by Jim Butcher
That left just two taxicabs, running now on either side of us, still firing their guns and trying to herd us away from the badlands.
Puff the Magic Dragon had fallen silent. At two thousand rounds a second, it runs out of ammo pretty fast. The taxi guns fell silent too, either because they’d realised their inventory was getting low as well, or perhaps because they’d finally realised the guns weren’t doing any damage. The taxis pressed in close on either side, and a dozen long steel blades protruded from the sides of the cabs, aimed right at our windows. Long blades, with strangely blurred edges, and a chill ran through me as I realised what they were.
“Dead Boy,” I said, doing my best to sound calm and concerned and not at all like I was filling my trousers, “do you see what I see?”
“Of course I see them,” he said, entirely unconcerned. “The car’s computers are already running analysis on the blades. Monofilament edges, one molecule thick. Cut through anything. Someone really doesn’t want us going wherever it is we’re going. Which means . . . they must be protecting something really interesting, and I want to know what it is more than ever. We’re going to have to do something about those blades, John. The car says her exterior is no match for them, and while she does have a force shield, maintaining it for any length of time will put a serious strain on the engines. I think we’re going to have to do this old school. In their face, up close and personal. Just the way I like it. Sweetie, lower the window, please.”
His window immediately disappeared, and Dead Boy calmly climbed out the window. It took a certain amount of effort to force his gangling body through the gap, and then he braced himself in the window frame before throwing himself at the taxicab. It jerked away at the last moment, as the cyborged driver realised what Dead Boy was planning, but the unnatural strength in Dead Boy’s dead muscles propelled him through the air, across the growing gap, until he slammed into the side of the cab, and his dead hands closed inexorably onto the cab’s steel frame. He clung to the side of the cab as it lurched back and forth, trying desperately to shake him off. His purple greatcoat streamed out behind him, flapping this way and that in the slipstream. I couldn’t hear Dead Boy above the roar of the traffic, but I could see he was laughing.
He drew back a gray fist, and drove it right through the cab’s window. The cyborged driver cried out as the reinforced glass shattered, showering him with fragments. The cab was all over the place now, trying to throw Dead Boy off, but he held his balance easily, the fingers of one hand thrust deep into the steel roof, his feet planted firmly on the wheel arch. He leaned in through the empty window, and punched the cabdriver repeatedly in the head with his free hand. Bone shattered and blood flew, and the driver screamed as the force of the blows slammed him all around the cab’s interior. Dead Boy grabbed a handful of tubes and cables and pulled them free. Sparks flew and hot fluids spurted, and the driver’s face went slack and empty. He collapsed forward across the jerking steering wheel, and Dead Boy threw the cables aside. He checked to make sure he’d done all the damage he could, and then backed out of the cab window. He turned and braced himself, his back pressed against the empty window frame. The cab was a good ten feet away now, but he jumped the increasing gap like he did it every day, and landed easily on the futuristic car’s roof. I heard the thud above me, followed by whoops and cheers as Dead Boy applauded himself and challenged all comers to come and have a go, if they thought they were hard enough.
The futuristic car was still driving itself. It didn’t need Dead Boy, and it certainly didn’t need me, so I gave my full attention to the one remaining taxicab, closing in really fast from the right. Its vicious steel blades were now only a few inches away. One good sideswipe and those blades would punch right through the car’s side and gut Liza and me. We’d already retreated as far back as we could, pressed up against the far door; but those blades looked really long . . . Dead Boy came suddenly swinging in through the driver’s window, and dropped back into his seat. He grinned widely, and started to beat a victorious tattoo on the steering wheel before he realised one hand still had bits of glass sticking out of it. So he leaned back in his seat, and set about removing them one at a time from his unfeeling flesh.
“Hi!” he said cheerfully. “I’m back! Did you miss me?”
“You’re a lunatic!” said Liza.
“Excuse me,” Dead Boy said coldly. “But I wasn’t talking to you.” And he spoke loving baby talk to his car until I felt like puking.
