The Bridge Read online

  The Bridge

  John Skipp and Craig Spector

  LEISURE BOOKS

  DEATHSONG

  Sykes activated the acoustical monitoring system, a series of strategically placed microphones that relayed the sounds coming from the inside of the nuclear reactor vessel to the control room.

  A deafening roar spilled out of the monitor speakers, the sound of coolant water pummeling the core into obedience. Henkel, Jenkel, and Sykes leaned forward, scrutinizing the rumbling wall of noise.

  Jenkel was the first to notice. “There,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

  Henkel and Sykes cocked an ear toward the sound. It hit them within seconds of one another. “Jesus,” Sykes whispered, as the fleshy part of his neck prickled with dread.

  It was an eerie barbed filigree of sound that rose and fell and twisted, not beneath the roar or behind it, but somehow in it, a frequency shifting inside the water-sound. As they listened one thing became clear. It was no accident. It was too complex and multi-timbral, too…intelligent.

  The reactor was singing.

  To Gaia and Linda Marotta Big goddess. Little goddess.

  “To be an Error and to be cast out is a part of God’s design.”

  William Blake

  “Nature does not premeditate; she does not use mathematics; she does not deliberately produce whole patterns, she lets whole patterns produce themselves. Nature does what nature demands; she is beyond blame and responsibility.”

  Peter S. Stevens

  Patterns in Nature

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Excerpt

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  PART FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  PART SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  PART SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  PART EIGHT

  PARABLE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sunday, November 23

  Paradise, Pennsylvania

  3:00 a.m.

  The thing Boonie loved most about dumping off Black Bridge was how altogether goddam convenient it was. Take, for example, the traveling time. Even with miniature minefields of ice booby-trapping the backroads of Hellam, he figured ten minutes tops in the old Dodge truck to hump a full load of barrels from there to here.

  So even if the storm broke before they were done—and the odds on that kept looking better and better—it still wouldn’t take them but forty-five minutes to unload the whole batch and skedaddle back home.

  On nights like tonight, he was especially appreciative.

  Not that they’d seen many nights quite like this.

  “Jesus,” Boonie spat out, grinning. “Would you look at that shit.” He jabbed one oversized thumb at the clouds, hanging swollen and gray in the black sky overhead. His other hand gripped the wheel in a casual stranglehold, steering by intuition. “They look like big dead ugly brains, you know it? Like the whole sky is made out of brains…”

  “Let’s just go back, man,” Drew muttered from the passenger seat, bulging lemur eyes aglisten with crystal meth and anxiety. “Do it tomorrow or something. We can’t work in this shit.”

  Boonie scowled, dodged a pothole. “You’re such a fuckin’ wiener, Drew. You don’t like the storm? I love it, man.”

  The sky went kaboom and neon-flickered, winter lightning twitching to the angry rowl of God. Drew jumped and shivered. It was funny as hell. “I love this shit,” Boonie reaffirmed, gazing ahead at their destination.

  Black Bridge loomed before them, stark against the violent, primal sky. It didn’t need anyone’s help to rate as ultimate creature-feature territory. It was a brooding, decrepit old railroad crossing, limned by crumbling stone and situated smack-dab in the middle of nowhere: a rusting dinosaur from the days when trains were the lifeblood, steel rails the veins of Paradise County and the nation.

  A generation of disuse had left it overgrown, flanked by bleached bony trees, choked with kudzu and dense, gnarled undergrowth. Many of the ties had long gone punky and worm-holed, but its poured concrete pylons and steel beams still held, casting fat lightning shadows on the murky green waters of the Codorus Creek, some thirty feet below.

  The only way in was via Toad Road, a bumpy, chuck-holed dirt access barely wide enough to accommodate the overloaded truck. Snaking through the verdant green valley at the east end of the county, Toad Road went unmarked and appeared on none but the most anal tax maps of the county, which pretty much sewed up the privacy angle. By day, it was home only to dopers, dirtbikers, and hunters looking to poach an off-season deer or two.

  By night, no one came there at all.

  Yep, Boonie loved everything about this place: its proximity, its privacy, its dread-inducing atmosphere. But the thing he loved most was the simple fact that if you pulled right up in the middle of the bridge and angled the sucker back until your ass hung over the side, you could sorta just lean the barrels off the back and let fly straight into the creek. Fuckers never even had to come down off the bed. That cut down on a lot of the really heavy lifting, which was the worst part of the job, except maybe for the smell.

  Bradley Gene Pusser—“Boonie” to his friends—was a twenty-five-year-old, six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-and-forty-seven-pound mountain of ugly intent. His flapjowled, aging-Elvis features were pasty and unpleasant, eyes sullen and bulging under the brim of his blue Steelers cap. Along with his size and his nasty disposition, he’d inherited the Pusser genetic penchant toward alcoholism, pattern baldness, and flab.

