by Adam Baker
The boat pushed through a bobbing scrim of garbage. Bottles, sodden newsprint, polystyrene packing chips.
A couple of bodies floating face down. They stank. Rotted and rat-torn. She tried to steer clear. The cadavers bumped against the boat. She pushed them away with an oar.
She was soothed by the tunnel darkness, a mesmeric splash-echo each time she dipped her oar. The place had a funereal beauty. Passageway receding to infinity. Stonework glazed with ice. Rusted roof signals. Fissured brick and dripstone.
Firehouse shift patterns had left her well acquainted with the arid landscape of exhaustion. She understood its bleak, Arctic terrain. Impaired judgement. Emotional lability. Sudden euphorias: giddy elation followed, minutes later, by black despair.
Detach, she told herself. Crush all emotion. Exhaustion will persuade you to love the womb-like tranquillity of darkness and silence. It will rob you of strength like hypothermia, paralyse you with a smothering wave of peace and wellbeing. You will become entranced by the passageways, their siren beauty. You will sit numb and thoughtless in the boat as the flood waters rise, lulled by dripping water and cool tunnel wind.
Fight it.
Survive.
She threw back her head and roared.
‘Fight, motherfucker.’ Her voice reverberated from the tunnel walls, alien and shrill. ‘Fight, bitch.’
She punched her thigh.
‘Yeah.’
Another punch. Invigorating pain, like a shot of caffeine.
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
She gripped the oar and began to paddle. Strong, muscular strokes. She sang ‘Danny Boy’.
Fleeting memory. New Year’s Eve. Tombes sitting on the bar at McDonnell’s wearing shorts and a fire hat, leading the chorus, beer glass in each hand.
She rowed harder, sang louder.
An arched passageway to her right. A ragged cave mouth blocked by prop-beams and planks. An old work notice nailed to the wood:
DANGER
DO NOT ENTER
UNSTABLE
KEEP OUT
Donahue turned her dive helmet and trained the halogen lamps on the tunnel entrance. The beam washed across crooked planks and shafted into the darkness beyond.
A raft of garbage had collected behind the planks. Blankets. Plastic drums. Scraps of sheetrock. The remains of a tunnel hobo camp. A refuge built by broken souls fleeing sunlight and city bustle. They had lifted an unchained grate, descended ladders, climbed downwards into darkness and solitude. Permanent midnight. A soothing all-better-now like a mother’s embrace.
A splash. A disturbance in the water near the planked cave mouth. Spreading ripples. Donahue focused the light. A skeletal face. An infected creature squirmed between wooden slats. Bone projected through quilted coat fabric. A splintered clavicle.
The putrid revenant pulled itself clear of the planks, hit the water and sank. Waves subsided and the black flood waters settled glassy smooth like onyx.
The creature suddenly broke surface shockingly close and executed a thrashing, spastic breaststroke as it headed for Donahue’s boat.
She hesitated. Flight or fight? Row, or confront the weak, dying thing?
Better to fight. She would easily outpace the creature if she rowed for Fenwick, but it would follow her wake. Sooner or later the rotted ghoul would reach the platform steps and emerge from the water. Better to kill it now.
She picked up an oar and snapped it over her knee. Splintering crack. The shaft tipped with jagged fibreglass.
She knelt in the prow of the boat, splintered shaft of the oar held in her hand like a harpoon, ready to strike.
Two more infected creatures wormed between crooked planks, squirmed from the darkness and seclusion of the cave mouth.
Double splash. Spreading ripples. Skeletal creatures thrashing through flood water, heading her way.
‘Shit.’
Donahue threw down the makeshift spear and picked up the remaining oar. She began to paddle.
It was a pursuit out of fevered dreams, out of heart-pounding nightmares. She rowed as fast as she could, yet maintained an imperceptible pace. The twin helmet lamps at the front of the boat illuminated the flooded tunnel. Bricks and buttresses passing so slowly it felt like she wasn’t moving at all.
