Prometheus Mode, page 8
“Brother Matthew, you said this was a storm drain, right?”
He doesn’t answer directly. All he says is that we should hurry. “We’re nearly there! Push harder.”
“How much farther?”
“Just keep going straight! Just a few hundred feet.”
I hurry forward. My knees hurt. Shinji splashes, and it wets my face. The low grinding rumble has grown into a roar. We’re actually heading straight toward it.
“Is there an exit coming up sooner?” I shout. “I don’t think we’ve got enough time to go a few hundred more feet!”
“Don’t worry about the water!” Brother Matthew bellows. “It’s never been more than a foot deep before.”
I glance at the tunnel wall beside me and see a gradation of watermarks. The darkest ones are well below the halfway point, and there’s nothing above it, yet it’s no assurance.
I feel a cold drip on my neck. It runs down my chin. The ceiling is leaking and up ahead a little ways it sounds like it’s actually gushing. The water is now halfway to my elbows. At this rate, it’ll reach the halfway mark in no time!
“The tunnel will narrow up ahead,” Matthew shouts.
“Are you freaking kidding me?” I yell.
“Just keep your head high! And watch the ceiling.”
“It gets lower, too? What the fuck?”
“I told you the tunnel gets smaller.”
I push onward, despite every cell in my body urging me to turn around and run the other way. My backpack scrapes against the ceiling. What’ll we do if the tunnel fills completely with water? I still have my mask and a single rebreather cartridge from the bag Kelly had in LaGuardia. I’d almost left them all behind but in the end decided to bring one. I don’t know why I did. I wonder if Micah has one, too.
Shinji’s collar slips from my fingers. He bounds ahead of me and into the darkness.
“Stop!!” I scream. But he’s too frenzied to hear me. He’s rushing away and I can’t pull him back. His barks linger a moment longer. Then they’re gone, too. “Shinji!”
Then the worst possible thing happens: the tunnel splits.
“Which way?” I shout.
“Turn—“
RUMBLE!
“—at the Y.”
“What?”
“Right!” Micah shouts. He bumps into me. “Go right!”
“But Shinji—”
“Go!” he roars.
“Shinji” I scream down the left-hand tunnel. “Shinji!”
“GO!”
The water’s up past my elbows now, just inches from my chest. “No! I don’t know which way Shinji went!”
Micah shoves me aside and heads down the right-hand tunnel without a light. Brother Matthew sloshes up behind me. “The dog will be okay,” he says. “He’ll come. They’re smarter than people.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I suggest you move. Quickly now!”
His self-assuredness is gone. There’s no longer any amusement in his eyes. I can tell he’s starting to wonder what he’s gotten us into. He may never have seen the water get high enough to fill the tunnel before, but I know this is higher than he expected it to get. And it’s still rising.
He gives me a shove that nearly sends me sprawling. I shake the water and muck from my face, and shout for Shinji one last time. And somewhere in the darkness — I can’t tell from which branch of the tunnel — I hear him bark.
“He’s this way!” Micah yells back from the right-hand branch. “Come on! He’s ahead of us!”
I launch myself into the narrower tube, banging my head on the lowered ceiling and blinking away the tears of pain. Water now laps at my chin. I gasp as it splashes into my face. I try to raise my head to keep from getting that ugly thick, black muck into my eyes and nose, but it’s no use. When I swipe it from my cheeks, it feels gritty and thick and smells like old things newly exhumed.
Soon I’m almost swimming. I have to push my way through with my head tilted to the side. And still the water rises and the roar increases until I can’t even hear Shinji’s barks or my own grunts.
A hand grabs my leg and pulls. Out of fear and instinct, I kick back. My foot connects, and Matthew bellows out in pain. “Turn left!” he yells. “Here!”
“Micah!” The roar swallows my voice. “MICAH!”
We reach the the next branch, but there’s no sign of him. Now the water laps at my right ear and there’s barely enough clearance to keep my nose above it.
