by John Shirley
“Whoa, slow down. You got all the dirt on my department, but I heard nada and nil about the Outside Train thing.”
“It’s—” He spread his hands as if to say Who knows? “It’s a train that’s completely unauthorized, with all the windows blacked out, that somehow gets clearance from the dispatchers—and they’re so fucking innocent about it you know they’re on the take from somewhere. It runs up the East Side, according to the story—I mean, maybe it’s bullshit. But it’s causing delays and all kinda confusion in the scheduling. That and the pest damage.”
Gribner stared, waiting.
“You haven’t heard about the pest damage, either? Way more than usual I mean. Rats or dogs or something chewing through some of the power lines… and a whole section of the subway blacks-out of power. Only happened twice, and people are so used to late trains that no one noticed much, but it’s getting harder and harder to find them, and repair them in time….”
“Let’s go back to the…the Outside Train, you called it? Where is it spotted?”
“Mostly between Delancey and Grand Central, on the East Side. An old train.”
Gribner nodded. “That’s the area I want you to search.”
“So that’s what this is about…but they took you off the case…”
“I’m investigating on my own, So, I want you to search mostly in the area between Gramercy Square and Grand Central. Utility tunnels, drain-off mains, subway tunnels, search anything big enough for a man, and most especially if it’s not being used much. Old basements…even old mine shafts if there are any. Caves if you have access to those—a systematic search.”
“This is my department you’re talking about? We’re going to do this search? Hah! And where are we going to get the personnel? Our budget could be printed on a bubblegum card. We haven’t got the men to patrol for sewage leaks, gas-line leaks, power-line breaks—we’re already overextended. We got five boroughs to cover, Cyril—”
“Tell them anything,” said Gribner, as if Morty had already agreed. “Tell them to look for anything unusual—and tell your boss they’re looking for what you said, power breaks. But find some excuse to concentrate them in that area. The more men the better. Because that’s the area where we’re getting the most reports of things seen under—well, it’s too much to go into. There was that Escondido thing. They still haven’t found those people. I don’t have the authority or the push anymore to get the force to do it. But this thing has to be stopped. The uniforms are too trigger-happy now, anyway, I can’t trust them.”
“Yeah. I heard about—”
“Why is it you got all the dirt on my department,. Morty?” Gribner asked, grinning.
“I got the connections,” said Morty with mock smugness. “I was just going to say, that I heard about those plainclothes blasting away uptown, the kids at the social club. On some bullshit excuse. There was nothing like that when we were working together. You didn’t draw that gun without filling out five forms first. Now they’re shooting innocent black kids.”
Morty was a little tipsy. He worked every other weekend at a neighborhood reclamation project as a vocational trainer, mostly with black kids.
“Hey, I know how you feel, but let’s not talk loose about it,” Gribner said instinctively, “till it’s been investigated. And anyway, you’re just changing the subject.”
Morty smiled widely enough to show his yellowed dentures. “You got me—take me away, officer!” He raised his hands as if in surrender.
“C’mon, c’mon.” Gribner dug his elbow into Morty’s ribs “What do you say?”
“I’ll do what I can. But if this little twerp Tooley hears about it he’ll be all over my ass. He’s trying to get us to reduce our inspection force—” He snorted in disgust, “—just when everything’s breaking down. Is that logic?”
Gribner didn’t reply.
He was thinking about his wife. Better she stop taking the subways for a while, he thought. I’ll give her cab fare. Which may give her heart failure.
He smiled wearily.
LANYARD WAS TRYING to wake up. It was strange to have to struggle awake. His limbs weren’t screwed on properly; he couldn’t operate them, but he could feel them there, heavy, twitching in a mindless effort to respond to his directions. Flex, arms, and help me to sit up. Flex, fingers, and reach to pry open my eyes.
But he felt as if his body were a metal sheath of some kind, vaguely man-shaped and deep underground, like a buried suit of armor, held unmoving by the weight of the whole city atop him; and his consciousness, his sensations and sense of himself, were combined into the man trapped in the suit of armor, struggling to break out, hearing the faint, pitiless creak of the metal at each useless effort….
