This story was first published in Interzone 202, illustrated by Rik Rawling, and is now longlisted for a British Fantasy Award.

###

I look at my five daughters as I leave the apartment and see only my fear of losing them.

In the hall, I shake the roaches from my shoes and head past the elevator for the stairwell. I tell my wife and children never to ride in that rickety lift, but I suspect they do anyway while I’m at work or asleep.

Outside, the gray snow falls like white noise.

I wonder if today will be the day.

###

My cab’s first passenger is a man older than me, accompanied by a girl younger than my eldest daughter. When he’s not groping her, he’s hitting her. It’s all I can do to keep from driving through a guardrail and killing us all.

The next fare is even more offensive. He only says two words, “Bloomberg Street,” but his stench speaks to me, taunts me, jeers at me the entire twenty-minute drive through the crosstown tubes. We witness four accidents and steer around the wreckage of four others during our short trip. As I dodge each obstruction of bloody fiberglass, rubber, Plexiglas and steel, I wonder when it will be my turn to inhabit one of these impromptu mid-lane, crumpled structures. Once the stinking man hands me his wad of gritty, smelly paper bills and gets out, it takes ten minutes with the windows open to replace the smell of his filth with the pleasant, familiar fumes of exhaust and sewage.

My third and final fare of the evening is a late-twenties, ethnically ambiguous male, smelling faintly of cologne and danger. I’d caught a glimpse of his hailing light at a port near the 9:00 tube lane. I was at ground level, but had enough room to maneuver leftward through lanes to get under the shield to his access ramp. There were a number of people there, clamoring for my back seat, but I indicated with a nod that I was taking him, whose signal I’d answered. In spite of this, some of the usual violence had followed. My intended fare had shrugged off his would-be interceptors easily and slammed the door shut three times until all of their limbs were clear of the opening.

“Welcome! Please buckle up; this vehicle is not equipped with gyroscopic harness seats to keep you upright in the upper lanes.” The automated message recites the rest of the disclaimers as I pull out again into the fast-moving traffic.

He needs me to take him to pick up a friend in the suburbs and then bring them both back to the city. He speaks with a grin that encourages me to be cheered by the prospect of such an expensive ride. I offer no words or facial expression in reply, wondering why he seems so subconsciously aware of his sport coat’s inside pocket, wondering for the millionth time if the souvenir mini baseball bat beneath my seat will be weapon enough, should I need to wield it.

Midtown 33rd Street has seen a bus skid out to form a barrier across the lowest four lanes in the tube. It had apparently swerved and lost control trying to avoid a stalled truck upside-down in the 11:00 lane. I sit looking at the mess up ahead, waiting patiently for a path to open and let me through.

“Too much cholesterol in this artery, man,” says my fare. His accent is indistinguishable. “Turn around and find another way. I can’t keep my friend waiting.”

I’m between the 3:00 and 2:00 lanes in the tubestreet, but with no room to reverse or go forward. There are some gaps in the slowly-unclogging lane to my left, though I haven’t even room enough to sidle over there. My passenger slides across his seat to the right, holding some kind of small black device in his hand. He opens the door and does something illegal; I feel the unsettling shift of weight as he releases all of the tires’ grips on the pavement. He closes the door and grins madly.

“Hey!” I yell, far too late. He’s unstuck the tires too quickly; suddenly, we’re going sideways, sliding fast to the left down the sloped tube, narrowly avoiding the Firestang racing up the 4:00 lane. The cab’s front left quarterpanel glances hard into a Mercedai’s rear bumper and slides ass-corner first into a bakery truck in lane 5:00. The Mercedai revs forward just enough to release my car’s front end. Suddenly unsupported, gravity slides the front end down leftways to complete our slam into the delivery truck. Angry shouts coming in from all directions, I maneuver out, screech across the bottom bowl of the tube, and skid to a stop in a discharge/entry ramp.

I turn and stare at my fare through the gap in the scuffed Plexiglas, feeling the onset of some righteous anger. “Out of this cab!”

Then, for the thirty-eighth time in my career as a cabbie, I see the inside cylinder of a gun barrel. This is the first time it ever strikes me, though, as a miniature version of the tubestreets I drive through every night.

