The World Beneath (Joe Tesla) Read online

  “Do you want to die in here?” The bricks had reached waist height and climbed higher.

  “If those are my orders.” The young man looked shaken but resolute. There was no time to win him over.

  Dr. Berger would not die in the darkness here. He must find out who had put him here. He must escape. He sprinted toward the growing wall, keeping low.

  The soldier outside opened fire.

  A bullet ripped into the doctor’s shoulder near his neck. Another tore a bolt of fiery pain through his leg. He fell heavily to the hard ties. Steel track struck his temple. Warm blood ran down one cheek. Full darkness blinked in his head, but he fought it.

  He must keep his wits about him.

  His broken eyeglasses fell to the ground as he crabbed toward the entrance, using his good arm and leg. The smell of his own blood filled his nostrils like water filled those of a drowning man. He gagged on it, spit onto the wooden ties, and crawled forward.

  They could not kill him. He was an important man. A doctor.

  As a doctor, he must stop the bleeding in his neck, must assess the damage to his leg. But he was an animal first, and if he did not reach the ever-narrowing crack of light, his wounds would not matter.

  Another row of bricks was added. Already, he would have to stand to climb through it. If Petey were here, he could have flown to freedom. The thought of his small yellow body flashing through the room and out into the light cheered him. Petey flying free.

  Weakening with each motion, he dragged himself one body length, then another, until he reached the base of the newly built wall. The odor of wet cement overpowered the smell of blood. It reminded him of the summer he built his house, after he was appointed head of his research lab at the beginning of the war, when everything had seemed possible.

  He grunted in pain as he hauled himself upright. His good leg took his weight, and his fingers found holds in the wet cement slopped between the bricks.

  Then the light vanished.

  The last brick was in place.

  September 8, present day

  Former Naval hospital

  Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

  Dr. Dubois jerked his head up at the crash of breaking glass. The windowless room held two battered steel desks, his and Dr. Johansson’s, both occupied; old wooden cabinets full of beakers and flasks; a stainless steel table with a microscope and other equipment; and an incinerator in the corner to dispose of medical waste. In his immaculate lab, glass did not randomly break. Nothing was amiss here.

  A distant scream, swiftly cut short, told him that the trouble was nearby.

  Had a test subject escaped? He’d locked them in carefully after their last mission, when they were still tired and docile. Most of them were sick, practically dead on their feet. None of them could have gotten out.

  Another crash, closer now. Something, or someone, was heading straight toward this room, and fast.

  Dr. Johansson drew in a sharp breath and pushed thick glasses up on her freckled nose, magnified eyes rounded with fear. One hand touched the bright pink locket she always wore, a gift from one of her young daughters.

  Dr. Dubois examined the room again, as if another appraisal might yield better results. It didn’t. The only exit was through the door, and it led to a long corridor lined with more windowless rooms. All those doors were locked and those inside would not help him.

  Based on the sound, the test subject had already reached the middle of the corridor. He and Dr. Johansson couldn’t get past him. They were trapped in the lab.

  He glanced at the thick steel door to the room. It had a stout lock, but it would not help them because the door only locked from the outside.

  “Hide,” he barked.

  They both leaped to their feet and searched for a secure hiding place. If he emptied one of the medical-supply cabinets, he might be able to cram himself inside, but the test subject would notice medical supplies all over the floor. The creaky wooden file cabinet? It wouldn’t offer more than a second of cover. Under the desk? Likewise.

  He picked up a scalpel. The subjects were younger and stronger than he, with advanced combat training, but that might make them overconfident enough that he could get in a quick slash to an artery.

  Dr. Johansson crossed to the massive incinerator recently procured to dispose of medical waste when this cell had been repurposed into a laboratory. It was the only place in the room large enough to fit a body. Her gaze met his, her unspoken question clear. She was a young military doctor with twin daughters in preschool and a brilliant research career ahead of her—she had much to live for. Dr. Dubois was years older than she, and his children were grown; they didn’t need him like hers did, but he was a far more valuable researcher than she. He recognized opportunities that others missed. Scientifically, he was a greater loss.

