Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Alastair Stone Chronicles, Books 1 through 4

by R. L. King

  “We’ll have to play it by ear,” Jason said, looking around. He wished he had a gun of his own, but his pistol was packed along with the rest of his gear in the BMW’s trunk, and he hadn’t had time to grab the one from the guy Stone had dropped behind the bar. “Al, how long can you hold the spell?”

  Stone was looking for more snipers. “Not long—a minute, maybe two. Figure one is a safe bet if we’re running—harder to concentrate. And be careful,” he warned. “Don’t run in front of traffic once we’re invisible.”

  “This way,” Jason urged, pointing. He glanced over his shoulder—the two remaining figures from the initial attack had caught the trail again and were getting closer. “Do it, Al.”

  “Stay close, and keep hold of me.”

  Jason and Verity moved close to Stone, gripping the sleeves of his overcoat so they could all stay together. Stone made a complicated hand gesture and they winked out of sight, blending with the night. Suddenly they could not see themselves, or each other. It was a disconcerting feeling.

  “Go, go,” Stone whispered.

  They ran—or at least they moved as fast as they could all huddled together. They darted up a dark street, but were pulled up short by the sight of several more figures approaching them from the other direction.

  “How many of these guys have they got?” Jason muttered toward Stone. “This way!” He yanked Stone’s arm and veered up a smaller street off to their right; Stone and Verity quickly moved to keep pace with him.

  A car’s lights blazed, dazzling them and forcing them to keep to the shadows. “Can they see us?” Verity whispered.

  “No, but keep still until they pass us.” Stone’s voice already sounded strained. Once the car was by them, he tugged them along. “Come on—can’t hold this much longer.”

  Jason looked around for a street sign, but none were visible. “I’m all turned around—not sure which way we need to go.”

  “Just—keep moving. And stay in the shadows.”

  They ran again, Jason leading the way. Another group of figures stepped out of an alley on the other side of the street, then fanned out and headed in both directions.

  “Fuck!” Jason whispered. “Move faster. I don’t want to be here when that spell goes down.”

  They hurried up the street away from the direction they’d come from. They could see a glow up ahead, but it didn’t look bright enough to be the massive lightshow of Downtown. Stone’s labored breathing rattled as he struggled to maintain the spell. About halfway up the street, he stopped. “Can’t—” The three of them shimmered back into sight like a weak television channel being turned on. Stone bent over, hands on his knees, panting.

  “There they are!” a voice yelled.

  Jason’s head jerked up—another figure was on the other side of the street about thirty feet back, pointing. “They’re here! They—” He screeched as he suddenly rose high up in the air, slammed into the side of a building, and then dropped and didn’t move. Jason looked quickly at Stone, but he was obviously in no shape to cast any other spells at the moment. Verity, looking first triumphant and then panicked, dropped her arm and grabbed Jason’s shoulder.

  “Come on!” she urged. “Let’s go before the rest of them catch up!” And indeed several other forms, far enough away to be indistinct but getting closer, ran in their direction.

  “Go,” Stone panted, raising up. “Come on. Forward.”

  They ran. It was hard to tell if the figures had noticed them, but they were definitely headed the same way. Verity, running ahead of the two men, turned for a second to make sure they were still following.

  “V, look out!” Jason yelled, but it was too late. She tripped over a low railing and tumbled out of sight, shrieking.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “V!” Jason yelled, rushing to the edge and leaning over. “V! Are you okay?”

  For a moment there was no answer, but then her shaky voice filtered back up. “Y-yeah. I’m okay. Little banged up, but nothing broken.” Her voice seemed to be coming from several feet lower than they were; her dark figure moved around, illuminated by the area’s single functioning streetlight several yards away.

  Stone looked back over his shoulder: the others were getting closer, drawn by her screams. He leaned over the low railing next to Jason. “Give me a minute and I’ll get you levitated back up here. We’ll have to—”

  “Wait!” she cried.

  “What?” Jason’s voice was abrupt with fear. “V, they’re coming! We have to get out—”

  “Come down here!” she interrupted. “Look at this! Quick!”

