Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

The charred head shifts an inch. A single word grates from the ruined throat. Niko thinks the word was time.

THE TWO MILES to the Battlements are the longest Niko’s ever walked. Every step an act of will. His ears are ringing and his vision sometimes blurs but seems to be improving. He’s hungry and parched and his throat tastes of sour vomit. A drink of water would fix everything right now he’s pretty sure. Yes sir a good old-fashioned sweaty glass of tinkling icewater with a twisty slice of sunshiny lemon would take care of just about all his worldly and spiritual needs. Can’t you just taste it? Wouldn’t it just make your mouth water if you had any saliva left?

Niko’s having trouble concentrating. The ground is hot beneath his bare feet. Walking naked in the open feels just wrong. Now there’s nothing to prevent him being mistaken for just another of the damned. It figures this would happen at the very time he’s most unable to deal with it.

And what about his guitar? He can live without the clothes. He can probably even manage without the shoes, though his cityboy feet are hardly primed to pound along the grit and filth and bone upon a baking plain. But what are you supposed to do without your axe, champ? How you gonna rescue the fair maiden now, Parsival? Maybe you can talk the head honcho into a round of scissors paper stone. Best two out of three, be a sport.

His big toe stubs a rock and he cries out and stumbles. Niko glances down and sees that it is not a rock at all but a blackened lump he would not recognize as a charred human being had he not just spoken with a similar creature. He apologizes to the lump and wipes his toe upon the ground. He realizes the surrounding plain is dotted with similar lumps of charred remains in various stages of reconstitution, some writhing or crawling about, some with speech regained but able only to scream, many just shapeless burned lumps waiting to resume their former shape to meet whatever punishment awaits them next.

A woman runs screaming past him and looks fearfully over her shoulder. An obese tumescent creature runs drooling after her, footwide tongue flopping to its jiggling belly like an obscene and slathering necktie. Its long translucent fingers tremble toward her as the pair runs by. Niko barely registers them. Just one damned thing after another. A tiny voice inside him, that little demon all his own he lived with all those years, is prodding him again. Why bother? it asks reasonably. What’s the point now? You’re barefoot and dick-naked, buddy pal, and your one bartering tool is as missing as a conscience in a cathouse. It’s not like any of this was gonna work anyhow, wetbrain. You’ve been a lame horse from the getgo. Pack it on up, move it on out, bring it on home. Go back to the world and grieve and live the rest of your augmented life and honor the bargain you made. I gotta admit you gave it a great try. Who else could’ve gotten this far? But now’s the time to let it go. She’s gone. She’s dead, asshole. The only way you’re gonna see her again is by getting your stupid ass killed down here and joining her.

Niko slaps imaginary duct tape over his demon’s lulling mouth. Fuck you. I’ll get there or I won’t. But I’ll have to be stopped because I will not stop so long as I can move. One step at a time, like the bumper stickers say.

Another fireball launches from the Battlements and screaming streaks to light the plain, shifting shadows from the grubbing creatures scavenging. The river of blood glints darkly in the moving light on high. Rio Rojo.

Footsteps pound toward him from behind. Despite his aching head he turns, paranoid from his last encounter. Two hundred yards away and running toward him is a teenaged girl. Ghostly pale and whippet thin. Her hair streams back and bloody footprints dot the plain behind her as she sprints. “Run,” she yells at Niko. “Run.”

Niko frowns. “There’s nothing chasing you,” he calls back. His head pounds harder from his shouting.

She’s a hundred yards away now and still running. Niko peers across the dimlit plain. There’s movement everywhere but so much of it is indecipherable against the unimaginably huge and perspectiveless plain.

The girl is running by him now. He turns to watch her pass. Athletic and trim and not an ounce of fat. Her breasts do not bob and her buttocks do not jiggle. The soles of her feet gleam with her blood.

To the far right is another running figure whose path will intersect the girl’s close to the fortress on the Ledge. Niko squints. Something’s chasing this runner, something low to the ground and wagging forward with deceptive speed. It closes on the distant runner. The thing is wide and long, waisthigh and dark. It edges up and stretches forward and passes the runner, and when it passes the runner is no longer there.

The running girl cries out. The long dark shape now stands between her and the Battlements, and she veers.

Behind Niko comes fast rhythmic clacking like a nail caught in a tire. He turns to see one of the long dark creatures running fulltilt toward him, twentyfive feet long and ten wide, manylegged and sidewinding but fast as a man on a bike. Mottled craggy hide and eyeless head shaped like a crescent held low to the ground like a vacuum attachment. The creature is some kind of living woodchipper.

Niko turns and runs like a cheetah with its ass on fire. Instincts old as mammals themselves scream at him to climb a tree and become very still and small. There’s not so much as a blade of grass in sight, only flat hard ground he cannot dig. His heart jackhammers and his head feels like it’s going to burst and he cannot possibly maintain this speed for long.

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.