Everything Inc.: The Precious and the Broken

by Geoff Sturtevant

  The weariness turned to a flash of anger as I found my motivation. I wasn't going to run away from this place, not just yet. Not before I got a little of what I wanted.

  CHAPTER 22

  I FOUND THE MOUTH of the channels right where Jack had placed them, dug out of a dry dune down from the East Gate. Where old Dave told me I could find him if I needed anything interesting. But drugs weren't what I was after. I wasn't sure exactly what I was after. But whatever it was, I was chasing after it.

  Twenty yards past the graffiti-lined entrance, I walked down the concrete tube in near-total darkness, food wrappers and paper bags crunching underfoot. A subtly dank subterranean breeze brought the temperature down a few degrees as I went deeper down the tube.

  I thought I made out some chatter a ways down, maybe picked up a hint of smoke too. I saw a smattering of light on a shiny curve in the tunnel wall further down the tube.

  Around the corner, the tunnel opened up into a spacious chamber, lit dimly by floodlights. Twenty or thirty people throughout, tables around the perimeter with their vendors displaying their wares. Customers examining the items closely in the dimness. Others clustered by the several tunnel entrances, talking, sharing bottles. Unseen cigarettes pulsing red in the dark. An underground flea market of sorts.

  I caught a couple of weird looks as I walked into the room. I scanned the room, but it was difficult to see in the dark. I approached the closest table, manned by a bundled-up vendor whom I couldn't imagine showing himself up on the surface. A channel rat, I thought.

  "I'm looking for Dave," do you know him?"

  "I know plenty of Daves," he said.

  "Black guy. Don't know his last name. Heard him called 'Old Dave' a few times."

  He nodded. "Ol' Black Dave. Yeah, I know where he is. How much money you got?"

  "For what?"

  "You want Ol' Dave, I know where he is. I'll show you the way, but it'll cost ya."

  It was more of the last thing I needed. Indignity. "Fuck off," I said.

  "Whoa, take it easy," the vendor said. "Times are tough. Can't blame a guy for tryin'."

  The vendor had his own share of defeats, I imagined. I took a breath. "He told me to come looking for him here. Never told me anything about a toll collector."

  "It's alright, this one's on me. Take the tube on the left there." He pointed to a corner in the room where a group of undergrounders cavorted around a large opening. "Head down a ways. Just give him a shout around the encampment down there, he'll hear ya."

  I fished a five out of Dan's emergency money and held it out to him. He snatched it away quickly.

  "Thank you," he said.

  Down the leftward tunnel, I came across another chamber, this one clearly designated as an encampment for the channel rats. Groups of homemade hovels built from shipping pallets, tarps, and cardboard boxes. Smoky coils hung cloudily in the yellowed floodlights. I asked a lady smoking a cigarette nearby if she knew where Dave was, and she pointed me to his "house."

  Dave's eyes lit with recognition. "My man..." He held out a hand and we shook. "In the mood for a little excitement?"

  "I am, but it's not what you think."

  "Oh no?"

  "What you told me up there, about them dragging people away. Tell me more."

  He looked queerly at me a moment.

  "What happened, my man?"

  "Dan is missing. He just disappeared."

  Dave shook his head. "You're thinkin' they had something to do with it?"

  "He just vanished. Left all his stuff behind."

  "He coulda just split. Wouldn't be the first time."

  "He never would've done it without telling me. And he never would've left this behind." I patted the go-bag at my side. "Trust me," I said before he could object. "There's something in here he never would've left behind."

  "What is it?

  "A manuscript."

  "A manu-what?"

  "A book he's writing."

  Dave chuckled. “He told me once he wanted to write a book. I was like what's the point?"

  "Look," I said. "Was it really true what you said? About them kidnapping people, dragging them down the channel?"

  "I told you it was true, didn't I?"

  "And everyone else tells me you're crazy."

  "Yeah? And what do you think?"

  It was hard to get a read on Dave's face in the dark, but I thought he was getting slightly annoyed. "You didn't sound that way to me," I said.

