Undertow (The UnderCity Chronicles) (9 page)

“I suppose if I stayed down here my eyes would become like yours,” Lindsay said.

“Yes. Your skin would darken too. It takes a few months.”

“I wouldn’t get paler?”

“You would, except the grime down here soaks into you after a while,” Dee said contentedly. “Turns everybody the same shade in time, which is good.”

“It is?” Lindsay asked, eliciting a good-natured laugh from the older woman.

“Sure. Topsiders are always fighting over who’s skin is what color. Down here we’re all the same. We’re all human. Well, all except for the Moles.”

Beside her, Jack shifted slightly and she knew that he’d tuned in. “The Moles?” Lindsay asked.

“They keep to themselves mostly, down in the pits, but they’re awful dangerous when they want to be.” She glanced at Jack. “I imagine Mr. Cole has told you more about them than anyone else ever could.”

“Actually—” Lindsay began.

Jack reached across her lap and hooked his hand under her thigh. It was a small gesture of claim. Lindsay stared at the hard stretch of his arm nearly touching her breasts, the curve of his fingers on her leg, and she felt her insides warm at how good it looked. “Actually, Mrs. Moore, I don’t trouble Miss Sterling with my tales given her present worry for her niece.” His words were polite, yet both women knew better than to challenge them.

Lindsay gave Dee a small, helpless shrug, and the woman redirected the conversation. “Of course, Mr. Cole. So, what do you do for a living, Miss Sterling?”

“Oh, I’m an interior designer,” she replied, awkward about her profession given the shabby surroundings, but Dee perked right up.

“You mean you decorate people’s apartments and the like?”

Jack withdrew his hand, clearly satisfied with the change in subject matter, and Lindsay felt that same stab of disappointment as when he’d pulled away from her in the tunnels. She refocused on Dee. “Sort of. I mostly work on retail décor,” she said. “I do restorations and renovations, create looks for stores, restaurants, boutiques….”

“Oh,” Dee said brightly, “that’s great. We’ll need people like you when we re-surface. It’ll be important to make things beautiful again.”

Lindsay blinked. “Um….”

“Sooner or later the world above will destroy itself,” Jack interjected, the conversational lilt to his voice overlying a warning tone. “Then the people down here plan to re-colonize the surface.”

Lindsay picked up Jack’s signal and nodded gravely. “I see. Well, that would certainly provide, uh…plenty of opportunities for my business.”

“Oh, yes,” Dee bobbed her head, her glittery hairpins twinkling away. “One day New York will be as beautiful as the ruins of Pompeii.”

After lunch some of the Sumptown residents disappeared, drifting off to their tents or fading into the darkness that was never far away. Jack and the mayor stayed to visit over tea, and since Lindsay didn’t know the protocol for excusing herself, she stayed as well. The conversation seemed interminable. They joked and gossiped about people and places she’d never heard of, their references too obscure for her to understand. Pipe-hand Joe and Gasoline Jane. Snakes and Ladders. The Pit Stop. The Black Door. Dyer Pass. Gutter Run. It was as if they were speaking graffiti; she understood the words, not the meanings.

She took to watching the people around the fire, and discovered that they, in turn, were watching Jack. The men, all skinny and stringy, stared at Jack as if he were a god. Though the women watched more circumspectly, Jack couldn’t take more than three sips of his tea before it was topped up.

She herself began observing him. He’d hung his jacket from the back of his chair, his long legs were stretched in front of him, his booted ankles crossed. The flames danced shadows across the planes of his face, and every now and again, caught the golden glint of his eyes. He held an air of reserve and power, ideal qualities for the hero that everyone here saw him as. It made him seem alien to Lindsay, yet sexy as hell. All kinds of females shot her looks of envy and wonder, and Lindsay felt a kind of warped pride to be Jack’s woman.

Try as Lindsay might to resist, her eyelids began to droop. She hadn’t slept the night before, too wound up from her encounter in the subway tunnel and Jack’s late night call. Her condition didn’t go unnoticed. When Mr. Moore came to the end of one of his rambling anecdotes, Jack turned to her.

“You look tired.”

It took a moment to bring him into focus. “I’m okay,” she lied, in compliance with the second rule.

“Uh-huh.” He turned to the mayor. “You have a place we can crash for a few hours, Mr. Moore? She’s exhausted, and I could probably use a siesta myself.”

The mayor nodded. “Of course. There’re bunks in The Library.”

Toting his gun, he guided Lindsay and Jack to the largest structure in the village: a pavilion tent, its entrance flanked by two small concrete lions. “Have a good sleep. I’ll send someone to wake you when the runners get back.”

With that he walked away, leaving them to settle in.

The floor of the library was made of plywood covered by a patchwork of old Persian rugs, the only furniture a pair of army cots pushed into a far corner, and a dozen overstuffed bookcases that lined the walls. Kneeling beside one Lindsay inspected the titles with her flashlight.

“Emergency Medicine… Anthrax, A Practical Guide for Citizens… The SAS Survival Handbook… Voltaire: Volume 5…”

Jack gave a thin smile, looking over his shoulder as he shoelaced shut the tent’s entrance. “No television or internet down here, so people read a lot. You name it, they’re ready for it.”

“Is that why they’re down here? Waiting for the end of the world?”

“That’s the case with the Moores and a few others. Mostly they're here because their mayor takes care of them. He used to be in the Special Forces a long time ago, so he knows his stuff when it comes to survival. He’s a good guy, but not someone to toy with.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to buy a cabin in the woods somewhere? Isn’t that what most survivalists do?”