I did point out the nearness and threat of the remaining taxi, but Dead Boy just shrugged sulkily, suggesting through very clear body language that he felt he’d done his bit, and it was now very definitely my turn. So I very politely asked the car to lower the window facing the taxi, and it did. I peered out into the rushing wind, concentrating on the distance between us as the rushing wind blew tears from my eyes. We were still both moving at one hell of a speed, but the taxi was having no trouble keeping up. The blurry-edged blades were almost touching the car. The cyborged driver glared at me, his lips pulled back in a mirthless grin. His tubes and cables bobbed around him as he stuck close to the futuristic car, despite all it could do to lose him. I leaned out through the car’s window and smashed the driver’s window with the knuckle-duster I’d slipped on my fist while he wasn’t looking.
I always make it a point to carry a number of useful objects in my coat pocket. Because you never know . . .
The taxi window shattered, glass flying everywhere, and the cyborged driver ducked, yelling obscenities at me as I leaned farther through the empty window and grabbed on to his door frame. I hung in midair between the two vehicles, very much aware that if they pulled apart, I’d very probably be torn in two. And I would have overbalanced and fallen, if Liza hadn’t been clinging desperately to my legs in the back of the car. I hauled myself inside the cab, and the taxi driver pointed his arm at me. A dull gray metal nozzle protruded from his wrist, pointing right at my face. I really hadn’t expected the driver to have an energy gun implant, but I still knew one when I saw one, and my mind raced for something to do. Time seemed to slow right down, to give me plenty of time to consider the possibilities; but since they all seemed to end with my face being shot off, that didn’t help much. I was just about to try a really desperate lunge, when Liza let go of my legs.
I could feel myself sliding out of the car, only a few moments from falling and almost certainly dying, when Liza appeared suddenly beside me, forcing herself into the remaining gap in the car window. The cyborged driver hesitated, as surprised as I was, and while he tried to decide which of us to shoot first, Liza surged forward and grabbed his arm, forcing it to one side. She was more than half out of the car now, and only our two bodies wedged in the car window stopped her from falling.
The cabdriver struggled to bring his gun hand to bear on either of us, while Liza fought to control his flailing arm. I tried to reach him with my knuckle-duster, but I was too far away, and I couldn’t risk trying to wriggle farther out the window. And all the time the taxicab and the futuristic car were hurtling through the Nightside at terrible speed, the ground rushing by only a few feet below us.
“Whatever you’re planning on doing,” Liza yelled to me, “now would be a really good time to do it!”
So I gave up trying to reach the driver, and wriggled back through the car window. Liza clung fiercely to the driver’s arm, as she started to fall. He brought his energy gun to bear on her. And I pulled a small blue sachet from my coat pocket, ripped it open, and threw the contents into the driver’s face.
Vicious black pepper filled his eyes, blinding him in a moment, shocked tears streaming down his face. He was just starting to sneeze explosively as I pulled Liza away from him, and both of us wriggled back through the window into the backseat of the futuristic car. We sprawled together on the bloodred leather seat, breathing harshly as we struggled to get our breath back.
The taxicab swayed away from us, the driver utterly blind and unable to control his cab for
the force of his sneezing. The cab fell away behind us, and a fifty-foot articulated rig ran right over it from behind.
And that was very definitely that.
Liza looked at me speechlessly for a long moment, and then . . .
“Pepper? That was your great idea? Pepper?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” I said reasonably. “Condiments are our friends. Never leave home without them.”
Liza shook her head slowly, and then sat up straight, pushing herself away from me, and adjusting her clothes as women do. “Was that . . . All that just happened, was that normal for the Nightside?”
“Not really, no,” I had to admit. “Most people have the sense to leave Dead Boy’s car strictly alone. And they certainly should have known better than to take on Dead Boy and myself. We have . . . reputations. Which can only mean it has to do with your Frank. Someone knows we’re coming. Someone who really doesn’t want us to know what’s happened to Frank. And to justify this kind of open attack . . . whatever’s going on, it must be something really out of the ordinary.”
