Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  Niko turns from the bonfire and gazes out into the black and starless air. Soon a streak of burning orange flares and shadows stretch from standing objects on the plain. A distant cry from high up in the direction of the flare is carried across the flat ground.

  Toward that source of light then. Once more Niko sets out on his ragged way. As he nears one of the staked men he hears a soft and pleading voice. Mein herr. Mein herr.

  Niko looks down at a naked German staked spreadeagled and facedown. Iron spikes pin the twitching spiders of his fractured hands to ground. His skin meticulously flensed in perfect alternating one inch strips from head to toe. The inchwide strips of remaining skin embroidered with yellow stars of david, strings of numbers, pink triangles, barcodes. The space between the naked muscles packed with sand.

  “Entschuldigen sie mich. Mein herr?” the man says in a whisper more awful than any scream. “Danke shon. Fiir die musik, ihre musik.” His head is turned to the side and his bisected lips move carefully. “Danke shön, gnedige herr. Fielen danke.”

  XI.

  BEEN DOWN SO LONG

  IN THE DISTANCE there appears to be a stadium or coliseum Niko’s path will near but not quite intersect. The enormous structure brick red in the murky light. A roar perhaps a hundred thousand voices strong carries from it even miles away.

  To Niko’s right lie toppled statues, informed giants with undifferentiated features, stone eyes open and forever staring sidewise at the broad expanse. All have fallen from their pedestals, some to fracture, some to break, some to shatter into scattered rubble. Hard about them on the flat stone plain are radiating cracks, jagged epitaphs engraved by their demise. Blood seeps from the statues’ cracks.

  Distant ratcheting like rattling engine valves. A mile or more away a group of demons standing high atop a recumbent head of granite performs a kind of sculptural lobotomy with jackhammers against the stone temple. It looks like what a migraine feels like.

  Another flare of orange lights the sky. This time the accompanying scream is more pronounced and grows still louder as the sparking comet streaks from what looks like a huge wall several miles away. It’s hard to judge the distance. There is no true horizon for the earth here does not curve. Only vanishing points on an infinite unvarying plane.

  Yet there where the flares streak from, where the massive wall holds sway, it seems there is an oddly close horizon. As if the earth beyond were sheared away. Five miles? Ten? There are a lot of objects in between, moving creatures, stationary structures. It also looks more crowded out there toward the wall. What’s the draw? Well he’ll know soon enough.

  Niko trips on scattered statue chunks and catches himself. His jeans have dried but he is conscious of the smell of urine clinging to him, of Sam’s gore tacky on his hands and arms, of stubble bristling at his neck and the underside of his chin, the saltrings of dried sweat and stiff patches of Sam’s dried blood staining his shirt and coat, the swampy slickness of his cotton socks encased by hiking shoes. His tongue is dry and thick and reptilian. His parched throat makes a tiny click whenever he swallows. His eyes burn from arid kiln air, from vapors and from lack of sleep.

  A group of demons with krylon spraypaint cans industriously tags a fallen statue that somehow conveys an air of quiet desperation. Little balls rattle when the demons shake the cans.

  Niko steps on something soft that screams and jerks from underfoot. He leaps away from the disemboweled man he’s stepped in and a demon looks up from the gutted body it is violating. It rises tall and slim and muscular and frightening and beautiful before Niko and looks down at him in wonder with catlike eyes of startling cerulean. Pendant cock slurried with shit and gobbeted blood. Chest slick and breathing hard from foul exertions. It surveys Niko head to toe and grins and licks the length of its chin with a pointed black tongue caked with gore. It raises an oddly elegant talon and waggles the tapering slim fingers.

  Niko tries not to look down at the spasming husk at the demon’s feet.

  The demon’s hand lowers. “Your name.” Its voice a beautiful contralto.

  “That word is mine to keep or give.”

  The demon’s laugh does something to Niko’s spine. “Credo in un deus crudelis.” It mockingly blesses him like a priest, tracing the sign of the cross hand sinister, bottom to top, right to left.

