by Adam Baker
‘Sorry. I can’t fix this shit. I don’t know anything about radios. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Ekks pointed at the radio again.
‘I don’t know what you want from me, doc. I’m not an educated guy. This list might as well be Chinese. I don’t know what any of it means. Maybe I should call the others. You want to talk to them? I’ll show them the list. They’re smart. They can make things work.’
Ekks shook his head. He struggled to raise himself on one elbow. He pointed at Sicknote, summoned his strength and spoke a single word:
‘You.’
Sicknote studied the circuit boards. Helpless shrug.
‘Why me? I’ve been locked up my whole life. Seriously. It’s been twelve years since I bought something in a store. Never had a phone. Never cooked a meal. I’m a life-long loser. I’m no damn good. Talk to Donahue. Talk to Tombes. They know how to fix machines. I can’t help. I wish I could.’
Ekks lay back and closed his eyes.
Sicknote held a sliver of board. Circuit tracery glinted firelight. He adjusted his spectacles and squinted with his good eye.
‘Hold on,’ he murmured.
He plucked a component from the circuit board. He wiped soot from the surface with a spit-wet finger. A little black chip with silver legs, like a robot cockroach. He held it close, like a jeweller assessing the internal structure of a diamond.
Infinitesimally small letters. A component stamp: LM741.
He checked the list.
‘Hey. Hey, I found something.’
Sicknote leaned over Ekks and shook his arm.
‘Doc. Wake up. I found one of the things on your list.’
No response.
‘Come on. What are we making? What are we trying to build?’
Sicknote was suddenly spooked by the man’s pale, gaunt pallor.
‘Doc? Hey doc, you okay?’
He checked for breath. A faint whisper of warmth from parted lips.
‘Don’t worry, doc. I’ll get what you need.’
Sicknote got to his feet. He shrugged off his coat and carefully laid it on the floor covering the scattered radio components.
‘Hey. Donahue.’
She blinked awake and glanced up.
‘You okay?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ She rubbed tired eyes. She stretched.
Sicknote pulled a burning chair leg from the fire.
‘I’m going to step into the hall. Take a piss.’
‘You shouldn’t go out there alone.’
‘Hell with it. If Galloway shows up I’ll torch his ass.’
‘Even so.’
‘I’ll be okay. I get the feeling I’m last on his kill list. Your head will make a better trophy than my sorry hide. I’m barely worth the effort.’
Fierce cold. The walls and vault-spans of the ticket hall sparkled with frost.
Sicknote kicked through ice-furred debris. His breath steamed the air.
Murmur of voices from the street level stairwell. Lupe and Tombes talking near the entrance gate. He couldn’t make out words.
He held up the burning chair leg. Flames cast dancing shadows. He glanced around. He couldn’t escape the skin-crawling sensation of being watched.
He crouched beside Cloke’s equipment trunk. He brushed ice from the latches and lifted the lid.
Radiological gear packed in a foam bed. A couple of spare Geiger handsets. He picked up a handset. He couldn’t release the battery compartment, so slammed the unit on the lip of the box, cracked the plastic shell like an egg and extracted a 9v power cell.
Sudden, giddy head rush. That old, dread feeling. Reality melting away.
He gripped the edge of the box.
‘No,’ he murmured. ‘Not again.’
He bit the heel of his palm, ground teeth into flesh, hoped pain would pierce onrushing dementia and anchor him in the present.
‘Please, not again.’
He climbed to his feet. He screwed his eyes tight shut.
‘I am Michael Means. I am Michael Means.’
He opened his eyes.
Pristine tiles. Dead ceiling lights restored and blazing bright. Fenwick Street at rush hour. ‘Silent Night’ over the tannoy. Bustle and distant street noise.
Guys in flannel suits shook snow from their umbrellas and queued to drop a nickel fare into the turnstile. Khaki uniforms among the crowd. Duffel bags and bedrolls. GIs headed for embarkation at a liner terminal. Minutes away from a gangplank and a troopship to Europe.
