Adam Baker - Terminus

She plucked the gold crucifix from his neck and put it in her pocket.

She threw the coat over his upper body. Then she knelt and prayed.

A tunnel cave mouth blocked by prop-beams and planks.

Bedrock still bore the scars of drills, picks and dynamite cartridges wielded by nineteenth-century navvies; Irish gangs that descended rope-lashed ladders below ground and bored the subway passage by lamplight.

Schist speckled with coarse flakes of mica. Fissures wept groundwater.

A hobo camp at the back of the cave. A crude bivouac. A shanty built from sticks and blankets. An oil can fire. Crate furniture. Stained bedding. Glass crack stems. Garbage bags and a shopping cart full of cans hoarded for redemption.

The camp was overwhelmed by rising flood water. Inundated shacks slowly listed and collapsed like sandcastles succumbing to an incoming tide. Garbage bags bobbed and bumped.

Three homeless guys curled foetal on a rock shelf. Thick beards and dirt-streaked faces. Laceless army boots. Quilted coats leaked insulation foam. Clothes torn by knotted tumours.

Beside them, on the ledge, was a makeshift griddle made from stacked tunnel bricks and mesh. A pile of bones and torn cycle Lycra. A woman they found lost in the tunnels, bloody and sobbing for help. A woman they raped and bludgeoned with a rock. A woman they cut and ate, cooking up slabs of muscle, salivating over steaks dripping hot fat, unaware she had been bitten and infected.

The ground-tremor of an office collapse somewhere on Broadway. The juddering rumble echoed through the tunnel system like an oncoming train. Trickles of dust and grit from the fractured roof. Flood water shivered and rippled.

One of the homeless guys climbed stiffly to his feet, as if responding to a silent command. He stepped from the ledge and plunged shoulder-deep into black water. He waded towards the cave entrance.

He pressed against the crooked planks. Heightened senses. Somewhere out there, deep within the tunnels, merging with the rush of churning water, he could hear the murmur of voices. An intoxicating scent carried in the air. Blood. Sweat. Fresh meat somewhere south near Fenwick Street.

Fleeting memory. He and his companions hammering planks, driving nails with a chunk of brick, sealing themselves inside the remote cavern.

‘Let those motherfuckers fight it out, up there in the world. We’ll be all right down here, brother. We can hold out for days. We got food. We got everything we need.’

The skeletal revenant drew back an arm and threw a heavy punch. A fist slammed wood. Blood splash. Broken fingers. A second punch. A third. The fist reduced to a mess of blood and bone. The creature continued to pound the planks and beams. Wood began to splinter and break.

Lupe and Donahue sat on the platform steps and gazed into black water.

‘I’d go myself,’ said Lupe. ‘But I know jack shit about scuba. Hell, I can’t even swim.’

‘First in the door,’ murmured Donahue.

Lupe helped Donahue climb into the drysuit.

‘Help me get my arms through the harness. All right. Tighten the straps. A little more. That’s it, that’s good.’

Donahue wriggled gloves. She inspected lock rings.

Lupe bent and picked up the heavy steel helmet. She checked the gas line was firmly screwed in place.

‘It’s a short swim,’ said Lupe. ‘Just grab the boat and bring it back.’

Donahue didn’t reply. Strength sucked by a sudden wave of sadness. She wiped tears with a gloved hand.

‘Hey,’ said Lupe.

She slapped Donahue across the cheek.

‘Hey, look at me. Look me in the eye, girl. You have to get it together. He would want you to live.’

Donahue nodded.

Lupe slapped her again, shook her shoulder.

‘If you die down there, what’s the point? What’s it all been for?’

‘All right.’

Lupe stepped back. She lowered the helmet over Donahue’s head and secured hex bolts.

Lupe and Sicknote pitched camp on the platform stairs. They laid Ekks across the steps.

They carried their backpacks to the stairwell and propped them against the wall.

Lupe filled the fire bucket with fresh wood. She uncapped a flare.

‘No point saving these, right?’

She struck the flare and jammed it into the bucket. Table legs and chair slats began to burn. The stairwell filled with smoke and crimson flame-light.

A couple of infected corpses lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs. Lupe kicked them into the flood water. The cadavers floated among garbage. Beverage cups and pages of Sports Illustrated locked in a thickening crust of ice.

‘Versatile bastards,’ said Sicknote. ‘Who knew they could swim?’

He stood and stretched.

‘How long has she been gone?’

Lupe stooped and picked Donahue’s G-Shock from a pile of folded clothes.

‘Twenty minutes.’

‘Freezing down here. Nothing to trap heat.’

‘White tiles,’ said Lupe. ‘I feel cold just looking at them. Makes sense to pitch camp here, though. Better than sitting in the plant room waiting for Galloway to take another bite.’

Lupe warmed her hands over the fire.

‘Reckon he’s dead?’ asked Sicknote. ‘Galloway?’

‘Doubt it. But he’s not half the man he was.’

Sicknote emptied his pockets. Resistors, capacitors, a tuning dial. He cracked his knuckles and began to work on the circuit board.

‘So what the hell is this thing?’ asked Lupe. ‘Trying to repair the radio?’

‘I’m following instructions. Ekks showed me what to build.’

Lupe shook her head.

‘Voices in your head, dude. Ekks is out for the count. He hasn’t told you shit.’

‘He woke. He wrote stuff down.’

Sicknote pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. Lupe held it up, angled so she could read by firelight.

‘Dude, this is your handwriting.’

‘No.’

‘I watched you scrawl all kinds of shit over the walls in Bellevue. Remember the dayroom? All that ketchup? Hell is coming. We are dust. You wrote this.’

‘No. Ekks woke. He spoke, a little. He asked for pen and paper. I watched him write the list.’

‘Look at him. He’s comatose. He hasn’t moved an inch. Probably never will. You didn’t talk to him, dude. Trust me. It was all in your head.’

‘I swear. It was his voice.’

‘Why would he talk to you? Think it through. You were nothing to him. A lab rat. A chance to test his brain implant. Why didn’t he speak to Donahue? Tombes?’

Sicknote looked down at his hands.

‘Because he knew I would follow orders.’

He held up the radio components.

‘If Ekks has been unconscious this whole time, if he hasn’t said a word, then how could I build this? How could I write this list? I don’t know the first thing about electronics.’ He held up the component sheet. ‘Forty-seven pF capacitor. I don’t know what the fuck a capacitor does. Doubt I heard the word before today. How could I select these bits and put them in sequence?’

‘That pile of junk doesn’t do a thing, far as I can tell. Transistors strung on wire. Looks like the kind of tribal jewellery a pygmy would make if they discovered a plane wreck in a jungle clearing. You might as well wear it round your neck.’

Sicknote shook his head.

‘I’m sane. Right now, I’m sane. I see the world clear and true. You’re wrong about Ekks. He figured something out. He made some kind of big discovery, down here in the dark. It’s not a vaccine. It’s not a cure. He found something big. And now he’s reaching out, trying to make us understand.’