by James Tarr
Forty feet in there was a sharp kink in the tunnel as it bent around a concrete pipe two and a half feet in diameter. Thirty feet past that there was a traffic jam as the men paused and very carefully stepped through the hole pounded through the huge reinforced concrete sewer pipe running directly north/south.
“We found an amazing amount of data online,” Morris had told the squad leaders during his briefing. “Maps of the entire water and sewer system. The first trunk line you’ll be using to travel, we knew within thirty feet or so where it was located, but weirdly enough none of the resources we found gave it a name. It is possibly the Hubbell-Southfield trunk line. The good news is that it’s twelve feet in diameter, and there’s only a small amount of gunk in the bottom of the pipe. The bad news is that if you want to stay out of sight as much as humanly possible, and trust me, you do, you’re going to be taking it in the wrong direction. North.”
Once through the four-foot-wide hole in the side of the pipe the men straightened up under their burdens. Quentin moved forward and waited while everyone made it through the hole into the sewer pipe. Ahead of him the pipe stretched straight and true, fading black beyond the beam of his flashlight.
The air in the pipe was stale, and Morris had told them breathable air had been a concern, but in addition to opening up the pipes to foot traffic—where possible—his engineers had made sure there were enough openings in the sewer lines to produce sufficient air flow.
“Smells more like dirt than shit,” Quentin said softly, playing his flashlight beam over the two-foot-wide stripe of organic material at the bottom of the big pipe. His voice, soft as it was, echoed ahead of him eerily.
“One turns into the other, give it enough time,” Sarah whispered. She was second in line. She’d spent some time in the pipes and knew what to expect, so was there to help the point man if necessary.
“Last man in,” Q heard George say some distance behind him, his voice rolling down the concrete.
The men of Theodore soon discovered that walking in the sewer pipe wasn’t nearly as easy as they’d thought it would be. The sludge at the bottom of the pipe wasn’t all mud, but it did suck at their boots with nearly every step. The sludge strip was so wide they couldn’t spread their legs apart far enough to avoid it entirely, not with the loads they were carrying. A few tried to walk to one side or another, but walking on an angled concrete surface soon had their ankles screaming.
After ten minutes everyone in the column was sweating and wondering just how much farther they had to go. The sewer pipe stretched out ahead of them into the dark, straight as a ruler. Mark was directly behind Jason, and in the strobing light of the low-beam flashlights he could see the young man trudging slowly through the muck, and hear his panting. And swearing.
“One foot in front of the other,” he called out softly. “One step at a time. One step, then the next, then the next. Don’t think about how far you have to go. Just worry about that next step.”
“For fuck’s sake, shut up,” someone behind them growled. Which for some reason made both Jason and Mark break out in giggles they had a hard time controlling.
Not quite ten minutes later they reached the end of the line. Or rather, the beginning of it, where several smaller pipes emptied out into the large one they’d just walked up. Water was trickling out of a few.
There was a huge hole in one wall that had been created with a shaped charge. Past the large crater was a narrower path dug upward through the earth. Twenty-five feet forward and up they shut off their flashlights and came out into the open air between two houses, just as they’d been told they would. They spread out in a defensive perimeter and waited until everyone was out of the sewer. It took some time. Between the moon reflecting off a few clouds and the stars above them, the night sky seemed incredibly bright compared to the lightless sewer pipe.
“Last man out,” George said quietly to Hannibal, panting under his load. The leader of Flintstone turned and gave a thumbs up to Ed, who was standing at the corner of the house. Ed checked the time on his watch, then doublechecked the columns on the paper in his hand, which he could barely see in the moonlight. They had an eighteen-minute window when no satellites would be above them. He waved a hand and the two squads slowly moved out, heading directly north.
They kept good spacing and moved around the last two houses on the street. Then they reached Puritan, a larger east-west surface street with two lanes in each direction. Two hundred feet to their east was Slash, the sunken freeway heading northwest/southeast. Theodore crossed to the north side of Puritan and the squads moved in two parallel columns down the street and over the bridge spanning the freeway.