Newsstand, shoeshine, soda fountain. A civil defence fire point: sand buckets and a shovel.
A station announcement echoed from the platform stairwell:
‘Please stand away from the platform edge, especially when trains are entering and leaving the station.’
‘This isn’t real,’ muttered Sicknote.
He tried to seize a guy in a business suit, grip his collar, his silk necktie, but his hands passed clean through the apparition.
‘You’re not real,’ he shouted. ‘None of this is real.’
He stood at the centre of the hall, hands on head. A teeming crowd of ghosts passed through him.
‘Get out. All of you. Please. Just get out of my head.’
59
Lupe found Sicknote crouched by a wall. She knelt and snapped fingers in front of his face.
‘Poor bastard. Phased out again.’
‘You should have let him take that walk,’ said Tombes. ‘He wanted to die. There was no reason to interfere.’
‘Help me get him back in the plant room. He’ll freeze to death out here.’
They each took an arm and pulled him to his feet.
They sat Sicknote on the floor next to Ekks. They draped a coat around his shoulders.
‘What’s this shit?’ asked Lupe. She crouched and picked through jumbled radio components. Capacitors, resistors and scraps of circuit board.
‘Sicknote put it together,’ said Donahue. ‘He’s been sitting there, talking to himself, messing with wires.’
‘What does it do?’
‘Nothing.’
Lupe threw the clump of components aside.
‘How’s Ekks?’
Tombes knelt and checked for dilation.
‘Comatose. Dying, slow but sure.’
‘How long can he last?’
‘I doubt he will wake.’
‘We better start monitoring radio traffic,’ said Lupe. ‘See if we can make contact with the chopper, once it gets within range.’
Donahue sat against the wall, ignoring the conversation, staring at a sheet of paper.
‘Something on your mind?’ asked Lupe.
‘Look at this,’ said Donahue. She held out the paper. Lupe took it from her hand.
Orders stamped USAMRIID – CLASSIFIED.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Cloke’s gear trunk.’
Lupe scanned the text.
‘“You are ordered to locate and rescue Doctor Conrad Ekks of the Bellevue Neurosurgical Department. You are also required to locate and secure any materials, whether in written or digital form, relating to his research. You are further required to locate and retrieve the Vektor artefact.”’
‘What does that mean? That last bit? Vektor?’
‘No idea,’ said Donahue. ‘The guy talked about Ekks so much I’m sick of his name. He never once mentioned any kind of artefact.’
Lupe continued to scan the note.
‘“The artefact is essential to the continuance of the programme.” The programme?’
Donahue took a sheaf of notes from the data bag.
‘Some of the folks on that train wrote a suicide note before they blew their brains out. An account of their last days below ground. Listen to this: ‘“… the Centre for Disease Control supplied our team with a sample of the virus in its purest form. It arrived under military escort. A white biocontainment box with a half-skull symbol on the lid…” Maybe that’s what Cloke was looking for.’
<
br /> ‘I saw a box,’ said Tombes. ‘We were in the tunnel. Me and Cloke. We found a pile of burned bodies. He poked around in the ashes. There was a box with a skull on the lid.’
‘What did Cloke say about it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Doesn’t matter much at this point,’ said Donahue.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Tombes. ‘This whole situation. Doesn’t smell right.’
‘Still think you can rely on these guys to save your ass?’ said Lupe.
Deep rumble, rising to a steady thunder roll. The room shook.
‘Shit.’
They looked up. Gunshot cracks. Trickle of stone dust. The Federal Building foundations beginning to shift and fracture.
‘Christ. Cover your heads.’
The walls continued to tremble. The bucket fire spat embers. Water pipes groaned and sang. The ceiling bulb swung like a pendulum.
‘Fuck,’ said Tombes. ‘The whole lot is going to come down.’
The tremor diminished to silence. They stared at the ceiling for a full minute, braced for a bone-crushing cascade of rubble.
‘Is everyone okay?’ asked Donahue. ‘Anyone hurt?’
