by Chuck Wendig
Its eyes are closed, hidden beneath leathery, callused lids.
Its uneven mouth is open. Tongue flapping.
It’s breath smells like roadkill.
Mookie stands – so much pain, a fire stoked anew, now in his legs and his arms, but he has to go, has to move – and he sees Nora nearby. She holds up her hands; she’s OK. He waves her on, then points past the worm-god’s tail which lays coiled around a pile of animal corpses. Beyond it is an archway – an exit.
She nods.
They hurry forward past the chorus of keening goblins.
He’s panicked. And in pain. Nora can sense that. He’s like a zoo animal testing the limits of his cage: up and down one tunnel, then back out and up another tunnel. He grabs some nearby glowing fungus, has nothing to use as a torch and smears it all over his knuckles and holds his hand aloft. They’re bathed in a nauseating green glow.
She tries to ask him where they are, but he just shushes her – and a not insignificant part of her wants to bite back, wants to shush him, wants to let loose with a fusillade of cruel barbs. But she has to choke it down. Stop. Grow up. He saved you.
Another voice within asks, Did he really?
She feels her skin. Cold. Corpse-cold.
The walls are warm but she can see her breath.
She can’t see Mookie’s breath.
She feels a nervous, acid edge in her stomach. Who are you? What are you?
Finally, Mookie points. “Look.” He seems excited. Or agitated. Both.
It’s a vein. A blue artery in the dark wall. Brighter than a human vein, this is the color of electric lemonade, of blue raspberry, a color you don’t find in nature except on tropical birds.
Cerulean. Peacock Powder. The Blue Blazes.
Some of this vein has been tapped already. The lower portion broken apart, the blue long-gone. But not all of it. At Mookie’s head height, the vein is still strong.
He grabs a rock with his glowing fist. Brings it hard against the Blue.
Once, twice, three more times.
Chips of blue fall. A cloud of shimmering powder fills the air.
He grabs a few chips. Pops them between his finger. They break apart, cakey and light. He gives her some. Then rubs some on his own temples. She sees the drug take hold in him. His head tilts. His vertebrae crack from butt-bone to base-of-skull like one long string of knuckles. He sucks in a pleasurable breath.
She rubs it on her temples, too.
And nothing happens. No sinking into a warm pool. No kick in her tail.
Nothing.
She decides not to say anything. Not now. Not here.
“I know this vein,” he says. “My Moles were working it. We’re near the Canal Street station. Come on. This way. We can get into the Sandhog tunnels using one of the old boltholes that Davey and I carved years ago.”
Nora hurries after. The Blue still hasn’t kicked in.
That worries her.
It’s not a plunger, Candlefly discovers. It’s a big red button in a box ringed with ruggedized rubber. He’s disappointed, honestly. He’d like a plunger. Like in the movies: stand before it, hands on the plunger – press it down and boom.
A small fleck of dirt in the eye of a truly lovely day.
Near him, Vithra suddenly shudders.
“Cold?” he asks.
“Something has changed,” he says.
“Oh?”
Vithra falls silent. Candlefly shrugs. Always such drama from the gods.
As they wind through the tunnels, Mookie grins at his daughter. He knows that in the eerie glow of his makeshift light source, he may look manic and mad, but he can’t help it.
“I like this,” he says.
“What?” Nora asks.
“You. Me. Working together. Father and daughter.”
“Yeah, it’s… great.”
“I just mean–”
“This isn’t how I imagined it,” she says.
“How’d you figure it?”
She says nothing.
He fills the silence, says, “I never imagined it at all.”
“I know.” She gives him a look. It isn’t a nice one. “That’s the problem. Isn’t it? You never imagined us as much of anything. You had your work. Then you had those… people out in Staten Island. Some brat named Nora. Some nag named Jess.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was and you know it.”
