Mortality Bridge (47 page)

Niko shuts his eyes. The hot wind against his skin. The gate and all the fractured plain behind him dwindling. The endless demolition of the hopeless damned receding. Goodbye, goodbye. I am escaped yet not delivered.

Niko taps the cabbie’s shoulder. “How. you. know. be. there?”

“How’d I know to be there?”

Niko nods.

“Well.” She fidgets on the seat. “I dropped you off and drove away and I got maybe as far as we are now and I heard this huge crash. I thought Wow, it didn’t take him very long to get in trouble, and I turned around and headed back to see what happened and there you were.”

Niko stares. “How. long?”

“How long what? How long did it take me to get there?”

Niko shakes his head. “How long. from let me off. to pick me up?”

The cabbie looks him up and down. Trying to reconcile his gaunt and weathered ruin with what she tells him next. “I couldn’t have been gone three minutes,” she says.

RIDING ON THE rails again. In the distance a pale green glow.

Unlike Niko the cabbie can check her rearview mirror and she does, continually. But every time Niko croakingly asks her what she sees she only shakes her head. In the back seat Nikodemus stirs. The cabbie lights a cigarillo. “So who’s your friend?”

Niko watches the brown tube of tobacco like a predator. “My demon.” He taps his forehead.

She takes a drag and nods. “Ah,” she says in smoke as if that explains everything. Maybe for her it does. She catches Niko’s longing expression. “What happened to the pack I just gave you?”

“Fell in a river. Long time ago.”

“Oh.” She pats her pockets and fishes out a fresh pack of Swisher Sweets and hands it to him and he taps one out and sniffs. Oh yeah.

The cabbie indicates the jar in his lap. “That what you came for?” The lighter knob pops and Niko lights up. The happy scratching in his injured throat, the little death inside his lungs. He holds up the jar and turns his head to blow out smoke that dispels in the hot breeze blowing steadily against them. “That’s her.”

She nods. “So. Where to, mister?” She says it lightly like a joke but Niko thinks a moment. Fueled by nicotine his mind feels widened. He feels he’s thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. What was it the cabbie had said? I never dropped a fare off anywhere but where he said he was going.

Three minutes. I’ve been gone three minutes.

And the final act unspools before him like a scroll.

The mason jar. In the absence of Jem herself returned to him Niko had naively thought that Jemma’s soul would somehow turn back into Jemma when they crossed over. The spell would lift and she would change like some enchanted frog into a sleeping princess. Yet they had crossed over and her bottled soul remained a glowing feather. Not that this light, this essence, isn’t Jemma. A lifetime’s length it rides within the flesh, a passenger bound until the vessel makes some farther shore.

But if what the cabbie says is true the rightful container of Jemma’s soul lies in her bed not one hour dead. Not found, not taken in an ambulance, not cut up and examined, not made over and exsanguinated and filled with alien fluids, not eulogized and wept over and bid goodbye and sealed inside a coffin and ensconced within the quiet earth and left to dwindle to the elements during all the long and struggling time of Niko’s absence from the roofless earth.

Not an hour dead. And Niko holds her outcast soul upon his lap. But she diminishes. She slips out through the cracks. I cannot let her gutter while I hold her in my hands. What will I do?

What he will do—oh. Oh.

Faust in all his hubris never contemplated such alchemy as Niko now considers.

“Home,” he tells the cabbie. “Take me home.”

THE FAINT GREEN glow around the speeding cab is phosphorescent mold jellying the tunnel walls. To either side the afflicted stumble, pale-eyed Morlocks absent of past or future. Unwitting guardians of this borderland adorned in ragged relics of a dim-remembered world long left behind. Greateyed Jeremy out there somewhere, side pierced like some mutant christ. Niko hopes the simple monster will recover from his wound. Compared to creatures he encountered later Jeremy was a muppet.

He remembers something with a start. “Hey. Do you still have those candybars?” He’s already reaching for the glovebox when the cabbie says sure. His mouth floods as he opens the glovebox and pulls out a shapeless foilwrapped Chunky bar. His hands shake as he hurriedly unwraps the halfmelted candybar and shoves it into his mouth. The sweet explosion almost unbearable.

The cabbie nudges him and points out the swath in the slimy wall where the Checker Cab jumped track and blew a tire and scraped along the side. Niko nods. Written passage.

