Jeff Jacobson - Growth

Charlie was next. He had on a backpack filled with extra ammo and magazines for the AA-12s. Edgar and Axel followed. Each had his flashlight taped to his shotgun and each was struck speechless. Edgar didn’t move far from the ladder; he looked like he was about ready to climb back up and get the hell out of town.

Purcell said, “Take a good look around, boys. This shit is why we’re going organic.”

Charlie said, “We’ll never find him. You know that, right? Not with…” He flung a hand to indicate the abomination of all the bodies, locked together in the gloom.

Edgar nodded vigorously, said, “Come on. If he’s down here, he’s done. Finished. No chance. I don’t want to die for somebody that’s already dead.”

Sandy got close, stabbed a finger into his chest. “Go then. Run.”

“Hang on, hang on,” Purcell said. “Let’s keep our heads here. What we need is a plan. I think we should split up. Cover more ground. Quicker.”

“We don’t even know what the kid looks like,” Charlie pointed out.

“His name is Kevin,” Sandy said. “And splitting up is a bad idea. We don’t know enough about these things. Just because we haven’t seen them move doesn’t mean they won’t. We should stick together, take our time, and do a methodical search. We get separated down here, there’s no telling what could happen.”

“I ain’t arguing with you,” Purcell said. “You got a point. But here’s the thing.” He looked up the ladder at the fading circle of light. “Sun’s going down. You said yourself you didn’t think these things like sunlight. What happens when it’s night out there?”

Sandy didn’t have an answer.

“So let’s split up,” Purcell said. “Cover as much ground as we can, try and find him, okay?”

“We still don’t know what the hell he looks like,” Charlie complained again, but Sandy was already unbuttoning her chest pocket. She pulled out a square photo that she’d run through the laminating machine at the office, securing it in plastic. Kevin’s face smiled awkwardly out of his school photograph. It was clear that she didn’t like folks knowing that she carried it with her on duty.

The Fitzgimmons passed it around. Purcell asked, “What was he wearing?”

Sandy closed her eyes, tried to remember. It felt so long ago. “Shorts. Blue gym shoes. Cheap knockoffs, all I could afford. T-shirt.”

“What color?” Purcell asked.

Sandy let her breath out slow and didn’t open her eyes. Finally she shook her head. “I don’t know. Black? I don’t remember.”

“Shit,” Charlie said.

“Well, let’s make the best of what we’ve got,” Purcell said. “Daylight’s wastin’. Charlie, you take that branch.” He pointed south, down along Fifth Street. “Ed, you and Axe take that one.” He indicated the northern tunnel, opposite of Charlie. “I’ll head this way.” His flashlight swept east, under Main Street. “Chief, you check down that way.”

Purcell said, “You see anything, you sing out. Take your time, don’t rush, and go as far as you can in fifteen minutes. At the end of fifteen minutes, you start back, you got that?” His boys nodded.

He looked at Sandy. “I’m sorry, but that’s all we can give you. Fifteen minutes, we haven’t found him, that’s a goddamn shame, but my boys are alive, and I intend to keep them that way.”

“I understand,” Sandy said in a small voice.

“Gonna do my best to keep you in the land of the living too, Chief,” Purcell said. “Okay then. Check your watches. See you back here soon. Good luck.”

Sandy found it was possible to walk along on the lower edge of the curved walls and avoid stepping on the bodies. She would stop at each cluster, sometimes leaning over it, sometimes able to circle it completely, looking for any trace of her son. Her little flashlight had a strong beam, but it was small, made for hanging from her belt, and each step took her farther and farther into absolute darkness.

She didn’t want to check her watch, didn’t want to know how much time had passed. The beam caught a flash of something familiar. Not anything connected to her son, but it still triggered a pang of recognition. She swept the flashlight back over the tangle of arms and legs, moving slower this time.

There. A hand. Long fingernails, elaborately painted with red, white, and blue stars and stripes. The beam of light found the woman’s face and revealed eyes wide and staring. Sandy’s hand flew to her mask and she turned away, squeezing her eyes tight.

It was Liz.

Sandy tried to take a breath, struggled with the gas mask. She had a powerful urge to rip it off and take a deep gasp, sucking in as much of the air in the sewer as she could. As she struggled to calm down, she heard a yell back down the tunnel.

It was Axel.

Oh God. Had they found Kevin?

Sandy started to run. She realized she was calling Kevin’s name, over and over, in a kind of chanting mantra as she ran. She leapt over splayed bodies and splashed through the muck at the bottom of the trough. Soon she was back at the junction, trying to remember which way Axel and Edgar had gone. Straight ahead, she saw Purcell’s flashlight sweeping back and forth as he came back down his tunnel.

To her left, she saw a distant light. That was Charlie. Axel and Edgar were to the right, in the southern tunnel. It didn’t take long to reach the two brothers. Edgar stood over one of the clusters, while Axel was sitting on the ledge farther along, his feet in the trough. The search had taken its toll on them. They looked as if they’d just toured an abattoir on their hands and knees and had been asked to do it again.

“There,” Edgar said simply, his voice flat, pointing at the mound of bodies.

Sandy pulled up, panting, trying to see through her mask that was suddenly fogging up. It must have been because she had been running. She forced herself to slow her breathing, but it was difficult with her heart thumping like a machine gun. She closed her eyes, focused on inhaling through her nose, exhaling through her mouth. When she was ready, she opened her eyes.

For a second, she thought it was Kevin. Same dark hair. Same skinny build.

Wrong shoes.

She looked closer. It wasn’t him. “Oh, thank you, thank you,” she breathed.

Purcell and Charlie splashed up behind her. “Well?” Purcell said, sounding panicked.

Sandy couldn’t speak. She could only shake her head.

Purcell aimed his flashlight at the boy. “You sure?”

Sandy finally managed, “Yes. It’s not him.”

Purcell took a deep breath himself. “Well, that’s… that’s good, I suppose.” He pointed his shotgun, shining his light back down the tunnel. “Let’s see, we have, five minutes left. I think we should—”

Axel cried out and jerked his legs out of the trough and scrabbled up the side of the sewer. There was a hand holding tight to his left ankle. An arm was connected to the hand, but up where the shoulder should have been part of a torso, there was only a mess of gray tendrils sprouting from around the white bone ball joint.

Axel shook his foot, but the hand refused to let go. He brought his AA-12 shotgun over his shoulder, rested the end of the barrel on the severed limb’s wrist, and squeezed the trigger. Three blasts, so close together they might have been a single explosive sneeze, vaporized the arm in an explosion of blood and viscous, gray slime.

The fingers did not relent and clutched his cowboy boot with a tenacity that enraged Axel. He scraped them off with his other boot and fired again, disintegrating the flesh, blowing the knucklebones into the trough. The sound of the shotgun blasts echoed down the tunnels and for a moment, silence reigned.