Empire's End

Nine / Beginning of the End

At dusk, Thackeray sat on a rock and whittled arrows from kindling. The evening fires were being lit, and the day’s purchase — rats and other small vermin — were being cleaned for supper. To almost anyone it might seem like a dismal life of poverty. But he knew better. He’d seen what was on the other side. And he knew that, soon, the Senate’s empire would fall.

Somewhere far off, at the very edge of his hearing, a little bell began to ring.

A few others heard it too. They looked to the west end of the quarry. The jingling increased in volume as other bells were triggered.

Then, to the east. More ringing. And the north.

Thackeray snatched a bow off the ground at his feet and peered into the trees on the quarry’s rim. Didn’t see a damn thing. Ringing to the south now.

Panicked exclamations split the air. Women grabbed their children and ran for their tents. Others took up torches and bows and watched the woods above. The ringing was almost deafening, every single lizard kicking its tiny legs as they were bathed in the aura of a presence massive, something huge and unseen watching the humans from the trees.

Then came the scream, the most godawful thing Thackeray had ever heard — a ragged, high-pitched banshee’s cry that seemed to come from all directions. It was in that moment that Thackeray realized all of them were about to die.

The rotters surged forth, all runners—all of them—cascading down the sides of the crater in a wave of gray flesh that swept over the men standing at the camp’s edge. Thackeray stared in abject horror as he saw his men torn limb from limb in seconds, ripped apart and simply thrown aside — fresh meat discarded while the undead went after the others!

He ran for the nearest fire. Fire, that was all they had. And fires were being stomped out right and left by the feet of the dead as tents collapsed under the weight of ravenous attackers and then the screams of the women filled Thackeray’s head, women grieving and dying all at once. Still the rotters kept pouring in.

Thackeray spun, a torch in each hand, and saw a pair heading right for him. He ran at them, flames thrust forth, ready to beat them both to pulp with the goddamned things if he had to—

They weren’t two. They were one.

Siamese twins, rotters fused at the torso and scrambling along on three legs like some sort of giant insect. Its heads snapped and slavered and both stared Thackeray dead in the eyes. He dropped the torches and fell to his knees. God in Heaven, it was them — it was him.

A shadow towered over him from the back. Turning he saw, framed in firelight, a great hulk of a man, covered in obscene tattoos and wielding a massive hammer.

Thackeray saw the hammer coming down and couldn’t even close his eyes. He was trapped in this waking nightmare, forced to see the death blow as it rocketed toward his face; and then

Kill. Then eat.

He’d taught them that taking down the entire herd at the onset left more meat for each of them. If they were to stay strong, to stay fast, they needed to eat well. To increase their chances of survival, all of the pack needed to stay healthy — and each of them understood that.

That said, Eviscerato was the alpha, and he always fed first.

All of the night’s kills had been dragged into the open, out from beneath bloody canvas and away from the heat of those campfires still burning; stripped naked and laid out before the King of the Dead, for him to select his morsel.

The young girls were soft and fatty. He grabbed one by the bracelet on her wrist, letters chained together. He couldn’t read them, and cast the item aside. J-O-S-I-E.

Pulling her away from the others, he knelt over her, lifting her to his mouth by her little ponytail — then tore into her. And the pack leapt at the remaining meat, spitting and gnashing in a frenzy of blood.

Eviscerato still wore his old suit, the crimson vest and top hat, even his cane — a handy bludgeon — and he hadn’t lost his showman swagger either. The dancer among the dead, they’d called him. He still moved with a sort of grace uncommon in thee dead. There were no memories of his former life, at least not in his mind; but his muscles remembered that peculiar gait with which he walked, and a certain instinct told him to smile grandly in the face of a large crowd. So he often came at his victims with an ear-to-ear grin, lipless and rotten, cane swinging in the moonlight.

They were animals, the lot of them; but preserved in each member of Eviscerato’s circus was a sense of identity. The Strongman and the Fakir and the Geek each knew his place.

And they all followed Eviscerato — who, in turn, had been following the withdrawal, the human convoys heading north. With those convoys long gone he pressed on, guided by am intuition which told him that there was a great nest of living flesh at the end of this long and bloody road.

There, they would feast until their bellies burst.

The joke was that they called it Old New York. Some people didn’t get it, some people didn’t know history and didn’t care to know about the world before, and that was fine. But for those looking for a little light in the world after, for a little humor in the burnt-out labyrinth, the dust-swept amphitheater of silence, the concrete-and-steel canyons of the dead island — they called it Old New York and maybe cracked a smile.

