From Out of the Outlands
Part 14
Police File:
I always understood that the Oulands were never as dangerous as Inlanders imagined. You’re safe enough if you take all the proper precations, and don’t interact with too many people you meet.
This world has its terrors, even for the wary. But they are less frequent than most people presume.
It’s the human tragedy that unnerves me and maybe the real mockey of my time in college. As if my life and their lives had nothing to do with each other. I seem to float through this world, coming and going from school. People don’t necessarily read my Inland roots from my expression. I don’t tell people readily where I come from.
I know most of the other students seek places Inside one neighorhood or another. But most of them come from rich families. I do not. My father worked as a neighborhood janitor, and it’s a blessing that I managed to get accepted to a college on scholarship. But scholarships don’t pay for everything, and I have to work a variety of jobs to pay my room and board.
You can’t find lodging in any neighborhood nearly as cheap as the Outlands supply. And I would gladly pay double what I pay here if only I could avoid seeing the pain.
Whereas I can walk through the Outlands invisibly, I can no longer close my eyes to the Outlands as I once could. My daily trips through the streets would make Dante cringe.
It was a oulander named Leo who did this to me.
He was an odd old man who I first set eyes upon while I was reading near the bridge. In daylight, you can even sit in the Outlands unmolested by the gangs. And for study, I preferred the river’s company to the ruckus my rooming house neighbors made – the screams and shouting that always kept me from concentrating on the words I was trying to digest.
I found relieve in the water’s surface knowing how it constantly changed. I had this belief that the water washed away the worst of our sins, and that after enough time, we could see the world washed clean of most of what we knew today.
Then, one day, I looked up from my book and saw Leo standing over me.
He was a dirty man with bad breath and dirty clothing, who is trying to read the spine of my book. His olive green knit cap was incrusted with leaves which suggested he had been sleeping in the park.
“That is a terrible book,” he said, shaking his head. “You shouldn’t be reading it.”
Can you imagine my indictnation at this bum telling me what I should read.
“Look, why don’t you mind your own business,” I said, and tried to go back to reading, by which time I knew he was staring again.
Rather than make any issue of it, I folded the book closed and came home, vowing to look out carefully for the character before I set out to be there again. There is no way to tell what’s wrong with his kind. With some it is drugs. But the local mental hospital let loose lots of so-called safe people into the Outlands. It was a mean social solution designed to let the street rid the world of a problem the governnment could not legally.
But that was not the last of the character. I saw him again a few weeks later at the library somehow he had slipped through all the detection equipment making we believe someone in authorities had let him and, despite rules against characters of his ilk occupying the library. He recognized me immediately, greeting me from across the silent room as if we were long-lost friends.
Of course, I ignored him, pretending he was talking to someone else or even himself. But he came over and looked at the books I was taking out.
“No! No! No!” he shouted when he saw the titles. “They have it all wrong.”
Embarrassed? I was mortified and the librarian seemed think we were together. She motioned to the security team who came in with weapons drawn. They were mean, non-compromising people who did not want to hear my side of the story. They put us both out telling us not to come back.
At this point, I was so peeved, I could’ve killed him!
But I carried no more lethal a weapon and then typical sprays and electronics done devices. I could not afford heady armor even. Let alone a weapon capable of killing.
I did give him a tongue lashing saying he had nerve associating with decent people like me, getting people like me tangled with his heady schemes. What did the men want from me money? Was that why he was bothering me?
I told him I had no money. This was not far from the truth. I told him I was working my way through the college, hoping to make something out of myself.
I did not half to explain even to him, how small of chance I had of escaping a fate in Outlands through my books. I would be lucky if I got a job as pretitious as my father’s, kicked around by the people I worked for, looked down upon for my inadequate status.
I told him it was difficult enough getting by without some lazy man like him trying to take from me the little I’ve earned.
I went on and on mercilessly.
Anyway, he took it badly. A lot worse than I thought he would. He actually looked hurt and turned away with expression of betrayal. I was so abored by my own behavior that I immediately caught up with him and said I could afford him a cup of coffee if he wanted.
He accepted.
