Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Niko hopes his demon will evade them. Since Nikodemus emerged from the Lethe with his memories shed like the water that ran off him, the demon has been an oddly endearing soul. Not innocent but naive perhaps. And still he risks himself for Niko’s sake. Risks not his life which he does not possess but risks oblivion itself. For him. For Niko. Damned Niko. Reneging Niko. Who has put himself ahead of all the world and sought to contravene the fate his own hands sealed in blooded letters of his name.

Why is Nikodemus doing this? Niko has no answer. Nikodemus has no answer either. But whatever luck exists in such a forlorn place as this, Niko wishes all of it upon his demon in his desperate flight.

And speaking of desperate flights. Have to stop and change that tire. Won’t that be fun.

Now the Franklin moves among blackened lumps of thrown burned bodies heaped about this section of the plain. The remnant cinders lying in their nerve-seared pain who wait for muscle and tendon and skin to regenerate enough for them to resume their pointless ways. Niko avoids them as best he can, but they are many and the headlamps are cockeyed and the plain is dim. The intermittent crunching underneath the tires is unnerving.

Those able to hobble, crawl, or drag themselves move among their roasted kindred. The mindless insane headed toward what punishment will greet them next. See here this one poor soul. Man or woman Niko cannot tell for all the burned flesh cracked and glistening like a boar gone upright off the spit. Standing rooted like a tree struck bare by lightning. The seared bark of its flesh gleaming with pus as it turns to watch the car roll by.

Niko frowns. The charred soul is clearly visible in the dimness. Lit by headlamps that have realigned themselves. Niko peers out over the steering wheel. The downbent fender has resumed its former curve, the smell of burning rubber gone. Niko waggles the wheel and the big car responds. He gives it some gas and shifts into third. Forty, fifty miles an hour now. Dodging bodies lying burnt. The tire is no longer flat. In the few minutes of Niko’s rumination and worry for Nikodemus the Black Taxi has healed itself.

A coppery hot slaughterhouse reek emerges through the floor vents.

It’s the blood. The Franklin used their blood to heal itself. As if the car contains within itself some complete memory of its ideal form, as a starfish holds its blueprint or a lizard its own tail. And fed vampiric on human blood is fueled to shape back to itself. Restored as fully as the dark idea it is.

Jesus christ. Niko’s dread at being contained within this awful conveyance is reborn. I am swallowed. Alive within the guts of some remorseless predator marauding an alien ocean and not the pilot of this thing at all.

He dampers his horror to swerve around a large black mound that is in fact a pile of reconstituting mulchosaur shit. How could he have forgotten?

And because that is the way things go in this demented world, as if on cue he hears from out beyond the headlamps’ reach an awful rhythmic clacking like a nail caught in a tire. Sure as Hell is all around him there it is, twentyfive feet long and angling toward him on its many legs, its crescent head held low before it to ingest whatever lies along its hungry way.

Niko floors it and cuts right and the creature moves to intercept. Niko cuts left. Five thousand pounds of famished running digestive tract respond.

Shadows shift inside the Franklin as the mason jar rolls. Niko herds the jar against him without taking his gaze from the side-winding creature growing in front of him. He can’t turn around to outrun it. He’ll have to drive right up on the son of a bitch and hope he can swerve past it.

“If you fuck me up I’ll let it eat you,” Niko tells the car. “And I swear to god I’ll get away, and I’ll laugh while I watch it tear you into scrap.”

Distant thunder shudders as the raven sky convulses and the ground shakes with his utterance of the word that is down here profane.

Niko’s pretty sure the mulchosaur can’t match the 298cc V-12’s top speed. He’s about to find out, though, because there the son of a bitch is, head raising off the plain and crescent shape all saw-teeth mouth and wider than the hurtling car. Niko holds the Frankin straight and feels it trying to get loose from under him. He shouts No and wrests the wheel back to avoid a head-on with a mulchosaur. The eating machine before him jags to follow. Niko yanks the wheel left and now the Franklin responds like a bored-out Corvette. The back end skids and tires fight to maintain traction. The mulchosaur scoops dirt where the Franklin would have been before the final swerve.

The Franklin fishtails and the right rear fender smacks the creature’s opened jaw. It’s like hitting a wall. The heavy car rebounds and Niko grabs the mason jar and jerks like a doll. He protects the jar but hits the dashboard with his shoulder and then feels another booming impact followed by a chorus of highpitched keens over rhythmic clacks. An entire pack of the creatures is after him.

Niko has managed to keep his foot on the gas and the Black Taxi is still moving at a good clip when it plows into something huge but yielding. Niko’s shoulder hits the dash again. For a few seconds he beholds nothing but raw white pain and he cries out and makes himself sit up and then he sees that most of the windshield and the driver’s window have turned nearly opaque brown. A nauseating stench from the floor vent fills the car. The stuff on the windshield looks like mud. Niko finds the wiper knob and pulls it and the wipers smear the chunky brown pudding to a paler ale that thickens dark and lumpy at the end of the wiper’s arc. The front left side of the car is covered with a muddy brown batter writhing with thick stringy worms and chunked with stuff that might be bone. The smell is sickening.

It’s digested mulch. The Black Taxi has plowed through a bank of excreted remains human and otherwise. Mulchosaur shit. The car is covered with it. Gobbets of it fly off into the slipstream. A worm-riddled clot slithers along the driver’s window by his head. It looks like one of those chocolate turtle candies. Niko’s stomach lurches. Saliva floods his mouth. He tries not to look but how can he not? He grits his teeth and pushes the vent knob. The hood is caked with cooking shit. Close behind him he is sure an always starving pack of two-ton food processors clacks and keens and cranes enormous crescentshaped mouths toward him.

Drive.

The heaps of blackened dead are thinning now. Even the most Olympian gargoyle throw can carry only so far. Up ahead and to the right is the giant rock near the stone altar that serves as the source for the lake of blood. Niko swings wide of it and the landscape shifts like a bad acid trip to bring into view the vast and convoluted line of bureaucrats waiting decades for their absurd fate. Niko wonders where Franz is out there.

Fleeting glimpses of punishments and atrocities all about him on the plain. Blurred sufferings and flashes of torment. Myriad sadisms enacted without origin, outcome, explanation. I have walked through this.

Niko drives among the toppled statues of forgotten icons carved in living stone dissolved by acid guano. Demon workcrews cover giant transfixed shapes like army ants to chisel and carve and hammer while manlike batshapes flock the pestilent air. Niko slows to thread through the massive ossuary. Headlamps pick out pale quarried flesh lying cracked and broken and bleeding from a thousand lightning fissures. Icon faces worn to anonymity across geologic time. Beneath the tires a steady crunch of marble gravel, broken chunks of broken souls. The ruddy light that dyes the bone of their hard flesh is generated by the massive bonfire fueled by burning hides of skinless nazis staked and branded on the gritty ground. Here I played dark melodies for genocides and their tormentors, here spoke with a titan. Here a demon lost her soul on my account. The whole despairing landscape is a kind of journal, ink of blood on every page narrating woe and loss, despair and pain. Drive.