He couldn’t open his eyes.
When he saw the beast of hot red wires bounding toward him across the ashen negative landscape—the dark world behind his closed eyelids—he fought to open his eyes, galvanized by terror. This time it’s coming for me.
He felt something rip free, and for a few moments the weight lifted from him. His eyes snapped open.
Out of ashes into whiteness: white walls, white doors, white ceiling.
An unpleasant sound, a high-pitched ah-ah-ah-ah-ah came from somewhere in the room. After a moment he realized it was a sound issuing from his own lips. He was trying to breathe. A wave of prickliness ran through him, as he drew air. He lay gasping, looking around. A hospital bed, a hospital room.
Now the room came into focus. The walls weren’t completely white—they were badly smudged, and in one place smeared with bloody fingerprints. What he’d blurrily supposed was a wall to his right wasn’t a wall at all, it was a white curtain on a railing, separating his bed from another; the room was small, his section no bigger than a walk-in closet. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the aluminum IV stand with its up-ended bottle and dangling hose. He looked away from it; the rubbery, transparent hose brought ugly associations to him. He didn’t want to think, now. Thinking made his head hurt. His limbs ached, and the sounds of old man coughing wetly and nattering senselessly on the other side of the partition, made Lanyard want to plug his ears. The sounds seemed unnecessarily organic. And they made him think of another old man wrapped in red membrane…the crunching as the membrane clenched.
But Lanyard couldn’t plug his ears; he couldn’t move his arms. He’d been strapped to the narrow hospital bed. There was a sheet over him, though he could feel that he was fully clothed beneath it. What was he here for? Why hadn’t they undressed him, if he was to be a patient?
Where was he, really?
He was strapped down in some unidentified hospital, surrounded by strangers, forced to listen to ugly noises—from beyond the closed hall door came sounds of women crying, a baby squalling, a security guard shouting at someone to get the fuckoutorshuddup. His nerves tautened and frayed with every sound. And he couldn’t move.
He knew where he had to be. They’d taken him down. They’d taken him to hell. He was thoroughly and sincerely convinced of it. He really believed it. This was hell, the Christian hell, or another more modern hell. He hated hospital emergency rooms, he’d always been miserable in them, even if he’d come there on someone else’s behalf. And when the nurse came in, a platinum blonde with a grisly case of eczema and halitosis, he was doubly convinced. He was in hell…it said so on her nametag.
Just under the Dynalabel, Melonie Tutz, RN, were the words for hell in the local vernacular: BELLEVUE HOSPITAL.
He was in the emergency room at Bellevue.
He screamed.
He struggled, and Nurse Tutz called for an orderly. “Shid, Bennie, c’mmere, gimme a hand widis guy, he’s wrigglin’ outta the straps.” She pulled back the sheet. “Where do you think you’re goin’, dumbshit?” she asked Lanyard, spraying his face with septic spittle, her eyes almost crossed with aggravation, radiating sheer hostility.
The orderly was black, reeking of marijuana, his white uniform spattered with something yellow. He
nearly wrenched Lanyard’s arm from its socket trying to jam it back under the strap. He cursed Lanyard, and Lanyard cursed him back, and the nurse cursed them both.
“Better givim a downer,” said the orderly.
“He’s some fuckin’ junkie jus’ doin this shid to get some tran-kill-izer,” said the nurse. “I ain’ givin’im shid.”
“Gowan, givetim, I don’ wanna hold ’im down all day. Whus ’e here fo’?”
“Some guy brought ’im in, said he was in shock or something, said he wasn’t breathin’…Okay, I’ll give ’im a shot of this shid…he won’t get no fun out of it; makes you feel like shid when you wake up. But it sure puts you out.”
The orderly grinned.
“Hey don’t put me under, you don’t know what I see, when—” Lanyard fought to keep the needle from his arm.
