The Blue Blazes (6 page)

The cage drops.

 

A pair of wavy yellow cables snake along the wall. A big fan blows air. A pipe for concrete is bracketed against the wall – it’s a “slick line”, used to pump the wet mix over a thousand feet from the worksite above. Glimpses of civilization. Of human work and effort. The Sandhogs have claimed this part of the Underworld for mankind. The trappings of man are all here: a pickaxe in the stone with a hardhat on the handle’s end, a discarded and dented lunchbox, a crumpled-pack of cigarettes, a lone boot crusted and made heavy with dry cement.

So much cleaner than many of the low places he finds himself in. Rooms laden with glowing polyps. Black stalactites like swords dripping blood. Hell, a month ago he found an old subway train car down at in the Tangle when he was looking for a couple wayward Mole Men. The train sat on a soft sand island out in the middle of a steaming subterranean lake – it was the moans that drew him to it, the
very human
moans. Inside: bodies. Vagrants, by the look of them. Mostly dead but kept alive by the gobbo eggs in their mouths, under their armpits, between their legs. The moist places of the human form.

Mookie burned the whole car. Not much else to do. The eggs, bulbous and red, were ready to hatch. The guys were dead anyway, they just didn’t know it yet.

He wonders what normal people would think of the way the eggs popped and squealed, like bacon fat in an iron skillet. What face they’d make when they saw the bodies thrashing around, the little gobbo hatchlings born premature, splashing up against the sooty train windows before finally expiring in a red squeak down the hot glass.

People just don’t know.

Finally, Mookie gets to the start of the tunnel proper. A massive concrete tube. Lit up like it’s practically daylight down here. Floodlights eliminate darkness. Big fans blow cool, musty air. In the middle of the tunnel runs a set of tracks – the Sandhogs don’t use old-school mine carts anymore. They use powered ones. “Pigs.” That’s what they call them. As in, “Hop on, the pig’s about to leave.”

There’s a small three-man pig nearby, sitting away on an ancillary track. Mookie feels relieved. The powered mine carts don’t move fast, but they move a lot faster than walking. And it’ll save him a ten-mile walk to wherever Davey and his crew are working.

He hops in. Starts it up with a growl.

Doesn’t take long to ease it on the track–

Soon Mookie’s chugging along. Bright lights passing overhead.

 

Chug chug chug
.

This tunnel, Mookie thinks, is the Sandhogs’ legacy.

They’ve been working on this for years. Hell, this tunnel’s where Mookie got his start, and really, that’s what he’s thinking about: how
this
could’ve been his legacy instead of what it is now. Ex-wife. Daughter who hates him. Breaking the heads of goblins and the knees of addicts.

He never gave much of a shit about the tunnel. To him it was just work. To the city of New York, it was them building a parachute while falling down to earth. Both of the original water tunnels are on their way out and the water in the city is undrinkable. Repair either of the original tunnels, you turn the water off for weeks, maybe months – and if the valves break, then longer. The city loses water, the city loses everything. But for Mookie, it was always just work. Because that’s what he does. And that’s who he is.

Though now it occurs to Mookie: that’s why Homeland Security is invested. They don’t want terrorists messing with the city’s water supply.

Up ahead, he hears it:

The sound of
work
.

Hammering. Drilling. The murmur of men yelling.

But that’s when he hears something else, too:

The scrape of claws on concrete. The whisper of flesh on stone.

 

6

 

The monsters of the Abyss. Offspring of the Void. The children of the Hungry Ones, of the Deep Shadows, of Those Who Eat. Birthed from the Maw-Womb, given life down in the dark – wriggling, screaming, baying for blood and singing lamentations to the lack of light. The gobbos, or goblins, those most common denizens of the Great Below – half-mindless, willing to eat their own young grubs, a tribe or hive of peons and pawns, Hell’s own foot-soldiers. The Trogbodies or troglodytes, blind golems of stone and clay and silt. The Snakefaces – or Nagas and Naginis – those hidden seducers, those worms in the rock. They, the named races, the sentient entities. Some are lesser beings with minimal minds: the roach-rats, the milk spiders, the gelled waste, the rimstone cankerpedes. Others are smart but have no names: I have seen a dripstone that unmoored from the rock and spoke riddles before scurrying away. I have seen a flying thing, with gray vented wings and eyes on telescoping stalks. And I have seen a tenebrous shape stalking the depths, darker than the dark, like a black sheet on a clothesline rippling in a hard wind.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

 

Something is following him. Some
things
by the sound of it.