  Taking advantage of his hesitation, she swung inside the incinerator. He reached in and grabbed her long hair. She braced herself against the sides with her arms and legs. A handful of blond hair came loose in his hand.

  He reached for the scalpel in his pocket to slash at her arms, but stopped when a thud against the outside wall warned him that young Private Henderson had fallen. He was the last guard in the corridor. The subject was nearly in the room. No time remained to fight with Dr. Johansson.

  Dr. Dubois ran for the door and stood next to the door’s hinges, gripping the scalpel. When the door opened, it would conceal him. If the test subject ran far enough into the room, or got distracted, the doctor might be able to slip out into the corridor and run. Not much of a plan, but he could think of nothing else. Maybe this test subject wasn’t one of the brighter ones.

  The steel door slammed open and crashed to a stop less than an eighth of an inch from his sweaty nose. He held his breath.

  “I’ve come for you,” said a hoarse voice.

  Dr. Dubois recognized it at once—Subject 523. Not good. Subject 523 was intelligent, with formidable strength and training.

  Quick footsteps crossed the lab, stopped by the computers, and resumed. A crash from the corner told him Subject 523 was breaking open an old wooden filing cabinet. He seemed to know what he wanted.

  No decompensation yet, still high functioning in spite of exhaustion and illness. Dr. Dubois stopped himself from continuing the diagnosis. Not the time for that, either.

  He peered around the edge of the door. Across the room, Subject 523 faced away from him. His dark hair was neatly cut, his uniform clean and pressed. From this angle, as he reached inside the broken file cabinet, he looked like a courier picking up a routine file.

  He was anything but.

  Subject 523 pulled an old manila folder from a wrecked drawer. The yellowed documents within were highly classified. They’d been kept hidden for decades, and for good reason. The doctor wasn’t about to fight him for them.

  Subject 523 stuffed the folder inside his desert camouflage jacket and half-turned toward the door. Dr. Dubois ducked below the wire glass window, straining his ears for the sound of Subject 523 moving toward him.

  Silence.

  He needed to distract the man for only a second, long enough to get into the corridor so he could make a break for the exit to the outside. A smooth rectangular object in his pocket had all the answers. Quickly, he lifted it out. His cell phone.

  He called the only person who could help him right now. Her phone chirped.

  From the incinerator.

  Subject 523’s footsteps hurried to the sound. Dr. Dubois slid out from behind the door and made for the corridor.

  Dr. Johansson’s shrieks sounded behind him.

  He stumbled over the soft hand of Private Henderson in midcorridor. The young soldier lay flat on his back on the polished concrete floor. A red slash ran across his throat, a wound so deep the knife must have gouged his spine.

  His head rested at an impossible angle in a pool of blood, and his sightless eyes stared at fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling. The meaty smell of a butcher’s shop hung in the a
ir. Five minutes later and the private would have been on his lunch break.

  Dr. Dubois ran past the corpse and two more blood-soaked bodies sprawled on the hard floor, throats slit. Blood had splashed against the brown doors on either side of the corridor. Those doors led to secured rooms full of other test subjects. He would find no safety there.

  Men pounded against the steel doors, hurling profanities at him.

  A crash from behind him. Subject 523 was close.

  His foot slipped in a pool of blood, and he fell against a door. The man inside smashed his fist into the thick glass inches from Dr. Dubois’s head. The glass held. He pushed himself off and ran, expecting to feel Subject 523’s blade against his throat at any moment.

  He burst out the exit door and into the humid Cuban afternoon, glad of the sunshine on his face and even gladder for the armed soldiers running toward him.

  The door slammed back against the side of the building as Subject 523 cleared the corridor behind him. Two options: He’d leave Dr. Dubois alone, or take his revenge before the soldiers could stop him. The doctor redoubled his pace.

  His right leg gave, and he collapsed onto the stinking tropical dirt. With a cry, he rolled over onto his back. Red spread across his thigh. He’d been shot. Subject 523 had shot him. The bastard.

