“Sure we do. Dr. Bennett. But he’s over with the Mole People seeing to a little girl who’s runnin’ a high fever. They live off the Amtrak tunnel below Riverside Drive.”
“Can you get word to him?”
“Sure can. Your friend needs somewhere to rest till the Doc can get here. My place is kinda rough right now. Got flooded two nights ago when we had all that rain topside? Take him to Candy Annie’s. You know how to get there.”
“Not from here,” McCall said.
Fooz took an old Filofax book and a pencil out of his back pocket and scrawled a series of passageways on a Filofax page. “We’re here,” he pointed out. “Other side of this old subway station is a storm tunnel. Take it to here … then cross to the viaduct here … then you gotta go down the stairs here. Hope they ain’t flooded. Once you get into the passageway here, you’ll know your way, Mr. McCall.”
“Some very bad guys may have come down into the tunnels after us,” McCall said. “From the Forty-second Street manhole entrance.”
“Sure, I know it. They’ll get lost plenty fast.”
“They’re armed. Don’t go near them. But come and find me and let me know if they’re down here.”
“Sure will, Mr. McCall. You get to Candy Annie’s. I’ll get word to the Doc.”
He melted back into the shadows and was gone.
McCall put his arm around Gershon’s shoulders and they walked across the echoing space of the one-time subway station. Gershon shook his head. His words were compressed with pain.
“So there’s a whole subculture living below the streets of New York City?”
“For a lot of years. They call themselves ‘Subs,’ Subterranean Dwellers.”
“How many are there?”
“I’ve only met a few of them. Probably over a hundred.”
“How do they survive?”
“How do any of us? They do what they have to do.”
“How do they eat?”
“They have ‘runners.’ They go up into the city for supplies every few days.”
“What do they use for money?”
“They panhandle on the streets. They do construction work for a day. They don’t steal. Some people bring them down supplies.”
“Like you.”
It was a statement. Gershon started to cough. He spit up blood.
“Don’t talk. Save your strength.”
They reached another iron door, almost rusted shut. McCall hauled on it and they walked through into a circular sewer tunnel. This time the water was almost up to their knees. It stank. They sloshed through it, a light from far down the tunnel casting an oblique radiance across the black water. McCall was virtually carrying Gershon now. He was going in and out of consciousness.
McCall followed the crude map on the back of the Filofax page. He climbed down a set of crumbling marble stairs into total darkness. He had to feel his way, one tentative step at a time, holding on to an iron railing with one hand and Gershon with the other. They made it to the next level down. It was bitterly cold. A wind blew from somewhere, keening through the eerie semidarkness. They were in a circular brick subway tunnel. Lights hung down at intervals, some of them out, some with such low wattage it was hard to see beyond the pools of wan radiance.
They walked down the tunnel for at least a mile until it widened out considerably. They came to a series of dank passageways that were better lit. They were filled with more rusting pipes, but also with a lot of big nooks and crannies.
People were living in them.
McCall noted a dwelling made out of old storm doors. Through an open doorway he saw a woman in her sixties, sitting in a rocking chair, gently rocking back and forth, reading a book. Stephen King’s great time travel opus about saving JFK. There was a warm lamp on a table beside her. There was furniture around her that was not broken or discarded. Not quite off the Ikea floor, but in pretty good shape. She looked up, startled at the sound of their progress. Stared at them. Maybe she’d never seen anyone but Subterranean Dwellers in her domain. McCall and Gershon were clearly from the upworld. McCall couldn’t tell if there was fear or amusement in her eyes. Then they were past her entranceway and she was a memory.
McCall climbed up some metal stairs to a half-level above. Here there were three more dwellings, made out of sheets of plywood, concrete blocks, some metal sheeting that was dark with rust. In one of them an older couple were sitting at a table drinking Starbucks coffee out of plastic cups. One of them must have made a run up to the city. There were pictures nailed onto the plywood walls around them and an old bookshelf jammed with books. They looked like they’d been taken from a library.
Probably overdue, McCall thought.
