Terminus

by Adam Baker

  ‘Inevitable. The subway system lies beneath the water table. Constantly pumped to keep it dry. Millions of gallons every day. The moment the city lost power, it began to flood.’

  Cloke crouched by the water’s edge. He held his Geiger counter an inch from the surface. Warning beep. The LCD screen flashed a threshold alert.

  ‘Jesus. Off the scale.’ He powered down the handset. ‘This stuff is a mix of groundwater bubbling from bedrock and run-off from the street. Fallout settled over the city and got washed into the drains. Rain tainted with radioactive ash, lethal isotopes cooked up in the blast. My equipment isn’t military spec. It’s from a power plant. It’s built to measure minor leaks, fractional deviations from background. But these are the kind of heavy contaminants found near a ruptured reactor core. The counter isn’t calibrated to measure this level of pollution.’

  They listened to the hiss of the burning flare, the distant trickle of water and the whisper of the tunnels.

  ‘Awful stench,’ said Cloke.

  Nariko pointed to the corpse floating in far shadows.

  ‘Rot gas.’

  She inspected the tunnel brickwork.

  ‘When was this place abandoned?’

  ‘Nineteen fifty-four,’ said Cloke. ‘The platform was too short to accommodate the new ten-car trains. They mothballed Fenwick when they built more capacity at Wall Street. Simply shut the station at the end of a working day. Waited until the last train left the platform, killed the lights, chained the doors. The place has been deserted ever since. Frozen in time.’

  Nariko pictured trilbied businessmen waiting for a trolley car. Flannel suits, umbrellas, attaché cases, rolled copies of the Times and Post. America at the height of empire.

  A deep, thunderous rumble. A groan of shifting masonry. The flood waters shivered and rippled. A trickle of dust from a fissure in the tunnel roof settled on the water, forming a white crust.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ murmured Nariko.

  ‘A nearby building must have toppled,’ said Cloke. ‘You can bet every tower and tenement on the island took major damage during the blast.’

  ‘As long as the Federal Bank doesn’t come down on our heads,’ said Nariko.

  ‘Hard to judge. Six storeys. Heavy stone. Built to last. It was shielded by surrounding office towers. They took the brunt of the shockwave. Citigroup Plaza and the AmCo Building. All those glass curtain walls. They took the impact like an airbag. But the ground shock must have split the foundations, subtly thrown the centre of gravity. Slow subsidence. The building is starting to tilt. She won’t last long.’

  Cloke turned up the collar of his jacket. He blew his hands for warmth.

  ‘So what do you know about Lupe?’ he asked.

  ‘Lucretia Guadalupe Villaseñor. Born in Honduras. Raised in the Bronx. She’s done plenty of time, for sure.’

  ‘The tattoos?’

  ‘The stillness,’ said Nariko. ‘Prison zen. Watch her. The way she sits back and closes her eyes, puts herself into hibernation. She’s spent a long time in solitary. Weeks locked in holding cells, punishment blocks, no window, no daylight. Nothing to do but work out, stare at cinder walls and count the minutes until the next meal gets pushed through the tray slot. She knows how to retreat into her head.’

  ‘Think she’s dangerous?’ asked Cloke.

  ‘Shit, yeah. Look at her. Hardcore gangster. A rattlesnake. Youth correction, one jail after another. Why else would she end up at Bellevue?’

  ‘She said she was getting her kidneys checked out.’

  ‘All supermax penitentiaries like Bedford Hills or Taconic have basic medical facilities. Sick prisoners get transferred to the infirmary. No need to take them outside the walls. Only reason a convict gets brought to Manhattan, sent to a neurological clinic like Bellevue, is for brain scans and court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. Violent recidivists trying to parley their way out of a life sentence. Lawyered-up third-strikers trying to blame their crimes on frontal lobe damage or childhood trauma. Bet that barcode stencilled to the front of her tunic would tell her whole life story if only we had a scanner. Bet it would make grim reading.’

  ‘She wants to cut a deal,’ said Cloke. ‘She’ll give us Ekks if we cut her loose.’

  ‘She’ll say anything to buy her freedom. I rest a lot easier knowing she is in chains.’

