He shook his damp locks, pulled the collar of his overcoat tight about his neck and fumbled with a cigarette. Minutes later the troll drove the boat into a suffocating fog bank. The chill air ate into Felon’s bones. His fingers fumbled and his nose ran freely. He sucked a stream of acrid smoke into his nostrils hoping it would dry and warm the sinus cavity. The assassin allowed himself a scarf, and warm socks, but no gloves. Felon almost died once because of gloves. They kept his fingers warm but a gun has a definite shape, and required precision to fire. He could not feel a trigger properly through gloves, and fabric reacted differently to other materials. Damp leather could catch on a wool coat or cotton jacket. Human skin, damp or cold, could distinguish the outline of a gun a lot better than a layer of fabric.
The Sunken City loomed suddenly out of a rolling fog. Monoliths of salt-stained brick and stone appeared. The ocean ground slowly, noisily through cramped streets, pounding its outer neighborhoods with waves. The walls of the narrow canyons were enormous sheets of concrete and steel rising in the distance. The dead and abandoned buildings reared out of the water at disturbing angles, many ready to collapse. Those closest to the boat disappeared in the low cloud cover. The fog swirled and churned around the trawler, as they pitched over broken houses while hollow thunder boomed, sending adrenaline surging in his veins. A gust of wind and the fogbank parted—the boat slipped into the protection of a narrow city street that opened along a steep divide. Echoes of water and wind rumbled. The Sunken City’s voice had nothing good to say.
Wurn slowed the trawler to a crawl. The water around them was black. Felon knew that the outer rim of buildings was a formidable barrier to any approaching ships. Tons of twisted steel and shattered rubble made a reef of destruction that few could navigate. Wurn steered down the flooded street, toward the inner neighborhoods where Felon knew lights were kept burning with coal and gas. That was where the Demon’s lived.
There was a splash to his left. Swimmers! A number of them converged on Wurn’s trawler when it slowed to navigate the dark streets. They swam silently with the boat, occasionally tilting a gray eye at its occupants. Swimmers were preserved by the Change and the high concentrations of salt in the water. The Demons allowed them to populate the streets as a deterrent to visitors. Little was known about them. Since their bodies could not long withstand the rigors of life out of the water, they posed little threat. Nobody who swam with the Swimmers lived to tell the tale.
“Hey there’s Swimmers!” Wurn exclaimed redundantly with dismay in his features. “Stay out of the water!”
Swimmers were dead people—drowned, murdered or dumped. The Change preserved them with the extinction of most forms of bacteria. Small fish nibbled the swimming corpses, large fish took the odd bite, but those that remained intact toughened in the salt water, their skins taking on a gray, sharkskin look. The dead on land had to worry about dehydration; the dead in the sea had to worry about dissolving. If the skin was intact, a Swimmer could go on, growing more durable with each passing year. But, if the skin was broken, that was the beginning of the end. Little fish and the nibbling parasites got in. In time, the afflicted Swimmer would become more and more ragged, more bloated and distended. In late stages they resembled a tangle of floating bones and rotting meat.
The creatures traveled the sunken streets alone or in packs. Swimmers didn’t speak. They were cunning, but unlike the dead on land they behaved like animals—more apt to flee than fight. Felon didn’t care what they were, or what they thought, he only knew that they didn’t like bullets. In the dark water their long-limbed bodies resembled toads’.
Felon growled, touching his holster as he eyed the boatman. The trawler picked up speed.
The broad sunken avenues gaped to either side of them as they passed over drowned intersections. At places where traffic of ocean currents converged, small maelstroms were created, their impetus pulling at the boat. The powerful engine rumbled and sent them surging on. One hundred years of rain and pounding surf had worn away at the Sunken City’s skyline. Skyscrapers had tumbled and apartment blocks had collapsed into dangerous mazes of corroded steel and mountains of reinforced concrete. The structures at the eastern edge of the Sunken City took the worst of it; they were pounded by Old Atlantic and torn by its winds. What remained had formed a break wall—a complicated shallows that absorbed the energy of the waves, protected the buildings deeper in.