He took me to a little coffee shop where he apparently hung out. There were others like him there dirty and sad, acknowledging our entry with grunts. Even the owner grunted and brought us coffee, black, and Leo talked about books the whole time.
He was like a man possessed. He spewed out titles and his opinion on their contents. A small portion of which I had even heard of. So much later I came to appreciate those of which he approved.
It was late, I asked questions about him. After he had wandered off, most of the men in the little shop had nothing to say, but others had more than enough for all.
“He thinks he’s special,” one of the men said, though what he meant was less harsh than it sounded. Different was more the word. No one seemed to know much about Leo which made him a subject for rumor and speculation.
A lot of this centered around the small army pouch which Leo carried constantly. Several men suggested Leo was actually independently wealthy.
“The bag is full of bank books,” one said, a belief most of those I talked to held in common.
As for his background, no two stories agreed, some insisting he was among the mental patients released to the street, who had somehow managed to survive despite his handcap.
A medical professor at school suggested Leo had suffered a stroke, basing this guess on a discription of the man’s distorted expression, and the weak hand with which he clutched his green bag.
I learned that the street gangs did not bother Leo the way they did other bums, sensing something different in him that other bums lacked, fearful perhaps of some strange magical power he possessed.
After our time in the coffee shop, I never saw him again, despite my effort to keep a lookout for him. I wanted to ask him about his past, but more importantly, to find out why he hated my books. He did seem to have a preference for more classically oriented things like literature and philosophy, as opposed to psychology and sociology which I was studying.
Maybe that was comment enough.
A few months later, after winter set in, the local roundup on cable television reported that the police patrol had found a body frozen to the ground near the river. He might have died first and frozen later, no one could say. But the cops showed up at my door later and gave me his bag.
“People said you were close to him,” they told me.
There were no bankbooks inside. The rodding cloth only had a broken glass framed certificate of graduation from Harvard University.
************
The tunnel widened, the walls growing rougher, as they smell of the air changed, indicating a change ahead. Vincent no longer used the light, though allowed Banks to use his to watch the passage behind. They had come passed many openings along the long descent, all of them full of darkness and stale water smells. No pursuit had showed, as if this level was too deep and disgusting for even the Skids to care about. Suddenly, the boy halted.
“We come to end,” he whispered to Vincent.
“Is he here?” Vincent asked, drawing his pistol out again.
“Not here,” the boy said. “This tunnel end.”
Vincent relaxed a little, then pushed the weapon back into his belt, as he watched the boy turn around and slowly ease out into the darkness legs first, vanishing down into some deep gully he could not see. Finally, unable to stand the blindness, he fished the flashlight from his pocket and flicked it on, revealing something like a cave or natural tunnel, one of the underground waterways that criss-crossed beneath the island of Manhattan, connecting the East River with the Hudson. A narrow band of water trickled down the middle of a much wider space, the brown stain half way up the wall indicating a high water mark and rises and falls in the water's elevation.
“Banks turn around,” Vincent said. “Cover me while I climb down.”
Banks did what he was told, shining his own flashlight into the space while he moved his weapon in an arch to cover a possible attack from either direction.
But no sound came, except for the sluggish gurgle of the water, and Vincent’s heavy breathing as he lowered himself, and the gasp of pain when he dropped onto his wounded leg.
“You all right, chief?” Banks asked.
“As all right as I can be,” Vincent said, taking out his own weapon and flashlight and repeating the covering pattern as Banks climbed down to the slippery floor of the water channel.
A green ooze made the curved floor tretchorous. They would have to move slowly here, Vincent thought.
“Which way now?” Vincent asked the boy.
The boy moved rather than answered, his small feet finding solid footing where Vincent could not, moving too quickly, forced to stop in order for the two more cautious men to catch up, Vincent hobbling again, Banks walking backwards to watch the tunnel behind.
“How far away is this place you’re taking us to?” Vincent asked the boy.
“Far yet,” the boy said. “Must hurry. Water rise soon.”
“You mean the tide?”
The boy nodded. “Comes in, goes out. We not stand here when it does.”
Vincent sighed. “All right, we'll hurry,” he said, then told Banks to drop the watch. “I don't think we'll have to worry about what’s behind us now. But you're going to have to help me. I can't hurry without leaning on someone.”