  Dave lit a cigarette. "So you wanna see for yourself," he said.

  "I have to."

  "And y'all think I'm crazy..."

  Dave took me to the mouth of a wider tunnel. A ways down was the locked gate. Beyond was the run under the secretive power plant. Neither he nor any of the channel rats went anywhere near there. Trouble was the last thing they wanted, and meddling with Enterprise was nothing but trouble. Besides, it was locked up. There was no way to get by the gate anyway.

  He reminded me that I was the crazy one, and he left me there at the tributary. I had second thoughts, but I reminded myself why I was here—on principle. The point? There was no point. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. Chasing whatever it was I was supposed to be chasing. I was just doing it. And I walked. And walked. The wall of the pitch-dark channel my only guide for what seemed like miles in the dark. Until faint grey lights produced the gate up ahead. There it was, the gate Dave had told me about.

  I hurried toward it, my feet smacking in the shiny film of water now on the floor of the tunnel. Black, jailhouse bars. I shook at them briefly, of course they didn't move a millimeter. So secure, they begged curiosity.

  Feeling around, I found no keyhole, no obvious lock mechanism. Even if there was, Dan's lock gun would be no match for it with its dainty picks and pins.

  I stood back, the dim light beyond casting long, black shadows at my feet. On the wall a ways back were the rusted remains of a rebar ladder.

  With Dan's bag slung over my shoulder, I climbed my way up the gritty rungs until I reached a dark recess in the ceiling topped by a manhole cover. Quiet above. No way it opened up onto the street.

  I climbed until my shoulder pressed against the iron and pushed, unseating the heavy cover and sliding it to the side. With another effort, the hole was wide open. I climbed up into cool darkness.

  CHAPTER 23

  I EMERGED INTO THE CORNER of a dim control room, unmanned at the moment. Two computer consoles at the far end, before dark, glass panes, like the cockpit of a large airplane. Red lights blinking back against the windows, dark beyond. The woodwind hum of industrial ventilation. The kind of place where you immediately knew you weren’t supposed to be. A prickle crawled up the back of my neck.

  There was a microphone for an intercom system. The thought of calling out for Dan crossed my mind, but I knew it was useless. I pushed the feeling back into that grim corner of my mind; the place where I’d set aside the truth for the moment. What I was after now was answers. I wanted to know just what it was that we lowly workers weren’t good enough to know. We suckers, locked up in our rooms like children at night and expected to behave. But the time for behavior was over.

  I sat at the console and squinted at the glass. Mostly dark on the other side, all I could make out was an immense, shapeless form in a huge chamber, wound with tubes running up to the ceiling high overhead.

  I tapped away at the keyboards and threw a few switches on the switchboard, but to no effect. Just the droning machinery and the blinking of the powered-down consoles.

  I pointed the flashlight around the room. There was a door to the left of the consoles which must lead into the chamber. I knew I didn’t belong in there, and that was enough.

  The door was locked, but there was a keyhole override, and it looked pretty basic. I retrieved the lock-gun from Dan’s bag and inserted it and started pulling the trigger. After a few snaps, I heard the lock release. Success. That’s when I noticed the sign on the wall nearby: DANGER, GAS MASK REQUI
RED BEYOND THIS POINT.

  Of course, danger was exactly what I was after at this point.

  Beyond was a short chamber and another door. SECURE AIRLOCK BEFOR PROCEEDING, the door said, but I already had the gun in the lock. In a few snaps, that lock gave way too, and I opened the door onto a hyperbaric rush of strange air. Automatically, dim lights illuminated the chamber.

  And there I stood, at the top of a set of tinny stairs, looking out on a steaming pyramid of…

  Rippling waves of mirrored air, like the midday desert asphalt, rode upward along the mass. Moving down, steadily decomposing, an intubated mountain of meat. Knotted arms and legs, clawed fingers, loose bodies at the summit, wormy rot underneath, gone to slime by the brow, by the bottom, gone to dirt.

