Dead Set: A Novel

by Richard Kadrey

  Emmett didn’t say anything about the record. It could still be in the shop somewhere. She had to know if it was there, and if it was, she had to get it, whatever it might cost.

  Later, her mother came in and put a hand on Zoe’s forehead. Zoe kept her eyes shut and her breathing shallow and regular, pretending to be asleep. After a couple of minutes, her mother left. Zoe heard her in the kitchen. Then she was in the bathroom, where Zoe heard running water and her mother brushing her teeth. Finally, her mother went to her bedroom and the apartment became quiet. Zoe looked at the alarm clock by her bed. It was just after eleven. Another hour, she thought. Just to make sure Mom is asleep.

  When midnight finally came, she slipped out of bed, trying to keep her mattress springs from squeaking. Padding around her room in bare feet, she gathered up the things she’d need. She opened the window and set an old pair of surplus-store boots on the fire escape. Then she changed into the Runaways T-shirt Joan Jett had given her father back in the day. She pulled on her lucky black hoodie, the one with cat ears on the hood. She slipped out the window and closed it behind her thinking, I know this is crazy, but what else is there left to do?

  She started up the fire escape when she realized she’d forgotten something. She opened the window just enough to squeeze through and grabbed her father’s straight razor from where she’d kicked it under the bed to keep her mother from seeing it. She closed the window and ran up to the roof.

  There, she sat on the gravel and pulled on her boots under the moon’s wasted, colorless light. Something moved in her peripheral vision. Turning, she saw her vodka-soaked T-shirt hanging where she’d left it. She made a mental note to bring it down when she got back.

  As Zoe climbed down the ladder she was hit with a sense of fear and sadness so deep that it made her stomach cramp. Doing what she was doing, going where she was going secretly in the middle of the night, it felt like she was crossing a border that she’d never be able to uncross and that she might not ever find her way home again.

  She shook her head to clear it. At the bottom of the fire escape, she pushed the final collapsible section all the way down just like she’d seen in a hundred TV shows, climbed to the bottom, and jumped the last few feet. The night air was cool, and because it might disguise her, she pulled her hood up.

  The walk to Emmett’s was long and dreary. She wondered at herself now, at how she could have found previous walks to the shop so pleasant and magical. The path wound through grubby streets full of ugly people and buildings and stores that all looked like they were about to collapse.

  A few men spoke to her as she walked. They stepped out from the doorways and alleys of dim, unreal buildings. Some of the silhouettes grabbed their crotches and made kissing sounds as she went past.

  A shadow man, tall and wide, stepped out from behind a tree just as Zoe was passing. One of his big hands gripped her shoulder, then slid down her shirt and over her breast. She didn’t even think about it. The straight razor was out. Her arm moved and the blade sliced deeply into the shadow man’s wrist.

  He staggered back. “You bitch! You little bitch. I’ll kill you,” he yelled, but he stayed where he was. Zoe kept walking, trying to look brave. She kept the razor tucked in her hand for another block.

  The light was still on in the record store. She ran across the street and hid in the shadows next to an old Dumpster. Did Emmett always work this late? No wonder he likes to collect girls’ things. If he spends all his time in that dreary store, he really doesn’t have a life.

  Zoe trembled a little in the cool San Francisco dark. She looked down at her hands. She was still holding the razor, and it was open. There was a thin streak like India ink across the edge of the blade that she knew was the shadow man’s blood. An old newspaper lay nearby. She took a couple of pages and wiped off the blade, refusing to think about how the blood had gotten on the razor. Still, it felt like one more step away from a safe life she’d never have again.

  For a moment Zoe wondered if this might all be some awful fever dream. Maybe she was really at home in her bed in the old house. Her father and mother would have breakfast with her before she went to her old, familiar school, where she’d tell Julie and Laura about this crazy nightmare where she went to a carnival with her father’s ghost, gave trinkets to an old pervert, and slashed a mugger like Elektra: Assassin. It was a comforting thought, but the night wind gusted through her, making her shiver, and she knew this was all real.