Brother Matthew grabs my shirt and yanks it to the left, urging me into the tunnel. Now the water is getting into my nose and the opening is somewhere up ahead and I don’t know if we’ll make it before we drown. All I know is that we will drown if I wait even another minute more.
I kick off of the opposite wall and plunge into the offshoot. The water is rushing like crazy past us, and it’s almost impossible to get any traction. It feels more like plunging through oil than wading anymore. Debris catches in my clothes and scratches my face. I hope it’s leaf litter and not carcasses. It flows down the front of my shirt. I can feel it scratching my chest. My body is too buoyant; I can’t move. Matthew grasps at me. His arms and legs are shorter than mine, so he’s got even less traction.
I push on, half-swimming, half-wriggling, fingers clawing. The water crashes into us, rising even higher until I’ve turned my body nearly all the way around and only my nose and mouth are above it and my hands are on the walls and I’m walking upside down. I’m desperate with panic. I’m blind. I’m so frantic about staying alive that I almost pass the widening where the shaft breaks to the right and rises to the surface. Brother Matthew grabs my leg again and pulls me back. Water is gushing down the opening like a waterfall. He climbs straight up into it, finding the ladder on the wall and pulling himself though it.
I cling to the metal rungs. I can see the faint gray sky above, sectioned off into perfect tiny squares by a metalwork grid. I sputter into that column of muddy water until I find a narrow stream of air, and I take in a wet lungful and cough and breathe again. Matthew pushes against the vent. “Hurry up!” I scream.
“There’s a tree branch,” he yells back. “It’s fallen onto the grate! I can’t lift it off!”
Below me, the water has risen nearly to the top of the tunnel. Neither Micah nor Shinji are in sight. They’re still down there somewhere.
Matthew steps higher and he puts his shoulder to the grate. If it were Reggie, he’d have flung the thing off without a second thought, but Brother Matthew’s smaller. He’s strong, but he doesn’t have the same upper body strength.
“Hurry!”
He grunts and strains, but the vent cover won’t move more than a few inches, and now the tunnel beneath me is completely gone, just a vortex of brown and white water, rising fast into the shaft and disappearing into the labyrinth below.
“Hurry!” I scream. Suddenly, the water beside me explodes and a figure emerges out of it. Micah rises up, gasping and sputtering. I grab a hold of him as a mixture of relief and grief and hope and bitterness flow through me. His body shudders as he coughs and chokes.
“Where’s Shinji?” I scream.
“Not here?”
I shake my head.
He coughs and spits muddy water.
“You didn’t find him?”
He pushes me away and tries to look up through the falling curtain of water.
“Micah!”
He grabs the ladder and begins to climbs.
“Micah, you can’t leave Shinji!”
Matthew steps to one side to make room, and now it’s the both of them pushing. Together, they’re still not as strong as Reggie, but they’re strong enough. The grate moves slightly to the side. Matthew shouts, and they push again. Another inch. Then two. The opening above us widens. Three... four... eight inches.
“Shinji,” I sob. I think about the rebreather cartridge in my pack and I consider diving down into that river of mud, but then a hand reaches down and pulls me up.
“Jessie! Come on!”
I push back. The water has reached my waist. The tunnel is gone now. “He’s going to drown!”
“He’s gone!” Micah screams back at me. He practically shoves me up the ladder. He orders me to climb. “He’s gone, Jessie!”
I climb. Five rungs, six. I lose count. Hands grab for me and pull me from the shaft and drag me onto the street where the water gushes from all around and flows into the hole like a bathtub draining. I’m drowning in grief as the sky above us weeps its angry tears. The ground bleeds so much water that it seems like it might be dying. There’s a brilliant flash and the clouds heave a hollow groan and fracture. The world is dying. I’m dying.
I’ve lost my friend and I’m dying.
But I can’t even mourn properly. As I lay sputtering and spitting and crying, Micah reaches over and tries to yank me to my feet. I scream at him to leave me alone, but he gets right in my face and tells me to move.
I don’t want to. I won’t.
