Tales From the Nightside Read online

  “Help yourself,” he said, around a mouthful of chocolate Hobnob. Liza declined. Dead Boy shrugged, finished his biscuit, knocked back a handful of glowing green pills, finished off the last of the vodka, and slung the bottle through the window, which didn’t happen to be open. The bottle passed right through the glass without stopping. They really have thought of everything, in the future.

  “Where to, John?” Dead Boy said easily. “My car requires directions. She is powerful and lovely and full of surprises, but she is not actually prescient. Apparently that only came as an optional extra.”

  “Head for the badlands,” I said. “I should be able to provide more specific directions once we get there.”

  “I love mystery tours,” Dead Boy said happily. “Off you go, girl.”

  The futuristic car moved smoothly out into the vicious traffic, and absolutely everything slammed on the brakes or changed lanes in a hurry, to give us plenty of room. Everybody knew Dead Boy’s car, and the awful things it could and would do if it got even slightly annoyed.

  “I can’t help noticing you’re not even touching the steering wheel,” Liza said to Dead Boy.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “My sweetie’s a much better driver than I’ll ever be. I don’t interfere.”

  Liza leaned back in her seat, watched the traffic for a while, and then looked thoughtfully at me. “Why are you helping me, John? It’s not like I’m even paying you for your services.”

  “I’m curious,” I said honestly. “And . . . I don’t like to see an innocent caught up and crushed under the Nightside’s wheels. There’s enough real evil here, without adding cruel and casual stuff. Good people shouldn’t end up here, but if they do, they need to be protected. Just on general principles.”

  “If this is such a bad place,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

  “I belong here,” I said.

  She settled for that, and went back to watching the traffic. I took out the two pieces of her photo, fitted them together, and concentrated on the image of her husband. My gift barely stirred, manifesting just enough to keep a firm hold on Frank’s location. Husband Frank. He’d better be worth all this trouble. Liza clearly loved him with all her heart; but women have been known to fall for complete bastards before now. His face in the photo didn’t give anything away. The smile seemed genuine enough, but I wasn’t so sure about the eyes.

  Frank hadn’t moved since I first sensed his location, and I got the feeling he hadn’t moved in some time. As I concentrated on his image, I began to get a feel for his surroundings, and the first thing I felt was the presence of technology. Advanced, future tech, not from this time and place. Frank seemed to be surrounded by it, fascinated by it . . . and the more I concentrated, the more my images of this future technology were tainted by distinctly organic touches.

  Sweating steel and cables that curled like intestines; lubricated pistons rising and falling, and machines that murmured like people disturbed in their sleep. Strange nightmare devices, performing unnatural tasks, with hot blood coursing through their systems.

  What had Frank got himself into?

  I was beginning to get a really bad feeling about this. Especially when Frank’s image in the photo suddenly turned its head to look right at me. His face was drawn, tired, and burning with a strange delirium. His eyes were dark and fever-bright . . . and he never even glanced at his wife, Liza, sitting right next to me. He locked his gaze onto mine, and his faraway voice sounded in my head.

  Go away. I don’t want you here. Don’t try and find me. I don’t want to be found.

  “Your wife’s here,” I said silently to the photo. “Liza’s here, in the Nightside. Looking for you. She’s very worried about you.”

  I know. Keep her away. For her sake.

  And just like that, the photo was only a photo, and his face was just an image from the past. I didn’t tell Liza what had just occurred. It didn’t matter to me whether Frank wanted to be found or not; I was working for his wife. And she wanted to know what her husband was up to, even if she hadn’t actually put it that way. This is why I don’t do divorce work. No matter what the client says, they never really want the truth. Still, the unexpected contact with Frank, brief as it was, had given me a more definite fix on his position.

  “I’ve found Frank,” I announced, to Liza and Dead Boy. “He’s on Rotten Row.”

  “Ah,” said Dead Boy, sucking noisily on his whiskey bottle. “That is not good.”

  “Why?” Liza said immediately. “What happens on Rotten Row? What do people do there?”

