From out of the Outlands
Part 10
Police file:
I should have said "No, I don't know them, never did." Even though their stare through the liquor store window still haunted me, hollowed eye sockets, mouths silently begging me, their faces so full of despair they might have seen right through me. They the whispering, shuffling figures in the night capable of killing me, hanging outside every door, like crumbling brown leaves blown here and there.
The street is full of villains like them, poverty stricken, violent, arguing amongst themselves as to what they will do with me once I wander too far away from a well-lighted door.
I had come in for a pack of cigarettes and information, asking the proprietor behind the bullet proof glass if I could use a telephone, or how I might go about getting road service, only to have him laugh and shake his head, and tell me "No Phone," "No tow service," he seeing the men outside as well as I did, knowing how the thick panes made him immune. He knew how I feared to walk outside again, feared they might pick up my trail and follow me as I sought a cab.
I could almost hear the safety as they readied their guns. I could almost smell the gun oil, so sickeningly sweet.
I had seen them before, like wolves picking up my scent when my Mercedes broke down, as if they knew I had few options as to where to go, and that people in this neighborhood would no more take sympathy on a person dressed like me than a rat.
Then, the owner motioned for me to leave, mouthing the word "closed" with his eyes laughing at me, knowing that my wallet full of credit cards won't buy me out of this situation. Perhaps, he wondered why I don't carry a cellular phone like the rest of my kind, or how I came to wander out of my own neighborhood around the Grove Street Path into the Greenville section of Jersey City, where I don't belong.
To explain my wrong turn off the New Jersey Turnpike extension would take too long and he would have no more sympathy for me at its end than he had before, he thinking I would not have paid him attention to him if I was not desperate, and he's right. Until this moment, I would have felt repulsed by his smell, thinking how little it cost to buy deodorant, less than the bottle of alcohol from which he clearly drank.
Then, with the door closing behind me, I found myself on the street again, and those two sets of eyes now without glass between us. I could hear the two of them giggling, and saw the tall one with the cruel smile clutching something in his pocket I knew had to be a gun.
The click sounded in my head, the smell of gun oil reached me, even though they were not close enough for me to hear that sound or smell that odor.
But they came fast, their whispered step rushing at me so quickly I barely had time to turn before I found one pushing a pistol into my face while the other riffled my pockets.
"Where is the money?" the smaller of the two asked. "Where is the money"
I grew distant from them, their voices echoing, as if my head was an empty drum.
I did not feel them strip my wallet from me; I felt only the blow to my head when they hit me and I fell.
The next moment, I police officer is helping me to my feet, asking me if I would recognize the two if I saw them again, and me, so grateful for their arrival I would have said anything, nodding my head as they put me into the car and drove me along the street, and when we came upon those two thugs again, asking me if that was them, and me telling the officers, yes, yes, it was them.
And then, time passing, the daily routines, me back at my Grove Street condo, coming and going from the Path, hardly thinking of the date I had to appear in court, and then, appearing in court, smelling the foul smell of sweating bodies as people crowd around me, then, me, alone, sitting in a chair, one lawyer asking me about what happened, then another, me telling them about the break down of my car, about my walking alone, my begging for help, my beating, and then, as if on top of it all, finding my car gone when I got back, the thieves capable of starting it and stealing it when I could not find a tow truck in time.
And the whole time, those two stared at me from their chairs, hands clenched into fists, their gaze enraged by my statements, they in their silent way promising me to never forget, telling me the next time they will be less kind than to leave me bleeding from the head yet clear-headed enough to pick them out of a lineup and put them in jail.
The next time, their gazes promised, they will find me wherever I am and make sure I can never witness against them again. And I tell the judge and jury, yes, it was them, only to hear the judge suspend their sentence, if they promised to be good.
***********
The back of Vincent's throat burned as he followed the others down, bile working up from his aggitated stomach, something more than fear coming over him, something so primative he felt again the way he had during his earliest adventures on the street.
