She held up her hands. “It wasn’t me, I swear. All I swiped was the gun.”
Cursing under his breath, he dropped to his hands and knees and began rifling through the filthy rags of the dead and wounded. Beneath the rags, they had nothing to offer except green pus, diseased blood and an unholy stench that rocked Cole back on his heels. “Shit. This puts us behind the eight ball a bit.” That was putting it mildly. He had money in his bank, but if the Fantuccis were pulling out all the stops to get him, then they’d certainly send someone there. A few bribes would freeze his account and maybe, if he showed up, he’d even be held at gunpoint until the goons arrived.
Stooping, he picked up his Fedora. Not only had it been crushed underfoot, there were greasy stains inside and out. “This was a mistake,” he whispered. Everything he had done since Eddie had walked into Mick’s diner had been one big mistake. Sighing, he pointed at Graylin. “Get us out of here. This time don’t lead us into an ambush, or you won’t be walking out again.”
Graylin believed him. “We’re almost there, but we gots to hurry. A ten-dollar bounty’ll have every trog in the city after you guys. The Morlocks, too.” Having grown up in the tunnels, he knew sixteen routes to the river and in the next twenty minutes he discovered that they were all being watched. Ambushes were everywhere.
“We’ll have to go around,” he told them.
He took them down storm drains that were three-quarters filled with rainwater, and through natural crevices that were sometimes little more than a foot wide, and always they traveled in utter darkness. And still their way was blocked time and again. Finally, he resorted to the most dangerous path of all: the night streets of Queens.
Although Cole and Corrina breathed a great sigh of relief at getting out of the toxic darkness, Graylin was beside himself in fear. A thousand windows looked down on the street they emerged onto. He knew that each one could hold a set of spying eyes.
“Try to keep up,” he said and then started jogging east, his rubber shoes flapping. He ran the length of a block, took an abrupt left, and then another so that he was going back the way they had come, only a block over. He then ducked into an alley, not two seconds before a squad car roared around the corner.
“In here,” Graylin whispered and crawled through a break in the building they had been running next to. A light caught the back edge of Cole’s mucked shoes just as he slid in. There was a cry and the engine picked up in volume, sounding angry as it raced down the narrow lane.
Cole waved for them to go on. He then crawled back to the hole with the Eagle knockoff in hand. These were some of the most unreliable guns ever made. They were prone to exploding and after ten shots it became something of a gamble each time the trigger was pulled. They were also infamously inaccurate. Still the squad car was a big target. He chanced three shots, hitting the windshield with all three. None penetrated, which was to be expected. What was also expected was how the driver slammed on the brakes and how the officers rolled from their seats, with their rifles aimed.
The driver ripped off half a dozen shots at the hole in the wall and while he did, his partner edged closer with a stun grenade in hand. With a gesture, the driver stopped shooting and his partner dashed forward and tossed the grenade into the hole. There was a pause and then the bomb went off with concussive force and had Cole still been in the room, his wits would’ve been leaking out of his ears.
Instead he was racing through the building, a gun in both hands, catching up quickly with Graylin and Corrina. Together they crossed one street and two alleys.
More cops showed up, but they had the wrong block surrounded and slowly Graylin ran them further from the most obvious danger. Soon Graylin was flagging and Cole took the lead. He kept up a demanding pace Cole and it wasn’t long before Graylin begged for a break. Corrina would have as well only she was doing everything in her power not to appear weak in front of the Morlock, who as everyone knew, were a discreditable species.
“We’ll take a break once we get…” Cole was just saying when he was brought up short by the sound of klaxons going off. The klaxons were far worse than the sirens that went off once or twice a week. They meant a Cat-2 cloud was coming in, or more than likely was already above them, raining down radiation.