The orderly rapped him across the face. Lanyard, more astonished than stunned, lapsed into quiet, staring in disbelief. The man had hit him.
“But then,” he murmured, as the darkness of the injection came, “I forgot I was in hell.”
Unconsciousness came like mudslide silt into clear water, a falling curtain of black stickiness.
The dream came rising up out of the black stickiness, as if it were some underwater creature disturbed, nosing upward, opening its mouth to engulf him.
Children on a subway platform. Children on a subway platform at the Battery in early evening returning to their own neighborhood from a field trip to the Statue of Liberty. Accompanied by a tall, thin lady teacher.
Lanyard, invisibly, was there watching. Was there, and wasn’t. It was one of those dreams that mockingly announce themselves, where something- tells you: You’re dreaming and there’s nothing you can do about it.
There were nine children, first graders, he guessed. He tried to speak to the teacher—an angular woman in a badly fitting gray wool dress and blazer; her chin was a little weak, her black hair shaped as if she were carrying a spherical black basket on her head. She had a pretty, pointy noise and large green eyes. Lanyard liked those. He tried again to speak to her. She couldn’t hear him. Or he couldn’t make a sound; he wasn’t sure which.
They peered down the tunnel, waiting for the train; the children were tired, cranky, kicking at one another, asking the teacher silly questions. Seven of the children were white, two were black, all the boys dressed in jeans and polyester shirts; two of the three girls wore frocks and miniature, stylish blazers, not much different from the teacher’s. The tallest girl, black, with her hair cornrowed into wooden beads, was dressed like the boys, but wearing a sweatshirt that said THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Repeatedly, the teacher called the children away from the edge of the platform.
A large crowd was building up behind them, pressing them toward the track. Now and then a commuter with a briefcase glared at some child scurrying underfoot; one boy chasing another to throw an apple core from his lunch bag.
The train was coming. It screamed that it was coming. It wasn’t the usual train sound, though it was similar. It was shriller, and more animal. The children could see the train’s glaring headlights far down the tunnel. Like an animal glowering from its hole in the ground. And funny—this train’s headlights weren’t white like the others. They were sort of…golden-red. The train shot into the station, bringing with it a foul wind, moving so rapidly its details were blurred. It ground to a stop, and Lanyard thought: It looks streamlined, must be one of the new ones, rounder than they usually are, almost worm-shaped.
And where were the windows? Where were its wheels?
Doors opened in the side of the train. They didn’t slide open sideways, the way most subway train doors did; they irised open. Wetly. And it was dark inside. There were sticky white filaments around the edges of the door, like cobwebs, trembling as the train breathed.
The children backed away, whimpering. But the crowd behind them, unable to see the train clearly, moving according to habit, bulling to get into the train before the doors closed, forced the children and the teacher toward the damp-edged doors and the red darkness.
The children were thrust into the train.
It wasn’t a train. The great worm, big as a subway train, closed the half-dozen mouths in its great, glassy hide and crawled off, picking up speed, down the tunnel, having eaten the children and most of the people on the subway platform, and Lanyard tried to run but he hadn’t a body to run with.
He was only dreaming.
CHILDREN ON A subway platform. Children on a subway platform in the early evening at the Battery, returning to their neighborhood from a field trip to the Statue of Liberty. Accompanied by a tall, thin lady teacher-whose black hair was like a globe on her head, whose chin was weak, whose nose was pointed, whose eyes were green, who wore a gray blazer.
There were nine children. Mrs. Chilroy, first-grade teacher, was divorced. But she still went by Mrs., chiefly because she didn’t want the other teachers to know her husband had left her.
Mrs. Chilroy was annoyed to see that the little boy who had followed them along the docks was waiting on the subway platform. He was a grimy little boy, and not her responsibility, and she frankly wished he’d go away. He’d refused to answer her questions, except to say, “Oh, I’m on my way home, too.” But he stayed with her group for blocks, trotting the sidewalk just behind them, down into the subway station, jumping the turnstiles, following onto the platform, just as if he were part of the field trip.
