Mortality Bridge (45 page)

Niko regards their ballpark camaraderie and on sudden impulse hits the horn. The soul-cleaving shriek cuts the chronic night and batwings spread and flap. One demon jerks hard enough to fall off the wall and land on his head. The others laugh and several jump up to piss on him. The fallen demon grins and opens his mouth and drinks and bows like a courtier. His wings flourish like a sable cape and then he leaps up to his former perch.

Niko lets up on the horn. The sudden reigning silence nearly as painful. He watches the wall a moment longer. Gathering for the pounce. He revs the engine. Ready or not boys.

Why are you doing this?

He puts the Franklin into gear one final time.

What choice do you have?

He looks toward motion to his left. Something big stands on the runner and its leathery brown face fills up the window. Niko calmly elbows down the lock and looks away. Screw it. You want a ride, I’ll give you a ride.

The suicide door explodes open, wrenched off its beehive hinges. Niko’s foot slips off the clutch and the Black Taxi lurches and stalls. Motherfucker! Niko turns to confront whatever has confounded him, not really giving a shit that it just tore the door off a car. It grips him with powerful tendrils and hauls him before its battered and demonic likeness. Niko has a moment to take in darkly bleeding clawmarks raked across the craggy face, an ear shredded to flapping ribbons, a pulped eye lying wet on the swollen cheek, and gleaming bone beneath the ripped scalp before he’s pulled from the car and thrown to the harsh warm ground beside the wrenched off door.

Niko lies there with the wind knocked from him and watches Nikodemus get behind the wheel. He whispers No.

Nikodemus starts the car.

Niko struggles to his feet. “No,” he says. “It’s not your fight.”

Nikodemus looks at him and even though his demon’s face is a bleeding bludgeoned ruin its expression is one of pity.

Niko trudges stiffly toward the car as if poisoned by curare. It doesn’t matter. I will not let my demon do this. This is my job.

But he is stopped by Nikodemus touching his chest. It’s not a whipthin tendril the demon presses against him but the hard curve of a glass mason jar.

Nikodemus fixes Niko with his remaining eye.

Finally Niko looks down at the jar. The gesture also an accepting nod. Gently Niko takes the jar and the tendril withdraws.

The demons waiting on the wall. The jar he cradles close. Smell of perfume rising from the broken glass. Is it fainter than before? His eyes burn and his lips press tight.

Nikodemus gives a little nod and hoarsely whispers Thanks. Because we all want absolution, all want to atone. And then he puts the car in gear and Niko steps back and watches Nikodemus smoothly drive away.

Niko doesn’t know he’s crying until a tear lands on the cracked glass in his hands. Son of a bitch sure learned how to drive a stick.

A THOUSAND YARDS:

Niko watches from this safe distance as the headlamps light the gate like prison searchlights. In the glare the six mad fires of the waiting dog’s reflecting eyes. The engine roar diminishing. Receding taillights blurred by tears. After all he’s done to get this far he stands alone now on the outskirts of Hell with the cracked jar held fast in his arms and watches his demon and his friend accelerate across the thousand yards toward the iron gate.

On the wall they scurry to their feet and hooves and claws. Shouting reaches him across the distance. Tridents rocks and bricks are poised.

The Black Taxi impossibly sleek and smooth and doomed streaks toward the waiting metal.

Just before the crash the demons throw. Missiles smash on grille hood windshield roof.

The mindless dog’s anticipated leap uncoils.

The nightblack car holds steady. Silently hits the iron gate at eightyfive.

The front end accordions. The taillights lift.

The gate buckles then bursts outward.

The front end hits the leaping dog. Meat and metal merge.

The engine plunges past the firewall.

The fused mass of enormous car and monstrous dog slams down beneath the portal.

Blood and burning oil gout the air.

The collision’s thunder reaches him.

Niko runs.

DESPERATE AS HE is to reach the gate he cannot run the whole distance. Niko is too injured and too tired and too goddamned old to sprint a thousand yards. Within a few hundred yards the run becomes a trot, the trot a jog, the jog a power walk. It takes a sundered lifetime to get to the wreck. He’s wheezing and holding his ribcage by the time the portal looms above him once again. All around him on the wall stand demons and gargoyles and abominations. The hot air heavy with their rustlings but they say nothing nor do they shout or move. Unmolested Niko walks beneath their alien scrutiny. They stand in mute witness at the passing of something. Midwives to the death and birth of myth and humbled in their pensive silence.

