The Unnoticeables

by Robert Brockway

  “I pry, you fly,” I said to Wash, motioning down into the pool of black so thick you could scoop it up in your hand.

  Wash nodded once, curtly, and leapt feetfirst into the hole.

  “Jesus fuck!” I screamed after him.

  There was a distant thump and some quiet moaning.

  “There’s a goddamned ladder, Wash!”

  More moaning.

  I swung my legs over the ledge and scrambled down the ladder. When the last cold rung slipped out of my fingers, I swatted around until I felt something Wash-shaped.

  “You all right?” I asked him.

  “I believe that I have taken most of the fall on my butt and elbows,” Wash answered.

  “Can you walk?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Let’s go, then,” I said, and waited for the sound of Wash moving.

  Nothing.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To … to the club, man. Come on.”

  “Yes, I know. But which way is that?”

  “It’s…”

  Shit.

  The air inside the sewer was stifling. I could feel the dark pressing in all around me, like a tangled sleeping bag. I tried to think how I’d been oriented when I came down, but I couldn’t remember. If you pressed me, I probably couldn’t have told you which way was down. I knew which way was up: The opening above us shone like the sun, though I knew the street we had just left had been mostly unlit. From one end of the tunnel, I heard a dull and distant rumble. It sounded like garbage trucks perpetually crashing into each other from about two blocks over.

  “Hear that?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  “I think it’s the music from the club. Let’s head that way. Here, put your hand on my shoulder.”

  I reached out in the general direction of Wash’s voice and ended up with my palm flat over his face. He replaced it with his hand, and I put it on the shoulder of my jacket, right over the little metal spikes. I took a half step forward, holding Daisy’s mangled kickstand in front of me like a torch.

  It took us about six years to go ten feet.

  “God damn it!” I lashed out with the metal bar and contacted nothing. “We’re never gonna get there in time. If fucking Gus hadn’t taken my lighter, we could—”

  “Do you want a cigarette, right now?” Wash asked, confused.

  “No, dipshit. For light.”

  “Oh,” he said, and his hand dropped away from my shoulder. There was a metallic clack, and then a fucking meteor flared into life.

  “Jesus,” I said, shielding my eyes from the blinding flame. “Are you kidding me? Tell me that you’re kidding me, Wash.”

  “I am not kidding you. What would I be kidding you about?”

  “You had your lighter all this time, and you didn’t think to use it?”

  “You did not think to ask for it.”

  “How was I supposed to know you even had it?”

  “You bought it for me last week.”

  Point, Wash.

  “Give.”

  When my eyes finally adjusted, I had to admit that the cosmic flare I’d seen a second ago was actually a pretty meager flame. It illuminated an area maybe five feet around and wavered perilously from the slightest draft. Still, it may as well have been a lightning strike for all the difference it made. At least now we wouldn’t stroll obliviously over a sharp drop or into some gator’s mouth.

  “You think those stories about the alligators in the sewer are true?” I asked jokingly.

  “Absolutely,” Wash answered, without a moment’s hesitation.

  We stopped talking after that.

  We followed the rumbling for what felt like miles, watching for an opening into the club, or at least a branching path that might lead to … something. But we didn’t find anything. Just a long, straight shot of concrete tube, stinking of mold and shit, pitch-black and forever.

  Wash’s Zippo got too hot to hold about ten minutes ago. I had it wrapped up in my jacket sleeve now, held aloft in front of me like a magic wand to ward off the dark. It couldn’t have much fuel left.

  “There’s no way the club is this far,” I finally said, breaking the silence.

  No answer.

  “Right, Wash?”

  Silence.

  Wash was gone. Wash was gone … and there was still a hand on my shoulder.

  I spun about, brandishing the kickstand. I nearly bashed Wash’s wide eyes right out of his head. He screamed. I screamed. It was not a dignified moment.

  “What the hell, man?”

  “What? What did I do?”

  “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I did. I nodded.”

