Red Tide (4 page)

6

A
t first, he’d attributed the sound to echoes. Told himself the noise was nothing more than the ricochet sound of his own feet bouncing around and around the tunnel walls. Or maybe something mundane like the rush of traffic overhead. Or something organic and benign like the settling of the earth. He’d successfully held that thought until the first time he’d had occasion to come to a full stop. At that point…despite his fervent wish that it not be so, he’d been forced to acknowledge that what he’d been hearing was the skitter of claws along the stone floor.

He winced, took a deep breath and reached above his head, grabbing the metal cage surrounding one of the thousands of lightbulbs festooning the ceiling of the tunnels. He tilted the light in the direction of the noise. The sight of a trio of harbor rats, their narrow eyes gleaming red in the beam, sent a steel shiver rolling down his spine. “Shoo,” he rasped. And then again…louder. Nothing. Not only didn’t they scurry off, but the largest of the three stood on his hind legs, bared his long yellow teeth and grunted out what Corso felt certain was a challenge.

He left the overhead light swinging to and fro as he hurried down the tunnel. Moving north toward Yesler Street, he focused on the corridor ahead and whistled out of tune as he walked along, filling his mind with thoughts of how nearly every city denotes the place where the community was first settled. About how they always seemed to give it a quaint-sounding name. Old Town, the Gaslight District, the French Quarter, the Mission District, or, in Seattle’s case, Pioneer Square. Soon as they got it properly named, seemed like they immediately turned it over to the tourist trade, before moving on to newer and greener pastures.

Corso was still pondering this historical anomaly when he came to a three-way junction in the tunnel. On his left lay the tattered remains of a turn-of-the-century dry goods store. The broken sign read:
Jensen’s Pr
—…its counter was empty and expectant, its shelves toppled down, rolling a collection of cans and bottles haphazardly out onto the floor. That the cobwebs were plastic and the cans crude reproductions mattered not a whit to the foreign throngs who flowed through these dank tunnels six days a week, year-round, hearing the story of how, after the city burned down in 1898, they’d rebuilt Pioneer Square from the second floor up, thus providing some measure of relief from the omnipresent dampness and ensuring that their newfangled flush toilets would operate as designed, a fateful decision which had simultaneously improved sanitation and interned a ghost city beneath eight square blocks of south Seattle.

Ahead a steep set of stone stairs led up to the street. On the left, beyond Jensen’s, a thick steel door held a bright orange
NO ADMITTANCE
notice. To the right, a narrow tunnel led slightly uphill. He nodded contentedly to himself, tilted the map in his hand, found where he was and then rotated it in his hand so that Jensen’s Provisioners was on his left. If the map were to be believed, and if he hadn’t seriously fucked up, those ought to be the stairs at the base of Yesler Street. He looked to the right again. Seventy yards that way ought to be the Underground entrance directly across the street from the bus tunnel. He’d thought it over and decided that one was too risky. Better to have a look from down here first, he’d decided, and then play it by ear from there.

As he rechecked his bearings, something in the darkness squealed. Corso frowned, jammed the map into his pocket and began climbing the stairs. Once at the top, he twisted the brass handle on the lock and eased the door open. Slowly. A quarter inch at a time, until finally there was room to poke his head through the opening.

Second Avenue was awash in metallic blue police cars. He listened for a moment. Heard nothing and then wondered why. No wailing sirens. No static crackle of radio transmissions. The only sound splitting the night was the
whop whop
of rotor blades. He poked his head out a little more and looked up. A pair of police helicopters circled lazily in the night sky. He craned his neck in a circle and wondered where the news choppers were. Why they weren’t up there giving their “eye in the sky” perspective. “High above downtown Seattle” and all that crap.

A pair of Seattle’s finest stood whispering, no more than thirty feet away, their attention riveted half a block uphill on Yesler, between Second and Third, where what little he could see of the bus tunnel appeared to be covered in plastic. Whatever was going on in the street outside the tunnel entrance was blocked from view by a pair of fire trucks parked nose to nose across Yesler Street. Another pair blocked the street farther up the hill, making sure nobody came blundering down from the freeway.

