The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  “Hey…!” Kirk began, already folding.

  Gary shook his head huh-uh, laid a sharp, flat-palmed love thump on Kirk’s hollow breastbone. It made a resonant thud, knocked him back just a step.

  “I think the question we’re asking here,” Gary continued, “is what did you do about Mike?”

  Kirk’s eyes flickered from side to side, as if the answer were written on a cue card somewhere just outside of his visual range.

  “You just fuckin’ left him there, didn’t you?” Gary pressed, his anger mounting, a black tide within him.

  Behind him, Laura went, “Gary. No.”

  “Just fuckin’ left him in the mud,” Gary snarled, backing him into the folding chairs. They collapsed with a clatter that did nothing but stoke Gary’s rage. “No cops, no nothing. Just race back here to cash in on your big fuckin’ story, forget all about the guy who fuckin’ died so you could even have it…!”

  There were hands on his shoulders now, holding him back. “Gary! ENOUGH!” she shouted. Gary tensed for a second, his fury threatening to blow back on her. Then he stopped in his tracks and swallowed it whole.

  Before him, Kirk’s mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. He was trying for his wounded-puppy look, but fish metaphors kept getting in the way. Gary guessed it was his wounded-guppy look.

  “It just got all fucked up,” Kirk sniveled, the tears coming now. “And when Mike got k-k-killed…”

  “It’s okay,” Laura said. Gary shot her a look like you’re kidding, right?; she just kept watching Kirk.

  “…the only thing I could think was get the tape back, get the tape back!” He smashed the desk with his fist—once, twice—his features contorting with anguish. “So I dih-hih-hid…” His voice decaying into unquestionably heartfelt sobs.

  When the picture came back on the monitor again—a disjointed shot of dirt and grass—Kirk reached over and clicked it off. A dramatic gesture.

  “So,” Gary said, turning to Laura. “Now what?”

  She just stood there, quietly thrumming, her features knit in intense concentration. He sympathized; it was an extremely tough call. He just hoped that she’d make the right decision.

  “We run with the story,” she said at last.

  “Alright!” Kirk exclaimed, scarcely daring to believe it.

  “Score: Cannibals, one; Humans, nothing,” Gary muttered, scowling.

  Laura picked up the phone and punched an inside line to the studio. “John?” she said. “Laura. Listen, get on the line and get me another cameraman…yeah, I know it’s Sunday, dammit! Something’s cooking, and it looks like it might break early…”

  She paused, suddenly. Gary watched her face turn a little bit green. “Um…Mike?” she said slowly. “Mike’s out of commission…never mind what happened! Just get me another shooter in here, pronto!”

  She finished, ringing off. Gary faced her squarely. “Aren’t you forgetting something?” he said.

  Laura took a deep breath. “The HazMat people will be out there any minute. Not to mention more cops, if they’re not there already. Now, we can spend the whole day tied up, answering their questions, or we can get to the bottom of this. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not even an issue.” She looked him straight in the eye. “They’ll take care of Mike.”

  “Aw, bullshit…!”

  “Kirk.” Laura focused on him, turned away from Gary. “I want to know whose truck that was. I want to know everything about them.” Kirk nodded, recuperating with astounding speed. “Then, as soon as we get another shooter, we’ll—”

  “WHAT?” Kirk cried out. “What do you mean, ‘as soon as we get another shooter’! I know how to work the camera! I’m ready to go now!”

  Laura looked to Gary, as if to say can we? Gary shook his head.

  “We can’t do that,” she decided. “The union would flip.”

  “The union,” Gary concurred, “would lose their fucking minds.”

  “FUCK the union!” Kirk barked. “We’re sitting on the biggest story of the year, and you want to wait for a goddamned cameraman?”

  “Rules are rules,” Laura said.

  “FUCK THE RULES!!” Kirk wailed.

  “Now, you listen,” Laura turned, recouping herself. “And listen good. I’m not going to risk my job and bring a strike down on us just because you’ve got a fire in your pants. So you either sit tight, and we do it by the book, or you just kiss it good-bye. You got that?”

