Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

Niko’s pressed against the wreck with both arms shoved inside it when something jumps below his feet. He lets go and looks down. It’s the dog? The car? Crackles and pings surround him. Metal slowly smoothing. Drip of fluids recirculating. Dog and car are resurrecting, each feeding on the lifeblood of the other.

The waiting shadow falls across him now.

Niko tries again to pry his demon from the wreck but it’s no use. He slaps the lifeless bloody face and screams his demon’s newly given name but still the hulk of him lies boneless pinned and unresponsive.

Sudden light shines from beyond the gateway. It brightens and shifts along the wall and as it does a familiar knocking gargle grows. Niko feels a pang of fearful joy as the source of that noise glides into view and stops with a highpitched squeal of wornout brakes. The door yipes open and the driver gets out and looks across the yellow roof at Niko standing in the wreckage and she lowers the cigarillo from her mouth to blow pale smoke into the air beyond the wall. “Holy shit,” the cabbie says.

THE CABBIE GAPES at wreckage and the mob behind it. When she looks at Niko her eyes hold no hint of recognition. Well who knows how long it’s been since she saw him last? He knows what he looks like now. Thin, bearded, scraggly, filthy, beat to shit.

Niko waves. The cabbie flinches. Niko sees her realize who he is, and with that startled recognition her gaze shifts to what he can only imagine must be gathered behind him. Now the cabbie’s astonishment is colored with something like admiration. She waves her cigarillo, mutely asking You caused this? Niko shrugs.

With remarkable aplomb the cabbie steps around the Checker Cab and opens the rear door. Her gaze shifts between Niko and the unnerving quiet crowd he feels behind him as she keeps one hand on the handle and beckons slightly with the other.

Niko feels as trapped as Nikodemus. He’s never been happier to see someone in his life. Every cell in his body urges him to pick up Jem and run to the cab and dive into the back seat and haulass out of here and not look back. But he balls his fists and stands where he is. “Someone’s trapped in there,” he tells the cabbie. “I have to get him out.”

The cabbie looks puzzled but she nods and selects a key from her crowded keyring and opens the trunk. Niko feels a terrible cold spot between his shoulderblades while she rummages. She lowers the trunk and puts her cigarillo back to her lips and heads toward Niko bearing a crowbar and dragging her wheeled hydraulic jack like a little dog on a leash. She raises an eyebrow at the glowing mason jar on the ground and guides the jack around it and stops in front of Niko.

“Hiya.”

Niko wants to laugh but if he starts he might not ever stop. Instead he simply stares. She looks exactly the same. Same clothes. Same loosely knotted tie. She left him at this very gate how long ago now? Nikodemus led him to suspect his fugue on the banks of the Lethe had lasted months at least and maybe longer.

The cabbie leans to one side and looks past him and takes a deep drag from her cigarillo. Looking into the face of her nemesis, Niko realizes. Her opposite number. She juts her chin in a look of acknowledgement but not respect and leans a little farther to blow smoke past Niko and toward her opponent. Niko could kiss her. He wants to ask her how she knew to be here now but a black fog spreads across his vision and things go far away.

“STEADY.” HER HAND on his arm. “Here.” Glass crunches as she walks him backward to the wreck, grimacing when some wet organ squishes beneath her battered leather tennis shoe. She peers at Nikodemus through the crumpled doorway gap. “Um.”

“He’s alive.”

She nods doubtfully and goes to work with the crowbar. Banging prying straining. Niko wants to help her but he feels encased in something. The cabbie tries to fit the jack sideways into the compressed doorway but can’t hold it in place and work the lever at the same time. Pure shame releases Niko from his immobility and he hurries to the cabbie. They trade a glance and she nods. Hers is the first human face he has seen in a long long time with any kind of life or light in it.

Niko holds the jack steady while the cabbie works the lever. The lifting arm touches the doorframe and metal begins to creak. The car flinches and the cabbie draws back with her eyes wide and the jackhandle coming up to strike. But there’s nothing to hit really and she glances again at Niko and goes back to work. “We need a jaws of life,” she says.

“I’m surprised you don’t have one in that trunk.”

The opening groans wider and soon Niko reaches inside the Black Taxi and grabs Nikodemus’ inert body while the cabbie sits on the crumpled hood with both legs through the windshield frame and both feet pushing on the demon’s burly bleeding shoulder. They get him loose enough that the cabbie can come around behind Niko and pull on Nikodemus’ naked legs while Niko leans into the desecrated car and guides the body under the wedging jack. On the deformed dashboard past the bent steering wheel he glimpses the tripmeter he reset at zero when he left the casino. The numbers now read 31415. Above it the odometer shows a row of zeroes.

Something tickles Niko’s arm and he jerks away. Beside Nikodemus on what’s left of the passenger side in the middle of a pile of shattered glass and stringy entrails a severed doghead the size of a beachball lies crushed. What fur is not peeled back to show bare skull is matted with blood. Inches from Niko rotted yellow teeth the size of fingers clack. A single brown and insane eye glares pure malice at him.

“On three,” the cabbie calls behind him.

Niko scrunches away from the doghead and braces both hands on Nikodemus’ shoulders. With the demon’s legs hoisted underneath her arms the cabbie calls out One two three and Niko pushes and the cabbie pulls and Nikodemus comes free and spills stillborn from the car.

The disembodied dog’s jaws snap frantically and Niko jerks away and bangs his head against the buckled roof hard enough to scatter pinprick lights. He blinks and shakes his head and carefully backs out of the murdered Franklin. Niko and the cabbie grab a tendril apiece. The whiplike tentacles are smooth and muscled as any strong arm and not reptilian at all.

Niko and the cabbie drag his demon through the wreckage, mopping a swath through blood gas bile glass ichor oil meat and metal. Niko’s bruised shoulder feels as if it’s glowing.

“Jeez, what is this guy, a statue?”

Niko stops beside the mason jar. “I need that.”

The cabbie wipes sweat from her brow as Niko carefully lifts the jar until he holds it against his hurting ribcage. The smell of perfume definitely fainter now. He nods at the cabbie and they start pulling again. One more step remains to take him past the threshold and at long last out of here. Niko is about to take it when he hears a voice.

“Leaving without saying goodbye, Niko-tizer?”

Niko stops. He expected something like this. “I’ve already said everything I have to say to you,” he tells the air before him.

“Not to me, Nikster. To her.”

And Niko hears the only thing that could stop him as no wall or beast or power has stopped him all this awful time.

“Niko,” says Jemma.

NIKO DROPS THE mason jar.

It lands on Nikodemus’ belly. He lowers Nikodemus and straightens feeling cold. As if a rifle’s pointed at his back.

“Niko. Where are you going?”

Niko shuts his eyes. She sounds so afraid.

“What’s wrong?” the cabbie asks.

“Niko please.”

Niko stands stock still with eyes clamped shut. “You don’t hear that, do you?”