The boy seemed better satisfied with the progress after that, Vincent moving more quickly with Banks to lean on, even though the slipery surface did not make travel easy.
After a while, Vincent noticed the rise in the level of water, and the boy's anxiety, urging them to hurry.
“Not far, now, not far, then we climb,” he said. “Must hurry before water comes.”
But Vincent was in no shape to move any faster than he was, even with Banks helping him, his leg throbbing as they moved, and his feet slipping and sliding on the slick surface as the water inched up over his tops of his shoes, working its way up over the edge of his pants, cold, oily, sour smelling liquid that had collected its poisons on its way from the river.
“Hurry,” the boy pleaded.
“I'm trying,” Vincent said, and stumbled on. “Is it far? Where you’re going.”
“No, not far now,” the boy said, and then took Vincent's other arm, and with Banks’ help, managed to nearly carry Vincent along, each slopping step taking them closer to the place where the boy wanted to go.
That place proved to be a kind of stairs, roughly hewn out of the side of the cave, not by the jack hammers or pick axes of any previous generation of tunnel builders, but by some more primative method to which Vincent could only guess. Banks and the boy deposited him on the first step as they climbed out of the water themselves.
Yet it wasn't the water the boy seemed to fear now, peering back the way they had come, squinting in the light as if he prefered the darkness because the darkness hid nothing from him, while the flashlights created shadows in which other things could hide.
“What things?” Vincent wondered. “How could there be things worse down here than the Skids?”
Then, Vincent caught movement in the water -- a subtle swish he might have missed had his own senses not been heightened by the last few days in the dark.
“What was that?” he asked, shining his light in the direction of the sound, its beam highlighting only the ripples in the rising water, not the sourse of the ripples.
“Fish people,” the boy whispered in disgust.
“What?”
“Fish people,” the boy repeated, but did nothing to elaborate.
“Are you telling me there are people in that water?”
The boy nodded. “Dangerous people,” he said.
Banks took even less comfort from the boy's talk, staring around, his rifle now pointed towards the water again, with his face showing a kind of panic Vincent had only seen on men confronted with their own worst fears. Vincent -- who had now seen enough of this underworld to know it had secrets and revelations of horror he could not imagine -- had come to terms with the oddities of such worlds.
The L.A. Wars had unleashed unimaginatable horrors on the world that few outside the field of combat had seen first hand. The military – bent on destroying the uprising – had unleashed its full arsenal, from chemical warfare to a much more insidious biological combat. The diseased released soon made their way into maintstreat society, creating s social nightmare the government could not contained. But less known were the biological alternations the military had made, secret bio-enginering projects that the L.A. Wars allowed to test. Vincent had heard reports, but had seen mostly the failed aftermath, pathetic children allowed to live, adults with two heads and numerous arms.
But reports claimed many more experiments had not failed, yet had produced horrors far worse than the failures. The military – with the cessation of hostility – did its best to destroy these, but did not succeed in getting them all.
The war, however, was not the only source. California – challenging federal restrictions against altering human DNA – conducted less secret experiments before the L.A. War, not in an effort to create better weapons, but a better and more productive human race. They genic changes they made were intended as a help to the poor, to make them more productive, to give them skills nature hadn't meant for them to have.
The media had called it: “Enhancement,” subtle significant changes to the DNA that gave people intensities of interest that made them learn better in different areas, gave them physical skills that allowed them to work harder, think in specific ways, and do things ordinary humans could not. None of these changes showed back then. People didn't get two heads or develop gills, the way some did later. People's faces didn't melt from a conflict of chemical and biological changes caused later when the military, using biological and chemical weapons fought back against the masses of people who rushed at them, who sought to tear down civilian authority in a manner much more reminicent of the French Revolution than modern America.
Then, struck by these weapons, people began to change. Some changed color. Some grew new limbs. Some died. Others fled in horor of what their mirrors displayed. Each growing more and more terrible, more and more like the creature from which their genetic changes had dirived. The surviors, unable to cope with civilization’s upper world, crawled into its depths, to shape societies more suited to their own kind.
“But this?” Vincent thought, eyeing the surface of the water for another sign of attack. “How could people evolve so far back as to become fish again?”
