He hops in. Starts it up with a growl.

Doesn’t take long to ease it on the track–

Soon Mookie’s chugging along. Bright lights passing overhead.

Chug chug chug.

This tunnel, Mookie thinks, is the Sandhogs’ legacy.

They’ve been working on this for years. Hell, this tunnel’s where Mookie got his start, and really, that’s what he’s thinking about: how this could’ve been his legacy instead of what it is now. Ex-wife. Daughter who hates him. Breaking the heads of goblins and the knees of addicts.

He never gave much of a shit about the tunnel. To him it was just work. To the city of New York, it was them building a parachute while falling down to earth. Both of the original water tunnels are on their way out and the water in the city is undrinkable. Repair either of the original tunnels, you turn the water off for weeks, maybe months – and if the valves break, then longer. The city loses water, the city loses everything. But for Mookie, it was always just work. Because that’s what he does. And that’s who he is.

Though now it occurs to Mookie: that’s why Homeland Security is invested. They don’t want terrorists messing with the city’s water supply.

Up ahead, he hears it:

The sound of work.

Hammering. Drilling. The murmur of men yelling.

But that’s when he hears something else, too:

The scrape of claws on concrete. The whisper of flesh on stone.

6

The monsters of the Abyss. Offspring of the Void. The children of the Hungry Ones, of the Deep Shadows, of Those Who Eat. Birthed from the Maw-Womb, given life down in the dark – wriggling, screaming, baying for blood and singing lamentations to the lack of light. The gobbos, or goblins, those most common denizens of the Great Below – half-mindless, willing to eat their own young grubs, a tribe or hive of peons and pawns, Hell’s own foot-soldiers. The Trogbodies or troglodytes, blind golems of stone and clay and silt. The Snakefaces – or Nagas and Naginis – those hidden seducers, those worms in the rock. They, the named races, the sentient entities. Some are lesser beings with minimal minds: the roach-rats, the milk spiders, the gelled waste, the rimstone cankerpedes. Others are smart but have no names: I have seen a dripstone that unmoored from the rock and spoke riddles before scurrying away. I have seen a flying thing, with gray vented wings and eyes on telescoping stalks. And I have seen a tenebrous shape stalking the depths, darker than the dark, like a black sheet on a clothesline rippling in a hard wind.

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

Something is following him. Somethings by the sound of it.

He prays it’s nothing dangerous. Which is a lie in its own way – nothing down here could be categorized as “safe”. Even a starving brood of roach-rats (and they are always starving) offers up a thousand mean teeth and a hundred long claws and the light-only-knows how many strange diseases and parasites. But those he can handle.