The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  By three minutes to three, the truck was gone. The drums were gone. What once had been Boonie was gone. All gone.

  As the toxin spread, deep into the plumbing of Paradise.

  And the sleepwalking city below.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Number Seventeen:

  Everett G. Vulich was the president of AeroCorp, a locally based industry that provided, among other things, rocket fuels for the Defense Department and NASA. AeroCorp’s contribution to Overmind included dichloroethane, dichloromethane, chloroform, and TCE, all of them highly dangerous substances.

  He lived at 29 Morningside Terrace, with his wife, Francine, and their Scottie dog, Lance.

  The Deitz-thing used a table saw this time. It didn’t take any longer; Vulich had one handy, in the basement where they found him; and, overall, it was a lot less wear and tear. Once Vulich stopped struggling, the operation virtually ran itself.

  Of course, it was a lot less satisfying that way.

  But there would be more. The list was long.

  And it was always good.

  The wonderful thing about Wyndham Hills was how altogether goddam convenient it was. More than a third of the hundred key people in Paradise on his list lived there, within that elite fifteen square miles of real estate overlooking the city.

  Indeed, Wyndham Hills was a land of plenty. They were practically going door-to-door. With his six-man team working in tandem, it hadn’t taken long at all to round up sixteen of the local heads of industry.

  And mount them on his trucks.

  But they were almost out of time. There was no doubt about it. Upstairs, Francine and Lance were entertaining the spawn of Franklyn and Pyle; and while that was fine—there were no innocents—it was certainly no substitute for justice, either. As the head detached, the Deitz-thing found itself looking at the watch on the dead man’s wrist.

  Two minutes to three, it said.

  (i swear upon my soul)

  Two minutes to three.

  And suddenly, Deitz remembered.

  In the few short hours since his death and rebirth, Austin Deitz had been thrust so deeply into the horror that he’d virtually forgotten what it was. No longer.

  It was back, with a name and a face.

  Horror was a woman named Jennifer Quirez, with a gift for persuasion, a love of the stars, and the clearest, finest deep brown eyes he’d ever seen. Horror was that woman, trapped alone at the Shop ‘N’ Go, with no transportation, no one to help her, and no idea what Hell was about to break loose.

  Horror was loving that woman—in the last few grinding turns of the wheel—and knowing that he was powerless to save her.

  Horror was love, in this Brave New Hell: the capacity for caring, and for sharing pain. To find oneself both in love and in Hell was more than torture, worse than madness.

  It was tantamount to sin.

  But for Deitz, the fallen angel…

  Suddenly, he changed the agenda; to do so was still within his power. He climbed the stairs, severed Vulich-head in hand, understanding that it was the last one he’d be getting. At least for now.

  Then he headed for his truck.

  And if he was mad, then it was certainly understandable; if he failed, it would certainly be nothing new. But he was less than five miles from the woman he loved.

  And—New World or not—he would save her if he could.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  By two fifty-eight Werner Blake was high over Paradise, taking his last look at the land he called home.

  Getting the plane had not been a major problem; he’d long ago talked the county Emergency Management Agency into keeping a Cessna 152 hangared for aerial observation and emergencies and such. The ground personnel had cautioned him about the coming storm, but Blake was nothing if not persuasive.

  Far more troublesome for him would be what to tell Approach Control at Baltimore/Washington International: at the rate everything was coming unglued, they might just be hearing about it by the time he got there. If his timing was on and his bullshit solid, he’d be able to slide through the cracks and disappear.

  And if not…

  I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it, he thought. First things first.

  Blake reached a nominal cruising altitude of three thousand feet. The ground below took on a toylike quality, with wonderfully reproduced miniatures. His bags were stuffed into the cramped cockpit space behind him. God was not his copilot; the attaché case occupied that position, the better to not let it out of his sight. Inside, a little over one point two million awaited, the seeds of a new life.

  He sighed, relieved to be airborne. Things always seemed clearer when he was flying. Everything was going to be fine, he realized. Everything was going to work out.

  Blake sighed and worked the controls. The Cessna banked south, heading for the promised land.

  And straight into the coming storm…

  In the last sixty seconds before three o’clock, the Drew-thing stirred. It had been dreaming again: more and more as its function diminished in importance, gave way to Overmind.

  In the dream, he was an infant again: laying face-up in his crib, playing with something like a mobile. He was happy and content.

  Then a shadow passed over, saying time to wake up now…

  The Drew-thing awoke.

  It was groggy from glut, its body swollen huge beyond all human scale or comprehension. It was a miracle of mutant creation, the wild experimentation giving way to a symmetry, as form followed function…

  It was conical in shape, growing up as it expanded outward like a massive organic pyramid, imitating the mandala shapes of the natural world it subsumed and replaced.

  Dozens of mouths ringed its base, yard-long vertical gashes that hung open obscenely, willing portals in the mottled fie. Segmented proboscises snaked out of them, lightning-fast and fluid. They slithered along the endless corridors of drums, blind beaked heads knocking over barrels, cracking drums like eggs.

