Ez gave him a pat on the back that almost knocked him to his knees. “We go in.”
* * *
The werewolf ripped a side panel off the elevator shed. A rusty iron ladder was bolted to the side of the shaft which disappeared into darkness a hundred feet below.
Bishop stuck the Glock back in his waist band and peered over the side. “Got any more demon loads?” He asked.
Ez handed him a clip. “Always keep a spare under the bar.”
Bishop slipped the spare clip into his back pocket and pulled the night vision goggles over his head adjusting them until they fit snugly around his eyes. He swung one a leg over the lip of the shaft feeling for the first rung of the ladder with his foot.
“Got any room for me under that bar? I can sleep anywhere, ask my ex-partner.” He started to descend.
The soft echo of Ez’ growly chuckle followed him down into the darkness.
* * *
Bishop stopped next to the first set of elevator doors. The goggles lit the shaft with an eerie green light. He could see the elevator safety gate was pulled shut over tarnished brass doors with raised art deco designs. The doors were built in four panels meant to divide left and right as the elevator opened. Bishop tugged at the gate with one hand. Flakes of rust rained down the shaft, but the gate wouldn’t budge. He decided to continue climbing down the ladder to a set that was more accessible.
Luckily the rungs of the maintenance ladder had been set into a shallow indent in the brick wall next to the doors and it seemed to run the entire length of the shaft. If a set of doors opened even part of the way it would be an easy jump into the interior of the building.
The gate on the second floor elevator was open and the doors didn’t quite come together. The opening was maybe six inches wide. The interior beyond the opening was a deep green meaning there was no ambient light. That also meant that nothing was prowling that floor. It was an encouraging thought until Bishop reminded himself he was the only one who needed goggles to see in the dark. He reached out and gave the door’s interior handle a one-armed tug. It didn’t move. There was twenty years of grit and dirt in the track and quite probably, no one had oiled the doors since the building closed.
Ariel motioned him to move lower, following him down the rungs to give Ez a chance to reach the doors. Bishop leaned out to avoid the swirling tent made by her coat and looked up. The goggles made everything look like a bad horror movie. A hairy arm reached out to hook a set of claws into the opening. One solid jerk and the two left panels telescoped together and slid into a slot in the wall. Their screech of protest caused Bishop to hunch his shoulders in silent dismay. Ez swung through the opening onto the floor, followed quickly by Ariel and Bishop.
“Where are we?” Ariel whispered.
Bishop scanned the expanse. It wasn’t as empty as he thought it would be. Square plaster and walnut pillars held up a dusty, but ornately stamped tin ceiling. Display cases lined the interior, shrouded in dusty white drop cloths. A low wall in the middle of the floor confused him for a minute until he remembered the long, wood-runged escalators that swept up and down from the second floor, past the mezzanine, to the high ceilinged first level. On the other side of the second floor bridge there was an escalator to the third floor and the toy department. The space between the up and down hand rails had always held towering displays of one thing or another.
“We’re on the Third Street side of the building,” Bishop pointed past the elevator. “That opening is the bridge to the Fourth Street side. There’s an escalator there to the third floor, or we can take this one down to the front door.”
Ez raised his snout and wrinkled his nose in a sniff. Then he took another. “Bridge,” he said.
“Mouser?” Ariel asked in a tight whisper.
Ez shook his head. “No scent of him, plenty of mice though, that’s why we take the bridge. We need to backtrack to where he came in.”
Ariel let the gravity blade in her right sleeve drop into her hand. She nudged Bishop forward with a finger poke in the shoulder.
The windows in the bridge let in enough light that Bishop had to take off the goggles. The floor of the entire store seemed to be covered with the debris of a hasty, resentful exit. Cardboard boxes, clothing, pieces of display stands had been left in haphazard piles that had quickly turned into rat condos. The faint smell of urine and dust made him want to sneeze. When he hit the dark on the other side of the bridge, he pulled the goggles down over his eyes only to stifle a shriek of horror. Boxes of dismembered arms, legs and heads jumped into green relief in front of him. Oh my God, it’s a demon massacre!