  Thunder shudders from above and Niko glances up. The charcoal sky convulses with a swarm of bats, black scraps that flex like epileptic birds across the hot abyss.

  “You have no quarrel with me. I’m mortal.”

  “And you think that opens every door? Spreads the legs of every whore? Unlocks each and every lock? Makes my cock hard as a rock?”

  Niko tries to break in but the demon speaks nonstop and does not pause for breath. “Pulls the cork from every bottle? Melts the king’s wax like a griddle? Breaks the vows of silent monks? Pries the lid from every box?”

  Babbling doggerel it advances. Niko steps backward in kind and raises a placating hand, the guitar case moving forward as a shield. “Come on now. I’m still alive, I haven’t been Judged, you have no power over me here.”

  “Biggest ass gets softest seat? Living flesh gets choicest meat? Smoothest tongue gets softest thigh? Sharpest glance catch brightest eye?” A graceful and accusing finger points at him and he retreats as if pushed.

  “My business is with one who would destroy you should you hamper me,” Niko recites. He looks around for a place to run to or a weapon or even another demon to enlist against this one, for they seem to fear the wrath of their superiors.

  “Quoted word should make me quake? Stolen fire make me bake? Demon nose whiffs mortal dung. Shit must spew from borrowed tongue.”

  The backs of Niko’s knees touch something hard and warm. Another demon crouched on hands and knees and grinning up at him. The doggerel-spewing demon grins and pushes Niko backward. Niko lets go the guitar case and tucks and rolls to come up in a doubtless futile fighting stance.

  The demon he has fallen over straightens up and dusts itself off, still grinning at Niko as it guffaws in a big loud stupid voice, literally saying Haw haw haw haw. He’s wide and burly and covered with piercings, studs and bars and metal rings.

  The demons highfive each other and their palms strike sparks. Absurd embarrassment heats Niko’s cheeks. He has quite literally fallen for the oldest schoolyard bully trick in the book.

  “Oh you wacky funmasters,” Niko says.

  “Haw haw haw.” Pierce slaps his thigh hard enough to kill a small animal. “That’s the spirit.”

  “Not the spirit but the flesh. Mortal meat pie, him no guest.”

  “Naww.” A stubfingered hand goes to the flat broad face in caricatured astonishment.

  Doggerel nods. “This widdle meat pie, him go hunting. This widdle meat pie, him not home. This widdle meat pie, him got mojo. This widdle meat pie, leave alone.”

  Pierce looks Niko up and down. “No molesta?” He sounds disappointed.

  “This widdle meat pie, him go wee wee wee all the way home.”

  Pierce slumps and Doggerel drapes an arm partway around the massive demon’s shoulders. Doggerel’s arms are long but Pierce’s shoulders are much broader. “Not to worry, never fear. Us will leave this meat pie here. Let him go his meat pie way. We see him again someday.”

  And paying Niko no more heed they walk away. Niko watches them go, unaware of his incredulous expression. He shakes his head and picks up his guitar case and continues on his dire way.

  THE STATUE GARDEN now consists of lifesized sculptures of mounted generals and declaiming politicians, the kind of statues found in parks or civic centers the world over. Except here they are not lone monuments to fallen leaders but thousands on thousands of stone figures crowded on the plain like forgotten figures in some giant child’s toy army. A general of Pharaoh’s army clutches his staff of command and inspects troops only his stone eyes can see. A Grecian senator in draped double chiton clutches a scroll and raises a fist. A Civil War general
on horseback stares out across the plain with gloved fist on West Point saber. An Arab chieftain looks up to Allah with upturned palms. Their alabaster ranks are all in different stages of erosion, some merely blemished as if suffering a century’s urban acid rain, others deeply corroded and runnelled. One statue of a furclad Hun on horseback is so dissolved his helmet is cleaved in two and his features smoothed to disturbing anonymity. His mount’s ears have worn away and one hoof eaten to the base. Many statues have toppled like defeated chessmen as their foundation dissolved by whatever slowly eats their quarried flesh.

