by Adam Baker
‘Tombes,’ bellowed Lupe. ‘Need some fucking help.’
Tombes fed another couple of chair legs onto the fire.
He crossed the room. He bent and inspected Ekks. The guy lay motionless and sallow. Tombes leaned close and checked for the rise and fall of the man’s chest.
Carotid pulse. Weak. Slow.
A distant shout from Lupe.
‘Tombes. Need some fucking help.’
He snatched up his axe and ran for the door.
Lupe, Donahue and Sicknote scrambled up the stairs. Three infected creatures on their tail, climbing the steps hand-over-hand.
Sudden hiss and fizz. The stairwell lit blood red.
They looked up. Tombes at the top of the stairwell, axe in one hand, flare in the other.
‘Here.’ He tossed the axe to Lupe. She snatched it out the air.
She braced her legs ready to swing.
‘Hey. Cabron.’
One of the creatures hissed. Lupe swung the axe and split its head in two.
‘Who’s next, motherfuckers?’
A broken thing dragged useless legs.
Lupe rotated the axe, swung hard and hammered the spike into the nape of its neck. She jerked the axe free, ripping away scalp, brain and a section of skull.
An eyeless revenant clung to the balustrade. It stumbled up the steps, left arm clutching the air as it reached for Lupe.
She adjusted position and brought the axe down in a shallow stroke that decapitated the creature with a single blow.
Tombes glanced around for a weapon. A fist-sized chunk of roof rubble lay beside a pillar. Angular enough to crack skulls. He threw down the flare and sprinted across the hall. He skidded to a halt and snatched up the rock.
A splintering crash.
The freight elevator filled with dust and split wood. Something kicking its way through the planked roof.
Some kind of gargantuan, misshapen spider.
Tombes slowly backed away.
The grotesque creature crept from the deep shadow of the elevator and was lit by crimson flare-light. Four legs. Four arms. Bloated torso. Burned flesh.
Cloke’s head twisted side to side.
‘I knew you’d be back,’ murmured Tombes.
A gasp of horror from the stairwell. Donahue and Sicknote standing at the head of the platform steps, transfixed by the monstrous thing crouched in the corner of the hall.
The creature’s head swung back and forth. A cold, insectoid intelligence surveyed Tombes, then turned its attention to Donahue and Sicknote.
The creature moved towards Donahue. A powerful, arachnid glide.
‘Hey,’ yelled Tombes. ‘Hey, over here.’
The creature turned its attention back to Tombes.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ hissed Donahue. ‘It’ll rip you apart.’
The creature sidled left, then right; a slow dance that pushed Tombes away from the plant room and platform stairwell, and cut off any means of escape.
‘Watch it,’ shouted Lupe. ‘It’s boxing you in the corner.’
He nodded.
‘Donnie. Lupe. Get ready to run.’
Tombes shrugged off his coat. He tossed the rock hand to hand, assessed it for weight.
‘Think you’re going to make a meal out of me?’ he yelled. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’
He turned to one side and pulled back his arm like he had the pitcher’s spot.
‘I love you, Donnie.’
He hurled the rock. It blurred through the air and struck the creature’s flank, tearing flesh.
The deformed thing emitted a high, inhuman howl.
It ran at Tombes. It crossed the ticket hall in a lightning, liquid scuttle.
Tombes turned and sprinted as fast as he could. He ran at the wall. The creature shrieked with rage as, somewhere within its insect mind, it perceived what Tombes was about to do.
Tombes dived headfirst into the station sign.
Fe ck eet
His head slammed into the tiles. Skull-shattering impact.
Lupe grabbed Donahue and Sicknote and pushed them towards the plant room.
‘We’ve got to get out of here.’
The creature stood over Tombes. Harsh, braying roar. It grabbed his broken body and swung it back and forth until an arm ripped from a shoulder socket. The cadaver skidded across the tiled floor and came to rest.
Door slam.
The Galloway/Cloke hybrid swung around. Lupe, Donahue and Sicknote shut in the plant room.
The creature loped across the ticket hall and hurled itself against the door.
