Terminus o-2

by Adam Baker

  Lupe climbed the steps to the entrance gate. She set the bag on the floor alongside a rolled NBC suit. Quick inventory: gloves, overboots, sealer tape. She twisted a fresh filter into her respirator. She propped an axe against the wall.

  ‘You shouldn’t be out here alone.’

  Tombes climbed the steps and joined her. He dumped a backpack and NBC suit on the floor.

  ‘Makes a lot of sense,’ he said, gesturing to the backs. ‘A fallback plan. That’s army thinking. Someone should have sent your ass to West Point.’

  ‘This isn’t a fallback plan. I’m leaving soon as dawn breaks. End of story.’

  He watched Lupe kneel and tuck a big lock-knife into the side pocket of the backpack alongside a couple of energy bars and a pair of socks.

  ‘Got a canteen?’

  ‘No point,’ said Lupe. ‘Temperature at street level is sub zero. No point carrying a brick of ice around. Might as well weigh down my pack with cinder blocks.’

  ‘What the hell were you doing in jail, girl? You’re smart. You could have been somebody.’

  ‘I am somebody.’

  Lupe straightened up.

  ‘I’m not going back to Ridgeway, that’s for sure. I’m going to cross the river and get beyond the city.’

  ‘Brooklyn. The streets will be blocked. And there will be plenty of infected running around. Way more than Manhattan.’

  ‘I’ll use elevated train track. I’ll walk right over their heads. Travel light. Keep moving. That’s the trick. Don’t let the bastards mass and box you in.’

  ‘Got a street map?’

  ‘I don’t need one.’

  ‘Where will you go? After the city.’

  ‘North. Far as I can. Avoid towns and cities. Avoid highways. Travel across open country. See if I can reach Canada before winter kicks in for real. Food won’t be a problem. Plenty of pets and livestock running loose. Build a fire every night. Spit some meat.’

  They listened to the rising night-wind. The polythene curtain billowed and crackled.

  ‘The night is turning mean,’ said Tombes. ‘I’d hate to travel in this weather.’

  ‘Might work in my favour. Colder it gets, slower those fuckers move. Easy to outrun. And cold deadens smell. A person could walk right past them.’

  ‘You really want to step out there?’

  ‘Sick of waiting. I’ll leave at first light.’

  ‘What are you going to do when you reach the river? Build a raft? Strong currents. Stronger than you think. The strait bumping gloves with water from Long Island Sound. The tides can be pretty nasty. Time it wrong, you could be swept out to sea.’

  Lupe held up her Motorola. ‘I’ll take a radio. Give updates as I move street-to-street. If I run into trouble, you guys will know to take a different route.’

  An unearthly sobbing scream echoed from the hall. The sound built slow, peaked, then died away.

  ‘Mother of God.’

  They looked down the stairwell to the shadows of the station.

  A second juddering howl.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’

  Lupe picked up her axe. Tombes unsheathed a knife. They crept down the steps to the hall. They scanned shadows with their flashlights. Scorched dereliction.

  ‘See anything?’ asked Tombes.

  ‘If I did, I’d tell you.’

  A low, whimpering moan. The sound came from directly above their heads.

  They trained their flashlights upwards, examined the dust-furred louvred slat of an air-con vent.

  ‘Must be Galloway. Fucker is in the pipes, trying to spook us out.’

  ‘No,’ said Lupe. ‘That’s not Galloway. Listen.’

  A faint, keening whine.

  ‘Cloke. My God, that’s Cloke’s voice. Mother Mary, he’s alive.’

  56

  Cloke died, time and again.

  His chest was ripped open, his body bled dry. His empty heart had fluttered to a standstill. Yet some kind of fusion was taking place. He was melding with Galloway. Their cardiovascular systems were knitted together. Veins and capillaries entwined. Fresh blood filled Cloke’s flaccid heart and set it pumping. He jerked back to consciousness.

  ‘Please, I just want it to stop.’

  He reached out and scrabbled at the crumbling brickwork, hoping to find a shard he could drive through his eye into his brain.

  He gnawed his wrist. He ground his teeth, tried to break skin and tear open an artery. His jaws, his will, were too weak.

