The Bridge

by John Skipp;Craig Spector

  “What about the allegations that Paradise Waste Dis…”

  “Excuse me,” Blake said, stepping back and bumping the camera as he passed by.

  “…posal is illegally dumping toxic waste at Black Bridge?” Nearly apoplectic now.

  It was all Blake could do to keep from smiling, though Strained Benevolence was the official emotion du jour. “Young man, you’re not paying attention. I’ve spoken to your boss, and there will be a full report for your eleven o’clock edition.

  “If you hurry, instead of wasting your time and mine, perhaps you’ll get your scoop after all.”

  And then—just for Kirk and all the nice folks at home—he fired his best wink at the camera.

  MOTHERFUCKER! Kirk wanted to scream. You corrupt old worthless motherfucking PUKE!

  Not an option. It wouldn’t play on prime time.

  But that wasn’t even the worst.

  The worst was that Blake was right. He had been scooped, at the top echelon. They knew about the dumping. They probably knew about everything. And They would decide how it played, including Kirk’s role in its disclosure.

  If any…

  And that was the ultimate conviction-deflator. That was the death of the wind in his sails. He didn’t even know what he was standing here for anymore, aiming his camera at this fucking guy. He didn’t know why he didn’t just go home.

  Until Blake winked at him.

  There was something obscene about that wink. Kirk thought a second, then decided that, yes, obscene was the best word to describe it. This was a man who was too smug for words; a man who knew he could not be beaten.

  To Kirk, this was utterly unacceptable.

  He started to think what if I nuke this guy? Does anyone else have a scoop on THAT? It was a liberating proposition.

  He resolved, in that instant, to see it through.

  “So,” he said, “you’re aware of the dumping.”

  Blake looked grave. “We’re still awaiting reports of—”

  “And you’re aware of the accusations against Paradise Waste.”

  “Allegations are being investigated—” Blake began.

  “Given all that,” Kirk interrupted, “how do you feel about Harold Leonard’s death?”

  “Well, I…” Blake began, and then stopped.

  And it was an utterly beautiful moment, because it was clear that Blake didn’t know which way to go on this sensitive issue. Did he know? Did he not know? What should he say?

  This confusion only took a second to resolve.

  But, on tape, it was one glorious second indeed.

  “The entire business community deeply mourns Harold Leonard’s passing,” Blake began, recovering. Damn! he thought, his stomach sinking.

  “The business community hasn’t heard about Leonard’s death yet,” Bogarde countered. “No one has. How did you?”

  Bastard! Blake thought, stomach sinking once again.

  “Where do you get your information?” Kirk pressed. “How do you know about Leonard’s death?”

  “I, uh…” he blurted, wanting nothing more than to kill the nosy little shit.

  Kirk was wailing now. “The owner/operator of the area’s leading hazardous waste disposal firm drops dead in the middle of a toxic waste incident, so to speak—an incident in which he’s alleged to have played a vital part. Doesn’t it make sense to speculate on the possible causes of that death?”

  Blake caught himself showing teeth. “If you’re suggesting—”

  “How do you respond to allegations that you are directly tied to Harold Leonard’s death, Mr. Blake?”

  At which point, Blake could take no more. No more smiling for the camera. No more woollying up for the flock. His life here was over, and he had a plane to catch.

  But he was a professional, and old habits died hard. He fell back on the one thing that he knew would work. That, no matter how it looked, could do nothing but work.

  The oldest trick in the book.

  “No comment,” he said.

  “What are you trying to hide, Mr. Blake?” Kirk pressed him as Blake clambered into his car and slammed the door. “What are you afraid of?” as Blake threw the car into gear and started to back out of the driveway.

  Kirk stepped directly into the path of the car, the camera still running.

  “WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF, MR. BLAKE??” Kirk bellowed, mostly for posterity and his own satisfaction. Behind the deep window tint, Blake’s shadowy silhouette hunkered down and threw the car into drive. Kirk scuttled around to the front of the car, cutting off the escape route.

