The Memory Agent

by Matthew B. J. Delaney

  Parker shook Clayton again. “Come on, buddy. Wake up.”

  “Almost got it,” Selberg said. “There!”

  Clayton’s eyes flew open and he gasped for breath. His hands came up to his chest and he looked around wildly. He jumped up from the seat, then fell backward, grabbing the wall with his hand to steady himself.

  “Be calm. Be calm, Sam,” Parker said.

  Clayton rubbed his eyes, blinked, then looked around. He focused on Parker. “Wow, that’s intense.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. I think.”

  “Good, because we have to move out of here. Fast,” Parker said. “Can you run?”

  Clayton nodded and they moved quickly out of the train and onto the platform. Blake eyed them as they approached. Clayton was unsteady, but he could manage well enough. And the sync would improve over time.

  “Sam, this is Blake,” Parker said. “Vice versa.”

  Blake and Clayton nodded at each other, then Blake turned back toward the concourse. “I think we’ve got about a dozen rovers in there now. All armed. Probably more outside.”

  “We’ve got to get to the Waldorf Astoria,” Parker said to Charlotte. “Can you find us a route?”

  “You could try the Waldorf Astoria line,” Charlotte said.

  “The what?”

  “It’s in the other systems. During the 1930s, a secret railway line was built connecting Grand Central Terminal with the Waldorf Astoria. You should be able to use that tunnel to get to the Waldorf.”

  “Is it in this system?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlotte said. “But probably.”

  “Probably. Great,” Parker said. On the concourse, the rovers moved to the row of ticket windows. They were going to start checking each of the platforms. The secret railway sounded like a long shot, but Parker would have to take the chance. “All right, tell me where.”

  “Across the concourse, go down the platform for Track 9,” Selberg said.

  Parker turned to Blake and Clayton. “You ready?”

  Clayton nodded. His face still looked pale. He hadn’t adjusted yet to being in this world. The trio moved in a crouch-walk along the edge of the platform. When they reached the edge of the concourse, Parker held up a hand, keeping them out of sight. The rovers had moved off onto an adjoining platform, leaving the main floor free. Quickly, Parker and his team sprinted out onto the concourse and headed for Track 9.

  As they reached the central information booth, a man shouted behind them. Then, the loud crack of gunfire. The trio took cover behind the booth. The rovers were running toward them from the opposite platform. Parker pulled the trigger on the Sten, the weapon spraying metal across the concourse. Chips of pink marble shattered off the far wall and the rovers scattered for cover.

  “Poor old building,” Parker said. “I’m sorry, Grand Central.”

  Parker fired another burst from the Sten, then headed toward the Track 9 platform, Blake following close behind and Clayton in the rear. The platform was the single depressing concrete slab that stretched out like a pier for almost a hundred yards. Railroad tracks ran below ground in long parallel lines that vanished into the tunnel.

  “There should be two sets of tracks,” Selberg said. “Jump down onto the track bed on your right, follow it for thirty yards, then you should see a door.”

  Parker took the lead and landed with a thud on the gravel-covered rail bed.

  “You sure you know what you’re doing?” Blake said. “This looks like a dead end to me.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  “Your confidence is not inspiring.”

  Ahead was a metal door set into the concrete wall of the tunnel. It looked little-used, traces of rust visible over the front, with graffiti covering the face. Parker reached the door and pushed hard with his shoulder. It swung open with a shriek of metal and a puff of stagnant air. Inside, concrete stairs led down into blackness.

  From her pocket, Blake handed Parker a long-tube, metal flashlight. Parker turned on the light and swung the beam down the stairwell. A strange glimmer flickered back from below. Parker moved down to get a closer look.

  “Oh no,” Parker said.

  Blake and Clayton stood at the top of the stairs. “What is it?”

  “Selberg, we’ve got a problem here,” Parker said. “The stairwell is totally flooded out.”

  Parker passed the light once more across the bottom of the stairs. Below him dark water filled the stairwell, reaching the level of the roof and completely blocking the passageway.