  Dr. Dubois looked back toward his building. The freed man sprinted into the jungle, his own safety clearly more important than his need for vengeance against the doctor, at least for the moment.

  Hot pain shot up the doctor’s leg. His heart raced and skipped in his chest. Was he having a heart attack, too? He was a middle-aged man who hadn’t taken care of himself the way he should. He should have spent more time in the gym as Dr. Johansson always nagged him to—his mind sheered away from her final moments in the incinerator.

  Armed soldiers surrounded him, shadows falling across his face.

  “Orders, sir?” asked a burly sergeant whom he didn’t recognize.

  “Follow,” he wheezed. He pointed in the direction Subject 523 had taken into the trees. “Don’t let him leave the island.”

  “Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted and pivoted to direct his men.

  One man dropped to his knees next to the doctor and dropped a first aid kit onto the ground. A medic who barely looked old enough to be out of high school. “Are you OK, sir?”

  “No,” the doctor yelled. “I’m shot. Shot in the leg.”

  “I see that, sir.” The young man’s voice was infuriatingly calm. His hands fussed with a hypodermic syringe.

  “Hurry, God damn it!”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The doctor barely felt the needle, but he felt the drug enter his system. The pain gave way to warmth, to a feeling of well-being. He couldn’t give in to it. They had to catch Subject 523.

  But he was too smart to be caught. If he didn’t come back for revenge, Subject 523 would be off the island in hours. He had the training to evade capture, and he’d figure out a way to steal a boat or a plane or God knew what else. He was a skilled man, still.

  Dr. Dubois must control this situation—starting with dealing with the rest of the 500 series, then hiring a man to find and sacrifice Subject 523. As bad as things were now, they would soon get much worse.

  Subject 523 was infected.

  And the file in his shirt would lead him to the most-populous city in the United States—New York.

  Chapter 1

  November 27, 3:02 a.m., present day

  Tunnels under New York City

  Subway tunnels breathe. They exhale when trains come and inhale when they leave. Their concrete lungs fill with smoke and soot and rubber and the scents of a hundred ladies’ perfumes. When trains aren’t running, the tunnels hold their breath. They might let wisps of warm air drift into the cold night, draw in slow nips of bracing frost, but mostly they sit still, waiting for trains to bring them back to life.

  A thousand times a day their breath coursed over Joe Tesla’s body. It was not so warm as human breath, nor yet so cold as stone. He was used to it, now.

  Because he lived here, underground, in the tunnels of New York City.

  He had not felt sunlight on his skin for 181 days, and he might never feel it again. His skin, long pale, had whitened. He looked like a vampire, except that he didn’t have the teeth for it.

  He didn’t have the teeth for a lot of things these days.

  Not so long ago, he’d had plenty of teeth. Sharp ones. Now he wasn’t much use to anyone.

  Edison nudged his hand with a cold nose, brown eyes concerned. Edison was his psychiatric service animal—a patient and affectionate dog who’d inherited the best genes of his Labrador mother and golden retriever father. When Joe got upset, the dog brought him back, brought him home. Edison pulled Joe through the darkness. He’d have been lost without him.

  He scratched Edison in his favorite spot behind his ear. The dog’s tail thumped the hard train ties. As always, Joe counted, and with each number its corresponding color flashed through his mind: the number one was cyan, two blue, three red, four green, five brown, six orange. Edison stopped wagging his tail, and the colors and sound faded. This late, quiet filled the empty tunnels, broken only by the occasional squeak of a rat, or the rustle of tiny paws across paper blown down from a platform.

  No passenger trains ran this late—Joe had long since committed their schedules to memory. Of course, trains were occasionally moved to new stations or out for servicing at night, so his system wasn’t foolproof, but with Edison’s keen hearing and Joe’s knowledge of places they could hole up along the tracks while trains went by, it had been pretty safe.

