Peeps (11 page)

“The first incident was in 1880, killed twenty workers,” Chip said. “Then another in 1882 killed a few more than that. They were supposedly explosions, and the company had the body parts to prove it.”

“Handy,” I said.

“And leggy,” he chuckled. Out from under the soulless eyes of the Shrink’s doll collection, Chip was a certified laugh riot. “That brought the project to a halt for a couple of decades. Those incidents were in Jersey, but on this side of the river we never bought the cover story.”

“Why not?”

“There are ancient tunnels that travel through the bedrock, all around these parts. And around the PATH train, the tunnels are … newer.” His fingers drifted along the tunnel blueprints on his desk. “Check it out, Cal: If you add up the weight of all the plants and animals that live under the ground, it’s actually
more
than everything that lives above. About a billion organisms in every pinch of soil.”

“Yeah, none of which is big enough to
eat twenty people
.”

He lowered his voice. “But that’s what happens after you’re buried, Kid. Things in the ground eat you.”

Great, now
Records
was calling me Kid. “Okay, Chip,” I said. “But worms don’t eat people who are still alive.”

“But there’s a food chain down there,” he said. “
Something
has to be at the top.”

“You guys don’t have a clue, do you?”

Chip shook his head. “We have clues. Those tunnels? They’re a lot like the trails of an earthworm through the dirt.”

I frowned and dropped my eyes back to the blueprints for Lace’s building. The fine-lined drawings—precisely scaled and covered in tiny symbols—showed only the shapes that human machines had carved from the soil. No hint at the environment surrounding our descent into the earth. “So you think there are giant
worms
down there? I thought you guys in Records were a little more … factual.”

“Yeah, well, we read a lot of weird stuff.” He pointed his pen at the edge of the level labeled Health Club, Lower. “This is what somebody should have noticed—and then filed a great big ST-57.” The pen tapped. “The excavation goes too deep for comfort; it’s only a few yards above part of the exhaust system for the PATH tunnel. Any variation from these plans, and they’re connected.”

“Connected to what?”

“You ever seen those big exhaust towers by the river? The fans are about eighty feet across, sucking air all day. Bad.”

“Air is bad?”

“They’re
pumping oxygen
down there!” Chip shook his head, tossed the pen disgustedly down onto the plans. “That’s like pouring fertilizer on your weeds. Lack of oxygen is the growth-limiting factor in a subterranean biome!”

“Ah, so things are growing. But those ‘explosions’ in Jersey were a hundred and twenty years ago, after all. We’re just talking
rats
these days, right?”

“Probably,” Chip said.

“Probably. Wonderful.” Standing there in the gloom, I realized that Chip and I were underground right now, tons of bricks and mortar piled up over our heads. The squeaking ceiling fan labored to bring oxygen down to us; without the flickering fluorescents it would be too dark even for my peep eyes to see. Down here was hostile territory—a place for corpses and worms, and the bigger things that ate the worms, and the
bigger
things that ate them…

“But our guys at the PATH say that there are a few places under the exhaust towers that their workers have abandoned,” Chip added. “They aren’t officially condemned, but nobody goes down there anymore.”

“Great. And how close is that to Morgan’s building?”

“Not far. A couple hundred yards?”

My nose wrinkled, as if a bad smell had wafted into the cubicle. Why couldn’t I have just lost my virginity the normal way? No vampiric infections, no subterranean menaces. “Okay, so what’s the best way for me to get down there?”

“Through the front door.” Chip ran a finger across the building plans, pointing out a set of symbols. “They’ve got major security all over the joint; cameras everywhere, especially in the lower levels.”

“Crap.”

“I thought you had an inside line. That girl you mentioned in your 1158-S, the one who lives there now? Tell her you want to check out the basement.”

“She had an attitude problem. I’d rather break in. I’m good with locks.”

Chip raised an eyebrow.

“Or a Sanitation badge,” I flailed. “Maybe a Health Inspector of Health Clubs?”

“What happened between you and her?”

“Nothing!”

“You can tell me, Kid.”

I groaned, but Chip fixed me with his big brown eyes. “Look, it’s just that she… We had this…” My voice fell. “There was a Superhuman Revelation Incident, sort of.”

