Mortality Bridge (30 page)

The Achaian smiles. Not grudgingly but openly and shockingly boyish. “How good it is to know my name is still remembered on the earth.” And sits up.

Niko tenses as through the wooden shaft he feels the bronze slice flesh and grate against a vertebra. The soldier lies back down with a liquid gurgling sigh as if relaxing. A soft rhythmic hiss, and the sand around him reddens. Bubbles float in that brief red pool. The rhythm slows. The soldier stares up at Niko the whole time and Niko watches the blue eyes until their light is mere reflection. Then he braces his foot on the fallen soldier’s breastplate and withdraws the leafshaped blade. He thinks to do the chivalrous thing and set the spear beside the body and close the cooling fingers round the haft. But no. Not here where the body’s death is so shortlived. Instead he takes a dozen running steps and hurls the spear out on the sandy plain. The arc of its flight is lost in the dark but Niko hears the faint chuff when it strikes ground.

He stands a moment looking out at what he cannot see. The river’s hiss behind him.

That deep sadness upon returning to himself. Because he’d crawled up from these icy waters with no notion who he was. Nameless in Hell he’d held no memory of despair. No loathed and cherished demon clawed inside him. He was not a man who’d signed away his soul or lost his love and did not remember what all myth and history related he would lose. What he has lost countless times in many forms. For the first and only time in Niko’s life and lives he’d been at peace. And the sadness he had felt upon returning to himself was grief at peace’s loss when memory infected him again.

He turns toward the frigid peopled Lethe. You’re it, aren’t you motherfucker? The cowabunga fix. The motherlode whiskey river. I’ve been looking for you all my life. And there you are, oblivion, there you are. I could take a running jump right now. Couldn’t I? Dive on in and do the very opposite of drowning. And never know a moment of remorse. And why not. Why not.

Niko looks away from the river Lethe and turns his back on his forgetting.

ON THE SAND the soldier’s body has already begun to twitch. Niko hurries to him and links hands under him and lifts. Jesus christ. The guy may be short but even without that armor he’d weigh at least one eighty.

Niko staggers with the soldier to the riverbank and lobs the body as best he can. He watches the Achaian’s limp form splash into the water and flop unwilled as it rolls until it drops beneath the surface, weighted by armor and more than armor and carried by the current as it quickly sinks from sight and memory and all else but the lying mirror that is myth.

Niko collects his meager belongings from the sand. The whiskey bottle still full and sealed. Hadn’t it been empty? He looks at the river and then hurls the bottle out over the water. Its splash is lost in the river’s rush.

The message on the parchment the Achaian delivered.
Buddy pal: Here’s the short version.
Niko reads it now with eyes once more haunted by untold lifetimes’ memories behind them. As with the note in the makeshift igloo the handwriting is familiar because the andwriting is his own. He rolls the parchment and flattens it again and slips it into a pocket and then picks up his hardcase. Wet grit clings along one edge. Red discoloration on the fine blond sand.

Looking inland Niko narrows his eyes. It will be different this time you goateyed son of a bitch. It will. The song will not remain the same. Walks on.

XVIII.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

WASTED, WEARY, NIKO navigates the inner shore. His ragged shirt is soaked with sweat, his calves are cramped from walking on the sand. It’s hot and muggy as New Orleans in August but the sky is murky and the air is curling dark and the light is ochre red. And that sure as shit ain’t the Mississippi behind him.

Niko treads the hardpacked sand, pulled by instinct like some migratory bird that senses its direction but has lost all sense of why it travels or where it will arrive. Perhaps his journey has made him a little crazy. Going crazy seems the only rational response to this ceaseless parade of torment and despair.

He comes upon a narrow stream that runs inland from the river. Rather than ford it Niko follows it. Soon a forest lines the rivulet banks. The smaller trees bear pale yellow fruit the size of softballs. Beneath the trees are knots of obese damned so gravid that they cannot lift themselves enough to pluck the fruit their starfish hands strain toward like massive babies blindly groping toward a toy. They look halfmelted and drowning in themselves, blubber spreading in a doughy mass and features buried under wrinkles like bleached Shar-pei dogs laboring to breathe, their gender blurred to indistinction and imprisoned in their convoluted flesh.

