Terminus (22 page)

‘I’m heading down,’ said Tombes. He secured his helmet and equalised suit pressure. His wrist screen flashed brief amber, then green.

He swung his legs into the shaft and began to descend the ladder rungs, flippers swinging from his weight belt.

He paused and looked down. Ekks suspended by rope. Concrete walls shafting downwards into darkness.

‘Looks like this thing drops to the centre of the earth.’

Cloke stood beside the radio operator.

One last look at the grotesquely transformed figure.

‘You’ve suffered enough, kid. You deserve a long sleep.’

He crouched beside Ivanek. A last inspection of the ammonium nitrate charge strapped to the table leg.

He unhooked the radio clipped to his belt.

‘How’s it going?’

‘I’m in the water. The shaft is about fifty feet deep.’

‘Okay. I’ll set the detonators running. I’m coming down.’

He pinched the pencil timer with pliers, crushing the internal acid vial.

Cloke jumped from the car. He inspected the seals of his suit. He buckled a weight belt. He shouldered the tank harness and checked the gas gauge strapped to his wrist. Flippers hung from his belt, ready to be transferred to his feet when he hit the water.

He took a last look around. Arched shadows. Mausoleum hush.

Something moving in the gloom. He trained his flashlight. An infected soldier, part burned, cut in half at the waist. The creature feebly clawed the air.

‘Poor bastard. You been there this whole time? Watching us come and go?’

Cloke lowered the dive helmet and span lock-bolts. Hiss of pressurisation.

He clumsily ducked beneath the subway carriage, squirmed on hands and knees beneath rusted, oil-caked air brakes, leaned sideways as his tanks struck metal.

He swung his legs into the shaft and began his descent.

Last shot. The stairwell fogged with gun smoke and stone dust.

‘That’s it. I’m out.’

More monstrous creatures headed down the steps. They stumbled over bodies. They slipped on tiles slick with blood and brain tissue. They crawled on hands and knees, eyes fixed on Lupe and Donahue.

‘Okay,’ murmured Lupe. ‘Let’s do this shit the hard way.’

She flipped the shotgun and gripped the hot barrel, ready to swing the weapon like a club.

Donahue gripped her fire axe.

A kid in a rot-streaked football shirt. His skin was slashed and peppered with broken glass, like he had been standing near a plate window when the shockwave hit. Lupe felled him with a side-blow to the head. She stood over the kid and pounded his face with the butt of the shotgun until his skull broke, spilling brain.

A girl in a Wendy’s uniform. Her name tag said LANA. Metallic growths hung from her mouth like she was vomiting chrome. Donahue swung the axe, punched the blade through the crown of her head in a single, emphatic hammer blow. Sickening bone crunch. Face split in two.

‘We have to reach the entrance. We have to close that gate.’

‘Too many of them,’ said Donahue, backing away. ‘Rip us to shreds.’

‘We got nowhere to run. We’ve got to make a stand. Drive them out. We can’t let them take the station.’

‘Too damn many.’ Donahue turned and ran.

Lupe hesitated. She raised the shotgun, adjusted grip, strings of blood dripping from the stock like drool.

Wade groped along the ticket hall wall until he found the stairwell entrance. He held a knife in his hand.

‘Get out of here, Lupe,’ he shouted. ‘Block yourself in one of the rooms. Hide until the chopper arrives.’

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘Get out of here. Go on. Get going.’

Wade began to climb the steps. He slipped in blood. He stumbled over sprawled bodies.

‘Come on, you fucks,’ he screamed, yelling upwards at the street entrance. His voice echoed around the tight space. ‘Come on, motherfuckers.’

Four infected creatures headed down the stairs to meet him. They jostled and hissed.

Wade heard them coming. He braced his legs and gripped the knife, ready to strike.

‘Okay, fellas. Let’s see what you got.’

They seized his arms and shoulders, sank teeth and tore flesh. He roared. He shook his right arm free. He slashed and stabbed.

A bus driver pinned him to the wall. Wade groped, found the creature’s face, and drove the knife into its mouth. It gagged and shook itself free, knife still wedged between its jaws.

Wade punched and kicked, battled his way upwards towards the street entrance.

‘Come on, you cunts.’

Lupe took a last look as she backed away. Wade at the top of the steps, overwhelmed but still fighting, bloody but exultant.

