Discount Armageddon

clipping it to my belt before saying, “Close your eyes. I’m going to turn the light on.”

“What?” asked Dominic.

I flipped on the cave light—a miniature halogen designed for deep spelunking and hunting basilisks in the woods on moonless nights. Dominic’s pained yelp told me he hadn’t listened. “I warned you,” I said, and turned to survey our surroundings.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the tunnel we were in was labeled as “generic New York sewer tunnel, model 16-C” on the official maps. The walls were just the right shade of grimy, slightly-mossy concrete gray; the slime covering the floor was just the right depth, with just the right questionable texture. I glanced up and nodded, satisfied. “Thought so.”

“What are you talking about, you insufferable woman?” demanded Dominic, still scrubbing at his eyes in an effort to recover from looking directly into my halogen light. The gesture was made amusingly awkward by the short sword he was holding in one hand, which begged the question of where, exactly, he’d been hiding the sword before he got into the sewer.

“Look up.” I jerked a thumb toward the ceiling to better illustrate my point.

He looked, scowl turning slowly into a bewildered frown. “What am I looking at?”

I decided to take pity. If I didn’t, we’d be standing in the faux sewer all afternoon, and that was so not the way I wanted to spend the hours before my shift. “Look at the light fixtures.”

“I don’t see what you’re talking a—oh.”

“Yeah.” The light fixtures dangling from the concrete ceiling were ostensibly for use by city maintenance personnel. That would have worked fine, if they’d actually been functional. With my cave light directed at the bulbs, it was clear that they might look like lights from a distance, but were really nothing but blown glass covered in Halloween store cobwebs. They even had lengths of yarn where the filaments should have been, guaranteeing that no amount of tinkering would get them to turn on.

“Monstrous deceits,” snarled Dominic.

I turned to face him, careful to keep my light aimed downward as I gave him a dubious look. “What, swapping a light bulb for a decoy is a monstrous deceit in your world? Remind me never to eat the last of the Thin Mints.”

“What’s a Thin Mint?”

“That’s it: after we save the world, we’re finding some Girl Scouts to mug for cookies.” I did a slow turn, checking the tunnel branches around us. There were three. Two of them looked naturally broken-down and unpleasant, while the third wouldn’t have looked out of place in a midnight monster movie. “That way.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s the one that looks like it should have a sign warning us not to go near the castle. Come on.” I started picking my way carefully through the sludge. It might be there for effect, but that didn’t mean I wanted to get any more of it into my shoes than I had to.

“I don’t understand,” said Dominic. This didn’t stop him from muscling his way forward until he was pacing next to me, his shoulders making the tunnel a substantially tighter squeeze than it would have been if we’d been walking in sensible single file.

“Look: we’re not actually going to walk into anybody’s living room,” I hoped; the city cryptids would never forgive me for that, “but we’re definitely walking into somebody else’s territory. Most of the sewers and subway systems are inhabited, and I don’t mean by the human homeless. Although the humans may make up a serious chunk of the total population. I don’t know, I don’t keep track. What I do keep track of is our local cryptids, and this ‘don’t look here, ooh, spooky’ sort of setup is classic bugbear.”

“Doubtless you’re overlooking the human homeless because they’re supplementing the diets of your precious bugbears.”

I rolled my eyes. Thanks to the dark, he never saw it. “Bugbears don’t eat people. What are they teaching you Covenant kids, anyway?”

“So what do bugbears eat?”

“Usually? Trash, half-rotten meat, whatever they find that looks interesting and isn’t actually alive. They’re not big on eating living things. Or hunting. Or cooking.” Your average bugbear can set an apartment building on fire trying to make a bag of microwave popcorn. It’s either a supernatural power, or they’re really, really dumb about technology. Possibly a little of both. “They’re not harmless, but they’re not big contenders in the ‘fucking with you’ department.”

The sludge on the floor dried up as we walked, giving way to smooth-worn concrete. The tunnel slanted down shortly after that, easing us deeper into the bowels of Manhattan. I glanced at Dominic, trying to assess whether he’d caught the descent. Judging by the way his lips were narrowed, he had.

The walls were beginning to look less horror movie “all hope abandon,” and more legitimately weathered. The lower we got, the less effort the locals would have needed to put into making the transit authorities look elsewhere. “The top layers are likely to be bugbear and maybe—maybe—Jersey devil territory. Under that, we’ll have the hidebehinds, and under them, the subterranean bogeymen.” There were various other underground races we might encounter, but those were the big guys: the ones with sufficient numbers to have a say in what passed for local “government,” and sufficient intelligence not to mess with us unless we threatened them.

“Beyond that?” asked Dominic.

“Beyond that, according to Sarah, we’ll find our dragon.” A rat squealed ahead, alerting its relatives to our presence before darting back into the shadows. Its presence was a good sign. If there’d been cave basilisks around, there wouldn’t have been rats. I’d rather risk a little bubonic plague than a lot of turning to granite, thanks.

“I’m not equipped to kill a dragon,” said Dominic, sounding uncertain and faintly peeved. “I’m not even sure how you’re supposed to start.”

“Neither am I, but we’re not killing it, remember? We’re just finding out what the situation is, and if somebody’s stupid enough to be trying to wake the damn thing, we stop them.” The tunnel in front of us divided at a Y-bend, both branches proceeding identically into the dark. I stopped, frowning. “Cute.”

“I don’t suppose you have some great wisdom in the arena of sewer exploration?” Dominic asked. I shot him a look, and he met it with an amused quirk of his lips. “You seem to know everything else. I thought perhaps you’d been concealing a background in spelunking until the right dramatic moment to reveal it.”

“No, that’s my grandmother’s hobby, not mine.” I dug through my bag until I found a pair of high-bounce balls I’d purchased earlier from supermarket vending machines. I held them up for Dominic to see. “We can, however, consult the oracle.”

His expression turned dubious. “Your oracle is a pair of rubber balls?”

“Round rubber balls,” I said, and stepped forward, bending to place the balls carefully at the mouths of the two tunnels. “Okay. Watch the balls, not my ass.”

“I assure you, madam, your, ah, ass is of no pressing interest to me whatsoever.”

I smiled into the darkness. “Of course it’s not,” I said, and let the balls go.

Any kid can tell you that a high-bounce ball, when released, will immediately start making a break for freedom—even if you put it down on a completely level surface. The sewer tunnels were far from level. The two balls began rolling forward at the same pace, but the ball on the left started gaining speed almost immediately, accelerating until its brother was left in the proverbial dust. I straightened.

“We go that way,” I said, pointing down the leftward fork.

I was expecting at least a token argument, but to my surprise, Dominic nodded. “We’re trying to go down, so that makes sense. I do have to wonder—how long were you intending to wander around blind?”

“You didn’t have a problem with it when we were deciding to come down here,” I said, starting down the left fork. The light went with me. Dominic, not wanting to be abandoned in the dark a considerable distance beneath the streets of New York, followed.

“Since I don’t think maps exist for this sort of thing, I still think this is the best idea. But is there any way to start narrowing down where we ought to be looking?”

“There are maps of the New York sewer system, but they probably won’t extend to cover the areas we’re heading for.” I sighed. “I wasn’t expecting to come down here without having time to