Four demons lounge around the base of one spreading tree, playing cards and eating fruit. They laugh and shout insults at each other and shuffle and deal. One says I knock and raps the ground in front of him with his sharp knuckles. Without looking he lobs the slim core of a gnawed apple over his winged shoulder. The sessile damned are groping for the scrap before it has stopped moving. The lucky winner is the one who rolls a few inches to one side and feebly grasps the core in his chubby fingers and brings it to his gaping mouth to chew and swallow mindlessly, seeds and stem and all.

In a moment three of the demons groan and complain and pitch their cards to the grinning dealer who then shuffles for another round. One demon gets up grumbling and idly hooks his trident in a branch and jerks it up and down. Heavy ripe fruit thumps down around the rotund dead who strive to gorge themselves upon it. The demons break off their game to watch the obscene feeding. They nudge one another and chortle and point out favorites and place bets.

One of the obese gluttons lets forth an awful highpitched keening and begins to rock like a dinghy on a choppy sea. His enormous belly shudders and convulses and heaves and his jaws work and his eyes are terrified and agonized as they look out from their fleshy pits. From deep within this struggle of bloat comes a mild purring terrible to hear. One demon whoops and shouts and slaps the shoulder of the one beside him as the purring enloudens and becomes a rip on the fat man’s belly that spreads across his massive floundering gut as if he’s being disemboweled by an invisible assailant. The curved rip widens and reddens like a smile and the smile vomits an engorged stomach and stuffed-sausage intestine and bile. The body wheezes but it cannot scream because its diaphragm is torn in two. The wound’s lips flap with a thick fart of venting gas. The corpulent explosion grips great handfuls of its own ruined guts and stuffs them in its mouth and chews and swallows and spews them out again from its exposed digestive system only to grab and swallow them again. Around the gluttonous display recycling itself the other swollen dead grab whatever of the spilled sweetbreads they can hoist into their engorged selves.

The happy demon does a little dance and tells the others to pay up. Niko hurries on into the woods.

NAKED BODIES SHACKLED hand and foot against the boles of fledgling trees of some lost species never named. Many of the dead seem barely inconvenienced by their long confinement as they talk casually among themselves. Others are stretched taut and lengthened over the course of many years as the trees to which they’re bound have grown and slowly pulled apart their chained and moaning decorations in the agonizing grip of the slowest imaginable rack. Manacles on taller trees hold only stumps of tornoff limbs.

Demons with tackhammers and awls patiently transcribe entire narratives onto the trunks of certain trees. The bark shudders at every stroke and Niko sees that these trees have an eerily human shape. As if long ago the seeds of human beings were planted and grew elongate and distorted. Some bear fruit that demons pluck and eat to conjure muffled sobs from deep within the rooted flesh.

Demons with enormous axes chop at other trees that exude blood instead of sap. Scabbed stumps sprout limb saplings born again from parent trunks. From the deeper forest comes a hornet whine of chainsaws, a grating keen of buzzsaws, a chortle of woodchippers, pounding of hammers, intermittent chopping. The vibrant tone of human wood filed down to powder.

Several times Niko glimpses odd apparitions. Waisthigh Boschlike naked chicken creatures mostly leg and running blindly through the woods. He can’t figure out what they are until one such strange and awkward thing slams against a tree and falls back kicking and convulsing to regain its footing. Against his better judgement Niko goes to help the flopping thing only to pull up short in utter horror at the realization that the creature is a human being. A woman rendered unrecognizable as such because her spine has been snapped and bent double and her entire head shoved up her ass. The flailing arms find purchase on the ground and hoist the contorted body upright. The extruding pelvic bones and lower back are cut and bruised and scabbed and swollen where she has sprinted into trees.

The woman scampers off like some kind of maimed blind spider. Niko does not follow.

THE SOUND OF powertools flaying wood grows louder as Niko presses on and soon emerges from the peopled wood and stops before an appalling sight. Ahead on the denuded plain thousands of demons work the living lumber and drive teams of shackled damned to chainhaul soul-encasing logs to a low enormous building, itself made of timber rough and doubtless conscious. The logs go into one end of the building and emerge from the other as eightfoot lengths of finished four by fours. The air smells heavily of sap and blood, sawdust and rotting meat. The building is both slaughterhouse and lumber mill. A slaughtermill.

