The Good, the Bad, and the Uncanny Read Online Free PDF Page B

The roads.
    There are many roads leading in and out of the Nightside, and wise people have nothing at all to do with them. The traffic that roars up and down our streets hardly ever stops, and it’s better that way for everyone. There are cars and trucks, ambulance chasers and motorcycle messengers, horse-drawn equipages and futuristic vehicles that often don’t have wheels or windows or any regard for the rules of the road. Every single one of them in a hell of a hurry to get where it’s going, usually to somewhere even stranger and more dangerous than the Nightside.
    Ambulances that run on distilled suffering, ice wagons that carry blocks of frozen holy water, and ghost trams that stop for no man. Articulated vehicles as long as city blocks carrying hazardous and forbidden materials, silent hearses carrying the kind of cargo that has to be fought back into its coffin at regular intervals; and not everything that looks like a car is a car. There are things in the traffic that feed on slower things. Sometimes I look at the main roads, and I don’t see traffic; I see a jungle on wheels.
    Which is why no-one with any sense uses the roads unless he absolutely has to.
    I don’t own a car. I have my own ways of getting places. But when I do need one, I throw myself on the kindness of strange friends. I got out my phone and called Dead Boy. An old friend and occasional partner in crime, Dead Boy owned a truly magnificent car that had strayed into the Nightside from some future time-line. It could beat up anything on four wheels, and had never even heard of road safety. But after I waited patiently through the dialling chant, all I got was Dead Boy’s usual recorded message.
    “Hi. I’m dead. Call back later.”
    So I frowned, tapped my foot thoughtfully, and considered who else might be available and up for a little motorised mayhem. It wasn’t a terribly long list, and it didn’t take me long to get to the bottom. I sighed and entered the number for Ms. Fate; the Nightside’s very own transvestite crime-fighter. A man who dressed up as a super-heroine to kick the crap out of bad guys. She’s actually very good at it; and she has a really remarkable car. It’s just that I find her continual bright-eyed girl-guide enthusiasm somewhat trying...
    “Hi, John!” she said, her voice rich and warm as always. “In trouble again, are we?”
    “How did you know?” I said, a bit suspiciously. “John, my phone is preprogrammed to recognise your voice. It sets off all sorts of warning bells and a siren, because let’s face it, sweetie, you’re always in some kind of trouble.”
    “How would you like to drive me and my elven client from one side of the Nightside to the other, all the way to the Osterman Gate, almost certainly fighting off attacks by assorted bad guys from beginning to end, and help prevent a major war into the bargain?”
    She laughed. “You always did know how to show a girl a good time. Did you say... elven?”
    “Yes. Don’t ask me to explain, or I’ll start to whimper. It’s complicated.”
    “My fee just doubled. Shall we say ... twenty per cent of what you’re getting?”
    I grinned. “I don’t have any problem with that.”
    “Fabulous, darling! I’ll slip a few extra nasty tricks into my utility belt, fire up the Fatemobile, and be with you in two shakes of the best false boobies money can buy.”
    There wasn’t anything I felt like saying in response to that, so I shut down my phone. I was about to put it away when it rang. I looked at it for a moment. Sometimes you just have a feeling... I answered the phone, holding it a cautious distance away from my ear.
    “This had better not be who I think it is.”
    “John, dear boy, this is Walker. You need to stop what you’re doing and go home, right now. This is none of your business.”
    “He’s my client,” I said. I didn’t know how Walker knew I was involved with the putative Lord Screech; but then, Walker knows everything. I think