Mortality Bridge

by Steven R. Boyett

  The twister lights with static lightning. Angry god deprived of sacrifice. Across the surface of the plain its cursive body writes an endless nightmare rhapsody in some alien script.

  The funnel lifts.

  Niko stands on brake and clutch. The heavy car skids backward to a halt and Niko pops it into first and puts the hammer down. Shadows shift as the mason jar rolls and hits again. The slowly rising whirlwind finger stops and poises and strikes. Niko works through gears and forces the car straight and drives directly under the living funnel as it augers onto the plain intent to write his epitaph. Niko drives. He drives and the funnel touches down where he just was. The heavy car is caught within the grip of vortex winds and Niko shuts his eyes as stinging sand assails his skin. The rear end of the car tries to get away from him. He lets off on the gas and feels the car gain traction. For a moment Niko thinks he’s got control and then the Franklin spins. Niko turns the wheel in the direction of the spin. He averts his mortal gaze and feels himself turn round and round. The tires’ scream is faint against the cyclone’s freight train thunder circling and circling.

  And comes to rest.

  The rolling mason jar taps Niko’s shoe. He picks it up. A cold blade stabs his heart when Niko sees a tiny triangle of glass has been knocked out. But within the feather glows. And a faint smell of Jem’s perfume. The smell that filled him with when he hugged her long and hard after months away on tour. It smells like Jemma. It smells like love.

  Carefully he sets the jar upon his lap and starts to look out the kickedout windshield. And stops. Which way is forward? Which way backward? The Franklin spun so many times there’s no way he can know for sure. He can hear the twister roaring down the plain—behind him? Yes behind and to the right. Then ahead and to the left is where he wants to look. Right?

  Probably. But what if it’s not? The twister’s had time to move.

  Niko sits unmoving in an agony of doubt. God damn it. You can’t just sit here. You’ve got to look up sooner or later. Got to pick a direction. Got to have a moment’s faith.

  He takes a deep breath and holds it. Jem. The solid certainty of broken mason jar held his bleeding hands. All right. Okay.

  He looks up and sees a redlit white wall separating ground and sky. All breath escapes him.

  The engine that had been so well tuned idles roughly now.

  The tornado closing from behind him.

  The heatless jar in his cut hands.

  Go.

  XXVII.

  EVERY GOODBYE AIN’T GONE

  AND NOW THE mad and headlong race across the final stretch of plain. Niko pushes the Black Taxi to the limit with the pedal to the metal and hands clenched on the wheel and the broken mason jar wedged firmly at his crotch.

  The engine keens. A rapid chuffing sounds beneath the tires like a speedboat rushing through a modest chop. Constant around him are bangs and thumps as metal unbuckles. The dented hood slowly smooths and the right side roof raises as the crumpled pillar post straightens. The Franklin looks as if it is inflating as it eerily heals itself. A crystalline lattice spreads across the empty windshield frame like a web weaved by an unseen spider, bowing in the steady wind and making it difficult to see what lies before him.

  Niko rolls the window down and hangs his head out. Something smacks his forehead and he flinches back and wipes away a whitish paste and dark brown bits. A kamikaze cockroach. The chuffing from the tires is the Franklin running over hordes of roaches carpeting the plain.

  Unable to look out the window Niko rocks from side to side to triangulate a view through the thickening lattice of reforming windshield. Occasional dead shine ghostly in the headlamps’ glare as Niko heads obliquely toward the growing line of marble wall that stretches probably forever away in either direction. Up ahead in the far distance he sees a darker patch within the wall. The gate?

  Niko has become afraid to hope for anything but now he cannot help the hot anticipation that uncoils in his chest. The end in sight. The end in sight. He reminds himself that he has made it past the end before, in submerged memory, in different guise, and still looked back. And still lost everything.

  I will break this. Whatever else it costs me I will break this chain.

  Before him grows a steady creaking as the windshield glass reforms. It’s nearly impossible to see out now. Niko blindly heads toward the wall. When he nears it he cuts right and drives alongside it. He ought to come upon the gate soon.

  He cannot shake the sense of unseen legions nipping at his heels. Surely they will not just let him waltz on out of here. Surely they’ve got something special planned.

  Well let’s hurry up and find out what it is.

  THE WINDSHIELD IS a solid pane of glass again, lined with a network of filament cracks that slowly thin until they disappear and leave clear spotless glass when they are gone. If the mason jar would only do that.

  Suddenly the gate whips by. Niko yells and stands on the brake and then fumbles into reverse and backs up until he’s sitting in the idling car beside the massive gate. Staring out the window wondering what to do next. Beside him looms the massive iron grillwork of the gate. Just beyond that crouches the giant insane dog growling growling growling.

  He forgot about the goddamned dog. This time it has no need to strain its anchorchain leash as it faces him with slobbering feral grins. The dog is posted less to keep people from going in than to prevent their leaving. If Niko tries to get past it, it will have no problem at all tearing him into bitesized chunks. No jumbo milkbone gonna save your ass this time buddy pal.

  While the dog quivers like a drumhead just beyond the gate Niko surveys the wall. Featureless white marble smooth as glass rising at least thirty feet. No way in hell he can scale it. He fights to quell a white blind wave of desperate panic that will own him if he lets it break. Like trying to figure out a chess problem while a bomb ticks down to zero underneath your chair. Come on. It’s just a dog for christ sake. A hydra headed dog the size of a small elephant but still. Just a stupid fucking animal. Come on smart boy. Can’t you outthink a watchdog on a leash. That old bumper sticker, My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma. Yeah well my karma’s pretty much become—

  Niko draws a deep breath as a desperate idea is born. No oh no.

  But he goes into action before he allows himself to think about it. For thought would surely paralyze him now. He sees his hand reach toward the shift lever. Don’t do this, old son. Miles away his foot lets in the clutch. You won’t survive this. His remotely operated hand fumbles until it finds reverse. Jemma won’t survive this. He lets out the clutch. God damn it you stupid grandstanding asshole you won’t make it. As the car backs up he turns it to the right until the gate glides into view again in front of him. You think there’s an airbag in this thing? You don’t even have a seatbelt, you moron, you’re gonna kill yourself. He straightens out. The grated gate and eager monstrous dog beyond it shrink as he backs up. The view through the nearly regrown glass is slightly fractured, but the dog remains kaleidoscopic even when the glass is whole again.

  Something heavy lands on the back of the Black Taxi. Niko flinches. Guess you were being followed. Oh well.

  He stops about a thousand yards from the gate. That should be plenty.

  Now winged figures land along the top of the marble wall above the gate to perch like heckling ravens on a power line. They dangle hooves or claws or feet and grin and nudge each other and wager and cackle as they hold up tridents and rocks and bricks.

  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. Gat
hering 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.”