He felt like he had been pummelled at an emotional boxing match. Didn’t he have enough to deal with without all of this being thrown at him? Wasn’t it enough that his son was dying and his wife hated him?
“This is all so much to take,” he said to Otto, resting his head back against the wall. “You have no idea what my life has been like over the past twenty-four hours.”
“I’m not going to give you sympathy, Tom. I am sorry about your son, really I am, but I have the bigger picture to think about.”
“So what now?”
“We have to go deeper, out of the man-made tunnels and into the ones below. And if you think this has been hard, Tom, then you need to grow some serious balls because things will only get worse from here down.”
“You’re always such a ray of light, Otto. You and Mack must have attended the same school of thought.”
Otto raised his eyebrows. “I think I’ll take Bugs for a walk, see if there are some girl rats he wants to entertain while we rest.”
Tom screwed up his nose at the thought. The other man jumped out of the cubby and down into the sewer, Bugs still clinging to his shoulder.
Jo shifted over so she sat next to Tom.
“How are you doing?” she asked.
“I’ve been better.”
“You’re worried about your son?”
Tom gave a sad smile; the pain just her words caused him was almost unbearable. “That and everything else. How could I not be?”
“You’ll figure this out, Tom. I’m sure you will.”
“Why do you trust me, Jo? I don’t know anything, but you seem to believe in me.”
Jo leaned over and put her rough, calloused hands on each side of his face. She grabbed his cheeks between her thumb and forefinger as though he was a young boy.
“You have a kind face,” she told him with a rueful smile, dropping her hold on him. “I guess I am a sucker for a kind face.”
He couldn’t help smiling, but he wasn’t going to let her off the hook so easily.
“I need answers, Jo. So what if I remember being down here when I was a kid? It still doesn’t tell me what I’m supposed to do to save David. Everyone just seems to dance around the topic, but isn’t that important? Why won’t anyone tell me what I’m supposed to be doing?”
She shook her head. “We haven’t told you because we don’t know. When we found you in the deepest tunnels, you’d already sent the Shadows back beneath—back to the Underlife—but no one witnessed what happened and you were too young and in shock to explain.”
“So we’re basically the blind leading the blind down here?”
She grasped his hands in her own. “Sometimes you need to believe in yourself. Sometimes a little faith is all we ever have.”
“Hey, Billy?” Otto’s voice came from deeper down the tunnel system. “I need you to see something.”
Jo and Billy glanced at each other; Tom read the mistrust in their faces. Whatever Otto wanted, these two clearly didn’t trust him, not now anyway. Were they still worried about Otto thinking Billy had been infected? Were they worried about what Otto might do?
Billy gave a wry smile. “Better go see what the boss needs.”
Jo nodded. “Be careful.”
Crouching, Billy scuttled his skinny body to the edge of the cubby and jumped down, same as Otto had only a few minutes before. His footsteps echoed and faded as he walked away.
“Otto would never harm him,” Samantha said, addressing Jo, picking up on the tension. “You have to believe that.”
No one answered.
* * *
BILLY WALKED DOWN the tunnel in the same direction Otto had gone. Within a minute, Otto’s figure emerged from the darkness. He stood in the middle of the tunnel, his torch pointed at the ceiling. Bugs no longer sat on his shoulder.
Otto looks naked without the rat, thought Billy. Like seeing a man after he’s shaved off the moustache he’s worn for the past ten years.
The torch Otto held lit up a bundle of wires hanging through a hole in the roof.
Otto noticed Billy approach and motioned at the wires with a jerk of the torch.
“What would these be for?” he asked. “I can’t figure out why they’d be so far down.”
Billy frowned and walked closer until both men stood together, their faces lifted to the curved brick ceiling. Coloured plastic coated each individual wire—red, yellow and blue—but the ends of the wires shone metallic, frayed and exposed.
Billy folded his hands across his narrow chest, his head tilted to one side. “Must be part of a telecoms system. It’s old, but probably still live.”
“I didn’t realise sewer workers needed to be in touch with above ground.”
Billy walked around Otto, checking out the wires from every angle. “Same reason any other underground workers would need to be,” he said. “If there is an emergency, if they need help and it can’t wait until they get above ground, or even worse, if they couldn’t get above ground. I expect a phone would have been attached to a wall once upon a time.”
“Could we use the connection if we needed to?”
Billy pursed his mouth and ran a hand through his hair. “I’d need my tools out of my bag, but I can try.”
“Good. You do that and we will meet you on the way out.”
Billy stepped back in surprise. “What?”
“You heard me. That was your job here, to get us contact with the outside world if we needed it. There might not be another opportunity, so you might as well be here doing your job.”
Billy pressed his lips together, considering the words that he was about to let out of his mouth. He wanted to tell Otto to go fuck himself, but he knew how ranking went here. In the Underlife, everyone had their place. If he screwed up with Otto, he would also be screwing himself.
“Sure thing, Otto,” he said finally. “Whatever I can do to help.”
Otto called back up the tunnel. “Come on, people, time to get moving.”