Millions had once lived in the now shattered buildings, driven its flooded streets, and worked in its crumbled factories and for a moment a nagging pre-Change recollection tugged at Felon’s thoughts. He imagined most were dead now and wondered how many of them still moved along its streets as Swimmers.
A horrible cry cut through the gathering gloom. It started guttural and gravely high above them, and wound upward in pitch and ferocity, until it became a screaming whip stroke of sound that undulated and fell on the delicate tissues of the brain like broken glass. Felon’s gun was out and pointed at the shadows above.
“Watcher!” he hissed.
“Watchers watch!” the troll whimpered, glancing into the shadows above them before gesturing with an over-sized hand. “There! Master Balg’s boat—on the Street of Walls!” He swung his arms along a broad corridor lined with enormous stone buildings.
The overcast left everything in gloom. Felon ripped his eyes away from the empty window frames above. He could see the shape of a large ship a half-mile away. Lights blazed out of its many windows and with it came haunting musical strains. The sounds echoed toward them, distorted by the distance.
“Light!” He paced to the wheelhouse.
Wurn reached under the boat’s dashboard and grabbed a spotlight. Felon snatched it away and played its harsh beam first along the regular surfaces of the buildings towering over them. Shadows swung about the black interiors of the dead monoliths. Nothing. Then Felon turned the spot, and sent its powerful light across the water. Balg’s ship was growing in size as they approached. Perhaps one hundred-fifty feet in length, it rose from the waterline thirty feet to its top deck.
Felon pierced the surface of the flooded street and stroked the corroded pavement forty feet below with the angled beam. It flashed over barnacle-encrusted vehicles, a corroded bench, a toppled light post then fell on the first of the Swimmers. A great, distended blob, with bloated legs and head, it bucked and thrashed away from the light like it was on fire. There was a mob of them, floating and paddling around in the dark. The moment the light passed near they dove and swam into the recesses of submerged doorways and sunken subway entrances. He shone the spotlight toward the yacht, and caught a few more gray eyes disappearing in a splash. He let the light slide up the anchor chain.
Felon glared at Wurn.
“Swimmers don’t take no Baron Balg. They takes Eyesores, and we watch. They take us but we watch!” Wurn ran his large palms over his thick thighs, and then rubbed them together. Felon slipped his gun away, watching the powerful muscles bunch beneath the creature’s yellow-gray skin. He slid the pistol in and out of the holster, left it unfastened, and turned to watch the yacht.
20 – The Mission
The magician waited while Dawn finished with her little woman’s moment. Years before she started dawdling while getting ready for breakfast. She claimed she spent those minutes in her cubbyhole applying finishing touches. A little dab of scavenged rouge perhaps, a final flourish for her thick dark hair—Mr. Jay could never tell what wonders she worked. Her forever girl’s condition had her brimming with youthful beauty at all times.
He curled cross-legged on the sill of the boarded-up window. The magician had returned some forty minutes before Dawn awoke. Mr. Jay loved and hated his time away from her. He enjoyed it because he had a very isolated life before he’d met her. Not lonely, just isolated and he had adapted to solitude. And now, he was uncomfortable with time alone, because it meant being away from Dawn. He’d known her all these years and still could not predict her actions. So he worried.
Mr.
Jay blamed the fact that she’d never gone through puberty. She couldn’t recognize the dangers of the world. For her, a danger passed was passed and life took her onto the next thing. He checked that line of reasoning because it wasn’t true. She learned, and she was wiser than she let on. She played dumb from time to time. He knew that was because if she could take care of herself, she was afraid he’d leave.
Mr. Jay stretched himself out of his moody brooding and settled against the bricks. The exertions of the night had little effect upon him. He rarely needed more than a couple of hours sleep. It gave him great opportunity for study and meditation.
