Biofire, p.39
Biofire, page 39
Dagmar winced at the light and looked away from it. She had grown accustomed to the darkness down under, so much so that she and boy only went up during the night, and then only when they had to. The glow of the flashlight hurt her eyes, and she knew it would do the same to anyone else down there.
“You’re gonna have to put your hands over those lights and shade ’em a little,” she said. “Long as they’re that bright, they’re just gonna bring trouble.”
McNolte wondered what kind of trouble might be drawn by light in such impenetrable darkness, but before he could ask, Dagmar was on her way again, saying over her shoulder, “Stick real close and don’t talk to nobody you see. Don’t even look at ’em.”
They did as they were told
At no time did they look back, because they assumed no one would be foolish enough to follow them.
P.W.’s first thought as he stared in at the bodies all over the floor of the receiving room was that Jorgan had been right, Emma was contagious, and it had spread through the building rapidly. But that possibility dissolved after a moment’s thought; it simply did not make sense. That did not change the fact that everyone was lying still on the floor.
When he moved to pass through the doorway, Jorgan held out an arm and stopped him, saying, “No, wait. The two men in the basement—the ones who shot your friend—they were wearing gas masks.”
P.W. stepped away from the doorway, letting the door swing closed, and turned slowly to Jorgan. “Gas masks?” There was a sharp edge to his voice.
“Yes, and I suspect—”
Before he knew what was happening, Jorgan’s back was against the wall, his feet a couple of inches off the ground, and his throat was clamped shut by P.W.’s big hand. The barrel of P.W.’s gun was in his face again.
“What do you know about this?” P.W. roared into Jorgan’s face.
Jorgan tried to speak, but he could not even breathe.
“Listen,” P.W. said through clenched teeth, “I didn’t like you the second I saw you, but I’m gonna do you a favor. I’m gonna let you go and give you five seconds to start talkin’ before I rip your fuckin’ eyes out and feed ’em to you like grapes. Understand?”
Jorgan’s face felt swollen and hot and his ears were beginning to ring.
“Do you understand?” P.W. said again.
He nodded as much as P.W.’s grip would allow.
When he was released, Jorgan collapsed to the wet sidewalk, his back still against the wall, gagging and heaving for breath. He stroked his burning, aching throat as he tilted his head up, letting the cold, reviving rain fall on his face.
A young couple walked by, but they only glanced at the gun P.W. was pointing at the top of Jorgan’s head. They passed by without missing a step.
“Start talkin’, goddammit,” P.W. said.
“I don’t know anything about this,” Jorgan shouted, his voice ragged. “But I’ve got a pretty good idea what’s going on here, if you’d just let me talk.”
“Get up.”
Jorgan talked as he got to his feet. “Those two men were wearing gas masks because, I suspect, they’ve gassed everyone in the building, and I’d bet money they’re in there right now looking for Emma. They work for Landon. They must.”
“He wouldn’t kill a whole building full of people just to find her, would he?”
“No, he’s not stupid. He probably used—would you put that gun down, please? I’m not armed and I’m certainly not dangerous.”
P.W. lowered the gun.
“The people in there will be out for maybe an hour, hour and a half, and they’ll wake up with headaches, but that’s all. Landon probably used HC-13. It’s potent and disperses quickly. A few minutes after it’s been administered, you can move unaffected through the targeted area without a mask.”
“And how the hell do you know so much about it?”
Jorgan chuckled. “I helped create the damned stuff.”
P.W. looked at Jorgan for a moment, differently than before. He was deciding whether or not to trust the man.
“Okay,” P.W. said, “since you’re an authority, what do you suggest we do?”
“I suggest you save your bullets for whoever’s been prowling around in there. It should be safe for you to go inside by now.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“Oh, no. Do you know what Landon’s people will do if they find me here?”
“Probably the same thing I’ll do if you try to leave. Let’s go.”
P.W. pushed Jorgan ahead of him and they both went inside.
The door was not even all the way closed behind them when the gunfire began.
The foul, sickening odor in the darkness became almost as tangible as the cobwebs that caressed their cheeks and foreheads as they moved deeper into the city’s black belly.
