Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) (21 page)

“And that was the same one?” Heather gasped.

“No, the story’s bullshit. The truth is that rats can get big down here and they’re dangerous as hell.”

We drifted down more tunnels before emerging in a large chamber. A series of risers on either side made it look like a flooded Mesoamerican ballcourt, though that was probably not the intent. A large splash greeted us. The beam jumped as Heather tried to focus on what had caused it. Gold coins, apparently hovering an inch above the waterline, glittered back. They weren’t coins; they were eyes.

“Is that...?”

“An alligator? Yes.”

“What’s it doing down here?”

“Floating.”

Even though Rosicrusophists are never supposed to get annoyed, Heather’s voice was shot through with it. Her nerves were probably pretty frayed after the night we’d had. “I meant why is it floating down here.”

“Supposedly people flush them down toilets, but it’s probably more likely they get put into storm drains.”

“Sewer alligators? I thought those weren’t real.”

“They’re not real in New York. Gets too cold there. Winter would wipe them out. Here, it’s warm all year round.”

She watched the gator watching us. It wasn’t all that big, maybe six feet long from what I could see poking through the surface. Just like the rats, the gators could get very large. In any case, I gave it a wide berth and tried my best not to look like anything it would want to eat.

“Heather, I need you to point the light at where we’re going.”

“Okay,” she said, and I heard her muttering a mantra over and over. Technosis to keep the gator away. I had no idea if it would work, but as long as she kept the light where I needed it, I didn’t care. The gator stayed in its reptilian trance, waiting for something to happen by that it could snack on.

We traveled for another hour or two, every now and then passing another dock, sometimes with a similar boat tied to it. They weren’t uniform, though, looking like whatever put them there had scavenged or built whatever it could and called it a day.

My phone beeped. “Low battery,” Heather said.

“I was worried that this was getting too easy,” I muttered.

I was exhausted. It had to be morning soon, if not already. That would make this Day Three on the investigation and no closer to finding who killed Neil and framed Mina. I was going to have to ditch Heather somehow, and do it in such a way so as not to be murdered in a men’s room. Distracting her while conducting my investigation and making sure she didn’t realize I was her quarry was turning out to be impossible. And that was before the sewer.

Although, since my only lead was Vassily Zhukovsky, it might be nice to have a killer along for the ride. Once I’d re-armed her, of course. Re-arming a bounty hunter on my ass. I guarantee Han Solo never had to do that. Han had it easy. Don’t see me dumping my cargo at the first sign of Imperial cruisers, do you? Hell no.

We passed a large chamber, running parallel to our underground canal. Metallic hisses came from the inside and I really didn’t want to know what else the undercity had in store for us. Heather didn’t have my sense of resigned fatalism and directed the light into it.

Thousands of writhing tentacles dripped from the ceiling. Some were metal, others were bundles of cables with naked ports at the end. They curled around one another, reaching and grasping at nothing.

Heather swallowed a yelp.

I took it as good news.

“What’s that?” she managed.

“Shub-Internet,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

Things were looking up, because the avatar of the god of the internet was underneath an abandoned building in downtown LA, a little to the southwest of a cluster of skyscrapers that made up the Los Angeles skyline. I ignored the fact that Shub-Internet had grown. Last I heard, it managed to incarnate the Four Horse_ebooks of the Apocalypse and started dating Alison Brie, so that was bound to make it feel like a big god.

I started looking for another dock, and shortly found one. It had a skiff on one side, so I angled for the other one. I hoped whoever owned it wasn’t around and checked my weight on the little pier. Though it creaked, it held me. Heather held out her hand and I helped her onto the dock. She handed the phone back. I checked the battery. A sliver of red left.

I inched along the little walkway around my subterranean Venice, and after about fifty feet and one more yawning pipe, there was a door in the wall. I climbed up and peered in. My light sputtered as the phone used a little bit of its precious battery to beep at me. This looked like an access tunnel, leading somewhere that was slightly less wet. That was good enough for me.

