Lisa thought about it. “And how are they gonna make us like them? What’re they gonna do? Bite our throats?”
“Don’t be too surprised.”
He slung his shotgun over his shoulder and walked a few feet away to a manhole cover. He took his boat hook and inserted the tip into the drain hole. With everything he had, he pulled and the lid came up. He dragged it onto the pavement.
“After you,” he said.
Lisa had been watching him with a mixture of amusement and confusion, now she said, “You’ve got to be out of your mind.”
“Maybe. But down you go.” He handed her the flashlight. “You want out, don’t you? This might be the only way.”
“How about we find a cell phone instead?”
Johnny laughed. “Cell phone? They’ve destroyed every piece of technology they could lay their mitts on. You think they overlooked cell phones?”
“They couldn’t get ’em all, Johnny.”
He shook his head. “Don’t have to. There’s only one provider here. Its base station and transmitting antennas are located at the edge of town. In one of the blacked-out areas. No power, baby. I tried my neighbor’s this afternoon… nothing. Just a dead piece of plastic…”
Man proposes and God disposes, Lisa thought helplessly.
She shined the light down the throat of the sewer.
It was dank and misty below. A built-in ladder led down to the water beneath. She looked back at Johnny. He was smiling, enjoying the hell out of this. Now she knew what he had in mind with the poncho and boots.
She handed him the light. “Keep it on me,” she said.
Setting her guitar case on the street, she lowered herself down.
The rungs were greasy, slicked with mildew. Halfway down, Johnny fed the guitar case to her. It fit, all right. And if it hadn’t, Lisa wasn’t going either. It seemed like a long climb down, holding the guitar case and maneuvering with only one hand. The shaft opened at the bottom into a large central drain. Plenty large enough to walk through without hitting your head.
But the stink, oh God.
Stagnant water, organic rot. Like a brackish swamp.
She dipped one boot into the water, found the bottom, and then went all the way in. It was deep, nearly two feet. And cold. The boots kept her feet dry, but she could feel the chill wetness sucking out her heat.
Johnny dropped the light to her and swung down into the shaft. He pulled the lid closed after them, then moved down the ladder like it was something he’d done many times.
He smiled. “Not so bad, eh?”
“Says who?”
He took the light from her, played it around.
The passage was maybe seven feet in height, little more in width. A brick tunnel, more or less. She was surprised to see graffiti on the walls.
“This is the main drain line,” Johnny explained to her. “It runs beneath the entire length of Chestnut Street. Most of the rainwater sewers in this town are only big enough to crawl through on your hands and knees. Some are a lot smaller. This one feeds to a culvert that empties into the river. That’s where we’re going.”
Lisa lit a cigarette. “Only you would think of something like this.”
“I been down here lots of times.”
“I believe it.”
He seemed surprised. “You grew up here and you never been down in the sewers?”
She shook her head. “Guess I missed out on that. I feel so incomplete.”
He laughed, leading the way through the darkness, splashing just ahead of her. “We used to come down here, get stoned and drunk when we were teenagers. Usually there’s only a trickle of water down here, half a foot, if that. But we’ve had a lot of rain lately, what with the storms and all, so it’s pretty deep.”
Lisa caught up to him, stayed at his side. “So we’re going to crawl through a pipe into the river?”
“Got a better idea?”
“Yes. The streets above.”
He shook his head. “No, not a good idea. There’s lots of them up there. Rabids everywhere.”
“Rabids?”
“It’s what I call ’em. They’re crazy, foaming at the mouth. Rabids.” He paused, scanned the light along the walls. “See that?”
There was a crude, ancient pot leaf carved into the discolored face of a brick.
“Nice,” she said.
“Yeah, me and my buddy Tommy did that. Tommy Haynes. I was sixteen. Before the war.”
They splashed along, shoulders touching. “Was it bad?” Lisa said.
“What?”
“The war? Vietnam.”
He rubbed his jaw, sighed. “Yeah.”
Lisa didn’t push it.
“Christ, I hate it down here,” she admitted.
Johnny smiled. “Reminds me of somewhere else, another set of tunnels.”
“The war?”
“Yes.”
Everything echoed in the sewer.
The sound of their boots slopping through the water was like thunder. Water was dripping and running, the sound of it amplified. The entire situation was surreal. It was the sort of place that would have driven a claustrophobe crazy—the stone walls pressing in, the sluicing water, the cloying darkness, and the ripe stench of rot and buried things. And above it all, the seepage from above, dripping and dripping.
Like a cave in an old movie.
They passed another ladder leading to a manhole above.
Lisa looked to Johnny hopefully, but he plodded onward into the subterranean maze.
The dampness was everywhere.
It came from the gently flowing river of rainwater, it came from the air, it bled from the damp stone walls. Lisa hugged herself, trying to keep warm, trying to hear anything but the dripping, the hollow splashing sounds, the noise of rainwater running from outlet pipes.
After awhile, it got on your nerves.
And when you had the need, the habit, things were only magnified as you came down. She tried to keep it out of her head, tried to think about her mom and dad and what the chances were that they had escaped (but that blood, all that goddamn blood, sticky, stinking). It only made things worse, though, so she examined her current situation minutely… unpleasant as it was.
She thought: I came home to see my family after being gone for five years. I came home with a hit record under my belt, a lot of money from a successful yet grueling tour which nearly killed me (nearly killed all of us), and a heroin habit. I came home, not expecting much, but finding that my dad had accepted who and what I was, was maybe even proud of me. That would have been enough. I could have been happy. Maybe it was what I needed all the time, just that. Not the music or the life or the money or the drugs, just acceptance, understanding. Yes, I could have been happy. Except, I wandered into this goddamn nightmare and what the hell is this all about, what—
Johnny concentrated his light on something bobbing in the water. “A dead one,” he said.
“What is it?”
“Just a rat,” he told her. “Lots of ’em down here. Always has been. The heavy rains probably drove most of ’em to higher ground, the rest maybe drowned.”
“Rats. Christ.”
Johnny shrugged. “Not so bad. They won’t bother you. Trust me, rock star, infinitely preferable to what walks above.”
So they kept going and Lisa kept trying to forget about the gnawing in her belly while making concessions about rats being preferable to the rabids, as Johnny called them, haunting the streets above.
It was not easy.
She felt ready to crawl out of her skin.
There was something indefinably eerie about all this.
“Hey, Rambo?” she said, needing badly to hear a voice, even her own. “Before you said that I was naïve. That I didn’t know what this was all about. What did you mean by that? Do you know?”
He looked at her, looked away. “I know some things.”