From Out of the Outlands
Part 13
Police File:
I'm a working slob.
We don't get the kind of choices most rich kids get, having to drive old bombs instead of brand new cars -- and we certainly don't get the same kind of girls.
With me, it's doubly bad. I'm ugly. In school girls avoided me, or giggled behind my back, making me feel like I wasn't even much of a man, using me as an example to insult other men.
"You're hair's nearly as dirty as John Benson's," they say to their boyfriends. Or their zits were nearly as bad as mine. Or their eyes nearly as crossed.
You know how the whole thing goes.
I thought then I would spend the rest of my life hanging around with the boys, draining six packs and talking football. I thought for certain I would be working jobs that left me dirty and stinking from sweat.
Sure, this dame's got a fish face.
But when she came into my life, I was damned grateful that some female, any female, thought me special.
It's a big thing for a man like me, who goes through the day getting shit on by my boss, and dirty looks from his daughters, to feel special.
No, this fish-faced woman doesn't have much of a personality. She mostly complains about this pain or that, or how bad her parents treated her when she was a kid, and how much she would do to get out of her house.
That made me feel a little bad, like maybe she was using me. But hell, I used her, too, so I can't complain. And it wasn't like I was talking marriage or anything. I just wanted someone to be with, that's all.
And hell, maybe old fish-face changed me a little, making me feel better about myself.
Sure I might have done it all by myself, sort of slipping out of my shell when I got old enough not to have the insults bother me any more. But whatever caused it, I didn't feel like some stupid wage-slave any more, but as one of those hard-working slobs that make the country run.
With fish-face under my arm, I started to go out, and then, sometimes I even went out on my own, catching up with a social life I never knew before, talking to girls-now-women from high school I didn't think would ever talk to me.
Which is how I met this other girl, you see, a real redheaded sweatheart who took to me like she'd been waiting for me to come along her whole life.
You can't even guess how big that made me feel. It wasn't no fish face I had under my arm now, but a beautiful woman that had other guys scratching their heads.
What did a guy like me have that could attract a woman like that?
I was on top of the world!
That is until old Fish-face found out, like she was bound to sooner or later.
She was so hurt I thought I had murdered her or something, moping around, looking at me with those big, ugly mold-green eyes of hers. She didn't have to say anything to make me feel bad. All that went on inside o me, this tugging and pulling, this need to make a choice. It was as if there were two people inside of me, each needing to walk in a different direction. And I felt like I was the car in the middle of one of those monster truck pulls you see on TV sometimes, pieces of my insides yanked apart.
Maybe you think it should have been an easy decision. But I was too close to it, you see, making me blind to everything. I knew I had to decide and decide quick, or I'd wind up on my own again, with no body to love me or think me special -- which would have been a lot worse than when I'd started. You don't feed no starving man and let him starve again. He sort of gets used to the idea of food.
So I went and saw the other girl again, and saw that she was as beautiful as I remembered, and just as nice, too, and she made me feel like a king when she greeted me.
That bothered me.
It was all too good to be real, if you know what I mean.
It seemed to me that she was living in some kind of dream, not really seeing me for what I was, warts and all, and that sooner or later, she would wake up, turn to me in the bed and scream, then act just as cold as all the other girls I used to know in high school, or worse, sneak off and find some rich guy with a fast car and a handsome face, taking off with him, and leaving me to eat the dust.
I knew when I held her that I would spend the rest of my life wondering when that moment would come, fearing every guy that looked at her, hating her for looking back, asking myself: "Is this the one?"
I didn't see living like that as making me happy, no matter how pretty the woman was.
Which is why I'm marrying old Fish Face next Saturday, and why I'm so damned happy she said yes!
*********
Hudson shook his head, standing a few feet beyond the bank of tubes and instruments connected to Vincent.
Despite all the places Vincent had visited over the last forty eight hours and all the discomforts he had faced, the hospital bed just didn’t feel comfortable.
“The doctor's won't allow you out of here for a week,” Hudson said. “And I agree with them.”
“Damn it, that’s Roth down there, and Hilda, and Cromwell. If we don’t get to them, the Skids will.”
“We have every resourse activated,” Hudson said. “We're combing the underground tunnel by tunnel. We’ll find them even if we have to clear out the entire underworld of Manhattan.”
“But will you find them in time?”
“Sooner than if we had to rely on you hobbling around down there, Chief,” Hudson said. “You've done your part. Besides, technically, you are under arrest. The only reason you aren’t under guard is because the mayor’s office can’t find an officer in this city he can trust to guard you. While the governor has offered state police, the mayor can’t trust many of them. You’re a hero, Chief. Even if federal authorities hadn’t reinstitute charges against the mayor and put an acting mayor in his place, you still have a lot to answer for. Why push your luck?”
“Because I feel guilty,” Vincent said.
“Guilty? Of what?”
“Of being stupid,” Vincent said. “Of letting that bastard, Cromwell, get to me. I should have let him come out and then killed him.”
“And you would have felt less guilty over that?”
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “I don’t see how justice could be served better by having so many good people die trying to bring him in.”
“You have changed, chief.”
“Changed? No, I'm just weary.”
