The Night Market (2 page)

Yael paused to consider the opening. It was at waist
height and constricted so that she would have to crawl to fit, pushing the
duffel ahead of her. She shrugged, stripped off her windbreaker and gas mask
and shoved them in her bag.

She picked her way up through the rubble to the
opening, pausing to shine her flashlight in to confirm that it went through. It
was narrow, but after a moment of consideration, Yael decided that she could
manage. She took a deep breath, stretched out both shoulders, then clenched her
flashlight between her front teeth.

The duffel went first and then Yael followed, her arms
extended in front of her and her legs extended flat behind. There was enough
space when she lay flat, but every time she moved, her shirt scraped against
the uneven rubble above her. The air in the opening wasn’t entirely stale, but
it was warm and dusty, which made it difficult to breath. The flashlight
rattled between her teeth and sweat dripped down her face and tickled her nose.

Yael crawled forward, making progress by inches,
pushing with her toes and digging into the loose soil beneath her with her
fingers. She had trouble maintaining the position she needed her neck to be in
order to keep her face above the dust stirred up by the duffel bag but below
the jagged roof. It caused the back of her neck and the muscles across her
shoulders to cramp, forcing her to pause and rest, but the longer she stayed in
the narrow space, the more her shoulders ached.

Halfway through, Yael told herself, not at all certain
that it was true. She pushed with the toes of her boots and tried not to worry
about the things she felt scurrying in her hair and across her back. She had to
negotiate a hump in the middle of the passage, a swelling of the ground that
had no corresponding change in roof level. Yael’s shoulders and neck had
cramped too badly for her to think it over.

Yael forced her shoulders through the space by brute
force, sucking in and then holding her breath until her ribcage cleared the
swelling. She was seeing stars by the time she finally gasped for air, her
stomach pressed against the bump on the floor. Yael scrambled for purchase for
what seemed like a long time and then spent even longer twisting until she found
an angle she could manage to fit her hips through. Even then, she tore skin
everywhere the tights had rolled back.

She made good progress for a little while, then the duffel
stuck on a protrusion or narrowing of the passage and all Yael could do was
press against it with her hands and trapped arms, wondering if she would have
to leave everything behind, wondering if there was even enough space for her to
attempt to go back. Her sweat pooled on the dusty rock beneath her face. Yael
found herself obsessed with the idea that she would die that way, confined and
unable to move from the position.

The bag dislodged like a cork from a bottle. Her
heartbeat was so loud that she could have sworn it echoed in the tiny space
like the reverberations of an enormous drum. Yael felt air on her face from the
opening in front of her and lost any sense of caution. She wriggled forward
frantically, ignoring the outcroppings and sharp areas that tore at her hips
and arms, snagged her hair and bruised her shins. She didn’t care. Nothing, at
the moment, could matter more than the ability to move freely.

Her head emerged into oily darkness, stale with years
of inactivity. Yael was almost overwhelmed with gratitude. Muttering a
half-remembered prayer under her breath, she finished the process of extracting
herself from the opening, mangling the Hebrew as badly as she did the skin of
her lower back.

Yael didn’t climb down the few feet to the tunnel floor.
She fell, collapsing in a heap at the base of the rubble, waiting for her heart
to stop pounding and the adrenaline to dissipate from her shaking body. She
rubbed her hands together as they came painfully back to life, numb from being
extended for so long, wondering if she would be sick before the dizziness
subsided.

It was only after she regained her bearings that she
admitted to herself that the space was the smallest, by far, that she had ever
managed.

Her bag hit a rail and she tripped over it in the
darkness, spilling into an open tunnel on the other side. The space was huge
relative to where she had been, big enough to fit a subway car. Yael paused to
examine with the thin beam of her flashlight the various scrapes and bruises
she had earned, before digging her jacket and mask out of her duffel bag. She
felt better with the mask on and her hood up, despite the heat. She continued
down the tunnel, elated with her own bravery. Yael had become very nearly
optimistic, despite the length of the tunnel and the sweat collecting above her
upper lip underneath the mask.

Until she saw the rat.

“Nice… Well, nice rat, I suppose…”

The tracks running down the middle of the tunnel were
mangled and overgrown with a thick layer of purple moss, but she kept clear of
them, one gloved hand running along the stained and moist cement of the wall.
The LED bulb in her miniature flashlight was particularly intense in the permanent
dark of the underground. It cast a brilliant white circle on the bend in the
tunnel in front of her. In the center of the pool of light, the largest rat
that she had ever seen blinked lackadaisically at her.

“Please don’t... Or, should I say... I’m sorry,” Yael
chattered nervously. “This is probably your home, isn’t it? I’m just passing through.
You don’t mind, do you?”

Yael pressed herself against the wall of the tunnel,
her hair in a tangle of spider-webs, doing her best not to breathe while the
rat walked by on the rusted rail, hairless tail waving in agitation. She
counted the seconds as it walked past, sparing her the occasional glance but
never stopping. She watched the rat continue on the way to the tunnel entrance,
only able to move again when she could no longer see its eyes reflecting the glare
of her flashlight.