A wooden platform runs the slaughtermill’s length, and beside the platform runs a railroad track emerging from the thinning forest on Niko’s right. A signal at the platform’s end glows steady green. An odd jewel of color in this monochromatic red.

The railroad signal’s green turns flashing red, a color nearly white in the ochre light. Niko feels the rumble grow until its thunder fills the world. A great sculpted black iron locomotive howls braking from the wood of the gluttons with a sound like a nation of fingernails clawed across a vast clean chalkboard plain. The locomotive’s front is shaped like a frenzied gargoyle head with a great maw gaping to devour whatever lies before its bound life screaming on the rails. Its behemoth breathing carries across the clearing as it bellows to a stop beside the platform. A load of naked dead disgorges like fleas abandoning a corpse, to be rounded up and herded along by whiphanded demons who direct them to piles of finished beams. The dead are made to pick up two beams each and drag them along a twinrutted trail etched deep into the plain by centuries of just such wooden beams dragged likewise. Niko feels dread certainty about their fate as his gaze follows the rutted path into the distance where inverted phonepole crosses crowd the flat horizon.

The train bleeds forth a ragged thousand of the damned, then winged demons search the cars for those who cower fearful in the dark. What wretched bodies they prise forth are carried struggling high into the weighty air like baggage. The demons chortle and cavort and dogfight one another, playing chicken and making diving airplane noises as they bash the bodies against each other in the raven air. When they tire of this the demons dive toward the gaping head of the locomotive and feed the limp pulped bodies to the waiting train like offerings to some allconsuming god of industry. The venting engine steam turns bloodred like the spout of a mortally harpooned whale.

Soon the train is thrumming again, a neverending growl like some entropic engine of the night unraveling the fabric of nature itself. Niko feels the locomotive’s urge to tear along the track and devour all that lies along its fated way. The boiler builds up its head and begins a labored breathing. Slaved wheels spin to grate sparks from the rails beneath. Demons scatter powdered bone onto the rails. The wheels gain traction and grind on. The angry god of locomotive shudders and convulses waking. Boxcars jerk into motion as the gaping metal maw once more eats up the neverending miles.

Niko is up and running before he is aware of what he’s doing. Running awkward with the guitar case in hand and free fist pumping. Running toward the leaving train and watching thick red smoke vent from the locomotive straining deeper into Hell. The demons on the nearby platform have their whip hands full with this new trainload of tormentees but Niko clothed and carrying a guitar case and running fullout is bound to attract attention.

And he does. A demon looks up from lashing a sobbing girl’s naked bleeding back and sees Niko making for the rear of the train and frowns. He cracks his whip about him to clear a space and gets a running start and spreads his leather wings and takes to the irontainted air.

Niko veers more sharply toward the train. He glances over his shoulder at the demon on the wing. It’s going to be close. At the last moment he cuts left to run in the direction the train is going. The train has picked up speed and sobs along faster than Niko can run with the guitar case. Only a few feet now. A freightcar with an open doorway glides into view. Niko throws caution to the winds and his case into the door. The case bangs the edge and spins into the deeper darkness of the car. Niko jumps in after it. His shins bark the boxcar’s edge and he pitches forward and his arms and chest slam the filthcaked wooden floor. His hands scrabble and slide and catch. His body cants toward the spinning metal wheels that want to mill him into pulp.

Something thuds onto the boxcar just above him. Niko looks up and sees the demon clinging to the side of the train like a browneyed bat. Its arms are tapering tendrils, leathery whips coiled around freightcar handles and protrusions Niko could never reach.

Niko glances frantically. Metal walls, the freightcar’s dark interior, the edge of the opened door.

The demon grins and draws a tendril idly back and flicks it forward. The serrated tip brushes Niko’s forearm and the searing pain makes his arm jerk free. He flails, he hits the door edge, he catches it. Bearing Niko’s weight the freightcar door is sliding shut. His ribcage scrapes along the bottom edge of the car. The ground rolls by just beneath him like a giant sanding belt. Niko fights to get a leg up without losing his grip.