Mortality Bridge (9 page)

Shapes that have been stirred to motion by the passing of the Franklin can be glimpsed in halflit regions of the jellied tunnel walls. Now they turn their Morlock eyes upon the Checker Cab’s approach and stretch toward them unavailing mottled malformed limbs. The cab passes and the creatures flatten against the curved tunnel walls and shield their luminous lantern eyes with clublike hands.

If somehow Boyd Street were cut off from the world like Loch Ness from the ocean and its shambling zombie guardians left to carry on, over time might they become what Niko sees here. But some he passes cringe against the tunnel on four legs. And some on four legs rise to sniff the agitated air with long and tapering snouts. But these tunnels cannot be that old. But this tunnel may be old as man.

The cabbie has the air on full but it’s only pushing the hot air around. Beneath that is a foundry breath of sulphur, tinge of rot.

“Sorry about the AC.” The hornet hum increases as she rolls her window partway down. The sudden reek so thick it seems to invade the cab as visible curling tendrils.

The cab’s not driving all that fast, twentyfive or thirty miles per hour. Any faster and the cabbie probably couldn’t keep it on the rails. Niko wants more speed of course but as he sees and hears the milling and averting shapes go past he’s grateful for what speed he has.

Sudden purple splats across the windshield. The cab jerks right and they thump off of the rails. The cabbie yanks the wheel and steel rims scream along the iron. She switches on the wipers and they smear fan shapes across the windshield and stutter back. In the wavering headlights Niko sees a creature pale and cratered as the moon and then the left front fender slams it with a solid sickening crunch of bone. A hairy clot lands on the left rear window and crawls sluglike and dripping in the slipstream.

The cab bounces over the righthand rail. The fender grazes brick and plows a furrow of moist matter that streaks the headlight and tints it like a gel spotlamp. From behind them comes a pop and then a slowing rumble fills the tunnel as the Checker Cab jounces to a stop.

“Tire.” The cabbie zips the emergency brake and cuts the engine and kills the lights and gets out and trudges to the back of the cab, leaving Niko in the dark.

Slick patches covering the tunnel walls give off faint algae phosphorescence.

Niko hurries from the cab. It feels like days have passed since he first climbed in, though it can’t be more than an hour. Far ahead the Franklin’s taillights dwindle. Damn it.

The cabbie pulls the spare tire from the trunk and leans it on the bumper. Niko asks if he can help. The cabbie bends into the trunk again. “You might wanna see what you can do to keep the lookieloos away.” She straightens holding a two ton hydraulic service jack and an old red plastic twelve volt lantern with a rubber nipple over the switch.

Niko glances back up the tunnel. “What’ll they do?”

She pulls the jack past him and it squeaks and jounces like a nervous little yipyap dog. “I don’t know.” She squats and rolls the jack beneath the cab. “Never stopped to find out.”

“Okay.” Niko leans into the cab and turns the headlights on. Exposed shapes scurry or hump or flow or limp a startled retreat. Slime on the headlamp tints the tunnel’s right side seasick green. Niko goes to the front to examine the damage. The left bumper is pushed inward and sports a large fresh lumpy splotch. Wiry black hair sprouts from a clot sizzling on the radiator grille with an awful smell of burning pork.

While the cabbie jacks up the cab Niko gropes around the large and lightless trunk to find a rag to wipe the headlight clean. Boxes, jumper cables, gascan. Did he just hear something behind him? He finds a bag of rags. He straightens and turns and gapes up at the slick hide of a greateyed thing hunched in front of him.

“Candybar?” it says in a guttural hopeful voice. It shifts toward him and raises a ropy glistening arm from which small things fall to writhe upon the wet ground.

“Uhh,” says Niko.

“Jeremy love candybar.” It clenches its clubfingered fist and lumbers forward. “Jeremy Hershey bar.” It looks like a great gray-green shag carpet grown slimy in the rain. It may once have been a man the way a hippopotamus may once have been a horse. Pale owlish eyes with pinpoint pupils. Floppy-tongued shoes dimly recognizable as Converse Hi-tops. “Butterfinger Pay Day Almond Joy.” It steps again with a great heaving sucking sound. Niko smells something like weekold diapers and dumpster cabbage. He backs away from the cab and steps on something hard and round. A pry-bar. Hellyeh. He picks it up and holds it high and feels ridiculous and afraid.

