Necropolis (37 page)

“Should be enough to get us through to the next juncture,” said Jakob.
 

“Who are you?” I said. “You’re sure as hell not Jakob.”

He pulled idly at his beard. “I’m your only way out.”

“You’re the Lifetaker.”
 

He merely looked at me.

Maggie, her voice thick as syrup, said, “What?”

“You killed Jakob. Impersonated him,” I said.

“My price,” he said.

“Price?”

“For saving your worthless lives. Now come with me, or die. I don’t care which.”

Maggie threw herself at him before we could even react. He caught her clawed hands and held them while she twisted and spat. I watched his resolution shimmer, watched him go shiny and transparent for a moment. Then he was Jakob again. Maggie seemed to run out of steam, sagging. He released her and she collapsed sobbing into my arms.

“Let’s go,” I said. “First we survive. The rest later.”

“I can’t do this,” said Maggie.

“Maggie,” said Max. “Your memory—of the lab, Crandall’s interrogation, this raid. You have to survive so that you can upload it to the Conch. It’s all we have left to fight them with.” Max put a hand against her cheek. “Too many of my friends have died today,” he said.

She blinked back the moisture in her eyes and turned them with pure hate to the Lifetaker.
 

“Alright,” she said. “Lead on, you miserable piece of shit.”

47

DONNER

T
he next few hours were a jumble of cement tunnels, dank air, stumbling and heavy breathing. The Lifetaker led us through the pipe into an empty chamber beyond. From there it was deeper into the bowels of the city and away from the battle.

We heard the church go. Down here, it sounded like the world ending. Maybe it was.

When the explosions faded, Max pulled me aside. “This thing killed the Surazal doctors! And Hector Alvarez! And
Jakob
!” he whispered. “Why the hell are we trusting it?”

“We don’t trust it, Max,” I replied. “We follow it.”

“We should destroy it now!”

“You know how to get out of here, do you?”

The others walked back to us. “Is there a problem?” it asked.

“Where the fuck are you taking us?” said Max.

“Beyond the Blister.”

“That’s impossible. We’re infectious!”

“You pose no risk to the world.”

“You kill people for fun,” barked Max. “We’re supposed to take your word for it?”

The Lifetaker shimmered. “I shall scout the tunnel ahead. You have two minutes.”

“Like hell,” I said. “I want some answers. Now.”

“Your questions will be answered, but not by me,” it replied. “For now, your choice is to hold your miserable tongues and do what I say or I will kill you right here.”

I had the feeling that this thing could do exactly what it said.

Maggie reddened. “Stop manifesting as Jakob.”

Its face contorted into the rictus of a grin. “No. It causes you pain.”

I wanted to knock that smirk off its synthetic mug. “We don’t move until you drop the charade.”

It sighed. And like the snap of a finger, Jakob was gone and the Lifetaker appeared in its true form. It undulated in the air like a floating oil slick, its shape vaguely human. Rough amalgams of eyes, nose and mouth flowed incompletely across its “head,” but they were constantly changing, constantly in motion. Its “feet” brushed the surface of the ground without touching it. The thing moved with an obscene ripple that raised my hackles and churned a wave of nausea in my gut. I had never seen anything so completely
wrong
. In the dim tunnel, it was truly monstrous.

“Two minutes,” it said, its voice no longer close to human. It moved off down the tunnel.

Maggie whirled to me, her eyes wild. “Kill him, Donner! We’ll take our chances!”

For some reason, in a day filled with horrors, her sudden bloodthirstiness hurt the worst. I’d come to rely on Maggie’s pacifism to balance my ever-present desire to lash out in rage. What an ironic symbol of this counterclockwise world—that an artificial person should become the anchor for my humanity.
 

“Armitage, Jonathan… they’re gone,” I said. “We won’t last ten minutes out there with Nicole’s patrols and biometric wasps. This thing is our only chance right now. Besides, we need to get some questions answered. The thing has as much as admitted that it’s only helping us because it’s under orders. I very much want to find out whose orders those are.”

“You really think we can leave Necropolis?” asked Max. “Safely?”

I rubbed sweat from my eyes. “Crandall said we could leave Necropolis too, remember?”

Max cracked his walnut-sized knuckles. They sounded like gunshots in the tunnel. “Big risk to take with the whole world,” he said. “You wanna carry that freight?”

“Screw the world,” I said.
 

“Donner!” Maggie gasped.

“The Shift virus isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. It doesn’t
kill anything
. Worst case scenario, more dead people come back. The world’s precious status quo gets upset again. You know what? Maybe it’s time the world learned to live with it.”

They were silent. The Lifetaker flowed back, solidifying into a six-foot amoeba. I could barely keep my eyes on it. It offended every animal instinct I had.
 

“Have we a verdict?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Go fuck yourself. In the meantime, we’ll keep following.”

It seemed to find amusement in that.
 

***

We made our way uptown through a maze of auxiliary corridors and service tunnels. We kept a good distance from human activity. Occasionally I could hear the rumble of the subway, and once I caught the
dee-ding!
of its doors opening, but down here, with all the echoes, it could have been three feet or a million miles away.
 

At a junction, the Lifetaker produced some flashlights from a cached bag. We used the beams to explore our subterranean surroundings. The corridors were narrow and utilitarian, empty except for the mesh-covered corpses of light bulbs or rusted metal drains. Water trickled past our feet, carrying the occasional candy wrapper or soda can. On the street this morning, the wind had blown fresh and cold, but down here it tasted stagnant and worn out. My face was caked with grime. I was coated with cobwebs, crushed insects and worse, but there was nothing clean with which I could wipe my face. My T-shirt had been a hand-me-down from Armitage. I could smell his pipe on it. It made me want to scream.
 