  He lay on his back. He convulsed as Galloway burrowed beneath his ribs. He lifted his head and slammed it down, tried to knock himself insensible.

  ‘Stop. Please. Just stop.’

  The bodies lay conjoined in the tunnel shadows as Galloway pushed deep into Cloke’s chest cavity.

  ‘Get out,’ whispered Cloke. He fought to regain control of his hands as they began to clench and unclench under alien volition. ‘Get the hell out of my mind.’

  Galloway shouldered his way into the man’s thorax. Ribs peeled back and snapped like twigs. He buried his face deep in gelatinous viscera, opened his mouth wide and inhaled blood and lymph.

  He no longer had eyes. Optic nerves swelled and extended from empty sockets like questing tendrils, branching and spreading through muscles and membranes. He assimilated body tissue, drank Cloke dry like a voracious carcinoma. Snaking ganglions punctured Cloke’s spinal tract, wormed between vertebrae, fused with his nervous system.

  Galloway’s mouth was forced jaw-breaking wide as he vomited a knotted root system of metallic fibres. Tumour-strings roped from his nostrils, ears and throat as the relentless colonisation of Cloke’s body continued.

  Light pierced the darkness. Blurred colours. Muffled sound. A tentative trickle of sense-data.

  A collision of memories. First time Cloke kissed a girl. First time Galloway kissed a guy. A fusion of minds.

  The Galloway/Cloke hybrid saw through new eyes.

  57

  Donahue and Tombes pulled boxes aside. Donahue snapped open her knife and cut plastic pull-ties holding the grille in place. They stared into the darkness of the conduit mouth.

  ‘Just for the record, I think this is a retarded idea,’ said Lupe.

  ‘I got to find the guy,’ said Tombes.

  ‘He’s infected. He’s beyond help.’

  ‘What if it were you? Want to be left to turn? Dead but not dead? Crawling around the pipes for God knows how long, flesh rotting off your bones?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to die on my behalf.’

  Tombes shrugged off his coat and unzipped his sweatshirt.

  He stuffed a couple of paint tins into a backpack. He tucked a clutch of detonators into his waistband. He clipped a radio to his belt.

  Lupe hefted the oxygen cylinder lashed with ammonium nitrate.

  ‘You want the bomb?’

  ‘The building is too unstable. Might bring the whole thing down on our heads.’ He turned to Donahue. ‘Got that rope?’

  She threw him a coil of rope. He tied one end round his waist.

  ‘If anything happens, pull me clear. Don’t let that ghoul gnaw my bones.’

  He wriggled on gloves, gripped the lip of the tunnel, hauled himself up and inside.

  ‘Take this.’

  Lupe passed him an iron roof pike.

  He switched on his flashlight. He picked his way through broken glass on hands and knees. Rope played out behind him.

  He crawled through narrow darkness. Gloves, boots and canvas bunker pants scuffed against rough brickwork.

  ‘I’m at the junction.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Few drops of blood.’

  ‘Which way you headed?’

  ‘The right hand passage leads to the office. Think I’ll head left. See what I can find. Hold on. I can hear something.’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘Just wait.’

  Tombes squirmed along the pipe. An insistent beep. Something winking on the tunnel floor.
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br />   Cloke’s wristwatch. A black G-Shock with a broken strap. The cracked, blood-spattered countdown flashed 00:00. Time for the team to take their meds.

  Tombes shut off the alarm.

  ‘Something up ahead. I got to check it out.’

  ‘What can you see?’

  ‘Some sort of chamber. There’s a wide-bore pipe running floor to ceiling. Some kind of water main, at a guess. Give me more slack.’

  Tombes lowered himself into the chamber. He shone his flashlight round the concrete space.

  The back wall was caked with blood and matted hair. Bones embedded in a rippled metallic mess. Ribs. Skulls. Femurs, clavicles and vertebrae.

  ‘Mother of God.’

  He touched the crucifix round his neck.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘I think Galloway has been building himself some kind of nest.’

  ‘Out of what?’

  ‘People.’

  ‘Bail. Get out of there.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  Tombes shrugged off his backpack. He pulled out a tin of paint and shucked the lid with his knife. He splashed crimson enamel across the wall like he was slopping gasoline.

