The Wrinklers came on, their eyes blood red and streaming, their skin mottled and burned from the intense light.
She shook the squeeze bottles. “Hear me? Activated 7-dehydrocholesterol! Enough to kill all of you ten times over!” As the first Wrinkler reached her, knife raised, she hosed it in the face, and then hit a second Wrinkler just behind it. They fell backward, writhing horribly, small wisps of acrid smoke rising from their skin.
The other Wrinklers paused, a gibbering sound rising from their ranks.
“Vitamin D!” Margo repeated. “Bottled sunlight!”
She raised her arms and sent two delicate streams of liquid arcing over the milling crowd. A wail rose up, some falling and tearing at their cloaks, splattering droplets on their companions. Margo stepped forward and hosed the rest of the front rank. They fell backward in sheer panic, the sounds of gibbering and wailing filling the air. She advanced again, spraying a thick line of solution from left to right, and then the mass of Wrinklers broke and turned, scrambling over one another to get away, leaving a dozen convulsing, smoking bodies on the floor, ripping desperately at their cloaks.
Margo stepped back, and hosed the rest of the solution across the floor of the archway, then up along its sides and ceiling, leaving the exit tunnel wet and dripping. She tossed the empty containers into the Pavilion. “Let’s go!”
She ran after the others, catching up to them by an open grating at the far end of the platform.
“We’ve got to get back to the rally point,” the black-suited figure said. “Those charges are set to go off in ten minutes.”
“You first, Margo,” D’Agosta said.
As she dropped to the level of the tracks and began to descend into the drain below, a series of shattering explosions sounded behind and above her.
“Our charges!” D’Agosta cried. “The fires must have set them off prematurely!”
Pendergast turned to answer, but his voice was drowned in a rumble which, like an earthquake, was felt first in the feet, then in the gut, growing in violence and volume. A strange wind kicked up in the passageway—a gathering roar of air, forced along by the collapse of the Crystal Pavilion—pushing dust, smoke, scraps of paper, and the ripe smell of blood before it.
= 62 =
MARGO DROPPED through the drain into a long, low tunnel, lit only by the sputtering glow of a dying flare. Several piles of rubble were strewn here and there, poking up from the standing water on the tunnel floor. Above her, the passages still rumbled and shook from the aftereffects of the concussion. Dust and debris drifted down through the drain, settling onto her shoulders.
Smithback fell into the water beside her, followed by Pendergast, D’Agosta, and the diver.
“Who the hell are you?” D’Agosta asked. “And what happened to the rest of the SEALs?”
“I’m not a SEAL, sir,” the man said. “I’m a police diver. Officer Snow, sir.”
“Well, well,” said D’Agosta. “The guy who started it all. Got a light, Snow?”
The diver snapped a new flare to life, and suddenly the tunnel was illuminated by a harsh crimson glare.
“Oh, God!” Margo heard Smithback murmur beside her. Then she realized that what she thought to be piles of rubble were actually rubber-suited divers, battered and headless, their bodies splayed in mute agony. The surrounding walls were pocked and scarred by countless bullet holes and the charred tracings of shells.
“SEAL Team Gamma,” Snow muttered. “After my partner bought it, I ran back here to make a stand. Those creatures chased me up the drain, but then abandoned the chase on those tracks up there.”
“Guess they were late for the debutante’s ball,” D’Agosta said, looking around at the massacre site, his face hard.
“You didn’t see any of the other SEALs in there, sir?” Snow asked. “I followed the prints. I hoped some of them might have survived…” his voice trailed off when he saw the look on D’Agosta’s face. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“Come on,” Snow urged, once again animated. “There’s still forty pounds of C-4 around here, waiting to go off.”
Margo stumbled forward in a dark daze. She felt the floor of the tunnel solid beneath her feet, and she tried to draw that solidity up through her feet, her legs, and her arms. She knew she could not allow herself to think about what she had seen, what she had learned, inside the Crystal Pavilion: if she stopped to do that, she would be unable to go on.
The tunnel took a long, shallow bend. Ahead, Margo could see Snow and D’Agosta already moving into a large vaulted space at the end of the tunnel.
Beside her, she could hear Smithback’s breathing turn choppy. Her eyes drifted toward the tunnel floor. Around her lay the torn and bloodied bodies of perhaps a dozen Wrinklers. She caught a glimpse of a dirty hood, burned away to expose skin seamed and veined to an extraordinary thickness.
“Striking,” Pendergast murmured at her side. “The reptilian traits are unmistakable, yet the human attributes remain dominant. An early way station, so to speak, on the way to the full-blown Mbwun-hood. Odd, though, how the metamorphosis is so much greater in certain specimens than in others. No doubt due to Kawakita’s continual refinements and experimentations. Shame there’s no time for further study.”
The echoes of their footfalls grew broader as they moved into the large space at the end of the tunnel. There were several more still forms lying scattered in the shallow water.
“This was our rally point,” Snow said as he sorted quickly through the rows of equipment lining one side of the vaulted space. Margo could hear the sharp edge of nervousness in his voice. “There’s more than enough scuba equipment here to get us out, but no suits. Look, we’ve got to move quickly. If we’re still here when those charges blow, this whole place is going to come down on top of us.”
Pendergast handed her a set of tanks. “Dr. Green, we have you to thank for our escape,” he said. “You were right about the vitamin D. And you were able to contain the creatures within the Pavilion until the explosions blocked their escape. I promise you’ll be welcome on any further excursions we may make.”
Margo nodded as she snugged her feet into a pair of flippers. “Thanks, but once was enough.”
The FBI agent turned toward Snow. “What’s the exit strategy?”
“We came in through the Sewage Treatment Plant on the Hudson,” Snow replied, shouldering his air tank and strapping on a headlamp. “But there’s no way to return through the plant. We were to leave via the north branch of the West Side Lateral, to the One Hundred Twenty-fifth Street Canal.”
“Can you get us there?” Pendergast asked, quickly passing air tanks to Smithback and helping to fit them.
“I think so,” Snow panted, pulling masks out of the equipment pile. “I had a good long look at the Commander’s maps. We retrace our route as far as the first flow riser. If we ascend the riser instead of descend, we should reach the access spillway leading out into the Lateral. But it’s a long swim, and we’ll have to be extremely careful. There are sluice gates and evacuation shunts. Get lost down those, and…” His voice petered off.
“Understood,” Pendergast said, shrugging into a set of air tanks. “Mr. Smithback, Dr. Green, ever used scuba gear before?”
“Took a few lessons in college,” Smithback said, accepting the proffered mask.
“Skin-dived in the Bahamas,” Margo said.
“The principle’s the same,” Pendergast said to her. “We’ll adjust your regulator. Just breathe normally, stay calm, and you’ll do fine.”
“Hurry!” Snow said, real urgency in his voice now. He began to jog toward the far end of the vaulted space, Smithback and Pendergast close behind him. Margo forced herself to follow, tightening her tank belt as she ran.
Suddenly, she was brought up short by Pendergast, who had stopped and was looking over his shoulder.