Without a choice, she began walking, taking small tentative steps onto the wooden foot-bridge that skirted along the wall of the great chasm, heading down at an angle. It shook and shimmied under her weight, threatening to crack under her at any second, sending her plunging sixty feet to the upper layer of the mountain of trash. If the fall didn’t kill her, being impaled on the jagged edges of rusting metal certainly would. She figured that with her luck, it wouldn’t be a quick death. She would lie there bleeding from a dozen wounds until she died from shock.
A hundred yards passed too quickly, and she found herself at the platform that jutted over the chasm. The air roiled with heat and smoke. “I can’t,” she whispered, looking over the edge. Far below was a ledge of sorts that jutted into the trash.
“Ya can,” another slag said. He was very much like the Tier 3, covered in strange warts a number of which seemed to have erupted and were emitting pus. When he smiled encouragement, he showed three blackened teeth that were barely hanging on to their gums. “It’s easy.”
“But there’s a fire. Look. You can sorta see flames. And…and there’s smoke. I can’t go in there.”
She had been trying to will her feet to get her out of there, but they had more of a sense of mission than she did. Although she hadn’t budged, the slag leapt at her with surprising speed. “Oh no, boy. Ya gotta go, now. Management, ya know. They’re watchin’ and ya don’t want them to get involved. Oh, no. Besides, it ain’t that bad. Steer clear of the smoke and you’ll be good. And look, we got gloves.” He handed her heavy leather gloves that were made for a man many times her size. There was what looked like blood or tar on them. Slowly, mechanically, she slid them on; they ended almost at her elbows. “Now just get in the harness.”
Attached to a length of rope was a crude harness, again made for a man. She looked like she would slip right through it. She stepped back and ran into another man, thick and strong.
“I’ll go first,” Cole said, moving her behind him.
The slag jerked in surprise. “Huh? What? No. We only send people one at a time down there. Who sent you over here? Was it Gilbert? The Tier 3?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cole said, standing over the man. “I’m going down first. Then, once I’m down you’ll send the…him.” He had nearly blurted out Corrina’s true sex.
“No. No way. That’s not the rules. Ya gotta be smart. That ain’t stable down there. You could set off a chain reaction and bury him. Is that what you want? I didn’t think…”
Cole snatched the slag by the front of his overalls and glared through his fake tattoos like a man possessed. “You are going to lower me down first and then the boy. Or I’ll pitch you right off of here. And if you even think about double crossing me, I’ll climb back up here and do bad things to you before I throw you off. You got it?”
The slag had never been talked to that way, at least not out on the platform, but he had been around enough desperate men to see one who would carry out the threat out of spite alone. “Fine,” he grunted. “It’s your funeral.”
As Cole slipped on the harness and the slag tightened it around his waist, he nodded toward Corrina, giving a significant look to her ankle. He wanted her to be armed. Quickly she knelt and worked the Crown from its ankle holster with shaking, sweat-slicked hands. It went in her pocket. “You better take these,” she said, handing over the giant gloves. “I’ll just use my sleeves.”
“So,” Cole said, when he was ready to go, “do I get any instructions?”
“Simple. Just get three pounds of copper. The spot price is up three cents this week.”
Cole’s eyes narrowed, but he said nothing. On the other hand, Corrina had a question, “Up three cents from what?”
The question bothered the slag. He frowned and had the big man not been there, he would have smacked her across the teeth. “Don’t know and I don’t care neither. I just know you’re supposed to get copper. So, get getting. All the area right in front’s been cleared for ages, so follow the main tunnel. Oh yeah, I forgot.” He handed Cole a heavy flashlight. “Just keep following the tunnel.”
A hand winch lowered Cole into the abyss. With the smoke and the haze, he all but disappeared halfway down. From there he became nothing but a shadow until he flicked the flashlight on. To Corrina he seemed very small and the light little more than a match as he spun it around in slow circles.
“Why ain’t he goin’?” the slag asked.