Once over it the squads turned directly north again on the first side street. A very old commercial building built of red brick sat on the corner, then it was all houses to either side of them, compact two-story homes of red brick and white siding.
The men walked through the front yards, the grass swishing against their pantlegs. A dog barked, and faint talking carried on the soft breeze. They saw candle light in the window of one home, and heard laughing. Many of the homes seemed to have collapsed in upon themselves.
The two squads traversed one block, then a second, then a third, and found themselves at an alley. On the far side of the alley were the commercial buildings lining McNichols. The street was two lanes in each direction plus curbside parking.
Quentin, still in the lead, pointed questioningly and Sarah nodded. They led the squads through the alley eastbound for one block, then with four minutes to spare before the next satellite appeared in the sky above them, entered the back door of what, years ago, had been a small church wedged between a car wash and a tax service. Now all the modest commercial buildings in this area were long abandoned, half of them destroyed by fire.
In a city that had seen ten years of war, which was constantly shadowed by a haze of smoke from fires, the occasional muffled explosion was of no interest. Morris’ engineers had used charges to blow a hole twenty feet down past the foundation of the church, then, worried about sympathetic cave-ins, dug the rest of the way to the Six Mile Relief sewer line using shovels. They’d used a very small shaped charge to cut a circular hole in the reinforced concrete of the pipe, which they’d then widened with sledge hammers.
“This is a trunk line, a big one,” Morris had told them in the briefing, his finger tracing its route on the map. “It was first constructed in 1958. Where you’ll be inside it the pipe is between eleven and fourteen feet in diameter and twenty-two to forty-eight feet underground, depending, so you’ll never have to worry about banging your heads, or making noise. But I still wouldn’t be loud. Once you enter it here, inside this church, you’ll take it two and a half miles directly east.”
“There are giant sewer lines under the city, ‘interceptors’, big enough to drive an IMP through, but unfortunately none of them are where we need to go. When it comes to the trunk lines, the next size down, what my engineers did was figure out where they weren’t passable and devise workarounds. Most of the places they were blocked were impossible to dig out, but when the Army went after them they were lazy, or maybe in a hurry. They demolished this or that sewer line or junction, and then a quarter or half a mile down set additional charges and blew that site. Another half a mile or a mile further on they might have blown another junction, but probably not. They didn’t have the time or the inclination to collapse whole lengths of the sewer, they just blew spots here and there as blocks, and it worked for them. Until now. My men found that nearly half of the collapsed areas were really easy to get around with just a bit of digging and exploration. You might have to crawl up to the surface and walk fifty or a hundred feet, but then you can go right back down. The pipe heading directly north from here will be an easy traverse. On the other hand, numerous sections of the Six Mile Relief are blocked, either blown by the Army in the past or simply collapsed, so you’ll have to exit and walk above ground half a dozen times. Still, though, you’ll be undergrou
nd for over two-thirds of that two and a half miles.”
Unlike the first sewer pipe they’d traversed, they found this one had running water in the bottom. The slow-moving fetid stream was less than a foot wide, however, and there was almost no mud in it, so instead of taking a break to rest their backs as planned, Hannibal and Ed agreed to push on.
Not quite a mile ahead the pipe was ruptured. A slope of mud and chunks of concrete stretched upward, but a trench had been dug through the debris. Ed moved to the base of the slope and peered up. He could see an oval of sky through the breach in the pipe, at the end of the chute dug and clawed by Morris’ engineers.
Ed stepped back and murmured to the first man, “Fifteen minute rest.” The word passed among them back down the pipe. Carefully the men set down their burdens and wormed their way out from under their heavy backpacks.
Ed met with Hannibal, George, and Sarah in the middle of the two squads, and they bent their heads together. “We’ve gone two and a half miles, total, since leaving?” he asked, peering at his folded map.
