Mortality Bridge by Steven R. Boyett

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