Lupe and Donahue put their shoulders to the door and tried to hold it closed. Shuddering impacts. Splintering wood.
Lupe shouted to Sicknote:
‘Come on, dumb-ass. Get something to prop the door.’
Sicknote backed away in fear.
Rusted strap hinges tore from wood. Tumourous arms punched through the panels.
The door gave way. Broken planks kicked aside.
Lupe and Donahue backed off as the grotesque, melded form ducked beneath the lintel and entered the room.
A bulbous, misshapen head. Two skulls jostling for position behind Cloke’s face.
The creature looked around. Jet black eyes. It saw Sicknote and snarled.
Sicknote grabbed an axe. The creature was on him before he had time to swing. He was seized by four arms, lifted clean off his feet. He dropped the axe. He was slammed against the wall.
Donahue snatched the axe from the floor and swung. She put all her strength behind the blow. She buried the blade deep in the creature’s back. She hung from the shaft.
A pair of hands reached behind the creature’s back and tried to detach the axe blade. Donahue was thrown to the floor.
Engine noise. A sputtering growl.
Lupe revved the stone cutter. She pressed the blade to the creature’s waist. Whirling teeth sliced flesh. Shriek and squirm. Blood spray. Bubbling pus and rot-stink.
Bone-crunch as the blade snagged spine. The grotesque thing convulsed and fell to the floor.
Donahue hurled paint cans. The cans hit the wall and burst open. The wounded creature drenched in white paint. Overpowering turpentine stink.
Lupe kicked over the fire bucket scattering embers. Catastrophic vapour ignition. Fireball. Burn-roar. Lupe and Donahue threw themselves to the floor as flames washed overhead.
The creature lay at the centre of the conflagration, engulfed in fire. Limbs thrashed and cooked. Black smoke. Boiling fat. Popping, spitting flesh.
The monstrous, melded thing contorted and flailed. It ripped itself in half at the waist. The upper torso squirmed away from the flames, trailing ropes of intestine. It gripped water pipes and swung itself up the wall. It snatched at Lupe’s head. She ducked the grasping talons and rolled clear.
The Cloke/Galloway hybrid dropped to the floor and crab-scuttled into the hall.
Lupe struck a flare. Crimson fire. She stood in the plant room doorway and peered into the gloom.
‘Is he out there?’ asked Donahue.
Lupe squinted into shadows. The wrecked roof of the freight elevator. The dark passageway leading to the flooded platform.
‘I think he’s gone.’
They edged out into the ticket hall.
A crumpled fire coat lying among the rubble. Lupe picked it up. A shamrock patch on the sleeve. Erin go Bragh.
Tombes lay beneath the FENWICK sign. Donahue approached his body. She tried not to look at his empty shoulder socket and his shattered head.
She plucked the gold crucifix from his neck and put it in her pocket.
She threw the coat over his upper body. Then she knelt and prayed.
61
A tunnel cave mouth blocked by prop-beams and planks.
Bedrock still bore the scars of drills, picks and dynamite cartridges wielded by nineteenth-century navvies; Irish gangs that descended rope-lashed ladders below ground and bored the subway passage by lamplight.
&
nbsp; Schist speckled with coarse flakes of mica. Fissures wept groundwater.
A hobo camp at the back of the cave. A crude bivouac. A shanty built from sticks and blankets. An oil can fire. Crate furniture. Stained bedding. Glass crack stems. Garbage bags and a shopping cart full of cans hoarded for redemption.
The camp was overwhelmed by rising flood water. Inundated shacks slowly listed and collapsed like sandcastles succumbing to an incoming tide. Garbage bags bobbed and bumped.
Three homeless guys curled foetal on a rock shelf. Thick beards and dirt-streaked faces. Laceless army boots. Quilted coats leaked insulation foam. Clothes torn by knotted tumours.
Beside them, on the ledge, was a makeshift griddle made from stacked tunnel bricks and mesh. A pile of bones and torn cycle Lycra. A woman they found lost in the tunnels, bloody and sobbing for help. A woman they raped and bludgeoned with a rock. A woman they cut and ate, cooking up slabs of muscle, salivating over steaks dripping hot fat, unaware she had been bitten and infected.