Then as now, some deeper part of him failed to understand the necessity for his actions, as if in each case he reacted exactly opposite to what survival required.
Ahead, Roth’s light peirced the dark, as if creating the cavernous world as she went.
Stone and dirt on either side, signs that the original builders had never meant for a permanant space here, cutting this for some brief repair who knew how many years earlier, now cracking under the weight of the city that had been constructed above, sagging wooden beams, rotting in places, dusty sections where the dirt spewed out onto the stairs. Even the stairs seemed temporary, not even flat, making descent a risky endeavor that took most of their attention. Roth -- the professional that she was -- handled her side well, moving with the grace that training and experience had taught her, despite the terror she obviously felt. Vincent was equally in control, his own light shifting from side to side, to investigate the various pipes and opening that showed to either side, air vents and water vents and gas lines no longer in use. But those between, Cromwell and Hilda, stumbled and muttered, and stared around, half expecting some prehistoric terror to leap out at them.
Both seemed aware of the scrapings and scurrying ahead in the dark, the noises Vincent had noted early, noises that said they followed behind someone who had been wandering in the regions above.
Who was it, Vincent wondered again, picturing some poor neighborhood outcast, too frightened to show his or her face?
And yet, Vincent detected an expertise in the movements, the echoes of the unavoidable scraping of a figure on the run, just occassional enough to be accidental.
As they descended, the air changed, too, growing more stale, caught in whiffs of mildew. Slow streams of liquid oozed down the walls, leaving small pools at their feet. The dripping echoed around them. Slow, perpetual, like a ticking clock. Then, they came to another door, and another passage.
As Roth consulted her wrist viewer and its map, Cromwell bolted, turning suddenly like a frightened bear, both arms across his chest as he barged back towards Vincent, elbows poking at the police chief's face.
With the tight space, Vincent barely had time to duck, the frieght train of a man rolling over him, shoving Vincent against the wall, but not before Vincent stuck out a leg, disrailing the charging man, sending him back down to the bottom and muddy floor at Roth's feet, she poking the muzzle of her rifle in the fallen man's face.
“That was really stupid,” Vincent said, pulling himself up, his shoulder aching from where he had made contact with the wall.
“This is stupid!” Cromwell growled, looking almost pathetic on his back, like a crab stranded, arms unable to manipulate his bulk up. “We're all going to die down here.”
“Maybe we will, and maybe we won't,” Vincent said. “But whatever happens, it'll happen to us all together.”
“Bullshit!” Cromwell barked, finally managing to pull himself up into a seated position, his face flushed under the beams of the combined flashlights, Roth's barrel light and Vincent's hand-held. “You call this justice, dragging me through goddamn hell? Just shoot me. That would be more merciful.”
“No one said I wanted to show you mercy,” Vincent said, his mind flashing back to the police woman Cromwell had killed, and the images of all those other women he had seen since taking on the case. “Justice demands I bring you to trial. I'm going to do that, even if you die in the process.”
“I don't mind dying,” Cromwell yelled. “I just don't want to die like this, like some kind of rodent. I have my dignity.”
“So did the women you raped and murdered,” Vincent snapped back. “Now get up on your feet. And if you try and run again, I shoot you in the foot and make you crawl the whole way out.”
Cromwell rose, first to his knees, then slowly to his feet, rising the way a stunned bear might, the surprise in his eyes slowly giving away to rage. But the big man made no move to come after Vincent again, instead, the anger smoldered in his eyes.
“I'm going to have to watch my back with him,” Vincent thought, then motioned for Cromwell to step out into the hall, following the others into a space not much wider than the stairwell. Nor was this space nearly half as crafted as the stairs, the mark of the pick ax and the shovel sharply evident between the wooden beams supporting the upper structure.
“Is this it?” Vincent said, casting his light around, finding no relief in any direction from the dismal construction.