By reflex alone, the three pelted for the nearest building, dashing in before anyone could rush up and lock them out. In a dark and deserted lobby Graylin began to pace, his chest working like billows. “We is so fucked!” he cried, his voice cracking. “This can’t be happening. Shit! If we head into the tunnels, the trogs’ll be waitin’ for us, and if we stay here, they’ll have a hun-nert taxmen in place ready to fuckin’ pounce the moment the alarm is lifted.” He stopped, facing away and, over his shoulder, he added, “Maybe…maybe I should take off. I tried, man. You know I tried. And it’s not like me gettin’ pinched with you guys is gonna help or nothing.”
“Yeah, you can go,” Cole told him. Corrina glared at both of them and looked as if she was ready to give them an earful. Cole shot her a warning look. “There’s no sense all of us getting nabbed. We’re going to hole up here until the alarms cut off, then we’ll go south to throw them off our trail.”
Graylin shrugged and grunted, “Smart, that’s really smart. So, yeah, good luck.”
Cole gave him a phony smile and waved until he had disappeared down the central staircase. Immediately, he turned to Corrina. “Trust me. This is for the best. The river is to the west. We can find it ourselves. And this radiation warning is going to work in our favor. There’ll be no more eyes on the street.”
“Why would there be? Who’s gonna be dumb enough to go out in a…no!” She took a step back, her grey eyes round and wide. “There’s no way we’re going out there in a Cat-2. Maybe if it was a Cat-1, maybe, but I seen people get fried in a Cat-2, Cole. Yeah, yeah, it’s true. They looked like they just got pulled off a fuckin’ griddle.”
“Watch your language. And maybe, likely in fact, those klaxons aren’t real. The timing is just too much. It’s too exact. We slip from the police and ten minutes later a Cat-2 moves in? Naw. I’m not buying it.”
Corrina ran to the door and put her back to it. “No! There’s nothing to buy. You can’t bribe a storm, Cole. Not even the vamps can change them. That’s why they live in their vaults, to hide from the radiation. Everyone knows that.”
“But you can bribe someone in the RDD. It’s the Radiation Detection Division and they work out of a building that’s right in the middle of Fantucci territory. My guess is that ten bucks is enough to shut down half the city.” He said this with more confidence than he felt. He had never heard of anyone bribing someone at the RDD. And would ten dollars really be enough of a bribe to send three million people into a panic? And didn’t they have redundant systems, and wouldn’t that mean multiple bribes…And am I really worth all of that? he wondered.
Cole knew he wasn’t and yet, in his gut he felt he was right about the timing of the warning. He wasn’t happy about it. If he was right, it would mean he was once again mixed up in something big—immediately, his mind formed a picture of Ashley Tinsley. She was a vamp’s vamp: painfully beautiful, ever-changing, but always young, rich beyond conception, fashionably perfect, and capable of the most cold-hearted cruelties.
She and the other vamps were like petty gods…or demons. They ruled the city from deep in their vaults. Without a breath of regret, they enslaved the masses, giving them pennies for jobs that routinely left them maimed and slagged. They “modify” their servants, mega-dosing their guards with steroids and turning them into hulking giants with life spans of less than thirty years. They were also implanted so that they can be “muted” with a remote device. That same controller could also kill the servant in case they made an attempt at turning on their masters, though the kill switch had been known to be used when a vamp was simply displeased.
They had absolutely no regard for the lives of lesser beings. When the Silvertons were denied the right to build a new factory in
Brooklyn on a site where thousands lived, a very convenient fire broke out and destroyed the exact dimensions of their proposed ten-block factory. They then scraped the remains and poured concrete over the entire lot, entombing untold numbers of slags in the tunnels beneath.
Day to day, vamps were bad enough, but when they quarreled, the city reeled as famine, fire and death swept the streets. The last vamp war had leveled half of the Bronx, killing a quarter million innocent people.
Cole hoped to God that he hadn’t accidentally kicked off a new vamp war by saying no to the Fantuccis. It didn’t seem likely. As powerful as the Fantuccis were, they were two-bit players compared to vamps—unless Julius Fantucci was being used by a vamp. That was possible, and if Cole was being dragged into the mess, it probably had something to do with Ashley.