What he found would make it impossible to sleep anyway. He would try to rest later after he figured out whether his mission was complete. It wasn’t a success. But it was unlikely he could take it farther with Dawn in tow. The incident with the Prime’s spies worried him. They had to be using Powers to locate him so quickly.
It was a decade since his last visit to the City of Light and it had grown more oppressive and degenerate in the intervening years. He realized the City might have been among his primary reasons for his extended period in the wilderness. It was more than that; but the City repulsed him. The worst part was that its inhabitants were forgetting that something was wrong—or that there had ever been a right.
Complacency was turning them all into the walking dead. The metropolis’ soaring, bulging, hanging bulk pressed down on the spirit. Each level perched on the bones of another monstrous city below it combining to make a leviathan under a tarry shell. The citizens burrowed through its guts like roundworms.
But that they could forget why the City was the way it was. He hated and loved people for their ability to adapt to anything. History books told him what he needed to know about human tenacity, and experience had shown him their terrifying survival instincts unleashed.
He was appalled, not surprised, by the conditions he’d found while moving under cover of night through the City’s lowest and oldest level. The poor and the dead were forced to exist in the damp shadows where the first streets had been built upon and forgotten. The poor propped up hopeless lives with meaningless work. The meaning diminished by the drudgery of the tasks they were forced to accept in a society that rewarded wealth and punished poverty. And with the Change robbing them of the simple pleasures of child rearing and real death, what more then? Work. Get enough to eat, and cavort, for there was no start or end or meaning to life.
And the contrasts were extreme. High above their reach, immortal billionaires raced along the elevated Skyways from one tower to the next, gobbling up wealth and monopolizing economic power with a staggering disregard for those who eked out existence in the levels far below.
Mr. Jay shook his head at such notions. It was always the way. These ideas awaited him in every city he’d ever visited. The City of Light just took it to incredible extremes. Black winged limousines flying over the stinking bodies of the homeless. The beggar is free to work his way to the top; he’s free to die in the streets if he wants. He’s free!
There was nothing left for the poor. And they couldn’t even rest in death. Their neighbors, the dead, scurried, limped and dragged themselves through the darkness on errands of some arcane sort or other—or outright competed for the same jobs. Many of the dead retained their memories in part or whole, and these tried to mimic the semblance of lives that were gone forever.
Mr. Jay had traveled across the lowest Level Zero without incident. It was simple enough. There were few restrictions on the activities of the living. And all obstacles he found were designed to impede the actions of individuals moving up to the levels above. He found massive gates permanently blocking ancient side streets that wound upward. City Authorities patrolled all vantage points but concentrated on the large manned access areas. They were easy for the magician to evade.
Throughout his excursion he had reminded himself that there was a curfew on the denizens of the lower levels, not a state of war. Many living men and women from below worked on the City’s upper levels, and these were allowed to come and go as their employment demanded—though they were scrutinized at Authority checkpoints. They were issued work permits and travel documents. As in other cities, Mr. Jay found that the living did not fear the dead as much as the rich feared the poor.
He moved secretly around Zero and elsewhere in the City because of the Prime’s interest in him. Obviously, a watch had been set. Mr. Jay could smell Powers in the air.
Listening to Dawn hum her little morning song, Mr. Jay was revisited by the faces of the newly dead, collected and deposited in neighborhoods just past the gates on Zero. They scurried around near panic, still terrified of the dead whom they had spurned but now joined. They clung to any elevated position in the dark labyrinth of the City’s cellar because there was nowhere else to go. They were dead. But the world after the Change would not let them rest. Many, desperate, huddled about the doorways of the Relief Centers and Missions, gathering there as though some treatment might change their position in the City. They were a pitiful lot.
He had to console himself with admiration for the living workers who tried so hard to comfort the sad torment of the dead. Mr. Jay avoided them all the same. He had business under night—and no time to dally.
