“How good it is to let the truth come out.”
His voice, too, had altered, possessing a high, hidden note with a squeaking sound. The air around him smelled of animals. The small, burrowing things of the world.
“Open your eyes, Amy.”
Fanning was standing beside Peter. The virals had hauled him upright.
“This man, he is your curse, as Liz was mine. It’s love that enslaves us, Amy. It is the play within the play, the stage on which the tragic drama of our human lives unfolds. That is the lesson I have to teach you.”
And with these words, Fanning opened his jaws wide, tipped Peter’s face upward on the end of one long, webbed digit—tenderly, like a mother with her child—and clamped his jaws around Peter’s neck.
The squeak of current from the plunger was not enough to open the bulkhead all the way; but it was enough to get things started. As the door’s counterweights jolted downward, creating a gap between the door and the floor of the tunnel, Michael and Alicia were blasted by a jet of water. In less than a second, the tunnel became a roaring river. Michael attempted to rise, but the force was too great, he could find no traction, and then they were tumbling, hurtled downstream in the roiling water.
They plunged into the station, going like a shot. There was no real light, only a vague glow from the stairway, glimpsed fleetingly as they passed. Water filled his nose and mouth, foul-tasting—he imagined this to be the taste of rats—and threatening to choke him. They were riding just beneath the platform. Gripping Alicia by the wrist, Michael reached out with his free hand and made a desperate lunge for the edge. His fingers touched but tore away.
They passed through the station. The water was rising fast; soon it would be over their heads. The next station would come at Fourteenth Street—much too far. Ahead, a faint glow appeared. As they neared, the light congealed into a discrete shaft—an opening in the roof of the tunnel.
“There’s a ladder!” Alicia cried. Her head went under again.
“What?”
Her face reemerged; she was fighting for breath. She pointed. “A ladder on the wall!”
They were sailing straight for it. Alicia grabbed hold first. Michael spun around her body, then, using his left hand, reached out, seized a rung, and hooked an elbow through it. At the top of the ladder was a metal grate, daylight beyond it.
“Can you make it?” Michael said.
They were being pummeled by the current. Lish shook her head.
“Try, damn it!”
Her strength was gone; she had nothing left. “I can’t.”
He would have to pull her up. Michael reached above her head and drew himself free of the water. The grate presented a different problem; unless he could find a way to open it, they were going to drown anyway. At the top of the ladder, he raised one hand and pushed. Nothing, not the slightest tremor. He reared back and shoved the heel of his palm into the slatted metal. He punched the grate again, and again. On the fourth blow, it burst open.
He shoved it aside, climbed out, and pressed his body to the pavement. The rising water had lifted Alicia halfway up the ladder. The light seemed to make a kind of halo around her face.
He reached down. “Take my hand—”
But that was all he said, his words cut short as a wall of water slammed into her—into both of them—bursting like a geyser through the open grate and blowing Michael halfway across the street.
The collapse of the bulkhead just south of the Astor Place station—one of eight retention dams protecting the subway lines of Manhattan from the greedy Atlantic—was the first in a series of events that no person, Michael included, could have anticipated. Freed from incarceration, the water shot through the tunnel with the hammering power of a hundred locomotives. It ripped and tore. It blasted to bits. It detonated and crushed and destroyed, plowing through the structural underpinnings of lower Manhattan like a scythe through wheat. Eight blocks north of Astor Place, at Fourteenth Street, the water jumped the tracks. While the main body churned straight north beneath Lexington Avenue, toward Grand Central, the rest veered west on the Broadway line, roaring toward the bulkhead at Times Square, which would subsequently fail as well, flooding everything beneath the pavement south of Forty-second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue and opening the whole West Side to the sea.
And it was only just getting started.