And then he heard the voices. Raised voices coming from his left. He pushed his head farther out the door. A KING-TV remote truck sat angled into the police barricade two blocks up Second Avenue, its yellow lights blazing. The guy with the red hair. What was his name? The one who was always broadcasting from the summit at Snoqualmie. The snow conditions guy. In his mind’s eye, Corso could see the red ski jacket…the collar flapping in the stiff breeze. Parka Boy Something they called him. He was standing out in front of the truck, trying to talk his way past the cops. The cops looked like they were hoping he’d step around the barricade so’s they could kick his ass.

Corso pulled his head back inside and snapped the lock. Took a deep breath. No doubt about it. If he was going to get a look at what was going on, he was going to have to walk up and poke his nose out smack in the middle of it.

He looked down the passage. Overhead lights threw oblong pools of yellow light along the floor of the tunnel. At the far end, he could just make out the landing and the half a dozen stairs rising to the street. Something disturbed one of the tin cans in Jensen’s long-ago store, bouncing a mettalic
ping
around the walls and sending Corso on his way.

He walked quickly up the corridor, moving from light to darkness and back again a dozen times as he covered the seventy or so yards up to the next Underground entrance.

End of the line. It was either walk up the stairs and open the door or retrace his steps back to the foot of Yesler Street. He climbed the stairs. Put his ear to the door and listened. Nothing. Not surprising. The doors were steel and solid. Kept the winos from turning the place into the Homeless Hilton. He grabbed the knob on the brass lock and twisted. The door stuck in its warped wooden casing. He pulled harder. And then harder still, until finally the upper corner came loose and the door popped open with a rattle.

He held his breath, used his other hand to quiet the door. A cool breeze fanned his face through the crack. The sounds of angry voices filled his ears. Cops using that command voice they practice. “Down,” one of them was yelling. “Get down right now.”

A yelp of pain. The scratch of boots on concrete. And then…other voices. Cautionary…outraged. The sound of running now, followed by the unmistakable sounds of a struggle. He eased the door inward and stuck his head out.

The street was lit up like a ball game at night. He was staring at the red and white side of an SFD aid car, parked along the curb. A huge van was parked in the middle of the street, its nose pointing down the hill, its sliding doors thrown open, revealing a rack of orange jumpsuits quivering slightly in the breeze. The lettering on the side read:
CRITICAL INCIDENT MOBILE SQUAD ROOM
.

To his right, an unruly crowd of about fifty citizens was being held behind a double line of police barriers. At the moment, they were clustered at the upper end of the enclosure, where one of their number was being subdued by a trio of burly SWAT storm troopers. One knelt on the back of the man’s neck while the other two jerked his hands behind his back and clicked on a pair of cuffs.

“You got no damn right,” somebody shouted.

“Leave him alone,” a woman’s voice pleaded.

A foot came swinging out from the crowd, catching one of the kneeling cops in the side of the helmet with a crack. He turned his visored gaze toward the cluster of people and growled. The seething mob surged forward to meet the challenge, bringing another half dozen officers sprinting across the street. The mingle of voices grew more strident now, the sounds of struggle more violent.

With all eyes trained on the scuffle, Corso took a chance. He stepped out into the street and closed the door behind himself. Up at the scuffle, the newly arrived squad of cops held their batons before them in both hands as they forced the mob away from the struggle on the sidewalk. The crowd resisted. Cursing, shouting, lashing out here and there as the phalanx of officers moved them inexorably across the sidewalk until the rearmost members of the pack had their backs pressed to the buildings on the south side of Yesler Street.

Corso looked around. He was just outside the enclosure. To the left, a pair of firemen knelt in the street behind the aid car. They were fiddling with a wheeled metal cart, upon which a nineteen-inch TV monitor flickered. A braid of cables as thick as a man’s arm led from the cart, across Yesler Street, over the sidewalk, right up to the mouth of the bus tunnel, where what had to be a robot of some sort sat unmoving on the concrete, its rubber-tracked feet still, its articulated metal arms held forward as if in supplication. Only the blinking green light on top of the contraption suggested the possibility of movement.

