The Bot was one of the many unquestioned realities of Downside life. It was there, had always been there, and needed no further explanation as far as Downsiders were concerned. Simply put, the Bot was a Big Old Tunnel—a stone-lined cylinder that ran the length of the Downside and beyond. Although its bilgy waters were nowhere near as befouled as the main line, its cavernous twenty-foot diameter made it a sewer to be reckoned with, and it was the last place Talon would have wanted to bring Lindsay.
“I can’t see a thing!” complained Lindsay. “Why don’t you people carry flashlights?”
“I don’t need one!”
As Talon tried to catch a feel for the direction of the breeze, he had to admit how useful a flashlight would have been. But to Downside men, flashlights were considered a feminine accessory, so Talon was left with nothing but his wits, which right now were about as helpful as a match in a gas main. He silently stewed in the cold, wet tunnel, wondering what moron decided that stumbling in the dark was a “guy thing.”
“Serves me right,” mumbled Talon. “I never should have taken you to the Downside.”
“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and let’s just find a way out.” Even though their hands were unpleasantly slimy, they kept a firm grip on each other as they moved down the tunnel, groping for another ladder.
Talon heard a scraping sound, and stopped short, listening.
“What’s wrong?”
“Shh!” Talon turned his head to get a fix on the sound— its direction, and more importantly, its distance. He waited a moment more, then heard it again. He placed it about five yards away, but it was a much smaller sound than he had first thought.
“It’s nothing,” he informed Lindsay. “Probably just a throg.”
“A what?”
“You know—a throg. They’re like big water rats with long, thick necks to keep their heads above water—don’t you have them on the Topside?”
“No.” She pulled a bit closer to him. “And anyway, rats don’t bother me.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about,” he told her.
Being the widest and deepest of the Topside sewer tunnels, the Bot had quite a well-established ecosystem, and rodents were only a small part of the food chain. Talon remembered stories of the Bot from when he was a boy—it was a place of mystery, for it was the one tunnel whose farthest reaches had never been properly charted. It extended into a dark frontier of tributaries, and caverns that were known only as the Beyonds. More than anything else, the Bot had fine disciplinary appeal among parents, as in, “If you don’t behave yourself, your father and I will send you to the Bot”; or, “The Bot’s full of little boys who hit their sisters”—threats Talon had heard more than once. Of course no one ever threw small children into the Bot, but the mere suggestion worked like a charm. It wasn’t only kids who feared the Bot, however. Even among adults, the place evoked a sense of awe, and a reminder that there were forces at work in the universe beyond the work of human, or Topsider, hands, because unlike any other tunnel, the Bot’s only connections to the Topside sewer system seemed random and accidental—as if its existence had little to do with anything either world had planned.
“You’re afraid of this place,” said Lindsay, far more attuned to Talon’s emotions than he wanted her to be. “Why?”
He didn’t deny the charge. “Some places aren’t as friendly as others. There must be things about the Topside that you’re afraid of, aren’t there? The moon, and all the pin-pricks in the night sky—don’t they frighten you?”
“They’re not pinpricks,” answered Lindsay. “They’re stars, and they’re comforting, not frightening.”
Talon tried to imagine how an unreachable expanse above one’s head could be comforting, but couldn’t. A ceiling that he could reach up and touch with his fingertips— that was comforting. Or the distant rumble of the subway up above. Or the dark.
“I think there’s some light up ahead,” said Lindsay.
And there was—faint, but it was there, a few hundred yards down the tunnel. Talon breathed out his relief. This was one time when light was, indeed, more comforting than the dark.
They picked up their pace as they sloshed their way toward it. “If I were you,” suggested Talon, “I would take a bath when I got home.” Then he added, “I could give you some soap, if you like.”
“That’s okay. I think I can find some.”
Just then, Talon heard something again, and he had Lindsay stand still once more as he listened. This time it was a much deeper tone, echoing from much further away— something far batward, but drawing closer. Through the soles of his boots, he felt a vibration rising through his legs until it reached the pit of his stomach.
“Oh, no...” He put his ear to the wet wall and could hear it like the approach of a train. But this was no train—and now he could feel the breeze he could not find before, as if air was being pushed toward them from behind.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Talon turned to look behind them, seeing nothing in the darkness. But he didn’t need to see them. He knew.
Talon squeezed Lindsay’s hand tighter, so it could not slip out of his grasp. “Run!” he said. “Run and, whatever you do, don’t look back!”
Lindsay didn’t bother to ask for an explanation. Nor did she need to see Talon’s face in the shadows. She knew instantly by his tone of voice that this was not about being caught breaking the rules; it was about living, or dying.
