Corruption

by Adam Vine

  Not a valley. A crater.

  A narrow switchback descended the crater wall where the road should have been. I started to make my way down. My feet slid on the loose-packed snow. The buildings ceased to stand upright, becoming collapsed piles of ancient rubble.

  I could finally see the light source that gave the snow blanketing the city streets their glow. It had been previously obscured by the crowded, broken skyline, but from the crater my view of it was clear.

  There was a gargantuan black plate hanging in the sky surrounded by a halo of golden light. It broke the low, rolling cover of ebony clouds like a cliff dissipating the tide. Long, jagged shapes dripped from its starless center, huge stalactites the size of upside-down mountains made of oily stone and twisted metal.

  The floating behemoth blotted out most of my view of the sky from inside the crater, but the brightness of its halo gave enough light for me to see at least a few steps ahead on my treacherous path. A silent theater of weird shadows cast in amber danced and flickered all around as the dark clouds came and went a mile overhead.

  I hadn’t descended more than a quarter of the crater when the searchlights rounded the ledge above me. Sirens sounded, shrieking through the vast amphitheater of the crater as if the world itself was screaming.

  The Lice rappelled down the cliff face with eldritch efficiency. Their slender, bladed limbs picked claw-holds faster than I could walk, and the buffeting winds and nearly vertical incline of the slope didn’t seem to slow them at all.

  I lost my foothold, caught myself on a busted steel pipe hanging out of the frozen dirt, recovered and kept moving. They were so close behind me I could hear their flame buds extending out of their shells and clunk-clunk-clunking into position. I was certain I would be dead in seconds, tried to make peace with God, gazed longingly toward the shadow-shrouded bottom of the crater-

  There was an opening in the snow. It was the entrance to a tunnel, bricks the color of old soot lining an arched, weed-bedraggled cave mouth. A few stone piles stood outside in loose, man-made shapes. Beyond the pale border of foreground where the snowfall ended, twin metal tracks ran away into the darkness.

  A subway tunnel, I thought. It’s been torn open. The Lice won’t fit inside.

  I didn’t know how tall the Lice were, but they looked a lot taller than a subway car. Whatever impact had formed the crater had vivisected this old tunnel like some unfortunate prisoner of war, its brick and mortar guts all spilling out down the hillside. My eyes tracked up to the black disc hanging in the sky with its dancing ring of gold and dangling, inverted mountain of spires. I thought I was close enough to jump and roll inside, but the distance was hard to estimate in the dim, flickering light.

  If I missed, I’d fly off the path into five or six seconds of freefall before meeting my end on the broken slope somewhere near the bottom of the crater.

  I’ll be dead either way.

  A burst of flame lit the night, cooking the skin on the back of my neck. I screamed, sprinted and dove into that oil pit of darkness.

  I had run a good fifty feet deep into the tunnel before I looked back. The Louse was still at the tunnel entrance, trying to fold its triple-jointed legs into a shape that could fit inside the narrow mouth of bricks and steel. For an instant, its floodlight swung toward me, whiting out the pale crescent moon of the entrance and the unnatural night beyond.

  It can’t fit.

  The light swung away again and started moving frantically. It was stuck. The Louse jerked hard, trying to remove the leg that was jammed, whipped back and slammed its bulbous carapace into the curved arch of the tunnel mouth. A dread rumble rose outside, and the dim light of the opening was blotted by the Louse’s body and the sudden avalanche that buried it.

  It was a long time before I looked back again. When I did, the tunnel mouth was a distant pinpoint of white, a single star shining against a pitch-black sky. One of the other Lice had pulled the stuck Louse free. But they hadn’t followed me in.

  I exhaled and slowed my pace to a painful, gasping limp. The tunnel was noticeably warmer than outside. By the time the light of the tunnel mouth vanished behind me, I had all but forgotten about the Lice and the Snowmen.

  THE NIGHT COUNTRY

  I WALKED through deep silence broken only by the occasional hidden drip of water and the soft scuffle of my footsteps. The ground was smooth, polished stone.