Suddenly, Banks’ weapon barked, three sharp flashes followed with three roaring reports, the bullets wizzing into the dark water, striking at a place near to the bottom step where new ripples at started.
Someting dark and slimy surged up from the filthy water, cried out, and sank again, amid a rush of bubbles.
“Son of a bitch!” Banks snarled, then shifted the barrell of his weapon in an arc, waiting for the next watery shadow to emerge.
The water surged with movement, suggesting a whole flood of bodies beneath it.
“Hurry!” the boy pleaded. “Must go away from here.”
“Go ahead, chief,” Banks said without looking at Vincent. “I got this cover....”
Banks fell, his legs grabbed out from under him by the horror from the water, rifle splashing where it sank into the monstrous flood.
Vincent yelled, and leaped towards the man, who vanished into the water nearly as quickly as his weapon, pulled in by the feet as something slimmy gripped.
“No, no,” the boy said, yanking at Vincent’s sleeve. “Come now.”
Vincent stumbled along as the boy led him up the roughtly hewn stairs, into the new tunnel, into a tunnel that only the earth and its unrelenting sense of patience could carve, narrow, but tall enough to allow Vincent to move along without having to stoop, move along leaving the water and its terrible implications behind.
Now, his head throbbed as well as his leg, and he hobbled on after the boy, feeling as if the world had changed right under his feet, or he had wandered so far underground as to step out onto another planet, one in which he was the alien and not these creations.
“Hurry,” the boy said again, and tugged his sleeve for him to move more quickly than his stunned condition would allow.
“Why?” he asked. “Do the fish people climb up after us?”
“No, others,” the boy said.
What did he mean? What other, greater horrors could exist as to frighten the boy like this?
Vincent did not have to ponder this long before he began to feel and hear a throb in his step that was not his wounds protesting his flight.
It was not a sound at first, just a vibration, something he might have otherwise mistaken for an oncoming headache, except that the boy seemed to notice it, too, glancing frequently over his shoulder as he urged Vincent to hurry, pulling his sleeve as they climbed, up into ragged-sided tunnel, which didn't rise for long, but grew to a mound then twisted to the right, and down.
“It’s a Goddamn cave,” Vincent thought, caught between the throbbing of his leg and the growing vibration of someone following them, drawn to them by their fight near the water. “I'm going to die in a Goddamn cave with all kinds on monsters around me.”
“Hurry,” the boy said, and pulled and prodded him, even though Vincent now felt as if he was walking in a fog, the pain and the weariness now consuming him. He could not fend off an attack without rest. He could do little more than stumble forward at the boy's urging, and hope they escaped whatever danger the boy happened to fear.
The passage went on and on, rising sometimes, but always making up for that rise with a deeper, for stiffling descent. His flashlight weakened, and its beam grew dimmer as they went on, leaving him more and more dependent upon the boy's guidence. A soft green glow began to show from some underground growth along the always moist walls.
“How far now?” Vincent asked, pleading with the boy to stop and let him rest, always disastisfied with the short time the boy provided. The vibration grew into a hum. No, more than one hum. Like a buzzing of bees that Vincent suddenly realized wasn't natural at all, but the sound of engines of some sort, motorized vehicles he couldn't imagine being driven in places such as these.
“Not far, we keep going,” the boy said, as the sound grew louder, and the buzzing turned into distant roars.
The boy led him passed opening on either side, and down some of these Vincent saw flashes of light.
What were they?
The boy would not say, shaken by their implication, urging him to move more quickly as the path led still further and now finally down.
The roars were real roars when the boy stepped out of the narrow tunnel and into a much broader, and clearly man-made via-duct, something which water rested upon the bottom of, but did not fill. It was a passage as large as a subway tunnel, though lacked tracks or breaks of any kind as far as Vincent could see in the dim light of his nearly dead flashlight.
His pain-numbed brain took a moment to sort the matter out, the vague memory of maps rising into his head from before his return with Hudson. He remembered the subway tunnels, the gas mains, the sewage system, even the storm water facilities. He remembered the vein-like structure of each highlighted in greens, and blues and whites and reds on the computer screen. Then, he remembered the darker colored lines, larger, seemingly less important, indicating a few tunnels running down into the city from the north.
