Jim Butcher - Mean Streets

"Where to, John?" Dead Boy said easily. "My car requires directions. She is powerful and lovely and full of surprises, but she is not actually prescient. Apparently that only came as an optional extra."

"Head for the badlands," I said. "I should be able to provide more specific directions once we get there."

"I love mystery tours," Dead Boy said happily. "Off you go, girl."

The futuristic car moved smoothly out into the vicious traffic, and absolutely everything slammed on the brakes or changed lanes in a hurry, to give us plenty of room. Everybody knew Dead Boy's car, and the awful things it could and would do if it got even slightly annoyed.

"I can't help noticing you're not even touching the steering wheel," Liza said to Dead Boy.

"Oh, I wouldn't dare," he said. "My sweetie's a much better driver than I'll ever be. I don't interfere."

Liza leaned back in her seat, watched the traffic for a while, and then looked thoughtfully at me. "Why are you helping me, John? It's not like I'm even paying you for your services."

"I'm curious," I said honestly. "And… I don't like to see an innocent caught up and crushed under the Nightside's wheels. There's enough real evil here, without adding cruel and casual stuff. Good people shouldn't end up here, but if they do, they need to be protected. Just on general principles."

"If this is such a bad place," she said, "what are you doing here?"

"I belong here," I said. She settled for that, and went back to watching the traffic. I took out the two pieces of her photo, fitted them together, and concentrated on the image of her husband. My gift barely stirred, manifesting just enough to keep a firm hold on Frank's location. Husband Frank. He'd better be worth all this trouble. Liza clearly loved him with all her heart; but women have been known to fall for complete bastards before now. His face in the photo didn't give anything away. The smile seemed genuine enough, but I wasn't so sure about the eyes.

Frank hadn't moved since I first sensed his location, and I got the feeling he hadn't moved in some time. As I concentrated on his image, I began to get a feel for his surroundings, and the first thing I felt was the presence of technology. Advanced, future tech, not from this time and place. Frank seemed to be surrounded by it, fascinated by it… and the more I concentrated, the more my images of this future technology were tainted by distinctly organic touches.

Sweating steel and cables that curled like intestines; lubricated pistons rising and falling, and machines that murmured like people disturbed in their sleep. Strange nightmare devices, performing unnatural tasks, with hot blood coursing through their systems.

What had Frank got himself into?

I was beginning to get a really bad feeling about this. Especially when Frank's image in the photo suddenly turned its head to look right at me. His face was drawn, tired, and burning with a strange delirium. His eyes were dark and fever-bright… and he never even glanced at his wife, Liza, sitting right next to me. He locked his gaze onto mine, and his faraway voice sounded in my head.

Go away. I don't want you here. Don't try and find me. I don V want to be found.

"Your wife's here," I said silently to the photo. "Liza's here, in the Nightside. Looking for you. She's very worried about you."

/ know. Keep her away. For her sake.

And just like that, the photo was only a photo, and his face was just an image from the past. I didn't tell Liza what had just occurred. It didn't matter to me whether Frank wanted to be found or not; I was working for his wife. And she wanted to know what her husband was up to, even if she hadn't actually put it that way. This is why I don't do divorce work. No matter what the client says, they never really want the truth. Still, the unexpected contact with Frank, brief as it was, had given me a more definite fix on his position.

"I've found Frank," I announced, to Liza and Dead Boy. "He's on Rotten Row."

"Ah," said Dead Boy, sucking noisily on his whiskey bottle. "That is not good."

"Why?" Liza said immediately. "What happens on Rotten Row? What do people do there?"

"Pretty much everything you can think of, and a whole lot of things most people have never even contemplated," said Dead Boy. "Rotten Row is for the severely sick and disturbed, even by the Nightside's appalling standards."

Liza turned to me. "What is he talking about?"

"Rotten Row is where people go to have sex with the kind of people, and things, that no sane person would want to have sex with," I said, just a bit reluctantly. "Sex with angels, or demons. With computers or robots, slumming gods or other-dimensional monsters; worms from the earth or some of the nastier versions of the living dead. Rotten Row is where you go when the everyday sins of the flesh just don't do it for you anymore. Where men and women and all the many things they can do together just don’t satisfy. Sex isn't a sin or a sacrament on Rotten Row; it's an obsession."

Liza looked at me, horrified. "Sex with… how is any of that even possible?"

"Love finds a way," Dead Boy said vaguely.

Liza shook her head stubbornly, as though she could prove me a liar if she was just firm enough. "No. You must be wrong, John. My Frank would never… never lower himself to… He just wouldn't! He's always been very… normal. He'd never go to a place like that!"

"We all find love where we can," said Dead Boy.

"You're talking about sex, not love!" snapped Liza.

"Sometimes… you have to go a little off the beaten path to get what you really need," said Dead Boy philosophically. "There's more to life than just boy meets girl, you know."

And that was when all the car's alarms went off at once. Flashing red lights, followed by a rising siren, and the sound of an awful lot of systems arming themselves. Dead Boy sat bolt upright, tossed his whiskey bottle onto the passenger seat, and studied his various displays with great interest. Dead Boy lived for action and adventure.

"All right, car, turn off the alarms, I see them. Proximity alert, people. We are currently being boxed in by three, no four, vehicles. In front and behind, left and right. Look out the windows, see if you can spot the bastards."

It wasn't difficult; they weren't being exactly furtive about it. Four black London taxicabs were forcing their way through the crowded lanes of traffic to surround us on every side, positioning themselves to cut off all possible exits and escapes. The cabs bore no name or logo on their flanks, just flat black metal, like so many malignant beetles. They all had cyborged drivers, human only down to the waist. The head and torso hung suspended in a complex webbing of cables, tubes, and wires that made them a part of their taxis. The car was just an extension of its tech-augmented driver, so it could manoeuvre as fast as they could think. Human consciousness given inhuman control and reaction times. By the time I'd finished peering out of every window, there were black cabs speeding in perfect formation all around us.

And long machine-gun barrels protruded from each and every one of them, covering us.

"Put your foot down," I said to Dead Boy. "Try and lose them."

"You go, girl, go!" said Dead Boy, and the futuristic car surged forward.

The back of the taxicab in front of us loomed up disturbingly fast, and for a moment I thought we were going to ram it, but the taxi accelerated too, maintaining its distance. The other cabs swiftly increased their speed too, suggesting the cyborged drivers and the protruding machine guns weren't the taxis' only special features. These black cabs had been seriously souped up. We were all moving incredibly fast now, hurtling through the Nightside at insane speed, streets and buildings just gaudy blurs of colour. All around us, traffic hurried to get out of our way. Vehicles that didn't, or couldn't, move quickly enough were slammed and shunted aside by the taxis. Cars ran careering off the road, into defenceless storefronts, or smashed into one another, crying out like living things. Screams and shouts of outrage rang briefly behind us, Dopplering away into the distance.