  He pulled a detonator from his waistband. Red tag. Sixty second fuse. He bit the tube and triggered the countdown. He tossed the detonator. It landed at the foot of the wall.

  He hauled himself up into the conduit mouth and crawled thirty yards back down the brick pipe. He stopped and looked over his shoulder.

  Crack. Thud of ignition. The chamber filled with rippling fire. It was like staring into the open door of a furnace. Flames spat down the tunnel towards Tombes, a fierce plume of dragon breath. Hot air washed over him.

  ‘Take up the rope. I’m heading back.’

  He reached the junction. The plant room up ahead. He began to crawl towards the distant disc of light.

  A low growl.

  Tombes twisted round and shone his flashlight behind him.

  Something grotesquely naked blocking the pipe. A distended body, as if two people were trying to occupy the same skin.

  ‘Cloke?’

  A bulge at Cloke’s shoulder as if a second skull were attempting to force its way up through his neck and wear his face.

  The creature hissed.

  Tombes bolted down the conduit, scrambled and squirmed towards the plant room.

  Urgent drag and scuffle behind him. Cloke on his tail.

  ‘Hey,’ shouted Tombes. ‘Lupe. Serious fucking problem.’

  ‘I hear it,’ shouted Lupe, from the tunnel mouth. ‘Keep moving.’

  Tombes pulled himself over broken glass. It sliced his gloves, sliced his palms.

  ‘Right behind me,’ he shouted, as he threw himself from the conduit mouth into the plant room.

  His iron pike clattered to the floor. Lupe snatched it up.

  Something monstrous scuttling down the brick conduit to meet her. She braced her legs, raised the pike like a harpoon and stabbed.

  Shriek and howl. The creature two yards from the tunnel mouth, spike embedded in its breast bone, face animated by insect hunger.

  Lupe and Donahue struggled to hold the monstrous thing at bay. The creature pushed forwards, impaling itself further on the iron spike. Skin stretched and broke as the barbed tip emerged from its back.

  Tombes climbed to his feet. He pulled gloves from his hands with his teeth. He pulled a detonator from his waistband, fumbled with blood-slick fingers. He bit down, triggered the sixty-second burn, and threw the timer into the conduit.

  He grabbed a tin from a wall-stack and hurled it into the tunnel mouth. The lid popped and white paint splashed the tunnel walls. It dripped from the ceiling. It dripped from Cloke’s misshapen body and face. Stink of turpentine.

  The creature began to slide itself along the pike.

  ‘Get the bomb,’ shouted Lupe.

  ‘Wait,’ said Tombes. ‘Just hold on.’

  Crack of ignition. Paint combusted and filled the tunnel with fire. The creature thrashed and squealed. Lupe and Donahue released the pike and jumped back.

  Tombes pulled the remaining detonators from his waistband and hurled them into the tunnel. They fell among the flames and started to cook. Detonations like firecrackers. Flying stone chips.

  The hybrid shrieked and retreated down the tunnel. It thrashed and threw itself against the conduit walls as if it were trying to shake off the flames. The pike was still embedded in its chest. The iron rod sparked as it raked brickwork.

  The creature turned the distant junction corner and passed out of sight, leaving the conduit littered with scraps of burning, smouldering flesh.

  Mewing. Squealing. Inhuman shrieks of rage and pain.

  Lupe reattached the conduit grille and stacked boxes against the tunnel mouth.

  ‘You both saw that, right?’ she asked. ‘Cloke and Galloway. The two of them combined.’

  Tombes sat on the plant room floor, back to the wall. Donahue sat beside him. She cleaned blood from his hands and bound them with bandages.

  ‘I’m not going out like that,’ said Tombes. ‘Absorbed into some kind of giant flesh-monster. Swear to God. Anything but that.’

  ‘It will be back,’ said Lupe. ‘It won’t forget about us.’

  ‘Not by this route. It won’t risk getting cooked a second time.’

  ‘Hard to believe it was ever human.’

  ‘I’d like to think there’s nothing of Cloke left inside that head.’

  58

  Donahue sat cross-legged and warmed her hands over the fire.

  Sicknote studied her slumped shoulders, tried to work out if she were asleep. He shuffled sideways. He sat next to Ekks.