“The map shows deeper passages below, but they seem to be little more than viaducts for water or gas,” Roth said, “And barely high enough to crawl through. If we want to remain upright, this is the last passage we can use.”
“Use for what?” Hilda asked, her bright eyes catching the light, as she stare around in dread of the darkness.
“To hide,” Vincent said.
“Hide? For how long?”
“Until we get rescued,” Vincent said, and then stopped speaking and motioned the others to silence as well.
A stone or something had fallen, and he flashed his light in that direction, his beam catching a dirty, big-eyed boy squarely in the face.
The boy -- blinded by the light -- blinked, frozen like a deer frozen under the glare of oncoming headlights, his grey flesh, revealing him as caucation, age 10, perhaps, with brown, dialated eyes that seemed to have grown wider and larger from lack of consistant light.
“Who the hell is that?” roared Cromwell, as startled by the revelation as the others, but offended, too, as if he still had priority rights over the land beneath his neighborhood, fear mingling with outrage in his voice.
The explosive sound was as effective as a shot in setting the boy loose, causing him to flee.
“Damn it!” Vincent yelled. “After him! We can't let him get away.”
“Bullshit!” Cromwell said. “Shoot the fucker. He has no business being...”
Vincent shoved the larger man in the direction the boy had taken.
“I told you to catch him, now move,” Vincent shouted, glancing at Roth who had nudged Hilda in the same direction, Roth apparently catching at least a glimpse of Vincent's reasoning.
That was no urchin from the neighborhood above, but a creature of the deeps, someone whose relations had gone underground a generation or more ago, had thrived in its dark economy, and someone who had found a possible means through the wall.
And if that creature had found a way in, Vincent could possibly use it as a means out, precluding the need to wait in the dark for a Hudson rescue which might not come.
Cromwell staggered forward, followed by Hilda, with Roth casting her weapon light ahead of them into the dark, creating a confusion of shadows, out of which the running boy came and went. The tunnel -- while it had occassional side passages, seemed to have only one main route, the rest leading to false endings or storage spaces for tools, places the boy had already explored and knew he could not escape from.
No, Vincent thought, the boy is seeking the most direct way out. Our trouble will be on the other side, especially if he has friends waiting.
“Slow down,” he told the others, drawing a quizical look from Roth, and a roar from Cromwell.
“I thought you wanted to catch him!”
“I do. But wherever he's headed, it's straight ahead. I suspect we won't have much trouble finding it.”
Cromwell swallowed, stared at Vincent for a moment, then down the passage from which the whispered echo of the boy's flight still echoed. The large man's face showed some emotion Vincent couldn't read, lips pressed tight, eyes narrowed, more the looked of a trapped animal than anything human.
“Let's go,” Vincent said, motioning for Roth to lead on. “But be careful.”
Roth nodded. She was coming around to Vincent's thinking, picking up on the clues and what the boy's appearance here meant. She advanced now, with her rifle thrust forward as if in anticipation of a trap, easing the muzzle lamp into each side passage now with her finger tight on the trigger.
Vincent's light stretched ahead, casting long shadows as the beam tried to peirce the darkness around the other three, the long shadows of the advancing party making the tunnel seem haunted. So, too, did the occasional abandoned tools the party came upon from time to time, a shovel or pick ax left leaning against a wall as if a work man would soon be back to recover it, only the rust showing the years each had stood waiting.
“They must have used this passage for constructing the subways,” Vincent thought, though he knew construction crews could have come here for a hundred other reasons during any year from when the tunnels first began to appear beneath Manhattan after the American Civil War in 1865.
The under city as some called this world was a massive network of everything people on the surface had wanted hidden, from cables to sewage lines, gas mains, water mains, side by side with subways and train tunnels. One historian once called these the intestines, nervous system and bowels of New York City. And long before the first wall went up dividing Inlands from the Outlands, people took refuge here in Manhattan's honeycombed underworld, the way early Christian cultists did the catacombs of ancient Rome. With a bedrock of nearly pure granite, the underworld was built up into a hive of burrows, as deep into the ground as some of the skyscrapers, made of concrete, of metal.
