Douglas Preston - Reliquary

“ Duffy! Where are we?’”

There was a stifled sob. “I don’t know. One of the spillover tubes, maybe.”

“Any idea where it goes?”

There was a sniffle. “It bleeds off excess flow from the Reservoir. If we move downstream to the Bottleneck, maybe we can reach the lower drain system.”

“And from there, how do we get out?” Smithback whispered.

Duffy hiccuped. “Don’t know.”

Smithback mopped his face again and said nothing, trying to roll the fear, the pain, and the shock into a little ball he could stuff down inside himself. He tried to think about his story. God, he’d be a made man with a story like this, following on the heels of the Museum Beast murders. And with luck, he’d still have the Wisher piece in his pocket. But first…

There was a splashing sound, its distance hard to gauge because of the echoes but clearly approaching. He leaned into the darkness, straining to hear.

“They’re still after us!” Duffy yelped, inches from his eardrum.

Smithback grabbed the arm a second time. “Duffy, shut up and listen to me. We can’t outrun them. We need to lose them. You know the system: you’ve got to tell me how.”

Duffy struggled, making an unintelligible sound of fear.

Smithback squeezed harder. “Look, we’re going to be all right if you just calm down and think.”

Duffy seemed to relax, and Smithback could hear him breathing heavily. “All right,” the engineer said. “The emergency spillovers have gauging stations at the bottom. Just before the Bottleneck. If that’s where we are, maybe we can hide inside—”

“Let’s go,” Smithback hissed.

They splashed through the darkness, the flashlight beam jogging from wall to wall. The low tunnel took a turn, and a vast, ancient piece of machinery rose up before Smithback: a giant hollow screw, or something like it, placed horizontally on a bed of granite. Heavily rusted pipes protruded from either end, and a convoluted mass of pipes lay farther back, like coiled iron guts. At the base of the machine was a small railed platform. The main body of the stream ran down past the station, while a small side tunnel snaked its way into the blackness to their left. Taking the flashlight, Smithback grabbed the railing and swung himself up, then helped Duffy to a position beside him.

“Into the pipe,” Smithback whispered. He pushed Duffy inside, then wriggled in himself, tossing the lighted flashlight into the stream before retreating into the darkness.

“Are you crazy? You just threw away—”

“It’s plastic,” Smithback said. “It’ll float. I’m hoping they’ll follow the light downstream.”

They sat in absolute silence. The thick walls of the gauging machinery muffled the tunnel noise, but in a few minutes Smithback could tell that the splashing sounds had grown more distinct. The Wrinklers were approaching—swiftly, too, by the sound. Behind him, he could feel Duffy twitch, and he prayed the engineer would keep his head. The splashing became louder and now Smithback could hear them breathing, a heavy wheezing, like a winded horse. The splashing sounds drew alongside the gauging station, then stopped.

The foul goatish reek was thick now, and Smithback shut his eyes tightly. In the blackness to his rear, Duffy was trembling violently.

He heard splashes in the water outside the station as the things milled about. There was a low noise that sounded like snuffling, and Smithback froze, remembering the Mbwun beast’s keen sense of smell. The splashing continued. Then—with an enormous feeling of relief—Smithback heard it begin to retreat. The things were continuing down the tunnel.

He breathed slowly and deeply, counting each breath. At thirty, he turned to Duffy. “Which way to the storm drains?”

“Out the far end,” Duffy whispered.

“Let’s go.”

Carefully, they turned around within the cramped, fetid space and began wriggling their way toward the rear of the pipe. Duffy emerged at last into the open air. Smithback heard first one, then both, of the engineer’s feet drop into the water, and was wriggling forward himself when a sudden piercing scream cut through the pitch black, and a spray too thick and warm to be water spattered his face. He backed frantically into the pipe.

“Help!” Duffy blurted suddenly. “No, please don’t, you’re gonna—Oh, God, that’s my guts—Jesus, somebody get—”

The voice changed suddenly to a frenzied wet wheeze, then died beneath the heavy thrashing of water. Smithback, scrambling backward in mindless terror, heard a thudding sound like meat chopped with a cleaver, followed by the knuckle-crack of bones being wrenched from their sockets.

Smithback fell out the near end of the pipe, landed on his back in the stream, scrambled to his feet and ran blindly down the side tunnel, not hearing, not caring, not thinking about anything except running. He ran and ran, careening off the sides of the tunnel, scrabbling and thrashing down the endlessly forking paths, deeper and deeper into the dark bowels of the earth. The tunnel joined another, and another, each one larger than the last. Until, quite suddenly, he felt an arm, wet and horribly strong, slide around his neck, and a powerful hand clamp down simultaneously over his mouth.

= 55 =

WITHIN AN HOUR of its spontaneous flare-up, the riot along Central Park South had begun to sputter fitfully. Well before 11:00 P.M., most of the initial rioters had spent their anger along with their energy. Those who had been hurt were helped to the sidelines. Shouting, insults, and threats began to replace fists, clubs, and stones. However, a hard central core of violence continued. As people left the scene, bruised or exhausted, others arrived: some curious, some angry, some drunk and spoiling for a fight. Television reports waxed lurid and hysterical. Word traveled like an electric spark through the island: up First and Second Avenues, where young Republicans gathered in singles bars to jeer and hoot at the liberal President; along St. Mark’s Place and into the Marxist corners of the East Village; over fax lines and telephone lines. As word spread, so did the rumors. Some said that the homeless and those that tried to help them were being massacred in a police-instigated genocide. Others said that leftist radicals and criminal mobs were burning banks, shooting citizens, and looting businesses uptown. Those that answered this call to action ran into—sometimes brutally—the last pockets of homeless that were still streaming to the surface, emerging here and there around Central Park, fleeing the trapped and spreading tear gas.

The original vanguard of Take Back Our City—the Brahmins of New York wealth and influence—had quickly retreated from the scene. Most had returned to their townhouses and duplexes in dismay. Others had massed toward the Great Lawn, assuming the police would quickly quell the rioting and hoping that the final vigil would go on as planned. But as the police shored up their line and began to hem in the rioters, the fighting itself also retreated deeper into the Park, moving ever closer to the Lawn and the Reservoir that lay beyond. The darkness of the Park, the thick woods, the tangle of undergrowth, and the maze of paths all made efforts at riot control difficult and slow.

The police moved against the rioters with caution. Already spread too thin by the massive rousting operation, much of the force was late on the scene of the riot. The police brass was all too keenly aware that influential people might still be among the milling throng, and the idea of gassing or clubbing a member of the New York elite was not something the politically conscious mayor would allow. In addition, a large body of officers had to be dispatched to patrol the adjoining areas of the city, where sporadic looting and vandalism was now being reported. And in the backs of everyone’s minds lay the unspoken, but dreaded, spectacle of the Crown Heights riot of a few years before, which had gone on for three days before finally drawing to an uneasy close.