Authors: Adam Baker
‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’m just a guard.’
‘You have to save me, David. You have to save yourself.’
Galloway scrambled through tight passageways, mapped the warren of pipes.
A network of conduits built in the nineteen twenties, long before the smooth aluminium ducting and monitored flow control of modern ventilation systems. Giant plenum blades in the plant room circulated air through the pipes. Negative pressure drew off stagnant tunnel fumes, replaced fetid vapour with clean air drawn from street vents.
Galloway still had sensation. His hand and feet delivered the texture of brick and abrasive mortar. Yet he was impervious to pain. Rotted skin hung from his arms in strips, exposing muscle threaded with metallic veins.
He knelt, gripped his bicep and ripped away ribbons of loose skin. He felt no pain. He could feel his flesh stretch, peel and tear as if he were shredding paper.
Sometimes he was Galloway. Sometimes he wasn’t.
Consciousness came and went like an intermittent radio signal, but his body kept moving. He would sit, staring into darkness. Next moment, he would find himself crouched in an entirely different section of tunnel, exploring a fissure in the brickwork, probing it with his finger. No idea how much time had passed. No idea what instinct had piloted his body during the blackout. Clearly he had moved through the tunnels with deliberation and purpose. But what entity had looked out from behind his eyes? What alien intelligence had displaced his thoughts and memories?
He squatted in the darkness. He could still see. There was no light, but the tunnel around him seemed to dance with a weird bioluminescence as if it were lit from within. He perceived the bark-ripple texture of each brick, and the granular crust of mortar, with the heightened clarity of dreams.
He explored new sensations, a torrential inrush of sense data.
He was not alone.
He could feel something else deep in the tunnel network. A cold intellect, watching, appraising. It sang in the darkness. His body began to respond.
‘Who are you?’ he murmured, addressing the thing in his head. ‘What do you want?’
As if in response, his left arm began to rise. He fought the motion, battled the hijacked limb. He tried to bar the grasping hand with his mutilated right arm and force it down. It was like fighting a hydraulic ram.
He tried to ball his fist, but his fingers overcame the command, reached for his face and began to claw skin. Nails dug into his forehead and tore decayed flesh like it was the putrid, semi-liquefied pulp of a rotten fruit.
He screamed.
Stretch and tear. Epidermis slowly peeled back. He shook his head and blinked away blood as it trickled down the bridge of his nose into his eyes.
A wide strip of skin slowly ripped from his brow, eye socket, cheek and jaw. The glistening musculature of his face fully revealed. Metal-fused bone.
Galloway emitted a guttural howl of revulsion and despair. He spat blood and drool. He tried to pull his head away as the hand clawed his face and gouged skin.
Fingers gripped the back of his neck and peeled off his scalp like a ski mask, exposing the white dome of his skull. The discarded flesh-cap hit the tunnel floor with a slap.
Each ear lobe twisted free, dripping strings of pale cartilage.
A wide slab of tissue torn from his chest, exposing ribs and knitted sinew.
A sleeve of flesh ripped from his arm.
Galloway had lost the battle for ascendancy. He was a passenger in his own head. He watched, helpless, as the methodical excavation continued. Fingers raked and clawed, sloughed dead tissue from his bones as something lean and lethal fought to emerge.
Cloke threw the notebook aside.
‘No luck?’ asked Lupe. ‘Thought you could decipher the thing.’
‘The key doesn’t work. I’ve transposed letters. But look. More gibberish.’
He held up a scrap of note paper.
‘Hovering on the edge of coherence. There must be something I missed. Some additional step.’
‘Anagrams?’
‘The whole book? Hope not.’
‘Ekks is foreign, right?’ asked Lupe. ‘Naturalised?’
‘East European. Ukrainian, I think.’
‘No reason the code should be in English.’
‘How much water do we have left?’ asked Cloke.
‘About a pint.’
Lupe passed the nearly empty bottle of mineral water.
Cloke took an appreciative swig and sluiced the water around his mouth. He gestured to the plant room door.
‘Prowlers. Do you think they communicate? Their actions seem to be crudely coordinated.’
