She racked the slide, took aim and pulled the trigger. Click. Empty.
Donahue stood next to her, paralysed with horror.
‘Shells,’ shouted Lupe. She cuffed Donahue round the head. ‘Give me the spare shells.’
Donahue dug cartridges from her pocket.
‘Make them count.’
Lupe snatched the shells from her hand and fed them into the breech.
‘Grab an axe, a hammer, anything.’
Donahue ran to the equipment pile, pulled a strap and released a clutch of heavy tools.
‘Give me something,’ shouted Wade. ‘Give me something I can swing.’
Donahue ignored him. She grabbed an axe and ran back to the stairs.
Lupe shouldered the gun. She squinted down the barrel sight, waited for a clear and certain shot.
‘Come on, fuckers. Come get some.’
Cloke and Tombes lowered the stretcher from the subway carriage and set it on the track. They inspected the oxygen and nitrogen cylinders lashed to the backboard. They checked straps, gas levels and helmet hose.
Ekks lay impassive, face serene behind his visor.
‘Let’s get him in the hole.’
Tombes squirmed beneath the subway car. He dragged Ekks behind him.
He tied kernmantle rope to the head of the backboard. He looped the rope over a greased axle and slid Ekks into the shaft. It was a tight angle. The head of the backboard scraped against the underside of the coach.
He fed rope hand-over-hand until there was no more slack. He shone a flashlight down the narrow pipe. Concrete ribbed with ladder rungs. Ekks hung far below, suspended by taut rope.
‘I’m heading down,’ said Tombes. He secured his helmet and equalised suit pressure. His wrist screen flashed brief amber, then green.
He swung his legs into the shaft and began to descend the ladder rungs, flippers swinging from his weight belt.
He paused and looked down. Ekks suspended by rope. Concrete walls shafting downwards into darkness.
‘Looks like this thing drops to the centre of the earth.’
Cloke stood beside the radio operator.
One last look at the grotesquely transformed figure.
‘You’ve suffered enough, kid. You deserve a long sleep.’
He crouched beside Ivanek. A last inspection of the ammonium nitrate charge strapped to the table leg.
He unhooked the radio clipped to his belt.
‘How’s it going?’
‘I’m in the water. The shaft is about fifty feet deep.’
‘Okay. I’ll set the detonators running. I’m coming down.’
He pinched the pencil timer with pliers, crushing the internal acid vial.
Cloke jumped from the car. He inspected the seals of his suit. He buckled a weight belt. He shouldered the tank harness and checked the gas gauge strapped to his wrist. Flippers hung from his belt, ready to be transferred to his feet when he hit the water.
He took a last look around. Arched shadows. Mausoleum hush.
Something moving in the gloom. He trained his flashlight. An infected soldier, part burned, cut in half at the waist. The creature feebly clawed the air.
‘Poor bastard. You been there this whole time? Watching us come and go?’
Cloke lowered the dive helmet and span lock-bolts. Hiss of pressurisation.
He clumsily ducked beneath the subway carriage, squirmed on hands and knees beneath rusted, oil-caked air brakes, leaned sideways as his tanks struck metal.
He swung his legs into the shaft and began his descent.
Last shot. The stairwell fogged with gun smoke and stone dust.
‘That’s it. I’m out.’
More monstrous creatures headed down the steps. They stumbled over bodies. They slipped on tiles slick with blood and brain tissue. They crawled on hands and knees, eyes fixed on Lupe and Donahue.
‘Okay,’ murmured Lupe. ‘Let’s do this shit the hard way.’
She flipped the shotgun and gripped the hot barrel, ready to swing the weapon like a club.
Donahue gripped her fire axe.
A kid in a rot-streaked football shirt. His skin was slashed and peppered with broken glass, like he had been standing near a plate window when the shockwave hit. Lupe felled him with a side-blow to the head. She stood over the kid and pounded his face with the butt of the shotgun until his skull broke, spilling brain.
A girl in a Wendy’s uniform. Her name tag said LANA. Metallic growths hung from her mouth like she was vomiting chrome. Donahue swung the axe, punched the blade through the crown of her head in a single, emphatic hammer blow. Sickening bone crunch. Face split in two.
‘We have to reach the entrance. We have to close that gate.’
‘Too many of them,’ said Donahue, backing away. ‘Rip us to shreds.’
‘We got nowhere to run. We’ve got to make a stand. Drive them out. We can’t let them take the station.’
‘Too damn many.’ Donahue turned and ran.
Lupe hesitated. She raised the shotgun, adjusted grip, strings of blood dripping from the stock like drool.
Wade groped along the ticket hall wall until he found the stairwell entrance. He held a knife in his hand.
‘Get out of here, Lupe,’ he shouted. ‘Block yourself in one of the rooms. Hide until the chopper arrives.’
‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘Get out of here. Go on. Get going.’
Wade began to climb the steps. He slipped in blood. He stumbled over sprawled bodies.
‘Come on, you fucks,’ he screamed, yelling upwards at the street entrance. His voice echoed around the tight space. ‘Come on, motherfuckers.’
Four infected creatures headed down the stairs to meet him. They jostled and hissed.
Wade heard them coming. He braced his legs and gripped the knife, ready to strike.
‘Okay, fellas. Let’s see what you got.’
They seized his arms and shoulders, sank teeth and tore flesh. He roared. He shook his right arm free. He slashed and stabbed.
A bus driver pinned him to the wall. Wade groped, found the creature’s face, and drove the knife into its mouth. It gagged and shook itself free, knife still wedged between its jaws.
Wade punched and kicked, battled his way upwards towards the street entrance.
‘Come on, you cunts.’
Lupe took a last look as she backed away. Wade at the top of the steps, overwhelmed but still fighting, bloody but exultant.
The water tunnel.
A ferro-concrete channel so vast Cloke couldn’t see the full circumference. His twin helmet halogens lit the wall beside him. The rest was cavernous shadow.
A fierce current. Street run-off, burst water mains, and liquid leeched from porous Midtown bedrock. Thousands of tons of water funnelled towards the East River.
A safety wire cinch-anchored to the tunnel wall. A steel cable looped through pitons. A guide-line to enable maintenance crews to snap a carabiner and traverse the passage. Cloke and Tombes gripped the wire, hauled like they were battling a hurricane wind, fought the tide that pressed at their backs, threatened to lift and hurl them into the darkness ahead.
A streaming blizzard of refuse. Leaves, wrappers, newspaper.
A corpse washed by, tumbling in sub-aquatic shadow. A woman in a wedding dress drifting head over heels, satin gown dilating in the current like the skirts of a jellyfish. The spectral cadaver trailed lace like ghost-vapour. It rushed past, and was swallowed by shadow.
‘We are truly down the rabbit hole,’ murmured Tombes.
Cloke dragged the stretcher along the tunnel floor. No sound but the harsh helmet-rasp of his own exertion.
His wrist gauge flashed an amber RMV warning. Heavy oxygen consumption. Raised CO2.
‘How much further?’ asked Tombes.