“What are those?” Vincent had asked.
“Water viaducts,” Hudson said, after consulting the color guide. “We get water shipped south from upstate, the way Jersey City across the river gets water from upstate New Jersey.”
From where he stood now, Vincent realized they now stood in one of these. He barely time to evaluate this additional information, when the roaring exploded over him, and lights flashed from the left, like large white eyes bearing straight down on him. The boy knocked him to the wet floor just as some kind of flying motorcycle rushed over his head.
Vincent could hardly breathe, the stench of the water, his own pain, and the sudden realization that he had climbed down into something deeper and more furious than he ever imagined, New York City a honeycomb of other activities to which the mayor, police chief and neighborhoods had only a small clue.
And as soon as the eyes had come, they vanished, taking their light and their roaring with them. The boy rose, pulling Vincent up.
“Hurry,” the boy said.
Vincent plodded on, his feet slipping on the slick tunnel bottom, the curve, the wet, leaving him uncertain about his footing.
“Hurry,” the boy said again, as Vincent heard the buzzing again, and saw the distant splash of lights, growing brighter as the sound grew louder.
“I am hurrying,” Vincent said, but was once more dragged down as the lights appeared and the roaring echoed over them, and the machines -- which Vincent glimpsed a little better this time -- rushed by. This time, when they rose, the boy urged Vincent up, showing him footholds and handholds in the side of the tunnel that led up into another hole higher up on the side. The boy waited at the bottom while Vincent rose, and then, urged Vincent inside when Vincent reached the tunnel's mouth. He nodded, and eased in, and then rested, breathing heavily until the boy appeared at the mouth of the tunnel and urged him to begin crawling-- which he did, painfully slowly, but now, here, for the first time, the boy did not seem unduly concerned by Vincent's slow progress, as if they both had finally reached a place where the lights and the fish people would not bother them, as if finally, after all that, both had come to a part of the tunnel the boy considered home.
Even the smell of the air changed, scented with something other than stale water, a lived-in kind of scent Vincent had always associated with the street, the smell of the unbathed awash in those smells like sweat, and shit and piss that made up closeness of a human kind. Emergency rooms suffered its indignity, fighting it off with a variety of cleansers. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, bus depots, even mall toilets struggled with it. But here, it seemed natural and right, something befitting the place to which Vincent had descended, and remarkably, something that made him feel safe again.
The tunnel widened, and his fingers detected the end of a pipe and the beginning of some other escavation, dug out around him, growing higher and wider so that he eventually found that he could stand.
Then, he saw a flicker of light, and caught the smell of something -- oil perhaps -- burning, and found himself stumbling towards a fire, around which several figures sat.
He recognized Cromwell immediately, though the figure now looked bent, and wary, croched on the far side of the flames like a beaten dog, baring his teeth as Vincent approached, holding at his side a pistol.
The larger man did not bother to lift the weapon, only tightened his grip on it.
“Well, well, well,” Cromwell said. “Look who has made his return at last. I thought you had given up on me.”
“Given up? On you?” Vincent said, leaning against the wall with his shoulder to keep from shaking, as he gripped his own pistol. “You ought to know better than that.”
“You're a fool,” Cromwell said. “If you think I'm coming back up to the city with you.”
“Then, I'm a fool,” Vincent said. “Because you are. Even if I have to drag you the whole way.”
“In your condition?”
“In any condition."
“We shall see,” Cromwell said, then, finally lifted his weapon, but aimed it at the girl, Hilda, seated beside him. Her blonde hair and half her face was now matted in blood. “Give me your weapon, or I shoot her.”
“Go ahead,” Vincent said. “Then, I'll still drag you up to justice, beating you the whole time.”
Cromwell glared. Every aspect of the civilized man had vanished from his face. He was the beast that prowled the streets of the outlands in search of victims now, brought into focus by his time here underground. Blood showed on his cheek from some scrape in his fleeing above. His clothing showed tears and deeper rents in the flesh beneath. Vincent did not trust him to be reasonable, or sane, but felt the man did not want justice to drag him anywhere, nor did he seem pent on killing the woman, who was his last connection with the greater world above, the world of the neighborhood where he had hidden himself all these years.