  “Pretty much everything you can think of, and a whole lot of things most people have never even contemplated,” said Dead Boy. “Rotten Row is for the severely sick and disturbed, even by the Nightside’s appalling standards.”

  Liza turned to me. “What is he talking about?”

  “Rotten Row is where people go to have sex with the kind of people, and things, that no sane person would want to have sex with,” I said, just a bit reluctantly. “Sex with angels, or demons. With computers or robots, slumming gods or other-dimensional monsters; worms from the earth or some of the nastier versions of the living dead. Rotten Row is where you go when the everyday sins of the flesh just don’t do it for you any more. Where men and women and all the many things they can do together just don’t satisfy. Sex isn’t a sin or a sacrament on Rotten Row; it’s an obsession.”

  Liza looked at me, horrified. “Sex with . . . How is any of that even possible?”

  “Love finds a way,” Dead Boy said vaguely.

  Liza shook her head stubbornly, as though she could prove me a liar if she was just firm enough. “No. You must be wrong, John. My Frank would never . . . never lower himself to . . . He just wouldn’t! He’s always been very . . . normal. He’d never go to a place like that!”

  “We all find love where we can,” said Dead Boy.

  “You’re talking about sex, not love!” snapped Liza.

  “Sometimes . . . you have to go a little off the beaten path to get what you really need,” said Dead Boy philosophically. “There’s more to life than just boy meets girl, you know.”

  And that was when all the car’s alarms went off at once. Flashing red lights, followed by a rising siren, and the sound of an awful lot of systems arming themselves. Dead Boy sat bolt upright, tossed his whiskey bottle onto the passenger seat, and studied his various displays with great interest. Dead Boy lived for action and adventure.

  “All right, car, turn off the alarms, I see them. Proximity alert, people. We are currently being boxed in by three, no four, vehicles. In front and behind, left and right. Look out the windows, see if you can spot the bastards.”

  It wasn’t difficult; they weren’t being exactly furtive about it. Four black London taxicabs were forcing their way through the crowded lanes of traffic to surround us on every side, positioning themselves to cut off all possible exits and escapes. The cabs bore no name or logo on their flanks, just flat black metal, like so many malignant beetles. They all had cyborged drivers, human only down to the waist. The head and torso hung suspended in a complex webbing of cables, tubes, and wires that made them a part of their taxis. The car was just an extension of its tech-augmented driver, so it could manoeuvre as fast as they could think. Human consciousness given inhuman control and reaction times. By the time I’d finished peering out of every window, there were black cabs speeding in perfect formation all around us.

  And long machine-gun barrels protruded from each and every one of them, covering us.

  “Put your foot down,” I said to Dead Boy. “Try and lose them.”

  “You go, girl, go!” said Dead Boy, and the futuristic car surged forward.

  The back of the taxicab in front of us loomed up disturbingly fast, and for a moment I thought we were going to ram it, but the taxi accelerated, too, maintaining its distance. The other cabs swiftly increased their speed, too, suggesting the cyborged drivers and the protruding machine guns weren�
��t the taxis’ only special features. These black cabs had been seriously souped up. We were all moving incredibly fast now, hurtling through the Nightside at insane speed, streets and buildings just gaudy blurs of colour. All around us, traffic hurried to get out of our way. Vehicles that didn’t, or couldn’t, move quickly enough were slammed and shunted aside by the taxis. Cars ran careering off the road, into defenceless storefronts, or smashed into one another, crying out like living things. Screams and shouts of outrage rang briefly behind us, Dopplering away into the distance.

  The cabs decided enough was enough, closed in on us from every side, and slammed on their brakes simultaneously. We had to slow down with them or risk a collision, and the futuristic car was clearly cautious enough not to want to risk direct contact until it had to. Just because they looked like cabs, it didn’t mean they were. Protective camouflage is a way of life in the Nightside.

  Why do you think I work so hard to look like a traditional private eye?

  Dead Boy beat on the steering wheel with his pale fists, hooting with the excitement of the chase and shouting helpful advice that the car mostly ignored. Liza peered out of one window after another, her small hands unconsciously clenched into fists. I wasn’t that worried, yet. The car could look after itself.

