Veniss Underground (7 page)

“You, John the Baptist, are going below level,” Shadrach said. “I don't think there's much else I can do in the light.”

         

SHADRACH ATE
at a cafe in the Canal District, oblivious to the strangled whimpers coming from his pocket and the strange looks the waiter gave him. His mind had become extraordinarily clear, as if he had managed to discard all the detritus of his past.

The great wall that surrounded the city impressed itself upon him with a precision that verged on the microscopic: He understood that with only the slightest squint he would be able to make out every blemish, every pockmark, on its blind, timeworn face. The colors running beneath the deck of the restaurant shone with a vibrance he could not recall having seen before—the orange hues livid as flames, the blues reflecting a sky that in its immensity could crush him in an instant.

The wind from the sea brought to him such a variety of scents that simply by breathing he became more alive: the sting of salt, certainly, and the subdued brine, but also an underlying sweetness that reminded him of Nicola's favorite perfume. Had he truly never smelled that sweetness before, or had it always been there?

Now Shadrach knew he was fated to go below level again. This was not fickle chance, not coy coincidence—this was fate, and he would run toward it as fast as he could, mouth curled back in a snarl. To think that he could grow so complacent that he could take
anything
for granted, even a smell, an aftertaste, an echo.

He ate his sea bass and potatoes with a peculiar combination of intensity and sloth, each bite savored, before, finished, he slapped down payment and left that place, as far as he knew, forever.

CHAPTER 2

Down below. Ten years since he had been there, and who knew how it might have changed, have warped in his absence? Somehow, he had thought, as a child might, that it had not existed at all after he had left, but had been a nightmare from which he had finally woken up.
Why
such a place should exist was a question hopelessly tangled in other questions, lost in the below-level passageways, long ago. At times, its distant, fading shrieks could be heard, only to be once again drowned out by the chaos of a million other voices whispering about survival. What lay below level? Surely not his past.

         

A NARROW
alley. A slit of sky caught between tall buildings. A wealth of garbage—cans, rotted food, plastic boxes, dead animals—that some eccentric hadn't simply heaved over the side of the city wall. Under the garbage, the keys to the old kingdom: an ancient maintenance entrance—just a manhole cover anyone could lift, after a moment's strain, by hand. He knew of more normal entrances, but from this one a careful person could bypass two belowground levels without detection. An element of surprise might be vital.

As Shadrach stood at the threshold, the wind died away, the rumble and hiss of hovercraft faded into the air, and even John the Baptist stopped his futile squirming. No sound but for his own shallow breathing. The round gray manhole cover grew and grew until it became the world. From beneath it, he imagined he could hear the sounds of below level rising to poison the sunlight. It came softly, softly, but building, like gossamer dream transforming itself to heavy nightmare.

On the other side of the manhole a wet glob of slugs and grubs waited for him; it was their faint mewling cries he heard, the whole of their pulsing, gray bulk waiting for him to come home. The image of a maggoty, sudden dark. The
drip-drip
of water. The suggestion of massive machinery grinding. The dark. The harsh, spitting sound of holovids flicking green light from behind closed doors in closed-off corridors. The dark. No matter how he might rationalize it, he knew that his own personal Hell waited for him down below level. He had driven autotrains through the desert and seen what no one in the city could imagine, but he would rather do anything than return below level. He did not want to go. He would not go.

In a single motion, Shadrach pried open the portal, jumped into the greasy hole, clamped on to the ladder that ran down the inside of it, and shut the lid above him. The clang resounded in the darkness as he clung to the metal ladder. He clawed at the unpleasantly moist lid, which he could never again open, locked as it was from the outside.

He had no choice but to grit his teeth and descend the ladder, never knowing if
something
below might be scuttling
up
the ladder, slinking through the darkness to surprise him. The sound of his boots on the rungs resonated through the brackish, close air. Sweat trickled into his eyes. The already enclosed space around the ladder seemed to collapse in on him. His movements became frantic. It took a conscious effort to slow his breathing, to not just let go of the rungs and slide down into . . . what?

