Reliquary

by Douglas Preston

  He scrambled to his feet, aching in numerous places but glad to feel a firm surface under his feet. The floor of the tunnel seemed even, and the water smelled relatively fresh. Beside him, Duffy was wailing uncontrollably.

  “Shut up,” Smithback hissed at him. “You’re going to draw those things right to us.”

  “Oh, my God,” Duffy sobbed in the darkness. “This can’t be happening, it can’t. What are they? What—”

  Smithback reached into the blackness, located Duffy’s arm, and pulled the man toward him brusquely. “Shut up,” he said, lips touching the engineer’s ear.

  The sobbing subsided to a soft hiccuping.

  “Where’s the flashlight?” Smithback whispered.

  Sobbing was the only reply. But then a dim light switched on nearby. Miraculously, Duffy was still clutching it.

  “Where are we?”

  The hiccuping subsided.

  “Duffy! Where are we?’”

  There was a stifled sob. “I don’t know. One of the spillover tubes, maybe.”

  “Any idea where it goes?”

  There was a sniffle. “It bleeds off excess flow from the Reservoir. If we move downstream to the Bottleneck, maybe we can reach the lower drain system.”

  “And from there, how do we get out?” Smithback whispered.

  Duffy hiccuped. “Don’t know.”

  Smithback mopped his face again and said nothing, trying to roll the fear, the pain, and the shock into a little ball he could stuff down inside himself. He tried to think about his story. God, he’d be a made man with a story like this, following on the heels of the Museum Beast murders. And with luck, he’d still have the Wisher piece in his pocket. But first…

  There was a splashing sound, its distance hard to gauge because of the echoes but clearly approaching. He leaned into the darkness, straining to hear.

  “They’re still after us!” Duffy yelped, inches from his eardrum.

  Smithback grabbed the arm a second time. “Duffy, shut up and listen to me. We can’t outrun them. We need to lose them. You know the system: you’ve got to tell me how.”

  Duffy struggled, making an unintelligible sound of fear.

  Smithback squeezed harder. “Look, we’re going to be all right if you just calm down and think.”

  Duffy seemed to relax, and Smithback could hear him breathing heavily. “All right,” the engineer said. “The emergency spillovers have gauging stations at the bottom. Just before the Bottleneck. If that’s where we are, maybe we can hide inside—”

  “Let’s go,” Smithback hissed.

  They splashed through the darkness, the flashlight beam jogging from wall to wall. The low tunnel took a turn, and a vast, ancient piece of machinery rose up before Smithback: a giant hollow screw, or something like it, placed horizontally on a bed of granite. Heavily rusted pipes protruded from either end, and a convoluted mass of pipes lay farther back, like coiled iron guts. At the base of the machine was a small railed platform. The main body of the stream ran down past the station, while a small side tunnel snaked its way into the blackness to their left. Taking the flashlight, Smithback grabbed the railing and swung himself up, then helped Duffy to a position beside him.

  “Into the pipe,” Smithback whispered. He pushed Duffy inside, then wriggled in himself, tossing the lighted flashlight into the stream before retreating into the darkness.

  “Are you crazy? You just threw away—”

  “It’s plastic,” Smithback said. “It’ll float. I’m hoping they’ll follow the light downstream.”

  They sat in absolute silence. The thick walls of the gauging machinery muffled the tunnel noise, but in a few minutes Smithback could tell that the splashing sounds had grown more distinct. The Wrinklers were approaching—swiftly, too, by the sound. Behind him, he could feel Duffy twitch, and he prayed the engineer would keep his head. The splashing became louder and now Smithback could hear them breathing, a heavy wheezing, like a winded horse. The splashing sounds drew alongside the gauging station, then stopped.

  The foul goatish reek was thick now, and Smithback shut his eyes tightly. In the blackness to his rear, Duffy was trembling violently.

  He heard splashes in the water outside the station as the things milled about. There was a low noise that sounded like snuffling, and Smithback froze, remembering the Mbwun beast’s keen sense of smell. The splashing continued. Then—with an enormous feeling of relief—Smithback heard it begin to retreat. The things were continuing down the tunnel.

