by Matt Forbeck
For a while it was so quiet that Mitch didn’t know if it was all over or if he’d gone entirely deaf. Then he heard Samuel coughing out a lungful of dust.
Mitch struggled to his feet and peered back toward the shaft. As the clouds of dust settled once more, he saw that the doorway to the shaft was entirely blocked. Stones had filled the bottom of the shaft higher than the doorway. A pile of them had slipped into the room as well, going from the floor halfway into the place, all the way up to the top of the doorway.
“Anybody hurt?”
The six of them were safe from the mutants for now. Even if some of the creatures still lived or were streaming up from the pit, there was no way they were getting past that landslide of rubble.
Juba, of course, was gone.
Duval walked up to the rubble and stared at it as if she might be able to make it move with her eyes. When nothing happened, she lowered her gaze and bit her bottom lip.
“Hey, shit,” El Jesus said.
Mitch nodded a final salute toward the man’s resting place and then began to look around. Steiner and Severian had already started to hunt for some way out of the room. Samuel, meanwhile, faced where the elevator doors had been and muttered a benediction for Juba in Gaelic.
“Let’s go,” El Jesus said. “Let’s go.” As eager as he was, he still looked for others to lead the way, and they had no better options to offer than he.
There had only been two other ways out of the elevator lobby, and they had been sealed off too. Whether that had happened years or seconds ago, Mitch wasn’t sure, but it hardly mattered. The fact was there was no way out of the room. They were trapped.
“Dead end,” Duval said. Her voice had lost its usual sense of wonder.
“Who’s got a deck of cards?” El Jesus said. The big man put down his shotgun and cracked his knuckles.
“MacGuire,” said Duval.
El Jesus shook his head at the bitter joke. “Figures.”
Steiner took up his sword again and went over to one of the blocked exits. The rocks flowing out of the collapsed stairwell had wrenched the door off its hinges. The oberleutnant prodded at the broken bits of concrete with his blade, looking for a sign of weakness.
Looking grim, Samuel staggered over to the rocks in front of the elevator doors and sat down on the pile. He opened the Book of Law on his lap and began to flip through the Chronicles, searching for some kind of guidance.
Severian followed Samuel and stood over him as he pored through the book. When it became clear he didn’t need her direct attention, she reached into her uniform and pulled out a chocolate bar. She spotted Mitch watching her and the monk, and she fished out another bar and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” Mitch said, accepting her kindness.
In one corner, Samuel sat reading from his book. “They use tunnels to drag bodies to the Machine. It takes days, even weeks.”
Finishing the chocolate, Mitch sat down next to Samuel and peered at the book. Whatever language it was in, he couldn’t read a word of it.
“You got a lot of faith in that book.”
Samuel allowed himself a wan smile, then shut the book’s cover. “It’s a very good book, Hunter. But in the end, even this book is just a book.”
“You’re a priest.”
“Yes.” He patted the leather-bound cover. “And I place my faith in something greater.”
Mitch lowered his voice, speaking confidentially. He didn’t like to talk about religion—or his lack of it—much. He didn’t aspire to have any for himself, but he didn’t see the point in tearing down what others had.
“Haven’t seen much to have faith in,” he said, no trace of bitterness in his voice. He’d gone beyond anger over the state of the worlds and accepted them for the horrors they held.
Samuel nodded. “You have seen the worst that Man can do.” He looked Mitch right in the eyes. “But you have not seen the worst the Enemy can do.”
Across the room, Steiner and Duval kept digging away at the wall of rock. All they seemed to be doing was taking up more of the space in the room they were in, but they didn’t question that and didn’t stop working.
“So who got the tickets?” Duval said as she took a rock that Steiner handed to her.
“What?” The oberleutnant stopped, a large stone in his hands. The man hadn’t been involved in the discussion on the skyship, and Duval’s directness surprised him.
Unfazed, Duval persisted. “Your tickets.”
Mitch shook his head. He could see the woman just would not let this go. He wondered then about Adelaide and Grace and if they’d made it offworld by now. He glanced up at the ceiling and realized he was so stuck on Earth it had buried him.
Steiner reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. He tossed it aside, and it fluttered to the ground. Mitch recognized the envelope, as did Duval. Their tickets had come in ones just like it. “Who cares?”
Duval looked up at Steiner. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Mitch then realized what she had figured out. It wasn’t that Steiner had held the tickets back. He didn’t have anyone to give them to.
Steiner ignored her, though, and stayed focused on digging out the stairwell. El Jesus joined them, and she went back to work too, each of them now silent.
Samuel spoke to Mitch. “Do you understand what the Enemy is, Hunter? This Dark Star cast from heaven?”
It sounded like a bunch of bullshit, but Mitch shook his head.
The monk put his hands in front of him as he explained. “Everything that is comes from God. Everything you can see and feel, taste, touch—everything—is from God and of God.”
Samuel paused for a moment to let that sink in. If he expected Mitch to counter his statement, he was disappointed.
“The Enemy is not of God. It came from outside. And as God is life, the Enemy is unlife. It is the end of every living thing, everywhere. For all time.”