  Joe didn’t need much to keep them safe down here: a metal flashlight he’d discovered on the mantel of his new home, a pewter badge to show transit workers, and the heavy ring of old-fashioned keys hooked to his belt and covered with a polar fleece bag to quiet the jangling. Those keys were said to grant him access to every underground door and platform. So far, they had.

  Right now he stood in a vast room deep underground northeast of Grand Central Terminal. Here the tracks merged together under Manhattan before reaching the station’s forty-four platforms (green, green). Since they had been built a century before, many of the tracks were no longer electrified. It was a good place to let Edison explore without worrying that he’d electrocute himself on the third rail.

  Joe rummaged through his backpack. His questing fingers found a roll of duct tape, a bag of dog treats, and, at last, the glow-in-the-dark tennis ball. He pulled it out. “What do you think, boy?”

  Edison’s tail wagged in approval, brown eyes glued to his hand.

  Joe tossed the ball in an arc across the old sidings, and Edison ran after it in a streak of gold. The dog returned with it, and he threw it again. He liked watching the glowing ball careen off tracks and roll under parked train cars, liked to see Edison having fun.

  Edison bounded about, abandoning himself to every moment. Joe couldn’t remember a time when the same could be said about him. Maybe Edison could teach him that, too.

  Ball in his mouth, the dog loped back again. This time he didn’t drop it at Joe’s feet. Instead, he dropped the wet ball in his hand, a sign that he’d lost interest in playing. Joe tucked it into his jacket pocket and wiped his hand on his pants.

  Above, tons of rock hung between him and the sky. It was very different from his beginnings—he’d spent his childhood with only the thin metal skin of a travel trailer separating him from the elements, and often not even that. Whenever he could, he’d slept outside in a sleeping bag. He’d gazed at the night sky from fields across the Midwest, sleeping with quiet stars above and the circus animals moving in their cages around him for company, everyone waiting for the next performance. Now he, too, was trapped in a cage, because his brain, once his greatest ally, had betrayed him.

  Enough. No self-pity.

  Joe adjusted his night-vision goggles and turned toward home, Edison ranging ahead. The world glowed an eerie green,
the best the goggles had to offer. He found them more reassuring than a flashlight. The white beam felt out of place down here, more unnatural than night-vision green.

  He’d bought Edison canine night-vision goggles, too. Not hard to find. War dogs used them, but Edison didn’t like them. He’d wear them with a weary air of resignation if Joe made him, but Joe didn’t force the issue. Edison’s eyes were good in the dark. Turned out, dogs could see almost as well in darkness as cats. The tapetum lucidum at the back of a dog’s eye refracted the light back through the retina, like a cat’s or a bat’s.

  Joe swept his gaze along the tunnel. This one was cut and cover. It had been built by tearing up the street above, cutting the tunnel, then covering the top back up and replacing the street on top. Most of the tunnels this high were cut and cover.

  He liked them better than the deep-bore tunnels because they had more room on the sides to get out of the way of trains. Deep-bore tunnels were drilled with a big round drill. They were barely large enough for the train cars. He and Edison could be spread across the walls like tomato paste if they got caught there off guard at the wrong time. Even there, if he flattened himself against the side, he’d survive a passing train. Edison would be safe, too, so long as he didn’t panic, and Edison was never one to panic.

  Counting each step, Joe marched toward home. He used the short strides he’d developed for walking in the tunnels. Instead of measuring his stride by the length of his legs, he measured it by the distance between train ties. It had felt awkward at first, but now it was his natural gait down here. When he went back to the stations and shops topside, it took him a few minutes to switch back to the same gait as everyone else.

  Edison stopped to sniff a foul-smelling object on the ground, probably a dead rat.

  “Don’t roll in that!” Joe called.

  Edison had, before. He often brought the odors of dead rats or rotten food into their home, and Joe had to toss him in the giant claw-foot tub and scrub him clean with Balenciaga soap. Edison didn’t like the scent any more than Joe liked the stench of dead rats, but since Joe had to do most of his shopping at the luxury stores in Grand Central Terminal, Edison had to take what he could get.