“Half an hour.”
Niko scrutinizes the unnerving spaceless juncture of granite and ground from which part of Sam emerges like some inflatable Sam doll flattened there, the rough depression beneath him meticulously scraped for how many patient painful years like a dribble of water carving out a canyon. Half an hour? “No way.”
“Half an hour, Niko. I swear to. Well, I swear. Look, I’ve dug down to. About my belly button. My arm won’t go. Any lower because. My back won’t bend. It’s just my hips. And my legs. Taking the weight. Under here. If you use that. Pitchfork. To jab out a. Shallow trench about. Down to my knees. I think you can. Work it in. From an angle. And lever me out.”
Niko stares. “Are you out of your fucking mind? I’ll probably stab you as much as the ground. And do you know what it’ll do to you if I lever you out of there?”
Sam grins. “What, you think it can. Get any worse?” He pats the granite looming over him. “Come on, Niko. I can’t bleed to death. I can only bleed. And you’re not. Gonna kill me. Cause I’m already dead. And if it hurts me. Well. Death’s a bitch huh? Half an hour and. If I’m not out. You can go your. Merry way and. I’ll still be grateful. For you knocking. A hundred years off. My downtime here.”
Niko eyes the iron rod. He stands slowly and reverses it until the business end is pointed toward Sam. “You always did talk me into the most unbelievable shit.”
In the dimness Niko can’t tell if Sam’s expression is deadpan or earnest. “You ain’t seen nothin yet. Pilgrim.”
IT TAKES CLOSER to an hour, every second of it nauseating.
The pronged rod is really more trident than pitchfork. Niko sets to work tentatively, pushing the prongs along the depression begun by Sam and jabbing at the hard ground. Soon he sees his trepidation will get him nowhere. Propped on his free arm Sam lifts up to make a space between himself and the compacted ground. There’s still only a few inches’ clearance and it’s hard for Niko to get leverage. On one knee he pulls the trident back and shoves it forward again. The shock of it striking jolts his hands. Sam hisses and grimaces.
Niko hesitates. “Did I hit you?”
“Just ignore me. Okay? I’ve developed. A high tolerance.”
“Okay.” Niko jabs again. Again Sam winces. They continue like this, Niko jabbing and Sam making pained faces and even whimpering once, until Sam suggests Niko scoop out the dirt he has scraped loose. Niko wipes sweat from his brow and reaches under Sam. His position necessarily close and uncomfortably intimate. Sam’s face caked with old blood. One eye nearly bugging out of his head, both cobwebbed with burst capillaries. Smell of rot.
What Niko’s hand encounters in the cramped hot damp space beneath Sam’s flattened body does not feel recognizably human. He scoops dirt back toward himself and his hand emerges bloody. “Jesu—”
“Don’t.”
Niko stares amazed at the fear in Sam’s cry.
“No holy names man. Not here. They’ll be on you. Like a cheap suit. And they’ll make you. Sorry you even know. How to talk.”
“Okay.”
“I know it doesn’t. Mean anything. When you say it. We all got into. The habit up there. But it means something. Down here. Trust me. And they do not. Like it.”
“Okay.” And recommences jabbing with the trident.
Before long Sam screams with every trident stroke, but whenever Niko hesitates Sam begs him to keep going. The head of the trident caked with blood and dirt and gore. Niko puts his hand beside Sam’s ruined face and reaches under the block and scoops out tacky dirt and something moist and filthy. He brushes off the dirt and the object flops in his hand. Sam’s penis. Niko stares stupidly at it and then realizes what it is and yells and jumps backward, flinging it away as if it is a snake poised to strike him. He turns and spews his last earthly meal upon the hard flat ground. When he’s finished heaving and he straightens and turns to Sam to say he’s sorry but he just can’t do it, he can’t do this to another human being dead or damned or friend or stranger, and Sam sees it in his face and interrupts to tell him that it hurts but not that bad, and besides the pain is easier to take when you know it isn’t mortal. That no wound here is mortal. If you didn’t heal they couldn’t keep on torturing you.
It doesn’t make Niko feel any better but it does let him go on. Soon he’s jabbing the trident in as far as it will go, and Sam tells Niko to try using it to pry him out.
There’s only one way to do it and Niko doesn’t protest. He pushes the trident until it grates against Sam’s flattened hipbone and then wedges the iron rod where the bottom of the block meets the lip of the depression and begins to pull. Easily at first, then harder. Sam pulls himself with his free arm, screaming but refusing to let Niko ease up. The trident tip scrapes bone and the rod slides back toward him. Either Sam has moved forward or the trident has ripped across his flesh. Or both.
Niko wedges the trident and pries again. Sam is definitely coming loose. His crushed arm flops into the depression. Sam reaches with his good arm to drag the crushed one free of the block and it flops onto the plain like the boneless limb of a freshbaked gingerbread man. Sam oozes from his stone prison like something excreted. Niko drops the trident and grabs Sam around his chest to pull the rest of him free. Sam’s chest is soft and full of lumps and it gives in the wrong places. Niko feels as if he’s hugging a loose and lumpy sack of flour. Both men yell as Sam pulls free, jellied legs dragging behind him and raw exposed muscle and bone and a loop of intestine coming out his ass and glistening in the pale orange light.
Niko is about to blow his groceries again and he sets Sam down. Sam clings to him a lingering moment with his only working arm, drowning man to driftwood, then lets go to flop onto the ground with a soft resilience that makes Niko tighten his throat and look away. His old friend’s body so distorted it inspires horror more than empathy or even dread. Sam’s been trapped long enough to heal but his organs and bones have grown back flat.
Unable to lift his head Sam stares up at the sky. “How do I look?”
“Like you crawled out from under a rock. What now, Sam?”
“Now we get out of here.”
“Sam, you can’t walk.”
Sam merely stares up at him. Of course he can’t walk, his legs are flabby tentacles. Blood burst from his skin and even toenails when the block landed on him, blood and shit spurted from his bowels along with loops of intestine and other unidentifiable stuff. His pelvis and ribcage are crushed and every organ that wasn’t shredded by bone had to have hemorrhaged. The pain alone would have killed Sam if he weren’t already dead. His brain had probably hemorrhaged like sat-on macaroni. It’s obvious as the block beside them that Sam isn’t going anywhere anytime soon unless somebody carries him, and the only person likely to do that for a long long time is Niko. The blunt truth of it hangs there between them like an odor.
Sam looks up at him. “I’d do the same for you.”
“I know you would.” Sam would, too. He was the guy who made the news by charging a machine gun nest with a grenade in hand and pulling the pin to lob it in through sheer inertia long after he’d been shot dead, the guy who dives in the frozen river to retrieve the fallen baby and hands it up to the mother before submerging one last time. Posthumous decoration was invented for men like Sam.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Fire away.”
“How’d you die?”
Absurdly and despite his horrific appearance Sam looks embarrassed. “Tried to break up a fight in a bar. Don’t know what it was about. Guy had a knife and the other one didn’t. I didn’t think it was fair, that’s all. I was—well, what difference does it make, here I am. Oh well, huh.” Sam snorts. “That’s probably what they put on my tombstone. Oh well.”