He shuts his eyes but the images still come.
The strain behind Jem’s smile as she clutched tight his hand and slid into the little CAT scan. Niko smiling back while his demon voice said Take a bow, buddy pal, ’cause this is your work.
Faces gone these many years now, withered in the transmutating earth. He can smell Dad’s Old Spice, see the defiant tilt of Van’s jaw, hear Mom’s voice across a continent of wire, You were there when he died and now you won’t come home to throw in a handful of dirt, what kind of brother is that, what kind of son can you be, Jemma skeletal on the bed and pain a distant lightning in her eyes, But you always land on your feet, Niko, Van’s eyes unseeing and a flower of blood in one of them and why wouldn’t his brother blink it away, the boneless flop when Niko shook him with the very hand that might have stopped the death of one of them and the damnation of the other, Sign right here, Niko-meister, keep the pen, you fucking bastards I can fight anything you throw at me except myself. The dead arrayed behind me pointing.
The Checker Cab breaks from the tunnel into city night. The assault of memories cuts off and all is visible again. The two cars that are more than cars and yet not cars at all race down Second toward the convergence of streets, of worlds, of myth, toward the portal where in 1925 the old Pacific Electric Railway used to go to ground.
VI.
SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES
THE RAILS BENEATH the tires sing a happy hornet’s song below the syncopated beat of Robert Johnson calling out the “Coal Shaft Blues.” Far ahead and dimly seen the Franklin’s taillights glow like rateyes in the Stygian dark. The rusted rails are very old, the tunnel older still. The route they take is not on any map above the ground.
Robert Johnson never played the “Coal Shaft Blues.”
The humming rails unspool from out the skein of night itself. At some point they have linked up with the Red Line tunnel, for the rails within the old graffiti covered subway tunnel entrance where they drove into the midnight earth became modern level smooth and prestressed concrete sections gleaming as the headlights pulled them from the dark. But now the rails are raised and rusted resting loose on rotting wooden crossties. The conjoined fate of hurtling trains. Now the cabbie drives the Checker Cab upon two iron lines conscripted to the ground by iron spikes driven by what indentured hands for reasons that no living mind of man could fathom. Without guides and by her kinesthetic sense alone the cabbie holds them true and Niko marvels at her casual expertise. Now the chase is pure and plain, no stunts no tricks no strategies. Now is but a set of rails that narrows to a distant point above which shines the twin red lights of their objective.
The tunnel has darkened in the absence of signal lights or the cold bluewhite of an approaching or receding station. Now there is only the weak wash of the Checker Cab’s headlights, pale yellow as manila paper. What lies in their purblind view has changed from prestressed concrete to what looks like brown brick slick with darkgreen algae and large patches overgrown with moss and creeping vines.
Shapes that have been stirred to motion by the passing of the Franklin can be glimpsed in halflit regions of the jellied tunnel walls. Now they turn their Morlock eyes upon the Checker Cab’s approach and stretch toward them unavailing mottled malformed limbs. The cab passes and the creatures flatten against the curved tunnel walls and shield their luminous lantern eyes with clublike hands.
If somehow Boyd Street were cut off from the world like Loch Ness from the ocean and its shambling zombie guardians left to carry on, over time might they become what Niko sees here. But some he passes cringe against the tunnel on four legs. And some on four legs rise to sniff the agitated air with long and tapering snouts. But these tunnels cannot be that old. But this tunnel may be old as man.
The cabbie has the air on full but it’s only pushing the hot air around. Beneath that is a foundry breath of sulphur, tinge of rot.
“Sorry about the AC.” The hornet hum increases as she rolls her window partway down. The sudden reek so thick it seems to invade the cab as visible curling tendrils.
The cab’s not driving all that fast, twentyfive or thirty miles per hour. Any faster and the cabbie probably couldn’t keep it on the rails. Niko wants more speed of course but as he sees and hears the milling and averting shapes go past he’s grateful for what speed he has.
Sudden purple splats across the windshield. The cab jerks right and they thump off of the rails. The cabbie yanks the wheel and steel rims scream along the iron. She switches on the wipers and they smear fan shapes across the windshield and stutter back. In the wavering headlights Niko sees a creature pale and cratered as the moon and then the left front fender slams it with a solid sickening crunch of bone. A hairy clot lands on the left rear window and crawls sluglike and dripping in the slipstream.
The cab bounces over the righthand rail. The fender grazes brick and plows a furrow of moist matter that streaks the headlight and tints it like a gel spotlamp. From behind them comes a pop and then a slowing rumble fills the tunnel as the Checker Cab jounces to a stop.
“Tire.” The cabbie zips the emergency brake and cuts the engine and kills the lights and gets out and trudges to the back of the cab, leaving Niko in the dark.
Slick patches covering the tunnel walls give off faint algae phosphorescence.
Niko hurries from the cab. It feels like days have passed since he first climbed in, though it can’t be more than an hour. Far ahead the Franklin’s taillights dwindle. Damn it.
The cabbie pulls the spare tire from the trunk and leans it on the bumper. Niko asks if he can help. The cabbie bends into the trunk again. “You might wanna see what you can do to keep the lookieloos away.” She straightens holding a two ton hydraulic service jack and an old red plastic twelve volt lantern with a rubber nipple over the switch.
Niko glances back up the tunnel. “What’ll they do?”
She pulls the jack past him and it squeaks and jounces like a nervous little yipyap dog. “I don’t know.” She squats and rolls the jack beneath the cab. “Never stopped to find out.”
“Okay.” Niko leans into the cab and turns the headlights on. Exposed shapes scurry or hump or flow or limp a startled retreat. Slime on the headlamp tints the tunnel’s right side seasick green. Niko goes to the front to examine the damage. The left bumper is pushed inward and sports a large fresh lumpy splotch. Wiry black hair sprouts from a clot sizzling on the radiator grille with an awful smell of burning pork.
While the cabbie jacks up the cab Niko gropes around the large and lightless trunk to find a rag to wipe the headlight clean. Boxes, jumper cables, gascan. Did he just hear something behind him? He finds a bag of rags. He straightens and turns and gapes up at the slick hide of a greateyed thing hunched in front of him.
“Candybar?” it says in a guttural hopeful voice. It shifts toward him and raises a ropy glistening arm from which small things fall to writhe upon the wet ground.
“Uhh,” says Niko.
“Jeremy love candybar.” It clenches its clubfingered fist and lumbers forward. “Jeremy Hershey bar.” It looks like a great gray-green shag carpet grown slimy in the rain. It may once have been a man the way a hippopotamus may once have been a horse. Pale owlish eyes with pinpoint pupils. Floppy-tongued shoes dimly recognizable as Converse Hi-tops. “Butterfinger Pay Day Almond Joy.” It steps again with a great heaving sucking sound. Niko smells something like weekold diapers and dumpster cabbage. He backs away from the cab and steps on something hard and round. A pry-bar. Hellyeh. He picks it up and holds it high and feels ridiculous and afraid.