As if she can read my thoughts, she says, “You watch the ground. You see anything remotely big, you let me know. Follow up at the rear.”
“What do you do when I’m not here?” I ask as the kids file out onto the roof. They’re all elementary age and don’t look quite as carefree as I remember being at that age, before the scientists got experimental and everything went to hell.
“Mrs. Gonzalez.” She nods at the steel-haired granny standing at the door, broom in hand and mouth grimly set.
I wish the old woman good morning, and she mumbles, “Usted no esta mirando a la calle…”
“Estoy viendo,” I say, giving her an almost-honest smile.
Over at the makeshift bridge, Rip scans the alley below. She’s always scanning, which is probably why she’s still alive and there are still kids around here. When she steps on the bridge, she treats it like it’s an everyday thing, not a march over a murder-chasm. The wood creaks and sways as the children follow her across like baby ducks, a measured four feet or so between them, like they’ve been reminded again and again not to cluster together and overweigh the structure. I move closer to the kids on my side and wish I’d brought a bigger weapon. The sky is hot and clear, and the day would be beautiful if not for the near-constant terror.
When the last kid on my side steps onto the bridge, I look up at Rip, and she motions me across like I’m an idiot. It’s a good thing they trained me for heights. I wonder what it must’ve been like for the first person who tested this contraption, and for these kids the first time they saw it. The wood bounces with each step as the metal sways in the wind. I look down at the alley six stories below, imagining what might be hiding down there, mouth open for a juicy tidbit.
Jesus, what these kids will do for an education. I’m amazed that anyone still cares.
I step onto the other roof and look back. Mrs. Gonzalez is gone. Rip is at the other side of this roof, knocking on another door and leading another dozen kids out onto the roof and toward a ladder down to the next building. She’s like the damn Pied Piper, and the kids’ eyes follow her with worship and a little awe. They don’t even seem scared. This is their new normal, and they trust her.
We gather kids on six different rooftops. There must be at least fifty, and none of them breathe a word the entire time. Next thing I know, Rip’s knocking on another door, but this time the children enter the building, quietly thanking Rip as they pass within. She doesn’t really see them, though. She’s watching the street and the sky.
“Are we going down, too?” I ask.
Rip shakes her head. “We bricked in all the doors and windows down there. Couldn’t chance a croc getting in where all the kids are. The orphans live here, too. They don’t talk about that on the news, much. They treat it like a war zone, but Amazon still delivers at least once a week.”
“Bet those guys get paid well, right?” I ask, trying to lighten the mood.
It doesn’t work.
“Look, Susan. When you live around here, it’s not about being paid. It’s about community. It’s all we’ve got left. The government won’t fix our streets, they shut down our schools, they closed the police station. Ambulances don’t come here because the roads are blocked off. They gave up on us. If we let these kids grow up without an education, we might as well shove ‘em down the subway tunnel. There are still places that are safe. Just not here. Not like they can afford to move to Nebraska.”
With another rueful head shake, she hurries back along the bridges, back the way we came. I follow.
“So, why’d you stay here?”
She doesn’t answer as she heads back down the fire escapes to our starting point. She doesn’t answer as she jogs down the street, taking so many turns that if I hadn’t extensively studied maps of the area, I’d be lost. She doesn’t answer as she stops in front of a subway entrance papered in fluttering yellow caution tape and smeared with dark, slimy stains. She turns to look at me. Judging me, as always.
Whatever she sees, she must finally decide it’s enough.
“These are the rules. Be quiet. They should mostly be asleep right now, but that mostly means nothing to ancient assholes. If something comes at us, let me face it first. Guns scare them. The noise and the light more than the bullets. I’ve got a few tricks, but not many. If either one of us gets grabbed, the other one does the merciful thing. You hear me?”
I pause, because that’s what a normal person faced with this question would do.
“Uh.”
“What’s uh?”
“What are we doing, Rip? Why would we go down there?”
Rip’s grin is finally a real, feral, fully-made thing.
“To find their nests. And crush all their eggs.”
“But isn’t that the government’s job? If you find a nest, you call 911 to report it, right?”
So slowly, she turns to face me. Her eyes go flat and dark, like those of the creatures she’s about to hunt. “The government’s job is to make money for the fat cats paying their salaries, and there’s a lot of money in constantly rebuilding the city. This is the new Iraq, honey. They don’t take out the robots because they keep the crocs in check and make great news headlines, and they don’t take out the crocs because it’s dangerous and messy and gives the robots nothing to do. Robots vs. megacrocs is better for clicks than the 2016 election. I haven’t figured out how to take care of the robots myself, but I know how to kill the crocs before they turn into unstoppable tanks. That’s why our neighborhood isn’t abandoned. That’s why we’re not overrun. That’s why you were able to walk down my street without a weapon in the first place.”
“Because you smash the eggs.”
Another grin. “That’s right. You in or you out?”
I pretend to be speechless, but not for long.
“I’m in.”
Because I have to be. That’s my job. And because I want to be.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not scared.
Rip pops open an overturned blue mailbox and pulls out a huge flashlight. Her gun appears in her other hand. Her quick glance tells me she still thinks I might run.
