Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  Niko doesn’t even think of running from the whirlwind twisting there before him. He only watches in mortal dread as the vortex lifts to hopscotch over his windswept head and pass mercurial above him. The voice of the whirlwind a leviathan moan. It augers down again behind him to gyre like a mindless deadly battling top. The wind of its periphery whips him and he covers his eyes as sand stings his exposed skin like nettles. Then the wind abates to scour elsewhere on the naked dark.

  Niko realizes he has fallen to his knees as if in supplication to some oblivious god. He rises, lucky or blessed or perhaps just insignificant, and walks on. He passes piles of glossy polished bones that clack like windchimes in the remnant breeze. The sockets of sandblasted skulls contain a residue of pureed eye and muscle pulp. The bones appear to writhe with pink maggots until Niko sees that ligaments and tendons and muscle tissues are slowly regrowing, stretching over tortured frames while polished skullteeth chatter as if cold. Purple filigrees of veins spread thickening webs. The twister’s murdered are not dead but are to slowly reassemble to endure new torments that await them when again they are made whole.

  The mashed grape eyes of one such skull inflate to fill sandblasted sockets once again. Eyes that track him in their polished frames as Niko navigates the endless gloom. And though these dead are flayed to glossy skeletons he feels certain they are conscious all the while. That their reconstitution is a deep and undiluted pain in every lazarus nerve and cell.

  Again pale orange smears the abyss. He decides to head toward the source of the intermittent light.

  Enfleshing skeletons rise quaking against the light that glowers through the gaps between their picket ribs and glistens on wet marrow and raw meat. They twitch and shudder and convulse and jerk, uncertain as yearlings in their newmade frames. As they stand they slowly turn to stare at him like vivitropic flowers.

  IX.

  LIFE BY THE DROP

  HALF AN HOUR later Niko encounters his first demon.

  The ground shudders beneath his feet, followed by a loud deep boom of something massive smashing on the broken plain. In the distance large square silhouettes are scattered about. Some kind of structures. Temples? Houses? Hard to determine size and distance because there is so little light and because the plain he walks is vast and featureless and without horizon.

  A low shape undulates toward him. Niko turns to avoid it and it swerves to meet him, traveling close to the ground in jerky flopping motions like some enormous writhing maggot. Fifty yards away and Niko sees it is in fact a human being, prone and dragging itself toward him with its pale arms. Twenty yards and the shape is a woman, naked and fat and oozing a doubled sluglike trail of her own blood from stumps of amputated legs.

  Niko stops walking and she raises on her arms. “Por favor.” She shifts her weight to one arm to beckon with the other. “Por favor.”

  Niko steps toward her, the question How can I help? already breath in his mouth. But she is dead and damned and consigned to torment. Relief from what has been willed is beyond action or even consideration. How many damned down here, what private universes of suffering? Millions certainly. Billions probably. Even to alleviate their torment would consume the balance of his mortal years and derail him from his mission. Harden your heart, Niko. You cannot save them. They are already lost. Harden your heart.

  That shouldn’t be too difficult for you, buddy pal, whispers another facet of himself, the demon voice in the Greek chorus of his self-deprecating soul.

  The legless woman regards him now with her head atop her upcurved back. The shocking termination of her thighs. Some carved sphinx half buried in the hardpan of the plain, artifact of a civilization lost and alien and cruel. Her pleading face. Her pain-dulled eyes. Her outstretched hand. Already sprouting from her ragged stumps are tiny buds of legs to be.

  Orange light throbs again to gleam her doubled trail of blood, which leads toward one of the distant blockish shapes.

  I’m sorry, Niko says. I’m sorry. And hurries past ashamed and afraid. Behind him come her spanish imprecations. Niko feels her gaze between his shoulderblades. Don’t look back. Don’t look back.

  SCATTERED ON THE lambent plain are granite blocks. Ten feet square and smoothwalled, their shadows moving in the intermittent airborne orange light that waxes, lengthens, flickers, dies. The spanish woman’s driedblood trail abruptly stops beneath the bottom edge of one such block.

