Niko screws the cap back on and wipes his trembling hand against his pants. Attaboy. Now look away from it. Come on. Leave it.
He grabs his guitar case and kicks the hole in the wall a little wider. He bends to crawl outside but halfway out he stops and yells Shit and shoves the hardcase out ahead of him and backs into the slagging igloo and picks up the bottle. Fuel. I’ll need fuel. The air is sauna thick as damping fire steams. Niko puts the fifth in a coat pocket. Its weight an anchor as he hurries from his shelter’s rain.
TRUDGING ON THE frozen plain and holding high a makeshift torch a few hours later Niko feels the temperature begin to rise. An oddly warm wind gusts. Niko lowers the guttering torch and draws a deep breath. Rot decay corruption. He glances behind him. No one here but us chickens. Somewhere back there his igloo has melted to a puddle and frozen again.
Niko sets the guitar case on the milky ice and pulls his last branch from his belt with stonestiff fingers. He transfers the flame from the dying brand to the new one like a lost Olympian and shields it with his body against the mild breeze until the new branch catches. It brightens right away. Well, how bout that. The torch is passed.
Niko continually trades torch and guitar so that his hands can recover some mobility and feeling. At one point the shadow of his torch wielding hand falls across a face caught screaming in the ice and Niko’s shadowfingers form a figure. He says Bunny and makes it hop.
Niko’s feeling pretty danged good. He was just breathing in a room full of whiskey vapor and he’s buzzed for the first time in a quarter century. Thanks to his old anesthesiologist pal Dr. Daniel his scrapes and cuts and bruises are now dull background throbs. If he makes it off the ice his wounds will probably sing an aria as his body warms again. Meantime thankee Dr Dee.
The abortive toast he’d shared with Phil to commemorate the Deal twentysomething years ago had been Niko’s last taste of alcohol. Drinking champagne beside a wreck that held the body of his brother and convinced he was hallucinating. The whole episode brought on by head trauma after the accident, with a dash of withdrawal symptoms thrown in for good measure. The Mouton Cadet had barely cleared his palate before he was on his knees in the middle of that preternaturally quiet Hollywood street and retching while above him Phil-for-short had grinned and grinned. “If you think that’s bad, wait’ll next time you try shooting up. Welcome to sobriety, Niko-holic.”
From that moment on the very smell of alcohol made Niko queasy. Drinking it was out of the question. Any other drug was inconceivable.
But now he wants to suck on that old JD bottle like a baby at its momma’s tit. He has it in his power right this very second to fall off the wagon hard enough to get road rash and it sounds like a terrific idea.
I should throw the fucker out on the ice right now. But I might need the alcohol for fuel. Besides it’s a test.
A test, buddy pal? Like the smoking test you failed with flying colors in the cab and on the Battlements? You know you’re digging yourself a hole that leads straight down to china white.
He holds high the burning torch and continues his determined march across the frozen plain, Prometheus in rags.
Now with the air warming and his last torch burning Niko suddenly remembers the message in the bottle. Shit, how could I have forgotten it? Well you’re juggling a lot of balls here buddy. He sets down the guitar case and feels in his pocket for the glass tube. His fingertips brush the box of matches and the cigarillo pack. Traveler’s charms. He pulls the glass tube from his pocket and examines it by paltry torchlight. Thick as his pinky and sealed with a cork. Niko yanks the cork out with his teeth. Fuck it tastes like whiskey. His mouth waters as he spits the cork out on the ice. Litterbug.
He taps the note out and unrolls it and unfolds it and stares at it in utter disbelief.
Buddy pal—
One for the road.
Thick ivory laid cardstock paper with a deckled edge. Thin-stemmed broadcurved letters in the calligraphic style of a broadnibbed fountain pen. No signature. No need for one because the handwriting is Niko’s own.
SHORTLY AFTER THE final torch has guttered out the ice grows slick with standing puddles. Niko has discovered Hell’s own springtime thaw, a change of seasons measured by a progression not of days but of miles. In the distance is a line that seems to mark the end of the ice. Beyond it is a redlit gleam that must be water runoff from the melting plain. Beyond that it’s hard to see.
Niko’s hiking shoes are not exactly built for trekking over plains of melting ice. He’s already pratfallen several times and bruised his tailbone.
The whiskey bottle taps his hip in time with his walk. With the branches burned away his rationale for toting booze has gone up in smoke. Why doesn’t he heave that bottle as hard as he can just to hear its satisfying smash upon the ice?
The melting plain begins a slight downslope toward the river. A constant runoff flows around his heels. His frostbit feet throb with the water’s cold.
The icy reach is dotted now with body parts uncovered by its melting. Upthrust clenching hands and idly kicking legs and staring faces brought toward the light however dim. The closer Niko gets to the river the more there are of the indifferent dead emerging from the ice, till at the slippery bank itself the icebound souls are embedded only from the waist down. Several are free above the knee. Blankly they stare at Niko as he passes among their transfixed number like an orchard keeper. He tries to tell himself he doesn’t care. All he wants to do is find a boat, a bridge, a way to reach the inner shore.
If the plain of Hell is infinite and the earthquake-created Ledge is infinite and the Lower Plain and frozen reach are also infinite then perhaps the river carrying the runoff and the thawed out damned is infinite too. Infinitely long but not infinitely wide; the far bank is only a quartermile away. Swimming distance, if Niko were a decent swimmer even unencumbered by the guitar case. If the water were not cold enough to freeze his joints motionless within two or three minutes. If the rapid current were not laden with the detritus of bodies like a logflow.
It looks as if a thick line runs from bank to bank downriver in the distance. A bridge?
As he heads downriver thousands upon thousands of naked freezing bodies tumble in the shallows of the sloping shore, huddle into fetal shapes for warmth, hold one another as the current sends them downstream to bump and smash along the shore, tissue frozen but not numbed and feeling ripsaw cold in every isolated nerve.
Suddenly an enormous black thing breaks surface, streamlined like some creature evolved for life in windtunnels. A gash of sawblade mouth opens as it arcs back into the water, and where it disappeared it leaves a large red stain that spreads and quickly dissipates.
Niko stares at the placid water where the thing knifed out and in without a ripple. Finding a bridge is definitely the thing to do.
A MILE OR so later Niko finds a small patch of ice free of emergent hands or legs or faces or backs. He squats on the frozen riverbank to rest his feet as best he can without actually sitting in the chill runoff.
The frozen dead around him stare. One woman is embedded in the ice up to her thighs. She continually slaps her paleblue face as if to make herself feel something, anything, even pain as substitute for warmth.
Ahead of Niko two embedded men face each other a dozen yards from the water. One buried to midthigh, the other to midshin. One large and fat and covered with thick black hair, the other slim and pale and nearly hairless. Both scream hoarsely at each other. Apparently each thinks the other more fortunate. They aren’t close enough to hit each other but that doesn’t stop them from trying.