Adam Baker - Terminus

Lupe picked up the notebook and thumbed pages.

‘So what has he found?’

‘I don’t know. But that’s why he held on so long. His body is falling apart, but his heart keeps beating. Pure will. There’s something he has to tell us, something we need to understand, before he can die.’

Donahue hauled herself over the bow skirt and rolled into the boat.

She wiped water from her visor. The floor of the boat was cluttered with dive gear. Spare flippers, spare weights, spare gas.

She found bottled water. She struggled to twist the cap with gloved hands. She split the bottle open with a knife and emptied it over her helmet, arms and chest. She sluiced radioactive flood water from her drysuit and threw the empty bottle aside.

She twisted lock-rings and pulled off her gloves. She unbolted her helmet and lifted it clear. Her breath steamed in the frigid tunnel air.

She released harness clasps and shrugged off her backplate and tanks. She shut off the regulator.

She dumped her weight belt. She unbuckled ankle straps and kicked off her flippers.

She looked around. Impenetrable blackness. Her helmet was still plugged to its nickel hydride battery pack. The lamps still burned. She held up the helmet and surveyed the tunnel.

The flood waters had risen so high her head was inches from the rough brick roof. She could reach up and touch cracked stonework and crumbling mortar.

Too much clutter at the bottom of the boat. She threw stuff over the side. Dive gear. Couple of coats.

She found Nariko’s fire hat. Old style, stitched from thick leather, the kind that got handed down generation to generation, proud emblem of a family’s dedication to the service.

She turned it over in her hands, rubbed grime from the captain’s shield, buffed it on the sleeve of her drysuit.

She glanced at the rockfall, the curtain of rubble that blocked the north passageway. Somewhere, beneath those tons of concrete and steel, Nariko lay interred.

Donahue pulled the tether line and brought the boat closer to the rubble. The PVC hull abraded concrete. She leaned forwards and placed the hat on a boulder. She adjusted its position, made sure it was sitting straight and proud.

If Nariko had died in the line, if they’d stopped the city traffic, given her the pipes and drums, the helmet would have rested on her coffin at the head of a fire truck convoy.

It belonged close to Nariko.

Donahue unhooked her radio.

‘I reached the boat.’

‘You okay?’

‘Yeah. I’m heading back.’

She took position in the centre of the boat. She set her helmet and battery pack on the prow. Twin halogen lamps lit the tunnel ahead.

The boat pushed through a bobbing scrim of garbage. Bottles, sodden newsprint, polystyrene packing chips.

A couple of bodies floating face down. They stank. Rotted and rat-torn. She tried to steer clear. The cadavers bumped against the boat. She pushed them away with an oar.

She was soothed by the tunnel darkness, a mesmeric splash-echo each time she dipped her oar. The place had a funereal beauty. Passageway receding to infinity. Stonework glazed with ice. Rusted roof signals. Fissured brick and dripstone.

Firehouse shift patterns had left her well acquainted with the arid landscape of exhaustion. She understood its bleak, Arctic terrain. Impaired judgement. Emotional lability. Sudden euphorias: giddy elation followed, minutes later, by black despair.

Detach, she told herself. Crush all emotion. Exhaustion will persuade you to love the womb-like tranquillity of darkness and silence. It will rob you of strength like hypothermia, paralyse you with a smothering wave of peace and wellbeing. You will become entranced by the passageways, their siren beauty. You will sit numb and thoughtless in the boat as the flood waters rise, lulled by dripping water and cool tunnel wind.

Fight it.

Survive.

She threw back her head and roared.

‘Fight, motherfucker.’ Her voice reverberated from the tunnel walls, alien and shrill. ‘Fight, bitch.’

She punched her thigh.

‘Yeah.’

Another punch. Invigorating pain, like a shot of caffeine.

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

She gripped the oar and began to paddle. Strong, muscular strokes. She sang ‘Danny Boy’.

Fleeting memory. New Year’s Eve. Tombes sitting on the bar at McDonnell’s wearing shorts and a fire hat, leading the chorus, beer glass in each hand.

She rowed harder, sang louder.

An arched passageway to her right. A ragged cave mouth blocked by prop-beams and planks. An old work notice nailed to the wood:

Donahue turned her dive helmet and trained the halogen lamps on the tunnel entrance. The beam washed across crooked planks and shafted into the darkness beyond.

A raft of garbage had collected behind the planks. Blankets. Plastic drums. Scraps of sheetrock. The remains of a tunnel hobo camp. A refuge built by broken souls fleeing sunlight and city bustle. They had lifted an unchained grate, descended ladders, climbed downwards into darkness and solitude. Permanent midnight. A soothing all-better-now like a mother’s embrace.

A splash. A disturbance in the water near the planked cave mouth. Spreading ripples. Donahue focused the light. A skeletal face. An infected creature squirmed between wooden slats. Bone projected through quilted coat fabric. A splintered clavicle.

The putrid revenant pulled itself clear of the planks, hit the water and sank. Waves subsided and the black flood waters settled glassy smooth like onyx.

The creature suddenly broke surface shockingly close and executed a thrashing, spastic breaststroke as it headed for Donahue’s boat.

She hesitated. Flight or fight? Row, or confront the weak, dying thing?

Better to fight. She would easily outpace the creature if she rowed for Fenwick, but it would follow her wake. Sooner or later the rotted ghoul would reach the platform steps and emerge from the water. Better to kill it now.

She picked up an oar and snapped it over her knee. Splintering crack. The shaft tipped with jagged fibreglass.

She knelt in the prow of the boat, splintered shaft of the oar held in her hand like a harpoon, ready to strike.

Two more infected creatures wormed between crooked planks, squirmed from the darkness and seclusion of the cave mouth.

Double splash. Spreading ripples. Skeletal creatures thrashing through flood water, heading her way.

‘Shit.’

Donahue threw down the makeshift spear and picked up the remaining oar. She began to paddle.

It was a pursuit out of fevered dreams, out of heart-pounding nightmares. She rowed as fast as she could, yet maintained an imperceptible pace. The twin helmet lamps at the front of the boat illuminated the flooded tunnel. Bricks and buttresses passing so slowly it felt like she wasn’t moving at all.

She couldn’t see the creatures swimming behind her, but she could hear the churn and splash as their arms beat water. The sound echoed from the tunnel walls, loud and intimate.

She glanced back. They were close. They would reach her before she achieved the safety of the station platform.

Something up ahead. The hulk of the old IRT coach sitting on a siding. Warped wooden cladding hanging on an iron frame. Doors hung open. Water almost high as the windows.

Donahue paddled towards the coach. She drifted alongside, and shone headlamps through the vacant windows. Brass fixtures hung from rotted timber. Corroded seat frames protruded from dark water.

She lashed the tether to a window pillar, gripped the frame of a side door, and eased herself into the coach.