From Out of the Outlands
Part Nine
Police file:
The cowboys hooted at us as we left the bar, their slobbering, drunken faces hanging off the back of their pickup trucks like a half dozen of the wobbly-headed dog-toys in the back of car windows on the highway.
“What ya doin', darlings!" they shouted and laughed, slapping each other on the backs.
"Ignore them, Daniel," I said, gripping his arm hard. I knew him. I knew his attitude towards cowboys-- call it a stubborn streak which said he wasn't going to take anything from anybody, let alone beer-brained bully boys from the ranches.
He didn't listen to me. He gave them the finger.
We had no business outside the wall of our neighborhood after the dark. But Daniel insisted. He couldn’t get enough of taking chances.
This was his kind of thing, not mine. Maybe we had to work outside the neighborhood, going through the Outlands on our way to and from work. But I never saw a reason to play there, too.
We had a good neighborhood. The board didn’t merely tolerate us, but shaped the bylaws to make certain nobody felt out of place. And not everyone in the neighborhood was gay either.
I needed to talk to Daniel, something he had put off for the whole night, claiming we could talk in the car on the way to the bar, then putting that off until we were in the bar, and then once situated at a table, ignored each of my efforts to communicate – short of asking him what he wanted to drink or which cowboy he found hot.
I guess I was as much jealous as I was annoyed. Daniel had a reputation for liking straight boys as much as he did gays, and I felt that he would have taken up with any of the cowboys had one bothered to ask him.
But this was not that kind of bar, and almost from the moment we arrived, I felt the hostility. They rode their bucking mechanical horses or acted out their holigraphic scenes for the amusement of the other men – each scene more violent than the last, involving bar fights and physical abuse that left me feeling extremely uncomfortable. Depite the array of detectors at the doors, I knew each cowboy possessed a weapon, and from the way they eyed us over their drinks, I knew if we pushed things, they would use those weapons on us.
Sixty years since Stonewall and we still couldn’t feel safe anywhere outside of our own neighborhoods.
“Daniel, I need to talk to you,” I said, drawing his stare from the rearview mirror. He looked put out by me, as if he was getting his kicks off the fact that the cowboys had piled out of the bar behind us. His makeup hid some of the scars left from his botched implants – designed to make him look more feminine. At night, when he took off the makeup, he looked a bit like Frankenstein.
“What is it, Peter?” he asked sharply, as he punched the correct code for the ignition sequence – our turbo lift Beamer humming to life under us, although on the rough roads outside the city, the car did not live up to sales people’s claims for smooth riding. “Why have you been bugging me all night? You said you had something important to tell me. Is that what has made you such miserable company?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
I was nervous. To tell you the truth, Daniel scared me as much as the cowboys did. He was always aching for violence, and often dragged me to the gang wars downtown to watch the clashes. His eyes always grew bright at the spilling of blood.
One of the cowboys stepped in front of us before Daniel had a chance to hit the lift command – the man’s large face hidden under a spread of salt-and-pepper beard that made him seem demonic. With us so low on the ground, the cowboy looked taller than he actually was – although his six feet something inches was quite tall enough. He held a metal baseball bat in one hand and glared down at us.
“What was that you did, Faggot?” the cowboy asked.
“If you don’t get out of our way, I’ll do more than give you a finger,” Daniel said boldly.
“Will you, eh?” the cowboy howled, and called over to the others. “This faggot’s threatening to beat the shit out of me.”
“I didn’t say that,” the indignant Daniel growled, his hand moving ever so slowly towards the car’s defense control box – he had carelessly neglected to turn it on the moment we got in.
The Beamer’s defense system wouldn’t hold of a sustained attack the way an armored vehicle would, but it would cause a lot of pain and make enough noise to discourage attack. It would also summon the police.
The bat struck the dashboard before Daniel’s fingers could reach it, shattering the metal and plastic in a single blow.
“Don’t go there, boy,” the cowboy said as his companions edged their pickup truck up to the side, the front and back spilling over with thick-muscled limbs. The tattoos and the scars made them resemble one of the city gangs. They lacked the typical physical additions, the canine teeth, the spiked colored-hair, the surgically installed deformities or weapons.
“We’re not bothering you,” Daniel said, staring down at the destroyed mechanism, as if pondering whether the assault had activated any of its features.
“Bothering us?” the cowboy asked with a harsh laugh. “You’ve been bothering us all night, sitting there at that table like pretty little chicks. Don’t you have bars of your own you can go to? Or were you looking for real men’s dicks to stick up your butts?”
I could see Daniel’s face growing red. It was a certain sign of anger. But I grabbed his arm and squeezed, hoping to discourage him from another fight. We were too far out from the city to hope that his skills as a fighter could hold off the cowboys until the law would come – if the law came at all with our distress signal disabled.
