Terminus (40 page)

Jefferson threw the empty flask aside and dropped to his knees.

He tore at the explosive, tried to rip it free. He pawed the slabs of clay, tried to locate the detonator and twist it from the putty.

‘Motherfu—’

Lupe helped Sicknote climb the platform steps.

Catastrophic blast damage. Smouldering rubble. The palatial elegance of Fenwick Street reduced to a soot-blackened grotto.

‘Sure you don’t want to come with me?’ asked Lupe. ‘I could use the company.’

He shook his head.

‘Think I might head to the roof. Take in the view.’

Lupe pulled an assault rifle from beneath bricks. She checked it over. Broken stock. Cracked grip. She tested the slide. Functional.

She heaved a chunk of rubble aside. Bingham, chest crushed, sightless eyes matted with grit. Lupe shook out Bingham’s shoulder pack. She pocketed a spare rifle magazine. She blew dust from the generator fuse.

‘Let’s crank up the power.’

They headed for the plant room.

Sicknote stood in the doorway. He leaned against the frame. He coughed and fought back vomit.

‘Getting bad, huh?’ said Lupe.

‘Yeah. How about you?’

‘Pretty rough.’

She squatted beside the generator. She screwed the fuse back in place. She wrenched the starter cable and set the machine running.

She put an arm round Sicknote’s shoulders and helped him cross the hall.

Her foot hit something hollow, something metal. A crushed hip flask.

The Chief lay beneath a girder. A barely recognisable mess of offal and NBC fabric.

‘Fucker.’

Sicknote pointed to the street level stairwell.

‘Over there. Something moved.’

Lupe climbed over bricks.

Twisted limbs knotted with metallic tumours.

Galloway.

A blackened hand clenched at the sound of her approach. Weak, spastic movements.

She kicked bricks aside. Cloke’s head split open by a bullet. Spilled brain tissue. Black eyes turned towards Lupe. Weak hiss.

‘What does it take to kill you bastards?’

She picked up a heavy lump of concrete. She raised the jagged block over her head.

‘Cloke, if you’re still in there, I’m sorry. This is the best I can do.’

She dropped the rock and pulped the creature’s head.

She turned away.

Sicknote was slumped against the ticket hall wall.

‘Hear that?’ he said. ‘Infected. Out in the alley. The gate is fucked. They’ll be heading down here in a minute or two. Don’t drag it out. Get going.’

Lupe helped him to the freight elevator. He leaned against the back wall.

They looked down at Donahue.

‘What a waste.’

Lupe shone her flashlight upwards through the splintered roof of the elevator. The shaft. Sheer, concrete walls. Cable and counterweights.

‘Sure you want to do this?’

‘Yeah, why not?’ He took the notebook from his pocket. He gave it to Lupe. ‘Get this to someone who can make sense of it.’

She tucked the notebook in her coat pocket.

‘Are you going to be okay up there?’

Sicknote held up a cyanide capsule.

‘I’ll be all right.’

Lupe stepped out of the elevator and pulled the gate closed. Rust-shriek. Slam.

‘Take it easy, brother.’

‘See you around.’

Lupe pressed Up. The elevator began its ascent. Rattle and grind. A last smile from Sicknote as he rode out of view.

The brass clock hand of the floor indicator charted the elevator’s ascent.

Lupe gripped the bars and watched the wooden platform rise up the shaft.

Distant rumble. Ground tremor. The elevator swung in the shaft.

Grind of stone on stone. Trickles of dust from the hall roof. Lupe hurried to the platform steps. Last look back.

Flame-seared rubble. Blood and splintered bone. An elegant transit hub, now an annex of hell.

Lupe ran down the platform stairs. Thunder crack. A chunk of masonry detached from the roof and smashed across the steps. Lupe danced round the rubble and continued her descent.

She threw herself into the boat. She flicked open her knife, cut the tether and pushed clear.

Gunshot retort. A fissure zagged across the tunnel roof, bringing down a curtain of stone dust.

She grabbed the oar and began to paddle. The prow of the boat split plates of ice.

