Terminus

by Adam Baker

  ‘Might have been rats,’ said Lupe. ‘You can bet the flood water drove a swarm of rats from the tunnels. Bet there are plenty swimming around down here.’

  ‘No more surprises. We stick together. No wandering off alone, all right? Line-of-sight, at all times.’

  ‘Relax. You got the gun.’

  ‘I got nine rounds. Won’t go far. You guys stay sharp, all right?’

  Galloway sat on the bench, sweating and rocking, teeth clenched in pain.

  Donahue knelt in front of him. She loaded a hypodermic, jabbed into his bicep and shot Galloway 20mg of Demerol.

  He relaxed as opiate bliss washed over him.

  ‘Let me see your neck,’ said Donahue.

  He pulled his collar aside. Bruised. No blood.

  ‘Quite a hickey. Show me your hand.’

  Galloway held out his right hand, sticky with blood. The forefinger was bitten through at the knuckle.

  Donahue wriggled on two pairs of Nitrile gloves.

  ‘Hold still.’

  She rinsed the injured hand with mineral water and began to swab it clean with cotton wool. She didn’t look him in the eye.

  ‘Doesn’t look like you lost too much blood. Vasoconstriction. The cold worked in your favour.’

  ‘It’ll be okay, right?’ he asked. ‘Few stitches. It’ll be fine, yeah?’

  ‘Relax,’ she said. Calming voice. ‘Let me do my thing.’

  She knelt beside plenty of injured folk during her time as an EMT. Pedestrians who ignored DONT WALK and got their legs crushed by a truck. Balcony jumpers impaled on railings, broke-backed but with a weird look of acceptance as if this horror were an average day in a lifetime of bad luck and failure. Disoriented stab victims lying on a sidewalk, trying to plug a wound with their hands, trying to tell her, as they slid into unconsciousness, they had looked into the dumb, dull eyes of the kid demanding their wallet and seen the true face of evil.

  She had a personal code. Soothe, but don’t lie. Say: Help is on its way. Don’t say: You’ll be fine.

  ‘There,’ she said, dabbing the wound clean. ‘Looks a bit better.’

  She felt icy detachment steal over her. A familiar mindset. The willed callousness she adopted each time she faced catastrophic injuries, certain her patient could not be saved, nothing to be done but supervise a painless death.

  Galloway was infected. A talking corpse.

  She stitched the stump with suture, and lashed bandage in place with micropore tape.

  ‘We’ll give you regular shots,’ she said. ‘Should dull the pain.’

  She gathered up bloody swabs and scraps of suture, balled them ready to be hurled into the flood water.

  ‘You have to amputate my arm,’ said Galloway. ‘You guys are trained EMTs. You have medical gear. Drugs. Scalpels. You’ve got to cut my arm at the elbow. Before the disease spreads.’

  Donahue shook her head.

  ‘Sorry, bro. You know the score. One bite. That’s all it takes. You’re infected. No antidote. No cure.’

  He looked up at her like a frightened child.

  ‘There must be something you can do.’

  Lupe joined them. She stood over Galloway. She held out an axe.

  ‘Tie a tourniquet, if you want, and bring down the blade. But we both know you’re done. Best decide how you want to spend your last hours.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Wade with a grim smile. ‘You just joined the cyanide club.’

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Sicknote, looking up from the elaborate artwork slowly metastasising across the ticket hall floor. ‘It’s a blessing, in a way. No more thought. No more you. It’ll be beautiful.’

  Galloway scuffed the mural with his boot.

  ‘Fuck the lot of you. Talking like I’m already dead. Fuck you all.’

  He crossed the ticket hall and sat on the platform stairwell steps. He contemplated the subterranean blackness below.

  28

  Trinity Church. A sombre gothic-revival structure built from massive blocks of limestone. The spire had toppled. The nave was open to the sky. Rain dripped from shattered arch spans, danced on pews and marble tiles.

  Lightning flash.

  The dead sat in rows. A succession of suicides. Scattered pill pots. Skulls vaporised by shotguns. Throats gouged by strop razors.

  The dead faced a rubble-strewn altar and toppled cross. Congregants at a macabre Eucharist.