“Move!” he screams, pointing into the gray curtain of rain. “Now!”
In the next flash of lightning, in that moment when there’s a vacuum of sound before the next thunderclap splinters the air, I see why:
We’re surrounded by the undead.
PART TWO
Mould Me Man
Chapter 11
There were times when I considered suicide. I think I may have mentioned that before. As painful as these memories are to dredge up, they are what come to me now, now as I sit here clutching my side. Now, as the blood leaks through my fingers and soaks into my shirt. Now, as the insidious infection extends its poisonous strands throughout my body and reaches into every cell, turning me from what once made me who I am into something I am not. Thoughts of ending my own life, even as something much more permanent and resembling nothing like death strips those thoughts away from me and urges me to keep on living, even if this new life resembles nothing before it in my entire experience.
“I guess I’ve made a mess of things, haven’t I?”
Noise grows. It surrounds me, voices raised in defiance and dismay. No one responds to my question.
I don’t even remember what the argument was about, that first time I gave suicide any serious thought. I was fourteen. I do remember that much. And I remember that it was triggered by something my mother said.
Or did.
Or, maybe, something she didn’t do.
A birthday? Did she forget my birthday?
I can’t seem to remember any of the details. I guess that should mean something. But for the life of me I can’t figure out what.
I do, however, remember standing at the base of the Stream transmission tower at the end of the block. I remember staring up at it and hearing the buzz of electricity and thinking how easy it would be to climb right up and reach out and...
And I don’t want to die. Remember?
But even as these thoughts come to me, from somewhere in the deepest recesses of my rational mind, I know that I am. Dying. I’ve been bitten. I’m going to die, and then I’m going to come back. There is no cure for it, no stepping back from this precipice. No treatment or antiserum. What a false hope all that turned out to be. I know that now. No matter how much I wanted to believe over the past few days. We’re all dead; it’s just that some of us don’t know it yet because we haven’t leveled up.
How fucking ironic that it should end this way.
I think about how easy it should’ve been, all those times — a razor blade in the tub, an overdose, the intentional ‘accidental’ step off the curb and into the rush of nonstop traffic on Hansby Way, where everyone drives fast and nobody gives a damn — and how much pain I could’ve avoided if I’d only just gone ahead and done it. Just once. But in all the times I’d contemplated ending my life — seriously contemplated it — I just couldn’t do it. I never had the guts.
The gun presses against my back, makes a gun-shaped imprint in my skin. One bullet. Kept with me from the very beginning of this fucking adventure. I guess I always knew it would come to this. Huh. One single solitary bullet, like a friend, faithful, never leaving me, never wavering in its promise. All I have to do is aim carefully. It’ll find its own way after that. Then everything that ever caused me such pain in this hell of a life will be nothing more than a footnote in someone else’s.
But my hands don’t move from the bleeding holes in my side. They’re useless, unable to stanch the flow, unable to extract the poison from the wound.
Who will mourn me? Eric? Strangely enough, it’s he who will be hurt the most by my passing. He always loved me, unconditionally, even though we’d never gotten along growing up— he with his unreasonable devotion to our absentee mother and that inexplicable smoldering disaffection for our long-dead father. He who unilaterally and irrationally decided that he would take on both their responsibilities for himself.
He of the strange, almost sympathetic, obsession for the undead.
He who was the only one to never back down from my grandfather. The resentment they bore for each other was always visible for anyone to see. And, I suppose, the mutual respect, too. Neither of them would ever admit to it. But it was just as apparent.
I doubt that either my mother or grandfather will mourn for me. Not much, anyway. Mom will drink her way to forgetfulness, just like she did with Dad.
And Grandpa will...
Well, I don’t think he even has the capacity to mourn. Maybe that’s what hurts the worst. I struggled all my life to connect with him. We touched each other’s lives, but only as if through a frosted pane of glass, he on one side, me on the other, just fuzzy silhouettes to each other and vague notions of movement.