The bottom of the ladder and its attendant platform finally appeared below him. Relief flooded him. He clambered down onto the platform and took a deep, shuddering breath. He had passed the first test. He had controlled his fear.

He looked around. Two sides of the platform were boxed in by walls. One side led into darkness. Straight ahead stood an open elevator shaft. The elevator, which glowed a faint green, had gotten stuck between floors, halfway to the bottom of the open elevator door. It smelled of old rust and new oil. Below it lay the abyss: a shaft that might descend three levels or three hundred.

Shadrach walked up to the shaft, put his hands on the metal of the elevator's jagged metal lip. Maybe he could hoist himself up and into the elevator, if he could find enough purchase.

They came at him from above and from three points of the compass—four nasty little brats from the puling sound of them. They pulled him to the ground so close to the shaft that he had to roll away from the edge before he could even think of defending himself. Two of them had nubs for legs, and as he rolled away from the shaft, he flung one of his crippled attackers against the ladder with a swift, brutal kick. The others held on, oddly bulky, their breath moist and unpleasant as they screeched in some degenerate language. They had claws. They had teeth. They had a knife, which snapped when the wielder tried to stab him, come up against his laser gun. One punched him in the kidneys, its grasp sticky as a gecko's. Another tried to bash his head against the hard stone floor, but either his head was harder than the stone, or his assailant couldn't get enough leverage, because the action barely dazed him. The third held down his left arm while riffling through his pockets and had the misfortune to discover John the Baptist, who snapped at the brat's fingers. The brat shrieked, distracted long enough for Shadrach to pull his arm free. He found his gun. He fired into the air, bringing a rain of pebbles down on their heads. In the momentary flash of light he caught a glimpse of a pale, bald scalp, luminous eyes, a darting tongue.

As suddenly as they had attacked him, he was free of them, the displaced John the Baptist rolling impotently on the floor, snapping his jaws.

Shadrach spun to his feet, pressed himself against the ladder, prepared to scramble back up it. But there was no need—the bipedal thugs had already leapt over the shaft's edge. As he watched in amazement, the two legless wonders galumphed over the edge, too, in what resembled some form of ritual suicide.

He ran to the edge, stared down into the shaft. Below, he saw, like pale mushroom caps in the gloom, the parachutes of the last would-be bandits gliding gracefully out of sight. He aimed into the shaft, but at the last moment did not pull the trigger.

Instead, he hoisted himself into the elevator, pushed B for lowest level, set it for speed return, and released the emergency stop. As it creaked into rumbling motion, he jumped back onto the platform.

Shadrach picked up John the Baptist by the plate and sat down against the wall near the ladder. His side felt bruised, his lip was split, his right wrist partially sprained. His hand passed over something smooth as he propped himself up and he brought it in front of his face, to examine it in the dull green light.

“Huh!” he said to John the Baptist. “A bomb. The little bastards were going to blow me up.”

He looked at John the Baptist and John the Baptist looked at him.

“Why?” Shadrach asked. “Why was an assassin-model meerkat in Nicola's apartment?”

John the Baptist tried to snap at his fingers.

“What's the point of silence? You're not an animal. You're not a robot. You're dying.”

John the Baptist said, “She
thought
I was an animal. I thought she was capable of genocide.”

Shadrach jammed the cylinder deep into the meerkat's left ear. It screamed, cursed, reduced to incoherence.

“I knew you were incomplete,” Shadrach said.

Just then the elevator reached the bottom with a gut-wrenching shriek of metal, echoed by at least two screams.

Shadrach picked up John the Baptist and said, “We'll continue this conversation later.” He stuffed the head back in his pocket. Aching, he got to his feet.

“Welcome to below level,” he said, and laughed, but it was a laugh like breaking glass.

