Growth

by Jeff Jacobson

  Purcell nodded. “Your call. I’m old enough to know that you never mess with a mama bear.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Sandy didn’t bother waiting, and started down; she had her own flashlight and firearm and didn’t see the point. She carried the shotgun in her left hand and used her right on the cool iron rungs. The temperature dropped at least fifteen degrees as she descended beneath the surface of the street and even before she reached the bottom and saw anything, she knew in her heart that they had found everyone.

  It still didn’t prepare her for the reality of actually seeing the twisted knots of bodies, stretching away as far as her flashlight could throw the beam. The brick sewer had been built in the shape of a tube, with curving walls and a trough running along the center of the bottom. She turned in a slow circle, flicking the flashlight beam over the small mountains of bodies, and saw with horror that she was in the middle of a junction, same as the intersection above. People were strewn throughout all four of the huge pipes. The sewer tunnels followed the streets, and Sandy realized that it would take her hours to search through the hundreds of bodies.

  They weren’t all clustered together in one huge mass. Instead, ten or twelve people had curled tightly together, gathered in curious clumps, then four or five feet farther along, there was another mound of bodies. Sometimes a few of the heaps would be collected along the shallow trench that ran along the bottom, then several mounds would coalesce on one side before they drifted back to the other side. Sometimes it appeared that a few single bodies had laid down between the mounds, as if they were connecting one circle of bodies to the next. The whole tableau could almost be seen as a vine of some sort, growing along from one flower to another, culminating in a tight ring of clusters that encircled the sewer junction.

  Sandy stood in the middle of this and felt despair crash over her shoulders like a tsunami. She would never find her son, not among all these bodies, down here in the dark. Her hands shook and she almost went to her knees.

  Purcell climbed down, SPAS-15 strapped to his back, a Maglite duct-taped over the barrel. He splashed the light around and muttered, “Holy fuck,” under his breath. “Believe I’m gonna be writing a letter to the editor about this.”

  Charlie was next. He had on a backpack filled with extra ammo and magazines for the AA-12s. Edgar and Axel followed. Each had his flashlight taped to his shotgun and each was struck speechless. Edgar didn’t move far from the ladder; he looked like he was about ready to climb back up and get the hell out of town.

  Purcell said, “Take a good look around, boys. This shit is why we’re going organic.”

  Charlie said, “We’ll never find him. You know that, right? Not with . . .” He flung a hand to indicate the abomination of all the bodies, locked together in the gloom.

  Edgar nodded vigorously, said, “Come on. If he’s down here, he’s done. Finished. No chance. I don’t want to die for somebody that’s already dead.”

  Sandy got close, stabbed a finger into his chest. “Go then. Run.”

  “Hang on, hang on,” Purcell said. “Let’s keep our heads here. What we need is a plan. I think we should split up. Cover more ground. Quicker.”

  “We don’t even know what the kid looks like,” Charlie pointed out.

  “His name is Kevin,” Sandy said. “And splitting up is a bad idea. We don’t know enough about these things. Just because we haven’t seen them move doesn’t mean they won’t. We should stick together, take our time, and do a methodical search. We get separated down here, there’s no telling what could happen.”

  “I ain’t arguing with you,” Purcell said. “You got a point. But here’s the thing.” He looked up the ladder at the fading circle of light. “Sun’s going down. You said yourself you didn’t think these things like sunlight. What happens when it’s night out there?”

  Sandy didn’t have an answer.

  “So let’s split up,” Purcell said. “Cover as much ground as we can, try and find him, okay?”

  “We still don’t know what the hell he looks like,” Charlie complained again, but Sandy was already unbuttoning her chest pocket. She pulled out a square photo that she’d run through the laminating machine at the office, securing it in plastic. Kevin’s face smiled awkwardly out of his school photograph. It was clear that she didn’t like folks knowing that she carried it with her on duty.

  The Fitzgimmons passed it around. Purcell asked, “What was he wearing?”

  Sandy closed her eyes, tried to remember. It felt so long ago. “Shorts. Blue gym shoes. Cheap knockoffs, all I could afford. T-shirt.”

