. I cannot meet that unremitting gaze for long.

“You are in a great hurry to be in a world of pain.”

Niko shrugs. “Oh well.” Heated wind rushing up from the abyss ruffles his hair.

Geryon stares. The gargoyles have returned to their horrific human pigeonshoot and crouch now upon the crenellation with their granite backs to Geryon and Niko. “I cannot willingly do this,” the monster finally says.

Niko forces himself to stand and holds on to a merlon for support. Oh man. “Then I’ll walk.”

“You would never make it.”

“I’ve come this far.”

“Yes.”

They regard one another. Finally Niko sighs and breaks the stare. His eyes throb as if he’s looked away from a bright light. He slowly bends to pick up his clothes. Pain lights up his hamstring so he squats instead. The cuts on his arches spread and tears spring to his eyes. Putting on his clothes may truly kill him. He fishes out his underwear and turns them inside out and feeling like an invalid steps into them. Tries not to think that they were recently worn by a dead man he just threw off a cliff. Glances at his ragged shirt and shakes his head. Hisses as the fabric rasps the shoulder that scraped the merlon in the fight.

The jeans are stiff and ripe with blood and dirt and shit and sweat and piss, but damn if there isn’t a single tear in them. He struggles into the pants and tries not to cry when the denim slides across his bite wound.

Buckling his belt Niko becomes aware of the monster looking on in what he thinks is amusement. “What?”

“You tucked your shirt in.”

Niko stares down. So he has. “Well. You never know who you’ll run into. Maybe my elementary school principal is down here.” He buckles his belt and painfully shrugs into his torn and filthy jacket.

“Mr. Wilson. He is.”

Niko stops with the jacket halfway on and stares at Geryon who stares back without returning a thing. Niko shrugs and works his arms the rest of the way through the jacket and shoots his hands through the cuffs and pats the pockets. Son of a bitch. He fishes out the Swisher Sweets and sees the cabbie also tucked a box of whitehead lucifer matches into the pack. He tamps the battered half full pack against his unbitten thigh while gazing around the Battlements. Ramhorn rears back holding a bald old man by the torso. Pignose shouts Pull and the poor soul flies away.