Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Niko lets up on the horn. The sudden reigning silence nearly as painful. He watches the wall a moment longer. Gathering for the pounce. He revs the engine. Ready or not boys.

Why are you doing this?

He puts the Franklin into gear one final time.

What choice do you have?

He looks toward motion to his left. Something big stands on the runner and its leathery brown face fills up the window. Niko calmly elbows down the lock and looks away. Screw it. You want a ride, I’ll give you a ride.

The suicide door explodes open, wrenched off its beehive hinges. Niko’s foot slips off the clutch and the Black Taxi lurches and stalls. Motherfucker! Niko turns to confront whatever has confounded him, not really giving a shit that it just tore the door off a car. It grips him with powerful tendrils and hauls him before its battered and demonic likeness. Niko has a moment to take in darkly bleeding clawmarks raked across the craggy face, an ear shredded to flapping ribbons, a pulped eye lying wet on the swollen cheek, and gleaming bone beneath the ripped scalp before he’s pulled from the car and thrown to the harsh warm ground beside the wrenched off door.

Niko lies there with the wind knocked from him and watches Nikodemus get behind the wheel. He whispers No.

Nikodemus starts the car.

Niko struggles to his feet. “No,” he says. “It’s not your fight.”

Nikodemus looks at him and even though his demon’s face is a bleeding bludgeoned ruin its expression is one of pity.

Niko trudges stiffly toward the car as if poisoned by curare. It doesn’t matter. I will not let my demon do this. This is my job.

But he is stopped by Nikodemus touching his chest. It’s not a whipthin tendril the demon presses against him but the hard curve of a glass mason jar.

Nikodemus fixes Niko with his remaining eye.

Finally Niko looks down at the jar. The gesture also an accepting nod. Gently Niko takes the jar and the tendril withdraws.

The demons waiting on the wall. The jar he cradles close. Smell of perfume rising from the broken glass. Is it fainter than before? His eyes burn and his lips press tight.

Nikodemus gives a little nod and hoarsely whispers Thanks. Because we all want absolution, all want to atone. And then he puts the car in gear and Niko steps back and watches Nikodemus smoothly drive away.

Niko doesn’t know he’s crying until a tear lands on the cracked glass in his hands. Son of a bitch sure learned how to drive a stick.

A THOUSAND YARDS:

Niko watches from this safe distance as the headlamps light the gate like prison searchlights. In the glare the six mad fires of the waiting dog’s reflecting eyes. The engine roar diminishing. Receding taillights blurred by tears. After all he’s done to get this far he stands alone now on the outskirts of Hell with the cracked jar held fast in his arms and watches his demon and his friend accelerate across the thousand yards toward the iron gate.

On the wall they scurry to their feet and hooves and claws. Shouting reaches him across the distance. Tridents rocks and bricks are poised.

The Black Taxi impossibly sleek and smooth and doomed streaks toward the waiting metal.

Just before the crash the demons throw. Missiles smash on grille hood windshield roof.

The mindless dog’s anticipated leap uncoils.

The nightblack car holds steady. Silently hits the iron gate at eightyfive.

The front end accordions. The taillights lift.

The gate buckles then bursts outward.

The front end hits the leaping dog. Meat and metal merge.

The engine plunges past the firewall.

The fused mass of enormous car and monstrous dog slams down beneath the portal.

Blood and burning oil gout the air.

The collision’s thunder reaches him.

Niko runs.

DESPERATE AS HE is to reach the gate he cannot run the whole distance. Niko is too injured and too tired and too goddamned old to sprint a thousand yards. Within a few hundred yards the run becomes a trot, the trot a jog, the jog a power walk. It takes a sundered lifetime to get to the wreck. He’s wheezing and holding his ribcage by the time the portal looms above him once again. All around him on the wall stand demons and gargoyles and abominations. The hot air heavy with their rustlings but they say nothing nor do they shout or move. Unmolested Niko walks beneath their alien scrutiny. They stand in mute witness at the passing of something. Midwives to the death and birth of myth and humbled in their pensive silence.

Niko approaches the steaming ticking wreck. Dread and caution. The terrible marriage before him barely recognizable as creature or car. Blood and oil and shit and gas and fur and metal everywhere, bucketfuls hurled against the portal’s white marble hugely stained about the smoking wreck. The Franklin half its former length. Bent around itself and warped around the bleeding meat and protruding bone of guardian dog. The blighted air thick with smells of burnt rubber and cooked flesh. A clotted headlamp shines straight up. Cooling metal pings. A palmwide studded collar wraps a redringed whitewall canted outward and still slowly turning like an abandoned playground toy.

Tensed as if expecting a blow Niko rounds the wreck. Looking for any sign of Nikodemus. Afraid that he will find it. He stares at a gap in the metal so crumpled and compressed he doesn’t recognize it at first. And then the shapes around the gap make sense. There’s what used to be the roof. There’s a slanted length of bench seat mashed against the bent steering wheel. Niko’s looking through the space where the driver’s door used to be. Between the seatback and the steering wheel a bloodsoaked shape that must be Nikodemus. But it can’t be Nikodemus. There’s barely three inches between seat and wheel. But it is.

Niko looks beyond the wreck. Beyond the gate. Past the threshold. Outside. Half a dozen steps and you’re out of here. One two three four five six and free and then you win. Come on. Come on. Let’s go. There’s nothing you can do for him. Leave him here or what he did for you will be for nothing.

Shattered glass crunches as he takes a step. He glances at the wreck. The bloody shape within.

A shadow stretches on the ground. Thin. Elongate. Human. Someone standing close behind him. All Hell holds its foundry breath.

“He’s not alive,” Niko tells the empty waiting air before him. “He never was.” He looks up but sees only the marble top of the arched portal and the bent overhang of ruined gate. “He wasn’t mortal so he can’t die. Right?” Cold marble flattens his voice. Speaking to the shape behind him. He can’t look back to see it but he can guess who it is. “You’ve come to take him. Haven’t you?”

The shadow’s hand comes up to touch the bill of its shadow cap.

Crunching glass resumes as Niko returns to the wreck. It takes all his will to bend and gently set down the mason jar he holds like some rediscovered fragment of Atlantis. I can’t let them take him, Niko tells the jar.

When he moves toward the car the waiting shadow falls across the jar. The feather’s green glow dims. The shadow’s arm comes away from the jar and its shadow hand now holds the shadow of a jar. A jar in which there is no shadow of a feather. A new jar then. Empty and awaiting capture of the firefly soul of Nikodemus.

Mortal threats occur to Niko but what threat can he make, what power does he have? He must have faith in the bond of uttered vows. Abide. Abide.

He turns away from the jar. Through the flattened and serrated wedge where the windshield smashed and the roof caved in Nikodemus sits crushed between steering wheel and seat, his huge body crammed into an impossibly small space. Niko pushes on the seat but it won’t budge. He reaches through the collapsed doorway and grips Nikodemus but his hands slip on the blood. He leans in as far as he can and tries again and gets a grip but still can’t move his demon’s bulk. Three hundred pounds of Nikodemus are wedged in tight.