Adam Baker - Terminus

Nariko struck a flare and held it above her head. The cavernous rail tunnel was lit by red, sputtering flame light.

A mildewed sign pasted to the wall:

‘The water is rising,’ said Nariko. ‘A couple of inches in the last hour.’

‘Inevitable. The subway system lies beneath the water table. Constantly pumped to keep it dry. Millions of gallons every day. The moment the city lost power, it began to flood.’

Cloke crouched by the water’s edge. He held his Geiger counter an inch from the surface. Warning beep. The LCD screen flashed a threshold alert.

‘Jesus. Off the scale.’ He powered down the handset. ‘This stuff is a mix of groundwater bubbling from bedrock and run-off from the street. Fallout settled over the city and got washed into the drains. Rain tainted with radioactive ash, lethal isotopes cooked up in the blast. My equipment isn’t military spec. It’s from a power plant. It’s built to measure minor leaks, fractional deviations from background. But these are the kind of heavy contaminants found near a ruptured reactor core. The counter isn’t calibrated to measure this level of pollution.’

They listened to the hiss of the burning flare, the distant trickle of water and the whisper of the tunnels.

‘Awful stench,’ said Cloke.

Nariko pointed to the corpse floating in far shadows.

‘Rot gas.’

She inspected the tunnel brickwork.

‘When was this place abandoned?’

‘Nineteen fifty-four,’ said Cloke. ‘The platform was too short to accommodate the new ten-car trains. They mothballed Fenwick when they built more capacity at Wall Street. Simply shut the station at the end of a working day. Waited until the last train left the platform, killed the lights, chained the doors. The place has been deserted ever since. Frozen in time.’

Nariko pictured trilbied businessmen waiting for a trolley car. Flannel suits, umbrellas, attaché cases, rolled copies of the Times and Post . America at the height of empire.

A deep, thunderous rumble. A groan of shifting masonry. The flood waters shivered and rippled. A trickle of dust from a fissure in the tunnel roof settled on the water, forming a white crust.

‘What the hell was that?’ murmured Nariko.

‘A nearby building must have toppled,’ said Cloke. ‘You can bet every tower and tenement on the island took major damage during the blast.’

‘As long as the Federal Bank doesn’t come down on our heads,’ said Nariko.

‘Hard to judge. Six storeys. Heavy stone. Built to last. It was shielded by surrounding office towers. They took the brunt of the shockwave. Citigroup Plaza and the AmCo Building. All those glass curtain walls. They took the impact like an airbag. But the ground shock must have split the foundations, subtly thrown the centre of gravity. Slow subsidence. The building is starting to tilt. She won’t last long.’

Cloke turned up the collar of his jacket. He blew his hands for warmth.

‘So what do you know about Lupe?’ he asked.

‘Lucretia Guadalupe Villaseñor. Born in Honduras. Raised in the Bronx. She’s done plenty of time, for sure.’

‘The tattoos?’

‘The stillness,’ said Nariko. ‘Prison zen. Watch her. The way she sits back and closes her eyes, puts herself into hibernation. She’s spent a long time in solitary. Weeks locked in holding cells, punishment blocks, no window, no daylight. Nothing to do but work out, stare at cinder walls and count the minutes until the next meal gets pushed through the tray slot. She knows how to retreat into her head.’

‘Think she’s dangerous?’ asked Cloke.

‘Shit, yeah. Look at her. Hardcore gangster. A rattlesnake. Youth correction, one jail after another. Why else would she end up at Bellevue?’

‘She said she was getting her kidneys checked out.’

‘All supermax penitentiaries like Bedford Hills or Taconic have basic medical facilities. Sick prisoners get transferred to the infirmary. No need to take them outside the walls. Only reason a convict gets brought to Manhattan, sent to a neurological clinic like Bellevue, is for brain scans and court-ordered psychiatric evaluation. Violent recidivists trying to parley their way out of a life sentence. Lawyered-up third-strikers trying to blame their crimes on frontal lobe damage or childhood trauma. Bet that barcode stencilled to the front of her tunic would tell her whole life story if only we had a scanner. Bet it would make grim reading.’

‘She wants to cut a deal,’ said Cloke. ‘She’ll give us Ekks if we cut her loose.’

‘She’ll say anything to buy her freedom. I rest a lot easier knowing she is in chains.’

‘You understand the gravity of the situation, right?’ said Cloke. ‘One way or another, we have to persuade her to talk.’

‘What have you got in mind?’ asked Nariko. ‘We can’t let her go. If she gets her hands on a knife or a gun, we’ll have real problems.’

‘There are other means.’

‘Chop her fingers? Burn her feet? She won’t break. She’ll laugh in our faces.’

‘I know. But we have to try.’

Nariko crouched next to Lupe.

‘I figured it out,’ she said.

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Ran the whole scenario in my head.’

‘Hope you had fun,’ said Lupe.

‘Ekks and his team had the third floor at Bellevue. 101st Cav guarded the main entrance. Sandbags and machine guns. They were okay for a while. A good place to hold out. But the city turned to hell. It looked like the hospital would be overrun. A fast contracting pocket of safety. So they gathered up their shit and fled to the 23rd Street Station. They took to the tunnels and headed south. They headed here. Fenwick Street. Because this station is hidden, sealed from the public, entrance padlocked for decades. A perfect refuge.

It was a two-mile journey. But they didn’t schlep their shit through the tunnels. They rode a subway train. They loaded their gear on to an MTA locomotive they found at 23rd Street, didn’t they? The third rail was still active. So they threw their shit aboard, broke into the motorman’s compartment, found a brake handle and figured how to get the locomotive moving. Smart thinking. As long as the power held, they could take that train anywhere they liked, move around the subway network at will. Hundreds of miles of tunnel. If their location got overrun they could simply jump in the cab and relocate. That’s the little detail you held back during your debrief, isn’t it? Ekks and his crew camped here, on the Fenwick platform. But they had a loco standing by, in case they had to haul-ass.’

Lupe didn’t reply.

Nariko sat cross-legged beside her.

‘They were here for weeks, conserving food, conserving water, trying not to go batshit insane,’ continued Nariko. ‘They kept their receiver tuned to the emergency frequency day and night. They were desperate for rescue, hoping the continuity government at NORAD finally got their shit together and the cavalry were on their way.

‘Word comes through. The new president will address the nation at midnight.

‘They crowd round the radio, anxious, excited. They want to hear that the army has regrouped. Tanks and troops are massed outside each major metropolitan area, infantry ready to take back the streets. Help is coming.

‘But instead, the president declares the battle lost. The cities cannot be saved. The son of a bitch announces an airstrike. Planes are on their way, carrying a cleansing fire. The countdown has begun.

‘The Bellevue team panic. Minutes to detonation. They throw their gear aboard the train.

‘They couldn’t move further south. Fenwick Street is the end of the line.