101 years or so out from the Year of the Plague, the Last Day, End Time, Old New York was a sun-bleached husk of a city. Nature had reclaimed what it wanted, but it had left a lot of the skyscrapers and sewers and streets to themselves, a decaying spectacle bespeaking an ancient fallen empire. The skeletons of monolithic business enterprises and government concerns loomed over ruptured veins of asphalt and seas of dirt and glass. Loomed over nothing.

“So what are we looking for?” asked Keane. He was perched on a rusted-out hulk that had once been some piece of construction equipment. It was now host to an ecosystem of plants and insects that had infested its limbs and guts and built kingdoms of their own. It was almost like a little hill, this so-called “Caterpillar” entrenched in earth somewhere in the former Manhattan.

“Anything,” answered Alex, balancing his axe on his right shoulder while trying to sort through the torches under his left arm. “Anything we can use.”

“Or eat?”

“If you want to hunt, let’s hunt. I don’t know if we’ll find anything edible in these streets, but let’s hunt.”

“Well, I am hungry.”

“Why’d they only send three of us?” asked Jarrett.

“Because this is pointless. All of this,” said Keane, gesturing to the ghost city around them, “and there ain’t shit worth taking. Not anymore.”

“At least it’s empty,” Jarrett said.

“We don’t know that,” warned Alex.

“If there are any rotters here, they’re starved down to fuckin’ skin and bones. They gotta eat just like us, and just like us, they don’t eat.” Keane held an aluminum bat, a relic from a time when there was play. It was caked with rust, and other things rust-colored, and he wielded it like an extension of his arm. “All right. Look, Alex, we know this city’s been stripped bare… If there’s anything here, it’s under.”

“Under?”

“Ol’ New York is supposed to have a whole other city beneath it — train tunnels, sewers, basements and connections that ain’t on any of our maps. There might be some real worthwhile stuff down there. Stuff locked up even before Plague Year. Hell, there could be a goldmine down there.”

“We’re just looking for basic supplies—”

“Yeah, I know,” Keane snapped. “We’re just trying to get by. Make it to the next day. Is that livin’? C’mon. What if we could bring back more than some goddamn salt and paper? What if we brought back books? Booze? Fucking juice! I don’t needa get drunk, if I could taste apple juice just one more time—”

“Don’t start,” Alex shook his head. “Just don’t.”

“Yeah, you hate to think about it, but what if it’s really fuckin’ down there? What if, Alex? C’mon, we’re otherwise basically wastin’ our time in this ghost town, why not just go look? Jarrett, whaddaya think?”

The smallest and youngest of the three, Jarrett stared at the dead city with wonder. He still had dreams, Alex knew, he still had an idea that life was more than breathing and eating and outlasting the rotters. He had a concept of the future.

“I wonder what’s down there,” Jarrett said.

Keane slapped his knee and held the bat up. “Let’s just poke around this block, huh? Just see what’s under this block. Under this hill here, Caterpillar Hill. If we find somethin’ interesting, we’ll head back to camp and they can send out a real salvage team.”

Alex shrugged. “You know, there could be rotters down there. Preserved somehow, away from the hot and the dryness. It could be bad.”

Jarrett suddenly looked pale. Keane popped his neck with a snap of his head and sighed. “I’ll take point. We’ll sweep every room before we start shopping. Okay? I’m not gonna take any chances with you guys. C’mon.”

“What the hell,” Alex said. “Might as well make something of this trip.”

“Wait!” Jarrett said. He pointed, hand trembling, at something approaching the hill.

It lurched forward, the gaunt, thin-limbed thing, still partially hidden in the shadows of the buildings but beyond all doubt a rotter. Its stilted, insane run, its head thrusting downward with each step — it was alien and horrifying and yet they’d seen it a thousand times before.

But this one was a little different.

It ran like a bird, its arms held behind its back and its gray head making rude pecking gestures. As it came into the light, Alex saw the reason for its bizarre posture: it was handcuffed.

They’d never know why. They’d never know if this man had been some sort of prisoner, or if he’d been placed under restraint due to infection. They’d never know why he, or it, a starving scavenger just like them, was prowling the streets of Old New York alone and in old-style police handcuffs.

“Buzzard,” Keane breathed, following the rotter’s movements. “I mean, we call ‘em that, the lone ones… but never seen one that really was.” And with that, he descended the hill and, with a powerhouse swing, decapitated the rotter. Its body ran past him, scrambling halfway up the hill before collapsing and rolling back down to the street.

The head, its few teeth gnashing madly, lay in the grass. Keane stomped it to dust.

“Still want to go poking around?” Alex snapped, heart racing, face flushed. He looked at Jarrett, expecting to see terror in the boy’s eyes; but he only saw morbid fascination.

Alex knew he’d been outvoted.

“You feel that?”

“What?”

“Like a little quake. Just now.”

