“GO. GO. SERIOUSLY go.”
“It won’t go any faster.”
“Then we’re S O L, buddy pal.”
“How far now?”
“Hundred fortytwo yards. The rate they’re gaining, a minute before they hit us.”
“I can’t fucking believe I’m doing this.”
“Drive.”
The unbordered tracks look like a slash across a landscape painting of a Martian canyon. Close-set crossties shoot from the vanishing point and disappear beneath the car.
“Where’s Jem? Where’s the jar?”
“I’ve got it. You just keep us on the rails.”
“How can you be so calm?”
“Cause I’m the one with the wings.”
Humming tires run atop the narrow rails before the gaping train behind them bearing down. Niko struggles not to blink. He’s so terrified he wants to cry. His mouth is dry, he fights an urge to sneeze. He wants to scream but all he does is clench his teeth. His palms are sweaty on the wheel. He dares not look away from two slim lines on which the big car rides above the deep crevasse without an inch of play on either side. Maybe that’s best. They’re balanced like a clown bike on a tightrope and if he looked down and saw nothing but miles of empty space above a redlit and unfathomable bottom he would surely lose whatever fraying thread of nerve he still possesses.
“How far?”
“Forty yards now.”
“We gonna make it?”
Another pause. “No.”
Niko narrows his eyes. “If I’d stopped every time I thought that.” An awful pressure builds between his shoulderblades as the voracious iron engine burns down the heated night toward them. Worse than looking back to see the locomotive gullet straining to engulf them is not being able to look back at all. Now his demon is his eyes and ears.
The very iron trembles with the resonance of hurtling weight behind them. This bridge should not support its own weight, much less a locomotive, but it does. The rolling thunder gains and Niko swears he smells its heated iron breath. His demon yells Faster but the pedal’s on the floorboard.
“Maybe if we lost three hundred pounds of deadweight,” Niko says.
His demon whoops and snaps a tentacle with inspiration and before Niko knows it the backright suicide door has been flung open and the demon has leapt from the car. The door rakes back in the airstream and suddenly the car wants to veer right. Niko’s neck aches from the effort not to turn his head. Then his demon forces shut the door and leaps from the siderunner. He glides alongside for a moment and then spreads great batlike wings and snaprolls out over the uncontainable immensity of the canyon. Relieved of weight the Franklin gains some distance on the hungry metal hurtling behind it.
The cliff edge of the fissure’s other side is bottomlit hot lava red. Half a mile maybe. Niko’s face hurts and he’s paralyzed with muscle tension.
The car’s own shadow now precedes it, shortening and growing more opaque as fierce behind the car the massive train crowds up until its headlamp glowers down upon the roof. A sudden primal scream of trainhorn nearly causes him to veer off of the rails. Five hundred yards. Come on come on. Thick hot oil smell. Screaming demons over thundering metal and rumbling rail. Iron lip of locomotive kisses polished bumper chrome. The car is pushed along the tracks now by the unrelenting train. Niko knocks the gearshift into neutral and clamps both hands on the wheel to keep the tires on the rails. The Lower Plain’s resumption is a thousand feet away now. Distant crucifaxes stubble the flat ground.
Something lands on the back of the car and Niko stops himself from looking back so fast he pulls a muscle in his neck. His hands twitch on the wheel. He yells God damn it. Distant thunder dimly rumbles. Niko’s breath catches. o what have I done.
The rails shudder beneath him and he remembers tremors rippling down the gossamer length of railway bridge. He imagines an iron tidal wave rolling his way like a moving hump in a flicked garden hose. Roused from monstrous sleep the bridge beneath him groans. Bucking in the metal surge the light behind him wavers. Niko screams but cannot hear his voice in all the clang and thunder. Iron screams on iron and the car is lit by flashing sparks behind it as a thousand tons of locomotive angles off the slender bridge of rails. The train horn howls its outrage at the death that is the price for breaking free from its conscripted fate, tie spike rail wheel, howls out as the massive locomotive plummets from the trestle bridge to arc over the precipice.