Then, in a move that startled even me, Daniel hit the accelerator.
It was not a proper manuever, one completely against every safety regulation, our sudden lift off knocking the cowboy and his metal baseball bat back.
I saw the cowboy fall, but did not see if he injured himself. Daniel gunned the flyer and we rushed off, rocking as the uneven road beneath the car kept us from a steady flight.
“That was crazy!” I said.
“It’s better than getting beat up,” Daniel said.
“If you hadn’t given them the finger, maybe we would have escaped without violence.”
“Don’t be so naïve, Peter,” Daniel said. “The minute we got up to go, those cowboys were going to attack us. Now what is it you wanted to talk about?”
He was driving with one hand, using the manual controls because automatic pilot could not handle the dips. But he paid no attention to the road, and more than once had to jerk the wheel around so as to avoid hitting a tree or boulder, among the parade of deadly objects leaping out at us from the dark.
He smiled at me, half mockingly, half with the brutal tenderness that had made me fall for him in the first place. He always managed to defuse my anger with that smile or to misdirect me: his scent suffocating me despite the open top and the motion, like a potion I could not resister.
“Well?” he asked. “What is it you wanted to talk about?”
“I've been to the clinic, Daniel,” I said.
I felt him stiffen, his hands gripping tight the steering wheel. He wasn't looking at me again, mouth set into a grimace.
“I thought I told you not to,” he said.
“I had to know, Daniel,” I said. “I mean for sure.”
“All right,” he said. But it wasn't all right. It was far from all right. It was about as all right as slapping him in the face.
In the 40 years since the first of the immune diseases made their appearance, this was a moment many of us had to face – and in my case, I was calling him a liar.
I had remained loyal to him. And yet, the symptoms had come, and the doctor’s confirmation. It was a death sentence for both of us.
Then as if an answer to his mumbled prayer, headlights appeared behind us, ground level, rocking and rolling over the rough ground, but clearly advancing on us – despite our technological advantage. Air cars saved time but cutting corners, flying over obsticles, not by an increase of speed. Caught in this channel of trees and boulders, we could not match the old-fashioned vehicles that gave us pursuit.
On his side of the car, the cowboys came, their pickup truck back loaded to the brim with them, hooting and hollaring and laughing, looking as silly as teenagers, yet as perverted as most normal things were, them staring up at as they kept up with our car.
“Hey, honey!” one of them shouted. “You sure you don't want to give us a blow job?”
Daniel yelled back. “Fuck off!”
He punched the control panel for overdrive, as a few beer bottles struck our car. Overdrive proved disasterious as it increased our speed and our instability.
“Turn it off!” I yelled. “It’ll shake to piece.”
The cowboys laughed at our dilemma
Daniel’s eyes glowed. He did not look as scared as I would have expected, but had the expression I sometimes caught when he was viewing a particularly grissley moment at the clash of gang ritual each Friday night. Suddenly, he slowed the air car and let it drop closer to the ground.
“What are you doing?” I screamed as the pickup trucks swirled around us, now at eye level.
We suffered another assault of beer bottles and obsenities, and this did not upset Daniel either. He seemed drunk on the promise of violence – even though we were going to be the subjects.
The road straightened, then slid into another series, and another. But it was all too dark and the glow of the city was too far away to promise us hope.
Daniel grew even more reckless, steering the car to the right then to the left, causing our bumper to collide with the fenders of the pickup trucks on either side.
I wanted him to stop, and yet the action also attracted me. I wanted him to make love to me, over the steering wheel, even as the car pitched and sway. I wanted him to make it all worth it, to give me something in trade for the life time stolen from me by his carelessness. Could he love me as hard as he drove that car? Could he enough to make my death sentence worth it?
Then, he slammed on the brakes, my arms going up as we pitched towards the windshield. But he stopped in time. He stopped inches from the wall of the dead-end canyon, his engine stalling, the air car floating down to the ground as the pick up trucks skidded amid clouds of dust.
That’s the last I remember until I woke up here in this hospital bed. They tell me Daniel put up a struggle before they killed him.
He must have known he had nothing to live for. Maybe he figured they’d kill us both, save us the next few years of agony.
Daniel was wrong. I survived.
**************
Cromwell had spared no expense in providing protection. The vehicle was more comfortable than a tank, but that was largely the only difference. While it lacked the cruise mistle cabablities, the vehicle did have other weapons. Small body mines that launched from the sides like grenades. A small laser front and back. And a fifty caliber cannon in the front, with a few anti-personal explosives that could be hoisted from the front fenders like motars.
