crossed his arms and leaned up against the wall and Samantha did likewise.
They waited for what felt like hours. Then he tilted his head as though he had heard something. He told her, “Wait here,” and slipped away.
She waited in the darkness and eventually put her eye to the crack in the wall. She saw two men in overalls walking down from the street to the center of the bazaar. They had on knit caps and one wore an old overcoat. They came to the center and stood there, waiting, and seemed to grow frustrated as the minutes ticked by. Then Hayes returned to her, slick as a snake, and whispered, “Let’s go.”
They walked out of the booth toward the two men, feeling absurd, like some quaint couple just out for a midnight walk. When they came before the men Hayes nodded at them and said, “Hello. Lovely evening, isn’t it?”
The two men glanced at one another. One was older and thicker with ash-gray sideburns. The other was short and thin, his hair slicked back. The older one said, “You the man we’re supposed to be escorting?”
“I believe so. Are you Tazz’s men?”
“Don’t know nothing about Tazz,” the older one said. “Orders were just to take someone from the bazaar to a meeting. Escort-like.”
“Alone?” asked Hayes.
The younger one nodded. “Alone.”
“And it’s just you two?”
“Yes.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Because there’s a man hiding behind the bazaar wall. Hunkered down with a pistol,” said Hayes. “Is he supposed to be there?”
The two union men shared another glance, this one dismayed.
“He’s protection,” said the older one.
“Leave him here,” Hayes said. “There’s no need for protection.”
“We won’t. We don’t know who the hell you are.”
“I don’t know who the hell you are, either. You’re leaving him behind, anyways. And only one of you is coming.”
“Why is that?”
“Because your protection needs someone to help him,” Hayes answered primly.
The men shared yet another glance. The older one nodded and his partner ran off into the bazaar. After he was a good ways away the gray hair said, “If you’ve hurt a hair on his fucking head…”
“He’ll be fine,” Hayes said. “In the morning. He’ll just need to lie down for a while. I left the gun with him, too, so you don’t have to worry about that, though it’s empty now.”
“Fucking bastard,” said the gray hair.
Soon the young one came running back, face streaked with tears. In between panting breaths he said, “What’d you do to him? You piece of shit, what’d you do?”
“Put him to sleep,” Hayes said coolly. “You’ll want to keep an eye on him. So one of you will have to take us to the meeting spot. Alone.”
The two union men withdrew and discussed it. After a while they returned and the old one said, “Fine. I will. But I am armed. And if you do one fucking thing that I think warrants it I’ll kill you both myself, you fucking snake. You and your goddamn woman.”
“Fair enough,” said Hayes.
The older one led them farther west, down High Street. It was wide and deserted, no cars and no pedestrians. Abandoned buildings marched down the left side, windows broken and sunken roofs yawning wide. Bright yellow signs cheerfully informed them that this block was set for demolition. Then they came to an intersection cordoned off with sandbags. The old man walked by the bags and led them to a long, tall temporary fence circling a part of the street Samantha could not see. They went to a spot where the boards were missing and the old man motioned to climb through. Beside the hole in the fence was a small oil lamp. He knelt and lit it and picked it up. “This way,” he said.
They walked across the cordoned street, passing over more walls of sandbags, and soon came to an immense sunken hole that went right down through the cement. A set of steps had been made with yet more sandbags, their misshapen forms descending into the dark.
“Oh,” said Hayes. “The Dockland trolley.”
“Yeah,” said the old man. “Follow me. Carefully. You can trip and die if you damn well please, though.”
The old man held the lantern out before him and they walked down the shifting steps. Scaffolding and piping crawled around the walls and water ran down into the dark in pattering streams. As they came to the bottom they found they were at the start of an enormous stone tunnel, more than thirty feet high, the walls smooth and sloping and bone-white. At the bottom were tracks for the trolley lines and up above were faint yellow lights. Most were dead, leaving the tunnels in near darkness.
“What is this place?” Samantha asked.
“The Dockland trolley,” said Hayes. “Still in development. Like Construct. Problem with this one wasn’t the ocean, though. No, the contractors soon just found themselves running out of workers, and those that chose to work found themselves beaten in the streets.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the old man savagely.
“Am I wrong?”
“They worked us like animals,” the old man said. “Worked us like dogs.”
“Hm,” said Hayes.
“I was there on one shift when two men were mauled by equipment. Two men, do you hear? And the overseers didn’t care. Didn’t care at all. When the north tunnel flooded after Construct began tipping an entire crew drowned. They told us to go in and start baling it out by hand. That freezing water, always rising. They didn’t care if we died. That was two years ago now and I don’t regret a single thing we done since.”
“And this is where Tazz has gone to ground?” said Hayes. “Interesting choice.” Yet he seemed unsurprised at the revelation.
They continued on through the tunnels, the old man keeping his lantern aloft like some hobbling Charon, leading them to darker, stranger depths. The air grew cold and the tunnel walls were cracked in places from lack of maintenance. Sometimes they heard machinery far beneath them, some massive piston endlessly rotating. Samantha suppressed a shiver at its sound.
The old man took lefts and rights and eventually turned up a long, sloping branch that took them to warmer levels. He veered toward one wall and set into it was a small maintenance passage. As they entered the old man froze and turned to peer back down the tunnel lengths from where they’d come.
“What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” said Hayes.
The old man shushed him and held the lamp high and squinted down the shaft. There was nothing below but gloom and water. The old man grumbled something and lowered the lamp and they entered the maintenance network.
They passed through pipes and maintenance sheds long unused and covered with dust. Shovels and picks and shoes were scattered on the tunnel floor. Many had been gnawed by rats and more than once they saw pink naked tails fleeing into the shadows. Finally they came to a long tunnel that ended in a small door, and as they walked through the wall completely fell away on one side. They stopped short, shocked, and blinked, and saw they were standing on a small stone pathway that ran along one side of what had to be an enormous room, but it was so dark they could not see beyond several feet out. A small iron railing ran along one side but below that the wall dropped away. Samantha could feel the pressure change upon her skin and knew the room had to be incredibly vast. Sometimes there was the sound of dripping, but otherwise the immense hall was silent.
At the far end of the pathway they saw four men standing patiently in the weak yellow light along the wall. As they entered one of the men turned up a lamp at his feet. They saw a broad, boyish face illuminated bright white, eyes clear and untroubled with an easy smile. He was short and stocky but well built, sporting a plain haircut and simple overalls with leather gloves and brogans.