Niko approaches the steaming ticking wreck. Dread and caution. The terrible marriage before him barely recognizable as creature or car. Blood and oil and shit and gas and fur and metal everywhere, bucketfuls hurled against the portal’s white marble hugely stained about the smoking wreck. The Franklin half its former length. Bent around itself and warped around the bleeding meat and protruding bone of guardian dog. The blighted air thick with smells of burnt rubber and cooked flesh. A clotted headlamp shines straight up. Cooling metal pings. A palmwide studded collar wraps a redringed whitewall canted outward and still slowly turning like an abandoned playground toy.

Tensed as if expecting a blow Niko rounds the wreck. Looking for any sign of Nikodemus. Afraid that he will find it. He stares at a gap in the metal so crumpled and compressed he doesn’t recognize it at first. And then the shapes around the gap make sense. There’s what used to be the roof. There’s a slanted length of bench seat mashed against the bent steering wheel. Niko’s looking through the space where the driver’s door used to be. Between the seatback and the steering wheel a bloodsoaked shape that must be Nikodemus. But it can’t be Nikodemus. There’s barely three inches between seat and wheel. But it is.

Niko looks beyond the wreck. Beyond the gate. Past the threshold. Outside. Half a dozen steps and you’re out of here. One two three four five six and free and then you win. Come on. Come on. Let’s go. There’s nothing you can do for him. Leave him here or what he did for you will be for nothing.

Shattered glass crunches as he takes a step. He glances at the wreck. The bloody shape within.

A shadow stretches on the ground. Thin. Elongate. Human. Someone standing close behind him. All Hell holds its foundry breath.

“He’s not alive,” Niko tells the empty waiting air before him. “He never was.” He looks up but sees only the marble top of the arched portal and the bent overhang of ruined gate. “He wasn’t mortal so he can’t die. Right?” Cold marble flattens his voice. Speaking to the shape behind him. He can’t look back to see it but he can guess who it is. “You’ve come to take him. Haven’t you?”

The shadow’s hand comes up to touch the bill of its shadow cap.

Crunching glass resumes as Niko returns to the wreck. It takes all his will to bend and gently set down the mason jar he holds like some rediscovered fragment of Atlantis. I can’t let them take him, Niko tells the jar.

When he moves toward the car the waiting shadow falls across the jar. The feather’s green glow dims. The shadow’s arm comes away from the jar and its shadow hand now holds the shadow of a jar. A jar in which there is no shadow of a feather. A new jar then. Empty and awaiting capture of the firefly soul of Nikodemus.

Mortal threats occur to Niko but what threat can he make, what power does he have? He must have faith in the bond of uttered vows. Abide. Abide.

He turns away from the jar. Through the flattened and serrated wedge where the windshield smashed and the roof caved in Nikodemus sits crushed between steering wheel and seat, his huge body crammed into an impossibly small space. Niko pushes on the seat but it won’t budge. He reaches through the collapsed doorway and grips Nikodemus but his hands slip on the blood. He leans in as far as he can and tries again and gets a grip but still can’t move his demon’s bulk. Three hundred pounds of Nikodemus are wedged in tight.

Niko’s pressed against the wreck with both arms shoved inside it when something jumps below his feet. He lets go and looks down. It’s the dog? The car? Crackles and pings surround him. Metal slowly smoothing. Drip of fluids recirculating. Dog and car are resurrecting, each feeding on the lifeblood of the other.

The waiting shadow falls across him now.

Niko tries again to pry his demon from the wreck but it’s no use. He slaps the lifeless bloody face and screams his demon’s newly given name but still the hulk of him lies boneless pinned and unresponsive.

Sudden light shines from beyond the gateway. It brightens and shifts along the wall and as it does a familiar knocking gargle grows. Niko feels a pang of fearful joy as the source of that noise glides into view and stops with a highpitched squeal of wornout brakes. The door yipes open and the driver gets out and looks across the yellow roof at Niko standing in the wreckage and she lowers the cigarillo from her mouth to blow pale smoke into the air beyond the wall. “Holy shit,” the cabbie says.

XXVIII.
 