  A flash of understanding. The gas. The plant. The technology I’d read about on the internet. The people. My legs went weak. Pressurized gas sucked from within the intubated mountain of gore. The mulching bodies, fermenting gas, churning the machinery that fed Enterprise. Fed the streetlights, the machinery, ran the television back in my room. This place, it feeds on its own people. What the hell have we done?

  I went down.

  CHAPTER 24

  “AGAIN, DOGGIE, sorry I couldn’t get the message to ya, there just wasn’t any time.”

  Dan tested the light and hit DONE. He’d had no trouble making his numbers since Ronnie and I had switched stations. Ron’s fat fingers were fine at plugging the connectors together, and my dainty, little ones were much more adept at his old job.

  “And I’m sorry about Debbie,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”

  “It is what it is,” he said. “But I still wish I could’ve let you know.”

  “Was she your only family?” asked Jack.

  “She was it,” Dan said. “If you could still call her family. We’d been separated ten years.”

  “Still,” said Ronnie. “It’s a bummer when it’s someone you know.”

  There were only a few ways they’d let you cross back over and return without repeating the admittance process; one of them was the imminent death of a family member. Since Dan and Debbie had never legally divorced, the situation qualified.

  “Sure,” said Dan. “But it wasn’t all bad. It was good we got to talk a little. The way things ended, you know. Some loose ends.”

  “Thought your ass had been fired,” said Jack.

  Dan grinned to himself. “You guys should’ve seen the Paul machine,” he said. “Breathed in so much gas, he thought he’d seen Jesus.”

  “I saw a lot more than that,” I said.

  I sure had. The last thing I remembered was my ass hitting the floor. I was lucky it was my ass and not my head. I was even luckier Dan had found me when he had. A few more minutes of methane and we wouldn’t have been having this conversation.

  “Man,” Dan went on, “I never figured you for such a go-getter.”

  “Neither did I,” I said.

  “Or a sucker,” Jack said. “Listening to old Dave. The guy’s been sniffing glue since he was eleven.”

  I shrugged.

  “How’d it go down anyway?” Ronnie asked Dan. “After we talked?”

  Dan hit the done button and sent another piece down the line. “Soon as I saw my go-bag was gone, it was like I saw things through Paulie’s eyeballs. I mean, if I were him, I’d probably think I was in trouble. Dead, even. And I had a feeling he’d be peeking around the channels. So when crazy old Dave pointed me down the tube, I had a pretty good idea where I’d find him. Of course Dave had laid all his conspiracy stuff on him by now, and with me missing and everything, shit, I’d have believed it myself. So when I saw the light comin’ down from the manhole, I knew I was on the right track.”

  “Man, the both of you boneheads could’ve gotten caught,” said Ronnie.

  “If Pauly was gonna get caught, so was I,” Dan said. “So I went up after him, followed the Paul-sign.” He chuckled. “Wet footprints, due west. Signs everywhere: ventilation equipment required. Gas masks hanging on the walls. So I grabbed one and put it on. And thank God I did. You know who didn’t?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  Found him lying flat on his back in the compost theater. It’s where all the methane gets made. Basically a planet-sized mountain of fermenting garbage where they extract all the gas. And Pauly here’d breathed enough of it to kill a dinosaur. He was hallucinating.”

  “You’re lucky he came after ya,” Jack said.

  “I’m a lucky guy sometimes,” I said. “Much luckier than I thought.”

  “So I drag him out,” continued Dan. “And this prick’s heavier than he looks.”

  I gave Dan a jab in the arm.

  “Ooh. Prick’s got an arm on him too. Forgot you were next to me now.”

  “That’ll learn ya,” Ronnie said. “And now Paul gets to deal with your farts.”

  “I’ve had enough gas for awhile,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “I’ll spare you as long as I can.”

