“Oh, shit, don’t fall down, Jack. Don’t trip. Don’t fuck up. And, for heaven’s sake, I hope the flashlights don’t go out.”
“I’ve been trying not to think about that,” I said. “All I’ve been thinking is, I ever get hold of the director of this picture, boy is he gonna take a bitch-slapping.”
“Oh, Jack,” Reba said. “It hit me.”
“What?”
“Those things. One of them hit my arm. It’s bleeding.”
“Get the light off yourself. Keep it searching. Keep moving.”
“I shouldn’t have come. I sounded so brave when I volunteered. But I shouldn’t have come.”
“Neither of us should have. Do you want to go back to the bus?”
“Yes. But guess what? I can’t see it anymore.”
I looked back the way I thought we had come. And Reba was right. There was nothing but the dark to see.
The things moved around us as if we were the center of a hurricane. They swirled, crinkled, and cracked, like an old film negative being wadded. As we moved forward, flashlights extended, waving this way and that, the things scattered.
But it seemed to me they were getting a bit more testy, coming ever closer. Pretty soon, we both had a number of cuts from the edges of the things as they flittered by.
“Look,” I said.
So she could look, I turned right and she followed around until I took her position and she took mine.
“My God,” she said.
“Yep.”
What she was looking at was a narrow metal bridge. A grillwork bridge. It went across into a darkness the flashlights would not cross.
The bridge spanned what looked to be an abyss.
“Let’s scoot onto the bridge,” I said. “One of us can point our light, get a better look at what’s down there while the other watches for critters.”
As we made our way onto the bridge we were confronted by a foul smell.
“God Almighty,” I said. “We must be at Ed’s sewage plant.”
“Or a way out,” Reba said. “It goes down a ways, but it also veers to the right there, to what could be Ed’s rear end. Though, with just a flashlight, it’s hard to tell what I’m seeing.”
“Let’s change roles,” I said. “You flash about, I’ll have a look.”
Reba was right. The hole beneath the bridge dropped way down, and there were worker ladders on either side of the pit, something the robots used for maintenance. But there was a ki nd of tunnel that went off to the right. I noticed too that it was moving. As I watched, it irised open, then closed. Then repeated itself. Again and again.
It was a sphincter. I saw a mass of something dark rise up from the pit and reach the tunnel, flow into it as if sucked, and disappear.
I lifted my light and joined Reba in flashing mine about.
“I think it’s a sphincter that exits Ed’s waste. We might could get out that way.”
“Boy, won’t that be shitty?” Reba said.
“Frankly, I don’t see how we can do it. Not and live.”
“Grace is right though. We have to try something. We can’t just wait here. We’ll die anyway. I’d rather go out trying.”
“I could go down there and investigate. I think I can swing over the bridge and get closer for a look. Can you stand being here by yourself?”
“Oh, Jesus… Make it quick as you can.”
“Kiss me,” I said.
She did. Quickly.
I went to the base of the bridge and started climbing over. Reba’s light hit me.
“Shadow,” she said.
I jerked my head and my light. My carnivorous shadow friend fluttered away from me.
I got my foot on the ladder and started climbing down. It was hard to do with my flashlight, and I knew if I dropped it, I was dead meat. Maybe the things wouldn’t come down here, but even still, if I dropped the light, when I went up, they’d be waiting.
The deeper I went the stinkier it got.
What had seemed like depth from the bridge, darkness in the light, was something moving, gurgling, and stinking.
Ed functioned as a fish, but had never been completed. Like Bjoe said, someone forgot, or the mechanisms just played out too soon. Still, Ed was working all right, and his innards were working satisfactorily enough to manufacture what we in the bathroom business (which is pretty much all of us), would describe as pure-de-ole-identifiable-for-a-fact-you-bet-your-smelly-ass S-H-I-T.
No question there.
13
I shined my light down there. The tunnel was pulsing, sucking in that nasty goo. I thought, well, I die this way, it isn’t a death I ever expected. It was, to put it mildly, a unique way to go. Had to be better than cancer or some sort of horrid disease, going slow, like being gummed to death by proteindeprived octogenarians.
In a way, it was no less dignified than aging and lying in your own shit and being eaten away slowly from the inside. Of course, if I were home, who was to say I wouldn’t just die quick of a heart attack at the age of eighty while in bed with a twenty-five-year-old hooker with her little finger crooked up my ass.
So, that thinking business, sometimes it was better not to do too much of it. It could get you in trouble.
I was pondering this to the point of almost feeling that hooker’s little finger in my tail, when suddenly, above me, there was light.
Not heavenly light, but light. And it was too much light for Reba’s flashlight. Light from a distance, filtered through something the consistency of a gunnysack. It held for a long moment, then went out.
“The bus,” Reba said. “Oh, God, Jack, come up.”
I carefully padded my way up the shit-slick ladder onto the bridge, somehow maintaining my grip on the flashlight.
When I was standing beside her, she said, “Wait.”
I waited. The birth of the universe couldn’t have been any slower than that wait.
Then, the light.
When the beams hit, the darkness shredded like something dark tossed into a fan. There was a sound like a baseball card in bicycle spokes, the bicycle being peddled fast.
“The darkness,” Reba said. “It’s absolutely alive with them.”
“They may be the dark,” I said.
When the bus’s head beams went out, I made a swooping movement with my light and Reba flashed hers about too. After a moment, I used the light to nab the direction of the bus, though I couldn’t actually see it in my feeble beam, and pulled the flashlight over my shoulder. I did this repeatedly, signaling for them to come.
“Oh, Jack, behind you.”
I turned with the light. The darkness sucked back a bit, the bridge trembled.
“Sorry,” Reba said. “I had the light on it, but it was still coming.”
“They’re not as afraid now,” I said. “They’re getting brave.”
“Look.”
We could see from a great distance the bus beams moving toward us, two headlamps that looked to be the size of the tips of our thumbs.
Seeing the light grow and brighten was as hypnotic to us as it might have been to a moth. Soon, we stood on the bridge in a bath of yellow. It was heartening.
We worked our way back to the bus, and to get in the door, we had to step momentarily out of the glow of the bus’s head beams and into shadow. Our flashlights seemed less bright than before, and I could feel those things all around us, closer, touching, almost tasting us. Steve, sitting in the driver’s seat, worked the door lever and let us in. As the door slammed behind us, Steve, eyes wide, said, “You don’t want to know what was right behind you, almost up your asses.”
Inside, everyone gathered around, and we told what had happened. Steve drove the bus right up to the edge of the divide. He let the bus idle. The lights struck across the chasm like a golden honey bridge.
“It’s ugly down there,” I said. “Once you go in, you might be wadded up with the turds. If you aren’t, you’ll be stuffed with turds, won’t be able to breathe. I don’t see a way to make it work.”
“We haven’t got but one choice,” James said. “We got to go back into the light. Maybe Bjoe will let us stay with him. He might do that. Or we have to fight him. Hell, Grace can kick Bjoe to death. We can become the leaders. We can’t get out without being killed, and we can’t stay back here in shadow, so seems to me, that’s the only way to go.”