I’M TORE DOWN

THE CABBIE GAPES at wreckage and the mob behind it. When she looks at Niko her eyes hold no hint of recognition. Well who knows how long it’s been since she saw him last? He knows what he looks like now. Thin, bearded, scraggly, filthy, beat to shit.

Niko waves. The cabbie flinches. Niko sees her realize who he is, and with that startled recognition her gaze shifts to what he can only imagine must be gathered behind him. Now the cabbie’s astonishment is colored with something like admiration. She waves her cigarillo, mutely asking You caused this? Niko shrugs.

With remarkable aplomb the cabbie steps around the Checker Cab and opens the rear door. Her gaze shifts between Niko and the unnerving quiet crowd he feels behind him as she keeps one hand on the handle and beckons slightly with the other.

Niko feels as trapped as Nikodemus. He’s never been happier to see someone in his life. Every cell in his body urges him to pick up Jem and run to the cab and dive into the back seat and haulass out of here and not look back. But he balls his fists and stands where he is. “Someone’s trapped in there,” he tells the cabbie. “I have to get him out.”

The cabbie looks puzzled but she nods and selects a key from her crowded keyring and opens the trunk. Niko feels a terrible cold spot between his shoulderblades while she rummages. She lowers the trunk and puts her cigarillo back to her lips and heads toward Niko bearing a crowbar and dragging her wheeled hydraulic jack like a little dog on a leash. She raises an eyebrow at the glowing mason jar on the ground and guides the jack around it and stops in front of Niko.

“Hiya.”

Niko wants to laugh but if he starts he might not ever stop. Instead he simply stares. She looks exactly the same. Same clothes. Same loosely knotted tie. She left him at this very gate how long ago now? Nikodemus led him to suspect his fugue on the banks of the Lethe had lasted months at least and maybe longer.

The cabbie leans to one side and looks past him and takes a deep drag from her cigarillo. Looking into the face of her nemesis, Niko realizes. Her opposite number. She juts her chin in a look of acknowledgement but not respect and leans a little farther to blow smoke past Niko and toward her opponent. Niko could kiss her. He wants to ask her how she knew to be here now but a black fog spreads across his vision and things go far away.

“STEADY.” HER HAND on his arm. “Here.” Glass crunches as she walks him backward to the wreck, grimacing when some wet organ squishes beneath her battered leather tennis shoe. She peers at Nikodemus through the crumpled doorway gap. “Um.”

“He’s alive.”

She nods doubtfully and goes to work with the crowbar. Banging prying straining. Niko wants to help her but he feels encased in something. The cabbie tries to fit the jack sideways into the compressed doorway but can’t hold it in place and work the lever at the same time. Pure shame releases Niko from his immobility and he hurries to the cabbie. They trade a glance and she nods. Hers is the first human face he has seen in a long long time with any kind of life or light in it.

Niko holds the jack steady while the cabbie works the lever. The lifting arm touches the doorframe and metal begins to creak. The car flinches and the cabbie draws back with her eyes wide and the jackhandle coming up to strike. But there’s nothing to hit really and she glances again at Niko and goes back to work. “We need a jaws of life,” she says.

“I’m surprised you don’t have one in that trunk.”

The opening groans wider and soon Niko reaches inside the Black Taxi and grabs Nikodemus’ inert body while the cabbie sits on the crumpled hood with both legs through the windshield frame and both feet pushing on the demon’s burly bleeding shoulder. They get him loose enough that the cabbie can come around behind Niko and pull on Nikodemus’ naked legs while Niko leans into the desecrated car and guides the body under the wedging jack. On the deformed dashboard past the bent steering wheel he glimpses the tripmeter he reset at zero when he left the casino. The numbers now read 31415. Above it the odometer shows a row of zeroes.

Something tickles Niko’s arm and he jerks away. Beside Nikodemus on what’s left of the passenger side in the middle of a pile of shattered glass and stringy entrails a severed doghead the size of a beachball lies crushed. What fur is not peeled back to show bare skull is matted with blood. Inches from Niko rotted yellow teeth the size of fingers clack. A single brown and insane eye glares pure malice at him.

“On three,” the cabbie calls behind him.

Niko scrunches away from the doghead and braces both hands on Nikodemus’ shoulders. With the demon’s legs hoisted underneath her arms the cabbie calls out One two three and Niko pushes and the cabbie pulls and Nikodemus comes free and spills stillborn from the car.