Shepherd starts to sprint then, and the other SOG flash past. Liz and Fozz can only stare, and even Collins and Austin hesitate, unsure what to do. Instinctively, they start to follow, then the entire SOG unit skids to a halt. A distant rumbling in the distance grows to a deafening roar.
Liz’s breath hitches as the police switch as one from their non-lethal guns to the AR15s hugging their backs. Take aim as they start to retreat.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Holy fuck,” is all one of them says and she follows his wide-eyed look up the tunnel back towards their entry point. The sight paralyzes her.
A wave of shadows surges toward them, pouring in through the gap above. The tower’s residents, in an unending stream of bodies, descending after them. They hit the ground and those who aren’t trampled are instantly up and racing on, filling the tunnel.
“What do we do?” someone yells as they retreat.
Shepherd is staring stunned at something in the midst of the crowd. Something dark-clad and doll-like in their midst.
Halo. Now just a broken rag puppet as the crowd tear him apart. A glimpse of crazed faces.
“Just fucking shoot!” the commander yells.
They open up. The noise is deafening, disorienting—and their efforts utterly useless. Suppressing fire is supposed to overwhelm with its blanket of bullets. Any rational being will seek cover.
But there’s nothing rational about this.
The swarm of screaming, drug-affected men, women and even children—oh God, there’s children among them, falling beneath the stampeding feet even as they try to keep pace with the mob like tiny zealots—keep surging forward despite the SOG mowing down their front lines.
The elite police unit fights as they’re trained to do. But they’re not soldiers, and they’ve never faced numbers like this. They’re seconds from being overrun.
Liz’s heart is in her throat as she turns and sprints back into the undiscovered tunnel. The two detectives and Fozz pound behind her with most of the SOG guys she thinks, but the adrenaline floods her system so quickly she can barely focus on anything except the narrowed sliver of sight before her, the tunnel arcing around and around, then angling down even further into the earth. Then the banks of plants beside her suddenly cut out and twenty feet ahead the tunnel splits in two.
She hesitates and Austin barrels into her. “Left, left, go left!”
He pulls her along by the collar and she stumbles, then finds her footing and she’s running again, glancing back for a stolen glimpse. Sees the black-clad Shepherd reloading as he runs, waving her on. Behind him roiling shadows.
Two of the SOG members cut right, not seeing them detour as they fire behind. Shepherd roars but they keep running, disappear. The mass of residents pursue them, but that leaves only two remaining SOG, the two detectives, and her and Fozz. To battle an entire building.
It’s insane. Too insane to rationalize and her brain is overwhelmed as she pounds on, unthinking. She almost doesn’t register the huge room looming ahead until the roof opens out again and she stumbles into another massive ammo dump vault. There’s even old marked boxes lining the walls. But the rest of the floor space is taken by banks of Black Lung plants. Row after row. There must be a hundred mature plants in here, bathing under heatlamps. Condensation drips from the ceiling and drainpipes and she’s dizzy just looking at the dark bounty. Her vision swims. Then she remembers her mask, realizes she’s dropped it far behind somewhere.
“Blast door,” Shepherd is yelling, and Liz rouses and turns, sees him and the detectives and the last SOG officer all grab the heavy steel doors on either side of the entrance. A screech and the old machinery starts to crawl shut.
Liz slams next to Shepherd, wrenches with all her strength. Her arms feel like they’re pulling from their sockets.
Then the sound of distant gunfire and strangled screams. The two soggies buying them precious seconds.
“Hurry!” Collins is shouting and Liz almost stumbles at the look of uncharacteristic fear on his face. He has kids, she knows—Jasmine and Jasper—had even met them and his wife one night for dinner. Had glanced in at him, sprawled on their bed, reading stories as they jumped and swung from his bulk like he was their pet tree.
Detective Austin has a cat that shadowed his ankles like a dog. Fozz and Liz had been invited to his apartment once, too. Small but neat and clean, and his current girlfriend looked like a stayer. He’d had trouble finding anyone who could cope with the hours, but she was a paramedic, so her shifts were even worse.
