Shadows (39 page)

Click.

Full dark. All she saw were purple afterimages of Leopard’s head and shoulders and the outlines of his Uzi. Could she get the gun? Her ears tingled. She heard a slight shush, a whisper of cloth and leather, and then the grind of metal against rock.
Putting down his gun.
His boots crunched closer. Rock squealed.

She got her feet tucked under in a crouch. The geometry of the tunnel was simple. Daniel was on her right; Leopard was ahead and a little to her left—because he was right-handed, he’d worn the Uzi in a cross-carry that could be shrugged off his right shoulder. So his weapon was on her left. One gun down. Leopard normally wore that Glock tucked in his waistband. Had she seen it earlier in the day? She couldn’t remember.

She felt him move closer. His smell was huge now, a boiling black fog. His breath was ragged and sour with excitement.

Click.
Light, hot and bright, shining directly into her eyes. The brightness was so intense it felt like needles, and she could feel the tears spilling down her cheeks.

Leopard was only ten feet away, no more, and he had a decision to make. If he stayed true to the brief glimpse she’d seen of what he
wanted,
then he needed both hands. Hard to take a struggling girl one-handed. So, either he’d turn off the light, or put it down to free up his hands. She bet he put it down. From what she’d seen, the Changed didn’t absolutely need the light, but she thought he’d brought it so
she
would understand just what was going to happen, or maybe he wanted her to not only feel what he would do to her but see it, too. He might also leave the light on out of habit, too. In his previous life, Leopard was probably the kind of guy who liked to watch.

Then Leopard surprised her. Sidestepping to his right, his eyes on her the whole time, he wedged the flashlight between two timber supports at waist level. Smart. Keep the light on her and behind him. But when he sidled away, her gaze clicked to his waist and she got a good look because Leopard wasn’t wearing a jacket. After all, the mine was relatively warm, and he figured on working up a swe—

All of a sudden, he was there, so fast she had no time to spring from her crouch or knee his balls or jam her thumbs into his eyes. One minute he was ten feet away and the next he was slamming her into the rock. Her head bounced against stone. Pain detonated in her skull, and the air bolted from her lungs.

Breathlessly, she bucked and flailed as he rode her: his weight on her chest, his hands scrabbling to grab her arms. She swiped with her left hand and felt her nails, jagged and cracked, rake his face. He jerked away with a grunt of pain, and in the light, she saw sudden rails of blood. His grip loosened, and then she was rearing up, cocking her right fist, aiming for his Adam’s apple
.

His hand shot out. Deflecting the punch, he grabbed her wrist, then jammed his knee into her bad left shoulder, grinding the bone into the rocks. She screamed. He hit her, a fast open slap and much harder than she had managed on her own. A bomb of pain exploded just beneath her left eye. Her mind blanked, and her arms loosened up. In a kind of haze, she saw him winding up to hit her again—

From somewhere beyond the tunnel came a low boom, faint but unmistakable: a shotgun
.

Leopard stiffened, and she felt his weight shift. Felt the pressure against her shoulder ease as he craned over his shoulder.

Grab it!
Her left hand pistoned, her fingers found hard polymer, and then she was yanking the Glock free. She jammed the muzzle into Leopard’s stomach, right at his navel.

A Glock is a Glock is a Glock, and the beauty of a Glock: no active safety, nothing the owner has to remember to flip off and on. Just point and shoot. So Alex knew Glocks, very well. She’d had days to study this one. She’d watched Leopard kill Ray with it. She knew a Siderlock when she saw one, because she’d installed the very same on her dad’s Glock herself. So her father’s Glock had a cross-trigger safety.

But Leopard’s didn’t.

The only gamble was whether Leopard kept a round chambered. No time to check or even jack the slide, because that took two hands, and she only had one.

Big gamble.

Her best and only shot.

She took it.

The rack of the pump was a nightmare that echoed and bounced off rock:
ka-ka-CHUNK-CHUNK-crunch-cru—

Tom let the rock fly in a hard, vicious cut, a Frisbee throw that was two parts arm, three parts wrist. The rock whirred and struck the girl square in the chest just as she swung the shotgun up— because Tom had seen that she was sloppy and overconfident, racking the shotgun before she’d even slotted the butt or brought the muzzle to bear. Total time, maybe a two-second jump—but he grabbed it.

