“No, talking about Marcus is stupid things. Talking about drowning is morbid things.”
“Whatever.” Sarah giggled.
Maya closed her eyes for the span of a few breaths. “This pipe hasn’t had water in it for forty years.”
“I believe you.”
Minutes later, a dark patch on the pipe stood out from the pervasive rusty brown.
“I see something.”
“The end?”
“No. We’re not even halfway yet.”
“Ugh.”
Maya crept up to the black smear. At a few feet away, what had appeared to be a dark stain became obvious as a missing section of pipe wall. She stopped short; Sarah’s head bumped into her rear end.
“Oof,” mumbled Sarah.
“Sorry. There’s a hole in the pipe.”
“What?” Sarah sounded excited. “Can we get out?”
“The pipe broke.” Maya bit her lip. “You know, this was a really stupid idea. Mom was right. What am I doing down here?”
“Saving the free world, or what’s left of it, from an evil bitch.”
Maya giggled.
“Can we get past the hole?”
“I dunno. It’s big, but it’s mostly on the side.”
She edged forward and peered into blackness. Her flashlight glinted from parallel metal rails on the ground far enough below to make the idea of jumping scary, but right under the hole in the pipe, a mound of dirt came up about halfway, leaving a drop of about six or seven feet. It looked as though the ceiling had collapsed. Metal beneath her creaked. The egg sandwich she’d eaten before did a full-on ballet production in her gut.
“Umm. What do you think?” Maya flattened herself against the left side, away from the hole, and peered down past her body at Sarah’s pale face and saucer-wide blue eyes. “Keep going down the pipe and hope they can find another cap, or try an old tunnel that might cave in if we fart too loud?”
“It’s that bad?” asked Sarah.
Maya looked out the hole again. Aside from the area below the pipe, the glint of metal rails in her flashlight beam appeared uninterrupted. “Maybe not.”
“I think I’d rather walk than crawl.”
“What if it’s a dead end? There might be a cave in later on, and once we go down, we won’t be able to climb back up here.”
“Oh. Okay.” Sarah sighed. “Keep going then.”
Maya shifted to all fours and crept past the opening. The third time she put her hand down, the rusted metal gave way. She let out a shrill scream and rode a four-foot long slab of rusting metal down to the dirt pile. The pipe shard stopped dead on impact, but she kept sliding, rolling over twice, before coming to a halt on her back between the train tracks.
“Ow,” said Maya, more out of surprise than pain.
“Maya!” yelled Sarah from above. “Are you okay?”
She spat out dirt and sat up. “Yeah. Guess we go this way.”
Grunting from above let her zone in on Sarah. She pointed her head (and flashlight) up, so her friend could see. Sarah lowered herself out of the pipe, hung by her hands for a second, and let go. She landed feet-first on the dirt mound and fell into a backward somersault, skidding to a halt half on top of her.
Maya grabbed on. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” Sarah clambered upright, pulled Maya to her feet, then dusted herself off. “So, umm, which way do we go?”
Maya looked up. The pipe ran perpendicular to the subway tunnel, so neither option would take them closer to where Genna/Pope waited. “I don’t know. Hang on. Be quiet.”
Sarah nodded.
Eyes closed, Maya concentrated on listening. Amid the sound of her rapid heartbeat and the rush of air in her nostrils, a faint car horn blared. Evidence of civilization offered hope. She rotated a half turn and kept listening. A shout and the whirr of a passing drone fan seemed to be on her left side. Again she turned. Seconds of silence passed. The thump of a distant car door slamming came from the right.
“That way.” Maya pointed to the right.
“It’s creepy down here. This is way scarier than the pipe.”
Maya looked down at a sunken channel holding the train tracks. Narrow flat sections ran parallel to the track, but it didn’t look like people belonged down here on foot. With little other options, she started walking, trying to step on the metal blocks holding the rails in place. “We can actually breathe in here. How is it scarier?”
“It kinda looks like a place where zombies are gonna get up and come after us.”
Maya gasped and whirled to stare at her. “Don’t even say that!” She jabbed a finger at her a few times before her brain woke up. “Zombies aren’t real.”
