Noir (16 page)

Rage beyond anger blossomed inside his heart, a fist shattering his breastbone from inside, as though some rapid feedback loop had taken her disdain and amplified it toward murder. As if the dead could be killed again—if so, he would have lunged across the table and seized her neck in his hands, pressed his thumbs against her throat until small bones had snapped like dry wood. It was how he knew she still hated him as much as she loved him—
She wouldn’t have said that name to me, otherwise
.

“You’re wrong.” Whatever emotion was inside his dead wife, it had compressed itself into a coldly hardened gaze. “I’d say that name to you, no matter what. Because you know it’s true.”

The fury dwindled as quickly as it had sprung up at his core, leaving an ashen hollow there. McNihil opened his fists, laying his hands flat against the table to control their residual trembling. He nodded slowly.

“I know,” he said. Defeated, for now if not forever. “Like you said … I’ve always known.” Just who was waiting for him, in that place he’d been before. And didn’t want to go to, ever again. “It’s her. It’s always been her.”

W
hen the explosions hit the train, McNihil thought to himself,
I should’ve walked home
.

Loud enough that there were no longer words after the first reaction: the derailing charges made a hammer out of the air, ringing McNihil’s lungs like soft percussion instruments. He found himself suspended, thrown loose from any mooring or balance as the passenger car tilted around him. His arms reached backward instinctively, hands level with his head, to catch the dizzily tumbling wall, to keep it from shattering his spine.

“Shit …” Spoken through clenched teeth, blood oozing salt from his bitten lower lip; McNihil was more irritated than afraid, even as one of the metal window surrounds struck him in the small of the back. Whatever breath had been left in his lungs was expelled in a last raw-throated semi-word. The catch holding the door between cars had
disintegrated, the round-tipped metal claw twisting like a broken finger as the mating latch rotated and deformed; the door slid open with enough violence to splinter the passenger car’s interior panels, sending soft daggers of foam-core insulation tumbling through the space. Through the doorway, as though it were a suddenly exposed video billboard, could be seen the dark outlines of the world outside, spinning on multiple axes. For a second, McNihil had the kinesthetic hallucination that the train was still, gravityless, and the landscape beyond had erupted into chaos.

A warm black velvet filled McNihil’s sight; he blinked it away, and saw blurred light piercing the thin fabric. The light focused itself into stars; for a moment, he wondered how they had wound up scattered across the rubbish dunes of the dead territory through which he’d been traveling, heading back toward the inhabited zones of the Gloss—inhabited by the living—and his own tiny apartment therein.
Maybe the sky exploded
, he thought. And all the pieces had landed on the ground; that could account for it.

Gravity reasserted itself, along with his perception of it; he realized he was lying on his back now, with the open doorway of the baggage car above him. The view of the night stars was veiled by drifting smoke, which he supposed was connected to the acrid burning smell in his nostrils. One foot and leg were pinned by debris; he managed to kick himself loose without leaving more than tatters of cloth and a few square centimeters of bloodied skin behind.

Silence had replaced the explosion’s shock wave; his own breath and pulse, and the hissing of something like steam, were all McNihil heard as he climbed toward the doorway above. The derailed train, or at least this section of it, had landed at less than a ninety-degree displacement, leaving him an off-vertical slope to claw his fingers into.

He managed to get his elbows up over what had been the lower sill of the baggage car’s sliding door. The bent metal tracks cut into the flesh of McNihil’s arms as he let himself hang for a minute, catching his breath. Smoke and the burning smell hung low in the air, forming a thick knot at the back of his throat as he breathed it in.

The salt of his own blood trickled into the corner of McNihil’s mouth. A billow of smoke, invisible in the darkness, stung his eyes; he wiped them clear against his shoulder, then hoisted himself farther onto
the doorway’s tilted sill. Another shove with his feet, and he toppled out and onto the loose gravel lining the tracks below.

As soon as he’d managed to get to his knees, the sharp-edged stones cutting through the stained and torn trousers, he could hear the soft human sound of ragged breath and preconscious moaning. He got to his feet and stumbled a few meters alongside the overturned cars. His eyes had adjusted well enough that he could see the starlight glistening off the iron wheels, some of them still slowly turning, hubs thrust higher than his head. Flakes of rust peeled off and drifted snowlike into the spreading pools of oil; the glossy liquid mirrored the stars and smoke as though it were polished obsidian.