“He’s waiting on me, I think. Is there anything down there? You know, like alive or something?”
The man stepped back, nervous at first before spitting out a rancorous, “No. Course not. What could live down there? Just get in the harness, for fuck’s sake.” She slid her skinny legs through the holes and discovered that the harness was tighter than it appeared. She wasn’t going anywhere, which was the only thing not terrifying about the entire event. The slag was clearly lying about pretty much everything. He had been given the rehearsed line about copper prices and told to parrot it without bothering to understand its meaning. Had this been a real job, he would’ve simply said: go get copper. Instead they were trying to sell the idea that what was being asked of them was important.
And he had certainly been caught off guard when asked about something living down in the darkness. He knew about the Dead-eyes. Perhaps not the exact details, but he knew enough to know that he didn’t expect either Corrina or Cole to come back. Corrina shivered despite the heat radiating from below.
With a shaky breath, she stepped away from the platform and clung to the rope with both hands as it swayed back and forth. The slag muttered under his breath as he worked the winch, and slowly she went down into the mess. It looked as though entire buildings had simply been uprooted and hurled into the pit. There were great slabs of cement and great chunks of wall that were oddly still intact. She thought that the fires would be larger, raging among the twisted hunks of metal, but there was not one to be seen. And yet, the entire abyss glowed with an odd light. It shimmered off the walls, which were uneven and slick with what she took for oil.
At the bottom she quickly pulled herself from the harness and wasn’t surprised to see it begin to rise up the moment she was free. Cole wasn’t surprised either and leapt at it, grabbing it with both hands and pulling back as hard as he could. The slag up top wasn’t expecting this and lost control of the winch long enough for Cole to tie it off on one of the girders.
“He knows,” Corrina told him in a whisper. She had the Crown out and was pointing it around at the shadows, of which there were many, and they were all as scary as hell in her mind. In fact, it felt a lot like she had been lowered into hell. The stench was like that of an overflowing toilet and she was sure that the sewer lines from the factory ran directly down here and emptied somewhere beneath her. At the same time, heat emanated from below and baked into her.
Foolishly, she touched a spear of old steel that jutted up out of the pile, and had to jerk her hand back.
Too late, Cole warned, “Don’t touch anything. I heard there are fires down here that have been burning for a century. But I wonder.”
“About what? Fires? What else makes stuff hot except a fire?”
“Pressure,” he answered simply. “New York used to be a huge city with giant buildings, some a thousand feet tall. When Krupp tore all that down, they dumped it here. All that metal and weight, crushing down will cause heat.”
Corrina was sorry she asked. She didn’t care about metal and buildings, and the heat was more annoying than anything else. What occupied her mind was the fact that there were zombies somewhere in the great mass. Were they lurking in the wreckage, watching the two of them even then? She felt eyes roving all over her. “That guy up there knows about them. God, I think we’re being fed to them. He wanted to leave us here without a way up. Jeeze, God, I might puke.”
“Yeah, you may be right. Why else would the Dead-eyes work for Krupp unless they were being fed? Well, we know where to find them.” He pointed
at a twisted circle of darkness that grew deeper as it ran inward.
“Maybe we shouldn’t…” Corrina began, her fear becoming too much to bear.
Cole came down to her level and held her arms to her side. Looking into her face, he told her, “It’s too late to go back. Like you said, the slag up there knows. He’s not going to pull us up. He’s going to leave us down here for them. Our only choice is to go on, but we can’t go on like this. We have to look like a couple of slags looking for scraps. So, hide the gun in your pocket. It’ll be okay.”
It sure as hell didn’t feel as though it would be okay, not even to Cole. He was about to enter the hunting grounds of a pack of undead. It was ideally suited to them, and deadly to any human. The entire great heaping mountain was unbalanced and seemed to sway all around them. It groaned and hissed as if alive.
Corrina took a step, but in the wrong direction. “It won’t be okay,” she said in a croaking voice.
