Once leaning against his chest and belly and groin, with his knees bending the right 362
way, he could slip down further, letting his calves and feet slide into the horizontal pipe until he was in the praying position. Still no good. His buttocks were pushing against the solid ceramic facing above the entrance to the horizontal pipe.
Faintly, it seemed that he could hear shouted commands above the heavy crackle of the fire, but it might have been his imagination, which was now strained and fevered beyond the point of trust.
He began to flex the muscles of his thighs and calves in a tiring seesaw rhythm, and little by little his knees began to slide out from under him. He worked his hands up over his head again to give himself more room, and now his face lay solidly against the slime of the pipe. He was very close to fitting now. He swayed his back as much as he could and began to push with his arms and head, the only things left in any position to give him leverage.
When he had begun to think there was not enough room, that he was going to simply hang here, unable to move either way, his hips and buttocks suddenly popped through the horizontal pipe’s opening like a champagne cork from a tight bottleneck. The small of his back scraped excruciatingly as his knees slid out from under him, and his shirt tucked up to his shoulder-blades. Then he was in the horizontal pipe-except for his head and arms, which were bent back at a joint-twisting angle. He wriggled the rest of the way in and then paused there, panting, his face streaked with slime and rat droppings, the skin of his lower back abraded and oozing blood.
This pipe was narrower still; his shoulders scraped lightly on both sides each time his chest rose in respiration.
Thank God I’m underfed.
Panting, he began to back into the unknown darkness of the pipe.
Minus 068 and COUNTING
He made slow, molelike progress for about fifty yards through the horizontal pipe, backing up blindly. Then the oil tank in the Y’s basement suddenly blew with a roar that set up enough sympathetic vibrations in the pipes to nearly rupture his eardrums. There was a yellow-white flash, as if a pile of phosphorus had ignited. It faded to a rosy, shifting glow. A few moments later a blast of thermal air struck him in the face, making him grin painfully.
The tape camera in his jacket pocket swung and bounced as he tried to back up faster.
The pipe was picking up heat from the fierce explosion and fire that was raging somewhere above him, the way the handle of a skillet picks up heat from a gas-ring.
Richards had no urge to be baked down here like a potato in a Dutch oven.
Sweat rolled down his face, mixing with the black streaks of ordure already there, making him look, in the waxing and waning glow of the reflected fire, like an Indian painted for war. The sides of the pipe were hot to the touch now.
Lobsterlike, Richards humped backwards on his knees and forearms, his buttocks rising to smack the top of the pipe at every movement. His breath came in sharp, doglike 363
gasps. The air was hot, full of the slick taste of oil, uncomfortable to breathe. A headache surfaced within his skull and began to push daggers into the backs of his eyes.
I’m going to fry in here. I’m going to fry.
Then his feet were suddenly dangling in the air. Richards tried to peer through his legs and see what was there, but it was too dark behind and his eyes were too dazzled by the light in front. He would have to take his chance. He backed up until his knees were on the edge of the pipe’s ending, and then slid them cautiously over.
His shoes were suddenly in water, cold and shocking after the heat of the pipe.
The new pipe ran at right angles to the one Richards had just come through, and it was much larger-big enough to stand in bent over. The thick, slowly moving water came up over his ankles. He paused for just a moment to stare back into the tiny pipe with its soft circle of reflected fireglow. The fact that he could see any glow at all from this distance meant that it must have been a very big bang indeed.
Richards reluctantly forced himself to know it would be their job to assume him alive rather than dead in the inferno of the YMCA basement, but perhaps they would not discover the way he had taken until the fire was under control. That seemed a safe assumption. But it had seemed safe to assume that they could not trace him to Boston, too.
Maybe they didn’t. After all, what did you really see?
No. It had been them. He knew it. The Hunters. They had even carried the odor of evil. It had wafted up to his fifth floor room on invisible psychic thermals.
A rat dog-paddled past him, pausing to look up briefly with glittering eyes.
Richards splashed clumsily off after it, in the direction the water was flowing.
Minus 067 and COUNTING
Richards stood by the ladder, looking up, dumbfounded by the light. No regular traffic, which was something, but light-The light was surprising because it had seemed that he had been walking in the sewers for hours piled upon hours. In the darkness, with no visual input and no sound but the gurgle of water, the occasional soft splash of a rat, and the ghostly thumpings in other pipes (what happens if someone flushes a john over my head, Richards wondered morbidly), his time sense had been utterly destroyed.
Now, looking up at the manhole cover some fifteen feet above him, he saw that the light had not yet faded out of the day. There were several circular breather holes in the cover, and pencil-sized rays of light pressed coins of sun on his chest and shoulders.
No air-cars had passed over the cover since he had gotten here; only an occasional heavy ground-vehicle and a fleet of Honda-cycles. It made him suspect that, more by good luck and the law of averages than by inner sense of direction, he had managed to find his way to the core of the city-to his own people.
Still, he didn’t dare go up until dark. To pass the time, he took out the tape camera, 364
popped in a clip, and began recording his chest. He knew the tapes were “fastlight,” able to take advantage of the least available light, and he did not want to give away too much of his surroundings. He did no talking or capering this time. He was too tired.
When the tape was done, he put it with the other exposed clip. He wished he could rid himself of the nagging suspicion-almost a certainty-that the tapes were pinpointing him.
There had to be a way to beat that. Had to.
He sat down stolidly on the third rung of the ladder to wait for dark. He had been running for nearly thirty hours.
Minus 066 and COUNTING
The boy, seven years old, black, smoking a cigarette, leaned closer to the mouth of the alley, watching the street.
There had been a sudden, slight movement in the street where there had been none before. Shadows moved, rested, moved again. The manhole cover was rising. It paused and something-eyes?-glimmered. The cover suddenly slid aside with a clang.
Someone (or something, the boy thought with a trace of fear) was moving out there.
Maybe the devil was coming out of hell to get Cassie, he thought. Ma said Cassie was going to heaven to be with Dicky and the other angels. The boy thought that was bullshit.
Everybody went to hell when they died, and the devil jabbed them in the ass with a pitchfork. He had seen a picture of the devil in the books Bradley had snuck out of the Boston Public Library. Heaven was for Push freaks. The devil was the Man.
It could be the devil, he thought as Richards suddenly boosted himself out of the manhole and leaned for a second on the seamed and split cement to get his breath back.
No tail and no horns, not red like in that book, but the mother looked crazy and mean enough.
Now he was pushing the cover back, and now-
-now holy Jesus he was running toward the alley.
The boy grunted, tried to run, and fell over his own feet.
He was trying to get up, scrambling and dropping things, and the devil suddenly grabbed him.
“Doan stick me wif it!” He screamed in a throat-closed whisper. “Doan stick me wif no fork, you sumbitch-”
“Shhh! Shut up! Shut up!” The devil shook him, making his teeth rattle like marbles in his head, and the boy shut up. The devil peered around in an ecstacy of apprehension.