He stares at the ground. “I always thought about you guys. I always tried to be there. I just…” Mookie’s not good with words. Especially not now: all the pain, the fatigue, everything, it’s drawn him out, hammered him thin. “I never wanted my life to get near yours. My life is all…” He sighs, gestures around him. “It’s this. It’s the ugly dark. It’s goblins and addicts, dead men and snake venom. It’s just… trash and horror and blood. I never wanted that for you.”
“Well, it found me.”
“I know. And I’m sorry.”
She stops. He continues for a few steps, looks back.
“When this is all over,” she says, pointing her finger at him, “I want you to go visit Mom.”
“I’ll call her–”
“I said, go visit her. Promise me.”
“She may not want to hear from–”
“Promise me!”
“I… OK, yeah, I promise.”
She stands still. Staring at him with a look he cannot parse.
“Can we go?” he asks.
“Thanks for saying you’re sorry.”
“I am. I am sorry.”
She swallows hard, then nods. “We can go now.”
He finds the bolthole carved by Davey a long time ago. Covered up with a false limestone pillar carved with an X etched into the rock.
Mookie shoulders into the stone, pushes it aside.
A small passage is revealed. A musty breeze breathes upon them.
“C’mon.”
The men in the tunnel are Sandhogs, yes. But Sorago knows that they’re more than that. They’re men of the 147 ½ – a cabal within the union that know of the monsters, that are familiar with the ways of the Underworld, that protect the city’s most vulnerable projects from intrusion by malefic forces.
A malefic force such as Sorago.
He runs through the tunnel, feet echoing on the round concrete beneath him – a tireless journey. He is at present alone, and alone they may defeat him. It takes a lot to admit that, for he is a woefully efficient killer – but they will be many and they will be prepared.
That is why he cannot go in alone.
Ahead he sees the first sign of them.
Gobbos.
Not just a pack. An army. Fifty of them. Or more. Among them, black shapes – the reaper-cloak Vollrath, the advance knights of the Hungry Ones.
Sorago is not a zealot of the worm-gods. Few Snakefaces are. This is a strange role for him, to help bring them to the light of the above world. But it is all for a good measure. Candlefly says that it is his will and the will of the whole family that they will not serve the gods but rather be served by them. And that is a mission Sorago can get behind.
Not that the gobbos need to know that.
The Vollrath know but don’t seem to care – what that means, Sorago cannot say.
All that matters is that they gather like this under a single purpose.
Normally getting gobbos to work together in this number is an impossible effort: a Sisyphean task that will inevitably roll back upon you. But now they are bound by the whims of their worm-gods.
Which means Sorago now has an army to bring with him to the end of this tunnel.
They hear the screams.
Echoing through the concrete tube that is Water Tunnel #3.
Mookie lifts the concrete piece back in place. Then grabs a handful of nearby dust and blows it back over the seams, making them disappear.
“It’s already started,” he says. “You stay here.”
“What?”
“I can’t
risk you getting hurt. Not again.” The thought alone almost kills him.
“I’ll help. I’m not some weak-kneed little brat. I just need a weapon.”
“We don’t have any weapons.”
“We have you.”
Pride blooms in his cheeks. It tightens his fists to sledgehammers.
But still–
“I can’t. Nora, I can’t. I don’t want to lose you again.”
She sneers suddenly. “You’ll lose me if you don’t let me come. You let me out of your sights, Mookie, and I’ll walk. I’ll walk out of this tunnel, and you’ll never see me again. Stop keeping me at arm’s length. Stop treating me like a little girl. You want me back in your life? Then we do this together. You want me gone? Then do it alone.”
A glimpse of the old Nora. No. Not the old Nora, but a recent one – the cruelty of a teenager, the acid response to what she must perceive as betrayal.
But strong, too. He sees Jess in there.
And maybe he sees himself, too.
From down the tunnel comes yelling. Hollering. The bellows of hearty men. Sandhogs. Must be. Seconds later, the sound of drilling vibrates the concrete.
