NOS4A2(187)

When she lifted her chin and looked up, the Shorter Way Bridge was there, its mouth black in the cotton-candy-colored haze. She exhaled, a long rush of breath, and almost shivered with relief. The bridge was there and would take her out of this place, back to where she needed to go. The shadows that waited within were, in their way, as comforting as her mother’s cool hand on her fevered forehead. She missed her mother, and her father, and Lou, and was sorry they had not all had more time together. It seemed to her that all of them, not just Louis, would be waiting for her on the other side of the bridge, waiting for her to climb off the bike and fall into their arms.

The Triumph banged up onto the bridge, over the wooden sill, and began to rattle over the boards. To her left she saw the old familiar green spray paint, three sloppy letters: LOU →.

The Wraith boomed up into the bridge behind her, struck the rusted old Raleigh, and sent it flying through the air. It whistled past Vic on her right. The snow came roaring behind, an obliterating blast of it, choking the far end of the bridge, filling it like a cork jammed into a bottle.

“YOU TATTOOED CUNT!” Charlie Manx screamed, his voice echoing through the vast hollow space. “YOU TATTOOED HOOR!”

The bumper banged into the back of the Triumph. The Triumph careened to the right, and Vic’s shoulder slammed into the wall with such force she was almost torn off the saddle. The board shattered to show the furious white static beyond. The Shorter Way rumbled and shuddered.

“Bats, Mama,” Wayne said, his voice soft, the voice of a younger, smaller child. “Look at all the bats.”

The air filled with bats, shaken loose from the ceiling. They whirled and raced about in a panic, and Vic lowered her head and flew through them. One struck her in the chest, fell to her lap, flapped hysterically, took to the air again. Another brushed the side of her face with a felty wing. It was a soft, secret, feminine warmth.

“Don’t be afraid,” Vic told him. “They won’t hurt you. You’re Bruce Wayne! All the bats in here are on your side, kiddo.”

“Yes,” Wayne agreed. “Yes. I’m Bruce Wayne. I remember.” As if he had for a while forgotten. Perhaps he had.

Vic glanced back and saw a bat strike the windshield of the Wraith, with enough force to smash a white spiderweb into the glass, directly in front of Charlie Manx’s face. A second bat thwacked into the other side of the windshield, in a spray of blood and fur. It remained caught in one of the windshield wipers, frantically beating a shattered wing. A third and a fourth bat smacked into the glass, bouncing off, flying away into the dark.

Manx screamed and screamed, a sound not of fear but of frustration. Vic did not want to hear the other voice in the car, the child’s voice—“No, Daddy, too fast, Daddy!”—but she caught it all the same, sounds amplified and carrying in the enclosed space of the bridge.

The Wraith slipped off course, swung to the left, and the front bumper hit the wall and tore away a three-foot section to reveal the hissing white static on the other side, an emptiness beyond thought.

Manx pulled at the wheel, and the Wraith lurched across the bridge, over to the right, hit the other wall. The sound of boards splintering and snapping was like machine-gun fire. Boards burst and shattered beneath the car. A hail of bats drummed into the windscreen, caving it in. More bats followed, whirling in the cockpit, striking Manx and his child about the head. The little girl began to scream. Manx let go of the wheel, flailing at them.

“Get away! Get away from me you god-awful things!” he screamed. Then there were no words, and he was just screaming.

Vic hauled on the throttle, and the bike launched itself forward, rushing the length of the bridge, through the darkness boiling with bats. It raced toward the exit, doing fifty, sixty, seventy, taking off like a rocket.

Behind her the front end of the Wraith crashed through the floor of the bridge. The rear end of the Rolls-Royce lifted into the air. Manx slid forward, into his steering wheel, his mouth opening in a terrified howl.

“No!” Vic thought he screamed. Or maybe . . . maybe it was Snow!

The Wraith pitched forward into snow, into white roar, tearing the bridge apart as it went. The Shorter Way Bridge seemed to fold in the center, and suddenly Vic was racing uphill. It collapsed in toward the middle, either end rising, as if the bridge were trying to close itself like a book, a novel that had reached its ending, a story that reader and author alike were about to set aside.

NOS4A2 dropped through the decayed and rotting floor of the bridge, fell into the furious white light and buzzing static, plunged a thousand feet and twenty-six years, dropping through time to hit the Merrimack River in 1986, where it was crushed like a beer can as it slammed into the water. The engine block came straight back through the dashboard and buried itself in Manx’s chest, an iron heart that weighed four hundred pounds. He died with a mouth full of motor oil. The body of the child that had sat beside him was sucked out in the current and dragged nearly to Boston Harbor. When her corpse was discovered, four days later, she had several dead, drowned bats tangled in her hair.

Vic accelerated—eighty, ninety. Bats gushed out of the bridge around her into the night, all of them, all her thoughts and memories and fantasies and guilt: kissing Lou’s big, bare chest the first time she ever took off his shirt; riding her ten-speed in the green shade of an August afternoon; banging her knuckles on the carburetor of the Triumph as she worked to tighten a bolt. It felt good to see them fly, to see them set free, to be set free of them herself, to let go of all thought at last. The Triumph reached the exit and flew with them. She rode the night for a moment, the motorcycle soaring through the frozen dark. Her son held her tight.