Terminus (35 page)

‘Hey,’ said Lupe.

She slapped Donahue across the cheek.

‘Hey, look at me. Look me in the eye, girl. You have to get it together. He would want you to live.’

Donahue nodded.

Lupe slapped her again, shook her shoulder.

‘If you die down there, what’s the point? What’s it all been for?’

‘All right.’

Lupe stepped back. She lowered the helmet over Donahue’s head and secured hex bolts.

Lupe and Sicknote pitched camp on the platform stairs. They laid Ekks across the steps.

They carried their backpacks to the stairwell and propped them against the wall.

Lupe filled the fire bucket with fresh wood. She uncapped a flare.

‘No point saving these, right?’

She struck the flare and jammed it into the bucket. Table legs and chair slats began to burn. The stairwell filled with smoke and crimson flame-light.

A couple of infected corpses lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs. Lupe kicked them into the flood water. The cadavers floated among garbage. Beverage cups and pages of
Sports Illustrated
locked in a thickening crust of ice.

‘Versatile bastards,’ said Sicknote. ‘Who knew they could swim?’

He stood and stretched.

‘How long has she been gone?’

Lupe stooped and picked Donahue’s G-Shock from a pile of folded clothes.

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Freezing down here. Nothing to trap heat.’

‘White tiles,’ said Lupe. ‘I feel cold just looking at them. Makes sense to pitch camp here, though. Better than sitting in the plant room waiting for Galloway to take another bite.’

Lupe warmed her hands over the fire.

‘Reckon he’s dead?’ asked Sicknote. ‘Galloway?’

‘Doubt it. But he’s not half the man he was.’

Sicknote emptied his pockets. Resistors, capacitors, a tuning dial. He cracked his knuckles and began to work on the circuit board.

‘So what the hell is this thing?’ asked Lupe. ‘Trying to repair the radio?’

‘I’m following instructions. Ekks showed me what to build.’

Lupe shook her head.

‘Voices in your head, dude. Ekks is out for the count. He hasn’t told you shit.’

‘He woke. He wrote stuff down.’

Sicknote pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Lupe held it up, angled so she could read by firelight.

‘Dude, this is your handwriting.’

‘No.’

‘I watched you scrawl all kinds of shit over the walls in Bellevue. Remember the dayroom? All that ketchup?
Hell is coming. We are dust.
You wrote this.’

‘No. Ekks woke. He spoke, a little. He asked for pen and paper. I watched him write the list.’

‘Look at him. He’s comatose. He hasn’t moved an inch. Probably never will. You didn’t talk to him, dude. Trust me. It was all in your head.’

‘I swear. It was his voice.’

‘Why would he talk to you? Think it through. You were nothing to him. A lab rat. A chance to test his brain implant. Why didn’t he speak to Donahue? Tombes?’

Sicknote looked down at his hands.

‘Because he knew I would follow orders.’

He held up the radio components.

‘If Ekks has been unconscious this whole time, if he hasn’t said a word, then how could I build this? How could I write this list? I don’t know the first thing about electronics.’ He held up the component sheet. ‘Forty-seven pF capacitor. I don’t know what the fuck a capacitor does. Doubt I heard the word before today. How could I select these bits and put them in sequence?’

‘That pile of junk doesn’t do a thing, far as I can tell. Transistors strung on wire. Looks like the kind of tribal jewellery a pygmy would make if they discovered a plane wreck in a jungle clearing. You might as well wear it round your neck.’

Sicknote shook his head.

‘I’m sane. Right now, I’m sane. I see the world clear and true. You’re wrong about Ekks. He figured something out. He made some kind of big discovery, down here in the dark. It’s not a vaccine. It’s not a cure. He found something big. And now he’s reaching out, trying to make us understand.’

Lupe picked up the notebook and thumbed pages.

‘So what has he found?’

‘I don’t know. But that’s why he held on so long. His body is falling apart, but his heart keeps beating. Pure will. There’s something he has to tell us, something we need to understand, before he can die.’

Donahue hauled herself over the bow skirt and rolled into the boat.

She wiped water from her visor. The floor of the boat was cluttered with dive gear. Spare flippers, spare weights, spare gas.