  After she’d spent an hour standing in the cold, the lights went off in Emmett’s shop. He came out the front door with a stack of records under one arm. Zoe squinted, but couldn’t tell if they were regular records or the special ones.

  Emmett walked to the corner and stood under the traffic light. It turned from red to green. The pedestrian sign said WALK, but Emmett didn’t cross. He turned his head, looking up and down the street. Apparently satisfied that no one was around, he stepped off the curb. Instead of crossing the street, he crouched by the corner. Zoe crept forward and stood on her toes to see what he was doing. When Emmett stood up he was holding a sewer grate in one hand and the records in the other. To Zoe’s amazement, he seemed to be shrinking. No. He was climbing into the sewer. A second later, she heard a dull clank as the metal grate dropped back into place.

  Zoe ran from the shadows. At the corner there was no sign that the grate had been moved. She went to Emmett’s shop and looked in through the dirty window. Do I break in? she wondered. What if there’s an alarm? I should have brought a flashlight. How am I supposed to find Dad’s record in the dark, if it’s even in there? If Emmett took the record with him and I waste time inside, it won’t matter. He’ll be too far away for me to follow.

  She wanted desperately to go into the shop. It was safe and dark and known. The idea of following Emmett into some unknown underground labyrinth terrified her. But there was this terrible feeling in the back of her mind, a feeling that told her that her father’s disc wasn’t in the shop. That out of spite or something worse Emmett had carried it underground, and that if she didn’t go after him soon, her father would be lost forever. She would have failed him twice.

  Zoe went to the corner and knelt down to get a good grip on the grate. She pulled, but it didn’t budge. She knelt down and pulled again. Nothing. Zoe remembered Emmett’s grip on her arm and the surprising strength with which he’d held her. She sat down in the street and braced her feet against the curb. She wasn’t going to get this close to Emmett and her father and lose them both.

  With both hands, she grabbed the far edge of the grate and pulled. The metal was wet and slimy, hard to hold on to. Finally, she felt the grate rise slowly away from the street. When it was a little more than halfway up, she let go and it fell backward toward her, leaving the sewer open.

  She leaned her head into the opening. The smell reminded her of the time she and some friends had sneaked into the house where old Mrs. Asher had died and no one had found her for a week. Zoe pulled up the edge of her hoodie, covering her nose and mouth. Just inside the opening, she could see steel rungs, like a ladder, set into the concrete.

  She turned herself quickly into position and lowered a foot into the opening. When one foot touched a rung, she stepped down and pulled her arms inside. Below street level, she was instantly swallowed by impenetrable darkness and a death-house reek of dead old women.

  Zoe held her breath and started down.

  Seven

  At the bottom of the ladder the ground was a soft and yielding soup of slippery muck. It compressed beneath her, as if she were walking on damp leaves. No matter how hard Zoe tried, however, she couldn’t pretend that what she was walking on was anything but the collective filth and waste of the city that loomed twenty feet over her head.

  The damp soaked through her sneakers and socks, but she kept walking, breathing through her mouth, afraid she might throw up. She moved quietly, carefully, trying not to splash or make any noise. She kept a hand on the wall, feeling her way along as h
er eyes adjusted to the dark.

  Even when she grew accustomed to the gloom, Zoe couldn’t see much, just the vague outlines of the tunnel’s edges where concrete sections were joined and metal service doors dripping with a colorless fungus that hung in ragged strands like Spanish moss.

  Every now and then she’d pass under a manhole or a street grate and shafts of feeble light shone down to her. Then she would be submerged again in the dark, and each time it was like a black wave pulling her down to the bottom of the ocean.

  She followed Emmett by listening for him. He was well ahead of her, and because he thought he was alone, he didn’t make any effort to be quiet. He splashed casually through the black sewer muck, singing as he went. His voice echoed down the concrete tunnels, sounding to Zoe like a ghost choir. The tune sounded like something very old and from far away. She’d heard it in the shop, a song full of mystery, vengeance, and death: “Walk on Gilded Splinters.”

  Zoe focused her mind on the sound, on Emmett’s song, and not on her surroundings. With each step the stronger part of her mind, the part that kept her panicky self in check, repeated, I’m not afraid. Dad is waiting for me. Just keep walking. I’m not afraid.

