From Out of the Outlands
Part 11
Police file:
They broke in again last night, wedging open the upstairs bathroom window with a crowbar or pipe. The last time they came through the garage while we were away, the parade of oily feet still visible on the livingroom rug. But this time, they had wandered through the upstairs when we were sleeping. They could have murdered us any time-- a fact that registered on each of our faces as the police went over the details.
"I want to move," Clara whispered to me, her hoarse voice full of terror and rage.
"I know," I said, having gone through the same conflict after the last crime. This time, however, I felt violated, too. Not because they'd stolen my valuable stamp collection-- it having come down to me from my father and from his father before him-- but rather as a last straw of things that had been going on for months, maybe years.
The police detective coughed politely. "That's about it," he said. "I'll file everything downtown. You can get copies for your insurance next week."
There was coolness in the detective's voice, not hostility, but distance, his sideward glances taking in the subtle luxury that a professor's salary had allowed me over the years, wall to wall carpetting, a colored TV. Things that anywhere else might not have seemed so luxurious. But here...
"Look, Mr. Hansen," the detective said. "Do you want some advice."
I had the feeling he was going to give it to me whether I wanted it or not, but I nodded, as did my wife.
"You people are crazy for staying down here. This isn't the kind of neighborhood where you can have nice things and keep them long. You know what I mean?"
"Which means we probably won't see any of our stuff back?" Clara asked.
"You're lucky they didn't kill you," the cop said. "They rob black families down here. They kill whites."
The anger bubbled up slowly from some deep recess thirty years unused, as if I was staring down the racist nose of a Southern Sheriff. But I nodded again and politely showed him the door, slamming and locking it before cursing outloud.
"Did you hear that, Clara?" I said indignantly. "He has nerve telling us that these days!"
"But he's right, dear," Clara said. "There are stories in the paper all the time about people getting killed."
"Other people," I said with an impatient wave of my hand. "People who stick their noses where they don't belong. Like Tom who wanders around down by River Street talking to junkies. I'm a teacher, remember, not an activist any more."
"Maybe we should call Tom," Clara said, her face thick with early wrinkles. "Maybe he could find out something..."
"No," I said. "Let's not dwell on this. The stamps are gone as well as the other things. Let's forget them."
***********
But it didn't end there as I knew it wouldn't. Something fundamental had changed with this second burglary and the house seemed unsafe, even with us fully awake and the locks all secure. It was as if a wind could blow through the walls any time it wished, taking us with it.
Over supper several days later, I could take the dark looks no longer, from Clara or our two children.
"All right, all right. I'll see what I can do," I told them. From Clara, I'd expected the look of relief, but the children looked up hopefully, bright eyes intensely relieved.
Of course, they were going to junior high school next year. Many dark stories had reached me through my classes about white children surviving the city's secondary school system. I hadn't believed them until then.
"I'll go to the bank in the morning," I said. But I knew things weren't good and the house in which we presently lived wouldn't bring us much if we could sell it. Buying another might well be impossible.
**********
"I'm sorry, Professor," Mr.Cummings said. "But you still owe too much on the other house. We can't float two loans. Once you sell the old house, I'm sure we can accomodate you."
But there was a negative note in his voice, something that said even that might not allow us enough to move. I made decent money, but not enough by today's standards and with the crisis the banks were in, loans were tight. I was lucky to have what I had through veterans benifits.
"We could talk to the state for you," the banker said with a dubvious note to his voice. "You teach at the college. It wouldn't be hard to register you as black on the application."
"Black?" I said, the tone in indignity straightening the man's shoulders.
"It's the only way you'll get help through the government these days, I'm afraid. But if your set against it, we can try anyway."
***********
The sting of the banker's words were still fresh when I came out to my car and found its hood up, battery and radio gone, the windshield shattered on one side as if in vengence for something. No other reason would explain the act.
Of course the car would have to be towed, and anger came, that enraged anger I'd felt the first time discovering the oils stains on the rug of my house, rage that came to the rape victim hours after the attack when it was too late to strike back at the attacker. I wanted to find the first black face and scream at it. An unreasonable act considering the lack of certain knowledge that it was a black that had done this or the other crimes. I felt properly shamed, then hiked down to Main street to look for a phone.
Three vandalized phones later, I found one working-- though when Tom's voice came onto the other end, I could barely hear him.
"It's me, Tom. I'm stuck downtown. Could you give me a ride?"
"Certainly," Tom said and quickly took the details.
Road Service was a different matter. It took every every threat I could imagine to get the man to send a truck.
"Well, I'll send one," the man said. "But you'd better be right there by the car. I don't want anything happening to my driver."