Mitch grimaced at the monk and left it at that.
“So I have faith that we will triumph,” Samuel said. “Because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.”
“What if you don’t believe in God?”
A hint of a smile curled Samuel’s lips. “If you did not believe in God, you would not be here.”
Mitch grunted to himself. He wasn’t so sure he bought the monk’s argument. He’d believed in helping his best friend’s wife and kid. That was what had brought him here.
When he thought about it, though, Mitch realized he would have come along either way if he’d known what was really at stake. Back in that bar near Addy’s cottage, he hadn’t been sure he trusted what Samuel had told him. It had all sounded like the desperate ravings of a lunatic who took his literature too seriously. The tickets had convinced him that he didn’t need to believe in what Samuel told him. They’d been reason enough for him to buy in.
Now that he was here, though, and had been through all this—now that it seemed they would all die here together—he knew that he’d have come either way. Fighting for the survival of humanity, even if there was only a small chance of it, beat the hell out of fighting for his corporation any day.
El Jesus stood up and groaned, wiping his face with his hands. “Hey, you guys gonna help?” he said to the monk. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but your mission is kind of fucked.”
Samuel nodded, then removed a bottle of holy water from his robes.
Mitch bit his tongue. No blessing would get them out of here, no matter how heartfelt it might be.
“You should have a little faith.” Samuel looked at El Jesus as he spoke, but he might as well have been talking to Mitch.
The monk poured the entire bottle of water onto the ground. Mitch thought about grabbing his wrist and stopping him but discarded the notion. After all, if they were trapped, the water would only mean a few more hours of life in this hole, tops, and what difference would that make?
Mitch and the others watched as the water trickled away from the center of the floor
. It rolled slowly through the dust and around the stones in its way as it ran toward the corner across from the collapsed stairwell at which Steiner, El Jesus, and Duval had been working.
There it flowed down through a pair of small circular holes set in the floor.
45
Mitch made it to the grate first. “Give me a hand,” he said.
He and Steiner cleared the rubble from it, and El Jesus reached down and pried it up with his bare hands. Beneath it stood a hole more than large enough for even the big man to fit through, fully loaded.
He stared down into it and allowed himself half a smile. “Something’s down there.”
Mitch got down on his knees and shone his light into the opening. Water trickled across the floor below, soft and shallow but steady. He leaned his head into the hole, half expecting a mutant to leap forward and slice it off.
Nothing happened.
He found himself staring down a tunnel—a wide pipe, actually—that led off into the darkness in both directions. He looked back and motioned for the others to be silent. Then he lowered himself down through the hole.
Mitch winced at the soft splash he made as he landed in the water, but it couldn’t be helped. He shone his flashlight in either direction but saw nothing. The pipe ran off in both directions as far as the beam could reach. He backed up from the opening and signaled for the others to join him.
He thumbed the safety off his M50 and tried to cover both ends of the tunnel as the rest of the crew splashed down into the pipe one by one. Once they were all there, they looked at each other, wondering which direction they should take. Samuel pointed at the way the water flowed, and Mitch nodded in agreement.
Duval took point. Although Mitch guessed he could fight better than she would, she moved more quietly than anyone but Severian. The lady monk, though, could not speak and did not have the small-group training of the soldiers, so Duval got the job.
They made their way down the tunnel, moving as fast and quietly as they could. They followed its twists and turns until a soft light showed as a small disk in the distance.
Duval stole ahead to check it out while the others crept up behind her. When she became a silhouette framed in the circle at the end of the pipe, Mitch realized how much the tunnel seemed like the barrel of a gun. He wondered from which direction the bullets it fired might come.
Duval froze and stared out at the scene before her for a moment. Then she leaned back to signal the others to join her quietly. As they reached her, she moved off to the left.
When Mitch got to the opening of the pipe, he could barely believe his eyes. The water from the pipe flowed into a large tunnel and trickled fifteen feet down into a wide, open sewer that carried it away.
The line of mutants marching below didn’t seem to notice the intruders. They kept their heads down, staring only at their feet or the back of the mutant before them. Overhead, stalactites formed from crud that had leaked through cracks in the ceiling hung like teeth on the inside of a monstrous mouth.
These mutants didn’t have boneblades like the ones the squad had fought earlier, but hooks made of the same material, as gray and dead as the rest of their flesh. They walked at a steady pace in an unceasing line that ran in either direction as far as Mitch could see. Each of them carried a human body on its back.
Most of the people atop the mutants were dead, but a few still breathed. They struggled feebly, barely alive, moaning and crying, even praying.
More than anything else, Mitch wanted to leap down into the tunnel and start hosing the mutants down. To do so would be suicide, he knew. Even if these worker mutants couldn’t slice at him like the others, there were enough of them to bring him down with their bare hands. His ammo couldn’t hold out forever, and sooner or later his arms would tire of swinging his sword.
That way lay doom.
Gritting his teeth, Mitch followed the others as they moved in single file down a narrow ledge that ran along the top of the tunnel. They crept forward as quietly as they could, each knowing that a single misstep could alert the mutants to their presence and kill them all.