Fozz she’s known for years. Is probably her best friend in the world. Her only one left. She’d pushed everyone else away. The look of helplessness on his face now is heart-breaking. It’s her fault he’s here. He’d been putting off leave for months while she chased this drug thing. He was already burnt out and now he’d die in here.
They all will. No one would see their families, their loved ones, their pets again.
Shepherd must see her mind slipping because he’s in her face, that tight skin around his eyes like he’s a shouting mannequin: “Close it!”
The rusted doors creak closed, the rusted grating echoing the screams again coming toward them, then the steel slabs give a final groan before abruptly stopping, still leaving a gap of inches. There’s no way they can budge either one.
“Son of a—” Jacko, the last of the SOG unit says, still straining to shut out the nightmare tunnel behind them. The cords of muscles on his neck like they’re about to pop. But panic and wishful thinking mean nothing now.
“The boxes!” Shepherd points at the stacked crates and starts shoving metal tables aside. The others take his lead. Liz grabs one of the hydroponic trolleys to help and looks right into the leaves of its plant, can see every vein spiraling out from its shaft, every feather of its leaves. She’s close enough to inhale its ash scent and even that much contact triggers flashes of light behind her eyes. She sags, hands gripping the table as if stuck.
“The girl... She wants us to...”
“Hey!” Collins is shaking her. “Stay back from that shit.” He pulls her away until she’s on empty floorspace.
“She was there.” Liz looks past his shoulder.
He looks to the back of the room. The carved-out room narrows until converging at the far end in a rock formation. A hole to a cave system perhaps. There’s no one there. But for a moment she thought she’d seen—
A flash of shadow across the gap: figures hitting the junction again, pouring back down after them. Screaming fills the tunnel.
Fozz drags a box and, in his panic, trips and upends it. He stares down at the contents peeking through the broken lid. “Ah, you think this is the best thing to use?”
Long thick gleaming brass bullets rest on straw: old M1 carbine. Artillery shells nestle within another. All utterly useless to them, but also entirely unstable and volatile. They have no choice.
The screams get closer like a tidal wave of water. Flashes of darkness as shadows surge in the narrow gap. Fill it. Crazed cries of rage, the gangbangers and co-opted residents fueled by whatever psychotropic effects Black Lung causes in its victims.
The ragtag group shoulder the door. Dig in their toes.
Then too many feet stampede toward them, the noise eclipsing everything. There’s a huge crash as the first bodies slam against the blast doors. Everyone skids back across the slick floor.
Liz can’t help it. She screams. But so do the others.
5 ‒ CONTINGENCY ADJUSTMENT
ONCE, WHEN SHE’D been a young cadet, she’d been sent to interview a home invasion victim. Nowadays you did most interviews by phone or Skype, most research on the internet, but twenty years ago it was all footslog work. There was no substitute for seeing a person’s reactions in the flesh. The man had invited her in, hunched and injured, but as she’d spoken to him, she began to see something animal behind his eyes, a too-intense hanging on her words, an unconscious tongue licking his teeth. She realized she’d been
invited alone into the house of someone wrong, that despite his victimhood, he saw a moment of advantage. And when she saw him break up a tablet into her coffee, she fled. Despite reporting to police he was an innocent random homeowner, the guy was in fact a drug dealer targeted by greedy clients. She’d rubbed up against something evil and tainted, glimpsed beneath the veil of society to the easy corruption lurking ever-present. A glimpse that became a deluge the more she worked, until her own family was torn apart by it.
A voice calls to her. Distant, incoherent. She stares with unfocused eyes, and then makes out a face near hers: Fozz. Saying something, imploring.
She smiles at him. Wishes they could close the gaping rent in the veil. But perhaps she’d known it would always end like this, undone by her own curiosity. Her own pigheadedness.
