The Bridge

All the time people ask themselves: If nuclear war broke out,
where would I be?  When will I die?  And the question comes into
the mind of every surgeon once or twice: Can a patient stand the
shock of losing part of themselves?  Are they strong enough to
withstand the shock-trauma?  Will they go CRAZY?  It boils down
to the most basic of all: How badly does the person want to live? 
How badly?

May 3

     I'm stuck under this bridge.  The city as I can make out,
has been nuked.  All that is left is this bridge.  Oh, before I
continue, I must identify this writing.  My name is Alberto
Piltenelli, and at age 21 I changed my name to Al Pine.  There. 
I'm a small bank manager in this stupid town of House Lake, Iowa. 
I got here at age 0 (born here) and lived here ever since. 
Started school here, went to college at University of
Pennsylvania (far eh?) got my doctorate (general surgery) and I
don't know why I got this job.  (Maybe because my old man died
and no-one wanted the job of BANK MANAGER.)  Oh well.  The piece
of vellum with the red seal means doodly squat when you're stuck
under a bridge.  No food right now, maybe a fish might swim by
under the bridge. 

     I can't write much right now, my wrist is tired and the pen
is getting shaky in my hand.  The bank blew up today.  I wonder,
right after I got out!  HA!  Too bad, over five million in assets
in there.  Blew hundred dollar bills all over the place. 
Collected them for toilet paper.  Worth squat now.  

May 4

     I'm going to keep writing in this book (actually they're
withdrawl slips held together by a clip) until i'm saved, or die,
whichever comes first.  Food has been scarce.  There was nothing
until this morning, when I saw something moving in the water and
I just pounced, and squashed it.  It was a.. I think a grouper or
a Sun Fish.... it had three eyes though.  Didn't care.  Put it
out into the sun for an hour or two, got fed up, and ate it raw.  
Hey!  You don't know how I got here!  Damn funny story if I think
so.  Something snapped when I pounced on that three eyed fish.  I
think it was my leg or something.  Doesn't hurt but no problem. 
I ain't Jamaican though! HA! HA!

     It all began when I was signing off a few loans, taking away
people houses, foreclosing, and siphoning off interest from over
900 people.  So far, over three years, I have over 30,000
dollars.  0.001 interest from each person adds up to alot. 
Anyway, as I said, I was making people's lives havoc when some
bum walks in.  He doesn't really attract much attention until he
goes to the teller.  As I know it, the teller said get out, the
bum gave her nine millimetres.  She hit the silent alarm, and I
slid into vault to ring the phone to the police.  The teller, as
I know it, gave the guy $250,000.  I dialled 9-1... AND BANG!!!!
I heard this huge bang and was thrown across the floor.

     As I peeked out of the crack in the vault, I saw the bum put
the gun in his mouth and splatter his guts over some old bag.  I
would have seen more but people were dropping from some orange
gas coming in, and some seeped in before the door of the vault
slid shut.  Then a huge bang that burst my ears rocked the vault,
and I fell asleep.  I woke up to the locked vault.  As I opened
it, for some strange reason, I scratched my head so hard that
blood poured down my face.  I don't know, but the taste
fascinated me.

     I stepped out of the vault, and was blinded by the daylight
that hit my eyes.  I saw the rotting dead carcasses in front of
me, burnt beyond recognition and worms flowing through the blood
vessels in the bodies.  Maggots were all over the floor of the
bank, and the poor teller who was held up in the first place was
bonded to the brass bars by a chemical process similar to rust,
except on the body.  I threw up stomach acid.

     The trek outside was like nothing I had ever seen before.  I
scratched my face, and found, shockingly, that I had a beard.  I
ran over to where I am now, the bridge, and looked in.  My face
was orange and puffy, sores around my eyes and mouth dominated my
major features.  My eyes bulged and were all going which way.  I
looked like some orange chameleon.  I threw up again, and that's
where I am now.  Under the bridge. 

     I think that fish was infected, or a sixth finger grows by
itself.  No food yet again.  That's what happens when you're used
to hot meals four times a day.  No problem.

May 6

     Sorry I skipped a day.  I was just sleeping and massaging my
knee.  Seems to be hurting alot nowadays.  I never told you the
story before I was a bank manager.  Well, i'll tell you a bit.