“No.”

They had gone into a corporate tower whose windows were long gone and whose floors had been given over to the local flora and fungi. Sunlight streamed in from all four sides — high noon — and Alex watched as rats scrabbled down into their burrows, going under the floor.

“Think they’re infected?”

“We can’t ask. Just kill ‘em if they get too close.”

“I feel bad for them,” Jarrett said. “They don’t know. They’re just living, like us.”

“It’s nature,” Alex said in an attempt at a calming tone. “We have to protect ourselves. Nature understands.”

“The rats don’t.”

“Ever hear of a rat king?” Keane muttered. He was using his bat to clear a closet of debris. “It’s an Old New York legend. Rats, they live under the city, millions of them. Some of ‘em get mashed up together and twisted — tangled, their tails, their legs — and they just go on like that. They become this one thing that just goes around taking care of itself. A rat king.”

“You mean like a huge ball of rats?” Jarrett sputtered.

Keane nodded. “It probably happens.”

“It probably happens that they get all tangled up and can’t separate,” Alex said, “but I don’t think they become one entity or whatever. They just struggle and die.”

“Why not?” Keane asked.

“Because all every rat cares about is taking care of its own self.” Alex found a brittle sheaf of papers; they could be moistened and used as bandages or cloths down the line. Maybe he’d even do a little writing. “Each rat for itself. Rat king wouldn’t work. It’s not nature.”

Jarrett looked troubled. Alex gave him an inviting smile, wanted him to speak up; but he didn’t.

The basement was a parking garage, empty. Beyond that was sewer access.

“I say we check it out,” Keane said.

“What’re we gonna find? Hundred-year-old crap.”

“New York sewers aren’t just pipes, man! There could be another fucking building down there. Let’s just look for fuck’s sake.”

“Okay. Lay off the ‘fucks’?”

“Why? No one’s around.”

“I’m around.”

“It’s just a word.”

“I’m tired of words that mean things like fuck and shit and all of that. If you’re in a good mood then talk like it, okay?”

Keane shrugged at Alex. “Right. All right.”

A ladder went down to the sub-basement in place of the long-dead elevator, and from there was a door. An actual door into the sewers.

“Why would they put a door?” Alex asked.

“Because there’s more than shit — I mean garbage — down there.” Keane rapped the bat on the old metal door. The room was small and dark and there was no echo. “Who knows? A vault or a bomb shelter or a god-please-let-there-be-a-pot-garden.”

“What’s pot?” Jarrett asked.

“Nothing you need to know about,” Alex said, and approached the door. “Take a torch, Keane. You’re on point right?”

“Right.”

The door sounded like a banshee’s dying cry. Jarrett covered his ears while Alex lit a torch and shouldered his axe. “I’ll take the rear, Jarr. You go after Keane.”

There were stairs; wet stairs, Alex noticed immediately, old carved stone steps that collected tepid little pools of water from some unknown source. Had to be the humidity. It was hot and fucking damp in that narrow stairwell. Drip-drip-drip from down below rattled the nerves. Jarrett was breathing hard, looking from side to side at the flat black walls as they descended the winding staircase, Alex and Keane each holding a torch and a weapon. Jarrett was approved for weapons, but all he had was a length of pipe tucked against his calf, down in that one old holey sock he wore on his right leg. He knew to strike them in the eyes and teeth. Blind them, disable them, evade them. Rotters weren’t to be messed with. It wasn’t Man’s cause to seek out and slaughter the living dead. Just stay out of their damn way and let them rot.

“I almost hear a rumbling,” Keane said.

“Well, do you or don’t you?” Alex whispered.

“I don’t know. It’s kinda in my feet, you feel that?”

“I don’t feel anything. And I don’t hear anything. We’re down in solid rock here, Keane, I don’t think you’re really feeling anything moving about.”

“Just the earth?”

“I don’t know. Your imagination. Your heartbeat.”

“So dark,” Jarrett breathed. “How far do you think these stairs go?”

“Don’t know, son,” Alex replied. He was beginning to feel claustrophobic, despite being the rear guard, and he thrust his torch toward the ceiling. “Flame’s dancing a little. I think there’s some air coming up from below.”

Keane nodded. “It’s getting a little less damp. We’re onto something.” He grinned at Jarrett.

The stairs ended. There was a tunnel, and another door, sodden wood bulging with just a few tiny holes letting some cool air push through. Pungent, but cool.

“What do you think the city was like back then? When it was New New York?” Jarrett asked.

Alex stared at a blank wall. “All I know is, it was always the same down here.”

“Definitely a sewer behind this door,” Keane grunted as he tugged at the old, swollen wood. “But there’s gotta be something more. This passage wasn’t carved out so some guys could clean shit outta the pipes.”

