The World Beneath (Joe Tesla)

by Rebecca Cantrell

  “Joe?”

  “Just thinking.” He would order a butterscotch sundae sent to her penthouse apartment. It was New York City, and he was a multimillionaire, how hard could it be? It wasn’t what he most wanted to do with that syrup, but it was better than nothing.

  “Any progress on breaking out of your prison?” she asked.

  He hesitated. She rarely spoke of his illness, or of her own. “You have it a million times worse. I know that.”

  “Do I?” she asked. “Everyone pities me and cares for me, and no one ever blames me for this. No one tells me to buck up and stop being such a pussy. Even when I am a pussy.”

  “I’d trade you,” he said.

  “Only because you want to cure me, because you’re a hopeless romantic.”

  “Hopeful romantic,” he said.

  She sputtered into the phone.

  “You OK?” he asked.

  “The nurse Googled seagulls,” she said. “Times Square? You rogue.”

  Joe smiled. The risk of the hacking had been worth it to hear lightness in her voice again.

  Chapter 5

  November 28, 12:49 a.m.

  Platform 23, Grand Central Terminal

  Rebar reached the half-empty train platforms. The numbers twenty-three and twenty-four told him he’d found the right place. He liked to go down into the tunnels from Platform 23. It felt right. He ducked to the side, away from a familiar silver train with blue stripes, and made for the far end of the platform, centering himself between the rows of fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling next to the tracks and avoiding the yellow stripes installed on the floor to tell people when they were getting too near the trains. He didn’t like the color yellow anymore, although he couldn’t remember why.

  In Cuba his door had been painted yellow. Maybe that was it. There, the doctors had called him Subject 523, but here, in the tunnels and streets of New York City, the homeless called him Rebar. He liked the name. Ramrod straight, hard iron, invisible—but at the center of everything, giving it shape and strength.

  Not a lot of folks came down here this late. Once the train left, the platform would be empty, and no one would notice what he did. He walked by people stumbling on to the train. Late-night smells assailed his nostrils—beer, onions, and wet wool.

  A couple leaned against the railing by the entrance with their arms around each other and their tongues down each other’s throats. The sheer animal need of them brought memories—girls he’d kissed and girls he hadn’t. He hadn’t kissed enough of them.

  He walked until he reached the end of the subway platform. The train made ready to leave, and the amorous couple hurried aboard. Two men slurred insults at each other, but neither seemed to have the energy or the passion to act on them. He made himself small against the wall and waited.

  It was warm here, and safe. Maybe he should just sit here for a while. He was tired all the time since Cuba. Maybe he just needed rest.

  The train pulled out and away, red taillights growing small.

  The platform was empty. He could have dropped a grenade in here without hurting anyone. White light beat down on flattened gum, forgotten newspapers, an empty paper cup.

  He dozed and woke with a jerk. He had to go down. It was his mission. Without checking to see if anyone had come onto the platform, he vaulted the metal divider and trotted down the stairs without breaking stride. No shouts behind him, but he didn’t slacken his pace until he was fifty yards in and invisible to anyone in the station.

  He walked through the graffiti, broken beer bottles, and used condoms that gathered by the platforms, half-hearted attempts to assert ownership over the dark tunnel. Most desperate people’s tolerance for darkness extended about a hundred feet in.

  He had a much higher tolerance than other people. For a lot of things.

  He stopped next to the second pillar unmarked by graffiti and picked up his tools. He hefted a sledgehammer in one hand, a battery-powered lantern in the other. The pockets of his filthy jacket bulged with maps and papers, some old and others new. Since he’d left Cuba, he’d carried them with him everywhere. He needed to keep them safe, but also to reread them often to remind himself that he wasn’t crazy. Everyone was wrong about that. And he had to do it soon. He’d overheard them talking about December. December first was an important deadline for them. He wasn’t sure why right at this moment, but he would remember it again.