  All told, life had been one steep, harsh, downhill slide since the end of his high school football career. For a while there, back in the glory days, he�
�d been able to entertain dreams, of scholarships and pro ball and a permanent all-expense-paid ticket out of this pisshole town. His coach believed, his teammates believed, the nookie-nookie candyass cheerleaders believed, and god damn if his own daddy—the venerable Otis J., Jr.—hadn’t come to believe that a Pusser had been born who could break the chain and bust on through to some kind of success.

  But when his right kneecap vaporized late in the season of his senior year, so had his ticket out of town, and his dreams. Suddenly, the calls from Penn State and Indiana dried up; his name disappeared from the local sports pages; and Otis—who’d taken to telling everyone within earshot that his boy was gonna go big-time—suddenly Boonie and Otis and the whole goddam family had to bite the bullet and own up to the facts: no Pusser was ever gonna amount to a hill of shit.

  And Boonie would always be a Pusser.

  From that moment on, he’d thrown himself into the family business with a vengeance, working long and hard to make his Pappy proud again. It was dirty work, but it paid cash money, and Pussers weren’t shy where there was money to be made. In fact, business had boomed since he’d taken over the grunt work, leaving Otis to preside over public relations and pursue his hobby of stargazing through the bottom of a Jim Beam bottle.

  On the other hand, there was cousin Drew.

  “Here we go, cuz,” Boonie said, pulling up to the point where the road met the railroad tracks. He grunted, shoving the truck into low gear. It was hard to maneuver in this much darkness; even the headlights were swallowed up by the storm. He laid on the gas and eased off the clutch, careful to roll up onto the tracks without losing the load.

  “Watch out!” Drew whined, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He was the runt of Uncle Bud’s litter, a complete genetic one-eighty from the rest of the menfolk in the Pusser family tree. At twenty years old, he was as much a man as he was ever likely to be: knock-kneed and scrawny, with a chicken-bone chest and a cratered, crescent-moon face. His hair was a black matted oil slick that trickled down way past his shoulders. He wore a black leather jacket and little fingerless gloves, a greasy Harley T-shirt, and tons of biker gear, though he didn’t own a bike and wouldn’t have known how to ride it if he did.

  Drew’s contact sport of choice was a little liquid-crystal video game that he wore on his digital watch. It had an eensy little jet that bombed a teensy little city; every time he dropped a bomb, it played a weensy, wheedling melody.

  The truck lurched again, jostling them so hard that Drew’s head rapped the ceiling. “Boonie!” he whined.

  “Fuck you, puss. Hang on,” Boonie growled. The truck groaned and gnashed gears, big knobby tires biting into rotted ties. The barrels shifted hard but stayed.

  “This place, you know, it really makes me fuckin’ nervous.” He diddled with his watch. Weedle eedle eee, it said. Weedle eedle eee…

  “Would you cut it out?” Boonie barked. “God, I hate that thing!”

  “Fuck you, man.” Drew sniffled. “This is modern technology at its finest, dude!”

  Weedle eedle eedle eeeeee…

  He smirked, and there went the last of Boonie’s patience. He pegged Drew’s skinny little jut-jawed profile with a straight-arm, flat-hand blow, square to the side of the head. Drew’s skull cracked painfully against the passenger side glass; he bit down on his tongue hard enough to spritz blood.

  “Ow! Fug you, Bood! I’b dellin’!” he whined, gripping his cheek.

  “Swear to God, Drew, if you don’t stuff it I’m gonna fuckin’ leave you here and keep your share of the money.”

  Drew started to counter, then abruptly and visibly changed his mind. He knew well enough, from previous experience, that Boonie was not fooling.

  For his part, Boonie found it downright gratifying to watch Drew fold like that. It gave him a nice warm feeling inside. So he decided to be magnanimous. “Here ya go, peckerhead. Got a surprise for ya.”

  Boonie produced a reedy little joint from his jacket pocket. “Just what the doctor ordered. Fire ‘er up.”

  “Thangs,” Drew sniffled, taking the doob.

  “We dump this load, I’ll cut us a couple lines,” Boonie said paternally. “In the meantime, I suggest you stoke up, ‘cause we got work to do.”

  Boonie laid on the brakes and brought the truck to a shuddering halt, then gnashed it into reverse and humped over the tracks until the tailgate was butt up against the lip of the rail. The positioning was perfect. He left the engine running against the cold and stared out over his domain.

  Above him, the heavens thundered, so close Boonie could feel it in the soles of his shoes. A flash of lightning seared the night sky. “BLOOOH-HA HA!” Boonie cackled, his features glowing green in the dashboard light. The first fat raindrops spattered the windshield.

  At last the storm had broken.

  The Codorus Creek had long been a sin-eater for the Industrial Revolution: a chemical cessway, accepting and dispensing with the intemperate by-products of the good life. Defense plants, research laboratories, factory farms, electroplate shops, paper mills, and landfills routinely decanted their excreta there. As such, even in the days before Boonie, it was already laced with “acceptable” levels of a thousand wild-card contagions: leads, cyanides, arsenics, alkalies, chlorinated hydrocarbons, dioxins, trioxons, trichlo-rophenal residues, poisons, and pesticides galore.

