Chapter 2 - The Scent of Sickness and Salt
The service elevator descended forty-eight floors without a sound, but Alexander Morgan felt every foot of the drop in the base of his skull.
Beside him, Tommy stood pressed against the stainless steel corner of the cab, his shoulder blade flattened against the cold metal as if trying to merge with it. He had refused to leave the yellow bucket behind. He held it by the thin wire bail, the wire cutting into his gray fingers until the knuckles were bloodless. The bottom of the bucket dripped a small, regular circle of black mud onto the diamond-plate floor.
Alexander had not changed his clothes. He had merely thrown a heavy, charcoal-wool overcoat over his pajama trousers and silk-lined dressing gown, jamming his feet into a pair of unlaced leather boots he kept near the terrace door for rain. He smelled of four-hundred-dollar woodsmoke cologne; the boy smelled of wet newspaper and vinegar.
The elevator hit the subterranean parking level with a heavy, pneumatic sigh.
Maria was already there. She stood beside the black Suburban, her slate-gray pencil skirt sharp as a straight razor, an aluminum clipboard held against her breast like a breastplate. Two men from private building security stood ten paces back, hands folded over their belt buckles, their faces carefully vacant.
When the elevator doors parted and Maria saw Alexander Morgan—the man who had, forty-eight hours prior, forced an international airline into restructuring without untying his tie—dressed in a mud-splattered dressing gown and standing over a barefoot child clutching a drywall bucket, she did not flinch. That was why Alexander paid her a quarter of a million dollars a year.
"The vehicle is running, Mr. Morgan," Maria said, her eyes flicking to the boy for a fraction of a second before returning to Alexander’s nose. "The kitchen packed two thermal carriers. Broth, roast chicken, bread, clean water. Dr. Halloway has been notified and is on stand-by at his private practice."
"We don't need Halloway," Alexander said, his voice flat. "Not yet. Where is the Shadows district?"
Maria’s eyebrow twitched—the only outward sign of her total disorientation. "The Flats? Beyond the eastern rail yard? It’s industrial brownfield, sir. Unincorporated squatter developments between the canal and the old chemical works. It has no municipal services."
"Get in," Alexander said to Tommy.
The boy hesitated, his eyes wide at the vast, leather-lined cavern of the SUV. The seats were cream-colored Nappa hide, buttery and unstained.
"Go on," Alexander said, his hand touching the small of the boy’s back. The spine felt like a row of empty walnut shells under the shredded nylon.
Tommy climbed in, dragging the bucket between his knees, sitting on the very edge of the leather so only his tailbone made contact. Alexander climbed in after him, pulled the heavy door shut with an armored *clack*, and leaned forward toward the partition.
"Drive," he told the chauffeur. "Follow the boy’s directions."
The city peeled away in layers of declining value.
First went the glass needles—the bank towers, the luxury condominiums with their vertical gardens, the boutique hotels where a glass of gin cost thirty-five dollars. Then came the gray concrete zone: mid-century office blocks converted into medical billing centers, parking garages with weeping salt stains on their ramp faces, and strip malls where every third sign was an illuminated neon proclamation for cash loans or pawn brokers.
Then the concrete gave way to corrugated iron and sky.
The eastern rail yards were an iron swamp. Thousands of freight cars, rusted to the color of dried blood, sat on tracks choked with sumac and wild chicory. Beyond them lay the low, sprawling brick carcasses of the old chemical plants—facilities that had spent the twentieth century dumping polychlorinated biphenyls and heavy solvents into the groundwater before their corporate entities dissolved through three successive bankruptcies, leaving the land too toxic to tax and too expensive to clear.
Here, in the dead zones between the railway embankments and the oily sheen of the barge canal, the city had grown a second, secret skin.
It was called the Shadows.
It did not appear on the GPS display on the Suburban’s walnut dashboard. The screen simply showed a gray void crosshatched with obsolete rail lines. But the community was there: hundreds of shacks built from packing crates, blue plastic tarpaulins held down with worn tires, and abandoned delivery vans jacked up on cinder blocks to serve as bedrooms.
Smoke rose from a dozen oil drums, carrying the sharp, sweet stench of burning treated wood and melting plastic.
"Down there," Tommy whispered, his small finger pointing through the tinted glass. "By the yellow crane."
The Suburban’s suspension groaned as the tires left the asphalt, dipping into ruts filled with milky, chemical-smelling water. The big engine chugged at low revs, the computer-controlled transmission shuddering as it tried to find traction on a path made of compacted slag and crushed plaster.
People came to the openings of the tarpaulins to watch. They were figures wrapped in blankets, their faces gray with coal dust and the peculiar, leaden pallor of long-term anemia. They watched the six-figure SUV with neither fear nor anger; they watched it with the dull, bovine detachment of people who have already survived the end of the world and have no interest in its survivors.
