Terminus (15 page)

She crossed to the equipment pile. She pulled clothes from a canvas duffle. She pulled on an over-sized fire coat and turned up the cuffs.

‘Did I hear right?’ asked Wade. ‘Nine shells?’

Lupe picked up a fire axe and took a couple of practice swings.

‘We’ll be okay,’ she said. ‘Any of those bastards make it inside, we’ll take care of them.’

‘What about me?’ said Wade. ‘I want a knife.’

‘You’re blind.’

‘I can fight.’

She upturned a tool bag. She found a lock-knife and put it in his hand.

‘Thanks.’

He flipped it open and tested the blade with his thumb.

‘Hey, Lupe.’

‘What?’

‘I heard there’s a bike out there, in the street.’

‘Yeah. Other side of the alley.’

‘What kind?’

‘No idea.’

‘Messed up?’

‘Looked in one piece.’

‘A Harley?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Describe it.’

‘Chromed out. High handlebars, ape hangers. Extended forks. Someone spent a lot of money on that bike. Lavished a whole lot of love. She was somebody’s baby.’

‘How old?’

‘God knows.’

‘What did the cylinder look like? Was it a panhead?’

‘Dude, I don’t know shit about bikes.’

‘Man. If only I had my eyes.’

‘You wouldn’t last long out there, brother.’

‘Fuck it. I just want a ride. I want to be under the sky. I don’t want to die down here, in this sewer like a roach, you know? Anywhere but here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Lupe. ‘Yeah, I hear what you’re saying.’

Donahue and Lupe dragged a table from the IRT office. They hauled it across the ticket hall, kicked it over and blocked the platform stairwell.

‘So what exactly did you see?’ asked Lupe.

‘I’m not sure. Something in the water, below the surface. Bubbles. Ripples. Reckon they could survive under water? Infected? How long can they last without air?’

‘Might have been rats,’ said Lupe. ‘You can bet the flood water drove a swarm of rats from the tunnels. Bet there are plenty swimming around down here.’

‘No more surprises. We stick together. No wandering off alone, all right? Line-of-sight, at all times.’

‘Relax. You got the gun.’

‘I got nine rounds. Won’t go far. You guys stay sharp, all right?’

Galloway sat on the bench, sweating and rocking, teeth clenched in pain.

Donahue knelt in front of him. She loaded a hypodermic, jabbed into his bicep and shot Galloway 20mg of Demerol.

He relaxed as opiate bliss washed over him.

‘Let me see your neck,’ said Donahue.

He pulled his collar aside. Bruised. No blood.

‘Quite a hickey. Show me your hand.’

Galloway held out his right hand, sticky with blood. The forefinger was bitten through at the knuckle.

Donahue wriggled on two pairs of Nitrile gloves.

‘Hold still.’

She rinsed the injured hand with mineral water and began to swab it clean with cotton wool. She didn’t look him in the eye.

‘Doesn’t look like you lost too much blood. Vasoconstriction. The cold worked in your favour.’

‘It’ll be okay, right?’ he asked. ‘Few stitches. It’ll be fine, yeah?’

‘Relax,’ she said. Calming voice. ‘Let me do my thing.’

She knelt beside plenty of injured folk during her time as an EMT. Pedestrians who ignored DONT WALK and got their legs crushed by a truck. Balcony jumpers impaled on railings, broke-backed but with a weird look of acceptance as if this horror were an average day in a lifetime of bad luck and failure. Disoriented stab victims lying on a sidewalk, trying to plug a wound with their hands, trying to tell her, as they slid into unconsciousness, they had looked into the dumb, dull eyes of the kid demanding their wallet and seen the true face of evil.

She had a personal code. Soothe, but don’t lie. Say:
Help is on its way
. Don’t say:
You’ll be fine.

‘There,’ she said, dabbing the wound clean. ‘Looks a bit better.’

She felt icy detachment steal over her. A familiar mindset. The willed callousness she adopted each time she faced catastrophic injuries, certain her patient could not be saved, nothing to be done but supervise a painless death.