***********
"We're leaving town, Tom," I said, once the truck had come for my car and we were safely driving to the so-called "good" part of town.
Tom looked over. He was older than I was by a few years, but looked a decade older, her curly black hair now fringed with grey near the ears. Sun and worry had wrinkled his brow, folding it over his eyes into a perpetual squint. But the eyes themselves were the same grey and lively eyes I'd travelled with on buses in the south, gone to jail with, beaten beside-- watching the final glory after the 1964 Equal Rights Amendment passed in Washington.
"Just because someone broke into your car?" he said, his voice crisp like a lawyers.
"Yes," I said, feeling it all coming down on me again. I hadn't been certain before the break in on the car, going to the bank as a matter of passifying Clara. But now it was clear the world was changing here, for me, my kids, my wife and anyone else with white skin-- even Tom. "I don't spend my life being afraid."
"You could try changing it," Tom said.
"I have tried! I teach in the local college, don't I?"
But the words were hollow and we both knew it. I had settled into a faculty seat with the idea that my activist days were over, thinking I could just as easily change the world from behind a book. Yet, it was an isolated platform, one that really didn't see the city at all. I was five minutes from the interstate on-ramp and five minutes driving to the college. What I saw along the route was hardly representative, just rows of houses in a neighborhood marked on the ballot lists as "white."
"Look, there's no use arguing with me about it, Tom," I said. "I've made up my mind. My wife and kids are too important to risk them on some idiological stand."
"I wasn't arguing with you, Phil," Tom said, his voice squeeky, the way it got when he was angry.
***********
The phone call to Clara's father was another matter altogether. Over the years the resentment had brewed into something close to hate, he, a county business and development magnet living in a luxury estate in Wayne, as conservative as the town was green, and thick with ill opinions about my Liberal leanings.
The coolness was in his voice when he acknowledged my existance on the phone.
"Yes?" he said, perhaps thinking there was some unavoidable social engagement his secretary had forgotten to warn him about.
"We're planning to move out of Paterson," I said, as light-heartedly as I could, trying to make it sound something less than outright surrender. And, I expected him to take full advantage of the defeat, treating me to a verbal barage of I told you so's.
But a moment of silence came and then a long, almost satisfied sigh. "Why don't you and Clara bring the kids up here for dinner tonight," he said, then hung up when I agreed.
***********
It is not a long journey from Paterson to Wayne, just a short climb up a steep hill from the Great Falls. But the change is stark, from the extreme worst part of Paterson slums to the drawn out lawns of great estates, the Watcung mountains like a great gate somehow knowing who to admit and who not to. Wayne's police sit slyly in the cracks and side streets off the winding road, guarding each pass, staring at the color of the drivers as their cars huffed and puffed at the end of their climb.
They looked at me as I drove the rented hunk of junk up the final incline, leaving a trail of smoke behind that might have been the remains of my pride.
"I don't understand what made you call Daddy," Clara said, looking at me strangely, but obviously pleased. She'd been trying to bridge the gap between us for years, not quite able to understand the differences which seperated us in the first place.
"He was the only one I could think of that might help," I said. "He's offered before."
Though those offers were always edged with the trappings of a bribe, something like the sales pitch of Satan, looking for my soul along with my signiture.
Once into the green-lawned world, I saw the faces of my children in the back seat, their mouths set grimly like vistors to dreamland, eyeing younger children that rolled in the leaves on the wide lawns. It was the stuff of television. It was stuff they had missed when younger, locked in the grasp of a city where things outdoors always came with a risk.
"Would you like to live out here with you grandfather?" Clara asked them.
"Could we?"
Clara looked at me, her eyes hard, saying: "If you disappoint them now, Phillip, I'll never forgive you."
"We'll see," I said.
**********
Clara's father greeted us with a stiff wave of hand and his usual determined strut down the front steps to the circular drive. He was a large man with a top of grey that was meaningless, slowing none of the energies alive in his eyes. He was almost smiling when he opened the door-- yes he himself and not his doorman-- something which told me immediately I was making a mistake.
"A new car, Phillip?" he asked.
"A rented car, Mr. Olsen," I said, slamming the driver side door a little too hard, handing the keys to the doorman who drove it off to be parked.
"Yours being repaired?"
"You could say that. Shall we go in?"
**********
The eyes were an inquesition, staring at me the whole time through dinner, making me wish for the after dinner man talk that would end the torture.
He led me to his den and offered me a cigar. I surprised him by accepting one-- the first time since my marriage.
"So?" he said, leaning back in his chair, the smell of leather as thick as the smoke in the room.
