The Immortality Virus

by Christine Amsden

  Another flash from above seemed to emphasize his point.

  “They’re not in great shape,” Grace pointed out as they walked up the steps to the front door. Two skinny men blocked their way. They wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight–not that you’d know it from their expressions.

  “What do you want?” one of them asked.

  “We’d like to go inside,” Sam said.

  Grace knew instantly that he’d said the wrong thing.

  “This is our house and you don’t live here,” the first speaker said. “Who are you here to see?”

  “We think a friend of ours may have come through here,” Grace said. “We’re hoping to talk to the people who live here and ask if anyone’s seen him.”

  The second man coughed but did not speak.

  “I knew it,” the first speaker said. “They don’t think we’re people at all–just obstacles to get in the way of what they want. Well, this is my house and I will defend it from all you sorry-ass folks who think you can come through any time of the day and night!” He put up his fists as if to fight.

  “Who’s come through?” Grace asked.

  “I ain’t saying.” He put his fists down and turned his back to her.

  Grace looked helplessly at Sam. “You got any nutri-bars?”

  “Half a dozen or so in my pack.” Sam unstrapped it and produced six nutri-bars. The skinny man turned halfway back in obvious interest.

  “Can we take a look for some nutri-bars?” Grace asked.

  The look of longing in his eyes was piteous, but he shook his head. “That ain’t enough for my family. We’ve got fifty living here.”

  “We can get fifty,” Grace looked meaningfully at Sam. “We passed a small grocery two blocks back.”

  “Sure thing,” Sam said. “I’ll be right back.”

  The man watched Sam go, and then turned to Grace. “Most people just try to beat their way in.”

  “It’s your house,” Grace said. It was a shame others didn’t see it that way. These people were probably used to being roughed up, and not just by other people in the same situation looking for shelter from the cold.

  Sam returned fifteen minutes later with a bag full of nutri-bars. He handed them over to the men, who stepped aside so they could pass, shouting over their shoulders, “We got dinner!”

  They had to wade through a sea of people responding to the dinner call to find the stairs to the basement. Then they had to wade through even more bodies to find the panel that hid the tunnel exit.

  “It comes out here,” Sam said, pointing to a bit of wall that looked no different from the rest. “Matt figured nobody would come looking for it here.”

  He had to be right about that. This was exactly the sort of place people pretended not to see.

  “How do we get in?” Grace asked.

  “We don’t,” Sam said. “It’s an escape tunnel. It can only be opened from the inside.”

  “Which means...” Grace took a deep breath and tried to think. “It means that Matt either escaped successfully or was captured by Medicorp personnel on the other side.”

  “No way,” Sam said. “He had bodyguards with him at all times, and they were trained and loyal. He must have escaped.”

  Grace scanned the room, looking for something to guide her. A clue–anything. Then she spotted it–two large, beefy men with vacant, wide-eyed stares, lying dead on the floor, stripped naked by the vultures.

  “Unless he was grabbed on this end.” Grace pointed to the dead men.

  They edged closer, past people feasting on the nutri-bars. A few stared at her with resentment and one challenged her right to be there. “This ain’t your house! Get out!” The woman had her hands on her hips. Dangling from one of her wrists was a silver watch.

  “Where did you get that?” Grace asked, pointing.

  “That’s mine!” she grabbed at it. “I found it fair and square. People keep barging in my house. I know it ain’t pretty but it’s mine.”

  “I know that,” Grace said. “The gentlemen at the door were kind enough to let us come in so we could talk to you.”

  “Gentlemen?” the woman repeated with less certainty. She looked down at her wrist and then at the men. “I didn’t kill them. This watch is mine, fair and square.”

  “I agree,” Grace said. “Who did kill them?”

  “They’re not men!” shouted a woman on the other side of the room. “They’re demons that come straight out of the wall!”

  “Shut up, Lucy!” said the woman with the watch. “Don’t know why we took you in with your damn superstitions.”

  “Who killed them?” Grace asked.

  “Some crazy men shouting, ‘Death to The Establishment,’ or some such nonsense. There was another guy with the dead ones, all fancied up in a suit and tie. Too bad they didn’t kill him instead. I bet he had a ton of good stuff on him.”

  “What did they do with him?” Sam demanded.

  The woman shrugged. “Took him.” She turned and wandered off, clearly done with their conversation.

  “There are lots of groups who would shout that,” Sam said. “It isn’t much to go on.”

  Grace put up a hand to ward off any more questions for a while. Finally, she said, “We know more than that. We know that whoever took him knew to expect him here. It’s not like the people who lived here took him–that would be a crime of opportunity. No, someone barged in here, disrupted these people’s home, and dragged Matt away after killing his bodyguards.”

  Grace turned to Sam. “Who else knows about this tunnel?”

  Sam shrugged. “Too many people, I think. Matt kept talking about digging a new tunnel because he had no idea who his father would have told. He never got around to it, obviously. Matt only told his secretary, his bodyguards, and the six of us on his top research team. He said he wanted us out if there was ever any trouble.”

