The Seventh City

Chapter 16: Blue Fire

The first thing they teach an engineer about a tunnel is water.

Not the enemy. The enemy is loud, and a man who is loud is a man you can plan for. Water first. You stand in the mouth of the thing with your light off and you listen, and if there is water moving up ahead of you, you can go in, because water has been going somewhere since before there were men to walk after it, and it does not stop in a room and wait. If you hear nothing, you stand there another minute and think about whether you have ever wanted anything badly enough to die in a hole in the ground.

A sergeant taught me that at a sand table in Virginia. I have no idea what became of him. I have broken the rule twice. That morning was the first.

In the spring of 1969 I was twenty-three years old and in the rock country west of the coastal plain, carrying a rifle, a demo bag, and about nine pounds of mud in each boot.

Three of us went in. Marcus Barrett was six foot three and had carried the same .45 since the day he signed for it, and he never let it out of reach, including in the shower. In the field I never once heard a man use his real name. He was Tank, and that was all of it. Ray Delgado was thirty years old and four months short of going home, and he found every watering point the platoon drank from and could walk you back to any of them in the dark. And me. I was the engineer, which meant the ground was my business, in the sense that "reconnaissance of subterranean installations" is a line a man can write down without having to picture it.

The tunnels were theirs. We were visitors.

We went in at first light. I stood in that mouth with the light off and heard my own breathing and nothing else, and I went in anyway, because there was a road to find and a captain above ground with a map that had nothing on it.

We went a long way in. Three hundred meters, then four hundred, the roof coming down until a man walked with his head sideways and his shoulder against clay that sweats, the air taking on that taste air gets when it has not moved in a very long time. Twice we came to a junction. Both times we took the branch with the water smell, because that is the whole of the doctrine: follow the wet.

Then the branch opened into a room the size of a church, and we stood up straight for the first time that day, and that is when the light came up.

I have tried to tell this part and never once made it work, so I am not going to make a run at it here. What matters is what it did. Hanging in that room — off the ceiling, down both walls, six or eight feet off the floor, around the corners, up in the black where the roof went away — were a few hundred small blue things, not one of them bigger than a thumbnail, and every one of them was on fire.

Not glowing. Burning. Each one put out light the way a lamp puts out light, except blue, and there was enough of it, and it was in the wrong place: a thousand feet under a hill, in a room that nothing had ever lit.

Tank did the next thing without saying anything, the way he did everything. He took his pack off, carried it out in front of him the way you carry a pan of scraps out to dogs, and set it down on the floor ten feet out, in the middle of them, and walked back. He did not explain it. He wanted to know what we were in the room with, and the pack was the only thing any of us had that he did not need.

One of them came down off the wall onto it.

The canvas went — not burning, going, the way a page goes in a stove — and then the strap, the spare shirt, the cigarettes, and the letter he was carrying and had never opened. All of it, in about the time it takes to turn your head. Then the thing came back up off the ashes and hung in the air by my elbow. It was not smaller. Nothing about it had gotten smaller.

There is one rule with those things, and it is not a legend, it is a fact, and we learned it the way we learned everything that year, by watching: they cannot be touched. Not swatted, not stamped on, not flicked off a sleeve. Contact is the mechanism. You touch one, you are the fuel. The pack was the fuel. That lesson cost a pack and a letter and nothing else, and I have watched men pay a great deal more for a great deal less.

We had three rifles and sixty rounds. Sixty rounds is something like ninety seconds of what we were doing, and we were not doing it carefully.

We fell back the way we had come, which is a sentence that gets people killed, one man firing and two men moving, until the shooting stopped being shooting and turned into a noise, and then stopped being a noise.

A rifle with nothing in it is a club, and a poor one.

They pushed us to the last bend before the church room. Then they stopped pushing and hung there, a couple of hundred of them, low, and the walls went from blue to a kind of white, which is how I knew there were more behind the first ones, and more behind those.

There was one fragmentation grenade left in the squad and it was on my belt, where it had ridden since the trucks. I pulled the pin and threw it.

It went off in the middle of them, and everything in the first ten feet of that room came down and burned out on the floor like struck matches. The light dropped by half. The noise was enormous. I thought: that's it. I actually thought that. Then the rest of them came through the smoke without slowing down.

And when I turned around, Tank had one more.

Thumb on the spoon, pin already out, held up where the light could get at it. He had come in with it off the books and had never said a word about it, and I would like to be able to tell you I was surprised, and I was not. Tank had worked out a long time ago that the man who hands out all his matches ends up cold.

He did not explain it. He stood there with it in the air between us and waited.

"Hollis," he said. "Yes or no."

Nobody had to draw the picture. One grenade left in the world, three men, and the only door we had come in by, which was behind us, and the door had gone blue. Every man in that room had already run the calculation, and had already picked out his own part in it.

I opened my mouth to say yes.

I had thought about dying well maybe a hundred times, because that is what a man does at twenty-three when somebody hands him a rifle and a country. The picture I had built had me outside, in the light, with a couple of men watching and one of them writing it down, the captain sending my mother a letter that did not say much, the fellows saying afterward that I was the same as I ever was. In that picture I had never once been on my back under a hill in the dark on account of a bug.

Delgado's hand closed on my arm above the elbow, hard enough that I felt it the next day.

"Hold on," he said. "Hold on. Listen."

And because he had never once been wrong about water, not in four months, I listened.

