by Chuck Wendig
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
Something is following him. Somethings by the sound of it.
He prays it’s nothing dangerous. Which is a lie in its own way – nothing down here could be categorized as “safe”. Even a starving brood of roach-rats (and they are always starving) offers up a thousand mean teeth and a hundred long claws and the light-only-knows how many strange diseases and parasites. But those he can handle.
The thought nags at him: what if it’s something else?
As the pig grumbles forward, Mookie fumbles with the tin in his pocket, a tin sized well for normal hands, but in his hand it looks the size of a button popped off a shirt. With a thumb he lifts the rust-rimmed top (it’s an old lip balm tin, same tin he’s been using for coming up on ten years now) and reveals the peacock-blue powder inside. Just the sight of it makes his temples tingle, his knees go weak, his brow flush with sweat.
He looks down at his cakey blue thumb, a “Smurf thumb” in Blazehead parlance, a classic tell for those looking for Cerulean addicts – and then he thinks, here it is, here’s where I rip open my third eye and see what’s following me.
Mookie pops a callused thumb into the powder–
He presses one thumb to one temple–
Then the other–
The Blue Blazes washes over him.
It’s like being in a ship that’s just starting to capsize. Listing on an unforgiving ocean. Then: a wind of wet heat on his forehead – a hot breath – and at the edges of his vision the ripple of blue flame like a puddle of vodka lit with a Zippo, a ripple that fades fast, taking with it the scales that cover the eyes, that protect the mind, that hide the happy dumb people from the truth of what lies beneath.
It’s then that he sees.
Not roach-rats. Or cankerpedes.
It’s gobbos. Gray snot-slick heads. Yellow fangs. Some loping like dogs, others hurrying along on bent and rubbery legs. A dozen of them. Many with weapons.
Fifty feet in and closing. Forty. Thirty.
A few of the gobbos are naked – bulbous genitals like tumors slapping against hairless thighs – while others are robed in tattered rags, rags once the clothing of humans but stolen and torn to ribbons and knotted together in motley patchwork clothing.
Twenty feet.
The pig won’t go faster. Mookie’s going to have to fight. Last thing he wants to do is bring some mob of the Underworld’s finest to the Sandhogs’ door. They’ll never help him if he does something like that.
Ten feet.
It’s then he sees something else–
Behind the Gobbos, something else. Shiny eyes. Long, flashing fingers. A black shape, blacker than night, black like a hole in the Devil’s heart.
Like a Grim Reaper’s cloak.
Through the walls, the lub-dub oonch-oonch of pounding bass.
Nora steps on the gobbo’s arm. Bones crackle like bubble wrap popping. Anybody poking their head past the door of this strip club back room would see Nora standing on a skinny, greasy man – a divot-cheeked, sallow-faced weasel with thinning black hair matted to his bulbous scalp – with a .38 snubnose pointed at his face.
But she’s Blazing. One of her last doses.
And it shows her that this is a goblin. Little fucker’s been hiding out here at Double Delilah’s, hired as the janitor – which translates to “jizz-mopper” – of this back alley strip joint. While on the side, he’s been slinging bits of Blue to top-shelf customers and well-paid dancers. And, worse, once in a while he kidnaps one of the girls and takes her down into the dark where…
Nora doesn’t want to think about that.
The gobbo bleats and babbles at her in a guttural tongue.
“Oh, no, no, nuh-uh,” she says, pressing down harder on its arm and cocking the hammer of the gun. “Don’t play with me, gob. You’re up here wearing your ugly-ass mask which means you speak English well enough to get by. So speak English.”
“You eat dick!” the gob cries out. “You eat it hard.”
She presses down again. The goblin keens through his wet mouth, eyes shut.
“Why?” the gob asks. “Why do this?”
“First, because you got Blue, and ta-da, I need it. Second, because you’re going to send a message to all your gross little fuck-buddies downstairs.” This, a different message than the one she paid Skint to pass along. “I want you to tell them I’m going to wipe them out. Every last one of you nasty mutants.”
“You?” The gob laughs. “You just a girl.”