  Warily Niko touches the rough hewn granite. A fissure jags the surface. The hard ground around it fissured too. Niko lowers his hand and steps back. A block like this would have to weigh what? Fifty, sixty tons? Niko leans away from the block and cranes up at the cavernous expanse of black that is not night. He frowns and quells a welling urge to blindly run. Instead he walks among the widely scattered cubes toward the source of the orange light. No nightchirps of crickets here, no hiss of wind in leaves. No freeway surf boom, no distant music or conversation. What he will hear down here is screams and moans and cracking whips. What human laughter he will hear is maniacal and leached of pleasure. The sounds that come across the plain are oddly flattened. The space is vast and the horizon unattainable, but Niko cannot shake his sense of being inside something, the certainty of living rock above his head. The panic-tinctured claustrophobia of being underground.

  Now a man’s voice weakly calls out to him. Hey. Hey. Hey. Dull repetition as if uttered by rote. Hard to fix direction. Hey. Hey. Coming from his...left? Yes, from the block of granite nearest him. From its base.

  Niko has decided to ignore the voice when it begins to call his name, Niko Niko Niko, with an urgency quite different from its leaden repetition. Gooseflesh sweeps his back and arms and his scalp grows tight. Your name is something you don’t want to hear called out down here. Unaccountable shudders in the mortal world are caused when someone says your name in Hell.

  Niko turns toward the granite block. Emerging impossible from beneath the bottom and flush with the flat hard ground is a man’s head and neck and right arm. The man lies facedown where he’s been smashed flat. It’s too dark to discern more detail.

  Niko stops before the man. “How do you know my name?”

  The chanting stops. Then once more, Niko, in a whisper all relief. A thin weak voice with little air behind it. No surprise when tons of granite sit on top of lungs pressed flat as burst balloons. “You don’t. Recognize me? I’m crushed.”

  “I can barely see you.” Niko glances around, half expecting some trick, some ambush or cruel joke.

  “It’s Sam.”

  “Sam?”

  “Sam Gamundi. Samwise.”

  “Samwise?” Niko can’t believe what he’s just heard. “Sam?” And hears himself ask a question that must, in this place, be the most hackneyed of clichés. “What are you doing down here?”

  “Trying to. Dig my way out. I’ve made a start. Already.” But then Sam senses Niko’s larger question. “I don’t know. No one tells us. Anything and. There’s no way to. Find out.”

  Pale orange flares and Niko sees that Sam indeed has made a start. Beneath the free right arm a small depression near his free shoulder has been scraped out with his fingernails and presumably leads beneath his flattened chest.

  Niko frowns. The ground here is like rock. How long would it take to—

  He gasps at sight of Sam’s face. Hydrostatic pressure from the impacting granite block burst cells and arteries and veins toward the free end of Sam’s body like stepping on half a waterfilled balloon. One of Sam’s eyes has popped partway from the socket. The other is beet red. Blood has burst from his ears and nostrils and mouth, from beneath fingernails scraped down to nubs.

  Mercifully the orange light fades. “I’m luckier. Than most. I have something. To dig with.” Sam waves his free arm feebly. “Most others have to. Wait until. The rock wears away. Before they can. Get out.”

  “Until it wears away?”

  “Yeah. We’re gonna be. Down here forever. You learn to. Think longterm. You must not. Have been here.
Very long.”

  “I only just—”

  “Well that’s the thing. It takes a while. To adjust. Hey are those. Shoes?” The head turns slightly. “And clothes. They let you in. With clothes? And. Shit is that. Your guitar? Son of a bitch. You mean you get. VIP treatment. Even here?”

  “It’s not like that, Sam. I’m on a kind of mission. I’ll do whatever I can to help you but—”

  “Son of a bitch. You’re not dead.”

  Niko slowly shakes his head.

  “Son of a bitch. You always were. The luckiest guy. I ever met. In my life. I followed your career. Since we were. In school. Had all your albums. Used to tell people. I knew you. Way back when. Told em even then. I knew you were. Going to be famous. Always carrying that. Little guitar around like. Linus’ blanket. Son of a bitch. How in the world. Did you get down here. And you not dead?”

  “Um. I took a cab.”