“I know, but this looks like the―”
“Stop!” Maya tried to plug her ears, but the oversized gloves made it impossible. Instead, she clamped her hands over them. “La la la la la.”
Sarah laughed and pounced, fake-zombie clawing at her while making growls and ‘rawr’ noises.
“Eeep!” Maya flailed, giggling. “Stop! Really. We don’t know what’s down here, and you don’t have a Hornet.”
Sarah covered her mouth; her expression said ‘oops.’
Maya took the gloves off and stuffed them in her thigh pockets. Every ten steps, she looked down to watch for holes, traps, rats, or anything that might make her fall and hurt herself, but by some miracle, the tracks remained clear almost as if the subway line still ran. Except for a few buses, no form of public transportation existed after the nuclear bombardment, making the cleanliness eerie. Boats still made the trip to Europe, and the Authority had helicopters, but subways?
She picked up to a light jog.
“What’s up?” asked Sarah, unwrapping her hands and pocketing the cloth strips.
“The tracks are too clean.”
“So?”
“So, I don’t wanna get hit by a train.”
Sarah laughed. “There’s no trains.”
“I know that’s what they say, but they also said Fade came from aliens.” Maya glanced at her for a second before watching where she stepped again. “Why else are the tracks clean?”
“Maybe the zombies ate all the junk.”
“Shut up.” She grinned.
“Or took it home to their zombie houses.”
Maya swatted at her, and they both wound up laughing despite being scared. For a while, she tried to balance walk on one of the rails, waving her arms about. Sarah hopped up on a rail too, but made it look easy.
Ambient noise of the outside world grew louder with each step, eventually overtaking the scuff of their sneakers on the ground. For what felt like an hour, they traded nervous conversation about Book’s most recent story or hoped that Genna and Pope wouldn’t be too upset with them for changing course.
Weak light gleamed on white bricks up ahead on the left where the passage curved to the right. Hopeful that meant an exit, Maya hustled up to a jog. The eerie remains of an old station platform came into view on the inside of the turn.
A scattering of LED bulbs around the walls and ceiling flashed and fluttered, casting the open area of benches and red tiles in an eerie, otherworldly presence. Small black blurs zipped around in the shadows, one knocking a beer can rolling. Benches, empty for decades, held the withered remains of magazines. The wide-open area extended about thirty feet in from the tracks, ending at a partition covered in ads for movies made before Maya had been born. An archway at the center offered a view of a similar sized space behind it, the farthest wall a glass-encased ticket counter covered in dust. The echo of traffic, people, and drones carried across the abandoned train station.
“Whoa,” whispered Sarah. She crept up to the platform edge, as tall as her chest, and leaned forward.
“There’s rats,” said Maya.
“How many?”
“More than I’m comfortable with.”
Sarah glanced at her. “So, one?”
Maya poked her in the side. “Not funny.”
Air shifted in a quick breeze, dispelling the stagnant tunnel atmosphere with the crispness of outdoors. A second later, it turned foul.
“Ugh.” Maya coughed. “Sewer?”
Sarah lifted her shirt up to cover her face and shrugged.
“I hear people. There’s gotta be a way out.” Maya pulled herself up out of the track, stood, and clapped dust from her hands.
Sarah climbed up behind her. “It’s so creepy.”
“Stop trying to scare me.” Maya walked around an aluminum bench, heading for the archway, as the area by the track had no other way to go.
A shadow zipped across the tiles at her left, making her jump and squeal. The rat disappeared into a mound of trash. She stood frozen, hands clutched at her chin, shivering and staring at the spot until Sarah put a hand on her shoulder.
“Just rats. They won’t bother us. They’ll also bother us less if we don’t stay here.”
Maya nodded and hurried for the archway, ignoring all the moving shadows at the corners of her vision. The smell got worse with each step she took, becoming eye-watering by the time she reached the opening in the wall that divided the boarding platform from the inner station. Dark blood smeared a tile column near the ticket booths, and dirty cloth strips piled here and there, as if an entire empire worth of mummies had exploded.
“Wow, this―”
Sarah screamed.