         

NOW A
strange condition overcame Shadrach, in which the world existed in gasps and gaps, so that the intervals between events vanished and his actions took on a cold and deadly precision: There were only places he arrived at and places he had yet to arrive at. Once gone, he was again instantly at his next destination. He remembered vaguely, as he made his way to the fifth level, the absence and presence of light, the touch of skin against skin in the tightly packed corridors of raggle-taggle communities to whom he was like a pale ghost, fast receding from them, followed by vast, empty passages. More than once some brave local arm of the law would stop him and ask him his business among them, and he would answer them with a stare that corroded their souls.

Only once did he come free of this fey mood, when he found himself aboard an old industrial elevator hurtling down through the darkness, lit only by red emergency lights, his fellow passengers' faces subsumed in blood, their eyes locked on the gun he held at his side. The elevator bellowed and leapt like a beast eager to plunge into the heart of Hell, and through a hole in the floor, he could see the rock to either side passing by faster than fast. He thought that the elevator must be a manifestation of his own bloodlust, the berserker love that had crashed his nerve ends, hijacked his cells.

But such self-awareness was an anomaly: The gaps, the gasps, of time between events had been filled with memories, for he was not truly remorseless, not truly a machine rebuilt for revenge. He was brittle with the weight of his humanity, and he had memories of this place. Every step became a step into the past—the fear of not having enough to eat, of being packed into a tiny room with five brothers and sisters, and of early shifts and late returns from the mining facilities. Each day they prayed that the lottery would save them by bringing them to the surface, the other country that lay like a miracle above the darkness.

His first memories outside of the room that served as their house were of the clank-and-thrum musics of the mining machines. He soon saw them up close: monstrous black metal carapaces four, five stories high, the heat they gave off like sweat, so that they always seemed possessed of a righteous anger: to steam, to bubble, to boil. They generated a fierce light that annihilated his vision even as he adjusted to it; a corona of flame through which the machines burst in glimpses—their bodies a black darker than night (the blue-black skins like that of a metal god-temple), their spokes like iridescent midnight starfish; their rancid smell, which Shadrach came to realize was the stench of their own sweat as they toiled; the flecks of metal that floated off of them, infiltrating his clothes, his skin. The rust was on fire, the particles so small that when they came to rest on his clothes they burned through to his skin and embedded themselves like tiny coals, to flame white-hot before burning up, burning away. The rust spots didn't hurt, they only itched, but they lent his skin a mottled orange hue he only noticed on the rare occasions when the family visited the entertainment section with its bright lights and fun house mirrors.

Eventually, he had adjusted—his night vision so improved he discarded his infrared goggles; his skin toughened, he developed sinewy muscles in his arms and thick muscles in his legs from pulling down huge levers, shoving mining carts into place, rolling exploratory shafts into position over holes. On days when the machines sang with the weight of the minerals caught in their great maws, he felt as if he were the fire itself, the site of a thousand pinprick conflagrations.

His father had worked in the mines, too. His father: a silent giant of a man who caved in on himself over the years until it seemed the flames had devoured him, a sad husk who had done the best he could for his family.

His mother skipped from job to job with a flexibility and ease that was frivolous next to his father's stoic centeredness. She had taught Shadrach to read and write using books plundered from an ancient library. The solimind civil war had effectively destroyed the school system.

Why, he had often asked himself, after the lottery had brought him to the surface and condemned the rest of his family to the darkness, did they persist in their antiquated mining methods? Only after a long time had passed and he had been assimilated into the surface world did he realize that no one really controlled the machines, that the internal strife of the solimind war had severed the cause and effect between the companies above ground and their servants below ground. The food machines still worked and the lottery ran, and the mining machines were maintained, but to no purpose. Out of tradition, out of being stuck too far inside the beast to see it had ground to a halt, he and his family had enslaved themselves. But it was too late for Shadrach to tell them this.