  One cab pressed in from the left, trying to pressure us into changing lanes. The cyborged driver wasn’t even looking at us. The other cabs gave way a little, to entice us, trying to persuade us away from the badlands exit, some way up ahead. To keep us away from Frank . . . and probably to herd us into a previously chosen killing zone where they’d have all the advantages. The futuristic car swayed back and forth, looking for a way out between the cabs, but they constantly manoeuvred with their more-than-human reflexes to block our way. And then, without warning, all four sets of machine guns opened fire on us. The sound was painfully loud, as bullets raked our car from end to end, and slammed viciously into front and back. Liza cried out, but quickly calmed down again as she realised I wasn’t even ducking. The machine-gun fire roared and stuttered, but none of it could touch us. Whatever Dead Boy’s car was made of, it wasn’t just steel. Bullets ricocheted harmlessly away in flurries of sparks and metallic screeches, but the futuristic car didn’t even shudder under the impact. The gunfire continued, as though the taxis thought they could break through our defences through sheer perseverance.

  “Time for Puff the Magic Dragon, I think,” Dead Boy said cheerfully, entirely unmoved by the massed firepower aimed at him from all sides.

  “What?” said Liza. “What did he just say? He’s got a bloody dragon in here somewhere?”

  “Not as such,” I said. “More of a nickname, really. Because it breathes fire and makes problems disappear. Go for it, Dead Boy.”

  Lights gleamed brightly all across the display screens, and there was the sound of something large and heavy moving into position. To be exact, a large gun muzzle was slowly protruding from the car’s radiator grille. Puff the Magic Dragon fired two thousand explosive fléchettes a second, pumping them out at inhuman speed and with appalling vigour. Puff is a gun’s gun. The futuristic car opened up on the taxicab in front of us, and the whole back of the cab just exploded, black steel disintegrating under the impact, throwing ragged shrapnel in all directions. The cab surged wildly back and forth, but Puff moved easily to follow it, tearing the cab apart with invisible hands. The cab burst into flames, and was thrown this way and that by a series of explosions, before the endless stream of explosive fléchettes picked the cab up and threw it end over end across several lanes of traffic, leaving a trail of blazing debris and drifting smoke behind it. I caught a brief glimpse of the cyborged driver, trapped behind his wheel in his ruptured webbing, screaming horribly as he burned alive in the wreckage.

  I couldn’t bring myself to care, much. He would have done worse to us, if he could.

  The taxi to our left accelerated wildly, forcing its way in front of us to block our escape, machine guns blazing fiercely from its rear. A brave and determined move, but the driver really shouldn’t have taken his eyes off the main threat. The other traffic.

  A long dark limousine with dull unreflective black windows moved effortlessly in beside the cab, having sneaked up in the driver’s blind spot while he was concentrating on us. I winced, despite myself. I’d seen the limousine in action before. It moved in beside the taxicab, matching speeds perfectly until it was right opposite the driver’s window; and then the black window surface erupted into dozens of long grasping arms with clawed hands. Hooked fingers sank deep into the steel side of the cab, holding it firmly in place, while powerful black arms smashed through the window to get at the cyborged driver. The limousines can smell human flesh, and they’re always hungry. The cyborged driver screamed shrilly as a dozen hands gripped him fiercely, long barbed fingers sinking deep into flesh and bone, and then they hauled the driver right out of his webbing, tearing the human torso free from its rupturing tubes and cables. They dragged the screaming head and torso out through the shattered window, and into the interior of the limousine. The driver’s mouth stretched wide in an endless howl of horror, his eyes almost starting from his head at what he saw waiting for him. He disappeared inside the limousine, there was a brief spurt of blood out the window, and then the black arms snapped back in, the window re-formed itself, and the dark limousine accelerated smoothly away. The empty taxicab shot across the lanes, traffic diving every which way to avoid it, until finally it ran off the road and crashed.

  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 opening. 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 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 grey 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 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.