  I briefly considered bludgeoning him and leaving his body here to feed the mutant goldfish. But with a saintly effort, I managed to repress the anger and shove it into the little cubbyhole in my mind where I keep all the things I hate.

  I repeated the question: “So you think we passed the club, too?”

  “Yes,” Wash answered, looking up at the sloping concrete ceiling. “Plus, there’s no way it’s this deep.”

  “Deep?”

  “Of course. We have been walking downhill for some time now.”

  “What? How can you tell?”

  “The water.” Wash pointed at the thin stream of brownish gray trickling into the darkness. “It flows downhill.”

  “No, that’s only … Fuck me. You’re right. Why the hell didn’t you say anyth—”

  Flicker. Waver. Black.

  The Zippo had run out of fuel.

  We both lapsed into hopeless silence.

  “I guess we go back,” Wash finally said. He sounded dismal.

  “I guess so,” I agreed, “but at least it should go quick. We know there were no branching paths. No crap in the way to trip over. We can jog it. We’ll just go ’til we hit the light from the open manhole. Maybe try the door again. Maybe just light the fucking building on fire and see if we can smoke the bastards out.”

  “Or we could just bar the doors and burn them.”

  “What the hell kind of talk is that? Jezza is in there.”

  “Jezza is dead. You heard him scream and you heard him stop. You saw what they were doing when we left hi—Ow! What was that?”

  “That was a fucking kickstand to the knee, asshole. You don’t say that. We lost your girl, and that sucks, and I’m sorry. But Matt and Safety Pins got away, and we’ll get Thing 1 and Jezza back, too. We don’t lose any more tonight. So you don’t say he’s dead until we see it with our eyes, you understand? You fucking understand, Wash?”

  Silence.

  “I can’t see you nodding.” I sighed.

  “Yes, I understand,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  “Let’s get started,” I said.

  I reached out and gently pushed against Wash’s chest. He turned and began to run. There was no sound but our shoes smacking around in the little stream of sewage.

  Splish splash. Splish splash. Splish sp—

  We had only made it a hundred feet or so when I grabbed Wash’s shirt and pulled him to a stop.

  “W—” he started, but I pinched the skin on his back and he fell silent.

  We listened to the dark rumble.

  Some sort of pumping station?

  I kept my hand on Wash’s shirt, waiting for … what, exactly?

  I’m going fucking crazy down here.

  I nudged Wash forward again. More splashing. The rhythm was hypnotic. You could pick up forms there, like a song. Our footfalls were even and repetitive: Splish splash splish splash splish splash splash—

  I tugged on Wash’s shirt again, and we both came to a sudden, synchronized stop.

  Somewhere in the dark behind us, there was one single, solitary, mistimed splash.

  It has been walking with us, hiding its footfalls with ours.

  Splash.

  It took an unconcealed step now. It realized the game was up.

  Splish. Splash.
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  A girl’s laugh, low and sweet and sincere.

  Splish splash splish—

  I raised Daisy’s kickstand up in front of me, like that would do fuck-all. I tried to drop low, but there was nowhere to take cover.

  Splash splish splash splish sp—

  It was running toward us. Picking up speed. I couldn’t place the distance with those echoes, but it was close. Louder and louder, faster and faster. I struck out with the bar. Nothing. I did it again, and sliced through more empty air.

  Splash. Silence.

  That last one sounded like it had come from right in front of me. It was out there somewhere. Waiting just beyond the reach of my pathetic little weapon.

  I held my breath. I practically pulled a muscle in my eyelid trying to see something—anything—in that darkness.

  “You were almost there.” A female voice, thick and coy. Close. So close it was practically on top of us.

  I lunged forward and brought the kickstand down hard, on nothing.

  Laughter.

  “You were almost at the party,” the voice sounded in the darkness. Slightly farther away? “You can’t stop now.”

  Splashing again. Rapid but fading. It was moving away from us, quickly and unerringly.