  “I heard you,” Selberg said. “Stand by one second.”

  Parker turned toward Blake and Clayton. “How we doing up there?”

  Blake shouldered her Sten and fired a burst up the tunnel. “Not good.”

  Clayton joined Parker on the stairs. “What’s the problem, buddy?”

  “Whole tunnel is flooded out,” Parker said. The water lapped on the stairs just below their feet.

  “All right, listen,” Selberg said. “That tunnel is about twenty yards long, then there are stairs leading to another track at your elevation. If you can make it twenty yards, the water should clear when you hit the other stairs.”

  “Should?”

  “I don’t know,” Selberg said.

  Parker sighed. Above them he heard the static burst of gunfire. Blake came hurtling down the stairs, chips of concrete flashing off the tunnel wall behind her. “We’ve got company coming. Fast. Tell me you found something.” Blake saw the flooded tunnel and stopped abruptly. “What is that?”

  “It’s supposed to be clear in twenty yards. Can you swim?”

  “I can swim,” she said. “But if it’s still flooded, we’re going to drown down there.”

  “Nobody is going to drown,” Parker said. “We’ll make it.”

  “Not like we have a lot of choice,” said Clayton.

  Parker studied the surface of the water. If they stayed, they would die. But what did that mean here?

  “What if they kill us?” Parker said. “We just get recycled. We’ll just end up somewhere else.”

  “Yeah,” Blake said reluctantly. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about that.”

  “What?”

  “You do get recycled, and you do come back. But there’s only a handful of return points in the city. And they always have rovers there waiting. They’ll grab you the moment you come back.”

  “Then what happens?” Clayton asked.

  “They’ll throw you in a cage and torture you in unimaginable ways.”

  Clayton nodded and bent down to take off his shoes. “Looks like we’re swimming.”

  “Fuck, man.” Blake slid the strap of her weapon off her shoulder. “Why did I even get mixed up in this?”

  “All right, everybody, be calm,” Parker said. “This is all going to be fine. We’ll just swim and I will see you all on the other side.”

  Parker studied the surface of the water, as black as oil. He took a last look at the light in the tunnel above, pulled in a deep breath and dove into the water.

  The cold hit him immediately.

  The flashlight in his hand flickered out. And then it was absolutely pitch black. He wanted to move forward as cautiously as possible, one hand in front of his face, like a newly blind man walking through a room. But already he could feel the slow burn in his lungs from the lack of oxygen. He abandoned all restraint and kicked out his legs hard to propel himself forward. Anything could be down here. He thought of the revenant Blake had described. Living but not living. Waiting, reaching out to grab his leg with one of their cold, rotted hands and pulling him down into the darkness.

  He swam faster, using both his arms now, trying to pull himself forward. Twenty yards was nothing. He could walk twenty yards in a few seconds. But here, under water, his legs and lungs already burning, that twenty yards felt like eternity. And what if Selberg had been wrong? He was outside the system, hacked in. That was an imperfect science. What he thought might be t
wenty yards could really be fifty. A hundred yards.

  His lungs were burning now. Behind him, he heard three distant cracks. The sound was muted through the water, but he knew they were gunshots. Parker kept moving, yearning to breathe, his eyes squeezed shut. His fingers reached out and he felt the hard corner of a concrete stair.

  He pushed up with his legs and his head broke the surface of the water. The air was heavy with the staleness of many years, but he breathed it in deeply, the oxygen filling his lungs and pushing away the pain. He was still in complete darkness but he slowly felt his way forward and pulled himself up the stairs.

  An instant later, he heard someone else break the surface of the water.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Blake,” she said. “You friend is coming behind me. He was holding off the rovers. That guy can shoot, man.”

  Parker heard her swim forward and reach the stairs next to him.

  “Selberg,” Parker said, “can you read me?”

  “Who is that you keep talking to?” Blake asked.

  “A friend,” Parker said, not sure how to explain the system. “It’s complicated.”

  “Okay.”

