Richard Kadrey - Dead Set

There, she sat on the gravel and pulled on her boots under the moon’s wasted, colorless light. Something moved in her peripheral vision. Turning, she saw her vodka-soaked T-shirt hanging where she’d left it. She made a mental note to bring it down when she got back.

As Zoe climbed down the ladder she was hit with a sense of fear and sadness so deep that it made her stomach cramp. Doing what she was doing, going where she was going secretly in the middle of the night, it felt like she was crossing a border that she’d never be able to uncross and that she might not ever find her way home again.

She shook her head to clear it. At the bottom of the fire escape, she pushed the final collapsible section all the way down just like she’d seen in a hundred TV shows, climbed to the bottom, and jumped the last few feet. The night air was cool, and because it might disguise her, she pulled her hood up.

The walk to Emmett’s was long and dreary. She wondered at herself now, at how she could have found previous walks to the shop so pleasant and magical. The path wound through grubby streets full of ugly people and buildings and stores that all looked like they were about to collapse.

A few men spoke to her as she walked. They stepped out from the doorways and alleys of dim, unreal buildings. Some of the silhouettes grabbed their crotches and made kissing sounds as she went past.

A shadow man, tall and wide, stepped out from behind a tree just as Zoe was passing. One of his big hands gripped her shoulder, then slid down her shirt and over her breast. She didn’t even think about it. The straight razor was out. Her arm moved and the blade sliced deeply into the shadow man’s wrist.

He staggered back. “You bitch! You little bitch. I’ll kill you,” he yelled, but he stayed where he was. Zoe kept walking, trying to look brave. She kept the razor tucked in her hand for another block.

The light was still on in the record store. She ran across the street and hid in the shadows next to an old Dumpster. Did Emmett always work this late? No wonder he likes to collect girls’ things. If he spends all his time in that dreary store, he really doesn’t have a life.

Zoe trembled a little in the cool San Francisco dark. She looked down at her hands. She was still holding the razor, and it was open. There was a thin streak like India ink across the edge of the blade that she knew was the shadow man’s blood. An old newspaper lay nearby. She took a couple of pages and wiped off the blade, refusing to think about how the blood had gotten on the razor. Still, it felt like one more step away from a safe life she’d never have again.

For a moment Zoe wondered if this might all be some awful fever dream. Maybe she was really at home in her bed in the old house. Her father and mother would have breakfast with her before she went to her old, familiar school, where she’d tell Julie and Laura about this crazy nightmare where she went to a carnival with her father’s ghost, gave trinkets to an old pervert, and slashed a mugger like Elektra: Assassin. It was a comforting thought, but the night wind gusted through her, making her shiver, and she knew this was all real.

After she’d spent an hour standing in the cold, the lights went off in Emmett’s shop. He came out the front door with a stack of records under one arm. Zoe squinted, but couldn’t tell if they were regular records or the special ones.

Emmett walked to the corner and stood under the traffic light. It turned from red to green. The pedestrian sign said WALK, but Emmett didn’t cross. He turned his head, looking up and down the street. Apparently satisfied that no one was around, he stepped off the curb. Instead of crossing the street, he crouched by the corner. Zoe crept forward and stood on her toes to see what he was doing. When Emmett stood up he was holding a sewer grate in one hand and the records in the other. To Zoe’s amazement, he seemed to be shrinking. No. He was climbing into the sewer. A second later, she heard a dull clank as the metal grate dropped back into place.

Zoe ran from the shadows. At the corner there was no sign that the grate had been moved. She went to Emmett’s shop and looked in through the dirty window. Do I break in? she wondered. What if there’s an alarm? I should have brought a flashlight. How am I supposed to find Dad’s record in the dark, if it’s even in there? If Emmett took the record with him and I waste time inside, it won’t matter. He’ll be too far away for me to follow.

She wanted desperately to go into the shop. It was safe and dark and known. The idea of following Emmett into some unknown underground labyrinth terrified her. But there was this terrible feeling in the back of her mind, a feeling that told her that her father’s disc wasn’t in the shop. That out of spite or something worse Emmett had carried it underground, and that if she didn’t go after him soon, her father would be lost forever. She would have failed him twice.

Zoe went to the corner and knelt down to get a good grip on the grate. She pulled, but it didn’t budge. She knelt down and pulled again. Nothing. Zoe remembered Emmett’s grip on her arm and the surprising strength with which he’d held her. She sat down in the street and braced her feet against the curb. She wasn’t going to get this close to Emmett and her father and lose them both.

With both hands, she grabbed the far edge of the grate and pulled. The metal was wet and slimy, hard to hold on to. Finally, she felt the grate rise slowly away from the street. When it was a little more than halfway up, she let go and it fell backward toward her, leaving the sewer open.

She leaned her head into the opening. The smell reminded her of the time she and some friends had sneaked into the house where old Mrs. Asher had died and no one had found her for a week. Zoe pulled up the edge of her hoodie, covering her nose and mouth. Just inside the opening, she could see steel rungs, like a ladder, set into the concrete.

She turned herself quickly into position and lowered a foot into the opening. When one foot touched a rung, she stepped down and pulled her arms inside. Below street level, she was instantly swallowed by impenetrable darkness and a death-house reek of dead old women.

Zoe held her breath and started down.

At the bottom of the ladder the ground was a soft and yielding soup of slippery muck. It compressed beneath her, as if she were walking on damp leaves. No matter how hard Zoe tried, however, she couldn’t pretend that what she was walking on was anything but the collective filth and waste of the city that loomed twenty feet over her head.

The damp soaked through her sneakers and socks, but she kept walking, breathing through her mouth, afraid she might throw up. She moved quietly, carefully, trying not to splash or make any noise. She kept a hand on the wall, feeling her way along as her eyes adjusted to the dark.

Even when she grew accustomed to the gloom, Zoe couldn’t see much, just the vague outlines of the tunnel’s edges where concrete sections were joined and metal service doors dripping with a colorless fungus that hung in ragged strands like Spanish moss.

Every now and then she’d pass under a manhole or a street grate and shafts of feeble light shone down to her. Then she would be submerged again in the dark, and each time it was like a black wave pulling her down to the bottom of the ocean.

She followed Emmett by listening for him. He was well ahead of her, and because he thought he was alone, he didn’t make any effort to be quiet. He splashed casually through the black sewer muck, singing as he went. His voice echoed down the concrete tunnels, sounding to Zoe like a ghost choir. The tune sounded like something very old and from far away. She’d heard it in the shop, a song full of mystery, vengeance, and death: “Walk on Gilded Splinters.”