I explained the situation and he eyed me for a long time in silence, peering at me over the tips of his fingers-- his hands pressed together in a chruch steeple under his nose.
"I can do better than lend you money," he said after a time. "I have a buyer for your house-- No, don't ask me who. But I have someone. There is only one catch."
I took a deep breath. "Which is?"
"You relocate here in Wayne."
It seemed like such a small request, a minor detail that might easily have been passed off as concern for the welfare of his grandchildren, and the need to seem them somewhat regularly. But there were darker designs behind those eyes and he knew I knew about them. Details of the surrender. By accepting his location, he kept me from picking some other less depraved region of city where I might maintain my Liberal values. Here in Wayne, I would be surrounded by his kind, joining the anti-ethnic coolition of disgusied bigots that mowed their lawns with the deep satisfaction of knowing no black or hispanic would ever set foot on it, even by accident.
"All right," I said, and sucked slowly and guitily upon my cigar, eyeing the victorious grin of Clara's father through the smoke.
***********
It was a longer drive back to the city, despite the downward incline, the insanity of slow deterioration that I'd not noticed in detail before, the sagging disgust of century old buildings never meant to stand longer than a decade, windows thick with drying laundry and wandering, dare-devil kids. It was like passing through a world in which every building contained a circus, but one in which the animals had taken charge, Orwell's predictions hardly capable of reflecting the reality. It scared me more than the break it did. It lacked any sense of hope.
***********
Tom was waiting on the front stoop of the house, dressed in his usual dark clothing. It made him look priestly, though his nervousness seemed habitual, having grown out of the beatings of police in the south. He started up with the approach of our headlights and grinned only when I appeared.
"Phil, I have good news for you," he said, coming towards me with his large hand extended. "I've found a buyer for your house, and another house you might be interested in buying on the hill."
The hill, of course, was one of the last few liveable neighborhoods left in Paterson, near enough to Wayne and Haledon to be attractive, yet still in decline, a neighborhood maybe twenty years or less from extinction.
"I really appreciate all you've gone through, Tom," I said. "But we've already made arrangements with Clara's father. He has someone to buy our house."
"Him!" Tom moaned. "You're selling your house to one of his cronies."
"Thomas," I whispered, Clara just then climbing from the car. "Don't start with any of your politically correct trash with me. We've made up our minds."
"To leave town," Tom said, shaking his head. "To sell this fine old house to some developer, who'll take it off the market so he can jack up the prices on the rest of his houses. How could you do this, Phil? I mean after all we've been through..."
"Tom," I said. "Either you quit all this or leave. I'm not in the mood to argue with you."
"But your leaving amounts to nothing more than segregation," Tom said, turning me with a start from the door. I glared at him, my rightous indignity broadcasting from every pore.
"Are you calling me a racist?"
"I'm saying that you're throwing the civil rights movement out on its ear," Tom said. "If every white in every city did what you're doing now, we'd be back to Selma, Alabama, 1955 in no time."
"And maybe the south had the right idea all along," I said. "Maybe they saw all this coming and knew they had to control their blacks or wind up with things like this."
I was shouting. My voice carried into the street, echoing slightly off the storefronts and apartment buildings, raising faces of people on the corner.
"Do you hear what you're saying?" Tom asked, his voice strained and his eyes full of disbelief.
"Yes," I said. "And I mean it, too. I'm sick of living in other people's shit. I want to be the man with the big lawn and the lazy chairs and respectability."
"Respectability?" Tom spat. "That's not...."
"Go away and keep your speeches to yourself," I said and slammed the door in his face.
***********
Roth appeared dragging the boy behind her.
Vincent had seen many such creatures above ground -- indeed, had looked much like this one during his days his street, unkept hair, ragged, misfitting clothing, and a general air of the unwashed that served as uniform in the Outlands where soap was a sign of distrust. Under the limited illumination of the two flash lights, the boy's hair looked brown or black, as did his squinting, tearing eyes. He squirmed under Roth’s grip and she cuffed him several times to keep him still. Scabs showed on his arms and face, the natural consquence of traveling in close spaces underground. Surprising, he looked more healthy than most of the tunnel rats Vincent had seen, apparently fed well on Chelsea's stores over a long period.
“Leave off me” he snapped, and took another swipe at Roth’s hand which gripped his arm. “I didn't do nothing”
“Stealing food is a crime” Vincent said. “Even down this deep.”
“Prove it!” the boy snapped, glaring at Vincent, providing Vincent with a stark reflection of himself.
“The little bastard’s as tough as nails,” he thought. “And he can't be much older than ten.”