“Interesting,” Vincent said, studying the whole display as Hilda steered the limo through the maze of streets, working away around the inner security. Apparently, not every street locked up during an internal emergency. Residents in his homeland feared getting locked in their own cage, and left provisions for emergency services, a single route through the complex pattern of streets that allowed access to every part of the city. The problem was, emergency vehicles had that route programed into their systems, following it automatically when the report of a problem came up. Hilda had to drive up to the inner gates before she found out a street was closed, then back out again, looking through another until she found a way through. Some of the patterns were deep and a lot of time got wasted working the vehicle towards the west.
“This is crazy,” Vincent mumbled, wondering just what the security forces were doing and whehter or not they'd discovered the missing vehicle. Vincent was temped to call Hudson, but knew that a second transmission would draw the Homeland security down on him. He debated whether or not to blow his way through the local gates, but that would draw attention, too. He didn't want to have to fight until he got to the outer wall. He simply wanted to get out into the zone with his prisoner before the state troops swarmed in and sealed off Chelsea in a way no one could escape.
“You're crazy,” Cromwell said. “You' not going to get us out of here. They'll stop you once they realize you've taken me in this.”
“Then we'll go down fighting,” Vincent said, staring at his prisoner, wanting to hit him again just for the arrogant tone in the rich man's voice. “But I'll tell you this. I'll kill you before I let them take you out of here.”
“Yeah,” Cromwell said. “Then you'll have your revenge, won't you?”
“This isn't a matter of revenge,” Vincent said. “It's a matter of justice.”
“Shooting me is justice?”
“It is for those women you murdered.”
“And you're so sure I killed them that you're willing to play judge and jury?”
“Only if I have no choice. We tried the jury thing, remember?”
“And that jury found me innocent. Why can't you just accept that?”
“Because bad justice isn't justice at all,” Vincent said. “You'll get your day in court, but in front of a jury that really is impartial, one that isn't so scared of the zone that it's willing to let a killer remain unpunished.”
Vincent touched one of the screens, shifting its image from a projection of the road to a map of Chelsea. The streets they had already traveled showed red on the screen, while those still a question blue. Their own passage through showed as a small green dot struggling along through the maze. They had covered about half the roads now, and Vincent was growing anxious. It was all taking too long. Sooner or later security would pounce, causing him real troubles, guessing perhaps his intended destination and blocking him from getting there.
And what of Hudson? How long could his team afford to wait once they'd secured the gate? Could they fight off the state troopers, too? Vincent didn't think they would wait too long or fight a more powerful army if push came to shove. Suddenly a redlight flashed on the consol, a red light signally a scan.
“Shit,” Vincent said, jabbing at the control pads to activate the car's defenses. “It looks like we're going to have to fight our way out after all. Out of the car.”
“What?” Cromwell said, clearly shocked.
Vincent glanced up from his study of the vehicle map, the frame work of the neighborhood’s inner services showing like an x-ray on the streets. He didn’t have Hudson to guide him now, but Chelsea like many of the neighborhoods were based on the Disneyland model, brought into Manhattan when Disney took over 42nd street,
underground services forming a beehive beneath the surface, sometimes using many of the spaces formerly used by the old transit tunnels. Down there, he might just be able to find his way out, and certainly pursuit would be on the same limited footing, since
security tended to focus its energies in defending against an invasion, not escape. All Vincent needed was an access point, and - - there it was.
“I said get out!” Vincent said and gave Cromwell a shove, as the thick door popped open. The big man looked pale under the lights of the street, and Vincent wondered if the man had ever even stood on the street of his own neighborhood the way he did now, breathing air that was not filtered through the circulation system of his limoscene.
Vincent felt the cool air swirling around him as he joined Cromwell. Hilda exited the car looking like a startled cat, her hair caked with matted blood. Roth eased out, warily eyeing the street, although her face looked pale against the red slash.
“What did you have in mind, chief?” she asked, clearly fighting off shock.
“Underground,” Vincent said. “I studied the skematic. The place is riddled with connections out, mostly pipes for sewers and trash, but they use old subway facilities.”
“They'll be watched.”
“Maybe,” Vincent said. “But they won't be guarded as tightly as the gate. We've still got some explosives. If we blow a hole in one of the weaker walls we can make a run for the old areas before they can send a security team down to stop us.”
“What about Hudson?”
“I think if we pushed him, he would come in and get us. But I don’t want the governor coming down on him. And frankly, we can’t wait for him. We're rats in a maze in here and we've got to find our own way out.”
“You do,” Roth said. “We don't.”
She indicated herself and Hilda.
“What do you mean?”
“I can buy you time by setting up a diversion. If we keep driving around in the limo, security will concentrate on us, leaving you a little more time to blow the wall.”
It was as if he was scattering pieces of himself behind, a little more of him dying with the death of each companion. Vincent shook his head. “That' won't do. They'll kill you when they find you. I won't have that on my conscience. Enough good people have died because of this scum bag.”