Galloway was infected. A talking corpse.

She stitched the stump with suture, and lashed bandage in place with micropore tape.

‘We’ll give you regular shots,’ she said. ‘Should dull the pain.’

She gathered up bloody swabs and scraps of suture, balled them ready to be hurled into the flood water.

‘You have to amputate my arm,’ said Galloway. ‘You guys are trained EMTs. You have medical gear. Drugs. Scalpels. You’ve got to cut my arm at the elbow. Before the disease spreads.’

Donahue shook her head.

‘Sorry, bro. You know the score. One bite. That’s all it takes. You’re infected. No antidote. No cure.’

He looked up at her like a frightened child.

‘There must be something you can do.’

Lupe joined them. She stood over Galloway. She held out an axe.

‘Tie a tourniquet, if you want, and bring down the blade. But we both know you’re done. Best decide how you want to spend your last hours.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Wade with a grim smile. ‘You just joined the cyanide club.’

‘It’ll be all right,’ said Sicknote, looking up from the elaborate artwork slowly metastasising across the ticket hall floor. ‘It’s a blessing, in a way. No more thought. No more you. It’ll be beautiful.’

Galloway scuffed the mural with his boot.

‘Fuck the lot of you. Talking like I’m already dead. Fuck you all.’

He crossed the ticket hall and sat on the platform stairwell steps. He contemplated the subterranean blackness below.

Trinity Church. A sombre gothic-revival structure built from massive blocks of limestone. The spire had toppled. The nave was open to the sky. Rain dripped from shattered arch spans, danced on pews and marble tiles.

Lightning flash.

The dead sat in rows. A succession of suicides. Scattered pill pots. Skulls vaporised by shotguns. Throats gouged by strop razors.

The dead faced a rubble-strewn altar and toppled cross. Congregants at a macabre Eucharist.

Thunder crack.

A priest lay sprawled on the altar steps. He slowly climbed to his feet. Cassock streaked with pus. One arm gone.

He looked up, mesmerised by roiling cloud and forked lightning. Rain splashed his rotted skull-face.

Movement among the congregation. Infected among the dead. Those that were too sick to die; already infected when they opened their veins.

They climbed to their feet and stumbled along the pews, kicked cadavers aside, until they reached the aisle.

Some kind of unspoken command jerked revenants to their feet and propelled them towards the doorway at the back of the nave.

The priest hobbled down the centre aisle, dragging a useless leg behind him. Other infected fell in line.

The great bronze doors hung off their hinges. The rotted horde filed out of the church and stumbled down stone steps into the street.

Lightning flash.

A garbage truck lay on its side, driver still buckled in his seat. He vomited maggots.

The crowd shuffled through the rain-lashed street, squeezed between the hulks of burned out cars.

They filed past Zuccotti Park and headed east down Liberty towards Fenwick Station.

Nariko drifted in black silence. Twin helmet lights shafted through swirling sediment. Bone-chilling cold. She kicked against the velvet dark with a series of muscular leg strokes.

Cloke and Tombes swam behind her. Lights danced in the dark. They carried a stretcher between them. A fibreglass backboard loaded with equipment.

She reached a wall of rubble. She gripped the tumbled blocks and manoeuvred hand over hand. She clipped a karabiner to the rivet hole of a girder and spooled safety line.

She sank to the tunnel floor.

Her helmet lamps lit the buckled yellow hull of the school bus sitting on the track-bed, part-buried beneath masonry.

She inspected the bus.

‘The rubble has shifted. I think the roof is starting to fold.’

‘We can’t abort, Captain,’ said Cloke. ‘We have to press on.’

‘I’m heading inside. You guys stay here.’

She pulled herself through the windshield

The driver. Hands fused to the wheel. The corpse leaned right, like he was taking a hard corner.

She used the dash and driver’s seat to haul herself inside.