She puts all her weight on it. The arm-bone beneath gray rubbery flesh cracks. The gobbo howls. “And oh, what a bad girl I am. Daughter of Mookie Pearl, if that name means anything to you.” She sees by the widening bulge of his bulbous eyes that he does. “Now cough up the Blue, freak.”
The gobbos hit him hard, a truck slamming into a guardrail–
The first two are fucked from the get-go. Mookie’s chokes one snot-slick monster with the shoulder strap of his satchel. The other gets stuffed up under his armpit. Then the rest are on him, clambering up his shoulders, wrapping themselves around his legs. Yellow teeth tear at his shirt, his jeans. He sees a flash of green above. Sees one atop the others, holding a weapon made of an old wrench – the end spackled with a Q-tip wad of black gunk, which is in turn riddled with shards of green glass from a beer bottle–
The thing brings the green-glass mace down, but Mookie uses the naked gobbo in his grip as a shield. He holds the thrashing creature up just as the mace crashes down on its head, sticking in the thing’s skull and spraying up a mist of oily goblin blood.
They shriek in his ears. Whooping and cackling.
Fucking gobbos.
They must have formed a hunting pack a while back. Been waiting in the dark. Invisible – down here, that’s an option for them. Can’t play that trick up above. Up top they’ve got to look like somebody, so to the Blind they look like miscreants, vagrants, thugs. Some go the effort to get gussied up in other outfits and play different roles – maître d’, cop, pimp. But most just stay at the fringes, acting like one of the many freaks New York City has to offer. Such simple camouflage.
The question here is: how the hell did they breach this tunnel? The easy answer: They found one of my boltholes. Probably not the one he just used, but he’s got dozens of the hidden doorways around here. Hell, so does Davey. Maybe one of those doorways isn’t so hidden anymore.
No time to worry about that now.
Mookie tosses the ruined creature in his hand – it splats limp against the curve of the concrete pipe-wall. The one under his arm is starting to bite at his side; he feels teeth sink into the meat encasing his ribs, and he snarls, pressing down with his bicep and squeezing arm to body hard enough that he hears the thing’s spine snap like a piece of celery.
Pop. Drop. Splurch.
A pair of gobbos tries to dart past him. But Mookie pivots – a slow turn, as his body is weighed down by shrieking gobbos clinging to him like wolves trying to bring down a charging moose – and reaches out, grabs one by the heel. He drops, using the momentum of his fall to fling the one into the other. They bowl into one another, a tangle of limbs, a clatter of bludgeoning weapons.
Now Mookie is on his back. A gobbo grabs his ear. Tries to rip it off. Another takes a shiv made out of a sharpened toothbrush, starts stitching it in and out of his forearm – punch punch punch, blood welling up red and hot. Hands in his mouth. A lashing tubule tongue trying to force its way past his lips. One is pulling at his boot.
But the Blazes run through him full-bore now: a bullet spinning down a rifled barrel, a sweep of fire across a gas-soaked floor. And with the Blazes comes more than just sight. It brings with it high-test clarity and a double-dose of extra strength.
Even off the stuff Mookie’s no weak-kneed Girl Scout – he’s all grizzly, no Care Bear. But on the Blue Blazes, he’s like if an M1 Abrams tank made mad monkey-love with an eight hundred pound silverback gorill
a and had a baby, all black fur and olive iron, all guns and treads and swinging fists.
He grabs the stabber gobbo, cranks its shiv-arm upward, smashes its head down on its own weapon – the end of the toothbrush popping up through a rotten eggshell head. The ear-grabber gibbers and wails, and Mookie slams his head sideways into the monster, bowling the goblin backward. Oily gob fingers are still in his mouth; he bites down. The blood is bitter, cloying, tastes like infection – it’s not the first time he’s tasted their blood. Won’t be the last. And as the gobbo opens its mouth to scream in pain, Mookie spits the fingers into the former owner’s wailing mouth. Ptoo.
He kicks out with a hard boot. Bones crack, yellow teeth clatter.