  “Come see your friends,” the voice said, giggling. It was far and faint. Almost inaudible beneath the rumbling. “Come see what we’ve done to them.”

  We waited in frozen silence, straining for any hint of movement. It couldn’t have been more than a minute. It seemed like hours. I felt more than heard Wash stir behind me.

  “You do not have to go, but I am going,” he said.

  I smiled at him, then remembered he couldn’t see it.

  “Like I’m gonna let you make me look like a pussy.”

  “It did not sound like she hit anything or fell down anywhere,” Wash prompted. “It might be safe to run.”

  Yeah, fuck it. Why not?

  I broke into a dead sprint. My feet flew, landing flat and sliding in the muck. Only my absurd momentum kept me upright. I laughed a little, if only at the stupidity of it. We were barreling down a dark sewer after an unseen assailant—two blind, aimless missiles firing forward into the void.

  * * *

  I had no idea how long we’d been sprinting through the pitch black tunnel, but my legs had gone numb five minutes ago. I jumped and scraped my head on the low ceiling. I skipped for, like, maybe a quarter mile, just for some variety. I let out a whoop that echoed forever. I tried out a baseball slide—dropping onto one thigh and coasting for a good ten feet over the slippery mucus that had accumulated across every inch of the sewer floor.

  It worked surprisingly well.

  You know, sliding may be the single most underrated method of travel—

  I bit a very small part of my tongue clean off.

  I had forgotten to account for Wash, sprinting along behind me. He clipped the back of my head with his knee and went down in a heap somewhere ahead of me. We took turns swearing at each other and catching our breath for a bit.

  “Fuck your mother raw, Wash. Watch where you’re going,” I said, spitting a few mouthfuls of blood in his general direction.

  “Die in an avalanche of shit, please,” he replied. “I do not understand why you were on the ground.”

  “I was sliding, dumbass.”

  “Oh,” he said, then after a long pause: “Did it work?”

  “Hell, yes. It’s all slick, man! Like a giant waterslide.”

  “Oh,” Wash repeated, then again: “Oh.”

  “The fuck are you doing, Wash?”

  “Oh,” he said. “My voice. It sounds odd.”

  “Maybe it’s all the cocks in your mouth distorting the timb—Shit. You’re right. Hoo!”

  The noise traveled a matter of feet, then disappeared completely. Like something was out there eating the words. I had gotten so used to a tight echo after every sound that the absence of it unnerved me. It took me a minute to catch the meaning: We were no longer in the sewer. We were in someplace more open. Something that felt vast, now that I thought to pay attention to it. I wondered how long ago we’d left the relative safety of the tunnel. How long had we been running through this gargantuan unseen space, full of God-knows-what terrible obstacles? We could have fallen into anything—yawning pits, sharp rocks, vicious mole-men, masturbating hobos—but more worryingly, where the hell were we supposed to go? The tunnel was simple. I understood the tunnel.

  She went thataway. Go get ’er.

  Now what?

  “It sounds like it is everywhere,” Wash noted.

  He was right. The rumbling wasn’t louder, exactly, but it was more present. It ground at your ears from every direction equally, like tumbling around inside a giant cement mixer. I swiveled my head around, trying to hear if it was louder from any one particular direction. Something had to be causing it: a processing plant or water pump or some shit. Didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it was running, which meant it would probably have some kind of passage or walkway workers used to get to it—maybe even an exit to the surface. No way in hell were we leaving without Thing 1 and Jezza, but maybe it would be smart to grab a rope, a pen and paper, some food, some water, some rollerskates, a flamethrower, perhaps a couple of small howitzers, and above all, some goddamned motherfucking flash—

  Lights!

  They were almost invisible. Tiny pinpricks hovering in the distance. I thought they were more misfires, at first—you know how if your eyeballs go without light long enough, they start supplying their own? Those little shimmering pops and dazzles that float around your vision like jellyfish caught in the currents? I’d been seeing that crap for miles. But these lights only danced when I moved my head. They were fixed. They were real.

