Get Blank (Fill in the Blank)
Page 16
I let go of her and shined the light at the doorway. In the darkness ahead, something crawled over an uneven surface and flopped into water. I cursed.
“What?” Heather asked.
“I hate the undercity.”
“Why?”
“Seriously? Look around.”
“Oh, I thought there was more to it than that.”
“There is. The best parts smell like dead fish and the worst parts, well... let’s move fast.”
I was worried about a persistent legend in Los Angeles known as the Lost City of the Lizard People. No, seriously. It’s a real thing and you can google it if you don’t believe me. Like most things in California, it had all started with gold. Specifically, a deposit said to be located under Fort Moore Hill, downtown. In 1934, local lunatic G. Warren Shufelt (The G was for “God, are you kidding?”) claimed a wise old Indian had told him about the underground city of the lizard people, and because he didn’t seem to understand that such a thing, if real, should be avoided at all costs, promptly sunk mineshafts to find it. He did find it, stretching from Broadway downtown all the way to the Southwest Museum (which, for conspiracy buffs, is less than a mile from the former headquarters of V.E.N.U.S.). Shufelt went into the city and was either crowned prince of the lizard people or eaten (accounts vary), and the LA Times claimed the whole thing was a hoax.
It isn’t.
Oh, God, I wish it were.
When I said I worked for every conspiracy, cult, or secret society, that’s not entirely true. I never worked for the lizard people.
Because they are fucking crazy.
And here I was, in their domain. Granted, we were west of their city, but in getting away from our present predicament, we’d be going toward it. I was going into Moria knowing exactly what was waiting for me in the dark. No reason to panic Heather, though. I was panicking enough for the both of us.
I went to the doorway, a rushing sound growing louder and louder as I approached. I shined the light down, revealing a single slick step leading to a larger pipe. Concrete borders gave us a place to walk. In the middle was a sluggish six-foot river of black water turgidly plowing its way through the dark.
“That way,” Heather said, pointing in the direction of the flow. “That will lead us out.”
“Not necessarily. I mean, yeah, if we were aboveground. Down here, sometimes those dump into flood chambers, reroute into pipes. It’s a goddamn maze.”
“I hate the undercity,” she said.
“Damn right.” I led her downstream anyway. My sense of direction has never been stellar, and down here, whatever I had was completely scrambled. I kept my eyes peeled for markings on the wet concrete walls, either conspiracy symbols or something mundane added by a municipal employee. I didn’t see anything, and that worried me. We were theoretically west of their city. Nothing said they hadn’t branched out. Or separated into warring clans.
The water didn’t look deep, but that was deceptive. It was completely opaque, with angry eddies periodically swirling up from the depths. It was either the slide down or the ambient filth, but all the little scratches I had received during my first escape from Vassily had started itching as my subconscious mind provided the feel of infection. I kept my back to the wall, inching along the side. Heather imitated me, probably thinking I had some secret way to move around down here. Ahead, the pipe opened up into a pool, which boasted two more pipes, going in opposite directions.
Jutting from the side of the pool was a short pier. A skiff was secured to the side with some greasy rope. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said.
“Whose boat is that?”
“I really hope it’s not Zed’s.”
“Who’s Zed?”
“We’re not doing this.”
“Doing what? Jim? Are you stealing that boat?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t... it’s Mis... you need permiss...”
I wasn’t getting permission from whatever lizard person or mutant owned this thing. Instead, I could hope they had some kind of subterranean ride-share program, and if they ever asked me to kick in a couple bucks or maybe some roadkill, I’d happily do it. I gingerly stepped out onto the dock, putting my weight carefully on one foot. The wood was waterlogged and filthy, but it looked mostly solid. I pressed down. It creaked a little, but held. I took another step, now completely on this odd little structure. The skiff was small, but it would fit two people as long as one was standing. It was entirely empty, except for a bit of dirty water collecting at the bottom.
“If I fall in, you’ll save me, right?” I asked.
“You want me to jump in there?”
“It’s not my first choice, no. But if this thing sinks, yes.”
“Of course!” Heather said, the happy smile audible in her voice.
I had no idea how sincere she was. I put one foot in the skiff. It wobbled, but didn’t seem like it was going to sink. I winced as I slowly transferred my weight into it. I took my foot off the dock, and now I was officially standing in a stinking skiff I found in the LA storm sewers. A long pole with grimy tape around one end was on hooks on the side of the dock. I picked it up.
“I think we’re okay. Can you untie the boat?”
“You see, Jim? Positive thinking. You believed you could stand on that boat, and you did it.”
“Is that what happened?”
She nodded, untying the ropes. She hopped in, and though she barely weighed over a hundred pounds, I winced again, sure the vessel would tip over, sink, or maybe even explode, because it had been that kind of day. When nothing of the sort happened, I handed her the phone flashlight. She lit what little of the gloom she could as I pushed off from the dock. The pole found purchase at the bottom of the pipe; judging from that, we were in about six feet of water. There were currents at the bottom moving a good deal faster than the stuff on top. Someone falling in would likely be sucked to the bottom, then get shunted along on a very drowny trip through the undercity to be spat out into the Pacific as fish food.
