The Immortality Virus (34 page)

She shook her head. “We’re going to have to go into the sewers.”

“Do you think they’ll follow us down there?” Sam asked, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“If they don’t, they’ll lose us. They may need more men to handle the Sewer Rats, though. It may be our best chance.”

“That’s just great.”

Grace ignored him, and they started north without another word.

The entrance to the sewers was a manhole people tried to skirt, as best they could, with some success. When they noticed two people set on going down there, they gave it an even wider berth.

“Do you think we’ll get ambushed as soon as we drop down there?” Sam asked.

Grace patted her new disruptor and shrugged. “Only one way to find out.”

They pried up the cover and Grace started for the ladder.

“That’s far enough!” came a deep, deadly voice from somewhere in the crowd around the manhole. She looked up just in time to see half a dozen Sewer Rats had disruptors trained on them.

There was no need for the guns, Grace thought as the armed men pointed them in exactly the direction they had been going anyway. It would have been easier if they’d just waited until they got to the bottom. As it was, the only thing keeping her from using the manhole cover as a shield and taking out each and every one of them was the fact that they had a disruptor trained on Sam’s head. His death might simplify her life, but she would never forgive herself for it.

The first thing she noticed as she slipped into the sewer was the putrid smells. The city always contained the smells of sweat, blood, body odor, pollution, and a myriad of others she filtered out in her daily business. Down here, though, it smelled like urine, feces, and disease.

“That’s it, nice and slow,” came a voice from below.

She dropped off the last rung of the ladder and splashed into something foul that came up past her ankles. From behind her, several people chortled with laughter.

“Welcome to the River of Shit.” The speaker was a blond woman, her hair cropped so short that upon first sight she could have easily been mistaken for a man. But the voice, high-pitched and full of venom, was distinctly feminine.

A tall man standing next to the speaker held up an electric lantern that gave off just enough light to show they were standing on a ledge above the slow-moving and aptly named River of Shit.

“Who are you?” Grace asked.

“Funny,” the blond woman said, “I was just going to ask you the same question. We don’t get too many visitors.”

“I can’t imagine why.” Grace stepped onto the ledge opposite the blonde woman and her two cronies.

The woman chuckled appreciatively. “We like it without visitors. Call me Blondie. My parents died and left me to come up with my own name so that’s the best I got.”

“I’m Grace.”

“That’s nice,” Blondie said. “I bet you got bloated rich parents with a name like that.”

“If I had bloated rich parents, would I have come down here and stepped in a river of shit?”

“I like you,” Blondie said. “It’s a shame I’ll probably have to kill you, but all the same... Hey! Get that other one down here already!”

Sam was halfway down. He quickened his pace and landed in the River of Shit, to the added amusement of Blondie and her companions.

“All right, you two, time to start talking. Who are you? And I don’t mean what are your names.”

“We’re looking for a friend of ours,” Sam said.

Graced could have kicked him. She would have if the crap on her shoes hadn’t cemented them to the ground. She shifted left and right until they came free.

Sam had never been good at thinking on his feet. He preferred spending hours mulling over a problem, and was likely to shove his foot down his throat when put under pressure to come up with something in a moment’s notice.

“This ain’t the place to come looking for friends,” Blondie said.

“They could be Establishment,” the man to Blondie’s left said.

Blondie’s head whipped around. “No one told you to talk, Ray. Shut up!”

It was too late, though. They told Grace what she needed to know–the only reason they’d think someone from The Establishment would be down here looking for a friend is if they’d taken Matt Stanton.

“All right, you two, enough talking. It’s time to march.” Blondie waved her disruptor in emphasis.

Grace started in the direction indicated, but Blondie told her to stop.

“You two can walk through the river,” Blondie told them, a sinister smile curling her lips.

Grace’s hand itched to go to her sidearm, which they hadn’t taken yet, but she didn’t want to draw attention to this fact while three people had their weapons out and ready to fire in a half a second.

“If you think you can draw fast enough to get to your weapon before I fry your brain, feel free,” Blondie said. “We don’t check weapons down here. It’s not very sportsmanlike, now is it?”

She was crazy. Not that Grace was going to argue with her logic; she’d take her advantage, but the woman was crazy.

As Grace trudged through the River of Shit, she tried to keep her mind off the sludge and disease seeping into her clothes and probably her bloodstream. She tried not to think about the things swimming in the muck and the things that moved through it and bumped against her legs.

Instead, she tried to decide if she’d rather be unarmed and with a sane captor or armed with a crazy one. Blondie could decide to shoot her dead at any moment. She was a loose cannon. Ethan Lacklin, on the other hand, had at least been somewhat predictable. She knew he wouldn’t kill her until after she broke–if he could arrange it.

She’d escaped from Ethan. Only time would tell how she’d do with Blondie. A part of her wasn’t even sure Blondie was her biggest problem. Those people who had been following her would not just let her disappear into a sewer. She imagined them falling into the river as they began their chase.

Grace tried to count turns as they made their way through the sewage. She began to fill in a mental map, but her mental map was going in circles. Perhaps Blondie was doing that on purpose to try to trip them up if they escaped.

Finally, they turned out of the sewage and into a completely dry corridor that seemed to take them under the rail. Every so often the rumble of a high-speed train raced overhead. The walls shook and debris flew in their faces, making Grace wonder how stable this all was.

They didn’t actually meet any people until they reached a large, cavernous room at the end of that dry tunnel. Here, they found swarms of people, most of whom ignored their existence. Here and there, fires burned to provide heat. Overhead lights took care of the illumination, but made Grace wonder where and how these people slept.

