Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

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.