“I'll tell you what, Vincent,” Cromwell said. “Let's call it a truce. I'll let her live and the others if you let me alone.”
“That's not why I came all the way down here again,” Vincent said. “I’ll kill you before I let you go off on your own.”
“You are a stubborn bastard.”
“No doubt about it,” Vincent agreed.
“Which means I'm going to have to kill you.”
“Which means you can try.”
Cromwell lifted his weapon, but Vincent leaped before the business end could properly take aim and the bullet struck the stone surface of the floor instead, richocheing trhough the tunnel, echoed by its loud report, but by then, Vincent had his hard fingers around Cromwell's soft throat, squeezing the flesh until he heard the larger man's breathing cease. Vincent felt the larger man fall to his knees, arms flailing to make Vincent stop.
“Get the gun!” Vincent shouted at the boy, and the boy complied, snatching up the weapon from Cromwell's limp fingers.
Then, with the larger man disarmed, Vincent released his grip, backed away, and retrieved his own weapon from where he had stuffed it in his belt.
Only then, did Vincent allow himself to look around more closely at the cave in which they stood, a tunnel that slipped slightly downward near the rear, the light of the fire revealing narrow holes which were indeed designed for escape if trouble should come via the front way. A few other people huddled in the shadow, apparent survivors of the fight and flight above. One of these, Vincent took particular notice of, a small, gnarled creature of a man, whose genetic distortion made him look less like a man than a gnome, face of a greyish color, with wrinkles so thick from the neck up that Vincent could only guess where the mouth was, or the eyes when the creature blinked.
The boy rushed to the creature and hugged him, muttering over and over single word ejaculations designed to show his concern and his caring.
“A mutant,” Vincent thought. It looked like a spider, all arms and legs. “Can it speak?”
The creature's head wobbled on a weak neck, too large for the body, a distorted oval with some form of growth bubbling out the right side, distorting that whole side of its face. While the mouth of the beast seemed normal enough, the nose did not exist, and the eyes had no lids at all, whole eyes staring as if dead. The head shook.
“Daddy can’t talk. He got shot,” someone else said in a high pitched, squeel of a voice, several of the residents pointing to a wound near the poor creature’s throat. Vincent shifted the light and caught a much smaller child-sized creature just then rising from behind the pile of rubble, not distorted, just small, but obviously malnurished, skin so tight Vincent could count every bone.
This creature had similar brown complexion as the larger, though neither resembled the other in any other way. They were not “negros” as the old police records used to define blacks in New York, they were not Latino, oriental or native American Indian, they were weather worn, leathery, as if cooked in the sun for years, though Vincent knew neither of these two had seen the street in night or day for many years, living their lives in this hole, delving into deeper holes where they might exist on a diet of worms or bugs, just the way a spider might. Their discovery of this wall and their working their way through it must have seemed a great treasure to them, indeed, an inexhaustible supply of human waste off which they could feed.
But Vincent's intrusion into their world had caused the whole thing to crumble, for them to seek even deeper places, where they had stored for a time of emergency, they believing in some apocolypse or another as set in stone by whisperings in the dark, if not the fish people, then the people of flying lights or worse, gangs like the Skids. The fact that Cromwell or the women with him had led the Skids to the place did not ruin the prophesy.
Vincent knew little of the social order down here, except reports that one existed, and that certain clans or gangs ruled certain layers of this strata and claimed different sections of the underground city as theirs.
No one traveled through these places without permission or tariffs. Many paid these tariffs with their lives.
Vincent also suspected that many of the lower order like these two wandered very little from their own places, espeically if their survival depended upon a hole like the one in the wall. They had likely guarded it jealously, watching over it all the time they weren't using it, trying to keep its presense undetected. Vincent had ruined that as well.
By this time, however, Vincent's attention turned back to Cromwell, who had recovered himself somewhat.
“You'll never get me back,” he said in a hoarse voice.
“I will, I promise,” Vincent said. “And as soon as I'm rested we're going to start back.”