In the second structure a young man with wild, curly hair, dressed in Army camouflage fatigues, was sitting in an old broken armchair smoking a cigarette. He never moved as they walked past. It was as if they weren’t there, or he wasn’t there.
In the third structure, this one made up of only metal sheeting, a man in his fifties was sitting at a table painstakingly putting together a LEGO town. He already had a police station and a fire station completed. He was working on what looked like a mom-and-pop grocery store. When his head snapped up as they passed McCall saw a flash of fear in his eyes.
Upworlders weren’t welcome here.
They weren’t to be trusted.
At the end of the tunnel, McCall and Gershon came out into a high-vaulted room that looked like some kind of fantastic Hollywood movie set. It had several levels with metal steps connecting them. There were more Subterranean Dwellers in them, tucked away beneath the pipes, most of them with some kind of wood or metal shelters around them, some of them just sitting on blankets or in big cardboard boxes as if they were in doorways above ground. What amazed McCall was a section of what looked like a park. Artificial grass had been put down onto a large rectangular space. A family was sitting on the grass with a picnic basket, actually having a picnic, like they were in one of the many beautiful small parks in New York City. A Yorkie was running after a tennis ball that a teenage boy was throwing for him. He picked up the ball in his mouth, romped back to the boy, who threw it for him again. He ran after it again. Repeat until the dog collapsed. Suspicious eyes looked at the intruders as they climbed up onto another level.
McCall wondered if they didn’t have the right idea.
No rent, no traffic, no job searching.
Make your own world.
When he got to the next half-level, McCall was relieved. There was a long narrow tunnel with more pipes crowding in on both sides. It was dimly lit, but he recognized it. He’d never accessed it from this direction before. He shifted Gershon’s weight under his arm.
“Stay with me, Danil,” he said, his voice echoing in the tunnel.
Gershon nodded, didn’t speak. But he was conscious.
McCall half dragged, half carried him to the other end of the tunnel. There was a large niche in it that went back about seventeen feet. It had obviously been another tunnel that had been closed off and abandoned at some point. Inside the niche there was furniture: a bed with a bright quilt on it, a dresser, a table, two upright cane chairs, two red leather easy chairs, a rocking chair, a bookshelf. There was a TV set, circa the 1990s, but there was a picture on the screen. A close-up of Walter White from Breaking Bad.
He wondered how she was getting a signal this far down and then he noted the stacks of DVDs beside the set and the DVD recorder. The final season of Breaking Bad was on the top. He did wonder again where the electricity was coming from. It had to have been set up specially for her. But then, she was a very popular girl in the steam tunnels.
Candy Annie was probably in her mid-twenties, but living below ground since she was sixteen had aged her face. She was very pale from lack of sunlight. She looked like a ghost in the semidarkness. There were two halogen lamps on either side of her bed that glowed with amber light. Her hair was red, a Julianne Moore kind of red, gorgeous, which showered down her back. She was wearing a wh
ite blouse and a long beige skirt. She never wore underwear and when she turned in the amber light both the blouse and the skirt were virtually transparent. McCall had long since stopped trying not to look at her voluptuous figure. She wore sandals on her feet. There was pink polish on her toes. The room, if you could call it that, was very warm. Must have a heating duct in it, or some of the ceiling pipes carried hot water. There was a sink that had been hooked up to a large tank of water. There was also a small toilet in one corner and even a shower stall with a paisley shower curtain. All hooked up. It was rudimentary, but it obviously worked. Candy Annie looked clean and radiant. There were shelves with paperback books, a few framed photos and canned goods on them. And lots of candy. Candy bars, M&M’s packages, gummy bears, liquorice sticks, jelly babies, nougat swirls, chocolate frogs and bunnies. If you stumbled upon her living space, and didn’t know how she got her nickname, one look at the shelves would solve the mystery.
Her face lit up when she saw McCall, but then immediately clouded when she saw he was half carrying a wounded friend.
“What’s the matter with him, Mr. McCall?”
Her voice was like a spring shower.
“He took a gunshot wound in his arm,” McCall said. “I need to put him down on your bed.”
“Of course.”