“Watch out—the stairs are slippery. Hell, everything from here on out is slippery.”
Little does she know that I, too, am slippery.
She starts down the subway stairs like it’s totally normal. The ground thunders underfoot, one of the still-running, higher placed lines whooshing by. But no one on two legs has used this station in years. It’s weirdly tidy—no trash, no homeless, no junkies—and yet filthy like a swamp, wet and green in the corners. I want to pull my gun, but I settle for fists.
As soon as I’m out of the sun, the temperature drops ten degrees and the air goes moist. It smells like wet metal and moss and predator. The caveman in me recognizes it and the tiny hairs rise on my arms. Rip swings the flashlight back and forth as we go down, illuminating every empty corner. The movies I grew up with have me expecting piles of human bones and tooth-marked briefcases, but there’s no evidence of people here. It looks like this place was abandoned hundreds of years ago instead of just three. Moss grows on the walls and floor, and vines reach toward the sunlight. As we hit the next level, I see why: there’s a busted pipe leaking everywhere, and no one’s bothered to fix it. This place is eating itself, the earth swallowing it into the swamp, long waiting under Manhattan for just such an occasion.
I shake my head. This is not time to get all poetic. There are actual megacrocs down here. Sarcosuchus. Fossils told us they could reach forty feet, but in this world, necromanced using DNA, the scientists say they should stay under thirty feet, maybe only twenty if they’re still agile enough to crawl up stairs. I saw one up close, once, before I took this job. They wanted me to know what I’d be facing. I asked them what it would taste like battered and fried. I guess that’s what they wanted to hear.
“Watch out,” Rip mutters, low.
The subway platform is creepy as hell, utterly empty. Weirdly, a few of the lights still work, c
asting the concrete into a patchwork of shadow and flickering blue. A barricade blocks any contact with the train, cement and steel and razor wire. On the other side, posters remind subway riders that this stop is closed and attempting to stop the train and exit here will end in certain death. Have a Nice Day! A few chipped spots in the barricade suggest the crocs have attempted to eat the L train.
“You cool?” Rip asks.
“Hard not to be, down here,” I say, letting my voice shake a little. It doesn’t require a lot of acting.
“We’re going down one more level, and then it gets bad. No more lights.”
“Yay.”
Her grin is the brightest thing underground. “That’s the attitude I like to see.”
Damn, she’s right. The next steps feel like slowly walking into a swamp to die at midnight. I move closer to her—and her flashlight. Even brave people don’t want to be alone in a place like this. My fingers twitch for the guns I’ve got flat against my back and strapped in my boot. That’s my last resort. Better to break cover than die. But we still haven’t seen or heard a megacroc, and maybe we won’t.
The stairs are interminable and slick with muck. The next platform hovers bare inches over a sea of black water where tracks used to be. One submerged train lists to the side sadly, half full of bog. I shudder involuntarily at the thought of what it would be like to get pulled down, down, down into the darkness.
As if reading my thoughts, Rip murmurs, “At least it wouldn’t last long. Megacrocs don’t barrel roll. They just snap you right in half at the start.” I say nothing and she adds, “I’ve seen it. Nobody has time to pop off a scream. And then…”
She points with her flashlight, showing me a log on the floor that turns out to be an old croc turd, dry and flecked with chunks of bone.
“This is the weirdest first date ever. You trying to scare me?” I ask, voice shaky.
“Maybe. You should be scared.”
“Then why’d you bring me down here?”
“Because I think you’ve got potential, and this is the best way to find out.”
But she doesn’t say it’s not a date, which makes me grin. They told me she was a hard ass, but they never told me she was funny and kind. It only seems to come out when she’s under stress.
“Well, maybe—”
“Shut up.” Her arm flies against my chest like she’s trying to save groceries during a car crash, and I jolt back as I hear it, too. A scrape and a splash. She steps toward the water and sweeps the flashlight into the darkness of the tunnel beyond the sunken train car. The flash of green eyes makes me shudder, my heart kicking up. My hand goes for the gun and stops before it can ruin everything.
“What do we do?” I whisper.
“We wait to see if it’s going to attack or just go on being a stupid dinosaur.”
I can hear our breathing in tandem as we watch the eyes blink and keep on swimming. The flashlight reveals a series of spikes in the water, right down to the wide tail lazily propelling the body down the underground river. Fifteen feet, maybe. Might even be a regular gator somebody flushed down a toilet when it wasn’t cute anymore. But it’s not, and we both know it. Megacrocs would eat one for supper. That’s one reason their growth rate from juvenile to adult is insanely fast. Scientists thought that was marvelous until the first lab-created megacroc escaped through a fence it couldn’t have broken through the day before.
When the croc’s out of sight, Rip takes a deep breath and flashes her light down the way it came. There’s a ledge along the left, just wide enough for a person. Maybe.
“If you’re going to give up, now’s the time,” she dares me. “We’re going through a pipe. It’s a tight squeeze.”
“No biggie. I did some spelunking with my Girl Scout troop,” I say, trying to sound nonchalant.
She can’t help chuckling. “Yeah, this is just like that. Damn, you’ve got spunk.”