  Oddly enough Sam accepts this with a slight nod. But then Sam has probably learned to accept an awful lot.

  “What can I do, Sam?”

  “For starters you can. Get me out. From under this. Damn thing.”

  Niko appraises the block. “I don’t see how. There’s no way in hell—uh, there’s no way to move this block.”

  “Don’t move it. Dig me out. From under it. I’m pretty much. Healed under here. But I can only. Do so much. With one arm.”

  Niko squats, sighs, lets go of the guitar case. “Sam. I don’t—that would take a long time, and I don’t—”

  “See the block. Closest to us. Over there?” The free arm points. “I see it.”

  “On top of it there’s. A tool that. Got dropped there. Bring that back. And you can. Dig me out. With it.”

  “A tool.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You want me to climb on top of that block and bring back a tool that got dropped there and dig you out.”

  “You got it.”

  Niko sighs again. “Sam.”

  “Listen Niko. You’re mortal. Down here. You’ll need sleep. You’ll need food. Whatever your mission is. You aren’t gonna get. Far without food. Or sleep. And you’ll get filleted. Like a chicken. If you get caught. Sleeping anywhere. In this joint. I can help you. I don’t know. What you’re doing here. But this place is really. Really big. I can help you get. Where you’re going.”

  Niko shakes his head. Not negation but resignation. “All right, Sam. Back in a few minutes.”

  “That’s the ticket.”

  For some reason Niko takes off his coat and sets it neatly on top of his hardcase. He starts away, rolling his eyes at the unseen canopy of rock and still shaking his head.

  “Niko.”

  He stops. “Yeah?”

  “Try to be in. Conspicuous. These blocks didn’t just. Grow here. You know?”

  Niko thinks he does know, but he merely nods and sets out.

  SAM GAMUNDI. SAMWISE, for Christ’s sake. Of all the people to run into down here, the last I would have expected. When was the last time I saw him? High school? Yeah, he came back for a week or so and stayed with me and my family after he’d moved away with his mom. And even then I hadn’t seen him since...eighth grade? First time I ever got drunk was with Sam. Skipping school and getting into his mom’s gin. Jesus, a gin drunk at fourteen. Watered the bottle down so she wouldn’t know we’d been at it. Caught us anyway. Caught Sam that is. He never narked on me. What did she do to him? Can’t remember.

  Dark as hell here. To coin a phrase. Not much to trip over at least. I hope.

  First time I smoked pot was with Sam too. Hell we were trouble, weren’t we? Poor Mom and Dad. That time they picked us up from the movies in that old white Ford and me and Sam so stoned we would’ve giggled if you hit us with a shovel. Sam had somehow got his shoelaces knotted together and couldn’t get them untied. Tried to karate chop them and knocked his feet out from under him and landed on his head on the sidewalk just as Mom and Dad pulled up and I laughed so hard I banged my head on the roof getting into the car. Which only got us laughing harder.

  I used to wonder what happened to you, sitting tuning my guitar or reflecting on someone else’s story from their youth or just daydreaming on the tour bus during those long stretches of paved America between dates. Were you still alive then Sam? How did you finally die I wonder? Would it breach some etiquette here to ask you? And would you tell me if I did?