“I'm not sacrificing myself,” Roth said. “We'll just stay in the limo until Hudson gets here. Security won't dare attack us if they think Cromwell is inside. They'll just shut us down and try to talk us out.”
“I don't agree. We all go or we all stay. Come on. Move it. Things are going to slip once they realize where we are.”
Roth sighed, and then eased along the length of the car, her rifle moving whereever she looked, up, down, and around, studying the street and the sky for the next sign of security. None yet showed, but they were bound to be onto them in a moment, coming down hard on the remaining intruders.
It was now more than just a security thing, but something cultural. Vincent and the police seemed to have taken the wrong side for these ultra conservatives, enforcing the weight of injustice, always too liberal, always emphasizing the rights of the criminal, against those industrious ants who make the whole world function.
Even before the terrorists took down the World Trade Center towers decades earlier, the walls mounted between the poor and wealthy – a new kind of class system in which even those supposedly protected by the walls were victim. But once established, the walls could not come down as easily as they went up. Even when people believed the walls made no difference, the nagging doubt remained, yet worse, the walls indentified people, shaping a world view. People on the inside thought themselves actually superior to those outside, the way whites in the old south truly believed their race superior to the whites. Culture made it difficult to convince them otherwise.
It was a misperception. These people contained behind these walls did less than their share and used more than their due, claiming their taxes paid for it all, when they consumed more than their taxes could ever pay. Some worked hard, but most rode the back of society, acting like a priveleged class, too heavy for the real workers outside the walls to bear.
Perhaps this fed into the fear as well, the way Afrikaners feared the loss of Aparthied. The poor, blacks and ethnics could not help but want to get even with those within the walls. Thus they believed the walls alone kept them from aniliation, and and so did the blood suckers who were employed to protect them. The guards and bureaucrats who ran these walls fortresses realized that if they did not defend them, they would find themselves on the outside, too, having to gravel over mounds of trash for their survival.
Vincent eyed the street as well, trying to match it up with the images he had studied on the screen in the limo, looking for the entrance to the lower regions of the neighborhood, a service duct that would only show here as part of the ornamentation. As with the original Disneyland, the seams were nearly perfect, part of that disguise such people demanded, like a video recording set, with the front far different from the reality.
Then, he spotted the gap, a section of brick wall framed by two dogwood trees, the crumpled curb, worn hinges and scratches near the lock telling him this was used frequently by service people,coming up and down from the guts where the real work went on, taking trash or recycled items out of the sight of the priveliged class, so those traveling these streets believed they did not generate any aspect of filth, neither trash nor bodily fluids.
“Come on,” Vincent told the others, yanking Cromwell along by the arm.
“Don't touch me!” Cromwell snapped, yanking back.
“I'll touch you in ways you won't like if you get me any more lip,” Vincent told the man.
“And miss your opportunity to take me to justice?” Cromwell laughed.
“I can hurt you without killing you,” Vincent said. "Which is more than you can say.”
Cromwell's face grew grey, and he did not resist this time when Vincent shoved him towards the door. Hilda came next, stumbling as if in a haze with Roth backing up slowly behind her, rifle ready as she warily eyed the street for signs of Security. Oddly enough, no one showed, though Vincent was sure their retreat was being tracked by scanners hidden in the walls. Did security have ways of reaching the underground more easily than this?
Vincent suspected, yes, and knew they would have to go deep and perhaps find a nitch somewhere they could hold out while Hudson brought a more significant invasion force in to free them.
Dig deep, he thought, but how deep could he go that Security couldn't reach before him?
“Something's coming, chief,” Roth's voice whispered in Vincent's headset, but Vincent's attention remained on the door.
“How the hell do they open this?” he wondered. “Some kind of electronic key?"
No. The locals would spend a fortune on security, but why would they bother with such sophistication for a mere service door? He saw the handle, a black iron bulge that fit in with bricks gap pattern. He grabbed it and yanked it, and the door swung out with a groan.
“In!” he ordered, shoving Cromwell in first. “Roth. I'm going to need your help. Can you get back to the limo and patch into its guidance?”
“Sure, why?”
“Because it's bound to have a map of below, too, by default.”
Overhead, the rack of helicopter engines sounded, and the shadow of their spidery shape fell over the far end of the street.
It was dusk and the choppers rode high enough for the sun to catch ont their windshields, giving them the look of fire descending upon them.
“I'll need cover,” Roth said.
But Vincent shook his head. “You stay, I'll go. You can walk me through the connection.”
Vincent had an idea.
“But chief, that car's an easly target.”
“Just follow orders,” Vincent said. “I'm going to buy us some time.”
Roth shrugged, then handed him a small black box, about the size of a pack of cigarettes. “You'll need this,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, and stripped off his backpack. He needed only the radio now, and his pistol, and perhaps not even the pistol. He crouched near the corner of the wall, then made a dash back towards the car.