  But now there was a rusting graveyard under the waters beneath Black Bridge: tons upon tons of crushed drums and rotting husks, choking the space beneath the muddy surface. Most had long since popped their corks, but quite a few were still intact: fifty-five-gallon pockets of concentrated death, corroding the barrels from either side and then suppurating into the slipstream.

  Carcinogens settled in its silt, drifting lazily on their way to the river and the sea: mutagens skinned its sluggish surface, quietly rearranging the molecular building blocks of everything they touched. Carp and hardier garbage-eaters slid through its murky currents: gills siphoning oxygen, stockpiling pestilence.

  Mindlessly laying their eggs.

  Black Bridge was a toxic ground zero, an industrial Instant Primordial Stew. Only one century in the making, and already as rich as the brew from which all life-as-we-know-it sprang. Across the country, across the globe, countless thousands just like it lay dormant and sleeping.

  It was only a matter of time before the next wake-up call.

  At 3:27 that morning, it came.

  “BOMBS AWAY!” Boonie cried, and rolled another one down the chute.

  “Bombs away!” Drew reiterated, dropping the gate. It jutted over the rail like a stumpy steel diving board.

  A cobalt-blue fifty-five-gallon drum stenciled DANGER rumbled down the slight incline of the truck bed, then off and into the blackness below. There was a beat of silence as gravity took over, then a deep wet thwump almost musical in timbre as it broke the creek’s surface like a cannonball. A plume of water shot high into the air, then rained back down in a pelting, misty spray.

  “Bull’s-eye!” Drew cackled as he turned around. “Fuckin’ aye!” He was stoned as a bastard now, relaxing behind the job. With his red bandanna pulled up over his nose to cut the fumes, he looked like a cross between Bazooka Joe and the Frito Bandito.

  “Awright! Drewie gets a woody!” Boonie bellowed through his own paisley kerchief. “Shit, cuz, I knew you’d come ‘round!”

  The rain came down in earnest now, wet and steady. And warm, Boonie noted; strangely out of place, a summer storm snaking up from out of nowhere to thread through the chill November night. The warring fronts slammed together like invisible giants. Warm rain hit cold ground and hissed like whispering voices.

  Boonie left his cab door open anyway, the better to hear the radio. Starview 92 classic rock was layin’ down some fine old Allman Brothers, and they had the volume cranked to Brother Greg’s moody classic, “Midnight Rider.”

  Yeah, man, Drew smiled to himself, nodding in time with the tune. That’s exactly who we are. We’re the fuckin’ midni
ght riders, man. It gave him a little surge of pride, made him feel real good about himself.

  In fact, Drew was feeling fine. Never better. They were soaked, but it was great; a warm wind whipping around them, the whole world glowing and pulsing in time with the music.

  Boonie was trading air-guitar licks with the late great Brother Duane. Drew grinned at him and sucked on the joint through his impromptu mask. It gave him a toothless shadow mouth. He toked again and sucked the scarf full into his mouth, went bluh bluh bluh through the red cotton maw. Goddam, but he was funny sometimes.

  His lips began to tingle.

  The song ended, segued into “Riders on the Storm.” “Okay!” Boonie hollered. “Ready up! Only thirteen more to go!”

  “Fuckin’ aye!” Drew yelled back absently, thinking about his lips. The tingle was now a slight burning sensation. It was probably just the dope. Sometimes Boonie did dumb shit to get high, like cop some lame weed and lace it with crack or dust or whatever he had lying around. It made you, like, ultra-aware of your senses. Like the rain, trickling water down his spine. Like the howl of the wind through the trees, or the throb in his brain from sucking up all those fumes…

  “Ech,” Drew spat. His lips were really burning now; and worse, he could taste it: a bitter, pungent, distinctly chemical flavor. It stuck pins in the tip of his tongue and tickled at the roof of his mouth.

  It was starting to make him nervous.

  “Hey, Spacely Sprocket!” Boonie yelled. “You gonna give me a hand with this?” Drew turned to look at him, the barrel he was angling onto its side.

  “Boonie.” The name tasted vile in his mouth, down his throat. And his eyes were beginning to itch.

  “What?” Impatient.

  “Dude, I don’t feel so good.” He rubbed at his eyes, and the burn redoubled. “Ouch! Sonofabitch!” Now his nostrils were burning, and the smell was getting stronger. “Something’s wrong here, man…”

  “Don’t get paranoid on me, Drew. I thought we were havin’ fun.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  A thunderclap ignited in fiery gray light, directly above their heads. Drew’s bones nearly flew out through his skin; he could feel his nerves jangle and his heartbeat rev. “Christ!” he yelled, feeling suddenly light-headed.