  Thunder crack.

  A priest lay sprawled on the altar steps. He slowly climbed to his feet. Cassock streaked with pus. One arm gone.

  He looked up, mesmerised by roiling cloud and forked lightning. Rain splashed his rotted skull-face.

  Movement among the congregation. Infected among the dead. Those that were too sick to die; already infected when they opened their veins.

  They climbed to their feet and stumbled along the pews, kicked cadavers aside, until they reached the aisle.

  Some kind of unspoken command jerked revenants to their feet and propelled them towards the doorway at the back of the nave.

  The priest hobbled down the centre aisle, dragging a useless leg behind him. Other infected fell in line.

  The great bronze doors hung off their hinges. The rotted horde filed out of the church and stumbled down stone steps into the street.

  Lightning flash.

  A garbage truck lay on its side, driver still buckled in his seat. He vomited maggots.

  The crowd shuffled through the rain-lashed street, squeezed between the hulks of burned out cars.

  They filed past Zuccotti Park and headed east down Liberty towards Fenwick Station.

  29

  Nariko drifted in black silence. Twin helmet lights shafted through swirling sediment. Bone-chilling cold. She kicked against the velvet dark with a series of muscular leg strokes.

  Cloke and Tombes swam behind her. Lights danced in the dark. They carried a stretcher between them. A fibreglass backboard loaded with equipment.

  She reached a wall of rubble. She gripped the tumbled blocks and manoeuvred hand over hand. She clipped a karabiner to the rivet hole of a girder and spooled safety line.

  She sank to the tunnel floor.

  Her helmet lamps lit the buckled yellow hull of the school bus sitting on the track-bed, part-buried beneath masonry.

  She inspected the bus.

  ‘The rubble has shifted. I think the roof is starting to fold.’

  ‘We can’t abort, Captain,’ said Cloke. ‘We have to press on.’

  ‘I’m heading inside. You guys stay here.’

  She pulled herself through the windshield

  The driver. Hands fused to the wheel. The corpse leaned right, like he was taking a hard corner.

  She used the dash and driver’s seat to haul herself inside.

  She touched down in the passenger compartment. A double row of seats. The bus listed forty-five degrees. She gripped a seatback to keep her balance.

  ‘Tombes? You got the breaching gear?’

  ‘Right behind you, Cap.’

  Nariko glanced around at buckled window pillars, the bulging, ridged metal of the roof.

  ‘Let’s hurry it up, guys. This thing could implode any moment.’

  Light shafting through the vacant windshield. Twin helmet beams. Tombes floated into view.

  ‘Here.’

  He leaned into the bus. He shouldered the dead driver further aside, and passed Nariko a black cylinder lashed with webbing.

  Nariko hugged the cylinder under her arm and manoeuvred down the centre aisle in a series of slow lunar strides. She spooled braided paracord tether behind her. She tied the line to the rear seat frame.

  ‘Need a hand, boss?’

  ‘Hang back. Place is a death trap. Less time we spend in here, the better.’

  She rested the steel cylinder on the back seat of the bus. She unwound hose, checked regulator pressure and unsheathed the cutting head: a red pistol grip tipped with an exothermic heat rod.

  She positione
d herself in front of the rear door, braced her legs, and pulled the trigger. The unit vented a jet of high-pressure oxygen/hydrogen, and simultaneously popped an igniter spark.

  An incandescent flame, hot as the sun. Water surrounding the exothermic head fizzed and boiled. Nariko felt spreading convection warmth through the trilaminate of her suit.

  She pressed the cutting head to the door panel. Steel turned angry red and began to sweat. The burn hole widened and dripped metal. Steel tears fell and scattered like ball bearings.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Cloke.

  ‘Good. An easy cut.’

  ‘We’ve been submerged nine minutes.’

  ‘Just shut up and let me work, all right?’

  The cutting head burned at ten thousand Fahrenheit. She could feel the steel of her helmet radiate heat like a hot plate. She cooked in her suit. She shook her head, blinked to clear perspiration from her eyes. She licked sweat from her upper lip.

  She completed the cut. She shut off the plasma torch and took a step back into cooler waters.