“I hate to sour our friendship like this, but keep driving. It’s very important that my friend and I complete our mission today.”

I sigh defeat and turn back around, feeling the circle spotlight of the gun barrel’s aim on the back of my head.

There is a loud thunder of crunching and tearing from above; my passenger and I look up to watch a cluster of just-crashed, inertia-compelled vehicles rolling and skidding over our shielded port. When the noise has mostly stopped, I pull back out onto the roadway and maneuver around the mess, smoking here, leaking there, tiny scattered shards of vehicles everywhere, crunching beneath my tires.

“Don’t worry; you’ll still get paid in full for the fare.”

But I do worry. Not about the money, but about every other danger my imagination can manufacture. I have a superstitious belief – scratch that – a superstitious certainty that the best prevention method against tragedy is to worry and agonize over all potential catastrophes. Never relax and let yourself be at ease; never give in to optimism. Never omit any of the possible calamitous outcomes in your worrying, otherwise the fate you overlooked will be the manner of your doom. And always be aware that even strict adherence to this system is not a guarantee against ill fortune.

“You don’t drive on the upper lanes much, do you pal?”

“You deactivated my tires’ grip. Remember? We have to stick to the bottom,” I say. The gun has returned to whatever fold it had originally come from. I sense his Cheshire grin in the rearview mirror, even as I try not to see him.

“The effects of that only last for about thirty or so seconds. Your anti-grav traction will work fine again if you go back up to the top lanes.” He pauses, but I can tell he has more to say. “But even before I slid us out of that traffic jam, you still were driving really cautiously, especially for a cabbie; sticking to the bottom half of the tubes, like you didn’t really want to go upside down. Am I right? What are you, afraid?”

I shrug, extremely tired of this. “I’ve heard of devices like the one you have. There are a lot of crazies out there who might get one and use it just for fun.”

“Ah, so you liked my toy then? It’s the least interesting one I own. My friend will have something much more exciting.” I do look this time; he’s smiling smugly and staring out of the window. “So what are you then, some kinda pantophobic? Look at all those cars up there right now in the ceiling lanes. None of them are falling! In fact, you never really hear about vehicles losing grip and falling – yet you still don’t trust that your cab’s wheels will hold you up there? You’re afraid that you’ll be the one unlucky guy in ten million who dies because of a bizarre traction malfunction? Amazing! You never travel by airplane, do you pal? I bet you haven’t been on a roller-coaster in decades, if ever.”

I shake my head in disgust, but realize too late that I’m also giving the answer he’s looking for.

“You been driving a cab too long, seen too many crazy accidents happen out of nowhere; it’s got you afraid of the whole world. You gotta forget all that shit, pal; life isn’t like these fuckin tubestreets.” He laughs a quick, strange little laugh. “I guess I’m not the guy who should be telling you that, though.”

I shoot my best Clint Eastwood look into the mirror, but it’s wasted; he’s staring out the window and doesn’t even notice. I sigh and refocus on the road. At least we’ve finally gotten out of the deep city; I’m now driving into the madman’s nightmare of loops leading to the trans-channel bridge. We’re only a really long way from the suburbs now, as opposed to the extremely long distance that we were before.

I think he must be the least desperate person ever to point a gun at me, and possibly the most frightening. I wonder about his scheme, and whether I’m helping to bring some terrible dream to fruition.

###

Just an anonymous granule of cork in an unsolvable bottleneck. The problem is that the on-ramps and the Dinkins Bridge’s twelve levels are all 2-D flat. On the decks where there’s no construction, the cars sit parked or moving slowly to get past the accidents. Sitting in the jam on the second-lowest level, I wonder if the structure is going to choose that moment to collapse from the strain of all those tons of vehicles. Even as huge as it is, the massive thing swings sickeningly in the wind. I look at the underside of the level above and wonder if it will give way and drop a big rig onto the roof of my taxi. I wonder if someone will try to cheat through the traffic jam and their inevitable crash will carom into my cab and send us through the guardrail, into the waters below. In all the doomy scenarios I dream up, I take comfort in the probability that my passenger will die too.