She drifted closer to the blocked south tunnel entrance. She hefted the assault rifle. She switched on the barrel light and raised the weapon to her shoulder. Planks lit harsh white. She fired, rocked with the recoil, tried to keep a grip on the bucking weapon. Tungsten penetrator rounds punched holes, blew wood chips and splinters.

Floor six.

Sicknote hauled back the elevator gate. A last glance at Donahue. A vague conviction that she deserved better than to be dumped like garbage. He laid her on the elevator floor, arms folded across her chest.

A thin gold chain coiled on the floor. A crucifix. Belonged to Tombes. She must have held it in a gloved hand as she rode the elevator to meet the Chief.

He laid it on her chest.

He crossed the hall and headed for the stairs.

He gripped the balustrade and hauled himself up the steps.

Dawn was breaking. He emerged into cold grey light.

Lupe knelt in the boat and prized splintered planks aside.

Another deep tremor sent ripples shivering across the surface of the water.

She created an aperture wide enough to allow the boat to pass. Hurried oar strokes. She ducked beneath jagged wood as the dinghy entered the south tunnel.

She struck a flare. It burned fierce red.

Ancient brickwork. Crumbling mortar. The tunnel roof tight overhead.

Ribbed tunnel buttress stretching ahead into darkness.

She let the current carry her further from Fenwick Street.

Sicknote’s voice:

‘Lupe, can you hear me?’

She unhooked her radio.

‘Yeah, I can hear you.’

‘It’s beautiful, Lupe. Truly beautiful. The sun is rising. It’s topped the horizon. I can see the whole city. Christ, if only you could be here, Lupe. If only you could share this . . .’

The last reception bar flickered out. The LCD screen flashed:

Lupe shut off the radio and tossed it into the water.

She picked up the oar and began to row.

The boat was carried on the current, swept deeper into the flooded tunnel system.

Flare light dwindled to a blood-red pinprick as she rode the black tide to the end of the line.

Sicknote walked across the wide, flat roof. Boots crunched virgin snow.

Rusted chimney pipes. The remains of a water tower: cedar planks and galvanised steel hoops.

The beige JetRanger parked at the centre of the roof. Empty seats. Headphone coil dangled from an inert switch panel.

He ducked beneath the tail boom and walked to the edge of the parapet.

‘Can you hear me, Lupe? I can see the whole city.’

He looked out over broken towers, vertiginous cliffs and canyons. No birds. No traffic. No car horns. Nothing moved. Empty streets, empty avenues. Titanic desolation.

Ruins that would, in time, be reclaimed by vegetation. A slow and beautiful decay. In a couple of thousand years, Manhattan would be woodland one more. Rubble buried beneath forests of hickory, hemlock and pine. Central Park would return to salt marsh. The street grid would be reduced to soft delineations in the forest floor, blurred by leaf mulch and bracken.

Perhaps a handful of landmarks would endure. The marble lions of the Public Library might stand in the humid twilight of an arboreal clearing, draped in vine like a lost Inca temple. A home for salamanders and toads.

The city wiped away. A restored Eden. It would be as if New York never happened, as if the Dutch sailors never came.

A rolling crash like thunder. A partial tower collapse in the far distance. An apartment building on the upper west side. It crumbled like an ice floe. A wave of dust washed down adjoining streets.

Built by giants, smashed by gods.

‘This is it, Lupe. Humanity is finished. Nothing left of us but old analogue TV transmissions radiating out into the cosmos.

No sound, Lupe. Not even wind. I wish you could hear it. I wish you could be up here right now. Absolute stillness. Absolute quiet. A city of the dead.

‘Can you hear me, Lupe? Are you there?

‘The silence. My God, the silence.’

Five years have passed. Five years in which the plague has spread across the world leaving only tiny enclaves of survivors . . .

They took the job to escape the world.

They didn’t expect the world to end.

Kasker Rampart: a derelict refinery platform moored in the Arctic Ocean. A skeleton crew of fifteen fight boredom and despair as they wait for a relief ship to take them home.

But the world beyond their frozen wasteland has gone to hell. Cities lie ravaged by a global pandemic. One by one TV channels die, replaced by silent wavebands.

The Rampart crew are marooned. They must survive the long Arctic winter, then make their way home alone. They battle starvation and hypothermia, unaware that the deadly contagion that has devastated the world is heading their way . . .