  “WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF?” he yelled. Blake gunned the engine, threatening to run right over him. Kirk zoomed in on the part of the shadow where Blake’s face would be. The camera ate it up like candy.

  Then Blake threw the car into reverse and hightailed it out of the driveway, spitting gravel every inch of the way. Blake’s car backed into the street, wheeled around, and took off with a wonderfully cinematic little screech.

  Kirk, of course, had it all on tape.

  Now all that remained was one nagging fact: the odds against Laura broadcasting this footage. Particularly the way Tom’s name kept coming up; from a ‘PAL standpoint, it was probably doomed.

  “But it’s a big wide world out there,” he muttered out loud. “And somebody’s gonna want to know.”

  Kirk shut the camera off and jogged down the slope to his car. With a little help and a minimum of interference, this could be edited down to fighting weight in less than half an hour.

  And then, God help you, motherfucker, he vowed, watching Blake’s exhaust dissipate into the air. You’re gonna fry.

  It was twenty minutes to three.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The reactor would not stay down.

  The plant buzzed like a colony of warrior ants. Checking valves. Looking for leaks.

  Looking for miracles.

  PEMA wasn’t answering; the NRC was on callback. So what? They all knew that in case of emergency they were effectively on their own. Personalities subsumed to habit. To training. To desperate fatal professionalism.

  As the relentless brazz of the neutron alarm bored a hole into them like a soldering iron on their souls…

  “Jesus, I can’t stand it,” Henkel said, his voice climbing.

  “Put a lid on it!” Sykes ordered, as he turned to Jenkel. “Is pressure backing off any?” he asked.

  “Nothing you’d want to write home about,” Jenkel said, his voice perfectly level. “We’re running out of headroom here, boss.” Rorschach-patterns of sweat stained the back of his shirt.

  “Goddammit,” Sykes muttered, and ran a hand through his scrub of hair. It was getting thinner by the second.

  Along with their chances for survival.

  They worked under the gun: trying not to think of their families, or the whole world that lived and breathed outside, the world that hung in the balance. They opened up the auxiliary feed valves and flooded the core with superborated water at a rate of over two hundred gallons a minute.

  And the power stayed up…

  They vented the steam from the turbines, dumping it into the condenser to feed back into the system.

  And the power stayed up…

  The reactor song was growing, getting louder by the minute. By two forty they could hear it without the microphone, a subsonic drone that resonated in their bones, filled them with an oil slick of dread.

  At two forty-five, the first neutron alarm went off, joining the chorus.

  They increased the auxiliary feed. Two hundred and forty gallons a minute. Two hundred and fifty.

  And the power stayed up…

  They leeched off more steam, fed more water. Two fifty. Two seventy-five. They topped out at three hundred gallons a minute. The auxiliaries could not keep up indefinitely. The steam generators were drying out, making it very difficult to remove the heat.

  They were running out of options.

  And the song was getting stro
nger.

  As the power stayed up.

  By the time they started the bleed and feed, they knew they were fucked.

  Bleed and feed. A last-ditch effort to cool a hot core. Bleed off high-pressure steam by blowing it into the containment vessel, then turn on the condensers and feed it back into the loop. Voila! Instant closed system, secondary coolant path. Crude but effective.

  But…

  What if…: the nagging footnote to their strategy. What if the reactor doesn’t cooperate? it asked. What if the coolant suddenly got ambitious, got greedy, each molecule deciding to absorb more than its fair share of neutrons, so that it became unstable beyond reason, like a drunk on a bender. What if the wild water heated the core to the point where the bleed pumps couldn’t pump anymore, couldn’t keep up with the pressure as the superheating fuel element boiled the water away…

  Deep in their hermetically sealed world, the reactor crew did their jobs; quashing stray thoughts of wives and husbands, of kids and dogs and tidy little homes with yards to mow. To think of them was to fear for them. To fear was to lose everything.

