Brad Goldberg

"Kyle, there's more stairs. Come look!"

I can't see where her voice is coming from.

"Down here!" Now she's shouting. Her voice echoes off the cement and rings off the metalwork. At the end of the narrow space between the fans, there are open metal stairs. Chloe calls from below.

Chloe and I are in one of four ventilation towers that extracted toxic fumes from the Holland tunnel and fed it fresh air. Only two years ago the towers kept over 100,000 people alive in their vehicles every day. Today, they're hulking relics of a time when New York City was throbbing with life instead of teeming with death. They are useless except as an escape route if we could only get inside one of the airshafts.

The next floor down, where Chloe is calling from, is another large fan room. From the top of the stairs, I can see how massive these things are. They are as tall as an adult human. The motors that drive the cylindrical fan blades are the size of truck engines. The drive chains, hanging useless and limp, are heavy enough to pull a locomotive up a steep hill. The blowers themselves look like giant hamster wheels. Everything is protected by thick metal housings.

I try to imagine what it sounded like when they were all running full throttle. It had to have been an intense roar even though the nameplates on the fans proclaim their silence—Whisperflow. The air must've felt alive as it was pulled through the ducts by all those whirling blades. I'm trying to imagine if it felt like a refreshing breeze or an incessant gush of foul city air. The louvers hang limp now. But they would have been drawn open by the air flowing through.

I hear the echo of Chloe's feet running on the metal floor. She's running and the sound pings off the cement walls like gunshots.

"Kyle!" Chloe screams. It is terror interpreted through a ten-year-old girl's high-pitched shriek.

I spin. A decaying Port Authority worker stumbles toward her. He's not going to ticket her for trespassing. He's going to rip her throat open and have her for dinner.

"Kyle!" Chloe's scream reverbs off the cement walls. She is trapped in a narrow space between two huge fans.

Dead eyes are inches from her face. Yellowed, rotted teeth snatch at her neck. I was never a fast draw, but my hands are bandaged from injuries sustained on our trip to Pier 34 and the ventilation building. I ham-hand a Glock 19 out of its holster, but I can't risk hitting her. I fire at the ceiling. The bullet ricos once off the cement and twice off the steel fan housings. The Port Authority worker, still wearing the cheap suit he had on before he turned, lumbers in my direction. He hashad forgotten about Chloe. I am now the only thing on what's left of his mind. I let him get uncomfortably close so that Chloe can move out of the line of fire. He extends fetid, claw-like hands at my throat. I shoot him. I shoot him five times. He falls, but his hands keep reaching for me. His legs spasm in uncoordinated jerks. I may have told you; part of the zombification process is a decentralization of the nervous system. You don't have to kill the brain. They die like anything else, but severed body parts can keep moving on their own. It's unnerving, but they are dead. As in dead.

Let's review. Lying at my feet is a corpsie—zombie, the living dead, walker, undead, abomination, whatever you want to call them. I call them corpsies. They are one of two flavors of death infesting Manhattan and probably the rest of the world. The other flavor is vees, night people. If there were any of them in here, we'd already be swarmed. Their fangs would have pierced a vein, and our blood would have been drained. So, there are no vees. But there might be more zees.

I rush to Chloe, who buries her head in my arms. "Chloe, where'd he come from?"

"I don't know. She shrugs. In there?" She points to a dark passage that threads like a labyrinth around the fans.

I don't need to tell her to stay close. She's come a long way in the few days since I found her hiding in the basement of the abandoned building where I was squatting, but she's not going to stand around alone if there might be corpsies nearby.

The shadows are daunting. Daunting and creepy. Daunting and creepy and terrifying. The gun shots would have brought any of these carrion eaters out of hiding, and I don't see any. That should be reassuring. Tell that to my racing heart. Tell that to my throbbing head. Tell that to my adrenaline-amped nerves. Tell that to Chloe, who's clinging to my leg like an ankle bracelet. Besides, they could be trying to get at us but are confused by the pinging echoes. If I haven't made it clear, corpsies are as dimwitted as the dimmest bulb in a chandelier—the dimmest bulb that's been unscrewed from the socket and stepped on. But they have one instinct, to find food and eat. Right now, Chloe and I are the only food in the place.

At every dark, blind corner I pause, waiting for a corpsie to talon my throat. When I see movement caused by our own distorted reflections in the metallic curves of the fans, I expect a ravenous maw to shred my face. None of that happens. And after every nook, cranny, and crevice is certified corpsie free, we return to our escape plan, which is at a total dead end.