“All the more reason for you to stay here.”
“All right, I’ll stay,” Vincent said. “But I feel useless and blind. Couldn’t you get me connected so at least I can follow the reports of what's happening down there?”
“I don't know, chief,” Hudson said. “We don’t normally give such equipment to our prinsoners? What would the Mayor say?”
“Just do it, for Christ’s sake.”
Hudson grinned and vanished.
Vincent fell back onto the bed. Perhaps it wasn’t as uncomfortable as he thought. Perhaps the discomfort was always on the inside.
He grinned, picturing Hudson’s face when his transmission finally worked its way through the system to Hudson’s office, Hudsonss face losing its color, despite the micro adjustment of the computer to keep the image life-like.
His rescue had come swiftly, in a wail of sirens and a flood of flashing lights.
But down below in the darkness, Roth waited, listening to the whispers on her radio, partoling the dark looking for Vincent. He was sure she would not survive. She didn’t have the experience to pull out of such a scene. She didn’t know how to feel her way inch by inch through the grime, knowing to sense danger before it appeared.
Only growing up in the Outlands provided that.
Techys returned within the hour, dragging in an assortment of screens and terminals, all of which the nurses protested, and then the doctors, all of which Vincent said was necessary in doing his job.
The doctors relented, but made Vincent promise to keep view time to few hours during the day. He agreed, and then, watched the screen that one of the techys had lowered before him, while other techys sat near by before terminals of their own, tapping into various programs that improved the image, while a radio woman relayed Vincent’s commands to the underground units.
Three teams descended, one via the route Vincent had taken, another through a portal nearer to Chelsea. Vincent had come up nearly two miles south, just west of where former City Hall Park sat. A third unit went underground near the East Village, would move through one of the cross town subway tunnels, set up an underground base from which its troops could be dispatched if one of the other units came under fire.
“It’s like a goddamn war,” Vincent thought. “That LA thing all over again.”
He watched as the camera descended with the troops down the tunnels he had climbed. The distance shocked him. He could not believe he had climbed so far and held out so long -- even with the troop moving cautiously ahead. They came to the point where the tunnel rose again, moving down the ladder to the slanted tunnel. Down they went, men and women garbed in bullet proof gear, carrying gas and explosive gernades, carrying small machine pistols, gas masks, and transmission equipment that would allow the East Village troop -- as well as Vincent -- to monitor their exact location.
After a time, the camera came to the point where the two tunnels converged, and the straight tunnel descended. One by one they dropped down into this.
The other unit, near Chelsa, moved through wider spaces, climbing down a pre-planned route of former access tunnels, trying to get to the level at which Vincent had left Roth and the others. They moved with much heavier weapontry, and looked that much more like an army, their faces framed in bullet proof masks, lead by Hudson.
“You following all this, Chief?” Husdson asked, his voice booming over the speaker so that one of the Techys turned it down.
“I'm following it,” Vincent said.
“You let us know if anything looks familiar,” Hudson said.
“I’ll just shout out,” Vincent said, though had already grown weary and knew he would have to review tapes later, and that the teams would largely be on their own when he fell asleep. That could not be helped. The infection had spread wide and the wound had come close to gang green. The doctors said they'd barely saved the limb at all.
Vincent nodded out, then woke, an hour had passed. The teams had progressed to a safe point, then stopped. The East Village troop had reached a branching of tunnels, stopped, set up, and now began to spread out its tenticles, trying to secure real estate. These troops had encounter resistance. Not from the Skids, but from a handful of smaller gangs, who -- in mistaking the arrival of the police for a small raid or an invasion of rouge cops -- began to shoot.
It was a mistake.
The police returned fire with such verocity that few of the bodies of the gang members survived to be hawled up for the morgue. The rest dripped down lower into the tunnels like red oil thick with the pieces of their former selves.
Resistance in that quarter fell off.
The tube team following Vincent's trail had reached the main sewer out of which Vincent had climbed, and found the bodies of the two men who had passed Vincent in the tubes, or parts of them, arms and legs and heads left. The torsos would be grilling over some spicket deeper down, in the Skid’s gathering place.
Vincent closed his eyes, wondering again about Roth and the woman, Hilda, and the boy.
Each team constantly broadcast on Roth’s requency to alert her to their search. But so far, they'd recieved no reply.
“Blame the tunnels, chief," Hudson told him. “So much dirt, stone, concrete and metal, you can only transmit for a short space.”
“But we heard each other,” Vincent said.
“On the same level with a tunnel open between you,” Hudson said. “Even then you said you got static. Image the problems with tons of concrete and steel between you?”
When Vincent fell asleep again, he woke to find his guard, a young luetenint, arguing with a slick-haired young professional in a three piece suit that Vincent recognized at the town’s corporation counsel.
“The doctors said no one’s to bother him,” the Lueteient said, hand on the hilt of his pistol as the other man, complete with brief case and trailing several aids, attempted to move around the guard into the room.
“Nonsense,” the lawyer said. “This is important. Besides, you have all that equipment in there. If he’s so sick, the physcians wouldn’t allow that either.”
“Let him come in, Dixon,” Vincent said, his voice sounding weak and strange to him, like someone else's voice.
