Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

IN THE STAGNANT air above him claw rakes wing and barbed tails twine and grapple as his newly christened demon fights alone unseen and desperate, moved by what strange urge his mortal counterpart may never know. The air about the dark combatants beats and shudders and corrosive blood rains down upon the damned. Far below the living airwar two small white lights glide steadily across the grim and sunless plain.

HERE THE DECAPITATED stagger clutching their own heads. Blind they trip and fall and drop their burdens and their groping hands recover the wrong ones and collaborate to reconnect their proper selves. Here are screaming children pierced by rods to march in perfect lines. Demons flaying women to the bone and past. Now the lengthy wooden platform hung with populations of the skewered hugging their greased poles. Bowels lanced by splintered wood. The Franklin’s headlights pass them soundless by like some portentious comet. Crows the size of men pluck out men’s eyes with sharp hooked beaks and toss blackfeathered heads to gulp them down like olives. Eyes that see throughout their own digestion. The lips of flatterers sewn to the rectums of diarrhetic misers.

The Franklin shudders from some impact on the plain behind and once more Niko stops himself from turning to look back. A creeping feeling grows between his shoulderblades and as it strengthens he decides to trust his intuition and yanks the steering wheel left right left.

A giant granite block slams the ground he might have occupied had he not dodged. From high above come indecipherable curses. God damn it. They’re not allowed to stop me. Are they? No. The deal was clear. They’re just trying to get me to look back.

Wait a second. The granite blocks?

Sure enough the plain is dotted now with slabs of granite dropped upon the running damned and left to weather away in a place that has no weather. Now the plain looks like an unkempt graveyard for some vanished race of giants. Sam Gamundi lies beneath one of these nameless markers. Digging and digging as he always will, world without end amen.

On impulse Niko honks the horn. The sound that emerges is the bellow of some ancient sea creature decrying its own extinction, an awful nightmare alarm calling to the very soul to strip itself from mortal flesh and prepare to be delivered from its bound estate. Niko shudders in his very core.

Did you hear it out there Sam? Did you know that it was me? That I’m returning with Jem’s soul in hand? I think you did. And I think that you will bless and curse me at the same time. As always.

Now a thin white line out on the dimlit distance like a scar. Can it really be the marble wall? Demarcating here and there? Niko blinks and rubs his eyes but can’t be sure. The white line blurs and fades and as it does a sound grows round the Franklin, rustling at first like swishing taffeta but quickly growing louder and more sibilant.

What had he encountered before running into Sam? So much has happened. So much is jumbled.

Strong gales buffet the heavy car. Streaking sand illuminated by the headlamps looks like rain. But this rain would not drench, this rain would flense—

Twisters. He remembers now. Enormous dustspouts scouring a baked plain intaglioed with the polished bones of the patient dead.

A stuttering rumble shudders the dirted air and a terrible coil dances past the car and lowers an undulant finger toward him like a mindless searching god. Flayed bodies flail within the spinning redlit gray, sailors drowning in a maelstrom. Constantly they bash each other and stain patches of the living wind a brief dull red.

The back end of the Franklin saws. Niko lets up on the gas and turns the wheel in the direction of the threatened spin. If the tornado touches him it could lift this car and sling it tumbling and set it smashed and crumpled on the plain with Niko pulped inside it and the glass shards of the mason jar catching the last fading glints from the feather’s dying glow.

The tires sing across a sea of polished bone as Niko swerves around the roaring serpentine. The tornado lurches and then lifts. Niko evades it and heads toward the false horizon of that thin white line. A wrenching groan behind him like some alien god sobbing in its tortured sleep. The air itself is humming now. It glows and sparks with static from the rubbing sand.

The funnel stabs toward the ground in front of him and darkens as it feeds on sand and rock and living bone, a deadly churning arabesque. Niko veers again. The whirlwind spits out some projectile that javelins toward the car. Just before it hits he sees it is the half flensed body of a man. Niko screams and swerves and ducks. The body slams the passenger side of the windshield and glass and blood and shit explode into the car. The glass is not tempered and Niko’s hands and forehead are cut by tiny shit-infected shards.

Niko sits back up. The pulped body is wrapped around the pillar post it has buckled.

The twister now meanders toward the car. The mason jar has got loose again and thumps across the floorboard. The ghastly body screams a sickening gargle and sprays teeth and bloody gobbets from its ruined mouth. Niko waggles the wheel and the body flops but does not fall of off the car. The mason jar thumps again.

With his side of the windshield starred he’s driving blind. The freight train rumble of the closing whirlwind loud and growing louder. The smashed body flails its macabre puppet arms as it tries to crawl into the car with Niko. Niko grabs the warm red mush of nearly jellied head by its matted clotted hair and tries to force the body off the hood. It feels like tepid oatmeal. The damned soul’s scream sprays warm blood mist across his arm. A gore drenched hand grabs Niko’s wrist and pulls the broken body farther into the car. For one long second mortal and tormented gazes meet. In the raw steak of the dead soul’s face one eye is crimson and the other burst. Niko glimpses awful fire in that remaining ember eye. The depth of this soul’s pain a counterpart to the abyss upon which it must look forever.

Niko pushes the man’s arm and slams the brakes. His bruised chest hits the steering wheel and his busted rib screams bloody murder as it grates. The clinging soul’s scalp peels away in Niko’s fist with a horrible soft purr and the body plows a furrow of caked brown shit as it slides along the dented hood scrabbling and clawing and slipping off to leave behind a red swath of itself. The car bucks over the fallen body.

Niko hits the gas and nothing happens. He didn’t let the clutch in when he slammed the brakes and the Franklin stalled. Now the car is barely moving.

The twister’s roar is deafening now and the bloodsoaked car interior is coating with fine sand. The abraded chassis hisses. Niko tries to start the car and the car lurches. Stinging sand sticks to his bleeding arms. Niko stomps the clutch and turns the key again and the engine catches and then something hits the front of the car hard enough to knock it aside two feet.

Niko stops the car and finds reverse and drives backward. All he can see is spiderwebbed glass in front of him. He hunches in the seat and brings up his left foot and kicks out the broken windshield. A sliver gashes his ankle. He sits back up and there it is, a wall of spinning air before him. He grips the wheel more tightly and he presses harder on the gas. He screams Go at the car. His ribcage throbs. Go, go.

The gearbox whines.

Niko’s eyes sting with grit.

Assbackward deeper into Hell and blind to boot. If anything besides the tornado is chasing him, gargoyles or mulchosaurs or demons or sherman tanks or marching bands with bagpipes for all he knows, he’s about to join their party bigtime. But it seems he’s outrunning the whirlwind even going backward.

The twister lights with static lightning. Angry god deprived of sacrifice. Across the surface of the plain its cursive body writes an endless nightmare rhapsody in some alien script.