Another pause. “I was already sick,” the rat-man says, and although I can’t see his face, I can hear that he is smiling just a little bit. I wonder if Julian is as surprised as I am.
It occurs to me, then, that people themselves are full of tunnels: winding, dark spaces and caverns; impossible to know all the places inside of them. Impossible even to imagine.
“What happened?” Julian persists.
“She was cured,” the rat-man says shortly, and turns his back to us, resuming the walk. “And I chose … this. Here.”
“Wait, wait.” Julian tugs me along—we have to jog a little to catch up. “I don’t understand. You were infected together, and then she was cured?”
“Yes.”
“And you chose this instead?” Julian shakes his head. “You must have seen… I mean, it would have taken away the pain.” There’s a question in Julian’s words, and I know then that he is struggling, still clinging to his old beliefs, the ideas that have comforted him for so long.
“I didn’t see.” The rat-man has increased his pace. He must have the tunnel’s twists and dips memorized. Julian and I can barely keep up. “I didn’t see her at all after that.”
“I don’t understand,” Julian says, and for a second my heart aches for him. He is my age, but there is so much he doesn’t know.
The rat-man stops. He doesn’t look at us, but I see his shoulders rise and fall: an inaudible sigh. “They’d already taken her from me once,” he says quietly. “I didn’t want to lose her again.”
I have the urge to lay my hand on his shoulder and say, I understand. But the words seem stupid. We can never understand. We can only try, fumbling our way through the tunneled places, reaching for light.
But then he says, “We’re here,” and steps to the side, so the flashlight’s beam falls on a rusted metal ladder; and before I can think of anything else to say, he has hopped onto its lowest rung and started climbing toward the surface.
Soon the rat-man is fiddling with a metal cover in the ceiling. As he slides it open, the light is so dazzling and unexpected I cry out for a second, and have to turn away, blinking, while spots of color revolve in my vision.
The rat-man heaves himself up and out through the hole, then reaches down to help me. Julian follows last.
We’ve emerged onto a large, open-air platform. There is a train track below us, torn up, a thicket of mangled iron and wood. At some point, it must descend into the underground tunnels. The platform is streaked with bird shit. Pigeons are roosting everywhere, on the peeled-paint benches, in the old trash bins, between the tracks. A sun-faded and wind-battered sign must at one point have listed the station name; it is illegible now, but for a few letters: H, O, B, K. Old tags stain the walls: MY LIFE, MY CHOICE, says one. Another reads, KEEP AMERICA SAFE. Old slogans, old signs of the fight between the believers and the nonbelievers.
“What is this place?” I say to Rat-man. He’s crouching by the black mouth of the hole that leads below. He has flipped his hood up to shield his eyes from the sun, and he seems desperate to leap back into the darkness. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to really look at him, and I see now he is much younger than I’d imagined. Other than faint, crisscrossed lines at the corners of his eyes, his face is smooth and unlined. His skin is so pale it has the blue tint of milk, and his eyes are fuzzy and unfocused, unused to so much light.
“This is the landfill,” he says, pointing. About a hundred yards off, in the direction he indicates, is a tall chain-link fence, beyond which we can see a mound of glittering trash and metal. “Manhattan is across the river.”
“The landfill,” I repeat slowly. Of course: The underground people must have a way to gather supplies. The landfill would be perfect: heaps and heaps of discarded food, supplies, wiring, and furniture. I feel a jolt of recognition. I scramble to my feet. “I know where we are,” I say. “There’s a homestead nearby.”
“A what?” Julian squints up at me, but I’m too excited. I jog down the platform, my breath steaming in front of me, lifting my arm to shield my eyes from the sun. The landfill is enormous—several miles square, Tack told me, to service all of Manhattan and its sister cities—but we must be at its northern end. There’s a gravel road that winds away from its gates, through the ruins of old, bombed-out buildings. This trash pit was once a city itself. And less than a mile away is a homestead. Raven, Tack, and I lived here for a month while we were waiting for papers and our final instructions from the resistance about relocation and reabsorption. At the homestead there will be food, and water, and clothing. There will be a way to contact Raven and Tack, too. When we lived there we used radio signals, and, when those got too dangerous, different-colored cloths, which we raised on the flagpole just outside of a burned-out local school.