Iterations and other stories (collection)

Josepha Sherman—one of my favorite people in the SF world— asked me to contribute to an anthology she was editing with Keith R. A. DeCandido of stories based on urban legends, like those described in the nonfiction books of Jan Howard Brunvand, such as The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Although this was to be a dark-fantasy anthology, I decided to do a science-fictiony take on the rumored alligators in the sewers beneath New York.

Jo and Keith loved the story, and used it as the lead piece in their anthology; the story also garnered an honorable mention in The Tear’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

* * *

Something scampered by in the dark, its footfalls making tiny splashing sounds. Ludlam didn’t even bother to look. It was a rat, no doubt—the sewers were crawling with them, and, well, if Ludlam could get used to the incredible stench, he could certainly get used to the filthy rodents, too.

This was his seventy-fourth night skulking about the sewers beneath New York. He was dressed in a yellow raincoat and rubber boots, and he carried a powerful flashlight—the kind with a giant brick battery hanging from the handle.

In most places, the ceiling was only inches above his head; at many points, he had to stoop to get by. Liquid dripped continuously on the raincoat’s hood. The walls, sporadically illuminated by his flashlight beam, were slick with condensation or slime. He could hear the rumble of traffic up above—even late at night it never abated. Sometimes he could hear the metal-on-metal squeal of subway trains banking into a turn on the other side of the sewer wall. There was also the constant background sound of running water; here, the water was only a few inches deep, but elsewhere it ran in a torrent, especially after it had rained.

Ludlam continued to walk along. Progress was always slow: the stone floor was slippery, and Ludlam didn’t want to end up yet again falling face forward into the filth.

He paused after a time, and strained to listen. Rats continued to chatter nearby, and there was the sound of a siren, audible through a grate in the sewer roof. But, as always, he tailed to hear what he wanted to hear.

It seemed as though the beast would never return.

The double doors to Emergency Admitting swung inward, and ambulance attendants hustled the gurney inside. A blast of ice-cold air, like the ghostly exhaling of a long-dead dragon, followed them into the room from the November night.

Dennis Jacobs, the surgeon on duty, hurried over to the gurney. The injured man’s face was bone-white—he had suffered severe blood loss and was deep in shock. One of the attendants pulled back the sheet, exposing the man’s left leg. Jacobs carefully removed the mounds of gauze covering the injury site.

A great tract of flesh—perhaps five pounds of meat—had been scooped out of his thigh. If the injury had been another inch or two to the right, the femoral artery would have been clipped, and the man would have bled to death before help could have arrived.

“Who is he?” asked Jacobs.

“Paul Kowalski,” said the same attendant who had exposed the leg. “A sewer worker. He’d just gone down a manhole. Something came at him, and got hold of his leg. He hightailed it up the ladder, back onto the street. A passerby found him bleeding all over the sidewalk, and called 9-1-1.”

Jacobs snapped his fingers at a nurse. “O.R. 3,” he said.

On the gurney, Kowalski’s eyes fluttered open. His hand reached up and grabbed Jacobs’s forearm. “Always heard the stories,” said Kowalski, his voice weak. “Rut never believed they were really there.”