Vincent sagged a little, and glanced at the woman near Cromwell, a woman so covered with blood, he hardly recognized her as the same person, her eyes showing the fear and pain, showing the same contempt as Cromwell, having re-taken his side. He was clearly her only tie to the world above and she did not trust anything else here. Without him, she was doomed.
“I'll have to watch her,” Vincent thought. “She’s lible to cause trouble before we're through with this.”
Rest was a problem. Vincent needed more than he dared take. He could not trust the boy to keep guard on Cromwell or Hilda. And sleep would be something Vincent would not readily wake up from. He sighed and then eased himself nearer the fire and the warmth, feeling the fingers of heart working into his wounds. He sat slowly, stiffly, keeping his pistol elevated in the general direction of Cromwell, who glared at him across the fire, the flames distorting his face, exposing the actual being.
“Why are you doing this, Vincent?” the man asked. “Aren’t you satisfied with taking everything from me?”
“Not everything,” Vincent said, drawing a frown. “Not your life.”
“What good is my life now?” Cromwell complained.
“It’s more than those women have.”
“Women? Whores you mean. Wasted lives.”
“Lives just the same.”
“But lives that don't matter to anyone.”
“All lives matter, even yours,” Vincent said. “That’s the point. Who can predict what life matters until its over, and not even then. The value of life changes with changing lives.”
“You sound like a goddamn philosopher.”
“I sound like what I am, a wasted life that made something of himself.”
“You're down here with me, that's hardly making something of yourself.”
“I'm keeping you from killing again,” Vincent said. “And if that’s all I do with my life, that's success. I’m an instrument of justice.”
“There is no justice!” Cromwell snapped. “That’s the point. There's only power, those who have it, those who don't.”
“With power comes responsibility.”
“For what?”
“To protect the powerless, not prey on them.”
“That's bullshit, and you know it. Power justifies itself. You can't be limited by rules and laws. Those things are made by the weak to reign in the strong.”
“And your case with good reason.”
Cromwell glowered. “Your reasons, not mine.”
“Society's reasons.”
“Fuck society. It’s more dangerous than the beasts who roam these deep places.”
“To you and your kind, maybe. Not to me. It may have its faults. It may have created neighborhoods full of arrogant, self deluded people of power, but that society also protects them and the poor and all who agree to honor its rules, keeping the strong from hurting the poor, by greating a mutual sense of survival that put weak and strong on the same side, fighting for the collective to survive.”
“Bah!” Cromwell said and waved a hand disgustedly at Vincent.
“It's true. Look around you, down here where society is least, people are worst off, struggling haplessly.”
“It’s no better up top,” Cromwell said.
Vincent shrugged. He knew it was pointless to argue. Instead, he leaned back against the wall of the tunnel and let the warmth roll over him, his mind drifting to better days, those days when he had come home to a wife, when he thought that same society could protect them, after he had spent so many years climbing out of it.
Nothing could protect a person, not walls, not guns, not biological agents -- only perhaps an idea, accepted by the majority, that civilization was worth preserving and that by honoring its rules, a society could grow and prosper.
His mind drifted on, floating over open fields, from a distant time, not his memory, but the memory of his race recalling an era when walls did not exist.
“Even then, people feared,” he thought. “Feared the savage inside and outside themselves.”
Vincent never knew the moment he fell asleep, but an explosion shook him awake, and the smell of smoke and blood filled his lungs as the wails of the boy filled the cave with misery. Cromwell stood above Vincent, pressing the now hot metal of the cop's own pistol against Vincent's forhead, behind it, as if needing to take aim, the dark eyes of the rapist glared.
“Get up, fucker,” Cromwell said. “I don't want to shoot you sitting down.”
“Fuck you,” Vincent said. “If I'm going to die anyway, I might as well die comfortable.”
Cromwell swung the gun, smacking Vincent across the side of his head. A searing pain blinded him for a moment, as the force of the blow tobbled him.
“Leave him alone!” the boy shouted, and made a leap for Cromwell's arm, but the large man swung the pistol again, striking the boy's face, that blow sending the boy sprawling. But the brave act gave Vincent time to recover and roll slowly and painfully into a half crouch. He couldn't quite bend his wounded leg.