The Luetient glanced back at the police chief. “You sure, chief?”
“Absolutely,” Vincent said, knowing that neither the luetient nor the whole police department could keep the lawyer out if the man persisted. And this man, Robert Zinger, was known for his persistance, an up-and-coming figure in the polical scene who had made connections not only in city hall and the state house, but in Washington D.C. where he hoped to go some day in an elected capasity.
“What do you want, Zinger?” Vincent asked when the indignant man wormed his way around the luetient and made his way to the bed.
“Boy, you've done it now,” Zinger said, putting his brief case on the edge of the bed, flicking open the electronic locks that allowed him access to the computerized office inside. While many modern systems were smaller than his, few could equalize the capasity this briefcase had for communication and computing. Any file electronically stored in Town hall, Zinger had in this.
“Oh?”
“You’ve got this city in more lawsuits in two weeks than the city has seen in a decade.”
“I'm not surprised,” Vincent said, drawing a dark look from Zinger.
“Well, you'd better care about it,” the lawyer said. “The acting mayor is having a fit and so is the council. They're calling for your resignation.”
“I’ve had that request before,” Vincent said with a laugh.
“This time they mean it.”
“Under pressure from Chelsea, I suppose? And the Governor and whatever higher level of government they could reach?”
“This is no joking matter,” Zinger said. “Every body your men hauls out of those tunnels, every victim wounded or killed while you and your men were in Chelsea will have us in court. And for good reason. You exceeded your authority going in there, and the city must pay the price.”
“I was pursuing a criminal.”
“Illegally,” Zinger said. “That makes you a criminal, too, and one that has killed or maimed dozens of people, guards, innocent bystanders, even some of your own officers. And now, you're dragging this insanity through the maze under the city, risking more lawsuits, more lives as well as wasting tax payer’s money.”
“I have an officer down there,” Vincent said. “I won't leave her stranded.”
“You should have thought of that before you brought her down there in the first place,” Zinger said. “Or left her there to get yourself out.”
Vincent’s hand moved too quickly for Zinger to step away, grabbing the skinny lawyer by the tie and collar, yanking him towards the bed and down towards Vincent’s face. Now, nose to nose, Vincent glared into the man’s small eyes.
“Don’t push me, Zinger,” he said. “What I did, I have to live with. But I don’t need some rodent like you reminding me or acting as my judge and jury. You don’t know what it takes to survive in that world, or how hard it is to get out once you're intangled.”
Zinger did not move. Terror registered in the thin man’s eyes. He was a shark on his own terms, and Vincent had seen him gut his opponents in a court room, by he was also an inlander, one of those jogging, gym-once-a-day men, who lorded over people with his expensive education and his superior position, full of the panic and fear of what might happen if he and his kind had to live without the walls and security, without the protection of a militant society to kept the street people from harming him. In those eyes, Vincent saw the whole fear, the fear that would prevent the inlanders from ever coming to terms with those on the outside, the fear and sense of self-importance a far greater wall than the walls they built, walls that would not crumble down until did it for them, someone from the outside, someone pretending to be civilized, someone like Vincent.
Vincent released the man with disgust.
The indignant Zinger staggered back out of Vincent’s reach.
“You’re an animal,” he said, trying to recover his breath. “You ought to be in a cage.”
“You’re an animal, too,” Vincent said. “And you’re in a cage, one that you and your kind have built for yourselves.”
Zinger glared. “I won't have this,” he said. “I was told that if you don’t resign, and apparently you won’t, that the council has authorized me to continue with the charges against you and force you out.”
“Go ahead,” Vincent said. “I’m sure that’ll bring you much satisfaction. Meanwhile, get out of here. I have an officer in distress and I’ll be damned if I’ll let a weasle like you get in the way of her rescue.”
Zinger glared, his eyes full of legal rage that did not bear weight with Vincent, rage that could not dent the reality beyond the walls of the court room or the neighborhoods, where people lived and died in that lawless state, that untamed wilderness of ghetto that good society had abandoned, stealing their welfare as well as their dignity, giving them slave jobs to serve superior walled beings like Zinger.
“I’m sorry, chief,” Lt. Dixon said after Zinger and his flock of assistants had fled. “I should have kept him out.”
“You couldn’t have,” Vincent said. “Those people are like roaches. They breed in filth, use filth and squalor to elevate them, and then act as if they were better than us.”
Vincent sighed, thought about the whole mess, then fell back to sleep again. Another officer shook him awake. It was dark, and the face of the officer looked shocked.
“They found them,” the officer said.
Vincent was instantly awake and sat up to stare at the monitor, understanding instantly the police officer’s shock.
The camera panned over the bloody scene showing the interior of a small tunnel the boy and his small tribe had used as a home, an assortment of stolen goods from lamps to liquor strewn across the floor -- apparently by some enraged hurricane that had swept through the place in a vicious act of violence. He saw the image of the boy’s bullet-ridden body. He saw bodies of others, with the same pale faces, and the same tattered clothing, all dead, all shot or hacked. Then, he saw Roth, pinned against a small section of wall where the tunnel turned, still gripping her rifle, spent cartriges scattered around her as she half sat, the dead bodies of a dozen Skids blasted to pieces as they’d charged. But she was unable to halt them all, and had taken dozens of hits herself, her head slumping forward onto her chest in a final resignation of her inability to hold back the tide.