Flashes of light emerged from one of the helicopters, followed by the rat-tat-tat of machinegun fire, and a string of clicks along the sidewalk with the buttets struck the ground, a paralell mark of death that worked its way up the sidewalk towards Vincent as he ran, then passed him as he crossed to the car.
“They're crazy!” Vincent hissed into his radio mouth piece. “Don't they know they could kill Cromwell firing like that?”
“I don't think they care, chief,” Roth said, voice crackling with the interference. But with the two this close in phyiscal proximity, the jamming only generated static.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they might want to put an end to all of us.”
Vincent made it to the car, the door still open. He shut it behind him as another, better aimed series of bullets struck the vehicle, pinging off the bullet proof metal like pellets. Why would they want to kill Cromwell, too, he wondered? Hadn't they wanted to protect him before? Or had the neighborhood masters set a certain point to which they would go and no further, protecting him for a long as it didn't hurt them. But now, with part of the neighborhood in flames, and significant explainations due, to their residents and to government investigators later, the master might find it more convenient, turning over the dead bodies of Vincent, his officers and Cromwell, rather than anyone who could incriminate them.
“What did we know?” they would tell the inquistors. “We saw shooting and tried to stop it, and when they didn't stop, we shot them all.”
Vincent shivered, and then punched in the commands that activated the computer.
“The map's up, Roth,” he said into the microphone. “What do I do now?”
Roth gave him instructions for placing the box, and the numbers to feed into its small pad. Several red lights came on.
“All set,” she said. “I've got the feed here on my set. Now get out of there, chief. I'll give you covering fire.”
Roth's gun fire sounded the moment Vincent reopened the door, a heavy stream of bullets that rose in an arch of muzzle flash and tracers that soon caught one of the choppers as if in an arch of water, only the chopper didn't simply bubble with wet, but with flame, and the resulting explosion rocked the neighborhood and sent a rain of hot metal and plastic down on Vincent's head as he ran, each stinging the back of his neck until he reached the wall and the door down into the sub strata.
“Now, down!” he yelled, dragging the bloody-headed blonde Hilda into the door with him. Roth came more slowly, her weapon swinging this way and that as if expecting an attack from the ground at any minute, and indeed, as if not to disappoint her, ground fire started just as she was inside, bullets richoting off the brick around the door.
“Close it!” Vincent order, and then glanced around for something to lock the door with. But even that measure of security seemed lacking here, exuding the over confidence of the neighborhood masters that no one would penetrate so deeply into their world. He found a few carts, and rolled them across the opening, then turned them on their sides, flat carrying surfaces facing out to slow the enemy, buying a few precious seconds for their retreat.
“That's the best we can do,” he said. “Where's Cromwell?”
Roth nodded back into the dark.
The large man looked pale even in the dim light of the access tunnel, his eyes angry, but frightened, too, as if this latest round of gun fire had said as much about the thinking of the neighborhood masters as it had Vincent.
He bore the look of a man betrayed, and that scared Vincent. Something was surfacing in the man, something dark and mean, part of that other person who had murdered three dozen women. Cromwell kicked lightly at the dusty floor, like a trapped animal, caught between Vincent and the darkness, a man clearly out of his element among the dirt and machines. He glanced around at the dials, and the digital readouts, the accumulated tools that allowed his world to seem so seamless. He did not understand it. He clearly did not like it. In fact, he glanced towards the shadows as if he expected something to leap out at him, something nearly as vicious as himself.
“What now, chief?” Roth asked.
“I'm looking for another way out,” Vincent said.
“Here?”
“Some neighborhoods have access to the outlands,” Vincent said.
“The neighborhood equivelent to servant's entrances. You know, to take out the trash, so to speak."
Roth shook her head, even before she studied the small screen now illuminated on her forearm.
“Things don't work like that any more, chief,” she said. “If there's a way out, it would be uptop, through a security gate. They might have a corner of the town where they take all their filth to, and they might even have a gate. But it would be on the surface, and have a lot of security around it, similar to the place we came in.”
“Check the map,” Vincent said. “If we can't find an exit, then we'll hole up somewhere like I originally planned, and wait for Hudson.”
Roth complied, while outside, the sound of heavy machinery told Vincent that Security had arrived in force and would most likely make a move on the door, if they didn't already troops swarming through other entrances elsewhere in Chelsea with hopes of putting an end to the invasion, here, out of sight from the general public. Roth whistled sharply.
“What is it?” Vincent asked.
“This place goes much deeper than I ever expected, chief.”
“Deep?”
“Down into the substrata of the island,” Roth said. “I thought the inlanders would have cut off all that, being as paranoid as they are about people from the outlands. But apparently, they also planned ahead for services and storage. They have access to many of the old tunnels. But the map shows most of them walled off.”
“Most of them?”