  “Wash,” I said, “look.”

  “Where?”

  “Over there,” I pointed, and immediately felt dumb. “To my left? Your … right? I don’t know where you are. Just swing your head around a bunch until you find something to look at.”

  “Ah, yes. Lights.”

  I felt around in the dark until my hand landed on Wash’s thigh.

  This was getting downright erotic.

  I helped him up and we stepped cautiously toward the specks. Having gotten some perspective, I could see now that they weren’t small, just far away. A half mile off, at least. That couldn’t be right. No way a space this big should exist underground.

  After an eternity of careful shuffling (something about the wide-open space made sprinting blindly seem like a much worse idea), we reached the lights, though we couldn’t see what was making them.

  They are … below us?

  We eased onto our bellies and pushed our heads over the lip of a dirt embankment. A hundred feet away and ten feet down, we saw the source of the lights: six waxy yellow bulbs hanging from a half dozen ancient, corroded streetlamps. They looked like something out of a period drama, all wrought-iron and decorative metal swirls. They were evenly spaced along the length of a low, raised platform. A busted awning covered in graffiti and weathered posters creaked above it. Below it, a narrow path ran along one side, with two parallel steel strips embedded in the dirt.

  A train station?

  If so, it was ancient. Like something you’d expect to find just outside a small country town at the turn of the century. I could even see a ticket window set in the side of a crumbling building in the shadows behind the lamps.

  “Ah,” Wash said. “I know what this is.”

  “Yeah. It’s how the fucking mole-men commute. What the hell, Wash?”

  “Some of the old subway lines were built over existing railways. Where they were not built over, they were built around. This station is abandoned, but do you see the tracks, farther out?” Wash pointed to a second set of rails, just at the edge of the light. “They are newer. They must use this place to store cars.”

  But Wash was wrong about it being abandoned: There must have been fifty punk kids milling about down there. I tried to see
if I recognized anybody in the crowd, and came back with an impression like rubbing an old eraser over wet paper. Unnoticeables. They were all looking toward a mammoth set of gears—thousands upon thousands of them, grinding away pointlessly. The source of the rumbling. The gears looked ancient, maybe older than the streetlamps, and covered entirely in rust. All except for the teeth. Those were clean, bare metal. They saw regular use.

  From the crowd next to the machine, faces started popping out at me. They weren’t all Unnoticeables: There was a line of normal kids down there, too, stripped naked, beaten to a pulp, and muttering with dazed shock. They were standing single file, looking straight ahead at nothing. Beside the queue, his hand resting atop a giant copper lever, a man like a stick of dried meat smiled his hapless, dope-fiend smile.

  Gus.

  I heroically suppressed the urge to get up some major velocity and drop-kick his fucking lopsided smirk into the sun. Instead, I made myself scan the line again more carefully. I was looking for a skinny, pale kid with a ridiculous coif of overstyled blond hair, probably swearing at his captor in a fake Cockney accent. I was looking for a pretty blue-haired girl, probably spitting in somebody’s eye for looking at her funny.

  I didn’t find them. I tried not to think about what that meant.

  What I wasn’t looking for—what I had secretly given up hope on, what I was so certain I wouldn’t find that it didn’t even occur to me to search—was the wide-faced, perpetually sneering son of a bitch at the back.

  Randall!

  He looked like shit. Like he hadn’t eaten or slept since the pizza parlor. I almost yelled his name. I almost called him a motherfucker and ran up to punch him in the arm.

  But he moved then, taking a small step forward and advancing one place in the line. I looked back to the head of it to see where they were going, just in time to see a chubby bearded dude bend at the waist and calmly insert his face into a whirling mesh of gears. He didn’t even scream when they ground him into hamburger meat.

  TWENTY

  1977. New York City, New York. Sammy Six.

  Eighteen wet concrete steps, and it wasn’t raining. Could be somebody just washed something nasty away. Could be somebody hadn’t washed something nasty away yet.