“God, this traffic is killing me! Hey pal, don’t you ever listen to any music?”

After I’d had three memory sticks of song files stolen, I’d stopped bringing music to the car. I never tune to the broadcast stations, driving in silence as a kind of silent, personal protest against the city’s rampant kleptomania. Besides, the quiet allows me to hear my own thoughts.

“Here. Pop this in. It’s a mix of Billy Joel tracks.”

God I hate Billy Joel. But, I remember the yawning O of the gun barrel and plug in his memory stick. I notice that it’s a high-capacity stick, its drive almost completely filled. That’s – oh, I can’t do the math down to the minute – a couple of hours of Billy Joel. I search the level above’s underside again for structural cracks.

###

Well, at least the music shuts him up for the rest of the trip. The icy roads create a chilling, slushy fear at the core of my being. I feel a dread certainty of every other car on the road that they’re going to hit a patch of black ice and lose control right into me.

We pull up to the target address, a tired, white, aluminum-sided house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, just as ‘Captain Jack’ is segueing into ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.

The other guy hurries out of the front door, slips on the icy sidewalk, and gets into the car, shivering wordlessly next to his friend. I see my original fare looking at me in the rearview.

“All right, pal. All that’s left is for you to bring us back into the city. I’ll tell you the address once we get downtown.” The two of them then begin to converse in some language full of Ks and Zs and SHs. There’s no family resemblance at all, but – the new guy looks and talks just like the other one.

My inner jury is becoming more and more swayed by my suspicion’s prosecutors. These two are up to something bad, some evil deed of a yet-to-be-determined scale. And I’m driving them to their ground zero. An accessory. I look at the battered Polaroids of my daughters, wedged into the door handle’s cracks, and see only my fear of being lost to them.

Back on the Dinkins Bridge, headed into the deep city; again an anonymous mote of phlegm in the eternal congestion. The new guy pulls an encapsulated vial of some amber fluid from one pocket, a small pod terminal from another, and fits a few wires between slots on the beaker and ports on the little microtop computer.

He types something quickly and then triumphantly strikes the RETURN key. LEDs on the vial start to go nuts, much to the delight of the two men.

“Genius,” smiles the first. Both of them then look up at me, both wearing matching unsettling expressions. I have no hope of getting out of this alive.

“Ah, good song! Whenever my girl gives me problems, I just pop this track into the player. Hey, pal, that’s a wedding ring, right? You must know what I’m talkin about. Doesn’t this song say it perfectly?”

‘Always A Woman’.

I shrug.

“Billy speaks the truth, man.” I see him sit back and look at his friend. He then sits forward again eagerly. “Hey, you two haven’t been properly introduced. I’d like you to meet my friend, A.J. A.J., I’d like you to meet our driver…oh hell, I’m not even gonna try to pronounce that name. He’s a bit of a chicken for a cabbie; drives slow, mostly sticks to the lower lanes. But he seems like a nice enough guy.”

“That’s OK. I’d rather not take any chances, not today,” says A.J. “A slow, cautious driver is preferable to a reckless speeder. Nice to meet you, buddy.”

I nod, but say nothing.

Ah, the exultation of breaking loose from logjammed traffic and into open highway. The other vehicles around me accelerate dazedly, as if their drivers can’t yet comprehend their newfound freedom. The long winding offramp here is still only a 2-D stretch of flat lanes, but the city’s circular tubestreet entrances lie just ahead, piled on top of each other, with the networks of delicate ramps rising and snaking on their pylons to feed into the cylindrical openings.

We depart the bridge and look right into the teeth of the city.

There it is, dead ahead, the city’s ambitious project of the past decade to cut into its massive traffic problem, multiplying its major avenues’ lane capacities by rolling the streets up into long winding, tubular pipes, then stacking those tubes on top of each other. Basically, turning the streets into a sewer system for all of the waste to pass efficiently through.

The stacks of tubes stop at three levels, though special interests are pushing for construction of a fourth story of tubestreets on top. People say the cylinder openings all piled together there resemble honeycombs, which has earned the city the nickname of ‘the hive’. I feel almost tempted to vocalize my private opinion that it looks nothing like a goddamn honeycomb, to ask my two passengers if they agree with me.