  “What color?” Purcell asked.

  Sandy let her breath out slow and didn’t open her eyes. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know. Black? I don’t remember.”

  “Shit,” Charlie said.

  “Well, let’s make the best of what we’ve got,” Purcell said. “Daylight’s wastin’. Charlie, you take that branch.” He pointed south, down along Fifth Street. “Ed, you and Axe take that one.” He indicated the northern tunnel, opposite of Charlie. “I’ll head this way.” His flashlight swept east, under Main Street. “Chief, you check down that way.”

  Purcell said, “You see anything, you sing out. Take your time, don’t rush, and go as far as you can in fifteen minutes. At the end of fifteen minutes, you start back, you got that?” His boys nodded.

  He looked at Sandy. “I’m sorry, but that’s all we can give you. Fifteen minutes, we haven’t found him, that’s a goddamn shame, but my boys are alive, and I intend to keep them that way.”

  “I understand,” Sandy said in a small voice.

  “Gonna do my best to keep you in the land of the living too, Chief,” Purcell said. “Okay then. Check your watches. See you back here soon. Good luck.”

  Sandy found it was possible to walk along on the lower edge of the curved walls and avoid stepping on the bodies. She would stop at each cluster, sometimes leaning over it, sometimes able to circle it completely, looking for any trace of her son. Her little flashlight had a strong beam, but it was small, made for hanging from her belt, and each step took her farther and farther into absolute darkness.

  She didn’t want to check her watch, didn’t want to know how much time had passed. The beam caught a flash of something familiar. Not anything connected to her son, but it still triggered a pang of recognition. She swept the flashlight back over the tangle of arms and legs, moving slower this time.

  There. A hand. Long fingernails, elaborately painted with red, white, and blue stars and stripes. The beam of light found the woman’s face and revealed eyes wide and staring. Sandy’s hand flew to her mask and she turned away, squeezing her eyes tight.

  It was Liz.

  Sandy tried to take a breath, struggled with the gas mask. She had a powerful urge to rip it off and take a deep gasp, sucking in as much of the air in the sewer as she could. As she struggled to calm down, she heard a yell back down the tunnel.

  It was Axel.

  Oh God. Had they found Kevin?

  Sandy started to run. She realized she was calling Kevin’s name, over and over, in a kind of chanting mantra as she ran. She leapt over splayed bodies and splashed through the muck at the bottom of the trough. Soon she was back at the junction, trying to remember which way Axel and Edgar had gone. Straight ahead, she saw Purcell’s flashlight sweeping back and forth as he came back down his tunnel.

  To her left, she saw a distant light. That was Charlie. Axel and Edgar were to the right, in the southern tunnel. It didn’t take long to reach the two brothers. Edgar stood over one of the clusters, while Axel was sitting on the ledge farther along, his feet in the trough. The search had taken its toll on them. They looked as if they’d just toured an abattoir on their hands and knees and had been asked to do it again.

  “There,” Edgar said simply, his voice flat, pointing at the mound of bodies.

  Sandy pulled up, panting, trying to see through her mask that was suddenly fogging up. It must have been because she
had been running. She forced herself to slow her breathing, but it was difficult with her heart thumping like a machine gun. She closed her eyes, focused on inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.

  For a second, she thought it was Kevin. Same dark hair. Same skinny build.

  Wrong shoes.

  She looked closer. It wasn’t him. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.

  Purcell and Charlie splashed up behind her. “Well?” Purcell said, sounding panicked.

  Sandy couldn’t speak. She could only shake her head.

  Purcell aimed his flashlight at the boy. “You sure?”

  Sandy finally managed, “Yes. It’s not him.”

  Purcell took a deep breath himself. “Well, that’s . . . that’s good, I suppose.” He pointed his shotgun, shining his light back down the tunnel. “Let’s see, we have, five minutes left. I think we should—”

  Axel cried out and jerked his legs out of the trough and scrabbled up the side of the sewer. There was a hand holding tight to his left ankle. An arm was connected to the hand, but up where the shoulder should have been part of a torso, there was only a mess of gray tendrils sprouting from around the white bone ball joint.

