She held up the helmet and scanned the dereliction.
Saturated oak panels soft and malleable as cork. Rotted drapes. The wilted blades of ceiling fans.
Waist-deep water. A crisp film of ice fractured as she waded to the front of the coach. Bone-chilling cold.
The planks beneath her feet were soft as carpet. She walked slow, checking each floorboard would take her weight.
She stowed the helmet on an overhead luggage rack, and angled the halogen lights. The flooded coach lit harsh white.
The door at the end of the carriage was jammed. She kicked it. She punched it. Rotted timber fell apart like wet cardboard.
She looked out into the tunnel darkness. She could hear splashes, hands slapping water.
Three creatures swam out of the shadows, thrashing the water with clumsy strokes. They headed inexorably towards her. Bearded vagrants weighed down by winter coats.
She adjusted her grip on the broken oar shaft.
They drew close.
She thought about Tombes. A head full of screaming dissonance. A series of happy memories interrupted by gut-punch trauma:
Summer night. Tombes with his arm round her shoulders as they leaned on a river railing and contemplated the floodlit span of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
Horror-flash:
Tombes lying dead on the ticket hall floor, right arm ripped from his shoulder socket leaving torn muscle and a partial sleeve of flaccid skin.
A midnight promenade along the Wildwood boardwalk. Eating cotton-candy, watching the summer crowd and stately revolutions of the Ferris lights.
Horror-flash:
Smashed skull, spilled brain, tongue lolling in an open mouth.
Donahue rubbed her temples. Sudden wave of nausea. She leaned out the carriage door and puked. She spat to clear the taste.
She leaned against the doorframe.
‘Come on, guys.’ She could hear the exhaustion in her own voice. ‘Party time.’
The first guy reached the carriage. Long, grey beard. Yellow teeth. He gripped the sides of the doorframe, eyes fixed on Donahue. Black eyeballs stared through a curtain of lank hair. He struggled to pull himself up into the carriage, leaning on the submerged coupler for support.
Donahue gripped the lapel of his coat.
‘Let me give you a hand.’
She helped the stinking revenant climb into the carriage.
‘There you go.’
She drove the splintered oar into the creature’s eye socket. The vagrant jerked rigid like he’d had a high-voltage shock. Donahue twisted the shaft deeper into his head. He convulsed a couple of times then toppled backwards, oar still wedged in his head. Donahue tried to maintain a grip, but the smooth fibreglass shaft slipped through her gloved hands.
The vagrant toppled back through the doorway. He floated for a moment. Donahue made a last snatch at the oar shaft. Then his waterlogged coat dragged him down into black.
‘Shit.’
She stood in the doorway and looked out into the tunnel darkness.
The other two vagrants were gone.
She froze. She listened for movement. She grabbed her helmet from the luggage rack and began to back down the carriage, sweeping halogen light over smooth waters, tensed for an attack.
Sudden lunge. One of the bearded hobos leaned through a window and grasped for Donahue. She gripped his arm and pulled him further through the window, then swung her steel helmet and delivered a skull-shattering blow. The vagrant slid back through the window and sank.
She edged towards the side door, sweeping her helmet lights around the empty, inundated carriage.
She leaned out the door. She gripped the edge of the boat and pulled it close.
Peripheral movement. She looked up. A rotted vagrant crouched on the carriage roof directly above her head. It leaned forwards, matted hair hanging down, and hissed.
64
Lupe watched the north tunnel mouth. She checked her watch.
‘Donnie should be back by now.’
She turned around. Sicknote sat on a stairwell step. Blood ran down his neck and chest.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted Lupe, vaulting the steps three at a time.
She grabbed Sicknote’s wrist and pulled his hand from his ear. Fingers dripped blood. She pushed his head to one side. The implant port hung out of his head, trailing wire.
‘Christ.’
‘I want it out of my head,’ said Sicknote. Woozy smile.
‘You’ll pull your damn brains out, idiot. I’ll fetch a dressing. Sit there. Don’t move. Don’t touch your head.’
Lupe fetched a first aid kit. She sat beside Sicknote. She brushed blood-matted hair aside and examined the wound.
A small, titanium five-pin socket. Two small screws, threads clogged with blood and bone splinters.
‘Jesus. You wrenched this bastard right out your skull.’
Lupe tore the wrapper from a pair of surgical scissors. She snipped iridium wires, thin as hair.
She held up the socket.
‘That’s the power pack,’ said Sicknote. ‘Some kind of lithium charge.’
‘So what did it do? Zap your brain each time you had one of your visions?’
‘It made them worse.’
Sicknote held out his hand. Lupe gave him the implant. He hurled it into the flood water.
She dressed the weeping hole in his skull. She washed her hands with bottled water. She gave him Tylenol.
‘How do you feel?’
‘Better.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m not a robot. I don’t want to be controlled.’
Lupe checked her watch again.
‘Forty minutes since I spoke to Donnie. She ought to be here.’
‘She’s pretty ill. She might need to stop for a rest. Got any more Tylenol?’
Lupe threw him the pot. He knocked back more pills.
He picked up the tangle of radio components and continued to twist wire. He unscrewed the earpiece of the transmitter headphones and knitted the little speaker to the circuit. He lashed cable round the stairwell’s iron balustrade and used it as an antenna.
‘Take it easy,’ said Lupe. ‘You lost a lot of blood.’
‘I feel good. Honestly.’
‘You’re high. Blood loss. In a minute, you’ll crash.’
He touched frayed cable to the terminals of a nine-volt battery, and adjusted the tuning dial. He sat with the speaker pressed to his ear, frowning with concentration.
He scratched his scalp.
‘I just fixed you up,’ said Lupe. ‘Don’t re-open the wound.’
‘My skin. Itching all the time.’
Lupe pointed at the radio.
‘You won’t reach shit. No power. No range.’
‘I’m not trying to talk. I’m trying to listen.’
‘Listen to what?’
‘The virus.’
Lupe sat beside him. She held the little speaker to her ear.
‘Nothing. White noise.’
‘Listen harder.’
‘There’s nothing. It’s a dead channel.’
‘Can’t you hear it? That pulsing sound beneath the static? I’ve heard it every time anyone used a radio down here. Like a hammer knocking wood.’
‘Interference. Lot of iron in these rocks.’
‘Listen again. Can you hear it? Each click is different. There are variations. Little changes of tempo.’
She put her ear to the speaker once more.
‘It all sounds the same to me. Just noise.’
Sicknote held up the notebook. ‘Ekks transcribed the sounds. That’s what these letters and symbols represent. Not words. More like musical notation. A precise record of the endless tunnel song.’
‘He tuned in to its thoughts? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Yeah. That was his big-ass breakthrough. Other labs round the world tried to kill the disease. Nuked it with penicillin and antibiotics. I heard there were a bunch of guys down a missile silo in the Everglades doing all kinds of Frankenstein shit. But Ekks figured out the virus was smart. He tried to communicate. He spoke to the parasite.’