The decorative blue arches of the tunnel entrance had been completely enshrouded in thick plastic film, creating the illusion of a giant opaque cocoon. Half a block uphill, Government Park was deserted; its worn grass, usually a haven for the homeless, lay limp and empty, littered here and there by backpacks, sleeping bags and scattered piles of debris.

He looked upward. Only the pale blue light at the top of the building announced the Smith Tower’s stab into the night sky. A shouted threat pulled his attention down to earth. Down the hill to that pair of cops who’d been whispering at the base of the street. They’d noticed his sudden appearance and were now running up the hill, pointing his way, coming as fast as their baggy motorcycle pants and high black boots would allow.

Corso moved quickly uphill toward the enclosure. He stepped in front of the aid car, raised the strand of yellow plastic police tape above his head and then bent over, as if to duck under the collection of tape and barriers that formed the downhill edge of the enclosure. As if to step inside and lose himself in the crowd.

Another shout split the air. The sound of boots was nearly upon him when, instead of ducking under the barriers, he lay down in the gutter and forced himself backward on his belly, sliding between the front tires of the ambulance, inching toward the rear of the vehicle, his head half an inch beneath the oil pan by the time the boots arrived. Four of them. He lay still, his breathing short and silent.

“You see him?” he heard somebody shout.

Another pair of boots, shinier than the others, arrived at the front of the aid car. “See who?” a voice demanded. “Somebody get out?”

“Looked to me more like he got in,” a third voice offered.

“Guy was just standin’ there on the sidewalk.”

“We looked up and there he was.”

“Tryin’ to get inside?”

“He lifted the tape. I saw him.” The other cop agreed.

“Sure it was a
him?”

“Too tall for a woman.”

Corso rested his chin on the street and watched as the new pair of boots turned uphill toward the crowd. In the momentary silence, he could hear a jumble of voices raised in protest and the rustle of bodies in motion. “Musta been trying to get out when you guys spotted him. Musta changed his mind and got back where he belonged.”

“You’d think they’d understand,” a voice complained, “it’s for their own damn good. You’d think—”

“We need more containment.”

Corso heard a sigh. “I already made three requests. Brass don’t want to hear about it. They’re sayin’ they want to send the robot inside before they decide what to do next. All I’m getting is a bunch of crap about minimum personnel exposure.”

The feet turned to the left. One toe tapped the pavement.

“Exposure to what?” The voice was now half an octave higher.

The toe stopped tapping. “Nobody’s saying,” came the answer. “Just that we got a couple of missing buses and some dead citizens down inside the station.”

The boots began to shuffle. Corso could sense their mutual uneasiness.

“You two better get back to your posts.”

They didn’t have to be asked twice. From the corner of his eye, Corso watched the pair start down the hill toward the foot of Yesler Street. The third cop hesitated for a moment, then shouted something Corso couldn’t make out before moving uphill at a lope.

Corso used the heels of his hands to move himself backward. Out from under the engine, to a place in the middle of the undercarriage where he had room to lever himself up onto his side. The pitch of the hill gave him an unobstructed view of the firemen as they fiddled with the robot’s control panel.

He watched as the men spoke to one another and as the taller of the two then began to walk his way. As the feet approached, Corso shrank deeper into the darkness beneath the ambulance, lying still until the feet disappeared.

Corso waited a moment and then crawled over to the edge of the chassis and looked up. The guy had stepped up into the haz-mat van. He had his back to the street as he pushed a leg into one of the orange biohazard suits. And then the other. Then up over the shoulders with a wiggle. And the zipper and the Velcro. Until finally he pulled the orange hood over his head just before disappearing inside the truck.

When the fireman stepped back into the street his entire face was covered with a black rubber mask. Corso watched as the guy adjusted the straps, satisfied himself that the filter was working and headed back toward his buddy.

He rolled over and watched between the rear wheels as the pair exchanged a much practiced collection of nods and hand gestures. Watched as the orange apparition started across the street toward the robot and the mouth of the bus tunnel. Watched as his partner picked up what looked like one of those virtual reality helmets and fitted it over his close-cropped head.