“Which means,” Dead Boy said cheerfully, “it must be something new! And I’m always up for something new! On, my lovely car, on to Rotten Row!”
“You’re weird,” said Liza.
THREE
And so we headed into the badlands. Where the neon gets shoddier and the sins grow shabbier, though no less dangerous or disturbing. If the Nightside is where you go when no one else will have you, the badlands is where you go when even the Nightside is sick of the sight of you. The badlands, where all the furtive people end up, pursuing things even the Nightside is ashamed of . . . because some things are just too tacky.
The traffic thinned out more and more as we left the major thoroughfares behind, dying away to just the occasional tattooed unicorn with assorted piercings and a Prince Albert, a stretch hearse with the corpse half out of its coffin and beating helplessly against the reinforced windows, and a headless bounty hunter on horseback. The flotsam and jetsam of the Nightside, all hot in pursuit of their own private destinies and damnations. The streets grew narrower and darker, and not only because maybe half the streetlights were working. The shadows were darker and deeper, and things moved in them. More and more buildings had boarded-up windows and broken-in doors, and where lights did sometimes glow in high-up windows, strange shadows moved behind closed blinds. The neon signs remained as gaudy as ever, like poisonous flowers in a polluted swamp. A few people still walked the rain-slick streets, heads down, looking neither left nor right, drawn on by siren calls only they could hear.
Homeless people lurked in the shadows, broken men in tattered clothes. Mostly they moved in packs, because it was safer that way. There are all kinds of predators, in the badlands. And a few good people, fighting a losing battle and knowing it, but fighting on anyway, because they knew a battle is not a war. I saw Tamsin MacReady, the rogue vicar, out in her rounds, determined to do good in a bad place. She recognised Dead Boy’s car, and waved cheerfully.
The night grew quieter and more thoughtful, the deeper into the badlands we went, a shining silver presence in a dark place. Working streetlights grew few and far between, and the car cruised quietly from one pool of light to another. Dead Boy tried the high beams, but even they couldn’t penetrate far into the gloom, as though there was something in this new darkness that swallowed up light. The roar and clamour of the Nightside proper seemed far away now, left behind as we moved from one country to another. The few people we passed ignored us, intent on their own business. This wasn’t a place to draw attention to yourself; unless, of course, you had something to sell.
A tall and willowy succubus, with dead white skin, crimson lingerie, and bloodred eyes, loped along beside the futuristic car for a while, easily matching its speed. She tapped on our polarised windows with her clawed fingertips, whispering all the awful things she would let us do. Liza shrank back from the succubus, her face sick with horror and revulsion. When the succubus realised we weren’t going to stop, she increased her speed to get ahead of us and then stepped out into the middle of the road, blocking our way. Dead Boy told the car to put its foot down, and the car surged forward.
The succubus ghosted out, becoming immaterial, and the futuristic car passed right through her. A spectre, tinted rose red and lily white, the succubus drifted at her own pace through the car, ignoring Dead Boy, her inhuman gaze fixed on Liza. A succubus always has a taste for fresh meat. She reached out a ghostly hand to Liza, but I grabbed her wrist and stopped her. It was like holding the memory of an arm, cold as ice, soft as smoke. The succubus looked at me, and then gently pulled her arm free, the ghostly trace passing through my mortal flesh in an eerily intimate moment. She trailed the fingertips of one hand along my face, winked one bloodred eye, and then passed on through the car and was gone.
The badlands grew grimly silent, abandoned and forsaken, as we closed in on Rotten Row. We had left civilisation behind, for something else. Here buildings and businesses pressed tight together in long ugly tenements, as though believing there was strength, and protection, in numbers. Windows were shuttered, doors securely locked, and none of these establishments even bothered to look inviting. Either you knew what you were looking for, or you had no business being here. Enter at your own risk, leave your conscience at the door, and absolutely no refunds.
