Chapter 17
The problem with relying on my weird ability to sense lurkers while tiptoeing beneath Manhattan is that I can sense all of the fucking lurkers in Manhattan while I do it.
Okay. Maybe not all of them. There are supposed to be thousands of the monsters hiding in the city, tucked away in abandoned buildings, subway tunnels, and every other dark place they can find until the sun goes down, and I doubt even my weird internal lurker radar reaches that far.
But it sure as hell feels like it does. Ever since we climbed into the sewer, there has been a dull ache low in my stomach.
Not the vicious cramps that double me over when a horde is coming.
This is more like a nagging sensation I can’t escape, the kind that makes me want to tuck my torch under my arm, press both hands against my belly, and tell every lurker in Manhattan to shut the fuck up for five minutes so I can concentrate.
Because they’re here. That’s the one thing I can say with absolutely certainty. When Maverick initially sold me on that suicide mission of his by saying that Manhattan has the largest nest of lurkers nearby, he was right. They’re everywhere.
And that’s the problem. When I constantly sense them, it makes it so much harder to tell if they’re going to be a problem once night falls or if we’re about to follow Jules’s map right into a horde hiding out in the sewer.
So far we haven’t, and I’m glad. If we manage to get to the small, understated building where Gwen is supposedly being kept by the last-standing members of the National Resilience Institute without having to flame a lurker, I actually won’t complain that he missed the opportunity to take them out.
Especially since, if Maverick has a chance to follow through with Stage II of the plan, we should be able to eliminate a huge amount without having to be face-to-face with the rotten zombies…
For now, I’m just following behind Veronica and Mav.
Delilah is a step ahead of them, checking her map every time the long, narrow length of sewer we’re trawling through branches off.
Aaron is in the lead, taking point and prepared to use his torch to flame any lurkers we might run across.
David is protecting us from the rear, turning behind him to double-check that no lurkers have picked up on our tail and are plodding their way behind us, waiting for us to fuck up and lose our torches.
So long as we have fire on our side, we’re fine.
Outside of the sewers, the torches won’t do much, though Delilah did tell us that the almost-lurkers—those who took the first Injection—do burn like their fully Turned brethren.
They don’t get caught in the stare, and while her vision is sensitive, she can tolerate the orange firelight surrounding her if she keeps her shades on.
She just has to make sure to keep the torches away from her, though we can say the same for any of us.
I have a patch of ruined skin on my upper arm that proves ordinary survivors burn, too.
The only problem we’ll have if we run into the Men in Black is that they’re four times as fast a lurker. They’re super strong, too, snapping bones like they’re kindling. Even if we try to use fire against them, it’s not like they’ll stand there and let us flame them.
So, yeah. We don’t want to run into anyone from the NRI. It’ll be better if we avoid lurkers. Our main goal is to grab Gwen so we can convince the scientist that she needs to help our rebel band of survivors create the antidote. Anything after that is a bonus.
I just wish I didn’t feel like I was going to hurl the whole time.
I should be getting used to it. We’ve been down here for almost an hour, making our way slowly through the sludge that I’m trying not to think about.
We haven’t seen a single lurker, and though I know that should be a good thing, it isn’t.
Instead, it’s driving me nuts that I can’t get past the sensation that they’re going to jump out at us.
I huff out a breath.
Next to me, Chase pauses. “Something wrong? How’s your gut?”
“Telling me they’re everywhere.”
He immediately looks around. “Close? We need to be ready?”
I wish I knew.
“I can’t say. I mean, there’s a shit ton above us.
I know that. There are more somewhere to the left, and maybe they’re on the ground-floor on a building just over our heads.
Or they could be in another tunnel, if there’s one veering off of this one.
And every time we follow Delilah and take a turn, it all changes.
” I use my free hand to rub my stomach again.
“It’s like trying to listen to somebody talking on the other side of a wall while three other people are shouting at you. ”
“But you’ll still be able to tell if anything’s coming toward us?”
“I… I think so.”
“You sure?”
I glare at him.
He gives me the sort of innocent look that had every teacher at Madison High believing he was harmless.
