by Jim Butcher
“In the Nightside, the traffic comes and goes, but not everything that looks like a car is a car,” I explained patiently. “Here, ambulances run on distilled suffering, motorcycle couriers snort powdered virgin’s blood for that extra kick, and sometimes the bigger vehicles sneak up behind the smaller ones and eat them. Pretty much everything passes through the Nightside, at one time or another and sometimes simultaneously, and it’s always in a hurry. Foot down, everything forward and trust in the Lord, and Devil take the hindmost. That isn’t traffic out there; that’s evolution in action. Which is why we can’t get where we’re going by just hopping on the crosstown bus. We are waiting for Dead Boy, and his marvellous car of the future.”
“The sky, the traffic, creatures and demons walking openly in the street . . .” Liza shook her head just a bit dazedly. “Where is this place, John?”
“Good question,” I said. “Of this world, but not necessarily in it. Halfway between Heaven and Hell, but beholden to neither. A place of infinite jest and appalling possibilities. But don’t let it get to you. The Nightside is just a place where people go, in search of all the things they’re not supposed to want. Forbidden knowledge, forgotten secrets, and all the nastier kinds of sex. A place where the shadows are comfortably deep, and the sun never rises because some things can only be done in the dark.
“It’s the Nightside.”
Liza looked at me. “You do like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?”
“You asked,” I said.
Perhaps fortunately, Dead Boy arrived at that moment in his fabulous futuristic car, and Liza had something else to stare at. Dead Boy’s car is always worth a good look. It glided silently to a halt before us, hovering a few feet above the ground. A car from the future, so stylish it didn’t even bother with wheels anymore. It originally arrived in the Nightside through a Timeslip, from some future time line, and adopted Dead Boy as its driver. Bright gleaming silver, long and sleek and streamlined to within an inch of its life, the car hovered arrogantly before us, looking like it ran on distilled starlight. The long curving windows were polarised so no one could see in, and the mighty engines didn’t so much as deign to murmur.
The driver’s door swung open, to reveal Dead Boy lounging languidly behind the steering wheel. He had a half-empty bottle of vodka in his hand.
“All aboard for the badlands, boys and girls! Feel free to admire my beautiful ride’s elegance and style. This is what every car would be, if they only had the ambition.”
“You’re late,” I said sternly.
“I’m always late. I’m the late Dead Boy.” He sniggered at his own joke, and took a healthy pull from his vodka bottle.
“I am not getting into that!” Liza said firmly. “It hasn’t got any wheels. It looks like something from a bad seventies sci-fi movie.”
“Hush, hush, my beauty!” Dead Boy said soothingly to his car. “She is an uneducated barbarian, and doesn’t mean it.” He appeared to listen for a moment. “All right, yes, she probably did mean it, but you mustn’t take it personally. She is a mere tourist, and knows nothing of cars. Please let her in. And please don’t activate the ejector seat, no matter how annoying she gets.”
There was a pause, and then the other doors opened, slowly enough to express a certain reluctance. Liza looked at me.
“Does he often have conversations with his car?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Only he can hear her, though.”
“I see. And does this car really have an ejector seat?”
“Oh, yes. More than powerful enough to blast you into a whole different dimension.”
“I’ll be more polite to the car from now on,” said Liza.
“I would,” I said.
“But I’m still not sitting next to Dead Boy.”
So we both got in the back. Liza jumped just a bit as the door shut itself behind us. The seats were bloodred leather, and very comfortable. There was a faint perfume of crushed roses on the slightly pressurised air. There were no seat belts, of course. Their very existence would have been an insult to the car’s driving skills. Liza leaned forward and stared openly at the frankly futuristic display screens where the dashboard dials should have been. In fact, there were enough screens and displays and flashing lights to suggest anything up to and including warp speed.
“Can you get warp speed on this thing?” said Liza, proving that great minds think alike.
“Only in emergencies,” said Dead Boy. He didn’t seem to be kidding.
Liza took in the whiskey, brandy, and gin bottles lined up on top of the monitor screens, all of which showed signs of extensive sampling, and sniffed loudly. Dead Boy took this as a hint, and gestured generously at the bottles, and the open dashboard compartment full of honeyed locusts, spiced potato wedges, and assorted chocolate biscuits.
“Help yourself,” he said, around a mouthful of chocolate hobnob. Liza declined. Dead Boy shrugged, finished his biscuit, knocked back a handful of glowing green pills, finished off the last of the vodka, and slung the bottle through the window, which didn’t happen to be open. The bottle passed right through the glass without stopping. They really have thought of everything, in the future.