Mrs. Chilroy called Rocky and Nancy back from the edge of the subway platform, shuddering as she pictured what could happen; so easy for them to fall off, to lie stunned on the tracks just as the train barreled into the station. How far down to the tracks? Four, five, six feet? It would be hard to get a child back up in time.
So many things could go wrong.
“You kids come over here, stay near the bench,” she called. “Donny!” Donny was the tall black girl, repeating first grade, intelligent enough but psychologically unable to concentrate on anything but mischief.
“Yo, lady teacher, I’m gonna go up the street ’n’ take a cab!” she yelled from the exit gate, pretending she was about to leave so that Mrs. Chilroy would have to go and fetch her. Mrs. Chilroy did, collaring Donny by the back of her Incredible Hulk shirt, just as the train came rocking and squealing into the station. It was an old train, with layers of highly stylized graffiti; the magic-marker graffiti on the windows made them almost opaque, but Mrs. Chilroy could see that the cars were quite crowded, people standing, swaying with the motion of the train as it ground to a halt. The children dutifully lined up behind her and she led them into the car that seemed the least crowded, near the train’s rear. She had to count them three times before the doors closed to make sure everyone was aboard. She wished the school budget hadn’t been cut again: no buses for field trips. She wished they’d taken the city bus. But she’d been in a hurry, and now the children were wending in and out of the crowd in the subway car as it gathered speed, sometimes literally underfoot, as if playing in a woods, eliciting “Lady, control yuh kids willyuh?” Most of the kids, at least seven of them, were bunched up at the end of the car farthest from her. Mrs. Chilroy had taken hold of a stanchion near the door; she was reluctant to let go her support. The car was packed; there was nowhere to sit, and barely room to stand; the riders, all colors, all economic strata, swaying as if in some communal dance, everyone to the left now, when the train took the curve. The train, as usual, felt like it was just about to jump the tracks. And then they rushed into another station.
As the train rocked to a standstill, she took advantage of the temporary stability to plunge through the crowd. “Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, oh I’m sorry, pardon me, I didn’t mean to step on—”
But when she reached the other end of the car, only one of the children was there. Rocky, a small blond-haired boy with thick glasses and rumpled, oversized (“You’ll grow into it”) clothing, squinted up at her, his eyes distorted through his lenses. “Where are the children?” she a
sked in a hushed voice, and the thunkathunkathunk-grind-and-rumble of the train’s starting seemed appropriate to her growing intuition of catastrophe. “They’re in the last car.” Rocky shouted, as she leaned close to hear. “That kid, he said some bank robber left some money in there, and that kid, he showed ’em some money. He had a hunnerd dollars in his hand! So they all went back there. That kid Everett. But I don’t like that kid. He smells bad, and—”
“Come on.” She took Rocky’s small wrist and with her other hand pushed open the heavy sliding door between trains, walked through the rollicking passageway, pressed through another crowd, nearly falling as the train lurched. She apologized endlessly, dragging Rocky, who had inexplicably burst into tears.
They labored through another precarious linkage between cars, and into the last car.
The car was almost empty. There was no one in it but the children. Donny was listening raptly to the grimy little boy—Everett?—who had his back to Mrs. Chilroy. She couldn’t hear them clearly over the train noise; she heard only, “…if that is what you want, He will give it to you, and when He plays with us it is just like we own everything….”
And Donny replying, “I want a motherfucking color TV with cable and Betamax.”
Mrs. Chilroy looked at the children with amazement. They were clutching money. There was paper money on the floor. It looked like real money.
Her first thought was to turn back to try to find a transit cop.
She turned—and saw the train receding, dwindling in the distance, swallowed in the darkness of the tunnel, its lights getting smaller and smaller. The lights went out. The children screamed.
Their car had become detached from the rest of the train.
It was still moving, rolling, slowing, swaying more than usual as it shuttled around the curve. Another train will come up behind, she thought. They won’t see us in time. They’ll hit us.