The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  “Please,” she prayed in her heart. “Please let them be safe. Even if I never…if I can’t…if…”

  Something inside her tore loose then, like a flock of blackbirds fluttering inside her chest. She fought like hell to keep it down, but it was no use: the fear and pain and panic and loss burbled up like Old Faithful, geysering out in a wave of tears and frustrated rage.

  “Bastards!” she muttered in anguish, slamming the phone down. “YOU MISERABLE FUCKING BASTARDS!!”

  She exploded then, grabbing a pile of rough copy that no one would ever read and sending it sailing. She railed, cursing Blake and Leonard and Pusser, the Three Stooges of the Apocalypse, for the greed and expedience that brought this on…

  “IT’S NOT FAIR!” she cried.

  …cursing herself for not getting the news of it out there, for not ramming it down people’s throats while she still had a chance…

  “NOT FUCKING FAIR!!”

  …cursing everyone, cursing the whole miserable stupid world for letting things slide, until it rolled right over them all.

  Down in the basement, Laura wept.

  The newsroom absorbed her cries, reflected them back to her. Bad enough to feel these things at all: so much worse still to feel them alone. Her anger spent itself on empty air, leaving only the terror in its wake.

  “Please, God,” she whispered, her voice quivering in her chest, a chill sweat prickling her scalp. “I’m scared. I’m afraid to die like this. I’m…

  “Please…” she faltered, unable to fully voice the grief and guilt and regret.

  And Monitor One suddenly hitched and came to life.

  “…This is Kirk Bogarde, uh, live, with an emergency report from our broadcast tower on Mt. Hope…”

  “OH GOD!” Laura cried, leaping straight out of her chair and heading for the monitor as if he were there in the flesh. It was a feeble signal, distorted, but it was there like a lifeline; a single candle glowing in a world gone dark.

  “SONOFABITCH!” she cried, tears streaming now. “YOU MADE IT!”

  Kirk looked like hell; his hair was plastered to his scalp on one side with what certainly looked like blood, and the light source cast harsh shadows on his features, making him as gaunt and cadaverous as an extra from the lost footage of Night of the Living Dead.

  But he carried himself, she realized. He was there, goddammit, and he knew it.

  “Reports are difficult at this time,” Kirk said, “but our most up-to-the-minute information indicates a tremendous explosion at the Paradise Waste Disposal facilities in North Manchester Township. All residents are advised to evacuate the area immediately. Repeat: hundreds feared dead at an explosion at Paradise Waste facilities in North Manchester Township.”

  “YES! DO IT!” Laura said excitedly, clapping her hands, “YES YES YES…”

  “Authorities are unavailable for comment at present,” Kirk said. “But our recommendation here at Channel 9 is that you get your loved ones and yourselves the hell out of here.”

  He leaned into the camera. “And that goes double for you, Laura.”

  Laura gasped. On-screen, something fell in the background. Kirk ignored it, went back to his stats.

  “The evacuation routes are as follows,” he said. “From Windsor Township, take Route 615 south to Fulton. From Upper Darien, take the Mifflinsburg Pike…”

  And then suddenly, the lights went out. There was a pop. The monitors went dead. The overhead fluorescents sputtered abruptly.

  And in less than an eyeblink, the room went black.

  “Ohgod ohgod…” Laura whispered, clamping down. The room was almost totally enshrouded, its sole illumination a wan blue glow coming from the hall door.

  “It’s okay,” she told the shadows. “It’s just a blown transformer, or a downed line, or, uh…or…”

  There was a drinking fountain just outside the door, its white porcelain gleaming. As she watched, the spigot suddenly spritzed to life, sending a little arc of water pooting forth, going pucketa pucketa pucketa pucketa…

  Upstairs the front doors wrenched open, the sound of metal ripping like paper, followed by crowd sounds, of many many things coming in and rooting around, casting bizarre shapes against the solitary shaft of light that filtered in from the head of the stairs. It wasn’t long at all until it was followed by the leathery slap of feet hitting the stairs, one by one by one.