The shotgun
baROOMED
. He was instantly deafened. Light sheeted in a bright tongue of muzzle flash, but he was still alive to see it. He would not have a second chance. Either his Uzi or her shotgun, and his Uzi was closer. He hurtled to his right, but now she was pivoting, racking the shotgun, leading, anticipating where he would land.

He just had time to think:
Too late—

He never heard the shot because the sound was small and his hearing was still gone. But the pain he expected—the rip of buckshot through his body—never came. In another second, he banged to the rock and swept up his Uzi . . .

The girl was falling. Her shotgun slipped from her fingers. In the dark of the tunnel beyond, Tom saw another quick flash as someone shot at the jittery kid, but the boy was already peeling away in a brassy twinkle. His heart boomed, something he felt but could not hear over a loud, burring hum. A crazy thought bounced around in his skull: many more shots in close quarters and he was going to go deaf. He waited, quivering, his breath tearing in and out of his throat, as the light grew brighter, and then he saw enough to understand who was there.

“I’m over here,” he said, not bothering to whisper now. He aimed his Uzi at the ceiling.

Luke rounded the corner. His skin was pale. His lips moved.
You okay?

“Yeah. Thanks for not listening.” Tom heard a faint hissing as sound started leaking through the hum.

Luke’s worried face broke into a lopsided grin. “I would’ve stayed put, except I spotted the kids and saw they were headed right for you.” His eyebrows lifted as he saw the jury-rigged network of time fuses. “Whoa. That’s cool.”

“Yeah.” It hit him that all his work might be for nothing. When the jittery kid got back with his friends, all they had to do was cut the fuses. He thought about the two spare bricks of C4 in his pack. “Come on, we got to block off this room and then get out.”

He had Luke slap a brick on one side of the entrance as he fixed the other to the highest point of the arch. Jamming a blasting cap on a time fuse into each, he used his knife to cut the det cord in half. “All right, go. Get to your charges and start the delays. If I don’t show in thirty seconds, don’t come back this time.”

Luke’s eyes raked his face, probably to see if he was serious. “I mean it,” Tom said.

Luke’s head jerked a quick nod. “But please come, Tom. Please.”

Oh, believe me, I plan on it.
As Luke pelted off, Tom darted back into the room, pulled two M60 igniters from his pack, then dug out a lighter and flicked it to life. He touched off the spiderweb.
Just hope the explosion at the door doesn’t blow this stuff early.
If it did, he would never get clear in time.

Dashing to the entrance, he looked down the tunnel. Luke was already out of sight. Maybe a minute had passed since the shotgun blast. Tucking his lighter into a hip pocket, he pulled out an igniter, removed the shipping plug, then threaded in the loose end of the time fuse as far as it would go. Tightening the cap, he removed the safety pin. Wash, rinse, repeat with the second fuse.

Do it right the first time.
The M60s could be rearmed in a pinch, but he really didn’t want to do that. Grabbing the pull ring, he pushed, rotated, pulled. Heard the sharp
pop
as the igniter fired.

Hurry, hurry, hurry.
He knelt by the other igniter, grabbed, pushed, rotated, pulled the ring.

Pop.

He ran.

The boom was enormous, a roar that crashed and broke and reverberated against and over the rocks. The Glock bucked as the round ripped into Leopard’s gut. He flopped in a sudden, spastic, loose-limbed jerk like a marionette whose puppeteer had just been goosed. In the yellow light, his blood spray was dark orange. Blowback splattered her hands and drizzled over her face. Leopard began to crumple, already so much dead weight. Bucking him off, she rolled and hung there on hands and knees, the Glock still fisted in one hand. She knew she was panting, but she couldn’t hear herself well; the sound was muffled and far away.

How long since she’d squeezed off that shot? Five seconds, ten at most. Was there someone else down here? She couldn’t tell. That shotgun had sounded very far away, but if she could hear them, they might have heard the Glock and come running. She had no time; she and Daniel had to get out—

Movement. Left. She jerked, the Glock coming up . . . “Daniel.” She knew she’d spoken because she felt the air leave her mouth. The stench of burned gunpowder and Leopard’s blasted guts filled her nose. Blinking away blood, she scuttled to where Daniel had levered himself to a sit, his back against the rock. He stared at her with wide eyes, and she realized how she must look: blood glistening on her face and hands, slopping over her chest. “Daniel, it’s Alex.”