Below the thin skin of asphalt and concrete that marks the surface of a Manhattan street, the first layer of these underworld carries the wires that carry telephone voices, fiber optics, electricity, servicing everything from private apartments on the Upper West Side to the businesses at the top of the World Trade Center. These cables connected street lights, traffic lights, fire and burglar alarms like a web, with hundreds of miles of gas lines and water lines strung about four yards below these, and sewer lines and tunnels at sloped angles just below these.
During the 19th Century, more than a dozen gas companies competed to serve New York, each installing its own set of pipes, many of which were abandoned or replaced a century later, those abandoned became the unauthorized shelters for people seeking to escape the world above.
At its peak, the subways in Manhattan covered nearly 750 miles along nearly 25 separate rail lines with nearly 500 stations. Only a handful of these survived the building of the walls, just enough to service transportation up and down Manhattan. Those stations not in use, were walled up for security reasons, though not monitored as tightly as the streets and gates above. Few figured any threat from this quarter.
But under here, the secret societies found a fully functional world in which to breed, abandoned train stations with bathrooms and banks of lights, with toilets that flushed, sinks with running water, and lights that illuminated with the flick of a switch.
None of these luxuries existed this deep, of course, but the island had other underground necessities that would allow a primitive kind of life to exist, underground streams supplying water -- and little known tunnels and stairs that would allow access to higher more populated sections. A careful thief could survive for years, eating and drinking from the stores of such places as Chelsea -- provided they could gain access on some lower level no one else knew about.
The wall builders would have sealed up even the lowest levels from intrusion, but could not have found every niche in a system so complicated as this. Yet the real danger -- as with most things in the perception of the Inlanders -- came from beyond the wall. Such a breech as Vincent expected to find was more valuable to Outlanders than a discovery of gold or oil, with the human rodents perfectly capable of murdering each other over its secret. The fact that only one boy seemed to wander these passages told Vincent that the secret had been kept well.
“Otherwise, the upper passages would be filled with murder and mayhem,” he thought. “None of the gangs could have resisted exploiting their advantage over security.”
At some point, Roth's light would reveal the lower sections of the wall, and Vincent wondered what they would find.
He didn’t like the idea of being blind on both ends. Where was security anyway? What kind of obsticals was Hudson running into in getting authorization for a rescue mission? How far would Vincent have to go towards rescuing himself?
All these questions had the same answer, though he was reluctant to admit he knew it. Security was even then tightening its circle and would go to every length to make sure Vincent did not escape with Cromwell, even if it meant searching every passage or worse, filling these passages with some kind of chemical or biological element.
Vincent had heard of such things before. The media did not talk much about neighborhood seiges, but all across the country, gangs and others made inroads on walled communities, breaking into them despite elaborate defenses – a kind of neo-French revolution inspired by rage instead of greed, outraged poor refusing to live side by side with the arrogant wealthy, displaying their displeasure in a furious, insane killing sprees that often left whole neighorhoods strewn with dead.
Many neighborhoods, fearing this ultimate breech, had begun taking up a new, more desparte defence, a doom's day mechanizm designed to go into operation the moment ordinary security had failed, filling such tunnels with poisons the way the government had done in the streets during the LA wars, creating yet one more level of mutation to fester in the dark places and grow into something less and less human.
Did Chelsea have such a device? And would Security engage it now?
Suddenly, a panic siezed Vincent.
“We’d better hurry,” he said, drawing another odd look from Cromwell and a worried one from Roth. But neither bothered to speak. The darkness ahead and behind seemed to seal them into a cacoon, everything beyond the bubble of light was a terror. All stumbled over the rubble on the floor, even the sure-footed Roth, and both her light and Vincent's began to uncover a trail of disgarded containers that showed indeed someone had come this way and often, cardboard boxes of cereal or dried fruit ripped open during some previous retreat, the starved child devouring the contents before bringing the rest back to some equally starving human element beyond the wall.