     When I got out of high school I went to university.  I dealt
a bit in drugs and then moved to those doctor pads.  I usually
sold a pad of a hundred for a hundred bucks.  The patients in the
hospital where I worked after I got out of university were stupid
enough to steal some and get caught or buy some, from me of
course.

     The yahoos even used them to buy some morphine based pain
killer or something.  The old ladies would snort Lysol if it made
'em high!  Patients in the hospital, in cahoots with their
doctors, would walk out with handfuls of that kind of stuff. 
Needles, drugs, all kinds of pain killers and thumpers.  Us
doctors call headache pills thumpers.  Anyway, I got to this
position when i came home and decided to set up practice in this
old town of House Lake.  Then, after about a year of seeing
people with hernias and appendicitis, my father died, and I took
over his job of bank manager, even though it didn't pay much.

     That's it.
     
May 7

     I've made my first inventory here.  Listed according to Al
Pine is: A Zippo 2000 lighter.  Ronson zippy light Lighter Fluid. 
One pad of writing paper.  Two pens.  A knife.  A calculator
watch.  One nice suit.  Briefcase of some one with some
fingernails bonded to the surface.  And anything else I would
want!  I can get anything basically from the bodies.  Another
building just by the bank blew up again.  Showered me with
shrapnel.  No food again, for 3 days now.  The face on my watch
is scarred and worn, but still readable.  I figure that if I
don't get food in about 3 days, I'm gonna starve.  Best for me. 
If I don't get out of this now, I'll get out of this later.  Up
there maybe.  I don't care.  My life insurance company will give
me my five hundred grand when they find my corpse.

(later)

     I forgot to mention something when making my inventory:  One
of those shocking machines to wake up dead people, and a
briefcase FULL of allergy pills, aspirin, tylenol, and all kinds
of crap.  And three, nice full bottles of Trycyclecane.  Trike
(as us docs call it) is a pain killer which numbs almost
everything in the nose and other mucus membranes while leaving a
sort of "aura" around the body.  Makes my flesh pink when I taste
some of it.  Sipped a few and guess  what!  My skin returned to
normal color!  The orange has become more pronounced and my
vision is almost constantly blurry.  But a bottle of Optrex will
help that.  The wallet in the brief case says: "Mister William
Maxwell Thorpe."  Probably some executive nerd who still lived
with his mother at the age  of thirty! That's all I please to
say! 

May 8

     No chow again.  I almost constantly DREAM of food and guns,
every possible dream of a killer.  I think I might kill myself to
pass through that nice bridge.  I've eaten a picture of a
watermelon.  I just crumpled it up and ate it.  Bland.  I hope I
get something to eat soon.  Rocks aren't satisfying.  The fish I
ate has all but gone to crap now, and stomach cramps fill me with
horror all day now.  The pain in my left knee has rendered my
left leg almost useless, and I can barely feel it now.  A few
Tylenols should help that.  I don't want to go into the Trike
unless its desperate.  Very desperate.



May 10

     I skipped a day again.  Poor me.  I spent the whole May 9 
going to the bathroom (or river, call as you want) and sleeping. 
At least I ate today!  Ha!  But you can't call this really
eating.  Anyway, I found some kind of dog or something, I lured
it close, and just stabbed it with my knife.  I don't know if it
was a dog, because it had wings if I remember correctly.  Damn
thing was a funny color... and this was real.  It came oozing
from the nuclear muck from the black hole of the bridge.  It was
blue!  Honestly!  Some kind of hard skin on it too because I
couldn't cut it completely enough to get to the good parts. 
Don't care!  Stabbed it anyway!  Killed the sucker!  And ate it
too.  Since there's nothing here to cook it with, except the sun
(which will fry you if you're not careful) and the sun doesn't
cook it fast enough.  I don't care.  Ate it raw.  My stomach
wanted to regurgitate it almost right after I ate it.  Fake solid
hawk dog from a dimensional portal... WHAT!

     Anyway, right now I'm sucking on a bone and  picking the
shell of a leg for a snack.  I lost about half of the thing to
bad cutting.  Threw it in the river, mind you.  Environment can
go to hell, for all I care.  The earth is nuked!  So are you!
HAHAHA!  That stupid dog scratched me good though, and on my
knee, and on my face, and on my arms, and on my chest, and
everywhere!  The sucker put up one good fight!  Survived it
though.  Dabbed myself with mercurochrome.  Now i'm a bloody,
stinking and rotting of medicine pulp of a corpse.  I swear, if I
ever catch one of those again, i'm going to torture it before
eating it, and soak the thing in the hell that is covering my
soaking, cut up skeleton.  Just to see it die, red and in
horrible pain, just to see the glazy eyed look of death and
LAUGH.  LAUGH! HA HAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHAHHA!!!

