Nocturnal

by Scott Sigler

  Those steps rose forty feet to the spectator ledge. She had led him into a narrow tunnel at the back of the ledge, just a few feet away from the last step. Aggie had turned for a last look down below before going in. The ship was off to his right, back end buried in the cavern wall, front end pointing across the oblong cavern. There had been activity on the ship’s deck — Hillary’s people preparing for some kind of an event, maybe?

  They’d been following the tunnel for fifteen minutes, maybe thirty, he wasn’t sure. This time, at least, she had a battery-powered Coleman lantern to light the way. She seemed to know the location of every rock, every turn, every jagged outcropping of rusted metal or moldy wood. He knew this because those things caught him, poked him, snagged him while she avoided them all with a subtle turn, a simple twist.

  He cradled the knit bag in his right arm. Inside, the baby boy slept. Aggie felt the child’s faint warmth through the fabric. The boy weighed almost nothing. Aggie could carry him forever if he had to.

  Finally, Hillary stopped and turned.

  “Move carefully here,” she said. “Step only where I step.”

  She set the lantern down and stepped aside so Aggie could see a small stone forest; fifteen or so piles of stacked rocks rose from floor to ceiling. No, not piles, columns. The columns supported big slabs of concrete, chunks of old brick wall and blackened squares of timber. This strange ceiling ran the final fifteen feet of tunnel, right up to where it dead-ended at a giant, dirty sheet of plywood. It didn’t take a genius to see the plan — make any column fall and the whole kit-and-caboodle would collapse, filling the tunnel with tons of dirt and rock.

  Hillary gestured to the ceiling. “You understand?”

  Aggie nodded.

  She slid around the first column. Aggie watched her. She looked like an old lady, but didn’t move like one. Her agility and balance complemented the ridiculous strength Aggie already knew she possessed.

  With each step, she wiggled her shoe in the dirt, leaving a clear footprint to show the safe path.

  She slid around the second column, then waved him on.

  Holding the baby-filled bag to his chest, Aggie followed in Hillary’s footsteps. He took his time. She didn’t seem to mind.

  As he passed the third column, he felt something … some kind of trembling beneath his feet. An earthquake? The rumbling increased. With it came an echoing, grinding roar. How could there be an earthquake now, when he’d almost made it out? Aggie held the baby close, looked up, and waited for death.

  The rumbling subsided. The roar faded away.

  Hillary was laughing silently, again waving him on.

  Two minutes later, they’d passed all the columns save for one. The final column was less than two feet from the piece of plywood. Hillary grabbed the plywood by a pair of metal handles screwed into it, then slowly slid it aside, revealing a hole perhaps three feet wide. The hole led into a deep blackness.

  Aggie felt the tender kiss of something he hadn’t known for days … a breeze. Fresh air. Well, not fresh, it smelled of metal and grease, but it was far fresher than the still air he’d breathed since he woke up in the white dungeon. He again felt the rumbling — something big, something mechanical, something getting closer.

  Hillary held up a hand, palm out. The gesture said stay there, don’t move. Aggie waited. She turned off the Coleman, leaving a blackness that made the walls close in.

  The sound grew louder. The tunnel rumbled. Suddenly there was a flash of light, the roar of metal wheels on metal tracks.

  A Muni train.

  He was in the San Francisco subway.

  Aggie tried to calm his breathing. He couldn’t allow himself to believe this was it, that he was really getting out.

  The Muni train passed, its roar a fading echo.

  Hillary turned the lantern back on. The columns hadn’t collapsed. “Now you go,” she said. “Do you remember what I told you?”

  Aggie nodded. She was giving him life. He would honor his promise to her. No way he was going to wind up as a groom. No way.

  He turned to hand her the baby so he could duck out of the hole, then paused. A sudden, all-powerful twang of anxiety ripped through him: What if Hillary took the baby and ran?

  She waited.

  “I’m going to set the baby down,” he said. “Can you step back?”