  There was a burst of static, then Selberg’s voice came online. “You made it. Congratulations.”

  “It’s a little dark here. Any way you could get us some light?”

  An instance of silence. Then a flicker of feeble light. A string of bare bulbs hung along the wall above them. Parker watched as the filaments inside slowly began to glow, gaining in brightness and pushing away the dark.

  “Found some old construction lighting,” Selberg said quickly. “I had to reroute the power to the tunnel. You should be operational for a while.”

  A stream of bubbles broke up from the water, followed by Clayton’s head. He gasped and choked, his hair slick against his forehead. Blood streamed down the side of his neck.

  “These guys are coming right behind me,” Clayton said as he hauled himself out of the water. “We’ve got to move.”

  Together they ran up the stairs and onto the track bed of another railway line. This line had no platform, only a narrow tunnel that stopped abruptly with a brick wall at one end, extending into the dark mouth of the tunnel toward the other. The train, constructed of dark gray metal plates with a series of small windows high on its walls, looked more like an armored troop carrier than a passenger vehicle.

  “That was the personal train for FDR,” Selberg said. “When he traveled to New York City from Washington, he’d go directly to the Waldorf Astoria. The tracks run right below the hotel. It’s about a quarter mile jog.”

  “What, we can’t get the train?” Clayton said.

  “Stop being lazy. This system was engineered to age naturally. Nobody expected it to be abandoned for this long. Those train wheels are rusted solid.”

  Behind them, they heard a splashing. One of the rovers had broken the surface of the water in the tunnel. Together, the trio took off at a quick jog along the railway line, then around the abandoned train. The tracks offered no cover at all, which meant the rovers would have clean shots. Parker and his team had to put some distance between their position and the tunnel entrance.

  Parker’s feet pounded over the gravel of the bed. Behind him came the sound of voices, then a long, low whistle. He ventured a look back and saw three flashlights bobbing in movement up the track.

  “They’re coming,” Parker said.

  Clayton was huffing alongside them. He was a big man and ran with slow steady strides. Blake moved faster. She was long and lean and carried herself almost effortlessly. Ahead of them, Parker saw a fully illuminated train platform. They were making time but still had a hundred yards to go. The rovers were catching up fast. Parker knew his team wasn’t going to make it. They had to make a stand now.

  He turned quickly, his hand tightening on the Sten. He only hoped the water hadn’t damaged the weapon’s firepower. His finger tightened on the trigger, then he froze in surprise. The flashlights were moving away from them. The rovers were retreating back down the tunnel.

  “They’re going away,” Parker said. “They had us . . . and they’re pulling back. Why would they do that?”

  “Because they know about the hotel. Everyone does,” Blake said. “It’s just one of those places you don’t go.”

  “Why not?” Clayton asked.

  “Because of the revenants. This place is infested with them. Imagine a beehive colony. That’s what the Waldorf Astoria is like.”

  They slowed to a walk as they approached the hotel platform, another stretch of concrete with several well-oiled industrial-looking machines with gears and large crank shafts. Several sets of lamps were affixed to the wall, each electrically lit and filling the space with an uneven glow.

  “Selberg, you’ve got the power on here?” Parker said.

  “Nope. Not me. For some reason I’m actually having trouble accessing your location. It’s blocked for some reason. I’m working to find a way around it.”

  “Your guy has generators hooked up everywhere,” Blake said. “That’s how he keeps the place running.”

  “And he’s here by himself?”

  “As far as I know,” Blake said. “The guy is like this total recluse weirdo.”

  Parker pulled himself up onto the oil-spotted platform. The trio boarded a cargo elevator large enough to transport a car. Inside were two black buttons, one with an up arrow, the other with a down. Parker pushed the up button and two metal doors slid shut. The elevator groaned and with the heavy crank of gears, they began their ascent.

  “How long has he been here?” Parker said.

  “Since the system went bye-bye,” Blake said. “About two years. The first year was the worst. The rovers were everywhere, raping and murdering everyone. We didn’t know about the revenants back then. They came later. In the second year. That was bad too. Now we’ve got both. Your guy just sort of retreated into the hotel. Nobody has seen him since.”