By the time we’d covered three or four miles, my arms were quivering. The shakes. A massive amount of adrenaline had dumped into my system during the fight, and now I was paying for it.
 

I was getting flashes from the battle—little mental instant replays. Dead monks, limbs askew. Jonathan, who’d nursed me from the brink of madness with saint-like patience. Armitage, light leaking through his eyes from the hole in the back of his head. My mind was trying to process what had happened. I couldn’t let it. As long as my emotions stayed in deep freeze, I could function. But when they started to thaw, things would get bad. Real bad.

Minutes later we hit a dead end. The tunnel simply ended in a blank wall of cement.
 

“Uh…” said Max.

The Lifetaker pointed to a jagged crack at its base. Water and time had fissured open a hole. It was maybe just big enough for a body to squeeze through. Maybe.

“You want us to crawl through
that
?” asked Max.

The Lifetaker slipped into it like grease poured down a drain, but sideways.

“Nice to have a choice,” Max mumbled.

I gripped my flashlight in my teeth and wriggled into the adit. Using my elbows, I pushed deeper, measuring progress in inches, straining with my toes against the sides, working hard to focus on moving forward and not on what would happen if I got wedged in this spelunker’s nightmare.

Max grunted behind me, having more trouble with his Grand Canyon shoulders. At one point he sounded stuck, but a mighty thrust cleared him. It brought a shower of dirt down on us.

“Careful, buddy,” I said. “Suck it up.”

“Too many goddamned slices,” he grumbled. I smiled, wondering if anybody but a New Yorker would know he was talking about pizza.

Finally we were clear, standing on a ledge of some sort. Maggie half-crawled, half-flowed out of the hole beside us. I pushed away how similar her movement was to the Lifetaker’s.

“What,” breathed Max, “the hell is this?”

The space that stretched before us was more like the interior of an aircraft hangar than a tunnel—an enormous steel and concrete superstructure around a pair of railroad tracks. It had to be seventy feet wide and thirty feet high. I looked down, and realized that we were standing on the top of a cement wall that dropped another ten feet down to the gravel of the track bed.

Here, there was no noise at all. Only sepulchral silence. The feeling of having stepped into some ancient catacomb was overwhelming.
 

“What is this place?” whispered Maggie.

“Riverside Park Tunnel,” said the Lifetaker.

Recognition in Max’s eyes. “The Mole People Tunnel!”

I turned to him. “The what?”

“I read about this place,” he said. “It started as part of Vanderbilt’s New York Railroad in the 1850s,” he said. “Runs north-south along the Hudson, along the West Side Highway and under Riverside Park from around 72nd to up in Harlem somewhere.”

“123rd Street,” said the Lifetaker.
 

“New Yorkers hated the tracks… they were ugly, plus they blocked access to the river, so in the 1930s they were encased in cement and the park landscaped around it. Can you believe it? That ceiling up there is the floor of a pedestrian plaza.”

I tried to imagine people walking their dogs and playing Frisbee over our heads.
 

“There was actually a thriving homeless community down here. The Mole People.”

“I thought that was a myth,” said Maggie.

“This place is full of utility rooms, sheds and recessed nooks that got turned into homes.”

I thought of H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine.
The Eloi and the Morlocks. The above and below people. Stockbrokers making million-dollar deals on their cell phones during a morning stroll in the park, while down here these people ate dumpster food.
 

“Most of ’em got kicked out when Amtrak started using the tracks again in the early ’90s.”

“Looks abandoned now.”

“Since the Blister, no more trains across the Harlem River.”

“No wonder my legs are killing me,” I said. “We’ve gone over ninety blocks.”
 

“More,” said Max. “It sure as hell hasn’t been a straight route.”

The Lifetaker flowed down to the track bed. Max squatted on his haunches and found a handful of broken cables bolted into the cement. He gave them a couple hearty tugs. “Bombs away.” He swung over the edge and lowered himself to the ground with surprising agility. Maggie and I followed, hitting the gravel with streaks of rust on our hands.
 

A few dozen feet down the tracks we again stopped in astonishment. The space had become an art gallery. Twenty foot murals burst dazzling color under our flashlight beams. Recreations of famous art were rendered with incredible skill, like a ten-foot tall Mona Lisa and a melting Salvador Dali clock. Further down, there were newer works by another artist, trying to emulate the earlier master. Sad faces with golden eyes. Reborns.

“Unbelievable,” said Maggie. “After all these years, they’re mostly intact.”

“The taggers leave them alone, out of respect.”

“If the art appreciation class is over,” said the Lifetaker, “may we continue?”

Max gave him half a peace sign. On we went.

***

“Look at this,” Maggie said. Stone pillars cut in the sides had created niches and galleries. Inside one of them was a cot, a battered dresser, tattered paperbacks, a pile of clothing. Someone’s living quarters.
 

All of it dust-free.

Our flashlights revealed more galleries, maybe dozens of similar rooms full of scavenged possessions. Well cared for. And finally, we came across a table loaded with food.

Bread. Fruit. Half a salami.

Max lowered his nose for a sniff. Fresh. His face reflected my own sudden foreboding. “Maybe we better pick up the pace.”
 

But it was already too late.
 

They coalesced from the galleries, more than thirty of them, surrounding us. Their gold eyes shone with feral luminescence beneath dreadlocked white hair. Some had filed their teeth to points. Some had the young-old look of rapid youthing. They brandished shivs made from spikes and spoons.
 

Several of them fired torches, casting the scene in flutters of stark orange. They pushed closer. We’d instinctively formed a circle, our backs to each other. Max and I clicked off our safeties.