Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles)

by S. M. Stelmack

  “I’m their hope, Linds. Their experiment. I found a way out, and now they’re trying to get me back down there. Into the lab, so to speak.” He seemed so lost and defeated. Lindsay felt a surge of hatred for the Moles, for what they’d done to him. She felt horrible asking him anything more, but she needed to know…and oh hell, he knew how to tell her to shut up.

  “Jack. What—what exactly are they?”

  He fell back against his chair. “Not human,” he replied, wincing even as he said it. “They’re intelligent, so maybe they were human once. Now they’re more like”—he seemed to struggle for words then shrugged—“they’re like nothing on the surface. Nothing I’ve ever heard of anywhere.”

  “Do they look human even? Like the way chimps look human?”

  “There’s nothing I can really compare them to,” he answered, rubbing his eyes. “They don’t stay in one form like normal creatures. They can compress or extend their bodies, lock their joints, switch between being stocky or lanky, a biped or a quadruped. Some are even born with more limbs, or maybe they grow them as they age. The things live in total darkness, yet they can alter the texture of their skin, squeeze themselves through tiny spaces. Whatever form they’re in, they’re always like something out of a fucking nightmare.”

  He grimaced. “Shit. This is why I never told anyone, Linds. Who the fuck would believe something like that, especially from someone like me?”

  She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘From someone like me’? You’re a professor. You’ve done groundbreaking research and published papers. Why wouldn’t you be believed?”

  “Look at me, Linds!” he snapped. His outburst drew looks from some of the other patrons, and gritting his teeth he lowered his voice. “Tell me what you’d think I was if you didn’t know me. Go on. Tell me.”

  She wasn’t standing for this. “Don’t you try that bullshit on me, Jack Cole. You want me to tell you that you’re a pathetic loser that no one in their right mind would give a dime to, much less five minutes of their attention. I’m telling you that what you need is—” she began tapping a list off on her fingers “—a shower, a hot meal and a long sleep. And I know a place a block away where you can get it all.” She reached for her purse.

  He didn’t move. “It’s too late for that, Linds,” he said quietly. “I’m going back down now. I’m going to get Seline.”

  Lindsay’s grip on her purse tightened. “You mean we’re going to get her back.”

  Jack shook his head. “Don’t even go there, Lindsay.”

  “So you’re going to waltz down there and rescue her by yourself?”

  His expression was grim. “This is my fault. All of it. So I’m going to damn well try.”

  With that he got up from the table. She had to stop him. “Wait till tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got to go. I’ll have Reggie get in touch with you if there’s any news.”

  “Jack, come home with me. Get cleaned up. I’ll cook you a meal and you can get a good night’s sleep. If you’re going down there, at least get yourself together first.”

  He looked at her, pain in his amber eyes. He was going to refuse her, even though she knew he didn’t want to. A different tactic occurred to her.

  “Fine. Go. Only don't think I won't follow if you don't come back, and you can bet Reggie will be with me. You're not the only one who knows the underground.”

  The pain in his eyes switched to anger. “You leave Reggie out of this.”

  “Why? You think he wouldn't work with me to get you back?”

  “Because it would be suicide! Reggie feels guilty over something that happened years ago between us. He doesn’t need but he does, and he doesn't need you talking him into something stupid.”

  “You two were friends before your capture?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re friends now?”

  “Of course we are. So what?”

  She stood. She had to make him see right now, because she knew that if he walked out the door without her, she would’ve lost him, and if the fear of the past two days were any indication, it would be like losing her family all over again. “The Moles messed with your mind, not with mine, not with Reggie’s. We've still got the real Jack. We know who you are better than you do. That’s why you asked me about our time in the tunnels, because you know I know the truth about you. That’s why Reggie is in your life, because he knows who you really are, too. And because he knows who you are, he's not going to abandon you any more than I will.”