  “I wonder if Jordan knew,” Grace said. “No one ever mentioned how he got out of Medicorp. They called Mr. Stanton Sr.’s death a result of a break-in, but there was no damage to the front doors, no one forcing themselves past the guards–as if they could.”

  “They don’t stop people going out,” Sam said.

  “That’s true, but didn’t they lock down the building as soon as Mr. Stanton died? There would have been an alarm, right?”

  Sam’s eyes widened in understanding. “Jordan might have known. In which case, this goose chase might not be as wild as you’d hoped.”

  Grace waved him off. “Let’s go see if those two by the door saw which way the kidnappers went.”

  * * *

  After a second round of nutri-bars, they managed to learn “the house crashers with the guns” took Matt due north and then disappeared into the sewers a couple of blocks away.

  “Sewer Rats,” Sam breathed as they began moving north.

  Rebels. Revolutionaries. People called them a lot of things, but in Kansas City, they were Sewer Rats.

  Rumors abounded about the Sewer Rats. Some said they bred real rats for their dinner. Some said they stole away children to raise as their own, like something evil out of a fairy tale. What did seem true was that they stole, plundered, and killed. There didn’t seem to be anything they were above doing if it served their goals.

  “They won’t hesitate to kill us,” Grace said.

  “Do we have any other choice?” Sam asked.

  Grace looked around. She spotted the four men she knew were tailing her since her apartment and another half dozen that she had either missed at the time or who had joined the game since then.

  She shook her head. “We’re going to have to go into the sewers.”

  “Do you think they’ll follow us down there?” Sam asked, lowering his voice to a whisper.

  “If they don’t, they’ll lose us. They may need more men to handle the Sewer Rats, though. It may be our best chance.”

  “That’s just great.”

  Grace ignored him, and they started north wit
hout another word.

  The entrance to the sewers was a manhole people tried to skirt, as best they could, with some success. When they noticed two people set on going down there, they gave it an even wider berth.

  “Do you think we’ll get ambushed as soon as we drop down there?” Sam asked.

  Grace patted her new disruptor and shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

  They pried up the cover and Grace started for the ladder.

  “That’s far enough!” came a deep, deadly voice from somewhere in the crowd around the manhole. She looked up just in time to see half a dozen Sewer Rats had disruptors trained on them.

  Chapter 29

  There was no need for the guns, Grace thought as the armed men pointed them in exactly the direction they had been going anyway. It would have been easier if they’d just waited until they got to the bottom. As it was, the only thing keeping her from using the manhole cover as a shield and taking out each and every one of them was the fact that they had a disruptor trained on Sam’s head. His death might simplify her life, but she would never forgive herself for it.

  The first thing she noticed as she slipped into the sewer was the putrid smells. The city always contained the smells of sweat, blood, body odor, pollution, and a myriad of others she filtered out in her daily business. Down here, though, it smelled like urine, feces, and disease.

  “That’s it, nice and slow,” came a voice from below.

  She dropped off the last rung of the ladder and splashed into something foul that came up past her ankles. From behind her, several people chortled with laughter.

  “Welcome to the River of Shit.” The speaker was a blond woman, her hair cropped so short that upon first sight she could have easily been mistaken for a man. But the voice, high-pitched and full of venom, was distinctly feminine.

  A tall man standing next to the speaker held up an electric lantern that gave off just enough light to show they were standing on a ledge above the slow-moving and aptly named River of Shit.

  “Who are you?” Grace asked.

  “Funny,” the blond woman said, “I was just going to ask you the same question. We don’t get too many visitors.”

  “I can’t imagine why.” Grace stepped onto the ledge opposite the blonde woman and her two cronies.

  The woman chuckled appreciatively. “We like it without visitors. Call me Blondie. My parents died and left me to come up with my own name so that’s the best I got.”

  “I’m Grace.”

  “That’s nice,” Blondie said. “I bet you got bloated rich parents with a name like that.”

  “If I had bloated rich parents, would I have come down here and stepped in a river of shit?”

  “I like you,” Blondie said. “It’s a shame I’ll probably have to kill you, but all the same... Hey! Get that other one down here already!”

  Sam was halfway down. He quickened his pace and landed in the River of Shit, to the added amusement of Blondie and her companions.

  “All right, you two, time to start talking. Who are you? And I don’t mean what are your names.”

  “We’re looking for a friend of ours,” Sam said.

  Graced could have kicked him. She would have if the crap on her shoes hadn’t cemented them to the ground. She shifted left and right until they came free.

  Sam had never been good at thinking on his feet. He preferred spending hours mulling over a problem, and was likely to shove his foot down his throat when put under pressure to come up with something in a moment’s notice.

  “This ain’t the place to come looking for friends,” Blondie said.

  “They could be Establishment,” the man to Blondie’s left said.

  Blondie’s head whipped around. “No one told you to talk, Ray. Shut up!”

  It was too late, though. They told Grace what she needed to know–the only reason they’d think someone from The Establishment would be down here looking for a friend is if they’d taken Matt Stanton.

  “All right, you two, enough talking. It’s time to march.” Blondie waved her disruptor in emphasis.

  Grace started in the direction indicated, but Blondie told her to stop.

  “You two can walk through the river,” Blondie told them, a sinister smile curling her lips.

