The Annihilation Protocol

by Laurence, Michael

  “Did you see the trigger?” Ramses asked.

  “Exposed wires pass through the hole in the bulb, into the upper liquid. They’re connected to a motion detector that barely sticks out of the top of the bricks. The domed kind with sensors that cover a full three hundred and sixty degrees. Not a very sensitive model. Battery-powered, little more than a toy. We could work around it in open space, if we could see it.”

  “So why can’t we?” Layne asked.

  Mason focused on the unmistakable rectangular reflection he’d seen.

  “Because the lamp’s been retrofitted with a solar cell. The kind you buy to charge your cell phone and that works even under indoor lighting conditions.”

  It was an ingenious trap. The Scarecrow had known that anyone pursuing him down here would have to use either night-vision goggles, which didn’t have sharp enough resolution to discern the motion detector from the bricks until the wearer was well within its range, or flashlights, which would charge the photocells and send a current through the filament in the bulb. Setting off either one would create an electrical charge large enough to ignite the chemical bomb he’d created.

  And they’d been shining their lights right at it.

  There was no way of knowing how much charge had accumulated in the solar panel, so they couldn’t risk turning on their lights again, even for a second, for fear of reaching the threshold charge and triggering the reaction, which meant they were going to have to beat the motion detector in total darkness.

  They could only guess at its range, but even a three-foot radius was more than enough to cover the entire width of the aqueduct. The fact that the Scarecrow had lowered it into the bricks in an effort to conceal it just might work to their advantage, though. By doing so, he’d blocked off everything below the level of the rubble surrounding it.

  “We go underneath the detector,” Mason said. “That pile of bricks has to be at least a foot and a half high. We should be able to circumvent it if we keep our bodies pressed to the ground and don’t knock over the lamp.”

  “Screw that,” Ramses said.

  “Then head back to the house. I won’t hold it against you. We’ve got this from here.”

  “You think I’m scared of a little mustard gas and a fiery death? I’m just pissed I have to get down in that water. It smells like whatever died in it shit all over itself in the process.”

  Mason smiled in the darkness. There were worse people with whom to share an agonizing death than his old friend.

  “I’ll go first,” he said. If he’d misremembered any of the details of what he’d seen, the remainder of their lives could very well be measured in seconds. “Don’t follow too closely, in case something goes wrong.”

  “Like ten feet’s going to make a big difference,” Layne said.

  Mason lowered himself to his chest and turned his face sideways, both to minimize his profile and to keep his mouth and nose above the vile water. He scooted sideways until he felt his shoulder rise up onto the slope, stretched his arms out in front of him, and planted his palms on the slimy bricks.

  Deep breath in.

  Long, slow exhalation.

  He pushed with his toes, pulled with his hands, and managed to move about four inches.

  Again, push with his toes, pull with his hands.

  Four more inches.

  The glow of the phosphorus faded. He could only guess as to where the lantern was now.

  Push with his toes, pull with his hands.

  Frigid water sloshed against his cheek, into his ear. The smell was so intense, he could taste it. His shoulders already burned from the exertion. He bumped something hard with his elbow—

  A clattering sound, followed by a splash near his head.

  He closed his eyes and listened for the electrical sizzle of current passing into the fluid.

  Seconds passed.

  Nothing.

  He exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and scooted away from the bricks, careful how high he allowed his right shoulder to creep up the sloped wall.

  Pushed with his toes, pulled with his hands.

  Again and again.

  He heard a faint clamoring sound behind him as Ramses knocked the fallen brick back against the pile, but he didn’t even slow.

  Push, pull.

  “I’m past it,” Layne whispered.

  Mason tried to gauge the distance between them. Maybe a dozen feet. The length of his body plus Ramses’. There was no way the sensors reached that far, but he wasn’t taking any chances. Another three feet and he eased to the side to allow Ramses to squeeze in beside him.

  “We can’t just crawl forever,” Ramses said. “For all we know, this guy’s standing right above us with night-vision goggles, having a good laugh at our expense.”

  “Surely we’re out of range by now,” Mason said. “Layne?”

  “Just be ready to run if you’re planning on doing what I think you are.”

  He closed the lens of his flashlight inside his fist and switched it on. A pale pinkish glow seeped out from between his fingers. He relaxed them just enough to allow a little more light to leak out, barely enough to see the impression of the pile of bricks behind them, at the farthest reaches of sight. It had to be a good twenty feet away, with the solar cell on the far side, facing the opposite direction.

  The tunnel ahead of them was empty, save for the rusted rungs protruding from a flattened section of the wall. He slithered over to them and rolled onto his back. They led upward into a narrow, circular chute. His beam was just strong enough to reveal the hint of the iron disk sealing the top. He waited until Ramses and Layne were nearly on top of him before rising to a crouch.

  “Stay here,” he said, and scurried upward, the tapping sounds of his feet striking the sticky rungs echoing below him.

  The manhole cover at the top was cold and solid, its edges sharp and uneven where someone had used an acetylene torch to cut through the welding that had once sealed it in place. He braced his feet and shoved the cover upward until he was able to slide it to the side with a screeching sound.

