by Tim Curran
“This is the main drain line,” Johnny explained to her. “It runs beneath the entire length of Chestnut Street. Most of the rainwater sewers in this town are only big enough to crawl through on your hands and knees. Some are a lot smaller. This one feeds to a culvert that empties into the river. That’s where we’re going.”
Lisa lit a cigarette. “Only you would think of something like this.”
“I been down here lots of times.”
“I believe it.”
He seemed surprised. “You grew up here and you never been down in the sewers?”
She shook her head. “Guess I missed out on that. I feel so incomplete.”
He laughed, leading the way through the darkness, splashing just ahead of her. “We used to come down here, get stoned and drunk when we were teenagers. Usually there’s only a trickle of water down here, half a foot, if that. But we’ve had a lot of rain lately, what with the storms and all, so it’s pretty deep.”
Lisa caught up to him, stayed at his side. “So we’re going to crawl through a pipe into the river?”
“Got a better idea?”
“Yes. The streets above.”
He shook his head. “No, not a good idea. There’s lots of them up there. Rabids everywhere.”
“Rabids?”
“It’s what I call ‘em. They’re crazy, foaming at the mouth. Rabids.” He paused, scanned the light along the walls. “See that?”
There was a crude, ancient pot leaf carved into the discolored face of a brick.
“Nice,” she said.
“Yeah, me and my buddy Tommy did that. Tommy Haynes. I was sixteen. Before the war.”
They splashed along, shoulders touching. “Was it bad?” Lisa said.
“What?”
“The war? Vietnam.”
He rubbed his jaw, sighed. “Yeah.”
Lisa didn’t push it.
“Christ, I hate it down here,” she admitted.
Johnny smiled. “Reminds me of somewhere else, another set of tunnels.”
“The war?”
“Yes.”
Everything echoed in the sewer.
The sound of their boots slopping through the water was like thunder. Water was dripping and running, the sound of it amplified. The entire situation was surreal. It was the sort of place that would have driven a claustrophobe crazy—the stone walls pressing in, the sluicing water, the cloying darkness, and the ripe stench of rot and buried things. And above it all, the seepage from above, dripping and dripping.
Like a cave in an old movie.
They passed another ladder leading to a manhole above.
Lisa looked to Johnny hopefully, but he plodded onward into the subterranean maze.
The dampness was everywhere.
It came from the gently flowing river of rainwater, it came from the air, it bled from the damp stone walls. Lisa hugged herself, trying to keep warm, trying to hear anything but the dripping, the hollow splashing sounds, the noise of rainwater running from outlet pipes.
After awhile, it got on your nerves.
And when you had the need, the habit, things were only magnified as you came down. She tried to keep it out of her head, tried to think about her mom and dad and what the chances were that they had escaped (but that blood, all that goddamn blood, sticky, stinking). It only made things worse, though, so she examined her current situation minutely…unpleasant as it was.
She thought: I came home to see my family after being gone for five years. I came home with a hit record under my belt, a lot of money from a successful yet grueling tour which nearly killed me (nearly killed all of us), and a heroin habit. I came home, not expecting much, but finding that my dad had accepted who and what I was, was maybe even proud of me. That would have been enough. I could have been happy. Maybe it was what I needed all the time, just that. Not the music or the life or the money or the drugs, just acceptance, understanding. Yes, I could have been happy. Except, I wandered into this goddamn nightmare and what the hell is this all about, what—
Johnny concentrated his light on something bobbing in the water. “A dead one,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Just a rat,” he told her. “Lots of ‘em down here. Always has been. The heavy rains probably drove most of ‘em to higher ground, the rest maybe drowned.”
“Rats. Christ.”
Johnny shrugged. “Not so bad. They won’t bother you. Trust me, rock star, infinitely preferable to what walks above.”
So they kept going and Lisa kept trying to forget about the gnawing in her belly while making concessions about rats being preferable to the rabids, as Johnny called them, haunting the streets above.
It was not easy.
She felt ready to crawl out of her skin.
There was something indefinably eerie about all this.
“Hey, Rambo?” she said, needing badly to hear a voice, even her own. “Before you said that I was naïve. That I didn’t know what this was all about. What did you mean by that? Do you know?”
He looked at her, looked away. “I know some things.”
“And?”
“Take too long.”
Great. Mystery man clutching secrets to his bosom. “It had to happen quick, right? I mean, the whole fucking town? If it took weeks, the authorities would have been involved. They would’ve stopped it or quarantined this place or something. Right?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” He touched her arm, paused. “It depends what they’re up to. Who can say?”
She sighed. “You speak in riddles, white man. I’m just saying whatever this is it went fast. You were here…how fast did it happen?”
“I live outside town. In the woods. I wasn’t here.”
“You were close enough.”
“You wanna know how it happened? I’ll tell you that much. There was a storm. Not the bad one. Just a rainstorm a few days before. I was out of town, didn’t see it. Old guy who lived out by me said it was strange…a black rain. Ink-black.”
Lisa stared at him. “Black rain?”