  He breathed slowly and deeply, counting each breath. At thirty, he turned to Duffy. “Which way to the storm drains?”

  “Out the far end,” Duffy whispered.

  “Let’s go.”

  Carefully, they turned around within the cramped, fetid space and began wriggling their way toward the rear of the pipe. Duffy emerged at last into the open air. Smithback heard first one, then both, of the engineer’s feet drop into the water, and was wriggling forward himself when a sudden piercing scream cut through the pitch black, and a spray too thick and warm to be water spattered his face. He backed frantically into the pipe.

  “Help!” Duffy blurted suddenly. “No, please don’t, you’re gonna—Oh, God, that’s my guts—Jesus, somebody get—”

  The voice changed suddenly to a frenzied wet wheeze, then died beneath the heavy thrashing of water. Smithback, scrambling backward in mindless terror, heard a thudding sound like meat chopped with a cleaver, followed by the knuckle-crack of bones being wrenched from their sockets.

  Smithback fell out the near end of the pipe, landed on his back in the stream, scrambled to his feet and ran blindly down the side tunnel, not hearing, not caring, not thinking about anything except running. He ran and ran, careening off the sides of the tunnel, scrabbling and thrashing down the endlessly forking paths, deeper and deeper into the dark bowels of the earth. The tunnel joined another, and another, each one larger than the last. Until, quite suddenly, he felt an arm, wet and horribly strong, slide around his neck, and a powerful hand clamp down simultaneously over his mouth.

  = 55 =

  WITHIN AN HOUR of its spontaneous flare-up, the riot along Central Park South had begun to sputter fitfully. Well before 11:00 P.M., most of the initial rioters had spent their anger along with their energy. Those who had been hurt were helped to the sidelines. Shouting, insults, and threats began to replace fists, clubs, and stones. However, a hard central core of violence continued. As people left the scene, bruised or exhausted, others arrived: some curious, some angry, some drunk and spoiling for a fight. Television reports waxed lurid and hysterical. Word traveled like an electric spark through the island: up First and Second Avenues, where young Republicans gathered in singles bars to jeer and hoot at the liberal President; along St. Mark’s Place and into the Marxist corners of the East Village; over fax lines and telephone lines. As word spread, so did the rumors. Some said that the homeless and those that tried to help them were being massacred in a police-instigated genocide. Others said that leftist radicals and criminal mobs were burning banks, shooting citizens, and looting businesses uptown. Those that answered this call to action ran into—sometimes brutally—the last pockets of homeless that were still streaming to the surface, emerging here and there around Central Park, fleeing the trapped and spreading tear gas.

  The original vanguard of Take Back Our City—the Brahmins of New York wealth and influence—had quickly retreated from the scene. Most had returned to their townhouses and duplexes in dismay. Others had massed toward the Great Lawn, assuming the police would quickly quell the rioting and hoping that the final vigil would go on as planned. But as the police shored up their line and began to hem in the rioters, the fighting itself also retreated deeper into the Park, moving ever closer to the Lawn and the Reservoir that lay beyond. The darkness of the Park, the thick woods, the tangle of undergrowth, and the maze of paths all made efforts at riot control difficult and slow.

  The police moved against the rioters with caution. Alrea
dy spread too thin by the massive rousting operation, much of the force was late on the scene of the riot. The police brass was all too keenly aware that influential people might still be among the milling throng, and the idea of gassing or clubbing a member of the New York elite was not something the politically conscious mayor would allow. In addition, a large body of officers had to be dispatched to patrol the adjoining areas of the city, where sporadic looting and vandalism was now being reported. And in the backs of everyone’s minds lay the unspoken, but dreaded, spectacle of the Crown Heights riot of a few years before, which had gone on for three days before finally drawing to an uneasy close.

  Hayward watched as the emergency medical crew rolled Beal into the waiting ambulance. The back legs of the stretcher folded up as the officer was slid inside. Beal groaned, then raised a hand toward his bandaged head.