  The voices and pounding footsteps were close behind them now. Jason and Stone exchanged glances, then as one they vaulted over the railing and slid down what turned out to be a steeply sloped embankment into a wide concrete trench littered with trash, shopping carts, and old broken furniture.

  “V, this is a drainage ditch!” Jason protested. “Why did you—”

  “Look!” She grabbed his arm and pointed.

  They looked. Crudely spray-painted onto one of the concrete walls near what looked like a yawning tunnel disappearing into blackness was a white Forgotten ‘good place’ symbol, nearly two feet high.

  “No way,” Jason breathed.

  “Here’s another one.” Stone had moved into the mouth of the tunnel, which was about eight feet high and twice as wide, and was pointing out a smaller version of the symbol.

  Jason and Verity hurried to join him, Verity fumbling in her bag for a flashlight. “Let’s get inside!” Jason said in a low voice. Two dark heads poked over the railing up above, and another bullet ricocheted off the concrete trench wall. More of the figures called to each other, approaching closer.

  “Inside,” Jason urged. “Hurry.”

  They headed into the tunnel. It was pitch dark; Verity’s small flashlight barely made a dent in the overwhelming blackness. She kept it in front of her and shone it toward the ground so they could see where they were walking. Behind them, the voices receded, but they couldn’t tell if the Evil were trying to climb down into the ditch.

  They kept moving, staying close to the right-side wall. After about fifty feet, the tunnel veered right and kept going; they risked stopping for a brief conference.

  “Al, do you have enough juice left to do the ‘we’re not here’ thing?” Jason asked. “Just in case they’re still following?”

  Stone nodded. “Back against the wall,” he ordered, pointing at the tunnel wall closest to where the Evil were coming from. The others quickly moved into place and he cast the spell. They waited, tense and silent, craning their ears to hear the Evil’s voices as they approached, but they heard nothing.

  “Did they give up?” Verity whispered.

  “Maybe they don’t come down here,” Stone said. “Perhaps we’ve found the dominion of our lost Forgotten.”

  “Down here?” Verity’s lips curled in distaste, her nose wrinkling. The stench in the tunnel, a noisome mix of mold, decay, fetid water, and hints of human waste, threatened to overwhelm them. She shone her flashlight around, illuminating a couple inches of murky standing water along with a collection of cast-off detritus: Styrofoam cups, old blankets, cigarette cartons, empty liquor bottles, broken glass, used needles. A few cockroaches, startled by the light, skittered into hiding beneath a soggy, shredded mattress, and a fat black spider watched them from a web spun high above. “Who’d live down here?”

  “I’ve heard of this place,” Jason said, looking around. “I forgot about it until now, but I ran across a mention of it in one of the library books I looked at. It’s the flood control system. These tunnels are all over the place under Vegas. Supposed to be for handling the runoff if they have flash floods.”

  “And there are people in them?” Verity asked. She carefully took off her leather jacket and tried to examine her arm without touching more of her surroundings than absolutely necessary.

  Jason shrugged. “You live where you can when you don’t have anyth
ing. It’s gotta be cooler down here, if nothing else. And probably safer.” He glanced back toward the end of the tunnel where they’d just come from. “I don’t think we should go back yet. I’m betting they’re waiting for us up there. They probably know where these tunnels let out, even if they don’t come down here.”

  Stone gave him a hard look. “You want us to keep going down here?” His expression was full of almost as much disgust as Verity’s. He glanced down at his shoes: they were light leather and not designed for this sort of thing; the water had already seeped into them. “Jason, I—”

  “I don’t like it either, Al, but we don’t have much choice. At least we need to find another exit—I’m sure they’re watching the one we came in from.” He looked over at Verity. “You okay, V? You took a pretty good fall back there.”

  “Arm hurts—looks like I cut it on something, and I kinda wrenched my shoulder when I landed on it. But at least I didn’t hit my head.”

  Stone took the flashlight from her and handed it to Jason, indicating for him to point it at Verity’s arm. “I think I can fix that,” he said. “Just hold still.” He gently wrapped a hand around her arm and concentrated for several seconds. “Better?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.” She shrugged back into her jacket, obviously wanting to cover herself up as much as possible so she didn’t have to touch anything in the tunnel.