The Black Taxi’s rear tires thump off the rails and the car begins to slew and then the edge is past and the interrupted plain resumes. Behind him now two hundred thousand iron pounds of locomotive missile slams the anvil of the sheer cliff face. The Franklin bucks on crossties. Unbelted Niko is airborne and anchored only by his grip upon the wheel. Then he lands back on the seat and stomps the gas and the car gains traction and rooster tails a gout of red plain floor as it speeds away from empty rails and a murdered locomotive.
NO SOONER IS he off the rails than Niko’s dodging crucifaxes. He nudges the wheel and the car slips between two inverted souls staked to their fate. No way he can keep this up. But wait. With the train gone now he doesn’t have to drive fullout. Duh.
As he slows the car he catches motion in the passenger window and sees a whippet thin and windraked demon opening the door.
A crucifax looms dead ahead. Its inverted tenant gaping like a deer at the oncoming lights. Niko speeds up and jerks left. A thud and a crack and the demon is gone. Clotheslined by the crucifax crosspiece.
Niko slows and threads his close way through the cruciforest till he breaks into a clearing. Ahead lie piled lumber and massed demons and the herded damned of the slaughtermill. The 4:07’s gonna be a little late today boys.
Niko gives the station of the cross a wide berth as he drives along his ruthless way.
A STEADY FORTY mph is both the slowest and the fastest Niko dares go right now. He’s shaking and his breath is ragged, senses overloaded. He wants to drive walleyed into what unmarked path lies leading where. Wants to let go the wheel and let the car itself take him where it may. Wants to get out of the car and get on hands and knees and shake until the shaking stops. Instead he holds the car at forty.
Now his route has led him to the forest. Trees swell toward him and flash by, souls entombed in living wood and someday to be wedded to the fleshly dead by iron spikes airgunned into the conscious pulp of their incessant being.
The roof above him buckles. Niko readies for another salvo but it’s not another assault. It’s his demon, who has glided overhead like a carrion bird to watch the car escape the train and then returned. Once again he lets his demon in and once again his demon fills the spacious rear compartment. A swath of blood that might not be his gleams his enormous chest.
“Nice flight?”
“Lost my baggage.” His demon looks backward at pursuing shapes not apprehended by the mind of man. “Go for the woods. They can’t fly there, they’ll get tangled up like kites.”
The wood is sparse compared to the forest of the crucified. The ground is rough and the Franklin’s passengers are bounced around as Niko threads among the rotund gluttons imprisoned in themselves exactly as he left them. Jouncing headlights glance upon the pale bruised creatures with their spines snapped backward and heads shoved up their rectums to look so like the plucked and headless corpses of turkeys. The suicides run horrible and blind like panicked fawns. They trip over branches and gluttons and stumble across roots and slam into trees.
From behind approaches arrhythmic pounding. Niko’s about to ask his demon what’s going on when suddenly around them gallop emaciated horsemen on elongate mounts like anorexic jockeys on enlarged greyhounds. They part around the Franklin to the left and to the right so spindly on their matchstick legs they cannot possibly support their famished weight. Yet they dart like nimble antelopes and flash so quickly in and out the headlamps cone that some dozen of them have sped by before it can be seen that horse and rider are not separate entities at a
ll but joined and of a single will. Running easily beside the car are centaurs. Not the burly robust creatures of Greek myth but gaunt and predatory frames supporting taut thin flesh the gray of crematorium ash stretched near to piercing by protruding bones. If there are eyes within those hatchet heads they are so deepset or black that they appear as twin holes only, painted patches like dark spots on the wings of dusty moths. Their hooves kick up no leaf or twig or clod. Three dozen of them run before the Franklin’s prow like shepherd dolphins before a schooner’s bow, their hoofbeats’ number not accounting for the distance they advance. In their aspect more like insects than like creatures with a meated heart. They part to flow around the bleeding trees and sessile gluttons and argus demons they encounter, each obstacle revealed to Niko moments before he might plow into it. He dodges and swerves, and he curses the centaurs because of course it is their aim to lull him into fallen logs and stone outcrops.