Or maybe the klaxons were a real warning of a Cat-2 storm and if he went out in it, he would likely die from radiation poisoning in the next couple of days or weeks.
“I think you should wait here,” he said to Corrina, digging in his pocket and coming up with a dollar and twenty-two cents in change. “Blend in with the locals and when this all blows over, take the train back to Manhattan. Meet me at the…”
“No,” she stated with her you-ain’t-changin’-my-mind tone of voice. “I’m no Morlock. They knew me for an outsider right off. And you know what they’ll do if they catch me. They’ll turn me over to the highest bidder. I just spent all day chained to a fuc…to a post, so no thank you. We stay together.” She glanced to the front door of the building. “Is the alarm really a fake?”
He had been willing to bet his own life that it was a fake, but he wouldn’t bet hers. “Wait here.” He took off the Fedora, sucked in a big breath and walked outside.
Chapter 8
Cole had also seen people burned by a heavy Cat-2 storm. It usually took a few hours for the first boils to grow, however everyone always said they could feel the radiation as little pinpricks on their exposed flesh. He had no idea if that was true. Afraid that it was, he slid up his sleeve and stood just outside the door with his bare wrist held out.
The rain pattered softly around him, and the klaxons blared, and his wrist grew cold. He knew enough about radiation to know that there was a chance he was being blasted by alpha rays and gamma rays and who knew what kind of rays, and not even feel it. Not right then. Depending on the dosage, he might not feel it for days.
Or the alarm could be a hoax.
“Fuuuuck,” he muttered under his breath, not knowing what to do. If he stayed, he would have to dodge hundreds of cops, thousands of angry trogs and tens of thousands of money-hungry Morlocks. If he stayed, he would die. That was the truth. Corrina knew this as well. She was a loose end and the Fantuccis weren’t likely to spend all this money and then leave her free to go.
A new sound broke in on his thoughts: it was the wail of police sirens. They were far off still and barely audible beneath the alarms. He couldn’t tell how many there were, but he knew that it wouldn’t be one or two. The entire force had wanted him dead for years and now they had a ready-made excuse. And they had him trapped. But not for long, he decided.
He turned to the door and saw Corrina staring out at him. “I can’t tell,” he told her. “I could be soaked in a lethal dose of the stuff and not know it.”
“But you don’t feel, like burns or nothing?” She had been expecting her death to come for a while now, really ever since she could remember. Even as a little child, death was a vibrant fact of life. It had danced around her time and again, and she knew it would come for her sooner rather than later. She had given a lot of thought about how she’d want to die and at the top of her list was overdosing on Rican Mule. At the bottom was being broiled alive by radiation.
Dying from “the big slag” as she thought of radiation poisoning was somewhere in the middle. It was a slow enough death that there was plenty of time to choose one of the quicker, less painful ways to go out because there was no way in hell that she was going to lay about vomiting up brown blood while black blood shot out of her ass.
Nope. That was not going to happen.
“Actually, I feel a little bit cold,” he told her.
Unlike him, she mushed her pork pie hat down on her head and resisted the urge to look up into soft rain; getting radiation in the eyes seemed like a bad thing. She tried to feel the radiation with her palm. “It feels like rain. Maybe this is all a trick. Prolly is. Only you can piss people off enough to do all this.”
“This isn’t my fault…sorta.” He started walking straight east through a city that was indescribably empty. Although it had seemed deserted before, there had been an underlying sensation of life. It was a hidden sensation, as if Cole could have run to any building and thrown back a door or a curtain and found people huddled there.
Now, Queens felt completely empty. He doubted he would find anyone in any of the buildings. They had closed up their lead shutters and had scurried below the skin of the earth to hide with the rats. Far from alleviating the intensely lonely sensation, the sirens and the klaxons only made it worse. The sounds echoed down empty streets and bounced off of empty buildings. They were mechanical sounds, inhuman sounds.
Strangely, the echoes seemed to punctuate the darkness, making it both deeper and sharper. Corrina shivered and, forgetting herself, glanced up.
“You want my coat?” he asked.