“The really deep sections don't show up well on this map,” Roth said. “I doubt anyone really explored them much since the neighborhood was first walled off. Some of those tunnels go back to the 19th century.”
“They'd be crazy not to have them walled off,” Hilda said for the first time, blinking away the fog that had settled onto her. “Even I've heard talk about the dark things that wander around under the city.”
“I'm sure the founders walled off everything,” Vincent said, suddenly sounding brighter since first contact. “But the maps came later, after the neighborhood started developing its services. No one would have bothered mapping out those sections not used. Can we get down there, Roth?”
“Several elevators go down part of the way,” Roth said, reading the screen. “But I don't see any that go all the way. Though I see marks that indicate several stairs going deeper from the levels where the elevators stop. But this could mean ladders or worse. Many of those tunnels weren't ever meant for public access.”
“Which means we might find somewhere to hide, even if they're all walled off,” Vincent said. "Let's go.”
***********
For all the technological marvels that had greeted Vincent in the world above, Chelsea residents had invested little of them in their underbelly, resorting to some of the most primative mechanizms for transporting goods anywhere in the Outlands. The elevator was of the traditional freight variety, not even push button, let alone voice activated, with a single throttle-like handle for making the huge, flat, padded-walled-cage rise or sink. It didn't even have a door, just a sissor-style gate that squeeked when it opened or closed. The shape of it, and the wiring and plumbing Vincent passed on his way to it, made him relax a little. If the neighborhood had neglected this part of this world, it had also neglected to supply sophisticated security. His little troupe would not have to fear hidden sensors or traps, or even simple television monitoring. The enemy would be travelling blind behind them, and might not even have thought to hook into the neighborhood map.
“Take it all the way down,” Vincent told Roth when they were all inside.
A thud from the corridor through which they'd just come, told Vincent that security had finally mounted its assault on the door. They would come cautiously and in force with portable sensors feeling out the dark passage inch by careful inch, none willing to walk into any possible and deadly trap these intruders might set.
“That gives us time,” Vincent thought. “Though God only knows if we really can hide from them once we get below. And maybe Hudson won't be coming to our rescue. If that's the case, they security won't have to hunt us down, just wait for us to starve.”
Yet food seemed less a problem than Vincent imagined. As the cage started its trembling journey down, he could see the store rooms on the lower levels, rooms filled with every sort of necessity and luxury the residents of Chelsea might need, from cans of beans to jars of carviar, stock piled as if expecting a seige. But weren't they under seige? Wasn't that the idea in building the walls? Middle class and wealthy people growing more and more alarmed at the dangers they saw, fearing that some poor, hungry son of a bitch might just see how well off these fools were and decide to get some of it.
No, that wasn't all of it, Vincent thought.
In a world rapidly sinking back to the basic concept of survival of the fitest, Chelsea residents like all Insiders, didn't stand a chance. They acted superior because they had money, but in a tooth and nail exchange, they were largely lambs waiting on the wolves. But it was the psycholocal aspect of this weakness that annoyed them. They could not afford to admit how inferior they were to the beasts that roamed around them, so they built pretty little worlds where they didn't have to look at reality, or recognize their low place in the food chain, living behind walls where they could pretend to be superior to all other human beings, driving expensive cars, eating expensive foods, walking and talking like some new elite.
Even before the armed walls went up, such isolated communities had started to emerge out in the suburbs. Places like Smoke Rise where guards greeted visitors with all the friendliness of the inquistion. Then, during the 1980s, these people began to get the itch to return to the city, believing their own myth of superiority. Whole poor neighborhoods in places like Hoboken went up in flames to accomodate them, poor kids falling from third and forth story windows seeking to escape the flames. On the ruins of such places, the wealthy built their private empires, stocking it with their own special breed of being. But their money brought out the thieves and the muggers, and soon their private places became killing fields.
But some greater fear hit them when foriegn terrorists mounted their attacks on America. The Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center had struck at the heart of the neighborhood mentality, creating a whole different level of paranoia that ordinary criminals could not generated. Nearly every American had seen the fall of the two towers. Many had also seen close up photographs of the hundreds of people lingering on window ledges waiting for death. But it was that specific, upperly mobile segment of the population that hurt most. The perished thousands had come from posh schools, and had dreams similiar to those that had survived. This was the elite who had been struck and those still alive felt the extreme level of vulnerablity as further – less dramatic attacks –
followed, or even rumor of attack. Each FBI warning sent this population seeking increased cover.Yet they refused to give up their cities the way they had in the past. So up went the walls, and in came the security, and they lived in prisons of their own making, fearing to tred outside.
