Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

He remembers something with a start. “Hey. Do you still have those candybars?” He’s already reaching for the glovebox when the cabbie says sure. His mouth floods as he opens the glovebox and pulls out a shapeless foilwrapped Chunky bar. His hands shake as he hurriedly unwraps the halfmelted candybar and shoves it into his mouth. The sweet explosion almost unbearable.

The cabbie nudges him and points out the swath in the slimy wall where the Checker Cab jumped track and blew a tire and scraped along the side. Niko nods. Written passage.

The moonish creatures press against the gelid wall and let the cab pass unmolested, their blinding encounter with the yellow car a blob of painful recent memory in their meager minds.

Niko shuts his eyes and feels the damp air on his face. It reeks of rot but he no longer notices.

The glowing length of tunnel is behind them now. Bare brown brick conjured from the dark ahead. The iron rails on which they ride are no longer rusted and the crossties are no longer rotten wood. Tie spike rail wheel.

“Your bud back there,” the cabbie says. “What are you gonna do with him when you get back?”

Niko coughs to clear his injured throat. “I haven’t thought that far.”

“I think he might be in for some trouble when we leave the tunnel.”

“We’ll make him keep his head down.”

“Not what I meant.” The cabbie glances in the rearview. At what, at what.

“Then what?” Niko feels thick and stupid and filthy and weary and sore.

“Well. He isn’t mortal is he? Like you are?”

Niko notices she doesn’t say Like us. “No.”

“Well I think he might be once we’re back.”

Niko blinks. “Might be mortal?”

She nods. “I don’t know. I mean it’s just a theory, right? But these guys.” She hooks a thumb at the back seat. “They don’t get out much. I think somehow the game is rigged against them. Otherwise they’d be taking vacations in Disneyland and screaming in the Haunted Mansion. Don’t you think?”

“But.” Niko scrunches up his face. He’s thinking about his good old buddy Phil with his trendy shades and his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Daytona Cosmograph and his hair in perfect disarray and his iPhone cased in human leather that appears from nowhere. Mortal when they’re in our world? How many times has Niko wanted to kill the supercilious son of a bitch? “Well so what if he is?”

The cabbie eyes him. “He’s bad hurt. Injuries like that probably would have killed a mortal man.”

“Yeah but he’s not a—oh.”

She stubs out her cigarillo. “Oh. If we take him to the surface it might kill him when we cross over. If he stays down here he’ll definitely heal.”

“If whoever’s following us doesn’t catch us first.”

She looks at him sharply.

Niko points out the window. “You can see their light on the walls. Behind our headlights. It’s him, isn’t it?”

She scowls at the rearview. “It’s a pair of headlights.”

“It’s him.” That goddamn cold spot creeping back between his shoulderblades. “He waited for the car to heal itself and then he came after us.” Niko looks out the window at light from the headlamps shining far behind them. “How far back is he?”

“Hard to say.” She chews her lower lip.

Niko senses more bad news. “What now?”

“Black Taxi driver’s kind of an independent contractor. He follows company rules but he doesn’t really work for the company.” She glances again at the rearview. “His rules let him go past the gate. And he’s not mortal on the world. Otherwise what use would he be?”

“So he’ll try to distract us all the way back up.”

“At the very least.”

“Well, we’ll just try to outdrive him until we’re out. What else can we do?”

“I don’t think it’ll stop there.” She indicates the jar.

“But they gave Jemma back. It ends when we’re back, when we’re out of here.”

“They really like technicalities. Loopholes. She’s not back until her soul’s back where it belongs. He’ll try to get her before that.”

“What, does he work on commission? He already did his job.”

“You stole his car and wrecked it.”

Niko stops. The rushing dark ahead looks exactly the way he feels inside. “So now it’s personal.”

“I’d be pretty pissed off if I was him. I’m sure he’ll win employee of the month if he brings your lady back too. But I doubt there’s anything he can do if you can put her back where she belongs.”

“And Nikodemus?”

“That’s his name?” She seems amused. “I think someone will have to come up after him. He doesn’t belong where we’re going.”

The tunnel walls are growing smooth and pale gray. In the distance floats a faint green dot. The first of the rail signals.

Niko puts his hands over his scabbed and bearded face. “So I’ve at least got to get Nikodemus somewhere safe or drop him off before we come out in case he goes all mortal on us and his injuries kill him. I’ve got to get Jemma back into… Jemma, before the Driver catches up to us.”

“That pretty much covers it.”

Niko lowers his hands. “The jar’s broken. I think she’s… leaking out.”

The cabbie shakes her head.

“Do you know anything about that?” Niko holds up the jar. “About putting these back where they belong?”

The headshake continues. “I drive a cab. I take people where they’re going. I don’t know how to do that.”

Niko and the cabbie both jump when Niko’s own voice comes from the back seat.

“I do,” says Nikodemus.

THE TUNNEL IS modern again, three steel rails, prestressed concrete walls, equidistant lights. The distant cries of Red Line cars call out across an unknown distance, ghosts of dinosaurs haunting the chthonic world.

“Two hundred yards,” calls Nikodemus. Hunched in the back of the Checker Cab he stares out the rear window at the Black Taxi eating up rails and steadily gaining on them. The demon’s shredded wings flutter in the constant rush of wind into the car.

Niko and the cabbie told Nikodemus what they fear may happen to him when they cross over but the demon insisted on coming with them all the way. “In for a penny, in for a pounding.” His tone had brooked no argument.

The cabbie squints intently at the lights unspooling from the dark. “Hundred fifty yards,” calls Nikodemus.

Up ahead the tunnel splits. The cabbie’s going to try to cut over to the righthand tunnel at the last possible moment. “One twenty.” If she cuts over too soon the Black Taxi will easily follow her. “One hundred.” Too late and they’ll miss the tunnel and the Black Taxi will be right on them.

Niko sees the switchoff now a thousand yards ahead. A faint curve of wall, another set of rectangular lights branching out to the right.

The tunnel walls grow bright around them. “Train,” yells Nikodemus. “Train behind us. Two hundred yards and gaining fast.”

“Where the hell did that come from?” says Niko.

“It’s running down the—no wait, the black car’s going faster.”

“Shit.” The wind blows harder as the Checker Cab speeds up. “I keep thinking it’s you talking back there,” the cabbie tells Niko. “He sounds just like you.”

The cab fills with an eerie lamentation. The siren song of the pursuing Blue Line train reverberating down the rails and through the passenger compartment.

“Don’t look back,” chants Niko. “Don’t look back. Don’t—” A blast of the trainhorn fills the tunnel.

Nikodemus yells from the back seat but Niko barely hears him. The branchoff is dead ahead. His peripheral vision picks up bright lights from the passenger side mirror. The trainhorn’s about to powder his skull.