  At the other end of the room, something that walked upright for the first time ever stopped at the little fountain and took a refreshing gulp.

  Then it turned and peered into the darkness. Its many eyes made out Laura’s huddled form and it gurgled, a sound of pleasant surprise.

  It moved forward, one withered hand up for balance, dragging the rest of its parts behind, and closed the distance as if in perverse answer to her prayer.

  And Laura was no longer alone.

  High atop Mount Hope, the world premier of The Kirk Bogarde Show was ending just a little ahead of schedule.

  It wasn’t quite as he’d imagined it, but then what was? The bad news was that the major east-west and north-south escape routes were hopelessly jammed with wrecks, as survivors of the first wave went manic, trying to get out of town.

  The good news was that he could still do the weather.

  The temperature was dropping rapidly; it was maybe thirty-five, definitely falling. Atmospheric pressure intensified as the firestorm drew cold air in from all directions. Water vapor condensed on the finer atmospheric particulate, bonding.

  And the fog rolled in.

  Kirk shivered in his linerless jacket, feeling the acid sting of the mist on his skin. It’s primal, he thought: weather for the dawn of time.

  Or the end of the world.

  His teeth chattered as he rattled off possible, even hopeful escape routes. He didn’t really believe in them anymore. That wasn’t the point.

  Behind him and around him, pieces were falling: the tower was disassembling itself, strut by strut, in the high killer wind. The last hunk to tumble was big as a refrigerator; it crashed into the ground less than ten feet away from the shed with a deafening thump, sent rainbow ruptures of agony throughout his leg.

  Kirk blinked back tears. And kept on going.

  “From Geetzerburg, take Route 232 to Hanlin,” he read. “And remember: avoid Route 30 east over the river bridge.”

  He hobbled out of frame then, looked out the window.

  Down on the Susquehanna, the flames were blooming yellow-gold where a tanker truck had collided with a stalled lane of traffic and ignited. Flaming victims still tumbled to the rocky waterline, their tiny limbs thrashing wildly.

  “Repeat,” he reiterated, limping back into frame. “The river bridge is definitely out on Route 30. Looks permanent, folks.”

  Just then the wind kicked up, and there was a great wrenching sound as it caught the lip of the shed’s corrugated roof. It peeled back like the lid on a sardine can. Metal and junk rained down; a lug nut the size of a golf ball hit Kirk in the temple, knocking him out cold.

  He came to in the wreckage an instant later, jump-charged by adrenaline and immeasurably worse off. He had a concussion and a crushed rib, and his leg was broken in at least three more places.

  “Oh, fuck, not again,” he moaned. He tried to move.

  And found he could not.

  Something was pressing against his chest, something huge and unforgiving. Kirk opened his eyes and found he was pinned beneath the fallen tool shelf, half-buried in parts, staring up into roiling fog and endless, eternal night. The remains of the tower teetered uncertainly.

  The camera lay on its side against the workbench, the tripod toppled. It was pointing at him, askew and just out of reach. The “record” light still glowed red and merciless.

  “Unh,” he grunted. The camera watched. Kirk struggled under the buckled shelf, fighting down panic. “Having a little, unh…technical difficulty, here, folks.”

  He grunted and heaved, trying to budge the blunt edge of me
tal that pressed him into the floor like a bug in a science project.

  High above, there came the pop pop pop of tension cables snapping like steel slingshots as something heavy broke free, began the long fast descent. He strained to free himself, and something burst deep in his chest.

  Kirk screamed. His eyes went wide and locked on something coming, big and bright and spinning like a dervish. A five-hundred-pound strut came pinwheeling down from out of the fog and straight for his face, like the ultimate 3-D effect.

  Kirk screamed again. The camera loved him.

  It was a television first.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  The first contraction struck at three thirty-five, a tidal wave of ground glass and lethal venom aimed directly at Gwen Taylor’s spine. She’d felt it swell, amassing strength, for nearly thirty seconds before it hit. She hadn’t known what it was, what it meant, or what it held in store.