“Language.”

“Yeah,” Keane mumbled. “I’ll bet this was here before the sewers. I’ll bet they came later and took this up as part of ‘em, but this used to be something else — something—”

The door roared as it fell apart, an icy wind with the smell of rancid waste smacking each man in the face. Then it was gone. A gaping hole remained.

“Blew my torch out,” Keane whistled.

“Here’s another.”

“I can get this one to go again. No problem.”

Jarrett approached the opening on trembling legs. There was a black vacuum, a soundless, sightless void.

“Here,” Alex said, and tossed his torch through the doorway.

It splashed, and fizzled, but didn’t go out. It illuminated the six-foot drop, managed by ladder, and the cavernous sewer tunnel extending from right there to the end of the world in both directions.

“Lookit this,” Keane said, perched in the doorway with eyes wide. “It’s huge. By Adam, you could drive a truck through this here! Two trucks! What were they flushin’?” he laughed, and it echoed throughout the system, making Alex’s skin crawl.

“Keep it quiet.”

“You honestly think there’s anything down here? We had to kill that door to get through!”

“Don’t stir up the rats!” Alex hissed. Keane threw his hands out in mock horror. “God forbid I should have to mash a few rat heads.”

“Rat king,” Jarrett said, “could fit through there. Big enough for a rat king.”

“Rat kings aren’t real.” Alex shot a stern look at Keane, who just rolled his eyes. “But there are almost certainly rats in there infected with the Plague or something else and I don’t want to mess with ‘em.”

“So we’re not going in there?” Keane pouted.

“Are you kidding?”

“What’d we come down here for? What’d I rip apart that door for?”

“It’s just a sewer! There isn’t any gold down here, man! Do you see anything but a little river of shit water? There aren’t any other tunnels or doors or anything. It’s just a big-ass sewer, that’s all. I’m sorry,” Alex sighed. “I wish there was something down here. It would’ve made this day worthwhile. But there’s not.”

They all felt the rumble.

“What do you think that was?” Keane asked.

“Maybe…” Alex leaned through the doorway into the tunnel, feeling the slight breeze. “Maybe there’s water down here. Maybe there’s like some sort of river system that still exists, and it shifts things around. Could be natural caverns underneath all this.”

“Wouldn’t that be something to see,” Keane said, smiling at Jarrett.

“We’re not sight-seeing, though, we’re—” And then Alex fell.

It was a jarring drop, not lethal, not frightening, just jarring. Painful and shitty and wet. He landed in a fetid slop and knew his ankle had turned. “GOD! FUCK!” It probably was just a sprain. Just a sprain, Keane could haul him up if he could just grab that ladder. Alex looked at his hands, looked for cuts in the dying light of the thrown torch. He couldn’t see shit for shit.

“Keane, gimme a hand. I’m okay.”

Jarrett’s head shot into the tunnel. “Are you all right?”

“I just said I’m fine,” Alex grumbled. He sat up and scooted his butt forward a little, sloshing in the muck. He was going to stink for days. The group hadn’t come across fresh water in a week, and it would probably be another damn week before they did. Alex saw the coming days going to hell; saw himself sitting alone in a dirty tent and just when he’d gotten up the nerve to ask Tru if she wanted to lay with him.

“Need more than a hand, looks like,” Keane said, clambering down the ladder.

“No, I can get myself up there, I just need—”

“Man, forget it. I’ve got you.” Keane clapped Alex’s back and coughed. “You smell like shit.”

“Thank you.”

There was another rumble.

“I know you felt that.”

It didn’t stop.

Then the thing came around the bend, filling the tunnel, all of it, claiming every inch of space in its insane locomotion.

Torsos, heads, limbs, all desiccated, all human, all undead, all packed together with mud and blood and everything else and wound tight with threads of bone and flesh and fungus. A gnashing moaning rumbling thing that pawed at the walls with skeletal hands, feeling old grooves, having run this track a thousand times like a polished marble. Broken teeth and watery eyes and bloody gums all searching for the least bit of meat. Plunging through the tunnel, the rumble now a crescendo of wails and grunts and other things going on inside the wet pulsing core of the rat king.

Jarrett’s head snapped back as the thing came by, and he saw a split-second flash of faces and feet and skulls and things he never wanted to see, ever, ever again. The thing swept by and rolled up Alex and Keane into it and swallowed them and it continued its terrible progress through the bowels of the city, searching for every last warm morsel to sustain itself.

Jarrett never explained the rat king to the others, to anyone. He didn’t tell them just how the rotters had taken Alex and Keane. He didn’t think they would understand. Only nature would. Nature, who, he now knew, was a goddess in Hell.