Jack Chalker - A War of Shadows

The next station was some twenty blocks or more away; there was no sign of it in the ghostly-lit tunnel whose bulbs spread out before him almost to infinity. He knew what lay at the next station: a squad of riflemen and a flamethrowing team, the same as was in back of him. She must know it, too, he thought, still surprised and still not understanding why he was still surprised. His mind kept going around and around like that.

Either he would find her or he would miss her. If he did the latter, well, the next group to come in sure wouldn’t. And if he found her?

Why had he taken the pistol? It was Suzy out there, Suzy running and hiding in the dark, not some mysterious ogre.

There was a dripping sound, some leak or something that reverberated up and down the empty tunnel.

Yes, it was Suzy out there, he told himself, but not the Suzy of the camps or the Suzy of the good days just over in the Carroll County woods just over? It seemed years ago—but the Suzy of Kennedy Airport and the marshland near the end of the runways. The Suzy who told them to hold the vertical mortar steady as she timed the takeoff of the great silver bird with hundreds of innocent and non-idealogical people on board, and smiled and laughed as she timed it just right and dropped it in and it had gone whomp and torn into that plane and she’d laughed when the explosion littered the sky and found pleasure in the screams, the screams, the screams…

Several minutes in, he thought he detected movement. There was some sort of sign up there on the right, and he was sure that some figure had moved near it. Just a shadow, but…

The sign marked an escape shaft in case the trains got stalled without power or crashed or whatever. “There was also a pumping noise as it became clear that the shaft was also used for providing some ventilation for the stagnant air of the tunnels.

How many between here and there? he wondered.

Would Edelman and his people have them all covered?

But, no, he scolded himself. He was thinking like himself. He would be looking for a way out; not Suzy, oh, no. She had a mission to complete. She couldn’t get on one of their fancy big trains now, no, but she could if possible still do a little damage. What would Suzy do?

Air shaft, his mind told him. Not only fresh air down but dead air and exhaust and fumes up. An outlet to the air.

He walked more quickly now, toward that exit sign. And then, there he was. He stopped and listened. There were noises all right, slight and easily overlooked, but there, beyond the exit.

“Suzy!” he shouted, his voice echoing eerily up and down the length of tunnel. “Suzy! It’s Sam!”

The sound of his own voice obscured all other sounds for a moment.

“Suzy! Don’t do it! It’s a plot by The Man, Suzy! We’ve been suckered by the pigs all along! None of the big boys will die—they got the real stuff! Just you and me and a lot of ordinary people! Suzy! Don’t you end up working for the other side!”

Still there was no response. He pushed open the exit door and walked into the shaft. Surprisingly, even to him, he felt no fear at all. He no longer had anything to be afraid of. That, in itself, was a wonderful thing, and he savored it.

There was a wide metal ladder in the center of the shaft, and, looking up, he could see light from the distant street. For a moment he thought he’d guessed wrong, but then he saw her, on a metal ledge not eight centimeters wide, near an access valve for the air system. She was just standing there, looking down at him, but she had opened her shirt to expose the two gas nodules, and had the two long, thin spray tubes out of her pants legs. One hand steadied her on the precarious perch; the other was on the left gas cannister.

He started up the ladder.

“Stay back, Sam!” she warned him. “This isn’t any of your fight. I don’t know if you finked or what, but it’s not your fight, Sam. You don’t belong here. Go away.”

He continued up at a steady pace. Now he was only a few meters below her.

“Stop where you are, Sam, or I’ll just let these jets go right now,” she said. Her right hand, which she’d been using to keep her balance, came free, and she grasped the right tube and stuck it in a cavity in the wall behind the air intake valve.

He stopped and stared at her, surprised now at himself as tears welled up in his eyes.

“Stop, Suzy! Please! This is crazy! There’s no reason…” he pleaded.

“Only in blood can come the revolution,” she said, eyes not on him but on something distant, something neither he nor most other human beings could see. “The blood of the innocent, though it count in the millions, buys the future of mankind.”

“Suzy, if you don’t stop I’ll have to shoot you,” he said, his voice choking up. “I can’t let you do it again. Not a second time, Suzy.”

Suddenly she seemed to notice him again, and she looked down on him with an expression of mixed arrogance and bewilderment. “Why, Sam?” she asked. “Penance for the plane job?” Her hand moved to the trigger for the cylinder.

He could hardly see her, yet the pistol came up and pointed at her all the same. “No, baby,” he said. “Love.” He fired the pistol, not once, but all five rounds in the chambers, and he continued to pull the trigger, clicking away at the useless pistol.

Suzanne Martine stood on the perch, that same expression still there but the arrogance now fading, leaving only the bewilderment. “Sam?” she said, the tone carrying that bewilderment to him as if, for the first time in her life, she questioned everything.

And then she fell, dropping down the shaft, her body striking the ladder once and bouncing, until it hit the cement floor and lay still.

He stopped firing and looked at the pistol again in wonderment, as if he had no idea how he’d gotten there. He let it drop out of his hands and it fell, too, to the floor below.

He started climbing for the sunlight above him.

Jake Edelman looked like he was about to have a heart attack at any moment. He’d aged terribly in the past few days, and he was neither young nor in the best of condition to begin with.

Bob Hartman, who didn’t look so great himself, entered, nodded, and sat down in the familiar chair.

For a while his boss said nothing, as if thinking of another world. Finally he looked over at his associate.

“It’s the fifteenth,” Jake Edelman said.

Hartman nodded. “You’re ready?”

Edelman shrugged. “Hell, how do I know? Do you realize what a long shot this is?”

The younger man knew perfectly. They had it all now, everything. Everything but a way out except for an outlandish gamble by his weakened boss.

“I visited Dr. O’Connell today,” Hartman said. “She’s doing pretty well, but it’ll take time. A lot of time. She’s a remarkable human being, though, Jake. We owe a lot to her.”

Edelman nodded. “Pity we couldn’t get to Dr. Bede. Dead in LA with those nice little suicide notes.”

“Mitoricine?”

“Who knows?” The older man shrugged. “The county medical examiner, who owes his job to Mayor Stratton, who went to college with Allen Honner, says self-inflicted with some trace of barbiturates and the like but no really funny stuff. He’s the ME. Who’s to argue? Bede’s in Forest Lawn already.”

Hartman sniffed derisively. “Well, I dropped in on our doctor after looking in on you-know-who.”

Edelman managed a smile. “Poor Mr. Honner still in C.C.U. at Bethesda? That was some heart attack! I understand they have to keep him so doped up for pain that he hardly recognizes anybody.”

They both shared a laugh over that.