He found the source of the human noises. A female, condition not good: she lay on her back, arms outstretched, blind face and neck darkened with red that shone like ink in the partial illumination. A piece of one of the broken cars, a beam studded with rivets and twined cables, lay diagonally across her breast, its weight crushing the ribs beneath the grease-smeared leather of her jacket.

For a few moments longer, McNihil stood beside her, letting his own breath and pulse slow, and whatever strength he had left settle back into his limbs.
Shouldn’t even bother
, he told himself. He’d already figured out that, whoever she was, she was the one who’d been following him on the sly. Otherwise, she would’ve been inside the train’s passenger car with him.

“Hey.” McNihil knelt down, bending close to her red-webbed face. “You still with us?”

The young woman blinked, her eyes focused at some point past him; one pupil dilated large and black, the other small and trembling. “Connect you,” she said. A blood-streaked bubble popped on her lower lip. “Goddamn … idiot …”

“Yeah, I’m charmed as well.” He set his fingertips against the side of her throat, gauging her fluttering pulse. “You’re in a bad way. You know that, don’t you?”

She made no answer. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, showing only white, as though the effort of answering him had knocked her out.

“She’ll be all right.” A voice came from behind McNihil. “Or maybe she won’t. It doesn’t really matter much, either way.”

Still crouching beside her, McNihil turned his head and looked up
at the figure standing only a few feet away. Though actually, not standing; he saw that now. More like hovering. A familiar face, with a too-familiar smile. “For Christ’s sake,” said McNihil, shaking his head in disgust. “What’re you doing here?”

“Pretty much the same as you.” Harrisch’s voice was mockingly gentle. “Looking to make some kind of connection.” He used the word in its nonslang form. “Aren’t we all?”

McNihil already regretted at least one of his own words. The DZ exec was obviously on some kind of redeemer-image kick, without needing it pointed out to him. Harrisch, in his sharp Arma-Ni-Lite™ suit, stood with arms stretched straight out to the sides and ankles overlapped, fastened to a glistening white crucifix. Which in turn was mounted on a circle equally luminous; the top of his head, the tips of his palm-outward fingers, and the soles of his well-shod feet were just grazed by the circumference. Harrisch could just as well have been modeling one of the positions of da Vinci’s measurement of man as parodying any ancient Nazarene.

“Like it?” Some of the silvery glow caught on the teeth in Harrisch’s smile. “I hope you do.”

“Yeah, it’s great.” The soft light had made its little internal adjustments to McNihil’s vision; he could make out now the way in which the cross-imposed circle was suspended a few feet above the rubble-strewn ground. “Real impressive.” Some kind of minor-league earth-moving equipment, with caterpillar treads and a bored DynaZauber employee at the levers, had crept out of the low hills. An articulated crane arm dangled the circle and its occupant on a length of heavy-linked chain. The operator had his name stitched above the DZ logo on his grease-stained jumpsuit’s breast pocket; he nudged one of the control sticks, the chain clanked and retracted, lifting Harrisch another meter higher in the air. “But really,” said McNihil, looking up at him. “You shouldn’t have gone to the effort.”

“It’s no trouble.” Even with his arms pinioned out, Harrisch managed a nonchalant shrug. “And … you know … I even rather like it.”

I bet
, thought McNihil. He nodded toward the cross and circle. “Your own creation?”

“This old thing?” Harrisch laughed. “I inherited it. Or let’s say … the company did. Look.” He turned his head, glancing up at the rim just
above his head. “Can’t you see the letters there?” His gaze darted back toward McNihil. “Stuff like this doesn’t have a corporate emblem on it. It has
insignia
. There’s a difference.”

He saw what the exec was talking about. The letters
R
and
A
, stylized in an
echt
Teutonic manner, intertwined with each other so their legs stuck out at broken forty-five degree angles; the result was halfway between a Manx triskelion and a deformed swastika.

“The Rail Amalgam,” said McNihil. “What, they’ve been absorbed by DynaZauber? They’re one of your corporate divisions now?”

“They wish.” A sneer formed on Harrisch’s face. “DZ wouldn’t have them; we have our standards. Those people are all talk and no action. Strictly yesterday’s news.”