As they followed Dagmar’s winding route, McNolte moved his flashlight around now and then, its glow bleeding between his fingers. Fat concrete pillars stood among the rubble, chunks of broken metal and glass littered the ground along with the blackened remains of old fires. There was an occasional oddity: a broken chair, a rusted bucket, old bedsprings, the skeleton of a bicycle. Although he saw no ceiling when he turned the light upward, there were great, filthy pipes and cables intertwined above them.
And there were people, of course. Some of them appeared to have been people at one time, but not any longer. Many of them huddled over small fires, which Dagmar steered them away from, but some just sat or lay in the darkness. The orange flicker of the fires was nearly smothered in the dense blackness, but there was just enough of it to cast dancing shadows over the long, hopeless faces that gaped at them in the dark.
As they went deeper, their path narrowed as the surroundings became more populated, more cluttered. Makeshift shelters became more common, until there were so many they were crowded together in the dark.
Eyes peered out of a cave made up of stacks of cardboard boxes.
A man lying on a pile of rags groaned and turned away from them to curl up in a ball as they passed.
A pale, androgynous face with strings of black hair hanging over the eyes peered up at them from inside a battered cardboard box turned on its side.
A woman with wild, white hair tangled around her head like Medusa’s snakes pounced out of the darkness, swinging a broomstick and shouting at them savagely, “You can’t have me! You get away from here, you godless fucking spies! You can’t have me!” The woman had no nose, just a dark triangular cavity where her nose used to be.
The broomstick whistled through the air, too close for comfort, and Dagmar shouted, “Calm down, Anna, they’re with me, calm down.” She reached into her bag and threw a sandwich at the woman, then a cupcake.
Her attention diverted, Anna hunkered down in the dark and tore at the wrapping as they quickly moved on.
Sitting on an overturned crate, a man gnawed glistening gray meat from a bone, shrinking away from them as they passed.
The darkness was alive with rats. Their guttural squeaks, skittering feet, and frantic chewing sounded from every direction. They stayed away from the light, but McNolte caught a glimpse of a couple of them and his breath caught in his throat. They were the size of cats and their eyes burned in the flashlight’s glow.
Sounds emerged from the darkness all around them. Dripping and slithering. Shuffling movements. Gasping breaths. Plaintive wails.
A baby cried somewhere, and a man’s hoarse, throaty laughter went on and on, seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere, sometimes sounding close, sometimes far away.
The fires that flickered here and there in the darkness looked like the watchful eyes of predatory beasts, and McNolte did not look at them long because he did not like the chill they gave him.
Dagmar and Boy disappeared abruptly before them. Emma pressed herself to McNolte as her fingers dug into his arm.
“Down here,” Dagmar whispered.
Their flashlight beams fell on a small, sagging fortress made of soggy cardboard boxes and the halves of a broken card table top. When they stepped through the small opening at one corner, Dagmar moved an old box the size of a washing machine into the space, closing them in. They all sat Indian-style on the ground around the meager fire in the center of the space.
Within the makeshift walls, a slight figure was curled up on a filthy blanket.
“We’re back, Wanda,” Dagmar whispered.
The figure slowly sat up. The old woman was almost completely bald except for a few wisps of gray, and her scalp was covered with crusty scabs. She had no teeth and her entire face seemed to be sinking into her mouth as it opened and closed lazily. She had been asleep, and her tiny eyes, nearly lost beneath sagging, white folds of flesh, squinted against the flashlights.
“Turn those off now,” Dagmar said as the four of them huddled in the patchwork enclosure, setting down their bags.
McNolte and Emma glanced at one another nervously, reluctant to surrender their only source of light.
“Turn ’em off now, we’re here,” Dagmar said, voice brittle with frustration.
They turned off their flashlights, leaving the small, weak fire as their only light source.
Somehow, the sounds seemed louder when it became darker, and the unsettling laughter seemed to be drawing closer.
“Uh, I-I…I’m sorry,” Dagmar whispered.
“What are you sorry about, Dagmar?” Emma said.
