All the lights were on, which I was pleased about; I wasn’t sure how well protected the lights would have been from the water that must have been pouring through here. There was a thin trickle of water down the center of the floor but nothing more than that. The crew chief, Kelly, was the first down the ladder. “What are we fixing, and how far is it?” I asked.
“Electrical short, about a half a mile north,” he said. That would put us just about squarely in the middle of the City Center by my reckoning. “And if it turns out to have been caused by a leak, we’re to find and seal that.” He coughed self-consciously. “We’re hoping it’s a leak,” he continued. “Because if it’s not, it’ll be Them.”
“We’d prefer our jobs to be routine and boring, but this is what they pay us the big bucks for,” said the short-haired woman.
“We get paid?” I said in an incredulous voice, getting a laugh from all of them. “Give me a second to get the troops deployed.” I put Hold and Strike with Bya, Dusana, Shinje, and Kalachakra on the front half, Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai and the other three in the rear. I asked Bya to be the front scout, and Myrrdhin to be the lag-behind, and then we set off. They introduced themselves to me; Kelly was the crew chief, Sanders was the woman, and the rest of the crew were Blake, Feineman, Rodrigo, and Lee.
I noticed that Sanders was one of the three packing a handgun, in a well-worn and well-oiled holster, right next to some of her tools on her tool belt. And that gave me some concerns.
I managed to sidle up to Sanders and caught her eye. “What are your loads?” I asked politely, nodding at her sidearm.
“Steel shot,” she said without hesitation. “We get special loads from Supplies. Ricochet is nuts down here.”
I nodded, relieved, since that was exactly what I was worried about, and why I had a shotgun instead of a sidearm. She chuckled. “You’re smart to ask, but anyone they let down here has had the lecture, the demonstration, and the graphic demonstration.”
I didn’t ask what the graphic demonstration was. I had the feeling it probably involved a lot of vid of people who had become “cautionary tales.”
The sewer was about twenty-four feet wide, and a flat oval, with the lights behind protected slabs of something transparent above us. At about six-foot intervals, there were smaller pipes about a foot in diameter entering the main line about halfway up. The mouths of these pipes were covered in a metal grate; by the rust on the grates, I knew these were cold-forged iron, something most, if not all, Othersiders cannot tolerate. I’d seen the street-level openings of these pipes when I’d gone out running; the openings were not only covered by identical metal grates—they had a fine metal mesh over the top of that. “Hey,” I said, “how do you keep the inlets up on the street from getting clogged up by debris during storms?”
“Turtles,” said Sanders. “That’s what we call them, anyway. Armored gutter sweepers; they’re about twice the size of an armored pod and heavily weighted so floodwaters can’t carry them away. They’re out as long as the rain’s coming down. I used to drive one. It’s weird—you obviously can’t see anything in the downpour, so there’s no windows and it’s all drive-by-wire, the same guide wires the driverless pods use. We could send ’em out without a driver, and sometimes we do, but the bosses want a driver on board in case you sweep up a body. Human, I mean, not one of Them.”
“There are always at least half a dozen bodies for each storm,” said Lee from behind me, before I could ask. “Sometimes more, never less. Accidents, people not paying attention to the warnings, Spillovers that take advantage of the rain to run across the Barriers and don’t realize you can’t just find a busted-up building to take shelter in once you get over here.”
It was the way he said those words that gave me a bit of a chill…as if these dead people were an inconvenience and of no more importance than a dead rabbit. Less, really—you could eat the rabbit…but I managed to keep my thoughts to myself.
“Well,” said Kelly, his tone going dark, “I’ve had my suspicions about some of those bodies for a long time. If you wanted to get rid of someone, it wouldn’t be hard to invite ’em over for a storm party, get ’em drunk, then haul ’em outside. The storm would take care of the rest; they’ll just drown, probably get washed as much as a mile away from where you left ’em, and no way to trace it back to you.”
I made a note to tell that to my uncle. Because Kelly was quite right: that would be a good way to get rid of someone. And I made another note to make sure that I was either in my room alone, locked in, or with people I knew I could trust during storms. You know, just in case.
Of course, anyone trying to ambush me would get a big surprise. I can do the emergency summons for my pack in mere seconds now, and if I did that, they’d come over alert and angry.
“Damn, Kelly,” said Blake, with an uneasy laugh. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”
“He watches too many murder mysteries,” Sanders replied with a snort. “Last time I was over at his house, that’s all that was on the vid. You’re gonna raise those kids of yours thinking that every other person they meet wants to kill ’em.”
That led to some good-natured bickering about vid shows. I let them chatter. It didn’t interfere with my communication with my pack, and it kept them relaxed. They didn’t need to be vigilant; that was what the pack and I were there for.
Besides, I really wanted them to concentrate on each other and leave me alone. If I had to make conversation with them, that would interfere with my communication—and I didn’t want this turning into fan service for the same reason.