She could feel the rumble now, and heard the violent churning of water behind them. At first she thought it might be some sort of flood—a sewer discharge pounding their way—until she heard the ghastly moaning, deep and guttural, of something, no, of a great many things, that were very much alive, and bearing down on her and Talon far faster than they could run. She had heard the stories of alligators in the sewers. Now she knew that those tales must have been true, although she never imagined alligators would make that kind of noise.
“There’s the ladder,” Talon shouted. It was only thirty yards away now, stretching down from a shaft much wider than the one they had first fallen through. “We can make it.”
But Lindsay wasn’t so sure, for the rumbling and churning was deafening now, and so was that gruesome groaning that reverberated hollowly around them—a sound so strange, and yet oddly familiar.
The light from the shaft ahead lit the way now, reflecting off the slick limestone bricks that lined the Bot, making it brutally clear how far away they still were from the ladder— and although Talon had warned her not to look, she did not want to die without knowing the nature of her end. She forced a glance behind her, expecting to see a pack of toothy, reptilian monstrosities bearing down on them—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I must be going crazy, she thought. Those can’t be what I think they are. But indeed they were, and now they were twenty yards and closing....
While alligators once had been a legitimate reason to avoid the Bot, sadly, they no longer played a significant part in Downside life. Their meat, once a staple of Downside existence, hadn’t been seen on a dinner table for more than ten years.
It was no mystery how the reptiles had originally gotten there—in the good old days, Topside children would buy baby gators on their Florida vacations. Then after an ungrateful nip or an unpleasant tussle with kitty, the baby gators were sent on a one-way flush down into the sewer. Once there, they would begin a new life, and provide many a hero’s scar among the proud hunters of the Downside.... But that was long ago. Thanks to those same proud hunters, and the fact that children now returned from Florida with mouse-ears instead of reptiles, the sewer gators had become extinct.
This threw the whole subterranean ecology into disarray, for without an alligator population to thin out their numbers, other creatures began to thrive. And so, in recent years the prevailing nuisance in the sewers of New York City was violent and unpredictable stampedes of cattle.
The bovine menace was first introduced to the Downside by the unexpected incompetence of two Topsiders—Sidney Black and Henry Pitt, who headed the better-forgotten film company BlackPitt Productions. In the mid 1970s, Sid and Henry had shipped in the steer for their subterranean horror epic, Bull!, which the producers proudly billed as “Jaws, with a cow.”
The star bull, as well as his many understudies and stunt doubles, turned out to be lousy actors, and escaped on the third day of filming, disappearing into the depths. In the end, Bull! was never completed, BlackPitt Productions went bankrupt, and moviegoers were spared the cinematic spectacle of man-eating holsteins. As fate would have it, however, several of those wayward bulls turned out not to be bulls after all, and, well, nature found its way. The result was several healthy, if somewhat light-sensitive, herds of cattle.
It was a godsend for the Downside hunters. Subterranean life turned the cattle primitively fierce as they stampeded endlessly through the muck of urban waste in search of moss to graze on. At last there was dangerous game once more, and the hunt reemerged as a favorite rotation among the Downside teenagers. Few events were more exciting than the prospect of running with the bulls.
Of course, few people actually ran with the bulls. After all, being trampled to death in the sewer wasn’t exactly a hero’s death—and besides, hunting methods had become more sophisticated than in the days people wrestled alligators by hand. No, only an imbecile on an unlucky day would find himself caught in a down-steer stampede.
Twenty yards and closing.
Talon pushed Lindsay in front of him as they ran for the ladder, putting himself between her and the herd, determined that if someone had to be gored by a horn, it would be him. The first of the beasts overtook them, churning past them as if they weren’t even there, their maniacal mooing resonating through the tunnel.
In an instant the animals were barreling past them two and three abreast and disappearing again into the darkness ahead, completely oblivious of the two humans caught in their bone-crushing path. Talon and Lindsay were almost carried away, then Talon reached out and grabbed the ladder. Using all his strength, he pulled Lindsay away from the blind beast that was about to crush her beneath its hoofs. But they were not home free yet, for now the largest of all— an Angus as dark as the pitch it was coming through—was heading directly toward them. There was no question that its head was much stronger than the worn iron of the ladder, and there was no time to climb out of range. Talon and Lindsay could only stare as it plowed toward them.
It would have killed them had salvation not come in the form of a heavy steel disk dropping from the shaft above.