“Fuck off, Chase.”
A wicked grin tugs on his lips. “There she is. That’s my girl.”
I elbow him lightly, and his grin widens, but I can tell that, most of all, he’s relieved. I might not be able to figure out where the nagging sensation is coming from precisely, but I’m still me.
I’m still Holden.
To be fair, though, he has more than enough reason to be wary…
Thanks to time in school and my fascination with mental health, I know enough psychology to understand what happened to me, even if knowing the terminology doesn’t make it any less fucked up.
After Xandra died, my brain couldn’t reconcile being Hallie with surviving when my tougher twin didn’t get the chance.
So it did what brains sometimes do when reality becomes too painful to live with: it dissociated.
Only I didn’t just detach from what happened.
I detached from me. Somewhere between the explosion and waking up afterward, being Hallie became unbearable, so my mind handed me an identity I could survive as instead.
I became Xandra.
Except I wasn’t really her, was I? I had Hallie’s memories and habits buried beneath everything I remembered about my sister, cobbled together into a version of Xandra convincing enough that even I believed it, though I’m pretty sure I was the only one.
And then the Doctor tortured me into admitting that I am Hollie, only I still can’t be, and now I’m Holden.
And Holden isn’t afraid. She’s going to march next to Chase, holding her torch, ignoring the hell out of her stomach cramps as she trudges forward.
You know what? Ignoring the damn things would be a lot easier if, every few minutes or so, a more powerful cramp didn’t hit hard enough to have me wincing.
The last one I had was a beast. It came so suddenly, so unexpectedly that I had to slow down to ride it out. Chase is consistent in matching my pace. When I slowed, so did he. David hovers a few steps behind us, and the retired Marine asks me if I’m okay.
Shit. I don’t know.
Up ahead, Aaron’s torch disappears around a gentle curve before reappearing, and I concentrate on the sensation. For some reason, it hits me again as I lift my torch, peering at the new path branching off from the main sewer. There, I think. Something is definitely—
I stop in my tracks.
The others notice quickly. They’ve learned that when the human lurker alarm stops moving, everybody else should, too.
“What is it?” Veronica asks.
“I’m not sure,” I admit reluctantly. “I’m trying to figure it out.”
While they wait, I close my eyes, which shouldn’t help. My stomach isn’t connected to my eyesight, obviously, but Xandra taught me to concentrate this way when we were first figuring out what I could do. Shut everything else out. Ignore the noise. Listen to my body.
Sometimes I wish my stupid body would speak English already.
The cramp eases, only to return a second later. I turn slightly, trying to orient myself, and when I open my eyes, I’m once again looking at that side tunnel to our left.
Maverick raises his torch. “Something down there, kid?”
“Maybe? I don’t know. I get bad vibes about it. Like something’s not right.”
“Lurker?”
“It’s possible. My stomach is definitely off, but… it’s hard. With so many nearby and me trying to search for them… it could be lurkers. It could be danger. Either way, maybe we should avoid it.”
Handing her torch to her twin, Delilah unfolds Jules’s map, checking it beneath the light from both her and Veronica’s torches. “We can. We’re not taking that branch. We continue straight for another quarter mile, then there should be an access ladder.”
Aaron looks thoughtful. “Could connect farther down. Maybe I should do more than peek my head in. Just make sure there aren’t any lurkers, just in case.”
Veronica considers that, then nods. “Don’t go too far. If they’re near, you’ll be able to tell. Flame ‘em and come back.”
“You got it, Vee.”
Gripping his torch, lifting it high to light his way through the darkness, Aaron turns left and starts down the tunnel.
I don’t like it. It doesn’t make sense that I don’t, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned since the Turning, it’s that I need to rely on my intuition. He needs to come back.
He never gets the chance.
Aaron has gone maybe five, ten feet down the tunnel when his voice echoes back to us. “You guys smell that?”
Ew. Not even a little.
The truth is that I stopped breathing the moment I first descended the stairs with Chase and got my first whiff of “sewer”.
It’s gross. It reeks of damp concrete, old waste, mildew, and shit.