  “Careful,” Hayward snapped to the paramedic. She put a hand on one of the rear doors and leaned inside. “How you doing?” she asked.

  “Been better,” Beal said with a weak smile.

  Hayward nodded. “You’ll be fine.” She turned to go.

  “Sergeant?” Beal said. Hayward paused. “That bastard Miller would have left me there to find my own way out. Or to drown, maybe. I think I owe you guys my life.”

  “Forget it,” Hayward said. “It’s part of the job. Right?”

  “Maybe,” Beal said. “But anyway, I won’t forget. Thanks.”

  Hayward left Beal with the paramedic and walked around to the driver’s seat. “What’s the news?” she asked.

  “What do you want to hear?” the driver asked, scribbling on a log sheet. “Gold futures? The international situation?”

  “Take your act to the Poconos,” she replied. “I’m talking about this.” And she waved her hand along Central Park West.

  A surreal quiet lay over the dark scene. Except for emergency vehicles and the police cars stationed at every other cross street, there was no traffic on the immediate blocks. Pools of darkness dotted the avenue; a mere handful of streetlights remained unbroken, sizzling and sputtering. The broad avenue was dotted with chunks of concrete, broken glass, and trash. Farther to the south, Hayward noticed, the flashing lights grew much more numerous.

  “Where you been?” the driver asked. “Unless you spent the last hour at the center of the earth, it was pretty hard to miss the action around here.”

  “You’re not that far wrong,” she said. “We’ve been clearing out the homeless underneath the Park. There was resistance. This guy got wounded, and it took us a long time to extract him. We were pretty deep underground, and we didn’t want to jostle him too much. Okay? We came up five minutes ago at the Seventy-second Street station, only to find a ghost town around here.”

  “Clearing out the homeless?” the driver asked. “So you’re the ones responsible.”

  Hayward frowned. “For what?”

  The ambulance driver tapped his ear, then pointed eastward, as if that was the only answer necessary.

  Hayward stopped to listen. Over the squawk of the ambulance scanner and the distant pulse of the city, she could make out sounds floating from the dark interior of Central Park: the angry buzz of bullhorns, shouts, screams, the whine of sirens.

  “You know that Take Back Our City march?” the driver asked. “The unannounced one that was going along Central Park South?”

  “Heard something about it,” Hayward said.

  “Yeah. Well, suddenly all these homeless started pouring up from underground. Kinda hostile, too. Apparently, you cops had been using them for baton practice. Started squabbling with the marchers. Before you know it, there was a full-blown confrontation. People just went nuts, I heard. Screaming, yelling, stomping on other people. Then the looting started up along the fringes. Took the cops an hour to get the situation under control. It still isn’t under control, actually. But they’ve managed to confine everything to the Park.”

  The paramedic in the rear gave a signal, and the driver put the ambulance in gear and pulled away, flashing lights striping the limestone facades. Farther up Central Park West, Hayward could see curious people looking out from their windows, pointing into the Park. A few braver souls were standing on the pavement outside of lobbies, staying close to the protective presence of uniformed doormen. She gazed up at the huge Gothic shape of the Dakota, unharmed and seemingly aloof from the chaos, almost as if its narrow, stylized moat had repulsed an angry throng. She found her eyes traveling up the corner tower toward what must be Pendergast’s windows. She wondered if he’d made it back from the Devil’s Attic in one piece.

  “Get Beal off okay?” she heard Carlin call out. His massive form emerged out of the distant shadows.

  “Just now,” she replied, turning toward him. “How about the other one?”

  “Refused medical treatment,” Carlin said. “Any sign of Miller?”

  Hayward scowled. “He’s probably in some Atlantic Avenue bar by now, sucking down beer and bragging about his exploits. That’s how it works, right? He’ll get a promotion, and we’ll get letters of caution for insubordination.”

  “Maybe other times it works that way,” Carlin said with a knowing smile. “But not this time.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hayward asked, then continued without giving Carlin time to answer: “No way to tell what Miller did or didn’t do. Guess we’d better report in.” She grabbed at her radio, snapping it on. But torrents of noise, static, and panic came pouring from every band.

