“Yeah,” Paul said. “Well. I know that feeling.”
HIS PANT leg was caught on something sharp. It was dark and he had to feel with his hand along the wall of a narrow, paved tunnel, until he found the cuff of his jeans, snagged on a jagged section of pipe. He yanked it away, banging his elbow on the wall of the tunnel, and then continued crawling toward the light. He was wearing a respirator; the sound of his own breathing echoed in his ears. His hands were chalky with wet dust. There was a sound somewhere like a dentist’s drill. Two other men were crawling down this narrow tunnel ahead of him, the soles of the closest man’s hiking shoes twenty feet ahead. He followed the shoes toward a leaking yellow light, which bobbed ahead in a larger space, until, one by one, the two men ahead of him fell through an opening into a short white cave, or – no, he recognized it, even in its current state… a subterranean parking garage, the Orange level, apparently.
Remy pulled himself to the mouth of the tunnel and stared out. Along one wall the concrete pillars had been snapped and the roof had caved in, gunmetal Benzes and black BMWs crushed and blanketed in a fine coat of dust. Some of the car doors were open, as if people had gone through them and simply left the doors open. A CD wallet lay open on the floor next to one of the cars, and Remy imagined a rescue worker looking for something to listen to on the way down. The garage floor was wet, the dust piled where rivulets had run along construction seams and the newer cracks produced by the collapse above. Strings of utility lights had been laid like holiday garland along the remaining standing pillars, their bare bulbs illuminating the dank underground and lighting the dust particles like firebugs, dread shadows thrown in every direction.
Remy spilled out of the opening onto the concrete floor. The two men ahead of him were already standing and brushing themselves off, the beams from their flashlights creating plumes of dust and light. One of the men was Markham, the Documentation guy who had assigned him to find March Selios. The other man was someone Remy had never seen before, an older guy in coveralls and a utility jacket. This older man removed his respirator, and so Remy and Markham did the same. Markham’s smooth face screwed up in a sneeze.
Remy’s first breath was choked with dust. The Zero smell was even stronger down here, and he couldn’t help wondering if, as they moved down, they weren’t nearing some hot wet core of the thing – and he imagined a river of smell, perhaps guarded by a robed ferryman or a cabbie sitting on a beaded chair. Markham pulled blueprints from his back pocket and walked over to the hood of a Mercedes coupe, its front end pristine except for the dust, its trunk bashed by falling concrete. Markham spread the prints out, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and put it in his mouth between his teeth.
When Remy didn’t budge, Markham had to pull the flashlight out of his mouth and beckon him over. “Brian. Please. We don’t have much time.”
Remy edged over. Markham put the flashlight back in his mouth and pressed down on the creased blueprint. It showed the levels of this underground parking garage, both from above and in relief, its ducts and staircases and elevator shafts, its relation to the commuter train tubes. The other man, who wore gray coveralls, pointed with a drafting pencil at a long slender line on the page, and then at the collapsed parking structure in front of them. “Okay. We’re here.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. “On the northeast corner. There were six basement levels down here, filling up most of the entire sixteen acres – parking, shopping, public transportation, air condition, elevators and other machinery – like a honeycomb. About sixty percent of all that was destroyed.”
He ran his pencil along a tunnel. “This part of the garage where you say this woman’s car might have been parked is here. Like I told you… it’s blocked, if not entirely collapsed. We might be able to follow this PVC cluster to the PATH tunnel, assuming the line is still there. And passable. But this is the way to the place you fellas want to go, and as you can see it’s blocked off. If we go this way-” He dragged his pencil across the print. “We’re going to hit the fire. This direction, we run into water. And all of this area is probably contaminated by Freon.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a choice,” Markham said, as his flashlight fell to the ground, the light frantically testing the walls for escape before hiding beneath a crushed Lexus sedan. “Fire or flood or poison. Burn or drown or choke on your own vomit. I guess I’d take drowning, you know, if I had to pick. How about you, Brian? You seem like a burn guy… like you’d want to go out in as much glory as possible.”
Remy picked the flashlight off the ground, extinguished its light, and handed it back to Markham.
The guy in coveralls talked to Remy as if he were in charge. “Like I told you up above, this is as far as we can go. Maybe after they get the fire down here controlled and pump out some of the lower levels. But even then, I doubt it.” The guy gestured toward the crushed cars. “You could try the lowest level, B-6, and then try to move up, but like I say, that’s seventy feet below the surface, and in this section it’s either on fire or under water. We could go north, but then you got the potential of gas from them old Freon tanks.”
Markham looked at Remy seriously. “What do you think?”
“What do you think?” Remy asked.
The guy in coveralls interrupted: “Look, I appreciate how important this is. I want you to know that if there was any way we could do this, I would… Because I think you fellas are the most important people down here, far as I’m concerned. I mean, I heard them talking about all them documents on TV. But this is a needle in a… haystack.” He looked around. “A really scary haystack.”
Remy looked around the garage. The collapsed corner troubled him. What was above that? How far up did the rubble go? To the pile? The Spires? Against another wall, a stream of black water minded its own business, flowing through the ruined garage into a fissure in the wall. Where did that water come from? Where was it going? And why was it black? These seemed like the real questions they should be asking.
Markham put his hands out. “Okay, Brian. You’ve gotta call the ball on this one. What do you want to do? Go back or follow the sewer line?”
“I don’t…” Remy surprised himself by laughing. “I can’t say.”
The guy in coveralls glanced at Markham, who sighed with disapproval. He took Remy by the elbow and pulled him aside. His voice was low. “What’s the matter with you today, Brian?”
Remy heard himself laugh again, maniacally. He said, under his breath, “I don’t have the slightest clue what we’re doing down here.”
Markham stared at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Hell, even if we got to the floor where her firm kept their cars…” Markham walked over and folded up the blueprint.
“Were we looking for March’s car?” Remy asked.
“Yeah, when you put it that way, it does seem crazy.” Markham turned to their guide. “Brian thinks we should just turn back.”
The guy in coveralls sighed. “Thank you.” He looked over his shoulder, headlights of ruined cars peeking out from collapsed roof. “I don’t like it down here.”
Markham watched Remy for a moment, his face noncommittal. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. It was a long shot anyway. You made the right call.”
Markham and the guy in coveralls put on their respirators and moved back to the opening they’d crawled through. Remy looked around once more at the dusted windshields, which stared at him inscrutably. Then he put on his mask and followed the two men back into-
“MIDNIGHT SATURDAY I’m jacked up on some waitress, half-to bangin’ the ass off her when my fuckin’ pager goes off nine-one-one and I’m thinkin’ Oh shit, my wife found out I ain’t workin’ this weekend, right, but when I check the page, who do you think it is? Brian fu-u-uckin’ Remy, that’s who.” McIntyre gulped a breath as the guys barked laughter and Remy took the moment to glance around. About half the old detail was here, six of The Boss’s guys and five guys from the PC’s office – where Remy had been assigned for six months – twelve guys including Remy and Guterak, who sat at his right, laughing so hard he lacked the breath to say anything inappropriate.