  She lost track of the time. The dark never let up, nor did the stink of the place, but something changed ahead. There was faint yellow light around the next turn. She walked as fast as she could, careful not to splash. In a few minutes, Zoe reached one of the rusted iron service doors. It was half open, and when she listened, she could hear Emmett’s song echoing from the passage beyond. Lowering her head to get through the door, she took a tentative step inside the new passage. The light was brighter a few yards ahead. She stepped into the passage and stopped in surprise at what she saw. The air, the bare stone walls, the ancient rotting carpet that ran along the floor, a whole different world from the sewer tunnels. But it was more than the carpet and the light. The place gave off a static charge like it was alive and very old. Zoe started toward the light.

  She could breathe through her nose here. The horrid stink of sewer didn’t seem to extend beyond the metal hatch. The bare stone walls were smooth and covered in glyphs, like the ones on the special records in Emmett’s shop. The marks covered the walls down the whole length of the corridor. Water. Snakes. The moon. Black dogs.

  The light in the tunnel came from candles held in sconces all along the walls. Wax dripped down the wall like the liquid on stalactites and pooled on the floor. Rats ran ahead of Zoe, zigzagging across the carpet.

  The passage ended at a stone staircase that descended at a steep angle to another tunnel below. The gray stone steps looked polished, worn smooth by centuries of use. But who used them? Zoe wondered.

  Going down the steps, she wondered if she’d hurt herself without realizing it and thrown herself off balance. Each step she took was more uncomfortable than the last, and more than once she fell as she moved from one step to another. A few steps later, she realized that there was a simple explanation: the staircase was changing as she descended, with each step slightly higher than the one before. By the time she reached the bottom, she had to lower herself over the edge of each step and jump to the one below.

  She was in a tunnel that was much larger than any of the others. Its vaulted ceiling towered over her head, lost in the moving shadows cast by the flickering candles set along the walls. Ahead of her was a set of enormous wooden doors, towering almost as high as the tunnel itself. An entrance for giants, she thought. The doors were ajar, so it was easy for her to slip between them. As she stepped through the doors she paused. Emmett’s song was a distant echo ahead of her.

  Beyond the doors were a series of dark stone chambers. Each of them was filled with lost trinkets and abandoned junk washed down from the city. Nearby was a pile of broken dolls as big as Zoe’s house. Their tattered faces and glittering black eyes stared blankly at the ancient walls. Scattered throughout the chambers were mountains of rusting bicycles, water-swollen books and porn magazines, snowdrifts of wedding photos and hills of wallets, many open, creating shiny plastic islands of driver’s licenses, credit cards, and school photos of smiling children, now lost and sodden underground.

  There was a chamber filled with women’s shoes and one with money—coins pushed to one side and bills to the other, a lost fortune. Enough to last her mother and her for the rest of their lives, Zoe thought, if she could figure out some way to bring it all home with her. Stacks of glittering gold coins lay at her feet and she was tempted to take some, but Emmett’s song was growing fainter, so she moved on.

  The next chamber brought her to an abrupt stop. It was divided into separate rooms, each almost as large and packed as the previous chambers. But instead of junk, these rooms held more personal items. In one room were bundles of hair, neatly tied with string and attached to a paper label holding a name and more of the symbols Zoe knew from Emmett’s records. Next to that was a room full of small bottles, each of which contained a single tooth. The teeth, too, were labeled. In another room were stacks of marked vials that each held a drop of blood. In the final chamber were thousands of small, clear bottles. Each bottle was labeled with the word Tears and a name. Zoe stared at Emmett’s awful collection, feeling cold inside. She wondered if Emmett had bothered to add her false tooth to that pile.

  Shit. Emmett!

  She could barely hear him now. Zoe turned and ran through the rest of the chambers, following the sound of Emmett’s voice. There was little light past the chambers. She blundered in the dark, groping and stumbling along the walls until she came to an underground crossroads, tunnels leading in four directions. She couldn’t hear anything. Emmett had stopped singing.