The airshaftsair shafts are the way to get into the ventilation system of the Holland Tunnel. The tunnel itself was sealed off in a vain effort to isolate the infestation of corpsies and vampires to Manhattan. Sealing the tunnels and blowing up the bridges made sense to someone.  I don't know who. It's not like patient zero was isolated here. But when an entire society panics, its plans are riddled with stupidity and prejudice. New York was deemed one source of all that was evil and deadly, so here we are trying to get off an island that the rest of the country has barricaded in a futile effort to save itself.

Back to the airshafts. The only way into the airshafts is to jackhammer through the concrete walls or figure out a way to dismantle one of the fans. That would require some heavy-duty, specialized tools.

Or an acetylene torch.

"Chloe, over here."

An acetylene torch is exactly what was used on the blower housing against the far wall. It is nearly adjacent to one of the main vents, so it would be the shortest route into the tunnel. Next to the abandoned torch, a jagged hole about two feet wide and three feet high is cut into the cowling of the fan. Several of the exposed fan blades are cut away to allow access to the airshaft. We had seen signs that someone else may have tried this route. Now, we have proof. Whoever came before us didn't care about neatness. They just cut where they needed to get through the metal. It is a grotesque gouge, but to me it looks beautiful. It was also a major undertaking. We're probably talking about three or four people at least.

"We have to go in there?"

"Sure," I try to reassure her, "it'll be fun. Like those climbing tubes at McDonalds."

Her exasperated sigh slaps off the walls of the room. "Those are for little kids. They're plastic. You can see through them. And…" Her voice gets quiet. "There's always a parent there. Jordan likes to play in those."

Of all the things that would make her think of her family, how was I supposed to fucking know it would be McDonalds? Jordon is Chloe's younger brother. He and her father came to visit us soon after I took Chloe into my somewhat inept aegis. It didn't go well. Jordon and his father had turned—not to corpsies but to vampires. They wanted to turn Chloe into a vee and take her with them. You can see what an attractive offer that could be tofor a ten-year-old who is glad to be alive. Oh yeah, I had also killed Chloe's mother. Chloe doesn't know that. Mommy dearest had turned into a zombie. She was last seen with her brains bashed out on a bathroom floor one story above where Chloe and I had been sleeping. She was trying to kill me, tear my guts out, and eat them. Still, I have a soft spot for orphans, particularly when I'm partially responsible. But it's her dad and that little creep Jordon that will keep me looking over my shoulder. I think they and an entire hive of their bloodless kindred will be following us to take Chloe into their fold.

If you're starting to get the idea the world is majorly fucked up, you would not be wrong. You want to know how fucked up? I have no clue. But pay attention. I'm sure you'll get the idea.

"I'll be with you the whole time." I will tell Chloe. I'm kind of vamping, because I still haven't figured out how to get Chloe, me, and all of our stuff down to the tunnel. I don't know how far this shaft runs or how steep it is, but I'm guessing far and vertical.

Then I see the ropes. Of course!

Our predecessors needed to solve the same problem. They had to secure the ropes from the top and they're still here. Two ropes are securely lashed to the fan motor. The welder that cut the hole knew not to leave a jagged edge where the ropes would rub against the metal. Where they pass over the cut steel, the edge has been rounded to a smooth lip. The ropes disappear into the darkness of the shaft.

I start to worry that we might run into the first group in the bowels of the Holland Tunnel and that they might not be happy that we followed them. That's stupid. They either made it through to Jersey, or they failed and came back. If they had to retreat, they would have taken the ropes with them at least. No, this is good. Whoever went ahead of us made it out.

I shine my flashlight in the tunnel. It angles sharply, but it's not a straight drop right away. I can only see as far as the main vent. From there it drops off straight down. Climbing in would be like riding a sliding board into an elevator shaft. I pick up a coin-sized scrap of metal and toss it into the tube. We can hear it bounce twice, then slide along the duct until it hits the vertical drop. If it makes it to the bottom, there's no sound to let us know how big a fall it is.

"Let's pull these ropes up and see what we're dealing with." I started pulling end over end. From the weight and the drag, I can tell we have a long way to climb down. We're on the fourth floor, so it's at least 50 or 60 feet to the waterline. How much deeper is the tunnel? I don't know. I guess we'll find out when we get the ropes pulled up. Chloe tries to help by pulling on the ropes with me, but she's really making it more awkward.