She was not cold. “It’s just weird, you know? It’s like we’re the last two people alive. They say Kansas City is like this all the time. That true?”
“I think so. As far as I know. St. Louis is empty, too.” There were many abandoned midwestern cities, empty except for the zombies. Although it had been only a hundred and fifty years, those cities looked as though they belonged to an ancient civilization. From the pictures that explorers brought back, these once great cities had become ruins.
They walked in silence, each trying and failing to imagine living in one of those far off places. The idea was frightening, and it wasn’t the radiation or the zombies that cared them, it was the intense loneliness and the immense silence. Humans weren’t meant to live without other humans, and even there on a New York street, Cole and Corrina subconsciously moved in closer to each other.
It was almost a relief when they heard the roar of an approaching squad car. They slunk down in the shadows of a stoop and watched as it raced by in a blur, going eighty miles an hour.
“Taxmen are morons,” Corrina said, grinning and climbing to her feet. Already the squad car was blocks away and growing tiny.
“Pretty much,” Cole agreed and went on. Although they had wound around under the earth for what felt like ages, they still had a mile and a half walk before they finally caught sight of the bridge. It was dazzlingly, lit by searchlights, and the red and blue strobes of squad cars. The west bound lanes were closed and the east bound ones were being watched. There’d be no crossing the river anytime soon.
Cole struck out southward along the river wall, looking for a break in it that wouldn’t require him to wade through chest-high raw sewage. As polluted as the rest of the city was, nothing compared to the East River. It was a giant horrible bog of feces and industrial waste that gradually oozed south at a glacial pace. For a century it had been used as the city’s trash dump and even though dumping in it had been outlawed two decades before, midnight runs were still common.
The river was unnavigable except by the rafts and shallow-bottomed rowboats. Anything with an engine would find its propellor spun-up in who knows what in minutes.
When Cole finally found a section of the river wall that had collapsed, he and Corrina sat above the stinking sludge in silence. After the stench of the trog tunnels the river was only unpleasant.
“Maybe we should find a room,” Corrina suggested. “Or a pawn shop. We can pawn the Eagle for at least a hundred dollars.”
“It’s a knock off and it’s got a crack in the cylinder.” He spun it, feeling the tiny click, click, click. While it was
n’t a problem yet, it would soon be as dangerous to the shooter as it would be to the person he was shooting at. “I’d be lucky to get ten for it. And as for a room, that’s a no go. Not on this side of the river. Once they realize we’ve slipped through their fingers, they’ll hit every motel and flop house in a three-mile radius. They’ll keep an eye on the bridges and watch every train in and out of Astoria.”
But why? Why had they gone to all these lengths just to find one not-so-good bounty hunter? Once more he pictured Ashley, and once more, he sighed. He did that often when he thought of her. He was just undressing her with his mind—another thing he did all too often—when the klaxons suddenly cut off.
Cole glanced at his watch and scoffed. They’d been going for barely two hours. At a minimum a Cat-2 alarm would ring for five hours and that was if there was a good storm pushing up behind it to wash away the residue. Sometimes they rang for a day or more and once, as a kid, they went for nine days straight. A two-hour alarm was more than suspicious. It confirmed that someone had been bought off.
“Good news, bad news,” Corrina said, leaning back on a decaying slab of sand-crete. “We ain’t gonna die from radiation. I just don’t know if that’s the good news or the bad.”
He didn’t know either. He lay back as well, his hands behind his head. “We’ll wait until morning to try to cross. One of the scows will take us across.” She wrinkled her nose at the idea. Where there was garbage, there were garbage pickers. Slags would pole themselves along in homemade boats, poking through the night’s dumps for anything that could be re-purposed or sold for scrap. They would also nose about for dead bodies, human or otherwise.
The city paid twenty-five cents for a body fished out of the river. Very few people knew that the only reason there was a budget for this sort of thing was because of the Dead-eyes living in the city. In his five years as a bounty hunter, he had been called on to inspect far too many floaters and it never got easier.
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 7