It was cool, damp, and very, very clean down here—pretty much what you would expect in a concrete tube that had been scoured by rainwater for two solid days. According to my Perscom map, we were approaching an intersection where two smaller sewer pipes joined this one. I sent Bya and Myrrdhin ahead to check both of them out as the sewer crew continued talking, this time about the ranking Hunters. With me and Ace out of the picture, the current top five were changing nearly every time a shift went out to Hunt, and the top ten were all within a few points of one another. Since today would be the first Hunts since the storm started, all of them had opinions about who would come in at the number-one spot after first shift. I didn’t really care now that I was Elite, except insofar as Ace’s group had pretty much broken up and were being friendlier to everyone, making the competition among the regular Hunters less antagonistic than it had been when I first arrived.
Bya and Myrrdhin went back to their scouting ahead. No scents at all coming from the side tunnels, Bya told me.
In addition to sniffing out trouble, some of the Hounds could use senses besides scent; my original seven could tell when there was another Othersider or a Mage or Hunter using magic about. Thanks to the Hounds, we were able to move briskly, passing several more side sewers before ending up at our destination.
Besides the grated pipes leading up to the streets, there had been featureless metal doors painted the same color as the ’crete every fifty feet or so. Our goal was one of those, on the right-hand side of the sewer. As we neared it, the chatter stopped, and the crew got tense. I didn’t blame them.
When we stopped opposite our goal, they all looked straight at me.
“How do we open this?” I asked Kelly in as quiet a voice as I could manage, while the Hounds arranged themselves, two pairs facing up or down the sewer tunnel, just to make sure we didn’t get ambushed, and the rest in a semicircle around the door.
“Magnetic seal,” he said. “I unseal it with this, it pops open and moves to the side, inside.” He held out a gizmo, and I nodded.
“All right. I am going to assume there’s something in there, and be pleasantly surprised to find out otherwise. So all of you, get in close to me. If you’ve got weapons, get them out now.” I put up my Shield to cover us all; my Hounds each put up their own, and I primed my shotgun. “Kelly, whenever you’re ready, pop the door.”
He did something to the gizmo. The door made
a thunk sound, pulled away from us, and slid to the side.
And I was not pleasantly surprised.
THINGS POURED OUT OF the door. Things I’d never seen before: half human-ish with way too many arms, and snakes for the bottom half and—they moved fast. They came right at us, and I hit them with the first things I could think of, strengthening my Shield around us all while simultaneously making a flash-bang and firing my shotgun, as beside me Sanders opened up with her pistol. The sound was deafening in the confines of the ’crete tunnel, but it still didn’t drown out the shrill shrieks of the things. My heart was going a zillion beats a minute, and my head was on a swivel, keeping track of them.
Nagas! Bya shouted in my head, which meant nothing to me, and anyway, I was too busy backing the group up so we had the sewer wall at our backs, and opening up again with my shotgun. I got one square in the chest with the combination load of silver shot and blessed salt, and it stopped moving long enough for me to see these things had four arms—they were wielding swords, for heaven’s sake—and they had mouths full of needle-teeth. Keep the Cits safe…That was all I could consciously think of, but lucky for all of us, the crew wasn’t panicking, and they were just as concerned about keeping themselves protected as I was about protecting them.
Meanwhile, the Hounds weren’t idle. As the unarmed members of the group squeezed in between us armed ones and the wall so they had cover on both sides, the Hounds were attacking whatever parts of the creatures they could get. Gwalchmai managed to get his teeth into the tail of one and tried dragging it away from the others, but the thing was lithe, strong, and smart, and Gwalchmai had to let go and leap out of the way to avoid being diced by four swords. That was the problem all the Hounds were having: these weren’t stupid monsters, intent only on their prey.
“Kelly!” I snapped. “The door!” Because I sure did not want those things retreating into the smaller tunnel. There was no room to fight in there, no way to use anything more lethal than we already had without ruining what we’d come to fix, and they were better suited to those quarters than humans or Hounds were. I couldn’t see Kelly, who was behind me, but he must have triggered his gadget because the door slid shut and sealed again before any of the monsters noticed it was closing.
Now all we had to do was survive a tornado of whiplike snake tails and swords.
My Shield was at least keeping them at bay, and the Hounds had regrouped, rearranged themselves to the left and right of us in a group of five and a group of six, and had changed tactics to defense. They dodged and leapt and stayed in constant motion, always staying just ahead of the whirling blades and the wicked tails, blocking the things from going either direction in the sewer tunnel. And meanwhile those of us with firearms fired round after round of steel or silver shot into them when I briefly dropped the Shield. Their skin was really tough, armored hide maybe, so the shot wasn’t flaying them the way it would have something with just skin. But nevertheless it was having an effect. Every time one of them got hit with a load, it lost speed and a little agility, so it looked as if the steel and silver weakened them.
The cacophony of firearms and shrieking monsters was deafening. The monsters might have been slowed, but they never stopped moving. This was a stalemate; even if I pinned them down with a net, I wasn’t at all sure how long I could hold it, and they could still use those whip-tails and their swords on the Hounds or us.
Was there even a chance they’d be as resistant to fire as they seemed to be to damage from firearms? Only one way to find out.
With a shouted cantrip and a quick tracing of Glyphs in the air, I formed up my net and dropped it on them, passing my shotgun to Kelly as I did so because I couldn’t hold that net down and shoot at the same time. Bya! Fire! I told my Alpha, and in the next moment, my seven Alebrijes Hounds breathed inferno on the netted monsters.