  Axel shook his foot, but the hand refused to let go. He brought his AA-12 shotgun over his shoulder, rested the end of the barrel on the severed limb’s wrist, and squeezed the trigger. Three blasts, so close together they might have been a single explosive sneeze, vaporized the arm in an explosion of blood and viscous, gray slime.

  The fingers did not relent and clutched his cowboy boot with a tenacity that enraged Axel. He scraped them off with his other boot and fired again, disintegrating the flesh, blowing the knucklebones into the trough. The sound of the shotgun blasts echoed down the tunnels and for a moment, silence reigned.

  “You good?” Purcell asked.

  “Fuckers!” Axel shouted.

  “Okay,” Purcell said. “I think—”

  “Shhh.” Edgar put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”

  Purcell and Charlie turned their flashlights back down the tunnel. For a moment, all they could hear was their own rasping breathing inside the gas masks. Then, way, way down the tunnel, a splash. Something heavy. More splashing. It got louder. Then a whole cascade of wet slapping, almost like bare footsteps.

  “Whoever it is, there’s more than one of ’em,” Charlie whispered.

  “Maybe it’s somebody coming to help. National Guard, somebody like that,” Axel said.

  “Might be more boys from Allagro,” Purcell said.

  “Great,” Axel said. “Let them clean up their mess.”

  Sandy shook her head. “We’re part of the mess. They’ll kill us all.”

  Something emerged into the very edge of their lights, then backed away into the darkness. Whatever it was, it was down low, as if someone had been crawling along on their hands and knees.

  “I wanna try something,” Purcell said. “Point your lights at the floor for a sec.”

  Sandy said, “I’d rather keep an eye on whatever is down there.”

  “We will. Just for a quick second. Want to see if I can draw it any closer. Let’s get a better idea of what we’re dealing with here.”

  One by one, they all aimed their flashlights at the trough. Sandy was last. She stared into the blackness, straining to hear whatever was down the tunnel. She finally couldn’t take it anymore and brought her light back up. A yelp burst out of her before she could stop herself.

  The Fitzgimmons whipped their lights up.

  The tunnel was alive with crawling tendrils. Human limbs had been stretched out along each tendril, sprouting from each side in random arrangements, like crumbling teeth in a rotten mouth. Pale, bare legs slapped through the shallow trench, arms reached out and clutched at the wet bricks. There were too many tendrils to count. They skittered and scrabbled and clawed over each other, undulating over the mounds of inert bodies, sometimes crawling up the sides of the sewer pipe.

  Axel was the first to let loose, unloading his clip in less than three seconds. Charlie and Edgar were next, unleashing a blizzard of lead. Purcell and Sandy started shooting as well. An unholy firestorm of destruction exploded down the tunnel.

  The arms and legs shattered in bloodless spatters of meat and gray muck.

  The shooting died down and everybody reloaded. The trough and bottom of the sloping walls were littered with empty shotgun shells. Blue gun smoke hung around them in a thick haze.

  The tendrils did not stop. They sloughed off the ruined limbs, leaving them behind like a plant sheds dead leaves. Fresh, undamaged arms and legs continued to propel the tendrils forward, surging ahead in a clumsy, hungry motion.

  “Go,” Purcell said. “Go!”

  Nobody argued; they turned and ran. Edgar and Axel charged through the sewer, side by side, Sandy on their heels, followed by Charlie and Purcell. They sprinted through the darkness, jumping over mounds of bodies, flashlight beams bouncing off the curved walls.

  Axel stepped on the kneecap of one of the bodies stretched between the mounds. The sudden weight twisted the vulnerable joint, pitching Axel sideways into the wall. He rolled into a mound, flailing and kicking. Sandy grabbed the back of his jeans and yanked him upright. Charlie crashed into her and they all stumbled.

  Purcell fired a few rounds back down the tunnel behind them for the hell of it.

  Edgar ran on ahead, panic fueling his flight. He looked back to make sure that everyone was following, and when he turned back around, his head smacked into low concrete. His feet kept going and he flopped flat on his back in the center of the trough. Sandy and Axel reached him and Sandy jerked his head out of the filthy water.