  A column of moonlight, barely brighter than the tunnel itself, streaked past him and encircled Layne, who stood at the base of the ladder, silhouetted by the aura of light coming from deeper in the tunnel to her right. She must have given Ramses her flashlight, he realized.

  “What do you see?” she whispered.

  Juniper shrubs had grown over the manhole. He pushed them aside and found himself looking up into a dense canopy of deciduous trees, their skeletal branches intertwined to such an extent that he could barely see a handful of stars directly overhead. A gentle snow had started to fall, frosting their limbs.

  “Nothing.”

  Mason transferred his flashlight to his mouth, drew his pistol, and crawled out through the vegetation. The manhole cover beside him was coated with a crust of dirt so thick, it would have been invisible even to someone standing right on top of it, assuming the person dug through the carpet of dead leaves first. A dusting of accumulation concealed a natural trail of stones that almost looked like a staircase ascending the hillside toward the granite formation at the top, above which he could see the outline of the crossbar to which Charles Raymond’s arms had been tied.

  The forensic team had packed up and moved on. There was no hint of movement through the surrounding trees, no aura of flashlights in the distance. No voices carried over the distant din of car horns and sirens. There wasn’t a soul within the boundaries of the park.

  His phone rang through on his Bluetooth. He tapped the button to connect.

  “I’ve picked up your GPS beacon,” Gunnar said, “but it doesn’t appear as though anyone else has.”

  “Just poking my head out to get a look around and gather my bearings,” Mason whispered.

  “I sent you some more maps that might be of interest. Turns out there are a bunch of subway tunnels in various stages of completion and abandonment down there. And even more proposals that mad
e it to some unknown stage in the drilling process. There’s a lot of drama surrounding the early subway operators, especially during the twenties, with the Independent City-Owned line making an aggressive play to cut the Interborough Rapid Transit Company and Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company out of the East Side and bankrupt them in the process.”

  “Now’s not the time for a history lesson, Gunnar.”

  “The moral of the story is that the mayor at the time, John Francis Hylan, hated that private interests controlled the subways, so he created his own public line to compete, which required a little creativity and a lot of secrecy. His early proposal for a Second Avenue line incorporated a shortcut under Central Park, some of which we know was actually built because it was incorporated into the Q line.”

  “How far is that from my current location?”

  “Just under a half mile to the southeast.”

  “Guys,” Ramses called from below. “You’ve got to see this.”

  “Heading back down,” Mason said.

  He slid back into the ground, dragged the manhole cover into place, and descended as fast as he could. The call dissociated into static halfway down. He killed the connection and let go of the rungs as soon as he was within range of the ground. Landed with a splash.

  Ramses stood maybe fifty feet ahead of him, framed by mounds of broken bricks and granite. Curtains of roots cascaded from the exposed earth above him. He shone the beam at Layne and Mason as they approached, then to his left, into a gaping maw where the bricks had fallen. They caught up with him and followed the trajectory of the light down into the earth, to the point where it dissolved into the fathomless darkness.

  Mason knelt and examined the mess of sludge that had been tracked up onto the rubble. The Scarecrow had definitely dragged Mikkelson’s body through here.

  “We’re screwed,” Layne said.

  Mason could only nod. He stood, aligned his flashlight beam with the sight line of his pistol, and, without a word, ducked through the hole in the collapsed wall.

  62

  Mason skidded down the loose rocks to the edge of the hole, which overlooked a cavernous chamber bathed in darkness. The walls and ceiling were rugged, coarsely chiseled granite braced by a framework of ancient wooden cribbing so old and ravaged by water damage that entire sections had collapsed, including the one supporting the rubble upon which he now stood. Twin rail lines ran across the muddy ground, covered with so much loose talus, they disappeared in places. Murky puddles formed beneath weakened sections of the earthen roof, from which a steady drizzle of water fell. An ancient railcar protruded from the rocks below him, abandoned and forgotten. A mine cart overflowing with stones sat on the adjacent track, which vanished into the dark mouth of a tunnel leading deeper into the earth to the southeast.

  Broken lengths of timber and boulders formed an uneven walkway down to the bottom. Mason descended cautiously, pausing every few steps to shine his beam into the crevices around him. There could have been motion sensors or pressure plates rigged all around him and he never would have seen them. The path where Mikkelson’s body had been dragged was readily apparent. Unlike inside the aqueduct, no effort had been made to hide the trail.

  Layne hopped down behind Mason and knelt over a footprint that couldn’t have been more than a day old. She snapped a picture of it with her cell phone, then stepped in the dirt beside it to demonstrate scale. Her print wasn’t all that much smaller.

  “How does someone barely larger than I am haul a full-grown man down here by himself?”

  “You think he had help?” Mason said.

  Layne didn’t answer. She walked past him and shone her light through the maze of wooden support posts, elongating their shadows into the tunnel. The brackets and bolts were rusted, the wood rotted in some places and nearly petrified in others. It was as though construction had simply ceased one day and never started back up, leaving the years and the elements to have their way with everything the workers had left behind.