The ground-tremor of an office collapse somewhere on Broadway. The juddering rumble echoed through the tunnel system like an oncoming train. Trickles of dust and grit from the fractured roof. Flood water shivered and rippled.
One of the homeless guys climbed stiffly to his feet, as if responding to a silent command. He stepped from the ledge and plunged shoulder-deep into black water. He waded towards the cave entrance.
He pressed against the crooked planks. Heightened senses. Somewhere out there, deep within the tunnels, merging with the rush of churning water, he could hear the murmur of voices. An intoxicating scent carried in the air. Blood. Sweat. Fresh meat somewhere south near Fenwick Street.
Fleeting memory. He and his companions hammering planks, driving nails with a chunk of brick, sealing themselves inside the remote cavern.
‘Let those motherfuckers fight it out, up there in the world. We’ll be all right down here, brother. We can hold out for days. We got food. We got everything we need.’
The skeletal revenant drew back an arm and threw a heavy punch. A fist slammed wood. Blood splash. Broken fingers. A second punch. A third. The fist reduced to a mess of blood and bone. The creature continued to pound the planks and beams. Wood began to splinter and break.
62
Lupe and Donahue sat on the platform steps and gazed into black water.
‘I’d go myself,’ said Lupe. ‘But I know jack shit about scuba. Hell, I can’t even swim.’
‘First in the door,’ murmured Donahue.
Lupe helped Donahue climb into the drysuit.
‘Help me get my arms through the harness. All right. Tighten the straps. A little more. That’s it, that’s good.’
Donahue wriggled gloves. She inspected lock rings.
Lupe bent and picked up the heavy steel helmet. She checked the gas line was firmly screwed in place.
‘It’s a short swim,’ said Lupe. ‘Just grab the boat and bring it back.’
Donahue didn’t reply. Strength sucked by a sudden wave of sadness. She wiped tears with a gloved hand.
‘Hey,’ said Lupe.
She slapped Donahue across the cheek.
‘Hey, look at me. Look me in the eye, girl. You have to get it together. He would want you to live.’
Donahue nodded.
Lupe slapped her again, shook her shoulder.
‘If you die down there, what’s the point? What’s it all been for?’
‘All right.’
Lupe stepped back. She lowered the helmet over Donahue’s head and secured hex bolts.
Lupe and Sicknote pitched camp on the platform stairs. They laid Ekks across the steps.
They carried their backpacks to the stairwell and propped them against the wall.
Lupe filled the fire bucket with fresh wood. She uncapped a flare.
‘No point saving these, right?’
She struck the flare and jammed it into the bucket. Table legs and chair slats began to burn. The stairwell filled with smoke and crimson flame-light.
A couple of infected corpses lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs. Lupe kicked them into the flood water. The cadavers floated among garbage. Beverage cups and pages of Sports Illustrated locked in a thickening crust of ice.
‘Versatile bastards,’ said Sicknote. ‘Who knew they could swim?’
He stood and stretched.
‘How long has she been gone?’
Lupe stooped and picked Donahue’s G-Shock from a pile of folded clothes.
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Freezing down here. Nothing to trap heat.’
‘White tiles,’ said Lupe. ‘I feel cold just looking at them. Makes sense to pitch camp here, though. Better than sitting in the plant room waiting for Galloway to take another bite.’
Lupe warmed her hands over the fire.
‘Reckon he’s dead?’ asked Sicknote. ‘Galloway?’
‘Doubt it. But he’s not half the man he was.’
Sicknote emptied his pockets. Resistors, capacitors, a tuning dial. He cracked his knuckles and began to work on the circuit board.
‘So what the hell is this thing?’ asked Lupe. ‘Trying to repair the radio?’
‘I’m following instructions. Ekks showed me what to build.’
Lupe shook her head.
‘Voices in your head, dude. Ekks is out for the count. He hasn’t told you shit.’
‘He woke. He wrote stuff down.’