“Might get blood on the quilt.”
“I can always make another one.”
Candy Annie rushed to Gershon’s side and helped take his weight as McCall walked him to the bed and laid him down on the multicolored quilt. It was only then that he noticed the patches of the quilt were hand-sewn and made up of Norman Rockwell paintings. Gershon had passed out. Carefully McCall took off his leather jacket. Blood had soaked through Gershon’s shirtsleeve. McCall untied the tourniquet and tied it tighter again. Candy Annie ran to the little sink and turned on a faucet. A trickle of water came out. She ran it over a cloth and hurried back to the bed and wiped the sweat from Gershon’s face. Then she folded the cloth and put it against his forehead.
“How did it happen?” she asked, as if this was something inconceivable to her.
“We were attacked,” McCall said. “Not something that happens in your world.”
“It happens,” Candy Annie said softly. “But very rarely. Everyone here keeps to their own spaces. But we’re kind of a big family. We look out for each other.”
Gershon was conscious again. He tried to sit up. McCall and Candy Annie put a couple of pillows at his back, resting against the concrete wall. There was no headboard.
“I just made some mint tea,” Candy Annie said. “Can I bring you some?”
“Tea would be good,” Gershon murmured.
Candy Annie ran back to the counter beside the sink, lifted a porcelain teapot, and poured tea into a large mug that had the New York Yankees logo on it. The amber light soared through her blouse and skirt as she turned back, cradling her breasts, lighting her triangle of dark pubic hair. McCall resolved to bring some underwear the next time he came down with supplies for her, which usually consisted of food, magazines, books, and, of course, candy.
Candy Annie knelt beside the low bed and held the mug for Gershon. He took a sip. Nodded. Looked around the small shelter.
“This is your home?”
“This is it,” she said, with a kind of simplicity that said, What more do I need?
McCall heard footsteps running down the tunnel and half turned, his hand reaching into his pocket for the Sig Sauer. But it was Jackson T. Foozelman. With him was a man in his early sixties, short, compact, wearing a rumpled gray suit and carrying an old-fashioned doctor’s bag, as though they were in Dodge City. In fact, he reminded McCall of that wonderful character actor who had played the irascible doctor on Gunsmoke.
“This is Doc Bennett,” Fooz said. He was out of breath and leaned against the wall. “I ran into him comin’ back from the Mole People. Say, I never asked ya how that little girl is doing.”
“Her fever broke,” Dr. Bennett snapped, as if irritated by the question. “She’s going to be fine.”
Curmudgeonly, McCall thought. Just like Doc Adams on Gunsmoke.
Dr. Bennett untied the makeshift tourniquet from around Gershon’s arm, unbuttoned his shirt, and slid it off. The wound was raw and had started bleeding again. He opened his doctor’s bag and took out some salve and gauze and scissors. Also a syringe and a small bottle.
“Give me some room.”
Candy Annie and Fooz moved as far away from the bed as the small space would allow. While the doctor dressed the wound and gave Gershon a shot for the pain, McCall moved to the edge of Candy Annie’s niche and looked out. There was nothing in the levels of the tunnels but shadows and silence. He turned back. Candy Annie was pouring tea for Fooz. McCall moved back to the narrow bed.
“I’ve stopped the bleeding, but he’s lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Bennett said. “He can’t stay down here. He needs to go to an ER right away.”
“They’ll report a gunshot wound.”
Dr. Bennett sighed. “What is this, some mob shooting?”
“No. But he can’t go to a hospital. Any other ideas?”
“I have a family practice on Columbus Avenue. My son Brian runs it. I go upworld every week to visit with him. See how the family is.”
“But you live down here.”
“For the last fifteen years. These Subs need a doctor. I’m all they’ve got.” He finished bandaging the wound and looked at Gershon. “You’re very lucky. The bullet went right through without touching the humerus bone.”
Almost subconsciously, McCall rubbed the wound in his shoulder, where a bullet had once grazed him. It ached badly when he was down in the subterranean tunnels.
“I’ll be all right,” Gershon said.
