Atomic Underworld: Part One

by Conner, Jack

  “I know.” Mutants were contagious and thus ostracized in the world above, at least in Ghenisa. There was more to it than that, of course. The long-ago wars over the Resettling had left their mark, and there was the fact that Hissig, a proud fishing port with a well-regarded processing industry, saw those infected by the sea as a blemish.

  “I was hoping Madam Saraja could give me a room for the night,” Tavlin said. “The Wide-Mouth is full, and I’m supposed to lay low—no pun intended.”

  She appeared surprised, then a pained look entered her eyes. “You didn’t hear? Madam Saraja died a year ago.”

  “That’s terrible. How?”

  “A shooting. Two bravos from different gangs. She tried to stop it but got gunned down. She lasted two weeks at the hospital, but you know the doctors down here, and the supplies they have.”

  “Damn.”

  “Boss Vassas is good at keeping order, but sometimes one of the smaller gangs gets restless, and that just encourages the others. Then the Boss has to clamp down hard—which is a good thing, I think.”

  “I guess Madam Saraja would agree.”

  “Elana’s our new madam.” She indicated a plump woman talking with one of the girls near the dance floor. “Maybe she’ll give you a room.”

  “Thanks.”

  She kissed his cheek, and he was careful not to wipe it in front of her; the contagion was passed through bodily fluids. “Give me a call if you’re in the mood for a tumble. For you, half price.”

  Before she could leave, he grabbed her arm, and she looked back at him in surprise. He gathered his courage and said, “Sophia. Where is Sophia?”

  She shook her head. “This isn’t your night for good news, dear.”

  Something balled in the pit of his stomach. His voice suddenly hoarse, he said, “She’s not ... she didn’t ...”

  “No. But she left Muscud when Saraja died.”

  The fist balling in his stomach unclenched—somewhat. He still felt the ache were it had been. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t remember. Still in the under-towns, I think. Maybe Netherlusk. Or Cor. I’ll ask around.”

  She squeezed his hand and rejoined the crowd, seeking out her next client. For a while Tavlin stayed on the couch, taking it all in. The music seemed far away now, as if a veil of cotton separated him from it. When a girl with a silver platter bearing complimentary drinks passed by, he snatched one and downed a long swallow without glancing twice at its contents. The whiskey burned his throat, and his eyes watered. Healing waves of warmth traveled through him, and he finished off the glass in another swallow.

  Thus fortified, he made his way to the new madam, Elana, a big woman in a loose red dress practically spilling out her voluminous breasts, which were only barely contained, half tease, half threat. Her eyes were bulging and somewhat fish-like, and her skin bore the faint suggestion of scales. Currently she was whispering with a john, possibly negotiating the price for one of her girls. It gave Tavlin time to study her, and he realized that he recognized her. Elana had been one of the aging prostitutes under Madam Saraja, one of those who had fought for power within the ranks of the Skirt.

  When finished with the john, she turned her bulging eyes to Tavlin. “How may I help you? Wait, I know you, don’t I? Yes, you used to come around calling on Sophia.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You ran the gambling hall over at the Wide-Mouth, didn’t you? Yes, I remember because you’re uninfected, and I always thought it strange that in a city of mutants, only a human could appear so flashy. But you were especially so.”

  He smiled. “I think that was a compliment.”

  “Just an observation. You did have style, I’ll give you that.” She gave him the once-over. “What happened?”

  He wished he had another drink. “Listen, I need a room for the night, maybe several. Just a room, no girls. I’m trying to avoid the inns. I don’t want to be noticed.”

  “Like I said, a human in a city of mutants is going to get noticed. But I suppose you’re not the only one, and I do have a few empty rooms currently making no money. I’ll give you one for five crowns a night.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Bit steep, isn’t it?”

  She put her hands on her wide hips. The hands were slightly webbed. “It’s you that wants special accommodations, dear, not me. Are you willing to pay for it? That price, by the way, pays for breakfast in the mornings. You can eat with the girls. But don’t get any ideas. No toss under this roof without compensation.”