“Are you sure you want to go all the way to the bottom, chief?” Roth asked, her face still pale even in the dim light of the single elevator bulb. Clearly she was not completely comfortable with their destination. She used to the protection of an armored vehicle and secure walls of the police station, easing down into a world of which she had heard only ill things. People often talked about this side of the city in terms of darkness and unspeakable horrors. Of the four, only Vincent had ever wandered into the deeps of the city, and then, only down through the first few layers as a kid, on a dare, scurrying out when something stirred in the darkness beyond his sight.
“All the way,” Vincent said.
The tiny map showed much of it a tangle of hazy lines below the level at which the elevator stopped. He could see the changes already beyond the cage, each level less finished than the last, as if the cage was traveling down through the layers of time or the psyche of humanity, growing more primative with each, even the lights had grown less frequent and less sophisticated, resorting finally to bare bulbs hanging from threads of wire.
“No wonder they have no cameras here,” Vincent thought. “They would have had to installed fiber optics through every inch. That would have cost them a forture.”
But this wiring must have been a hundred and fifty years old. The moving cage caused the lights to flicker, some to even go out for a moment, leaving them in the dark with only the glow of their suit uniforms to cast a pale, green glow over their faces -- a darkness so primal that even Vincent shivered and wished to go no deeper. But he said nothing to Roth and let the cage continue down, the relief of lights flickering on again as mysteriously as they had going off.
Up top, he heard the voice of security, a kind of panicked sound that one civilized man recognizes in another, even if the words were not disquishable, this sense of common dread over the other man's craziness. He could envision their expressions in his mind, the shock at Vincent's daring for taking this hard road into places they would never otherwise have gone -- each guard staring at his or her commander, asking with pained voices: “You don't mean for us to go down there, too?”
And the commanders, who would likely not make the trip down themselves, saying: “Of course.”
Vincent searched the screen map for the other elevators and found two at different points in the neighborhood, but only one of the others -- the furtherest -- going as deeply into the core of Manhattan as this one did. The shorter elevator shaft was likely the most modern, and one which went to more civilized storage facilities, lockers and such where the wealthy patrons stored excess goods.
“They'll come down that way after us,” Vincent thought, then consulted his own location and realized they had already descended below the lowest level of that other elevator. If security sought to catch them now, they would have to take the furtherest elevator and made their way through the maze of the lower city, giving Vincent and his little troop time to find a place to hide, and time for Hudson on the outside to mount his attack, convincing higher authorities of the necessity. “All we have to do it wait it out,” he thought.
And yet, something nagged at him. Vincent wasn't convinced that the higher authorities would authorize anything so risky as a rescue, perhaps thinking they would finally solve their problems with the quirky New York City police chief by letting him die in a fire fight. Later investigations would uncover unauthorized behavior, exonerating them, as well as allowing them to fill his place with a much more conventional figure. Then, Vincent heard a different sound, one that came from below the cage, not above them.
“Stop!” Vincent snapped, and Roth brought the cage to a sudden halt. In the silence that followed, Vincent heard the continued sounds from above, and then, something else, something like the sound of a scurrying rat below. Roth and Vincent both had their weapons aimed at the door, as if they expected the sourse of the noise to suddenly invade the elevator.
“What was that?” asked Hilda, blinking out of her previous daze, as if the darkness of the lower regions relieved her of the fear rather than increased it.
“It's obviously an animal of some sort,” Cromwell growled.
“I'm not so sure,” Vincent said, glancing at Roth whose slight nod said she agreed. The sourse of the noise was human. “But I don't think we're in danger from that quarter.”
“Are you sure, chief?” Roth asked. “Security could have gotten down there ahead of us.”
“Not by any route listed on the map,” Vincent said.
“Maybe there's another way?”
“If so, they wouldn't likely know it,” Vincent said. “Let's just get on with this. If there is someone down there, he or she doesn't want to be seen any more than we do.”
“I hope you're right,” Roth said, then activated the arm that controlled the cage, and the elevator began its shaky descent again. They heard no more scurrying the rest of the way, though Vincent could sense something else in the darkness, some set of eyes that peered up as they came down the last level.
It was the instinct he had learned on the street, that sense of insight that told him when another human was near and watching, and even as the cage settled to the uneven ground at the bottom, he could feel the gaze on him, something human, but animal-like watching them, studying them from the darkness.
“What now?” asked Cromwell, almost mocking in his tone, his previous fear fading as he came to think they would not escape at all, but become mired in the darkness and the endless passages here until security came to rescue him.
Poor fool, Vincent thought. The man thinks they still mean to save him, when they really mean to kill us all and be rid of all their problems, dumping our bodies into the arms of Hudson and company when the governor finally consents to let my men come to get us.
“Now we look for the stairs down,” Vincent said, stepping out of the cage and into a clearly unfinished passage, walls made of earth and stone with only wooden supports maintaining them, something on the order of a coal cave, only not quite as dank or dangerous. But Vincent knew the passages below would make this look desireable, places never meant for human passage, or at best, for passage by workmen looking to allivate some foul up in wiring, a broken water main or a leak of gas.