  Kirk looked away, conceding nothing. Laura headed back to her Rolodex, started pulling important numbers.

  “Well, great,” Gary said, radiating contempt as he turned to leave. “Hope it all works out for you guys…”

  “Wait,” she said, stopping him at the door. “I need your help. Do you think you could run A.D.O. on that tape?”

  He turned back, looking at her as if she had just said would you eat barbecued baby butt? “You’re serious,” he said.

  “You bet your ass,” she replied. “Can you do it?”

  “Sure, I can.” Gary nodded incredulously, making no pretense of niceness. “But you forget: I’m outahere. Besides,” he added, “what do you need digital effects for? You got your action footage.”

  “The police report said that the vehicle was stolen,” Laura countered. “That means it could have been anybody. We need to isolate the face of the driver, give us a recognizable still.” Beat. “If we’re gonna nail this guy, we need your help.”

  Gary paused. The bitch of it was, she had a point. Ampex Digital Optics processing could show the bugs stuck to the bumper, if Mike had shot it right. And Gary’d be lying if he said he wasn’t curious.

  “Please,” she entreated. “Do it for Mike.”

  Ooh. He felt his blood freeze in his veins. You manipulative bitch.

  But her gaze didn’t waver. And the facts didn’t change.

  “Okay,” he conceded at last. “But just for the record, this utterly sucks.”

  “For the record, noted.” She nodded, handing him the tape. “Oh, and Kirk?” she began, turning toward the edit room. “Kirk…?”

  “Oh, shit.” Gary got it at the very same time.

  “Kirk!” she yelled, turning back to the stairs. “Oh, you son of a bitch!”

  Both Kirk and the camera were gone.

  And it was twelve o’clock.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At twelve fifteen, the HazMat team pulled onto the Black Bridge road.

  Deitz noticed the atmosphere shift at once. It immediately got ten degrees warmer, and close: a sticky, subtropical humidity that clung to the inside of the lead truck’s cab.

  The last thirty years, he knew, had seen radical shifts in global climate patterns, accelerating as the carbon dioxide levels increased. And the weather had always been a quirky, temperamental thing at best.

  But this, he noted, isn’t right. This isn’t just a weird, sudden whim of Mother Nature.

  This didn’t start to happen till we rounded the corner.

  It was as if Toad Road had developed an atmosphere all its own.

  “Gettin’ hot,” Pyle said from the driver’s seat beside him. He had a ruddy, cheerfully predisposed face on a short, squat, sandy-haired frame: a sort of Barney Rubble made flesh. Fresh beads of perspiration dappled his forehead, grew stains in the budding swamplands of his pits.

  “Yep.” Deitz’s response was automatic. His mind was busy, sifting data, relying on his senses and his wits to provide it.

  “If it gets nice enough, my wife’s gonna take the kids to Dutch Wonderland,” Pyle continued. He sounded wistful. “God, they love that place. Even with most of the rides shut down for the winter…”

  “Uh-huh.” Even though he wasn’t but barely listening, Deitz could certainly sympathize. Pyle wanted to go to Dutch Wonderland, too. Just as all that Deitz wanted was to be back in Jennie’s bed, before that first phone call from Krummy Kake Pat had begun to ring the death knell on his wonderful day.

  He had been in higher spirits, tha
t much was for certain. The best day of his life, slightly crippled from the git, had gone terminal the second his beeper went off. By the time he’d been briefed, with what little information was available, his Day of Days was pushing up proverbial daisies in Dreamland.

  The fact was, even a minor spill could be nasty work and tie them up for days. Not to mention the little matter of the missing cop, which Deitz found severely disconcerting. When a cop disappeared, it invariably meant that something was very wrong. As team leader, he was excruciatingly aware of this.

  It made him intent on being more than careful going in. He would err on paranoia’s side, if he thought he could afford to err at all.

  The temperature and humidity continued to increase; and he noticed that the woods were getting progressively more dense and green to either side. The swollen air grew rich with smells: pungent, florid, chlorophyll-dense; earthy and heady all at once.