  A vein of super-hot metal glowed red like neon. She kicked the door. It fell open.

  ‘That’s it. I’m through.’

  She stood in the rear doorway and surveyed the debris beyond.

  A crevice between two massive chunks of concrete.

  ‘It’s a tight traverse, but we can make it to the other side.’

  She returned to the front of the bus. Tombes fed her the spinal injury backboard piled with equipment. She laid the plasma cylinder alongside EMT kit and lashed it down with nylon rope.

  They wrestled the stretcher down the aisle towards the rear door.

  Cloke crouched on the hood of the bus. He looked through the windshield into the dark interior. He watched the dancing helmet lights of Nariko and Tombes as they struggled to manoeuvre the bier to the rear door.

  He looked up. Rubble and girders. A precarious Jenga-stack. A massive tonnage of stone piled above the bus roof.

  ‘This stuff could collapse on our heads any moment,’ said Nariko, wind-rush of exertion captured by the helmet mike. ‘If this were a standard street rescue, I would tell my guys to hold back. At least until we got proper structural support.’

  Cloke psyched himself to enter the buckled hull of the bus. He gripped the tether line and pulled himself past the dead driver. His helmet lights briefly illuminated empty sockets and a yellow-tooth grin.

  He called to Tombes at the rear of the bus:

  ‘How’s it looking? A clear route?’

  ‘Looks that way.’

  Cloke’s left foot snagged. He squirmed. He tried to shake free. He was stuck fast.

  He turned and looked back. The bus driver had twisted in his seat and sunk teeth into the fabric of his drysuit. He could feel the tight vice-pressure of teeth grinding into his suit lining, trying to break flesh.

  Cloke screamed.

  ‘What’s up?’ shouted Nariko. ‘What’s going on?’ She grabbed seat backs and hauled herself towards the front of the bus. ‘Cloke. What’s going on?’

  Cloke kicked at the cadaver’s eyeless face. He balled a fist and pounded the creature’s skull. Water pressure slowed his arm, softened every movement like he was battling monsters in a helpless fever-dream.

  Rising panic. He thrashed and flailed. He lost a flipper. His helmet and gas pack slammed into the roof as he tried to wrench lose.

  ‘Keep still.’

  Nariko pushed past him. She gripped the back of the driver’s seat for support. She pulled the Glock from her weight belt.

  She clubbed the creature with the butt, hammered its forehead and temple until the driver’s teeth reflexively parted and released the fabric of Cloke’s suit.

  Nariko deactivated the safety with a gloved thumb.

  The skeletal driver strained against the seat belt, snapped and lunged.

  Nariko jammed the gun between gaping jaws, twisted the barrel deep into the creature’s throat and pulled the trigger. Muffled thump. A slow-blossoming burst of brain tissue and skull fragments. The bullet streaked out the windshield into darkness, fast-decelerating trajectory delineated by a plume of gas bubbles shimmering like globules of mercury.

  The dead thing slumped, head flung back, and was still.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Nariko. ‘Are you bitten? Did it puncture your suit?’

  She turned Cloke’s helmet to face her. He was sweating, eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Get it together. Control your breathing.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Focus. Be calm and focus.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said. Each panting exhalation roared over the open radio channel.

  She checked the leg of his dive suit. Deep gouges in the trilaminate fabric, but no tears.

  She gripped his arm and checked his wrist screen. An amber oxygen depletion warning.

  ‘Hey. Breathe slow. You’re burning too much air.’

  ‘How the hell was that thing still alive? How long had it been submerged?’

  ‘The virus never quits. Come on. Get it together. We have to get out of here.’

  Cloke replaced his right flipper and tightened straps. He swam towards the back of the bus using seatbacks for guidance, gas tanks scraping the roof.

  He helped Tombes lift the equipment bier and manoeuvre it towards the jagged burn hole in the rear bulkhead.

  Lupe took a last look at the dead driver. She leaned close. Her helmet lamps lit his shattered face. His head was thrown back, mouth open in a grotesque yawn. Wisps of blood curled from between his teeth and out his nostrils like cigarette fumes. Eye sockets bristled with metallic splinters.

  The roof began to collapse.