  At least, I thought it was, until a dim, yellow light flickered on beside the tracks, and I saw that the floor beneath my feet wasn’t rock, but amber. The lights turned on in domino fashion, each coming to life with a sound like a match striking, a marching line of ghost lanterns stretching around the distant bend of the tunnel.

  Not electric. Gas, maybe, or something else.

  That’s when I noticed I was covered in blood.

  I stopped to check my wound. I couldn’t see how deep the cut in my shoulder was, but it was agonizing just to peel aside the torn flap of my shirt. The lamps in the floor weren’t bright enough for me to get a good view, but they were bright enough that I noticed something funny about the clothes I was wearing.

  This isn’t the shirt I wore to bed. This isn’t my shirt at all. Nor are these my pants or my boots. They look homemade.

  I didn’t feel surprised by this discovery, only tired, a vessel of aches and pains and the perpetual, gnawing cold.

  I followed the tracks until the light bloomed bright and the tunnel widened. There was a subway station a short ways ahead. I sprinted to it and mounted the platform.

  It wasn’t much different than a subway station back home. There were vending machines, wall-sized advertisements, trash bins, and what appeared to be newspaper stands. The subway signs were mostly still intact, all written in that strange, pseudo-Cyrillic script, but the grand, mosaicked ceiling arches were almost completely caved in.

  And the floor of the platform was covered in human corpses.

  They were clustered together as if they’d died sharing a group hug. Their skulls and rib cages wore dry, random patches of skin and leathery meat, their remains partially mummified by the frigid air. Their clothes, shoes, and jewelry looked upper class, not much different than one would see at rush hour in San Francisco, New York, or even the City I’d left behind. The cuts and fashions of their clothes were unfamiliar, but not alien. One mummy I found that had squeezed herself into the gap behind a device that appeared to be a vending machine was nearly perfectly intact, as was the corpse of the infant clutched to her breast beneath the fuzzy lapel of her fur coat.

  Were they trying to stay warm? Or was it something else, and not the cold that killed them? Whatever it was, they look like they knew it was coming, though not for long.

  I left that sallow crypt, taking the main stairs up to the station proper, a grand open arcade with a domed ceiling at least a hundred feet tall, all marble pillars and statues made of hand-carved amber. The automatic lights must have been broken, because only a few came on, too dim to reach the gloomy upper levels of the dome. Glimmering shadows danced on the ornate architecture. The stinging smells of death permeated the air.

  There was a ticket counter against the back wall crowded with more rings of corpses, all sitting or lying against each other. Beyond, another stairway descended into inky blackness, framed by a golden archway watched over by the statues of two mythical, humanoid creatures that looked like angels; each had four wings instead of two. In place of human faces, they wore beaked masks. They carried flaming scepters in their hands, crossed to show guardianship over whatever lay in the tunnel beyond.

  I crossed the arcade, careful not to trip on any of the dead bodies littering the floor, and descended the stairs under that golden gateway. The stairs terminated in a dark hall. A lamp above the door switched on as I entered, casting a ricocheting beam of light that bloomed off the walls and spread down a spider web of branching tunnels. The walls were covered with twelve-foot high, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, allowing that single light source to illuminate a vast
network of passages.

  I was standing in a hall of mirrors that stretched as far as the eye could see. Each adjacent passage stretched beyond the horizon of my sight. I had no idea which way to go, but I couldn’t go back. This place was warm, so warm I broke a sweat walking through its passages. Maybe the climate control is already on, I thought. Whatever this place was, it had its own subway station, so it had to be important.

  In the end, I chose the passage immediately to my right, following the old principle I’d learned in Boy Scouts, that when lost in a maze, you can usually find your way out by simply walking forward, while keeping your right hand in contact with the right wall.

