The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [39]
“Now what?” Dr. Floyd Carpenter’s voice echoed behind her as they piled out into the main sewer.
A warm waft of rancid, fatty air enveloped her like a shroud. She moved forward to a wider section of the ledge so the others could move into the tunnel. On GPS mode, the Metapad displayed a digitized map of the sewers, courtesy of WASA’s Documents and Permits Section and exchanged for a large wad of cash from a supervisor at the Blue Plains sewage-treatment plant. Red lines identified sanitary sewers, blue lines storm sewers, and an overwhelming layer of brown lines identified combined sewers—a gargantuan network with almost two thousand miles of pipes and tunnels. Laurel peered at an alien universe of colored dots: flow-metering stations, storm-water-pumping stations, and thousands of catch basins, infalls, and utility holes.
Hampered by the wrap around her neck, Laurel gazed into the impenetrable darkness to her left and the fat fields. The stench grew and, with it, the uncanny sensation of fat dribbling down her throat. Floyd stepped away from the stretcher resting on the floor, bent in two, and spewed forth a thick gush of vomit. Lukas joined him with a Morse code of dry heaves. Laurel swallowed, intent on the Metapad screen.
Please, not west. The main sewer ran east to west. The roaches and the slabs of clotted, festering fat lay a few hundred yards due west. She propped the flashlight on the floor, pointing upward, and glanced at Raul, who stood like a statue, with his stiff neck encased in a white band. From a depression on the computer’s rubber housing, Laurel fished a stylus and tapped the screen to transmitter mode. When a keyboard scrolled at the bottom of the display, she tapped with her stylus.
>Help.
Laurel jerked to a loud snort on her right. The edge of the band around her neck rubbed her chafed skin.
Floyd leaned over her shoulder. “Calling for Mom?”
“Look, Doc—”
“Drop the title. I’m Floyd.” His breath had a tang of hydrochloric acid.
The screen remained blank, a tiny prompt flashing white.
“The goons above will thank you for the beacon,” Floyd noted.
“No, they won’t. This uses a military-issue Squirt transmitter. It alters outgoing signals. After scrambling, it packs any transmission into a burst lasting a few microseconds.”
Where are you? She was using the emergency procedure Shepherd swore they would never need. If this failed, she had nothing else to try. Once more, she tapped her stylus on the screen.
>Help.
“Mom must be out of earshot.” Floyd sounded amused.
The Metapad’s screen flashed.
>Coordinates?
She addressed the GPS and clicked a window.
Lukas had finished retching and now squatted, his back to the curved wall of the tunnel. For a paper pusher, he was behaving with commendable restraint. The tunnel echoed with wet, slurpy sounds. She screwed her eyes to focus on a round opening on the opposite bank, a pipe hiccuping gushes of liquid. It didn’t sound like water but something thicker, like bile.
Laurel blinked and a single letter flashed on the computer’s screen: >E. She smiled.
“That way.” She pointed east.
Raul and Lukas let out breaths of relief.
“Am I missing something?” Floyd asked.
“Yes, the fat.” She grabbed her flashlight, stepped past the group and into the trough of the branch line, and crossed over to the walkway running along the opposite wall of the main sewer. Behind her, the men huffed, lifting the stretcher with Russo.
After a couple of hundred yards, the walkway disappeared and they had to wade through twelve inches of slowly moving fluid, its surface broken by bobbing lumps. Laurel kept glancing at the pipe openings on the walls, which spewed gushes of milky fluid, and the wider holes piercing the curved roof, half-expecting a blinding light and armor-clad men to drop through at any moment. She checked the computer. Nothing.