The shrieks quadrupled in pitch and volume, and I clapped my hands to my ears, feeling as if someone was sticking red-hot needles into them. Behind me, the crew doubled over, doing the same as we all tried in vain to block out the hideously painful noise.
But the fire was working as nothing else we’d tried. I didn’t even need to hold the net on them, which was just as well because with all that excruciating screeching going on, I couldn’t.
Thankfully, they had to breathe in order to scream, and when they sucked in air for a fresh shriek, they sucked in fire too, and that ended the noise. The screams cut off before we all dropped over from the pain, and by that point, the monsters were flailing on the concrete, and the few that still had their swords in their clenched hands were utterly unable to use them. The Hounds jumped them then and tore them to bits.
Even though I was blinking away tears of pain, I could still see somewhat, and as I swallowed and tried to clear my ringing ears, I saw something else that was new. These monsters didn’t go to goo as the Hounds inhaled their manna, nor did they fade away. Instead, they turned to dust. When the Hounds were finished, the floor of the tunnel was covered in piles of grayish-black powder, with swords scattered about the concrete as if discarded.
We took our sweet time recovering. Before we opened that door a second time, I wanted to make sure we all had at least part of our hearing back.
I passed around headache pills out of my pack, because all of us had splitting heads as well as ringing ears. Then for a while we all lined up sitting in a row, with our feet braced and our backs in the curve of the tunnel wall, and waited for our ears to clear and our heads to stop throbbing.
As for the Hounds, well, they were in fine fettle. Those monsters must have been pretty manna-rich, because the sword slashes the Hounds had gotten healed right up in front of our very eyes, and they looked as good as ever they had, long before our heads stopped hurting.
When the pounding in my skull finally eased up, I noticed something else—a scent. Where before there had been nothing in this tunnel but the smell of damp concrete, now there was the smell of snake musk—the bitter odor that some snakes give off when they’re handled. I recognized it for what it was because, well, I’m a turnip and I’ve handled a lot of snakes as a kid. But as the repair crew stopped hurting and started noticing, they clearly didn’t know what it was.
“What’s that stink?” Lee asked, his nose wrinkling.
“It’s from the whatever-they-weres, I guess,” Kelly replied.
“Feh. It’s nasty,” Sanders said. “Reminds me of my ex-husband.” By that I knew that they were getting back to normal. I got up first, and although the crew looked at me and sighed, they struggled to their feet as well.
“I have a plan,” I said as the last of them got up. “If there are any more of those things in there, they won’t have run away when the others died; in my experience, killing Othersiders just makes the rest want your blood more.” Or, except maybe for Thunderbirds…
“Well, aren’t you a bundle of good news,” Lee said sourly.
“Actually, it is good news because it means they won’t be sneaking up on you while you’re in there making your repair,” I pointed out. “So what we’re going to do is: you all are going back up the tunnel, far enough that you’re barely in range for that gizmo to open the door again. The Hounds and I will stay here. The second the door’s open enough, I’m tossing a gas grenade in, and I want you to shut the door again on it.”
“Poison gas?” Kelly wanted to know.
I shook my head. “Just tear gas. You’ve got nose plugs, right? And goggles.” They all nodded; of course they did, that would be standard kit for anyone coming down here to fix things where they might encounter sewage gas. Methane can kill you, and not just by blowing you up. “Right, so we’ll leave the door closed for about a minute, then open it up again. If there’s any more of those things in there, they’ll stampede for the open door and better air, and my Hounds will fry them.”
I didn’t hear any objections, so I pulled my full-face mask out of my pack and waited while they got their nose plugs in and goggles on. When everyone was read
y, we all moved to our respective positions, and Kelly cracked the door.
It went like clockwork and was anticlimactic, because when Kelly opened the door for the second time, nothing came out but gas.
So we waited for the gas to clear some, then the crew went in and did their work while the Hounds and I stood guard. I even had Bya and Dusana in the maintenance tunnel with them to make sure there were no more surprises.
Then I collected some swords and stowed them in my pack, and we all trudged back up to the exit hatch again. Once we got to the ladder, I waited while the others climbed, and sent the Hounds back through their Portal. That was just to avoid putting the ones that couldn’t bamph through the hassle of getting up the ladder the hard way. They can climb, but it’s hard for them—they don’t like to do it, and I don’t blame them.
I was the last one out, and Kelly locked the door. And then they all turned to me. Kelly spoke first. “What in hell were those things?” he asked.
Well, I was already asking my Perscom that particular question. “My Hound Bya called them Nagas,” I told him, while I looked up the word. “I’ve never seen anything like them before.” My Perscom was no help. So evidently there was no record of those things in any Hunter encounters here in and around Apex, nor in the folklore my Perscom could access. “But look on the bright side,” I continued. “We know they burn quite well.”
The members of the crew looked at each other as if they weren’t sure if I was being serious or not, and then Sanders cracked a smile. “True,” she said. “And now we’re never going down there without at least one of you Hunters with us.”
Elite: A Hunter novel Page 7