  She and Jack were as close together as two people could be without touching. Another inch and their chests would be touching, another two and she could hold his hand, another three and they’d be kissing. If her words didn’t work, she’d move onto doing that, right here in public. She didn’t care. “If you think you can walk out that door alone, Jack, then you really are deluded, because Reggie and me have a claim on you that beats anything those Moles have. We’re in you as deep as those tunnels are. You might want to do this alone but you can’t.”

  She let out a long breath. She was done, though she wasn’t sure she’d gotten through. His body had gone still during her speech and his expression was flat. It was his move and she could stand here until he made it.

  When he did, when he whispered his answer, it was a good thing she’d said all she’d wanted to because she was suddenly too choked to have said anything.

  “Take me home, Linds. I can’t be alone, anymore.”

  Jack watched the Mole through the bars of his cage. There was not enough space to comfortably sit, lie or stand, so over time he’d adjusted to a hunched crouch.

  It approached, its reeking metallic scent no longer bothering him, and held out a squealing rat in its claw. It slid the animal between the bars. Wordlessly, Jack accepted it.

  The vermin struggled to sink its incisors into his hand. Jack tightened his grip and crushed the life from it, blood seeping between his fingers. He skinned it with his teeth and nails, then began to eat.

  “What day is it?” came the Mole’s voice, cracking and cold as the ice of the Hudson.

  Jack gulped down a lump of stringy flesh, gore hanging from his ragged beard. “I don’t know,” he answered hoarsely.

  “How did you get here?”

  Jack shuffled in the cage. More than one question was never good. “I…I’m not sure. I followed someone. I don’t know.”

  “What is your name?”

  He set aside the remains of the rat. Questions made his mind hurt too much to eat.

  “What is your name?” the keeper repeated. It wasn’t going to wait much longer for a reply.

  “Jack.”

  “Wrong.”

  Jack rested his head against the bars, his face screwed up in pained concentration.

  “What is your name?”

  “Jack…my name is Jack.”

  His keeper reached forward with a key, undoing cage’s padlock. Swinging open the door, it took Jack firmly by the arm, pulling him forward. He shuffled out, remaining in his ape-like posture.

  The first time he’d been let out he’d tried to run. That only made things much, much worse. They’d thrown him in the pit till his feet had swollen, his skin had peeled, his wounds had run with pus. In the end he’d been screaming, clawing at the slimy walls, weeping to be let out. Only then had they hauled him up, buckled him down, and fed something into his veins that had allowed him to survive.

  Now he obediently loped after the Mole, down the black corridors where even his razor-sharp night sight failed. It didn’t matter. He knew all too well where he was going. He’d been through this countless times. It was inevitable, and anything was better than the water pit. Even this.

  Pushed onward he fumbled till his fingers met the cold metal of the gurney. His heartbeat quickened, his breath came in ragged gulps.

  “Get up,” hissed the voice.

  His body began to shake, even as he did as he was told. He was strapped down, thick leather bands tight
around his wrists, ankles and chest. He waited, trying to slow his gasping breaths. Still a whimper escaped and his lips trembled.

  A rubberized cord was tightened painfully around his arm, a needle was stabbed in, then withdrawn. There was a dab of antiseptic, then again his keeper hovered close.

  “What is your name?”

  He’d tried lying before, tried guessing what they wanted to hear. It never worked. The injection dropped him fast into a fevered delirium, robbing him of the ability to invent anything believable.

  He could feel his body warming, a toxic cloud spreading over the folds of his brain, and the darkness before his eyes swirled with forms and faces that couldn’t possibly be there.

  “Jack…” he whispered.

  There was a pause, then the sharp metal teeth of a clamp bit down on his right nipple. He gritted his teeth, fighting against the fear and pain, but tears began to stream from his eyes as more clamps were attached to his naked body. His other nipple. The skin between his fingers. His earlobes. His testicles.

  “Open your mouth.”