The moonish creatures press against the gelid wall and let the cab pass unmolested, their blinding encounter with the yellow car a blob of painful recent memory in their meager minds.

Niko shuts his eyes and feels the damp air on his face. It reeks of rot but he no longer notices.

The glowing length of tunnel is behind them now. Bare brown brick conjured from the dark ahead. The iron rails on which they ride are no longer rusted and the crossties are no longer rotten wood. Tie spike rail wheel.

“Your bud back there,” the cabbie says. “What are you gonna do with him when you get back?”

Niko coughs to clear his injured throat. “I haven’t thought that far.”

“I think he might be in for some trouble when we leave the tunnel.”

“We’ll make him keep his head down.”

“Not what I meant.” The cabbie glances in the rearview. At what, at what.

“Then what?” Niko feels thick and stupid and filthy and weary and sore.

“Well. He isn’t mortal is he? Like you are?”

Niko notices she doesn’t say Like us. “No.”

“Well I think he might be once we’re back.”

Niko blinks. “Might be mortal?”

She nods. “I don’t know. I mean it’s just a theory, right? But these guys.” She hooks a thumb at the back seat. “They don’t get out much. I think somehow the game is rigged against them. Otherwise they’d be taking vacations in Disneyland and screaming in the Haunted Mansion. Don’t you think?”

“But.” Niko scrunches up his face. He’s thinking about his good old buddy Phil with his trendy shades and his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Daytona Cosmograph and his hair in perfect disarray and his iPhone cased in human leather that appears from nowhere. Mortal when they’re in our world? How many times has Niko wanted to kill the supercilious son of a bitch? “Well so what if he is?”

The cabbie eyes him. “He’s bad hurt. Injuries like that probably would have killed a mortal man.”

“Yeah but he’s not a—oh.”

She stubs out her cigarillo. “Oh. If we take him to the surface it might kill him when we cross over. If he stays down here he’ll definitely heal.”

“If whoever’s following us doesn’t catch us first.”

She looks at him sharply.

Niko points out the window. “You can see their light on the walls. Behind our headlights. It’s him, isn’t it?”

She scowls at the rearview. “It’s a pair of headlights.”

“It’s him.” That goddamn cold spot creeping back between his shoulderblades. “He waited for the car to heal itself and then he came after us.” Niko looks out the window at light from the headlamps shining far behind them. “How far back is he?”

“Hard to say.” She chews her lower lip.

Niko senses more bad news. “What now?”

“Black Taxi driver’s kind of an independent contractor. He follows company rules but he doesn’t really work for the company.” She glances again at the rearview. “His rules let him go past the gate. And he’s not mortal on the world. Otherwise what use would he be?”

“So he’ll try to distract us all the way back up.”

“At the very least.”

“Well, we’ll just try to outdrive him until we’re out. What else can we do?”

“I don’t think it’ll stop there.” She indicates the jar.

“But they gave Jemma back. It ends when we’re back, when we’re out of here.”

“They really like technicalities. Loopholes. She’s not back until her soul’s back where it belongs. He’ll try to get her before that.”

“What, does he work on commission? He already did his job.”

“You stole his car and wrecked it.”

Niko stops. The rushing dark ahead looks exactly the way he feels inside. “So now it’s personal.”

“I’d be pretty pissed off if I was him. I’m sure he’ll win employee of the month if he brings your lady back too. But I doubt there’s anything he can do if you can put her back where she belongs.”

“And Nikodemus?”

“That’s his name?” She seems amused. “I think someone will have to come up after him. He doesn’t belong where we’re going.”

The tunnel walls are growing smooth and pale gray. In the distance floats a faint green dot. The first of the rail signals.

Niko puts his hands over his scabbed and bearded face. “So I’ve at least got to get Nikodemus somewhere safe or drop him off before we come out in case he goes all mortal on us and his injuries kill him. I’ve got to get Jemma back into...Jemma, before the Driver catches up to us.”

“That pretty much covers it.”

Niko lowers his hands. “The jar’s broken. I think she’s... leaking out.”

The cabbie shakes her head.

“Do you know anything about that?” Niko holds up the jar. “About putting these back where they belong?”

The headshake continues. “I drive a cab. I take people where they’re going. I don’t know how to do that.”