“Yes.” Johnny shrugged. “That’s what he said. Lasted only for a couple minutes, he said, that blackness. Other than that, it was just a normal rain. Next day, people were getting sick. Flu symptoms. Closed the school, lots of businesses. Nobody thought it was odd, what with all the flu raging around the country. Then we got that bad storm, shut the town down. When it was over…”
“It was like this?”
“Yes.”
“You think there was something in the rain?” she asked.
“Could be,” he said, his tone lifeless. “Could very well be. Like I said, I never go into town much. But I can imagine how it went—everyone calling into work and what not, laying around in their beds, dizzy and weak, puking maybe, not liking the sunlight at all. Sleeping a lot. Maybe when they finally woke up, they weren’t the same anymore. They’d changed. And what happened then? They started seeking out the ones who hadn’t been infected so they could spread it, whatever got to them. A race purge, you know? Eliminate the normal ones, the different ones. Bring ‘em into the fold or kill ‘em.”
“This is creeping me out,” Lisa admitted. “Like they’re…they’re…”
“Vampires? Is that what you were thinking?”
“I guess.”
“Why not?” Johnny said, finding the comparison acceptable.
He wouldn’t say anything after that, but he really didn’t have to. Oh, Lisa knew he knew more than he was saying. But she honestly didn’t want to know more. Enough was enough.
Whatever happened was evil.
And maybe that was silly and superstitious, but it was the only word that seemed to apply: evil.
Of course, being down here in the sewers wasn’t helping a goddamn thing.
She didn’t feel any safer down here.
It was like wandering through the musty confines of a tomb. In her head, despite her attempts to steel herself, there was that voice telling her there was danger here. No, m
aybe it wasn’t exactly a voice as such, but, God, it was clear, it’s meaning crystal. She couldn’t do a thing to dissuade it.
Maybe it was instinct.
Logic and reasoning were impotent in its shadow.
It made her heart thud dully like a hammer into a bag of sand, made the breath positively wheeze from her lungs as if her throat had constricted down to a pinhole, her air sacs thick with dust. Her skin was cold, damp, and shivering and it didn’t have shit to do with this sodden, inundated pesthole. It came from within, bled through every swollen pore, every dilated blood vessel. It filled her guts with warm, rolling jelly, snapped her eyes wide and unblinking. The hairs along the back of her neck were straight and taut as wires.
She’d never known such complete and total terror before.
Maybe it had something to do with the monkey on her back, but she honestly didn’t think so. Her adrenaline was high, electric, surging in every cell and for once, the need seemed to be nonexistent.
Is that what it took to go clean?
Either days of agony in some dark room or mindless fear?
“Stop,” Johnny said to her.
“Why? What is it?”
There was an edge to his voice and she didn’t like it at all.
Her heart practically kicked out of her chest like a boot through wet cardboard.
Johnny cocked his head to the side, narrowed his eyes.
He kept playing the light ahead, but the beam made it only fifteen, twenty feet at best before being swallowed by the stygian murk. Fingers of mist curled from the gently sluicing water.
Lisa wiped a sheen of dampness from her face, became very aware of the beat of her heart, her breathing.
She kept watching.
A cigarette butt floated by.
A few leaves.
Water dripped and dripped.
“I thought I heard something,” he whispered. He turned around, flashing the beam behind them. “Maybe I was wrong.”
Yeah, and maybe I’m ready to piss my pants out of sheer imagination, she thought fearfully, but I seriously doubt it.
They moved on wordlessly, communicating their dread silently. It rode on their backs like some black amorphous shadow, one with weight, with awful texture. It slid frozen fingers around their throats, whispered horrid truths in their ears.
And ahead…that tunnel, the burrow of some huge and obscene worm twisting into utter blackness.
“Stop,” Johnny said, this time a frantic whisper.
He had clutched Lisa’s arm, holding it tight and sure, not letting go.
And there it was.
A brief moment after their splashing footfalls ended, so did others.
Johnny swung around, bringing up the shotgun and the flashlight. Yes, behind them. He stood motionless and Lisa stood at his side, formed concrete, the guitar case oddly weightless for a change.
A minute.
Two.
Three.
Splash, splash, splash.
No more cat and mouse, the hunt was on.
Prey had to be brought down with claws and teeth. And it wasn’t only the sounds of approaching feet—many of them, in fact—but worse things now, echoing through the black throat of the sewers. Muted screams, cries, chattering, shrill childlike laughter. And scraping sounds like sticks were being dragged along the bricks…or sharp, bony fingers.
“Get ahead of me,” Johnny told her, afraid, but very much in control. “There’s a manhole up ahead. Run for it!”
Lisa needed no further urging: she ran.
Running, running, running.
No easy matter in two feet of thick, turgid water.
Running with Johnny at her back, the flashlight casting wild, creeping shadows in every direction, knife-edged black phantoms washing over them.
And the echoesthundering, reverberating. Their own and those of the things that gave chase.
Lisa’s legs were filled with sand as they pumped along, aching, tired, but refusing to give in until the hunters brought them down. Splashing, water spraying in her face, soaking her guitar case which she knew was waterproof but could’ve cared less if it wasn’t. Vintage, expensive guitar? Fuck it, there were others. She planned on beating off her attackers with it if it came to that.