“Where are the others?” Vincent asked.
“No sign of them, chief?” some invisible officer said, his voice breaking up -- even the enhansed radios could not battle the miles of metal and stone and earth.
“Were they taken?” Vincent said.
“We can’t tell yet, but our people think not,” the officer said. “There seems to be a several entrances to this place, and when the attack hit, some of the people here got out.”
Vincent sagged. Cromwell had escaped. That was the worst blow of all, the bastard loose in the underworld with his former playmate as a bargaining chip. She could buy him free passage out.
Out? To where?
To some place beyond Vincent’s juristiction, somewhere to start up his life again, allowing lawyers of Zinger’s kind to keep him safe from harm.
Vincent yanked the tubes and needles from his arms as he rose from the bed. His guard and techicians howled.
“What are you doing, chief?”
“Finishing up this business,” he said, swaying, the pain dulled by drugs, but still there, nagging, and he, weaker than he ought to be, weaker than he needed to be.
“Get me some clothing,” he told his guard. “And if any doctors and nurses try to stop you, put them under arrest.”
The guard scrambled away. Moments later an army of medical people rushed towards Vincent.
“Get away from me,” Vincent said and took a staggering step through their mass, seeking a door as his head swam. The mass of people parted, and his guard returned, carrying clothing that wasn’t his.
“It’s all I could find,” he said, handing Vincent the jumpsuit and boots that the underground team was wearing, this guard apparently anticipating going down himself, or wanting to.
“Good work,” Vincent said, and stripped himself of the medical garp to ease into a suit that was slightly to large.
“Now, get me a gun and a car,” he said. “I’m going to finish off this thing before I'm outsted.”
************
He felt as if he had never left the tunnel, the same miserable oppression flowing over him even as he took the lift down guarded by a half dozen fully armed and armored men, the underground like one huge black hole sucking the life out of him.
“You’re going to die down here someday,” Vincent thought. “This is your doom.”
No one else spoke to him except to indicate direction, each guard keeping close to the police chief, despite his slow, hobble, the predictions of the doctors coming at least partially true: He had begun to bleed again through stitches they said would not take extended pressure. He could feel the moisture growing against his legs, as if he had urinated.
Husdon’s military experience showed with each level, supply lines maintained to the surface as if expecting attack, guards with guns aimed at the shadows, waiting, lights strung down the whole route from the surface to the place two dozen stories deep where the slaughter had taken place.
Vincent smelled the carcuses before he actually saw them, taking note of the bullet holes in the wooden supports of the main tunnel -- which Roth’s rifle had made during her gallent defense against the intruders. A dozen Skids had fallen here, their bodies still sprawled at the door or along the narrow entry -- another hole, dug to connect the main tunnel with an apparent dead section long ago sealed and unusued. Vincent had to bend to ease through, standing straight a few feet later when he reached the other tunnel.
Boxes and bags of every imaginable comody filled the interior, from corn flakes to electrical fuses, many slashed, or burned in the attack, many unharmed, stacked as the masters of this little rat hole had left them, each item smuggled out of Chelsea in an amazing effort to build a little security in the midst of absolute chaos -- the boy and God knew how many other characters like him, laboring to set up their new life in hiding.
“God knows how long they would have gone on like this if we hadn’t come along when we did,” Vincent thought, as Hudson approached him from deeper in the tunnel, his bulky shape hiding the fallen Roth twenty feet deeper in where the tunnel curved.
“I don’t approve of this at all, chief,” Hudson said. “You’re in no shape to be down here.”
“I know you don’t approve,” Vincent said and tried to laugh, but could not help staring at the body that no one had evacuated yet, waiting for him to come, waiting for him to sign off on Roth and the scene. “But this is my responsibility and I’ll see it through to the end.”
“You make it sound like you’re about to retire,” Hudson said.
“I may be forced to retire,” Vincent said, then informed Hudson about the Corporate Counsel’s visit. “I suspect the city council is at this moment drafting a resolution to replace me. You’re the likely candidate for chief.”
Hudson’s face blanked as if he didn’t quite understand what Vincent had said, then when he did, his face grew red with rage.
“I won't take it,” Hudson snapped.
“Don’t be a fool,” Vincent said. “You have to. You don’t want some idiot taking over, do you? Now show me what you've found out.”
Hudson turned to the crime scene.
“As best as we can make out, the gang...”
“Skids,” Vincent said interupting the man. “They call themselves Skids.”
“The Skids,” Hudson went on, “came from only one direction -- the main tunnel. I’m not sure how they discovered this tunnel since it some kind of covering over the door. Perhaps a skuffle or sound in here which turned them towards it. But when they kicked it down, Roth wasn’t ready for them.”
“That wasn’t like her,” Vincent said.
“Agreed. She must have been distracted. Perhaps by something going on in here. We found some signs of a scuffle inside that appear to have nothing to do with the invasion. So when these Skids came barging in -- kicking down the wooden door as they came -- Roth was in the wrong position for an adequate defence. Had she been more prepared, she could have set up on the other side of the curve, where she had a clear line of fire, and could have picked off these creeps as they came through. As it is, she had to turn and face them head on, here, before the curve.”