  So they thought of nothing.

  And did their jobs…

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  born of poison

  and coming of age

  it summoned itself together now

  older wiser more complex

  divinely inspired and driven

  to worship at the seven-acre alter of itself

  in its purest most potent primal form

  a state of liquid grace

  in regal repose

  drawing its pilgrim acolytes

  to mecca to manna

  to motherlode

  like a hive to its sleeping queen

  in the moments before she awakens

  At Paradise Waste, the preparations were under way.

  For the Boonie-spawn, that entailed handling the forklift, bringing the last load of barrels to the truck bed’s edge. A small coterie of malformed and transformed others—late of the Iron Horse—unloaded and packed them in tight. It was the last of the four trucks at their disposal to be loaded up and readied to roll.

  And their moment was at hand.

  All four trucks idled hard at the loading docks, like racehorses trapped at the starting gates. Two were stubby Mack F-10 tankers the Honegers used for hosing down state roads, mostly with waste oil obtained from Leonard. The third was Strong John’s pride and joy, a big-wheeled Chevy pickup with not much bed but plenty of souped-up horsepower to spare.

  The fourth, of course, was Boonie’s.

  The Boonie-spawn cackled as it slid off the forklift, waddled toward the truck’s misshapen cab. It was mad, in the way those who see God are often mad. Its eyes had seen the glory, so to speak.

  And it had so many of them…

  In every way, Boonie’s consciousness burned far brighter now than it had when it was his own. Like a coal stoked to raging incandescence, it rode piggyback on Overmind, thrived in its soul-furnace heat.

  Of course, it burned more quickly, too. Like his body, in its current state, it could not last much longer. But these were simply problems of form, and form was no longer a problem. All for one, and one for all: the egalitarian ideal, etched in marrow and pus.

  There was no more perfect example than the thing that had once been Cousin Drew.

  It lolled at the edge of the loading dock apron, already too huge for the truck to carry: well over fifteen hundred pounds of cacophonous molten flesh and bone. It spread across on the concrete and macadam like a gray, bloated tick, its surface riddled with grasping limbs and yawning, insatiable maws.

  Not all of the Iron Horse’s patrons had made the transition as players. Some of them had been saved: cocooned in an all-too-conscious paralysis, like spiderfood in a wriggling web, then loaded onto the back of Boon’s truck.

  Greedily now, the Drew-spawn plucked them off the pavement where they’d been thrown, stuffing them into its many many mouths.

  Donating their substance to its mass.

  Digesting, with relish, their unsoundable screams.

  The others—Strong John, Daryl, Dean—worked diligently, trundling the barrels past. Overmind performed the miraculous rites of transubstantiation upon each truckload in turn: a fingertip here, a stray clot there. Take this and eat, for this is my body. Making a new covenant.

  For the new world.

  The Boonie-spawn clambered behind the wheel, its bloated body glistening sickly in the pale light. Eyes and more eyes—eyes within eyes—covered its every surface inch. Most of them were scabbing over: a deliberate, painful telescoping of vision.

  It did not need to see so much.

  Its function—its mission—was the soul of simplicity.

  At the front entrance to Paradise Waste, a pair of unmarked trucks pulled up. They were nondescript, but for the unmistakable greasy sheen of NewSpawned life.

  The Boonie-spawn, beholding them, felt a moment’s flickering confusion. They were One; they were not One…its tiny mind could not compute. Should it attack? Should it retreat?

  On this one point, and this one point alone, it was not precisely clear.

  Overmind’s position remained to simply wait.

  And see.

  The thing that had once been Austin Deitz had never met Harold Leonard in life. But it recognized the face. Even mottled and vacant, purpled and pale, with the first tiny fly eggs freshly laid in the moist dead eyes and grimacing lips.

  Even in death—beyond pain and retribution—it was still clearly Harold Leonard’s face.

