The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  First things first.

  Dizziness, numbness of the extremities, heart palpitations. They got her into the Monitoring Room with a minimum of questions and a maximum of efficiency.

  It was a smallish space: two beds, a chair, and a bath. It was decorated with absurdly cheerful wallpaper, balloons and little flowers everywhere. By each bed was a table holding a CMS Fetal Monitor, a bulky gray box the size of a VCR. A pair of cables plugged into the front on the one side of the center keypad; a slot fed a continuous strip of paper out the other.

  Micki disengaged from Gwen to allow Melissa to gown her, get her vital signs, and get her into the bed. Melissa looked at Micki. “Do you know what happened?”

  “No.” Micki took a deep breath, composed herself. “We were having a picnic, up at Sam Lewis Park…and then, when she went to the bathroom, I heard screaming, and I came up to find her, and she was…” Swallowing hard. “…she was convulsing, and…” She buckled, choking on the recitation.

  “It’s okay,” Melissa said.

  “So I surrounded her with light,” Micki went on. “For protection. And then I drove her here.”

  Melissa paused for a second, did a quick reality check. Surrounded her with light. Uh-huh.

  “Ummm…okay,” she said at last, letting it go, turning back to Gwen. “Honey, can you breathe alright?”

  Gwen thrashed, eyes swimming over the oxygen mask. It wasn’t tanked, the better to let her recycle carbon dioxide into her system, calm her down a little.

  “You’ve been hyperventilating. That explains the numbness and tingling.”

  Gwen shook her head, going no no no, her breath coming in great hitched gasps. She shuddered and pitched forward; Melissa and Micki reached for her at the same time, easing her back onto the bed.

  “Whoa, easy!” Melissa said, “Look at me!” She grabbed Gwen’s hands.

  “LOOK AT ME!”

  Her voice was forceful without anger, and it cleaved through Gwen’s panic. She caught Gwen’s gaze, forced her to hold it.

  “You’re safe now,” Melissa said, instantly shifting gears, going soft without losing an ounce of focus. “Everything’s going to be fine. Do you believe me?”

  “I dun…I dun…” Gwen stammered. She shook her head desperately, a spastic gyration somewhere between no and yes.

  “DO YOU?” Melissa said, her voice coming up a notch.

  Gwen nodded, uncertain.

  “Good,” Melissa said, squeezing her hands for emphasis. “It’s okay. I want you to take slow, even breaths. Can you do that for me?”

  Gwen nodded again. Melissa checked her blood pressure: one thirty over eighty-four.

  “We’re going to get a reading on your baby,” Melissa said, pulling the flowered flannel johnny up over the swell of Gwen’s belly. “Are you in pain?” she added, feeling for the baby’s position.

  Gwen mewled: a dreadful, pathetic sound. Evidently, the answer was yes. It tripped the alarm lights in Micki’s eyes. “Can’t you give her something?” Micki demanded.

  Melissa shook her head. “Anything we give her goes straight into the baby,” she said.

  “I’m scared.” Gwen’s voice was tiny, hoarse.

  “Don’t be. Just lay back. You’re going to be fine.”

  Melissa probed the surface of Gwen’s belly with her hands, feeling for something solid in the darkness. God, she’s big, she noted. Her womb was a smooth hard ball of flesh, heavy with fluid. There was a lot of retention going on in there.

  “Do you have a name picked out?” she asked, by way of distraction.

  Gwen’s eyes darted back and forth for a moment, searching through space. Then she seemed to lock on target, smiled a little herself.

  “Spike,” she said. “His name is Spike.”

  “Spike, huh?” Melissa arched her eyebrows in surprise. She found the curved prominence that marked the baby’s spine, moved farther along until she could discern the soft tiny dome of skull. “Well, let’s see how ol’ Spike is doing in there.”

  She reached into the drawer beneath the box, producing a squeeze bottle and a cabled oblong wand attached to an elastic strap. “This is a toco,” she said, holding up the disk. “It’s short for tocometer, and it sits right over your fundus, here, at the top of your uterus. It’ll measure contractions.”

