The Company Man

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Hayes slept in five-minute bursts. He had trained himself to do it long ago, and there in the empty cold shop the gift returned slowly. For the past two days he had lived in a swimming dreamworld, fatigue eroding every one of his senses. But still he watched. And, in a way, the silence and loneliness were pleasant. His mind had not been so clear in weeks.

When the storm rolled in he piled blankets about himself on his perch. He ignored his shivering and hunkered down more and sucked on the end of a pencil. He badly wanted a cigarette but would not risk the flame.

He was not sure when he noticed the man. Time had become strange to him as the sun shifted behind the overcast. But he had been staring at the pattern of the crowd for hours and had come to know the traffic and the loitering places, so when one man walked out of one alley and crossed before the building face and walked into yet another alley to examine something on the ground, Hayes knew there was something wrong. Through the fog and the condensation of the glass Hayes saw he was short with a gray coat and a smudged bowler, but could make out nothing more.

He watched the gray coat. Saw him look closer at the thing on the ground, then look at the street and the buildings above and pick the thing up and toss it away. It was half of a shoe, sodden and wet. The man wiped his hands on his coat and stood in the shelter of the alley and put his hands in his pockets and casually rocked back and forth.

“You,” said Hayes from his perch, “are fucking terrible at this.”

He gauged that the man in the gray coat would stay in the alley for a little less than five minutes. He slipped down to the bottom floor of the shop and watched him from behind a ragged sheet that had been left hanging. The gray coat sidled out toward the lip of the alley and huddled below an awning in the sleet. Then he walked out quickly, crossing to Hayes’s warehouse and dodging through the cars and the cabbies and the streams of soaking people. He slowed as he came to Hayes’s door, where he turned about and walked backward the rest of the way, eyes roving and clouds of breath forming a trail like the smokestack of a train. Then he ducked down and slid something below the door and hurried off west.

Hayes put on a thick black coat and boots and a riding cap and headed out into the rain after him. He marked the gray coat carefully in the street and strained to keep hold of him. Crowds swarmed about them as his quarry headed north on Embrage and then west on 112th and then south on Dowers. The figure slipped among street criers and huddled bands of the homeless and once a train of passing nuns, black and white like the keys of a piano. He paused at every other corner to inspect something on the ground and sneak glances over his shoulder. Each time he went through this inept process Hayes would pull his face down into his collar and merge with the nearest group of people. If they noticed him they did not say so. Perhaps on rainy cold days such as these the water blended people together until they could not tell themselves apart.

The gray coat came to a trolley station and he swung himself down the twisting iron staircase to the tunnels below. Hayes ambled up to the stairway and passed by while looking down. He did not see the man waiting so he quickly bought a newspaper and pretended to read it to hide his face. Then he walked to the stairwell and descended in a brisk trot and turned sharply left at the floor and kept going. Warm air and the roar of a distant trolley swallowed most of his senses. A vagrant sat by the foot of the stairs, hands cupped for change. He reached out to Hayes, saying, “I am a messenger, sent from afar. Please, you must listen to me. You must listen. You must…”

Hayes ignored him. His eyes stayed vaguely fixed on the print of the newspaper, scanning the crowd for that streak of light gray. He walked around in a quick loop and spotted the man walking east along the tunnel, then over one of the trolley bridges and down west to Westbank. Hayes followed and let the newspaper fall as he did so. It would be hard to lose him now. The trolley stations were mostly abandoned in the wake of the Bridgedale slaughter.

The gray coat came to a trolley stop and stood there waiting. Hayes passed him by, just a few feet away. The man did not notice Hayes taking in his black-smudged face layered with burst veins, the skin heavily lined around the eyes and lips. Probably from fumes of some sort. A unioner, almost certainly.

Hayes kept walking down to a sausage stand. He bought one and shambled down farther to where the maintenance tunnels began. He leaned up against a bright red pipe and chewed his sausage slowly and watched the gray coat. He squinted to read the trolley map. There was the D line and the G4 line and the C38 line and it seemed like thousands more. He badly wished Samantha were there. She was much smarter when it came to things like this.