“I don't need to prove it,” Vincent said. “We’ve followed your trail the whole way out of Chelsea. You're sloppy, boy. If we could find you out, then so could securty.”
“The Wallers don’t dig this deep,” the boy boasted. “They keep perched up top. They send fumes down after me, but they're too scared to chase me.”
Vincent could imagine. Bosk and his kind relied too much on technology and high-powered weapons, both of which had limited use in the ancient catacombs beneath Manhattan. For them to investigate a shadow like this, they would have to crawl through the same holes, sticking their noses in places where the shadows lived. They would sit back, set traps, send down a few canisters of gas, attacking the problem the way they would roaches or rats, hoping they could scare the creature out of the hole or possibly poison it.
“Well there’s others who might take an interest in your activities,” Vincent said. “Other night people.”
The boy stirred, his face showing signs of concern as he glanced passed Vincent into the tunnels.
“The Skids,” he whispered in a hoarse voice.
“Then you've heard them, too?” Vincent asked. “What kind of gang are we dealing with?”
“Terrible, terrible,” the boy continued to whisper. “They kill, they cut up, sometimes they eat.”
“Canabalism?” Cromwell said, reading the boy's message accurately enough, his own voice full of shock and revulsion.
“It’s a cruel world, Cromwell,” Vincent snapped, wanting to compare the man’s how crimes to this world, showing the fool just how theirs made more sense than his, theirs based on the need to survive, his based on some sicker sense of power produced by the arrogance of civilization. But such arguments made no sense in the dark. “The Skids” as the boy called them were not far now, the sound of their movement growing louder and closer, though not quickly -- not as quickly as they would come the moment they came across the trail Vincent and his party had left in their retreat from the wall. The Skids had heard the explosion. The Skids had perhaps also heard the sound of their movement. But the Skids had not yet likely discovered just how rich a company this was and the gold mine at the other end of the trail, an inside doorway to one of the wealthier neighborhoods.
Vincent turned his attention back to the boy.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“I'm not saying.”
“You want to stand here and wait for the Skids to come?”
“I'm not saying,” the boy repeated more vehemently, making Vincent realize the boy was hiding something, protecting someone who was perhaps weaker than himself.
“Fine,” Vincent said and looked up to Roth. “You have rope?”
Roth looked puzzled. “Sure, chief, but why do you need rope?”
“I want you to tie the little bugger up and leave him for the Skids to find.”
“NO!” the boy howled and tried to break free of Roth’s grasp and almost did, but Vincent grabbed his other arm.
“Now listen, you little twit,” Vincent said in a low, harsh voice. “We’re not here to hurt you, or hurt whatever friend you're protecting. We just want to get out of here, out to the Outlands, and we need you to show us the way. You do that, we leave you alone. If you don’t, we leave you for the Skids. You understand?”
The boy’s eyes bulged, but he nodded.
“Good!” Vincent said and straightened. “Now I’m sure the Skids are headed straight for us, and I’m also sure that you have a nice, safe little hideaway down here where you have your friend kept. You take us to it so we can lay low for a while, and then we'll talk about you're leading us out.”
The boy’s fear seemed to ease a little. “And what do I get for it?” he asked. “I ain’t doing nothing for nothing.”
“Some would say you’re getting your life,” Vincent laughed. “But all right, we’ll bargain. But not here.”
The boy twitched, and glanced around at the dark beyond the flashlights, and the sounds of scraping and occasional laughter, the Skids coming closer, probing and proding at the corners in search of intruders.
“So they had turf down here, too,” Vincent thought. “With this boy and his associates feeding off the edges without permission.”
“Well?” Vincent asked, glancing at Roth who had produced a section of cord unrolled from a wheel at her belt – thin as string, but tough as the best weaved rope.
“Okay,” the boy said in a rush of breath. “You follow me.”
The boy squirmed to be let go.
“Not so fast,” Vincent said. “Tie his hand, Roth. We don’t need him slipping away in the dark at an inconvenient time.”
The boy snarled and glared at Vincent as Roth worked up a loop in one end of the rope, slipped it tightly around one of the boy’s wrists, then handed the other end to Vincent.
“I’ll take the rear,” Roth said, and moved back to the rear of the column.
“Now,” Vincent said to the boy. “Lead on.”
The boy turned to the tunnel again, easing ahead with an agility only Vincent could match, like a water rat slipping into a familiar stream, aware of all the eddies, each step certain as if the boy had walked this crumbling path thousands of times between his home and the food source, keeping both as far from each other as practicality would allow so that if the Skids discovered his home, they did not discover also the hole into Chelsea.
