His fears proved to be ungrounded. As he stopped at the corner of the apartment building, he searched the street for any signs of life. There, on the opposite side of the street, the man and the girl were walking in the shadow of the courthouse building, hand in hand.
What a pretty picture, Oswald thought as he raised the walkie-talkie to his lips.
_____
“Read you loud and clear,” came his father’s voice over the walkie-talkie. “I hope you have something for me.”
“Male, Hispanic. Six feet tall, give or take an inch. Dark hair, coat, jeans, work boots. There’s a girl, too—maybe…5’4” or so. Wearing a pair of retro sunglasses. Be advised, the male subject is carrying a backpack. Over.” He released the button and waited for a response.
“For fuck’s sake,” his father answered, “would you give it a rest? Just tell me where he is.”
“At the courthouse, just two blocks down from you.”
“Armed?”
“Can’t tell from here.”
“Well, is he carrying a club or something?” Reginald’s voice had taken on a note of irritation.
“He’s carrying an object. Might be a gun.”
“Best be careful, then. I’ll send the crew over right away.”
“Wait,” Oswald said quickly.
“Yes…?”
“I need this one. For myself.”
Reginald was silent for a few moments. “You really think you can handle it on your own?”
Fuck you, Oswald thought. “I think so,” he said.
Reginald was silent a while longer. “Well, it’s your call, Os. Try to direct them toward us—we’ll take it from there. Just don’t make me regret my decision.”
“I understand. Sir.”
Oswald clipped the walkie to his belt again and returned his attention to the street. The man and the girl had moved past the courthouse building, but their progress was slow. Oswald did not know whether this was because of some kind of infirmity, such as malnutrition, or because of suspicion. He was not sure which he would have preferred.
He knew the streets of that little town as well as the lines of his own hand. He knew where they branched and where they reached dead ends, where broken glass would betray his steps and where the remains of gas-lines erupted from the earth like the worms from Tremors. He also knew what the others did not, that there was another town beneath the town.
He lifted the manhole cover and began climbing down the ladder, letting the cover fall into place above him. The darkness around him was nearly complete, but it was a darkness he knew and understood. It embraced him, welcomed him as its own, and he knew that regardless of what rules applied to life above ground, it was a different set that applied below ground. These were his rules, because here, in the damp darkness of the tunnels, he was king.
He had a spring in his step as he followed the tunnel. The smell of decay and rot reached his nostrils, but it did not bother him. It was not human sewage he was walking through, but the runoff of the streets. This was a storm sewer, designed to carry excess runoff out of town and into a nearby reservoir.
After walking through the darkness for less than five minutes, he grasped a ladder and began pulling himself up toward the surface. Before lifting the metal lid, he paused to listen. There! Footsteps, two pairs of them. They approached the drain cover, then kept on walking.
Right on schedule.
Oswald waited a full minute before lifting the cover and re-introducing himself to the sunlight. It felt like a new day. He dusted his hands, which were now empty, and started strolling after the man and the little girl, whistling as he went.
It was time to make some friends.
Chapter 24: Fellow Travelers
“What is it?” Jenny said.
Victor frowned down the alley. It looked like a bomb had gone off. A school bus had been driven through the narrow gap, then the walls of the adjoining buildings had crumbled into the alley, creating a heap of brick, plaster, and jutting pipe. In another time, an enterprising person would have picked through the wreckage for all that copper. Now the idea was almost absurd enough to make Victor crack a smile.
He felt Jenny’s fingers brush his arm. She had been doing that with increasing frequency the past day or so. It seemed to be her way of assuring herself of where he was standing, that he was actually with her in the flesh and not some disembodied voice. Victor did not know whether this was progress or regress.
“Just thinking,” he answered.
She folded her arms across her chest. He did not need to see her eyes to know what this gesture meant.
“It’s just a heap of rubble,” he said.
“In the alley?”
“Mmhmm.”
“And you think…” She flinched at a burst of gunfire in the distance. It was still far away, but it seemed to be moving closer. More likely, though, they were the ones getting closer. He wondered whether, if he had seen this road in the daytime, they would still be heading to the city at all. Maybe it was best he had been spared such a sight, just as Jenny had been. No matter how difficult the way became, there was no option to turn back.
He shrugged, then remembered she would not see the gesture. “It just looks…”
“Staged?”
He did not answer. An alarm had been steadily ringing in his head since leaving the Junker village, but he did not know whether this was a subconscious warning of danger or a miscue. His mind had grown more jumbled, not clearer, since setting out to rescue Dante. He was changing, rediscovering old instincts, and at times he felt more like himself than he had felt in years. At other times, however, it was like watching an actor in a movie.
“Let’s check the next alley,” he said. “If that one is blocked as well, then we might have a problem.”