Ez snickered.
Bishop took a closer look. Mannequins. His heart was still pumping two hundred beats a minute.
Ariel suppressed a grin.
Ez tapped his nose. “You don’t smell dead, it’s not a body.” He loped ahead of Bishop through the mannequin holocaust toward the escalators.
* * *
“Hey,” Bishop said in Ariel’s ear. “Not that I don’t appreciate being on team Survivor: Haunted Department Store, but do you think Mouser is really in here somewhere? I thought everybody avoids this place like the plague. . .”
Ez’s head hunched forward. It was the werewolf equivalent of going on point.
“Ez has something,” Ariel whispered. She followed the werewolf quietly down the old, frozen, wooden escalator.
The steps were alternating slats of dark wood and steel that rose at the top, only to flatten and slide into a slot at the bottom. When it was turned off for the last time some steps had frozen into stair-like treads, others had flattened out, ready to cycle into the continuous loop to the next floor. Some steps looked a little shaky like they might collapse if enough weight was put in the wrong place. It was a long escalator since the ceiling of the first floor was the highest in the building. The slow, mechanical ride down would have given shoppers a panoramic view of the merchandise below before they moved out onto the floor to start shopping.
Ariel hit a bad step. It had somehow become unhooked from the track and her weight made it slide forward, throwing her off balance. She grabbed for the wooded hand rail and at the same time shot her bare foot out to hook the front of the step with her claw-tipped toes so it wouldn’t go crashing down the rest of the escalator. No point in causing enough noise to alert anyone else who happened to be in the building.
Bishop leaped forward and grabbed her around the waist with one arm, letting her regain her balance without losing the step. When Bishop looked up, Ez had leapt over the hand rail that separated the up and down escalators from the long metal slide between them. Without a word, he began to slide toward the ground floor, leaping nimbly over the end to wait for Ariel and Bishop.
“Good idea,” Bishop whispered, and lifted Ariel onto the slide before she could protest. Ez caught her easily, then steadied Bishop as he made a perfect two point landing at the bottom.
“Did that as a kid a couple of times. My brother dared me. We got chased out of the store by one of the floor walkers. I forgot how much fun it was.”
“I don’t need your help.” Ariel told him, stiffly.
“Buzz kill,” Bishop said, but he grinned at the memory.
* * *
On the main floor, a shorter set of escalators headed in the opposite direction from the one they’d just come down, ready to take them even lower.
“What’s down there?” Ez asked.
“Bargain Basement.” Bishop tried to remember the details of the floor plan. “It’s been years since I’ve been in here. There’s also access to the store’s private subway stop down there. Hauptmann’s actually had their own set of train cars. You’d get off at the regular station, then board the Hauptmann cars for a free trip to the store platform. It was a big, continuous loop. They sealed up the access when the store went out of business. I don’t know if we can still get to the platform from the store.”
Ez said. “Maybe there’s a way into the Deeps from the tunnel.�
��
Ariel peered into the darkness below. “I’ve never been into the tunnels. Not my kind of place.”
“We had to roust some cookers out of the tunnels when I was back in Vice, but they weren’t that very far in. Most of them rabbited down the hole when we broke in. We only followed them so far. The tunnels are a great place for an ambush. They probably just set up somewhere else.”
“I’ve been down there,” Ez said. “People who take to the tunnels want to be left alone. Some of ‘em are just trying to survive. Others got a more lethal perspective on visitors.”
“Then we need to find Mouser before something happens to him,” Ariel said firmly. “Lead on.”
The short escalators proved a bit more stable. When they reached the basement, a faded sign marked “Subway” directed them to a set of wide steps between the electric stairways. A metal gate covered in plywood blocked the entrance.
“Now what?” Bishop whispered.
“Shush,” Ariel told him. “Listen.”
