Not Flesh Nor Feathers

by Cherie Priest

Page 27

 

  I’d read that during the war, people spoke of tunnels dug all over the place so soldiers could quietly move goods from the river. In the 1860s the city was held by north and south in turn, and tunnels were a known Civil War-era tactic of hiding and transporting soldiers and supplies.

  It made more sense to me than a precariously piled mound of underground city fragments, anyway. But people around here believe what they like.

  I didn’t really believe it. Not before, when the urban legend was passed around by my friends, and not even then, when staring down into an open hole covered by a grate.

  But I knew, without believing any of it necessarily, that I was breathing down into something bigger, deeper, and longer than an unfinished basement. I listened, kneeling there beside the edge, because I thought I heard something strange—something that wasn’t coming from outside, but coming from underneath.

  I leaned my head and pressed my ear down low, and there it was. A scratching, or a scuffling. Something slow-moving, but too big to be a rat. Something distant, but not so far away that I couldn’t detect the struggling pattern of feet in mud.

  Yes, it was distant still. But there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it was coming closer.

  14

  Help Me

  “Nick,” I started repeating into the phone long before he picked up on the other end. I was shivering and cold and unhappy, and I was trying to tune out the faint sloshing scratchings coming from the hole behind me. But it was dry inside the old building, so I made use of the roof and made a phone call.

  “Nick here. ”

  “Nick,” I said it again. “Something extremely fucked up is going on. ”

  “You’re not just whistling Dixie. ” He sounded tired, but a little bit happy to hear from me. “Where are you, woman? And please please please tell me that you’re up on the mountain still. Because if you’re down here in the city, I’m going to have to freak out. ”

  “Sorry. Commence freaking out—but be warned, I’m way ahead of you. I’m in that old building—I don’t know what it’s called—the old building down off MLK. The one that’s boarded up and looks like it used to be a bank or something. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “I don’t know. MLK and what street?”

  “Martin Luther King and—” I raised my head as if I could see outside to the street sign. I couldn’t, so I guessed. “Broad, I think. Maybe Market, or Cherry? It’s on the corner. Catty-cornered and down the street from the library and the Read House. ”

  “I don’t know it. But I could find it, if I could get there—and I’ve got to tell you the truth, I don’t know if I can get there. ”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m—” It sounded like he was doing the same thing I’d just done—taking a look around and not learning much. “I’m at the bridge. City-side, not Signal-side. The 27 bridge, Olgiati. It’s—it’s chaos. I’ve never seen anything like this. ”

  “What are you doing there?” I asked.

  “Trying to keep from getting trampled. I’m on foot, at the moment; the news SUV was commandeered by a couple of cops for use as an ambulance—but I can’t imagine how far they’ve gotten with it. So what’s going on where you are? You sound dry and alone, and if that’s the case, then I applaud you—because it couldn’t have been easy. ”

  He was hollering into the phone in the middle of a crowd, and it made him hard to understand.

  “It wasn’t easy. It was creepy, and I’m really worried. I need to get out of here and . . . and I’ve got some family that just came into town, and I’m not sure exactly what I expect you to do about this, but I guess I’m glad you’re all right and I could really use some company. But if you’re all the way down at the bridge, then I don’t know. I guess just stay safe, and I’ll catch up to you when I can. ”

  For all the trouble I’d gone to in order to get dry and alone, I wasn’t liking it much.

  “I’m going to try to work my way back down in your direction,” he said slowly. “I think I’m going to try to get to the Read House. You must be rubbing off on me or something because I found something this morning—something I shouldn’t have found, not in a million years. ”

  “What did you find?”

  “The Spanish Flu, a fire, and those juvenile murals you found in the old furniture store—they’re all related. I think Caroline knows why. And I think we need to talk to her, because if we don’t . . . ”

  “If we don’t, what?

  He was quiet, like he was listening to someone else. Then he said abruptly, “If we don’t, this could get a whole lot worse. Something’s down there in the river, Eden. Fuck me, something is down there. But it’s not going to stay down. ”

  Behind me, I heard the scritch, scritch, scritch of the faraway something crawling beneath the city. “You’re right. But what is it?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m starting to get a few ideas. ”

  “If you get to the Read House,” I started. “I mean, when you get to the Read House, give me a call. I’ll come and help. ”

  The burned-up man.