  Grace’s hand itched to go to her sidearm, which they hadn’t taken yet, but she didn’t want to draw attention to this fact while three people had their weapons out and ready to fire in a half a second.

  “If you think you can draw fast enough to get to your weapon before I fry your brain, feel free,” Blondie said. “We don’t check weapons down here. It’s not very sportsmanlike, now is it?”

  She was crazy. Not that Grace was going to argue with her logic; she’d take her advantage, but the woman was crazy.

  As Grace trudged through the River of Shit, she tried to keep her mind off the sludge and disease seeping into her clothes and probably her bloodstream. She tried not to think about the things swimming in the muck and the things that moved through it and bumped against her legs.

  Instead, she tried to decide if she’d rather be unarmed and with a sane captor or armed with a crazy one. Blondie could decide to shoot her dead at any moment. She was a loose cannon. Ethan Lacklin, on the other hand, had at least been somewhat predictable. She knew he wouldn’t kill her until after she broke–if he could arrange it.

  She’d escaped from Ethan. Only time would tell how she’d do with Blondie. A part of her wasn’t even sure Blondie was her biggest problem. Those people who had been following her would not just let her disappear into a sewer. She imagined them falling into the river as they began their chase.

  Grace tried to count turns as they made their way through the sewage. She began to fill in a mental map, but her mental map was going in circles. Perhaps Blondie was doing that on purpose to try to trip them up if they escaped.

  Finally, they turned out of the sewage and into a completely dry corridor that seemed to take them under the rail. Every so often the rumble of a high-speed train raced overhead. The walls shook and debris flew in their faces, making Grace wonder how stable this all was.

  They didn’t actually meet any people until they reached a large, cavernous room at the end of that dry tunnel. Here, they found swarms of people, most of whom ignored their existence. Here and there, fires burned to provide heat. Overhead lights took care of the illumination, but made Grace wonder where and how these people slept.

  As they made their way through the crowd, Grace toyed with the idea of using one of them as a shield while she got a few shots off, but then she began to notice that everyone down here was packing a weapon–even a small boy no older than five. Unlike the vagrants above, these people looked fed, if not overfed, and they clearly had some money left over if they used it on weapons.

  Rebels. In one hundred and thirty years, Grace had never spent much time thinking about them unless she paid attention to a report about an attack or a bombing. She had always thought of them as basically vagrants, just meaner, but now she saw she had been entirely mistaken.

  These people were not the pitiful wretches of humanity, huddled together for warmth, ready to spring on the first dead man they saw to steal his scraggly coat. These people were laughing, talking, joking, cooking, and eating. They warmed themselves by the fire, had mock fights with one another, and gave way when they saw Blondie approach. They deferred to her and respected her, which wasn’t too dissimilar from the way gang leaders would claim sections of town, but the looks in these people’s eyes were of respect rather than fear. Some of them even shouted warm greetings to her. Two of the children ran up to her and tried to wrap themselves around her legs.

  “Not now!” Blondie ordered, though not unkindly, and the two scurried off.

  As they reached the other side of the large gathering room, Grace noticed a series of tunnels leading out. Those tunnels were lined with doorways and people kept darting in and out of them. Bedrooms? It was hard to know for sure.

  T
hey approached one of these tunnels, the only one protected by guards.

  “More?” one of them asked.

  “They came looking for a friend,” Blondie said. “I thought we should reunite them.”

  The guard smiled and stepped aside. Blondie marched them into a tunnel lined, not with doors, but with barred cells. There were people in a few of them, people Grace thought might even be rebels themselves. Was it possible they had some kind of system of law and order down here?

  Matt was ten cells down, looking much the worse for wear. His suit was torn, and he, too, seemed to have taken the walk through the muck. He had taken off his shoes and torn the bottom part of his pants, ostensibly in an attempt to get the crap off him. The shoes and rags were tossed unceremoniously in a heap in the corner.

  His eyes widened when he saw them, giving him the look of a caged animal, which, Grace supposed, he was.

  He looked like she had felt when Ethan had trapped her in a cell beneath the Coopersfield Plantation. She didn’t feel that way now, though. Perhaps she had developed too strong a sense of resignation she might die, or perhaps so many days of fearing death had numbed her, but the only thing she feared now was the wrong people getting their hands on Jordan and the aging technology.

  Which meant she needed to get Blondie talking so she could figure out exactly what kind of predicament they were in.

  “How much are you selling him for?” Grace asked, as though only mildly interested. The mildness wasn’t a stretch.

  “Who said we’re selling him?” Blondie asked.

  “Why else would you have him here?” Grace asked.

  “Decoration?” Blondie suggested. “He’s just so handsome.”

  “You went to a lot of trouble to get him,” Grace said. “You must have paid handsomely to find out where that tunnel came out.”

  Blondie broke into fits of laughter. The two men by her side also chuckled, but did not reach the mad heights Blondie did. Grace took a step back involuntarily, as Blondie continued to laugh so hard she clutched at her side.

  “We live underground, or didn’t you notice?” Blondie moved her hands in a circle to indicate the earth above them. “We know where all the tunnels are!”