There was a soft rumble coming from the other side of the gate. It was the sound of machinery performing a task. Motors thrumming, ventilation fans whirring, the vibration of potential activity. It was impossible to tell whether there were people over there, using whatever the machines, enabled or not.
The rumbling began to fill the foyer near the gate. The air was suddenly sucked forward. Anyone who had ever stood on a subway platform as the train pulled in would know that sensation: a train was arriving.
The breeze ruffled whatever was blocking the light on the other side of the plywood. Light appeared at the bottom and the edges of the blocked opening.
Blackout curtains, Ariel couldn’t imagine what else it would be. The heavy, rubberized material was as good as a moonless night unless disturbed. She pressed her face against the bars of the gate, trying to get a glimpse of what was beyond. A sudden bright line created by the billowing curtain spotted her vision but she could stll hear voices, the sound of feet, the pneumatic wheeze of train doors opening. Then, with a final sway of material, it was dark again.
When she turned away, Ez had his nose in the air. She cautioned Bishop to silence with a finger to her lips.
Ez held up two, then five, then seven fingers. Seven people or creatures behind the barrier. There was a screech of metal and a muffled thud. Ez shrugged and pointed back up the stairs. When they were safely up and around the corner Ariel spread her hands in a ‘what?’ gesture.
“Five humans, two demons. One young female. Two of the humans are younger than the rest and they’re afraid. Fear has its own special smell,” he told Bishop. “The only smell that carries farther than fear is blood.”
“No Mouser,” he said to Ariel. “But I smell him. He’s been down here, but the scent comes from that direction.” Ez pointed to a back corner of the bargain basement. “I think he may have been in the air, because there’s no scent on the ground.”
Bishop cocked his head at the word ‘air’. The night vision goggles obscured the expression on his face. He was more interested in looking down the stairs to the subway platform, as if he was trying to remember something.
Ariel tugged at his arm and pulled him away, toward the direction Ez indicated.
When they’d put some distance between themselves and the subway stairs, Bishop said, “I’m trying to remember what the platform looked like in the old days. It was wide, with tile everywhere and big glass display cases set right into the walls. There were always fancy clothes, or the latest furniture, or holiday scenes with toys and stuff inside. For Easter they had a giant lavender bunny in a bow tie with eggs the size of footballs. I always wondered . . . well, never mind. As far as I know there are five foot tall, egg laying lavender bunnies. I just hope I never meet one.”
Bishop scanned the tracks. “That sure sounded like a train coming through the station, but there’s no place for it to go, unless . . . “
“Unless what?” Ariel and Bishop continued to make their way through the forest of discarded trash on the basement floor, following Ez and his magic nose.
“My mom would know, but she went back to Kansas a couple of years ago. I think she told me the Hauptmann family had a private train. Fancier than the one the shoppers used. Just a couple of cars so they could get back and forth without getting stuck in traffic or having to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi. There must be another tunnel on the loop that goes off somewhere else, probably wherever they lived.”
“Which was?”
“Don’t know. One of those big robber baron estates built before income tax? Didn’t the Vanderbilts do that, have their own subway station in New York?”
Ariel stopped at an old display counter that was, more or less, free of junk and laid out Mouser’s map of the tunnels. She traced the loop of track under Hauptmann’s. Two tunnels spoked at oblique angles off each side of the oval shaped loop that brought customers to and from the store. One dead-ended. The other went straight off the end of the page.
“This one must be a utility tunnel for maintenance and extra cars. This one,” she put her finger on the long tunnel. “Goes somewhere else. The question is . . .”
“Where?” Bishop finished for her.
When she looked up, Ez was waving a long hairy arm.
“He must have found something.” She refolded the computer pages and stuffed them into her coat pocket. “Let’s go.”
“Aren’t you worried about cutting your feet on something?” Bishop asked. Ariel had been barefoot since the roof, as had Ez.
“You ask too many questions,” she looked down at her Raptor feet with their high arches, long toes and curved claws. “Besides, I think you’re jealous.”
“Trust me,” Bishop told her. “If I ever want to gut a flying monkey, you’ll be the first person I call.”