I went up the stairs with Heather nervously following. The phone sputtered again. I picked up the pace. The beam picked up something ahead, shadows bobbing with every step. It was a fall of shattered concrete, probably shaken loose in one quake or another. As I got closer, I saw that the wall was entirely broken, creating a hole easily big enough to fit through. The blocks looked like they might have been moved to provide a passage, but the debris hadn’t been cleaned up or the wall repaired, hinting that it wasn’t municipal employees who’d done it.

A breeze, rank and metallic, wafted through the hole.
That’ll do, pig
, I thought at the universe. I climbed the little hill of broken concrete, stooped under the irregular arch of the hole, and emerged in another tunnel. This one was much larger, with easily ten feet of head clearance. The breeze wasn’t a phantom. I felt it, and knew which way it was coming from.

Heather came out of the hole and landed next to me. “We’re almost out of here,” I said.

I should not have said that. The shuffling started pretty much instantly after, coming from deeper in the tunnel behind us. It sounded almost human, but not enough to make me comfortable with what was happening. Several somethings were all rushing through the darkness, loping over uneven ground to get at Heather and me.

“We should probably go,” I said.

She didn’t need to be told twice, and soon we were both running along the tunnel. Whatever it was moved quickly. We couldn’t outrun it. Not for long.

I ran anyway, my burning lungs sucking up the air. The phone sputtered and died. Plunged into darkness, I was pretty certain this was it. At least I would vanish. No one would have to know I’d ended up as poop. But that would mean Mina in jail, busted on the fake murder charge. I wasn’t just running for me. I was running for her, and that meant something. I dug in, feeding off the stitch in my side, the exhaustion in my body, and the ache in my limbs.

The tunnel wasn’t quite as dark as it had been. I could barely make out walls. Each step brought the light up, brighter and brighter. And then it was clear. A doorway opened into a huge tunnel crossed with tracks. The metrorail. I even let myself grin a little. “Don’t touch the third rail,” Morgan Freeman said in my head, although to be honest, I had no idea if the third rail was even a thing. Good looking out, Mr. Freeman.

We came out into the rushing wind of the tunnel. The next car would be along soon, if not already bearing down on us. I spared a glance back at our pursuers and immediately wished I hadn’t. The creatures moved like hillbillies in a Wes Craven movie, their eyes shining like that gator’s had. There were little flashes: of teeth, of hands, and worst, of scales and forked tongues.

A platform was about twenty feet away. We ran for it as the headlight of a train haloed us from up ahead. I wanted to wave the phone flashlight to stop the train, but the battery was out. I couldn’t even spare the breath for a curse. I ran up the stair access and threw myself aside as the train slid into the station, effectively blocking the things following us.

I slumped against a wall, trying to catch my breath. Looked like we were below Union Station, giving this a certain amount of nostalgia: I had almost been killed here about a year ago. A few Angelenos standing on the platform gave Heather and I some looks, but all erred on the side of not getting involved with the two filthy subterranean joggers.

“What were those?” Heather asked. She was barely panting. Must be nice to be in shape like that.

“Lizard people.”

“What?”

“Like people. But lizardy,” I clarified.

“That... that’s a thing?”

“You saw them.”

She glanced backward superstitiously, trying to make that jibe with what she knew about the world. I put my head down and sucked in air.

That’s why I didn’t notice her grabbing me until her hands were already yanking me up by my shirt and slamming me face-first into a lit map of the LA metrorail.

“Now that we’re safe, how about we go see Mr. Quackenbush?” she said.

BLOOD RAN DOWN THE FRONT OF THE MAP
and over my right eye. There was a scar there, picked up when Ingrid Brady, a member of the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis, decided to turn my face into her personal speedbag, and from the pain on my brow, I figured it had just split like a seam. At least I’d managed to turn my face at the last moment, which kept my nose from breaking again.

Heather held me there, and though she was small, she had all the leverage in the world. I was off balance and, generally speaking, had fighting skills somewhere between “toddler” and “dummy you teach mouth-to-mouth on.”