  She slid the belt under Gwen’s backside and positioned the toco a full hand’s length above her belly button, snugging it down to the arcing rise of her womb.

  “And this,” she added, yanking another tangled cable free from the drawer and producing a disk the size of a stick-up air freshener. “This is the Ultrasound.”

  She squeezed a blue glob of conductive gel from the bottle and smeared it onto the disk. “No pictures, but it’ll tell us if everything’s alright.”

  She turned on the fetal monitor and the room was suddenly filled with a scratchy, thudding sound. A stub of graph paper fed up and out of the slot like a little tongue.

  “This gives us our readout,” she said, pointing to the paper strip. “And see that little heart, there?” Indicating a little glowing logo on the LED panel. “That comes on when we get Spike’s heartbeat.

  “Here, watch,” she said, feeling for the best spot and placing the disk against Gwen’s skin.

  The room suddenly filled with a flat, rhythmic thud. On the paper strip, a little mountain range appeared. The topography of life.

  “See?” Melissa said, smoothing Gwen’s hair back. “I told you.”

  Gwen saw the little light glowing in sync with the percussive thud of the sonogram. She stared at it for a good long time before her fist unclenched.

  Melissa smiled. “Okay, I want you to rest here quietly for a few minutes, just so we can make sure you’re stable. Can you do that?”

  Gwen nodded uncertainly. Melissa smiled reassuringly, then turned to Micki. “Why don’t we let her get some rest?” It was not a suggestion.

  “Wait,” Micki said, holding one hand up. Her eyes rolled behind the lids for a second; and she tensed, like a cat responding to some invisible stimulus in the room.

  “Excuse me…”

  “It’s okay,” Micki assured her, and the queer look disappeared. “I just had to check.”

  “For…?” Not sure, herself, that she really wanted to know.

  Micki started to say something, stopped herself. “Nothing,” she said at last. “Just thinking out loud.”

  “Uh-huh,” Melissa empathized. “I know what you mean.” Then she hustled Micki out of the room and turned down the lights, before they wound up checking under the bed for gremlins. To Gwen, she added, “We’ll be right out here, if you need anything.”

  Gwen nodded, leaning back in exhaustion. “Micki…” she added.

  Micki turned. “Yeah, babe…?”

  “Call Gary?”

  “Sure thing.” Micki nodded as well, smiling.

  And the door hissed shut between them.

  Melissa showed Micki to a little waiting area full of stale magazines. En route, she filled in a lot of blanks.

  “You said you were having a picnic,” she said. “Did Gwen eat before the seizure?”

  “No, she didn’t,” Micki replied. “She was on the phone for a while, trying to reach her husband, and then she had to use the can. We were both pretty starved…”

  “Uh-huh,” Melissa said, nodding to herself. “Her blood sugar’s way down.”

  Micki looked at her worriedly. “Is she going to be okay?”

  Melissa smiled. “Yeah, she’ll be fine. This kind of thing happens a lot. I have to check with her physician, but offhand I’d say we give her some ginger ale to get her blood sugar back up, let her rest, get an hour of good readout, and we can send her home. He might want to have her in tomorrow, though. Do a full sonogram, just to be safe.”

  “You mean her doctor won’t come in today?” Micki asked, a little shocked.

  “Are you kidding?” Smiling. “This is NFL playoff day, Eagles against the Giants. Like I
care, right?” Rolling her eyes. “Half the doctors on this staff are at home with their pagers turned off. You could cure cancer and they wouldn’t want to know about it until after six.”

  Micki smiled.

  “Oh, well,” Melissa said, politely excusing herself. “Make yourself comfortable. I have a call to make.”

  Micki nodded, and thanked her. She set off down the hall, heading for a phone. She had a couple of calls to make herself.

  A local one to Gary.

  And the other, a very long-distance one indeed.

  Gwen laid back and listened to the syncopated white noise that marked the life of her child. The paper tongue grew longer by the minute. The little LED heart flashed reassuringly with every beat: hypnotic, lulling.

  She stared at it for a long time, afraid to take her eyes away, as if the eternal vigilance were any defense at all. The room was warm and dark, womblike in effect. The leaky sink in the bathroom kept up a steady drip…drip…drip.