Just yards from where they’d entered the tunnel, they came to a fissure in the rock. It formed a passageway that led away from the tunnel.
Duval signaled a stop. They all looked to Samuel to see which way to go.
“Poor bastards,” El Jesus said, peering down at the mutants and their prisoners moving through the passage below. “Looks like they’ve been down there for weeks.”
“We mustn’t linger here,” Samuel said.
“Where the hell are they taking them?” Mitch stared down at the line of people being borne off to some horrific fate by those who had been there before them. As he did, his eyes fell on a familiar face hanging over one mutant’s back, and his blood ran cold.
“Is that—? Jesus, it’s Nathan.”
Mitch leaned over the ledge and stared. He didn’t question how his friend had gotten there or how they’d managed to cross paths at just this point. He just locked his eyes on the man, searching for some sign of life.
“Sergeant?” Samuel whispered, curious about what could have made the soldier stop.
Mitch ignored him. At the moment, he didn’t give a damn about the mission. Saving the world could wait until he was sure that he couldn’t go back and fix his latest failure. Just when he was about to give up, to salute his dead friend and carry on in his memory, Nathan coughed.
“Hunter,” the monk said, his curiosity turning to urgency. The longer they stayed on that ledge, the more they endangered their mission. They had to move along.
“I know him,” Mitch said softly, jerking his chin at Nathan.
“Top?” El Jesus said.
Mitch didn’t take his eyes off his friend as the mutant carrying him slowly marched past.
“It’s Nathan.”
El Jesus sucked at his teeth. “Fuck.”
Mitch moved to follow the line of mutants. He didn’t have to dive in and save Nathan now. He could bide his time, see where they took him, and make his move when the time was right—if that ever happened.
Samuel grabbed Mitch’s arm. Mitch glared at the monk and pulled his elbow free.
“He’s just one man,” Samuel said. He didn’t have to say that Mitch’s concerns didn’t measure up against saving the whole damned world. Mitch knew that. He didn’t care.
“I know that man.”
Steiner stepped up and shoved a gun in Mitch’s face. He could smell the oil in the barrel.
“We have a mission,” the oberleutnant said.
Mitch saw El Jesus’s hands tighten on his shotgun, but he didn’t know whose play the big man would back. Normally, he would have counted on the corporal’s loyalty, but the welfare of a planet might have outweighed that in his mind.
Mitch stared deep into Steiner’s eyes and waited. If the man was going to shoot him, he might as well make it easy for him. No matter what, though, Mitch refused to consider giving up on Nathan. Saving the world could wait.
If Steiner had a brain in his head, though, he’d have pulled his knife instead. A gunshot in the tunnel would ruin everything right there. Better to let Mitch wander off on his fool’s errand. At least that way, if he got killed, it wouldn’t bring the mutants down on everyone else. His death might even provide a distraction, pulling the mutants’ attention away from the others.
Of course, the last time they’d gotten in a knife fight, it hadn’t gone so well.
Mitch waited a moment longer for Steiner to pull the trigger. Seeing he was still alive, Mitch turned and walked away, following the line of mutants.
He moved slowly, hoping someone might join him. El Jesus’s voice was the only thing that came after him.
“Vaya con Dios,” the big man said. His footsteps didn’t follow. El Jesus had made his choice, and thinking about it, Mitch couldn’t blame him. It comforted him to know the man would still be there trying to help the others.
Samuel didn’t say a thing, and
that disappointed Mitch most of all. The monk had been full of wisdom when Mitch had been on his side. Now the sergeant didn’t even rate a blessing.
Mitch picked up his pace so he could catch up with the mutant carrying Nathan. As he closed on his quarry, he risked a glance back. He saw Severian standing there, staring after him. Then she followed the others into the fissure, and Mitch was on his own.
46
As Mitch moved along the ledge, he had to take care not to slip in the occasional bit of slime or get drenched by streams of water falling out of pipes similar to the one that had brought him there. If he fell down among the mutants, he had no idea what would happen to him, but he guessed it wouldn’t be good.
As he moved, he hunted for a good place to stage a rescue. He thought about sweeping down and snatching Nathan from the creature carrying him, but where would he go? It wasn’t like this was a cheap film and he was some hero swinging about on a rope.
Nathan groaned, and Mitch saw that the mutant dragging him along the ground had hooked his cargo through the shoulder. The flesh there had begun to separate and tear, and the agonizing pain seemed to be waking Nathan.
Mitch had to do something, though. He couldn’t just follow Nathan forever and watch his friend squirm in pain like a worm on that hook. The farther into the tunnels they got, the longer the trip back out, and there was no guarantee that wherever the mutants were headed would be better than this.
Mitch spotted a steep slope of rock that led down to the sewer and decided to chance it. His rifle slung over his back, he slid down the slick rock, keeping his feet the whole way down.
With each foot he got closer to the tunnel floor, he expected a mutant to spot him and raise the alarm. He imagined they’d rip him to shreds with their hooks before Nathan ever knew he was there.
The cry never came.
Mitch’s boot touched the damp, dank floor, but the mutants nearest to him didn’t do a thing but keep marching in unison to a beat only they seemed to hear.