Niko and the cabbie both jump when Niko’s own voice comes from the back seat.

“I do,” says Nikodemus.

XXX.

CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME

THE TUNNEL IS modern again, three steel rails, prestressed concrete walls, equidistant lights. The distant cries of Red Line cars call out across an unknown distance, ghosts of dinosaurs haunting the chthonic world.

“Two hundred yards,” calls Nikodemus. Hunched in the back of the Checker Cab he stares out the rear window at the Black Taxi eating up rails and steadily gaining on them. The demon’s shredded wings flutter in the constant rush of wind into the car.

Niko and the cabbie told Nikodemus what they fear may happen to him when they cross over but the demon insisted on coming with them all the way. “In for a penny, in for a pounding.” His tone had brooked no argument.

The cabbie squints intently at the lights unspooling from the dark. “Hundred fifty yards,” calls Nikodemus.

Up ahead the tunnel splits. The cabbie’s going to try to cut over to the righthand tunnel at the last possible moment. “One twenty.” If she cuts over too soon the Black Taxi will easily follow her. “One hundred.” Too late and they’ll miss the tunnel and the Black Taxi will be right on them.

Niko sees the switchoff now a thousand yards ahead. A faint curve of wall, another set of rectangular lights branching out to the right.

The tunnel walls grow bright around them. “Train,” yells Nikodemus. “Train behind us. Two hundred yards and gaining fast.”

“Where the hell did that come from?” says Niko.

“It’s running down the—no wait, the black car’s going faster.”

“Shit.” The wind blows harder as the Checker Cab speeds up. “I keep thinking it’s you talking back there,” the cabbie tells Niko. “He sounds just like you.”

The cab fills with an eerie lamentation. The siren song of the pursuing Blue Line train reverberating down the rails and through the passenger compartment.

“Don’t look back,” chants Niko. “Don’t look back. Don’t—” A blast of the trainhorn fills the tunnel.

Nikodemus yells from the back seat but Niko barely hears him. The branchoff is dead ahead. His peripheral vision picks up bright lights from the passenger side mirror. The trainhorn’s about to powder his skull.

The Checker Cab veers off the tracks too soon. Niko slams against the restraint as the car bounces over crossties. He tucks the jar against his stomach and hears the cabbie yelling and Nikodemus yelling and ricocheting all over the back of the cab and the trainhorn’s liquefying his brains and he can feel the awful closing pressure of the Black Taxi practically being pushed into them by the speeding Blue Line train and the tunnel switchoff gapes before them now too late to turn into it but the cabbie yanks the wheel regardless and Niko’s thrown against her and Nikodemus is hurled against the side as the Checker Cab bounces off the crossties and rumbles onto the adjoining track and as it leaves the first track bygod something smacks the rear bumper and the back end slides and the left rear scrapes yellow paint onto the tunnel wall and then they’re jouncing along the crossties of the adjoining track and the cabbie jerks the wheel right-left and the cab leaps onto the new set of rails.

The bumping stops. The vibration stops. The worldfilling apocalypse of trainhorn diminishes down the tunnel they have left behind.

And the Black Taxi?

Once again the cabbie checks the rearview. This time she grins. “Nothin to it,” she says. Already fishing the cigarillo pack from her shirt pocket.

Niko doesn’t realize he’s pulled something in his back until the muscles unclench painfully and all at once. The relief throughout the cab is palpable.

Niko quickly checks the mason jar. The same, the same. The glow barely perceptible, the perfume a faint memory on a garment.

The cabbie taps his leg and points and Niko squints into the wind against his face. Length of tunnel stretching out ahead of them and now a bright amber light set in its middle. Jesus christ another train. There’s nowhere to go this time. No convenient switchoff or nick-of-time escape hatch. They’re about to meet their fate headon without a prayer.

But the cabbie seems amused and waves her cigarillo at the hovering amber light. “It’s okay. It’s a streetlight.”

Niko gapes while she slouches on the bench seat and loosens her thin tie another inch and drives on the rails with one-handed confidence.

Nikodemus pokes his huge and one-eyed head between them to stare with eager trepidation through the open windshield.

The cabbie grins. “Sometimes,” she says, “the light at the end of the tunnel really isn’t an oncoming train.”