Tommy tapped the window. "Here. Stop here."
The Suburban rolled to a stop beside an old shipping container that had been painted with peeling white primer. A lean-to of corrugated tin leaned against its eastern wall, banked with mounds of sod and plastic shopping bags filled with dirt to keep out the wind.
A woman stood in the low doorway.
She was not old, Alexander realized with a shock that struck him like a punch behind the ear, though her body had been collapsed by labor until she moved with the slow, circular shuffle of an octogenarian. She was perhaps fifty. Her hair was iron-colored, pinned back with plastic barrettes, and her skin had the dry, cross-hatched texture of an old boot left in the sun. She wore a stained floral apron over two sweaters, her hands wrapped in a greasy dish towel.
When she saw Tommy climb out of the back of the SUV, she dropped the towel.
"Tommy!" she screamed. It was a sound like dry canvas tearing. "Tommy, where were you? I told you—the men from the county said if we weren't at the gate by ten, they’d sign the waiver! They’d put them in the lime!"
The boy did not answer. He dragged his bucket out of the car, his arms shaking, and set it down in the mud before her.
"I got the dirt, Grandma," he said, gasping for air. "It’s good dirt. Look. It’s got no glass in it."
The woman stopped. Her eyes shifted from the bucket to the boy, and then slowly, dreadfully, up to Alexander Morgan as he stepped out of the vehicle into the gray slime of the alley.
Alexander stood in his cashmere coat, the wind whipping his pajama trousers against his shins, the silk lining of his dressing gown visible at his throat. He looked like an apparition from a different century—an emperor who had fallen out of an airship into a municipal dump.
"Who are you?" the woman asked. Her voice lost its scream, dropping into a cold, defensive hiss. "Are you with the county? We didn't sign nothing. We got sixty dollars. Elena Martinez is my name. Rosa is my girl. We got sixty dollars for the administrative stamp."
"I am not with the county," Alexander said.
He looked past her into the interior of the shipping container. Through the low doorway, by the pale light of a kerosene lantern hung from a ceiling hook, he could see a mattress laid across four wooden pallets.
On the mattress lay two shapes.
They were wrapped in heavy white plastic sheeting—the kind used by construction crews to wrap asbestos pipes during abatement. The plastic had been taped shut with gray industrial duct tape, neat and tight at the feet, loose at the head.
Beside the smaller shape lay a child’s plastic tea set, three pink cups arranged on an upside-down lard tub.
"Mrs. Martinez," Alexander said, and his own voice sounded thin, alien, completely useless in the salt-laden wind. "Tell me what happened."
Elena Martinez looked at him. She did not ask why he was there. She did not ask why his car was clean or why his shoes were made of calfskin. Poverty had long ago stripped her of the capacity for astonishment; when you live beneath the level of human consideration, miracles and catastrophes arrive through the same door with the same face.
"The fever took Sofia first," she said, her voice flat, rhythmic, as if she were reading from an old bill of lading. "She was coughing black. The clinic down on Fifth wouldn't take her because we didn't have the county card. They said go to the general hospital. The general hospital had a forty-eight-hour triage in the hall. We sat on the floor for eighteen hours. Sofia went cold while we were waiting for the triage nurse to call the number."
She wiped her nose with the corner of her apron. The cloth was stiff with grease.
"Rosa took it two days later. The same thing. In the chest. She wouldn't go to the hospital. She said she wouldn't die on the floor like her baby. So she stayed here." Elena pointed her thumb back toward the dark container. "She died yesterday morning at four o'clock. The county morgue van came at noon. They said they’d take them for forty dollars a head to the state furnace, or we could have thirty-six hours to move them to the Potter's field if we bought the boxes ourselves."
"Why haven't they taken them?" Alexander asked.
"The boxes cost eighty dollars," Elena said. She looked down at the mud. "We got sixty. The gravedigger said if we don't have the boxes and the balance by noon today, they go to the trench under the bridge. They take six at a time in the trench. They use a backhoe."
Alexander looked down at Tommy.
The boy was kneeling by his bucket again, his small fingers compulsively picking out the little pieces of dry leaves that had fallen into the black soil on the drive down. He was cleaning it. He was preparing it.
"Where is the county morgue?" Alexander asked.
Elena blinked. "Down on Terminal Street. By the river."
Alexander turned to his driver, who was standing beside the idling Suburban, his hand discreetly hovering near his inside coat pocket.
"Frank," Alexander said.
"Yes, Mr. Morgan?"
"Get back in the car. Call the coroner’s office. Find out who runs the Terminal Street facility."
"Yes, sir."
"And Frank?"
"Sir?"
Alexander looked at the white plastic shapes on the pallet inside the dark container. The smaller one was no longer than his arm.
May you like
"Tell them," Alexander said, "that the owner of Morgan Holdings is coming down to audit their accounts. And tell them to turn the heat on in the viewing room."
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