  The yellowed pages crinkled when he moved. They were important. That’s why he’d stolen them from a filing cabinet in the Naval hospital. They described experiments carried out years before he was born by scientists taken straight from Nazi Germany and put to work for the US government. Even they had abandoned this research because it was deemed too risky.

  Years later, however, another doctor had started the research back up. On him and five hundred men like him. He just had to prove it.

  Even in the cool tunnel, sweat dripped off his nose, and he slowed his pace. It was the fever. He was weaker than he used to be. Before, he’d hiked for hours without faltering, but not anymore. Not since they infected him. The tiny organisms swimming around in his blood were eating away at his strength, his control, his identity.

  He was too weak to protect the papers now. He must find a place to hide them. That way, if he were ever caught, they wouldn’t get the information. But what if he forgot where he hid them? He forgot so many things these days.

  Setting down the heavy hammer, he patted his pockets. The papers were there. A big man had tried to take them from him. Rebar thought that he’d killed the thief, but he couldn’t remember. Whatever had happened, the thief hadn’t bothered him again. The papers were safe.

  A far-off rumble warned him of an approaching train. He picked up his hammer and stepped over the third rail, being careful to keep clear of the tracks’ points. They might snap together as a train approached, shunting the train off in a different direction. If his foot got caught in one, he could lose it. Or be killed by the train.

  He couldn’t be hit, and he couldn’t be seen. If the train engineer saw him, he’d call it in, and transit police would be down here with flashlights and baying dogs. It’d happened once before, and only his knowledge of the tunnel layout had saved him. He worked from a map that was older than theirs. It showed extra tunnels, and access doors that led to long-unused rooms. Places to hide. He needed a place to hide right now, from the train.

  Two sets of tracks separated by concrete pillars ran up ahead. If he hurried, he could take cover behind a column on the side away from the approaching train. Good enough. Not caring about his fever or his weakness, he ran and ducked behind a pillar before the train’s headlights came into view. He leaned his back hard into the cool concrete.

  The sound and shaking reminded him of night combat, of the aftermath of an IED, except that this went on and on, noise and light and the ground heaving under his feet. He’d fallen to his knees by the time the last car passed, the faces of dead friends swimming before his eyes as the red taillights winked out in the distance.

  He fought back against the memories and forced himself to his feet. He was in New York, not Afghanistan or Cuba. His buddies weren’t here. And he had a lot of tunnel to walk tonight. Hours.

  He would not think about how he was searching for objects that might not exist.

  According to the papers in his pockets, the scientist who’d done the first experiments after World War II had last been seen on a train heading from Washington, DC, to New York, but the car had never arrived. The official version was that he’d escaped with the files and taken them back to Europe to sell to the highest bidder. The project had been shut down after that, deemed too risky to continue even with another scientist.

  But Rebar didn’t believe the doctor had fled. He would not have fled. The United States was the safest place for him to be. Someone had taken the man before he’d arrived and silenced him. And, if he had gone back to Europe, what had happened to the train car? No, a bad thing had happene
d to him on the way to New York.

  If someone had taken that car from the open tracks between the cities, Rebar would never find it. So his only hope was that the car had been abandoned underneath the city. He had a map on which he’d marked potential tunnels in red and crossed them off in black after he’d cleared them. For weeks he’d been walking through old passages, checking walls, seeking decades-old clues. It was crazy, but no crazier than anything else.

  And his best chance lay up ahead. He knew it. Sometimes, he forgot what he was looking for, but not today. Today he was looking for answers.

  He felt stronger than he had minutes before and whistled as he walked on the train ties, stepping on every other tie as if it were a game that he could win. The lantern didn’t weigh much, and even the sledgehammer didn’t slow him down anymore. Today was a good day.

  Chapter 6

  November 28, 2:35 a.m.

  Tunnels under Grand Central Terminal

  Joe closed the heavy metal door behind him and moved through the dark tunnel. He donned his night-vision goggles, settling the strap behind the back of his head. The round contours of the tunnel jumped into sharper focus. He ran his fingers along the rough stone wall. In a few yards it would join with an active train tunnel, and he could already make out the lighter entrance where they met.