The boy, obviously, their sole connection to the treasures inside, he, choosing his own before returning. Perhaps they mistreated him, despite his ability to bring them food, Vincent thought, the boy eatting as he travelled with the full knowledge he would get nothing when he got back.
But back to where and to whom?
Vincent's skin blistered with goosebumps, partly from the cooler temperature here in the tunnels, but partly in anticipation of a fight beyond the wall, perhaps a fight worse than if they just stood and fought security at the top of the elevator.
The troop moved on, feet taking on a shuffling step to avoid stumbling, Roth keeping her muzzle beam straight, while Vincent allowed his to wander, to search the floor and the increasing discoveries, food tins growing more numerous as they went on, clearly the product of months or years of coming and going, feeding while fleeing.
And as they moved, the passage deteriorated, as if the original builders had done less and less work along with way, putting up the minimal amount of wood to hold back the stone and dirt, figuring they needed this passage once and then, never again. The timber over head bulged, and their movement seemed to cause some to creak and dust to float down on their heads.
Vincent could hardly breathe, the air was so stale. Yet, he could smell humanity even here, as if the earth could not keep out the influence of those who crawled above, absorbing human poison in a drip as slow as the drip of rain, water and filth working their way down through the cracks. And, then, finally, Roth stopped. They had arrived at the wall.
The construction crews had come and went in a hurry, doing the usual shoddy work that came with what they believed as a pointless effort, none of the crew comfortable in the dankness and imagining no one else comfortable either, slapping up concrete to block the space where few men had walked in generations, as an assurance that no man would walk here again, and none had. But the shifts in the old island and the drip, drip, drip of water had left their mark on the newer work more obviously than on the older, cracking the surface of the concrete, wearing away one particular corner so that eventually, a hole appeared, a whole that hands -- with tools -- could widen enough for a boy to slip through, and did, and yet not so wide as to attract attention on the other side, where such a secret entrance was worth more than all the bullets and bombs of a typical gang. Such a hole could feed a colony for years, one boy stealing small items so as not to be too obvious, coming in daily to fish for the family meals.
Vincent pushed his way to the hole and studied it under the closer scrutiny of his small light. The wall for all its shoddy construction still posed an imposing obstical.
“It’ll take you a year to widen that hole for us to crawl through,” Cromwell said, laughing clearly at Vincent's expense.
“If we were using the tools the boy did, it would,” Vincent said, glancing at Roth, who nodded in agreement as if reading his thoughts.
“What other way is there?” Cromwell snapped. “You can't shoot your way through with your weapons.”
“No, but we could blow our way through with plastic,” Vincent said.
“Plastic explosive? Here? With the roof looking like this? You must be out of your mind? We'd die in a cave in.”
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “But not if I used very little and just enough to widen the exising cracks.”
“Even that would be a risk, chief,” Roth said, agreeing at least in theory with the killer.
“A risk worth taking,” Vincent said.
“I agree,” Roth said. “But I thought it was important to state the facts.”
“Facts?” Cromwell said, looking first at Roth then at Vincent. “Our dying is not a fact. We should turn back.”
“And do what?”
“Hide as you suggested before, and wait.”
“Wait for a rescue that will never come?” Vincent said. “Or for the hunt to catch up with us? No, this is the only way now. We blow the hole wider and then we each go through.”
“We don't know what's on the other side!” Cromwell protested. “We made that much noise, it'll bring out...”
