by J. S. Volpe
* * *
“Okay,” Kirby said. “You ready?”
“Yessir, Mr. Kirby,” said Blunt.
They stood on the east bank of the Millisin, halfway between the River Road Bridge and the South Bridge. On the grass between them sat two bundles of clothing wrapped in watertight canvas. Their plan—Kirby’s plan—was to swim across the river with the bundles, thus taking the most direct route to the gold while avoiding the heavily guarded bridges. On the other side, all they had to do was unwrap the bundles and change into dry clothes, and they’d be all set.
Kirby grinned. He’d covered all the angles. He’d even made sure to confirm that Blunt could swim. In fact they didn’t even really have to swim. All they had to do was float on their backs with the bundles on their chests and then kick their legs to propel themselves across the river. It was insanely simple.
“Let’s go, then,” Kirby said.
They picked up the bundles, and waded out into the river until the water was up to their waists. Then they turned to face the grassy bank they had just left, clutched the bundles to their breasts, and reclined backward until they were floating in the water.
“Ooh, it’s real chilly, Mr. Kirby!” Blunt said. “My nipples are little bullets!”
“Shut up,” Kirby hissed. “Someone might hear you.”
“Sorry, Mr. Kirby. I sure can be a dopey-head sometimes.”
“Yeah, yeah. Now swim. And let’s hurry it up, ‘cause you’re right: This water’s freezing my nuts off.”
They rapidly scissored their feet, making a sound like plash plash plash plash plash and sending white water spraying in every direction. Kirby wished there were some way to do this without making any noise, but there wasn’t.
Flat on his back in the water, Kirby could see only the leaf-laden branches extending over the river from the trees on the east bank, and beyond them, the cloudy sky. As he and Blunt paddled farther out, the branches slowly moved below his line of sight, leaving only the clouds for him to look at.
“Gee, Mr. Kirby, this is kinda fun,” Blunt said, his voice muffled and distorted through all the water in Kirby’s ears.
“Quiet,” Kirby said.
“Oh, right. Sorry again, Mr. Kirby.”
They paddled on. And on. And on. After a while—it was hard to tell how long exactly; time was difficult to gauge when the only sight to see was the clouds rolling slowly and inexorably northward and the only sound was that increasingly irritating plash plash plash—Kirby started shivering, his teeth chattering. His clothes had become a dead weight of cold, sodden cotton and leather. The gentle breeze, which had been warm and pleasant earlier, now felt icy on his wet cheeks. He hadn’t thought it would be so damned frigid. He kicked his feet faster. Blunt followed his lead.
Plash plash plash plash.
Before long, Kirby’s legs started to ache. The bundle on his belly began to feel heavier, a lump of lead pushing him down into the water. His fingers were growing numb.
Plash plash plash plash.
Great Lukano, shouldn’t they have reached the west bank by now? The river wasn’t that wide, was it?
He sighed in frustration and forced his tired legs to keep kicking. He scowled at the clouds overhead as they continued rolling steadily north.
Wait. North?
His scowl turned into a faint, puzzled frown.
Why would the clouds be moving north, when the wind was blowing south?
That was when Blunt said, “Hey, look. A bridge.”
Kirby looked around and saw the weather-stained stone span of the South Bridge approaching from the south. He and Blunt were only about fifty feet away from passing under its high stone arch.
For a moment he couldn’t understand what was happening. Was the bridge moving?
Then the truth dawned. Despite his and Blunt’s frenzied kicking, the current and the wind had borne them steadily southward. Still, all their kicking had not been in vain; they were only fifteen feet or so from the west bank of the river. Unfortunately, since they were near the west end of a bridge, they were also near a gorgim guardhouse.
“Shit!” Kirby said. He stopped kicking. “Stop paddling,” he ordered Blunt. “The guards might hear us.”
Blunt, however, couldn’t hear him over all the plashing, and continued happily scissoring his feet.
Plash plash plash plash.
“Blunt,” Kirby said, a little more loudly. “Stop kicking. Now.”
Blunt’s head swiveled toward him.
“Huh?” he hollered. “You say somethin’ Mr. Kirby?”
Kirby clapped a hand over his mouth, the universal sign to be quiet.
Blunt’s eyes widened with understanding, and he clapped a hand over his own mouth in imitation of Kirby and stopped kicking. The sudden silence made Kirby realize just how much noise they’d been making.