“After all,” Vincent thought, “the boy and his associates could always find another home.”
Behind them, howls rose, shouts of discovery as the Skids came upon some sign of their passing.
“Chief?” Roth called, his voice whispering over the radio receiver in Vincent’s ear, one of the many small pieces of technology he'd forgotten he’d brought, as if the darkness should have stripped them of everything.
“What is it?” he said, whispering back into his own mouth-level microphone.
“They know we’re not tunnel people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen to their sound. They screaming bloody murder back there. Somehow those bastards think we’ve come from the other side of the wall."
“How would they know that?” Vincent asked, feeling a tingle of panic working down his spine.
The Skids might not take an intrusion of some parasite like the boy, but the smell of Inlanders in their tunnel would drive them crazy.
How did such people get here? How could they, the Skids, find their way inside?
Vincent glanced back, studying the blonde-headed Hilda, her face now a smear of spoiled makeup, she sobbed constantly, making her condition worse with her tears. Then, Vincent glanced at Cromwell, and noticed something different, something missing.
“Where is your watch, Cromwell?” Vincent asked.
The broad man looked startled, and then glanced down at his wrist, the impression of the watch still evident in his puffy flesh.
“My watch?” he said. “Well, I don't know. I must have forgotten to put it on this morning.”
“You had it on,” Vincent said, facing the man, despite the tugs of the boy on the rope for them to continue.
“Then I must have lost it,” Cromwell said.
“Or dropped it deliberately at an obvious place in the tunnel?” Vincent suggested.
“And why would I do that?”
“To let Security know you're still alive,” Vincent snapped. “Security that won’t ever come. But the Skids will. Once they see that, they'll come running and running fast. And worse, they’ll send runners the other way, searching out our path to see just how we got to that point.”
“I don't understand,” Cromwell said, and apparently didn’t.
“No, you’re too arrogant to understand the consequences of your actions. You rape and kill and think that’s all right. You drop precious jewels in the path of savage gangs, and don’t think they will seek out more, tracing your path, taking that watch as key to your city. Congratulations, Mr. Cromwell. By this time tomorrow, Chelsea will be an orgy of rape and murder, thanks to you.”
Cromwell’s face went pale as he stared hard at Vincent, then over his shoulder at the dark passage behind.
“I didn't know,” he said weakly.
“No,” Vincent sighed, and then glanced at Roth.
“What do you want me to do, chief?” she asked.
“We can't leave Chelsea exposed.”
“Do you want me to go back?”
“You'd never make it,” Vincent said. “I'm the only one who can.”
“That would be suicide.”
“It would be for you. But I’m sure I can slip passed the Skids.”
“And how would you get back?”
“Coming back won't be hard. I’ll have a whole heard of Skids to follow.”
Vincent handed Roth the rope, and eased off his backpack, removing from it two metal boxes, one with the remaining plastic explosive, the other with the fuses. He stuffed each into one of his front pants pockets. Then, from the pack, he removed several additional clips of bullets for his pistol. He handed the pack to Hilda, motioning for her to put it on.
“Just keep going with the boy,” he told Roth. “Hide out. I’ll work my way back into this general vicinity, then call you on the radio. Just keep your head down, and keep this idiot …” Vincent motioned towards Cromwell “…from doing anything else to cause a problem. If he gets to be too much, shoot him in the foot, or break his arm. But don’t kill him. I'm going to bring him before a judge if I have to drag him.”
Vincent extinguished his light, but kept it ready in his left hand as he advanced, his pistol gripped slightly too hard in his right. The darkness swarmed up around him like a furious invasion of insects, but he was not blinded by it, and once his eyes grew used to the lesser illumination, he found himself nearly as able to travel quickly as he had with the light, perhaps even more quickly for having come this way before.
Indeed, the glow of Roth’s light, even as it moved off, seem to stretch out to him, giving the tunnel an eerie iridescence, that frightful sense of invasion of the deep places that only the blind and helpless people of the upper world could bring.
The tunnel people needed no such bright lights, their dilated eyes and their elevated instincts allowing them a sight inside the darkness no upper worlder, inside the wall or out, had. Perhaps Vincent's previous visit to the edges of the underworld have gifted him with some of its ability, perhaps the reason he had survived on the streets of the Outland was because he’d inherited it without knowing from birth. But now, he felt grateful for the ability, and was shocked at what he saw.
The signs of their stumbling and bumbling trip through these passages showed more clearly than if they had left markers deliberately for someone to follow, scuff marks in the dusty floor, piles of bricks or broken concrete or dirt tumbled by their foot steps.