  It hardly mattered.

  Nothing in this life could have prepared her for that moment.

  The pain was a ragged ratcheting metal fist, a screaming bonesaw violation so far beyond ordinary pain it boiled down endorphins and tortured the steam. When she screamed, the sound it produced was the worst she could manage.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Gwen stared up, through eyes of anguish, into the widening eyes of her friend. She watched as Micki’s irises dilated, made room for the terrible realization that everything was not okay, no, not even a little.

  Gwen was going into labor.

  She was going to have her baby.

  Right now.

  The contraction rode its peak for twenty agonizing seconds, then decayed far too slowly. On the way back down, she felt her faculties return. The pain had blowtorched her mind into crisp hyperclarity; for the first time in hours, it was completely her own.

  Oh my God, it whispered silently in her ears. Watching the mobile spin above the shattered, capsized crib. Watching the vines compress and squeeze, like an octopus attacking a glass-bottomed boat.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered aloud, as Micki wiped high-definition beads of perspiration off her brow. Watching her dreams turn to rubble before her eyes.

  “Gwen…” All the color had drained from Micki’s face. She looked old in that moment, enfeebled by her terror.

  Gwen reached up to touch Micki’s face, Micki’s hair, to convince herself that this wasn’t real, that she hadn’t awakened from a dreaming Hell only to find herself trapped in its inner circle. She blinked her eyes, and the room was still there. She shut them tight, and the delirium sounds remained.

  “What are we going to do?” she quietly implored.

  And Micki’s response was, “I don’t know.”

  Behind the cacophonous wall of noise came a different voice: a distant, mounting growl. A powerful metal avenging roar, angrily surging into sonic dominion.

  It took her a moment.

  But she recognized the sound.

  Gary cried as he twisted the throttle in his hand, the hand that prickled and itched as if drugged to numbing sleep. The Harley growled in response, engine revving out a mad frantic rhythm of speed and endurance. His gloves were sodden; his jacket was so damp it felt like the leather would reanimate. Sooty droplets of living condensation crawled across his visor, looking for a way in; Gary realized that Gwen’s present had probably saved his life. It made him love her all the more, made him want to tell her that.

  If he ever saw her again.

  Because there was a deathvoice in his head now, a hoarse soul cry shrieking LATE TOO LATE TOO LATE, feeding his fear and stoking his guilt as Gary gunned along, a solitary rider on the road to Hell.

  Not Hell, he amended. Hell was a comical conceit in which human beings really mattered. Hell placed mankind, by simple proximity, at the center of Creation.

  There were no such illusions as Gary rode, no comfortable pantheon of gods and devils to fall back on. This land held no place for them, living or dead. The place that was his home now belonged to something else.

  And he was the intruder.

  Premature night had fallen like a shroud as the cloud cover thickened and the fog rolled in. The pillar of fire was visible as a furious red-orange glow on the horizon, a false midnight sun that blotted out the real thing. Gary’s mind was racing as fast as the bike, revising their escape route as each mile slid by. Once he got there they would pack the truck and head south, then west, keeping the disaster always to their backs.

  They would make it. They would survive.

  He swore it.

  At three thirty-nine he screeched around the corner that marked the homestretch and skidded to an abrupt halt. Gary stared out over the vista, momentarily paralyzed by the sight.

  The sides of the road had been grotesquely transfigured, its familiar contours turned unwilling host to the writhing knotted vines that oozed from the woods like some turbo killer kudsu, overrunning trees and telephone lines. Cars. Homes. Lives.

  Everything but the road, he realized.

  The macadam lay untouched; a smooth gray ribbon winding through a sea of writhing growth. It was as if it wanted the roads open, as if…

  …as if it needed them.

  Gary pulled off his helmet and stared in awe.

  He thought of the tape, of the figure in the truck: the truck full of barrels, the barrels full of poison rumbling down the roads, heading God knows where…

  Heading everywhere.