“Then it’ll be what it’ll be. We’ll do our best. Come on.” He took her hand and picked his way forward, and as he did the mound took on a strange shape, one that couldn’t be seen from above. By pure random happenstance, the trash and debris at this level had taken the shape of some sort of huge alien cathedral. Here and there, decrepit subway cars sat on end still linked together giving them the appearance of tremendous columns. And metal cargo containers had fallen across each other making odd, ugly arches. To cap it all off, part of a bridge had been thrown in whole and had been partially pierced by what looked like an oil tanker.
Together they formed a cross—an upside-down cross, which Cole felt was perfect.
God was not worshiped here. The hand of Satan had crafted the image.
Still, Cole gave Corrina the best smile he could under the circumstances and headed in first, the flashlight held in his left hand, the Forino tucked into one of the leather gloves, the heavier Riker Mega stuffed down into a cargo pocket at his thigh. The tunnel was man—or zombie—made in parts, and in others it was just an opening of sorts between the mess. Frequently, the walls were little more than a slowly bending lattice of corroded beams; it was all that held back the millions of tons of metal and cement above their heads.
The floor of the tunnel was just as unstable as the rest. Sometimes they would walk across a torn-up section of a building that was relatively flat, at other times they had to leap from one precarious little section of cement to another with everything shifting and teetering around them. Sometimes they had to climb upward at odd angles, then the path would wind down, spiraling deep into the darkness.
What was just as bad, from a psychological point of view, were the hideous noises that came from all around them. Great, inhuman groans, erupted without notice. They sounded as though immense beasts were slowly dying somewhere in the mess. Then there were shuddering moans that went hand in hand with strange, frightening vibrations which ran along the metal surfaces; these sent them clinging to the nearest support. When there weren’t groans and moans, there were long, snake-like hisses and high piercing shrieks that Cole assured her were not human or zombie made.
Corrina was ready to believe him, because clearly the hisses came from some other monsters that were even more horrible than zombies. In short, she was frightened beyond anything she had ever experienced and that was saying a lot. The only reason she didn’t cling to Cole was that she just knew he was going to put a wrong foot down somewhere and fall through into a pit lined with a forest of rebar, or simply disappear into the blackness of a chasm, his screams going on and on.
After one of the more violent vibrations that sent a crack through one of the chunks of wall, Cole told her that it wouldn’t be much longer. This was meant to reassure her but it had the opposite effect. The sense of coming doom only grew as they wound their way through the darkness. When they were so deep that no one would ever hear them scream, they came to a spot where another tunnel of sorts branched away at an upward angle. Cole tight-roped across what looked like an old lamp post and shone the light up the tunnel.
He came back and whispered to Corrina, “When we come back this way, stay to the right. See the motor? That’s the clue to keep to the right.” He did this at the next two intersections as well, pointing out features so she wouldn’t get lost. On the third one, he showed her part of a cable. Ten minutes later, they came to an identical one but instead of being on their left, it was straight ahead.
They had somehow gone in a circle. After that, Cole began marking their trail with a piece of rock, but had only to mark two more of these odd intersections, before they heard a voice whisper, “H-help m-me. Is s-someone there? I-I-I’m trapped.”
Neither of them were fooled. Corrina dropped into a crouch and had the little Crown out in a flash. Cole covered the lens of the flashlight and whispered, “Remember, watch my back. Aim for the face. Don’t waste bullets.”
He saw her shadowed spikes nod. Louder, he called out, “Where are you?”
“I-I don’t know. I passed what looked like prison bars. I’m not much further past them.”
“I see them. Hold on.” The bars were obvious. They were only a few steps beyond a gaping hole. On either side were sheer walls of linoleum; what used to be part of the floor of a hospital. Whatever had broken the section of flooring in two had also caused the gaping hole. The only way to pass the hole was to balance along a length of wood twelve feet long and only three inches wide that just “happened” to be there. The Dead-eyes had set up their trap so that escape would be nearly impossible. But Cole wasn’t looking to escape. He put a foot on the board to test its strength.