  “Fine.” He started to hand over the coins, but she shook her head.

  “Do I look like a cashier? I’ll send someone to collect the money.” She turned to a girl who was straightening her bodice. “Henrietta, will you take this gentleman to Room Twenty-nine?”

  “Sure thing, Madam.” She finished straightening up, appraised Tavlin, and said, “Right this way, honey.”

  She showed him out of the parlor and up a narrow, creaking flight of stairs, and he admired the sway of her hips as she took the stairs ahead of him. The glossy green fabric over her buttocks was stretched very tight, and he could see every flex and roll of her round cheeks—as, no doubt, was intended.

  “This way, hon,” she said when she reached the second story, and led down a certain hall. Frayed rugs of surprising fineness lined the way, and a split chandelier that looked as if it had been looted from a garbage dump, and probably had, lit the musty space. She ended at the last door and nudged it open with her knee, letting him see a flash of leg through the slit in her ruby skirt. The door was off-kilter and its paint peeling badly. What with the heat and humidity of the city, plus the strange fumes rising from the sewer, the buildings were constantly eaten away by the elements.

  “This is it,” she purred as he stepped close. She ran her hands up his right arm, and he felt a prickle of gooseflesh. “The room looks awfully lonely. Maybe you could use some company. Don’t worry, I have protection. Don’t want you to sprout gills, do we?”

  Tavlin hesitated. He still had his winnings from earlier that evening ...

  “No,” he said. “Maybe later.” The memory of those mutilated, transformed bodies lingered in his mind.

  She rolled a naked shoulder. “I’ll be here. Or maybe I won’t.”

  She sauntered away, swinging her hips as she went, and he watched her go. She glanced back at him, winked, then disappeared down the stairs. He sighed, entered the room and closed the door behind him. The unit was small and faded, the window directly opposite the door streaked with grime and cracked in the middle as if someone had thrown a stone at it. Oh, well, he was lucky to get a window at all.

  The bed lay along the right wall, and its length was pretty much the depth of the room. Opposite was a sink in disrepair overhung with the remains of a mirror. Tavlin moved to the sink, turned the faucet—the plumbing banged and squealed, but it worked, if fitfully—and nearly gagged at what came out. Quickly he shut off the water, or whatever it was, and watched as the blackish goop bubbled and swirled about the drain, regretfully leaving its stink behind. When it was as gone as it was likely to get, he braced himself against the sink, took a deep breath, and stared into the mirror.

  What he saw was a man slightly above average height, lean in build, with a likewise lean face, long nose and high forehead. Thick eyebrows perched atop eyes that seemed wary and alert, hiding in deep sockets. The lips, full and wide, noted for their smiles, frowned at him. He had cultivated a seedy appearance over the last few years, and his face reflected it – stubbled and unwashed, a scar on the cheek, another over his right eyebrow, hair unwashed and over-long, his flesh scoured by the sun. Once he had worn bright, flashy clothes, but now the clothes he wore were drab and ragged.

  He didn’t want to look at himself for long—it was too painful—so he reclined in the window seat and went about the motions of stuffing his pipe. He lit the bowl, drew the alchemically-treated tobacco smoke into his mouth, swirled it about his teeth and gums, prod
ded the smoke with his tongue, enjoying the faint lift it brought to his mind as it was absorbed into his bloodstream, and blew it out the window in a fragrant green cloud, which rose up and out. The great cistern chamber was large enough to produce breezes, and a faint acrid gust tore the smoke apart. In its place was revealed the panorama of Muscud.