“Just shut up,” Vincent said, pulling his back pack off his shoulder, and from it, taking a small plastic box -- this opening onto a quite sealled strip of what looked to be no more than flexible white plastic -- like the sealer Vincent's father once used on his boat. He moved to slice a two inch piece, but Roth shook her head, and he moved the knife closer to the end, slicing only an inch. He replaced the remaining five inch strip in the box, and the box to his pack, then slid out another, smaller box, out of which he withdrew something that looked like the plastic popup from a turkey that said when the turkey was finished cooking inside. Only this popup had a battery and a small red light on top. He pushed the sharp end into the plastic, fitting the plastic into an angled crack near the top of the hole, then -- waving the others to retreat, pushed the tip of the popup down, and the red light began to blink.
Vincent ran to join the others, but didn't get far when the thud sounded and the concusion of the explosive shoved against his back. The tunnel's dust rose and swarmed around them, stinking his face like tiny insects.
And as he turned, Vincent saw the rise and slight fall of the ceiling, like one huge heaving stomach ready to burst the bounds of its wooden constriction. But after the initial shutter, after the smoke had vanished and the dust settled, the ceiling remained constricted and the hole -- through which he'd barely been able to thrust his head -- stood open wide enough for a slim man to crawl.
“I’m supposed to get through that?” Cromwell asked when they reached the wall again and Vincent ran his light over the opening as Roth stood back, her rifle pointed towards the spot she expected to see beasts rise from beyond.
“You can do it,” Vincent said. “If you squeeze a little.”
“And if I say I won't?”
“Then I'll break your arms and legs and push you through first,” Vincent said.
Cromwell leered, but ceased his objections, staring at the space as if he, too, expected demons to pop out, then, finally, he sighed. Vincent turned to Roth.
“I'll go first,” he said.
“That's not a wise idea, chief,” she said, yet knew it was. She could not crawl through the hole without the chance of someone waiting on the other side to grab her weapon. Vincent's pistol was less risky.
He eased himself down to his knees, removed his backpack, pushed his pistol into his belt and slowly inched forward through the gap.The broken pieces of the wall jabbed at his hand and knees, his free hand, the one that held the light, shook as he moved, barely powerful enough to pierce the enormity of the dark on the other side, making out only the barest outline of the tunnel and the wooden braces that held back the miles of earth overhead.
But he saw other light, distant and dim, like yellow eyes of some large insent staring back at him from the dark. He paused, blinked, and fumbled for his pistol, only to realize when he hand found the comfort of the hilt, that he saw, not eyes, but yellow bulbs, strung along some distant part of the tunnel.
“Electricity?” he thought. “Down here?”
But, of course, some sections would have had lights, though these had such a low wattage that they barely illuminated themselves, let alone the tunnel. But they gave him comfort just the same, and he rose to his feet feeling as if his flight was not totally devoid of hope.
“Chief?” Roth called. “Are you all right?”
“Yes?”
“Do you see anyone?”
Vincent swung the light around to study the immediate area.
“Not so far,” he said. “Send Cromwell through next. Then Hilda.”
If Cromwell argued, Vincent didn't hear it, though it was a moment or so before the scraping sounded and the bulk of the large man appeared through the gap. The brick and concrete dust powdered his hair as if a 17th century wig, his face flushed with fury.
“Was that how he looked before he had raped and killed those women?” Vincent wondered, trying to remember the image he had seen on the video, a moment in time that seemed so distant he felt like another person, and thought of Cromwell more as a pathetic consquence of a pathetic people, one of the in-bred, ill-bred masses that huddled for fear behind walls, unable to fend for themselves except in fits of rage.
When the larger man stood, his image of perfection was ruined by the stain of earth on his pants and his hands, the first honest signs of labor Vincent had yet seen on Cromwell.
And Cromwell glared at Vincent, gaze so full outrage, Vincent felt a twinge of fear, and then, for the first time, sensed the real beast behind the so-civilized a mask, a beast caged by wall and society, utterly, and dependably perilous.
“I’m going to have to watch myself with him,” Vincent thought.
“It’s dark here,” Cromwell said, failing to notice the distant lights. “Are you sure this leads anywhere?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Vincent said, “Only that we're better off on this side of the wall than we are on the other.”
