The Sunken City was a perfect place for Demons to make their terrestrial lair. Their Infernal residence was the Pit, but traveling to and from the nether regions required considerable energy. By setting up shop in the Sunken City they could make better use of their powers while easily deciding who would come and go.
After the hit on Stahn, Felon had returned to his hotel where he received word that Baron Balg would make final payment aboard his yacht the following morning. The minor change in plan raised internal alarms, but the assassin always expected a double cross. If Balg did anything stupid Felon would make it more expensive than a bit of gold. That was why betrayal was so unlikely. Demons enjoyed nice long lives in the world after the Change, and it was only money. Meeting in the Sunken City was yet a quirk of the Demon’s massive ego.
The Coastview desk clerk told him to join Mr. Wurn at pier 22 no later than 9 a.m. Felon took a cab to the harbor and found the pier among the battered hulks of freighters.
He watched Mr. Wurn where he worked the trawler’s controls. Balg’s servant looked like something that belonged under a bridge. He had lurched out of the morning fog and motioned for the assassin to follow. The troll’s features were human, but distorted and grossly over-sized. His nose was easily a foot in length, which stood out, because Wurn was three and a half feet tall. He had thick, powerful arms that he had to keep bent while walking or let his knuckles drag. Something supernatural had made him. Wurn had obvious native strength, but the simple activities of life were a chore for him. His breath came in ragged gasps, and sweat poured from him continuously. His eyes were tiny and red, though they held quick, if tormented, intelligence. Wurn wore greasy coveralls, and smelled like vomit.
He had led Felon to an old fishing trawler, and quickly set course for the Sunken City. Some twenty minutes into the journey, Felon moved to the bow to stay clear of the troll’s stench. It was a struggle to keep a cigarette lit in the damp, misty air.
They followed an indirect route away from the ancient bridges-collapsed and eroded now. There was too much wreckage around the crumbled buttresses to be safely navigated. Looking at the destruction, Felon remembered the fires and riots in the early Change.
Felon didn’t waste words on Wurn. He knew that Demons had control over their own body shapes, and could change them with little effort. And he knew that they, like Angels, could manipulate matter to create whatever they needed from raw materials around them. Looking at the troll, it seemed they could work their magic on living flesh as well. It amazed him that Wurn was sent to get him. The Demons were growing powerful, or foolhardy to allow something like the troll so close to people. Wurn was no genetic screw up. Felon had always suspected that down deep Demons feared humans and their position in the Divine hierarchy. But Wurn was an open challenge. The Demons thumbed their noses at humanity, Fallen and the Angels. They were putting the City of Light on notice.
“Master Balg expects you.” Wurn’s guttural syllables flopped across the deck like fish. He had left the small wheelhouse and approached. His lips were the size of cucumbers, swollen beyond useful communication.
Felon glared.
“Master Balg says you are a great man!” Wurn smiled revealing large broken teeth.
“Shut your fucking mouth!” Felon snarled and drew on his cigarette.
Wurn scratched the thin fur on his sparsely covered head, and returned to the wheelhouse. The troll’s face appeared in the small window, weighing the assassin with nervous glances. He mumbled worriedly to himself.
Felon wondered why the Demon wasted flattery on a hired gun. Balg had neither the need nor the inclination. Demons rarely threw compliments around, and if they did, it was always for a reason. Why? Was it sugar coating to coax him into recklessness? Was it an attempt to flatter him into thinking he was something he was not? Was Balg trying to lull him into a false sense of security or were the words delivered to buy the assassin’s favor? Did it suggest that Balg was afraid? He had just proven yet again that he could kill Demons-that he possessed the ability to surprise members of the Infernal host.
Or, was that question proof of his first proposition at work? Felon knew that he should never underestimate a Demon, and here he was actually thinking that a one might fear him. Perhaps that was why Wurn had been instructed to flatter him-if there was a reason. Already, Felon’s thoughts had turned inward, decreasing his reaction time a degree. The assassin knew that it only took a second to die. The compliment had already cost him a minute.
He shook his damp locks, pulled the collar of his overcoat tight about his neck and fumbled with a cigarette. Minutes later the troll drove the boat into a suffocating fog bank. The chill air ate into Felon’s bones. His fingers fumbled and his nose ran freely. He sucked a stream of acrid smoke into his nostrils hoping it would dry and warm the sinus cavity. The assassin allowed himself a scarf, and warm socks, but no gloves. Felon almost died once because of gloves. They kept his fingers warm but a gun has a definite shape, and required precision to fire. He could not feel a trigger properly through gloves, and fabric reacted differently to other materials. Damp leather could catch on a wool coat or cotton jacket. Human skin, damp or cold, could distinguish the outline of a gun a lot better than a layer of fabric.
The Sunken City loomed suddenly out of a rolling fog. Monoliths of salt-stained brick and stone appeared. The ocean ground slowly, noisily through cramped streets, pounding its outer neighborhoods with waves. The walls of the narrow canyons were enormous sheets of concrete and steel rising in the distance. The dead and abandoned buildings reared out of the water at disturbing angles, many ready to collapse. Those closest to the boat disappeared in the low cloud cover. The fog swirled and churned around the trawler, as they pitched over broken houses while hollow thunder boomed, sending adrenaline surging in his veins. A gust of wind and the fogbank parted-the boat slipped into the protection of a narrow city street that opened along a steep divide. Echoes of water and wind rumbled. The Sunken City’s voice had nothing good to say.
