Bloody Horowitz (28 page)

“Where are we?” Tammy whispered.

Herb hadn't even noticed her beside him. He pointed at another sign, faded but still legible.

59th STREET. COLUMBUS CIRCLE.

What had happened here? It was as if an old subway station had gotten itself tangled up with a cavern out of
Jurassic Park.
It didn't belong to one world or another. Herb had once seen a movie where the world had been destroyed by a nuclear war and the survivors had huddled together in the ruins that were left. It was a bit like that here. And hadn't they been ruled over by talking monkeys or something? Herb wouldn't have been at all surprised if an ape in a suit came strolling up to them now.

Someone was indeed approaching.

“Herb . . . ,” Tammy whimpered.

It wasn't an ape. It was a man, perhaps the same man they had seen at 107th Street. He was dressed in an old raincoat that might have come out of a charity shop, tied around the waist with a piece of rope and so baggy that it was almost impossible to tell if the man was fat or thin. He had a knitted hat, a scarf around his neck and mittens on his hands. He was limping slowly along the platform, and as he got closer, they saw that his head was almost completely covered with bandages. It was only when he reached them that they saw why.

His face was rotting away. What skin they could see was gray and pitted with blisters and sores. One of his eyes was covered with a patch, but the other one was in a bad way too, red and swollen with some sort of liquid oozing over the lid. Part of his upper lip had been eaten away so that all his front teeth showed, giving the impression that he was either smiling continuously or howling silently in pain. His throat had partly caved in. Herb and Tammy could see the sinews, red and glistening, stretching down beneath his chin.

The three of them stood frozen in the doorway, not wanting to leave the train. Herb had dropped his hat. Madison was crying. And yet the man didn't seem to want to harm them. He raised a hand in greeting. Herb noticed that it was missing two fingers.

“You are welcome,” the man said.

“I . . .” Herb swallowed hard. As the man spoke, his sinews visibly rose up and down as if they were the cables that controlled his voice box. Herb couldn't tear his eyes away from them.

“We're not staying!” Tammy screeched. “We're not leaving the train!”

“I'm afraid that train's not going anywhere,” the man told her. “Not for a while.”

“Mommy . . .” Madison was crying harder than ever. Tears streamed down her cheeks and dripped off her chin.

Two more people approached. One was dressed vaguely as a nurse—but her dress and jacket were torn, a dirty off-white. She had no nose. The center of her face was a black, gaping hole that seemed to be trying to suck the rest of her features in, like water down a drain. Ginger hair sprouted from one side of her head. The other was bulged and shaped like a cauliflower. With her was a child in a dirty tracksuit, younger than Madison, bald with bulging eyes and skin covered with boils. It was impossible to tell if it was a boy or a girl.

“Hello and welcome,” the nurse exclaimed. “If you'd like to come through to registration, we'll find you somewhere to stay.” She waved the stump of her arm at the row of beds. She had lost her hand well above the wrist. “I'm afraid you'll have to use the public dormitory tonight. We hate doing that, especially for a family of three. But . . . you know! The paperwork!”

“Step out, folks,” the man added. “We're not going to hurt you and the sooner we get you registered, the sooner you can grab something to eat and get a wellearned rest.”

Clutching hold of each other, Herb, Tammy and Madison shuffled forward. Madison was still carrying her cell phone, but of course it had no signal down here. They were aware of people everywhere, shuffling out of the mouths of the caves, standing on the catwalks, peering around the corner of the train. No—not people. These were half-people, missing arms or legs, supporting themselves on crutches or old invalid chairs, rotting away even where they sat or stood.

“Look,” Herb began, struggling to find the right words. He had never felt like this before. Words were his currency. Words were his power. They were his life. “There's been a mistake . . .”

“We can sort this all out in the office,” the man said. “By the way, I'm Tom Callaghan. I should have introduced myself. And this is Sister Wendy with her daughter, LaToyah. She'll be looking after your medical needs.”

“Who referred you?” Sister Wendy asked brightly.

“Nobody referred us,” Herb replied.

For the first time, Sister Wendy and Tom Callaghan exchanged a look of doubt. “But you came in on the X train,” she said.

“We were going to the Museum of Natural History!” Tammy wailed.

There was a long pause.

“We'll talk about this in the office,” Tom Callaghan said.

The office was at the end of the platform, on the other side of a huge pair of wooden doors that might have been taken from a library or a town hall. Tom Callaghan and Sister Wendy went in with the Johnsons. LaToyah had drifted away.

They found themselves in a large, square room filled with filing cabinets and lit by a dusty chandelier. A red carpet—shabby and frayed—lay stretched out on the polished wooden floor. An ornately framed picture of Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, hung on one wall, with an American flag propped up in the corner. Velvet curtains hung ceiling to floor on two sides but there were no windows. A slim black man in a suit sat behind an oversized desk, facing the door. He was in his sixties, with grizzled silver hair and spectacles that hung crookedly on his face, mainly because he was missing one ear. The man had no lips. His teeth, quite possibly fake, were kept in place with two elastic bands that went all the way around his head.

“Come in!” he exclaimed. “Take a seat.” It was difficult to make out what he was saying. He spoke as if he were eating a meal at the same time. “I'm Obadiah Harris. And you are . . . ?”

“Herb Johnson. My wife and daughter.”

“They came in on the X train,” Sister Wendy said.

“But they weren't referred,” Tom Callaghan added in a low voice.

“Weren't referred?” Obadiah Harris seemed almost amused by the thought. He waved the others away. “You can leave us together,” he said. “It looks like we may have some explaining to do.”

“And then what?” Callaghan wouldn't give up.

The man behind the desk raised his hands. He had two of them, although not a full set of fingers. “We'll work something out.”