“A Goddamn child could have followed us,” he thought, wondering why they had not been more careful. But he knew. He hadn’t expected pursuit, and, in fact, had pursued the ghostly step of the boy ahead of them, following along like a pack of blind mice, hoping the boy would lead them out.
Vincent still hoped for that, but now understood such a retreat had its risks. They could not just plunge ahead, even in recesses as deep as these. Now, as he retraced his steps back, he avoided those previous mistakes, his lack of light giving him greater care that those gifted with light did not have. He moved around objects, staying closer to one wall or the other, he kept low and moved ahead in spurts after listening for a while, after studying the passage for the easiest, yet least revealing avenue ahead. Even with these precautions he moved quickly, and quickly grew closer to the sound of the Skids.
The gang had no concern about stealth. They did not care to keep their movements unannounced, and seemed indeed to defy the darkness with their advance, deliberately violating everything in their way, knocking down piles of stone or dirt, striking at wooden wall supports with metal pipes – as if daring the passage to fall down on their heads. Vincent could not guess their number, but could count scores of voices all seeming to talk at once, laughing or curses, calling to each other with taunts. And when he finally saw them, they came as a glow, not a light, and he slipped down into one of the side passages, the dead air telling him it had either collapsed at some point in the past or had been abandoned during digging, a passage less than half his height into which he had to crawl backwards to keep his pistol and still extinguished light facing out.
He resisted the urge to crawl to its end, seeking the total darkness as protection. He needed to see his enemy pass, see their faces to understand them, even if it meant they might accidentally discover him. When they arrived, they did not look down his tunnel, barging forward, the voices a cacophony of curses, laugher and echoes.
“Who do you think it is, huh, Billy?” one of the leading voices said. “Why do you think would come to visit us like that, huh?”
“How the hell do I know,” another, harsher and clearly impatient voice snapped. “Maybe those neighborhood snots are playing a prank, dumped some poor son of a bitch out here as a game. You know how bored those little brats getting, always looking for some new thrill.”
“And they’ll get us, right, Billy? We’re going to take care of them right?”
“If they got out, then we can get in. That's why I sent the boys back.”
“Then why we coming this way, Billy, huh? Why are we going the wrong way.”
“To find these son's of bitches,” Billy snapped. “If they got out through some secret door, then these fools probably have a key.”
By this time, the gang in body moved passed the mouth of Vincent’s tunnel, and he understood why they appeared to glow, because they did. Like many of the street gangs uptop, this group bore the usual markings, the spiked hair, the surgically installed teeth, wearing leather or denim spiked with metal. Some carried ammunition belts. Others swords and sabers. Some simply carried pistols of metal pipes. But all had the same dagger tattoos imprinted on their cheeks, tiny daggers in a ring around their mouths, tip of the hilt at the lip with blade pointing outward in a circle out. And these, in the dark had the green tint of phosphorous.
As they went by, Vincent counted them; they made no effort to hide or disguise their movement, twenty, thirty, forty of them, moving ahead like a pack of wolves, laughing about their advance as if defying even the darkness to undo them.
When they had gone passed, Vincent remained, waiting and listening, hearing the scuff of a rear guard -- who after some time, came up. Two men actually. Both much grimmer than the crowd that had passed, looking for side to side as they came, pausing at the holes to either side. Both sniffed and stopped before the tunnel in which Vincent hid.
They sniffed in unison and then, one moved to the side, knelt, held his weapon -- some earlier version of an oozi Vincent only barely recognized in the dark. The other carried a more primitive machine pistol that roughly resembled a milk carton turned on its side with a tiny spot out one end and a handle, trigger and ammunition clip spouting out the bottom.
“Someone’s here,” the Skid with the oozi said. “I can smell him.”
“Smells like he’s been in a gun fight,” the other said, easing against the other wall with only the glow of his face giving Vincent a target.
“You think it’s from the gun play up in Chelsea?” the oozi skid said.
“Can't see how it can be anyone else,” the other said. “Smells like explosives, too.”
“You want to shoot?”
“Maybe we'd....”
Vincent fired twice, once at each face; hearing the heads behind the glowing faces pop.
The roar of his own weapon hid the sound of their falling weapons, and bodies, neither brain had managed to send their mental command to their fingers to fire back before they'd died.
Vincent rushed forward, now fully engulfed in the smell of smoke. But this was not strong enough to cover the stink of blood and brain now scattered over both walls of the tiny tunnel, and he had to ease through it on his hands and knees to get into the wider chamber. Once standing, he glanced back the way the others had gone.
Would someone come to investigate?
No, Vincent decided. They would not think anything wrong. Not yet. They’d likely see their friends as shooting at shadows or killing rats. He had time yet, time that might vanish more quickly if he didn't hurry.