A headless snake jabs past Niko’s shoulder as his demon points. “There’s a trail there.”
Niko heads for it. “Does it lead out of here?”
“Yeah but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Niko drives along the rough and winding path. “Why’d you jump?”
“To make the car lighter, stupid.”
“I mean from the train.”
Silence from the back. Then, “I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time? I might ask you the same question you know.”
The car spits from the forest like offending gristle out across the open hardpan, the horsemen left behind. Across the fearsome night they drive. Niko and his demon and a faintly glowing jar. See them from a sky that never saw a dawn: carshaped blackness inching over ancient plain, paltry white light leading and dim red light behind, some luminescent bottomfeeder hugging the flat plain floor to follow currents or magnetic lines because its route is charted in the very helix of its twining DNA. And so prowls on. Mercifully oblivious to the indifferent vastness of the deep it crosses. More must yet unwind from out the Stygian dark. This the route the car must forge.
Within minutes they are come to the shore of frigid Lethe, the river of forgetfulness. Scant light gleams from its obsidian liquid. “How are we supposed to get across?” Niko says to the back seat. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
Niko glares at the dark instrument panel. Once again he fights the urge to look back at the smug inhuman bastard he chauffeurs.
“If you know something tell me. There are gonna be enough surprises without you adding to them.”
“I don’t know something.” The whiskey voice grows closer as the demon hunches forward. “I’m making this up as I go. Same as you.” Niko’s nostrils flare at the rot of his demon’s breath. His skin has the sour smell of a threeday bender. Mercifully the demon leans back. “When I want to go across a river I fly.”
They drive until the river flows before them.
Niko’s demon says Go right and Niko turns right. On his left the river flows. How much of my mortal life did I waste returning to that memory-cleansing water? I might still be bathing there had not the grave Achaian delivered my guitar, and the voice of it returned me to my self. Akileo, Akileo. Somewhere on this hard-packed shore I bested you. A feat no Homer will relate. Possibly your disgraceful armor weighs you still beneath those very waters. For your sake I hope it does.
Though the sand is hard and flat the car is still a little squirrely. It wants to get away from him again.
“We’re not headed out anymore,” says Niko.
“Why thank you Daniel Boone. No we’re not. If out is north we’re headed east.”
“What are we looking for?”
“A bridge would be nice.”
“I don’t see one.”
“There isn’t one.”
“Then we’re looking for the narrowest spot we can find.”
“You can never find the narrowest spot on an infinite river,” says his demon.
“The narrowest spot in the next five miles then.”
“Whyyy?” Like an obstinate six year old.
“Because we’re going to cross it your way.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re gonna fly.”
IT’S MORE LIKE ten miles but finally Niko finds a promising spot. Here some obstruction, probably logjammed bodies, has caused the mounding-up of runoff sand over uncounted centuries until a respectable dune has formed. It projects perhaps a hundred yards into the river and rises maybe thirty feet. From the end of the dune to the frozen far side of the river is about fifty yards. Using the slightly up-angled dune as a ramp, assuming the sandbar is hard and firm all the way, driving at a top speed of around ninety miles an hour ought to land the Franklin just about smack in the middle of the river.
Which is why Niko’s demon is on the roof as Niko backs up the car without looking. The mason jar is clamped between Niko’s thighs and his head is half out the window like a happy dog to hear his demon’s shouted directions.
“Right. Go right. More. Good, now straighten out. Ah nuts. Hold on, will you?”
Niko stops. The car rises as his demon jumps off the roof. “Let me do the talking.”
“Someone’s coming?” Niko doesn’t want to idle here. He must keep moving.
“One of my compadres.” He puts on a big ole shiteating grin and through clenched teeth says Look the other way, then nods amiably to whatever’s coming toward them.