“There was?” Chip frowned. “Have you filed an SRI-27/45?”

“No, I
haven’t
filed an SRI-27/45. It’s not like she saw me climbing up a wall or anything. All I did was sort of… lift her up, and only for a second.”

“And?”

“And swing her from one balcony to another. Otherwise we were going to get caught breaking and entering.
Just
entering, I mean—nothing was broken.” I decided not to get into the Grand Theft Blender issue. “Look, Chip, all I need are some traps and a Pest Control badge. Catch a few rats, let the Doctor test their blood, see if we’ve got a running reservoir. First things first. No big deal.”

Chip nodded slowly, then looked down and continued detailing the lower depths of the Hoboken PATH tunnel, letting his expression say it all.

“Pretty late, isn’t it?”

“Tell me about it,” I grunted at the doorman, willing him not to look too closely at my face. He was the same guy from that afternoon, but now I was dressed in a standard city-issue hazmat suit, a wool cap pulled down to my eyebrows. My oven-fresh Sanitation badge was flopped open in his face. In more ways than one, I was presenting a different picture than I had nine hours before.

“Yeah, I’m on till midnight myself,” he said, his eyes dropping from my face as he pulled out a desk drawer. He hadn’t recognized me. The clothes
do
make the man, as far as most people are concerned.

He yanked out a clattering ring of keys, and we headed to the elevator.

“Did you guys get a complaint from one of our tenants? I never heard nothing about rats here.”

“No, just some problems nearby. Population explosion by the river.”

“Yeah, the river. Always smells damp down in the basement. Kind of fishy.” The elevator door opened. He leaned one shoulder against it, blocking its attempts to close while he counted through the keys until he found one marked with a green plastic ring. He slipped it into a keyhole marked B2 at the bottom of the controls and gave it a half turn.

“You ever heard of a tenant getting bitten here?” I asked. “Maybe a year ago or so?”

He looked up at me. “Didn’t work here then. No one did. They hired all new staff early this year. The old guys were running some kind of payroll scam, I hear.”

“Ah. I see.” I made a mental note to run all those doormen’s and janitors’ names through Records.

He pressed the B2 button, keeping one hand on the door’s rubber bumpers. “Not that hardly that many people use it down there. Only a few diehards. Like I said, smells funny. By the way, when you come back up, don’t forget to mention you’re leaving to whoever’s on the door. It’s supposed to be locked up down there this time of night.”

“No problem.” I lifted my duffel bag in weary half salute.

He smiled and let the door close. The elevator took me down.

It did smell funny.

There were about fifty kinds of mold growing down there, and I could smell the rot of wooden beams behind the walls, dried human sweat on the padded weight benches, assorted shoes decaying behind the slats of locker doors.

But behind the health club smells, something else was brewing. I couldn’t quite figure out what. Smells are not as easy to place as sights and sounds. They’re like suppressed memories: You sometimes have to let them bubble up on their own.

I let the elevator close its door and glide away, not switching on any lights. I didn’t want the doorman watching me on the security cameras. I was hoping he would forget I was down here and go off his shift without mentioning me to the next guy.

Once my eyes adjusted, the red glow of the thermostats and exercise machine controls were enough to see by. For a few minutes, though, I just stood there, listening for the sounds of tiny feet.

It didn’t seem a likely spot for a rat invasion; there wasn’t any source of food down here, not even a candy machine. In any case, street-level garbage eaters weren’t the only issue here. I was looking for big alpha rats—and, if Chip was right, unnamed other things—bubbling up from below. Things that had never heard of M&M’s.

All I could hear was the refrigerator in the juice machine, the hiss of steam heat, and a distant steady rumble. I knelt and pressed one palm flat against the floor, feeling the vibration spreading into my flesh along with the chill of the cement. The rumble was cycling slowly—maybe it was those eighty-foot fan blades that gave Chip nightmares.

But I didn’t hear any rats, or any of Chip’s monsters, for that matter. I moved among the dark shapes of machines, the red eyes of their controls winking at me. The smell of chlorine rose from a covered Jacuzzi. That other scent, the one I couldn’t identify, seemed to grow stronger as I moved toward the back wall.