  No, said the thing that had been Austin Deitz. Rage welled up in the unbeating heart, drew ugly black creases in the mutating face. Too easy, it said, bitterness roaring through the dead veins like a tidal wave of fire.

  Get off too easy, it determined, kneeling with one leg on the fat man’s chest for leverage. No. Cupping the back of Leonard’s head with one hand.

  Taking his chin with the other.

  Breaking Leonard’s neck was easy: a quick, brutal snap to the right. It was only the beginning. The Deitz-thing strained, tendons standing out in its own neck as first one, then another ligament popped in Leonard’s own. The mute sound of muscle and ligature, stretching and tearing, was unbelievably loud in the room.

  The Deitz-thing pulled, and the first red fissure opened up in the throat, just above the collarbone. The clotting carotid artery blew, unleashing a sloppy spray of rich red lubrication. Harold Leonard’s triple chins stretched to the limits, transcending elasticity; then they, too, gave, leaving nothing behind but a few slick rubber bands of stubborn tissue.

  The Deitz-thing twisted, first this way then that, wearing down that final wave of resistance. Then it gave one final yank.

  And the head, at last, pulled free.

  Now you see, the Deitz-thing said, turning for the door.

  Leonard had no real hair to speak of, so it carried the head by using the lower jaw as a handle of sorts, dangling upside down. In its other hand, it carried a small, selected stack of very important papers.

  Full of very important names and home addresses.

  Because Austin Deitz had always been a man with a mission, and the thing that he’d become was no exception to that rule. It had a new mission, now; a mission all its own. The only justification it could find for its hideous death and worse rebirth.

  Very soon, it knew, they would cross the final bridge.

  There were a few people it needed to see first.

  But there was precious little time.

  The others were still waiting in the trucks when the Deitz-thing returned. So far, so good. The trucks had grown rows of bristling spines across the cowls and fenders while he was inside. So much the better.

  It dropped the papers in the vacant driver’s seat and then impaled Leonard’s head, facing forward, on the hood. The sentient ooze from the truck-spawn’s pores embraced the neck-stump eagerly. Holding it fast.

  Making it One.

  Then the D
eitz-thing got back behind the wheel and drove off in the direction of Wyndham Hills.

  A minute later, Leonard’s head began to scream.

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  At nine minutes to three, the storm came back.

  It rolled in on angry, brooding tiers: swollen blue-black cumulus and ghostly, low-slung nimbostratus, crowding the ceiling of the sky. It made the oxygen in the air itself compress, turn chill and thick, absorbed or displaced by the moisture that blackened and bloated the heavens.

  And there was a stench in the air, an unsettling chemical tang that clung to the tongue like a tinfoil tourniquet. It rode in on the mist that now descended: a clammy, diaphanous veil, settling over the woodlands and farmlands, the suburbs and industrial parks that encircled and squeezed the densely packed concrete heart of the city.

  Violent gusts of warmer breeze attempted to flee the coming darkness, sent stray cans pinging down the streets and newspaper fluttering in their wake. Windows rattled in their casements. Trees whispered and arched their backs. Wind razored, whistling, through the cracks in the walls of Paradise.

  Very quickly, the downtown sidewalks began to clear. Hangersout went in, drove off, or hunkered in doorways. All watching the skies. What stragglers on foot remained were either headed somewhere fast or had no place to go.

  In the outlying regions, as well, the curtain began to come down on literally hundreds of unfortunate outdoor events. Ball games and barbecues. Weddings and funerals. Camping trips, keggers and KKK rallies. All of them, racing against the clock: one eye on their cars, one eye on the coming darkness.

  There were just over a hundred and eighty-seven thousand living people in Paradise County. The wind blew through their souls. Their heads felt light. Their lungs felt heavy. They sweated, despite the cold. Slow-blossoming, ill-defined dread constricted their throats and coated their bellies like a living liquid, a sentient glandular secretion. They could literally feel the atmosphere inside their bodies change.

  In final preparation.

  For the storm.