CHAPTER 3

Shadrach found what he was looking for soon after he entered the fifth level: a round tunnel clogged with cripples. The dull golden light that suffused the tunnel rendered their infirmities in glistening, glittering perfection. Here an arm missing, there a leg, a nose, an eye. Some had no limbs missing but soon would. Others came not to recover a leg but to lose a second. Many had brought tents or sleeping bags or chairs. They muttered as they stood in a rough line. They muttered and they fidgeted and they muttered some more. They held their faces away from the light, even those who had no eyes. Those who lacked limbs were somehow more normal than those who had limbs.

Shadrach approached the nearest cripple—a little old man in a faded green suit. He had no legs. He was positioned in a tray on wheels, his pant legs floating out in front. A gray beard accentuated wide cheekbones. His eyes were large and a watery blue. He had the delicate bone structure of a thrush. Shadrach knelt beside him.

“You're not from here, are you,” said the old man.

“I used to be. Is it all like this? All the levels?”

“You must have been gone a long time,” the old man said. “It's worse. Every level lower is worse.”

“Is this the line for the organ bank?”

The man considered him for a moment, bending his head to one side, then said, “Yes.”

Shadrach stood up.

“How long is the wait?”

“You should ask, ‘How long is the line?'”

“All right then—how long is the line?”

“As long as the wait.” The man cackled.

Shadrach reached down and slapped the man. “How long is the line?”

The man flinched, his eyes wide.

“Four miles,” he said, choking back a sob.

“Four miles! That could take days. I can't wait even an hour.”

“You looking to donate?” the man said, his gaze running hungrily over Shadrach's legs. “'Cause if you are, I'll do the waiting and you can come back later. We can go in together and—”

That was the last Shadrach heard, for he had plunged into the tunnel, gun and badge held out before him like talismans against the dark.

         

AT FIRST,
it wasn't so bad—they shied away from his gun or his badge or his scowl, as if there were an inverse relationship between where they were in line and their level of resistance. But the closer he got to the front, the more people packed into the tunnel, and the more they resented being asked to move for a line skipper. They clawed and pushed at him with a hatred grown strong in the absence of their flesh, until he had to fire his gun to get them to back off. A mother with child screamed at him and he pulled out John the Baptist, who screamed back until she was screaming for an entirely different reason. A tall, muscular man with only one eye fancied himself a fighter and tried to stop Shadrach, only to find himself on the ground holding his balls. Shadrach was surprised to find meerkats in the line, but confused them by holding up John the Baptist and saying, “I have to find a body for this
now
.” The smell of sweat and urine grew stronger; claustrophobia began to grow inside him. He began to flail out at the multilimbed creation he was fighting. He shouted, he kicked, slowly surging forward even as he felt he was going to drown, and then, when he didn't think he could take it any longer, the tunnel expelled him into the antechamber of the organ bank.

He faced five burly attendants. A polite secretary. A professional-looking nurse.

“Your name, sir,” the nurse said, frowning, as she consulted the purple holographic list that lay between them like scrawlings trapped in a semi-invisible spiderweb. The secretary's makeup made her look demonic. The burly attendants had scars around their heads, a nervous tremor to their bulk.

Shadrach held up his badge, pocketed his gun.

They led him to a door, quite solicitous when faced with Quin's badge.

“Go in here,” the nurse said. “Wait for the surgeon. He'll be able to help you.”

He opened the door, went through, and gasped as he came out from the antechamber to a raised dais below which lay the main floor of the organ bank and from which rose tiers of columns to a ceiling some two hundred feet above him. Ahead, a series of tall stone archways led the eye onward to a faraway horizon. On first glance, it reminded him of nothing so much as the cathedrals built in the Tolstoi District to mimic those of ancient history, but changed strangely in function.

Where the sculptures of saints would have been set into the walls, there were instead bodies laid into clear capsules, the white, white skin glistening in the light—row upon row of bodies in the walls, the bewildering proliferation of walls. The columns, which rose and arched in bunches of five or six together, were not true columns, but instead highways for blood and other substances: giant red, green, blue, and clear tubes that coursed through the cathedral like arteries. Above, shot through with track lighting from behind, what at first resembled stained-glass windows showing some abstract scene were revealed as clear glass within which organs had been stored: yellow livers, red hearts, pale arms, white eyeballs, rosaries of nerves disembodied from their host.