I moved us out into the center of the underground river. Then, remembering something Mothman had told me one time, picked the left tunnel and pushed us over there.
“Jim?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did that monster call you Nicky?”
“I owe him some money. He came in shooting.”
“How did he know you were there?”
“That’s a really good question.” I thought about it, and short of Vassily tracking my phone, which seemed unlikely, it meant he was either watching the place or someone tipped him. Who? I had no idea. Vassily’s full net of contacts was a mystery, and it’s likely that through Neil he could have met any number of Satanists, both low- and high-ranking.
“Any ideas?”
“He was probably watching the place,” I decided. Then, spinning it up with some lies, I said, “He probably has any number of debtors in there. Gambling evokes greed, envy, probably gluttony, so they’re big fans. When I was there, they were always trying to get me into high-stakes poker.”
“Is that how you built up your debt?”
“Yep.”
“And you used a fake name? Why?”
“Would you tell a loan shark your real name?”
“I wouldn’t deal with a loan shark.”
“Well, yeah, that would obviously have been the better decision for me.”
She was quiet. I could feel her staring at me, even though she kept the dim beam of light barely clearing the path ahead. When she spoke, it was resigned. “You’re a complicated man.”
“You could say that.”
I pushed down the tunnels for hours. We were making good time, especially when I was able to make the current work with us. Of course, “making good time” was on a trip to God-knew-where, so maybe speed didn’t matter much. Along one of the tunnels, the light picked out a shape about the size of a terrier loping along one of the concrete walkways. It was moving towards us, eyes glowing red in t
he beam, totally fearless in its domain. And it should have been. It was a gray rat, huge and mangy. I almost muttered something about Rodents of Unusual Size, but I didn’t want to annoy it.
I pushed us over to the far size of the stream. It paused, watching us float by. Soon, the darkness swallowed it back up, but the sound of its claws on wet concrete dogged us for several hundred feet.
“What was that?”
“Tijuana pet,” I said. I knew that wasn’t enough, so I elaborated. “It’s an urban legend. Old lady goes down to TJ and she loses her glasses or something while she’s down there. I don’t know what an old lady would be doing in TJ, but that’s the story. Anyway, she meets a street dog and it’s starving, so she feeds the poor thing. It’s one of those heartwarming tales about someone rescuing a stray, and they become best friends. She brings the dog back to the States, where she takes it to the vet. That’s when the vet breaks the news to her: it’s not a dog. It’s a giant rat.”
“And that was the same one?” Heather gasped.
“No, the story’s bullshit. The truth is that rats can get big down here and they’re dangerous as hell.”
We drifted down more tunnels before emerging in a large chamber. A series of risers on either side made it look like a flooded Mesoamerican ballcourt, though that was probably not the intent. A large splash greeted us. The beam jumped as Heather tried to focus on what had caused it. Gold coins, apparently hovering an inch above the waterline, glittered back. They weren’t coins; they were eyes.
“Is that...?”
“An alligator? Yes.”
“What’s it doing down here?”
“Floating.”
Even though Rosicrusophists are never supposed to get annoyed, Heather’s voice was shot through with it. Her nerves were probably pretty frayed after the night we’d had. “I meant why is it floating down here.”
“Supposedly people flush them down toilets, but it’s probably more likely they get put into storm drains.”
“Sewer alligators? I thought those weren’t real.”
“They’re not real in New York. Gets too cold there. Winter would wipe them out. Here, it’s warm all year round.”
She watched the gator watching us. It wasn’t all that big, maybe six feet long from what I could see poking through the surface. Just like the rats, the gators could get very large. In any case, I gave it a wide berth and tried my best not to look like anything it would want to eat.
“Heather, I need you to point the light at where we’re going.”
“Okay,” she said, and I heard her muttering a mantra over and over. Technosis to keep the gator away. I had no idea if it would work, but as long as she kept the light where I needed it, I didn’t care. The gator stayed in its reptilian trance, waiting for something to happen by that it could snack on.
We traveled for another hour or two, every now and then passing another dock, sometimes with a similar boat tied to it. They weren’t uniform, though, looking like whatever put them there had scavenged or built whatever it could and called it a day.
My phone beeped. “Low battery,” Heather said.
“I was worried that this was getting too easy,” I muttered.
I was exhausted. It had to be morning soon, if not already. That would make this Day Three on the investigation and no closer to finding who killed Neil and framed Mina. I was going to have to ditch Heather somehow, and do it in such a way so as not to be murdered in a men’s room. Distracting her while conducting my investigation and making sure she didn’t realize I was her quarry was turning out to be impossible. And that was before the sewer.
