American library books » Fiction » Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕

Read book online «Move Under Ground by Nick Mamatas (guided reading books .txt) 📕».   Author   -   Nick Mamatas



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threw a worn wallet to the bottom of the boat, a tangle of string, a few soggy cigarettes, a bottle cap, a slim paperback from his jacket pocket, what looked like a chicken bone, and he reached into his pockets again before Charon, “All right, don’t empty your trash out! Just jump!” He put the gun up to Bill’s stone face. “Get your boyfriend to hug you. Two_ maricons _together should be able to float.”

I pushed him, with my brain. The boat, the gun, the river itself. Nothing came—the enlightenment well had run dry. No more miracles, just two sweaty and unimportant little men being poked at by a nasty little deathshead Puerto Rican. I so wanted to rush him but my limbs were heavy and Bill wasn’t with me. He was on his feet, half-staggering. He slipped an arm around my waist almost too comfortably.

_”Muchachos!“_ the ferryman said, “Listen, no hard feelings? Better you take your chances now than face the terror ashore. They might just keep you alive forever, to see your faces when the world turns to dust beneath your feet. Swim to shore, then walk all the way up The Bronx. That’s what I would do if I were you!” Then he kicked me square in the stomach, lightly really, but between Bill, the tanks and the rocking boat I lost my balance and fell headfirst into the drink. The bow of the motorboat loomed overhead as Charon cut hard to get back to Jersey, so we had to put our heads down into the foul water. It was like going headfirst down into a pile of compost, warm and viscous. Bill was a millstone around my waist, holding on tight like I was moored to something. My mouth was sealed, so vomit poured out of my nose and probably my ears as well, as the propeller ate through the water an inch from my face. We burst through the surface and gulped sweet city air. Bill spit up on my shoulder like a newborn and shrugged an arm out from under the shoulder strap of the bug spray cans. As he pulled away, our Charon waved at us, picnic-friendly.

We swam hard for shore. The river was against us, not the current, but the density. Swimming was like making snow angels in the drifts, and Bill could barely swim as it was. “Shit pudding!” he shouted. “This is nothing but shit pudding!” and then he vomited again through his nose because he was so busy yelling and carrying on with his cavern mouth and got it full of shit pudding.

I wanted to ask Bill to just dump the cans but my mouth wouldn’t open for the stench, and it was so hard to even breathe with the heavy river wrapped around my chest. A big wave came and baptized us, slow and heavy. We fought back up to the surface, Bill suddenly stronger than I with his thick fingers wrapped right under my chin. He cursed like a moviehouse cartoon with every stroke, all rassin’ frassin’ umpin’ jumpin’ through lockjaw. I paddled after him, got one of the tanks up over the water, and eventually we hit silt and dragged ourselves up to the pier, a rotting wooden ladder, and finally under the eerily empty West Side Highway. We stood on cobblestoned West Street where it usually rained crashes and noise from above, where junkys and she-hes lurked by the pillars holding up the highway; but it was all empty, blank as pages.

“Wooo!” I shouted. I was covered in river slime and embraced it. “Better a filthy hog than a death cult bean counter any day, right, Bill!” I danced around him—Old Bill was back on his knees, sighing and raking a shit-stained handkerchief over his shit-stained face—his teeth were blacker than usual. “Stand up!” I called out, and he said, “Shut up. I had to drag you through that muck. I’m going to vomit up everything I’ve eaten for the past month.” He stretched out right in the middle of the street and turned onto his belly, and heaved a bit, one more comma in his long retch-inten-sive life.

I started walking, confident he’d pop up and follow me. I wanted to find a YMCA, spend six or seven hours in the steam bath, get some grub in me, and then reconnoiter. There were sure to be some friendlies around, in the old Beat hangouts, the old man bars, the libraries up at Columbia or down by Washington Square Park. Bill wasn’t moving though, so I walked on back to him. He was unconscious in a puddle of brown muck. The streets were still quiet but there was no telling when a huge caterpillar the size of a train car would come rumbling down the street to claim him, or if a bacchanal of cultist insurance adjusters, teeth and nails red with the blood, would appear in a blast of screams and naked limbs to set Bill to rights with Accounts Payable. I looked around, found a small puddle of clear water between two broken cobblestones, cupped as much as I could into my hands and walked it over to pour it over Bill’s mouth, then waited for him to recover his strength.