His lips moved. She thought he mouthed her name.
No time for this.
Laying the Glock aside, she grabbed his shoulders and shook until his head flopped. Put her face right into his. “Daniel,
Daniel!
Can you stand? Come on,
talk
to me!”

“Alex.” She heard that. His eyes pulled together, zeroing in on her face. His eyebrows crawled to a frown. “Alex. What . . . what . . .”

Time, time, time!
“Daniel, come on, get up,
stand,
stand
up
!” She took fistfuls of parka. “We’ve got to go! Can you walk? Can you
fight
?”

“F-fight?” he said, as if she were speaking Swahili. “I—”

Something shot out of the dark off her right shoulder. She gasped, startled, and then she saw the fluttering outlines of a bat flash in and out of the light before darting into the main tunnel.
Shot must’ve spooked it.
More bats hurtled through the drift. The roof of this tunnel was arched but not high, only ten feet at most. Ducking, she felt the air whisk over her hair as the animals pinwheeled past.

She would have to get them both out. If Daniel could walk, that would be good, but she’d drag him if she had to. Kneeling, she rolled Leopard, her eyes noting the fist-sized hole the bullet had chunked in line with his spine. His blood was leaking over the rocky floor in a purple pool. Working fast, she stripped off Leopard’s leg sheath and knife, then slapped the pockets of his cargo pants. Her fingers found the familiar outlines of two spare magazines for the Glock in the pocket on his right thigh and then another full mag for the Uzi.
All right.
She slotted the mags into her own pockets, and then she was buckling the sheath around her right calf.
We don’t have any choice but to go back the way we came.
She gave the straps a yank and cinched them tight, but her mind was already jumping ahead, planning their next moves.
Got to find the stairs . . . maybe I’ll smell more Changed when we’re closer, and that’ll point us in the right direction
.

She heard Daniel moving, the grind and squeal of stone, and she froze—

Because his scent was suddenly bitter and rank, and there was no mistake. Her mind slewed and skipped, and then she saw herself, on the rocks, a splash of crimson coating her throat from where he would bite and tear. She could feel the sharp bite of phantom stone against her back, and taste how very salty and yet sweet her blood was in his mouth and—

This was the smell and the sight of her death.

Her gaze inched right. Daniel was slumped against the rock. The ghosts of her hands were stenciled in blood on his shoulders. The Glock’s black eye wandered because Daniel was shaking, but it stared right at her, more or less.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out, not even air.

“I—” His face clenched in panic and new dread, and she saw— and smelled—that he knew, finally, what was happening to him.

She’d guessed right, then, about why Spider had left them together. Alex didn’t hunt, but she knew kids who had. Bag that first deer, and you were blooded, wearing your kill as a coppery smudge on your forehead like ashes the day after Fat Tuesday.

Daniel was to be blooded with her. Or maybe it was no more complicated than a spider making an egg sac and then cocooning a great big bug. Once Daniel was hatched, Spider knew he would need a nice, fresh body upon which to feed.

“I c-can’t,” Daniel said. “You . . . you know. I know you d-do. Alex, you . . . you sh-should’ve . . .”

“No.” She dragged up her voice from where it had fallen. “Daniel, you’re talking to me. You
know
me. You’re still here,
with
me. Maybe it’ll be different for you. We don’t know if—”

“N-no.” His head moved from side to side. His hand was oily from Leopard’s blood, and now she watched in numb horror as he brought his fingers to his nose. A second later, the pink snake of his tongue slithered out for a taste.
The Changed don’t eat the Changed.
Every molecule of air left her lungs. She watched the emotions race across his face: revulsion and fear and . . . hunger. His cheeks worked and then he spat a gobbet of red foam.

The Uzi was behind her and too far away. She had the knife, but she’d never get to it in time. She didn’t know how to throw it anyway.

“A-Alex.” His voice thrummed with need. His teeth were orange. His eyes were too bright, and she smelled, exactly, what would happen next. “I don’t think I can s-s-stop it. I don’t know that I even w-want to.”