by Adam Vine
Eager faces peered out through the barred iron doors. A sudden clamor of awareness rippled through the cells, the prisoners scrambling and posturing to see what was going on. A thrilled, collective gasp rose when they saw us, then a cheer.
“Shut the hell up,” Barn Owl said.
Zaea tapped me on the shoulder. “Put me down!” I slammed the door shut as the Snowmen clambered onto the B3 landing. “Step back!” Zaea said. I did.
Zaea made five or six quick cuts at the ceiling, blocking the door with a landslide of fallen stone. Wails of bloodlust and anger filtered through the gaps in the makeshift barricade, followed shortly by the hiss of poorly aimed arrows that ricocheted harmlessly off the walls.
Barn Owl cringed, favoring the leg that didn’t have half an arrow sticking out of it. “Zaea, get those cells open.”
I held Zaea steady as she sliced the locks. Once all four of the cells were empty, the prisoners began arming themselves, filling their thin, quivering hands with bone spears, flint knives, or loose arrow shafts reclaimed from the floor. Their grimy, half-rotten faces were twisted and afraid, thirty pairs of red, tired eyes locked singularly on the rubble pile where the stairs had been.
“Where’s everyone else?” Barn Owl said. She was met with a bevy of sad looks and downcast glances. “This is it, huh? Shit. Wanderer damn him. Is there another way out of here?”
“Aye, there is,” a lean, gray-bearded man said. He’d donned one of the fallen Snowmen’s fur mantles as his own, and was brandishing a pilfered bone axe casually in one hand, like he’d done it a thousand times before. The graybeard saluted and identified himself. “Name’s Vampire, from Catacomb Town.”
“I know who you are, sir. Report,” Barn Owl said.
“This floor weren’t made a prison until a few months ago, when they moved us from up top. There were too many of us, and they’re planning for a whole lot more. This used to be the archives. The caves connect a ways back, becoming a matrix of honeycombed tunnels. The Frosties only use ‘em for storage. Grub here thinks they go all the way back under the mountain, but we never got the chance to explore that far. The few times we were able to slip out of our cells, the place was too heavily guarded.”
“Confirming that report, sir. They barely keep ‘em sealed off,” a bald, friendly-looking man twenty years the graybeard’s junior said.
The two men both held their salutes while Barn Owl considered what to do. “Thank you, gentlemen. At ease. I hope you’re all ready for a fight, because there’s about to be a bad one. They knew we were coming. Big Nasty sent the Ratkeeper to get us, but Leech here wasn’t gonna let us get got. Cut off the bastard’s mask and sent him running scared. Y’all hear that screaming a few minutes ago, sounded like somebody throwing a cat into a bottomless crevasse?”
The prisoners nodded, exchanging looks of excitement and disbelief. Barn Owl put her uninjured hand on my shoulder. “Oh, that was him, all right. And you can thank Leech here as soon as we get back to Salt Town alive… keyword, people. You all know the backup plan is waiting for us as soon as we walk outside. This facility was wide open when we got here. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be wide open when we leave.”
An arrow struck the wall a few feet from where Barn Owl was taking cover. She shot an irritated look at the barricade. There was already a considerable gap. “Is there anyone who can’t fight?” Barn Owl said.
None of the Burrowers raised a hand.
“All right, people. I know you’re all craving that sweet revenge you’ve been fantasizing about ever since they threw you in here, but we stop only if we absolutely must, and that includes for fighting. We can safely assume they already know where we are, and where we’re trying to go. So now, we gotta run. Column up. Two lines,” Barn Owl said.
“Wait,” Zaea said. She had to repeat herself twice to be heard over the din of the moving crowd. Finally, Barn Owl heard her and silenced them with a whistle.
“We can’t leave through the tunnels. Grub is right… they do delve under the mountain, some all the way to the other side. But they’re a maze, and impossible to navigate without a map. The area was originally a training ground for students to practice subterranean warfare and survival skills. Some of the bloodiest battles the Yesaedans ever fought were on worlds covered with mines or ancient cities with vast undersides, including this one, where there was a civil war that lasted over a hundred years. The point is we won’t make it. Students at the old academy studied for years before they took the Cave Trials. Most needed days - some, weeks - to successfully navigate the tunnels. Some came back. Many didn’t.”
