Mortality Bridge (43 page)

Niko is so deep within this rumination that the Battlements have been in view awhile before he notices them. What makes him finally straighten on the seat and draw a quick breath is a familiar sight from what seems long ago. A tiny distant flare of orange rising briefly out to limn the feudal Battlement walls as yet another burning soul is hurled to streak out shedding sparks and screaming high across the Upper Plain.

XXVI.
 

STONES IN MY PASSWAY

“WELL WELL WELL. Look what the cat dragged in.” Pignose grins through the windshield. “What’s the matter, fellas? Cat got your tongue?” Batface leers through the passenger window.

“Let’s let the cat out of the bag.” Ramhorn’s face appears upside down from where he lies prone on the buckled roof.

The Black Taxi is parked below the Battlement walls just past the head of the Ramp and near the shore of the Rio Rojo gouting blood out over the Ledge. The corralled dead so thickly streaming past them on the way to their prolonged descent it seems as if the car is moving forward but it is not. It is stopped, and Niko and Nikodemus look out at the stone gargoyles who have flown from their Battlement perches to land on it. The fenders press against the tires. The car so weighted down it cannot move. Any of the gargoyles could peel back the roof like the lid on a can of Vienna sausages. This respite merely toying before the kill.

Nikodemus looks more thoughtful than alarmed or even worried. His tendrils wrap each other like caduceus snakes entwining and disentangling. Nikodemus’ version of wringing his hands.

The tendrils part and Nikodemus looks out the windshield at Pignose waggling his fingers with his thumbs in his ears to the large knuckles and sticking out a gray stone tongue at least a foot long. “They’re forbidden to do anything to you,” says Nikodemus. “It’s me they want.” And with surprising grace and speed he jumps into the back seat and wraps a tendril round the doorhandle. Realizing what his demon is about to do Niko starts to turn back to grab him but then stops and balls his fists and yells in frustration because he can’t look back. Nikodemus yanks the handle and pushes open what truly is for him the suicide door.

BATFACE IS CAUGHT by surprise when Nikodemus surges from the car and knocks him off the runningboard. Pignose and Ramhorn gape stupidly as Nikodemus bats aside the damned like bowling pins and spreads his wings like a dark thing flowering. Half a dozen running steps and then he’s kicking air and canting forward with legs spraddled like a swimming frog’s. His leather wings beat furiously as he arcs above the ever congregating dead.

The Black Taxi groans and nearly bounces when the two remaining gargoyles push off from it. A loud bang sounds behind the car. Niko thinks it’s a shotgun blast, someone behind them firing at the flying gargoyles like a demented skeetshooter, until he understands that the Black Taxi has blown a tire. Batface regains his stone feet and glares at Niko and raises a warning claw at him before turning away and launching into the air to join his confederates in pursuit of Nikodemus. Niko stares a moment as the sea of the dead closes around the car again.

Then he becomes all frantic motion. Put the car in gear and lean on the horn and lurch away. The naked dead before the car jump back but can’t go far before they run into the wall of their own kind. Niko drives about ten clear feet and then plows into them. The first two fly backward like circus acrobats. The next slams the hood and clings there after the bumper breaks her shins. She claws the black metal and pulls herself along the hood toward Niko. He swerves and she rolls to one side and away. Tires bump across her soft body.

Jouncing on the yielding logs of bodies the car can’t pick up speed. At fifteen miles an hour there’s time for many of them to get out of the way but not all. But it’s run them down or join their ruined ranks. He keeps his foot on the gas and grips the wheel and clenches his jaw and plows through them.

Soon the car breaks free of the clustered damned and emerges onto open plain with both frogeyed headlamps askew. One beam projects directly down in front of the car and the other angles up to light a shaft of air. The left front fender is bent down into the tire which sends up smoke and a stench of burning rubber. The right rear tire is blown and the car feels sluggish and handles even more reluctantly than before. All four whitewalls redstained rings now like the smoldering irises of demons. The hood and grille and front bumper are covered with blood that cooks on the hot black metal with a slaughterhouse reek. Fine red droplets constellate the windshield. Niko leaves them be. Turning on the wipers will only smear the windshield and leave him blind.

The dead still flock toward the arch that opens onto the head of the Ramp but here they are spaced apart enough that Niko can avoid most of them.

Now the Black Taxi limps across the dimlit plain at twenty miles an hour, right rear tire flat and cockeyed headlamps a lighthouse beacon blazing Here I Am. The only light the distant glow of the enormous nazi bonfire. The flaming bodies that streaked out from the Battlement walls to light the plain are absent now that all the gargoyles are off pursuing Nikodemus.

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.

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.