  Gwen lay there, unable to sleep, unable to stay awake.

  Until eventually simple exhaustion carried her to a state somewhere in between…

  A solitary droplet of water, sailing down: a shining, innocent orb. Atoms held together by ironclad molecular bonds, spinning through space like a jewel, a perfect crystal ball.

  The drop fell through a hollowed cathedral of flesh, passed ribs rising up like buttresses, falling toward a still black pool below.

  It struck the surface, sending up a spray like a tiny crown; a spray that stayed up, became something not solid and not liquid but other, like a puncture on the surface on the pool.

  And from within: the beating of wings.

  The hand came next: baby fingers, curled into a fist. It rose from the wound in the water as if holding a prize.

  Slowly the fingers uncurled, revealing a wasp.

  It unfurled its wings and took off, flying up into shadows.

  Then came a torrent of tiny buzzing bodies. Spilling through the hole, swarming around the arm. Filling the empty spaces with an angry insect chorus, rising like stinging angels into the vaulted darkness above…

  Heading for the beating heart…

  “Oh God!!” Gwen cried, lurching awake. “No!”

  She sat up with a start. Beside her, the fetal monitor was thudding arrhythmically, its numerical LED display jumping and falling, the little heart flashing on and off. On and off.

  On…

  …and off.

  Melissa had just gotten off the phone with Gwen’s doctor. He agreed with her prognosis entirely, enough so that he felt no major need to see her before Monday. It was a consideration that clearly owed more to gameside than bedside manner.

  She was just coming back with the ginger ale when she heard the first scream.

  Melissa burst through the door and beelined straight for Gwen, who lay fetally clutching herself like a woman hugging a medicine ball. The monitor’s warning light fired up, flashing BASELINE PRESSURE OFF SCALE. The alarm was going off, a nerve-wrenching metallic buzz as the digital readout flashed 158…140…

  Then nothing.

  “Shit,” Melissa muttered. She grabbed the tongue of paper, traced the point where the peaks dropped off.

  “Where’s Spike?” Gwen cried.

  “Don’t worry,” Melissa said. “It just slipped.” She moved the disk, diligently searching. The sensor plate on the sonogram scraped across the surface of her skin, filling the air with a rumbling white noise, finding nothing.

  “Where IS he?” Gwen wrenched, and the disk popped off completely.

  The graph flat-lined.

  And the two women began a war of wills.

  For Gwen, it was the breaking straw. A distant, reasonable part of her brain insisted that the nurse was right, there was a perfectly good explanation for all of it. It was steamrollered into oblivion by the howling inchoate part that knew beyond all shadow of doubt that something was wrong, her baby was dead and her dreams had died with it, a little sleeping corpse floating inside her, sleeping forever…

  “Hold still, dammit!” Melissa said sharply.

  “He’s dead!” Gwen’s hysteria came rolling back. “Oh God, he’s dead!”

  “No, he isn’t!”

  Melissa’s mind was much simpler on the matter. She completely refused to accept it. Babies didn’t slip away like that, just drop off the meter like an unchained anchor. There was almost always a downward slide, and the lack of it on the graph told her it had simply moved, that there was still life in there somewhere.

  She just couldn’t find it, somehow.

  The Taylor woman was losing it fast. They’d have to sedate her if she didn’t level out. “Please, you’ve got to be still!” Melissa said, searching with a methodical desperation.

  She glanced at her watch. One minute and counting. One more and she’d worry, but not until then. She knew what kind of prenatal gymnastics a fetus could perform; flipping head over heels, changing sides completely in an eyeblink, damn near anything.

  The sensor scratched. She pressed down hard.

  And something pressed back.

  Harder.

  “Whoa,” Melissa said, watching the surface of Gwen Taylor’s ballooning belly distend. For an instant she could practically see the outline of the child pushing outward in stark, fleshy relief.

  Then it receded, and Melissa found her mark.

  “Gotcha!” she said, pressing the disk down.

  The alarm at last shut off, a loud, steady thudding taking its place. On the display, the little heart lit up like a prize.