As they made their way through the crowd, Grace toyed with the idea of using one of them as a shield while she got a few shots off, but then she began to notice that everyone down here was packing a weapon–even a small boy no older than five. Unlike the vagrants above, these people looked fed, if not overfed, and they clearly had some money left over if they used it on weapons.

Rebels. In one hundred and thirty years, Grace had never spent much time thinking about them unless she paid attention to a report about an attack or a bombing. She had always thought of them as basically vagrants, just meaner, but now she saw she had been entirely mistaken.

These people were not the pitiful wretches of humanity, huddled together for warmth, ready to spring on the first dead man they saw to steal his scraggly coat. These people were laughing, talking, joking, cooking, and eating. They warmed themselves by the fire, had mock fights with one another, and gave way when they saw Blondie approach. They deferred to her and respected her, which wasn’t too dissimilar from the way gang leaders would claim sections of town, but the looks in these people’s eyes were of respect rather than fear. Some of them even shouted warm greetings to her. Two of the children ran up to her and tried to wrap themselves around her legs.

“Not now!” Blondie ordered, though not unkindly, and the two scurried off.

As they reached the other side of the large gathering room, Grace noticed a series of tunnels leading out. Those tunnels were lined with doorways and people kept darting in and out of them. Bedrooms? It was hard to know for sure.

They approached one of these tunnels, the only one protected by guards.

“More?” one of them asked.

“They came looking for a friend,” Blondie said. “I thought we should reunite them.”

The guard smiled and stepped aside. Blondie marched them into a tunnel lined, not with doors, but with barred cells. There were people in a few of them, people Grace thought might even be rebels themselves. Was it possible they had some kind of system of law and order down here?

Matt was ten cells down, looking much the worse for wear. His suit was torn, and he, too, seemed to have taken the walk through the muck. He had taken off his shoes and torn the bottom part of his pants, ostensibly in an attempt to get the crap off him. The shoes and rags were tossed unceremoniously in a heap in the corner.

His eyes widened when he saw them, giving him the look of a caged animal, which, Grace supposed, he was.

He looked like she had felt when Ethan had trapped her in a cell beneath the Coopersfield Plantation. She didn’t feel that way now, though. Perhaps she had developed too strong a sense of resignation she might die, or perhaps so many days of fearing death had numbed her, but the only thing she feared now was the wrong people getting their hands on Jordan and the aging technology.

Which meant she needed to get Blondie talking so she could figure out exactly what kind of predicament they were in.

“How much are you selling him for?” Grace asked, as though only mildly interested. The mildness wasn’t a stretch.

“Who said we’re selling him?” Blondie asked.

“Why else would you have him here?” Grace asked.

“Decoration?” Blondie suggested. “He’s just so handsome.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to get him,” Grace said. “You must have paid handsomely to find out where that tunnel came out.”

Blondie broke into fits of laughter. The two men by her side also chuckled, but did not reach the mad heights Blondie did. Grace took a step back involuntarily, as Blondie continued to laugh so hard she clutched at her side.

“We live underground, or didn’t you notice?” Blondie moved her hands in a circle to indicate the earth above them. “We know where all the tunnels are!”

As Blondie kept laughing, Grace glanced over her shoulder at Sam, who just shrugged. His hand flexed over his disruptor, but she noticed he didn’t draw it either. Perhaps he was thinking the same thing she was–they might be able to take down these three while they were too busy laughing, but there was a whole crowd of people out there with weapons.

Blondie wiped a tear from her eye and stood up straight. “We don’t got no civilization like you rich folks upstairs.” Her voice was mocking, exaggerating her poor grammar. “But we gots the tele and the police frequencies!” She smiled and resumed her normal tone. “The news has been saying for weeks that he killed his rich daddy and today the police scanners said they were going to Medicorp to arrest him. So, we sat tight at the end of the tunnel.”

Grace didn’t know what to say to that. If she ever got out of this, she’d never underestimate a Sewer Rat again.

“Ray!” Blondie shouted over her shoulder. “How much do you suppose rich daddy killers are worth on today’s market?”

Ray smiled. “I think we’ll have fun finding out.”

“I ag–” The smile fell instantly from Blondie’s face as the ground beneath them shook. Grace stumbled backwards. Sam caught her before she could fall and for a moment, she leaned into him. Then she came to her senses and pushed him away.

Then from outside, people started screaming.

Blondie adjusted her ear piece and turned to say something into the receiver. Whatever they told her must have disturbed her, because she took off running, “Ray, get them in there and then come with me!”

“Was that an explosion?” Sam asked when they were safely locked in the cell with Matt.

“Maybe,” Grace said. “Maybe our tails didn’t want to come in after us and hoped they could convince us to come back up instead.”

“They could have killed us,” Sam said.

Grace shook her head. “We’re too far down these tunnels for that. An explosion big enough to get us here would take out half the city’s infrastructure. No, if they want to flush us out, they’ll use a series of smaller explosions.”

As if in emphasis, the ground beneath them shook again.

“I wonder where the nearest manhole cover is,” Sam said.

“Not too close, I suspect.” Grace looked back at Matt, who hadn’t said a word since they’d been thrown in with him. “You okay?”

Matt gave her a scathing look. “Do I look okay?”

“I’ve looked worse in the last few days,” Grace said.

Matt sighed heavily. “Well, my whole world has fallen apart around me. The police came to arrest me.” He continued to glare at her. “Where do you suppose they got evidence to support their claims that I killed my father?”