  Threading through them Niko catches a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of his eye. He turns to look but it is gone. Only the vast array of frozen figures. Niko continues on his ordained way, a strange pressure between his shoulderblades. He cannot shake the feeling the statues are watching him.

  After navigating the marble orchard for an hour Niko realizes that the area is littered with motley pigeons. They peck the ground and scatter in waves at his approach. Though they are stupid useless birds he keeps an eye on them. On a sidewalk or in a park he would not give mere pigeons a second thought. Here where all is sinister and strange no thing is mere.

  But the pigeons waddle aimlessly and peck at nothing and stare at nothing and ruffle their feathers at nothing and crap on statues— Niko stops.

  A pigeon roosts atop the combat helmet of an American twostar general in field uniform holding stone binoculars in one hand near his leg, the other hand a fist. The pigeon shits on the general’s head.

  Niko approaches the statue and the pigeon flaps threateningly, then flies.

  The general’s face is worn and pitted. A deep gouge has eaten into the bridge of his nose as if someone gave up sawing it off. Below one marble eye a shallow runnel grooves the pitted cheek, steady track of geologic tears. The eyes are blind as a bust of Homer but Niko feels they see him nonetheless. Where the pigeon roosted a fresh white splash of pigeonshit bubbles and crackles as acidic excrement eats into living stone.

  Niko reaches out toward the sculpted face and hears an unmistakable faint moan. He snatches back his hand. The fear that speeds his heart is quickly replaced by pity for the soul imprisoned in corroded stone before him. The man now monument to himself, frozen at the apex of his glory and feeling every atom of his slow decay.

  Niko turns to gaze at acre after acre of corroded statues. One nearby pedestal supports nothing but a pair of sandaled feet, all else worn away by millennia of intermittent pigeonshit.

  Niko hurries through their prolonged agony.

  “EXCUSE ME, SIR? There has been some kind of mistake. I would like to see someone in charge.”

  Niko has come to an astonishingly long line of the damned standing patiently in a roped off queue that twists and turns and doubles back like the worst imaginable wait for the most popular attraction at Disneyland. He’s a mile closer to the wall now and the numbers of the dead are growing. Demons with pitchforks—may as well call them that even if they are tridents—herd new batches of the sheeplike damned to the end of the line, which shuffles forward constantly but doesn’t quite keep pace with new arrivals at its everlengthening end. Throughout its snaking length are arguments, shoving matches, fights.

  “Sir? Are you hearing me?” The voice is Slavic, faintly adenoidal. “I wish to see someone in authority.” Near the end of the line a tall thin sickly man with springy darkbrown hair and large intense brown eyes is waving his arms for a demon’s attention.

  Which of course he gets. The demon closest to the clamoring man turns its twin heads away from the group it’s prodding and gives the man the once-over. ““A mistake?”” the demons ask. They look at each other. Its right hand passes the trident to the left hand and then thoughtfully scratches its left head’s left cheek. “What kind of mistake?” asks the right head, which Niko privately names Dexter.

  “I am not supposed to be here.”

  The damned around him laugh. There’s a polyglot murmur as others translate for the dead and then a second wave of laughter follows.

  Sickly ignores them but he cannot hide the flush that darkens his pale face. Niko looks on wonderingly as the delicate man defiantly raises his chin.

  “Hey hey,” says a swarthy little man with a thin moustache. “Issa fonny ting, Ima nah supposta be here too.”

  Around him comes more laughter followed by a chorus of sis, ouis, das, hais, jas, and fuckin A’s.

  “Okay look,” the left hand, Sinister, tells Sickly. “Did you wait in line for your ticket?”

  “Of course.”

  “Number called?” says Dexter.

  “Naturally.”

  “Naturally,” says Sinister. “Go to your designated line?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get your ticket stamped?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get a receipt?”

  “At the next line they tell me go back to the previous line and get a receipt. Then in the next line I wait again for my receipt to be stamped.”

  Sinister’s hand picks Dexter’s nose and then puts the jellied finger in Sinister’s wide mouth. “And of course,” says Dexter, “you took your stamped receipt to the Receipt Processing Window.”