He got to his feet, pulling on his shirt. Dr. Bennett wrote an address and a note on a prescription pad he took out of his doctor’s bag. He tore off the page and handed it to Gershon.
“That’s the address of my son’s practice and a note from me to treat you.”
Gershon nodded his thanks.
Fooz stepped forward, setting down his tea, clutching at McCall’s sleeve. He pulled him to one side. McCall watched Gershon button up his shirt and painfully shrug back on his leather jacket. Dr. Bennett packed up his doctor’s bag.
“There’s two Upworlders in the steam tunnels,” Fooz said softly. “Young guys, kinda intense looking. I didn’t see no guns, but that don’t mean they weren’t carrying ’em.”
“Show me where,” McCall said.
Fooz nodded. His eyes shone with excitement. McCall walked over to the table where Candy Annie was standing, as if unsure what more to do to help. McCall took her hand.
“I need you to show my friend a way to the upworld, as close to here as possible. Somewhere he won’t pop out of a manhole in the middle of Times Square. Can you do that?”
“Sure, Mr. McCall.”
“Just get him up that ladder and come back here.”
“I always come back here,” she said, her voice quieter.
“We’ve talked about that, Annie. You need to go to the upworld again.”
“Maybe. Sometime. With you.”
McCall didn’t have time to talk to her about it. He turned to Gershon.
“Annie will show you the way out of here.”
“Where are you going?”
“Two of them may have come down into the tunnels. I’ll make sure they don’t come after you.”
Gershon nodded and put a hand on Dr. Bennett’s shoulder.
“Thank you.”
Candy Annie threw a shawl over her shoulders, kicked off her sandals, and slid her feet into a pair of old bright pink Reeboks. They wouldn’t protect her feet like Fooz’s work boots, but they were better than sandals.
McCall handed Gershon the Sig Sauer pistol.
“After you’re treated by the doctor’s son, go to the safe house on Ninth Avenue. Nowhere else. I’ll meet you there tonight.”
“Take care of
yourself, McCall,” Gershon said.
It was not the answer McCall had been hoping for.
CHAPTER 22
McCall moved out of the cramped, sweating space with the old black man. They ran down the steam tunnel and climbed down the iron stairs. McCall turned back once, to see Dr. Bennett walking along the tunnel above him one way, Gershon and Candy Annie hurrying down the other way. Soon they were lost to sight.
McCall swung back to Fooz.
“Show me where you saw these men.”
The trip back to where McCall and Gershon had climbed down the ladder from the manhole near Forty-second Street was quicker, because Fooz knew all the shortcuts. In twenty minutes they were at one end of the first utility and steam tunnel, in a cross tunnel. McCall kept the old man behind him. Two dark figures were walking down the main tunnel, searching in the gloom, guns drawn. They looked disoriented. They’d been searching for a while.
“Is there a way for me to get behind them?” McCall whispered.
“Sure thing, double back behind us, you’ll see a door,” Fooz whispered. “Might be kinda hard to open it. Rusted pretty solid. If ya can do it, you’ll be in this little corridor between the pipes about two feet wide. Gonna be a tight fit. But at the end of it, you’ll see an opening and you can step into that tunnel right behind them fellahs.”
“You stay here and don’t move,” McCall said.
He ran behind the old man and found the door.
Pulled on it.
It didn’t budge.
He looked back down the corridor of pipes, in shadow from this angle. He could just make out Fooz’s unmoving figure. McCall pulled on the rusted door again with all his strength. Squeal of sound. It sounded like a gunshot in the tunnel. McCall froze. No way around it. He had to open the door.
It had moved two inches.
He pulled again.
Another few inches, but no squeal.
He took a deep breath and scraped himself through the narrow opening.
Fooz hadn’t exaggerated. The space between the pipes was barely two feet wide. McCall had to walk like a crab down it, arms pinned at his sides. He could hear nothing now. He had gone about twenty yards when finally the opening Fooz had promised came up on his right. If anything, it was smaller than the crevice he had just edged through. There was a real risk he’d get stuck in this split in the pipes. But he had to take the chance.
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