She looks around, reaches down, picks up a rock. “Look. I have a weapon.”
He sighs.
Then he nods.
“You can come,” he says. The decision is a small knife in his heart. The only comfort is that the knife could have been so much larger.
30
[gibberish written on bound swatches of human skin, inked in blood and coal dust]
– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below
The slaughter comes quickly but not without cost. As expected, the men of the 147 ½ are prepared for an assault at any time. They plan for this, they run drills, they come armed. The gobbos sweep over them like a tide. The men draw guns – a shotgun from a gearbox, a pistol from a hidden holster under a slicker – or they grab those tools around them that serve as weapons: pick-axes, hammers, wrenches. The goblins are armed, too, their best weapons brought to bear against the flesh of men: A mace made from a baby goblin at the end of a stick, its wormy mouth and sharp teeth ready to bite; a whirring sharpened blade made from the end of an old box fan, the fan running off a tank of gasoline on the gobbo’s back; a slingshot firing oblong marbles of hematite into the exposed eyes of goggle-less Sandhogs.
It starts to go pear-shaped. A bark from a shotgun blows the gas tank on the gobbo’s back. Liquid flame sweeps over five, six of the creatures, thrashing and crackling like logs in a fire as they burn. A newly one-eyed Sandhog runs at the gobbos one by one, poor depth perception not preventing him from bringing a sledge against their heads, wham, wham, wham. Pistol fire. A swung axe.
But then Sorago and the Vollrath step into the fray.
Sorago doesn’t bother with the dance. He walks – nay, strolls – among the fracas, as casual as an old man in Central Park. Any who come at him are dispatched with teeth, pistol, or blade. Legs cut out from under men. Holes punched through hardhats by a four-barrel derringer, splashing brains down the backs of necks. Venom spat in open mouths.
The Vollrath do their jobs. They move to the end of the tunnel, to the massive wall ahead of them that, were it laid on its side, would look like a mountain range but is instead the barrier of schist and granite that prevents this tunnel from moving forward. The tunnel is peppered with holes in a specific pattern – a pattern designed by Davey Morgan to create the most efficient blast. In each hole sits a stick of dynamite like a nesting bird, and from each stick is a braid of det-cord, and each cord winds together into one. The Vollrath know their targets. They pick the explosive experts. They pick the drillers. They leap upon them as a blanket, covering them, ethereal fingers like ice picks caring little for the corporeal barriers of hard hats, skin, or bone. They take control of them, riding them like men ride horses, marshaling them forward as puppets.
They begin to work with great efficiency.
The remaining goblins – two dozen left chanting and screaming their crass gobbo vulgarities – gather to watch the men work. The men wheel over long bore-drills, press the spinning bits (each as thick as a child’s wrist) into the stone. A spray of bits. The men would normally wear face protection but that would cause a delay. Here the flung scree chews into their faces, stone shrapnel biting skin. Their faces are soon a mask of red. It doesn’t matter. They don’t need to see. Only their minds are necessary. And their hands.
As they drill one hole, they move to the next.
And the other two men gingerly take dynamite out of existing holes, and slide them into the freshly bored pockets. One by one, a new pattern of dots emerges. A new blast pattern. One plucked from the wealth of knowledge stolen from Davey Morgan’s head.
It is an unstable pattern that will end it all. It will drown the tunnels. It will dry up the city.
A new era will begin, with the daemon families ascendant. The Underworld will be brought fully to bear upon an unsuspecting world. The city above them will be the first settlement of the Great Below.
The drill is loud. A deafening rock-chewing buzz.
Smoke rises from the drills and from the rock as it burns. The smell stings the nose. It isn’t long before the entire chamber is lost to the haze. The chamber is home to two massive fans – meant to blow smoke out of the chamber so that workers can see – and Sorago thinks to plug them in, get them going.
He doesn’t have the chance.
It’s only when a gobbo runs by him screaming silently – a rock still sticking out of the creature’s misshapen head – that Sorago realizes something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
He turns.