She couldn’t see the creatures swimming behind her, but she could hear the churn and splash as their arms beat water. The sound echoed from the tunnel walls, loud and intimate.
She glanced back. They were close. They would reach her before she achieved the safety of the station platform.
Something up ahead. The hulk of the old IRT coach sitting on a siding. Warped wooden cladding hanging on an iron frame. Doors hung open. Water almost high as the windows.
Donahue paddled towards the coach. She drifted alongside, and shone headlamps through the vacant windows. Brass fixtures hung from rotted timber. Corroded seat frames protruded from dark water.
She lashed the tether to a window pillar, gripped the frame of a side door, and eased herself into the coach.
She held up the helmet and scanned the dereliction.
Saturated oak panels soft and malleable as cork. Rotted drapes. The wilted blades of ceiling fans.
Waist-deep water. A crisp film of ice fractured as she waded to the front of the coach. Bone-chilling cold.
The planks beneath her feet were soft as carpet. She walked slow, checking each floorboard would take her weight.
She stowed the helmet on an overhead luggage rack, and angled the halogen lights. The flooded coach lit harsh white.
The door at the end of the carriage was jammed. She kicked it. She punched it. Rotted timber fell apart like wet cardboard.
She looked out into the tunnel darkness. She could hear splashes, hands slapping water.
Three creatures swam out of the shadows, thrashing the water with clumsy strokes. They headed inexorably towards her. Bearded vagrants weighed down by winter coats.
She adjusted her grip on the broken oar shaft.
They drew close.
She thought about Tombes. A head full of screaming dissonance. A series of happy memories interrupted by gut-punch trauma:
Summer night. Tombes with his arm round her shoulders as they leaned on a river railing and contemplated the floodlit span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Horror-flash:
Tombes lying dead on the ticket hall floor, right arm ripped from his shoulder socket leaving torn muscle and a partial sleeve of flaccid skin.
A midnight promenade along the Wildwood boardwalk. Eating cotton-candy, watching the summer crowd and stately revolutions of the Ferris lights.
Horror-flash:
Smashed skull, spilled brain, tongue lolling in an open mouth.
Donahue rubbed her temples. Sudden wave of nausea. She leaned out the carriage door and puked. She spat to clear the taste.
She leaned against the doorframe.
‘Come on, guys.’ She could hear the exhaustion in her own voice. ‘Party time.’
The first guy reached the carriage. Long, grey beard. Yellow teeth. He gripped the sides of the doorframe, eyes fixed on Donahue. Black eyeballs stared through a curtain of lank hair. He struggled to pull himself up into the carriage, leaning on the submerged coupler for support.
Donahue gripped the lapel of his coat.
‘Let me give you a hand.’
She helped the stinking revenant climb into the carriage.
‘There you go.’
She drove the splintered oar into the creature’s eye socket. The vagrant jerked rigid like he’d had a high-voltage shock. Donahue twisted the shaft deeper into his head. He convulsed a couple of times then toppled backwards, oar still wedged in his head. Donahue tried to maintain a grip, but the smooth fibreglass shaft slipped through her gloved hands.
The vagrant toppled back through the doorway. He floated for a moment. Donahue made a last snatch at the oar shaft. Then his waterlogged coat dragged him down into black.
‘Shit.’
She stood in the doorway and looked out into the tunnel darkness.
The other two vagrants were gone.
She froze. She listened for movement. She grabbed her helmet from the luggage rack and began to back down the carriage, sweeping halogen light over smooth waters, tensed for an attack.
Sudden lunge. One of the bearded hobos leaned through a window and grasped for Donahue. She gripped his arm and pulled him further through the window, then swung her steel helmet and delivered a skull-shattering blow. The vagrant slid back through the window and sank.
She edged towards the side door, sweeping her helmet lights around the empty, inundated carriage.
She leaned out the door. She gripped the edge of the boat and pulled it close.
Peripheral movement. She looked up. A rotted vagrant crouched on the carriage roof directly above her head. It leaned forwards, matted hair hanging down, and hissed.
64
Lupe watched the north tunnel mouth. She checked her watch.