He prays it’s nothing dangerous. Which is a lie in its own way – nothing down here could be categorized as “safe”. Even a starving brood of roach-rats (and they are
always
starving) offers up a thousand mean teeth and a hundred long claws and the light-only-knows how many strange diseases and parasites. But those he can handle.

The thought nags at him: what if it’s something else?

As the pig grumbles forward, Mookie fumbles with the tin in his pocket, a tin sized well for normal hands, but in his hand it looks the size of a button popped off a shirt. With a thumb he lifts the rust-rimmed top (it’s an old lip balm tin, same tin he’s been using for coming up on ten years now) and reveals the peacock-blue powder inside. Just the sight of it makes his temples tingle, his knees go weak, his brow flush with sweat.

He looks down at his cakey blue thumb, a “Smurf thumb” in Blazehead parlance, a classic tell for those looking for Cerulean addicts – and then he thinks, here it is, here’s where I rip open my third eye and see what’s following me.

Mookie pops a callused thumb into the powder–

He presses one thumb to one temple–

Then the other–

The Blue Blazes washes over him.

It’s like being in a ship that’s just starting to capsize. Listing on an unforgiving ocean. Then: a wind of wet heat on his forehead – a hot breath – and at the edges of his vision the ripple of blue flame like a puddle of vodka lit with a Zippo, a ripple that fades fast, taking with it the scales that cover the eyes, that protect the mind, that hide the happy dumb people from the truth of what lies beneath.

It’s then that he sees.

Not roach-rats. Or cankerpedes.

It’s gobbos. Gray snot-slick heads. Yellow fangs. Some loping like dogs, others hurrying along on bent and rubbery legs. A dozen of them. Many with weapons.

Fifty feet in and closing. Forty.
Thirty
.

A few of the gobbos are naked – bulbous genitals like tumors slapping against hairless thighs – while others are robed in tattered rags, rags once the clothing of humans but stolen and torn to ribbons and knotted together in motley patchwork clothing.

Twenty feet.

The pig won’t go faster. Mookie’s going to have to fight. Last thing he wants to do is bring some mob of the Underworld’s finest to the Sandhogs’ door. They’ll never help him if he does something like that.

Ten feet.

It’s then he sees something else–

Behind the Gobbos, something else. Shiny eyes. Long, flashing fingers. A black shape, blacker than night, black like a hole in the Devil’s heart.

Like a Grim Reaper’s cloak.

 

Through the walls, the
lub-dub oonch-oonch
of pounding bass.

Nora steps on the gobbo’s arm. Bones crackle like bubble wrap popping. Anybody poking their head past the door of this strip club back room would see Nora standing on a skinny, greasy man – a divot-cheeked, sallow-faced weasel with thinning black hair matted to his bulbous scalp – with a .38 snubnose pointed at his face.

But she’s Blazing. One of her last doses.

And it shows her that this is a goblin. Little fucker’s been hiding out here at Double Delilah’s, hired as the janitor – which translates to “jizz-mopper” – of this back alley strip joint. While on the side, he’s been slinging bits of Blue to top-shelf customers and well-paid dancers. And, worse, once in a while he kidnaps one of the girls and takes her down into the dark where…

Nora doesn’t want to think about that.

The gobbo bleats and babbles at her in a guttural tongue.

“Oh, no, no, nuh-uh,” she says, pressing down harder on its arm and cocking the hammer of the gun. “Don’t play with me, gob. You’re up here wearing your ugly-ass mask which means you speak English well enough to get by. So speak English.”