May 11

     No FOOD!!!!!!! I sit back sometimes and think, with the eye
of a dazed, hungry man, if I'm ever going to get my Five Hundred
Grand.  Paid for it, and I should get it.  I laugh in anyone's
face who ever said: Piltenelli, you're never going to make it.  I
showed them.

     The thing that bothered me most was that a bird, or
something like a bird, landed right across from the bridge from
me.  And just stared there, looking at me.  It was a floating,
blurry shape, cooking in the nuclear sun, roasting, waiting for
me to pour duck sauce on it and gobble it up.  It's fake, a
mirage I tell myself.  But I know in my heart its real.  It sits
there.  I damn well waited for it for four hours, yes I did.  I
saw it, still cooking, the sweet smell of blood and crazed sweat. 
It waited.  And waited.  But so did I.  I wanted the food, just
the filling feeling of cooked flaky flesh.  The bird comes from
the bridge, I know of course.  On the other side of that thing,
thats where dream like states and kid's fantasies come from. 
Mine of roasted chicken, basking in the nuclear sun.  It cooks,
and I drool.  I got damned fed up with waiting.  I spat and the
bird looked at the bloody mess at my feet, and guess what?  The
bird pecked at me.  It taunted me.  I lunged at its scrawny
neck.. and got bird flesh on me!  The thing slithered out of my
hands, and made its way to the bridge, and disappeared.  I wept,
just cried, and licked my fleshy palms, not knowing the blood was
my own.  That bridge.

May 12

     Nothing today.  After that bird, that stupid bird left me,
I've been totally grayed out.  This writing is going to be a
short one.  I didn't even see a bug, not nothing, nothing doing,
not even the bird from the bridge.  I started eating aspirin, as
I remember seeing old people who lived five years more because
they took an aspirin for no reason almost everyday of their life.
Idiots!  Wasted good money!  Coulda used it on ciggarettes!  No
reason why I can't.  I remember those shelly dog parts in the
river.  I stood their, in the river, for about five hours, knife
in hand, just waiting for a fish, or some other thing.  The
bridge was relentless, not giving me anything.  By anything I
mean some mutated part of reality.  The dog was mutated.  I ate
it.  I'm mutated.  I look in the water and see an orange
chameleon, going onto 34 years old, just dying here in a post-
nuclear war scene.  The earth is ravaged.  I'm worse.  I imagine
food, glorious food, machines of death, and I faint.  Great for
me, I don't feel hungry when I faint.

May 13

     Bad luck day.  Today is Friday the 13th, as best as my watch
can say.  It is getting burrier now, or my vision is getting
worse.  I keep thinking I see another nuke, and I run, screaming
my fool face off, and thinking I'm going to die.  Death should be
better than this.  The first time, with this crazy hallucination
of a HUGE bomb, just dropping down, following me.  I started
running, running crazily everywhere, under, over the bridge, and
that's where I got hurt.  Hurt good.  As I was just screaming,
drooling, and running, I climbed right to the bridge, went
straight for the deep end, and stopped.  I didn't want to go. 
Something scared me.  Then, for no apparent reason, I fell, and
screamed the word GOLP.  GOLP, yes, GOLP.  I don't know what GOLP
means, and while screaming the gibberish I grabbed onto the
leftover of the handrail.  The bridge wants me, it opens the
bowels of its black hole at its end, its wants me.  And it saved
my life by providing this iron guardrail for me to hold onto. 
Then a brick wall, hell, I don't know where it came from, it fell
and bashed the hell out of my arm.  It fell onto my arm while I
was climbing up to save my sorry life.  I remember screaming,
then falling and cracking my arm in the shape of an N, and then
seeing a load of blood everywhere.  I could not feel my arms, but
from my examination of others I know I was messed up royally. 
The bridge, oh that son of a bridge, it created my downfall.  I
lie here now, soaking wet in nuclear bomb waste, and just
flashing on and off about bombs coming down, its pointy nose
coming right down my skull.  And I lie there, just laughing, hee,
and I don't do anything.  MY HANDS!  My glorious hands!  They're
completely shot!  Ill never be able to write again!  HA!  It was
my LEFT ARM!! Irony to the person who laughs at me!  I can't do
squat!  How will I catch my food now?  I'm SOOOOO hungry!!  My
stomach is yelling at me, and all I do is drink water and vomit. 
I cannot go back. I will not.  The bridge, the bridge is the
thing that keeps me going.  When I go, I will go well, to the
bridge.