‘We’re cool.’
She opened the door and shone her flashlight into the hall. A cloud of stone dust washed down the street level steps.
‘Building collapse. Must have been close. Real close.’
‘Has it blocked the entrance stairway?’ asked Lupe. ‘Can we still reach the alley?’
‘I think we’re okay. For now.’
Lupe joined her at the doorway. She inspected the ticket hall ceiling. Her flashlight beam traced the deep fissure in the tiled roof.
‘Cracks are getting wider. We might have to haul ass in a hurry.’
Lupe and Donahue crossed the ticket hall. They hugged the walls, kept their eyes fixed on the buckled ceiling for further signs of subsidence.
The IRT office.
Wade’s body shrouded by a couple of foil blankets.
‘Hey, bro,’ murmured Lupe.
They stepped over the corpse and kicked through ashes.
‘Give me some light.’
Donahue focused her flashlight beam while Lupe crouched and picked through carbonised debris.
Charred poster tubes. Crisped, blackened paper.
‘Nothing. All burned.’
‘Help me shift these shelves,’ said Donahue, gesturing to a pile of planks. ‘Might be something underneath.’
They propped the shelves against the wall. They threw the remains of the phonograph aside.
A section of antique map, brown like parchment, lay on the floor. It had been shielded from the flames.
Lupe spread the ragged section of map on top of the desk.
1939 World Fair Travel Guide. Public transport routes to Flushing.
She flipped open her knife and stabbed Fenwick Street.
‘We are here.’
She stood her Maglite next to the knife.
‘And Wall Street is here. A short distance. Third of a mile, at most.’
‘What of it?’
‘The south tunnel mouth is boarded up. I reckon if we bust through those boards and follow that old IRT passage south it will intersect with the modern MTA line near Wall Street.’
‘So?’
‘What if we retrieved the boat? It’s sitting in the north tunnel, near that rockfall. What if we brought it back and headed south? If we reach the MTA network we might be able to travel far as South Ferry before we need to head above ground. We could bypass the streets entirely. Save ourselves a shitload of grief. Reach the shore without setting foot above ground. Then we could use the boat to cross the river.’
‘The flood waters are rising. Won’t be long before the passageways are completely submerged.’
‘There’s still enough clearance to navigate.’
‘Fenwick Street was a terminal stop. The end of the line. The south tunnel might not connect with anything. It might be a dead end.’
‘It’s worth a shot.’
‘You’re asking me to suit up. Put on dive gear, get back in the water and fetch the boat.’
‘Yeah.’
‘A quarter-mile trip. Another shitload of rads.’
‘Up to you, girl. Your call. But if these tunnels carry us south to the river, we’re home free. We can cross to the mainland. Shit, we can row up the coast without setting foot on land, put this city well behind us.’
They returned to the plant room.
Donahue sorted through jumbled dive gear, tried to find sufficient intact components to assemble a single functioning dive rig. She laid out a suit and checked front and back for integrity. She found gloves, overboots and flippers. She found a weight belt. She found a helmet and checked the headlamp battery for charge.
Lupe helped strap gas tanks to the back frame.
‘How are they looking?’ asked Donahue.
Lupe tapped glass and checked psi levels.
‘Some of these needles are getting mighty friendly with zero.’
‘Fuck it.’
‘Hey,’ said Lupe, looking round. ‘Where the hell is Sicknote?’
‘Ought to put that guy on a leash.’
Sicknote stood at the top of the platform steps.
The stairwell danced with ghostlight. Tarnished, broken fixtures unkinked and took on a polished gleam. Shattered bulbs recomposed themselves. Broken filaments fused and glowed incandescent. Mottled wall tiles washed porcelain white.
Phantoms pushed past and through him. Suits and wasp-waist dresses. Slicked hair and bouffants. Attaché cases and crocodile handbags. Edge of the financial district. Commuters, office workers and service staff, instinctively heading down the stairs in racially segregated streams.