‘Donnie should be back by now.’
She turned around. Sicknote sat on a stairwell step. Blood ran down his neck and chest.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted Lupe, vaulting the steps three at a time.
She grabbed Sicknote’s wrist and pulled his hand from his ear. Fingers dripped blood. She pushed his head to one side. The implant port hung out of his head, trailing wire.
‘Christ.’
‘I want it out of my head,’ said Sicknote. Woozy smile.
‘You’ll pull your damn brains out, idiot. I’ll fetch a dressing. Sit there. Don’t move. Don’t touch your head.’
Lupe fetched a first aid kit. She sat beside Sicknote. She brushed blood-matted hair aside and examined the wound.
A small, titanium five-pin socket. Two small screws, threads clogged with blood and bone splinters.
‘Jesus. You wrenched this bastard right out your skull.’
Lupe tore the wrapper from a pair of surgical scissors. She snipped iridium wires, thin as hair.
She held up the socket.
‘That’s the power pack,’ said Sicknote. ‘Some kind of lithium charge.’
‘So what did it do? Zap your brain each time you had one of your visions?’
‘It made them worse.’
Sicknote held out his hand. Lupe gave him the implant. He hurled it into the flood water.
She dressed the weeping hole in his skull. She washed her hands with bottled water. She gave him Tylenol.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Better.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m not a robot. I don’t want to be controlled.’
Lupe checked her watch again.
‘Forty minutes since I spoke to Donnie. She ought to be here.’
‘She’s pretty ill. She might need to stop for a rest. Got any more Tylenol?’
Lupe threw him the pot. He knocked back more pills.
He picked up the tangle of radio components and continued to twist wire. He unscrewed the earpiece of the transmitter headphones and knitted the little speaker to the circuit. He lashed cable round the stairwell’s iron balustrade and used it as an antenna.
‘Take it easy,’ said Lupe. ‘You lost a lot of blood.’
‘I feel good. Honestly.’
‘You’re high. Blood loss. In a minute, you’ll crash.’
He touched frayed cable to the terminals of a nine-volt battery, and adjusted the tuning dial. He sat with the speaker pressed to his ear, frowning with concentration.
He scratched his scalp.
‘I just fixed you up,’ said Lupe. ‘Don’t re-open the wound.’
‘My skin. Itching all the time.’
Lupe pointed at the radio.
‘You won’t reach shit. No power. No range.’
‘I’m not trying to talk. I’m trying to listen.’
‘Listen to what?’
‘The virus.’
Lupe sat beside him. She held the little speaker to her ear.
‘Nothing. White noise.’
‘Listen harder.’
‘There’s nothing. It’s a dead channel.’
‘Can’t you hear it? That pulsing sound beneath the static? I’ve heard it every time anyone used a radio down here. Like a hammer knocking wood.’
‘Interference. Lot of iron in these rocks.’
‘Listen again. Can you hear it? Each click is different. There are variations. Little changes of tempo.’
She put her ear to the speaker once more.
‘It all sounds the same to me. Just noise.’
Sicknote held up the notebook. ‘Ekks transcribed the sounds. That’s what these letters and symbols represent. Not words. More like musical notation. A precise record of the endless tunnel song.’
‘He tuned in to its thoughts? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah. That was his big-ass breakthrough. Other labs round the world tried to kill the disease. Nuked it with penicillin and antibiotics. I heard there were a bunch of guys down a missile silo in the Everglades doing all kinds of Frankenstein shit. But Ekks figured out the virus was smart. He tried to communicate. He spoke to the parasite.’
‘An actual conversation?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did he ask?’
Sicknote shrugged.
‘How should I know? Obvious questions, I guess. Who are you? Where are you from? What do you want?’
Lupe picked up the notebook.
‘And you think he wrote down answers?’
‘That’s why the notebook is so precious. It’s mankind’s first and only communication with this disease.’
‘I don’t buy it. It’s a germ. A bug squirming in a Petri dish. It doesn’t have thoughts. It doesn’t make plans. You can’t talk to it, any more than you can interview syphilis.’