“That’s about what I’m guessing,” Hannibal said. He checked his watch, which had luminous hands. “In under two hours. We’ve got almost ten hours to make our rendezvous.”
“I’d rather get there four hours early than one minute late,” George said, and not for the first time.
“From what I was told climbing in and out of this pipe is going to be a pain,” Sarah told them.
“Still better than walking around outside the whole time,” Hannibal said. “And thank God we haven’t had any rain, can you imagine walking through knee deep water in here? Be a fucking horror show. I’m actually shocked we haven’t run into any mutant alligators.” He checked his watch and then squinted at the satellite windows on the sheet in his hand. “In sixteen minutes we’re going to have a four minute blackout window. I think that’ll be barely long enough just to get all of us out of this hole. Then there’s a bird above us for seven minutes, and a twelve minute blackout window. What do we have, about a quarter mile above ground to the next hole?”
Sarah was consulting her map and satellite data as well. “Yeah.”
“So do we wait until the longer window before popping our heads out like gophers?” Ed asked the group.
“This is going to get fucking old quick,” George said.
Jason realized Weasel was next to him in the dark as they sat down at their next rest break. Carrying the equivalent weight of a fourth-grader on their backs was just as tiring as they’d expected. “You were right about the rats,” he whispered. He could feel the sweat dripping off his nose.
“What?”
“You said we were like rats scurrying around and biting people, and here we are in a sewer.” Strangely enough, while at first he’d been terrified trudging through the seemingly unending, pitch black pipes, now it didn’t bother him. Probably because he was too tired.
“Shut the fuck up,” Weasel said tiredly. He was trying to nap before they had to move out again. He opened his eyes, closed them, opened them. There was hardly any difference. He turned his head toward Jason. “Hopefully when we get to where we’re going we do more than bite a few ankles.” He sighed, then added, “I can’t believe you got with Brooke. Asshole.”
“Ummm.” Was Weasel dating Brooke? He didn’t think so. He still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. It had all been so fast. One minute he’d been walking down a hallway, then the next the big woman had grabbed him and pulled him upstairs, he’d had no idea why. And before he’d figured out what was going on she was out of her pants and pulling off his. He hadn’t had time to be nervous. At least the first time. He shook his head in the dark. A month ago he’d still been on the farm, getting yelled at by his dad. Now he was fighting in a war. Had killed at least one man. And then Brooke…. It seemed like all these things were happening to someone else, and he was just spectating.
“I’ve been trying to jump on that for two years,” Weasel said wistfully. “Those titties, Jesus. Were they—never mind, how would you even know? Fucking virgin.”
“Not any more,” Jason said softly, and even in the dark you could hear his smile. Weasel snorted.
“I read, years ago,” Ed whispered, leaning against his backpack as he sat on the floor of the sewer pipe, “a Navy SEAL wrote that by the time they got to where they needed to go on a mission they were so tired and pissed off and angry that they needed to kill someone. Like it was therapy.” He was trying hard not to wheeze. It felt like his entire body underneath his clothes was slick with sweat. “I understand what he meant, now.”
Mark, sitting next to him, just grunted. Ed dug out a bottle of water and chugged it straight down. He felt better immediately. “Drink some water,” he told Mark.
They’d traveled just over a mile in a little more than an hour, but it had been a grueling go. They’d been in and out of the sewer line three times, crawling up weed-choked slopes of mud and down through broken chunks of concrete, splashing through ankle-deep water that smelled of death. While carrying eighty-plus pounds of gear each.
One of Hannibal’s people had gotten sliced pretty badly by a piece of rebar jutting out of a jagged slab of concrete, and Quentin had nearly sprained his ankle in a short fall, but otherwise they were doing well. No other injuries, just growing exhaustion. But the excitement at the thought of what was ahead of them tempered their resolve.