"Chloe, as I feed you the rope, I need you to stretch it out neatly on the deck, so it doesn't get tangled. Okay?" I want to keep her busy, but it also makes sense not to have a rat's nest of rope sitting at my feet when I'm done. I'm sure there's an official way to do this so that the rope doesn't get snarled. You can give me a bad rating in the comments section. I've tried to make it clear that I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I try not to think about what it would be like to fall however many feet down a vertical shaft into an underwater tunnel with no one to rescue… sorry, retrieve my body except a ten-year-old girl. I try not to think about what it could be like for Chloe to be left dangling midway down, in total darkness with the only living adult she knows crumpled and broken somewhere below in a black abyss. Oh, yeah. I'm looking forward to this.

When I finally pull both ropes out of the shaft, after getting them tangled in the sliced ends of the fan blades, they each have climbing harnesses still rigged to the lines. This is a blessing I hadn't even imagined. We may not get out of here alive, but at least we have chance to make it into the tunnel.

One of the ropes is also stained red near the end. The harness on that rope has some of the webbing torn. It's not ripped through, but it's badly frayed.

"Is that…"

"No." I cut Chloe off. "Climbing ropes are always marked with red at the end. It's for safety so you know you're… uh… you know… near the end."

"But the other one isn't…" She knows I'm lying. My brief moment of optimism just dropped into oblivion. I'm going down there armed and ready.

 

#

We're fully committed. We just lowered the last of our supplies into the tunnel. As best as I can figure, we're talking about 150 to 200 feet straight down. It took nearly the full length of the ropes to lower our shit to the bottom of the shaft. I'll have to be careful not to use more rope than I need to tie us off or we'll be left dangling short of the tunnel. This is one time the darkness may be a blessing; we won't be able to see how far we have to fall.

"Kyle, I can't. I wanna go back." I don't blame her. This seemed so easy when I first thought of it. Break into the building. Climb down the airshaft. Crawl along the ventilator tunnel to New Jersey. Bam. Done. The reality is the scariest thing I've ever faced. I know fighting hordes of corpsies and vees is pretty scary, but that usually happens fast with no time to think. Now, I can dwell on the consequences of falling hundreds of feet onto concrete. And now that everything we need to survive is at the bottom of the shaft, we have no choice.

"Chloe, we can't go back. All our stuff is down there."

"I don't care. We can get more stuff. The house has stuff. You can't make me do this." She starts to cry. It's no act. She has surrendered to terror. I trytried to hug her, but she pulls away and runs for the stairs. She trips. Her flashlight rolls under one of the huge electric motors. That gives me enough time to catch her. I try to fold her in my arms, so I can hold onto her without her feeling like she's trapped.

"Chloe, shh, shh. It's okay. We can go back to the house. I have some guns with me, and we'll just stay there as long as we have to."

"We can? You're not lying?"

I had kept two of the Glocks for the climb down. I'm pretty sure we could get back to the house, but then we'd be stuck with only a couple of handguns and very little ammo. The house, by the way, isn't the apartment building where we first met. It was a refuge, a sanctuary, a safe harbor where we were able to rest for a few days and restock. We called the brownstone townhouse the vacation house, because it felt like we were on vacation from the bleak job of cheating death every minute of the day.

"Yeah, sure. But I really think you can do this. Did you see how cool those harnesses are?" The critical gadget here is a device you thread the rope through. There's a lever that allows you to control the rate of descent and it can bring you to a full stop when needed.

Chloe enjoyed practicing how to let the rope out slowly, but we were standing on the floor leaning back a little. The worst that would've happened is that we'd have endedend up sitting on our butts. That's different than lowering yourself into a hole that leads to certain death.

"Okay." Her voice is a faint whisper, and the words come out in stutters as she tries to control her fear. "Better than being eaten, huh?"

Gallows humor from a ten-year-old. Such is the world.

"Headlamps on, girlfriend."

"Headlamps on… old man." She had never called me that. It makes her giggle. She looks at me to be sure I'm okay with it. I love it. She pauses. "I bet you're the one that's scared."

If she only knew.

"Okay. I'll go in first and wait for you just inside the hole."

She nods. A little of her bravura has faded.

We feed all of our rope into the hole. The weight pulling on our harnesses is a reminder of how far we need to descend. I know the rappelling position I've always seen is semi-standing as you gracefully walk backwards down the side of a mountain. Ain't happening. I crawl into the hole and slide on my stomach. My feet keep getting snarled in the dangling ends of the ropes. I kick to get my legs free and hope I haven't tangled the two lines together. I catch my shirt on one of the sharp edges of the cut fan blades. At least, I didn't cut myself on the metal. I'm wounded enough. My right hand is throbbing from lowering the bags. It occurs to me, that without this real rock-climbing gear, there's no way we could do this. Thanks, to whoever led the way.