That might or might not be the case. Like most people in the Gloss—or at least those who weren’t sunk too far into their own bleak, inner L.A.—McNihil heard various rumors about what was going on with their world’s circular lifeline, the extended skein of rail lines reaching around the Pacific Ocean, from the old True Los Angeles core, up through where the urban metastasis thinned out in Alaska, across the fragile Bering Strait connections and down toward the Vladivostok financial centers and the transformed eastern edge of China, the little and now-aging dragons of Myanmar and Brunei, then back around the even more fragile and dangerous southern crossing, frozen tracks running across the floes and crevasses of the Ross Ice Shelf, in the shadows of the Transantarctic Mountains, and up the spine of South and Latin America, picking up
maquiladoristas
and boutique organic white-powder drugs before hitting the impacted Hispanic sprawl of Baja Los Angeles.

“Does that thing work?”

“You bet,” said Harrisch. “Check it out.” His middle finger pressed a button in the center of his palm, right where a rusted iron nail would have fit. The circle surrounding the cross grew brighter, sending hard-edged shadows, McNihil’s included, from the spot. “You see it?” Harrisch looked up at the rim above his head. “Great, huh?”

What McNihil saw, as he stood before the elevated cross, was the crawl of smaller, more intricate lights around the circle in which the DZ exec hung suspended. Blinking symbols and scurrying numbers, all tracking the progress of traffic—freight, people, whatever—along the greater circle of the Gloss’s rail links. A kludge of whatever had existed
before the advent of the
Noh
-flies, which had forced everything in the air to creep along the ground, and the new stuff that had been brought on-line—literally—to complete the loop.

A red dot blinked on a line horizontal with Harrisch’s left knee. McNihil supposed that was the kink in the circuit that had been created by the train derailment, right here in the dead territory. Other red and yellow lights, all along the glowing circle, flickered at different rates and intensities.
Trouble all along the line
, figured McNihil. Which was to be expected; there was everything in the rail-transport system, from steam-powered cog-wheelers cranking through the thin-aired Andes, to sleek maglev bullet trains tearing through the flat, smoky guts of California. In some places parallel to each other; at the inevitable bottlenecks, track gauges of wildly differing dimensions were crammed into each other. Plus sabotage and other industrial/political squabbles, ice shifts near the poles, earthquakes anywhere along the edges of the ocean’s submerged tectonic plates—given that degree of barely contained chaos, it was a miracle that the circle surrounding Harrisch didn’t light up as fiercely red as a biblical wheel of fire.

Or maybe it had, one time; McNihil wondered if that was how Harrisch had inherited the circle and the cross. The old, powerful Rail Amalgam had been run by a high-
mysterioso
figure named l’Etatbrut … or that at least had been the rumor. If he’d existed at all, perhaps he’d been consumed, annihilated, turned to sifting ash by all the red alarm lights going on at once, his outflung hands gripping a rolling inferno of catastrophe data. If that hadn’t been enough to burn the mythic l’Etatbrut to cinders, it still might have been a sufficient adrenaline rush to unplug his heart from the cage of his ribs.

“You’d better watch out,” warned McNihil. “There are other people who might want to be hanging where you are.”

The smile shifted to sneer again. “Such as?”

One word: “Ouroboros.”

“Bullshit.” Harrisch’s sneer became uglier—McNihil wouldn’t have thought that was possible—and tinged with an unhidable nervousness. “At least the Rail Amalgam exists … or it did. Ouroboros … there never was such a thing. That’s all legend.”

“Maybe,” conceded McNihil. He had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe no one except those inside Ouroboros—if it existed at all—had that certainty. It was an entity wrapped inside darkness deeper than this
night could ever have achieved. A true shadow corporation, summoned into being by the Rail Amalgam itself. The Gloss’s great circle of a railway was put together into one operating unit by government confiscation of various independent railway systems; some of them didn’t like that. Something called Ouroboros, taking on the symbology of the snake swallowing its own tail, supposedly represented the conspiratorial interests of those systems’ now-dispossessed owners. In its nocturnal sphere, Ouroboros would have needed to operate on a much more concealed basis than the Rail Amalgam ever had. No wonder there was so much disagreement among the daylight world’s police agencies and the underground’s denizens as to whether Ouroboros was real or just some deeply spooky imagining.