  Lights blazed from shabby houses and shops, and mysterious alleys emitted weird noises and shadows. It was quite late—early morning, really—but time didn’t mean as much down here, in this place forsaken by the sun. To the left stretched shops and homes, ragged apartment complexes, while directly before him sprawled the business district, merging with the industrial sector, such as it was, on the right, a rash of smoking factories and listing aluminum warehouses, some surprisingly large, and throughout it all, right, left and center, sprouting like mushrooms, the various churches and temples. Just ahead loomed the Temple of the Three Sisters with its white towers and silver dome, and Tavlin found it odd that an underground community, whose members rarely saw the sky, would worship the moons. However, it was a very popular religion up top and many of the dwellers of the sewers had been raised in its faith, so it was not too shocking that they continued in it even after becoming infected and moving below. Other churches dominated, however. Several were devoted to the worship of slug god Caryth, or Vorgost, the mythical giant white squid of the deep sewers, or Meblang, the Queen Flail. But there were darker places of worship, more sinister ones: the churches to the variously named gods sometimes known as the Ung’zain, or sometimes the R'loth, those awful beings that mutants had worshipped after the Withdraw, during the Dark Times. It had disturbed Tavlin years ago when he’d learned some mutants still worshipped them, and it still did. He didn’t like it, but he understood it.

  What he didn’t understand were the new churches he saw, the ones he couldn’t name. He supposed one must be the Church of Magoth. What others might there be? Had the mutants taken to worshipping all the bogeymen of the sewers? He knew the undercities were only tiny points of light in a vast, alien darkness, a system of tunnels ancient and strange and massive, and there were all sorts of things reportedly living out there in the darkness, but to worship them seemed ... what? Wrong? Insane? He was not particularly religious himself, but he understood the need for it. Life was chaos, and religion gave it order, meaning.

  Speaking of which …

  The attack tonight—what was the meaning behind it? He turned his mind to the problem, tried to understand what might have done that to the bodies. Some strange technology? Some weapon? Had some thing done it? And why had the perpetrator/perpetrators taken the jewel?

  He decided he would talk to Vassas’s men, surreptitiously, see if they’d noticed anything out of the ordinary. Then he would research the jewel itself and the race it came from. There was a decent library on Lovell Street, or had been. If it was still there, it might hold some helpful information. Perhaps if he knew more about the jewel, and the strange alchemy that apparently went into its making—Like it was alive, Frankie had said—he could figure out what the thieves wanted with it, and where/who they might be. If the Lovell library didn’t help, he would ascend to Hissig proper and its great library on Haslehg Blvd.

  He finished his pipe and paused before refilling it. It was late. He should sleep. He wanted to send down for an overnight kit, a toothbrush, razor and so on, but he was too tired. He did manage to leave the room briefly, find one of the public toilets—the one for the johns—and use it. At the urinal a man was bragging about his just-finished tryst with the Eel Twins. Tavlin tuned him out. Wearily he washed and made his way back to his room.

  Just as he turned the knob, Tavlin heard a long, terrified scream.

  *

  He stood stock-still.

  The scream came again.

  Blood pounding, Tavlin ran toward it, up a flight of stairs, then another. Prostitutes surged around him, crying out to each other in confusion.

  “What was that?”

  “It sounded like the Madam!”

  “Could it be?”

  “Maybe we should get some help.”

  “Get to her room!”

  Breathless, fighting his way through the tide, Tavlin emerged onto the fourth and highest floor and flowed along with the women toward Madam Elana’s rooms at the end of the hall. She didn’t possess half the floor like Boss Vassas did, but she did have a large suite (Tavlin had seen it before, when it was Saraja’s) and a large, elaborately-worked door.

  The girls banged on it. When no one answered, two of the larger women kicked it down. Tavlin volunteered to help, but they pushed him aside.

  As the door splintered, the girls rushed inside. Tavlin reached for the knife he always kept in his jacket pocket, although usually it was just for show. With it in hand, he entered the Madam’s suite. Elana had kept much of Saraja’s belongings, the lacy curtains and delicate lanterns, but she had added a profusion of figurines of toads and toadstools, and she had many surprisingly lovely paintings of swamps.

  Her body lay in the middle of the room. Like the ones at Boss Vassas’s place, it had been transformed into an inhuman mass of whitish, translucent material, blown apart as if by great force so that, in addition to the main mass oozing on the floor, pieces of the jellyfish-like flesh hung on couch and lantern, dripped off wall and overhead chandelier. It all stank of sulfur and ammonia. Tavlin placed his free hand over his mouth and nose and tried to breathe shallow. Several of the girls made gagging noises, and two rushed from the room. Others knelt over the Madam’s body, or stood carefully away from it, exclaiming in horror.