Sicknote pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Lupe held it up, angled so she could read by firelight.
‘Dude, this is your handwriting.’
‘No.’
‘I watched you scrawl all kinds of shit over the walls in Bellevue. Remember the dayroom? All that ketchup? Hell is coming. We are dust. You wrote this.’
‘No. Ekks woke. He spoke, a little. He asked for pen and paper. I watched him write the list.’
‘Look at him. He’s comatose. He hasn’t moved an inch. Probably never will. You didn’t talk to him, dude. Trust me. It was all in your head.’
‘I swear. It was his voice.’
‘Why would he talk to you? Think it through. You were nothing to him. A lab rat. A chance to test his brain implant. Why didn’t he speak to Donahue? Tombes?’
Sicknote looked down at his hands.
‘Because he knew I would follow orders.’
He held up the radio components.
‘If Ekks has been unconscious this whole time, if he hasn’t said a word, then how could I build this? How could I write this list? I don’t know the first thing about electronics.’ He held up the component sheet. ‘Forty-seven pF capacitor. I don’t know what the fuck a capacitor does. Doubt I heard the word before today. How could I select these bits and put them in sequence?’
‘That pile of junk doesn’t do a thing, far as I can tell. Transistors strung on wire. Looks like the kind of tribal jewellery a pygmy would make if they discovered a plane wreck in a jungle clearing. You might as well wear it round your neck.’
Sicknote shook his head.
‘I’m sane. Right now, I’m sane. I see the world clear and true. You’re wrong about Ekks. He figured something out. He made some kind of big discovery, down here in the dark. It’s not a vaccine. It’s not a cure. He found something big. And now he’s reaching out, trying to make us understand.’
Lupe picked up the notebook and thumbed pages.
‘So what has he found?’
‘I don’t know. But that’s why he held on so long. His body is falling apart, but his heart keeps beating. Pure will. There’s something he has to tell us, something we need to understand, before he can die.’
63
Donahue hauled herself over the bow skirt and rolled into the boat.
She wiped water from her visor. The floor of the boat was cluttered with dive gear. Spare flippers, spare weights, spare gas.
She found bottled water. She struggled to twist the cap with gloved hands. She split the bottle open with a knife and emptied it ov
er her helmet, arms and chest. She sluiced radioactive flood water from her drysuit and threw the empty bottle aside.
She twisted lock-rings and pulled off her gloves. She unbolted her helmet and lifted it clear. Her breath steamed in the frigid tunnel air.
She released harness clasps and shrugged off her backplate and tanks. She shut off the regulator.
She dumped her weight belt. She unbuckled ankle straps and kicked off her flippers.
She looked around. Impenetrable blackness. Her helmet was still plugged to its nickel hydride battery pack. The lamps still burned. She held up the helmet and surveyed the tunnel.
The flood waters had risen so high her head was inches from the rough brick roof. She could reach up and touch cracked stonework and crumbling mortar.
Too much clutter at the bottom of the boat. She threw stuff over the side. Dive gear. Couple of coats.
She found Nariko’s fire hat. Old style, stitched from thick leather, the kind that got handed down generation to generation, proud emblem of a family’s dedication to the service.
She turned it over in her hands, rubbed grime from the captain’s shield, buffed it on the sleeve of her drysuit.
She glanced at the rockfall, the curtain of rubble that blocked the north passageway. Somewhere, beneath those tons of concrete and steel, Nariko lay interred.
Donahue pulled the tether line and brought the boat closer to the rubble. The PVC hull abraded concrete. She leaned forwards and placed the hat on a boulder. She adjusted its position, made sure it was sitting straight and proud.
If Nariko had died in the line, if they’d stopped the city traffic, given her the pipes and drums, the helmet would have rested on her coffin at the head of a fire truck convoy.
It belonged close to Nariko.
Donahue unhooked her radio.
‘I reached the boat.’
‘You okay?’
‘Yeah. I’m heading back.’
She took position in the centre of the boat. She set her helmet and battery pack on the prow. Twin halogen lamps lit the tunnel ahead.