Wurn slowed the trawler to a crawl. The water around them was black. Felon knew that the outer rim of buildings was a formidable barrier to any approaching ships. Tons of twisted steel and shattered rubble made a reef of destruction that few could navigate. Wurn steered down the flooded street, toward the inner neighborhoods where Felon knew lights were kept burning with coal and gas. That was where the Demon’s lived.
There was a splash to his left. Swimmers! A number of them converged on Wurn’s trawler when it slowed to navigate the dark streets. They swam silently with the boat, occasionally tilting a gray eye at its occupants. Swimmers were preserved by the Change and the high concentrations of salt in the water. The Demons allowed them to populate the streets as a deterrent to visitors. Little was known about them. Since their bodies could not long withstand the rigors of life out of the water, they posed little threat. Nobody who swam with the Swimmers lived to tell the tale.
“Hey there’s Swimmers!” Wurn exclaimed redundantly with dismay in his features. “Stay out of the water!”
Swimmers were dead people-drowned, murdered or dumped. The Change preserved them with the extinction of most forms of bacteria. Small fish nibbled the swimming corpses, large fish took the odd bite, but those that remained intact toughened in the salt water, their skins taking on a gray, sharkskin look. The dead on land had to worry about dehydration; the dead in the sea had to worry about dissolving. If the skin was intact, a Swimmer could go on, growing more durable with each passing year. But, if the skin was broken, that was the beginning of the end. Little fish and the nibbling parasites got in. In time, the afflicted Swimmer would become more and more ragged, more bloated and distended. In late stages they resembled a tangle of floating bones and rotting meat.
The creatures traveled the sunken streets alone or in packs. Swimmers didn’t speak. They were cunning, but unlike the dead on land they behaved like animals-more apt to flee than fight. Felon didn’t care what they were, or what they thought, he only knew that they didn’t like bullets. In the dark water their long-limbed bodies resembled toads’.
Felon growled, touching his holster as he eyed the boatman. The trawler picked up speed.
The broad sunken avenues gaped to either side of them as they passed over drowned intersections. At places where traffic of ocean currents converged, small maelstroms were created, their impetus pulling at the boat. The powerful engine rumbled and sent them surging on. One hundred years of rain and pounding surf had worn away at the Sunken City’s skyline. Skyscrapers had tumbled and apartment blocks had collapsed into dangerous mazes of corroded steel and mountains of reinforced concrete. The structures at the eastern edge of the Sunken City took the worst of it; they were pounded by Old Atlantic and torn by its winds. What remained had formed a break wall-a complicated shallows that absorbed the energy of the waves, protected the buildings deeper in.
Millions had once lived in the now shattered buildings, driven its flooded streets, and worked in its crumbled factories and for a moment a nagging pre-Change recollection tugged at Felon’s thoughts. He imagined most were dead now and wondered how many of them still moved along its streets as Swimmers.
A horrible cry cut through the gathering gloom. It started guttural and gravely high above them, and wound upward in pitch and ferocity, until it became a screaming whip stroke of sound that undulated and fell on the delicate tissues of the brain like broken glass. Felon’s gun was out and pointed at the shadows above.
“Watcher!” he hissed.
“Watchers watch!” the troll whimpered, glancing into the shadows above them before gesturing with an over-sized hand. “There! Master Balg’s boat-on the Street of Walls!” He swung his arms along a broad corridor lined with enormous stone buildings.
The overcast left everything in gloom. Felon ripped his eyes away from the empty window frames above. He could see the shape of a large ship a half-mile away. Lights blazed out of its many windows and with it came haunting musical strains. The sounds echoed toward them, distorted by the distance.
“Light!” He paced to the wheelhouse.
Wurn reached under the boat’s dashboard and grabbed a spotlight. Felon snatched it away and played its harsh beam first along the regular surfaces of the buildings towering over them. Shadows swung about the black interiors of the dead monoliths. Nothing. Then Felon turned the spot, and sent its powerful light across the water. Balg’s ship was growing in size as they approached. Perhaps one hundred-fifty feet in length, it rose from the waterline thirty feet to its top deck.
Felon pierced the surface of the flooded street and stroked the corroded pavement forty feet below with the angled beam. It flashed over barnacle-encrusted vehicles, a corroded bench, a toppled light post then fell on the first of the Swimmers. A great, distended blob, with bloated legs and head, it bucked and thrashed away from the light like it was on fire. There was a mob of them, floating and paddling around in the dark. The moment the light passed near they dove and swam into the recesses of submerged doorways and sunken subway entrances. He shone the spotlight toward the yacht, and caught a few more gray eyes disappearing in a splash. He let the light slide up the anchor chain.
Felon glared at Wurn.
“Swimmers don’t take no Baron Balg. They takes Eyesores, and we watch. They take us but we watch!” Wurn ran his large palms over his thick thighs, and then rubbed them together. Felon slipped his gun away, watching the powerful muscles bunch beneath the creature’s yellow-gray skin. He slid the pistol in and out of the holster, left it unfastened, and turned to watch the yacht.