But he didn’t start off just yet. Instead he reached back into the tunnel and found the fallen weapons, took both, pushed his own now-warm pistol into his belt, along with the machine pistol recovered from one of the Skids. He took up the oozi, and then moved on, the weapon's muzzle in the crook of his arm.
The movement of the Skids had ruined signs of his own bands trip through these passages, but Vincent no longer needed those signs. He was sure that he would recover the path back to Chelsea easily enough, from the passage of those Skids sent along it to find where the hole was.
And he was right.
He came to a spot where the Skids had halted, a place where they had come into the passage from one of the side tunnels -- now blowing air as if somewhat further down a door had opened. It smelled of mildew and still water, one of the areas down in the deeps were the water dripped into small ponds.
Vincent found signs of the outriders who had separated from the main band to follow the tunnel back.
“Maybe ten or fifteen,” he thought. “No more than that.”
As if fifteen of those savages here in the dark wasn’t more than enough to cause him trouble.
But he had no intention of meeting any of them. He wanted only to make his way back to the hole where his band had come through from Chelsea. Then, he would reseal it using the remaining explosives.
Those fifteen Skids would be trapped inside, caught between an angry security filling the lower tunnels with gas, and the blank wall of the collapsed tunnel. They would not get the chance to rape and pillage, despite Cromwell’s dealings in the Outlands. Rape and murder were wrong on both sides of the wall, and it was Vincent’s duty to make sure both sides found justice.
He started down the tunnel after them, hurrying now, fearing that he himself trapped when the main body of the Skids finally grew concerned enough about their rear guard to send someone back to investigate.
They would smell the blood for a mile. Then, they would find the bodies, and then, Vincent could only guess what they would do.
He did not turn on his flashlight here either. He did not trust the passage ahead, and could hear the movement of the other group, their laughter announcing them.
“What arrogant fools,” Vincent thought. “How do they know they’re not marching right into the arms of some security detail?”
Perhaps they could smell the upsiders, sensing their presence the way the two dead Skids had smelled Vincent, and move through these passages with all the confidence of owners in their own home. Vincent moved less surely, even though he had come this way before, feeling the narrowness of the passage, out of touch with his own instincts which were honed on the streets, not in tunnels. Darkness did not provide him with a sense of security, but with a sense of dread. He feared something would leap out at him if he moved too quickly and did not feel out each corner before he moved into it.
Thus the voices ahead moved on faster than he did, becoming mere echoes. He did not hear anything closer, until he came finally to the place near where he had blown wider the hole in the wall, and then, he heard two more Skids talking, two obviously left behind to watch the main group's back as they moved in through the hole and into paradise.
“Man, this is spice,” one was saying. “Like we’ve found the top pot, the mother load, the greatest piece of pussy in the world.”
“I don't trust it,” the other, deeper voice said. “It's just too good a deal. And smell that smoke? This wasn't dug, it was blown, and there’s been shooting up top. I’m glad we’re the ones left back here. I think those fools are walking into a nightmare.”
“Ah, you’re always talking that way, always making with the negative. And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be basking inside with the others.”
“Damned right, I insisted someone watch out back here. Didn’t you hear those gunshots a while back? That wasn’t one of ours. And I didn’t hear not toot back either, which means either someone took a shot and split, or some poor Skid’s lying face down brains bleeding, with some son of a bitch walking around bragging about it.”
“There you go with that talk again. It was from down tunnel somewhere, beyond where our folks are, most likely.”
“Like hell it was,” the deeper voiced Skid said. “It came from a lot closer than where our people went, and I’m telling you, there's trouble in these tunnels tonight, trouble that we’re all going to be sorry about unless we're very, very careful.”
“You’re crazy. We find the biggest booty we ever found, and you're talking doom.”
“There's a reason why this is like this and I need to know why.”
Vincent slipped. He had stopped, and was bending forward when he weight shifted on the loose earth and the sound of the gravel shifting echoed slightly – but loud enough for the Skids to hear.
“Duck! We got company!” the deeper voiced Skid shouted and dove to the ground, his automatic Gluck firing off a string of rounds that buzzed in the narrow chamber, poking into the dirt packed wall and ceiling. The dust fell onto Vincent's head as he ducked, too, returning the Gluck’s fire with the oozi he had taken from one of the other fallen Skids. He hit the still-standing Skid with his string of bullets, spinning the glowing face around until it vanished into a pile of earth.
“Son of a bitch!” the deep voiced Skid screamed. “I’ll kill you for that! I swear I will!”