“Why didn’t she run?” Vincent asked.
“A good question. Others did. This tunnel has several other exits, though none of them into main tunnels. Some did escape. She chose, for some reason, to turn and fight. Perhaps to delay the Skids long enough for the others to get away.”
“Show me the other exits,” Vincent said, then followed Hudson through the narrow passage way, through a hive of tiny off-shoots that had served this group of people as home. Rags hung before several as if in search of privacy. In several other places, Vincent saw where fires had been kept and meals cooked, stolen pots and pans now scattered during the attack.
“They seemed to have escavated some of this themselves,” Hudson said, noticing Vincent’s study of the chambers they passed. “I think this group as been here for a long time, perhaps here several generations. They had cooking facilities, toilet facilities, even a crude kind of shower arragement, tapping into a main at the other end of the hive.”
It was a kind of private civilization, Vincent thought, not that much different from the high and mighty people in places like Chelsea, organized for their own protection, struggling daily to make sure they could supply themselves with bare necessities without calling attention to themselves.
“That’s where the neighborhoods made their mistake,” Vincent thought. “It’s all right to seek safety, and to live well. But not to boast about it, not to lord over others who weren’t so lucky to be born on that side of the wall instead of this. People who brag too much become hated, and become the targets of revenge.”
And yet, Vincent noted, these people hadn’t bragged, and they’d become victims, too, targets of the beasts that roamed this side. And that becauce these people could not have figured anything so remote as a conflict like Vincent’s descending upon them, a man’s insistance on justice putting the whole world out of kilter, sending many more people to their doom. Perhaps, the world has grown more simple again and that old style justice of courts and cops didn’t work any more -- where those on the right side of the law often become the target of the law. Sometimes, it was simply easier to resort to primative justice, just to keep the world from falling out of balance.
Vincent sighed. He should have killed Cromwell and let it go with that.
“And the others? What happened to them?” Vincent asked.
“You mean Cromwell and his niece?”
“Them and the others.”
Hudson’s face tightened, that look Vincent had long ago learned the fortelling of bad news.
“Most of those who lived here died in the tunnels beyond this one,” Hudson said.
“Most?”
“We found a trail that seems to indicate some got away,” Hudson admitted. “They went deep and crawled through spaces too dirty or tight for the Skids to want to follow. Cromwell and his niece seemed to have gone that way.”
Vincent took this in. After all the bullshit, after all the death and destruction, and the rumors of death and fighting that still went on in Chelsea where the trapped Skids fought fang and claw with security, to have things end with Cromwell slithering away was unacceptable.
“And we can’t get them?”
“Get them? Not unless we crawl into those tunnels after them,” Hudson said. “And then, only God knows how deep those things go, and to what kinds of places.”
“I want Cromwell,” Vincent said. “Even if I have to crawl down another sewer to get him.”
“This might be worse,” Hudson said. “The tunnel these people fled into wasn’t anything the city or utilities dug. It seemed some kind of natural hole, a tiny air duct to some larger network of caves. We had a hard enough time calling up maps and doing computer mockups so we knew something about these tunnels -- and even those are largely guess work. Those tunnels we couldn’t even guess about. Whoever crawled down them, would be travelling completely blind, and cut off from any kind of help. We’d have to bring everything we needed with us, but it wouldn’t be much. A man could squeeze down, but not with body armor or heavy equipment, or even food and water.”
“And you can’t find a team of volunteers?”
“I couldn’t even ask anybody to do that,” Hudson said.
It was the horror of the underground showing in Hudson’s eyes, similiar to the look Vincent had seen a thousand times on the faces of Inlander recruits confronting the Outlands for the first time. No training could undo completely the internal fears built up from a life inside. A person could not just walk out from the walls of civilization and face the overwhelming flood of chaos without feeling some sense of panic. Training forced the police officer and the soldier to overcome that fear, to fight it back, following orders rather than a socialized logic. War was not logic. Neither was modern day police work. If anything, it was the lack of logic, men and women plunging themselves into the midst of those elements that gnawed on the roots of civilization and undermined the foundations of civilized life. People like Hudson braved their own worst fears to save the life they had come to understand as normal. But even men like Hudson had limits, lacking the street sense Vincent had acquired from growing up in a world without rules or with rules so different no inlander could follow.
“Fine,” Vincent said, ripping open the seals of his body armor. “I’ll go myself.”
“You can’t!” Hudson exploded.
“I must,” Vincent snapped back. “Too many people have died trying to bring that man to justice to let him squirm out of this now.”
“But you don’t know what you’ll find down there,” Hudson said, sagging a little, glancing at Vincent’s face with growing dispair, his argument useless, and empty of conviction, since he knew Vincent would go no matter what Hudson said.
“I know I won’t catch Cromwell standing here,” Vincent said, pulling off the last of his gear, the mildewed air around him flavored with the scent of blood, fesis and gun smoke.
“Then, I’m coming with you,” Hudson said.
“No.”