The big man knelt down and made a couple of sharp squeaking noise using his tongue and front teeth. From the dark leapt ten pounds of rodent, landing on his shoulder. The animal curled up against his neck like a friendly cat. He reached up and ruffled its fur.
“Did you have fun, guy? Meet anyone you like better than yourself?” The animal squeaked and Otto laughed deep in the back of his throat.
The rest of the group came trudging down the tunnel, their torches still lit until they had regrouped and were back on a stable path.
“Billy has got some work to do here,” Otto told them, “so it’s time to say goodbye. And before anyone asks, no, you can’t stay with him. Billy is old enough and certainly ugly enough to look after himself. We can’t risk leaving any more of you behind because we don’t know when we might need each of your talents.”
“This sucks,” Jo said, under her breath.
“It’s cool,” said Billy. “Don’t worry about it.” He looked around them. “Did anyone bring my stuff?”
Jo picked the bag up from where she had dropped it at her feet and handed it to him.
“Thanks.”
“We’ll see you later then, Billy,” Otto said. He clapped the much smaller man on the back before heading down the tunnel.
Sky gave Billy a brief, but fierce hug, her way of saying goodbye without saying a thing, and then headed after Otto. Samantha did a similar thing and wished him luck.
“Hey, you guys will be the ones who need luck,” he replied. “Don’t worry about me.”
Tom lifted a hand in a goodbye wave and awkwardly turned down the tunnel.
“This sucks,” Jo said again, louder this time now that Otto was out of earshot.
“You’ll get over it,” Billy said with a grin and she couldn’t help but smile back. She stepped backwards and raised her hand.
Billy’s hand shot out and grabbed Jo’s wrist in a fierce grip. She stood, frozen for the briefest moment of time. Their eyes locked on each other and something passed be
tween them. Her face went blank for a fraction of a second—such a short period of time that none of the others noticed, especially in the dark. Then it was gone and he let go of her hand.
“See you soon, Bill,” Jo said, as though nothing had happened. “And look after yourself.”
He gave only a shadow of a nod in response and she turned away from him and followed the others down the tunnel.
Chapter 13
TO TOM, WHAT had initially felt like a democracy within the group was now starting to feel more like a dictatorship with Otto at its head. The thought made Tom uneasy. Billy might be tough enough to take care of himself—he had probably been doing so most of his life—but leaving someone alone in the dark when the Shadows might appear at any moment seemed wrong.
“I can’t believe we’re leaving Billy behind,” Samantha said to Tom, keeping her voice low so as not to let Otto, who was further ahead, hear.
Tom kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to start taking sides, especially when he couldn’t be sure which the right one was.
“What’s your talent?” he asked her, remembering something Otto had said.
“What?”
“Back there, Otto said we might need each of our talents. So what is your talent?”
She laughed. “Can’t you figure it out?”
Tom shook his head and shrugged.
“I guess you could say I’m the medical officer.”
“Oh, right, of course.” He frowned at his stupidity. “We’d better hope we don’t need you then.”
“You okay, Jo?” Sam asked, glancing back over her shoulder at the much larger woman who plodded along behind them.
Jo stopped walking. Her neck slouched down low between her shoulders, her head hung, staring at the floor.
“I can’t do this,” she said, still not looking up. “I’m not leaving him by himself.”
She turned on her heel and headed back up the tunnel.
“Jo?” Samantha called after her. “What are you doing? Otto will go mad if you’re not with us.”
But Jo ignored them and continued to walk away, her broad back reflected in their torchlight. Having switched her own torch off, she walked into the dark without a break in her stride.
“Is she okay?” Tom asked Samantha. “She seems strange.”
Sam’s brow furrowed in a frown. “I don’t know. Maybe we should go after her.”
They stood, hesitant with indecision, and Jo disappeared in the dark.
Otto and Sky hadn’t noticed the others stopping. Tom and Samantha were torn between their desire to follow Jo and their loyalty to Otto.
They weren’t given the time to make their choice.
A sound came in the distance.
Tom’s heart started up a now familiar, fast thump in his chest.
“What’s that?” he hissed.
Were the Shadows approaching again? Though similar—a hollow, whispery rush of noise—it didn’t have that strange way of being in his head, as though bypassing his ears. This was more normal, in the way anything could be normal in this place. Something about the sound struck a familiar chord and it grew louder by the second.
They stood frozen, waiting. Quickly, the noise increased in volume until it was less of a whisper and more of a roar. Tom caught Samantha’s eye and recognised the fear reflected within its depths.
So familiar, so achingly familiar...
Otto and Sky were farther down the tunnel, but not so far they couldn’t hear.
“What’s happening?” Otto called back.
Everything seemed to happen at once. Realisation dawned on Tom; Samantha’s eyes widened in terror as the same notion struck her; and then Billy came screaming and running towards them, arms and legs failing like a crazy person.
“Run! Damn it! Run!”
Jo ran behind Billy, slow and lumbering as though she was drunk or high. Behind her, a wall of black water fell towards them.
They turned and ran.
Within seconds, Tom’s breath shrieked in and out of his lungs, harsh and painful. His legs and arms pumped, propelling him forward. His pulse thumped in his ears and his muscles burned. He was aware of Samantha running beside him and he reached out an arm to help propel her forward, but the motion nearly took him off balance and he had to concentrate on himself.