  She smiled, nodded, then backed away. Aggie gently rested the bag on the ground, then stepped through the small hole and out of the death-trap tunnel. He stood on a narrow ledge that ran perpendicular to the tracks. He bent, reached back, and was again holding the boy.

  Aggie clutched the bag tightly; the anxiety faded away.

  Far down the tunnel to his right, he saw the light of a station.

  Hillary worked the plywood shut behind him. Aggie’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. The hole he had crawled from was gone — all he could see were the hexagonal tiles of the subway’s walls. The plywood was a tile-covered plug that perfectly fit the hole, sliding home as sure as a puzzle piece. If he hadn’t just come through there, he would have never known it existed.

  But that didn’t matter anymore.

  He had survived.

  Aggie kept his right hand on the tile wall as he walked. He didn’t know which rail was the “third rail,” the one that might electrocute him and the boy. It was probably the one in the middle, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He drew closer to the opening into the station. The tracks led out of the tunnel’s darkness and alongside the station platform. He saw a few people up on that platform — the trains were still running, so it wasn’t early in the morning.

  Aggie carefully stepped off the ledge and over the tracks, moving to the platform side of the tunnel. He slid along with his back to the wall. He felt a hint of a rumble — another train was coming. He had to move fast. The people on the platform would see him, but he didn’t have a choice.

  He was still draped in the stinking blanket. That’s how he would get past those people, by just looking, acting and smelling like the homeless bums who wandered down to the Muni stations all the time.

  He reached the end of the tunnel. The platform came up to his chest. He lifted the knit purse containing the boy and gently set it on the platform’s warning stripe of yellow. Aggie crawled up. People turned to look, saw what he was, then immediately turned away. Aggie picked up the bag. He held the baby with one arm, and with the other pulled the blanket around them both. His heart hammered in his chest.

  So close so close …

  Aggie saw the brown sign in the white ceiling, the white letters that spelled out CIVIC CENTER. He looked at the digital sign that told of the next train and saw that it was 11:15 P.M.

  He forced himself to walk — not run — toward the escalator that led to the surface. Homeless people didn’t run. All he had to do was keep up the illusion and everyone would ignore him. Illusion? How odd to think of it that way. Wasn’t he a homeless person after all?

  No.

  Not anymore.

  Aggie had done his time in the gutter. He’d lost years mourning, feeling sorry for himself, feeling sorry for his losses. He’d given up and tuned out. That time was over.

  He was alive. His wife and daughter were gone. Nothing could bring them back. He should have died down in the tunnels, in the white room, but he had a second chance and he wasn’t going to screw it up. He had a responsibility now, a responsibility to protect the child he held in his arms. He had sworn to find this child a home.

  Why don’t I just raise the kid?

  He realized that hidden thought had been lurking at the edge of his mind ever since he looked in the bag and saw the tiny baby. You were a parent once. A good parent. That robbery wasn’t your fault, there was nothing you could do.

  A second chance … a second chance to get things right.

  Aggie felt full of hope, full of a sudden and overpowering love for life. He moved toward the escalator that would lead him to the surface.

 
; And then, the baby cried.

  Not a soft cry, not a muffled I just woke up cry, but rather a full-blown I am not at ALL happy cry. Loud. Piercing. The dozen or so people on the platform who had gone out of their way to not look at him now turned to stare.

  The baby screamed again.

  The kid was probably hungry. This was just a baby being a baby, but Aggie knew what it looked like — a shabby, smelly bum with a screaming child hidden somewhere beneath a filthy blanket.

  Aggie saw hands reach into pockets and purses, then come out holding cell phones.

  He turned back to the escalator.

  A woman stepped toward him. “Stop!”

  Aggie took off, his newish boots thumping out a staccato drumbeat on the escalator’s metal steps. He heard and felt similar pounding behind him — the heavy steps of men.

  The first escalator took him up to the station’s main floor. One more escalator and he’d be out on the streets. There were more people up here, heading home from bars or from late nights at work.

  “Get out of my way!” Aggie ran, carrying the baby-bag in both arms. His legs felt weak. He was already exhausted.