Sicknote walked down the steps. He stood in the middle of the stairwell, spread his arms and let the spectral crowd wash through him.
A train pulled up at the station. Decelerating motor hum. Sneeze of air brakes. A silver subway car with old-time porthole windows.
‘Fenwick Street. This is Fenwick Street.’
Doors slid back. A fresh stream of commuters filled the platform and jostled their way up the stairwell.
‘Why not board the train?’ he thought to himself. ‘What will happen if I enter the ghost locomotive and take a seat? Where will it take me? What will I find at the end of the line?’
He began to descend the steps.
‘Hey. Hey, Sick.’
Lupe’s voice.
‘What are you doing, dude?’
Her words echoed down the decades. He heard them above station noise, the clatter of footsteps, babbling voices, the hum of traffic in the street outside.
He looked around the stairwell. Buy War Bonds! Trilbys, slicked hair, faces knotted with get-there-on-time anxiety.
A couple of girls in the blue blazer/brass button uniform of the Women’s Reserve.
All of them watched over by Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Each time they kissed there was the thrill of love… and the threat of murder!
‘Dude, what are you doing?’
Lupe’s voice, stronger, closer.
He searched for her among the jostling crowd, tried to spot her soot-streaked fire coat amongst the sea of grey flannel suits.
‘Look at me, bro.’
Her voice right by his side.
One by one, the stairwell ceiling lamps died.
The teeming crowd of business men and office girls dissipated like smoke.
Pristine tiles were mottled by a spreading accretion of dust and mould.
Cary Grant faded sepia and flaked to dust.
Sicknote found himself once more in the darkness and dereliction of the platform stairwell, feet at the water’s edge.
Lupe stood by his side. She put a hand on his shoulder.
‘Fight it,’ she said. ‘Fight the madness. Be here now, with me.’
He nodded.
‘Just breathe. Look at me. Look me in the eye. Breathe deep.’
He instinctively massaged for the implant behind his right ear. He struggled to breathe slow and deep.
‘That’s it. Better?’
‘Yeah.’ He smiled. ‘Yeah, I’m all right.’
The flood waters erupted. They leaped back. Sicknote lost his glasses. He pawed the step beside him, found the spectacles and jammed them back on his face.
A tumourous, skeletal thing rose from the water and straightened to full height. It waded thigh-deep across the submerged platform towards the stairs.
Lupe and Sicknote scrambled clear. The creature stretched clawed hands. A membranous, translucent lacework of skin hung from bare arms. The rotted thing opened its mouth and vomited filthy tunnel water.
Then it lunged.
60
Lupe pushed Sicknote to one side and swung her axe. The blade embedded in the creature’s throat. The creature staggered to maintain balance, head lolling, spinal cord intact. A second axe blow sheered clean through its neck. The head bounced down the steps and splashed in the water. The decapitated corpse toppled backwards and sprawled on the stairs.
Two more infected figures rose from the flood water.
Lupe grabbed Sicknote by the collar and dragged him clear.
‘Come on. Let’s face them on high ground.’
Donahue ran down the steps to meet them. She gripped an iron pike. She swung at one of the creatures. A glancing blow to the head ripped away its jaw, leaving upper teeth and a lolling tongue.
She gripped the pike like a javelin. She delivered a stab to the chest and pushed the rotted thing into black waters.
Another shuffling figure, arms outstretched. A doorman weighed down by a long braid coat.
Lupe swung her axe. She brought it down hard, missed the guy’s head, and lopped an arm. The blade continued its downward trajectory, hit a step and struck sparks.
‘Damn,’ winced Lupe. Her hands and forearms stung from the impact.
She hefted the axe and swung again. The blade embedded in the doorman’s stomach. It lurched backwards, jerking the axe from Lupe’s hands.
Lupe and Donahue backed up the steps. Another creature rose from the water. A sanitation worker draped in garbage. Green overalls and hi-viz. It stumbled up the stairs towards them. Lupe delivered a chest-kick that sent it toppling into the flood water. They leaped aside to avoid the toxic splash.