There it was. Not dripping. A line of it, steady and low, on the far side of that room, behind the dark part of the wall, loud enough that I should have had it long before and did not, because there had been a good deal going on.

I put my hand down flat on the floor beside me. The floor was warm.

"River," Delgado said. He said it the way a man reads a gauge. "Ten yards. Fifteen. That's running water, and running water goes somewhere."

"That's what it's for," Tank said.

"That's what it's for if we're dead," Delgado said. "We're not dead. We're wet."

I stood there with my mouth open and the water coming through the wall, and I got two things at once, which is more than I have managed most days of my life. The floor was warm under my hand and the water behind that wall was warm, and warm rock means heat under it, and heat means springs, and a spring comes up from somewhere, and anything that comes up, a man can go down. And the only road to that water ran straight through a couple of hundred blue things, and the only thing I had left to spend on it was the grenade in Tank's hand.

"Give it to me," I said.

Tank looked at me the way he looked at lieutenants.

"That's the last one."

"I know what it is."

"In the book, that's not what it's for."

"In the book," I said, "we're not supposed to be down here at all."

That got a laugh out of him, one short one, no more than air, the way a man laughs at somebody he is about to obey. He turned the grenade over and put the spoon under my thumb and folded my fingers onto it — carefully, the way you hand a man something that is alive in your hand, which it was.

"On the wall," I said. "Heads down, eyes up. When it goes, you run for the water and you do not slow down at the edge. You jump. If it's a river, we swim out. If it's a well, we don't."

I sidearmed it low along the floor, into the blue at the base of the far wall, where the sound was coming from, and it was still in the air when Delgado started moving.

Then the room came apart.

After that it is all one movement, and I am in it.

Through it, then. Into the smoke I made, with the blue coming over me like weather, along the wall and down through the break in the floor, the water sound growing out of a line into a roar, Tank behind me shouting something that was not a word, Delgado ahead with his rifle up over his head, the way a man crosses a river he does not trust.

The floor ended. There was a drop, and across it the spray stood off a wall of water coming down thirty feet, and under the spray a lake going out into the dark past where the light behind us reached.

And then something landed between my shoulder blades.

You do not get to think about it. You get one movement and it has to be the right one. I jumped, and the water took me down and closed over my head, and what was on my back went out with a hiss, the way a coal goes out when it goes in the water.

I came up into black. Whatever had been up on the ceiling was down, all of it, and it was over the water now, and there was a great deal of it, and it was moving.

They came down to the water and stopped, six or eight feet above it, and hung there, a few hundred of them, spread out across the whole lake. I do not know what water was to them. I know it was the wrong thing. They came as close as they could and no closer, and I treaded there with the warm water at my chin and watched one the size of my thumb hover over my head and not come down.

Then they stopped hovering, and the ones over the middle of the lake started to gather.

You do not want to see it and I am going to put it down anyway, because it happened. They came together into one mass, one thing, twenty or thirty feet across, and it got brighter as it got bigger, and then it dropped.

It hit the water and the spray went up to the roof of that place and came down as warm rain, and the light under the surface was like nothing I have seen since, and then it was over. The mass broke apart in the water and went out in pieces, and the pieces floated up. I went under when it hit and stayed under as long as I had breath for, and when I came up the whole lake was covered with dead ones, bobbing, no light in them, the way ash sits on a puddle after a fire.

I found Tank twenty feet away, breathing hard and swearing without a pause.

"Guns," he said. "Goddamn guns are on the bottom."

"We've got nothing to put in them."

"That's not the point."

"It's a little the point."

He had come in carrying everything he owned and he had nothing left but a knife and the clothes on him. The .45 had been in his fist when we went off the edge, and the water had taken it out of his hand — the pistol he had carried since the day he signed for it, the one he had never once let out of reach, including in the shower — and that was the thing under the swearing, and it stayed under there for years. He went under for it, came up empty, went under once more, and quit.

Delgado came up beside me out of the dark and did not say anything for a while. Then he said, "I have one thing."

He had an angle-head flashlight in his trouser pocket, where he had put it that morning out of habit, and it had stayed with him through the chamber and the jump and the burn, and he held it up where I could see it.

We got ourselves over to the shallow part and stood there in chest-deep water with our backs to the wall of the lake and the rifles and the demo bag on the bottom behind us, and we did not turn the light on, because we did not know how long we would need it and there was no more coming.

Tank said, "You saw how they wouldn't come down into it."

"I saw."

"That's a thing."

"That's a thing," I said.

Tank said, "Nate."

"What."

"Your back's cooked."

That was how I found out about it. It was the size of a hand, high up between my shoulder blades, and it hurt the way a burn hurts when the air moves over it. He was the only one of the three of us who ever said anything about it, and he said it once.

I thought about the water for a while, standing in it. That whole tunnel had a river running through it and a lake at the end of the river and warm stone under all of it, and none of it was on any map, and nobody above ground knew it was there, and I told myself that was worth remembering. It was.

Delgado had already turned his head. That was his whole character, and it had kept him alive four months longer than most.

"Hollis," he said, low.

I had heard it too, by then. It was coming from the dark side of the lake, out past where the dead ones floated, and it was not them and it was not the falls and it was not the three of us.

Whatever it was, it was big enough that the water in front of my chest moved, a slow push and pull, the way water moves in a basin when something large turns over in it, off in the dark, a long way off, and coming.

"Nate," Tank said.

"Get behind me," I said. And I took the light out of Delgado's hand and turned it on.