  “Stop him!” the men behind him screamed. Most of the people in front of him quickly got out of the way, but one man, a kid of no more than twenty, stepped in front of him.

  Aggie slowed, then tried to cut left.

  His foot landed on his blanket — the blanket slid across the polished floor, and his foot flew out from under him. In the split second it took him to reach the ground, his only thought was to protect the baby.

  The back of Aggie’s head cracked against the marble, and everything went black.

  Date Night

  The faint but beautiful sounds of a plinky piano echoed from inside of Mommy’s cabin. There were no lights in there, just darkness and music. People lined the arena’s ledges, holding torches that flickered like big stars against the cavern’s blackness.

  Alone, Rex stood on the ship’s ruined deck. He held a wicker basket with a present for Mommy. Tonight, he would become a man.

  Everything was happening so fast. He and Pierre and Sly had brought the chief of police and her daughters back Home. The chief had given up a bunch of names. They’d even printed pictures of those criminals on Chief Zou’s computer, so the soldiers would know if they had the right people.

  The chief’s husband was cooking in the stew. Most of him, anyway. His head was in the basket. Mommy liked brains.

  As soon as Rex finished this ceremony with Mommy, he and Sly were going to plan how to use Chief Zou to round up the criminals. Firstborn had allowed the bullies to live, but Rex would not. Once those who knew of Marie’s Children were gone, Rex’s people would become even more of a secret.

  Hillary wanted the people to spread, and so did Rex. She said the only way for that to happen was to make new queens. The only way to make a new queen, she said, was for a king to mate with an old queen.

  Rex was the king, and that was that. If he was the king, though, didn’t he need a crown? Maybe someone could make one for him — the people had built all these amazing tunnels, surely they could make a kick-ass crown.

  He felt so nervous. He’d never had sex before. Would he get it right?

  Two white-robed men walked out of Mommy’s cabin. They stood on either side of the door, waiting. The one on the left wore a devil mask. The one on the right wore a mask that looked like Osama bin Laden.

  They both waved Rex forward.

  Up on the ledge, all the people waited for him to enter. Rex turned slowly, looking up at the ledge, at the torchlight-illuminated faces of his people. Everyone was here. Now was the time to make Firstborn understand that all of this belonged to Rex, and Rex alone.

  “I have made a decision,” he shouted. His voice echoed off the arena’s walls. “I am not going to hide in the caverns and let other people go fight. I’ll fight with them. I’ll lead like a real king. But that means Savior might get me, or the cops might or someone else. I’ve decided who will rule if anything should happen to me. I name Sly as my successor.”

  Rex heard applause. Not as much as he would have thought, though. Didn’t everyone like Sly?

  “Sly is also a fighter,” Rex shouted. “If he and I both get killed, then Hillary will be our ruler.” He hadn’t seen Hillary around, but she was probably somewhere up on that ledge.

  Rex knew it was a good decision. Firstborn hated Sly, so maybe he’d try to kill both Sly and Rex. But Firstborn had saved Hillary once — would he kill her as well? Was his need for power that great?

  The announcement was done.

  That meant no more stalling — Rex had to go into that cabin and be with Mommy.

  A smell tickled Rex’s nose. He sniffed lightly, then deeper. What was that?

  He turned toward Mommy’s cabin. He sniffed some more. His face suddenly felt hot. Another step, and he stumbled a little on a loose board. He managed to catch his balance before he fell — wouldn’t that be embarrassing? To fall in front of everyone?

  Rex stopped. He looked down. He had the boner of all boners. Wow, did his face feel hot.

  And then a deep voice came from inside the cabin. Mommy’s voice.

  “Venez ah mwah mon rwah.”

  He didn’t understand her words. He didn’t care what she said, didn’t care about anything anymore but that smell in his nose and what waited for him there in the darkness.

  Rex walked through the cabin door.

  Bryan & Pookie Meet Aggie James

  They weren’t officially back on the force yet, but a lead was a lead. Bryan wasn’t going to let a little thing like being fired get in the way of pursuing it.