They crossed the alley and began moving through what had once been the tidy lawn of a corporate headquarters. Now it was a jungle of weeds. The ragweed reminded Victor of that early morning hunt he had taken with Dante, an event now frozen in another time. How different the world had been then. Victor’s only concerns had been gathering food and supplies, preparing for the winter. He had been trying to outlast the catastrophe surrounding them, but now he was forced to face it.
They pushed through the weeds, trying not to cause more disturbance than necessary. Jenny held the edge of Victor’s backpack and moved with surprising stealth. When they reached the end of the block, Victor turned into the alley and discovered what he had feared.
“It’s blocked,” he said to Jenny. He felt his heart move up a notch as he turned in a slow circle, studying the surrounding buildings. There were so many floors and so many windows. A shooter could be perched on a rooftop just about anywhere. It wasn’t like the movies, where you could expect to see the glare of a scope and move aside just in time.
“We should go back,” she said.
“We’ll lose time.”
“Better than losing our lives.”
Victor thought about this. It stood to reason that if two of the alleys had been blocked, others might be blocked as well. And what reason was there for someone to block those alleys except to funnel traffic in one direction, toward one point? Even now, someone might be watching them, hiding, waiting for—
“Well hello there,” said a voice.
Victor spun around to see a man standing in the middle of the street. He wore a zip-up hoodie, jeans worn at the knees, and cowboy boots. But it was the stranger’s wide-eyed stare that caught Victor’s attention. It was almost as if he had no eyelids at all.
Victor pointed the Winchester at the stranger. “Who are you?”
“Just a friend,” the stranger answered. “A fellow traveler. But not a Communist—that’s not what I mean. Are you a Communist?” He cocked his head like a bird watching a worm as it struggles across a sea of asphalt. Then he took a step toward Victor and Jenny.
“That’s far enough,” Victor said. He lowered his voice. “Jenny, stay behind me.”
“No need to be afraid,” the stranger said. “You see, this here is my town. You might say I’m the mayor.”
Victor studied the windows of the buildings again. It troubled him how the stranger showed no concern for the weapon pointed at his chest. It was clear there was something wrong with this man, but Victor could not yet guess his angle.
“The mayor, huh?” he said.
“That’s right. And what, may I ask, are you doing in this fair city?”
“Just passing through.”
The stranger smiled. “Aren’t we all.”
“Listen, I have no problem with you. Just keep your distance, and things won’t have to get ugly.” He began leading Jenny farther down the street.
“Sure you don’t need directions?” the stranger called. “I’m mighty good with directions.”
Victor ignored the stranger’s words and kept moving. If this was a trap, as he sensed it was, there would have to be other pieces in motion. Maybe the stranger had intended to befriend him and then lead him into the trap. Or maybe he was a ploy, a diversion used to distract Victor while other players moved into position.
When Victor glanced over his shoulder again, he caught the stranger trailing them. Victor aimed the gun. “You want to catch a bullet?”
The stranger did not flinch. “I’m sorry, I never introduced myself. Name’s Os. Sometimes they call me “Os, the Great and Powerful”—you know, the title of the movie, not the character in the book. But just Os will do. What’s your name?” He glanced at the girl as he said this, though the question seemed to be directed at Victor. His gaze troubled Victor. Could Jenny feel those eyes on her? Could she sense that wide-eyed stare?
It occurred to Victor that, if there was indeed a trap being set, he might want to take this Oswald hostage. But what if that was what he was supposed to do? What if Oswald had a concealed weapon and he was just waiting for Victor to get close enough for him to use it? He sighed, feeling he had been out of the game too long.
“Where are your friends, Os?” he said. “Are they watching us right now? How many of them are there?”
Os grinned. “Oh, a few. But they do nothing without my say-so.”
“You’re in charge, huh? The BMOC?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s your game then, big man?” He shook his backpack. “We don’t have much. Is it really worth robbing us? Or are you the kind of person who just enjoys crime for its own sake? The kind who wants to watch the world burn?”
“Oh, I’m sure you have something we might be interested in,” Os answered, still smiling. “Besides, there really isn’t such a thing as crime any more, is there?”
Victor did not answer. The conversation was getting philosophical in a hurry, and he still could not decide whether to put a bullet in this guy’s head or just keep walking.
“Well?” Os said, stepping closer. “What do you think?”
Victor opened his mouth to speak, more out of annoyance than intellectual engagement…then stopped. Os seemed too eager for his answer. Victor sensed he was stalling, trying to keep Victor and Jenny in one place so the other wolves could gather.
Victor turned to Jenny. “Let’s go.” She nodded and began moving almost before he did.