Although, since my only lead was Vassily Zhukovsky, it might be nice to have a killer along for the ride. Once I’d re-armed her, of course. Re-arming a bounty hunter on my ass. I guarantee Han Solo never had to do that. Han had it easy. Don’t see me dumping my cargo at the first sign of Imperial cruisers, do you? Hell no.
We passed a large chamber, running parallel to our underground canal. Metallic hisses came from the inside and I really didn’t want to know what else the undercity had in store for us. Heather didn’t have my sense of resigned fatalism and directed the light into it.
Thousands of writhing tentacles dripped from the ceiling. Some were metal, others were bundles of cables with naked ports at the end. They curled around one another, reaching and grasping at nothing.
Heather swallowed a yelp.
I took it as good news.
“What’s that?” she managed.
“Shub-Internet,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Things were looking up, because the avatar of the god of the internet was underneath an abandoned building in downtown LA, a little to the southwest of a cluster of skyscrapers that made up the Los Angeles skyline. I ignored the fact that Shub-Internet had grown. Last I heard, it managed to incarnate the Four Horse_ebooks of the Apocalypse and started dating Alison Brie, so that was bound to make it feel like a big god.
I started looking for another dock, and shortly found one. It had a skiff on one side, so I angled for the other one. I hoped whoever owned it wasn’t around and checked my weight on the little pier. Though it creaked, it held me. Heather held out her hand and I helped her onto the dock. She handed the phone back. I checked the battery. A sliver of red left.
I inched along the little walkway around my subterranean Venice, and after about fifty feet and one more yawning pipe, there was a door in the wall. I climbed up and peered in. My light sputtered as the phone used a little bit of its precious battery to beep at me. This looked like an access tunnel, leading somewhere that was slightly less wet. That was good enough for me.
I went up the stairs with Heather nervously following. The phone sputtered again. I picked up the pace. The beam picked up something ahead, shadows bobbing with every step. It was a fall of shattered concrete, probably shaken loose in one quake or another. As I got closer, I saw that the wall was entirely broken, creating a hole easily big enough to fit through. The blocks looked like they might have been moved to provide a passage, but the debris hadn’t been cleaned up or the wall repaired, hinting that it wasn’t municipal employees who’d done it.
A breeze, rank and metallic, wafted through the hole. That’ll do, pig, I thought at the universe. I climbed the little hill of broken concrete, stooped under the irregular arch of the hole, and emerged in another tunnel. This one was much larger, with easily ten feet of head clearance. The breeze wasn’t a phantom. I felt it, and knew which way it was coming from.
Heather came out of the hole and landed next to me. “We’re almost out of here,” I said.
I should not have said that. The shuffling started pretty much instantly after, coming from deeper in the tunnel behind us. It sounded almost human, but not enough to make me comfortable with what was happening. Several somethings were all rushing through the darkness, loping over uneven ground to get at Heather and me.
“We should probably go,” I said.
She didn’t need to be told twice, and soon we were both running along the tunnel. Whatever it was moved quickly. We couldn’t outrun it. Not for long.
I ran anyway, my burning lungs sucking up the air. The phone sputtered and died. Plunged into darkness, I was pretty certain this was it. At least I would vanish. No one would have to know I’d ended up as poop. But that would mean Mina in jail, busted on the fake murder charge. I wasn’t just running for me. I was running for her, and that meant something. I dug in, feeding off the stitch in my side, the exhaustion in my body, and the ache in my limbs.
The tunnel wasn’t quite as dark as it had been. I could barely make out walls. Each step brought the light up, brighter and brighter. And then it was clear. A doorway opened into a huge tunnel crossed with tracks. The metrorail. I even let myself grin a little. “Don’t touch the third rail,” Morgan Freeman said in my head, although to be honest, I had no idea if the third rail was even a thing. Good looking out, Mr. Freeman.
A platform was about twenty feet away. We ran for it as the headlight of a train haloed us from up ahead. I wanted to wave the phone flashlight to stop the train, but the battery was out. I couldn’t even spare the breath for a curse. I ran up the stair access and threw myself aside as the train slid into the station, effectively blocking the things following us.
I slumped against a wall, trying to catch my breath. Looked like we were below Union Station, giving this a certain amount of nostalgia: I had almost been killed here about a year ago. A few Angelenos standing on the platform gave Heather and I some looks, but all erred on the side of not getting involved with the two filthy subterranean joggers.
“What were those?” Heather asked. She was barely panting. Must be nice to be in shape like that.
“Lizard people.”
“What?”
“Like people. But lizardy,” I clarified.
“That... that’s a thing?”
“You saw them.”
She glanced backward superstitiously, trying to make that jibe with what she knew about the world. I put my head down and sucked in air.
That’s why I didn’t notice her grabbing me until her hands were already yanking me up by my shirt and slamming me face-first into a lit map of the LA metrorail.