Behind him, on the dais, a plaque to fallen surgeons, and more bodies set into the walls, their distant, lamenting gazes as sad as any martyr's, and yet none of them was Nicola.

Above him, in the rich, rich air, which smelled of blood, which smelled of bodies richly decomposing, dust motes floated and, as light as the dust motes, the globes of security cameras, the many lenses sticking out from their bellies as numerous as pores. He could just barely hear, coming from the wings of the cathedral, the faint sounds of surgeons at work (he thought): scalpel against scalpel, men's voices in casual conversation looped around gurgling screams. But even as he imagined them, these sounds faded like ghosts of sensation, and still there was no one to be seen below or above that was
in motion
, not locked up against the walls, like corpses.

Against such silence, such lack of resistance, Shadrach felt lost, and so when a pattering noise came from the long row of archways directly ahead of him, he was relieved rather than alarmed. A pattering as of feet slapping against marble. It did not fade, but became louder, more specific, somehow violent. It circled round the columns of blood and ichor. He stared intently down the long length of the archways to find its source. A laugh—short, barking—that he couldn't pinpoint. A shriek—long, feminine. Then once again nothing but the pattering. A shadow coyly peeking out from a column, the hint of motion, the glimpse of a face that seemingly withdrew into white marble. Once more the sound of feet. Shadrach took out his gun, walked to the stairs that led to the ground level.

He was about to take action—for here, finally, was resistance—when a shape came into view. It looked very much, from a distance, like a deformed, broken-backed “H,” a single strip laid across two larger strips. As it came closer—a halting, sideways progress—he recognized his mistake. It was two people somehow joined in the middle. And, finally, as they ran and spun and argued right beneath him, at the foot of the stairs, he saw that they were two ancient, wizened old people—so wrinkled and stooped, the flesh sagging, that he could not tell their gender—who fought over the snow-white corpse of a girl child. The child's abdominal organs smiled at Shadrach from a great epidermal rip between breastbone and stomach.

“Welcome to the cadaver cathedral, as we like to call it,” said a voice from behind him.

Shadrach whirled around.

A gaunt, pale man with hawkish features stood there. Goggles hid his eyes and he was dressed in a crimson surgeon's uniform complete with red cap. He held up his hands, covered by rust-red gloves, so that the blood dripped onto the marble floor rather than onto his uniform. He looked curiously old and young at the same time, as if wrinkles and worry lines had been too quickly engraved onto the face of a teenager.

“No need for that!” the man snapped, gesturing at the gun.

Reluctantly, Shadrach replaced it in his pocket and asked, “Who are you?”

A frown. “My name is Dr. Ferguson, and I've been interrupted at an important surgery.” He seemed to remember his gloves then, and carefully took them off with a rubbery
thwacking
sound, threw them into a corner.

He followed Shadrach's gaze to where the two hideous figures at the foot of the stairs were now pulling at a disenfranchised leg while one of the two humped the remaining leg. “Don't worry about them. They are, sadly, benefactors—patrons of our research who were, as a condition of their patronage, given the freedom to roam the cathedral as they wished. Senile before dead, I'm afraid. Now they play with the corpses.”

Shadrach looked away from them and at Dr. Ferguson, whose fingernails were steeped in blood.

“And you let them?”

Dr. Ferguson shrugged. “It's in the contract for their continued support. The corpses are dead, you know.” A grim chuckle. “You didn't think, surrounded by so much flesh, that we could ever really maintain its mystique? That would be unreasonable to expect. And now your name, please. You caused a disturbance in the corridor that still hasn't died down.”

“I'm with Quin,” Shadrach said. He pulled out his badge, shoved it at the doctor, even as he sought out once again the breadth and depth of the cathedral, so monstrously beautiful did it seem to him.

Dr. Ferguson handed back the badge. “What do you want? I'm expected back in surgery soon.”

