by Chuck Wendig
Except there’s a point where the tunnel passes near Tunnels #1 and #2.
New York City gets its water – all its water – from outside sources.
Cut off both tunnels, and with the third tunnel not expected to be finished until 2015, you destroy the city’s water source. That will render the city uninhabitable. People will be evacuated. It will be a no man’s land until they manage to pipe fresh water back into the city. Can’t bring in water by truck – the city at a conservative estimate uses over a billion gallons per day.
“That,” he says, “is how you kill New York City. You cut off its water, it’s like cutting off its head.” And the way you do that, he explains, is by fucking up the detonation of Water Tunnel #3 just as it’s near the other two tunnels. The wrong blast pattern – an ill-designed “pattern of dots” – will cause all three tunnels to blow. The water will cascade into the Great Below, but never reach the city.
That’s what they’re planning.
They have to be.
He doesn’t know why. But that has to be it.
Another boom below them. A sharp crack of stone like a glacier breaking. The tremor this time is sustained. He can hear them now, their wet flesh sliding against one another. The worm-gods as they rise to the vent of the Maw-Womb.
“While we wait here, the city’s going to die,” he says. A morose thought. He suddenly doesn’t hate the city so bad. He can’t imagine its streets dark. Some will stay behind, won’t they? Criminals. Lunatics. Mole Men. And the monsters will rise. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe they want a playground. A place for gobbos and snake-men, for rock-bodied golems. For all the monsters and the starving worm-gods that birthed them.
As though on cue, one of the gods launches up out of the rift – the size of the ancient worm dwarfs anything Mookie’s ever seen on land or at sea. It’s a giant worm of black segmented flesh, with one mouth containing a hundred smaller mouths, a thousand dead eyes at the fore of its shunted head.
When it rises, a deafening whisper fills Mookie’s mind:
HYOR-KA.
Nora makes a small, afraid sound.
The world shakes.
Another worm-god rises, this one lacking the segmented body and featuring a ragged line of rock-like spikes along its dorsal ridge.
Another screamed psychic whisper:
UTHUTHMA.
The first worm-god ascends, squirming in mid-air like a mosquito larva in pondwater. It slides toward the crackling golden gate left in the air high above, and it’s fits perfectly – like the worm-god and the impossible hole were made for one another. A vacuum hiss, a booming echo. The beast wriggles into it and is gone.
The next worm-god heads for the same hole.
Mookie stands up. Helps Nora stand, too.
“Come on,” he says. “I know how we get home.”
29
Their voices awaken me. Lith-lyru. The Bleak Hymn. The Song of Despair. It sings me to awake. One last moment of consciousness before I die, or so I thought. There greeting me in the dark: a tiny skull-shape clinging to a rock. The face of a small button-cap mushroom. It’s then I realize: I have found it. The prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box – Caput Mortuum. The Death’s Head pigment. Rumored to cure all ills but rumored also to confer… other effects, permanent ones, upon its eater. I do not care what they are. The song is loud now, its watery echo and discordant notes vibrating in my heart, urging me to eat, eat, eat. So I do. I eat the mushroom. I feel it. I feel the change. It is time now to join the gods.
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
His belly is full. Bursting, practically. Any moment now Candlefly expects the buttons of his shirt beneath his suit to pop off and ricochet around the limousine like wild bullets. Since being here in the city he’s eaten fairly light: a salad here, a little fish, a cup of oatmeal, and of course the requisite amount of human blood (warmed up – he, unlike some of his fellow daemons, prefers it that way as cold blood tends to unsettle his stomach). But this morning! Ah. Time to let loose a little. So close to the end now, his body was all but begging for a hearty breakfast! Three eggs, two pancakes, real maple syrup, blood sausages.
Powerfully delicious. And now he feels like his furnace is full of coal. Ready to burn.
Haversham sits next to him – a damp dishrag on all the good feelings. Sweaty palms on trembling knees. Finger continually pushing his glasses up his nose.