In Tom’s head, he could only think, ‘run, run, run, run,’ over and over, desperately forcing his legs to go faster. Irrationally, somewhere in the back of his mind, he was scared he would experience the weird, slow motion legs he sometimes got when he was being chased in dreams, and he wouldn’t be able to move.
They quickly caught up with Sky and Otto who took one look at them and literally fled for their lives. They had no idea where they were running to. The tunnel went on and on.
Like a tsunami wave coming onto shore, the water pummelled towards them. They couldn’t out run it for much longer.
Suddenly, Sky leapt at the wall like a cat. She clung to a ladder, which had appeared almost miraculously, and scaled the ten or so rungs leading to a hole in the ceiling.
“Hurry!” Otto shouted. He shoved Samantha up behind Sky and then gave Tom a boost.
They couldn’t get up fast enough—Sky pulling from the top and Otto pushing from the bottom, shoving them one by one up into another tunnel above.
“Where’s Jo?” Otto yelled at Billy when he arrived at the base of the ladder, gasping for breath.
Billy looked back. “She was right behind me!”
“Shit!”
Water started flooding around their ankles and Otto pushed Billy, urging him up the ladder.
Then it was upon them, an ice-cold torrent of water, threatening to knock Otto off his feet. He had no choice but to follow Billy up the ladder. As the water dragged at his legs, it took all his strength to hold onto the rungs and pull himself up.
Caught—half-standing, half-swimming—Jo struggled in the water.
“Jo!” Otto reached down and managed to grab her hand as she was swept past. Her hand was wet and slippery, but he held fast.
Jo managed to grab a rung with her other hand and pulled herself onto the ladder.
The deluge of water rushed past. With every passing second, the water level climbed higher.
“Come on, Jo. Hurry up, for fuck’s sake.”
Jo let go of Otto and grabbed hold of the rung above her and started to pull herself up. The flow of water almost ripped her hold off the metal bars. She reached for the next rung, but the water engulfed her chest now and the cold hit, constricting her lungs, making her gasp for breath. Her fingers missed the metal and she slipped, dangling by one arm.
“Grab my hand,” Otto yelled. He reached down to her, but she managed to grab the rung again and continued to pull herself up.
Only a foot of air separated the water from the ceiling.
“Come on, Jo, hurry.”
She’d almost made it, her head and shoulders almost through the hole. She reached up to grab Otto’s hand, their fingers only inches apart.
Electricity jarred through her body. Her eyes widened for a moment, her pupils somehow blank and yet terrified, her hand frozen in mid-air. And then, as though in slow motion, she fell backwards. Her body hit the water with barely a splash and sank beneath its black surface.
“Jo!” Samantha screamed and lunged toward the hole, wanting to go after her. Otto grabbed her shoulders and held her back.
The five survivors stood in shock, staring through the hole, watching the torrent of deadly black water rushing beneath them, carrying its victim away.
“The wires,” Billy said, numbly. “The live wires must have touched the water.”
Samantha’s fist bunched at her mouth. “Oh, God,” she managed, tears in her eyes. “We need to go and get her, she might still be alive.”
“Don’t be crazy,” said Billy. “The water might be live!”
Samantha made a small keening sound in the back of her throat and buried her face in her hands.
&n
bsp; Otto rounded on Billy, the huge, black man dwarfing the skinny, white man.
“What the fuck happened?” he demanded. “She should have been way out in front of you. How the hell did she end up behind you?”
Billy shook his head desperately. “She was right with me!”
“She shouldn’t have been with you! We left you behind.”
Samantha was in shock, pale-faced and trembling. Tom put his arm around her shoulders and she leant against him, her legs giving way.
“Is Jo really dead?” Sky’s voice came small and childlike and Tom turned to see her standing in the background, looking younger than ever.
Billy reached out an arm towards her, trying to offer some comfort, but Otto knocked his hand away. “Don’t you touch her,” he said, furious.
“Fuck off, Otto! Who the hell made you God?”
Otto looked like he could squash Billy flat, but Billy was in his face and didn’t appear the least bit intimidated.
“Stop it,” Samantha said, her voice strangled with tears. “Just stop it. We need to stick together. Jo has just died and you are fighting!”
Sky gave a choked sob and Otto backed off.
Tom spoke, his voice sounding strange in his ears. “Where did all that water come from?”
Sky shot him a narrow-eyed glare. “The reservoir, of course.”
“I know that. I meant how did it get out? Why did water that’s been sitting in the same place for God-knows-how-many years suddenly come flooding down these tunnels?”
“Someone must have altered the dam, done something to alter the level.”
“What? Like someone who was last out?” said Otto, glaring at Billy.
“I didn’t fucking do anything! Do you really think I would do something that could get me killed?”
“Don’t start again,” Samantha warned them.
Otto cleared his throat. “We need to figure out what to do now.”
“This all feels so wrong,” she said, taking a couple of hiccupping breaths. “We shouldn’t be carrying on as though nothing has happened.”
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