Behind him, she can see a figure across the room at the rock pile. See, she points. I was right. It calls to us now.
The figure turns from peering into the cave tunnel and it’s Shepherd, sprinting back toward them as he dodges around the hydroponic trolleys.
“Liz! Damn it, listen to them.”
Liz blinks as the commander hits the door beside her, lending his weight. The world swims back into focus. Her anxiety returns like a sledgehammer.
“We...we hit it as a group,” Shepherd’s saying, pointing to the dark tunnel across the room. “Close off the rocks behind. We’ll have a better chance of holding them off.”
“Do we even know it goes anywhere?” Collins demands.
“You want me to scout more?” They’re all close to hysteria, but Shepherd’s able to fight it, slow his breathing. He calms himself, looks at the rest of them. “It goes further. They’ve been using it. That’s enough. These doors aren’t going to hold.” He glances at Liz. “You still spacing?”
“I’m okay.”
He looks at her, fighting words. She braces for his sarcasm, knows it might push her over the edge this time. Her defenses are shot. When he speaks his voice is softer: “Just hang in there. I’ll get you all out.”
She stares at him. Realizes how responsible he feels for them. He’s already lost most of his men. And it’ll be all of them if he can’t get this plan to work.
“It was a trap. They waited for us to enter.” Jacko is quiet, the hardened SOG man close to losing it. “They were foxing.”
“We haven’t got time to worry about—”
“But why?” Austin cuts Shepherd off. They need this, need a moment to understand what the hell’s happening. “Why would anyone cultivate anything this psychotropic and destructive? If that’s what’s really affecting them. And where did they get the strain in the first place?”
Fozz points at the ocean of plants in the room. “If that’s what’s affecting them? You think it’s not this shit? An entire building’s trying to rip us apart is a coincidence? They’re fucking evil. You can smell it.” He shudders, tries to huddle into himself.
They all know it. Can feel the Black Lung cuttings in the room like a presence. Something malevolent lying in wait.
“Maybe it wasn’t intentional,” Shepherd finally says, looking around the room. “This has taken too long to engineer. And D2S’s empire is founded on a smooth-running organization, violence included. They still had workers sensible enough to be wearing protective equipment, even while others had gone batshit crazy. So maybe there’s something down here that affected everything. Maybe the plants became Black Lung somehow down here.”
“Could it be a fungal infection or something?” Liz says as she stares up at the waterpipes along the line of the roof. They’re strangely darkened. Not rusted but more like...the black mold she’d seen in the rooms upstairs.
“Infected how?” Shepherd asks.
“I don’t know. But ergot mold used to infect bread and cause hallucinations and sometimes insanity. They think it’s where a lot of our fears of monsters and other realities came from, because those affected would see horrifying visions they couldn’t explain.” She looks at the two detectives. “You guys hear about anything like that—” Something shifts on the edge of her vision. When she looks back at the pipe, there’s nothing, just the honeycombed cobweb. But when she turns away again, she has a sense it’s moving. She shuts her eyes.
“They built these buildings in the ‘60s,” Fozz says, staring up at the pipes. “Piled people in and let the whole thing rot. Like they do with everything. It’d be fitting if they caused this.”
“I don’t give a shit who caused what,” Collins says, turning to Shepherd. “They’ll know this has gone to hell. How long before Command sends someone?”
“Who are they going to send? Next call’s the army. Maybe they’ll just bomb the whole fucking thing.”
“Maybe they should,” Fozz says.
They stare at him. “All the more reason to get as far away as we can—” Shepherd starts to say.
Then Liz nearly screams as a white eye appears at the gap in the door: one of the residents looking in right at her. The man starts biting the metal, scrabbling at the sharp edge. Bright blood splatters in at them and she shies away. She can’t take much more of this.
Jacko braces against the door. “I’ll buy you some time. Better be room at the end for me, though.”
Shepherd grabs his arm. “I’m not leaving anyone Greg—”
“They’ll be through before you get across the room. I’ll be behind you, Shep.”