“Um, for talkin’ short to you like that. Guess I’m just not used to—”
“Don’t worry about it, you weren’t rude at all,” Emma said. “You know the rules down here. We don’t. You go ahead and tell us when we’re doing something wrong, okay?”
From a pile in the corner, Dagmar added shards of wood to the fire in the center of a small circle of rocks and chunks of concrete.
“You almost let the fire go out, Wanda,” she said without anger. It was a simple, friendly statement.
The light from the growing fire darkened the old woman’s sunken cheeks as she smiled, showing her gums.
“Thorry ’bout dat,” Wanda said, voice crackling with phlegm. She broke into a bout of loud, wet coughs that racked her frail body and went on far too long. When the coughing finally stopped, she spit a wet, black gob into the fire and it hissed for a few seconds. “Fell atheep,” she said. “Not feeling tho good.”
“Anything I can do?” Dagmar said.
“Aw, no, honey, nothin’ you can do.” Wanda turned her gaze to McNolte and Emma and studied them for a moment. Her eyes appeared to have no whites, only glistening, bleary pupils that were much too large.
“Brought some food,” Dagmar said.
Wanda’s hairless eyebrows seemed to rise, but it was hard to tell. She smiled and webs of spittle stretched between her lips. The corpse-like woman became almost girlish as Dagmar began to empty her bag. She handed Wanda two small bunches of bananas, some grapes, and a few cellophane-wrapped cupcakes.
“Where’d alla thith come from?” Wanda said.
“P.W. sent it,” Dagmar said. “And there’s more.”
Wanda laughed a low, phlegmy laugh and said, “Feelth like my birthday, or thumthin’.” She squinted at McNolte, then at Emma. “Who dey?”
“They’re gonna be staying with us for a while.”
“Hello,” McNolte said. “I’m McNolte, this is Emma.”
“Emma Shaw,” she said, leaning forward and extending a hand to the old woman, smiling.
Wanda closed her white, knobby, blue-veined hand lightly around Emma’s four fingers and said, “Nithe t’meetcha.”
No one spoke for a while and McNolte and Emma began to relax a bit in spite of the low, ominous laughter that continued outside the walls of cardboard and wood that surrounded them.
McNolte spoke in a sleepy whisper. “That sound, that laughter…what is it?”
“Oh, that’s the Laughing Man,” Dagmar said, putting a few more sticks on the fire.
“Who is the Laughing Man?” Emma said.
There was no joy in the laughter; it was, instead, cold and cruel.
“Nobody knows, really. He’s just down here, y’know? He wanders around laughin’ all the time. He’s really mean and cruel. But you shouldn’t worry, ’cause I don’t think he’ll bother us. That’s why we got the boxes stacked up around us, see. To keep the fire from showin’ in the dark. ’Sides, he hardly ever comes over this way, the Laughing Man.”
Dagmar’s reassurances did not make McNolte feel any better, nor did it make the laughter sound any less disturbing. He reached out and took Emma’s hand.
After a while, McNolte’s head began to nod forward heavily. He sat up with a jerk a couple of times, fighting his exhaustion, but failing. Finally, Emma put an arm around him and gently pulled his head down to her lap.
Dagmar peeled a banana, broke it in two, and handed half to Boy, who had been sitting beside her so quietly that McNolte and Emma had forgotten he was there. He gobbled the banana up with relish, and when he was done, Dagmar handed him half of a sandwich that had been wrapped in waxed paper. As she ate her portion, she watched Emma, who was staring now at the fire, enjoying the odd peacefulness there beneath the city, ignoring the smells in the damp air and the guffaws of the Laughing Man.
“Your name’s Shaw, huh?” Dagmar said.
Emma was mildly startled. “Yes. Why?”
Dagmar shrugged, taking another bite of her sandwich. The fire’s glow made her look much older than her years; it deepened the long creases in her face and had a strobe effect on her eyes, making them disappear in their deep, dark sockets for one instant, then glimmer the next among the lines of stress and exhaustion that surrounded them.
“Just know somebody named Shaw, is all,” she said, still chewing.
“Somebody down here?”