“Come on, bastard,” he muttered as he watched. “Come on. Go on home for me, just real quick.”

The gray coat looked back at the platform numbers, then began to walk farther down. Hayes waited for him to pass, then matched his pace, not willing to put any more distance between them.

As they moved a faint sound rumbled through the trolley station, a low groaning that blurred into a hum as some massive burst of pressure was shifted from one system to another. The other people in the station seemed not to notice, but as the noise increased Hayes became aware of something else. There was something crawling in the back of his mind, building tension with the noise until it was a white-hot needle burning into him, right behind his ear.

He stopped, gasping, then muttered, “Oh, no,” as the attack began to take grip.

He stumbled to the side, clawing at the wall as he fell before the tunnel. The guttering sounds from below him clacked and shivered, filling up his ears, and somehow the attack strengthened with it. Anger and fear and morose boredom flooded through him, pounding his brain with each wave. He looked up through tear-filled eyes and saw the maintenance tunnel ceiling above him. He thrashed about, the world around him blurring.

Close and dusty and dark. Chambers and passages splintering off, indecipherable signs written on each of them. The roar of the trolleys filling every moment. And somewhere in it was a voice, begging for him to listen.

Then something changed. Suddenly he could hear something new. But that wasn’t possible, he thought. Surely he had to be wrong…

Things went black. Then lights flashed before him, soft blue ones that were somehow at the edges of his sight. He felt there was some message in them, some signal like Morse code, but before he could pay attention to them they faded and he saw he was no longer in the trolley system at all. Instead he found he was in the bone-like ruins of a city long gone. Pockmarked ribs of ancient gray buildings lay broken on the paths before him. Everything smelled of ashes. Down the remains of one street he could see the husk of a tall building leaning against the dark sky. At the top its steeple had been reduced to shards, but he could see it had once been jade-green, and below it a few metal letters still clung to the building’s side, an M and a C and an O.

As he looked he saw there was something beyond it. Something out on the edge of the city, something enormous and white, rising up to the sky…

Someone was shaking him. “Hey, buddy. Buddy?”

The vision faded. He took a breath and smelled the urinal tang of the trolley stations and knew he had not gone anywhere. He opened his tear-blurred eyes and saw he was lying in the mouth of the maintenance tunnel. The sausage stand vendor was prodding him with the toe of a shoe as curious onlookers gathered around him.

“You all right, buddy?” asked the sausage vendor.

“What the hell was that?” gasped Hayes.

“You fell over. Just fell over and started shaking. You hit your head or something?”

Hayes sat up and looked around. The man in the gray coat was gone. “How long have I been here?”

“Sorry?” asked the vendor.

“How long have I been here?”

“Oh. I don’t know. A good couple of minutes or so.”

“Shit,” said Hayes. He got to his feet and staggered back a little but soon steadied himself.

“It wasn’t the sausage, right, buddy?” asked the vendor warily.

“Fuck off,” said Hayes, and darted off into the station.

He sprinted through the platforms, looking high and low for that smear of gray he’d marked, but found nothing. The man had either gotten spooked or made his connection. Either way, he’d be on the other side of the city by now.

Surrendering, Hayes limped back up to the streets. Dawn was crawling over the building tops. He made his way home, shivering and confused.

It was almost like something under the city had spoken to him. Spoken to him and caused his attack. And as strange as the vision had been, what disturbed him more was what had come just before it, because for one second Hayes had not heard whispers from the minds of those nearby but almost a loud shout from a single mind, one that was vaster than any other he’d ever encountered. An enormous and strange consciousness, somehow buried under the city, and waiting for him, imagining a ruined Evesden underneath a dark sky.

Something was changing in the city, that was for sure, and perhaps these murders and the unions were just the barest hint of things to come. Hayes shook himself and tried to forget it.

Underneath his front door the man in the gray coat had wedged a small letter. Hayes pawed at it with useless, icy hands and forced the door open and stumbled in. He had no wood so he built a fire in the brazier of books, history and poetry and versions of the Bible. He knelt before the blackening pages and felt warmth return to his bones. Then he opened the letter. On it were a time and a place, no more.