“You seem tense,” Candlefly says. He grabs Haversham’s knee and squeezes hard.
Haversham almost yelps. “I…” Then he swallows whatever he was about to say.
“Is it about the old goat? You did well, Haversham. What’s your name again? Your first name. Milton.”
“Milton, yes.” Haversham clears his throat, coughs into his hand. “It’s not about that.”
“By the gods, Milton, we’ll be at the dig site in–” He checks his watch. “Less than ten minutes. Don’t make me chase this down like it’s a stray dog. You can tell me.”
“I just don’t understand what we’re doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“What… all this is about. I thought it was about…” His eyes shift left and right as though he’s worried someone could be listening. “The Organization. Our business.”
“The business of a criminal enterprise, you mean? Illicit goods and prostitutes and protection rackets and the like?”
“Well. Yes.”
“It… is about all that. Or will be again. But first we have to… soften the city up a little. Are you a cook?”
“What?” A flash of confusion mixed with irritation. “No.”
“You get a tough cut of meat like a… chuck roast or a pork butt and you can’t just apply heat and eat. You have to roast it. Low and slow. Maybe a little smoke. Let the tough connective bits break down. Let the fat and juices warm up and seep into the meat. Then you can just… pull it apart with your fingers. This city is like that. It’s a tough hunk of meat and I need it yield to my fingers. Do you understand?”
“Y… no. Frankly not.”
“This city is going to fall. Today. We’re going to knock the giant to the ground and when he falls, his body will be ours. The city is the giant. A metaphor.”
“I understand the metaphor.”
“Good. Could we have done this without the Organization? Of course. But when the city is evacuated–”
“Evacuated?”
“–most of the people will leave, but you know who won’t leave? The criminals. They will remain. The Organization and its lieutenants and the gangs beneath them would have all remained here in the city. And they have a hold on the Underworld. I can’t have that. That hold must be mine. The city must be mine. For if I am to command gods–”
“Gods, what gods?” By now Haversham is really shaking quite violently, his eyes glistening with tears that have yet to fall. It’s all done quite a number on him. Candlefly wonders, is this what post-traumatic stress disorder looks like?
He figures, why not blow the cork right out of the bottle? If Haversham handles it, fine. If not… then perhaps he catches a bullet in the temple and that’s that. Candlefly certainly likes Haversham, especially with his most recent display of loyalty. He’s got a keen business mind. Candlefly needs that. So: stress test time.
“I am not human,” Candlefly says. “I am a daemon. With an ae, not just an e – we were the first offspring of the Great Below, you see? Our eight families were the first children of the Hungry Ones, the first progeny of both man and god. We betrayed the gods long ago and locked them down in the dark and they cursed us in turn: they ensured that those of the daemon families could not enter the Great Below, not without great pain and madness brought upon them. The gods have long sought an opportunity to return to the Above just as we have hoped for a way to once more go Below. Katabasis for us. Anabasis for them. And so with all the signs and portents, it seems the time is now. The Underworld beneath Manhattan – one o
f many Underworlds, if you must know – has been discovered and opened and now we intend to bring the worm-gods home. Ah, but the Hungry Ones despise humanity and hate the light. They will be weak when they arrive and so as they wait in the seven sacred goblin-folk temples, we will prepare the city as a ritual space. The house must be abandoned. Cleared of its prior residents before the new owners move in. Except, ah yes, one final trick: the gods shall not own this city. The Candlefly family will. And we will own the worm-gods, too. All part of an ancient bargain helping to ensure our own version of hell on Earth.”
He chuckles, then claps Haversham on the back. The priggish man runs his fingers through his hair with splayed fingers. He’s sobbing, now. Great hitching, heaving sobs.
“It’s all right, Haversham. It’s quite a lot to digest, but you’ve done well for us. I’ll give you some time to… process. But I suggest you make peace with it soon. Yes?”
Haversham barely manages a nod.
