CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I don’t actually like it down here, but why aren’t we doing more of this?” Jason whispered to Mark. “Isn’t it safer?”
For the last twenty minutes they’d been half walking, half crawling through a sewer pipe. It was five feet in diameter, or had been before the bottom six inches was filled with semi-dried muck. After what seemed like forever they reached some sort of collection point. Several concrete pipes of varying diameter met in a rectangular space below street level. Six feet above them was a square ventilated steel cover that let in the first natural light they’d seen since entering the sewer system. While they packed the small space elbow to elbow, all of them were relishing the opportunity to straighten their backs.
“Is that poop?” Jason had asked, when he’d been about to enter the cement tunnel. It was a stripe of brown sludge a foot wide along the bottom. He’d never even looked inside a sewer pipe before.
“From who? From what?” Quentin responded. “Nobody left in the city to shit, and none of the toilets are working. That’s just mud.” He smiled. “Although it smells pretty shitty, I’ll give you that.”
No matter what it was, it was a nightmare to walk through, especially when bent double carrying a rifle and backpack and wearing body armor. Everything about the sewer was nightmarish—the smell, the darkness, the claustrophobia. If he hadn’t had men in front of and behind him, grumbling and grunting and obviously as unhappy as he was, Jason might have panicked. Instead of being scary, it just became shared misery.
Ed was in the lead, using a flashlight that, even on its lowest setting, provided a surprising amount of light in the obsidian gloom. Weasel, in the rear, had another small flashlight out, and between the two of them there was just enough light to trudge along without bumping into the man in front. Jason was terrified of what would happen if the batteries in their flashlights died, but then he’d remembered Early had a lighter, and somebody else had some sort of fire-starting tool.
Mark took a drink from his canteen before answering. “Yes, a lot safer. And at the start of the war it was a great way to sneak around without being spotted. The larger trunk lines, I think they’re called, like this one, are big enough to move through, and there are more of them the closer you get to downtown. A few of those are ten feet wide. But the Army figured out what we were doing real quick. They flooded some, blew up others, put booby traps in a few more, blocked some by pouring concrete or dirt or gravel down manholes. So we’ve only got isolated sections left that we can move through, and nothing close to the Blue Zone or the Army base. The Blue Zone’s blocked off below ground, and aboveground there are Tabs and drones.”
“You never know from one year to the next which of these pipes are still going to be open,” Weasel added quietly. “City’s not doing any sewer repair, at least not outside the Blue Zone, so every winter and spring some pipes collapse, or flood, or fill up with silt.” He gestured at the floor below them, and smiled. “It’s a crapshoot.”
His comment was greeted with moans, and his smile grew even wider.
Jason looked at the various other pipe mouths. None of them was any wider than the one they’d just exited. “How much farther are we going down here?”
“Another quarter mile, if nothing’s changed since the last time,” Ed told him. “Now stop asking questions and drink some water.”
They took a twenty-minute lunch break in the ruins of a house that in its day had been quite impressive: two stories, fancy brickwork, a spacious floorplan probably in excess of three thousand square feet. At one point in its history it had been turned into apartments. Now it was crumbled in on itself, a fire having gutted it at least a year before.
The roof was caved in onto the second floor, and the rear wall was a pile of bricks in the back yard grown through with weeds. Water damage from the rain and the abuse of many harsh winters had turned the plaster walls into an earth-tone kaleidoscope of color. Rats and pigeons and bugs had all at one time or another made the house their home, but after so much time living in ruins the men didn’t even see the broken shell around them as they wolfed down what little food they could spare.
The stench rising from the rotten carpet, a combination of mold and animal droppings intermittently soaked by rain and left to bake in ninety-degree weather, only days ago would have been enough to make Jason vomit. Now he barely noticed it. In fact, he was grateful to be in the house, for it brought them out of the baking sun.
Food they could make do without, and he’d been hungry for days, but water was a necessity. They weren’t out, not yet, but each member of the squad had at least one empty canteen hanging off him. While the others ate George and Early prowled the neighboring houses, looking not just for forgotten canned food but standing water, concealed rain traps, anything they could run through their water purifier. They did this every time the squad stopped, security permitting. Usually the searches turned up zero food, but water was a different story. After moving stealthily through the city for years, the squads had set up hundreds if not thousands of rain traps in abandoned residences and commercial buildings. Most of them were simple, a pot or pan placed where it would catch the runoff from a hole in the ceiling, but every little bit helped. Also, just about every house had a water heater, and even if it wasn’t whole there was usually an inch or two of water inside. Of course, they weren’t the only thirsty souls wandering the streets, and while the military handed out jugs of water at the distribution centers it was never enough. George and Early returned dusty and sweaty and handed back most of the squad’s canteens still empty. Not all, though; they’d managed to get enough out of one rusty water heater to fill two canteens, which was better than nothing.
The squad passed one of the full canteens around, everyone taking a few big gulps, and by the time they’d all taken a turn the plastic container was empty again. Ed hung it on his belt in back and they moved out.
As they headed south, the prevalent single-story wood frame houses clad in siding slowly gave way to bigger, older residences. Brick became the exterior of choice, red and dark brown mostly, the houses square two-story affairs with raised, covered front porches and detached garages in back. The garages were usually in worse shape than the houses. Very few trees were to be seen; most were ornamentals planted up close to the houses, now shaggy and uneven.
Ed took the left side of the street, on point. He preferred to stay in the tall grass near the houses but many of them had yards bordered with chain link and he had to keep weaving down to the sidewalk and back. Weasel was behind him, George bringing up the rear. Across the street Mark led that column and was having the same trouble with fences. Early trailed far behind, watching their rear.
Ed glanced up to the right at the sun beating down on him, then across the street at the rest of the squad. Should’ve chosen that side, he thought to himself selfishly, not really meaning it. Mark’s line of men weaved in and out of cool shade thrown by the houses. He guessed it was close to ninety degrees, with high humidity. Which wouldn’t have been unpleasant at all, if he’d been in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. The armor plates front and back trapped heat like an oven door.
Walking slowly in the sun, the only sound they heard was the buzz of cicadas, the chirp of birds, the distant bark of a dog, and the rush of swaying grass. Fat bumblebees dipped and wove in the air above the grass. Every once in a while they’d hear the fierce chitter of an unseen squirrel announcing his displeasure at their arrival. Now that nature was halfway back to reclaiming the city, the wildlife was abundant; Ed had seen squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, chipmunks, turkeys, even deer in the decaying neighborhoods thick with vegetation. Plus packs of wild dogs. Not to mention the bear they’d seen the day before.