  They’d heard the call come in. A bum had been picked up at Civic Center; a bum carrying a baby. The bum had been injured. Paramedics had brought the bum and baby both to SFGH. When the arresting officer called it in, he described the baby’s blanket as being covered with circles and slashes, occult kind of stuff.

  A bum with a baby. Just like Mike Clauser had described.

  Most of the cops at SFGH were preoccupied with Erickson’s security. That — combined with the flurry of activity that had blown up surrounding this new Handyman Killer, and with Zou not being around to direct traffic — meant Bryan and Pookie weren’t really on anyone’s radar at the moment.

  They stepped off the elevator onto the second floor of the hospital’s main building, far away from the mental health wing. The injured bum was on this floor.

  Bryan looked down the hall. It wasn’t hard to spot the right room, because a uniformed officer sat on a chair outside of it.

  “Shit,” Bryan said. “Think you can talk your way past this one, Pooks, or is the Force no longer strong with this one?”

  A dismissive huff escaped Pookie’s lips. “Nigga, please. Don’t you recognize him? It’s Stuart Hood.”

  Bryan did recognize Hood: he was the guy who’d first interviewed Tiffany Hine after Jay Parlar’s death.

  “Come on,” Pookie said. “I’ll talk my way in there. Let’s see if Daddy really has lost his touch, or if the SWAT boys were just a fluke.”

  They started walking. Bryan hadn’t made it ten steps before he slowed, then stopped — a new smell. A strong yet faint scent, cut with the normal hospital odors of medicine and disinfectant.

  He knew that smell … it was a lot like the odor from Rex Deprovdechuk’s house. Similar, yet subtly unique. The baby or the bum, or both, were Zeds.

  “Bryan,” Pookie said. “You okay? You’re stumbling a little.”

  Bryan blinked, shook his head. “Yeah, fine.” He’d have to learn to control this stuff. What if he ran into one of those basement critters and they had some stink that made him lose focus? Losing focus against something like that bear creature could get him killed.

  Pookie put his hand on Bryan’s shoulder. “You sure?”

  Bryan took a breath, gave his head and shoulders a quick shake. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  He followed Pookie to the
room.

  “Stuart Hood!” Pookie said. “Good to see you again.”

  Hood looked up and gave Pookie a wide smile. “Inspector Chang.”

  “Hell, call me Pookie. Hey, did you hear that Zou reinstated us?”

  Hood looked from Pookie to Bryan, then back again. “No, I hadn’t heard that. That’s great news, congrats.”

  “Gracias,” Pookie said. “And we’re back on a case that’s related to what Tiffany Hine saw. You remember her?”

  “The werewolf lady?”

  Pookie snapped his fingers. “That’s the one.” He tilted his head toward the door. “We got an ID on the bum who had the baby?”

  Hood nodded. “Prints came back already. The guy’s name is Aggie James. A few minor drug possession charges but he doesn’t have any priors of note. No permanent address. Witnesses said he came out of the subway tunnels. I heard the docs say he has a concussion, but it doesn’t sound like anything major.”

  “What about the baby,” Bryan said. “Is it his?”

  Hood shrugged. “No idea. No ID on the baby yet. Kid’s in the maternity ward.”

  Pookie pulled out his notepad, sketched out the same triangle-and-circle symbol Bryan had first drawn, then held it up so Hood could see.

  “Was this the symbol on the blanket?”

  Stuart looked, then nodded. “Yeah. The blanket’s in there with him. Ambulance brought him right here, so his personal effects haven’t been processed yet. I was told this might be a kidnapping, so someone has to watch him.”

  “We need in that room,” Pookie said. “Just a few minutes. You mind?”

  Stuart shook his head, then stood and opened the door to let Bryan and Pookie enter. Inside, a black man lay in a hospital bed. Blankets covered him up to his chest. He had a white bandage wrapped around his head. Handcuffs kept his left hand locked to the bed’s frame.

  Bryan waited for the fluttery sensation in his chest, but it didn’t come. The man in the bed was just that — a man.