  And beneath it all: an acrid, chemical tang…

  It whispered like foil against his back molars, tickled the hairs of his nostrils with the suggestion of stinging pain. It wasn’t a smell he recognized—the entire olfactory gestalt had a queasily alien feel—but it left a bad first impression.

  “Stop the truck,” he said. Pyle looked at him, surprised; he had still been talking. “Now.” Pyle obeyed. A thin sliver of discomfort wedged itself in Deitz’s forehead, like a tiny phantom drill bit boring into his brain.

  And his lips began to tingle.

  The radio squawked: “What’s going on?” It was Beckett, from the truck behind them. Deitz took the radio, brought the mouthpiece to his lips. He turned to Pyle, and to Franklyn in the back, addressing the entire crew at once.

  “Suit up,” he said. “That means everybody. And get your heads on straight. This one doesn’t look good.”

  There were two HazMat trucks on Toad Road, nondescript except for several small yet tasteful warning placards on the back. The effect was designed to minimize their presence to the world around them, much as their bulky protective suits and gear were designed to keep out the world of shit they routinely plunged themselves into.

  Inside the trucks were the vacuum hoses and containment barrels, spill booms like enormous toxic tampons filled with superabsorbent polyester down. Inside the trucks were the only people both qualified and crazy enough to use them. But as far as the rest of the world was concerned, they might as well have been delivering beer. No one would ever know.

  There were only five other men on the team today: Beckett, Burroughs, Hooper, Pyle, and Franklyn. Deitz listened to them talk as they donned their space suits; none of them were what you’d call happy to be here. HazMat was a largely volunteer organization, and an NFL Sunday was likely to find a lot of people—far smarter than Deitz and company, evidently—somehow managing to accidentally lose their beepers. Westerberg and Ilginfritz, for example; those bastards were probably already drunk for the game.

  Collectively, his team had been on nearly a hundred cleanup missions: mostly small-scale, unpublicized local incidents. Deitz, on the other hand, had personally served on over three hundred, spanning more than a decade, from New York to the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. He’d fought the fires when Control Chemical shot its flaming wad over Elizabeth, New Jersey, back in ‘79; then been back up to suck sludge in ‘90, when Exxon vomited a half-million gallons of heating oil into the Arthur Kill. He’d manned the pumps off the St. Clair River for seventy-two hours straight, when a submerged dioxin blob from leaking storage caverns threatened the population of southern Ontario like something from a bad sci-fi movie.

  Austin Deitz really thought that he’d seen it all; and by ordinary standards, it was certainly true.

  It did nothing to prepare him for what happened next.

  When they were all safely, hermetically sealed, the convoy proceeded cautiously on ahead. A tense silence had fallen over the crew; evidently, they’d taken his message to heart.

  A hundred yards deeper into the woods, Deitz spotted something large in the road ahead. It looked, from that distance, like some sort of natural roadblock—the forest overspilling its bounds, squeezing in from either side until the road was reduced to a foot trail’s width—though the dense shadows kept it obscured from clear view.

  This isn’t right, he told himself, consulting the compulsively anal tax map the county had provided. This is supposed to go through to the bridge.

  That was when he noticed the police car’s remains.

  It was sitting in a ditch to the side of the road, its ass in the air, steam wafting up from under the hood. At least Deitz thought it was the hood. It was kind of hard to tell.

  Because the entire cruiser was crawling with thick, tendinous vines that moved as if rustled by the breeze. They covered the vehicle so thoroughly, so comprehensively, that it looked like topiary sculpture in the shape of a police car.

  “Jesus Christ.” Pyle saw it, too: twenty yards and closing now, as the truck slowed down to a crawl. Burroughs, behind them, mirrored the gesture without knowing why.

  The roadblock lay just beyond it: the wreckage of a tree, also thoroughly overgrown, a swath carved through it like a jagged, organic fortress gate. The heavy, hot, foul-smelling breeze came from somewhere deeper in the woods, blowing discernibly through the breach.

  “I don’t understand,” said Franklyn. His voice, transmitting off his lapel mike, was a timid little-boy peep.