“Maybe.” Jack sat on a cot, loosening the laces on his boots. “Except then he wouldn’t be helping people in the meantime. Besides, here he doesn’t have to worry about the warrant for his arrest.”

Lindsay darted a look at the entrance. “What’s he wanted for?”

“Double homicide.”

“Oh.”

She propped her backpack against the other cot and dropped onto the thin polyester bed, her knees bumping Jack’s. He swung his legs apart so that hers were loosely caught between his. His face, she could sense more than see, was inches from hers. And when he spoke, she could feel the warmth of his breath in the cool dimness. The scent of sugar and cinnamon.

“The runners travel around this part of the underground finding things to supply the town with. They trade too, so they often pick up bits of information that would be hard to gather otherwise. When they get back, we might learn something useful.”

“How many communities are there like this?”

“Hard to say,” he said, and she heard the rasp of his hand running over his chin stubble. “Maybe a couple of dozen. Near the surface there was one called ‘The Burbs’. Its people tapped into the power grid and piped in water. They had lights and showers, even had microwaves and refrigerators. Must have been about three hundred people living there. All they wanted was to be left alone.”

“What happened?”

“The police found out about the place. About fifty officers went down with dogs and cleared it out. It was a bad scene.”

“Were you there?”

“No, but Reggie was. The people were angry and tried to defend their homes. For a lot of them The Burbs were the only place they’d ever belonged. Many were raising families there. As for the cops, well, most of them were scared out of their wits. Only a handful had ever been in the underground before that night, and the sight of three hundred people threatening them with knives and pry bars didn’t make them any calmer. It was a mess.”

“I never heard about that.”

“Of course you didn’t. You think the cops invited reporters?”

“I don’t get it. If the people were living peacefully down there, why did the cops evict them?”

Jack sighed. “Because it’s their job. To be fair to Captain Monroe, he was under a lot of pressure from both the mayor and the transit authority to do something about all the ‘homeless’ in the tunnels, and that camp had grown too big to be ignored. Anyway, the people who lived there simply fled deeper underground. Splintered into smaller communities that were more difficult to detect, or too remote for the cops to reach.”

Lindsay imagined what it would be like if the police were to suddenly descend on Sumptown. While the residents were certainly hospitable, she doubted they’d abandon their little lakeside fortress without one hell of a fight. Not that authorities would risk a raid this far down.

“Who are the APs? Another community?”

“No. They’re more like a… kind of like an organization. Their name is an acronym—short for ‘aberrant psychology’. Basically they’re a group of people who broke free from the state’s mental hospitals.”

“They’re insane?”

Jack snorted. “Define insane. They have a kind of network they developed in the asylums. They help each other out. Watch each other’s backs. That sort of thing. A definite method to their madness.”

“That guy Jarvis mentioned that Seline had made friends with them,” Lindsay said uncertainly. “You don’t think they’d hurt her…do you?”

Jack tapped her knee with his, a quick touch, like a pat on the back. “Everyone down here will hurt you if you get on their bad side, but let’s not worry about it for now. Jarvis wasn’t sure, and to be frank it’s rather unlikely. The APs stick to themselves.”

“What if it’s true?”

“Then we’ll have to investigate it.”

“You ever dealt with the APs before?”

“No,” he admitted. “I know how to contact them if we have to. Now enough with the questions. Let’s get some rest.” He swung his legs away from hers onto his cot and stretched out, using his nylon bag as a pillow. Lindsay clicked off her flashlight and did the same. In the near dark, it took mere seconds before her eyes closed. Beside her, Jack began shifting about.

Lindsay murmured, “Bet you miss your comfy bed, huh?”

She could hear Jack twist to face her. “What were you doing snooping around in my bedroom?”

“I never went into your bedroom. Reggie mentioned it.”

“Why would you and Reggie be talking about my bed?”

Lindsay suddenly wished she’d never brought the subject up. She could feel her face go hot—her whole body go hot. “Um…something to do with getting your help to find Seline.”

There was a pause and then Jack gave a short bark of laughter. “You really are desperate, aren’t you?”

Her eyes snapped open and she faced him. “You don’t realize how much of a hero you are to these people, do you? The guys were clinging to your every word as if it were God’s truth. And the women—Jack, you could whistle once and any one of them would gladly fill the spot with you that I’m pretending at.”

His hand clamped down on her shoulder with a speed and accuracy that was eerie. “Shut up,” he hissed. “Sound carries down here.”

Lindsay hadn’t realized her voice had risen. She blew out her breath and relaxed. As he let go, his fingers brushed her cheek, deliberate or not it was hard to tell.

“Yes, I do know that I’m treated like a hero here. But I’m like a bad movie, based very loosely on the truth.”

Lindsay flipped onto her side. “So what happened to you, Jack? We haven’t seen each other since high school.”

His eyes glinted at her. “I’ve got a nice bed. That about covers my accomplishments to date.”

Lindsay flopped back. “You’re just trying to shut me up.”

Jack folded his hands behind his head. “I thought you were tired.”

“That’s because I couldn’t talk out there. Boredom causes weariness.”

“In that case, I’m bored.”

“Oh, fine then. Sleep.” Lindsay grumped. There was silence and Jack’s eyelids began to close naturally. She should let him rest, she should rest herself. His life was not—repeat, not—her business.“If you’re so well-liked here in Sumptown why haven’t you come to visit in a year?”