The sewer was alive with a constant chorus of cries of pain, death and anger, rising and falling but never wholly ceasing. Caged dogs yapped and howled, and a pair of lowriders cackled to each other. All the dogs howled at once as a light truck drove by with a covered cage. "That would be the butt-face," Asher said. "Never seen one out this early before."
Gale and Vixen held hands as they stepped down from the truck. Marvel gave a woozy, red-eyed glare. "Great, you're in love," he said. "Go ahead and rub everybody's noses in it."
"Whoa," Vixen said, "we've never been in love. Right, Gale?" He nodded.
They descended into the Inspection tunnel. Vixen raised her boot at the sight of a mantis-like insect almost a foot long. The insect made a decidedly sinister clicking sound, raising its arms and spreading its mandibles in a combat stance. "Hold it!" Asher said. "That's a stick-mantis; it's a flagged friendly, though that might change if their numbers don't level off." The bug gave a last defiant chatter and skittered away.
Gale was already reading their orders on his tablet. "All right, it looks like they want a check of a flagged junction. It says mixed infestation... rats, multiple crusties, and a possible exotic. There's another flag of multiple canine casualties." He opened a hatch, and a wiry black terror came leaping straight for his mask. He cried out in alarm, clawing at the creature ineffectually until Asher plucked it off.
"What you have here is a juvenile Felis ferales," Asher said. It was the semi-scientific name for stray cat. He hoisted the pitiful kitten by the scruff of its neck. "Looks like he was rarin' to go anywhere but here. Let's see what the hurry was about..."
He dropped a flare down the hole, and then held up the cat. "No," Gale said. He took the cat away and handed it to Vixen. "We got crabs." The flare revealed half a dozen of the creatures below. They were big, and they were feeding on several dead dogs. "Those would be the `canine casualties'... Forget multiples, this is the better part of a pack! There's a nipper, two dachs and a rott, and... is that a lowrider?"
"Half of one," Asher said. "You know, something doesn't feel right about this..."
"You were the one who wanted to drop the cat," Vixen said. She hugged the scrawny little thing, which purred for her and then hissed at Asher.
Asher shook his head. "I mean, this isn't normal," he said. "Normally, the bigger crabs are, the more they spread out. You never see this many this size in one place, unless there's food to attract them. And there's no way they could have taken out all these dogs. Even little nippers take out crabs all the time, and lowriders make them a specialty. Something got to these dogs ahead of the crabs."
"All right," Gale said, "I'll go check it out." Without another word, he climbed down the ladder, armed with a hatchet.
"Don't get your nuts chewed off," Vixen called after him. "I might want them later." Gale had halted halfway. He started at a contralto scream from down the pipeline. The crabs began sculling away, and the sewer echoed with the skirling cries of rats beating a retreat.
"Get up here!" Asher shouted. "Don't make it two Hawthornes at the shrine!" Gale reached for a rung to climb up. Then he heard another sound. He scrambled down the ladder and jumped down, sinking into water up to his waist. The biggest of the crabs swam at him, snapping its stinging mandibles. He swung the hatchet underhand, to smash the tiny head. Then he waded toward a small, open pipe. Two eyes shone by the light of his lamp, belonging to a tiny, whimpering nipper, not much bigger than a cat or even some of the rats.
"Gale!" Vixen screeched, "get up here now, or I'll- Just get up here!"
"Come here, boy," he said. He struggled to climb up another pipe to the open train. The nipper growled, baring its teeth. Another scream sounded, closer. He could hear a sloshing sound. Something was coming, and it was big. He scrambled back down, but took one last pleading look up. "Jump!" he shouted, stretching out his arms. "Jump, you son of a bitch!"
Vixen screamed profanity down the manhole. "You know, you might have something better to say," Asher said.
Vixen took one searing look at him, then leaned over the manhole and shouted, "Gale! I need you, you shithead!"
Gale clambered up the ladder, with the nipper barking from his tool bag. A thunderous pounding echoed through the sewers. "Vixen!" he shouted. Vixen, I think I-" Asher grabbed his arm and jerked him up, then Marvel caught his other arm, and together, they pulled him up. He was scarcely out ot the manhole before something hit the ladder with a clang, tearing it right out of its moorings. There was a loud splosh as something collapsed.
"So," Marvel said, "what were you going to say?"
Gale looked into Vixen's cool eyes. "I saw it," he said. "I was going to say, I think... I think it's an elephant."
There was a moment of silence before Marvel said the obvious: "How does an elephant get in a sewer?"
"It's a little one, not a lot bigger than the ones we saw in the arena," Gale said. "The Senator said those were babies. The one I saw looked as big as a horse, and it had tusks. It could have gotten down here and gotten bigger, like a ship in a bottle... Do many of them get sold as pets?"
"Enough to be a major problem," Asher said. "The miniphants are supposed to be owned only by licensed handlers, but the handlers themselves aren't above selling them off when they get too big to be cute. Never heard of one down here before. Let's just have a look shall we?" He leaned down into the manhole cover. "Yup, it's a bull. Most of the ones that get sold are male, because even people who know what they're doing can't really control them, even when... Yeah, that figures. When it shits, it pours. See that waxy patch behind the eye? That means it's in musth- basically horny plus homicidal to the power of ten."
"There's something else," Gale said. "There's all that red, not just on the tusks but all around the mouth... I think it's been eating meat."
"They'll do that, if they're hungry enough," Asher affirmed. "Only thing to do is pull out, and let animal control handle it."
"You mean kill it," Gale said.
"It's a sex-crazed, meat-eating sewer elephant," Asher said. "What else are they going to do?"
"We can take it in alive," Gale said. "It can appear in the Menageries, or the Arenas. What could beat a carnivore sewer elephant?" There was a long silence.
"All right," Asher said finally. "We'll need the power winch. And cable. Lots of cable..."
Within twenty minutes, Mavel and Gale had the elephant's limbs trussed up and hogtied. "HQ is sending an animal control unit with a heavy tractor," he said. "They're going to open up the whole floor to get it out. We just have to keep the elephant safe until they arrive."
Vixen held up the trunk. "I think it's coming to," she said.
"When it does," Marvel said optimistically, "it will probably snap those cables like so many spider webs."
"We can take care of that," Gale said. He drew an air pistol loaded with tiny tranquilizer darts, not much bigger than wasp stingers, and fired two into the folds of the elephant's chin.
"Do you do math up there in the mountains?" Marvel said. "The darts are meant for critters weighing five to ten pounds. This elephant weighs at least 500 pounds. To adjust for size, you need fifty darts. That's assuming the elephant's biochemistry is about-"
The elephant gave a shattering bleat. Everyone jumped back. "I told you so!" Marvel said. But the elephant only slumped on its side, twitching its trunk.
"What happened?" Gale said.
Vixen took a look at its rapidly expanding pupil. "I think you just stoned it," she said.
I decided to take a break from posting to build up a "lead" again, and will probably slow down the pace a bit to make time for other projects. Still, I hope to do at least a couple chapters a week for the foreseeable future; I have a LOT more ideas for this.