And they were gaining.
She was sure of it.
Maybe she could not hear it with all that echoing noise, but she could feel it just fine. She almost went on her ass half a dozen times, but through luck or pluck she stayed upright and then before her, thank God, there it was.
The ladder.
“Gimme your guitar,” Johnny said, pulling it from her hands and replacing it with the short-barreled shotgun and the flashlight.
Lisa did not argue.
He went up the rungs like a monkey, pulling the guitar case with him. At the top she heard him grunting and exerting, heard a metallic groan, iron scratched over cement. Then light…feeble, but light…spilling in from above.
He pulled himself up and out.
“NOW!” he shouted to her. “COME UP NOW!”
But she didn’t move as fast as she wanted to, almost as if some grim curiosity had to see what could make such sounds.
But then she smelled them, offensive, ripe like wet dogs.
Something kicked into her throat, maybe her heart, maybe a clot of raw terror.
But it got her moving.
She clawed her way up the rungs and she could hear the rabids shrieking and snarling, feel the cold air they brought with them, smell their breath like raw, spoiled meat.
And then Johnny somehow had hold of her and hoisted her out effortlessly.
He held her to him, maybe a moment too long, but it felt good, right, necessary. Then they were on their feet and Johnny was pushing the lid back on the manhole and he almost had it, but it was too late.
A tangle of clawing, clutching hands erupted around the edges of the lid, a mutiny of dead white fingers. The lid went clattering into the street. So many hands, four or five anyway, but small, delicate.
The hands of children.
Somehow, this was worse.
Yes, Lisa thought madly, the kids still hang around down there, Johnny. It’s still their place, even now.
Then they were running again, the feel of the damp night, the chill breeze so beautiful, so refreshing after the cloistered, suffocating underworld. The moon brooded above, huge, round, the color of fresh bone. A lonely, omnipotent killing eye, it described the city in a wan glow.
A harvest moon, a hunter’s moon.
The very thing to hunt and die by, as it was in the ancient world.
Although Lisa was exhausted, her legs rubbery and knotted with pain, she kept going, trying to stay up with Johnny who, despite the fact he was nearly twice her age, was in much better condition. So it wasn’t that surprising that she didn’t see the curb that spilled her to the sidewalk, made her nose kiss the cement, brought blood.
And maybe they smelled it.
The rabids.
Because it brought them, a swarm of them.
They came crawling and leaping out of the shadows like hyenas for fresh meat. They moved with a perverse, slinking motion as if they were more snake than human, boneless and fluid. They crept from behind the hulks of cars, from the mouths of alleys, through broken windows, and, yes, from manholes.
Jesus, so many.
Hissing and slavering, they came. An inhuman throng grinning with cruel mouths slashed in red against clownwhite faces, sinister yellow eyes, huge and unblinking, fingers hooked, matted fright wigs for hair. Naked, clothed, dressed in rags and what might have been the bloodied skins of domestic animals and human beings.
And the sounds.
Chatterings and chitterings and throaty growls. Shrill pipings and congested whisperings as they advanced.
A teenage girl came hopping out on all fours, screaming, teeth snapping.
Johnny cut in her in half with the shotgun, racked it, and killed two others.
In the span of less than thirty seconds there were five bodies on the pavement, limbs still twitching, mouths still chomping, teeth still grinding.
Johnny and Lisa made their break as the rabids set on their fallen comrades.
Lisa, her brain a hive of rushing noise, looked back once and saw them.
Dozens now, tearing and feasting and fighting.
But what really wrecked her was the sight of a little girl, no more than five or six, clad in stained yellow Dr. Denton’s, ripping free a decapitated head from a strand of bloody meat. Tearing it free and clutching it to her bosom like a soccer ball and scuttling off into the shadows with it.
That’s what made Lisa start screaming.
14
Lou Frawley watched the shoes under the stall door.
They did not move, did not do anything. Like a knife in the shadows, they waited for him, waited for his soft neck to get in range.
There was something caught in his throat.
It was cold and slippery. When he swallowed it back down, it landed thick in his belly like a shivering clump of coagulated grease. It could not be digested, could not be voided. It hung there, spreading out tentacles of nausea and making him want to vomit very badly.
Terror. Yes, terror so absolute it physically manifested itself.
How long, he had to wonder, could a person live on a raw diet of such continuous horror? How long before it brought on a coronary or a stroke?
He clutched the .38 tightly in his fist and approached the stall door.
The bathroom lights buzzed overhead as if the fluorescent tubes were full of wasps. A trickle of sweat ran down his spine. Every time he thought he could know no more fear, no more trembling apprehension, this town threw something new at him. Its menu of dread lunacy was inexhaustible.
He paused a few feet away from the stall door.
Far enough back that whoever was in there wouldn’t be able to kick it open and get the jump on him. He stood there, wondering what he should do—get the hell out or look this in the face and kill it if it indeed needed killing.
He stepped around the side of the door so he was out of range.
His palms damp with perspiration, he reached out for the catch on the door.