     YOOWWWCH!!!! My arms hurt!  I can't feel anything above my
chest, and my legs look like a pretzel!  But as they say, the
calm before the storm.  So I don't want relief.  They tylenol
keeps most of the pain away, and I don't want to get into the
Trike.  Not yet.  I am hurting.  H-U-R-T-I-N-G.

May 15

     I definitely know someone is out there.  Don't we all?  The
bridge spews its holographic crap to confuse me.Some big flying
ship sailed right across my face, blowing wind and dust, and a
big piece of pink shrapnel caught me right in the thigh. 
Screamed my fool face off. I pulled it out and just gaped at the
sky.  The ship flew off after a few seconds, as it was just
passing over.  I screamed when it was there, before, and hours
after until my throat hurt and my hands and feet and legs and
everything just swelled up so bad that I could write Goodyear on
them and it could replace the blimp.  They could be a whole fleet
of blimps!  I've made a makeshift help sign, crawling all of
yesterday.  I had only one hand and a couple of mangled legs to
work with, so that's why I couldn't write.  The sign is about
four feet high, and each letter is about my height wide.  That's
maybe five or six feet.  I can't THINK!! My ankle hurts so bad. 
At a guess, I'd say I've lost about 20 pounds since I escaped the
vault.  My beard itches like electric ants!  Anyway, from my post
under the bridge the nuclear sun reflects the four letters I
wrote with pink Cadillac parts: H E L P.  Another airship, if it
looks down, won't miss me.

     The discoloration has started above the wrist, above the
thigh, above the ankle, and of course, above the neck.  I have
begun to think that no one is going to help me.  Everything has 
gone from blue to black to yellow and back to blue.

     I may have to amputate.  (But what?  Everything?  Above the
neck?  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!)






May 16

     The pain has gotten worse still.  Even the Tylenol and daily
aspirins don't work.  If I don't get rid of it, i'll go nuts. 
Almost half the day now, my body just starts shaking, and I
convulse violently.  I an pretty confident that I will have to
amputate.  The blackness is now the whole area of the foot, and
the toenails have started to fall out.  I have everything if I
need it, pain killer, a knife, bandages, etc.  I must concentrate
and keep my strength, as the shaking has come on strong now.  My
hand is tired.  The damn wrong hand.  Oh, but I couldn't write to
you guys if it was my right hand.  I'm going to end it, stop.

May 17

     I am going to amputate.  As much as I love my left hand, I
fear I must.  I know I can, I've done it before to three other
people.  One poor guy had to have his shoulder cut out too along
with his arm and hand.  I know how HE feels. I hope this is
nothing like an appendix or something.  I'm more of a skin on
bones now, my skin gone dark orange and sores tattooing my face. 
My beard is full grown, and my vision is pretty bad now. I'm
going to do it.  If I don't soon, the combined shock of having no
food and the shrapnel in my thigh will make me faint during the
operation, and i'll bleed to death.  Maybe I should, and then,
mercifully, it'll be over.  I don't know though.  No food for a
week now.  Filthy water may be enough to sustain pond scum but
not a human. (Or a mutated human?)  Wish me luck, all of you out
there.