  “You see? I told you!” She steadied Gwen with her one hand and pressed the disk down with her other, making sure that the message got through. “Look! Look!”

  Gwen stopped bawling and looked: sure enough, the heartbeat was there. She held her breath and listened as the rhythm stayed, rock-steady.

  “He’s there,” Gwen whispered, the storm clouds abating inside her. “He’s really there.” She smiled a little, laughing through the tears.

  While Melissa, relieved, wiped a tear from her smiling eyes.

  “I told you,” she said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Gary and Laura sat before the monitor, two different sides of the very same coin.

  Gary was in his chair at the console, keeping calm by keeping his attention focused on the technical aspects of the matter at hand. Laura chain-smoked beside him, a dreadful exhilaration making her features flush and her body tight as an overwound spring.

  Fuck the smoke, Gary thought, watching the ashtray fill before him.

  They were busy watching reality unravel before their eyes.

  “What the hell is that?” Laura asked, starkly disbelieving.

  “That,” Gary whispered, “is all fucked up.”

  On the screen, Drew’s face was blown up and frozen in all its gruesome distinction. He was leering over the steering wheel and laughing, head bobbing like a demented dashboard ornament.

  “He’s wearing a mask…” Laura reasoned.

  “That can’t be right,” Gary muttered, shaking his head. He advanced the tape and Drew’s head bobbed into threequarter profile. “I mean, look at that.” He pointed to the screen. “That guy’s missing chunks.”

  “So what are you saying?” Laura stood up, started pacing in tight little circles, thinking on her feet. “I mean, one way we’ve got nuts in monster masks dumping hazardous waste in a hijacked truck. The other way we’ve got toxic mutant ninja rednecks…”

  She paused, realizing that even that didn’t fall off the edge of her weirdness map. “God, I’ve been in this business too long.” She turned to Gary. “So what do you think?”

  But Gary wasn’t listening anymore.

  His attention was focused instead on the screen. They had passed the end of Mike’s camera work, the static blip at which Kirk had stopped the tape before. On the far side of the wash of snow lay some more footage.

  Some very special footage.…

  The imag
e came back as a reverse POV, mounted on a tripod. It joggled for a moment, was still…

  …and then Kirk came running back into frame, stumbling through the mud and gravel as if the devil was on his ass with a blowtorch. He whirled, off-center, filled with panic and terror.

  “STOP!” he screamed, and tumbled out of frame.

  The image blipped, went to snow.

  It blipped back…

  …and Kirk was there, actually leaping toward the hood of the car, as if escaping the onslaught of a truck long since gone.

  “Wait,” Laura whispered. “Who’s shooting this?”

  Kirk rolled off the hood, walked toward the camera.

  “That little fuck…” Gary hissed, as Kirk’s body leaned across the frame, obscuring the lens as he fiddled with the controls.

  The camera blipped out again.

  “That prick,” Gary said, through gritted teeth. “That little mercenary bastard.” He felt the hatred percolate up inside, his fists clenching and unclenching arrhythmically. The image blipped out again.

  “I don’t believe this,” Laura said, her voice a barely audible croak.

  “I do,” Gary countered bitterly.

  Laura was about to speak when the screen blipped again.

  And they both fell silent.

  It was a tight close-up on a hand. The camera pulled back to reveal it sticking up forlornly out of a muddy track, fingers splayed back and broken like kindling, pointing awkwardly.

  The next pickup was a full three-sixty: excruciatingly slow, voyeuristic in its attention to detail. Gary knew the county medical examiner, and had seen his share of “home movies”—coroner-with-a-camcorder-style reference tapes of autopsies and murders and the occasional bizarro demise.

  They all paled as the camera completed its trip around the world.

  It spiraled in on a very dead Mike, held on his crushed and flattened countenance. His glasses were smashed into sharp little pizza-pie slices that dug into the soft cheek skin. His upper lip was split clear to his nostril, revealing shattered fulcrum over bloody, prominent teeth. There was a grin of sorts on his face, the sick little rictus of a member of the studio audience suddenly hauled up and quizzed by the host.