David Dunwoody - Empire's End

There were stairs; wet stairs, Alex noticed immediately, old carved stone steps that collected tepid little pools of water from some unknown source. Had to be the humidity. It was hot and fucking damp in that narrow stairwell. Drip-drip-drip from down below rattled the nerves. Jarrett was breathing hard, looking from side to side at the flat black walls as they descended the winding staircase, Alex and Keane each holding a torch and a weapon. Jarrett was approved for weapons, but all he had was a length of pipe tucked against his calf, down in that one old holey sock he wore on his right leg. He knew to strike them in the eyes and teeth. Blind them, disable them, evade them. Rotters weren’t to be messed with. It wasn’t Man’s cause to seek out and slaughter the living dead. Just stay out of their damn way and let them rot.

“I almost hear a rumbling,” Keane said.

“Well, do you or don’t you?” Alex whispered.

“I don’t know. It’s kinda in my feet, you feel that?”

“I don’t feel anything. And I don’t hear anything. We’re down in solid rock here, Keane, I don’t think you’re really feeling anything moving about.”

“Just the earth?”

“I don’t know. Your imagination. Your heartbeat.”

“So dark,” Jarrett breathed. “How far do you think these stairs go?”

“Don’t know, son,” Alex replied. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic, despite being the rear guard, and he thrust his torch toward the ceiling. “Flame’s dancing a little. I think there’s some air coming up from below.”

Keane nodded. “It’s getting a little less damp. We’re onto something.” He grinned at Jarrett.

The stairs ended. There was a tunnel, and another door, sodden wood bulging with just a few tiny holes letting some cool air push through. Pungent, but cool.

“What do you think the city was like back then? When it was New New York?” Jarrett asked.

Alex stared at a blank wall. “All I know is, it was always the same down here.”

“Definitely a sewer behind this door,” Keane grunted as he tugged at the old, swollen wood. “But there’s gotta be something more. This passage wasn’t carved out so some guys could clean shit outta the pipes.”

“Language.”

“Yeah,” Keane mumbled. “I’ll bet this was here before the sewers. I’ll bet they came later and took this up as part of ‘em, but this used to be something else — something—”

The door roared as it fell apart, an icy wind with the smell of rancid waste smacking each man in the face. Then it was gone. A gaping hole remained.

“Blew my torch out,” Keane whistled.

“Here’s another.”

“I can get this one to go again. No problem.”

Jarrett approached the opening on trembling legs. There was a black vacuum, a soundless, sightless void.

“Here,” Alex said, and tossed his torch through the doorway.

It splashed, and fizzled, but didn’t go out. It illuminated the six-foot drop, managed by ladder, and the cavernous sewer tunnel extending from right there to the end of the world in both directions.

“Lookit this,” Keane said, perched in the doorway with eyes wide. “It’s huge. By Adam, you could drive a truck through this here! Two trucks! What were they flushin’?” he laughed, and it echoed throughout the system, making Alex’s skin crawl.

“Keep it quiet.”

“You honestly think there’s anything down here? We had to kill that door to get through!”

“Don’t stir up the rats!” Alex hissed. Keane threw his hands out in mock horror. “God forbid I should have to mash a few rat heads.”

“Rat king,” Jarrett said, “could fit through there. Big enough for a rat king.”

“Rat kings aren’t real.” Alex shot a stern look at Keane, who just rolled his eyes. “But there are almost certainly rats in there infected with the Plague or something else and I don’t want to mess with ‘em.”

“So we’re not going in there?” Keane pouted.

“Are you kidding?”

“What’d we come down here for? What’d I rip apart that door for?”

“It’s just a sewer! There isn’t any gold down here, man! Do you see anything but a little river of shit water? There aren’t any other tunnels or doors or anything. It’s just a big-ass sewer, that’s all. I’m sorry,” Alex sighed. “I wish there was something down here. It would’ve made this day worthwhile. But there’s not.”

They all felt the rumble.

“What do you think that was?” Keane asked.

“Maybe…” Alex leaned through the doorway into the tunnel, feeling the slight breeze. “Maybe there’s water down here. Maybe there’s like some sort of river system that still exists, and it shifts things around. Could be natural caverns underneath all this.”

“Wouldn’t that be something to see,” Keane said, smiling at Jarrett.

“We’re not sight-seeing, though, we’re—” And then Alex fell.

It was a jarring drop, not lethal, not frightening, just jarring. Painful and shitty and wet. He landed in a fetid slop and knew his ankle had turned. “GOD! FUCK!” It probably was just a sprain. Just a sprain, Keane could haul him up if he could just grab that ladder. Alex looked at his hands, looked for cuts in the dying light of the thrown torch. He couldn’t see shit for shit.

“Keane, gimme a hand. I’m okay.”

Jarrett’s head shot into the tunnel. “Are you all right?”

“I just said I’m fine,” Alex grumbled. He sat up and scooted his butt forward a little, sloshing in the muck. He was going to stink for days. The group hadn’t come across fresh water in a week, and it would probably be another damn week before they did. Alex saw the coming days going to hell; saw himself sitting alone in a dirty tent and just when he’d gotten up the nerve to ask Tru if she wanted to lay with him.

“Need more than a hand, looks like,” Keane said, clambering down the ladder.

“No, I can get myself up there, I just need—”

“Man, forget it. I’ve got you.” Keane clapped Alex’s back and coughed. “You smell like shit.”

“Thank you.”

There was another rumble.

“I know you felt that.”

It didn’t stop.

Then the thing came around the bend, filling the tunnel, all of it, claiming every inch of space in its insane locomotion.

Torsos, heads, limbs, all desiccated, all human, all undead, all packed together with mud and blood and everything else and wound tight with threads of bone and flesh and fungus. A gnashing moaning rumbling thing that pawed at the walls with skeletal hands, feeling old grooves, having run this track a thousand times like a polished marble. Broken teeth and watery eyes and bloody gums all searching for the least bit of meat. Plunging through the tunnel, the rumble now a crescendo of wails and grunts and other things going on inside the wet pulsing core of the rat king.

Jarrett’s head snapped back as the thing came by, and he saw a split-second flash of faces and feet and skulls and things he never wanted to see, ever, ever again. The thing swept by and rolled up Alex and Keane into it and swallowed them and it continued its terrible progress through the bowels of the city, searching for every last warm morsel to sustain itself.

Jarrett never explained the rat king to the others, to anyone. He didn’t tell them just how the rotters had taken Alex and Keane. He didn’t think they would understand. Only nature would. Nature, who, he now knew, was a goddess in Hell.

“I’ll pick up the tab,” Blake said, sipping from a terrible cup of coffee. He motioned across the diner to the waitress.

Voorhees had barely touched his sandwich. It was ice-cold now, two and a half hours after it was dropped in front of him, two and a half hours of trying to wrap his head around what Blake had been telling him.