Then I felt a draft, the slightest hint of cold. I swept my eyes across the baseboard behind the radiator, searching for a rat-hole letting in the autumn chill of the earth. Rats don’t need much space to crawl through; they can break down their own skeletons and squeeze through holes the size of quarters. (We peeps can supposedly do that too, but it hurts like hell, I’ve heard.)

There weren’t any openings along the floor. The fittings around the steam pipes were tight. I didn’t spot any doors to slip under, no loose tiles in the ceiling. No way for anything to bubble up from the depths.

But in the farthest corner of the gym, the paneled walls themselves radiated cold.

I gave the wall a thump.

It was hollow.

Hearing the empty sound, I realized something about the darkened health club—it didn’t have any stairs down. The second level promised in the blueprints didn’t exist. Or it was hidden.

My duffel bag clanked against the concrete floor. From a pocket, I pulled the plans that Chip had printed for me, checking my compass. According to the blueprints, the sub-basement stairs were only a few yards away, on the other side of the wall.

The wood paneling didn’t give at all when I pushed; there was something solid behind it. Of course, my duffel bag was full of drills, hacksaws, bolt cutters, and a crowbar, or I could have just put my fist through the wall. But I still had to come back in my Sanitation costume to reclaim any rats my traps caught, and the staff doesn’t like it when you break their building.

I moved along the wall, pressing and thumping. The echoes were muffled, which meant that lots of crisscrossed S beams supported the paneling. The stairs were solidly sealed off as well, with no easy way in. Had they just abandoned a whole subbasement down there?

The wood paneling ended at a row of lockers—too heavy to move, even with my peep muscles. I tapped the floor with my feet, wondering what was hidden beneath. From the ceiling, the red eyes of security cameras glowed mockingly in the darkness.

Then I realized something: All of the cameras were pointed more or less at
me
. Were they tracking me?

I moved a few yards, back into the cold corner, but the cameras didn’t follow. They all stayed pointed at the same target—the row of lockers. Whoever had set the security system up didn’t care what happened in the rest of the health club, as long as they could watch that one spot.

I walked along the lockers, running my fingers against them, smelling the dirty socks and chlorinated swimsuits inside. The metal grew colder as I went.

In the center, one locker was icy to my touch, and through its ventilation slats that half-familiar scent—the one I couldn’t quite identify—floated on a draft of chilled air. I looked up at the cameras; they were all pointed directly at me now.

The padlock was an off-the-shelf Master Lock, though with four tumblers instead of the usual three, more expensive than the others. I knelt, cradling it like a cell phone to my head. As the numbers spun left, then right, I heard the tiny steel teeth connecting, the tumblers aligning … until it sprang open, as loud as a gunshot in my ear.

Sliding the lock off the hasp, I opened the door.

There was nothing inside—nothingness, in fact. No hanging clothes, no hooks or shelves, just a black void that consumed the dim light of the gym. A chill wind came from the darkness, bearing that same half-familiar smell, sharpened now.

I reached into the locker. My hand went back into the darkness and cold, disappearing into nothingness.

Let me get this straight about my night vision: When I’m at home, the only light I keep on is the red LED of my cell-phone charger; I can read fine print by starlight; I have to tape over the glowing clock face of my DVD player, because otherwise it’s too bright to sleep in my bedroom.

But I couldn’t see
jack
inside this locker.

There is something called
cave darkness
, which is ten times darker than sitting in a closet with towels stuffed under the door, covering your eyes with your hands—basically darker than anything you’ve ever experienced except down in a cave. Your hands disappear in front of your face, you can’t tell whether your eyes are open or not, random red lights seem to flicker in your peripheral vision as your brain freaks out from the total absence of light.

“Great,” I said.

Hoisting my duffel bag, I slipped through into the void.

The standard Night Watch flashlight has three settings. One is a low-light mode designed not to burn out peep night vision. The second setting is a normal flashlight, useful for normal people. The third is a ten-thousand-lumen eyeball-blaster intended to blow away peeps, scare away rat hordes, and generally indicate panic. Held a few inches from your skin, it will actually give you a suntan.