  I didn’t touch the mirrors, though. There were strange illusions floating in the glass, images of men and women in regal poses with their eyes closed. Each mirror contained its own slumbering resident, most of them old, some of them young, all with beautiful, noble-looking faces, high cheekbones and sharp noses that hinted at mass quantities of wealth and importance. Their clothes were lined with fur and trimmed with golden thread, their hair perfectly brushed and their heads adorned with circlets of pure amber.

  There must be hundreds of these portraits, I thought. Maybe thousands. These tunnels look like they go on for miles.

  They look like kings, queens, or celebrities, maybe - ghosts of the rich and famous, sleeping in the glass. But they’re not asleep, are they? They’re dead. These aren’t portraits. They’re tombs, and this place is a catacombs. It’s the Royal Crypts of whatever civilization once stood here… wherever here is.

  There were names etched into metal plaques under each mirrored panel, but I couldn’t read them. Instead, I used them as landmarks in case I needed to turn around and go back: a man, whose name looked vaguely like the English word for Dude, fittingly bearded; a very old woman, whose name looked like a cottage on the shores of a peaceful lake, who I called Grandma; a young man, whose name was a series of two-character combinations connected by dashes, who I decided to call Dashiell.

  In the hallway beyond Dashiell’s, a body was strewn across the floor. I approached slowly, careful not to disturb her. It was the corpse of a young girl who had frozen to death. She was so well-preserved I wouldn’t have known she was dead if I hadn’t already seen the other bodies.

  The frozen girl was curled up in a fetal position, facing the dead end wall of the tunnel. Her skin was pale wax, her hair, the color of whiskey. She wore it in a long braid now brittle with frost. Carly used to wear her hair like that before a match. It was the same color, too. Same length. She even looks a little like Carly.

  I knelt down to look closer. The girl wasn’t breathing, but she didn’t look dead, either, only sleeping, like the people in the mirrors. I ran a fingertip along the curve of her cheek. Her face was round, like Carly’s, and she had the same wide-set eyes and tiny button nose. The longer I stared at her, the more I began to think I was looking at someone I loved very much, rather than the dead body of a stranger; someone who should’ve been gone, but wasn’t; was here, lying on the floor in front of me.

  I cupped her head behind the ear, stroked a frosted wisp of her hair with my thumb. She’d never be able to make a braid again, to sigh in frustration as she tried to catch the extraneous frizz the way Carly used to. She’d never laugh or cry again, never read, or write poetry, or fall in love again…

  She’s so cold. The heaters are on. How is she still so cold? Why did she come here to die, rather than stay with the others? Did someone move her…?

  The dead girl trembled. I jerked back my hand and waited, motionless. I’m seeing things. No. She definitely moved. “Hello?” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  My voice caught in my throat as a long, pale cloud hissed from her lips.

  I touched her face again. It was still ice-cold.

  She gasped, shivered, exhaled, gasped, shivered, and exhaled again. The rhythm of her breathing stabilized and one of her eyes flickered open, then the second, two orbs a missing shade of deepest blue.

  “Dzi…en? Dzien?” the frozen girl said. Her voice came out a cracked whisper, so weak I could barely hear her. Her eyes lolled under half-risen lids, adjusting to the light. She muttered something I couldn’t understand, that I thought was a foreign language. She stared at my face, eyes narrowing, closing, opening and focusing.

  She’s fighting to stay awake. I shrugged out of my fur coat and bundled her in it, cradling her in my arms. She was small, but surprisingly heavy. All muscle, I thought.

  The girl’s voice shifted as she approached full consciousness, and she said in near-perfect English, “You’re… not… Dzien.”

  “No. I’m Dan,” I said. “Daniel Harper. From California.”

  “Daniel… from California.” The frozen girl said my name like it was a bitter drink. “Nice… to meet… you, Daniel Harper… from California.”

  “Do you remember your name?” I said.

  The frozen girl gave me a look like I was the biggest idiot in the world. She offered me a slender, delicate palm. “I’m… Zaea.”