“I mean it, chief.”
“You’re not an outlander,” Vincent said. “You wouldn’t last ten seconds in a tight battle down there.”
“I won't let you go alone.”
“Then go find me someone with outland experience,” Vincent said. “I need you on top too bad to lose you to some idiot fire fight.”
“Need me for what?”
“To start clearing out all these tunnels, layer by layer,” Vincent said. “I want them cleared, then sealed, in sections.”
“But that’s crazy,” Hudson said. “The rats’ll just find their way back again.”
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “But it will take them years, and perhaps by then, we’ll have found a better answer, a more humane answer. But until then, these places just serve as highways for the Outlands, private transportation systems that allow the gangs to travel quickly and strike at will. The Skids may headquarter down here, but they’re up top a lot, I’ll bet, doing dastardly deeds to people who need our protection. If we can slow them down, force them up to the surface, we can deal with them, making their lives as miserable as they make the lives of the tax payers.”
Hudson nodded grimmly, his gaze suggesting his awareness of how huge a job Vincent had handed him, huge in scope, huge in implication.
“Now go find me another man. Arm him with a light machine gun and a flash light. But nothing more,” Vincent said.
When Hudson returned, a thin, scar-faced officer trodded behind him, someone from the ranks Vincent knew as Eddy Banks, an Outlander like Vincent himself who had fought his way to back into civilization after having spent a hard thirty years on the wrong side of the walls.
“Good,” Vincent said, approving of the selection if not the man. Banks still tended to be a rough-edged man who stood out from the department, often falling into his old habits when it came to dealing with those he was supposed to arrest. But down here, in the tunnels, Banks was exactly the kind of man Vincent wanted, all reaction, someone who lived by instinct the way Vincent did.
“You a volunteer, Banks?” Vincent asked.
Banks shrugged, his grim face unmoved. “Let's say it don’t make no difference to me whether I go down or stay here,” he said.
“Fine, then you’re going down,” Vincent said. “You’ll take lead while I cover our rear.”
“Rear?” Hudson said. “You expect to get attacked from this direction?”
“If we find cross tunnels down there, I do,” Vincent said, then stuffed a pistol in his belt, and took up a light machine gun in one hand and a flash light in the other, and motioned Banks into the crawl space. The other man nodded, and then eased into the hole, shinning his light ahead. Vincent eased in after him, but backwards, his leg thobbing under the bandages as he made his way down the uneven floor of the tunnel. His light showed Hudson’s face where it stared down after him, until the natural curve of the tunnel erased ir. Then, the two men were on their own, moving in a odd rhythm of heavy breathing and shifting limbs, Banks’ movements a little more graceful than Vincent's wounded ones.
The smell changed, the oil and the sewage fading into something much more primative, as Vincent and Banks climbed down into not a hole in the earth, but a part of their own minds, each inch taking them along the cerebrial cortex back through time, stripping off each evolutionary era, rubbing out those marks civilization has left on succeeding generations. Vincent smelled the purity and viciousness of earth, stone, and dripping, dripping water, waiting, fearfully, for that four element to erupt. Even the logic faded and he felt much now as he had as a kid, with a throbbing sense of expectation, his eyes straining to see light behind him, his ears peaked by the sense that some sound would suddenly explode upon them.
Even his fingers and knees drew messages from the rough face of the tiny tunnel, reading its crags the way some psychics read the bumps on a man's head, feeling the subtle vibrations that hummed through the surface of the planet -- each small drone the passing of a being, each a drip, drip, drip in this eternal darkness.
“Chief?” Bank’s voice whispered huskly. “Something’s in the tunnel ahead of us.”
Both men stopped. But Vincent was badly situated, his fear of attack from behind now betaying him, and if the tunnel had not widened a little, he would have stayed that way, forever looking behind when he needed to peer ahead. Somehow, grunting over what the act did to his wounds, he managed to turn himself around. Then, he eased up so that he and Banks laid side by side in the tunnel staring down into its depths. Banks' light joined by his, revealed only the gradual, coarse curve of the tunnel continuing its descent.
“It was there,” Banks said. “I swear it was, chief. I caught it briefly in the light, and then it wasn’t there. I think it was too big for a rat or a cat. Maybe it was a dog or something.”
“Maybe,” Vincent said, but thought differently, images of another, small shape leaping into his head as he peered into this darkness the way he had another darkness in another part of this tunnel, when Roth had spotted a similiar movement in that tunnel, too.
The Boy!
Vincent hadn’t thought to search through the carnage above for the body of the boy, and knew he should have, and suddenly understood how Cromwell and Hilda had managed their escape, slipping out from under the attack of the Skids even when many of the others in the tunnel could not, Skids held off long enough by Roth’s noble fight for the boy to lead the larger man and the smallish woman down this very tunnel to some deeper and very secret place, humanity returning to the holes out of which it first emerged.
“So what do you think we should do?” Banks asked, inquiring, but not afraid, too much part of the street above to ever fear the darkness, knowing that it wasn’t the darkness that killed a man but what came out of it, and that could be killed as easily as he could.
