Free Prowlers: Wild Things by Christopher Golden Page B

coffee shops or restaurants when most other people in the time zone had long ago gone to sleep.
    But there were other parts of the city that became deserted as the hour grew late. Much progress had been made in the past decade in making New York City safer, in reclaiming blocks and sometimes whole neighborhoods that had gone to seed. Times Square was a brilliant jewel in the crown of this reclamation.
    Walking west from Times Square on 48 th Street, the jewel became tarnished with every block they moved closer to the Hudson River. Bill had seen so many faces on this city over the years, the heights of its greatest glory and the filth of its greatest shame. For better or worse, though, New York was a magnificent place, a city that lived and breathed, alive with the power of imagination and human ambition, yet with a dark pulse of violence and cruelty underneath. The architects of this grandest of cities had built their dreams high, their buildings higher, and Bill thought now as he and Lao walked along 48 th Street that perhaps they had done so in order to draw attention from the streets themselves.
    For awful lurked in the shadows on the street, and beneath it. Abandoned humans, broken children, drug-addled women, the forgotten of their race, all were horrible enough, but there were inhuman things as well. And so there were places in the city that were overlooked when the wealthy captains of industry decided to give Manhattan the polish it had so badly needed.
    They crossed Tenth Avenue and started for Eleventh, and shortly Bill and Lao came to one of those places. 48 th Street became bridge there, just for a short span. Perhaps thirty feet below the bridge, railroad tracks ran along the bottom of a long narrow ravine in a bed of gravel. Though it was autumn, weeds still grew up on either side of the tracks where the sun would hit them. To the north, the steel rails disappeared into a tunnel beneath 49 th Street that somehow seemed too small for a train to have passed through. Chain link fence had been erected on both ends to keep people from entering the ravine, by accident or by choice.
    An aging, filthy, unmarked delivery truck rattled east on 48 th Street. The driver was a swarthy man with a shaved head and a cigarette dangling precariously from his lips. He glared at them as he passed, but Bill knew his obvious rancor was not caused by suspicion, but a natural response many powerful human males had in the presence of one another like apes pounding on their chests.
    When the truck had rumbled away, Bill and Lao exchanged a glance, took one more cautious look around, and then grabbed hold of the chain link fence. With speed and agility no human of his size could ever have, Bill scaled the fence in a sliver of an instant, crouched impossibly on the top bar, and then dropped over the edge, plummeting into the ravine and landing on his feet with a grunt and the crunch of gravel. Lao dropped down beside him an instant later and together they started along the train tracks without a backward glance.
    The dim illumination from the lights of the city revealed that the rails had been worn smooth by passing trains. The two Prowlers moved quickly into the tunnel that had been hollowed beneath the city streets. Without the lights of the city, Bill felt immediately claustrophobic. He was not so dependent upon nature as many of his kind were — as he himself had once been — but with the stone and metal all around him and the thousands of tons of earth above him, he felt trapped. The air was close and oppressive, rank with the smell of urine and the scents of homeless humans who had made the tunnels their residence.
    Scents .
    Among the overpowering scents locked in that underground maze was the stench of death, of rotting flesh. The tunnels were deserted, devoid of human presence, save for that smell.
    "They're dead," Bill growled.
    Lao glanced at him as they followed the tracks. "Yes. I smell it as well. Humans, living down here.