“Old academy? What the rot is she goin’ on about? She some kind of deserter?” Vampire said.
Barn Owl waved him off, leaned on her spear and scowled. “Well, Miss Mouse, if we can’t go that way, I hope you’ve got a better idea. You’re the expert. Tell us. Where should we go? And can you tell us on the move?”
“It’s over there, at the end of that hall,” Zaea said, pointing. “I’ll show you. Dan, help me.”
The prisoners followed us to the adjoining hall, ducking, weaving, and covering their heads to avoid being hit by the Snowmen’s wayward arrows.
“That big door leads to the vault,” Zaea said. It was a squat rectangle of solid metal sealed by three gargantuan combination locks. “The brass used to store important artifacts in there, things even the doctors didn’t have the clearance to access.
“More importantly, behind that door is this facility’s emergency safe room. I remember it. The students were supposed to stand their ground and fight, but the top brass, VIP staff, and president of the student body were supposed to lock themselves inside that safe room until the worst of the danger passed, then evacuate to the Surface through a hidden escape tunnel.”
The column stopped in front of the vault door and parted to let Zaea and me through. She made a quick slash with the ghost that severed the ancient metal. But even with three strong men pushing it, the door seemed impossible to move. I heaved and lurched, Len’s tremendous, inexhaustible muscles screaming, but it was like trying to move a mountain.
Just when I thought Zaea would have to cut the door off the wall, the hinges moaned and the door creaked inward. The gap was barely wide enough for us to squeeze through single file, but the prisoners moved fast.
When everyone was inside the vault, four of us pushed the door shut while Zaea and Barn Owl led the others into the safe room. I didn’t think the vault door would hold longer than a few seconds once the Snowmen caught up to us, and we couldn’t lock it again.
The vault itself was a series of connected, low-ceilinged caves each wide enough for two or three people to stand in side-by-side, and long enough for about five. There were six caves that I could see, and another vault door on the back wall, which Zaea immediately began trying to cut open.
The place would be a deathtrap if the Snowmen got inside before Zaea could get everyone into the safe room. I searched for anything I could use to block the door. There was nothing except some modular, opaque cabinets lining the cave walls.
Actually, those might work, I thought. They were stacked floor to ceiling, and made from some kind of thick, durable glass. There were tiny red lights on the fronts of the drawers to indicate they were locked. The drawers bore no labels, only numbers.
I tried to move them. Some of the prisoners milling about in the caves saw me struggling to block the door and rushed over to help. The cabinets were heavy, but they weren’t bolted to the floor, as I’d feared. We needed at least ten of the stacks to create an adequate blockade, maybe twenty, but we’d only moved two when the first loud bang reverberated through the vault. A cacophony of guttural, Snowmanly howls echoed from the other side.
A sudden silence gripped the Burrowers, then chaos. I was too tunneled into my task to realize that Zaea and Barn Owl had already started leading them into the escape tunnel.
“A few more should do it. We only need enough time to get the last ones out,” Vampire sai
d.
The door moved. The volume of the Snowmen’s cries rose exponentially. It moved again, toppling the peak from the small mountain of cabinets accumulated there. The barrier held, but it wouldn’t for very long.
“Brace it!” Vampire yelled. “You, lad! Leech, was it? Three more – just three more! Then, we run!”
Vampire, Grub, and the other prisoners who had stayed behind put their shoulders to the blockade while I added the last of the moveable stacks to the pile. Yet the more resistance we added from our side, the more force the Snowmen added from theirs. They were hitting the door in a concerted effort now, pushing into it like a battering ram, each SLAM, pause, one two three SLAM, shortening the distance between us and them a little more, until I could see their beady eyes and gnashing, rotten teeth, could smell their cloud of piss and foul rotten meat breath.
“Retreat!” someone shouted. I looked back over my shoulder. All of the prisoners were inside the safe room. The men holding the door scattered. For an instant, I was alone. The next strike felt like trying to hold back a tsunami. My feet lost purchase and slid. A deluge of cabinets crashed all around me, and the door opened wide enough to let their arms and weapons in. One more and they’d be inside.