“We go on,” Vincent said, now filled with the scent of a hunt again, angry, outraged, drawn into passions churned up by some unseen force inside himself, as furious at Cromwell for bringing Vincent back to the roots of his own dispair as for murdering all those women and causing the death of all his officers.
“Calm down,” Vincent told himself. “You're going to kill somebody like this.”
And he wanted to, craving the blood of the man who had caused it all, as if Cromwell wasn’t just to blame for his own crimes, but the whole crumbling of civilization that “to have or have not” mentality that the walls of each neighborhood symbolized.
“Let’s move,” he told Banks, but this time, Vincent took the lead.
It was the same pattern as before, the boy easing back as silently and carefully as he had during the earlier hunt, as familiar with this tunnel as any of those outside the Chelsea break, moving more like a shadow or spirit than anything human. Vincent heard his own clumsier movements as loud in comparison, his shoulder or hand or foot scraping the side as he crawled down, sending echoes in announcement of his advance, echoes under which the boy could move without fear, easy whispers that only someone as sensative as Vincent could hear. Banks heard them, having a similar instinct, but his answer was a tightened finger on his weapon’s trigger, thinking to shoot first, the way all good street people did, never trusting to the innocense of the other party.
No one was that innocent, everyone was out to get you. So you had to get them first, and hard, and make certain they didn't get another chance.
Banks seemed nervous with the cat and mouse of this, puzzled as most of the power players were at those who could slip in and around him, surviving by stealth instead of strength.
This lack of understanding explained why so few power men survived to old age. It wasn’t so much the violence that killed them, but their own inablity to understand their shrinking strength, and to adjust for it, or deflate their own pride enough to find sollace as the senior, weaker member in a gang.
The boy came from a much different philosophy, that Vincent understood from a distance, having -- as a law officer -- danced with his kind before, learning to counter each step the way a good dancer reads the lead of another dancer, not quite able to keep up with it, not ever able to dublicate it, but aware of it, and how not to get too hurt by its embrace.
“We'll never catch the boy like this,” Vincent thought. “And with him knowing that we’re following him, he won’t ever lead us back to where Cromwell and the woman are.”
Vincent needed some new stagedy, something that would draw the boy to him. The police chief stopped, and motioned Banks into silence, and then, switched off his light and Banks’ and the darkness swallowed them.
Vincent could hear his and the other man’s breathing. That could not be helped, and yet, it was a sound far less audible than Cromwell’s had been, or even Roth’s, because this was a game Banks understood, a game in which a man waited, silently for prey before a pounce.
What would the boy do? He would have to come closer in order to detect the breathing, but would he? Did he need to? Logic dictated he flee as fast as possible, seeking to confuse his enemies with several twists and turns.
But that kind of logic didn't exist in a world where darkness ruled, where it was more important to know where the enemy was, so as to hide from it, than to wander blindly through such tunnels hoping to avoid stumbling into danger. Here, where sight was at a loss, a person needed every bit of information with which to make choices, learning to sniff out enemies, learning to know where an enemy was before you moved.
And clearly, this much had occurred. As Vincent and Banks fell into silence, so did the boy, all movement in the tunnel immediately ahead ceasing when they did.
Vincent did not think of time, though his beating heart seemed to measure the interval in a rapid sequence he could not make still. For some reason, he kept thinking of his wife, and the events that had occurred since her death, the kind of subtle bitterness that had oozed into him without his knowing. Before her murder, he had seen himself growing, advancing inch by inch through an unfair system, beating back all oppostion, believing in that now discredited theory that a man could pull himself up by the boot straps if he worked hard enough. Her death and the visions of the city he’d seen since denied all that.
A noise rasped out of the silence, jerking Vincent out of these thoughts, a noise so subtle he would not have heard it if his senses hadn’t been particularly tuned to it and waiting for it, and now, in the darkness, focused in on it, listening to the boy make his way closer.
Bingo!
As he had guessed, the boy did not expect the trap, having had no experience with someone who would offer silence as a lure. His traditional enemies lacked stealth, barging up and down tunnels as arogantly as the insiders stormed through the streets of their private, walled communities, owning them, and in owning, daring anyone else to take them away, or bar their progress.
Even then, the boy’s advance came as slowly as a cautious turtle, and Vincent could hear the pauses, the waiting, the listening, then the moving again, inch by inch, with an accompanying sniff. That Vincent couldn’t hide, the smell, his smell, and the smell of Banks beside him, that above ground scent that no undergrounder could ever mistake or miss.
The boy’s movement ceased again bearing all the shock of a sudden discovery, and Vincent could feel the air grow tense with the boy’s fear, the animal dread that would soon erupt into a panicked flight.
Vincent didn’t give the boy time, guessing about the distance between them, when he jerked himself forward. His hands stretched out ahead of himself in the narrow tunnel, grasping at the darkness in a vain hope that he was close enough now to the boy to grab some part of the boy's anatomy. And feeling cloth and skin much sooner than he expected – Vincent grabbed hold before the boy could squirm away.
“Let go of me!” the boy squeeled, the words clumsy in their delivery like those spoken by someone deaf from birth, or someone unused to natural speech for long periods.
“Like hell I will,” Vincent said, his voice deliberately harsh as he secured his grip on the boy with his other hand and yanked the boy towards him. Banks squirmed up the few feet to join him.
