The guy ahead of me is just as blind, but he knows the drains. Been down here I don’t know how many years. Since he was a kid most probably. Since someone kicked him loose to make his way on his own and he realized the tunnels might be dark, but they were a better place for not getting fucked with than the streets. In the land of the lost, no one empties a gas can over you and lights a match just to see what happens next. Sure people kill each other, but not for no reason other than you’re sleeping in a gutter in their neighborhood. Everyone down here has slept in more than one gutter. They got nothing to prove. When they kill down here it’s for something that matters. Stove fuel. A bottle of wine. A dead guy’s good boots.

What the guy breathing out carbon dioxide up ahead of me killed the cripple over I can’t say. What it was made me take off after him is a little easier to figure.

Figure it was because he did it near the mouth of Freedom Tunnel not far from where the graffiti kids come crawling around to see the work that Amtrak never bothered to paint over when they started running trains through there again. Figure there’s no telling if one of those kids might have seen it happen and might be up top right now talking to the cops about murder in the tunnels. Mostly the cops are pretty fucking happy not to do any enforcing down here. Let justice take its own course. But a nasty slashing witnessed by a Columbia fine arts student might encourage them to put together a squad of troopers with helmets and shields to come down here, break up the shanties, club some skulls and drag some asses up top for a grilling and a few days in one of their holes.

Not that I’m any too likely to get caught up in a sweep like that, but I have an interest in the moles maintaining something like a stable community. More stable it is down here, the less likely they’ll get spooked and spread out. More stable it is, the more moles get drawn in. The more moles, the more camouflage for someone looking to be lost.