He grabs the tongue – a female’s tongue, probably hoping to plant eggs somewhere moist and warm, because once those eggs attach they release toxins into your bloodstream that’ll make you slow and stupid – and winds it around the gobbo’s neck like a weedwacker string. Then he pulls taught.
Gray face goes blue. Cheeks bulging. Black capillaries bursting in ugly goldfish eyes.
Then, for a moment–
All goes dark.
A rippling shape, black as tar, flutters over his head–
Blocking out the light. Whispering as it passes.
What the hell–?
Mookie roars. Stands up, unsure what he just saw. Whatever the hell it is, it’s moving further down the tunnel, toward the distant Sandhogs – and fast. But as he stands, he sees: the two goblins he tossed into the wall aren’t dead or even knocked out. They’re up and at ’em, coming right for him. One’s barehanded, swiping at the air with dirty claws.
But the other’s got a weapon.
A gobbo pop-gun. Not a gun at all, but a short length of iron pipe with a pull tab at the back of it like one of those party-poppers where you yank the string and loose confetti into the air–
This doesn’t release confetti. It barks a big bang and makes a hard flash – and Mookie suddenly catches a scattershot spray of shrapnel in his side. No idea what it is, but probably nails, glass, stones, gobbo teeth, shattered crystal. And when it starts to burn, sending screaming tentacles of pain up through the wounds in his side, Mookie knows that the stuff was first dipped in goblin poison – rock-snot, or dung-thistle, maybe.
Ahead, the tunnel is swallowed by a haze of smoke–
Mookie staggers left, tries to barrel ahead, but the pain is an immense thing, a thing with shape and presence all its own, pushing on his side and slowing him down–
The gobbos leap for him.
And somewhere ahead, he hears his old friend Davey Morgan scream.
Davey Morgan’s got explosives on his mind.
Dynamite, in particular.
Dynamite’s how the tunnel grows. Sure, for a lot of it they can use that big bitch machine, but for sensitive areas of the rock, it’s dynamite all the way.
You drill holes. Drop dynamite into the cavities. Head back upstairs, hit the button and – the ground shakes, the earth booms, and the tunnel’s dug another thirty, forty feet. Then the men clear the rubble, put up more wire cage to keep rocks from dropping on their heads, and the process begins anew.
That’s the job. That’s been the job for twenty years.
Davey’s good. They say he’s the best, but he doesn’t care for that kind of talk. He knows he’s good, and that’s enough.
But things are changing soon.
In less than a week’s time he and his men – loyal men, good men, capable men – will be underneath the juncture between all three water tunnels. Dynamite’s not a scalpel. It’s not even a fire axe. It’s precise like a hand grenade. You don’t control an explosion so much as politely suggest what you want it to do and then pray. Maybe God gives you what you need. Or maybe God decides to blow your ass sky-high to Saint Pete’s doorstep. You accept the judgment of the blast and move on.
A man a mile.
But soon, they’ll be detonating rock with two other water tunnels fifty feet and a hundred feet above their heads, respectively.
Which means this has to be done right. They’re going to be using dynamite to thread a needle. Davey can no longer be good. He has to be great.
Has to get this right or they’re all, as he is wont to say, “fuckered”.
And it doesn’t help that they work down here. On the edge of oblivion. With any number of horrible things coming up out of the dark, smelling the sweat, hankering for blood. They’re the union-within-a-union. The 147½. The last line between the light and the dark. Only makes the job, oh, a thousand times harder.
Someone taps him on his helmet. It’s Boise – young kid from Jersey who when he was first asked where he was from said Boise instead of Joisey because he’s a nervous kid who stammers when he talks, but he’s also a hard worker and that’s all that matters to Davey. Boise says, “I hear a pig comin’ down the tunnel, Davey.”
Davey tilts his head. Gets away from the boys chipping and hauling blown rock.
Sure enough, he hears it–
The chug chug chug of a powered mine cart.
Now who the hell would that be? All his boys are here.
Some fucko from the EPA? Or Home-Sec? Bah.