‘No,’ said Sicknote. ‘You’re wrong.’
Lupe gestured to the crude radio.
‘So you’re listening to it right now? Is that what you think? Monitoring its thoughts?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So what does it say? What’s it trying to tell you?’
‘It’s from somewhere cold and dark. It’s travelled a long way. Unimaginable distances. It slept, thousands, millions of years. It dreamed. And now it’s awake.’
‘Crazy,’ said Lupe. ‘You’re not listening to the radio. You’re listening to the voices in your head.’
‘It’s all true. Swear to God.’
‘You don’t believe in God. And he sure doesn’t believe in a loser like you.’
A warm glow of light from the throat of north tunnel.
Lupe stood at the water’s edge.
‘Donnie?’ Her voice echoed from the tunnel walls. ‘Donnie, is that you?’
Faint oar splashes. Donahue paddled into view. She was sweating with effort. The dive helmet propped at the prow projected the weak orange glow of a battery burned dry.
She guided the boat to the foot of the stairwell and threw the tether line. Lupe caught the rope, pulled the boat close, and lashed the line to the stairwell balustrade.
‘I brought company,’ said Donahue.
Faint splash from the tunnel mouth. Churning water. Lupe trained her flashlight. A rotted skeletal thing. It flailed and thrashed. It nudged plates of ice aside. A vagrant with a long beard and matted hair, trying to stay afloat, fighting the waterlogged overcoat that threatened to drag it beneath the surface.
A stack of paint tins on a step. Lupe picked up a tin and loosened the lid. She hurled it towards the creature. The tin hit the water with a cannonball splash. The lid popped loose as it sank. Water surrounding the flailing revenant was filled with shimmering globules of oil. A wide chemical slick shone greasy rainbows.
Lupe pulled a slat from the fire bucket and hurled it spinning into the cavern darkness. The burning shard executed an elegant, flame-fluttering arc, then hit the water.
Ignition.
Blue fire washed across the surfa
ce of the flood. Ice fizzed and dissolved. Flames danced high and scorched the tunnel roof.
The creature thrashed and cooked. Burning arms, burning head. Matted beard hair shrivelled to nothing.
The creature fixed its gaze on Lupe and Donahue standing twenty yards away at the water’s edge. It strained to reach them from a lake of fire.
Face burned away. No lips, ears or nose. Eyeballs boiled, burst and evaporated.
Convulsions. Slow death. The vagrant sank beneath the surface. Skin crisped and popped as the corpse slowly submerged.
The fire dwindled and died. Blue smoke hung over steaming, fizzing water like swamp gas.
‘Any more of these fucks heading our way?’ asked Lupe.
‘There were three. I killed the others.’
Donahue was bleeding. A gash to the forehead. She released lock rings and pulled off her gloves. Lupe gave her a bandana. She dabbed the wound on her forehead.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Lupe.
‘Yeah.’
‘You didn’t get bitten, did you?’
‘No.’
Donahue sat on a step next to the bucket fire. She rubbed tired eyes.
‘Look at me.’
Donahue looked up.
‘Swear to me. Tell me that’s not a bite.’
‘It’s not a bite. And by the way, screw you.’
Donahue wearily got to her feet. She unzipped and stripped out of her drysuit. She pasted a dressing over the gash on her forehead. She dressed and pulled on boots.
She pointed at Sicknote, sat on the step listening to the radio apparatus.
‘What happened to his head?’
‘A little elective brain surgery.’
‘What’s he doing?’
‘Communing with the virus. Let him be.’
A couple of backpacks leaned against the stairwell wall. A couple of rolled NBC suits. Lupe threw them into the boat.
She pointed at crooked planks nailed over the south tunnel entrance.
‘Guess we just pull those aside and see how far south we can get.’
‘If the water rises any higher we’ll drown.’
‘This city is dreaming up new ways to kill us every hour. We’ve got no choice. We got to move out.’
Donahue checked her watch.
‘Still a couple of hours before the scheduled pickup.’