Mookie Pearl walks among them.
It is so impossible that Sorago can almost not conceive of it. The man went to the deepest pits of the Great Below – broken and beaten – and now emerges here?
Sorago hisses and stands ready.
The thug barrels through the ranks of the goblins, one arm swinging useless at his side – his other hand smacks, punches, throws, twists gobbo heads like they’re bottle caps. A girl steps into the fray next to him, a rock in her hand. Bashing. The thick treacle of gobbo blood speckling her face like flecks of black pudding.
It’s her. It’s the man’s daughter.
The gutshot girl.
Doubly impossible. For a moment Sorago doubts everything: the plan, his own eyes, the very gods he cares little for. But then it all snaps forward; he has no time for doubt.
He has only time for killing.
The plan must be saved. The dynamite is in place.
Mookie Pearl and his daughter must die.
Don’t think about the dead men. That’s the thought running through Mookie’s head. Sandhogs of the 147 ½ lie scattered about, broken, destroyed – tough men, men far better than Mookie has ever been, men who deserve better than what they got down here in the dirt. A man a mile? This mile has been the bloodiest of them all.
He can’t think about them.
He can only think about what happens if he fails.
About his daughter. About what happens after.
Gobbos fall beneath his one fist, beneath his stomping boots, beneath his smashing head. Ahead, he sees a sledgehammer. Meant for breaking rock after a blast. He curls his foot under it, lifts it up in the air–
The hammer spins. He narrowly catches it in a meaty paw.
Then he sweeps the legs out from under three, four, five gobbos at a time. As they drop, squealing, trying to stand, he pops their heads like blisters.
Movement. Ahead. Then gone.
To his right–
Fast through the smoke.
Sorago, the Naga assassin.
A four-barreled pistol in one hand. A curved blade in the other.
Mookie lifts the sledgehammer, not a moment too soon. The Naga’s gun barks one round, then two. One bullet pings off the metal head, the other pops into the handle, sending a cough of splinters into Mookie’s chee
k. He backpedals; Sorago leaps.
The Snakeface crashes into Mookie. His legs still hurt; his one arm doesn’t work. He teeters and falls.
Teeth sink into the meat of his shoulder.
The cold saline rush of venom travels down his arm. Already the muscles start to deaden. Already he can feel the sudden gallop of his heart followed by an immediate slowdown. His head cranes back.
He sees Nora.
She cries out for him.
The gobbos have her.
The rock wasn’t enough.
She knows that now. Somehow she thought – what? She thought her pride mattered. That this moment of standing with her father, of him choosing her, was all she needed. In a way, that’s still true. She holds onto that choice he made like a piece of broken boat in the open ocean; it’s the only thing that keeps her from sinking into a watery grave of abject hopelessness. Her back presses tight against the wall, jagged rock in her flesh.
The gobbos have her surrounded. They’ve swarmed.
She holds up her arms as one slashes a knife made of jagged glass. It opens a wound across her forearm. Fresh blood splashes. Another lunges at her feet; she kicks it away, but all it does is bowl over and cackle madly. Another snaps its teeth at her. She tries to bash it with the rock, but the rock slips away, cracks into another monster and is lost in the smoke. Her only weapon is gone.
They move in.
She can’t go any farther.
Her father hits the ground, the Naga atop him. His teeth in her old man’s shoulder.
The drills growl through stone.
She hears something else, too – a higher whine, a chugging engine.
Through the smoke, a black shape charges. Like an ancient beast born from fire. Except this beast doesn’t have four legs: it has four wheels. A jacked-up quad with chained tires blasts into the chamber and comes right for her–
It mows through the gobbos. Greasy gray creatures are flung forward, screeching.
A dead man with boiled skin sits up front, leaning forward on the four-wheeler. A goblin runs up the front of his vehicle, and he bashes it with a tire iron.
On the back is a familiar form.