  So I burned a sick day chasing down Dan, (or him chasing me, more like it) but it could’ve been a whole lot worse. It was bad enough Dan’s wife had died, but he’d nearly lost a roommate too. Funny how things turn out sometimes. The grass is always greener; you’ve heard it a thousand times. And you end up realizing things weren’t as bad as you thought. Take Dan, for example; he’s always trying to make the best of things. That day we got back to the hive, he told me about his wife and what had happened. It was bad, but it wasn’t all bad. Lying there in her death bed, Debbie had had plenty of time to reflect on the way thing had gone between her and Dan. To wonder, without all the petty, day-to-day concerns that normally cloud our thoughts and drown out those deeper questions that come in the quiet and the night. Like: what’s it all for? And: why bother? And: why do I do these things that I do? And: why am I not happy? I don’t know how much of that she figured out herself, but she did realize one thing. She told him she felt bad for discouraging him from writing his stories. That it wasn’t because there was no point in doing it, she realized. It was because it made him happy, and she resented it. No money, no future prospects, and there was Dan, tapping away, somehow happy. His only bad habit. They call it “the creative man’s burden,” but that’s no way to look at things, doggie. We all should have such burdens. As long as you’re willing to shoulder it, you’ve got a reason to keep going.

  And keeping going was what it was all about. Not about making all the right decisions. Not about winning or failing. It was only about going; about playing the game. Maybe getting one over once in awhile while you’re at it. There’s a way to do your unsavories, after all.

  But in the meantime, the important thing was not being idle. Humans are comfort-seeking creatures, I’d always heard, and sure, that’s what we tend to do, but it’s the worst thing for us after all, isn’t it? There’s a reason they say not to put a couch in the same room with a treadmill; you’ll always choose the couch over the discomfort of exercise. Same as you’ll choose the comfort of idleness over the insecurity of the ruthless world.

  It’s comfort we’re all ultimately looking for, but I don’t think we’re ever supposed to get it. Comfort dangles just beyond the void; all roads lead to it, whatever route you’re taking. It’s why we quit our jobs, sell our homes, ruin our relationships. It’s the very reason why we flail the way we do—we refuse to be idle because we’re searching for comfort. It’s our nature. It’s our engine. It would be more reasonable to take what pittance of comfort the world offered you and ride your years out safely, but that’s just not the way we do things. There’s no reason to do things the way we do things. And that’s exactly how we know we’re supposed to do them that way.

  “Let’s make a stop real quick,” Dan said.

  It had been a week since the incident, and Dan had managed to switch out his pen and paper for a cheap keyboard and printer he’d ordered from Amenities. I’d hear him through the wall these nights tapping away, printing pages. He’d bound
up a few prints of his short stories into little paperbacks. For homemade books, they looked pretty good too. He pulled one out of his jacket pocket as we walked into the little bookstore.

  There was the usual crowd in there; five or six bookworms and the two of us. Dan headed to the S section and tucked a book into the shelf next to Dan Simmons’s Hyperion.

  “Wrote free on the back,” he said.

  “The price is right.”

  “That’s what it cost me to write it.”

  “Only a matter of time before they get rid of this place,” I said. “This little drug-den. I mean, look at these guys.” I gestured to the few readers dipping in their toes. Taking indulgent, little peeks. Strange worlds, printed and pressed into these innocuous, little bricks, waiting to be unfolded. Whether you made them yourself or read them, you were in constant flux between dimensions. The grass isn’t much greener in any of them, really. It’s greener when you’re making the most of what you’ve got. When you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing. But seriously, who gives a shit about grass?

  “So you’re really leaving, huh?” Dan said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Papers are in. It’s official.”

  “You sure about this, doggie?”

  “I’m not sure about anything. I just know I gotta move.”

  “I understand.”

  “Not saying I won’t be back either,” I said. “But either way, nothing lost.”

  “You’ll lose your favorite drinkin’ buddy,” he said.

  “Yeah. I will lose that. At least for now.”

  “You couldn’t dig up a turnip out there, Pauly.”

  “Not sure a turnip’s what I’m looking for. Just want to dig.”

  “Dig for what? What are you after?”

  “Don’t know. Only know I have to chase it.”