Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

Then there was a new distraction, bright heavy things, swooping down on him like angular birds of prey, spinning from high across the other side of the compound. At first Wrobleski thought they were sheets of wood, pieces of metal and glass, maybe something pulled from the roof. But then came the sickening realization that they were frames, and not just empty frames, frames containing maps. His collection was taking flight, attacking him. He looked up and saw the women, their arms loaded with maps, launching them haphazardly into space. They’d got into his storage rooms. How the fuck was that even possible? The frames dive-bombed the ground, shattered as they hit. Splinters of wood and glass spiked around his legs.

The maps weren’t aimed precisely at him — they weren’t aimed with any precision whatsoever — but a random throw, one with an accidentally perfect trajectory, came heading right his way, and before he could sway or duck, a neat, stainless-steel corner gouged its way into the flesh above his cheekbone. His head jolted back, a piece of skin flapped open, and he felt blood on his face. He shuddered, tried to shake off the blow, but he couldn’t, not quite, not immediately. Carla struggled to get free, flipped around like a baby shark: he tightened his grip.

Something loomed at him through the smoke. Billy Moore was on his feet and in action, and he grabbed hold of Wrobleski’s gun arm. Wrobleski tried to shake him off, shoulder him away, aimed a venomous kick at him, even as Carla was biting him. The shark had teeth: he was fighting half a family here. He tried to turn his gun into Billy’s face, but he felt the man’s desperate, intractable strength. For a second he even thought of letting the kid go so he could deal solely with Billy, but no, he wasn’t a guy who willingly let go of his assets: it was a matter of principle.

Then he got lucky. Another map sliced through the air above them. Wrobleski stepped back and he pulled Billy with him, into the path of the tumbling, curling, accelerating frame. It gashed Billy on the temple, hard, precisely: he sank to his knees. Wrobleski kicked him aside, so he could retreat deeper still into the compound.

Flames skipped around the doors up on the top level. The women were immolating his maps, his whole building. Wrobleski started toward the stairs that led upward. If he could get there, he knew he’d be able to handle half a dozen drugged, damaged bitches and save the rest of his collection. But then he stopped himself. Maybe there were other priorities. He hadn’t imagined those sirens: they were real and they were getting louder and very close.

On the other side of the courtyard, Zak, shuddering, shaken, and astounded by the explosion, his sense of balance no longer reliable, looked up into the higher levels of the compound. He shouted, “Marilyn,” but his voice seemed entirely within his own head. He could see bodies moving around up there, but there was no sign of her through the growing turmoil of smoke and flame. He couldn’t pretend to know the feelings of Wrobleski’s women; maybe if you’d been forcibly tattooed, kidnapped, brought here, you might feel differently about maps from the way he did. Even so, he couldn’t help feeling that destroying maps simply because you despised their current owner was more than wrong, that it was a kind of blasphemy.

Wrobleski withdrew still farther as the world around him was thrown dangerously, giddily off-kilter. He was experiencing a brand-new sensation: panic. So this was what it felt like, what other people felt all the time. Not pleasant. Not good. His killings had always been placid, well-organized affairs, and he’d always been the one causing panic in others. He felt betrayed. He did the only thing he could think of. Clutching Carla like a security blanket, he hauled her into the deeper reaches of the compound, into a dark, untidy, familiar corner, where he lifted the flat, diamond plate hatch. It wasn’t any version of escape, nor any version of safety. He hardly even knew his way around down there except for the one route that took him to the disused subway station, but he reckoned that was more than anybody else knew. A man with a gun and a little girl who could be used as a shield would surely find a way. Carla Moore might yet save him.

Wrobleski and Carla Moore passed swiftly through damp, hanging, enclosed darkness. Wrobleski had crammed an oversized miner’s helmet onto Carla’s head, and one on his own. She looked almost adorable. Their feet were wet: dankness soaked into them. At some incalculable distance there was the vast sound of moving water.

Wrobleski told himself he’d been in tougher spots than this. Yes, he was in a sewer. Yes, he was in several kinds of pain, but in the end, pain was nothing, either it went away or you lived with it. And yes, sure, he assumed he would be pursued, and he didn’t know exactly who by or how many there’d be, but in any case nobody he respected.

For now he was prepared to look upon the kid as an asset, although that could change, because looked at in most ways, she was a liability and a total pain in the ass. At least, now that they were down in the tunnels, she’d stopped kicking and biting. She seemed to have realized that, for better or worse, the two of them were in this together. Of course, she could find other ways of being irritating.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked, as insolently as she knew how.

“Obviously,” Wrobleski replied.

“Doesn’t seem so obvious to me.”

“That’s because you’re a kid. You don’t know shit.”

She let that hang for a while, as if it might be enough to shut her up, though of course it wasn’t.

“Are we playing hide-and-seek?”

“I’m surprised you even know what hide-and-seek is,” said Wrobleski. “I thought it was all computers and video games for you kids.”

“Oh yeah, I’m very old-school. So how long do we hide for?”

“As long as it takes.”

“We could be down here forever.”

“Maybe you could, if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

“Boy, aren’t we a grouch today?”

“Not only today,” said Wrobleski.

* * *

Billy, Zak, and Marilyn stood in a corner of the compound, under a metal gantry, sheltering from smoke, flames, and cops. The good guys are always slow off the mark. They have to do the right thing, to make sure the victims are okay, which may also include finding out who the real victims are. They have to say something warm and supportive, or possibly cool and ironic. “You actually came to rescue me, Zak?” “Yes, Marilyn, I actually did. Don’t sound so surprised.” Then there’s some explaining to do, to the cops, or the concerned citizens, and in this case also to the fire fighters. Which is to say that sometimes the good guys also have to prove they really are good guys. Establishing an “innocence” that involved blowing up a car with stolen dynamite in Zak and Billy’s case, and in Marilyn’s, opening locked doors, destroying property, and torching the place, might be a time-consuming business. By then Carla and Wrobleski could be anywhere. Maybe they didn’t need to establish their good-guy credentials right there and then.

Billy Moore pulled open the steel trapdoor that led to the world beneath the city, found a cluster of heavy-duty, rubber-sheathed flashlights hanging from hooks at the top of the stairs, and called urgently to Zak and Marilyn, “Are you coming down with me or not?”

“Of course I am,” said Zak. “I’m an urban explorer.”

“And,” said Marilyn, “nobody descends into the underworld without me.”

* * *

“The thing about hide-and-seek,” said Carla, trudging on gamely beside Wrobleski, “is that in the end it’s never much fun. You hide, and then nothing happens. So you get bored, and after a while you start wanting to be found. Is that what you want, Mr. Wrobleski?”