  “Is that the Madam?”

  “What could have done this?”

  A gentle breeze stirred Tavlin’s hair. He looked to the window, which was large and elaborately framed.

  And open.

  Without thinking, he moved to it and peered outside. Rooftops and rooftops. Nothing else save for a swirl of down-sweeping flails, slippery and glistening in the light of a streetlamp. Whoever had done this must still be nearby.

  He placed his hands on the windowsill, swung a leg over it, feeling the chipped edge dig into his thigh through his corduroy pants, and carefully lowered himself onto the thin ledge that was the window’s bottom edge and that ran in both directions, becoming the bottom edge of the next window and wrapping around the house. At its corners, mismatched gargoyles glared out over the little city.

  “What are you doing?”

  The words, so close to Tavlin’s ear, made him jump so that he nearly fell off the ledge. He turned to see Maya looking grief-stricken and shocked.

  “Going after him,” Tavlin said.

  “You’re crazy.”

  He wanted to say it’s what he’d been hired to do, and the murderer had possibly just saved him a good deal of time and effort—not perhaps the most charitable thought, he admitted to himself—but instead he concentrated on stepping sideways along the narrow ledge. A flail swished past him, its mucus spattering his cheek and its wings making thick wet wack-wack noises. When Tavlin reached the corner, he was able to brace himself against the gargoyle there, turn about and use the crenellations and ornamentation in the walls as handholds and toeholds. He used to be a thief, and though those skills had long ago rusted they were still present, if atrophied. With a grunt, he hauled himself up, hand over hand, foot over foot, until he could heave himself over the edge. He flopped onto the roof, braced against the gutter that channeled the ever-present drip from above, and lay gasping. He had only climbed a few feet and already he was out of breath. You’re getting old, Tav.

  He forced himself to his feet, climbed the peaked roof of the Twirling Skirt and swept his gaze over the surrounding rooftops. All the buildings in this section of town were pressed up against each other—the columns that supported the platforms on which they stood being thick and ancient—and it would be easy for a thief to navigate roof-to-roof. Tavlin had done so back in the old days, and that had been in the city above where it wasn’t as easy.
Many of the residents of Muscud kept rooftop gardens, and weird fungus, pale ferns and lichenous growths sprouted from the darkness, lit only by the few lights still blazing in the buildings and by the occasional street lamp below, each one beset with moths and other, slimier things. The lights shifted and swayed as the clouds of moths and other creatures became denser, then more fluid.

  Among all this Tavlin did not at first see the slim dark shape speeding away from the whorehouse, but he had good eyes, used to seeing in the darkness, and at last he saw it. He swore. The shape was already far away.

  He crossed to the next rooftop, moving in the direction of the killer, but lost his footing and stumbled. Shit! He caught himself at the last moment. Gasping, he stared down at the pavement he would have landed on. Too close. Gathering his resolve, he pressed on.

  A gun cracked.

  He was just passing a crumbling brick chimney, and chips of brick exploded under the bullet’s impact. The shrapnel sliced his cheek. He ducked behind the smokestack.

  When a second gunshot did not immediately follow, he grabbed a loose brick and stuck it out. Nothing. He rushed out, ran to the next chimney and threw himself behind the low wall that bordered the rooftop garden. He could smell the ozone stench of the albino ferns and the pine of the mulch.

  No gunshots. He swore. He was breathing heavily and sweating. Part of him would have been relieved if he’d had to go back.

  Instead, he hauled himself to his feet and continued pursuing the assassin. He couldn’t see the figure but went on in the direction he’d seen it go. He found it odd that the killer would be armed with both a pistol and whatever had slain Madam Elana. Maybe the unconventional weapon has little ammunition—that or it’s expensive.

  The enemy moved into the open. Darting from one chimney to another, the assassin picked his way over rooftops, scrambled up a peak, then half slid, half scurried down the other side, almost vaulting over this rooftop to another.

  Tavlin ran after him.