“I'm looking for an organ donor.”

A thin smile split Dr. Ferguson's lips. “Aren't we all?”

“No. I mean a specific person.”

“What's the number?”

Shadrach handed him the printout.

Dr. Ferguson shuffled over to the dais and punched a few buttons. The holographic screen lit up.

“This might take a minute,” he said, wiping his brow with his left hand. A smudge of red appeared on his forehead. “Tell me, then, what's the world like up there?”

“You've never been?”

“Never.”

“You were born here?”

“No. I was born there, but I don't remember
there
—I only remember
here.
Once your world refines itself to encompass only the confines of the human body, the macro world seems hopelessly clumsy, distant, hazy. Ah, here”—and he read some number from the screen—“we do indeed still have this donor.” Then he frowned. “But I'm not sure . . . well, nonetheless, come on then—follow me.”

“What's wrong? What's the matter?”

“Never mind. Just follow me.”

They descended the stairs. The patrons had taken their corpse elsewhere, leaving behind only a purple trail of ichor. At the bottom of the stairs, Dr. Ferguson stopped, looked up and down the great halls, and started off to his left. Shadrach followed closely, still overwhelmed by the dizzying space above him, amplified by being on the first floor. He noted the way the columns of blood gushed and the gargoyles on the corners of archways, which were not, on closer inspection, gargoyles at all, but human heads coated in a white preservative and attached to the marble. None of them looked happy. A sense of disgust fought with the relief that soon he would have found Nicola. He gripped his gun in his coat pocket. He did not like Dr. Ferguson.

Another pattering sound, and he whirled in time to see a group of interns rattle by with a gurney full of hearts, tongues, and eyes. They went so fast, an eyeball fell off. Shadrach called out to them, but they ignored him and were soon lost in the distance.

Dr. Ferguson chuckled. “It's just an eyeball—plenty more where that one came from. It hasn't got a soul—it's only got an eyeball,” and laughed ferociously and kicked the eyeball into a corner.

Then they walked for a long time down the long hall, in silence. Until, finally, Dr. Ferguson turned back to look at Shadrach, slowing his pace and showing his teeth.

“You
are
sure you need to see this organ donor?”

“Yes.”

“It can be very emotional.”

“I know,” Shadrach said, hoping the doctor would shut up.

Dr. Ferguson turned away and continued to walk, Shadrach behind him. After a time, a low moaning and whimpering began to fill the air. It was a hopeless sound, which carried within it the promise of long days of agony. Just ahead of them, the hall turned off to the left, around a corner. The sounds came from beyond the corner.

Dr. Ferguson stopped right before they turned the corner. “You never answered my question,” he said.

“What question?” Shadrach asked. He thought of ice, of freezing, of his veins turned solid with the cold. Because he was afraid. Because he was afraid of what lay beyond the corner.

“What's the world like up there?”

“Lighter.”

Dr. Ferguson smirked. “I'm glad you're an ass, Shadrach. I'm glad. It makes this easier.”

“What easier?”

“It's not sanitary, it's not
right
. But it's the only way we know of to deal with the pressure, the sheer pressure of bodies. This is where we send them afterwards—beyond this corner.” A sardonic expression twisted Dr. Ferguson's face as he put his hand on Shadrach's arm. “Be strong. Be of iron will. Understand what desperation can drive a person to. I'll be leaving you now.”

He began to walk away. When he was almost out of view, Shadrach called out, “Are you really a doctor?”

But Ferguson was too far away for Shadrach to see whether the man nodded or shook his head. Besides, it didn't matter now. Without the echo of Ferguson's feet, Ferguson's words, the moans, the shrieks, the crying, were all that more distinct.

On the wall ahead of him, a body was being fed blood and other fluids. It was a boy, angelic in appearance, seemingly asleep. His eyes were closed, his perfect mouth set in an effortless smile. He didn't hear the moans. He slept in his amniotic fluid and dreamt of the surface world and knew nothing that his body did not tell him.