“Something's wrong here,” Vincent thought staring around the dim cave interior, searching for the detail that had struck him so oddly. Then, he saw the body on the floor. The old freak, the boy's father, bloodied from a shot to the head. The grey brain matter spread out across the floor near the fire along with blood and bone.
“Why did you kill the old man?” Vincent asked, when Cromwell had returned his attention on him.
“As punishment to the boy,” Cromwell said.
“He want your gun,” the boy said, blood spilling out a wound near his right eye. “He say I take. I say no.”
“You're a coward, Cromwell,” Vincent said. “You couldn't even do your own dirty work. You had to have the boy do it?”
“It's more complicated than that,” Cromwell said. “He's been disobeying me since your girl cop died. I told him to bring me up top. He brought me here, then left me here, scrambling through those goddamn tunnels of his until he came back with you.”
“Now what?” Vincent asked.
“Now I'm going to kill you, and then make the boy take me up.”
“And you would trust him now that you've killed his father?”
“He still has his own life, doesn't he?”
“And you've still got yours. But I suspect you won't after he's lead you someplace where something truly dangerous can get at you.”
Cromwell gave a dark glance at the boy. “He wouldn't do that?”
“I would,” Vincent said, “and I'd sit someplace close where I could watch that something take you apart, limb by limb.”
“Fine,” Cromwell said. “Then, you're going to make him get me out of here.”
“That seems pointless if you intend to shoot me anyway,” Vincent said.
“I wouldn't have to kill you.”
“Yes you would,” Vincent said. “Because you know I would keep coming after you until I got you or you got me.”
Cromwell glared, and then swung his pistol around at the Hilda's head again. “Take me out of here now or I shoot her,” he said.
“How many times are you going to play that hand? I already told you to do it.”
Cromwell pulled the trigger. The flash and explosion filled the small space, followed by the woman’s cry of pain.
The shot took off her right hand.
“You’re nuts!” Vincent said, and hobbled over to the woman just as she fainted.
“I’ll blow her to bits one limb at a time if you don’t cooperate,” Cromwell said.
Vincent peered at the man. “All right, I’ll talk to the boy,” he said. “Let me take care of her first.”
The blast had hit Hilda’s wrist, leaving tattered remains where the hand had been, and a flood of blood Vincent struggled to halt through a rough turnaquet. She was not going to survive long, he thought. The shock along would kill her – even if they were closer to the surface and nearer medical rescue.
When he did all he could to help the woman, Vincent looked around for the boy. The boy, crouching over the spoiled muck of his former father, wimpered, rocking back and forth on his heals, cursing and grumbling and glaring over his shoulder at Cromwell. Vincent eased up to the boy and spoke to him in a whisper. The boy whispered back harshly.
“I kill him, I swear. He kill father. He kill them all.”
“I’m not sure you'll get an opportunity to do that unless you listen to me,” Vincent said, drawing the hateful, hurt look.
“You said you would kill him.”
“I know,” Vincent said, saddly nodding about the deaths one man had caused. “But I intend to bring him to justice.”
The boy looked sour, even though he clearly did not know what Justice meant or if he did, refused to believe in it any more than he might a fairytale.
“I kill him. Only way.”
“Fine, you do what you think,” Vincent said. "But not here. He'll kill you before you have a chance to make a move on him."
The boy nodded over this, as if already calculating some deed that would eek his revenge.
“If you lead us out, I'll help you.”
The boy stared more intently at Vincent's face.
Did he read the deception, the dual meaning of the words Vincent used. Helping the boy did not mean killing Cromwell.
But the boy, still smelling the death of his father could think in no other way, could not concieve that civilizatioin might want better things for him, to help him overcome his savagdry the way such forces had helped Vincent himself.
The boy nodded only once. Vincent rose.
“It’s agreed,” Vincent told the waiting Cromwell who was too distant from the conversation to hear the details.
“Then you all will live,” Cromwell said, his gaze full of his lies. “When do we start?”
“If you expect your niece to survive, we should start as soon as possible,” Vincent said, casting a glance towards the boy who nodded once more, then moved towards the cave like opening through which he had led Vincent earlier, waving for them to follow.
“This way,” the boy said, then disappeared into the darkness.