An unspoken moment between them, a lifetime of service together. Shepherd nods.
He looks at the rest of them. “We good?” They nod, but Liz can see the fear in their faces, the clenched hands, can feel the apprehension descend like a caul over her and almost take the will from her legs. But there’s something that continues to drive her, even now, even as the numbing release of death finally beckons her, a promise to her past perhaps. “Then we move out,” Shepherd says, and Liz sets her feet, grits her jaw and prepares to push off the door. “Ready... Now!”
They burst away from the blast doors and thread through the maze of tables. Behind them there’s a shriek as someone spots the movement and the door’s slammed with a huge weight. Liz hears Jacko grunt.
She can’t risk looking. Can’t do anything but dodge through the field of plants. Each passing flash of black leaf seems to dig into her consciousness, tug at her vision and stretch at awareness like elastic. If smoking this substance has taken over the minds of so many, imagine what it could do for her. Imagine what it could blot out in her life. Her memories, her past. Her whole existence. Wipe it clean. Absolve her.
She stumbles with the weight of temptation and Fozz sees and comes back as he always does. Always doing so much for her. Now risking his life. She can’t let him.
She pushes him on. He has to save himself first. She’ll be okay. She’s right behind.
And as she looks past him to the tunnel, she sees Detective Collins just in front of her colleague, sees the big man slow, fixated upon the passing plants so close to his touch. The policeman stops, reaches out a hand.
“No!” she screams, but it’s like she’s in slow motion, and he runs a hand down a darkened frond then rips it free and jams it in his mouth.
Fozz slams into him, bounces off the big back like he’s hit a wall. The broad shoulders turn, and Collins looks down at him, still chewing, as dark veins spread from his mouth across his cheeks. His eyes have turned black and fathomless.
Collins’ skin ripples and shifts as if something within is trying to break free, like he’s becoming possessed by something. The image is impossible for her to reconcile, and for a moment she can see another face beneath his. A man also but not the same detective she’s known over so many weeks. A face twisted with hatred.
Collins grabs Fozz’s head with one huge hand, lifts him clear off the ground. Her friend flails, scratching at the immovable flesh, then he swings his precious camera like a weapon. It explodes against Collins’ temple, shatters in a rain of jagged plastic and blood. It’s like hitting concrete.
Liz screams at the sound of crunching bone. “Get back!” Shepherd’s saying, sighting his gun.
Liz is too enraged to listen, to get out of the way. She gives up trying to pull Fozz clear and spots a metal bar against the wall beside them, part of a broken trolley, and she grabs it, turns back. Collins senses her at the last moment, but she avoids becoming trapped in his eyes and just swings—
The bar clips his jaw and he finally staggers, but his grip on Fozz’s face is unending and his fingers compress and collapse the skull in on itself. Liz swings again. Harder, all her rage in the strike. The bar slams home, the jar numbing up both arms and she has to let go. The length of metal remains stuck in mid-air.
Stuck into Collins’ temple. The detective lurches to one side, steadies himself on a trolley that crashes beneath his weight. Fozz is thrown clear and hits the ground in a broken heap.
“No, please,” Liz says, sinking to her knees beside her friend, hauling him up onto her legs. His head swings to her and his face isn’t a face anymore. Beside her, Collins kicks a last spasm then stills. The metal bar clatters free. She can barely comprehend the sight of either of them.
Then Shepherd’s grabbing her by the back of the collar and dragging her with him. She shrugs free, freaking out, and he screams at her. “Look!” Across the room Austin has stalled, and he’s ripping at the Black Lung plants too, shoveling the poisoned leaves into his mouth.
Liz snatches up the length of bloodied metal, sprints after the SOG commander. At the blast doors, Jacko waits until the last possible moment, and then he leaps after them. Almost instantly, the door bangs in a foot behind him, the numbers moments from bursting through. And Austin is already turning to him, sensing the man coming, ready to embrace him.
Hellhole Page 27
