Robert Bennett - The Company Man

After they cleared the bodies Collins mustered up a group of men, armed them with rifles, and had them sweep the trolley tunnel, torches wheeling through the dark as they ran. Though the lights faded their shouts somehow remained, echoing through the many atria of the tunnels. Garvey sat on the station bench once they were gone, waiting. Sometimes he got up to examine the trolley car again, especially the door. He touched where it had crumpled in and traced his fingers over the strange cracks in the glass. Each time he would sit back down, chin in his hand.

A half-hour later a patrolman came down from the street and reported a call from Collins saying they had found no suspects, no assailants, no nothing, and to continue his investigation, this time down into the tunnel. Garvey nodded as he heard the order. It was not unexpected, but that didn’t mean it was welcome.

They paired him with a trolley maintenance overseer by the name of Nippen, a short, thick man in blackened overalls who seemed entirely too cheerful for such dark work. He ferociously shook Garvey’s hand, ignorant of the grease stains he was leaving on the big detective’s palm, and then gave him a tin hat and hopped down onto the rails. “Come on down, Detective,” he said. “Let’s wander a bit.”

Garvey, not liking at all the way he said “wander,” put on the hat, lowered himself down onto the rails, and followed him into the dark.

“They stopped the trolleys, right?” said Garvey as they entered the tunnel. He flicked on his torch and the rails before him lit up like dusky ribbons. “I’d hate if they followed up something like this by crushing my ass.”

Nippen laughed. “They stopped everything. Our whole system is fucked for a day, for a whole day. No money today, not for anyone.” He laughed again, as if the thought cheered him.

“Any idea what we should be looking for?” Garvey asked.

“Not a one,” said Nippen. “You get all kinds of odd stuff down here.”

“Really? I thought they kept the trolley lines clear.”

“Oh, no,” said Nippen. “Well, we try. We try to keep the tunnels clear. But shit obeys gravity, and all things eventually want to go down. People. Animals. Garbage. But if anything keeps the tunnels clear, it’s the trolleys themselves. It’s hard to argue with a few tons of iron and steel. They just push it all out, see?”

“You get people down here?” said Garvey.

“Oh, sure. The bums love it down here. It’s warm in places. The crazies all seem to come down here, eventually.”

As they passed under one juncture a deep moaning and squalling filled the tunnels around them. Garvey ducked down and sent his torch beam dancing about. “What the hell is that?” he said.

Nippen stared up at the tunnel roof, smiling. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully.

“You don’t?”

“No. You hear a lot of things in the tunnels. There’s a lot of machinery below the city you forget about.” He listened as the squalling tapered off. “That? Oh, I’d say that was probably a pneumatic messenger tube shooting across town. Probably trying to force through a thick spot of mail. Maybe.”

“It sounded awful big.”

“It may have been,” Nippen said. “I hear McNaughton has pneumatic tubes the size of people. That they shoot people back and forth through the tubes. That true?”

“I doubt it,” said Garvey.

“I thought so,” said Nippen, and laughed. “I thought that story couldn’t be true.”

“You sure there’s no one down here with us?”

“Yep. Your lieutenant ran through here just a while ago, guns drawn. He’d have shot anyone, no matter what they were doing. I hear they blew up a rat. Scared one of the cops and then just pow, rat was all over the place. That true?”

Garvey reluctantly admitted that that rumor, at least, was probably truer than he’d like, and Nippen laughed.

They continued on. The underground tunnels were a strange, alien place to Garvey. Ribbed metal shafts curved around him like immense tidal waves, sometimes giving way to old, scarred brick crisscrossing over the roof. Passageways of old stone slowly turned into tunnels of shining, alloyed brass. Pipes and tubing would surface along the wall and run for several yards before submerging below the stone. The walls themselves gurgled and chirped and squeaked as unseen things worked for the city above. And all of it stayed down here in the dark, buried here to be forgotten save for those few stragglers like Nippen, or the vagrants who wandered these midnight paths.

As they walked Nippen showed him the maintenance tunnels and the air shafts and the sewage pipes. They were all means of connecting with the surface, one way or another, though all of these were locked tight. Beside each one was a little tube with an earpiece, which Nippen told Garvey connected them to the maintenance man on duty, whoever that was. “It’s usually no one, unless there’s a scheduled check,” said Nippen.

“And there’s one on duty today?”

“Oh, yeah. Everyone’s on duty today. If there’s anyone running around in the tunnels right now, we’ll know.”

But there was no sign anyone had been in the tunnels at all. The rails were clean, or clean enough, with no signs of disturbance. After nearly thirty minutes of fruitless searching they came to an intersection where another tunnel branched off and sloped up into darkness.

“Which way?” said Garvey.

“Let’s see, that trolley that got hijacked, was it the ten thirty-five?”

“Yeah. And no one ever said it was hijacked.”

Nippen laughed and ignored him. “If it’s the ten thirty-five, it came through this way,” he said. He flashed his beam on the tunnel to the right.

“You sure?”

“Oh, sure enough,” he said gladly.

“What happens if you’re wrong?”

“Then we’ll come to some other platform and come out. Most of the time.”

“Most of the time?”

“Well, yeah. Some of these older tunnels don’t lead to the trolleys.”

“They don’t?” asked Garvey.

“No.”

“Then where do they go?”

Nippen shrugged. “Who knows? Listen, this city was built long before we installed the trolley lines. And a city is a big thing, people forget that. There’re opposing forces at work here.”

“There are what?”

“Opposing forces. Everything’s got to balance out. You build big buildings and fill them up with people, all piled up on the rock, so to balance that out you have to make a big underground, pushing back, anchoring it. It’s all floating on the surface.”

“Is it?” said Garvey, giving him a dubious glance.

“Yeah,” he said. “When McNaughton and Kulahee first made the city, they made it deep. The trolley just fills up the empty spaces, really. The spaces they spared for us. You can tell which ones are the old tunnels, they used red brick when they first made them. You see patches of it here and there. I don’t go in the McNaughton tunnels.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to know what’s down there,” he said simply.

Garvey stopped. Something white and crumpled was lying beside the rails. He flashed it with his torch, then walked over to it.

“What’s that?” asked Nippen.

“A trash can,” said Garvey, picking it up.

“A trash can?”

“Yeah. And it’s been beat to hell. Is it normal to find a trash can here?”

“On the rails, no. Maybe in the maintenance tunnels or one of the shafts. But not on the rails.” Nippen scratched his chin, leaving a twist of grease below his lip like a goatee. “Not unless someone threw it out the window or something.”

“Hm,” said Garvey. He tucked it under his arm and continued walking up the rails.