Welcome, sir. What’s your pleasure?
Few people walked the gloomy, desolate streets, and they all walked alone, despite the many dangers, because no one else would walk with them. Or perhaps because the very nature of their needs and temptations had made them solitary. And though most of the figures we passed looked like people, not all of them walked or moved in a human way. One figure in a filthy suit turned suddenly to look at the car as it drifted past, and under the pulled-down hat I briefly glimpsed a face that seemed to be nothing but mouth, full of shark’s teeth stained with fresh blood and gristle.
It’s all about hunger, in the badlands.
Glowing eyes followed the progress of the futuristic car from shadowy alley mouths, rising and falling like bright burning fireflies. They didn’t normally expect to see such a high-class, high-tech car in their neighbourhood. They could get a lot of money, and other things, for a car like ours. And its contents. In the quiet of the street, a baby began to cry; a lost, hopeless, despairing sound. Liza leaned forward.
“Stop. Do you hear that? Stop the car. We have to do something!”
“No, we don’t,” said Dead Boy.
“We keep going,” I said, and turned to Liza as she opened her mouth to protest. “That isn’t a baby. It’s just something that’s learned to sound like a baby, to lure in the unsuspecting. There’s nothing out there that you’d want to meet.”
Liza looked like she wanted to argue, but something in my voice and in my face must have convinced her. She slumped back in her seat, arms folded tightly across her chest, staring straight ahead. I felt sorry for her, even as I admired her courage and her stubbornness. She was having to take an awful lot on board, most of which would have broken a weaker mind, but she kept going. All for her dearest love, Frank. Husband Frank. What kind of man was he, to inspire such love and devotion . . . and still end up here, in Rotten Row? I would see this through to the end, because I had said I would; but there was no way this was going to end well.
Interesting, that Dead Boy hadn’t even slowed the car. Perhaps his dead ears heard something in the baby’s cry that was hidden from the living.
“This is it, people,” he said abruptly, as the car turned a tight corner into a narrow, garbage-cluttered cul-de-sac. “We have now arrived at Rotten Row. Just breathe in that ambience.”
“Are you sure?” Liza said doubtfully, peering through the car window with her face almost pressed to the glass. “I can’t see . . . anything. No shops, no businesses, no people. I don’t even see a street sign.”
“Someone probably stole it,” Dead Boy said wisely. “Around here, anything not actually nailed down
and guarded by hell-hounds is automatically considered up for grabs. But my car says this is the place, and my sweetie is never wrong.”
Someone in the tattered remains of what had once been a very expensive suit lurched out of a side alley to throw something at the futuristic car. It bounced back from the car’s windscreen, and exploded. The car didn’t even rock. There was a brief scream from the thrower as the blast threw him backwards, his clothes on fire. He’d barely hit the ground before a dozen dark shapes came swarming out of all the other alleys to roll his still twitching body back and forth as they robbed him of what little he had that was worth the taking. They were already stripping the smouldering clothes from his dead body as they dragged it off into the merciful darkness of the alley shadows. Liza looked at me angrily, more disgusted than disturbed.
“What kind of a place have you brought me to, John? My Frank wouldn’t be seen dead in an area like this!”
“The photo says he’s here,” I said. “Look.”
I held up the two jaggedly torn pieces, pressed carefully together, and concentrated my gift on them. The image of Frank jumped right out of the wedding photo, to become a flickering ghost in the street outside. He was walking hurriedly down Rotten Row, a memory of a man repeating his last journey, imprinted on Time Past. His palely translucent form stalked past the car, his face expectant and troubled at the same time. As though he was forcing himself on, towards some long-desired, long-denied consummation that both excited and terrified him. His pace quickened until he was almost running, his arms flailing at his sides, until at last he came to one particular door, and stopped there, breathing hard. The badly hand-painted sign above the door said simply Silicon Heaven.