‘You’re kidding, right?’
‘Think about it. This disease has no use for higher brain function. Once the virus burrows deep into a person’s cerebral cortex, their memories, their personality, are wiped away. But what takes their place? Even the most advanced case, skin rotting from the bone, is animated by a crude insect cunning. Whimsical thought, but what if the virus can communicate on some basic level?’
‘Say it could talk. What would you ask?’
‘Who are you? Where do you come from? What do you want?’
‘Speak to Ekks when he wakes. He stared into the heart of darkness. Maybe he’ll tell you what he saw.’
Cloke nodded.
He reached inside the data bag, pulled out a fresh sheet of handwritten paper, and began to read.
Sergeant Donovan
101st Airborne
Monday September 23
rd
Our third suicide.
Rosa Tracy. A nurse. Pleasant disposition. Liked by all.
She was found hanging in the plant room this morning. She had unclipped the nylon shoulder strap of a holdall and used it as a ligature. Stood on a box and lashed the strap to an overhead pipe. She looped the nylon round her throat, then kicked away the box.
I cut her down. She had been dead for hours. Purple, swollen face. Limbs locked rigid.
I searched her pockets. No note. No explanation.
I wish we had a priest. It seems callous to dump her body in the tunnels without formally commemorating her life. She is not a piece of refuse. She deserves a proper grave.
A madness has gripped the team.
The two remaining doctors openly inject themselves with opiates and sit in a blissed stupor as if they expect, sooner or later, to be ripped apart and intend to be drugged insensible when it occurs.
Janice, the sole remaining female among our group, seems to have surrendered to a nihilistic sensuality. I am reluctant to be more specific. Her behaviour, and the free availability of narcotics, has destroyed camp discipline.
Ekks could restore order with a glance, a single word. Yet, since the death of Knox, he has been curiously reluctant to establish control. He has spent the past few days alone in his carriage, cross-legged on his cot, transcribing the results of his research.
I visited him yesterday. Knocked on the slide door and entered his carriage.
It was dark. The windows were curtained with garbage bags. I let my vision adjust. Ekks lay on his bunk. His eyes were closed. There was a radio next to the bed hissing static. He wafted his hand back and forth like he was directing music only he could hear.
I stood in the carriage doorway. I told him the camp was going to hell. Food for a couple more days, then we would starve. We needed to get off the island. We needed leadership, some kind of plan.
He didn’t move, didn’t say a word.
Tuesday September 24th
Ivanek, our young communications officer, heard a brief announcement on the EMS waveband a few hours ago. He has been sat next to the RT for days, listening to a looped broadcast of prayers and hymns. He was half asleep when he heard a woman’s voice cut into the transmission. She said the president would address the nation at midnight.
Maybe the address will give us a clear indication of the situation above ground. Perhaps our infantry have regrouped and are preparing to reclaim all major cities. Or perhaps our position is truly hopeless: we are marooned in this troglodytic twilight, without the slightest chance of rescue. In which case I hope firm knowledge of our situation will be enough to galvanise the men. Once they realise their only shot at safety is to walk off this island, battle their way street by street across the bridge and into Brooklyn, maybe they will pull together.
My greatest disappointment these past few days has been Moxon, the guard who accompanied us from Bellevue. I regarded him as an ally. He alone among our number remained sober and focussed. He shaved, while others grew beards. He maintained his uniform while others shambled in sweat-stained lab coats. But he overheard a discussion in which I suggested the remaining prisoners represented an ongoing threat to our safety and should be euthanized. He has threatened to unshackle the prisoners and release them into the tunnels, if we attempt to take any action against them.
So there is nothing to do but watch my companions succumb to orgiastic squalor. I monitor our supplies of food and water and make an hourly inspection of the station gate. And I alone seem to care that Doctor Ekks, the man who embodies the entire purpose of our mission, is currently held captive by an apparent lunatic.
Wednesday September 25th
The standoff continues.
Private Tetsell, one of the least experienced members of our company, has shut himself in the station supervisor’s office with Doctor Ekks. He is armed with a shotgun. He has constructed a barricade. We heard furniture moved around, the squeak of chairs pushed against the door, pinning it shut.