I hit the ramp to the Ed Koch tube and keep my mouth shut.

The two in the back are engrossed in some foreign-language conversation anyway. I watch their heated discussion, their hands gesturing repeatedly to the vial and the microtop. What the hell are these two plotting?

The clusterfuck at the tube entrance is not too bad. ‘Piano Man’ comes on and the smile runs away from my face. Man, what am I doing here?

The two of them continue to chatter as I accelerate to meet the speed limit in the tube’s lowest 6:00 lane. My mind twists their language’s words into taunts for my cautious driving, my lack of faith, my insecurity within technology’s cradle. Angered by their jeers, I put my left blinker on and accelerate aggressively through the lanes. 7:00, 8:00, around a pile-up in 9, a stalled Caddy in 10, 11:00; I exhale again as I settle into the top-center high-noon lane, hyper-aware of the pull of gravity on my cab and its wheels, of our total dependence on the traction technology in the car’s tires. We’re speeding upside-down in the tube now, like spiders across the ceiling.

“Yeah buddy! That’s more like it!”

I feel my stomach wanting to drop; I look up toward the ground level, watch a big rig and trailer conducting a serpentine lane-shift along the bottom. Since leaving the Dinkins, the two in back have been conversing less. Their nervous, frenetic tension radiates stronger with each passing block. I wonder if they’re planning to unleash their unspecified nightmare right from the backseat of my cab. I wonder if it will be some grandiose, violent cataclysm, or something more subtle and deadly on a wide scale, like the release of a terrible disease.

I wonder if a previously undetected asteroid will smash into the earth, causing an apocalypse to one-up the one that killed the dinosaurs.

A motorcycle, a station wagon, two Chevrobishi pickup trucks, a retrofitted 1998 Porsche Boxter, an empty school bus, a mail truck, and a Volkswagon Beetle (the old kind) all collide directly up ahead in lane 12:00, each vehicle spinning off into debris-spitting hunks of…stuff. At least ten secondary accidents immediately follow, but I dodge through all of the dangerous debris and keep going.

The two in back look up with mild curiosity, but quickly return their attention to the microtop’s little screen. A.J. is typing away while the other guy points and makes comments. They argue a bit in their language; I interpret it as ironing out the details of the execution of their dread plan. The first one had mocked me for my anxious mistrust of each moment, my frightened view of the world, but he and his friend have engendered an entirely new sensation of fear in me, a terror so tangible I feel I could scoop it up and hold it in my hands.

The undulating orange glow from around the tube bend ahead is either hell itself come to earth inside this tubestreet, or the fireglow from a nasty accident. I count either possibility as equally likely, but it turns out to be the latter. As the street curves, I begin to see bonfires of wrecks at different hands on the clock ahead; one in the 8:00 lane, one in the 3:00, another at 7:00. They‚Äôre bad enough ¬?the models of the cars that kindle them are indistinguishable.

The natural rubberneck slowdowns are starting to accumulate; I look back at my two fares, their full attentions upon the vial and the computer terminal and their doomsday scenario. We fully round the bend and I see the big problem ahead. A burning tanker truck has jackknifed across the bottom lanes, with a little Japanese car buried in the crook of its L-shape. Police vehicles and big strong-robotic-crane-armed vehicles are there, the former serving to evac the area, the latter to safely withdraw the little car from the truck, while simultaneously straightening it out again and freeing up the lower lanes.

A.J. mutters something and they both laugh. Billy Joel is going on about a matter of trust.

Something snaps inside of me.

As the cars in the uppers around me decelerate, I accelerate faster, slipping deftly from lane 11:00 back across to lane 1:00, dodging in and out of the gawkers and motorists caught in the traffic trap. My foot trembles on the gas pedal, but I keep it pressed, feeling the fear coursing through my system like a paralytic drug. No force known to man could pry my shaking hands from their 10 and 2 grip on the wheel.

“Whoa, pal; what’s gotten into you? You suddenly in a hurry?”

I say nothing, zipping past a long rented limo, clipping the front bumper as I cut in front of it. Riding high-noon, baby.

