The Prisoner - Carlos J. Cortes [73]
Raul drew closer, his face suddenly animated. “Why is that?”
“When shit reaches the station, they filter it to separate solids in perforated drums. Q-tips fit neatly in the holes in the drums, and they have to get rid of them with high-pressure jets.”
“Cool.” Raul had just picked up another snippet of his favorite trivia.
“I hear you went through fat fields.”
Laurel grimaced. “Have you been there?”
“Ha, now it’s not so bad. Months ago a tunnel was clogged with a fatberg. It took a team of workers a month to move it.”
“How? Steam, pickaxes?”
“I don’t know, but I heard a large food chain offered to buy it back for recycling to its customers.”
Raul grinned. “You got to be kidding.”
“I am.”
Heading downstream, they came to a short passageway leading to a circular, dome-topped brick chamber, capped with a circular manhole. The chamber must have been fifteen feet high from the manhole cover at its top to the water’s surface below. Down one side were the remains of ladder rungs. The pins fastening the old iron hoops into the brick looked smooth and without much rust.
Henry announced the obvious. “They’ve cut the rungs.”
“Who are they?” Laurel asked.
“I don’t know.” Henry shrugged. “Workers from the Sewer Authority, I suppose.”
On one side of the manhole cover, a tree root had long ago begun a hunt for moisture and had spanned the fifteen-foot fall, its many tapered and split rootlets like the tongue of a strange reptile.
They returned to the intercepting sewer and continued along, holding on to the cast-iron pipe. Soon a noise started to build up. Laurel glanced around, but nobody seemed concerned. Susan smiled. “It’s coming from downstream. No flash flood. Waterfall.”
The floor turned slippery and a dull roar echoed from somewhere up ahead.
Soon the tunnel vented into a vast chamber, where water roared down toward one side to overflow into a wide tunnel. Laurel cringed at a whoosh of warm air, the hiss of fast-running sewage, and an ancient, sulfurous stink. Humidity thickened the air, making it unbreathable. On the opposite side of the fall were a series of steps large enough to be called terraces. The group climbed to reach a rectangular opening leading to a second chamber, smaller and dry. Then they came to a second set of steps leading to a passageway that ended in a circular vertical shaft, this time with an intact carbonate-encrusted ladder.
Climbing up the shaft holding on to the iron handholds turned out to be a very unpleasant exercise. The drenched clothes of the climbers released a rain of fetid drops. Laurel and Raul at the rear received the worse of it.
“God is dead. Shit lives,” Raul grunted, careful not to look up.
Through a utility hole, they climbed into a vast empty room that looked like a disused warehouse. Henry waved to draw everybody closer. “Lamps at minimum setting and silence from this point on.” Then he strode to the other end of the room and another set of handholds, which climbed to a square opening in the ceiling.
With measured movements, they negotiated the rungs to another seemingly disused warehouse. But this one was different. Laurel turned to grip Raul’s arm. A row of dirt-encrusted windowpanes lined the nearest wall. Through broken glass, she could see the outline of gorgeous clouds. Laurel stepped forward with slow steps, her blurry eyes fastened to the fragment of sky framed by shards of glass. Tears streamed down her cheeks. At the window she breathed