  “Wait, nobody has seen him in three years? How do you know he’s even alive?”

  “No, he’s alive. He’s got a sniper rifle. Every once in a while he’ll come out, take a shot at a rover or a revenant on the street. And we can hear him playing music.”

  “Music?”

  “Yeah, big Michael Jackson guy. But not Jackson 5 Michael, more like an older Michael Jackson, I think, sometime after our time. He figured out a way to access things outside our system. Rovers tried to go in and get him out. But there are too many revenants in the building now. He uses them as sort of a security system.”

  “Sounds like an interesting guy,” Parker said.

  The elevator slowed, then came to a stop. The doors slid open with a grind of metal.

  The elevator car opened onto a grand ballroom. It was a vast, open space, with cathedral-style windows that looked out across a deserted Park Avenue. Sets of crystal chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling, still glimmering brightly beneath a coating of dust. A carpet was rolled up and abandoned in the corner near a half-dozen overturned chairs and a piano obscured by a faded felt covering. Above the piano was a mirror that stretched the entire length of one wall.

  Someone stood in the center of the ballroom. He was a man of nothing particularly remarkable, slim in build and of average height. He wore faded blue jeans, work boots, and a flannel shirt. His back was to the elevator, his focus toward the windows. He seemed to sway slightly back and forth, reminding Parker of bits of debris rocking on an ocean current. Everything seemed normal about the figure, and yet Parker felt his skin grow cold. He was witnessing something terrible. Next to him, Clayton’s hands were clenched into fists, his eyes wide with fright. Slowly, Blake’s hand reached up and gripped Parker’s arm. She nodded at the man, then whispered, “Revenant.”

  She held a single finger to her lips and quietly stepped out of the elevator. The man continued his trancelike rocking, his arms at his sides, his feet planted on the ground. The three of them quietly edged along the
wall, making their way toward the set of double doors that led out onto the hotel lobby. As they moved, Parker glanced up toward the mirror on the back wall. The man’s face was reflected in the glass, the face of a nightmare. The bottom of his jaw was missing and ragged bits of flesh dangled from below his nose, partially obscuring a few broken teeth. Parker imagined the creature had taken a shotgun blast to the face, the bottom portion blown away. But what was even worse were the man’s eyes, covered with a white, gauzy film of death.

  Parker found himself staring at those eyes. Being drawn into them, utterly repelled at the same time. And then to his horror, the man’s eyes shifted toward the mirror. And even though the eyes were clouded jewels, Parker knew the man was looking at him.

  The revenant spun around, its rotting face turned completely toward them. It crouched down and emitted a terrible shriek of surprise before it charged at them, running with abandon across the ballroom floor.

  “Watch out!” Blake said.

  Shocked by how fast the thing moved, Parker stood frozen, the Sten clutched in his hand. Blake raised her weapon to her shoulder and fired a burst. The bullets struck the creature and spun its body full around, knocking it back to the ground. It was up again in an instant and as it charged once more, its mangled upper lip snarled back. Parker had a faint impression of Blake’s hand as it flashed down to the machete clipped to her waist. She brought the sharp weapon up, and as the creature reached them, she stepped to the side and swung the machete like a homerun hitter cutting for the fences. The blade struck the revenant in the neck and cut through already-dead flesh. The body still moved forward, headless for a few crashing steps, before collapsing to the ground in a pile of twitching limbs.

  “Fuck! Fuck! What the fuck?” Clayton said as he jumped back from the still-moving pile. “What was that thing?”

  “That was a revenant. And now you know why the rovers don’t come around here.”

  “There’s a whole building of these things?” Clayton said, his knuckles still clenched, the skin tight across the bone.

  “Yeah. That’s what I’ve been saying.” Blake shouldered the Sten gun. “Let’s get moving. There will be more around here soon. They can smell when one of their own gets killed. They all come running.”