He floated there, heart hammering, eyes fixed on the west bank. The guards in the guardhouse must have heard them. With all that noise, how could they not have?
Kirby waited. Following Kirby’s lead, Blunt waited too.
The water gurgled along the shore. The leaves of the trees rustled softly in the wind.
No guards appeared.
That was unusual to say the least. The guardhouse door was just a canvas sheet stretched across the guardhouse’s enormous doorway—given the gorgim’s variability in size, most gorgim structures were built to accommodate a wide variety of body-types—and canvas wouldn’t even begin to muffle all the noise he and Blunt had been making.
He frowned. The guards wouldn’t have abandoned the guardhouse unless something important had drawn them off—like, say, human intruders in Hump-a-scab. Human intruders who were probably on their way to get their greedy, sweaty hands on some gold.
Who had already passed this way? Bastard Jack? The Zombie Hill Boys? Maybe those crazy Yellow Pawns?
Whatever the case, the guards might not be gone for long, which meant that he and Blunt had better get their soggy asses onto the shore and out of sight of the guardhouse as quickly as possible.
Because they had stopped kicking, the wind and the current had borne them gradually southward and now they were only a few feet away from the north side of the bridge. Kirby could see it without turning his head, could see every crack and stain on the huge stone blocks that composed it.
He craned his head back and looked at the west bank next to the north end of the bridge. It was a good place to get out of the river: After a jumble of rocks at the water’s edge, there was a smooth grassy slope leading up to a field that stretched away for a hundred feet before the forest resumed.
“We need to get to shore,” Kirby said in a low voice, not quite a whisper. “Kick hard to get out of the current. Follow me.”
Their feet plashing harder than ever, Kirby and Blunt quickly made their way to the rocks on the west bank. There, they paused while Kirby listened for guards. He heard nothing.
“Follow me,” he whispered and crept up the slope.
When the guardhouse came into view at the southwest corner of the bridge, Kirby froze, eyes fixed on the small building, ears straining to detect the slightest sound.
The canvas sheet that served as the guardhouse door was half open. Cozy yellow-orange light from a small fireplace flickered inside. Through the doorway, Kirby could see a wooden stool and the corner of a wooden table. There was no one in sight.
He turned to Blunt. “All right. Let’s go. But quietly.”
They scurried toward the woods. As they did so, Kirby glanced back along the length of the bridge, suddenly fearful that they were visible to the guards in the guardhouse on the human side. But no: The bridge was long, and the night was dark, and the guardhouse was nearly invisible in the darkness, the only sign of its presence being a small orange light.
The light from their own window, Kirby thought. Their own fireplace. Just like the gorgim. We’re all so alike in so many ways.
He started to smile at the thought, then stopped.
What was he thinking? The gorgim were nauseating freaks. They were nothing like humans. He must just be tired from the cold and the swim.
They were nearly at the edge of the woods when they heard twigs cracking and bushes rustling amid the trees directly ahead of them.
Kirby pushed Blunt into a cluster of bushes to their right, where they squatted down and waited in tense silence. The sounds drew closer and were soon joined by thuds of footsteps and creaks of leather and clanks of metal.
And then a low raspy voice, like that of an old man with strep throat, said, “What the fuck was that, do you think?”
“I dunno,” said a second voice. This one was higher and more nasal. “I still think it looked like a human.”
“Humans don’t fly.”
“Well, maybe some do.”
Behind the bush Kirby’s eyes narrowed. The flying man these gorgim saw could only have been that cocksucker Beethoven. Kirby hated to think how far ahead the little bastard might be.
The sounds of the gorgim’s approach grew louder and louder and then stopped next to the bushes where Kirby and Blunt were hiding. The gorgim were so close that if Kirby had stretched his hand through the foliage, he could have touched their legs.
“Huhhh,” sighed the raspy voice. “Mind if we stay out here a little while?”
The nasal voice let out a thin laugh. “Not a problem. I’ll go mad if I have to sit on my ass in there for another two hours.”
“So do you think they’ll figure out what that flying thingie was?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
“Oh, hey. Did you hear about what happened to Glazulin?”
“Ha! Yeah! That was hilarious!”