“How many groups are you playing with, Erick?” she asked me. The creepy thing was, her tone was still bright and happy and even though I couldn’t see it, I could
hear
her smile.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

She punched me in the ribs, digging up and under. I dropped to my knees, trying to reinflate lungs that didn’t seem all that interested in breathing anymore.

“You shouldn’t lie, but it’s not like you’re really one of Dr. Wood’s students. Gambling debts? Satanists? How much did you think I’d swallow?”

“Is that a trick question?” I gasped.

“Is your nose even broken?” She tore the bandage off my face. Last time I’d looked at my nose, it was a vibrant blue-black, and I had no reason to believe that had changed. “Oh, I guess so.”

I heard her sniff, and I figured it was one of those cocky sniffs Bruce Lee would do back before he kicked all the asses in existence. I braced myself for another ruthless beating and reflected that I had spent a decent amount of time getting my ass handed to me by women. Cheryl Bartek of the ONI knocked me out with a headbutt on a floating casino that used to be out beyond Catalina, Mina beat me up right after we met, and then Ingrid Brady did this karate shit at the headquarters of the Guardian Servitors of the Anorectic Praxis. To be fair, I had my ass kicked by men a lot, too. Sometimes I thought I was the Information Underground’s designated punching bag.

Yet another reason I tried to walk away from that life.

Something wet hit my cheek. And again. For a second, I wondered if the ceiling had sprouted a leak. Then Heather spoke, and her voice was thick with tears and snot. “How could you lie to me?”

I thought about a response to cut through everything like a lightsaber made out of pure logic. She would see the error of her ways, let me go, and decide to become my faithful sidekick on the quest to free my girlfriend from jail. I formulated it in my mind, got everything in the proper order, and said, “Huh?”

“This whole time! You pretended to be my friend!”

“I never actually pretended to be your friend. I was friendly, but that’s less about deceit and more about mann—”

“You said you were one thing! And you were a totally other thing!” She mashed my face into the map, like she thought my cheek was a marker she was trying to use to color the whole thing in.

“You were going to kill me.”

“I was going to take you to Quackenbush!” she sobbed.

“Do you know who Irving Quackenbush
is
? Name a dictator in Central or South America. Chances are that asshole got into power because Irving Quackenbush killed every single rival, intellectual, college professor, and anyone who even knew someone slightly left-wing to put him in power. What do you think he’s going to do to me? Someone he thinks killed one of his people?”

“You lied to me!”

“You’re not listening! You never even asked me if I killed that guy!”

“Did you?”

“Of course not! I’ve never killed anybody!” I’d just been a repeated accessory to murder, but I wasn’t about to bring up that delicate distinction.

She seemed to be considering it. “You’re a liar! How can I believe anything you say?”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“Let that man go, and put your hands up.”

I blinked and looked over. Two transit cops had their weapons drawn and were pointing them at us. It was mostly at her, but they were LAPD: the only thing stopping them from shooting both of us was the paperwork.

“Officers! This man is a murderer!” Heather protested.

“Let him go, step away, put your hands up, and we’ll sort this out.” I don’t think he wanted to sort this out. I think he wanted to shoot someone.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a couple people surreptitiously filming the whole thing on their phones. I tried to turn away from that, since the last thing I needed was my face on YouTube, but she had me pinned pretty good. “Get this crazy bitch off of me!” I howled. Normally, I’m not a big fan of the word “bitch,” but when communicating with the law, it’s usually best to go for lowest common denominator.

“Sir, be quiet!” one of them barked at me.

I was quiet.

“Miss, I need you to put that gentleman down.”

I’d said “bitch” and instantly been upgraded to “gentleman.” I briefly wondered if the top hat and monocle set threw the b-word around like rappers.

Heather finally obeyed and I dropped to my hands and knees. The blood on the left side of my face had begun to get tacky and my nose was throbbing.

“Sir, put your hands behind your head.”