Maya whirled to the left. Dozens of bodies wrapped in the bandage-shrouds of Fade victims lay in a heap at the far end of the room, covered in rats. She whipped her head to the right, spotting another large group of dead people stacked against the wall on that side as well. Sarah’s talk of zombies kicked her imagination to overdrive; she expected them all to get up and blame her for their deaths.
A huge, ink-black rodent on a man’s chest stopped chewing on him. It perched up on its hind legs and stared her straight in the eye, bloody whiskers twitching.
Maya shrieked. She leapt at Sarah, grabbing her, and screamed again.
“Oh, shit,” gasped Sarah between gagging. “It stinks so bad.”
“N-not. N-not z-zombies,” muttered Maya.
The big rat kept staring at her. She turned in place, whimpering, terrified the dead would demand revenge. Her gaze shifted from body to body, watching. To the far right of the glass-encased ticket stations, an opening led to a corridor with brighter light, and more bodies. The sounds of the outside world emanated from a ninety-degree corner at the end.
“No…” Maya shivered. “We gotta walk by the zombies.”
Sarah clung to her. “They’re not zombies. Zombies are made up. They’re just dead people.”
She tiptoed forward, covering less than an inch each step, staring at the Fade victims on the right.
A rotting woman’s arm twitched.
Maya screamed her lungs empty. In her mind, every corpse shifted to look at her. The giant rat laughed. She bolted forward, running toward the way out with barely open eyes. Every time she bumped or brushed a dead person’s limb, she shrieked. She leapt a bloated man’s body at the entrance to the corridor and ran eight steps before a patch of semidry gunk took her sneaker out from under her. She came down hard on her butt, rolling to the right and wound up facing back the way she’d come.
Sarah hopped over the fat dead man at the start of the corridor, moving quick but placing her feet with care not to come near any of the bodies. The pain from landing on her backside stunned Maya long enough for panic to dissipate. Why wasn’t Sarah running? It took her a moment to realize the soft surface she landed on was a dead person.
“Eww!” Maya leapt up and swatted at herself.
None of the bodies near her appeared leaky—yet. In fact, most looked recent.
Lightheaded and sick to her stomach, Maya waited for Sarah to approach close enough, then grabbed her arm in both hands. “Ugh. I’m going to puke.”
“They’re not getting up. That woman didn’t move. A rat was nibbling on that arm.”
“Stop.” Maya pressed a hand into her gut and gurgled.
“I wanna get out of here.”
Maya leaned to the side and coughed up bile. “Yeah.”
Clinging to Sarah’s hand, she hurried to the leftward corner and gazed up a round-roofed tunnel. Six sections of stairs separated by stretches of flat with vending machines long devoid of food led up to street level. At the top, a barricade of boards and plastic sheeting offered a few gaps that looked wide enough for them to squeeze through.
Maya raced up the stairs, thankfully devoid of more bodies. At the top landing right inside the barricade, she doubled over, hands on her knees, gulping down fresh air. Sarah collapsed, out of breath, beside her.
“What the hell,” gasped Sarah, “was that?”
The reality of having touched dead people pierced the shield of panic she’d erected. Maya held up a finger in a ‘wait a moment’ gesture, turned to the side, and threw up.
Sarah clamped a hand over her mouth and nose. She crawled to the barrier and slipped out between two slats, tearing plastic to make a hole. Maya coughed up half-digested egg sandwich, spat a couple times, and wiped her mouth. Two breaths later, her head stopped spinning. She stared down the stairs, realizing she remained inside the ‘cavern of death’ alone, probably with fifty zombies about to come after her.
With a squeak of terror, she dove headfirst out the hole Sarah made, crawled a few feet away, and sat on the ground breathing hard. The subway entrance let out to an extra-wide section of sidewalk containing a row of decorative trees planted in square patches of dirt. Pedestrians went back and forth nearer the road, a few glancing in their direction with raised eyebrows. Behind her, a row of identical yellow signs on the barrier read, ‘Do Not Enter: Fade.’
“Sorry.” Sarah scooted closer. “I shouldn’t have said anything about zombies. Didn’t know you were so scared of them.”