The first passenger leans forward through the Plexiglas. “Look pal – ”

I choose that moment to jam the brakes. We skid forward, fishtailing but pinballing off cars on either side and staying in the lane. I’d chosen a decent stretch of open pavement to hit the brakes, but it’s obvious that we’re still going to hit the rear end of the slow-moving florist’s van up ahead. Just before impact, I reach back and grab my passenger’s lapels, doing my damnedest to pull him forward through the big gap in the Plexiglas shield.

We strike pretty hard into the delivery van’s ass bumper, and I half-achieve my goal. My shoulder hits the steering wheel hard; my first passenger lurches forward to wedge halfway between front and back.

He shoots a look of gritted teeth at me, then launches a barrage of what sounds like curses in his native tongue, struggling with his free right arm to liberate his pinched left. I take the opportunity to bring my souvenir bat hard against his jaw, then begin to search through his jacket pockets, pulling out all manner of strange devices. Finally, I find the one that had de-tractioned my tires back on 33rd Street. A.J. pounds on the Plexiglas and shouts angrily, but that’s the extent of his ability to affect anything.

1-2-3-4 Pressure!

I’m so fully engaged in fending off the guy’s free hand, I have no idea what’s going on outside of the taxi. I imagine a speeding car roaring up from behind, its inattentive driver spotting our mid-lane obstacle too late; the impact of the crash launching us all into fatal injuries.

The pistol! Still digging into his pocket, my hand closes on it; I immediately feel his cold fingers grip on top of mine. He screams out some kind of war cry, which succeeds in rattling me. I drop the gun to the ceiling, and he grabs for it. The pistol has fallen just beyond his easy grasp, but his fingertips touch the handle grip and work carefully to nudge it closer. Oh no goddamn way. I bat it away, consider picking it up myself, instead gun the car into reverse, smacking hard into the grill of the minivan that’s stopped behind our crash. The move creates just enough room for me to dart out and around the crumple-reared florist truck and again into accelerating motion.

###

“What are you doing?” the guy shouts, swinging his free right arm at me, but not able to generate momentum enough to hit hard. So he does the next logical thing; God, his gouging fingers hurt on my face. The little bat breaks across his chin; I then palm his face and smear him back, using my free left hand to swing open my door.

There’s no way in hell I’m going to hang out of the door, upside down in the tube at this speed and height.

The guy grabs my hair and pulls hard. I scream out and smash my forehead hard into his, releasing his grip long enough for me to shake my head free. We bump past a panicking woman’s Toyoldsmobile and it slams my door back shut. I open it again and swing out, momentarily mesmerized by the speeding pavement; it blurs quickly past, mere inches above my face.

I can only guess at how to use this little black device. It has a sticky, gluey underside and one button on top; the button clicks under my thumb and a red LED lights up. I adhere the sticky part to the taxi’s undercarriage; once it seems satisfied with its contact on the car, the red light dims out and another LED glows green.

I watch in a surreal, reality-detached moment as the ceiling-ground lets go of the car and begins to recede into the sky. The tires have lost traction on the 12:00 lane and are now rotating free of all contact. My stomach lurches into freefall. God, are we starting to spin? Are we twisting through the air, falling directly toward the stalled tanker truck below? People down there are pointing up and panicking; the two guys in the backseat are screaming mortal terror in the most hilarious way. I begin to cackle wildly.

We fall whoa-oh-oh-oh, for the longest time.

###

There’s a deafening noise, a horrible jarring feeling of bouncing, tumbling, rolling. I feel the man wedged between front and back seats being jostled in most unnatural ways, his upper half smacking hard into me; I feel warm fluids splashing onto me, and know that I’m going to be sick. There’s a greater roaring warmth coming from somewhere outside, cooking the car, which is still rolling for an even roasting on all sides.

The fiberglass-metal-synthetic shell of the cab crumples with each concrete impact; we finally stop bouncing and skid forward, sparks flying into the car through where the windshield is supposed to be.

I’m not dead. I’m on the ground level now, but still hanging upside-down. I can’t move at all, trapped by pain, by incapacitated extremities, between the seat and the dashboard. Where’s the steering wheel? Isn’t a car supposed to have a steering wheel? I look over at my passenger. He never got free of that perch between seats. The human skull is not supposed to be shaped like that.