The falling manhole cover hit the bull’s shoulder with a clang, and with such force that it was knocked out of stride. It stumbled into water, causing a multicow pileup that managed to slow the stampede long enough for Talon and Lindsay to climb up and out of the down-steers’ killing path. When Talon looked up, he saw what he knew he would see—because manhole covers did not fall indiscriminately in the Downside.
There, just out of view, toward the top of the shaft, were two familiar kids anxiously chattering with one another, perched like spiders in a web, and wielding a second manhole cover. The hunt had begun.
The spiders were Railborn and Gutta, who were tethered from ropes dangling down the shaft, in the midst of their first Hunt. Railborn balanced the second manhole cover, gritting his teeth against the weight, with high hopes of nailing a healthy steer so he could come back victorious on the first day. “Did we get one?” he asked.
“I don’t know, I didn’t see,” said Gutta, peering into the shadows. There had been a momentary slowdown, but the steer all seemed to be plowing past again. If their first shot had hit something, it had only been momentarily stunned. But there was something else down there now. Something moving toward them.
“Wait,” said Gutta, “I think there are people down there!”
“What?”
Out of the depths climbed a fugitive of the stampede—a wet, grimy girl. But she wasn’t alone. Talon was right behind her.
The shock was enough to make Railborn lose the manhole cover. It went spinning end over end, slamming into the water between cows.
“Great,” said Gutta. “That was our only ammo.”
“Talon, what are you doing down there?” demanded Railborn.
“And who is this?” asked Gutta angrily. “What’s this all about?”
“She’s a faller,” Talon quickly told them. “She got trapped in the Bot, and I had to get her out. That’s all. No big deal.”
“Hi,” the girl said, and said nothing more.
Gutta scrutinized this “faller,” shining her flashlight in the girl’s squinting eyes. “If she’s a faller, how come I don’t remember catching her?”
“I didn’t say she was one of our fallers. She’s somebody else’s—from one of the other groups in our last rotation.”
“You were supposed to be here with us!” shouted Railborn. “The hunts-master is blaming us because you weren’t here!”
“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?”
Down below, the last of the stampede had gone past. They could hear the distant clangs of falling disks as others in shafts further down the hunting route discharged their ammunition.
For Railborn, Talon’s actions might as well have been deliberate sabotage. “My father expected me to bring home a kill on the first day,” he barked. “What am I going to tell him now?” But Railborn was kidding no one. Even he knew that the real source of his anger was the fact that Talon, once again, had beaten him to the punch. It was obvious to Railborn that Talon had gone down into the Bot as a show of bravado on the first day of their hunting rotation. It was this kind of one-upmanship that always drove Railborn crazy. Tonight Talon would be able to go home and tell his parents and all their friends that he had actually run with the bulls. But what would Railborn have to tell? And although Gutta didn’t seem too impressed right now, Railborn knew she would be once she cooled down. Even now it seemed Gutta had completely forgotten that Railborn existed, throwing all of her attention on Talon, and this faller-girl, who, even under the layers of Bot scum, was clearly quite pretty.
“What is that she’s wearing?” demanded Gutta. “Are those Topsider clothes?”
“No...,” said Talon. In truth, the clothes the girl wore were so covered with grunge, you couldn’t tell what kind they were. “Can’t we talk about this somewhere else?” asked Talon.
And so the four of them climbed out of the shaft—but no sooner were they out than Talon was slipping away without explanation, taking the faller-girl with him.
Gutta tried to follow, but got caught in her tether and by the time she untied herself they had disappeared down any one of a half dozen passageways. She grunted out her frustration and kicked the wall.
Railborn took a step closer to her, but decided he was too close and backed away again. This may have been the wrong time to say what he was about to say, but it seemed to him this was as close to a right time as he would ever get. “It’s okay,” he offered, trying to find in his voice the casualness that came so naturally to Talon. “If he doesn’t want to be with us, then we can do the rest of the rotations without him. Just you and me.”
Gutta didn’t say anything. She just looked down the various intersecting passageways around them, still searching for a sign of Talon.
“I mean,” continued Railborn, clearing his throat, “there’s no law that says he has to be a part of our group, is there? And it would be kind of nice if it was just the two of us. I’d like it, anyway...wouldn’t you?”
Finally Gutta turned to him. “What’s his problem anyway? He’s never around when he’s supposed to be—he’s hanging out with fallers instead of his friends...” and then she stopped, finally catching Railborn’s pleading eyes. “Huh? Did you say something, Railborn?”
Railborn turned his gaze to the dusty stone floor. “Naah,” he said. “Never mind, it wasn’t important anyway.”