The tunnel stretched onward into the darkness, the air
growing staler and warmer as she descended. The rubber mask stuck to the side
of her face, but Yael didn’t trust the air enough to risk taking it off. The
slope was slight, but the trickle of water running in the gutter in the center
of the tunnel showed that she was gradually heading deeper, amongst the smell
of iron and burning plastic. The concrete was covered with a mosaic of brightly
painted images, words so ornate that they seemed to be part of another
language, something much more brilliant and vivid than spoken words. There were
light fixtures at infrequent intervals, but the bulbs were incandescent and
maintenance was hardly rigorous. Perhaps one in three survived to flicker and
hiss. It was warmer than on the surface and the air underground was old and
tainted with volatized solvents.

The tunnel she walked was not a straight line. Instead
it curved for no perceptible reason, making serpentine progress through the
dark. Every so often the tunnel split with two or three passages of varying
sizes heading off in multiple directions. Yael’s unanticipated flight into the
tunnel had rendered her map useless. She could not understand why a tunnel so
extensive would be abandoned, or how it could run for such a distance and not connect
with an active system. As often as she could she held to the main corridor and
walked along the tracks, but sometimes cave-ins forced her to use coffin-shaped
maintenance corridors, bored from surrounding sandstone and lined with rusting
utilities, or worse, storm drains and air vents. These were so confined that
she had to crawl, dust and spider webs collecting on her mask and in her hair.
Sometimes Yael needed to turn sideways to wriggle through narrow spots, or
painstakingly climb over fallen rubble and obstacles.

Yael was not dissuaded. Though sometimes she held her
breath, she did not let herself stop. There was no going back, after all. Therefore,
she reasoned, there was no purpose in being afraid of what was to come.

It was a change in sound that told her that the tunnel
had opened up to her right, a subtle difference in the echoes of her footsteps.
Her flashlight revealed a small indentation in the tunnel wall, a few inches
shorter than Yael and filled knee-deep with trash. It smelled horrible, even
through the nanotech filters in her mask, but she pushed the trash aside and
ducked beneath the concrete rafters. She had to shuffle along, careful to keep
her knees off the ground, dragging her duffel bag behind her.

Another change in the space around her that she heard
rather than saw, blind in the impenetrable darkness. When Yael activated her
flashlight to confirm, she discovered that she had clambered up out of the
trash-filled culvert and into a small space, probably a forgotten maintenance
room. It was split into two levels with an oil-stained loft and a broad lower
room covered in garbage and debris. A rusting staircase led up to a catwalk,
attaching the loft to the ground floor, though it was enclosed in a locked
metal cage. On the other side of the catwalk was a green-painted door that
looked as if it had not opened in a long time and a dead fluorescent lamp. The
lower room was bisected by a low concrete wall about half the height of the
ceiling. Yael surveyed the scene thoughtfully and then hefted her duffel onto
her shoulder. She aimed carefully and then threw the duffel over the railings
and onto the catwalk overhead.

She pulled the mask up to sit on top of her head, wiped
the sweat from her face, tucked her hair behind her ears, and then inspected
the lock on the cage protecting the ladder. It didn’t take long to decide there
was nothing she could do. The whole mechanism was frozen solid by rust and
neglect. Yael doubted it would have opened even with the proper key.

There was nothing for it. Yael prepared herself to
climb, running through an abbreviated stretching routine while she considered
her route.

Her galoshes and wet coat were no help, but Yael had climbed
since she was a child. Though she was tired, she could still muscle herself up
onto the top of the concrete half-wall, with the help of a running start. The
rubber toes of her boots banged futilely against the cement while her fingers
burned, clutching the edge of the top of the wall, but she finally found a
drainage outlet large enough to wedge her foot in, then used that to struggle to
the top of the ledge.

Yael paused for a moment to catch her breath, then
levered herself up and crab-walked the length of the wall, her hands on the
ledge for balance, water sloshing in her boots.

There was a three-foot gap in front of her and then
the railing of the catwalk directly across from where she stood. In between
there and here, a fifteen-foot fall to the trash and concrete. Yael didn’t give
herself time to think about it, glad that she had decided to throw her bag up
first, so that she was committed. She might have not have made the jump
otherwise.

“One... two...”

Her legs shook so badly she thought she might fall. Yael
jumped at the last moment possible, pushing off the corner of the ledge, a
shriek she instantly regretted echoing throughout the room. She hit the railing
chest-first, with an impact that knocked the wind out of her. Yael wrapped her
arms around the railing in desperation, hanging from the metal bar by virtue of
fear alone. Her legs kicked wildly beneath her, bouncing helplessly off the
bars lining the catwalk, the blunt toes of the galoshes too wide to fit between
the bars. Yael swore to herself, the worst word that she knew, then wedged her
foot sideways into the gap between the bars and the floor of catwalk, gasping
at the pressure on her trapped ankle.

The pain was bearable. Yael curled forward, clutching
to the railing with her fingers, taking the strain off her leg. She twisted and
pulled until her foot was free, leaving her clinging to the side of the catwalk
over the dark and uncertain void.

It seemed like a very long time that Yael labored,
partway across the bar, straining until her muscles cried out in anguish,
trying to push herself over the rail. With a titanic effort, Yael tumbled head
over heels onto the catwalk and then lay on the metal, breathing hard and
profoundly grateful to be on a flat surface.

When her heart stopped racing, Yael crawled over to
her bag, pleasantly surprised to find the catwalk wobbly but largely intact. Without
her mask, she tasted rotting metal and stale air, but there was none of the
sweetness that would indicate nanite contamination. Yael could stand the smell
long enough to sleep.