  His head ached with fever as he complied, and a thick rubber mouth guard was shoved inside and strapped behind his head.

  Then the shocks began.

  His body lurched and twisted at his restraints, the metal bars of the gurney rattling as he slammed his body against them. Shock. Rest. Minutes maybe, or perhaps seconds. Shock. Repeat. Again and again till his muscles twitched spasmodically.

  After a time he lost what could have been called consciousness, and when he regained it, he was on the floor. His body was curled into a trembling ball, choked sobs bubbled out and his mind still sizzled in poisons.

  “What is your name?”

  It took him a minute to make his mouth work, to utter anything more than a pitiful gibbering through his cracked lips. “I…I…I don’t know.”

  There was a long pause. “Good,” came the emotionless reply. “Now we can begin to find the answers to these questions together.”

  His arms were gripped and he was dragged back to his cage. Inside he coiled himself up, his naked body thin and shaking, long filthy hair obscuring his sunken face. His name was the last thing that could be taken from him. The last mark on an otherwise blank slate. His last crumbling hold on identity—except for her.

  His bony fingers curled around the thin steel bars, long blackened nails biting into his palms.

  Tasha, he whispered to himself. Her name is Tasha.

  * * *

  He woke with a scream still on his lips. All was quiet in the darkened room, and moaning, he pressed himself flat against the white sheets on Lindsay’s bed, taking deep breaths to calm his pounding heart. He hoped to God he’d gotten away with it as he had in Sumptown. For a moment all was quiet and he began to relax.

  “Jack?” came her voice from outside the bedroom door.

  Dammit. “I’m okay…just a dream,” he called, trying to keep his voice even. The bedroom door cracked open. Of course. Had he really thought she would go away? Despite what he’d told her earlier in the coffee shop, there was a huge difference between not wanting to be alone and knowing how to be with others.

  “I brought you some water,” Lindsay said.

  He sighed. Might as well as let her in because there was no keeping her out. “Sure.”

  The door swung fully open, and Lindsay appeared with a large glass of water in her hand.

  He sat up in bed, taking it from her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she replied and watched as he downed it.

  He handed the empty glass back to her. Rather than leaving, she seated herself beside him, her form gently illuminated by the moonlight filtering through the window. When he’d gone to bed she was fully clothed. Now she was in a thin, silky nightie that glided over breasts and behind.

  Her lips curved. “Guess even a good bed doesn’t always help.”

  Not without a good woman in it. He tugged his gaze away from her front and it collided with the bright mass of her hair. He tried to focus. “I told you to let me take the couch again.”

  “How is it that you could sleep down in Sumptown, and not here?”

  “I didn’t. You never woke up, that’s all.”

  She leaned back on one hand, causing her body to curve so nicely before him, presenting a place on her hip where his hand would fit perfectly. “Sounds like you don’t get much rest.”

  Her hair swept about her shoulders and his fingers twitched to reach for it. “Insomnia becomes a lifestyle after a while,” he said.

  “There are cures for it, you know.”

  His cock hardened in agreement. He needed her in bed or out of the room. Her being on the bed was killing him. “If you say so.”

  She gave a soft growl of annoyance. “I know so.”

  He gave in. He touched her hair. It was meant to be a quick, one-time gesture, but his hand slipped through her hair again and again, lifted the strands upward until the moonlight caught them, then filtered them through his fingers. Lindsay tilted her head back, sinking into the simple caress, and Jack automatically cupped his hand around her neck to give support. His thumb began gently stroking the softness of her throat. She made a low purring noise.

  Too far. Don’t make this painful.

  “Linds—” he whispered. Her palm passed over his mouth in a gentle request for silence, then traveled downward past his throat and across his chest.

  “Linds,” he repeated uncertainly. “What are you doing…?”

  Her lips moved dangerously close to his own. “What would you like me to do?”

  Jack could not have her this close and not do something. “Stop me,” he said, then curling his fingers back into her hair he closed the gap between them.