  And feeding, feeding the bloated ticklike monstrosity of its body, a hundred thousand gallons of liquid nightmare and more already inside it, the overspill sloshing from the ruptured husks, pooling together, forming an enormous toxic lake that deepened and spread…

  The Drew-head lolled on its great bloated perch, a perverse and temporary place of honor. It stared at the sky with its one remaining eye; the other dangled downward, dry as a forgotten spring onion.

  Somewhere overhead, an airplane buzzed its insect engine-drone. The Drew-head batted at it lazily, one of its hands coming up to wave the nuisance away.

  The drone grew louder.

  The next thirty seconds of Blake’s life were rich with irony.

  At two fifty-nine Blake realized that his flight path took him almost directly over the dump. Some deeply perverse impulse gained dominion over him at that moment, and he banked west; he wanted to catch one last fly-by of the thing that had so forever altered his life.

  The Cessna crossed the outside aerial perimeter of the dump at just over one hundred and ten miles per hour. Blake leaned into the joystick and dove down to two thousand feet, buzzing the pools and pits that marked the outer edge. As the ground swept by, he noticed the drums toppling, the tendrils pulling them down.

  The plane raced on, passing over the heart of the dump…

  …and suddenly Blake found himself looking down in helpless, morbid fascination and awe, staring at the great gray malignancy that had enveloped Paradise Waste.

  From above, it looked like a jellyfish, an anemone, a vast ganglionic tumor floating in a sea of spilled sludge. Fat tendrils snaked out between the rows and rows of barrels that spanned its seven-acre breadth, binding it inextricably to the dump.

  Then the air around it moved: a vaporous shimmer of anticipation like a heat wave, a visible coiling of energy. The little plane buffeted, and Blake felt dread clench like a fist in his throat, felt his bowels go slack and his adrenaline surge. He gasped, and felt his lips go utterly numb.


  Oh God, Blake thought, oh shit.

  He banked and rolled the Cessna hard; the engine whined in a desperate last-minute bid for freedom.

  But he was already out of time.

  Weedle-eedle-eeee…

  The Drew-head looked up and saw the silver bird: a bright toy against the mad black churning sky. It giggled and groped for it like an infant. It could not hope to reach it.

  But in doing so, it caught a glimpse of something familiar.

  Something wonderful.

  Another bright toy, easily within reach.

  The little digital watch-game was still strapped to its wrist. The arm had trebled in size until the strap had pinched off the hand like a sausage link, burying the tiny buttons in gangrenous blackened flesh. The Drew-thing tried to touch them with its bloated chubby fingers, found it could not.

  It only took five of the last ten seconds for another limb to form.

  Weedle-eedle-eee…, as the shadow of the plane passed over his face. Weedle-eedle-eee…, as the tiny plane on its wrist dropped its tiny payload. Moist new fingers pressed the buttons, scoring a direct hit.

  Weedle-eedle-eedle-eeeee…

  And the New World was born.

  alive

  and more than alive

  voracious ecstatic and free at last

  rising at the speed of combustion

  emancipated in flame

  set loose from the mooring of earth and flesh

  one hundred and forty thousand toxic apostles

  flush with Overmind

  comingling and exploding together

  then rising

  ten fifteen twenty

  thousand feet and climbing

  straight to heaven to godhead

  to primacy

  to claim both heaven and earth

  for its own

  The explosion was immense.

  One hundred thousand barrels caught at once, a deadly daisy chain started as five acres of fifty-five-gallon drums averaging four hundred and forty pounds apiece ignited in less than a nanosecond, a blistering four point four million pounds of volatile death with the equivalent blast force of just over two megatons.

  At two thousand feet Blake barely had time to scream before the fireball slammed into the Cessna’s fuselage, bludgeoning it upward, engulfing it in flame.

  And Blake might have wished that it would end quickly, a flash and then nothing. Such was not the case. He had far too long to experience the dramatic climb in temperature; far too long to feel his hair singe and see the cockpit slag and go red, savor the unmistakable smell of his own immolation.

  Far too long.

  Nearly all of a second.

  But the moment in which he exploded went on forever. He could feel his marrow cook, the gases in his intestinal tract ignite and detonate, blowing bone to shrapnel rain that ruptered his flesh even as it blistered off into grease and vapor.

  And all of it was agony. Pure agony, unsullied by merciful distance or candid spiritual reflection. No life flashing before his eyes. Just his eyeballs exploding.

  For one infinite moment.

  Then Blake and the plane and the air they displaced were gone, blown to bits, absorbed by the mounting pillar of flame. The sparkling cinders of one point two million in cash burned no brighter than anything else.

  They all turned to ash and were caught by the maelstrom wind, fed into the clouds as particulate matter.

  Feeding, and seeding, the storm.

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  They were drawn to the windows and streets by the sound. The spectacle held them there. Awe and terror of astonishing depth—the literal fear of God—embraced them as they gazed upon that vengeful, iconic, unquenchable fire. It stole their breath and paralyzed their souls.

  You could see it from the heart of town, a dozen miles away.

  For one long, terrible moment, one hundred and eighty-seven thousand people set aside their differences, threw caution to the shockwave winds. They forgot all about their homes, their jobs, their possessions, their passions and dreams, their loved ones, and all of the other little things that defined their tiny lives.