I look at the Plexiglas barrier toward the backseat. At some point, A.J. had taken off his seat-belt; now he’s given the rear interior a red paint job. I meet his fading eyes through the stained Plexiglas. His last weak words are, “How did you know…?”

“When you’re paranoid about everyone, you’re bound to be right sometimes,” I respond, for his dead ears.

I’d shake my head if I could; I close my eyes and feel the world swim. So this is that horrible trauma I’d spent my every waking moment dreading. I wish I could call my wife, to tell her, and to tell my daughters one last time how much I love them. I can’t remember the last time I used that word. Love. God, there are moments of such intense pain.

I was wrong. I am dead.

Footsteps.

The hollow metal sound of my passenger door torn open.

“Hey, this cabbie looks like he’s alive! God, there ain’t a thing unbroken in this car except for the radio.”

I wish those were words coming out of my mouth, instead of bloody teeth and incomprehensible moans.

“He’s trying to talk! What is it, buddy?”

More moans.

“What? The music stick…? What about it?”

“Turn it off!” I manage. “God, turn it off please. Don’t let me die with ‘Uptown Girl’ on the radio. Don’t let that song be the last thing I hear in this world. Please, I beg you.”

“Sure, sure pal. But don’t start saying your goodbyes yet. You gonna be fine, we just need to get an ambulance. You pretty banged up, but you ain’t gonna die. Can’t say the same for your passengers though; looks like we already too late for them.”

###

It turns out that the rescuer was right. EMTs freed me, doctors confirmed his diagnosis. Bruises and broken bones just about everywhere, a few cracked teeth, but I’d somehow survived the tubestreet crash, while my two passengers had died of the injuries sustained.

Inexplicably, life had given me a break.

Police had searched through the crash site and found the evidence of my passengers’ dire plan, though no details were released. I’d subsequently had to endure many exhausting rounds of interrogations and commendations. My face and name were in the newspapers for their full fifteen minutes, for all of my dead passengers’ comrades to see and memorize. The cameras turned on my wife and daughters next, to make their identities also well-known for all of my new enemies. The press turned against me when I attempted to defend my family from their exposing lenses and stories, painting me as a madman who’d killed some bad guys accidentally during a homicidal fit.

I lie here now in my hospital bed, a caricature, mummified in my full body cast, my left leg suspended inside of its plaster and gauze shell. There is a shapeless brownish stain dried into the new sheet they just put on my bed; I can almost see the harmful microbes there, like tiny swimmers in a brown pool. In fact, I see evil bacteria moving on every surface in this unclean place; swarms of the vile little things even fill the air in the halls and the room. My requests for sanitary conditions and security guards have gone largely ignored. As you’ve no doubt guessed, a mutual dislike and distrust has grown between me and the hospital staff.

I listen to my roommate coughing incessantly behind his curtain, wonder what flavor of plague he is carelessly unleashing upon the population, starting with me.

###

No matter the hour, this wing of the hospital is a noisy place. Yet I’m certain that every sound is the comrades of my two dead passengers, coming to exact their revenge. I’m the easiest target imaginable; immobilized and imprisoned in my cast in this bed, with no real security watch.

I lie here and wonder when they will come, until exhaustion and boredom finally claim my consciousness.

Awake again.

My daughters are here with me now. They look beautiful by the sunny window and I tell them so. Seeing their pretty faces, I want to tell them that life is a journey of joys and wonders in a world of glorious possibilities, but I don’t believe a word of that. The terrible truth is that the world is an unsolvable deathtrap, full of willful predators and malicious fatal coincidences. Life within it is a series of losses, tragic accidents, and near misses, until you finally break down and become the next anonymous tragedy in the infinite march.

I want them to leave, so that they’re not here when the men come for me.

I smile and keep all of these thoughts to myself.

I wonder if today will be the day.

###

Jack Mangan is a writer, musician, podcaster, software engineer etc, born in New Jersey but now residing in Arizona with his wife and three children. His short novel Spherical Tomi is available at Fictionwise and Podiobooks. Jack’s website.

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