  The kiss was hard. Vital. And as it deepened Jack was spurred by a raw need that sent his heart racing with fear as much as lust. Again, he tried to pull back. She followed him, leaning her body over his, the soft weight of her breasts upon his chest.

  “Don’t run from me, Jack,” she whispered into his mouth.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, Linds.”

  “You won’t. I want you, Jack. I want you.”

  His fingers tightened in her hair, his other hand moving over the curve of her breast, and not gently.

  His mouth still on hers he pushed her onto her back, then grabbing hold of her nightgown, he pulled it up, breaking the kiss only long enough to bring it over her head. It caught around her wrists, and straddling her Jack looked down. Her arms were bound over her head, her chest heaving, breasts bare and nipples hard.

  She looked up at him in the darkness, trusting, wanting, begging him to give into his carnal instincts. He felt the rise of the caged animal inside him, the dirty inhuman thing that tore at flesh. In an instant he was off her, away from the bed, slamming his hands against the wall and leaning there, eyes shut tight.

  Silence.

  “Jack…”

  “I can’t, Linds…I can’t undo what they did. I won’t hurt you. Not you.”

  He stood there, facing the wall, teeth clenched in frustration. In humiliation.

  He heard her slide from the bed. Go, Linds. Go!

  But when had she ever listened to him? Her arms slid around him, and she pressed her naked torso against his toughened back, her head resting against his shoulder blade.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “Back when we were teenagers, did you know that I had a huge crush on you?”

  He remembered her smiling up at him as he came up alongside her locker. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “Or, for that matter, that practically all eight hundred girls in the school did?”

  He felt the hard lump inside him ease. He turned inside her arms until he was facing her, and there didn’t seem anything for it, except to let his own arms come around her, too. His back was against the wall, and she leaned against him, the two of them falling into the classic pose of smitten teenagers. “No. I didn’t know about the eight hundred, either. If I had, it wou
ld’ve made dating a lot easier.”

  She made a noise. “If you’re not picky.”

  His arms tightened around her. “Yeah, but I was. That’s why I didn’t know about the other eight hundred. I only had eyes for you.”

  Her eyes widened and then he lost sight of them as she pressed her cheek against his chest. “That’s something the old Jack would say.”

  He thumb-stroked her spine. “I’m not sure that he exists anymore, Linds. Sometimes I don’t know if he ever did.”

  She pushed away from him, the fierceness of her move belied by her huge grin. “That I can prove beyond a doubt.” Naked, she ran to her walk-in closet and with a thump and a crash, hauled out a storage tub. “Come. Look.”

  He came over as she stripped the lid off. “Can you see? Do you want a light?”

  He shook his head in answer to her questions and in disbelief at what he saw. A box filled with him. Letters and postcards from him, framed pictures of them together and a rock the size of a cabbage.

  “The atacamite. You kept this?” He crouched down and touched its roughness.

  She grinned. "For my fifteenth birthday. . You remember?"

  “Yeah. I’d found it down in the tunnels. Some hole in a wall. It was shoved way back on this ledge, and I don’t even know why I hauled it out. When I did, I realized that it wasn’t just any old rock—”

  “Oh no,” Lindsay said and lifted it out, kneeling to set it on her lap. “Not just any old rock would do for me.”

  “It wasn’t. It had bright green crystals growing on it…that are normally only found in the driest deserts. I remember wondering how it got there. It wasn’t all that valuable money-wise, those crystals grow in Arizona—”

  “You telling me that I’ve been packing around a worthless rock?”

  “—so why go to all the trouble of storing it away? That was the only thing down there in the hole, I checked all—” Jack stopped. She hadn’t forgotten him. Ever. This woman with all her compulsion for things to be neat and complete, had packed away a memory of him, no matter that it was heavy and awkward and probably dirty. “Why would you do this? Why keep all this when you wouldn’t even keep in touch with me?”