Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

NIKO PUSHES AND worms his way through the dense crowd toward the lone clothed figure. It’s his coat all right. Also his jeans. Who else’s would they be? No sign of his guitar. There is no avoiding touching the dead around him. They press like mindless cattle heedless of their nakedness, of their stink and affliction. Their flesh rubs cold against him. Niko is brushed by pustulant sores and diseased limbs and bleeding wounds and excrement. He is groped and prodded and pushed and hit. An unidentifiable amalgam squishes beneath his bare feet as centuries of accumulated filth work into his cuts and well up between his toes to dry and cake. He moves amid the vesper moaning, the steady lament sung by the streaming chorus of the damned. Their voiced despair sounds oddly orchestrated, as if the trudging throng are opera players singing to an unseen host upon a boundless stage, a choir murmuring a requiem conducted by some unseen hand.

Some among the shambling dead sense Niko’s living warmth and seek it out as if by leeching from him they will gain some flavor or forgotten grain of life itself. They reach to feel the press of living flesh and Niko struggling through the prison of their mutilated flesh cannot avoid their terrible caress. He keeps a hand up near his face to ward away their jealous hands and presses toward his clothed objective. Around him voices break the mass eternal to beseech the mortal visitor in every tongue in which a cry of pain was ever uttered. Whatever pity Niko feels toward the suffering legions is blighted by disgust now that he shares in their corruption. He feels the stirring of an old selfloathing. So your compassion is just luxury then. Well and good to sorrow for the distant sufferers until their tragedy afflicts you.

The wearer of his clothes is only thirty feet ahead now but Niko has to close the gap through human quicksand. The jacketed figure strangely unmolested. Niko would have thought the damned would fight like dogs to take away the stolen clothing not so much because they need it as because they long for evidence of earthly life, mementos vivi.

Cold fingers clasp his ankle. He tries to pull his leg away and something drags. He looks down to see in flitting spaces between the teeming dead a small and beautiful little girl not more than ten years old who hugs his leg and gazes up at him with wide brown eyes set in a milkwhite face framed by long straight raven hair.

Startled by a sight of beauty Niko stops. He slaps away a blindly groping hand and bends down to the little girl. To ask her what? Are you lost little girl? Where’s your mommy? Do you know where you live? Can I help you? It’s likely she’s been down here longer than Niko’s been alive. But she’s a little girl. Unmangled and whole and clutching at his leg, and despite whatever abominations her odd calm eyes have seen her face remains unsullied as a newly minted doll. No sane and mortal eye could look upon her and not wonder how a god could so renounce its own.

So Niko bends to her, about to ask he knows not what, but feels his breath grow still and give no voice to wonder as he looks into her eyes, her calm gaze patient as the rock around them and as ancient, that roots him to this spot as sure as any certain love or venom. Looking into the little girl’s eyes Niko feels a flush throughout his body. Her cool dry hand against his leg.

Still holding his gaze the little girl slowly leans to set her cheek beside her hand against his naked leg. Her dark skin smooth and cold as the shell of a nut. Her eyes unwavering as she turns her head to kiss his thigh. His heartbeat louder than the din around him. The little girl closes her eyes and opens her mouth and Niko feels her cold dry tongue against his thigh. Pressure of her teeth upon his skin. Distant nip of pain. And then white blindness as her mouth clamps on his thigh. He arches his back and shudders and cries out. It uncoils from the pit of his stomach and locks his muscles, it’s centered around the little girl’s mouth fastened to his thigh, her mouth now hot and cool cheek warming and face growing flushed, her lips reddening as red overflows to run down her chin and trickle down his leg, his lifeblood coursing like magma in the cold stone tunnels of her empty veins. Niko knows she’ll take it all, drain the burning life from him in trade for the few hours’ warmth it will provide her, surcease from the mausoleum of her flesh. She’ll kill him and he knows it and he knows that it will feel so good if he’ll surrender to it, so good if he will let her take him from his anguish.

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.