Niko looks the other way. In his peripheral vision an obese demon waddles to the car. One side of her face looks halfmelted, one eye two inches lower than the other. The bottom of her face thick with caked-on food. A standard issue trident in one clawed hand. She glances at the car and Niko promptly looks away. Niko hears her say Howdy.
“How do.”
“What brings you guys to our neck of the woods? You’re a little off the beaten path.”
“Well. We’re delivering a cake. A big gooey chocolate cake with creamy rich frosting thick as dogshit.”
“A cake.” Her voice is suddenly pure sex.
“Bout yea big. In fact—” His demon’s voice lowers seductively and Niko can’t make out the rest. As she listens lustfully the obese demon’s gaze slides hopefully toward the Black Taxi where she sees Niko trying to look innocuous. “Say,” she says.
Niko hears a soft grunt and a strangled squawk and a meaty thump. By the time he looks his demon stands above the corpulent demon writhing with the blunt end of her own trident piercing her head. Her lower eye halfpushed from the socket by the length of iron rammed behind it. Niko’s demon has his foot on the trident to hold the bucking bloated figure down.
“Well, I see you did the talking.”
“My favorite form of communication. Wait here. I gotta take out the trash.” The vanquished demon’s mouth works spastically. “We don’t have time for this.”
“Fnuh fnuh fnuh,” says the fat demon.
Without looking Niko’s demon bends to the ground and loops a tendril to scoop a healthy load of sand into the fat demon’s mouth. “Look, do you know what’ll happen if they catch me?” He snorts and deposits another load into the sputtering mouth below him. “They’ll take me apart and put the pieces in boiling oil and cook them for a hundred years in a pot full of piranhas while they decide how they really want to punish me. They have rules about you but it’s open season on me, buddy pal. They can do whatever they want to catch me, and when they catch me they can do whatever they want to me. Forever and ever like the lovesongs say. So I’m unloading Shamu here before she decides to collect on the book the casino has surely put on me by now, or before she calls her wicked stepsisters in to share the loot. Okay?” He lifts the trident onto one powerful shoulder. The fat demon dangles like some bloated thing bagged out of season. “Bathtime, skinny.” He glances at Niko. “The less they bother me the easier it’ll be for you.” He turns away like some sick parody of a little lost devil running away from home. “We’re in this together sweetheart,” he calls over his should
er.
“What else is new,” Niko mutters.
“Fnuh fnuh fnuh,” the fat demon says.
“YOU READY UP there?” Niko calls.
“I still think you’re crazy as hell,” from the roof of the car. “But insanity’s helpful in someone I’m supposed to torment.”
“That’s not your job anymore.”
“I can moonlight. Let’s go.”
Niko reaches around the ungainly seatcushion his demon tore from the back seat and set across his lap in lieu of an airbag, and he puts the car in gear. Awkwardly he shifts as the Franklin lumbers up to speed. The breeze that blows into the opened front windows contains a chill from off the frozen plain across the river.
Above Niko his demon’s tendrils, wrapped through driver’s and passenger’s sides of the window, reposition for a better grip.
They race toward the dune projecting out into the river Lethe. All their calculations say the car can’t make it by itself. And his demon can’t possibly ferry the fortyfive hundred pound sedan a hundred fifty feet across the river. But perhaps the mongrel airfoil of his demon’s outspread wings can give them enough glide ratio to make the farther shore.
Niko keeps them straight and here comes the edge of the dune and son of a bitch it’s hard not to hit the brake. The ground drops below the windshield and Niko winces and his foot stays on the gas as the ground drops away and the engine roars and the whitewalls spin on nothing. Above him his demon spreads his wings and holds them as taut and wide and flat as his considerable muscles will allow.
The car soars off the dune. Black rock of sky beyond the hood. The mason jar wedged by the seatcushion between his clamping thighs. The car tips forward and the windshield fills with the frozen line of the far bank dotted with embedded figures. Solvent water rushes upward. Water that once delivered Niko from his haunted heart. The icy bank is twenty yards away now. Ten. Will we reach it?
Mortality Bridge Page 31