“Most excellent, my new friend. To the dig site, then.”
Mookie and Nora stand at the lip. The ground trembles. He holds her hand.
“You’re gonna need to hold on to me,” he says.
“I know.”
“Tight. Tighter than ever.”
“I know.”
“That means you’re gonna have to trust me.”
“I do.”
“You do?”
“I swear.”
Beneath them, the worm-gods roil.
Another one pulls away from the others and begins to rise to the surface. Mookie shields his eyes, sees a flash of three mouths and not a hundred eyes, but rather one: a cyclopean orb the color of the sun at sunset.
“This is us,” he says.
Nora lets go of his hand. She gets on his back. Wraps her arms around him.
Mookie pops the top of the sheath, withdraws the cleaver.
The beast begins to rise.
Everything tells Mookie not to do this. Every inch of his gristly frame screams at him, a chorus of horror.
He jumps. Roaring as he falls. Nora screaming.
They arrive in the middle of the dance.
That’s how Candlefly thinks of it: a dance. Because it’s beautiful, really. Graceful as anything you’d see on a stage. And so much more real.
They step past the bodies in hard hats and yellow slickers. Necks twisted like wrung-out hand-towels. Limbs separated from bodies. Sandhog corpses strewn about.
It’s still going on. By the trailer. Even more of Vithra has emerged beyond the container of Zoladski’s flesh, a glorious evolution of form: the neck three feet long, the limbs long and lean like whip-cord saplings, all claws and teeth and ripping skin and eviscerated bodies. The men of the Sandhog union give back in violence. These are tough men, men of the earth, men of salt and stone, but they are still just men, and Zoladski has become so much more.
On the other side, by the elevator leading into the rather epic hole, Sorago continues his work. His really is a dance – as Sandhogs rush him he pirouettes, sidesteps, bites one as he shoots another and beheads a third with a curved blade. Another set rush him. One is flung into the pit, another finds his head cleaved, yet another finds himself embroiled in the deadliest kiss as Sorago’s jaw unhinges and swallows the man’s face whole.
Haversham looks the color of a green potato.
“Looks like they’re almost done,” Candlefly says. “Enjoying the show?”
“Of… of course.”
He isn’t, but oh well. One day perhaps he’ll learn to appreciate true beauty.
The cleaver buries into god-meat.
Thwack.
It takes everything Mookie has to hold on. As the god-worm rose to meet them they met the god-worm in turn, and the hit was violent. And now Mookie’s hand strains to grip the cleaver’s handle. He tries to bring his shattered arm forward to grab something, anything–
As the beast rises above the surface of the rim, a booming whisper:
PELSINADE
So that, then, is the name of their ride.
A ride that won’t be their ride long. Because Mookie’s grip is slipping. Nora’s not a big girl, but the weight on his back is too much – and Mookie’s himself far too large and with a busted arm, to boot. He has no stability. The heat here draws out sweat and his hand on the prodigious handle of the cleaver starts… to… slip…
The worm-god’s skin is not smooth like the others – bundles of squirming cilia like the fingers of sea anemones rise up in clusters – and Mookie sees one of Nora’s hands reach out and grab a bundle while the other stays wrapped around his neck.
Stability. Just a little. Maybe enough.
They cling to the side of the creature like ticks on the belly of a bird.
Nora is dead.
She knows it as sure as she knows anything. And yet, she can feel her heartbeat. Can feel the sound of blood in her ears. This isn’t dead like the dead of Daisypusher. This is a different kind of dead. Worse and better in equal measure. It’s not that she’s dead inside but that something inside of her is dead. She just can’t put her finger on what.
Thinking about this helps distract her from the fact that they’re riding some kind of hell-born worm deity to the surface – or to wherever the shimmering gate above their heads is going to take them.
Even as the wind rushes past them, even as she fails to control the fearful whine in the back of her throat, even as she holds one arm around the neck of the man who for so long she hated and wanted dead in that teenage-fantasy way, she thinks about it.