May 18

     I did it.  The pain was excruciating, I screamed my face
off, but the Trike solved that.  One gulp left me dazed and
happy, and I looked longingly at the bridge, the bridge, I want
to go to the end of the bridge, as the bridge has no end.  Just
has a hole to the other side, the hole after death and before the
afterlife.  In this way, just staring at the bridge, I operated. 
I found that I messed up the job somewhat.  The first thing I
worried about was that a loss of blood would either kill me
during the operation or I would die after, because my body
couldn't replenish the supply.  I cut the big wrist vein last, to
save blood.  Nothing doing.  It was fine, as my blood didn't feel
pain.  The pain got worse throughout the operation, but i'm a
good surgeon and I can handle it.  Just count down from one
hundred to negative one hundred takes care of it.  Nothing to
clot the wound, a huge wound, a stump of cut arms.  I pulled out
the zippo and cooked my own self shut.  I've tied it up with the
pant leg to that suit I told you about, and the fiery pain  has
stopped now.  I haven't had anything to eat for over a WEEK now!! 
Can anyone sustain themselves for that long???  It doesn't
matter, no-one is here so no-one knows.  After all, you are what
you eat.  And with that line, the operation has been nullified. 
My hand  is here again.  WONK!  WONK!   New word!! HAHAHAAA My
face is oranger.  You could squeeze it for orange juice.  But you
must wash the dirty palm and cut out the fingernails before
sucking the fingers..... I've eaten SOMETHING at least!



May 19

     The itching from the beard has gone away, just because of
the itch of the mending flesh of the stump nullifies most of it. 
I'm going crazy now.  I've begun drawing funny pictures in my
notebook now, of bridges and a new life beyond that, black holes
and bent crowbars over oranges, and apples, and food.  Food,
lotsa food.  And of course, the usual bridge and my safe
passageway to my afterlife, and the before to the beginning.  I
think its going to rain, or just shower.  Rain anyway.  Legs are
hurting more.  I'll solve that.  My legs are so blue i'm a smurf! 
The same solution for the hand, for the legs, for the brain, la! 
Here we are, from the greatest city in the world, House Lake,
Iowa, its The MAN WITH NO LEFT HAND!!!! Screaming audience goes
nuts.

May 21?

     The face of my watch has all but gone to the dog house now,
because I shattered it after I got so frustrated because I
couldn't itch the stump of my cooked and sauteed hand.  It hurts
sometimes, but I look at the bridge and it goes away.  I can
crawl.  I can walk to the bridge.  I'm losing teeth and hair! 
Everytime I scratch my head my brain shows!  An insect now lives
in my shattered shell of my body!  Lists of food, insects brood,
apples and oranges, (can't find a rhyming word for orange!!! and
porange, gorange, tink)

May? 25?  June? 3?

     My body is wretched and I will not suffer!! Five hundred
grand can wait if i'm not dead and no-one can collect!!!   IN
YOUR FACE!!! The bridge awaits me... I can see the portal at the
other side of the bridge.  My bride awaits.... I am just bones,
my compound eyes twitch with each move, I can see behind my head. 
Radiation has turned me into a fly!  Al Pine an insect!  A
crippled insect!  The destroyed insect with the missing hand and
cut off foot and the cut up leg and the cut up all... Nothing
will stop me, I am going to the bridge.

month? date?

     I'm going to the bridge, i'm going to the bridge, heigh, ho,
a dairy oh, i'm going to the bridge.  My stump is bleeding badly
from the scraping it got from the pavement.  Crawling, and
drooling, I'm going to run right into that hole and end myself! I
can't stand this, i'm going to cross the bridge! hee!!

                   THE CROSSING OF THE BRIDGE

     Al, now just a skinny orange bee, or more like a cross
between a bee and a fly, crawled across the bridge.  He badly
scraped his left arm stump and red showers began to fill the
bandage.  The wind picked up speed as he gaped, wide eyed, at the
swirling colours at the end of  the bridge.  The bandage at  the
end of the stump of his arm fell off, and the stump lost a major
bit of tissue and, of course, bled.  Huge, thick, rope like
strands of blood oozed from the stump, but Al was possessed to
escape this torture.  His legs scraped the rough, unforgiving
ground and he rubbed against it lovingly... like his old fur rug. 
He was red and bloody all over now, his jugular vein spewing
gushers and gushers of blood like an upside-down waterfall.  He
smiled, and his head entered the hole, the vortex of swirling
colours.  His body entered, and his hand had nothing to hold
onto, and he fell, falling straight down a huge bottomless pit of
whirling, blue colours.  Al closed his eyes for a moment, in the
hole which is forever.  His brain switched tracks, and the
colours invaded through his ears.  His mind succumbed to the
swirling energies disrupting the charges in his brain.  The blue
colours hit his control centre!  Al's eyes shot open for a
second... and he remembered why he was here, his miserable life,
he, himself miserable.  And he went to sleep, falling, and the
constant stream of blood from his sickening neck marking his
downfall.

                    THE END?