  Deitz understood exactly how he felt; just looking out the window made him want to call a cop. The problem, of course, was that in this case, they were the cops, or the cop-equivalents. They were the ones you called, in these situations; there was no one else.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Deitz said, trying hard to sound more confident than he felt. He felt his military training mercifully kick in, take over where he did not care to tread alone. “Ladies, I want soil samples and preliminary readings in fifteen minutes,” he continued. “Pyle, radio back and let them know we’ve got a situation here. The second we’ve got what we need, we’re gone.”

  Then he opened the door, and stepped into another world.

  The crew nervously, painstakingly checked their gear and then followed, tramping along the moist resilient surface of the road. It wasn’t like any form of clay Deitz had ever seen, not to mention ordinary mud; it was almost rubbery in its stubborn surface tension.

  Hooper had the camcorder, was getting it all on tape. He was the first to note the fresh, deep tire tracks underfoot: signs of some recent Baja driving that even now receded, filling up as the ground absorbed the puddle runoff. One particularly deep indentation was man-sized. Strange. Like somebody had laid down and made a mud-angel, Deitz thought.

  “Austin.” It was Pyle. There was a lot of static interference, but even that couldn’t hide the agitation in his voice. “I…I can’t raise anyone. We must be in a dead spot or something.…”

  “Fuck!” Deitz hissed, regretted the outburst even as it happened. He turned and saw the men look to each other, could feel their apprehension complete a circuit between them. He was not outside of the loop.

  “Keep trying,” he addended, terse and clipped. This was no time to get sloppy; they needed him focused, to stay focused themselves. “Beckett. Burroughs. You can take the soil sample right off the road. Franklyn, those puddles will do. Let’s get this over with.”

  Which left him, of course, to deal with the vines.

  Deitz approached the car slowly, taking continuous mental notes. The vines: he’d never seen anything like them. They had a greasy-looking, muted sheen; again, the word rubbery came to mind.

  At the ends, the shoots were narrow and serrated, clustered in rings of threes and fours and curling around the edges, laced with pink veins thin as baby’s skin. They opened up at the thicker, more mature trunk, sprouting broad, thick leaves: pear-shaped and fluted, the veins etched in rich scarlet piping.

  Pale tendrils spiraled out from underneath the leaves, anchoring them to the metal of the car. Once
anchored, they pulled the dense weight of the vine forward, where smaller tendrils reached out like flying buttresses, bracing the heavy trunk.

  Stranger still, Deitz realized, he could watch them doing it.

  Now, he’d seen rapid vines before. Down South, he’d known kudzu to take over whole acres in a matter of days.

  But in a matter of minutes…

  The mass shifted as one tendril, thick as his thumb, settled like a dog on a favorite rug onto the roof of the cruiser. Deitz stepped back involuntarily, saw that the growth traced down into the drainage ditch on the car’s blind side, all the way back into the woods. He didn’t need a map to tell him that they shared a common source or destination.

  Deitz reached into his hip-sack, produced a sample bag.

  The vine groped blindly toward him, its feelers uncoiling, reading the subtle shifts in the air. It stretched, then drew back suddenly, the entire extension bunching up in the moment before it rose: a boneless arm, hovering above him, its leaf shoots intertwined to make a delicate wristlet of glistening spikes.

  He stood mesmerized, the sound of his own breathing huge in his ears as condensate fogged the Plexiglas plate. This is crazy, he thought.

  The vine curled back, storing tensile strength.

  And then it sprang toward him.

  Deitz’s heart jumped a beat. The plant moved with surprising speed. He sidestepped its arc, grabbing the vine as if it were an adder in mid-strike. His heavy glove squeezed it, clamping down as he produced a small Buck knife from a belt pouch. He held it taut, and felt his stomach tighten as he realized that the thing was actually struggling against him, trying to retreat back to the safety of the car and its host.

  Deitz brought the blade up, just behind a juncture of leaf and trunk. The incision he made was like slitting a throat. He grimaced as a rich, red, luminous sap spurted out, and the end piece came off in his hand. It was still twitching as he popped it into the bag and sealed it away.