Maya spent a few minutes taking slow, calming breaths while watching cars go by. “Zombies are scary. Especially when we’ve been talking about them in a dark cave and find a room full of dead people.”
Sarah squatted. “So, what was that?”
“Tomb.”
“They just throw them down there? That can’t be safe.” Sarah fanned herself. “I’m never going to forget that stink.”
“It’s not. Rats… they’re going to—well, not the rats. Their fleas.” Maya got up, fuming angry. “They’re doing it on purpose so people keep getting sick. Authority is watching for drone-released Fade. Those ‘bioassay’ units? I bet they weren’t really checking the air; they used them to spray Fade. No one’s watching for fleas.”
Sarah glanced around at the city, shivering. “Do you know where we are?”
“Don’t worry.” Maya grinned. “The power of your butt will save us again.”
Sarah turned bright red in the face but laughed. She shimmied, waving her rear end at the sky.
“I don’t think that’s going to help the reception.” Finally somewhat calm, Maya reached up and pulled the scrunchie off, allowing her hair to fall free.
“So, do we just wait?”
“Umm.” Maya looked around, experiencing a strange sense of familiarity. “I think I’ve been here before. I dunno how long they’ll wait for us at the pipe end before they start looking for your butt.” She headed to the right, drawn to an alley that she almost remembered.
Sarah laughed, but sounded nervous. “Where are you going?”
“I wanna see something. If I’m wrong, we sit down and wait.”
“’Kay.” Sarah caught up in a few quick steps and fell in stride. “What do you think is down there?”
“Someone who can help us.”
29
A Necessary Service
Weaving among the oncoming crowd of pedestrians, Maya headed for the opening of an alley a block or so from the old subway entrance. They waited for a traffic signal to flip, crossed the street, and rounded the corner.
A giant yellow sign marked ‘Integration Ward 4
’ hung on the brick wall of an old warehouse, with a flashing amber light on either side of it.
“Oh, shit. Don’t go in there.” Sarah pulled her back.
“It’s okay. I’ve been here before. And we’re both vaccinated, remember?”
Sarah whined, and stared at her for a few long seconds. “It’s still scary, you know. I grew up terrified of getting sick.”
Maya’s enthusiasm waned. She couldn’t comprehend how frightening that must’ve been. As much as she hated Fade for knowing what it did, the closest she had come to it affecting her on a personal level had been the emotional weight of meeting a five-year-old on the verge of death. Never in Maya’s life had getting sick from Fade been as much as a slight worry. Until a few weeks ago, Sarah had lived with the fear every day of her life that at any moment, a chance swing of fate might infect her with a disease she would not have survived.
I wonder if her father would’ve gotten off his ass to take her to the VA hospital if she got Fade.
“I can’t imagine how scary that was. I’m sorry.”
Sarah attempted to act casual, shrugging. “It’s okay. I mean, I guess it wasn’t as bad as I thought, right? Dad’s a vet, so I’m technically a Citizen. Would the VA have paid for Xenodril for me?”
“I don’t know. Probably as long as they didn’t know you helped, umm, certain people.” They were going to shoot Sam because Genna was wanted Brigade. The Dad wasn’t involved with them, was he? Is that why he avoided the Sanc? Nah, the Brigade wouldn’t have recruited him—he had too much mental damage. Sarah’s innocent. Wait, no, she did stuff for them, but did the Authority know that?
Another pair of ‘Integration Ward 4’ signs hung from a high chain-link fence at the end of the alley. The Fade ward inside looked deserted, far from how it had been when they dropped off Xenodril only weeks ago, and no Authority officers tried to keep people away.
Maya walked up to the gate and slipped past it.
The empty courtyard echoed her footsteps. All the tents remained, pale white fabric fluttering like ghosts in the wind. None had any people in them. On one hand, she hoped her video had forced Ascendant to stop releasing the virus, and Vanessa’s ‘oh shit’ face-saving maneuver of handing out free Xenodril had emptied the rest of the Sanc’s wards. On the other, she worried something more sinister may have happened. Those bodies in the subway station didn’t look like they’d been there long.
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