  ‘How you doing?’ he whispered, looking down at the sleeping man. ‘The pipes are freezing. Can you hear them? Contracting metal. Creak and groan.’

  No reply.

  ‘Come on. You’re awake. I’ve been watching. You’ve been awake a long while.’

  Ekks opened his eyes and stared back at him.

  Sicknote held up the notebook.

  ‘You found a cure, didn’t you? You nailed it. Everyone else struck out. Biocontainment labs around the world trying to cook up a vaccine. Expert virologists hunched over electron microscopes. You were stuck down here with a couple of scalpels. But you got there. You made the leap.’

  Ekks licked parched lips. Sicknote held a bottle of water to his mouth.

  ‘The others think you are a fraud. But they can all go to hell, right? Must be quite a trip. The power to save humanity. In your skull. Makes you the most important guy who ever lived, right? A bigger deal than Napoleon, Lincoln, Hitler. Shit, right now you’re bigger than Jesus.’

  No reply.

  ‘You want stuff, don’t you? You’re not going to give up that cure without something in return. Smart guy. Keep them waiting. Keep them guessing. Hold those aces long as you can. Take your own sweet time, then name your price.’

  Ekks held out his hands. He mimed pen and paper.

  Sicknote looked around. Cloke’s jacket. He searched pockets. He found a pencil stub and a crumpled notepad.

  Ekks took the pencil. Sicknote held the pad.

  Ekks scrawled:

  How long have I got?

  ‘Days. Maybe hours. Sorry, man. The bomb was a tactical nuke, some kind of super-radiation warhead. Zapped the whole island in the blink of an eye. Death rays passed through concrete, passed through rock. We both caught a killer dose.’

  Ekks closed his eyes.

  ‘You want some meds? These guys are EMTs. They brought a big-ass trauma kit. Uppers, downers, all kinds of shit.’

  No reply.

  ‘Hey. You might get lucky. They’ll do everything they can to keep you alive. Once they get you back to Ridgeway they’ll probably give you transfusions. O neg, right? Nothing fancy? Imagine that. All those cops and army guys lining up, offering the blood in their veins. Shit, they wouldn’t lift a finger to save my ass. Wouldn’t spit in a cup. But you
. You’re the big prize. My advice? Keep your mouth shut long as you can. The moment you give them what they need, your life won’t be worth a damn.’

  Sicknote glanced at Donahue. She gazed into the fire, drowsed on the edge of sleep.

  He leaned close to Ekks and whispered in his ear.

  ‘Know what? I can hear the virus. I can hear it, singing in the shadows. See that pipe over there? That grille? It’s down there, in the dark. It’s calling. You can hear it too, right? You know what I’m talking about. I can feel the pull. It’s north of here. Not sure how far. The heart of the city. Must be near the bomb site. Too hot to approach. Too hot for humans.’

  Ekks didn’t respond.

  ‘You know what I’m saying. I’m not talking about Galloway. I’m not talking about those ragged-ass prowlers out there in the street. There’s something else. An intelligence deep within the tunnel system. It’s made a home in the lowest sub-levels of the city. It’s growing. It’s getting stronger. This empty, radioactive world suits it just fine.

  It knows we are here. Those sorry fucks in the street. Eyes and ears. Watching us. Relaying our movements like CCTV.

  This thing owns the city now, you understand what I’m saying? Manhattan Island. Its domain. Its flesh and bone. It wants us gone. It’s sending out antibodies.’

  He polished the remaining lens of his spectacles.

  ‘Let me ask you something, doc. I got to know. The virus. Where does it come from? Was it cooked up in a lab? Did it drop from outer space? What’s the deal? Come on. You studied this disease a long while. What does it want?’

  No reply.

  Ekks cocked his head, like he was appraising Sicknote. He waved for a fresh sheet of paper. He raised a weak hand and began to write.

  Sicknote examined the list.

  ‘What do you want me to do with this? I don’t know where to get this stuff. Don’t even know what it looks like.’

  Ekks pointed at the trashed transmitter lying nearby.

  ‘You want the radio?’

  Ekks nodded.

  Sicknote held the broken radio in his lap.

  ‘This thing is all the way screwed.’

  He turned chunks of scorched circuit board in his hands.