She found bottled water. She struggled to twist the cap with gloved hands. She split the bottle open with a knife and emptied it over her helmet, arms and chest. She sluiced radioactive flood water from her drysuit and threw the empty bottle aside.

She twisted lock-rings and pulled off her gloves. She unbolted her helmet and lifted it clear. Her breath steamed in the frigid tunnel air.

She released harness clasps and shrugged off her backplate and tanks. She shut off the regulator.

She dumped her weight belt. She unbuckled ankle straps and kicked off her flippers.

She looked around. Impenetrable blackness. Her helmet was still plugged to its nickel hydride battery pack. The lamps still burned. She held up the helmet and surveyed the tunnel.

The flood waters had risen so high her head was inches from the rough brick roof. She could reach up and touch cracked stonework and crumbling mortar.

Too much clutter at the bottom of the boat. She threw stuff over the side. Dive gear. Couple of coats.

She found Nariko’s fire hat. Old style, stitched from thick leather, the kind that got handed down generation to generation, proud emblem of a family’s dedication to the service.

She turned it over in her hands, rubbed grime from the captain’s shield, buffed it on the sleeve of her drysuit.

She glanced at the rockfall, the curtain of rubble that blocked the north passageway. Somewhere, beneath those tons of concrete and steel, Nariko lay interred.

Donahue pulled the tether line and brought the boat closer to the rubble. The PVC hull abraded concrete. She leaned forwards and placed the hat on a boulder. She adjusted its position, made sure it was sitting straight and proud.

If Nariko had died in the line, if they’d stopped the city traffic, given her the pipes and drums, the helmet would have rested on her coffin at the head of a fire truck convoy.

It belonged close to Nariko.

Donahue unhooked her radio.

‘I reached the boat.’

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah. I’m heading back.’

She took position in the centre of the boat. She set her helmet and battery pack on the prow. Twin halogen lamps lit the tunnel ahead.

The boat pushed through a bobbing scrim of garbage. Bottles, sodden newsprint, polystyrene packing chips.

A couple of bodies floating face down. They stank. Rotted and rat-torn. She tried to steer clear. The cadavers bumped against the boat. She pushed them away with an oar.

She was soothed by the tunnel darkness, a mesmeric splash-echo each time she dipped her oar. The place had a funereal beauty. Passageway receding to infinity. Stonework glazed with ice. Rusted roof signals. Fissured brick and dripstone.

Firehouse shift patterns had left her well acquainted with the arid landscape of exhaustion. She understood its bleak, Arctic terrain. Impaired judgement. Emotional lability. Sudden euphorias: giddy elation followed, minutes later, by black despair.

Detach, she told herself. Crush all emotion. Exhaustion will persuade you to love the womb-like tranquillity of darkness and silence. It will rob you of strength like hypothermia, paralyse you with a smothering wave of peace and wellbeing. You will become entranced by the passageways, their siren beauty. You will sit numb and thoughtless in the boat as the flood waters rise, lulled by dripping water and cool tunnel wind.

Fight it.

Survive.

She threw back her head and roared.

‘Fight, motherfucker.’ Her voice reverberated from the tunnel walls, alien and shrill. ‘Fight, bitch.’

She punched her thigh.

‘Yeah.’

Another punch. Invigorating pain, like a shot of caffeine.

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

She gripped the oar and began to paddle. Strong, muscular strokes. She sang ‘Danny Boy’.

Fleeting memory. New Year’s Eve. Tombes sitting on the bar at McDonnell’s wearing shorts and a fire hat, leading the chorus, beer glass in each hand.

She rowed harder, sang louder.

An arched passageway to her right. A ragged cave mouth blocked by prop-beams and planks. An old work notice nailed to the wood:

Donahue turned her dive helmet and trained the halogen lamps on the tunnel entrance. The beam washed across crooked planks and shafted into the darkness beyond.

A raft of garbage had collected behind the planks. Blankets. Plastic drums. Scraps of sheetrock. The remains of a tunnel hobo camp. A refuge built by broken souls fleeing sunlight and city bustle. They had lifted an unchained grate, descended ladders, climbed downwards into darkness and solitude. Permanent midnight. A soothing all-better-now like a mother’s embrace.