  The rasp of shifting concrete, the grind of abrading cement. Roof panels creased and bulged. Torsion and metal shriek.

  The cab began to crumple and cave. Pillars started to bend and fold. The remaining side windows frosted and shattered with a muffled crunch. Serpentine clouds of silt curled through the vacant frames and began to fill the passenger compartment. Visibility dropped like the bus was filling with smoke.

  ‘Fucking move,’ shouted Nariko, voice deafening loud inside her helmet.

  She lunged for the guide line. Her gauntlets scrabbled at the fine, nylon rope. Too insubstantial. Too smooth. The cord danced between her fingers, like a wisp of gossamer.

  She caught the line, twisted for grip, and began to haul herself hand-over-hand.

  The three divers scrambled down the centre aisle, grabbed seatbacks, kicked up a silt-storm. The buckling hull closed around them like the piston-walls of a compactor. The roof kinked and crumpled, pressed lower as the steel frame of the bus folded in a series of sudden capitulations. They could hear the torque of stressed metal, deep howls and moans, like whale song.

  Cloke and Tombes struggled to haul equipment from the rear of the bus. A narrow crevice. Their headlamps danced as they shifted and contorted, tried to wrestle equipment in the confined space.

  Crack and grind. Titanic blocks of masonry shifted and settled. The water around them began to fill with a swirling blizzard of stone dust.

  ‘Go,’ yelled Cloke, shouting to be heard over the rubble-roar that filled their helmets. Tombes continued to tug at the stretcher. ‘Forget the gear. Just go.’

  ‘We need this shit.’

  Cloke seized the grab-handle on the back of his tank frame and pulled.

  ‘Move. Just fucking move.’

  They abandoned the equipment and struggled to kick clear of cascading debris.

  Cloke alone, disoriented, spinning in sub-aquatic darkness.

  He tumbled through space, no sense of up or down. His wrist screen flashed an amber warning: elevated oxygen consumption.

  Stop struggling, he told himself. Be still. Be calm.

  He slowly spun to a halt. He sank and gently hit bottom, kicking up a silt-plume.

  Occluded vision. He reached up and tried to clear his visor. A jagged crack running the width of the Lexan. A blot of blood
on the glass. Ear-whine concussion.

  His helmet lights lit a tennis shoe lying on the tunnel floor. Grey with dirt, been there years. He stared at the shoe, tried to regain his balance, willed his head to stop spinning.

  He fumbled the radio clipped to his weight belt. He checked the jack was still plugged to his helmet.

  ‘Nariko. Captain. Come in, over.’

  No reply.

  ‘Captain. Captain, can you hear me? Sound off, if you can hear my voice.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Tombes. What is your status, over?’

  No response.

  ‘Tombes. Captain. Guys. Speak to me. Sound off.’

  Something tendrillar coiling round his feet. He grabbed it. A loose length of safety line. He pulled hand over hand. The end was frayed and torn.

  He peered into a fog of swirling rock dust. He slowly turned around, tried to figure north from south, tried to locate the rockfall.

  ‘Captain. Tombes. Come on, guys. Where are you? Talk to me. Tell me you’re alive.’

  30

  Cloke surfaced. He broke through a crust of floating garbage. He gripped a ledge in the tunnel wall for support.

  He wiped water droplets from his visor with a gloved hand. He studied the cracked Lexan, anxious to see if irradiated flood water were leaking into his helmet.

  Twin lamps lit the tunnel walls. He looked around. Crumbling brickwork arched overhead. Old gang graffiti. DEF CON MUTHAFUKAS. A flaking portrait of Malcolm X.

  Tombes surfaced beside him.

  ‘Where the hell is the Captain? Did she get out?’

  ‘She was right behind us,’ said Cloke. ‘Right at my back.’

  They looked around at the bobbing scrim of garbage, expecting Nariko to break surface any moment.

  Tombes:

  ‘Captain, do you copy, over?’

  No reply.

  ‘Captain, can you hear me?’

  No response.

  ‘Shit.’

  Tombes resubmerged.

  Cloke checked his wrist gauge. They had been in the water twenty-nine minutes.

  He ducked beneath the surface and followed Tombes as he kicked for the rockfall.