The Wire Hanger

Chapter Seventeen

The next stretch of tunnels was the brightest, with light streaming in between the pillars that separated our dirt track from the tunnels that, during the day, ran the subways. We kept close to the furthest wall. Once or twice I felt something scurry across my feet and pretended, for my own sanity, that it was a chipmunk and not the more likely sewer rat. The steam hissing was becoming a dull roar.

We’d been going for just a few minutes when the sound grew suddenly louder, metal screaming towards us. “Back, back,” Obadiah hissed in our ears, and we all flattened ourselves against the far wall as the subway train streamed past us. I tried counting the cars as they flashed past us between the concrete pillars but couldn’t. Each car seemed full: Protectors sitting and chatting with each other, or standing and staring straight out the window. I stood as still as I could, heart hammering, as the faces flashed past me. For one heartstopping moment I thought one of them looked right into my eyes, but before I could breathe he was gone again.

As quickly as it had begun, it was over. The noise of the train receded, ringing in my ears, but none of us moved until Obadiah said, “Okay.” Then it was forward again, shaking ourselves out of the fear that had frozen us to the concrete wall at our backs. I could feel chilly sweat dripping down my sides. Only a few minutes more, the cold creeping through my socks, until we got to what looked like an ordinary service door. There was no fancy keypad, just a chain looped through the handles and secured with a padlock. Obadiah fiddled with it a while, his back towards us, until the lock popped free.

“Does he have a key?” I whispered.

Noah shook his head, moving past me. “Picked it.”

The door opened to a set of cheap metal stairs that made horrendous clanging noises as we clambered down. I hoped the ambient noise outside would muffle it well enough, as long as there were no Protectors patrolling the corridors. At the bottom we stood on a wide platform and Obadiah gathered us closer.

“All right, folks,” he said, “that was the easy part.”

I heard Noah scoff at my side, to my great relief. I hadn’t thought it was easy either. My feet were soaked – whether with sweat or the dampness of the tunnel, I wasn’t sure – and my breathing was constricted. The back of one hand was scratched and bleeding where I’d scraped it against the wall in my haste to get away from the subway train charging through.

“Where are we?” I wondered out loud, expecting Noah to answer me, but instead Felix piped up.

“The ghost station!”

“The what?”

“We are, as some of you know, in Bear territory,” said Obadiah. “They have been able to get rather closer to the….action, as their methods have, historically, been somewhat less, ah, dramatic.”

I looked around me. The place couldn’t have been more different from our first stop. It was more like an abandoned bomb shelter, where no one had been in a very long time. We were standing on a narrow platform, and at either side were expanses of cement set about a foot lower. I took a step closer to see better but Felix said, “I wouldn’t, if I were you. Rats.”

I thought of the “chipmunks” I’d encountered earlier and tried to suppress a shudder. It seemed like a place that had been half-constructed and then abandoned, with pipes and cinderblocks and other construction detritus scattered here and there. The infrastructure was roughed in overhead, but had fallen into decay. It hadn’t been used in at least a century, if it ever was.

However, there must have been people here recently, because Obadiah found a searchlamp and switched it on, illuminating the dankness and disrepair better than our flashlights had been doing. “Lower Queen,” he said. “Last stop before the Centre, long time Bear stronghold.”