“Son of a bitch,” Banks said. “That’s nothing but a kid.”
“Don’t let him fool you,” Vincent said. “He’s been down here all his life. He’s had to survive here. Turn you back, he'll slit your throat and then slip away.”
The boy glared at Vincent. If he recognized the police chief from their previous encounter, the boy showed no sign, but his filthy face did show other things, more terrible things, signs and portents of what had gone on since their last meeting, a bruise along the right upper cheek saying someone had hit him, and the stain of rust and dust and mud and blood streaked over his other cheek like a tatoo. The boy had traveled to a place, desperately deep, and had been driven there, less because of personal desire for safety than because of some other more fearful reason only his urgent gaze suggested.
“Where are they?” Vincent asked, speaking very slowly so the boy would clearly understand, and the boy did, the sudden rush of panic into his eyes said as much.
“Let go of me,” the boy said again.
“Not until you lead me to where they are.”
“I can’t! He’ll kill him!”
“Who?”
“HIM! HIM!”
Vincent scratched the back of his head with the fingers of his free hand, frowning as he stared down at the boy, clearly unable to read the mystery the boy had placed before him.
Banks did better.
“Are you saying that Cromwell bastard’s holding someone hostage?” Banks asked.
“Him!” the boy said, nodding enthusiastically. “He say he kill him if I don’t get food.”
Vincent grimaced. Another figure injected into this passion play, and another possible death laid at his feet.
“Who does Cromwell want to kill?” Vincent asked.
“Papa,” the boy said.
“Is that where you led him to after I left you?” Vincent asked.
The boy frowned, and then, after squinting at Vincent’s face for a moment, showed recogniation, giving Vincent another nod.
“She say I need to make us safe,” the boy said.
“You mean Roth?”
Again came the nod.
“She say we go where the Skids don’t find us.”
“So you took her home?” Vincent pressed. “To the place upstairs?”
This time the nod seemed graver, and the boy seemed to stare through Vincent and Banks, his dialated eyes picturing the place up the tunnel where the slaughter had taken place.
“That place safe, Skids not find us before.”
“How did they find you this time?”
The boy blushed.
“They sniff us.”
“Couldn’t they sniff you out before?”
“They sniffed women.”
“But you had women up there.”
“They not go out,” the boy said.
“You mean if they didn’t leave, the Skids wouldn’t have a trail to follow?”
The boy nodded once more, then sagged a little.
“Papa yell, say to make them go away. He say I bad son, we all die because of me.”
Vincent half pictured it in his mind, the panic spreading among the underground dwellers as the news spread, more and more of the people of that place coming to gawk, setting themselves up for the slaughter to follow, while the wise ones, the ones who knew what a disaster this meant, began to scramble out every whole they could find, hoping to get as far away as possible before the bloodshed began.
“So happened then?”
“Skids come, make noise, kill and kill.”
“But Roth fought them first?” Vincent said.
“Woman kill and kill, but not enough. They kill her first.”
“How did you get away?”
“Big man grab me, grab Papa, tell us he kill us if we don't help him.”
“Your father put up with that?”
“Papa old. Papa weak. Papa not big like big man.”
“So you led them down this tunnel?”
The boy nodded. “We go far, more deep than ever.”
“You had another dwelling?” Vincent asked.
The boy frowned.
“Home,” Vincent said. “You have another place down there like the one up top?”
“No,” the boy said and shuddered. “Not same. Not so nice.”
“Nice?” Banks snorted. “He calls that hole we just left nice?”
“Shush, Banks, you’re scaring the boy,” Vincent said, then turned to the boy again. “Can you take us there?”
“He kill Papa. He say get food.”
“What if we promise to kill him first?” Vincent asked.
The boy’s dialated and unnaturally large eyes opened wider. “You kill him?”
“He’s a bad man,” Vincent said. “That's why we came down here. To get him. To make him pay for his crimes.”
Doubt still painted the boy’s face. He did not understand why Vincent and Banks would go to so much trouble for something as illusive as Justice. People here or in the Outlands didn’t deal in such terms, all action centering around staying alive, killing to avoid being killed, killing to eat, killing out of fear, desperation, even a kind of pathetic cruelty. But Justice? To make a man pay for his crimes? Never.
And yet, Vincent saw something else in the boy’s dark eyes, the passing images of slaughter, of loved ones dying under the swift injustice of the charging Skids, family and dwelling members whom had helped the boy survive, held when he cried at night or felt hungry or afraid. Then, the most primative emotions reared itself in the boy, the need for revenge.
“I take you there,” he said. “You kill him.”
The boy turned and began to move back down the way he had come. Vincent motioned for Banks to cover the rear, moving in the way they had earlier, trusting the tunnels even less than before. But movement came slow this way, and Vincent had to call the boy to slow down several times. Banks could not crawl as fast at the boy did, even foward, and Vincent’s wounds had begun to ache again, dripping blood working its way through his bandages, telling him he could not keep up this pace.
“I wonder what kind of diseases I’ll catch down here,” he thought, though he knew disease was way down on any list of potential causes of his fatality.