“Maybe,” Vincent said in a soft voice that drew another round of bullets, but he had already rolled to the other side, and was up with his own pistol as the Skid fired, his gun rattling off its own sequence right into the prone body of the deep-voiced glowing face.
Vincent emptied the clip into the body, then when he was sure the Skid was dead, he threw the weapon away, and eased closer to the hole, stepping over the remains of both men as he had the previous two in the narrow tunnel earlier.
He could hear the others now, the confusion the gun fire here had caused, its echoes preceding ahead into the lower regions of Chelsea, voices caught in a panic that only stepping over the imaginary line from one world into the other could cause, they as afraid in their own way as the inlanders were of them, the way blacks in the old cities used to fear the rednecks of the country, and the rednecks, the fury of the blacks, each defining the limits of what made civilization work, the macho warriors of unreasonable prejudice between which the rest of mankind existed.
Vincent could hear the voices growing louder as he bent down before the hole and eased the two boxes out of his pants, the box with the explosive, the box with the fuse. He could hear their panicked step in their stumbled rush to reach the hole before some invisible hand sealed them in.
Vincent paused, removed the captured machine pistol from his belt, clicking off the safety as he laid it side by side between the two boxes. He opened the first box, removed the plastic, stretched the whole amount though it was many times more than was needed to seal the hole. He stood, stuck it to the ragged section near where one of the cross beams held up the ceiling on the outside of the hole. Then, when reaching to get the fuse, the first of the retreating Skids appeared.
He grabbed up his weapon, letting the automatic function fire a flare of raging led across the tunnel, cutting the first Skid completely in half, killing the second and third as well before those behind scrambled back to seek protection. Quickly, he grabbed up the fuse, made the attachment, then pressed the tiny plunger until the small red light throbbed. Then, he fired the weaspon again, and ran like hell.
The others, beyond the wall, fired at him, bullets shattering sections of the wall and then, slowly making their way up the floor of the tunnel after him, as if he was being chased by a hive of enraged bees, each seeking to sting his heals. Then -- he didn't even hear the explosion -- he found himself thrust forward, the impact picking up completely off his feet and sending him flying through the tunnel as earth and dust crashed down into the place where the tunnel had been.
He landed against the curve of the tunnel, like a sack of wheat, coming to a thudding stop as the dust cloud flowed over him and the bits of stone stung at his face and hands.
Even after the impact, he didn’t move, lying as he was on his back, staring up at the ceiling he could not see for the settling dust, the soil working into his lungs with every breath, making him cough, making his chest pang with protest, the smoke leaving its grit on his face and in his mouth.
He listened as the thunder moved on beyond him, flowing with the echoes through the rest of the cavern, until it was just one more rumble among many rumblings in this magnificent maze below Manhattan. And he listened for the sound of footsteps, which he could not hear, only the moans of men caught under the fallen stone, from those few who had made the mistake of charging under the cover of their own gun fire, looking to get a better shot at him before he vanished, men moaning invisibly under the weight of soil and stone, men whose moans would shortly die, as they would, leaving the tunnel silent again, and Vincent once more alone.
Then, in that silence, Vincent struggled up. Something was wrong with his leg. It would not bend right and when he tried to put his weight down on it, a pang of pain gushed up through him to his head that he nearly fainted.
“Something’s definitely wrong,” he thought, and then struggled to find his flashlight, and finding it, fumbled with it until his shaking fingers found the on switch.
The illumination hurt at his eyes. He blinked back the tears, and then looked down at his right leg, where dark red liquid soaked his pants, and a stone -- thrust by the power of the plastic explosive -- stood out from his flesh like the broken blade of a cave man’s knife.
With his free hand, he eased the stone out, one inch, two inches, and then another half inch, the pain making him shake that much more. He dropped the stone, and then store a piece of his shirt, pressing it into the bleeding hole.
“I’m going to die in this place,” his pain-racked mind thought.
“No,” some other part of him said. “Not down here, not like this. Not after all you’ve done to get that bastard Cromwell. You’ll get him to justice first, then you can die.”
During this, Vincent tore more of his shirt, using one arm, then the other, wrapping the first section around his leg so as to keep a smaller piece of fabric pressed tightly against the wound. The fabric from the second arm he used to tie the first in place, and then, as if that's all he needed in the first place, he felt better.
“I seem to be plugging up every hole I can find,” he thought, and then turned the light towards the fallen tunnel. The explosive had sealed it better than even his imagination could have envisioned, sealed it so that no human would ever come this way again without digging a whole new tunnel.
He sighed, and then, turned back the way he had come, hobbling painfully. He had to find the others.