She shook her head. “He don’t live down here. Just comes down sometimes. Takes people.”
“I’m sorry? He…takes people?”
Taking another bite, Dagmar looked down at Boy, who was devouring his sandwich, and absently ran a hand over his tangled hair. “Sometimes the people he takes don’t come back,” she said. “The ones who do are always different somehow.”
Emma’s voice lowered to a whisper and was beginning to tremble. “What do you mean, different?”
“Remember the woman who attacked us on the way in? She used to have a nose before he took her. When she came back down, it was gone and she was crazy. Still is. Another one couldn’t talk anymore, couldn’t make a sound. One was just…a vegetable. It was almost like his brain was turned into mush, or somethin’. Couldn’t even stand up on his own. They brought him back and just…dumped him here. He died not long after.”
“They?”
“He’s always got other men with him when he comes to take people. But when they bring ’em back…if they bring ’em back…he never comes. Just his men.”
“Who is this man?” Emma breathed as McNolte stirred in her lap. He had been dozing but was awakened now by the alarm in Emma’s voice.
“I know his name. He must be real important up top ’cause I saw his pitcher on a magazine cover once at the newsstand in the subway station. But down here, everybody calls him Experiment Man. ’Cause that’s what he does. Least, that’s what we think he does. He experiments on people. Him and his men tried to take Boy once,” she said, stroking her son’s hair again. “But I fought ’em. We got away. Most folks don’t fight, though. Most folks down here don’t know how to fight anymore.”
McNolte sat up and looked at Emma with a frown.
“Who…” Emma stopped, swallowed, licked her dry lips. “Who is the Experiment Man?”
“His name is Shaw, too,” Dagmar said casually, finishing off her half of the sandwich. “Landon Shaw.”
When P.W. and Jorgan went through the door, they were so distracted by all the bodies stacked on the floor that they did not notice the two standing figures until the first gunshot was fired.
The first bullet landed in P.W.’s left arm, just above the elbow. He cried out in pain, then raised his gun and fired back without aiming as Jorgan raised his arms protectively over his face.
Tonya Cox and Parson Higgins were no longer wearing their gas masks. Tonya fired a second time as Parson stood behind her looking tense and bitterly annoyed. Her second shot was unsuccessful.
When P.W. fired again, he had better luck. The bullet hit Tonya in the throat with a small splash of blood and knocked her on her back, kicking and gurgling.
“Oh, shit,” Parson said as P.W. took aim at him. He raised both arms and shouted, “Goddammit all to hell, I’m unarmed!”
Stepping over and around bodies, P.W. made his way toward Parson, holding the gun on him. He did not look back at Jorgan, who was just beginning to lower his arms uncertainly.
P.W. fired, anyway, aiming low.
The bullet lodged in Parson’s left shin and he let out a shrill scream as he hit the floor, crying, “Son of a bitch, I said I was unarmed, you fuckin’ asshole!”
By the time P.W. reached Parson’s side, a pool of blood had spread rapidly around Tonya’s head. Her movements had slowed to an occasional twitch, and the bubbling sounds coming from her punctured throat were faint.
P.W. aimed his gun down at Parson’s face and said, “Who sent you?”
“What?” Parson said, sitting up and rocking back and forth, wincing.
“I said, who sent you? Landon Shaw?”
“Who?”
“Lan—just tell me who sent you.”
“Nunna your fuckin’ bidness.”
P.W. bent over and pressed the end of his gun to the man’s philtrum, the narrow dip in the flesh just beneath his nose.
“You wanna die?” P.W. said.
By then, Jorgan had joined him and was fidgeting nervously as he watched.
“Why?” Parson said. “You wanna kill me? What good would that do ya, huh?”
P.W. thought about that a moment, then reached down and clutched the front of Parson’s shirt and lifted him to his feet. Parson cried out in pain, but stood with his weight on his right foot and swayed slightly. P.W. pulled him close and said, “Let’s go someplace where I can do something really productive, okay? Whatta you say to that, huh?” He looked over his shoulder at Jorgan. “Check some of these folks, Doc, and make sure they’re still breathing.”