There’s no sugarcoating it. It smells like shit, and it’s probably so bad because no one is left alive to maintain the city sewers.
They belong to the rats—though I’m sure any lurkers down here have already feasted on all of the rats—and lurkers.
That’s it. Now that I think of it, it’s probably super fucking dangerous for us to be messing around down here with nothing but a possibly outdated map as a guide.
But then Aaron says, “It smells weird. Not like lurker weird, but… you know. When you forget to turn the burner off or something. Like gas.”
Gas.
What? It can’t be.
I breathe in deep, but all I get is “sewer”. But if he thinks it’s gas…
Shit.
If it smells like gas, and Aaron is bringing a lit torch into a small space with little to no ventilation where we are down here and how can there be…
No.
No.
Chase figures it out at the exact same moment as I do. “Aaron? Get the fuck out of there!”
“I don’t see any lurkers—”
The sudden explosion swallows the last of his words whole.
I’ll forever be grateful for—and maybe just a tad envious of—Chase’s reflexes.
The instant the gas ignites, creating a fireball that shoots back out of the tunnel, scorching the other side of the sewer when it slams into it before it fizzles out and dies, he already has me tucked under him.
He’s careful to keep his torch away from me while avoiding the flame on mine, but I know I’m not the only one who is suddenly thrown back to that evening in July when another wayward flame set off a gas leak.
Xandra died that day. I was lucky to survive then, just like I’m lucky to survive now.
All of us are. Because we were standing together, far enough away from the tunnel that Aaron went to explore, the most we get hit with is a powerful rush of hot air.
It was loud enough that my ears are both muffled and ringing.
I can hear the thud of my heart, but not the sound of my own whimpers as I realize that Aaron…
there’s no way he survived a direct hit from that blast.
For a heartbeat, I’m back at the Grave. It’s the split second before Xandra tosses the firebomb, and in the flash of the flame, we both saw the wavy lines of a formerly undetected gas leak when there was nothing we could do to stop it.
Xandra…
Xandra is gone.
Xandra is dead.
My twin… I have to get to her. I have to stop her. She can’t die—
A hand closes on my arm, jerking me just enough to get my attention. My head snaps up, and through the haze that’s left in the wake of the blast, I see the panic twisting Chase’s face.
His mouth is moving. I can’t hear him. My ears are coming back on-line, and the ringing will fade eventually, but the way he keeps making the same two motions with his tongue, his lips, his teeth… I know exactly what he’s saying.
Holden.
He’s calling me Holden.
That’s right. I am Holden. Because Xandra died, and I wasn’t able to stop her from dying in a flaming-gone-wrong any more than I was able to stop Aaron from heading down that side tunnel with a lit torch.
Aaron…
My knees buckle. With two torches in one hand—because he must have relieved me of mine and is using his wide hand to hold them both—that leaves Chase one one free one to grab me before I hit the shit beneath us.
He manages it without dropping either torch.
He tugs me against him, guiding me to wrap my arms around him while he hugs me tight with his free hand.
I let him hold me until the smoke clears and I can hear again. And I know it’s selfish. I’m not the only one that’s been traumatized by the Turning, and I’ve only known Aaron for a little more than a month.
These are his friends. He was loyal to Veronica and her cause.
He was tight with David. He even spent the last couple of days with Delilah, looking at the map; that’s why he got the lead position instead of David, because Aaron was sure he could navigate our path to the NRI.
And Chase… both he and Maverick spent plenty of time with Aaron during border patrols and evening lurker hunts.
We’re all in shock. There’s no denying that. But I can’t let what happened to Xandra and me at the Grave color everything that happens now just because, for the second time in my life, fire stole a survivor from the rest of us.
I push against Chase with just enough force to let me know that I want to stand.
He hesitates, then lets me go. That Veronica is staring at shock at the tunnel, Maverick slinging his arm over he shoulder while tugging her against him…
that Delilah is clutching the crumpled map to her chest, weeping softly…
that David is pacing back and forth, cursing angrily under his breath… yeah. Aaron is gone.
He’s gone.