  His neighbors’ homes lay before him: nightmare structures rendered lumpen and indistinct as the vines choked them off, burying them, smothering whatever lay trapped inside. His neighbors lay, similarly lumpen and indistinct, beneath the twisting clumps of gray-green growth. Deep inside him, the death voice sang.

  LATE TOO LATE TOO LATE…

  “NO!” he screamed, frantically searching for his home in the mutant topography. He looked to where it ought to have been.

  And saw the magick circle.

  It was a ring of thorns rising high into the viscid swirling fog, a treacherous barrier disappearing into the cloud cover a hundred feet up. He could see the growth undulating, weaving itself in geodesic desecration, ten thousand barbed biting tendrils storming some arcane blueprint of protection. The vines were hardening, taking on the appearance of armor. There were easily a hundred thousand bristling, glistening spikes pointing menacingly out and inward.

  New vines on the edge of the circle coiled themselves, ready to strike, then leapt, stretching to maximum extension, like bungi jumpers, hooking onto the frame and pulling themselves up, feelers blindly reaching for the heavens.

  Their house was inside the ring, intact but barely visible, sealed away like a ghost ship in a glass bottle…

  “GWEN!” Gary cried at the top of his lungs. “GWEN!!”

  His voice echoed out across the thorned plain, came back unanswered. He looked to the house, letting the tears fall where they may, afraid to touch them.

  And that was when he saw it.

  There was a spot at the bottom edge of the circle that was still raw: not immediately visible, but there, like a secret entrance. It shimmered and refracted like a transparency laid over a real space, an Industrial Light and Magic-style hallucination.

  “What the fuck?” Gary blinked; it was still there. New vines reached across from either side, their barbed green fingers still soft. Micki’s spirit door, left open for him.

  The driveway before him slithered with undergrowth, as inviting as a bed of broken glass. Gary hesitated, racing the engine anxiously.

  Then he heard the women scream.

  The voices were both inchoate and distinct; two familiar cadences overlapping in terror and pain. It was Gwen and Micki; of this he was sure. The woman he loved and…

  Any animosity he’d ever felt toward Micki went flying out the window in that moment, as he tasted the timbre of fear in those cries.

  The women screamed again. The vines writhed in response, as if feeding on the sound. One voice screamed back his name;
the other simply screamed.

  “GWEN!” Gary bellowed. “MICKI!”

  The spirit door pulsed and glowed. He knew what he had to do. He revved the motor, feeling the tears come and letting them.

  Then he popped the clutch.

  And opened it up.

  The Harley leapt to the task, racing toward the shining door just as fast as he’d let it. The bike roared, chewing up the vines even as the barbed strands chewed up the tires. He would not stop. He could see them moving, feel thorned tips reaching for him. They nicked his boots and grabbed at his machine. The softtail’s wheels spun and slid, throwing shredded rubber and slick crimson spray.

  But he would not stop.

  Gary closed the distance. The vinewall loomed menacingly.

  “Please,” he whispered to no one in particular.

  He hit the outside perimeter at just under fifty miles an hour and together they mulched a path through the undergrowth. Ten feet from the wall was a low vine as thick as a fallen tree; Gary popped a wheelie as he reached it, threw his whole body into it, and sprang! The bike tore through the spirit door like a buzz saw through a bonsai tree.

  And Gary was flying.

  There was a moment of intense exhilaration as he breached the circle, a joyous fuck you all I made it! as man and machine hurtled through the wall, thorned streamers of vines trailing behind.

  Then the spirit door slammed behind him.

  And Gary was in.

  The earth came back with a piston-crunching resolve, and Gary found himself sailing through some very real space on his way to some very real ground. A vine as thick as a banister snagged the rear wheel on the way down and dropped the whole shebang out from under him, Gary went head-over-handlebars, off the machine and into space.

  He landed on a bed of leaves and stinging grass, came to seconds later with the screams still ringing in his ears. His skin was a flayed-raw thing, every bone in his body a player in his symphony of pain. Gary fought to clear his head.

  Then he staggered to his feet.