She touched down in the passenger compartment. A double row of seats. The bus listed forty-five degrees. She gripped a seatback to keep her balance.

‘Tombes? You got the breaching gear?’

‘Right behind you, Cap.’

Nariko glanced around at buckled window pillars, the bulging, ridged metal of the roof.

‘Let’s hurry it up, guys. This thing could implode any moment.’

Light shafting through the vacant windshield. Twin helmet beams. Tombes floated into view.

‘Here.’

He leaned into the bus. He shouldered the dead driver further aside, and passed Nariko a black cylinder lashed with webbing.

Nariko hugged the cylinder under her arm and manoeuvred down the centre aisle in a series of slow lunar strides. She spooled braided paracord tether behind her. She tied the line to the rear seat frame.

‘Need a hand, boss?’

‘Hang back. Place is a death trap. Less time we spend in here, the better.’

She rested the steel cylinder on the back seat of the bus. She unwound hose, checked regulator pressure and unsheathed the cutting head: a red pistol grip tipped with an exothermic heat rod.

She positioned herself in front of the rear door, braced her legs, and pulled the trigger. The unit vented a jet of high-pressure oxygen/hydrogen, and simultaneously popped an igniter spark.

An incandescent flame, hot as the sun. Water surrounding the exothermic head fizzed and boiled. Nariko felt spreading convection warmth through the trilaminate of her suit.

She pressed the cutting head to the door panel. Steel turned angry red and began to sweat. The burn hole widened and dripped metal. Steel tears fell and scattered like ball bearings.

‘How’s it going?’
asked Cloke.

‘Good. An easy cut.’

‘We’ve been submerged nine minutes.’

‘Just shut up and let me work, all right?’

The cutting head burned at ten thousand Fahrenheit. She could feel the steel of her helmet radiate heat like a hot plate. She cooked in her suit. She shook her head, blinked to clear perspiration from her eyes. She licked sweat from her upper lip.

She completed the cut. She shut off the plasma torch and took a step back into cooler waters.

A vein of super-hot metal glowed red like neon. She kicked the door. It fell open.

‘That’s it. I’m through.’

She stood in the rear doorway and surveyed the debris beyond.

A crevice between two massive chunks of concrete.

‘It’s a tight traverse, but we can make it to the other side.’

She returned to the front of the bus. Tombes fed her the spinal injury backboard piled with equipment. She laid the plasma cylinder alongside EMT kit and lashed it down with nylon rope.

They wrestled the stretcher down the aisle towards the rear door.

Cloke crouched on the hood of the bus. He looked through the windshield into the dark interior. He watched the dancing helmet lights of Nariko and Tombes as they struggled to manoeuvre the bier to the rear door.

He looked up. Rubble and girders. A precarious Jenga-stack. A massive tonnage of stone piled above the bus roof.

‘
This stuff could collapse on our heads any moment,’
said Nariko, wind-rush of exertion captured by the helmet mike.
‘If this were a standard street rescue, I would tell my guys to hold back. At least until we got proper structural support.’

Cloke psyched himself to enter the buckled hull of the bus. He gripped the tether line and pulled himself past the dead driver. His helmet lights briefly illuminated empty sockets and a yellow-tooth grin.

He called to Tombes at the rear of the bus:

‘How’s it looking? A clear route?’

‘Looks that way.’

Cloke’s left foot snagged. He squirmed. He tried to shake free. He was stuck fast.

He turned and looked back. The bus driver had twisted in his seat and sunk teeth into the fabric of his drysuit. He could feel the tight vice-pressure of teeth grinding into his suit lining, trying to break flesh.

Cloke screamed.

‘What’s up?’
shouted Nariko.
‘What’s going on?’
She grabbed seat backs and hauled herself towards the front of the bus.
‘Cloke. What’s going on?’

Cloke kicked at the cadaver’s eyeless face. He balled a fist and pounded the creature’s skull. Water pressure slowed his arm, softened every movement like he was battling monsters in a helpless fever-dream.