The Dark Arena - Mario Puzo [65]
Before him Mosca saw a shiny, black boot. He picked it up; it was unexpectedly heavy. He realized there was a leg inside it, the top sealed off by a cover of pressed brick and stone glued together with blood and marrow of crushed bone. He let the boot drop and went to the farthest corner, sometimes sinking down through the rubble halfway to the knee. Near the wall he stumbled over a long body trunk with no head or neck or legs or arms” He pressed against it with his fingers, the black cloth unrecognizable, and inside it he felt flesh out of which all the fat and blood had been squeezed by the enormous pressure of the falling building. The flesh felt very firm against the bone, but he could feel the bonelike rods: underneath. The two extremities of the trunk were sealed off in the same way as the boot
There was nothing horrible in these remnants of human beings. No sight of blood or flesh. They had been so crushed that the clothing they wore had been pressed into the place of skin. The blood had been absorbed by the tons of brick turned to blotting dirt. Mosca kicked the rubble around a bit and, when his other foot began, to sink, moved away hastily. Wolf was busy alone in a far corner, without illumination, almost invisible.
Suddenly Mosca felt oppressively warm. A hot dust rose in the air and a curious smell, like charred flesh, came from that dust, as if under the shifting floor, underground fires were raging all through the city, hidden by similar ruins.
“Give me a light,” Wolf said from his corner. His voice was like a great hollow whisper. Mosca threw his lit candle across the room. It made a great arc of yellow flame and landed beside Wolf. He let it rest there.
They could see Wolfs shadow fumbling with a torso. The quiet voice of Honny said conversationally, “It is very curious that these bodies have no heads. There are six or seven I have found, some have a leg or arm, but none have heads. And why have they not decomposed?”
“Here,” Wolf said, his voice reverberating now from the far corner, “I have something.” He lifted up a leather holster in which hung a pistol. He drew the gun out of its holster and parts of it crumbled away and fell into the shale of the floor. Wolf flung the holster away from him and resumed his poking around, meanwhile speaking to the blond man.
“Like the mummies, those old mummies,” he said. “All the stuff pressed into them. And maybe they were sealed off and the building just, shifted so we could get in. And their heads were crushed right into the floor, into little bits, shreds, part of the floor we walk on here. I've seen that before.” He had worked himself away from the candle and was now deep in the far corner and he said again, “Give me some light.” The woman at the wall lifted her candle high and Wolf held something aloft so that the weak yellow ray would fall on it. At the same moment the blond man swung his flashlight toward him.
Wolfs scream was short, more one of surprise, the woman's hysterical, trilling off to a sob. Caught in the light of the flashlight and candle, was a gray hand, tremendously elongated fingers patinaed with paintlike dirt The light of the candle fell away from it almost in the instant Wolf flung the hand away. They were silent, all now feeling the heat of the room, the oppressiveness of the air from the dust they had stirred from the shifting floor. Then Mosca said to Wolf teasingly, “Aren't you ashamed?”
The blond man laughed softly, but it echoed through the room. Wolf said apologetically, “I thought the goddamn thing was a rat”
The woman by the ledge said, “Let's go quickly, I need air,” and as Mosca started to move toward her and the light, part of the wall shifted.
A wave of rubble swept him off his feet His head fell against one of the torsos. His lips touched it and that touch told him there was no cloth over the body, but skin burned and charred hard as leather. Underneath