A splash. A disturbance in the water near the planked cave mouth. Spreading ripples. Donahue focused the light. A skeletal face. An infected creature squirmed between wooden slats. Bone projected through quilted coat fabric. A splintered clavicle.

The putrid revenant pulled itself clear of the planks, hit the water and sank. Waves subsided and the black flood waters settled glassy smooth like onyx.

The creature suddenly broke surface shockingly close and executed a thrashing, spastic breaststroke as it headed for Donahue’s boat.

She hesitated. Flight or fight? Row, or confront the weak, dying thing?

Better to fight. She would easily outpace the creature if she rowed for Fenwick, but it would follow her wake. Sooner or later the rotted ghoul would reach the platform steps and emerge from the water. Better to kill it now.

She picked up an oar and snapped it over her knee. Splintering crack. The shaft tipped with jagged fibreglass.

She knelt in the prow of the boat, splintered shaft of the oar held in her hand like a harpoon, ready to strike.

Two more infected creatures wormed between crooked planks, squirmed from the darkness and seclusion of the cave mouth.

Double splash. Spreading ripples. Skeletal creatures thrashing through flood water, heading her way.

‘Shit.’

Donahue threw down the makeshift spear and picked up the remaining oar. She began to paddle.

It was a pursuit out of fevered dreams, out of heart-pounding nightmares. She rowed as fast as she could, yet maintained an imperceptible pace. The twin helmet lamps at the front of the boat illuminated the flooded tunnel. Bricks and buttresses passing so slowly it felt like she wasn’t moving at all.

She couldn’t see the creatures swimming behind her, but she could hear the churn and splash as their arms beat water. The sound echoed from the tunnel walls, loud and intimate.

She glanced back. They were close. They would reach her before she achieved the safety of the station platform.

Something up ahead. The hulk of the old IRT coach sitting on a siding. Warped wooden cladding hanging on an iron frame. Doors hung open. Water almost high as the windows.

Donahue paddled towards the coach. She drifted alongside, and shone headlamps through the vacant windows. Brass fixtures hung from rotted timber. Corroded seat frames protruded from dark water.

She lashed the tether to a window pillar, gripped the frame of a side door, and eased herself into the coach.

She held up the helmet and scanned the dereliction.

Saturated oak panels soft and malleable as cork. Rotted drapes. The wilted blades of ceiling fans.

Waist-deep water. A crisp film of ice fractured as she waded to the front of the coach. Bone-chilling cold.

The planks beneath her feet were soft as carpet. She walked slow, checking each floorboard would take her weight.

She stowed the helmet on an overhead luggage rack, and angled the halogen lights. The flooded coach lit harsh white.

The door at the end of the carriage was jammed. She kicked it. She punched it. Rotted timber fell apart like wet cardboard.

She looked out into the tunnel darkness. She could hear splashes, hands slapping water.

Three creatures swam out of the shadows, thrashing the water with clumsy strokes. They headed inexorably towards her. Bearded vagrants weighed down by winter coats.

She adjusted her grip on the broken oar shaft.

They drew close.

She thought about Tombes. A head full of screaming dissonance. A series of happy memories interrupted by gut-punch trauma:

Summer night. Tombes with his arm round her shoulders as they leaned on a river railing and contemplated the floodlit span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Horror-flash:

Tombes lying dead on the ticket hall floor, right arm ripped from his shoulder socket leaving torn muscle and a partial sleeve of flaccid skin.

A midnight promenade along the Wildwood boardwalk. Eating cotton-candy, watching the summer crowd and stately revolutions of the Ferris lights.

Horror-flash:

Smashed skull, spilled brain, tongue lolling in an open mouth.

Donahue rubbed her temples. Sudden wave of nausea. She leaned out the carriage door and puked. She spat to clear the taste.

She leaned against the doorframe.

‘Come on, guys.’ She could hear the exhaustion in her own voice. ‘Party time.’

The first guy reached the carriage. Long, grey beard. Yellow teeth. He gripped the sides of the doorframe, eyes fixed on Donahue. Black eyeballs stared through a curtain of lank hair. He struggled to pull himself up into the carriage, leaning on the submerged coupler for support.

Donahue gripped the lapel of his coat.

‘Let me give you a hand.’