  “I probably should have let you do it. You’re better at it than I am. But healing oneself isn’t quite as easy.” He took a deep breath. “All right, then. It seems we don’t have a choice, so sewer-slogging it is.” He didn’t sound at all pleased about the prospect. “It sure as hell looks like they’re on to us. If we didn’t know the portal was open before, we do now.”

  Jason’s eyes widened. “What about Madame Huan? Do you think they got to her?”

  “No way to know—but that message wasn’t written by her, or in her voice. It was just a note from the desk clerk. Anybody could have left it. I’ll have to give her a call, though, when we get out of here, and make sure she’s all right.”

  They continued on, keeping close to the right-hand wall and trying not to step on any of the dangerous or disgusting things on the floor of the tunnel. The darkness was absolute: the tiny beam of the flashlight lit only a few feet in front of them, and not very well. Graffiti covered the walls, some examples colorful and showing considerable skill, others crude and obscene.

  At irregular intervals, tiny shafts of light poked down from above, but they weren’t enough to provide any illumination. “Must be manholes,” Jason said, pointing upward at the cylindrical shafts with ladder rungs set into them. “Can’t get out here, though—too much chance we’ll pop up under a bus or something.”

  They kept walking. Verity’s flashlight started to fade so Stone took over, summoning a small glow spell around his hand and holding it out in front of him. It wasn’t much more helpful than the flashlight had been, but he didn’t seem to have trouble maintaining it.

  “How long are we gonna go?” Verity asked after they’d gingerly covered another few hundred feet, stepped over the fragrant corpse of a dead dog, and made yet another change of direction.

  Jason glanced off at the narrower tunnels that branched off the main shaft. “I dunno,” he said. “I don’t have a clue where we are, but I think it might be a good idea to put some serious distance between us and the Evil. We—”

  “Shh!” Stone interrupted in a whisper, stopping. “I saw something move up there.”

  They crept forward with care, Stone holding the light off to his side so as not to present a perfect target. As they drew closer they saw what was obviously some kind of camp on the other side of the tunnel: a stained mattress raised up on pallets to keep it out of the water and a couple of milk crates full of random items. On the mattress lay a man dressed only in baggy sweat pants and a dingy tank top. A pair of battered, grimy rubber boots stood near his head.

  “Is he—dead?” Verity whispered.

  Before Stone or Jason could answer, the man stretched and rolled over. “Hey, turn off tha’ light,” he mumbled. “’M tryin’a sleep, here.” His slurred words were almost unintelligible.

  “Sorry,” Jason said. “We’re just passing through. We’ll be out of your way in a sec.”

  “No problem, man,” the man said, languidly moving his arm over his eyes. “Watch out for the boogeyman.”

  “What?” Verity demanded, wide-eyed.

  The man laughed, a rattle in the back of his throat. “Sorry, honey. ’M jus’ fuckin’ wit’ ya.” An empty liquor bottle lay next to him on the mattress.

  “Hey,” Jason said. “Do you live down here?”

  The man shrugged. “Sometimes, yeah.”

  “You think maybe you could help us? We’re lookin’ for somebody.”

  Stone started to protest that they should just keep going, but Jason waved him off.

  Again, the man shrugged. He rolled his head back and forth. “I dunno, man. I don’t think I can get up right now. Just wanna go back to sleep.”

  “It’s just a question,” Jason assured him. “You don’t have to do anything.” He paused, and when the man didn’t respond, he added, “I’m Jason, by the way. This is Al, and V.”

  “Yeah, yeah...” the man mumbled. “Kenny.”

  “Hey, Kenny. So, can you help us? We’re looking for some friends who might be down here. Have you seen the symbols on the wall?”

  Verity didn’t look any more comfortable standing here than Stone did. She kept looking back over her shoulder as if expecting someone to be sneaking up on them.

  “...Symbols...?” Kenny took a pull off the glass pipe in the hand that wasn’t shielding his eyes. “You mean th’ tags?”