  The thought flicked through my head and it almost hurt. I squeezed my temples between my thumb and ring finger. And my phone began to beep. “Nick, I’ve got another call coming. I’ll catch you later. Call me when you get here. ”

  “Will do,” he said, and hung up.

  I hit the button to transfer the next call over. “Harry? Is that you?”

  “It’s me. We’re at the Choo-Choo. ”

  I groaned. “That is not where I told you to go. ”

  “No, but it’s where we were taken. It’s being set up as a shelter and it’s a nightmare. But we’re here, and we’re safe, more or less. You don’t think it’ll flood up this far inland do you?”

  “I’ve got no idea. Surely not? But you’re at the Choo-Choo?”

  “Yes. We’re here. We’re in the main terminal building, the front one, you know. We’re back in the area that’s a bar. Lots of brass and glass, and red. There’s a piano, too. Do you know where I’m talking about?”

  “I do, yeah. And I’m coming—I’ll be there in a few minutes. Give me maybe twenty. I’m not real far away. ”

  “All right. We’ll be here waiting. ”

  I folded my phone and wrapped it carefully in its foil protective pouch before putting it back into my purse. And then, before I left—as if it would do any good—I pushed all those wooden shipping pallets back on top of the grate. I threw on a couple of crates and a whole lot of trash too, just for good measure. My phone rang again while I was doing this, but it was someone calling from home so I didn’t answer it. And then I exited the way I’d come in, out through the window.

  Back outside the sky was low and sulking, but it wasn’t raining—or it was, but only in dribbles. I blinked hard, rubbed my eyes, and tried to orient myself. I was less than a block from the Read House, but it would probably take Nick the better part of an hour to make his way there from the bridge. First came Harry and Malachi.

  Harry and Mal were a few blocks south. I was too tired to sprint the distance, and suddenly a little hungry, too. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and breakfast felt like ancient history.

  Onward and upward I walked. Out of the central district and away towards the south side, where there were fewer people than down by the river. But as I got closer to the Choo-Choo, the crowds began to thicken; and by the time I reached it I was surrounded again by crying babies, worried women, old people in wheelchairs, and a handful of men in lettered jackets trying to direct the human flow of traffic. I staggered up to the nearest such official and tried to get his attention.

  “Sir?”

  “Ma’am, if you could step aside unless there’s a medical emergency?”

  I let it go, because I think I only wanted to be told that someone knew what was going on—that somebody was in control, even if I knew better. I gathered
in five minutes of crowd surfing that at least this was a shelter and that the Red Cross was there. And under the great painted dome in the old train station, hundreds of people crushed together on the gleaming marble floors and waited for word, waited for food, or waited for the water to go down.

  I sidestepped as many of them as possible and made it to the piano bar with its wall of mirrors and shelves loaded with brightly colored bottles of liquor. And there, in the back corner, behind the piano and under a gilt-framed mirror the size of a patio door, waited Harry and my brother, who leaped to his feet and started waving as soon as he saw me.

  I stumbled towards them, over a few people and around a few others. I pushed my way past the edge of the bar and joined them.

  “You made it!” Malachi wheezed, flushed with excitement and sticky with sweat and water.

  “Was there ever any doubt?”

  Harry stood up too, and I’d forgotten how tall he was until he wrapped an arm around me and I was chin-forward into his shoulder. He looked the same as always, thin in a strong way that’s often called wiry, and with a face full of sharp angles that made him look smart. He was wearing a longsleeved gray sweater and jeans, while Malachi’s sweater was white.

  Malachi the Ageless still looked twenty, though I knew good and well he was in his late thirties. His hair was growing out again, into that straggly blond haystack he wore when I first met him on that playground in the rain. When he had a gun. When he wanted to kill me.

  I hugged him—and for perhaps the first time, I meant it. I was genuinely happy to see him. I grabbed Harry again too, because I was happy to see him as well. Their timing was terrible and the circumstances of their arrival could’ve been better, but they were here and they were alive. And, in the back of my head, I knew they’d gone to an awful lot of trouble to be here. It’s hard not to be flattered by that. It’s also hard not to feel some sense of obligation to someone who has climbed through hell and high water to see you.