A flashlight beam strikes Jeremy’s undifferentiated face and Jeremy leans back and covers the cartoon ovals of his lidless eyes with splayed wet hands.

The cabbie scrambles to her feet and stands beside Niko with the lantern trained on Jeremy. With surprising speed and grace the creature leans forward and bats the lantern from her hand.

Niko lunges like a fencer and the prybar strikes resistant flesh. He pushes and feels a small pop as the prybar sinks into Jeremy’s side all the way up to Niko’s knuckles. Startled Niko lets go and steps back.

Red-edged in the cockeyed taillights Jeremy stands staring dumbly at the wrench head of the prybar protruding from his middle like a radio knob. Niko gets the clear impression of a frown. “No candybar?” Jeremy grips the knob and pulls the length of metal out. A great gout of indigo follows to spray in pulsing arcs as Jeremy examines the glistening prybar and says Awww. A pissing sound as gushing ichor strikes the tunnel wall. Awww. Jeremy lumbers away bleeding with the prybar dangling from his bigfingered hand.

The cabbie is still watching the retreating island of Jeremy’s back as she holds up a shapeless foilwrapped Chunky bar. “I was gonna give him one. I always carry em.”

Niko isn’t quite sure what to say.

The cockeyed headlights show a dozen more approaching shapes two hundred yards away.

Niko and the cabbie fetch the flashlight and quickly change the tire. The cabbie tightens the lug nuts and lowers the jack and heaves it in the trunk and slams the lid. She and Niko hurry back into the cab.

The engine won’t start.

“Don’t do this to me,” says Niko.

“We’ll take care of it.” The cabbie turns the key again. The engine catches and dies.

Niko looks at the approaching creatures. “I think you need more candybars.”

“It’s flooded.” She stomps the gas and turns the key and lets the engine turn over and lets up on the gas and stomps it again, somehow feeling for the timing, and sure enough the engine catches and chutters weakly a couple dozen revolutions and then picks up. She eases the cab back out to the middle of the tunnel and lines up with the rails and jerks the wheel left-right to make the cab hop up on them. “Nothin to it,” she calls back.

Ahead of them more Jeremys shirk from the light and slink against the tunnel walls as the cab rides past. One of them picks its scabrous nose with a soggy finger shoved in past the middle knuckle as if lobotomizing itself. Another swings a squirming rat by the tail like a bolo and lets go as the cab drives by. Niko hears it thump against the side of the cab.

“You all right?” the cabbie says.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Yeah. It’s like that down here.”

Niko’s rough slim hand caresses the curves of the hardcase beside him. No taillights shine before them now. Lot of catching up to do. He settles back on the seat and feels the old urge rise, the small burn in his stomach’s pit. And suddenly he wants a drink so bad he can literally taste it. Whiskey.

The drone of rails moans through the cab as he outstares the pitiless dark.

“L.A. RIVER OVERHEAD.”

Niko startles from his reverie as the cabbie taps the ceiling of the cab. He wonders if the Red Line runs beneath the river. How to know? Where he is could not be found on any map. Except perhaps the maps enscrolled in the collective dream of what may lie outside of life. A cartography of bone and laminate of blood.

In any case he understands the significance of crossing running water. In this deep place, in this conveyance, with this unyielding driver. Customs must be honored and passage must be paid in kind and sterling. So Niko pulls his driver’s license from his wallet and removes one of the two remaining coins taped to its back. Its glint dull in the tunnel’s phosphorescence. Drachma, lepton, obolos. He’d obtained them through an online broker to whom he gave thorough and particular descriptions. Metal, denomination, condition, age. Knowing from his research he would need to pay his way. But the coins when he received them proved upsettingly familiar though he couldn’t have said how. These transactions merely reenactments. By intimations and degrees he is coming to feel himself directed by an older self that has watched and planned and only let Niko know as much as he needs to. A wiser deeper self that even now is moved and moving him to action.

This coin is silver, stamped with the head of a gorgon. Niko presses it against his lips, then taps the cabbie’s sweatdamp shoulder with the coin and holds it out in front of her. She accepts the silver drachma without looking, bites it as tradition demands though also as a kind of cowboy joke, and flips it ringing into her change tray.

“Much obliged,” she says.