“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 ba
d 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’t 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.”
I 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.
The cabs decided enough was enough, closed in on us from every side, and slammed on their brakes simultaneously. We had to slow down with them or risk a collision, and the futuristic car was clearly cautious enough not to want to risk direct contact until it had to. Just because they looked like cabs, it didn’t mean they were. Protective camouflage is a way of life in the Nightside.
Why do you think I work so hard to look like a traditional private eye?
Dead Boy beat on the steering wheel with his pale fists, hooting with the excitement of the chase and shouting helpful advice that the car mostly ignored. Liza peered out of one window after another, her small hands unconsciously clenched into fists. I wasn’t that worried, yet. The car could look after itself.
One cab pressed in from the left, trying to pressure us into changing lanes. The cyborged driver wasn’t even looking at us. The other cabs gave way a little, to entice us, trying to persuade us away from the badlands exit, some way up ahead. To keep us away from Frank . . . and probably to herd us into a previously chosen killing zone where they’d have all the advantages. The futuristic car swayed back and forth, looking for a way out between the cabs, but they constantly manoeuvred with their more than human reflexes to block our way. And then, without warning, all four sets of machine guns opened fire on us. The sound was painfully loud, as bullets raked our car from end to end, and slammed viciously into front and back. Liza cried out, but quickly calmed down again as she realised I wasn’t even ducking. The machine-gun fire roared and stuttered, but none of it could touch us. Whatever Dead Boy’s car was made of, it wasn’t just steel. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly away in flurries of sparks and metallic screeches, but the futuristic car didn’t even shudder under the impact. The gunfire continued, as though the taxis thought they could break through our defences through sheer perseverance.
“Time for Puff the Magic Dragon, I think,” Dead Boy said cheerfully, entirely unmoved by the massed firepower aimed at him from all sides.
“What?” said Liza. “What did he just say? He’s got a bloody dragon in here somewhere?”
“Not as such,” I said. “More of a nickname, really. Because it breathes fire and makes problems disappear. Go for it, Dead Boy.”
Lights gleamed brightly all across the display screens, and there was the sound of something large and heavy moving into position. To be exact, a large gun muzzle was slowly protruding from the car’s radiator grille. Puff the Magic Dragon fired two thousand explosive flechettes a second, pumping them out at inhuman speed and with appalling vigour. Puff is a gun’s gun. The futuristic car opened up on the taxicab in front of us, and the whole back of th
e cab just exploded, black steel disintegrating under the impact, throwing ragged shrapnel in all directions. The cab surged wildly back and forth, but Puff moved easily to follow it, tearing the cab apart with invisible hands. The cab burst into flames, and was thrown this way and that by a series of explosions, before the endless stream of explosive flechettes picked the cab up and threw it end over end across several lanes of traffic, leaving a trail of blazing debris and drifting smoke behind it. I caught a brief glimpse of the cyborged driver, trapped behind his wheel in his ruptured webbing, screaming horribly as he burned alive in the wreckage.
I couldn’t bring myself to care, much. He would have done worse to us, if he could.
The taxi to our left accelerated wildly, forcing its way in front of us to block our escape, machine guns blazing fiercely from its rear. A brave and determined move, but the driver really shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the main threat. The other traffic.
A long dark limousine with dull unreflective black windows moved effortlessly in beside the cab, having sneaked up in the driver’s blind spot while he was concentrating on us. I winced, despite myself. I’d seen the limousine in action before. It moved in beside the taxicab, matching speeds perfectly until it was right opposite the driver’s window; and then the black window surface erupted into dozens of long grasping arms with clawed hands. Hooked fingers sank deep into the steel side of the cab, holding it firmly in place, while powerful black arms smashed through the window to get at the cyborged driver. The limousines can smell human flesh, and they’re always hungry. The cyborged driver screamed horribly as a dozen clawed hands gripped him fiercely, long barbed fingers sinking deep into flesh and bone, and then they hauled the driver right out of his webbing, tearing the human torso free from its rupturing tubes and cables. They dragged the screaming head and torso out through the shattered window, and into the interior of the limousine. The driver’s mouth stretched wide in an endless howl of horror, his eyes almost starting from his head at what he saw waiting for him. He disappeared inside the limousine, there was a brief spurt of blood out the window, and then the black arms snapped back in, the window re-formed itself, and the dark limousine accelerated smoothly away. The empty taxicab shot across the lanes, traffic diving every which way to avoid it, until finally it ran off the road and crashed.