Thankfully he was able to find his way to the unused tunnel of the 7 line without going back up to the surface. He had seen the route on the map twice, once when he was waiting for the other cops in front of John’s Pizza, and the other when he’d studied it before destroying the phone. And he was even more grateful that there was no one in the stairs and hallways leading to that tunnel, or inside of it when he got there. So he jogged alongside the tracks heading toward Grand Central, shining the flashlight periodically in front of him to make sure there were no major obstructions. He didn’t want to use it too much, because if there happened to be someone ahead of him they might see it. Police and GS employees would be suspicious of any activity they noticed in the underground, because that was his last known location.
The jogging reduced his travel time to the Grand Central area by about half, and in less than ten minutes he started to see some light up ahead. He hugged the side of the tunnel as he approached it, and then peered through a small bright window in a door that was a part of the wall at the end of the tunnel, which had been erected to seal it now that it was in disuse. There was a train concourse on the other side, populated by commuters and a few Gotham Security uniforms standing guard at several places in it.
Jon knew the GS presence was typical; the company had taken over subway security from the Transit Authority after the flagger—that was one of the reasons they were able to remake the subterranean world for their own use. But he wondered if there might be a greater proliferation of such guards right now because of him. Or maybe it was because of Dayfall, since the commuter crowds were light and didn’t seem to warrant that much security.
Regardless of the reason, that obviously wasn’t the way for him to go, so he doubled back slightly into the dark tunnel and found a door on the right side with stairs leading downward. He knew the subways farther below the station were more likely to be empty, because of flooding and the fact that a lot of ongoing construction had to be abandoned when the River Rise occurred. Sure enough, there was a vacant platform two levels down the stairs, and he was soon able to find a tunnel that ran south, confirmed by an old sign he located with his flashlight.
Jon picked a pathway in the middle of the two sets of tracks that seemed smooth ahead of him, as far as the light could reveal, and started jogging along it. He ran in darkness as much as possible, but the fourth time that he turned the flashlight back on, he immediately sensed something wasn’t quite right in the darkness ahead. He didn’t sense it quickly enough to stop jogging in time, however, and soon found himself stepping into the air, flailing both his legs and arms, and free-falling for what seemed like an eternity.
In seeming slow motion, he waited for the inevitable collision with the rock floor below to break all the bones in his legs, snap his spine, and finally burst his head like a ripe fruit when his broken body jerked it forward to the ground.
Jon got lucky again. His legs hit the surface of a body of water instead, and his feet and knees were slowed enough by it to be uninjured when they touched the submerged floor about five feet below. The shock of striking anything when he expected certain death was enough to take the wind out of him, and he almost lost consciousness, but he was able to recover enough to push his head back up above the surface. He also managed to get his feet under him enough that he could stand, with his head and the top of his shoulders now out of the water.
What he couldn’t do was see anything. The flashlight had flown from his hand during the drop, and it must not have fallen close to him because sweeping his arms around him in the water didn’t help him find it. So he just stood still where he was for a few moments, as a feeling of fear caused by the total and unbreakable darkness started to come over him. He knew he was not really in danger at this point, however, so he forced the irrational terror out of his mind, and tried to think about what to do now.
His fall probably had been a good thirty feet, judging by the length of it and his impact on the water, so he must have dropped off the edge of an unfinished tunnel into a larger cavern—maybe one that had been dug for two levels of tunnels and tracks—and was now on the ground floor. That meant the way he wanted to go would be in the opposite direction of the mouth of the tunnel he had fallen from. But in the pitch black he couldn’t tell which direction that was, so he moved slowly in the one he was facing, with his hand outstretched in front of him, and kept moving until it hit something.
What it hit, after about twenty feet, was an iron wall, with an uneven surface that had deep recesses every few feet, with metal objects half-protruding from them. Jon felt one of those objects, and it reminded him of a thick flying saucer with a ring around it that narrowed as it proceeded outward. He moved back and forth along the surface of the wall and soon discovered it was not a wall at all, because it ended on both sides and was only about as wide as a subway tunnel. That seemingly unconscious comparison, and the fact that his feet could feel the tracks running under it, led Jon to figure out that it was the front of a huge boring machine that had been used to dig the tunnels, and was left down here in these watery graveyards after the flooding.
A few minutes of further consideration gave Jon a sense of direction. If what he was facing was the front of the machine, then behind him would be either a rock wall meant for boring or a tunnel already bored. Behind and above him would be the tunnel he had fallen from, and ahead of him would be the way south. He could either make his way along the tracks and through the water in that direction, or hopefully find a ladder and ascend to the level above at the other end of the cavern, to continue moving that way. The second option would be better, he realized, because he couldn’t be sure that the lower level tunnels would go through, even if this end of them had been dug already. Besides, he didn’t want to be in this disgusting water for too long.
He couldn’t do anything about that problem yet, so he simply pulled his way around the edge of the boring machine and pushed himself along its side. He wondered how long it would take him to feel his way to the other end of the cavern, and find a way up to the next level, and he began worrying that all this would be for nothing if he didn’t reach the Flatiron in time to stop the detonation of the bombs.
While he was still moving along the side of the massive “earthworm,” he heard a distant rumble ahead of him and caught some weak glimmers of light entering the cavern. As the sound grew louder, it seemed familiar to him, and he soon remembered it as the motor of one of the little boats that Shinsky had used to escape in the flooded tunnel the day before.
Jon felt the side of the big dead tool for a way to climb up to the top of it, and soon found a place that worked for him. By the time he was secure in a spot high up on the machinery, the headlight from the dinghy was shining brightly from a tunnel up ahead and illuminating much of the cavern. As Jon had imagined, it was very large and had four big open circles at both ends, two on top of the other two, where the trains would come into this bi-level station. Yellow tarp lined the sides of the whole upper level, and other abandoned machinery could be seen poking out of the water on the bottom floor.
When the light came through the tunnel mouth into the cavern, Jon could see that there was only one dinghy, with only one driver in a GS uniform. Which was a relief, because it meant that this was merely a random patrol rather than a posse sent here specifically for him. Feeling confident, Jon readied himself to jump onto the little boat and take it from the GS agent.
But the dinghy driver didn’t come all the way to the far end of the cavern where Jon and the boring machine were. He slowed and stopped the motor next to a medium-sized crane that had been abandoned in the middle of the bottom level, and stepped up on the part of the cab that wasn’t under the water. The GS man started urinating off the side of the roof into the water, and as he did he spoke into his radio, saying that he had reached the end of his loop and would be heading back.