  “Yes, and there I exchange my stamped receipt for a Personal Information Form.”

  “Excellent,” says Sinister.

  “Then I stand in the Pencils line to get a pencil.”

  “We’re just whizzing right along here, aren’t we,” says Dexter. His other half smirks. “I’m getting a nosebleed.”

  Dexter ignores him. “So with your official number two pencil and your PIF in its handtruck you waited your turn in the Forms Completion Room.”

  Sickly grows sheepish. “I am completing it before a space becomes available.”

  Dexter scowls. “You filled out all seven thousand six hundred fiftysix pages of your Personal Information Form—”

  “—staying within the margins—”

  “—no erasures, emendations, errors of spelling punctuation or grammar—”

  “—bubbles completely filled in, no streaks smudges stippling or stray marks?”

  “Well, I would have completed the form but the pencil is breaking.”

  “Ah,” from Dexter.

  “His pencil broke.”

  “It happens.”

  “What can you do.”

  “Nothing to do but wait in the Pencils line again.”

  “Management really ought to get better pencils. If they don’t break they wear out.”

  “Well I’m not going to be the one to suggest that Management change pencils.”

  “Me neither.”

  Sinister looks at Sickly. “I assume you got another one.”

  “Don’t assume,” says Dexter. “You know what they say about when you assume.”

  “No, what?”

  “You make an ass of you and me.”

  “Really. You and me?”

  Sickly plods on. “A year I wait again in the Pencil line—”

  “A year,” says Sinister. “They’re really quite the welloiled machine these days.”

  “It’s those Disney engineers. They get the trains running on time. You were saying, meat pie?”

  Sickly is looking more and more flummoxed. “After I am waiting a year in the Pencil line they tell me I must to go to the Replacement Pencil Requisition Desk. And finally I get to that and they give me a hundred page form to complete if I am to get another pencil.”

  Sinister shrugs onesidedly. “Well they can’t just hand out pencils indiscriminately.”

  “Think of the chaos,” says Dexter. “There are people in those lines who’d kill you for a pencil.”

  “If you weren’t already dead,” says Sinister. “But at least you completed your Replacement Pencil Requisition Form.”

  “I certainly did not.”

  Dexter is aghast. “You didn’t?”

  Sickly’s jaw is clenched so tight he can barely speak. “I. Had. Nothing. To. Write. With.”r />
  “Well,” says Sinister, “you should have asked for a pencil at the Pencil Window.”

  “They don’t let me have one! They send me to the Replacement Pencil Requisition Desk!”

  “That’s just for a replacement pencil for filling out your PIF,” says Dexter.

  “Skilcraft Number Two Medium Soft Point,” adds Sinister. Dexter nods. “But the Replacement Pencil Requisition Form can be filled out with any old thing.”

  Sickly looks as if he’s going to cry. Sinister clucks and shakes his head. “Poor little meat pie. All that time wasted.”

  “If he’d only learned his way around the system.”

  “Some people just can’t be bothered.”

  “Guess they don’t think the rules apply to them.”

  “Why make life any easier for some poor flunky who’s only doing his thankless job?”

  “For want of a nail.”

  “Or a pencil.”

  “Sad really.”

  “Yes, sad.”

  Sickly’s dam breaks. “I did not go back in the line for a fucking pencil, you—you stupid freak! The broken one, I am sharpening it with my teeth.”

  The demon draws himself erect. “My brother’s just as he was made, sir,” Sinister says.

  “He was talking to you,” says Dexter.

  “Nonsense.” Sinister narrows his eyes at Sickly. “I am curious, though.”

  “I’ll say,” says Dexter.

  “When your pencil broke that first time, I imagine it made a...stray mark?”

  “A stray mark you certainly didn’t attempt to...erase?”

  “Naturally I am obtaining another PIF. I am in this line now.” Sinister nods. “Adjustments and Closures.”

  “Last line, by the way,” adds Dexter.

  “Well why would I be in this line if I am not getting the forms taken care of properly?”