To his left was a member of Flintstone. They’d only been stopped a few minutes and already the man was asleep. Which, Ed had to admit, was probably a smart move. Ed looked to his right, past Mark. The flashlights had been off long enough his eyes were starting to adjust. Just visible forty feet away in the glow of the moon was the next collapsed section of the tunnel and the base of the slope up. Once they clambered up they’d have the longest above-ground trek of the night, nearly half a mile, before they could get back down into the sewer line. Then it was a full uninterrupted mile underground, straight east.
He checked his watch again. They had eleven more minutes before there were no satellites overhead, then had a forty-one minute window to cover that half a mile. Provided nothing unexpected happened, that should be two or three times as much time as they needed.
They’d worked out the best way for climbing up into the world. Two men would drop their packs and scramble up. They’d set up on either side of the opening, or the building if it came up inside one, and provide security while everyone else, laden down with all their own gear plus the first men’s two packs, struggled out of the pipe which, most of the time, was a significant distance underground. It was all done in silence, other than grunts and the occasional muffled curse.
When it was time they crawled up inside a low-ceilinged commercial building. Ed was the fourth man up. He had to go on all fours and drag his pack behind him because of the low roof in the hand-dug tunnel. He took a few seconds to catch his breath, then shrugged on his backpack and stood up with a grunt. His hands and clothes were caked with mud and he had abrasions all over his arms and legs from climbing over and around concrete puzzle pieces for hours. The tunnel mouth was near the rear of the building and he stepped through the splintered hole where the back door should have been. Before him was an alley.
Mill, from Flintstone—Ed wondered if was short for Milton or Miller, but knew better than to ask the young man—was in the alley, rifle in hand, providing security. Ed breathed the night air for a bit, then leaned in and told him, “I’m going to scout a bit ahead.” He patted him on the shoulder and moved down the alley east. He stopped at the first cross street. While the light from the moon was starting to fade as it sunk in the sky, he could see the alley appeared clear of obstructions for at least the next hundred yards. That was only a fraction of the distance they had to travel aboveground, but it was a start.
He heard the soft hush of a breeze, and some crickets, but that was it. Ed strode across and stopped on the sidewalk on the far side of the street, at the mouth of the alley. He looked back the way he’
d come and saw Hannibal walking toward him, his thick gray hair reflecting the moonlight like dirty snow. Under the weight of his gear the leader of Flintstone moved like an old man.
Hannibal stopped beside him and the two men looked around, north toward McNichols, south along the dark street, east down the alley, and back toward the building they’d just exited. A handful of dogsoldiers were now visible in the alley, black silhouettes against charcoal gray. Several started moving toward the squad leaders. Suddenly Hannibal shot his fist up into the air, and everyone stopped.
Ed cranked his head around. He’d heard it too, somewhere behind him, east. A low voice, and then a metallic sound, possibly a weapon. Not right on top of them, but close enough. Quiet, but loud enough to be heard…. He moved away from Hannibal and brought the butt of his carbine against his shoulder. Hannibal signaled for two of the men to come, but slowly. When the four of them were together, they moved out, trying to find the source of the sound. It was probably nothing, just a local denizen, but they had to check.
Moving at a creep, the men moved through the alley, into the backyard of a bungalow facing away from them. The rear wall of the house had crumbled into a pile of bricks, making an easy exit for a quick getaway. Or an easy way to get into the house without having to open a door. There was a soft sound from inside the house. Ed waved two of the men around the side of the house and then went through the hole in the wall, Hannibal at his side.
“I can’t believe it’s this fucking humid up here,” a male voice said, not much more than a murmur. There was the faint glow of a light. A flashlight, turned down low.
Ed took three very slow, careful steps, paused, then pushed around the corner, rifle up, Hannibal right there at his elbow. Two men sat on ratty furniture in the main room of the house, their heads leaned together. Ed lowered the muzzle of his rifle an inch as his eyes took in the men before him, then brought it back up. “Hey,” he said quietly.