  Blood ran from a gash in his forehead, spilling down between the two circular lenses of the mask. He was out cold, limp as an abandoned marionette. Axel and Charlie lifted him up and they turned to see what lay ahead.

  The sewer grew smaller here; the larger pipe collapsed down into a pipe only four feet in diameter. Purcell pulled a road flare from Charlie’s backpack and struck the tip. Everybody flinched from the burst of sizzling light. “Might slow ’em down,” Purcell said, and tossed it into the center of the closest mound behind them.

  Sandy went first. At least the mounds of bodies had tapered off and stopped, leaving the pipe clear. She could walk through the pipe fairly quickly, keeping her head down and back hunched. Charlie and Axel had to bend almost in half at the waist; they were dragging Edgar anyway, so it didn’t matter as much. The flare sent their running shadows flickering before them like black flames.

  Sandy saw something coming up, some irregularity in the top of the tunnel. She got closer and saw that it was another pipe, leading up to a new manhole. She yelled, “Here!” and climbed up. She reached the cover and tried to lift it. It was too heavy. She went back down, saying, “I can’t budge it.” Charlie pushed her out of the way and clambered up. They heard him grunt and a sliver of faint light spilled down around him. He came back down and together with Axel, they lifted Edgar up the vertical conduit.

  Sandy followed them and crawled out to a night sky and pavement still warm from the heat of the day. She saw that they had emerged three blocks south on Fifth Street, near the high school. The sun was only a red glimmer on the horizon. The streetlights along Main Street were on. Down here, it was all residential houses, and there were no lights. Night was gathering in the deepening shadows, spreading like ink.

  Edgar moaned and tried to sit up. He rolled onto his hands and knees and began to retch.

  “Shit,” Charlie said. “Don’t have any choice now.” He ripped Edgar’s mask off. Vomit spilled out it, dripping off Edgar’s nose and chin. He sucked in a ragged breath and vomited again.

  Purcell jerked his legs out of the manhole and Axel helped slide the cover back into place. It settled with a loud thunk.

  Edgar sat back and spat. “Dizzy,” he said.

  “You’ve probably got a concussion,
” Sandy said.

  “Can you walk?” Purcell asked. “We gotta get back to the truck.”

  Sandy helped Edgar to stand. He looked a little unsteady, but gave them a thumbs-up.

  “We’ll take it slow, but we need to get moving,” Purcell said.

  They started back up Fifth Street. Sandy said, “Let’s cut down Franklin. I don’t want to get any closer to that damn corn than we need to.”

  Purcell was about to say something when he suddenly stopped short and aimed his shotgun at one of the cars parked along the street. He squatted, sweeping the light back and forth under the car. “Huh. Thought I heard something.”

  Then they all heard it. The scraping of bare feet and hands over pavement. The sounds came from all around them, creeping through the shadows, slithering through dark yards, crawling through bushes, squirming under vehicles.

  Sandy spun, and they found themselves forming a tight circle in the middle of the street, shoulder to shoulder, trying to watch everywhere at once.

  They were surrounded.

  Charlie had two flares left. He stuck them in his back pocket, then shrugged off his backpack and gave it to Axel. “I’m going for the truck.” He racked the bolt back on his AA-12, making sure there was a shell in the breech. “Get him,” he pointed at Edgar, standing but still swaying, “someplace where you can hole up for a bit.”

  Purcell reached out and patted Charlie’s shoulder. Father and son shared a look for a moment. Charlie said, “You’re gonna hear some shooting. Don’t sweat it.” He sparked one of the flares and took off running, raising the flare over his head with his left and holding the shotgun by the pistol grip with his right.

  A dozen tendrils rippled across the street and followed. More of them, maybe a hundred, seethed out of the darkness and came at them. Purcell and Axel opened up, blasting a hole in the mass of creatures. They pulled Edgar along, struggling to run, heading south on Fifth Street.

  Sandy had a flash. “There!” She pointed at a hulking shape that rose above the houses, silhouetted against the stars. “The water tower! These things, they can’t climb. We’ll get up there and wait for Charlie.”