I'm in. The first part of the shaft angles like a pitched rooftop. "Okay, Chloe, I'll be right here waiting for you." She stands on her tiptoes, so she can see me inside the shaft. Our headlamps light each other's faces. "You ready?" She nods. Her lamp wags up and down inside the tunnel. I grab the handle of the controller and let go of the edge. I slide about two feet down the shaft and then stop. The rope holds.

I see Chloe's first leg appearappearing over the edge. Then she sits, holding the top of the cowling. I think I hear her whisper, "I love you, Jordan," before she turns on her stomach and starts to slide herself into the airshaft. She's thinking about her little brother. I wonder if she thinks that, somehow, we're going to save him. Or join him.

"Let's just go to the edge of this slanted part first." Chloe makes a grunt of agreement. She's breathing too hard to form actual words.

There's metallic slide against the concrete. I see one of the Glocks gliding toward the edge. I grab for it but miss it. It slides over the edge. It bangs against the side once, then silence. I waitwaited to hear it hit the bottom. It seems like I'm waiting forever, but it's probably only three or four seconds till I hear a faint crash. Sorry to disappoint you, movie fans, but it doesn't go off. I did have the safety on. I check to make sure the other Glock is still there. The second gun is snug in the holster. At least that much has gone right. So far.

"Are you all right, Kyle? What fell?" Chloe's still a few feet above me.

"I'm fine. It was one of the guns. It might be okay, but we've got plenty once we get down to our bags."

"Keep your light on me, Kyle. Here I come." She moves the handle just a little and slides a few feet then stops. She waits for her breathing to steady then slides a few more feet.

"Okay. Let's rest a minute. Then we'll go for it."

"Mm hmm," she squeaks in agreement.

I hear a giant clock ticking in my head. Each tick echoes like a gunshot in a canyon. I know I have to do this, but nothing about it seems like a good idea.

I've never jumped out of a plane. I've never trusted my life to fifty feet of bungee cord. I don't rock climb, mountain climb, or zip line. I've never parkoured, tightrope walked, or hang-glided. The closest I've come to any of those things is riding roller coasters, which I do like. But I trust in the apocryphal claim that, per passenger-mile, they're the safest form of transportation. So, I have nothing to compare to the sensation of sliding into a dark chasm that's over a hundred, God-damned, feet deep.

I am lowering my body over the edge. Reflexively, my feet flail to find something to steady me, to save me from certain death. I get as far as my waist. My feet dangle. My weight is all on my chest. I looklooked up and seesaw Chloe waiting just a foot above my head.

"Okay. I'll be just below the ledge. Take it slow and easy." Each word came out separately. I had to take a breath between each syllable. I don't know how much of my panic Chloe can pick up on, but I'm doing my best here.

As I slide over the edge, I scrape my chin on the cement. Now I understand why real climbers use their legs to rappel. I also scrape my knuckles because I'm gripping the handle of the braking assembly while sliding on my stomach. Then, I'm just sitting in the harness, dangling but not falling. I don't go any farther, so I can watch Chloe as she slides down to join me. When she has her lower body over the edge she calls. "Are you there?"

"I'm here, Chloe. It's easy once you get over the lip."

She whimpers a little, but I think she was trying to say, "okay."

She lets the rope out and drops into the vertical. Too fast.

"Kyle!!"

She drops past me. Her light whips across my face and keeps going. Then it stops and swings erratically a few feet below. One of the things we learned about these rigs while we were practicing is that they have some kind of panic failsafe. It stops if you start going too fast. I wish I had had a chance to read the directions. I would feel a lot more comfortable if I weren't just guessing at how they work.

"Kyle. I'm okay." She's gasping a little. But she's got it together.

"Okay. Stay there. I'll come to you. And we'll keep going."

The first ten feet or so we move like we're having some kind of spasm attacks. Not releasing the rope enough so we barely move, then releasing it too much so we drop a few feet then bounce and swing. Every time that happens, I feel like I'm about to go into free fall. Chloe lets out little gasps when she drops faster than she wants. But then we get the hang of it. We learn to keep the pace easy and steady. I keep looking up. There's still a soft glow at the top of the shaft. Light from the louvers in the fan room still flows through the hole in the housing. The crook in the shaft, our slanted entry point, is a soft rectangle of illumination. It is smaller and farther away then I feel it should be. Doesn't matter. It's totally out of reach.