“You think security can’t crawl through that hole?”
“I’m betting they won't,” Vincent said. “Not to rescue you.”
Hilda's blonde head appeared next. She was as little equipped to deal with the hardships of the underground as Cromwell, and her spike-healed shoes would not do well in the dark passage ahead, which were bound to be less even than those from which they had just come.
“Take off your shoes,” Vincent said when she finally stood.
“What?”
“Your shoes. Take them off. You won’t make good time with them, and we're going to need to hurry after this.”
She reluctantly removed them, but clung to one shoe in each fist, staring with bewilderment at the new world around her. She saw the distant string of lights, and her eyes filled with fright, because she knew what they meant.
A moment later, Roth emerged, and rose into a croach, her rifle aimed at those lights, glancing up at Vincent, waiting on his next command.
“Take point,” he told her. “The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll come to the end of this.”
“If we come to an end,” Cromwell grumbled.
“We'll come to an end,” Vincent said. “Though it may not be the end we have in mind.”
They repeated the pattern that had started on the other side of the wall, Roth moving slowly ahead, her slow, steady step feeling out of the passage even though her light illuminated it, sensing around corners with a well-trained instinct for danger.
And Vincent felt the danger, too, that throbbing tension filling the passage, Cromwell’s thumping step sending echoes ahead, announcing their presense, giving the shadows a point at which to aim -- even in the dark.
Hilda began to sob, partly because the broken gravel hurt her bare feet, partly because the tension asailed her and she had no experience to tell what it was and no training to supress it.
“Tell them to shut up, chief,” Roth said as she eased back to Vincent who walked last. “All that noise and someone's bound to take a shot at us.”
“There's no helping it,” Vincent said. “Just keep alert and duck if you see anything.”
Roth returned to the lead, moving more slowly than before, her shoulders hitching forward into a defensive position, telling Vincent she heard or saw something in the tunnel ahead. He flashed his light forward to join hers in searching the darkness. But the string of lights ahead of them, hurt their efforts, rather than helped, creating numerous shadows they could only investigate one by one as they marched closer and closer to each.
Was it the boy they had seen earlier on the other side of the wall, or the buzzards that had sent him through the hole day after day to seek out and bring back the treasures of Chelsea's store rooms?
Then, between Hilda’s sob and Cromwell's snorting, Vincent heard the scrap of the retreating feet, one set, not many, similar in nature to the sounds he had heard earlier.
“Are we lucky enough to have come through the wall without attracting attention?” he wondered. “Someone somewhere had to have heard that explosion.”
Yet no matter how intently Vincent listened, he heard only the whisper of the boy’s retreat, a stumbling, panicked, backward retreat that paused often, and then scrambled as the lights neared, as if the boy knew he was leading this small group of invaders towards some treasured location further up the tunnel.
“No doubt, he’d always feared something like this would happen one day,” Vincent thought. “But after getting away with so much for so long, he probably thought security didn't care. And he would have been right if not for our coming after Cromwell.”
Then, Vincent noticed something new. Side passages, which had previously seemed dead, now blew cool air in his face as the small troop trudged passed.
“These go somewhere,” he thought, and then began to fear the dark again, because now they had finally come to a part of the world where they could no longer be certain of what was behind them or before them, and could find themselves under attack from any direction, sudden hordes of freaks rising from some lower passage or from one side or another.
His grip tightened on the handle of his pistol, and his light now turned into some of these passages, searching for signs of life, and to his dismay, he discovered them, scraped sections of broken wall that showed movement, the mark of metal against stone, fresh enough to suggest someone -- perhaps someone other than the boy -- had come through here, and was most likely armed. And from the frequency of such marks, Vincent guessed the number of those traveling in or out of these other passages was significant. This may have explained the boy’s panic.
“Roth,” Vincent called.
The small troop stopped.