Niko pictures the dirty sluggish water running overhead, glinting in sunlight he may never see again yet still may come to dread glimpsing prematurely. He knows the light has played a part in ruining this quest before. But he hasn’t made this quest before. But he has.

He leans back in his seat and wonders why he isn’t more afraid.

VII.

WALKING THE DOG

“END OF THE LINE.”

Niko jerks awake and is startled to realize he has slept in the first place. Lulled by tire hum on narrow rail in shadowed tunnel. He feels faintly guilty. As if sleep betrays resolve.

He rubs his eyes and works a sluggish tongue around the sleep-taste in his mouth. He feels thick and slow, almost hungover.

The Checker Cab is idling with its engine knocking. Niko cranes forward to peer through the crudcaked windshield. Dull red intermittent light throbs like a painful wound, caressing bloodred highlights off the contours of the driverless Black Taxi parked beside a tall white marble wall that teems with figures carved in deep relief. Farther on along the sculpted wall an enormous wrought iron gate. On the lintel above the gate a red neon sign flashes.

ALL SALES FINAL

NO EXCHANGES

NO RETURNS

Above the sign an enormous marble figure of a pensive devil perches thinking, pointed chin on taloned fist and huddled in his jointed wings. Horned and brooding.

Chained to an iron plate bolted to the wall beside the gate is a very big dog.

A few yards past the dog a wooden ladder leans against the marble wall. On it stands a largeheaded balding man with a full beard shot with gray. Mallet in one hand and chisel in the other. The mallet strikes the chisel and a moment later Niko dimly hears the sound above the engine’s idle cough.

Of the tunnel there’s no longer any trace. At some point they have emerged from it or it has widened to become this unfathomable cavern around them.

The cabbie leaves the engine running and gets out to open Niko’s door. Looking not at him but at the Franklin parked undamaged by the wall. Her expression one of mild hatred.

Niko emerges like a man who can’t believe he’s just survived some kind of epic accident. Preternaturally aware yet faintly disbelieving. He stands behind the yellow shield of opened door, barely aware of the cabbie beside him. Eyes only for that Franklin. That wall. That gate. That dog.

The dog is staring at the cab’s headlights as if contemplating pouncing. There is no certainty the tanklike Checker Cab would survive if it did.

The cabbie leans in and turns off the headlights and steps around Niko to pull his hardcase from the back seat. Niko steps out from behind the door and the cabbie nudges it shut with her hip while holding forth the hardcase. Niko accepts it and for a moment their gazes meet, flinty blue and walnut dark, and when their hands touch briefly in the transfer of the case’s handle from her grip to his he feels again a sense of ritual. The passing of a torch perhaps. Acceptance of a boon.

“Got it?” says the cabbie.

“Got it.”

The cabbie turns to face the man at work upon the ladder. She glances at Niko with a mischievous look and cups her hands beside her mouth and calls, “Bonjour, Auguste.”

The man on the ladder nods but does not look. “Bonjour, bon-jour.” His mild voice faint with distance and drained of character in this cavernous space.

“Comment ça va?”

A shrug. “Ehh, bon. Trés bon.”

The cabbie grins at Niko. “Quand finirez-vous?” she calls. “Quand t’est finis.”

She slaps the cab and laughs. “Sorry,” she tells Niko. “He just cracks me up.”

Niko frowns at the Frenchman on the ladder tapping away. Tap tap tap. The seething multitude in deep relief in the walls around the iron gate, red-edged chiaroscuro figures writhing in the stroboscopic light. Tap tap. Straining marble flesh toward the archway. Their hands the living stone incarnate yearning to escape the very structure of their being, tap. Beyond Auguste the wall is flat and blank and stretches off as far as can be seen. How long has this man been working on the dozen yards of figures that have been completed?

Niko feels awkward and inadequate as he regards the cabbie. “Thank you doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

She pops a match alight against a nail and lights another cigarillo. “Get outta here. I oughta thank you. All I ever get is milk runs. It’s nice to stretch my legs.”

Niko laughs mirthlessly. “Well, I guess it’s my turn. To stretch my legs, I mean.”

The cabbie glances at the paladin dog. “Well. Knock em dead, huh.” She holds out a hand.

Which Niko clasps. “Too late.”

She laughs. “That’s good.” And lets go.

The cabbie gets back in the cab and shuts the door and turns the headlights on. She pats the side of the cab as if it’s a good horse and nods up at Niko. “Break a leg.”