  That week you came back to visit me at my parents’ house. You’d been Saved. Some Baptist summer camp you’d been to had gotten to you in some lonely fearful hour. You were worried about my life and my soul. The way I was carrying on. Pot speed booze girls coke smokes and never never never any sleep. I called you holier than thou. Saint Samwise. That was a long week huh? That party my band played. Howyadoin, we’re The Spanish Flies. And me getting drunk and scoffing at your thinly hidden disdain. At some point I decided to throw all that contempt back in your judgemental face, only I threw it out through my guitar. A pawnshop Les Paul that’d be worth a pretty penny now I’m sure. And you heard that volleyed contempt all right but you stayed on because I could see you couldn’t believe what was coming out of those beatup Fender amps. To this day I sit amazed six wires on a piece of wood can make a hundred thousand people crazy. That gig got dark and scary, the whole band picking up the vibe and magnifying it, and everybody drunk or stoned or tripping or just plain fuckedup somewhichway. And you better believe they grooved on it, St. Samwise, because they tore that joint apart, throwing bottles and tearing stuffing out of the couch and beating the hell out of each other. You said I was possessed and you ran off while feedback howled up to the bleeding edge and I surfed it all the way and felt maybe just a little bit of bad I’d run you off. But mostly it felt good to be the voice of that crowd’s anger. Good to drive you off in your sanctimony, good to drive those people wild enough to turn on themselves like dogs, good to push the amplifiers to the limit, good to push. And when you walked into Mom and Dad’s kitchen hours later, having walked all that way home, you suffering martyr, I remember looking up still drunk and hunched over a cup of reheated coffee and seeing both your umbrage and your concern, and Sam I think that was the moment I realized something writhed inside me with an appetite for self destruction. And perhaps we kept our distance after that night not because of your unswervable faith but because of the dark mirror you had held before me. And maybe you backpedaled with equal horror from the pleasure you saw me take in that reflection’s corrupt and ruinous bent. I had a demon inside me and I hated him but loved him too. Or maybe I just felt I needed him.

  Your black bible and your suffering jesus. My black Les Paul and my suffering blues. You find salvation your way, I will find it mine.

  Only—what hope of redemption or salvation or even some small reprieve is there for anybody if our own St. Samwise lies crushed and suffering beneath a granite slab on the outskirts of what deranged god’s mad Hell?

  Ah, Sam.

  NIKO’S FINGERS JUST clear the top edge of the granite block when he jumps. He raises himself up and clears the edge. He climbs up and rolls onto his back and stares up at the solid blackness and then scrambles to his feet. He looks around the surface of the smooth granite cube, looking for a...tool...that got dropped there.

  It’s so damned dark. Then again, the cube is only ten feet square, and anything that would help dig Sam out from under his own particular Lego block from Hell ought to be fairly easy to—

  He steps on a bump and bends to find a metal rod. He picks it up. It must weigh fifty pounds. About eight feet long. Projections on the bottom end. Some kind of shovel? He turns the rod over and regards the arrowheaded trident splayed above his head.

  Pitchfork.

  IT RINGS DULL and steady as it drags behind him on the hard flat plain. Niko is trying not to think about what the pitchfork implies when behind and well above him he hears something flapping. He turns and sees motion just as whatever flies above him yells Bombs awaaay! in a guttural delighted voice like whirring blades ch
opping meat. Then twin descending cartoon whistles as of plummeting bombs.

  A large gray square occults the sky.

  Shit oh dear. Niko bolts, realizes they may have taken his running into account, and cuts left. He runs as fast as he can, left arm pumping and the trident jouncing along. Behind him comes a deep slam he feels in his chest and an earthquake tremor that shudders through his feet. Niko glances back at a granite block that wasn’t there a moment ago.

  From the sky come curses. There are two voices up there. Niko has a moment to take in jaundiced lantern cateyes and mottled membranous leather wings and impossible combteeth fangs that bristle as the demons grin wide enough to split their heads. Dangling legs that end in talons. Upcurved warty penises the size of Niko’s arm.

  One of them yells Booooo.

  It isn’t easy running fulltilt with a fifty pound pitchfork. It’s easier when you think something the size of a minivan is about to plummet down from the Great Unseen and flatten you like a fruit rollup. Niko runs.

  Sam is waiting—no shit—when Niko returns. “Thought they got you,” he says as Niko draws up panting.

  Niko drops the pitchfork and puts his hands on his knees until he catches his breath. “Can I expect much more of that?”

  “If you were. One of us. I’d say. Definitely. Safe bet you could. Expect more of that. Forever. But with you still alive?” Sam turns his free palm up. “Reckon I don’t know. The rules there. Pardner.”

  Niko grins albeit grimly. Sam had always done a creditable John Wayne. “Found your toadsticker.” He holds out the pronged iron rod.

  “You are. The man.”

  “How do you plan to get out from under there? Dig?”

  “Thought you might.”

  “Sam. Look.” Niko looks around and then squats down, feeling absurd. I’m in Hell! I’m talking to a dead guy! And he’s squashed under a fifty ton block! “We were friends, Sam, a long time ago.”