“What is it, chief?”
He shone his light at several of the marks. Roth's face grew grimmer.
“That’s from fire arms,” she said, touching one mark where a bit of black came off on her fingers. She smelled it and then held her finger to Vincent's nose.
“Gun oil,” Vincent said.
“What do you want to do?” Roth asked.
“What can we do?” Vincent said, glancing at Hilda and then at Cromwell, both of seemed suddenly inhuman to him, walking and talking creatures who did not seem of much importance in the schemes of this underworld, who would not help Vincent escape doom if and when the gangs here discovered him passing through their turf.
“We can go back,” Cromwell suggested.
“No way,” Vincent snapped. “We'll push on.”
“To where?” Roth asked. “I mean it isn’t like we have a plan.”
“We have a map,” Vincent said, indicating the small screen on her wrist.
“An old map that tells us nothing about what’s changed since or who occupies what,” Roth said. “We could follow it and walk right into someone’s arms.”
Vincent pondered this a moment, then nodded. He needed someone who knew the landscape, who knew how to travel through the lines of enemies safely.
“We have to catch that boy,” Vincent finally said.
“Catch him?” Cromwell roared. “You ought to shoot him. Him and every other human rodent you find down here.”
“Shut up,” Vincent snapped, then nodded to Roth, who flicked off her rifle light and slipped into the gloom.
“Where the hell is she...?” Cromwell said.
“I told you to shut up,” Vincent said and yanked the man towards the side of the tunnel, then grabbed Hilda before she could float away, the two of them, striking Vincent an extremely pathetic example of civilized humans: one a pervert, the other excessively vulnerable.
“Is this what we're breeding in our closed communities?” he wondered. “Is this all we have to show for all humanity's progress.”
In the dark, more scrapings sounded. The boy’s movements like a road map in sound. Vincent kept his own light on, waving it from time to time. Never down the tunnel -- he didn't want to uncover Roth's movements by accident -- but at the ceiling and the walls, trying to make its weak beam draw the boy's attention, and perhaps curiousity.
“That little rat is clever, but he’s curious, too,” Vincent thought. “He may wonder why we've suddenly stopped and come back a short way to take a look. If he does, Roth’ll have him.”
Vincent also listened for other sounds, and thought he heard more distant scrapings, along with the dripping of water and the rumble of trains, the island of Manhattan shaking above and around them as life continued to go on. He seemed to recall an old Science Fiction novel he had read once, about scientists being reduced in size and injected into a human body. He felt that way now, felt the movements of the beast which contained them, the automatic, unthinking elements that allowed life to continue inside and outside the neighborhood walls, the breathing of the beast, the movement of its blood through artifical veins, the slow and steady decay that came naturally with age -- and, of course, the parasites. The germs, the virus, the potentially deadly diseases that inhabited every organizm, fought against by elments within the body to keep the disease from spreading into the blood.
“I’m a germ fighter,” he thought and chuckled and drew a dark look from Cromwell, who was a particularly infectious germ, but not the only germ and not the most deadly. “There are people down here who would make Cromwell look tame.”
His violent nature was not the reason Cromwell had to be brought to justice. A bullet would end his obvious threat. But he was part of a greater problem, a man fully injected into the main stream of this city's blood, an infestion made more insidious by its appearance as respectable. If Cromwell did not go to jail, then his infection would grow. More and more of his kind would seek to violate the law as a right, believing themselves superior to the crawling creatures of the deeps and the streets, believing they could not be tamed, should not be tackled, better not be shackled by law.
And that was the danger.
Despite the walls, Manhattan had no superior beings. Those with money on one side had all the same flaws, all the same desires, all the same needs as those on the outside. Those inside simply had the means to maintain themselves, to take what they needed either by payment or force, and to keep those who did not have anything from getting what they had.
Something scraped the wall in the dark!
Vincent jerked around, his pistol aimed at the shadow out of which the sound had come.