  I shook her hand. She stared at me. I thought she would pass out again, but instead, she tried sitting up. There was a pool of dark water quickly gathering on the floor underneath her. I helped her sit up after her third attempt failed. She started shivering violently. I gently crossed her arms over her chest, rubbing them with my palms to help her body generate heat.

  I spoke as slowly and clearly as I could. “Zaea, we need to get you warm. You’re suffering from severe hypothermia. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  Shivering, Zaea nodded.

  “Do you feel hot at all?”

  Shivering, Zaea raised an eyebrow at me and shook her head no.

  “Do you feel any urge to undress?”

  Her hand fell to her boot, where she groped clumsily and drew out a long, skinny knife.

  “No no no no,” I said, leaping to grab the knife out of her hand. “Stop, stop, stop. I didn’t mean that. I don’t want to undress you. I’m worried you’re in danger from the cold. Do you understand?”

  Studying me with sleep-sick eyes, Zaea let her hand drop away from the knife, and nodded. I switched my grip to the blade and gave it back to her, offering her the handle the way they taught us in Boy Scouts. “I’m going to give this back. Please don’t stab me, okay?”

  Shivering, Zaea nodded. She wrapped herself in her arms again, but kept the knife wedged out of one fist, pointed at me in case I tried anything.

  I held my hands out, palms up, to show her I wouldn’t. “Okay. Good. You don’t have to trust me. That’s fine. We just need to find some blankets or something, and a way to start a fire, so we can get you warm.”

  I remembered the Louse’s flame bud I’d absentmindedly set down on the floor next to Zaea a minute ago. I gave it to her. “I think the substance inside this is flammable. But I have no way to get it lit. We need to cut it open and find some way to light it.”

  I looked around, but the halls of the crypts were empty except for the ghosts floating in their graves of glass.

  We’re not going to find matches here. The people outside all look like they froze to death after being trapped inside this place. If there was anything in here that could light a fire, they would’ve found it.

  Wait. The blade of the Snowman's axe. That stone might be... I tested it with my finger and breathed a sigh of relief. Flint. Thank God.

  “F-food. P-please, food,” Zaea said.

  “You’re hungry?”

  She nodded furiously.

  Shit. Is severe hunger a sign someone has hypothermia? Or a sign they don’t? I couldn’t remember.

  “All right. Zaea, I need you to stay here, okay? I saw a vending machine outside, in the subway station. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Please don’t go anywhere.” I didn’t realize how stupid that sounded until after I said it. We were in the middle of a labyrinth of mirrored catacombs - where was she going to go?

  I ran as fast as I could back to the main hall, trailing
my left hand along the walls to avoid taking a wrong turn. It didn’t take long to reach the big room with the domed ceiling, or the subway station beyond.

  My suspicion proved accurate - the tall, rectangular box the dead woman and her baby were hiding behind was definitely a vending machine. It was made of stone rather than metal, but there was a screen on the front panel that glowed when I touched it, showing that same strange language I’d seen on the signs over the subway platform. I didn’t see anywhere to put money, not that it mattered. I didn’t have the time or stomach to start looting corpses.

  The front window of the machine was glass, too coated with ice to see if there was still food inside. I cocked the Snowman’s bone axe behind my shoulder, taking a low grip with both hands like I was holding a baseball bat, and swung it as hard as I could. The glass didn’t shatter, but it cracked, and I worked to get the axe head free where it had penetrated so I could swing it again.

  It took three more swings to break a hole big enough to get my arm through. I snapped the bone handle of the axe clean in half on the last swing, but the blade was still sharp enough to salvage, so I hung onto it. There was still food in the machine, too - some kind of energy bar in a translucent wrapper that looked like rice paper.

  Whatever killed them, they didn’t die from starvation.

  I took as many as I could reach and made my way back to Zaea.

  THE NIGHT COUNTRY

  ZAEA WAS STILL where I’d left her curled up under the Snowman’s furs. She’d cut open the flame bud and doused one half of the outer flesh with the black, oily substance inside. Her knife was sitting next to it, a clear indication that I was supposed to strike it against the blade of my axe and make fire.