After about twenty minutes of walking Orcrist pulled them all aside into a little yard filled with garbage cans. “We split up here,” he said. “Lambert, you come with me and we’ll circle north and come in from the other side. Poach, you take Frank and go west around the crater. Wister and Colin, try to come up from below. Bob, you and Daryl wait here ten minutes and then go straight in. Everybody got that?”
They all nodded and broke up into pairs. Frank’s partner, Poach, was a weather-beaten, middle-aged man with three fingers missing from his left hand. “Okay, kid,” he said hoarsely, “follow me and do what I do.” He had not looked directly at Frank yet, and did not now—he simply set off down the nearest east-west cross street. The older man had very long legs and a quick pace, and Frank had to trot to keep up with him. An uneven muted roar was becoming audible, and Frank knew it must be coming from the disrupted sections of the Leethee.
After a few blocks they took a right turn, which had them facing north, and Frank saw bright daylight at the end of the street; as his eyes grew accustomed to the glare he saw the jagged, tumbled wooden beams that were silhouetted against the brightness.
“This is it,” whispered Poach. “Move slow and don’t make no noise.” Frank saw that Poach had his knife out, so he took his out too. He looked around, and realized that the last couple of streets had been completely empty. It’s like sandcrabs, he thought. You dig a hole, let the sunlight in, and they all burrow deeper down, back into the darkness.
A harsh voice broke the quiet: “Tommy, get over here. They got more tunnels down here than an anthill.” There were sounds of splashing footsteps and another voice, presumably Tommy’s, spoke. “Captain, the whole floor is swaying on this level, and that damned river is thrashing around only one level below us. I haven’t seen one person yet, and I say we should clear out of this lousy maze.”
Poach made a “wait here” gesture to Frank and set off silently in the direction of the two voices. Frank stood absolutely still in the semi-darkness, clutching his knife and breathing through his mouth in order to hear better. Tommy has a point, he thought absently; the floor is swaying a little. A gray and white cat hurried by nervously, tail held high and eyes darting about. Frank tried to attract it by scratching his fingernails on a wooden gate post, but the cat, not in a playful mood, didn’t stop.
A shrill, jabbering yell was abruptly wrenched out of someone’s lungs a block away. “He’s killing me, he’s killing me, help me for God’s sake!” Frank jumped, dropped his knife, picked it up again, and ran off in the direction of the desperate shouting. More yells echoed up ahead: “Look out, Wister, over your head!” “Not me, idiot!” “Get him, will someone once and for all get him?”
Frank rounded a corner, running as fast as he could, and found himself in the midst of it. Two men in Transport uniforms were down and motionless on the street, and Orcrist was chasing a third, waving his knife like a madman. One of Orcrist’s companions sat against a wall, white-faced, pressing his stomach with blood-wet hands. Two more Transport cops burst out of an alley at Frank’s left, and one of them drove his knife at Frank’s chest. The blade ripped his coat, but missed hitting flesh, and before the man could recover Frank drove his own knife into the Transport’s side until he could feel the fabric of the man’s jacket with his knuckles. The other one clubbed Frank with a blackjack in the left ear, and Frank went to his knees, dropping his knife. The cop raised his own knife, but Poach kicked the man in the stomach and cut his throat as he buckled.
Frank was trying to clear his head and stand up when the angle of the street pavement changed. He had fallen onto a level expanse, but by the time he struggled into a sitting position the street was slanted like a roof. Panicky yells echoed on all sides, so he knew he was not imagining it. The floor is collapsing, he told himself. That’s the only explanation.
With a thundering, snapping crash the ancient masonry of the floor gave way like a trap door; Frank tumbled through a board fence, rolled over a collapsing wall and then plummeted through thirty feet of dust-choked air into deep, cold rushing water. The impact knocked the breath out of him and he was pulled far under the surface by savagely pounding whirlpools and undertows. Rocks and lumber spun all around him in the dark water, buffeting his ribs and back. Very dimly, he thought that he would not survive this. He convulsively gasped water, and then was racked by gagging coughs. Even if he could have mustered the strength to swim, he no longer knew which way was up.
He collided hard with a row of stationary metal bars. It must be some kind of grating or something, jammed across the stream, he thought. I could climb it and maybe get my head above water. Why bother? said another part of his mind. You’ve already gone through all the pain of dying—why not get it over with? You’ve earned your death: take it.
Working by instinct, his mind ordered his arms and legs to pull him upward against the wrenching of the cold water. In a few seconds his head was above the foaming surface and he was retching water, trying with desperate animal gasps to get air into his misused lungs.
He hung there for five full minutes, until the act of breathing did not require all of his concentration. Then he pulled himself along to the right, hoping that this gate, or whatever it was, was braced against the bank; there was absolutely no light, and he had to work by touch. A couple of times he felt the gate slide an inch or two, but it did not pull loose. Eventually he found his shoulder brushing against the wet bricks of a wall—that’s all it was, just a brick wall with the rushing flood splashing against it. There was no passageway, so Frank simply hunched there on his perch of metal bars, with one hand braced against the bricks, and wept into the stream.
After a while he gathered his strength and began inching his way across to the other side, clinging tightly to the bars and trying to keep his body out of the water to avoid the wood and debris that were constantly colliding with the gate. Groping blindly in the darkness, he eventually found a rectangular opening that might once have framed a door. He managed to scramble into it and crawl a few yards up the passageway beyond. Then, free from the danger of drowning, he collapsed on the stone floor and surrendered his consciousness.
SOMEONE was tugging at his hair. “Lemme ’lone,” he muttered. To his intense annoyance it didn’t stop. He dozed, thinking, I’ll just wait till they give up and go away. Suddenly he realized that he was cold, colder than he had ever been. I can’t sleep, he realized. I’ve got to get blankets, fast.
He sat up, and heard a dozen tiny creatures scamper chittering away into the dark. Mice, by God! Eating my hair! “Hah!” he croaked, to scare them. He’d meant to yell, but a croak was all he could come up with. He crouched in the stone corridor, clasping his knees and shivering uncontrollably. I’m naked, he noticed. No, that isn’t quite right. I’ve still got my boots on, and my brass ear is hanging around my throat like a necklace. If there was any light I’d be an odd spectacle.
He vaguely remembered his near-drowning and realized in a detached way that he probably needed first aid pretty badly. He stood up on knees that refused to work together, and staggered up the passageway, arms out before him to feel for obstacles. If I get through all this, he thought, I’ll stay home the next time Orcrist wants to go on an adventure.
JOHN Bollinger was a religious man and took no part in the sinful society of Munson Understreet. He subsisted on fish and mushrooms and lived in a tiny one-room house that had belonged to his father. He had four books—a bible, a copy of Paradise Lost, the Divina Commedia, and Butler’s Lives of the Saints. He always said, even when no one was listening, that to have more books than that was vanity.