  “Ready for another night out?” He looked down at Edison’s bright shape.

  The dog didn’t seem to hear him. He stared off to his right, his head cocked to the side as if he were listening to a far-off sound. Joe stood still, straining his ears. He heard only the wind through the tunnels and the faraway rumble of a single train.

  Whatever it was, it bothered Edison, so Joe might as well check it out. It might be the person whose boot prints he’d begun to see in the tunnels. Joe felt proprietary about the tunnels, as if they belonged to him, instead of just the house and the small tunnel that ran between the two doors.

  “Find it!” he ordered Edison, and the yellow dog trotted forward. He didn’t put his nose to the ground, but instead held his head up and his ears pointed forward. Whatever he was tracking, he was tracking it by sound instead of scent.

  After a few minutes’ walk, Joe heard it, too. A thud echoed down the tunnel. It wasn’t a train—too slow. It was rhythmic, like the beat of a sad song. He’d never heard a sound quite like it, and he wanted to know what it was. It might be dangerous, but he had to know.

  He trotted forward for about a quarter mile until the tunnel ended at a vast well-lit chamber where the tracks came in from outside and merged toward Grand Central Terminal. He and Edison often played fetch here.

  The thuds changed to a clanking sound. It drew him to the left, to an unlit siding. A quick glance at the ground told him that this was the person who had been leaving the footprints. Feeling like one of the children who followed the Pied Piper to their death, Joe turned sideways and slipped between black-painted columns.

  He had to know, and he had to share knowledge. This trait had cost him dearly at Pellucid when the CIA began to insist that only they should get the high-powered version of the facial-recognition software, while the rest of the world got a dumbed-down version. The demand, a veiled threat really, had resulted in bitter discussions between Joe and the other chief executives at Pellucid. They were all for giving the CIA what they wanted and not risking the IPO. That way everyone could make money and be happy. Even dumbed down, the software was still the best on the market. But Joe had insisted that the software was too powerful to leave in the hands of a single agency—if they were going to release it, everyone should have a right to use it.

  His insistence on making the knowledge free to everyone had alienated everyone except for Sunil, but Joe had the majority shares, so they had to go along with him. In the subsequent legal battle, Pellucid had prevailed, at least for now. The upshot was that Joe had lost his closest friends. Still, he’d been right.

  He hefted his heavy metal flashlight in one hand. A weapon in a pinch.

  He crept forward, trying to make as little noise as possible, keeping to the wooden ties. A yellow glow led him on. A minute later the source of the sound was illuminated by a battery-powered lantern set on the rocky ground—a scarecrow of a man pounding a brick wall with a sledgehammer. With each stroke, he mumbled a word. Gradually, Joe realized that he was counting. A man after his own heart.

  The man’s ragged pants and filthy jacket resembled desert-style camouflage, although it was hard to say through the thick coating of dirt and soot. The man struck the wall again, back straight, form perfect. His posture said that he was military.

  Whoever he was, he was taller than Joe, and looked stronger, too.

  Joe debated leaving him alone. The man was only damaging an old wall, and the wall wasn’t Joe’s business. No point in messing with a man with a hammer. But Joe had to know why.

  Before he could decide what to do, the man wheeled around, hammer held high. Edison growled a warning.

  “It’s just me,” Joe said, as if the hammerer knew him.

  The man’s glassy blue eyes came into focus. His eyes were set farther apart than average, one a few millimeters higher than the other, and his face gleamed with sweat. “They call me Rebar. Or Subject 523.”

  The numbers flashed in Joe’s head: brown, blue, red.

  “Joe,” he offered, trying not to let on that he was frightened. “Nice to meet you.”

  Rebar lowered the hammer, and Joe relaxed. The man stood well over six feet. Joe bet he could do serious damage if provoked. Even without the hammer.

  Rebar put the hammer head on the ground and leaned the handle against his baggy pants. His clothes hung on him as if he were a coat hanger instead of a man, as if he’d lost a lot of weight over a short time. His pockets bulged with dirty papers.

