“Nate, hang tight.”
“What?”
“Hang tight,” Quinn repeated. Copy…
“Nate?” Quinn said.
There was nothing but dead air. They had moved out of range.
Ahead, the tunnel seemed to go on forever. The beams of their flashlights pushed the darkness back only so far before the black took over again.
“What
It was the rumble. It had grown louder as they moved deeper into the tunnel.
“Subway,” Quinn said.
Though the noise was basically constant, it ebbed and flowed like trains would do as they moved through the busy New York system.
“Something up there,” Quinn said.
An opening in the wall along the right.
As they neared it, Quinn’s first guess was an intersection tunnel. But soon he saw that whatever it was, it was covered by an old wooden door. Decades of dampness, with an assist from unseen termites, meant at best it had only a few more years before it fell apart on the spot.
But the door wasn’t the only thing that was deteriorating.
“Smell it?” Quinn said.
“Yes.”
He shoved at the door with the end of his flashlight. It resisted at first, then began to swing open, scraping the floor as it did. The smell was stronger now, almost overpowering. What made it worse was the noise that accompanied it, a combination of smacking and chomping.
As Quinn shone his light into the room, dozens of rats scattered in every direction. Several even headed out the door and between Quinn’s and Orlando’s feet.
“Dammit!” Orlando said as she jumped to her left.
“You all right?” Quinn asked.
“I swear to God one of them tried to crawl up my leg.”
Quinn scanned the room with the light again. Except for the most tenacious ones, most of the rodents were gone now. Those that remained glanced up every few seconds, seeming to dare Quinn to try to make them leave.
In the center of the room was the feast they’d all been enjoying. The body of a man.
Quinn stepped across the threshold. Again the rats looked up but didn’t move.
The space appeared to be an old equipment room, long retired. There were bolts extending up out of the floor where machinery had once been secured. Pipes, some as wide as six inches, stuck down from the ceiling in a group. They were all truncated, their open ends either once connected to the long-gone machines or created that way to serve as conduits for cables and wires to pass through to the world above. There were no other doors out, no storage cabinets, no tunnels in the floor. Just the rats, and the memory of the machines, and the dead guy.
“Too well dressed to have been living down here, don’t you think?” Orlando said.
She had come in behind him, and was following close, flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. Quinn thought if another rat came within a few feet of her, she’d shoot it.
“Yeah,” Quinn said.
The body was wearing a suit. Dark gray, and made with expensive-looking material. And the man’s shoes. Mezlans. At least three hundred dollars a pair. Not the kind of outfit you’d expect a tunnel dweller to be decked out in.
The man was lying on his back. His suit was open, and the shirt had been ripped by the rats to get at the flesh underneath. There was even more damage along the man’s neck and jaw, but his face was largely still intact.
“I think we can rule out natural causes,” Quinn said.
The corpse’s most prominent facial feature was not one he’d been born with, nor one caused by the rodents feasting on him. It was a bullet hole, a half inch above his right eye.
“He look familiar to you?” Quinn asked.
Orlando shook her head. “Someone you know?”
I’m not… sure.
He took a step forward and looked hard at the man’s face.
The state of the dead didn’t always resemble that of the living. It was in the way the muscles let go, relaxing for the last time. But Quinn had seen plenty of dead, and had learned how to see the living in the decaying flesh.
And there was something familiar about this guy. Not the familiarity of someone Quinn knew personally, but more like someone he’d seen before. In pictures, or on TV, or something like that.
But no name came to him.