My legs moved of their own volition. I turned and ran, navigating that minefield of fallen cabinets for the low overhang of the safe room door. Adrenaline dumped into my veins, making time seem to flow simultaneously far slower and faster than normal.
I noticed the light on one of the fallen cabinets was green. Falling from the pile must have unlocked it and spilled its contents. The number on the cabinet was forty-one. Inside was a small glass-bound book, now cast halfway out onto the rough-hewn stone of the floor.
I can’t say what it was about that slender volume, all wrought in stained glass so old I thought it would turn to sand when I touched it that caused me to stop and pick it up. Those precious seconds nearly cost me my life. Yet something about the book beckoned to me: the jagged brown-yellow of its pages, the smooth vertebrae of amber wire coiling up its spine, the twin crescent moons setting over a triangular plane emblazoned on the cover.
An unnatural urge came over me to sit down and read it, right there amidst the raucous storm of my enemies’ war cries that would soon transform into blades if I didn’t move. But seeing that book, feeling its surprising weight in my hands, filled me with a deep, inner calm, until a spear bounced off the cave wall next to my head, breaking my trance.
The Snowman who threw it had squeezed halfway through the door and was wriggling fanatically to get his other leg in. I picked up his spear and gave it back to him through the soft spot under his jaw. He stopped wriggling.
I tucked the Glass Book under my arm, drew Metatron, and ran.
GANHEIM
VAMPIRE AND GRUB were waiting for me inside the safe room. The others had already exited through the escape tunnel and were on their way back up to the Surface.
The room itself was bare bones, nothing but a few bunk beds cut crypt-wise from the rock of the cave, a small kitchenette with dining table, an empty bookshelf, and a rusted, time-devoured machine that I guessed had been some kind of wireless communication device. The bathroom was a tiny, closet-sized chamber adjoining the main room, with no door and a hole in the floorboards that opened over a natural crevasse.
Brings the saying “don’t fall in” to a whole new level.
I was oddly calm, my thoughts swimming in a cloud of cool detachment. My adrenaline stores had been thoroughly depleted by the events of the last half-hour. I was resigned to the fact that the three of us were unlikely to leave this place alive. And that was fine. My life, and the lives of Vampire and Grub were a small price to pay so that Zaea and the prisoners could live.
“Help us get this shut,” Vampire yelled at me. I rushed to help them reseal the door.
We were too late. The Snowmen were already upon us. We braced the door with our shoulders, and they shoved it open with theirs. Vampire cut down the first two who came through. The third stabbed the old graybeard through the eye with a three-sided bone knife.
It seems shitty, leaving one of your friends to die – even if I’d only known him for a grand total of fifteen minutes – but practice beats planning in a fight, and I was used to running from my problems, even if that meant leaving others behind. In fact, it was the only thing I had ever really been good at. I was already ascending the nearly vertical corkscrew stairs of the escape tunnel when Vampire’s blood hit the floor.
Grub fell a few hundred stairs later, less than a dozen steps from the exit, to a Snowman’s bone axe that took him in the hamstring. I heard the bone blade bite into flesh, tried to spin and grab him before he tumbled, but only got his collar. Before I could pull him up, the Snowmen had him by the legs.
Grub’s eyes widened. He let out a sharp yelp of pain as the Snowmen below did something to his legs. If I let him go, the stairwell would be clogged long enough for me to reach the Surface.
“Go!” Grub screamed, his voice two-toned with resolution and terror. I let go of his collar and sprinted up toward the snow-shrouded mouth of the tunnel.
As soon as I stepped outside into the jaws of freezing wind and sideways-blowing snow the Vermin surrounded me to ask where Grub and Vampire were. When they heard the Snowmen coming up the stairs, their questions ended. A group of them pushed a huge, strategically placed boulder in front of the tunnel mouth. It had been put there so it could be used to seal the tunnel in case of just such an emergency, but also to camouflage it as part of the landscape of the prison yard.