That little skull mushroom gave something back.
But it took something, too.
She just doesn’t know what.
Eventually the police will come.
But for now the dig site is loud and remote and protected by two rings of very robust fencing. Nobody will know anything unless they pass overhead and see all the cock-eyed bodies and bright puddles of red.
They take the elevator – just a cage dangling from a crane – down into the massive quarry-like hole. Sorago and Vithra already wait at the bottom among a new batch of corpses. Some Sandhogs. A few EPA inspectors. A geologist.
Vithra’s limbs twist and crack as they slowly return to human form. Zoladki’s clothes are now in ribbons. Once he returns to the shape of the little old man, he looks like a homeless person, perhaps one cast out of his capitalist tribe when the markets took that nose-dive a few years back.
Sorago and Vithra stalk up to meet Candlefly as he exits the cage.
“The plan may continue,” he says. “Sorago, your… friends are waiting, I assume.”
“Yes. Near the juncture of the three tunnels. They’re blasting in two hours.”
“Good. It is a journey of many miles, so go. And take a walkie-talkie. We’ll need it to speak.”
Vithra cocks Zoladski’s fuzzy caterpillar eyebrows. “I want to kill more. I’ll go too.”
“You won’t. You’ll stay up here in case we encounter any problems.”
The old man’s face tightens. “But I want to go.”
“And I say you’ll stay.”
“My brothers and sisters will be waiting in the nesting temples before night falls–”
“Do not defy me, Vithra.”
“You could come down with us.” A flash of cruel irony in Zoladski’s eyes. “Oh, but you can’t, can you? What happens if you go down into the dark, Candlefly?”
Ernesto doesn’t lose his smile. It’s painful to keep it plastered to his face like that, but he feels it’s necessary. “You’re about to make me lose my good mood, old man. Stand back and let us work to free your brothers and sisters. Unless you care to see that mission complicated?”
Silence.
“Good,” he says. “As I thought. Now, let’s find the detonator. I want to be the one to hit the plunger when the time comes.”
Layers of earth – the mantle of this planet in its many colors and textures, the stratum of the Great Below laid bare – whip past as Mo
okie holds onto the cleaver embedded in the worm-god’s back. The air is heavy, the smell of soil and minerals bright.
Then there is a static crackle, the sound of stone shearing–
A fresh thunderous boom–
The beast known as Pelsinade launches forth into a massive open chamber like an eel dumped from a bucket. Its belly hits. The ground trembles. Limestone stalactites from above drop like swords into the earth, some sticking into the stone, others shattering.
All around them is a temple. A massive goblin temple. Mookie sees piles of bones. And corpses.
And hundreds of gobbos.
Mookie and Nora hang from the side of the worm-god.
He thinks: I’m going to have to kill all of these things if we’re going to escape–
But then he sees. They are all dropping to their knees. They’re ululating, tongues fluttering in their mouths. The sound is haunting, an infernal trilling fast dissolving into a warbling chant.
Mookie tries to pry the cleaver free, but he has no leverage. To Nora he says, “We’re just going to have to drop.”
“It’s almost three stories.”
“Just hold tight. I’m tougher than you think.”
He feels her arms around his neck. Even in this place of death, it gives him comfort. It’s the closest thing to a hug he’s had from her in years.
“Ready?”
She makes a nervous, uncertain sound.
He drops.
They slide part of the way along the rounded curve of the worm-god’s body. After that the drop is only fifteen, twenty feet – but with her weight on his back and his own bulk, his legs hit and pain jars up into his legs and a thought pops in his head like a muzzle flash (this is how Werth must have felt all the time) and then he tucks and rolls and Nora is flung from his back and he lands on his goddamn arm and–
He grits his teeth, bites his tongue. Don’t cry out, don’t wail, don’t make a noise you big dumb shithead.
He lifts his head.
He’s face to face with a gobbo.
