Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [3]
“And I’ll give you an extra twenty,” I added, “if you keep any mention of me off the list you sell to the cops.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said stonily, but there was a change in his attitude. “But I’ll take your twenty.”
I nodded and walked through the door. It shut behind me, and for the first time in five years I was inside New Richmond.
The door led into an old service corridor, which meandered toward the lower engine block through miles of dank and creepy corridors. There’s nothing of value to be had there, and that’s why nobody had cared when external construction had covered up the entrance. The one thing no one was going to be trying to do was get the engines going again. There’s an old story that says one of the original repair drones still toils away down there somewhere, grown old and insane, but even I don’t believe that.
For a long time the door was forgotten, and then somebody rediscovered it and realized its potential value as a covert entrance to the city. An adjunct to the service corridor leads via the exhaust ducts to a hidden and little-known staircase, which leads up to the second floor of the old Mall.
But I wasn’t going to be going that way. I quickly followed the corridor for two hundred yards, past panels etched and stained with rust. It’s eerily silent down there, perhaps the only truly quiet part of the city. The corridor took a sharpish right turn, and you could see the dim and intermittent lights in the ceiling disappearing toward the next turn, about half a mile ahead. Instead of following the lights I gathered myself and leapt upward, arms straight above me, hands balled into fists. They hit a panel of the roof and it popped up and over, revealing a dark space beyond. I took a quick glance back to ensure no one was watching, jumped up again, and pulled myself up through the hole.
When I replaced the ceiling panel I was left in a darkness broken only by yellow slivers of light that escaped through cracks in the floor. I straightened into the slight hunch required for New Richmond’s lost ventilation system, and hurried forward into the gloom. Every now and then I heard some fragment of life floating down from the city. An aged gurgle, soft clanks grown old, the occasional ghost of speech caught accidentally in some twist of corridor above and echoed down to the graveyard below. I had always felt that walking this corridor was like creeping through New Richmond’s ancient and barren womb, but then I’ve always been a bit of a moron.
After about half a mile I passed under one of the main entrances. You can tell because of the sound of hundreds of feet coming in, going out. I stood underneath the entrance for a moment, remembering. I used to come the covert way sometimes for kicks, but the main gates are the way you enter if you want to appreciate what you’re getting into. You walk into a foyer which is twenty stories high, a taste of the opulence you can expect if you’ve got clearance to go above the 100th floor. There used to be glass windows on all of the levels that tower above you, but they were walled in once they’d become low-life areas. It was like standing in the biggest and gaudiest shower cubicle of all time. You walked up to the desk, ran your ownCard through the machine, and established your clearance. I used to live in the 70s, and so I’d walk over to one of the express elevators, get in, and be shot up into the sky.
Not tonight. Tonight I was threading my way like a snake through endless tunnels, and I wasn’t going to the 72nd floor because there was nothing left for me there. I was in New Richmond because I needed money, and had only one way of getting some. I was going to go in, get the money, get out—and then turn my back on Virginia for good.
We’d reached the Portal settlement in the early evening. It had been raining all day, and was getting colder and darker by the minute. Virginia doesn’t fuck around in winter, especially not these days. Virginia says, “Here, have some winter,” and then delivers. The