  ‘You understand the gravity of the situation, right?’ said Cloke. ‘One way or another, we have to persuade her to talk.’

  ‘What have you got in mind?’ asked Nariko. ‘We can’t let her go. If she gets her hands on a knife or a gun, we’ll have real problems.’

  ‘There are other means.’

  ‘Chop her fingers? Burn her feet? She won’t break. She’ll laugh in our faces.’

  ‘I know. But we have to try.’

  Nariko crouched next to Lupe.

  ‘I figured it out,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Ran the whole scenario in my head.’

  ‘Hope you had fun,’ said Lupe.

  ‘Ekks and his team had the third floor at Bellevue. 101st Cav guarded the main entrance. Sandbags and machine guns. They were okay for a while. A good place to hold out. But the city turned to hell. It looked like the hospital would be overrun. A fast contracting pocket of safety. So they gathered up their shit and fled to the 23rd Street Station. They took to the tunnels and headed south. They headed here. Fenwick Street. Because this station is hidden, sealed from the public, entrance padlocked for decades. A perfect refuge.

  It was a two-mile journey. But they didn’t schlep their shit through the tunnels. They rode a subway train. They loaded their gear on to an MTA locomotive they found at 23rd Street, didn’t they? The third rail was still active. So they threw their shit aboard, broke into the motorman’s compartment, found a brake handle and figured how to get the locomotive moving. Smart thinking. As long as the power held, they could take that train anywhere they liked, move around the subway network at will. Hundreds of miles of tunnel. If their location got overrun they could simply jump in the cab and relocate. That’s the little detail you held back during your debrief, isn’t it? Ekks and his crew camped here, on the Fenwick platform. But they had a loco standing by, in case they had to haul-ass.’

  Lupe didn’t reply.

  Nariko sat cross-legged beside her.

  ‘They were here for weeks, conserving food, conserving water, trying not to go batshit insane,’ continued Nariko. ‘They kept their receiver tuned to the emergency frequency day and night. They were desperate for rescue, hoping the continuity government at NORAD finally got their shit together and the cavalry were on their way.

  ‘Word comes through. The new president will address the nation at midnight.

  ‘They crowd round the radio, anxious, excited. They want to hear that the army has regrouped. Tanks and troops are massed outside each major metropolitan area, infantry ready to take back the streets. Help is coming.

  ‘But instead, the president declares the battle lost. The cities cannot be saved. The son of a bitch announces an airstrike. Planes are on their way, carrying a cleansing fire. The countdown has begun.

  ‘The Bellevue team panic. Minutes to detonation. They throw their gear aboard the train.

  ‘They couldn’t move further south. Fenwick Street is the end of the line.

  ‘They couldn’t go north. That would take them into the blast zone.

  ‘So they hid in the tunnel. They pulled away from the Fenwick platform. Not far. Just clear of the station entrance and street grates. They wanted to get deep as they could, put a little distance between themselves and the shockwave. They sat aboard the train as the last seconds ticked away, plugged their ears, huddled in the crash position, and hoped the tunnel roof wouldn’t come down on their heads.

  ‘That’s your big secret, isn’t it? Your ace in the hole. You knew exactly where Ekks and his boys would hide when the bomb dropped. The team are still here, aren’t they? They’re inside the tunne
l, just out of sight.’

  Lupe leaned and spat between Nariko’s boots.

  ‘And so what? So what if they are down in the dark? The bomb dropped. They’re dead a dozen times over. Burned, drowned, irradiated, buried under rubble. And even if a couple of them made it, ate their buddies, drank their own piss, whatever it took to survive, you can’t reach the train. The tunnel is fucked. Radioactive flood water, rising higher by the minute. And this is an old section of line. Some old-timer with a trowel put it together brick by brick. That passage was a serious subsidence risk even before the bomb. Face it. You’re wasting your time here, girl. You’re on a fool’s errand. There’s nothing to find. No cure. No salvation. Just lingering death. Sooner we all get out of here the better.’

  16

  The IRT office.

  Nariko pushed the radio aside and spread charts on the table. Cloke helped shake scrolled maps from chart-tubes and unravel them. They pegged the curled sheets open with bottled water and an old rotary phone.

