Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

“Maybe if we lost three hundred pounds of deadweight,” Niko says.

His demon whoops and snaps a tentacle with inspiration and before Niko knows it the backright suicide door has been flung open and the demon has leapt from the car. The door rakes back in the airstream and suddenly the car wants to veer right. Niko’s neck aches from the effort not to turn his head. Then his demon forces shut the door and leaps from the siderunner. He glides alongside for a moment and then spreads great batlike wings and snaprolls out over the uncontainable immensity of the canyon. Relieved of weight the Franklin gains some distance on the hungry metal hurtling behind it.

The cliff edge of the fissure’s other side is bottomlit hot lava red. Half a mile maybe. Niko’s face hurts and he’s paralyzed with muscle tension.

The car’s own shadow now precedes it, shortening and growing more opaque as fierce behind the car the massive train crowds up until its headlamp glowers down upon the roof. A sudden primal scream of trainhorn nearly causes him to veer off of the rails. Five hundred yards. Come on come on. Thick hot oil smell. Screaming demons over thundering metal and rumbling rail. Iron lip of locomotive kisses polished bumper chrome. The car is pushed along the tracks now by the unrelenting train. Niko knocks the gearshift into neutral and clamps both hands on the wheel to keep the tires on the rails. The Lower Plain’s resumption is a thousand feet away now. Distant crucifaxes stubble the flat ground.

Something lands on the back of the car and Niko stops himself from looking back so fast he pulls a muscle in his neck. His hands twitch on the wheel. He yells God damn it. Distant thunder dimly rumbles. Niko’s breath catches. o what have I done.

The rails shudder beneath him and he remembers tremors rippling down the gossamer length of railway bridge. He imagines an iron tidal wave rolling his way like a moving hump in a flicked garden hose. Roused from monstrous sleep the bridge beneath him groans. Bucking in the metal surge the light behind him wavers. Niko screams but cannot hear his voice in all the clang and thunder. Iron screams on iron and the car is lit by flashing sparks behind it as a thousand tons of locomotive angles off the slender bridge of rails. The train horn howls its outrage at the death that is the price for breaking free from its conscripted fate, tie spike rail wheel, howls out as the massive locomotive plummets from the trestle bridge to arc over the precipice.

The Black Taxi’s rear tires thump off the rails and the car begins to slew and then the edge is past and the interrupted plain resumes. Behind him now two hundred thousand iron pounds of locomotive missile slams the anvil of the sheer cliff face. The Franklin bucks on crossties. Unbelted Niko is airborne and anchored only by his grip upon the wheel. Then he lands back on the seat and stomps the gas and the car gains traction and rooster tails a gout of red plain floor as it speeds away from empty rails and a murdered locomotive.

NO SOONER IS he off the rails than Niko’s dodging crucifaxes. He nudges the wheel and the car slips between two inverted souls staked to their fate. No way he can keep this up. But wait. With the train gone now he doesn’t have to drive fullout. Duh.

As he slows the car he catches motion in the passenger window and sees a whippet thin and windraked demon opening the door.

A crucifax looms dead ahead. Its inverted tenant gaping like a deer at the oncoming lights. Niko speeds up and jerks left. A thud and a crack and the demon is gone. Clotheslined by the crucifax crosspiece.

Niko slows and threads his close way through the cruciforest till he breaks into a clearing. Ahead lie piled lumber and massed demons and the herded damned of the slaughtermill. The 4:07’s gonna be a little late today boys.

Niko gives the station of the cross a wide berth as he drives along his ruthless way.

A STEADY FORTY mph is both the slowest and the fastest Niko dares go right now. He’s shaking and his breath is ragged, senses overloaded. He wants to drive walleyed into what unmarked path lies leading where. Wants to let go the wheel and let the car itself take him where it may. Wants to get out of the car and get on hands and knees and shake until the shaking stops. Instead he holds the car at forty.

Now his route has led him to the forest. Trees swell toward him and flash by, souls entombed in living wood and someday to be wedded to the fleshly dead by iron spikes airgunned into the conscious pulp of their incessant being.

The roof above him buckles. Niko readies for another salvo but it’s not another assault. It’s his demon, who has glided overhead like a carrion bird to watch the car escape the train and then returned. Once again he lets his demon in and once again his demon fills the spacious rear compartment. A swath of blood that might not be his gleams his enormous chest.

“Nice flight?”

“Lost my baggage.” His demon looks backward at pursuing shapes not apprehended by the mind of man. “Go for the woods. They can’t fly there, they’ll get tangled up like kites.”

The wood is sparse compared to the forest of the crucified. The ground is rough and the Franklin’s passengers are bounced around as Niko threads among the rotund gluttons imprisoned in themselves exactly as he left them. Jouncing headlights glance upon the pale bruised creatures with their spines snapped backward and heads shoved up their rectums to look so like the plucked and headless corpses of turkeys. The suicides run horrible and blind like panicked fawns. They trip over branches and gluttons and stumble across roots and slam into trees.

From behind approaches arrhythmic pounding. Niko’s about to ask his demon what’s going on when suddenly around them gallop emaciated horsemen on elongate mounts like anorexic jockeys on enlarged greyhounds. They part around the Franklin to the left and to the right so spindly on their matchstick legs they cannot possibly support their famished weight. Yet they dart like nimble antelopes and flash so quickly in and out the headlamps cone that some dozen of them have sped by before it can be seen that horse and rider are not separate entities at all but joined and of a single will. Running easily beside the car are centaurs. Not the burly robust creatures of Greek myth but gaunt and predatory frames supporting taut thin flesh the gray of crematorium ash stretched near to piercing by protruding bones. If there are eyes within those hatchet heads they are so deepset or black that they appear as twin holes only, painted patches like dark spots on the wings of dusty moths. Their hooves kick up no leaf or twig or clod. Three dozen of them run before the Franklin’s prow like shepherd dolphins before a schooner’s bow, their hoofbeats’ number not accounting for the distance they advance. In their aspect more like insects than like creatures with a meated heart. They part to flow around the bleeding trees and sessile gluttons and argus demons they encounter, each obstacle revealed to Niko moments before he might plow into it. He dodges and swerves, and he curses the centaurs because of course it is their aim to lull him into fallen logs and stone outcrops.

A headless snake jabs past Niko’s shoulder as his demon points. “There’s a trail there.”

Niko heads for it. “Does it lead out of here?”

“Yeah but we’re not out of the woods yet.”

Niko drives along the rough and winding path. “Why’d you jump?”

“To make the car lighter, stupid.”

“I mean from the train.”

Silence from the back. Then, “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time? I might ask you the same question you know.”

The car spits from the forest like offending gristle out across the open hardpan, the horsemen left behind. Across the fearsome night they drive. Niko and his demon and a faintly glowing jar. See them from a sky that never saw a dawn: carshaped blackness inching over ancient plain, paltry white light leading and dim red light behind, some luminescent bottomfeeder hugging the flat plain floor to follow currents or magnetic lines because its route is charted in the very helix of its twining DNA. And so prowls on. Mercifully oblivious to the indifferent vastness of the deep it crosses. More must yet unwind from out the Stygian dark. This the route the car must forge.