“I doubt it,” said Garvey.
“I thought so,” said Nippen, and laughed. “I thought that story couldn’t be true.”
“You sure there’s no one down here with us?”
“Yep. Your lieutenant ran through here just a while ago, guns drawn. He’d have shot anyone, no matter what they were doing. I hear they blew up a rat. Scared one of the cops and then just pow, rat was all over the place. That true?”
Garvey reluctantly admitted that that rumor, at least, was probably truer than he’d like, and Nippen laughed.
They continued on. The underground tunnels were a strange, alien place to Garvey. Ribbed metal shafts curved around him like immense tidal waves, sometimes giving way to old, scarred brick crisscrossing over the roof. Passageways of old stone slowly turned into tunnels of shining, alloyed brass. Pipes and tubing would surface along the wall and run for several yards before submerging below the stone. The walls themselves gurgled and chirped and squeaked as unseen things worked for the city above. And all of it stayed down here in the dark, buried here to be forgotten save for those few stragglers like Nippen, or the vagrants who wandered these midnight paths.
As they walked Nippen showed him the maintenance tunnels and the air shafts and the sewage pipes. They were all means of connecting with the surface, one way or another, though all of these were locked tight. Beside each one was a little tube with an earpiece, which Nippen told Garvey connected them to the maintenance man on duty, whoever that was. “It’s usually no one, unless there’s a scheduled check,” said Nippen.
“And there’s one on duty today?”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone’s on duty today. If there’s anyone running around in the tunnels right now, we’ll know.”
But there was no sign anyone had been in the tunnels at all. The rails were clean, or clean enough, with no signs of disturbance. After nearly thirty minutes of fruitless searching they came to an intersection where another tunnel branched off and sloped up into darkness.
“Which way?” said Garvey.
“Let’s see, that trolley that got hijacked, was it the ten thirty-five?”
“Yeah. And no one ever said it was hijacked.”
Nippen laughed and ignored him. “If it’s the ten thirty-five, it came through this way,” he said. He flashed his beam on the tunnel to the right.
“You sure?”
“Oh, sure enough,” he said gladly.
“What happens if you’re wrong?”
“Then we’ll come to some other platform and come out. Most of the time.”
“Most of the time?”
“Well, yeah. Some of these older tunnels don’t lead to the trolleys.”
“They don’t?” asked Garvey.
“No.”
“Then where do they go?”
Nippen shrugged. “Who knows? Listen, this city was built long before we installed the trolley lines. And a city is a big thing, people forget that. There’re opposing forces at work here.”
“There are what?”
“Opposing forces. Everything’s got to balance out. You build big buildings and fill them up with people, all piled up on the rock, so to balance that out you have to make a big underground, pushing back, anchoring it. It’s all floating on the surface.”
“Is it?” said Garvey, giving him a dubious glance.
“Yeah,” he said. “When McNaughton and Kulahee first made the city, they made it deep. The trolley just fills up the empty spaces, really. The spaces they spared for us. You can tell which ones are the old tunnels, they used red brick when they first made them. You see patches of it here and there. I don’t go in the McNaughton tunnels.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to know what’s down there,” he said simply.
Garvey stopped. Something white and crumpled was lying beside the rails. He flashed it with his torch, then walked over to it.
“What’s that?” asked Nippen.
“A trash can,” said Garvey, picking it up.
“A trash can?”
“Yeah. And it’s been beat to hell. Is it normal to find a trash can here?”
“On the rails, no. Maybe in the maintenance tunnels or one of the shafts. But not on the rails.” Nippen scratched his chin, leaving a twist of grease below his lip like a goatee. “Not unless someone threw it out the window or something.”
“Hm,” said Garvey. He tucked it under his arm and continued walking up the rails.
“That evidence?” said Nippen.
“Maybe,” said Garvey. “What’s the strangest thing that’s happened in the tunnels?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know,” he said. “There’s plenty of stuff me and my colleagues have done that was strange enough.” He laughed hoarsely. “But I hear stories. Real stories. About things Kulahee made and they just stuffed down here, stuff they didn’t want to use or think about.” He stopped smiling. “Once I heard there was a maintenance crew sweeping through here and they heard someone. Someone coming out of the McNaughton tunnels. And they followed the sound, listening to the footsteps. And then they saw him. It was a man, but all white.”
“White?”
“Yeah. Like you or me, but totally drained of color. Like it had just been sucked out of him. Even his clothes were white. He turned around and looked at them, his eyes pink as a grapefruit. He’d been picking up cans that had settled in the tunnels. He just looked at them for a while, then he turned around and wandered on, deeper in. They didn’t follow. I wouldn’t have either.”
He and Garvey walked on for a stretch longer, not speaking. “Still,” said Nippen, “they’re just stories.”
They kept moving, Garvey examining every maintenance hatch or sewage pipe. They still had not seen a sign of the platform yet. Garvey was surprised. The trolley had taken only four minutes to go from one to the other. It must have been moving at a tremendous speed.
Suddenly he stopped by one maintenance tunnel, then tilted his head, listening.
“What?” said Nippen, but Garvey held up a hand to shush him. Garvey unlocked the hatch, then drew his gun. He nodded at Nippen to step back, then flung the hatch open. The maintenance tunnel was low and poorly lit, but they could still catch a flurry of movement as someone scrambled down another passageway. “Stop!” Garvey shouted, and bolted after them with his gun drawn and the trash can still under his arm.
He swung around the corner, finger not on the trigger but ready to get there, and stopped. A ragged man was sitting on the floor of a small closet before him, trying to pile scraps of paper and refuse over him in an attempt to hide. His face was covered in sores and his hands were no more than bandage-wrapped claws. He kept his face averted and would not look at Garvey.
Garvey lowered his gun. “Shit,” he said. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The man shook his head.
“I said, what are you doing here?”
“Ain’t nothing doing,” mumbled the man. “Ain’t nothing worth doing.”
“Oh, Christ,” sighed Garvey, and reholstered his gun. “Nippen!”
Nippen came running up the passageway, breathing heavily. When he swung around and saw the vagrant, he said, “Oh, no. Morty! Morty, guy, you’re not supposed to be here!”
“Morty?” said Garvey.
“Yeah, he’s a regular down here. He sneaks down into the maintenance tunnels all the time. We keep telling him to stay out, but he always manages to get in somehow. Morty, come on.” He squatted before the vagrant. “You
