Chapter 2 - Current
UTTER DARKNESS, LAUNDROMAT, OLD TOWN (MORNING)
Inhale. Exhale. That smell.
Block it out.
The bandana helps little.
Valerie realizes her mistake: there’s no way for her to know if the goon is gone without opening the door.
Pray there’s another way out.
Pray that smell is just a smell.
:.Pray, Godless, pray.:
Valerie turns in to the room. Her pupils must be the size of dinner plates and still serving up nothing. Except for a pair of red eyes. Two pairs. Three. Staring, unblinking.
It’s not that she doesn’t have light. It’s that she’s afraid to use it.
The devil you know or the devil you don’t.
Imagination summons demons into the mortal world. Sometimes it’s best to put the demons back where they belong.
Let there be light!
Valerie’s phone is at once a brilliant aura.
She chokes a yelp, shutting it down.
The devil you don’t, she decides. But a part of her nags: Maybe you saw it wrong. It couldn’t be. Could it?
Round Two.
It’s kind of like going underwater. How long can you hold your breath? Longer this time.
Nothing’s moving. Nothing moved.
Lumpy black contractor bags. Faceless. Faceless is good. :.You say that now.:
Round Three.
BACK ROOM, LAUNDROMAT (CONTINUOUS)
A thicket of hoses and cords makes up a narrow hall behind the machines, leaks turned to viscous black puddles.
The red eyes across the room belong to a control panel. There’s still power in this joint.
Another hall recedes into darkness. Between here and there lies an ocean of refuse--a hoarder’s trove of: yellowed peripherals, rusted cookware, water-damaged catalogs. Several contractor bags have been eviscerated, clothes bursting from slits like entrails.
That smell.
Valerie presses her ear to the door and hears her fears.
Pray they can’t see the light bleeding under the door; she needs it.
Stolen novel; please report.
She picks her way across the room, leaping between exposed squares of floor, and scrapes one of the bags. Squishy. Organic. Forty-two gallons of NOPE.
Valerie’s light beats back the darkness up the hall; it filters in behind her like the Red Sea.
Pray for a similar outcome.
BACK HALL, LAUNDROMAT (CONTINUOUS)
This hall knows no curves, only right angles. Steel lockers are the walls. Shallow puddles cover the floor, between them smears Valerie pretends is rust. The smell only worsens.
Valerie takes every turn with bated breath, all her light this little aura of phone. She checks it:
NO SERVICE
Figures.
A snake of frigid air coils around her legs. Noise. Rushing water.
Diseased light sneaks under the door at the end of the hall. Valerie kills her phone to conserve battery and tries the handle, wincing at the screech that wakes up the rest of the city.
UPPER SEWERS (CONTINUOUS)
A vast manmade cavern extends far and below, everything bared by caged olive lights: catwalks stitched together by sketchy scaffolding, a network of concrete bridges over raging grey water.
Valerie stands on the precipice, telling herself that sewer can explain the smell. She isn’t convinced.
The way isn’t straight down. It’s a three-dimensional maze of what she can reach and what holds she can trust.
A thought bangs on Valerie’s door:
This isn’t the world I woke up in.
A slick shoe slips on a rung and she drops, crashing onto catwalk. Something falls. Her phone. She slaps her pockets. Worse. THE PAYLOAD.
It bounced to the edge of some scaffold out in no-man’s land.
Valerie wipes sweaty palms on her thighs and lets down her bandana, breathing yoga. She doesn’t gag on the stench. Must be getting used to it.
She has to play monkey bars to get over there: a teetering construction on the brink of collapse. Hanging, she can just reach THE PAYLOAD with her toe. Her attempts to nudge it back from oblivion have her swinging, the scaffold creaking, now canting.
Now collapsing.
The cacophony fills the cavern, Valerie somewhere inside it.
LOWER SEWERS (MORNING)
Valerie comes to on a causeway, sewer water loud and spraying, fragmented bones of scaffolding all around. Pain lights up her head, her shoulder. She’s been out mere seconds.
A shadow crosses her vision. An artifact. Something wrong with her eyes. She remembers: THE PAYLOAD.
The shadow comes again. Her head HURTS to track it.
Her eyes focus on THE PAYLOAD beside the rushing sewer. She struggles toward it.
The shadow, HOWLING, assails her. It’s humanoid, FACELESS besides a gaping maw, miasmic. Joints jut out like frog legs.
Valerie dives away, kicking blindly. Pieces of scaffolding clatter and clank. It’s ON HER, wet and rank. Valerie twists and thrashes, FIGHTING FOR HER LIFE.
Her fingers grasp a sharp rod and she strikes the HOWLING shadow: smash, smash, stab. Her stab pierces its blackhole mouth. The shadow, leaking liquid, lurches away and falls into the sewer.
THE PAYLOAD goes with it.
The shadow sinks. Bubbles rise up from the flowing grey water suddenly calm and no longer gushing. THE PAYLOAD, in its unremarkable package, floats. Downstream.
DEEP SEWERS (MORNING)
A mycelial labyrinth of canals and causeways extends in all directions lit by olive-green tumors.
Valerie follows THE PAYLOAD as it bobs along the current, across bridges and through tunnels and under arches, always keeping it in view.
She presses a fork of fingers into her temple, trying to keep THE PAYLOAD in focus as she hobbles along. Trying to curb the pain. Trying to keep at bay a torrent of emotion, fears, doubts, doom. Trying to conjure a plan.
In hindsight, she could have used a rod from the crumpled scaffolding to fish it out; that ship has sailed. She’s not swimming. Heaven knows :.not.: what lurks beneath the black waters.
The music keeps her moving.
DEAD END, SEWERS (MORNING)
Valerie watches as THE PAYLOAD is swept through a grated pipe and disappeared. Stone wall blocks her advance. She turns and mounts a spiral of rusted stairs.