  She didn’t know what to do, which way to go. A wrong decision could waste enough time to let Emmett get away. But standing there forever would accomplish the same thing. Zoe closed her eyes. This wasn’t the time to lose her shit, she thought. She’d come too far for that. She breathed and looked around for clues. As she stared at the ancient stones, the image of Mr. Danvers flickered into her mind. He’d know what to do. He was smart and would figure out some cool science trick to follow Emmett. But she didn’t know enough science for anything that James Bond–like. Did she know anything at all, anything useful? No, she decided, but she had to make a decision, and knew she needed a push. She pulled out Valentine’s compass and held it close to her eyes so she could see where the little pointer settled. It came to a rest pointing west, to her left. That was better than nothing. She started down the left tunnel.

  At first she walked very quietly, even covering her mouth and nose in an effort to muffle the sound of her breathing. The tunnel dropped her back into darkness almost as deep as the sewers, but there were candles here and there that kept her from bumping into the walls. There was something else, too. A whisper, like a voice. And maybe a melody. It was Emmett, singing again. Zoe sprinted frantically toward the sound.

  The tunnel took sudden sharp turns and there were two-foot blind drops where the candlelight didn’t reach. She fell. She slammed her shoulders into the walls. She twisted her ankle, but she kept running, and Emmett’s singing grew louder with each step. She gulped air and her chest burned from breathing so hard. Her arms and head ached from tension, but she closed in on the sound. She could tell Emmett was just ahead as she rounded a final corner . . .

  . . . And she found herself in a cul-de-sac of bare, rough limestone. A dead end. Emmett’s voice still hung in the air, a dying echo, like the smell of a room that had once held flowers.

  Zoe’s legs shook, and it was hard to catch her breath. She touched her fingertips over the walls, feeling the cold, damp stone. There was nothing in the cul-de-sac, no sign that Emmett or anyone else had ever been there. She looked wildly around the floor for footprints, a dropped piece of paper, anything that might show her that she’d gone the right away. There were just murky puddles, stones, and trash-speckled silt in small dunes in the corners. Zoe fell back against the wall.

  Lost, she thought. Everythin
g lost. Emmett. Dad. She bit the inside of her cheek and tasted blood. She wasn’t even sure if she could find her way back.

  Zoe held up her hands. They were almost black, covered in filth and ragged cuts. Her sneakers and jeans were ripped in a dozen places. She felt empty, as if, in the last few hours, she’d used up everything she was.

  I should have stayed in that room with the teeth and hair and tears. That’s where I belong. That’s all I am . . . Just pieces of a person.

  Something snapped inside her, and without thinking, Zoe screamed and kicked the stone in front of her. It hurt, but she didn’t care. She grabbed garbage from the floor and hurled it at the wall—cans, old magazines, a motorcycle chain, a beer bottle. The bottle shattered against rough rock, sending shards flying back at her. She covered her face, but felt blood running down her arms where pieces had cut her. The blood mixed with the black filth on her hands. The sight of it made her very tired. Tears ran down her face. She wiped them away and sagged against the wall.

  From far below, something rumbled. Zoe stepped back and the noise stopped. She pressed her weight into the stones, but nothing happened. She touched the stones to see if she could feel any movement. The rumbling came again, faintly. A moment later, the wall started to open, but stopped when she pulled back her hands. Zoe looked down and understood. She wiped her hands over her face, smearing her tears onto them, then touched the wall again. When her wet fingers came in contact with the stone, the wall swung back like a door opening.

  Another tunnel lay ahead, crowded with the skeletons of rusted-out old buses half buried in mud. There was a narrow pathway through the debris, and at the end of the path was an opening onto what looked like a street.

  Slowly and carefully, Zoe made her way between the mounds of garbage, limping on her twisted ankle. Rats scrabbled along the tops of the buses, their small, sharp claws ticking on the metal. Zoe could see their glittering eyes and twitching, inquisitive noses as they followed her passage through their kingdom. There was nothing threatening about the rats. They were just curious and cautious, but she also got the idea that the rats were partly staring at her in wonder, as if they knew something she didn’t.