The water tunnel.

A ferro-concrete channel so vast Cloke couldn’t see the full circumference. His twin helmet halogens lit the wall beside him. The rest was cavernous shadow.

A fierce current. Street run-off, burst water mains, and liquid leeched from porous Midtown bedrock. Thousands of tons of water funnelled towards the East River.

A safety wire cinch-anchored to the tunnel wall. A steel cable looped through pitons. A guide-line to enable maintenance crews to snap a carabiner and traverse the passage. Cloke and Tombes gripped the wire, hauled like they were battling a hurricane wind, fought the tide that pressed at their backs, threatened to lift and hurl them into the darkness ahead.

A streaming blizzard of refuse. Leaves, wrappers, newspaper.

A corpse washed by, tumbling in sub-aquatic shadow. A woman in a wedding dress drifting head over heels, satin gown dilating in the current like the skirts of a jellyfish. The spectral cadaver trailed lace like ghost-vapour. It rushed past, and was swallowed by shadow.

‘We are truly down the rabbit hole,’
murmured Tombes.

Cloke dragged the stretcher along the tunnel floor. No sound but the harsh helmet-rasp of his own exertion.

His wrist gauge flashed an amber RMV warning. Heavy oxygen consumption. Raised CO
₂
.

‘How much further?’
asked Tombes.

‘Look for another inspection shaft. A way up and out.’

‘We should have found this route earlier. The Captain would still be alive.’

A distant rumble. A tremor ran through the water.

‘There she blows,’
murmured Cloke.

He pictured the tunnel forty feet above their heads.

Chain detonations. Rock-roar: the tunnel and MTA locomotive obliterated by an avalanche of soil, bricks and fractured cement.

He pictured Nariko’s sub-aquatic tomb sealed by a cascade of rubble. Her body enclosed in eternal darkness.

They continued to fight the current as they headed south.

‘How you doing?’
asked Cloke.

‘Fine,’
panted Tombes.

Something massive up ahead. Vast bulk moving among shadows.

They drew closer.

Three huge turbine blades swept the circumference of the tunnel. Slow, stately revolutions. A manganese-bronze cloverleaf, like a ship’s screw. Under power, they would have spun at a blur, churning water towards the harbour outfall. The turbine motor was dormant, but the eight-ton blades still gently turned, propelled by relentless water pressure.

A body tumbled past them on the current. A guy in a suit. He hit the edge of a slow-moving blade. His head split in a cloud-burst of blood. He was snatched onwards down the tunnel.

‘How are we going to get past that thing?’
asked Tombes.
‘Can we jam it to a standstill?’

‘With what?’
asked Cloke.
‘Gas tanks? We need everything we’ve got.’

‘Jesus. We’ll get diced.’

They could feel it. A throb in the water. A subtle, sub-sonic pulse each time the great blades swept past.

‘Just got to time it right,’
said Cloke.
‘It’s moving slow. A three second interval between strokes. We can duck through, one at a time. I’ll go first.’

He edged closer to the blades. Inches away from blurred metal. He tensed his muscles and settled his breathing. Each sweep felt like a body-blow.

A blade swung past. He closed his eyes and pushed forwards, tensed for a bone-splintering impact.

He opened his eyes. He was through.

‘Go,’
shouted Tombes.
‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll deal with Ekks. Just go. Find us a route up and out of here.’

A roof vent fifty yards south. Cloke’s helmet lamps lit a concrete inspection shaft lined with iron rungs.

‘Tombes. You all right?’

‘Yeah, I’m through. I’m cool.’

‘Looks like we got a way out.’

Cloke gripped rungs and hauled himself up the shaft hand-over-hand.

Lupe’s voice:

‘Where are you guys?’

‘Almost with you,’
said Cloke.
‘Had to circumvent a little obstruction.’

‘They’re here. They got inside the station. They’re on us.’

‘We’re seconds away. Couple of hundred yards and we’ll be at Fenwick.’

‘I’m heading down to the platform to meet you. We’ll have to fight our way to the plant room. Be ready.’

‘Ten-four.’

‘Move your asses. We’ve got a serious fight on our hands.’

Incinerated vehicles. Incessant rain.

Shotgun fire. Reverberations like thunder. Muffled concussions penetrated the skull-socket darkness of vacant windows and storefronts.