Before I can respond to the compliment, she slides her back against the wall and edges along the ledge, her toes hanging over the water. It’s easy and practiced for her, and she’s still running her flashlight over the water beyond, but it takes everything I have to stay upright and moving, my shoulder almost touching hers. I want to ask how far it is, if she actually expects me to swim in pitch black water surrounded by crapped-out people, but I say nothing, because I can’t remember how good the crocodilian sense of hearing is.
As far as I can guess, it takes a million years and we shuffle along for seventy miles.
In reality, it’s maybe twenty feet. Maybe.
I nearly jump out of my skin when Rip’s fingers wrap around my wrist, hard and unyielding.
“We’re about to duck left,” she whispers. “There’s a pipe that leads to a shared nesting space I check every month. You’re gonna see what looks like a ton of garbage, but believe me, it’s a nest. Just follow my lead. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say.
In this moment, I realize that I’m not as tough as I thought I was, and I’m nowhere near as tough as Rip is. I feel her absence as she ducks into the pipe. When my hand hits the rim, her firm fingers grip it for a moment. Then she’s crawling, and I crawl, too. Small as I am, it’s still a tight fit. It’s suffocating in here, and I have to wonder what she was thinking, the first time she squeezed inside. I crawl forever and then nearly fall out. Rip helps me up and gives my shoulders a squeeze more eloquent than words.
She aims the flashlight to show me a room full of overturned desks and chairs. I want to ask why we didn’t use whatever personsized entrance the subway workers used, but I see the water lapping through the crooked door on the far side of the hall and keep my mouth shut. My shoes crunch, and I flinch. I realize that the heap taking up the other side of the room isn’t human trash: it’s the croc nest.
My skin crawls. It’s weirdly warm here, as if the trash—the nest—was just popped out of a microwave, which I recall has to do with how the mother incubates her eggs.
“Take this.”
Rip hands me a sledgehammer and places her flashlight on an upturned bucket. After a moment of fiddling with something, light flares. She’s got the room strung up with emergency lights, glowing an eerie blue. I can almost see the funky heat radiating off the nest, and I wish I had a flamethrower instead of a giant hammer. Rip picks up her own sledgehammer, the end crusted with glop, and uses it like a pickaxe, pulling off the top layer of the nest to reveal dozens of dirty white eggs, soft and leathery. With another rake of the hammer, eggs tumble down the slope and land at my feet. I don’t even have to ask what happens next. I start smashing them, turning my face away at impact.
We work quickly, silent but for the sound of our tools. Every so often, Rip pauses to hold up her sledgehammer and listens before nodding and returning to destruction. Hundreds of eggs fall under our sledgehammers and boots until we’re knee deep in shells and the slimy black corpses of almost-baby crocs. They’re so tiny they don’t even have toes or eyes yet, and I don’t let myself feel any horror or sadness. When I reach up to wipe sweat from my eyes, I see my own blood mixed with the slime, my hands covered in freshly popped blisters.
I don’t complain. If this doesn’t win her over completely, nothing will. And goddammit, I want Rip to be proud of me, to see how far I’m willing to go for her. Maybe I can lie to my boss and just… stay here. With her.
The eggs seem endless, and I’m about to ask why we don’t come back tomorrow, why we don’t just burn the whole thing down with a can of gasoline and a cinematically timed match, when I hear the sound I’ve been dreading.
Splashing water.
Mama’s coming home.
I look to Rip. Do we run? Do we fight?
But she just leans against her sledgehammer and stares at me, eyes narrowed.
“Who are you really?” she asks.
I go cold to my toes.
“Susan Marco,” I say. “Who else would I be?”
She shakes her head like she’s disappointed and kicks the sledgeha
mmer out of my hand. The handle bounces off the concrete, and my fingers twitch to fists at my sides as I consider who’ll win if we draw.
“Try again. You with the government or a private investor looking for eggs?”
“I told you. The Civilian Conservation Corps.”
“Bull.” She chuckles. “If you’re an arc welder, I’ll kiss a croc. Probably another FBI plant. You’re not down here because it’s the right thing to do. You’re down here because someone’s paying you. Because you want to know where your buddies went.”
I hold up my hands and shake my head, putting as much pleading and fear as I can into my eyes. I don’t have to fake my worried glance toward the water.
“That’s not…I mean…” I lick my lips nervously. “That’s crazy. You can ask the guys. I sleep in the same barracks as the rest of them.”
“Yeah, they told me that. But you don’t work the same jobs they do. And your hands aren’t as callused as theirs. And you’re packing, which I’m pretty sure the CCC doesn’t allow. What are the odds that the first pretty, fit, funny girl to show up on my block in three years is really as great as she seems?”
“Pretty good, I guess.” The warmth in my voice is real, and so is the loss. Because if this operation is going downhill, then she’s the one who’s got to go, not me. “Look, I—”
I go to draw, but she’s already got her gun, and it’s trained on my chest, and the steady splashing is closer now, and I don’t understand why we’re not running when the two of us together can’t take a twenty footer, not in close quarters like this, and not near a nest.
“Tell me the truth, Susan.”
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