  “No. Hey, look for a second, okay?” Jason pulled out his notebook and held it out, turned to the page showing the “good place” symbol. “You seen this down here?”

  Kenny reluctantly rolled his head over and moved his arm. His watery eyes cracked open for a couple of seconds, then he rolled back. “Yeah, I seen that. Fuckin’ weirdos.”

  Stone and Jason exchanged glances. “Weirdos?” Jason asked.

  “Yeah, man. I seen those guys. I think they’re some kinda cult. They pretty much keep to themselves. One of ’em gave me a pack o’ smokes once. But they’re still fuckin’ weird.”

  “How so?”

  Again, Kenny moved his arm off his eyes. “You ain’t gonna believe me, dude.”

  “Try me.”

  Kenny shrugged and scratched his skinny, pale stomach. “They can—like—do things. Weird things. Creepy things.”

  “What sort of creepy things?” Stone asked.

  The man moved his arm off his eyes again and peered at Stone, who realized too late that their light source was glowing around his hand. Kenny’s mouth opened and his eyes got big and scared. He put up his hands as if to ward off a blow. “H-hey, man, I didn’t mean nothin’. Don’t hurt me, okay?”

  “Nobody’s gonna hurt you, Kenny,” Jason said. “Just tell us what kind of creepy things.”

  “Like that,” he said, pointing at Stone. “I mean, I ain’t never seen ‘em make lightbulbs like that, but they, like, always seem to know when somebody’s comin’, and I swear they can hide so people don’t see ’em. And they got this one guy that talks to dogs. And they answer.” He took another pull on his pipe. “I don’ get involved, you know? Over my head. I jus’ keep quiet and keep my head down and get by, yeah?”

  Jason nodded. “Yeah, man. That’s cool. Hey, one more thing and then we’ll leave you alone: where did you see these weird people? If we keep going, will we find ’em?”

  “Not if they don’t want you to,” he said. “Like I said, they hide.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Kenny. We appreciate the help. Stay safe, okay?” Jason motioned for Stone and Verity to follow him, and they moved off further down the tunnel. When they were out of Kenny’s earshot, he said, “Sure as hell sounds like Forgotten.”

  Ston
e nodded, shining his ball of magical light around to examine their surroundings. It was Verity who spotted another Forgotten symbol on the wall to their left, above a broken tricycle and a small pile of used needles.

  They continued moving in the same direction. The tunnel seemed to slope ever so slightly downward; the water at the bottom of it got a little deeper, which made Stone even more unhappy as it completely covered his shoes. Verity and Jason, who were both wearing boots, didn’t have the same problem. The stench was as unbearable as ever, but at least there was a slight breeze, probably coming in from grates above their heads.

  They passed more signs of camps, many of them staked in the small auxiliary tunnels that forked off the main one, but didn’t see any other people. The camps all looked similar: old mattresses, sleeping bags, or hunks of carpeting raised up to keep them out of the water, some sort of storage in the form of cardboard boxes or milk crates on pallets, and piles of clothing and debris. Sometimes there were areas that looked like they might be commonly used: a threadbare old couch or a couple of recliners arranged around a table fashioned from a door propped on milk crates. A couple of times they came upon areas that the residents were obviously using as latrines, always a good distance away from their camps. There were signs of alcohol and drug use everywhere: broken bottles and old needles floated in the sluggish current next to fast-food wrappers, flyers for adult entertainment shows, and other ephemera.

  Verity took a deep breath and grimaced. “I feel sorry for these guys,” she said quietly. “It must really suck to live down here.”

  Stone didn’t answer. He wasn’t saying much now, and Jason figured he probably wasn’t feeling too charitable toward anything in the tunnels as the water started working its way up his trouser legs. “Al, you okay?”

  “If I’d known I was going bloody spelunking in a toxic waste zone,” he growled, “I’d have worn a hazmat suit.”

  Despite sympathizing with Stone’s plight, Jason grinned. “Eh, might as well just roll with it. I don’t think you’re gonna salvage those shoes anyway.”