After traveling the dark ways for an hour or more, he came to the base of Archangel Tower. Because of its massive weight, the Tower was separate from the arching stone and steel buttresses that suspended the rest of the City’s levels. It was built on bedrock, and its mammoth shape thrust upward through the metropolis’ layers until it burst free of all encumbrance a twelve-hundred feet or more from its foundation—there to swoop another eight-hundred feet skyward. It was not free of all association, and had been built upon and conscripted as reinforcement for the ascending layers around it.
But around the Tower’s footing was a clear space of cracked and broken concrete slabs forming a shadow-strewn valley. Fifty yards at its widest, this clearing paced the distance from the smooth foundation outward to the crumbled facades of long forgotten buildings, most now incorporated into the cyclopean footing of the upper City’s support structures. Massive concrete and steel arches roared upward into the darkness like giants. So deep was Mr. Jay that the City’s busy Skyway traffic far above fell mute. He heard greasy rustling noises.
Light fell from the City’s upper reaches as a dim blue mist. Peering through this he saw that the stony valley was rippling with movement. In and through this clearing a sea of the dead undulated, many thousands drawn by some invisible force into a swirling tempest of flesh. Dead creatures—many worn to remnants—of various shapes and decrepitude lunged, crawled and wriggled their way inward on a slow somber clockwise vortex, hideously struggling against the undead tide for contact with the mammoth blocks that formed the Tower’s foundation.
Silently—with only a whispered hiss of movement—this awful circuit was repeated—many of its participants so long engaged as to have eroded dead elbows, knees or hips flat. At first he thought they were the Lost. Those were dead who started turning up after the first fifty, completely devoid of higher brain function and who had reverted to animal and aggressive behavior.
But a dead woman draped in colorful rags lagged along the outer edge of the march. She was pitiful and strange to look upon, dressed in the remnants of a uniform as though coming off her shift of serving coffee and doughnuts. There was no doubt that she was dead, her skin was the color of chalk, but when he looked at her, a dead eye caught his and reflected awareness—some weak evidence that she had only recently joined this macabre cycle. Her wrists told a sad story through slit mouths.
“Where are you going?” he had asked her, his voice echoing over the shambling, horrifying parade. Her dead eyes flickered, conjuring something like warmth or appreciation from her hard plastic features.
“It is the singing. The music! Can’t you hear it?” The dead woman staggered past before Mr. Jay could answer. He only heard the slithering hiss of the ugly march. Noth
ing more. He might know the music, if he knew the singer, so he gently pushed his way through the hideous tide of death—sidled up to the body of the Tower, he set his hand against it to speak…
“What do you think, Mr. Jay?” Dawn popped out of her cubbyhole and Mr. Jay’s mind snapped back to the present. A chill went through him as the transition from memory chafed.
Her dark eyes were wide and beautiful—the light in them bright and ancient. She had put on his thick woolen sweater, and knotted it about her waist with a string. Her hair was brushed back and tied to form a dark brown bloom.
“As always my dear…” The magician climbed from his place of reverie. “You are a feast for the eyes.” Her downy cheeks bulged around her smile. “But a feast best appreciated on a full stomach.” He bent low, tweaked her button nose. “I am starved!”
“Did I take too long?” Her face dropped in a child’s wide-eyed expectation of trouble.
“Of course not.” He gestured to their little table, and the meager place settings. “If you would take the time to sniff the air, you’ll notice that our little stew is only now ready.” He moved toward the small propane stove he used for cooking, stirred the contents of the pot that rested there. “Please butter the rolls.”
As Dawn clambered into her seat, he pushed down the memories of Zero. Little Dawn was in too much danger here. He had underestimated the Prime’s abilities, and the other powers that lurked. He could never tell Dawn why he had come to the City. It was not her battle. It was not her mission, and if he would never make such sacrifices again, he could not ask her to. He paused a second over the cooking pot and made his decision. He’d replenish their supplies and they’d head north. He’d take her back to Nurserywood. If the world burned in the process, so be it. They’d already taken enough from him.
The Forsaken - The Apocalypse Trilogy: Book Two Page 11