He has demanded a helicopter fly him to Philadelphia.
Tetsell is a good man. He’s scared, confused, but fundamentally decent. I doubt he will harm Ekks. But I can’t be certain. These are extraordinary times. Each day brings fresh horrors. Minds break like porcelain.
We could storm the office, I suppose. We could ram the door until it splits and the furniture stacked behind it falls aside. But the consequences could be catastrophic. It would take many seconds, possibly a full minute, to gain entry to the room. Tetsell might kill himself, or worse, kill Ekks. Our orders were specific. Protect Doctor Ekks. Protect him at all costs. My one and only priority.
Perhaps we could use the ventilation conduits. There are brick tunnels built into the station walls. Maybe a man with a pistol could crawl through the narrow ducts. Maybe he could reach the IRT office, punch out a wall vent and shoot Tetsell dead.
I keep running hostage rescue scenarios. If the world were still intact, our course of action would be clear. We would summon reinforcements, deploy a tac team and have them storm the office. Start a conversation on the radio to distract the guy. Have SWAT kill the lights and simultaneously blow out the hinges with Shok-Lok rounds. An efficient breech-entry. They would kick the door aside, toss a couple of concussion grenades. Tetsell left flash-blind and reeling. SWAT swarming through the doorway equipped with laser sights and night vision helmet rigs. The siege would be concluded in two or three seconds.
But I can’t summon a trained takedown team. These elaborate rescue fantasies are a product of impotence and frustration. Tetsell is barricaded behind a heavy door. I have limited men, limited ammunition. Best to avoid a confrontation. I must be patient. Maintain a dialogue. Starve him out.
In the meantime, I have a grim task to perform. Rosa’s body is still lying beneath a blanket in the plant room. I suppose I must carry her deep into the tunnels, far enough that we won’t breathe the stink of decomposition.
There is a niche in the tunnel wall several hundred yards north near Canal Street. A branch of track aborted during the initial construction of the Liberty Line. It is little more than a cave. A brick arch framing rough walls of schist scarred by chisels and dynamite cartridges.
It is where I laid the remains of Knox, days ago.
I carried a garbage bag full of offal and bone deep into the tunnel. All that was left of him, all that wasn’t suspended in jars. No sound but the steady drip of water.
Foolish to travel alone. Plenty of infected stumbling round the passageways.
I dumped the bag in the wall niche, doused it in kerosene and set it alight. The tunnel was filled with smoke, meat-stink, the pop and fizz of boiling body fat.
I don’t know why I went to such lengths to destroy all trace of Knox. I could have put his carcass out in the alley. Or I could have dumped the bag a few yards into the tunnel near Fenwick and let rats gnaw the marrow from his bones. His death was necessary, legally sanctioned. No reason to feel ashamed.
No one gives a damn about Knox. He was a non-person long before this disease stalked the earth. No one will mourn him, no one will care. There will be no judge, no tribunal. He has been erased. It is as if he never lived.
Cloke folded the notepaper.
‘Donavan. Wasn’t he the soldier we found floating in the tunnel? That guy turned to rat food?’
‘Yeah,’ said Lupe. ‘Sorry bastard succumbed to infection.’
‘How old do you think he was?’
‘Young, at a guess. One of those blue-eyed, god-and-country types.’
‘Seems the lad walked into the dark rather than become a threat to his companions.’
‘Is that what you want to believe?’
‘Why not?’ said Cloke. ‘A good soldier. Took action rather than jeopardise the people around him. Some people do the right thing.’
‘You got kids?’ asked Lupe. ‘Family?’
‘No. You?’
She shook her head.
‘Times like these, it’s good to travel light.’
Cloke stuffed the notepaper back in the bag.
‘There’s nothing in these letters. Nothing of use. A dozen goodbyes. It seems indecent to read this stuff. Prurient. Eavesdropping on their final hours. Ought to put a match to them all.’
‘Then you’re back where you started,’ said Lupe. ‘Ekks. You’ve got to get inside his head, find out what he knows.’