As the gorgim babbled on, Kirby theatrically rolled his eyes and shook a fist at them. Blunt grinned and nodded, then suddenly stiffened, his eyes going wide.
“What,” Kirby mouthed at him. “What’s wrong?”
Blunt wouldn’t meet his gaze. He stared down at the ground and swallowed. His face burned bright red.
Kirby was about to mouth “What’s wrong?” again, but then it became painfully obvious: Blunt’s left leg started shaking rapidly back and forth, and he squirmed as if he had bugs in his pants.
Oh, crap. The son of a bitch had to piss.
The gorgim kept talking. And talking. And talking.
Kirby glared in their direction and thought at them: Go away! You want to go away! (After all, you never knew if you were a psychomage unless you tried, right?)
It didn’t work. The gorgim just kept prattling on and on about some asshole named Kubinko and how he’d gotten a gorgim STD named Scrap from a slutty gorgim female named Swenilda who apparently had horns and a barbed tail and fifteen gorgim children, all of them by different fathers, one of whom was a fellow named Jast, who was the cousin of Moofagoogoo, who was a good friend of the nasal gorgim’s girlfriend, whose name was Enja and liked to suck on the nasal gorgim’s fingertips when they had sex, which was really weird and kinda creepy, but kinky too, and the nasal gorgim certainly wasn’t complaining even though he was worried she might also be metaphorically sucking the fingertips of not only a gorgim guy named Branky and a gorgim girl named Daspin Skwabbin Gloculis, but also Gramlah, the nasal gorgim’s motherfucking brother, a complete bastard who constantly stole girls away from other guys, though the only reason he was able to do it was because he had a penis with pleasure-enhancing ridges all up and down its quite impressive length, and damn but the nasal gorgim wished he could bash in the bastard’s head with a rock, especially since if he was right about the illicit romance, this would make the fourth girlfriend his damnable brother had stolen away.
And during this interminable blather, Blunt’s leg shook harder and faster, and his squirming grew more and more frenzied. He was practically twisting himself around like a pretzel as tears leaked from his eyes, and his face grew redder and redder, and sweat cascaded down his face and dripped to the grass despite his drenched, freezing clothing.
And then finally—finally—just when Kirby thought that either Blunt’s bladder would burst or the big dumb lummox would let out an involuntary cry as he did his hyperactive pee-dance—finally the two gorgim moved away toward the guardhouse, the raspy-voiced one saying, “Ah, fuck. Back to glazed eyes and a numb ass.”
Kirby parted the bushes and peeked out. The two gorgim were nearly at the guardhouse now. Another thirty seconds and they’d be inside.
He finally got a visual to go with the voices, too. The nasal gorgim was tall and hairless, with pale-gray, rubbery-looking skin, and a pair of small fleshy horns extending from his temples. His ears were pointed like an elf’s, and a hole had been cut in the back of his pants so that his long, whip-like tail could pass through.
The raspy-voiced gorgim was quadrupedal and covered with fine golden hair. Its body was the size of a lion’s, and it wore specially designed boots on its feet, or paws, or whatever it had at the ends of its legs. Its neck was three feet long and sinuous like a snake. At the end of it perched a long, bald head. Its face, which Kirby caught a quick glimpse of as the gorgim turned to say something to its companion, consisted of a pair of green-gold eyes that sat above a narrow, hooked nose that in turn sat above a bunch of dangling pendulous lumps of ghastly white flesh where a normal being’s mouth and chin should be.
Kirby’s stomach turned. The sight of these freaks reminded him why he (and pretty much everyone else who had a brain in their head) hated the fucking gorgim. They were repulsive monsters who were better off dead.
As soon as the gorgim had disappeared into the guardhouse, Kirby turned to Blunt to tell him it was finally okay to pee, but Blunt didn’t look like he had to pee anymore. He had stopped twitching and jigging and twisting and squirming and shaking his legs at an unbelievable pace. The sweat on his no-longer-red face was quickly drying, as were the tears on his cheeks. The blissful smile that was on his face when Kirby turned toward him quickly turned into an embarrassed grimace when his eyes met Kirby’s. Blunt’s face started to redden again.
Kirby looked down. There were drops of something that Kirby was fairly sure wasn’t river-water dripping from the front of Blunt’s pants.
He sighed and thought, Well, at least we brought a change of clothes.