  Multiple street plans. Port Authority. Department of Transport. Utility schematics. The veins and capillaries of sub-surface Manhattan. The city spread open like a biopsy, marbled with sewer pipes, gas mains, copper-core Con Edison trunk lines and Verizon fibre optic cable clusters.

  Nariko examined an MTA map. She circled a section of tunnel.

  ‘Fenwick Street is part of the Downtown Liberty Line, the oldest and deepest section of track.’ She pointed to a dendritic junction. ‘If Ekks and his boys headed north a little ways towards Canal they should be here: the tunnel beneath Broadway.’

  ‘That’s a half-mile hike. In these conditions? Might as well be on Mars.’

  ‘It would be a tough extraction. But it could be done. They aren’t beyond reach.’

  ‘The flood water is already waist-deep,’ said Cloke. ‘The suits will offer some protection, but we’d still get a steady gamma dose just by being in proximity to such a strong radiation source. And if that residue splashes bare skin, the beta burns would be horrific. Essentially, we’d be navigating a river of acid.’

  ‘My boys trained for this kind of deal.’

  ‘I don’t like it. It’s a hell of a risk.’

  ‘You pushed for this shit. You brought us here. Can’t pussy out now.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘It’s down to you. This is a military assignment. Stay or go. You decide.’

  Cloke thought it over.

  ‘Bottom line: we’ve got orders. We’ve got a job to do.’ He spoke like he was lecturing himself, psyching for the mission. ‘Ekks is probably dead. But if he left a scribble on a note pad, a string of code on a hard drive, it could be the only thing standing between the human race and extinction. We can’t walk away. Not while there is a flicker of hope.’

  ‘So who goes?’ asked Nariko.

  ‘Me. You. Ideally, we need a third person for backup. Donahue or Tombes. But we can’t force them to go. A mission like this has to be volunteers only.’

  Nariko hefted a big blue vinyl kitbag from the equipment pile. FDNY MARINE RESCUE stencilled on the side. She unlaced drawstrings and shook out the bag. A tight PVC roll hit the tiled floor with a thump, whipping a dust-plume.

  She flipped strap-buckles. She kicked the PVC roll. A grey, inflatable raft unravelled.

  ‘You’re not seriously going into the tunnels, are you?’ asked Lupe. ‘You’re actually going to paddle around in that shit?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re insane. You heard the guy. If that thing pops a hole while you’re down there, you’ll burn while you drown.’

  ‘Bet if I come back with some kind of inoculation, you’ll be the first to hold out your arm.’

  Nariko screwed a battery pump to the Boston valve embedded in the flaccid prow of the raft. She set the pump running. The compressor hummed and hissed. The air hose bulged and unkinked. Slow inflation. Chambers within the boat’s rubber hull began to plump and expand.

  A four-man raft. No outboard.

  Nariko unzipped a vinyl case and pulled out two fibreglass oars. She threw the oars to Cloke and Tombes.

  ‘Ready to break a sweat?’

  They propped the oars against the wall and climbed into NBC suits. They pulled on butyl overboots. They pulled on gauntlets.

  The crackle of heavy rubber, and the burr of zipper teeth, reminded Nariko of the countless occasions her attendance at a house fire or auto wreck had concluded with a body bag loaded onto an EMT gurney.

  She buckled a leather utility belt.

  ‘Assholes,’ said Lupe. ‘All of you.’

  Nariko glanced at Galloway.

  ‘Feel free to tape her mouth.’

  Nariko picked up the Glock. She re-checked the safety, re-checked the chamber. She tucked the gun into her belt.

  ‘Reckon you’ll need it?’ asked Cloke.

  ‘No idea what reception we will get. What if the Bellevue team got infected? What if one of them got bitten and turned on his friends? You’ll need something in your hand. There’s a bundle of heavy tools over there by the equipment pile.’

  Nariko tucked a hatchet into a hip-ring on her thick leather belt.

  ‘Pick something heavy, something with a spike. Just don’t sink the boat, all right?’

  Cloke stood at the head of the platform steps and looked down into darkness. He held a respirator over his face and tested for visibility.