  “Interesting wall you got there, soldier,” Joe said, inanely. How did you strike up a conversation with a crazy man in the middle of a dark tunnel in the middle of the night? You didn’t. You ran. But the unsolved problem kept him there.

  Hefting the hammer, Rebar half-turned back to the wall. Joe followed his gaze. Soot had settled on the mortar between the broken bricks, and black lines streaked down the side. That wall had been put up a long time ago, probably before Rebar was born. Why was he knocking it down?

  “What are you after?” Joe drew himself to his full height, deliberately echoing Rebar’s military posture.

  “Completing my mission, sir.” Rebar rasped his hand across dirty brown stubble on his receding chin. “The month is almost up.”

  “Mission?” Joe stood straight, legs apart, hands loose by his sides, ready to run if he had to. Edison kept his distance from the man, too.

  Rebar gestured with the hammer’s wooden handle. “Been looking for what’s back there for a long time.”

  “Mind if I stick around to see?”

  “No, sir. I do not mind,” Rebar said, but the scowl on his face indicated otherwise.

  Joe leaned against the cold steel pillar and waited. Rebar picked up the hammer again and smacked it into the bricks, the noise echoing down the tunnel. Brick chips caromed off the wall, one slicing a thin line into Rebar’s stubbled cheek. He didn’t seem to notice.

  Brick dust, soot, and crushed cement swirled around the hammering man. He looked like a genie emerging from the glowing lantern in a cloud of red and gray dust. Rebar coughed, spit next to the rusty tracks, and went back to hammering, counting each blow.

  Should Joe offer to take a turn? What was the etiquette on performing public acts of vandalism with an accomplice? Lookout or criminal, those were the roles. That made him the lookout. He should sneak off. But he stayed.

  A section of wall at Rebar’s shoulder height gave, toppling forward to create a dark hole. Joe blinked in surprise. He pushed off the pillar and stood straight.

  Joe fidgeted from side to side while Rebar pounded the broken section until it was big enough to climb through. Joe wanted him to stop so that he could peek at the secret behind
the wall, but he kept his peace. After all, the mission was Rebar’s, not his.

  Rebar picked up the lantern and held it above his head like an old-time lighthouse keeper, warning ships away from the rocks. The man’s grotesque shadow leaped across the pillar and fell on Joe’s hand.

  Without turning around, the man thrust the lantern through the hole. The tunnel around Joe went dark. The silhouette of Rebar’s head against the yellow light blocked Joe’s view inside.

  Joe moved next to him, leaning forward eagerly. He couldn’t wait to see it.

  “Permission to see inside?” he asked.

  The horse-like smell of Rebar’s sweat blanketed the air, reminding him how much bigger, stronger, and crazier Rebar was than he. Rebar leaned away with a grunt, leaving the arm holding the lantern in the bricked-up room.

  Joe peered through the hole. In the center of the room stood a single blue train car. Rust bloomed along its steel side like dark lichen. The window glass looked more than twice as thick as normal train windows, watery green behind a patina of dust. Bulletproof. A familiar circular seal adorned the car’s side—an eagle bearing a laurel branch in one clawed foot and arrows in the other. He didn’t need to read the words above it to know what they said: Seal of the President of the United States.

  A legend in the tunnels. He had heard of a special train car that had carried Franklin Delano Roosevelt to New York during the Second World War, stopping two hundred feet underneath the Waldorf Astoria, a short walk from a freight elevator used to carry FDR and his automobile up to the hotel parking lot during the war. After the war, the car had vanished.

  Until now.

  Rebar had found it. But why?

  A flash of ivory drew Joe’s eye to the top of the car. Thick dust blanketed old bones. A tiny skull, long arm bones, fragile-looking ribs. A child’s skeleton.

  A train passed a hundred feet behind them. The ground shook. A piece of broken brick clattered into the room, and the skeleton on top of the car shivered. Rebar’s arm twitched. Moving light scattered shadows around the room as if a thousand ghosts danced there, finally set free.