Chapter Twelve

It took us four starving days to find anyone left with a soul. Most of Manhattan seemed utterly deserted and the ripe smell of recent death hung on entire blocks. Like they had said back in Jersey, we’d sometimes catch a yellowed eye peering out from between curtains or a weak and shaking hand quickly pulling down a blind, but people had either evacuated the city or were right behind us and would duck, a hundred thousand at a time, behind one lamppost whenever Bill or I turned to look over our shoulders. The Y on Twenty-third Street Street was abandoned, but the water ran, so we could drink. We armed ourselves with bricks and went hunting for food, but most bakeries and butchershops we came across had already been looted. At night when the moon never came out, we’d hear the laughter of breaking glass and occasional howls of animal satisfaction. The red stars in the sky kept me from venturing outside. Bill found some toothpaste, and being faint, ate it all without sharing with me.

There weren’t even any pigeons, or squirrels, or rats. The former two I would have eaten. I tore my thick right sock and made a sling of it and took to the streets at the crack of dawn, the lone hunter. The sling would do no good if I ran into any cultists, or any horrible clicking beetlemen or great beasts too horrible to describe, but I was ready for any squirrel the good Lord might send my way. There was nothing for me, and no food in any stores and not even a trail of ants on the sidewalks to follow to a spilled ice cream cone or piece of bubblegum. Leaves curled up all black on the trees, never flaming into autumn or falling. The morning searches made me hungrier too, and my belly growled in inchoate rage at me. I chewed on my fingers, eating little bits of my own salty skin, weak and humbled by mere waiting.

I kicked myself all the way back to the Y, so furious at myself I forgot to keep an ear out for the flap of wings in formation or for a roll left unscavenged from an overturned bread truck. Four days with no food was a cinch. Kids in China did it all the time, and still grew up strong enough to march in place and shout out Red slogans on television. Women in Africa with babies on their withered breasts did it too, and made it to the relief station without so much as a swoon. Indians too did it, I’m sure, trapped on the reservations away from their ancestral hunting grounds. I let out a war whoop to be just like them. If I were an Indian with face paint and feathers I’d fit into this fatal city better. Anything but a plain old white man, demoralized and too clumsy to starve with honor.

Bill met me at crepuscular Washington Square Park that day. He’d had better luck. “I found a guy up in Hell’s Kitchen manning a hot dog stand. There was no street traffic, and of course no cars that were still in one piece, but he was a wrinkled little man who told me that he’d been there for ten years and he wasn’t about to stop now. ‘The game’s crooked, but I’m the only game in town now,’ he said, and he laughed like a black lung miner.”

“Did he want money? How did you pay him?”

“I filled out an I.O.U.” He fished a grayish hot dog on a stale bun out of the pocket of his wrinkled suit jacket, all neatly wrapped in a paper napkin, and handed it me. “He wanted the top pocketknife stories of the Chrysler Building, but I talked him down to the top seventeen. And after this all blows over, I have to spray his flat for free.” I laughed at that, almost spilling my awful bite of frankfurter, but then stopped when Bill said, “He didn’t want the first few floors because they’re filled with human skin. All the bones from the bodies stacked up like bolts of fabric were pulled out of their eye sockets and assholes, he said. I double-checked his story. The vendor was mostly right.”

“What was he wrong about?”

“I wouldn’t call the first ten stories of a skyscraper a ‘few,’ ” Bill said, casual as weather. “So, you ready yet, or do you need to digest?” I wasn’t hungry anymore, but ate anyway and my wiener was gone in three bites. He nodded towards the south and we walked out of the park and down Thompson Street.

“What do you think those hot dogs were made out of?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions, Jack.”

Our determined tromping down to Wall Street to obliterate the Great Elder God who drowned California for appetizers and killed Manhattan as a sorbet stopped at Canal Street, because rather than the garish storefront signs with bold streaks of neon Chinese there was nothing but a wall of cold black flame rising from the yellow traffic lines. Bill just laughed and said “After you, Jackie!” ushering me towards the fire with the wand of his spray tank. I just ran east all the way to the Manhattan Bridge and back, huffing, to Bill. He shrugged and followed me at a more leisurely pace over to the west side. Even exotic Chinatown was abandoned, fish left to stink in the stalls, the ice having melted into slippery puddles already. The payphones still had little pagoda-style roofs, like altars lining the street, but there was nothing holy about that wall of black fire, fire that didn’t cast a shadow on the sidewalks.

The flames sealed the street off from rivers East to Hudson, and neither of us was ready to jump back into the groaning and awful river, which had started bubbling with either life or boiling heat anyway. I tossed a traffic cone into the wall. It sailed right through and to the other side, making the local flames go translucent just long enough for us to see the frozen rubber shatter into a billion needle-thin shards.

“Under ground,” said Bill.

“Under ground,” said I, and we rushed to the nearest manhole and worked together to pull it up. The manhole cover came up easily, as it was already resting a bit off the lip. I rolled it to the side as Bill stuck his head down the manhole, stuck his arm down into the dark and lit his Zippo. “All clear!” he called out while picking himself back up; he ended

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