- 2 -
Bishop gave the extra clip of demon loads in his back pocket a reassuring pat. Mouser flies, but he’s still a kid. Special talents or not, they’re all kids, even Ariel is barely out of her teens. Is this enough to fight people like Tesslovich and Kiriyenko, that is, if the bio-tech genius was actually involved?
The whole demon thing? Bishop was still not totally buying it. So Ez was hairy and weird. Had he ever taken a really good look at the guy before tonight? Maybe he’d always had a twelve o’clock shadow, bad teeth and a severe over-bite.
It was probably the goggles. Who doesn’t look weird when they’re green? Gargoyles? A bad science experiment like Jurassic Park; cloning run amok. Or maybe this was just a really bad dream.
Bishop liked Mouser, and the kid was missing. Other kids were missing too, there was no ignoring that. And one missing kid might lead to another -- from Mouser to little Sarah Elizabeth Morgan to a growing number of others. He only hoped they were both still alive and that whoever had taken them would have the opportunity to spend some quality time with Ariel, Ez and Bishop before anyone called the cops.
Ez had found a door in the corner leading to a utility corridor. It said “Staff Only” and had been propped open a crack with a wedge of debris from the floor. Ez opened it just enough for three of them to, pass through.
Along the corridor were doors labeled Men, Women and Stock. Further along was a door labeled Garage. It was locked.
Bishop tugged at his brain, getting nowhere, his mom and he always took the subway. They’d never driven to Hauptmann’s, but it stood to reason some people did and would be offered the convenience of parking near, or actually inside the building. Didn’t there used to be valet service at the front door?
A service stairway at the end of the corridor led downward. There were two doors at the bottom. One said Garage, Level II, the other Subway.
“This must have been the employee entrance to the platform,” Bishop said. “The garage must be on more than one level.” He tried the door to Garage, Level II. It was unlocked. He eased it open a crack, praying it wouldn’t squeak and was momentarily blinded. The garage had lights. They were dim, like emergency lightin
g, but they were on.
He pushed the goggles up on his head and put his eye to the crack. Two white vans, parked by a set of open doors. The side door to one van had been left open. A jumble of what seemed to be packing blankets and utility straps were barely visible. One blanket hung out of the door like something heavy had been unloaded and dragged.
“We have company,” Bishop whispered. “There are vans in the garage, but nobody in sight. There seems to be access doors to the platform. Maybe they use the train to transport goods in and out. I see rolling racks or cages by the door.”
“I smell Mouser,” Ez said.
“Okay.” Bishop closed the door softly. “See if the door to the subway is unlocked.”
Ariel shook her head.
“Well there’s nobody in sight. We could try for whatever’s on the other side of the garage.”
“I’m going,” Ariel said.
“We could be stepping right into a whole gang of demons.”
“Who’ve just abducted three terrified kids,” Ariel reminded him.
“No need.” Ez popped the lock to the subway door with one upward wrench on the handle.
The passageway beyond was unlighted, but the brightness that spilled through two dirty glass windows set in double doors at the end of the short corridor gave off enough light to see the way to their destination. Shoulder-high, each window was made of smoky, grey glass. Opaque enough to discourage a view back into the corridor, but with enough visibility to ensure that employees exiting onto the subway platform wouldn’t open the doors into a paying customer.
Ez, Bishop and Ariel had an oblique, but fairly complete view of the platform from where they stood on either side of the small windows.
Hauptmann’s subway platform reflected the opulence of a bygone era. Fancy tile walls with friezes in porcelain relief celebrated both early twentieth century transportation and commerce. Steamships, railways and old fashioned trucks brought goods to docks and freight platforms as passengers disembarked from exotic places. On another wall, well-dressed tourists shopped for rugs, jewelry and art objects in foreign market places. The blind, glass windows of empty showcases set in the walls reflected the light created by two large crystal chandeliers hung from a vaulted ceiling.
Raptor: Urban Fantasy Noir Page 12