He gives the tunnel a good look. Feels the Blue crackling at the edges of his vision – he’s looking for anything that belongs to this place, that shines of the Great Below. At least half his crew are Blazing at any given time. They take shifts. Half on, half off to cool down, ease off the powder. Some of them end up addicts. When they go that way, Davey puts them through his own personal treatment program. Which isn’t a fun program to go through, but he can’t have shaky hands playing with dynamite.
He doesn’t see squat down the tunnel.
Davey turns back to the crew. Whoops and twirls his hand like he’s got a fake lasso to get their attention. Men in hardhats with grime-streaked cheeks and goggles stand against the backdrop of a forbidding stone wall that will need to be blasted – others off to the side pouring concrete that will eventually get made into the walls of the tunnel proper.
Davey yells to them in his muddy one-generation-removed Irish accent:
“Any of you boys know who might be comin’ down the tunnel? Dutch–” He points to an old stoop-backed Hog with a scar across the bridge of his bent nose. Dutch is the radio-man. “Any news from above?”
Dutch starts to shake his head, but then his eyes go wide.
The other men start to yell and point–
One reaches alongside a mine cart and Davey sees a shotgun coming up–
Another grabs for a pick-ax.
Davey turns. Almost falls.
Sees something he’s never seen before and it’s coming at him fast–
It appears out of nothing – like a car riding through a heat haze on a long desert highway that seems to drive out of the vapor. All black. A shifting shape – like a kite, a bird, a flying puddle of dark oil. Big, too, big as a tarp.
He catches sight of shiny eyes, eyes like polished buttons.
And fingers, too. And teeth. Both like knives. Long knives. Hunting knives.
It casts fear in Davey’s heart. Turns to run, to find a weapon – but these boots aren’t meant for running. The toe of one boot catches the bulging heel of the other and Davey Morgan pitches forward.
The ripple of fabric is right on him. So is the clatter of knife-teeth and blade-claws. He hits the ground. Shoulder taking the brunt. Pain. Like a baseball through a window: ksshhh. The monster is upon him. Covering him. All light is extinguished. A horrible thought crosses Davey’s mind: I’m too old for this now. I’m too old and too slow and I’ve let fear creep in like black mold and now it’s all over.
He hears a shotgun boom. Men yelling, though they sound so distant…
He can’t breathe. The creature sounds like fabric but feels like liquid. Davey tries to swing a fist, but it’s like thrashing around underwater – a slow-motion freakout.
He sees those eyes. Just the eyes. Gleaming buttons.
Coins in black water.
Then knives plunge out of the liquid and into his chest.
Then into his head.
But the pain is strange – hardly a pain at all, not in the physical sense. It’s like a spear punching a hole through his thoughts, through his mind. What he feels instead is something far deeper and ultimately worse than physical pain:
Grief and guilt holding hands, la la la. In his mind, memories burst bright like fireworks: pop pop pop. His first day as a shaper on the bench at the Sandhog office, feeling the pinprick stick of shame as he secretly hopes some poor Hog breaks his foot so that Davey has a shot down below; him losing his virginity with a Bronx whore on a dirty afghan on a mattress that smells like beer and cigarettes; the day his daughter Cassie was born and he was down here working; the day his wife died from an aneurysm and once more he was down here in the dark while she flopped around on the kitchen floor like a fish trying to find water. Image after image, memory after memory, too-bright and too-loud fireworks launching into the sky of his mind before fading anew. All of it feels bad, sour, like a kind of mind poison – every memory robed in rotten ribbon, a mummy’s gauze, dusty and cursed.
Then one image stays fixed in his mind: blueprints and blasting plans for Water Tunnel #3, a yellow notebook with scribbles sitting under his left hand, a cold Coors Light in his right, the can sweating–
Cassie walks into the room. He says, “Hey, lollipop–”
He hears a sound. A familiar voice. A familiar roar.
And then it’s all over.
The goblins hang on him like boat anchors. He doesn’t have time to care. Mookie runs. The Blue gives him speed. Puts power in his legs. The Pig churns ahead of him around the bend of the tunnel. Gobbos bite. Claw. He feels blood wet his shirt.