“It's this way,” Roth said, waving her flash light towards the right, her verions of the map glowing green on her wrist.
“Lead on,” Vincent said. “I'll take rear guard.”
He didn't fear pursuit now, but the darkness and the passage, and the possible dropping away of the floor. No one would have repaired these passages and Manhattan -- as much as the mayor and his staff did not believe it -- shifted from time to time, creating weaknesses in the foundations that could kill them if come upon unwarily.
Roth was clearly not so certain as Vincent, pressing her back to the stone wall beside the stairway door, moving rifle barrel into the gap as she swept down, her boots striking metal as her light wavered ahead -- a light that showed no trap, but only the deterioated stairwell and thick layers of web through which the small group had to wade, waving their arms, beating back the strands as if moving through a tropical rain forest. Vincent cringed over the noise. Even Roth made too much of a racket as she clamored down the stair, more concerned with protecting the passage than disturbing something below that might well be better off left undisturbed. Vincent did not have firm evidence of anything ahead, just the random sound of scurrying he heard between the echos of their own desent, Roth's firm boots striking metal as she made her way down, followed by Hilda's clicking heals, and then Cromwell's thudding, reluctant step. Only Vincent seemed quiet here, his step the step of someone who had wandered the outlands all his life and knew the value of silence, who knew how to move easily among the enemy and not be discovered. Who would live here, he wondered, in the darkness below one of the more prestigious neighborhoods?
Perhaps the neighborhood itself had its cast system, exiles who had run from the social order, but not couragious enough to wander beyond the wall? Or perhaps, the mentally ill, the neighborhood's equivilent of the bag ladies and Bowery bums to whom the underground had become, then finally, they came to a landing and a door and another set of stairs going down, this time, the lights ending where they stood, and only their dim beam of Roth's and Vincents lights gave the passage down any illumination, and that illumination was dark, piercing little, showing only the roughly hewn walls of stone and stairs that shifted from metal to a poorer, weaker wooden version that Vincent did not trust to bear their weight.
“What now, chief?” Roth asked, her face showing a clear distaste for the lower passage, as if her training could not strip away that which had civilized her and the fears civilized people always showed for the dark. Only Vincent knew better than dread something as innocent as lack of light, knew that darkness itself could not hurt them, only their own clumbsiness could, or some other force using it as a shield.
“We go down,” Vincent said.
“Now wait one minute here!” Cromwell roared. “I'm not going to let you drag me into a goddamn hole!”
“You don't have a choice in the matter!” Vincent barked back.”You'll go where I tell you and do what I tell you.”
“And if I don't?”
“Then you'll pay the price.”
“What will you do, kill me?” Cromwell asked, eyes laughing as they reflected the dim light. “I thought you wanted to bring me to trial?”
“There are many things I can do to you without killing you, Cromwell,” Vincent said. “Pain is a much more terrible punishiment than death. That's why the ancients tortured their victims, that's why you tortured those women.”
Cromwell's defiance bled from his face. Something in Vincent's voice made him shudder and shrink, looking like an overgrown rat, eyeing Vincent as if thinking he could overcome the officer, plotting some action in the dark that would free him. But Vincent wasn't one of Cromwell's victims to be taken by surprise, lulled into a sense of false security by the man's promises or threats.
“You won't get away with this,” Cromwell said, but with much less conviction.
“We seem to be getting away with it very well,” Vincent said, though he knew more about what they would soon come upon than Cromwell did. Bosk would have understood better what their emergence into the city's underground meant, and would have warned against wandering into a place that was perpetually night, where the elements who made the streets of the Outland hell after dusk, bred and multiplied, occuppying ever corner of every crevice from which to contemplate their evil -- even here, where walls seem invisible.
No cop ever went down into those places, even to pursue a known felon. No cop would have come up alive. Except, of course, for Vincent, though when he had taken his deepest plunge in the past, he hadn't been a cop, just a kid. Now as a cop, he had to return to the depths, and somehow drag this asshole through it all alive, bringing him to the other side. Vincent wanted to kill him here and now, end the man's petty plotting. But too many good people had died because of Cromwell, raising the price of the man's crimes in Vincent's head. Killing him would be too easy, torture too kind. Vincent wanted the man behind bars, locked behind walls without luxuries, in the company of animals who would devour him the way he had devoured those women, making Cromwell understand that walls could be used to keep a man in as well as enemies out. And in someways, this was more than just a trial of one murdering son of a bitch, but of a system of justice that would evolve if Cromwell was allowed to get away with his crime, defining the Inlanders as superior beings to those scum Vicent routinely busted.No one was superior to the law. No one had a right to kill and get away it, even if he knew the mayor.
“We go down,” he said.