  ... Moving toward the Great Lawn, we need more manpower to… Got eight of them but I can’t hold them much longer, if that wagon doesn’t come soon they’ll just melt away into the dark… I called for a medevac thirty goddamn minutes ago; we got people hurt up here… Christ, they’ve gotta seal that southern quadrant; more keep coming in all the time…

  Hayward snapped the radio off and snugged it back into her belt, then motioned Carlin to follow her down to the squad car at the next corner. A police officer in riot gear stood beside it, vigilantly scanning the street, shotgun in hand.

  “Where’s command for this operation?” Hayward asked.

  The policeman tipped up his face shield and looked at her. “There’s a forward command post in the Castle,” he said. “That’s what dispatch says, anyway. Things are kinda disorganized right now, as if you couldn’t tell.”

  “Belvedere Castle.” Hayward turned toward Carlin. “We’d better head for it.”

  As they ran down Central Park West, Hayward was strangely reminded of her visit to a Hollywood back lot two years before. She remembered walking down the ersatz Manhattan street on which countless musicals and gangster films had been shot. She’d seen phony street lamps, shop fronts, fire hydrants… everything but people. At the time, common sense had told her that a mere hundred yards away were bustling, vibrant California streets. Yet the still emptiness of the lot had seemed almost spectral.

  Tonight, Central Park West felt the same way. Though she could hear the distant honking of car horns and the whistle of sirens—and though she knew that, within the Park itself, police were massing to stop the rioting and confusion—this darkened avenue seemed ghostly and unreal. Only the occasional vigilant doorman, curious resident, or police checkpoint broke the atmosphere of a ghost street.

  “Holy shit,” Carlin muttered at her side. “Would you look at that.” Hayward glanced up, and her reverie instantly dissolved.

  It was like crossing a demilitarized zone from order into chaos. To the south, across 65th Street, they saw a sea of ruin. Lobby windows were smashed, awnings over elegant entrances were torn to shreds and flapping idly in the breeze. The police presence here was stronger, the blue-painted barricades omnipresent. Cars along the curbs were missing windows and windshields. A few blocks down, a police tow truck with flashing yellow lights was removing the smoking skeleton of a taxi.

  “Looks like some pretty pissed off mole people came through here,” Hayward murmured.

  They cut across the st
reet, angling toward the drive and heading into the Park. After the destruction they’d just passed, the narrow asphalt paths seemed quiet and deserted. But the smashed benches, overturned trash cans, and smoldering garbage bore mute testimony to what had taken place here not long before. And the noise that drifted toward them from the interior of the Park gave promise of even greater pandemonium to come.

  Suddenly Hayward stopped short, motioning Carlin to do the same. Ahead in the dark she could make out a group of people—how many she could not be certain—swaggering in the direction of the Great Lawn. Can’t be cops, she thought. They’re not wearing riot helmets, or even hats. A noisy burst of hooting and cursing from the group confirmed her suspicion.

  She moved forward quickly, running on the balls of her feet to minimize noise. At ten yards back she stopped. “Halt!” she said, hand on her service piece. “Police officers!”

  The group came to a ragged stop, then turned back to look at her. Four, no, five men, youngish, dressed in sports jackets and polo shirts. Her eyes took in the visible weapons: two aluminum bats and what looked like a kitchen carving knife.

  They stared at her, faces flushed, grins still on their youthful faces.

  “Yeah?” one of them said, taking a step forward.

  “Stop right there,” Hayward said. The man stopped. “Now, why don’t you boys tell me exactly where you’re headed?”

  The man in front scoffed at the stupidity of the question, indicating the interior of the Park with the merest jerk of his head.

  “We’re here to take care of business,” came a voice from the group.

  Hayward shook her head. “What’s going on there is none of your business.”

  “The hell it isn’t,” the one in front snapped. “We’ve got friends there, getting the shit beat out of them by a bunch of goddamn bums. There’s no way we’re going to let that go on.” He took another step forward.

  “This is a police matter,” Hayward said.