“You eat dick!” the gob cries out. “You eat it hard.”

She presses down again. The goblin keens through his wet mouth, eyes shut.

“Why?” the gob asks. “Why do this?”

“First, because you got Blue, and ta-da, I need it. Second, because you’re going to send a message to all your gross little fuck-buddies downstairs.” This, a different message than the one she paid Skint to pass along. “I want you to tell them I’m going to wipe them out. Every last one of you nasty mutants.”

“You?” The gob laughs. “You just a
girl
.”

She puts all her weight on it. The arm-bone beneath gray rubbery flesh cracks. The gobbo howls. “And oh, what a bad girl I am. Daughter of Mookie Pearl, if that name means anything to you.” She sees by the widening bulge of his bulbous eyes that he does. “Now cough up the Blue, freak.”

 

The gobbos hit him hard, a truck slamming into a guardrail–

The first two are fucked from the get-go. Mookie’s chokes one snot-slick monster with the shoulder strap of his satchel. The other gets stuffed up under his armpit. Then the rest are on him, clambering up his shoulders, wrapping themselves around his legs. Yellow teeth tear at his shirt, his jeans. He sees a flash of green above. Sees one atop the others, holding a weapon made of an old wrench – the end spackled with a Q-tip wad of black gunk, which is in turn riddled with shards of green glass from a beer bottle–

The thing brings the green-glass mace down, but Mookie uses the naked gobbo in his grip as a shield. He holds the thrashing creature up just as the mace crashes down on its head, sticking in the thing’s skull and spraying up a mist of oily goblin blood.

They shriek in his ears. Whooping and cackling.

Fucking gobbos.

They must have formed a hunting pack a while back. Been waiting in the dark. Invisible – down here, that’s an option for them. Can’t play that trick up above. Up top they’ve got to look like somebody, so to the Blind they look like miscreants, vagrants, thugs. Some go the effort to get gussied up in other outfits and play different roles – maître d’, cop, pimp. But most just stay at the fringes, acting like one of the many freaks New York City has to offer. Such simple camouflage.

The question here is: how the hell did they breach this tunnel? The easy answer:
They found one of my boltholes
. Probably not the one he just used, but he’s got dozens of the hidden doorways around here. Hell, so does Davey. Maybe one of those doorways isn’t so hidden anymore.

No time to worry about that now.

Mookie tosses the ruined creature in his hand – it splats limp against the curve of the concrete pipe-wall. The one under his arm is starting to bite at his side; he feels teeth sink into the meat encasing his ribs, and he snarls, pressing down with his bicep and squeezing arm to body hard enough that he hears the thing’s spine
snap
like a piece of celery.

Pop
. Drop.
Splurch
.

A pair of gobbos tries to dart past him. But Mookie pivots – a slow turn, as his body is weighed down by shrieking gobbos clinging to him like wolves trying to bring down a charging moose – and reaches out, grabs one by the heel. He drops, using the momentum of his fall to fling the one into the other. They bowl into one another, a tangle of limbs, a clatter of bludgeoning weapons.

Now Mookie is on his back. A gobbo grabs his ear. Tries to rip it off. Another takes a shiv made out of a sharpened toothbrush, starts stitching it in and out of his forearm –
punch punch punch
, blood welling up red and hot. Hands in his mouth. A lashing tubule tongue trying to force its way past his lips. One is pulling at his boot.

But the Blazes run through him full-bore now: a bullet spinning down a rifled barrel, a sweep of fire across a gas-soaked floor. And with the Blazes comes more than just sight. It brings with it high-test clarity and a double-dose of extra strength.

Even off the stuff Mookie’s no weak-kneed Girl Scout – he’s all grizzly, no Care Bear. But on the Blue Blazes, he’s like if an M1 Abrams tank made mad monkey-love with an eight hundred pound silverback gorilla and had a baby, all black fur and olive iron, all guns and treads and swinging fists.