  For that one moment, they were as one, united in their certain doom.

  It was an altogether religious experience.

  The fireball hit the dense cloud cover at just over ten thousand feet. The outer edge of its corona reached a scorching three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, burning off the condensation instantly, punching a gaping hole in the ceiling of the sky.

  The pressure system responded by dilating, wrapping around the pillar of flame even as it supercharged the remaining moisture, building a thunderhead directly above ground zero. Heat lightning arced through the cumulonimbus, blue-white and foreboding as it bounced off the black aperture that ringed the blinding flame.

  At ground zero, the fire was insatiable. The seven acres of Paradise Waste were engulfed as the pillar achieved a diameter the size of a football field. Stray drums blew like four-hundred-pound party favors: rocketing hundreds of feet into the air, cindering before they hit the ground.

  Drew and the crown of Overmind immolated gloriously, flesh giving way to exultant living ash, riding the firestorm across the sky.

  The shockwave flattened everything within roughly a quartermile radius: crushing homes, throwing cars like Matchbox toys, killing the first thousand or so in mid-commercial break.

  They never even knew what hit them.

  They were the lucky ones.

  Thirty seconds into the blast, the shockwave reached its zenith and sucked back in on itself. A killer wind rose, sucking every spare ounce of oxygen back into the rapidly rising inferno.

  A mushroom cloud of living ash and soot disseminated out in ever-expanding rings, attacking and overcoming everything it touched. It merged with the storm clouds, bonding with the condensate, arming and readying a trillion tiny toxic bombs as the entire atmospheric pressure system clenched: its twenty-mile mass blanketing the city, the county, the horizon as far as the eye could see.

  Then the sentient storm unleashed its power.

  And the black rain began to fall.

  The first fat drops hit Micki as she rounded the back of the house, less than four miles from the blast. She barely felt the three to her shoulders and back, like rubber bands flicked by someone’s rowdy little brother. But the one that spattered the back of her neck sizzled like grease off a frying pan.

  DON’T STOP, urged Bob-Ramtha as she yipped in pain. DON’T STOP. It was the mantra that drove her, broke the hellfire pillar’s hypnotic hold, whipped her up and held her to survival speed. No matter what.

  There was no other way.

  She had all but completed the outer circle: a huge, unbroken ring of containment that surrounded the house, etched in driveway salt from a twenty-pound bag she’d found in the garage. It was vital that the circle be as perfect as was humanly possible. It took great concentration, and entirely too much time.

  The rain fell harder, offering up less space to move between the drops. As she scuttle-walked backward, delineating the last twenty yards’ worth of arc, it was like that rowdy little brother was putting out cigarettes on her scalp. She could smell her hair smoldering, melding to her skin.

  She could scream all she wanted.

  But she could not, would not stop.

  Fifty-seven thousand people were caught in the mounting acid downpour. There was no way to be prepared. Its corrosive, killing nature had caught them all completely by surprise. The longer it fell, the harder and faster and deadlier its descent: eating into them from the moment of impact, burning holes in the skin that seared through to the bone.

  Where the pillar of flame inspired awe and dread, the rain dispensed agony, panic and death. In the crazed, pathetic scramble for safety, they succeeded only in dragging each other down: trampling each other in parking lots as they struggled with keys, banged on windows and doors.

  Succumbing to the madness of the crowd…
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br />   At the Mt. Rose Amoco Shop ‘N’ Go, the man with the gun lay face-up, face gone, twitching on the tarmac. He was far from alone. From where Jennie hid, driven back behind the EMPLOYEES ONLY door, she could see at least a dozen of them: features peeling back, layer by sizzling layer, like slabs of human bacon on the skillet of the gas pump tarmac.

  They’d exposed themselves, in the process of rioting or trying to fill their tanks. Not only were they dead or dying, but the pumps were blocked as well. And she could no longer tend the console; they had shattered the window, forced her into desperate retreat.

  It was the end of the exodus. And Austin had not come.

  But the stain was here: inside now, growing. Forcing her back.

  And making her scream…

  …while the rain fell harder, hammering every square inch of Paradise with the liquid fire of Overmind. Dispersing it over the forests and fields, the tilled acres of farmland and manicured patches of green. Dousing the river. The lakes, wells, and streams. Leaving its distinctive mark on every living thing, from microbe to field mouse to man.

  Fifty-seven thousand people, caught in the rain. Unable to reach their cars, their homes, any form of shelter from the storm. In backyards or churchyards or graveyards. Outside fire halls or shopping malls. On bleachers. Ball fields. Sidewalks. Side streets.

  There were fifty-seven thousand of them, in all.

  They were dead inside the first three minutes.

  Garth and Lydia were trapped in the Codorus Basin, beneath the Philadelphia Street Bridge. After the first half-dozen drops, it was clear to them that they had no other choice. Garth’s left eyelid had been spot-welded to his eye, and Lydia’s lower lip and gum were rancid with agonizing, chemical-smelling sores.

  This would have been more than bad enough, but the creek was beginning to rise. As if it were blocked somewhere upstream.

  In the direction of Black Bridge.