I look down. There is no bottom. My headlamp only lights ten or twenty feet of the cement walls. Then it fades into total darkness. No matter how far we lower ourselves, the view looking down never changes. But looking back up, our former safe haven is the size of a small Post-it.

"How you doing, Chloe?"

"Okay. Are we almost there?"

Seeing Chloe descend next to me is the first time I've had a chance to watch her and realize how amazing she is. I may have mentioned that I don't know a lot about kids, but even using a yardstick for adults, she's way out in front of what I expect from people. She's done or experienced things most people I know couldn't handle. Which is why most people have either made a run for it or are vees or zees or dead. I don't know how long she was on her own before I found her, but my best guess is about a week.

It's been ten days since I scared the shit out of her in the basement of the building over in The Village. I thought I was hunting invading vees, so I yelled about killing anything that moved. She thought I was going to kill her. If she hadn't been crouching on the floor, I may have. I was sure I was facing a vee. I was armed and stupid. I was pointing an AR-15. I had three Glocks holstered around my waist. I hadn't bathed or shaved in months. And I had just screamed that I was going to kill anything in the basement. She was terrified, mostly of me. In the split second it took me to look down, I realized I didn't need to kill a ten-year-old girl. When I realized that I had seen her picture in a locket around the neck of the corpsie I had killed the night before, the horror of her life burned my stomach like acid. That's when I vowed to get the girl I had orphaned out of Manhattan to a safer life.

In a little over two weeks, she's left her mother for as good as dead, turning into a corpsie. She probably watched her father and brother get attacked by vees. She's never talked about how her dad and Jordan were turned, but I have to assume she was with them and somehow escaped. She's thrown in with a stranger whose survival skills are only evidenced by the fact that I'm not dead, but I can't claim to have exhibited any real competence. She's defied her father/vampire who could have killed us or turned us both if he had wanted. She watched him walk away with her brother, whom she dearly loves. She's trekked across Manhattan with no guarantee that my plan will lead to anything better than an agonizing death. She's engaged in close combat with zombies and killed two of them herself. She's seen me kill more corpsies than I can count. And now she's descending into the black unknown on 150 feet of rope with 30 minutes of training from someone who's never been climbing before.

All of that explains the deliberateness with which she performs every move. She never takes her eyes off the rope. Her lips move when she operates the handle of her climbing rig as if she's reciting the instruction manual that she's never seen. For a ten-year-old, she has eyes that carry all that she's witnessed. They're a clear blue, and you can almost see the laser focus with which she uses them. Her skin is now covered with a thin veneer of soot, but the hardships of the last year have tanned it to the same color as her hair, not quite blond but not brown either. Her hair is pulled back with a neon yellow, now faded, ponytail tie. She's probably five or ten pounds underweight because of the deprived world we inhabit. But the stress of staying alive has made her stronger than any kid her age I've ever met. Her hands look like she's been playing hardball without a mitt. The nails are chewed or broken. There are bruises on the back of her hands and a couple of rope burns. Her knees are scraped and there's a bad black and blue mark on her left shin from where she banged into a fence during one of the scarier moments of the last few hours. In short, her life has been fucked to pieces, but here she is surviving, which she does with extreme intent.

"We're at least halfway." I think that's true. Upwards the rope disappears into darkness, and the small, lit rectangle is impossible to use as a gauge. Down, it could be ten feet or ten thousand. There's no way to tell.

"What if we don't make it to the bottom?" Chloe's question literally echoes in the well of silence.

"We will. We know the ropes are long enough because we lowered everything down with them. And because whoever brought them here managed to get out." I pull on the loose end of my rope. It feels considerably lighter. I'm feeling confident. "We're going to be fine Chloe."

We must be below the waterline, because the temperature starts to drop. It's not that cold but it emphasizes our isolation. We could be on the moon. We are as far from fellow man, or fellow beast for that matter, as I ever believed possible. Even Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had the rest of their team for most of the climb. Then they had each other. Well, I've got Chloe.

I keep looking for some sign that we're near the bottom. I swing the free end of my rope, thinking I should hear it dragging on the cement, but I don't. Then, instead of my light just fading into a rectangle of blackness, I see some shapes. At least I think I do. That would be our backpacks and duffels. A few more feet and they change from shapeless shadows to solid objects.

"Chloe, look down."

"I don't want to, Kyle."

"No. You want to." I watch her lamp slide along the wall toward the bottom.

"We're there!"