“Can’t we just talk?” Os shouted after them. There was still a note of humor in his voice, as if this was all just a game to him. Maybe it was.
Then Victor heard the squawk of a radio. The game was up.
“Come on!” he said to Jenny, urging her forward. As they jogged along, he glanced down every side street for an escape route. They were all blocked. On his own, he might have climbed over the debris. But there was no telling how long it might take to help Jenny over.
He first caught movement through the window of a minivan parked on the opposite side of the street. A man was hunched over, his arms extended as he crept toward the front of the vehicle. Victor raised the Colt and fired a single bullet, cracking the windshield of the minivan and shattering the passenger side window.
Within seconds, he heard the sound of a window being raised and turned to see the nozzle of a rifle come poking into the air. Without a word, he snaked an arm around Jenny’s waist, carrying her toward the alley as a bullet spat into the asphalt beside his foot. He believed the alley would block them from the shooter’s vantage point, but getting over the debris would be another matter.
The air in the alley was dark and cool. Victor could smell the rot of old garbage filtering in from a kitchen on the left. There had been a door into the alley, but it had been boarded over and nailed shut. Graffiti had turned the alley into an art exhibit screaming with bright colors and blocky letters.
The alley appeared to have been blocked by an explosion. The brick walls of the adjacent buildings had crumbled inward, creating a large mass from which rebar and twisted metal jutted.
“We have to climb over,” Victor told Jenny, realizing she was likely to get hurt if he just pulled her across the debris. “And we have to hurry.”
She was breathing heavily, probably as much from fear as from the jog, but she did not argue. They began to climb the rubble, crawling on hands and knees. The sharp metal cut at Victor’s clothes, and he had to stop and make sure Jenny did not injure herself. They were taking too long. Any moment, one of the shooters might come into the alley and trap them, like mice in a maze. That was how it was supposed to go. Victor and Jenny were supposed to try climbing the rubble.
As he glanced back toward the entrance of the alley, he noticed the manhole cover. A storm drain. He did not know much about storm drain systems, but he did know they led to water. More importantly, he knew it would lead away.
“There’s another way,” he said to Jenny. He led her back down to the asphalt, then crouched to lift the cover. It was heavy, but it was not stuck. “We need to go underground, okay? It’s a storm drain. We’ll—”
Before he could finish speaking, a figure leaned into the alley and fired two shots, both of which narrowly missed them. Victor fired back, then told Jenny to climb down the ladder. While she searched on all fours for the sewer entrance, Victor kept his gun trained on the corner where the shooter had appeared. He asked himself how many bullets he had left and discovered he had not been counting. That was a mistake. Why had he forgotten to count? He wanted to check the clip, but not at the cost of eating a bullet.
Once Jenny’s head had disappeared in the darkness, Victor crouched and reached for the ladder with his left hand. Just then the shooter reappeared and began firing. A bullet grazed the side of Victor’s head, singeing the hair. Victor fired back. As the shooter moved back behind the cover of the wall, Victor thought he had hit the man’s leg, but he could not be sure.
Victor moved his legs into the storm drain and began descending into darkness.
Chapter 25: Not in Kansas
Jenny’s mind had always been a place of walls and tight spaces, of locked boxes and hidden doorways. The darkness of the tunnel leveled the playing field, and for the first time she felt as if she and Victor were equals. She felt less helpless.
Since the accident, she had been learning to rely on the senses she had left. The smell of the tunnel was strong—the decay of leaves and moldy trash. She could hear things, too—a distant patter overhead that could only have been human feet. She did not tell Victor about this. He lagged a few steps behind her, using his ears to keep track of her progress.
Her feet found an intersection. She was not sure how she knew the tunnel branched, but she knew. Maybe it was because the sound of their footsteps no longer returned immediately to her ears, but traveled a little deeper into the darkness.
“What now?” she asked, stopping. “I can follow a tunnel in the darkness, but…” But I can’t make the decisions, she finished in her head. Because I’m too afraid of making the wrong decision. As soon as the thought clarified, she hated herself. This was her role now: to be a burden to other people, to go on living until the day when someone else could no longer provide
for her. And then? Then she would be alone again. This was just an intermission in the greater loneliness of her life. It had accompanied her before she met Victor, and it was waiting for her on the other side.
“Maybe it’s time for a little light,” Victor said.
An orange glow began to waver in the darkness of the tunnel. Jenny raised her sunglasses and found she could sense the light just a bit more acutely. “Is that a match?” she asked. She hadn’t heard him strike one.
“No,” he replied. “A lighter. Just a gift from an old friend. Now be quiet so I can read this.” It was the closest thing she had heard to an admonishment, and even then his voice was gentle. She supposed it must be like disciplining a gimpy dog—sometimes you had to do it, but you always felt bad.
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