When the tunnel was sealed, I caught my breath and took stock of my surroundings. We were standing a dozen paces from the east wing of the main hall, behind a small, granite outcrop atop a hill overlooking the prison yard. Barn Owl, Zaea, and the Burrowers were all crouched among that scattered forest of cracked, icy stone, hidden, or so I hoped, from the guards patrolling the perimeter fence. My eyes scanned across the snowy reaches of the yard, all strobe-spotted with the bright, raking fingers of searchlights, finally coming to rest on the back gate.
Still unguarded, I thought. But why? They know we’re here. Something’s wrong. Those patrols aren’t guarding shit. We’re only meant to think they are. Someone put them up there so that we’d think this place was lightly guarded, but no one is this incompetent. They knew the bait was strong enough that we’d overlook the fact this is an obvious trap, either out of haste, or willingly. There’s a bigger fish waiting for us somewhere, and I’m guessing it’s close.
I ducked over to the rocky outcropping where Barn Owl was hiding, but before I could say anything about the guards she pushed a finger to her lips and pointed down toward the prisoners’ barracks.
Four silhouettes emerged from behind one of the buildings, half limping and half running in a drooping H configuration. Cheese Eater took point, with Vole, Bunny Rabbit, and Squirrel behind him. Vole and Bunny were carrying Squirrel under the arms. He’d been wounded. No one else was with them.
Barn Owl signaled to the prisoners to get ready to run. Thirty pairs of gaunt, shivering hands tightened around stolen bone axes, arrows, and knives. Barn Owl clicked her head to the side, indicating I should help Zaea.
I made an under hook beneath Zaea’s armpit with my free arm and hoisted her to her feet. Len was strong enough to swing Metatron one-handed, but I prayed I wouldn’t need to. My cuts wouldn’t be accurate, and more importantly, there would be no way for me to dodge or use the proper footwork if we were attacked. Still, the warmth of her small shape next to me was comforting.
We broke cover, descending the hillside in a silent mass of white-eyed shadows. Despite one searchlight coming a little too close, we made it safely to the shadows of the barracks without incident.
Bunny and Vole met us by the same stairwell where we’d split up. Squirrel had taken an axe through his arm. Even in the wan, ambient glow of the yard I could tell he’d lost a critical amount of blood. Vole had dressed the wound with pieces of hi
s shirt, which made me wonder briefly why none of these people carried first aid kits.
Squirrel’s labored breaths and pained, unconscious groans haunted the short debriefing that followed.
“We didn’t find anyone,” Bunny Rabbit said.
“Place is emptier’n my guts after a bad night of drinking,” Cheese Eater said.
“No shit,” Barn Owl said.
“Seems like they was still getting the place ready for the next batch of customers. Seems like the next batch of customers they was intendin’ to have here, was us… those from Salt Town and the Last Station. Seems like that was the whole reason this facility was built,” Cheese said.
“Most of these buildings is empty,” Vole added. “They ain’t even put the floors in yet. Part of me was thinkin’ they wasn’t real, and was built as some sort of distraction.”
Barn Owl sighed. “We got played. This place is a goddamned morgue. Still, thirty lives is better than zero.” She checked the bloodied field dressing under her shirt with two fingers and gasped.
“We did what we could,” Bunny Rabbit said.
“It ain’t over yet, youngblood. We’re gonna have big problems when we try to walk out that gate,” Barn Owl said.
“Cheese and I were just sayin’ the same thing. So, what’s the plan? Charge in screamin’ for blood and justice? Or try to do it sneaky-like?” Vole said.
“Dan… can you… hear it?” Zaea said.
“What’s that?” I said.
“Can you… hear it?”
“Hear what?”
Her voice was a threadbare whisper. “They’re… singing. Their song… their song is… the axle. That’s… all… I’m trying to say.”
I panicked. The blow to her skull had been worse than it looked. I was losing her.
Barn Owl licked the blood off her fingertips, poking the ground with her spear so she could lean on it. “I’ll tell you the plan. We’re going out the same way we came in, and we’re gonna kill anyone who tries to stop us. Leech already got the Ratkeeper. Cut his mask off like it was paper. You shoulda seen that motherfucker run.”