HONEYBEE.

A bombed-out boutique. Toppled clothes rails, scattered shoes, denim dusted with broken glass. Half-melted mannequins lay dismembered on the floor. Bald. Blank eyed. Arms and heads angled in a coquettish tease.

Clothing and hangers slowly pushed aside. A Hare Krishna, bald like a mannequin, come to life.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet. Coins fell from the folds of his robes and skittered across the floor.

He stood for a moment, swaying like a drunk.

He headed for the front of the store. His sandaled foot stamped through a dummy’s impassive face, shattering it like eggshell.

The Hare Krishna toppled through the storefront window and fell into the street. He lay on the rain-lashed sidewalk and looked around. Transformed vision cut through darkness like infrared. Rubble, buckled automobiles, toppled light poles.

Another distant gunshot.

The Krishna got to his feet and stumbled east.

Liberty Street.

The Krishna shuffled between buses, limos and yellow cabs, livery seared down to base metal.

He shambled past a meat truck. Faint lettering: CROWN MEATS sprayed out and DEPT OF HEALTH – DISPOSAL scrawled underneath. The rear doors leaned open. Infected bodies wrapped in sheets and hung from hooks. Still alive. They squirmed like larvae.

‘Come on, you fucks.’

A hoarse voice echoed from an alley off Liberty.

‘Come on, motherfuckers.’

The Krishna shuffled past the Doric facade of the old Federal Building. Doors boarded and chained.

He entered the alley. An arched gateway. Phantom letters and bolt holes in the stonework: SUBWAY.

A white tiled stairwell heading downwards. A mosaic sign: TO THE TRAINS.

Commotion near the top of the stairs. A big guy, surrounded by skeletal revenants. He thrashed in the confined space: kicked, punched and raged as he was slowly overwhelmed and dragged to the floor.

‘Fuck you. Fuck you, motherfuckers. Suck my fucking dick.’

Krishna descended the steps, arms outstretched.

Fresh blood.

Fresh meat.

He shouldered other infected creatures aside and gripped the man’s head.

‘Fuck you all to hell,’ screamed Wade.

The Hare Krishna pressed thumbs into sightless eyes, forced knuckle-deep into brain.

Tombes jammed his shoulder against the plant room door and struggled to hold it closed. Shuddering impacts. He braced his legs, strained against the blows. He was still wearing dive gear, still dripping tunnel water. Helmet and tanks dumped on the floor.

His feet lost purchase. Overboots skidded on concrete. The door was slowly pushed ajar.

A guy in bloodied pinstripe began to squirm through the gap.

Cloke threw himself against the door. Tombes kicked at the pinstripe creature, forcing it back into the hall.

Door slam. Sound of scrabbling fingers.

‘How many do you reckon?’ panted Cloke. ‘I counted five.’

‘We got to prop this thing.’

Lupe strained to push a heavy iron battery rack towards the door. Metal shriek.

Sicknote watched her work.

‘Help me, you dick,’ shouted Lupe.

Sicknote put his shoulder against the iron rack and helped shunt it against the door.

They stood back. Pounding fists. Scratching nails. The door shook.

‘Guess it will hold,’ said Cloke.

He unclipped his weight belt and began to strip out of his drysuit.

Tombes wiped sweat with the back of a gloved hand.

‘This is fucked. We can’t stay here.’

‘You want to head out there, into the hall?’ asked Lupe. ‘You’d get ripped to pieces in seconds.’

‘Sooner or later we’ll have to make a break for it. Each hour we wait, more of those bastards gather outside the door. We should hit them now, before the odds get any worse.’

‘Any of you guys got a watch?’ asked Lupe.

Cloke checked his G-Shock.

‘Eleven hours until the chopper arrives.’

‘Hey,’ said Tombes, looking around. ‘Where’s Donahue? Anyone seen Donnie?’ Dawning horror. ‘Christ. She must still be out there.’

Lupe tossed Tombes a radio.

‘Donahue, do you copy, over?’

No reply.

‘Come in, Donnie. Do you copy, over?’

No reply.

‘Talk to me, Donnie.’

Dead channel hiss.

‘What happened?’ asked Tombes. ‘Did anyone see what happened?’

No one spoke. No one met his gaze.

‘Come on. Think. Did anyone see her go down?’