Recursion(53)

It’s raining bullets when they step out of the car. Barry pulls a black duffel bag out of the trunk, and Helena follows him onto the sidewalk and a little ways down to the entrance of a bar they’ve been in once before, four months from now, when they came to scope out the tunnel access to Slade’s building and discuss their plans for this exact moment.

The rancid-smelling Diplomat is surprisingly busy, and every bit as soulless as she remembers. Barry’s badge gets the diminutive bartender’s attention. It’s the same guy she and Barry met four months from now in a dead future—an asshole with a Napoleon complex, but one who helpfully carries a healthy fear of cops. She stands next to Barry as he introduces himself, and then Helena as his partner, explaining they need access to the cellar because a sexual assault was reported to have taken place there late last night.

For five seconds, Helena thinks this isn’t going to work. The bartender stares at her like he’s not totally buying her place in all of this. He could ask to see a warrant. He could cover his ass and call the owner. But instead, he yells for someone named Carla.

A waitress sets a bus tray of empty pint glasses on the bar and wanders over.

The bartender says, “These are cops. They need to see the cellar.”

Carla shrugs, then turns without a word and heads down the length of the bar into a room of cold storage. She leads them through a maze of silver kegs to a narrow door in the farthest corner of the refrigerated room.

Plucking a key off a nail in the wall, she opens the padlock on the door. “Word of warning—there are no lights down there.”

Barry unzips the duffel, pulls out a flashlight.

She says, “The man came prepared. Well, then, I’ll leave you to it.”

Barry waits until she’s gone to open the cellar door.

The flashlight beam reveals a claustrophobic stairwell of questionable integrity, descending into darkness. The old, pervasive dampness is overwhelming—the smell of a long-forgotten place. Helena takes a deep breath to still the frenzy of her racing pulse.

“This is it?” Barry asks.

“This is it.”

She follows him down the creaking steps, which spill into a cellar containing racks of collapsed shelving and a rusted-out oil drum filled with burnt garbage.

At the far end of the room, Barry pulls another door open with a nerve-shattering creak. They cross the threshold into an arched corridor with walls of crumbling brick.

It’s colder down here beneath the city streets, the air dank with mildew and restless with the trickle of running water and the distant, unseen scratching of what she fears are rats.

Helena leads the way.

Their footsteps make echoing splashes.

Every fifty feet, they pass disintegrating doors leading into the underbellies of other buildings.

At the second junction, she turns down a new passage, and after a hundred feet or so, stops and shows Barry a door like all the rest. It takes a fair amount of pressure to get the handle to turn, and when it does, he forces his shoulder into the door, jarring it open.

They move out of the tunnel, into another cellar, where Barry drops the duffel bag onto the stone floor and unzips it. Out comes a crowbar, a package of zip ties, a box of twelve-gauge shells, a shotgun, and four spare magazines for his Glock.

He says, “Grab as many extra cartridges as you can carry.”

Helena tears open the box and starts cramming shells into the inner pockets of her leather jacket. Barry checks the load on the Glock, removes his trench coat, and jams the extra magazines into his pockets. Then he takes up the crowbar and crosses the room toward a newer door. It’s locked from the other side. He works the end of the crowbar deep into the jamb and torques back as hard as he can.

At first, there’s nothing but the sound of him straining. Then comes the deep splintering of wood and the shriek of metal failing. When the door cracks open, Barry reaches through the opening and pulls off a broken, rusted padlock. Then he carefully opens the door wide enough for them to squeeze through.

They emerge into the hotel’s old boiler room, which looks to have been out of commission for at least the last half century. Threading their way through a labyrinth of ancient machinery and gauges, they finally pass the massive boiler itself, then move through a doorway to the bottom of a service stairwell that spirals up into darkness.

“What floor is Slade’s penthouse again?” Barry whispers.

“Twenty-four. The lab is on seventeen, servers on sixteen. You ready?”

“Wish we were taking the elevators.”

Their plan is to go straight for Slade, hoping he’ll be in his residence in the penthouse. The moment he hears gunfire or catches wind of anything suspicious, he’ll likely be running for the chair so he can go back and stop them before they even set foot inside his building.

Barry begins the ascent, keeping the flashlight trained on their feet. Helena follows closely behind, trying to step as softly as she can, but the old wood of the stairs flexes and groans under their weight.

After several minutes, Barry stops at a door with the number 8 painted on the wall beside it, and turns off the light.

“What is it?” Helena whispers.

“Heard something.”

They stand listening in the dark, her heart pounding and the shotgun growing heavier by the second. She can’t see a thing, can’t hear a thing but a faint, low moan that’s like breath passing over the opening of a bottle.