He grabs the stabber gobbo, cranks its shiv-arm upward, smashes its head down on its own weapon – the end of the toothbrush popping up through a rotten eggshell head. The ear-grabber gibbers and wails, and Mookie slams his head sideways into the monster, bowling the goblin backward. Oily gob fingers are still in his mouth; he bites down. The blood is bitter, cloying, tastes like infection – it’s not the first time he’s tasted their blood. Won’t be the last. And as the gobbo opens its mouth to scream in pain, Mookie spits the fingers into the former owner’s wailing mouth.
Ptoo
.

He kicks out with a hard boot. Bones crack, yellow teeth clatter.

He grabs the tongue – a female’s tongue, probably hoping to plant eggs somewhere moist and warm, because once those eggs attach they release toxins into your bloodstream that’ll make you slow and stupid – and winds it around the gobbo’s neck like a weedwacker string. Then he pulls taught.

Gray face goes blue. Cheeks bulging. Black capillaries bursting in ugly goldfish eyes.

Then, for a moment–

All goes dark.

A rippling shape, black as tar, flutters over his head–

Blocking out the light. Whispering as it passes.

What the hell–?

Mookie roars. Stands up, unsure what he just saw. Whatever the hell it is, it’s moving further down the tunnel, toward the distant Sandhogs – and fast. But as he stands, he sees: the two goblins he tossed into the wall aren’t dead or even knocked out. They’re up and at ’em, coming right for him. One’s barehanded, swiping at the air with dirty claws.

But the other’s got a weapon.

A gobbo pop-gun. Not a gun at all, but a short length of iron pipe with a pull tab at the back of it like one of those party-poppers where you yank the string and loose confetti into the air–

This
doesn’t release confetti. It barks a big bang and makes a hard flash – and Mookie suddenly catches a scattershot spray of shrapnel in his side. No idea what it is, but probably nails, glass, stones, gobbo teeth, shattered crystal. And when it starts to burn, sending screaming tentacles of pain up through the wounds in his side, Mookie knows that the stuff was first dipped in goblin poison – rock-snot, or dung-thistle, maybe.

Ahead, the tunnel is swallowed by a haze of smoke–

Mookie staggers left, tries to barrel ahead, but the pain is an immense thing, a thing with shape and presence all its own, pushing on his side and slowing him down–

The gobbos leap for him.

And somewhere ahead, he hears his old friend Davey Morgan scream.

 

Davey Morgan’s got explosives on his mind.

Dynamite, in particular.

Dynamite’s how the tunnel grows. Sure, for a lot of it they can use that big bitch machine, but for sensitive areas of the rock, it’s dynamite all the way.

You drill holes. Drop dynamite into the cavities. Head back upstairs, hit the button and – the ground shakes, the earth booms, and the tunnel’s dug another thirty, forty feet. Then the men clear the rubble, put up more wire cage to keep rocks from dropping on their heads, and the process begins anew.

That’s the job. That’s
been
the job for twenty years.

Davey’s good. They say he’s the best, but he doesn’t care for that kind of talk. He knows he’s good, and that’s enough.

But things are changing soon.

In less than a week’s time he and his men – loyal men, good men,
capable
men – will be underneath the juncture between all three water tunnels. Dynamite’s not a scalpel. It’s not even a fire axe. It’s precise like a hand grenade. You don’t control an explosion so much as politely suggest what you want it to do and then pray. Maybe God gives you what you need. Or maybe God decides to blow your ass sky-high to Saint Pete’s doorstep. You accept the judgment of the blast and move on.

A man a mile.

But soon, they’ll be detonating rock with two other water tunnels fifty feet and a hundred feet above their heads, respectively.

Which means this has to be done right. They’re going to be using dynamite to thread a needle. Davey can no longer be good. He
has
to be great.

Has to get this right or they’re all, as he is wont to say, “fuckered”.

And it doesn’t help that they work down here. On the edge of oblivion. With any number of horrible things coming up out of the dark, smelling the sweat, hankering for blood. They’re the union-within-a-union. The 147½. The last line between the light and the dark. Only makes the job, oh, a thousand times harder.