  Mason opened the file Gunnar had sent him. This tunnel wasn’t on any of the modern maps, the hand-sketched blueprints of the BRT and IRT lines dating back more than a century, or even on the proposal for the mayor’s Independent line, which passed diagonally through the park to the south. And yet here it was, a partially completed tunnel beneath one of the busiest metropolises on the planet, abandoned during the Great Depression.

  “We can’t be more than fifty feet down,” Ramses said. His voice reverberated from the surrounding stone. “They’re lucky the whole damn park hasn’t collapsed.”

  Mason took a mental snapshot of each of the maps before returning his phone to its holster.

  The scuffing sounds of their footsteps echoed ahead of them into the tunnel, which narrowed until it was barely wider than the twin tracks and maybe ten feet high. Wooden scaffolding was replaced by smooth granite. They passed stacks of rusted rails and decomposing railroad ties. Shovels, picks, and spades held together by rust and splinters. Kettlelike cement mixers and massive drums filled with rubble for removal. A wooden ladder scaled the wall into a chute drilled through the granite.

  The trail left by Mikkelson’s dragged body led straight to it.

  “I guess we’re going up,” Layne said.

  Mason shone his light toward the top of a ladder easily as old as the collapsed cribbing behind them and into shadows his beam couldn’t penetrate.

  “Ramses—” he began, but his old friend cut him off.

  “No worries, Mace. I’m totally cool with waiting down here while you guys climb that totally stable and completely safe ladder.”

  “I knew I could count on you.”

  “Hey, what are friends for?”

  Mason directed his beam at rectangular wooden rungs made from two-by-fours, the edges of which were scored where heavy objects had been repeatedly dragged across them. He climbed upward toward the shadowed recess in the earthen ceiling. As he neared, his light revealed the system of pulleys that had once been used to hoist equipment and excavated rock to the surface. It had been threaded with modern climbing ropes, presumably to help the Scarecrow raise Mikkelson’s body to the ledge underneath the manhole, the welded seal of which had been cut in the same manner as the last one.

  “You know what’s up there, right?” Layne said from several rungs down.

  “He could still be alive.”

  “You and I both know the odds of that.”

  Mason shoved aside the manhole cover, which supported a thick layer of dirt and weeds, and emerged into a thicket of evergreens and elms. Some distance behind him, across a walking path and beyond a wall of weeping willows, was the placid surface of the lake and a line of paddleboats tethered to a pier. To his right, Bethesda Terrace stood empty, its red bricks rapidly vanishing beneath the accumulating snow, which settled upon the outstretched wings of the bronze Angel of the Waters statue, posed as though emerging from the fountain, her heavenly form completely at odds with the one looming over Mason from behind.

  He crawled out and reached back for Layne, who clasped his forearm and allowed him to pull her up beside him. They remained on all fours for several minutes, silently inspecting the ghastly tableau, until they were certain they were alone.

  The post had been sunk directly into the earth, the victim bound to it in such a way that his toes grazed the detritus. Like the others, he wore overalls, a flannel shirt, and a straw hat, which had fallen down to the bridge of his nose, concealing his eyes. His face was swollen to such a degree that it appeared to have been molded from a paste of flour and water, the vessels in his cheeks and nose striking through it like black lightning. Open necrotic lesions ran upward from beneath his collar, across his neck, and onto his face, almost as though someone had splashed him with acid.

  Mason barely recognized Andreas Mikkelson, who appeared to have been dead for several hours. A wire ligature attached to the crossbar was wrapped so tightly around his neck that it disappeared into the folds of skin. Faint scratching sounds emanated f
rom beneath his clothes.

  “They’re coming from inside him,” Layne said.

  She took out her cell phone and started snapping pictures.

  Mason glanced over his shoulder and searched the branches of a spruce for what he knew had to be there. The camouflaged camera was mounted about ten feet from the ground and directed straight at the victim’s face. It was a remote-broadcasting model, the kind that could transmit for up to a mile, a radius that had to cover at least ten thousand apartments. He wondered if the Scarecrow had stopped watching after Mikkelson died or if the monster was staring back at him from the other end of the wireless connection at that very second.

  “Oh God,” Layne said.

  He turned back to Mikkelson. She was right: The scratching sounds were definitely coming from inside of him. It almost sounded like he was trying to take a breath through his collapsed trachea, but he couldn’t possibly still be alive, could he?

  Mason brought his face to within inches of Mikkelson’s, whose lips parted just far enough for a wasp nearly the size of his thumb to crawl out from between them. It had a red face, a black thorax, and a striped abdomen, with a stinger that had to be half an inch long. Someone had removed its wings. He snapped a quick picture of it and sent it to Gunnar, who called him back within a matter of seconds.

  “It’s called the Japanese giant hornet. Vespa mandarinia japonica, a subspecies of giant Asian hornets endemic—as I’m sure you surmised from the name—to the Japanese islands. It can be extraordinarily aggressive toward humans if provoked.”

  “Like by plucking off its wings?” Mason asked.

  “I’d imagine that would do it,” Gunnar said. “According to the Journal of Immunology, its venom is nearly as toxic as that of an Egyptian cobra. It eats through the skin and attacks the central nervous system. They don’t lose their stingers, so they can inject you countless times.”