Стивен Бойетт - Mortality Bridge

“Where are we going?”

“Malibu Canyon.”

“What’s there?”

Niko blinks blearily at his companion. “Heaven.”

NIKO GETS A second wind as they climb out of the Valley just past Woodland Hills. He wakes up with a gasp and glances around, disoriented. They’re really whipping along the freeway. The speedometer hovers just above one hundred. Shouldn’t we slow down to avoid attention? Ah fuck it. What are they gonna do, shoot me?

The fuel gauge is below empty and the idiot light is on.

Niko turns to look behind them and feels that awful pulling in his back. Like a guitar string tightened to snapping. Great, I’m a highnote test.

A pair of bugeyed headlights races in the breakdown lane a couple miles back and slowly gaining.

“He’s back there,” says Nikodemus.

“I’m cold.”

Nikodemus frowns. “The heater’s all the way up.”

“You want me to drive?”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Okay. We’re a mess, huh?”

“We’re a mess.”

They pass the sign for Parkway Calabasas. Calabasas means pumpkins Niko thinks. Someone named a place pumpkins. “You don’t think we’re gonna make it, do you?” he says to the road ahead.

His demon drives in silence for a mile. “It would help if I knew what we were doing.”

“Okay. In a couple miles take the Las Virgenes exit. Go left and head out Malibu Canyon toward the ocean. Just before Pepperdine there’s a tunnel. If we can get to it before the Black Taxi gets to us I think we have a shot.”

“Whyyy?”

“Well. As below so above.”

“I don’t understand.”

“As the Red Line tunnel is an entrance to your old stomping grounds, so the Malibu Canyon tunnel is an entrance—” And Niko gestures at a point beyond the roof.

Silence for a while.

“Are you sure?”

Niko looks at Nikodemus. Worry does not sit well on the demon’s face. “Yeah. I’m sure. You still don’t think we’re gonna make it, do you?”

“We might. We could. If the Driver doesn’t run us off the road. If your car doesn’t run out of gas. If you don’t run out of blood before we get there. If your woman’s soul is still in the jar.”

“Okay, so other than that.” Niko leans his head against the window. The glass cool against his forehead. “Thanks for driving. You didn’t have to come you know.”

“Yes I did.”

“Yeah. I guess you did.” Niko shuts his eyes. His hands and feet feel miles away. He shivers with some inner cold. All he wants to do is sleep. O Faustus now hast thou but one bare hour to live. I am in the last hour of my life. All I do now a compendium of final things. I have kissed Jemma one last time. I have left my home a final time. The last time I will see my city. Music has left me now. On the road ahead my last words wait for me. Last breath. Final heartbeat. Sight. As always they have lain out there. As for all who ever lived. My enemy and friend beside me drives me toward that meeting I’ve evaded but anticipated all my life. The unsailed sea that shapes the continent of life itself by giving it a shore. Now my untried soul will brave that deep. As Jemma here beside me has though I have hauled her partway from that drowning.

He turns the redsmeared broken jar in his bloodstained hands. Just glass. Just a feather. Jemma will I see you again? We are spirits I have learned. Something in us immortal and irreducibly ourselves. But paired and forever bound? I don’t know. I fear perhaps we intersect we waltz and we move on. The music stops and we are all alone. Well if that is so I can accept it. When I set out to get you back it was because you had been taken from me. But on the way my reasons changed. It was because you had been taken at all. Taking you was wrong. Not unfair, not tragic, but wrong. A violation. You didn’t deserve to die. You don’t deserve to be there. And I don’t care what happens to me so long as I can make that right. My winning or losing no longer matters. I don’t deserve you back. I signed my soul away and can’t stand on some right to overturn that. Phil was right: a binding contract freely entered into. But you did not. They can have me. But not until we have you safely from them. That’s what’s different this time. That is what we have a chance of winning here. For even just the fact of change can be a victory.

But now that we have broken free the story’s outcome is unknown. What will happen to you when we cross that boundary again? To think that you might simply be returned to where I brought you from.

All I can do is what I do now. The rest is in the hands of the gods. Who are not known for their evenhandedness. Not to mortal men and especially not to those who set themselves against them. Even Orpheus before me did not get so far. Yet he was not blessed with such companions as I’ve had. Perhaps that was his failure, that he took it on himself. That in truth he went down for himself and not for her.

So hold on Jem. Hold on. Soon we will be home.

THE CAR TURNS off the freeway and Niko opens heavy lids. “Where are we?”

“Las Virgenes exit.”

“Go left.”

They turn left and pass above the Ventura Freeway. Up ahead a McDonald’s and a liquor store and a gas station. “We need gas,” says Niko.

“Look behind us.”

Niko looks just as the black length of the Franklin turns left off the exit ramp. Shit. Nikodemus puts the hammer down and an invisible hand shoves Niko into the seat. Mournfully he watches the gas station whip by.

The Bentley flashes by an L.A. County Sheriff car parked on a side road before a condo cluster. The patrol car kicks up dust and speeds onto the road where it is nearly broadsided by the Black Taxi before the big black car yaws into the lefthand lane and whips around the black-and-white.

“Cop,” says Niko.

Nikodemus merely looks at him.

“Yeah right, never mind.” They lean hard into a curve. “This road is sort of glued onto a mountain range. It’s pretty curvy so be careful.”

“I like this car. It’s much easier to drive than that one.”

“I’ll will it to you.”

Colored light plays about them. The sheriff’s lightbar. Its strobing backlights the Black Taxi racing between the Bentley and the patrol car and definitely gaining.

Nikodemus sticks the Bentley round a tight right curve. The tires wail as they slide out toward the precipice in a mild fourwheel drift into the path of oncoming headlights. Nikodemus backs off on the gas and cuts in and a black Ford pickup streaks by honking and goes on to barely miss the Black Taxi and the pursuing patrol car.

Whatever else Nikodemus might be he is certainly not the Checker Cab driver. The demon’s driving experience consists of three or four days driving a supernatural vehicle up a ramp full of dead people and mowing them down like grass.

Niko tries to think. Okay. So. Malibu Canyon Road runs along the hillside above the sheer dropoff of the gorge that houses Malibu Canyon Creek. Near the crest of Malibu Canyon Road there’s Mulholland Drive but few other side roads. Mostly undeveloped state-owned parkland till you get to Hughes Research Labs and Pepperdine University near Pacific Coast Highway at the Malibu shoreline where the Santa Monica Mountains drown in the Pacific. Friday traffic on the canyon road. No wonder that sheriff had been parked there. He’s gonna wish he’d baited his line for smaller fish.

Niko massages his forehead. His fingertips are cold. Okay. Stop worrying about the sheriff. He can’t stop us and if he radios for help they’ll just be waiting somewhere near PCH on the other side of the hill. Where the hell else are we gonna go?

The biggest worry is the tunnel itself. They’re not driving some tanklike Checker Cab with special buttons that enable it to do supernatural things. No sir. They’re driving a Bentley. A quarter million dollars’ worth of fine machine but a machine nonetheless. Its most supernatural controls are a GPS and personal environment controls and memory settings on the seats. When they reach the tunnel it may be just a tunnel. Not a Portal, not a Doorway to some other where. And what then? What if they drive into it and come out still on Malibu Canyon Road and heading downhill toward the highway and a row of Stop Sticks and a line of sheriff’s cars? But officer I can explain. This here’s my demon, see, and this jar contains my girlfriend’s soul, I was being chased by Death himself, you won’t believe the night I’ve had, can’t you just let me off with a warning?