  ‘Masks will be useless down there,’ he said. ‘No peripheral vision. Wouldn’t see a damned thing.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Just seal your suits and stay out of the water. Like I said, it’s nasty shit. If you go over the side, you’ll get more than wet.’

  Nariko and Tombes stood face to face. They tore strips of duct tape and wrapped them round each wrist and ankle joint. A well-drilled haz-mat protocol.

  Fist bump.

  ‘Good to go.’

  ‘You folks done this before?’ asked Cloke, trying to break the tension.

  ‘Suit up?’ said Nariko. ‘Before today? Big chem spill out on the FDR last year. Rush hour. A truck blew a tyre, jackknifed, spilled a bunch of drums across the lower deck. Some kind of noxious, carcinogenic shit. Put the whole city in gridlock. Had to foam down the freeway and mop it up. Closest we ever got to this kind of duty.’

  She twisted at the waist and wheeled her arms to make sure the suit was sitting right.

  ‘This is your mission, but I manage the turn-around, okay?’ said Nariko. ‘We’ll take it as far as we can. But if it goes bad, I’m pulling the plug. I don’t want to hear any argument. My word is final.’

  ‘Understood.’

  She re-checked glove seals. She paused for a moment, distracted by the mildewed Camel poster on the wall beside her. Rich red amid grey dereliction.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever see the sun again?’ she asked.

  They listened to the steady, white-noise roar of torrential rain, the rumble of thunder and the faint rasp of ragged nails dragged down polythene.

  ‘Maybe we are better off down here, below ground,’ said Tombes, and crossed himself.

  17

  The tunnels beneath Manhattan.

  Eight hundred miles of darkness and silence. Dripping water. Mournful wind-whisper. Passageways and caverns sealed for ever. A necropolis that would endure long after surface structures collapsed and were subsumed by forest.

  A subterranean realm ruled by rats.

  Rodents navigated the tunnels in packs. They sought out survivors, the handful of New Yorkers that fled into subterranean darkness to escape ground-level horror. Bewildered refugees stumbling through unlit passageways slowly succumbing to dehydration. Weak. Injured. Maimed by the concussive detonation: the crushing shockwave which burst eardrums, ruptured capillaries, made blood fizz with liberated nitrogen. Victims convulsed, dripped frothing blood from ears and nose as they were subject to massive decompression trauma, like a diver dragged from the depths.

  One by one the helpless survivors were
overwhelmed by a swarming, seething tide of vermin. Screams echoed through the tunnels as countless yellow incisors sank into flesh.

  Rats burrowed into eye sockets, gnawed soft extremities, chewed deep into muscle and viscera.

  Bodies quickly reduced to scattered, skeletonised remains.

  Rushing water. A rumble like an oncoming train.

  Rats scattered and ran. They fled the tidal rush. A rippling stream of dirt-streaked fur. They scurried across rail beds. They scampered along pipe work and ropes of high-voltage cable, looking to reach high ground, looking for air-locked tunnels and chambers that would escape the flood.

  Grand Central Terminal. A flame-seared ruin. A cascade of roof rubble had buried each concourse, pulverised the ticket booths and destination board, crushed the information stand and four-faced clock. The 9/11 memorial flag had burned and shrivelled to black melt-drips.

  The netherworld beneath the station, the labyrinth of stairways, passageways and ducts, still intact.

  Substation Four. A deep-level generator house beneath the ruins of the terminal. A vast dynamo hall. Five hulking rotary DC converters in a row.

  Rats infiltrated sub-levels beneath the terminal, but instinctively avoided the generator room. They turned tail rather than explore the long corridor leading to the power house. They reared and shrieked when they glimpsed the rivet-studded entrance at the end of the passageway, the high-voltage zags and danger signs.

  The substation doors hung ajar. Impenetrable darkness.

  A powerful sentience evolving in shadow deep inside the monumental chamber. A sleepless alien intelligence that pervaded the entire subterranean network, reaching out through the structural fabric of the flooded tunnels.

  It sensed an intrusion.

  Fresh meat had entered the subsurface system far south at Fenwick Street.

  18

  The subway tunnel, lit crimson by flickering flare-light.

  Nariko, Cloke and Tombes waded knee-deep across the submerged platform. They kicked through drifts of floating garbage.