Then there’s Kelly. He’ll mourn me in his own way, I suppose. Or maybe it’s too late for that. I think it might be. I wonder if the infection raging inside of him, the one that makes him harder and faster and stronger, that steals from us both what was uniquely ours, will leave just that one little shred of humanity inside of him.
Or maybe it’ll steal that way, too, just consume that last little bit of our times together, our feelings for each other, devouring them into oblivion.
In a way, his own living death will be a greater loss than my own. He has a family who needs him. His parents love him and depend on him. Kyle depends on him.
Like Shinji depended on me.
Poor Shinji. I couldn’t regain for him what he lost so long ago: a family, torn asunder by this never-ending tragedy.
But now that my own death is a certainty, as solid as a tangible presence standing before me, beckoning me to follow it, I cannot fathom how it was that I could ever consider wanting it. Right now, right in this very moment, I want nothing more than to live, even as I find the pistol in my hand, my finger on the trigger, the muscles contracting.
The scene around me is utter chaos. The plaintive cries of the undead mask the cries of those remaining few of us still alive and uncorrupted, uninfected. Yet, through it all, one sound rings clear...
Chapter 12
“Shinji?”
I can almost hear his bark. It seems as real to me as ever, like a distant foghorn cutting through the din of the storm raging around us.
“Shinji!”
I stumble to my feet, but Micah grips my arm and yells into my ear that we have to move.
“No! I can’t! I promised to take care of him.”
“He’s gone!”
“I have to find him!”
“There’s no time!” Brother Matthew roars. He steps to my side and grabs my arm. “The Elders are coming!”
His fingers slip off of me when I drop to the ground over the sewer opening and start shouting his name. “Shinji!”
Another bark rises from deep inside that roiling, cascading hole, and I know it’s not my imagination. I can see it on their faces that they heard it, too.
“I have to save him!”
“No, Jess!”
Micah tries again to grab me but my clothes are soaked and sticking to my body and his fingers fail to gain purchase.
I lower my head down inside the manhole and squint into the darkness. “Shinji!”
The road is an angry river, a raging cataract rushing down into the opening. At first I don’t see him. I see nothing but foam and mud and the wash of dead leaves. But then he appears, splashing frantically to stay afloat. Muddy water rushes into his mouth. He lets out a strangled bark. I yell and try to reach him. My arms aren’t long enough.
A hand grabs my shoulder, vise-like and painful. For just a fraction of a second, I see Jake back at the Jayne’s Hill complex. I see the IU biting him on his shoulder and my body suddenly has all the electrical energy of a lightning bolt. I let out a scream and spin away, nearly tumbling into the hole headfirst. But it’s just Micah and he shouts at me to get up and that he’ll get Shinji. He must tell from the expression on my face that I don’t believe him, not for one second, because he practically throws himself down into the sewer, as if he understands that this is his one chance to prove me wrong about him. To prove us all wrong.
Or at least cast doubt on our beliefs.
“Go with Matthew!” he roars. Yet I can barely hear him above the din. “I’ll find you!”
I spin around to locate the man. The rain is coming down so heavily now that I can barely see ten feet. I don’t know if it’s a mixed blessing. The disorienting chaos that hides him from me now also conceals me from the IUs that have come out in droves.
Before I can move, there’s a pressure on my thigh. I hear a weak bark, and Micah’s there, thrusting Shinji out of the hole. His head and shoulders emerge an instant later. “Take him!” he shouts. “Run!” He pulls himself out, snatches Shinji when I don’t move fast enough, and shoves me hard enough to get me moving. I run in a random direction, not knowing where the hell we are, where Brother Matthew is, where to go.
Disembodied arms reach out at us from the gloom. I stumble a few steps, nearly trip, then begin to sprint. More figures materialize, arms trailing torsos, heads and legs appearing next, then features: gaping mouths and clacking teeth. The resurrected dead, having come out of their hiding places while the sun can’t burn their brains into dust, alerted to our presence by our shouting, turn their attention from the rain to us. But they’re clumsy, unfocused, frustrated by the rain and fog and wind.