Corrina, who was still on the verge of running, grabbed Cole’s arm and silently pleaded with him to turn back. Forget the Dead-eyes and the mob and the orphans, she wanted to say, only she was too afraid to make a sound. She had hit a wall within herself, one that she didn’t think she could overcome. There was no way she’d be able to make it across the narrow strip of ancient wood—she would fall—and if she didn’t, she knew what was beyond it. Zombies. What if there were ten of them? Or twenty? What if they ate her slowly? What if they just nibbled on her for hours, working from her toes upward? What if she was still alive when they started eating her guts?
Cole saw the dread in her eyes. “Are you going to be okay?” Her mouth came open, but she was too afraid to speak. She thought she was going to cry. She was no fighter. She was just a girl, and a tiny one at that, and her gun was tiny as well. Tiny and stupid. It was useless. She was useless. She was…done. Her courage had run dry. It was just gone, and she couldn’t bring herself to take another step forward.
He pulled her back up the path a bit and set her beside an antique washing machine from before the bombs. It was partially holding up an industrial-sized walk-in freezer that was on the verge of tipping and crushing the washing machine like a tin can. “Stay here. Don’t move unless one of them comes down this trail.”
What she was supposed to do then, he left up in the air. Still, it was the best plan she had ever heard, and she squatted down, trying to blend in with the trash.
“It’ll be alright,” he said, as much to reassure himself as her. He wasn’t going to cry, but he was…anxious. He couldn’t allow himself to admit that he was just about pissing himself. A single Dead-eye was hard enough to kill, but three? Or four? Four would be too many. If there were four of them, that would be it. They’ll eat me.
“Shit!” he hissed, angry at himself for letting his mind go down that path. He had to know he was going to win before he set foot on that warped piece of wood.
With the Forino hidden beneath the thick glove and the flashlight in the other hand, he addressed the length of wood. It wasn’t flat or straight. Somehow it was twisted on two planes and with the smoke, the darkness, the sweat dripping down from his dark hair, and the fearful drop into the unknown, he didn’t think he had a chance in hell to tip toe across it.
Speed was his best chance. If he could get most of the way across before things went
bad, he figured he could leap the rest of the way. He was right. From the first step, the board bowed alarmingly beneath his weight and it only grew worse as he rushed forward. Then, just as he feared the board would break in two, he launched himself at the far end of the opening.
He’d been going so fast that it was barely a five-foot jump and he ended up barking his shins on the top of some sort of immense piston. Cursing under his breath, he scrambled up, beaming the light around and found himself on a slanted section of wall…no, it was linoleum. A thirty-foot long wedge of flooring had survived the fall though whatever was holding it up wouldn’t last much longer. Just the weight of his jump had caused the entire thing to rock back and forth.
Above him was the metal frame of a small warehouse making it look as though he was standing on edge of a cage. However, the struts of the frame were set so wide apart that Cole could easily get out, which also meant anything could get in.
Trash poured from some of the square openings above him, while other openings belched forth a spider’s web of insulation. Some of the openings were shrouded in such an impenetrable darkness that even when he shone the light at them, the shadows only receded into themselves a few feet.
“I’m over here,” the voice said in a plaintive whisper. “Please help me.” He was, of course, in the far corner of the room where the floor sloped down. Cole spun the light at him. The Dead-eye hid his face behind his hands. They were the hands of a slag, grey and foul, old blood beneath the fingernails. “No! Turn it away. I’ve been down here for days and my eyes are…weak.”
“Sure,” Cole said. He had seen enough of the creature. He had heard enough as well. A normal human would’ve been dead if they had been trapped in the pit for “days.” There was nothing to drink and the heat would’ve sapped the moisture out of them, leaving them leathery, wrinkled and dead. Cole worked the light around the room, noting the possibilities. The attack would come from above, from what passed as a ceiling, more than likely from the high end of the slope.
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 15