He waited until the two of them had gone. The doors swung shut behind them. Then he examined the Johnsons. “I have to say,” he muttered. “You don't look sick.”

“We're not sick!” Tammy exclaimed. “There's nothing wrong with us!”

“Then what are you doing down here?”

“We took the wrong train!”

“I don't see how that's—” Harris broke off. “Maybe you'd better start at the beginning. Where you live, what you were doing in Manhattan and how you came to take the X train. Don't leave anything out. We've got plenty of time.”

Herb assumed that the man was talking to him and was about to begin, but instead it was his wife who silenced him with a scowl and then launched into an explanation that began with the TexChem case, the unwanted vacation, the Wilmott Hotel, the decision to take the subway and (although she was a little muddled about what exactly had happened and where exactly they had gone) the decisions that had brought them here.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” Obadiah Harris sighed. “This
has
happened before, but not for a very long time. The X train only runs once a day and at a very specific time. I'm afraid to say you people have been extremely unlucky.”

“Where are we?” Herb demanded. “What is this place? Who are all you people?”

“I'm going to tell you everything you want to know, Mr. Johnson. I can understand you being upset. But please remember, we didn't invite you here.”

“Where is here?”

“Well . . .” Obadiah shook his head regretfully. He had been handsome once when he was young. But for the missing ear and lips he might still be. “I'll keep this brief because we can talk more when you've had a chance to get used to all this,” he began. “But somehow you've found your way into a community of people who, not to put too fine a word on it, are pretty sick. There are over three thousand of us living down here . . . living and dying because there's plenty of that too. What we have is a disease.”

“What disease?” Tammy asked. Her eyes were wide and staring. Even as she sat there, she was trying to shrivel into herself as if she could find some protection from the air around her.

“There's no name for it. Never has been. That's part of the problem. Ever since it was first diagnosed—and that was more than a hundred years ago—nobody has been able to work out what causes it . . . or if there's a cure. They say the first poor soul who caught it was a man called Lebowski, and there are those who would like to name it after him, not that he would have wanted the honor. He's been dead a long time now, buried under platform nine. But it wasn't his fault. He came from Poland; there are people who say the disease began there. Only that doesn't make any sense because nobody in Poland has it. Nobody in Europe has it. Nobody outside Manhattan has it. Just people who live here. They catch it, they get sick and they come down here.”

“Why not to a hospital?” Tammy asked.

“No point going to a hospital. You see, the disease is like a rotting sickness. I can see the way you're all staring at my mouth. And maybe you've noticed my ear. Just as well you can't see what's happened to my stomach under this suit, but put it this way—if this were Christmas, I could hang the decorations on my ribs.” He sighed. “Once you get the disease, you just begin to rot away, one piece at a time, and there's nothing anyone can do. And it's worse than that. The sunlight makes it worse. It's a bit like vampires.” He glanced kindly at Madison. “I'm sure you've read about them. They go out in the daylight, they shrivel up. Well, with us, the sunshine just makes us hurt and it makes the illness quicken up and it makes us rot even more.”

“So you've come down here . . .”

“The authorities didn't know what to do with us when the sickness first broke out. They were frightened, you see, that we'd cause a panic in the city. An illness that came from nowhere and that nobody could cure? To begin with, they kept us on Blackwell's Island just off Manhattan in the East River. Later the name changed to Roosevelt Island—but then they needed Roosevelt Island for other things, so they moved us again. That was at the turn of the century, the twentieth century, when they were building the New York subway system. They found an area specially for us and we've been here ever since.”

“But what do you do here?” Herb demanded. “What do you do?”

“There isn't much we
can
do,” Obadiah replied. “We look after each other and we look after ourselves. Occasionally, government doctors and scientists come visit, but they've long since given up on us. They've tried drugs. They've tried radiation. Nothing works. So they send us food and money to help us keep going, but nowadays they more or less leave us alone.”

“And the X train . . . ?”

“That's how new patients reach us. Of course, the Manhattan doctors know about the disease and they recognize the symptoms. If anyone in the city gets sick with the big D, they get sent to us on the X train. We meet them and look after them just like we met you.”

“But we haven't got the disease!” Tammy exclaimed. For the first time she was glimpsing a way out of this. “We took the X train by mistake!”

“That's right, Mr. Harris,” Herb weighed in.

“Herb . . . ,” Tammy began.

“Leave this to me, Tammy.” Herb leaned forward. “You only have to look at my wife, my daughter and me to see that we are completely healthy. We're just tourists who happened onto the wrong train quite by mistake. So if you don't want me to sue you and the people who look after you and everyone else who knows about this totally crazy situation, you'll put us back on the X train and send us back where we came from, and maybe, if you're very lucky, we'll forget that any of this ever happened.”

“I'm afraid it's not quite as easy as that, Mr. Johnson,” Harris replied.

“Why not?”

The older man rubbed a finger across his chin. “Well, to start with, there's the question of national security.”

“What about national security?”

“I've already told you. Nobody knows about this community. Nobody has heard about the disease. You seem like a reasonable man to me, sir. How do you think the people of New York would feel if they found out that there were three thousand of us down here?”

“I don't give a damn about the people of New York! I never even wanted to come to New York in the first place! I'm going back to Texas with my family. We're never coming back here again.”

“Well, that's the other problem, sir—”

“Listen.” Suddenly Herb was angry. “I've had enough of this. I don't want to talk to you any more. Just give me a yes or a no. Are you going to show us the way out of here?”

“Mr. Johnson, you must let me explain—”

“Yes or no?”

“I can't.”

“Then to hell with you!”

Herb sprang into action. He was only a small man, but he could move surprisingly fast when he really had to, and he was well built after many sessions in an exclusive gym. In one movement he stood up, sending his chair toppling behind him, and grabbed hold of his wife.