by Jenna Black
“We can’t do that,” Agnes said with quiet dignity. “If we do nothing, Dorothy’s eventually going to find us and kill us. If we’re going to die anyway, I’d rather at least be trying to stop her. Angel might not particularly want to work with us, but she said she needed warm bodies. We’re warm bodies.”
“No!” Shrimp said sharply.
Agnes looked up at him with a serene expression very much at odds with what she was proposing. “We’ll ‘sneak’ out sometime when you’re on your rounds. As long as you’re not here, Maiden won’t expect you to stop us, right? So you shouldn’t get in trouble or anything.”
Shrimp gaped at her. “You think that’s why I’m saying no?”
Nate didn’t much like the idea of the five of them joining up with a bunch of Basement-dwellers who hated them in order to throw themselves against Dorothy’s tanks, but maybe that was the best possible outcome for all of them. Agnes was right: there was a certain dignity to going down fighting. A hell of a lot more dignity than there was in dying while in hiding.
“There are five of us, and one of you,” Nate said, although technically he couldn’t be sure Nadia, Kurt, and Dante were on board. “If we’re determined to leave, you can’t stop us.”
Shrimp’s eyes glittered in the glow of the candles. “Tell me you didn’t just threaten me.”
Kurt came to stand shoulder to shoulder with Nate, and Dante joined him. Nate wasn’t much of a fighter, but Kurt and Dante were both formidable. Between the three of them, they could take Shrimp down no matter how scrappy he might be.
“I know you understand better than you’re letting on,” Agnes said to Shrimp with a sad little smile. “Just go on out and do your thing, and we’ll be gone when you get back.”
“You’d never make it out of Red Death territory,” Shrimp responded. “Too many enforcers out there keeping an eye on things. And Angel’s blaze of glory crap ain’t gonna do anyone any good.”
“That doesn’t m—”
“Yes, it does matter!” Shrimp growled. “If y’all have to be heroes and get yourselves killed, you might as well do it for something that has a chance of working.”
Agnes cocked her head. “What do you have in mind?”
“I’ll tell you as soon as you get your boys to sit down and shut up.”
Agnes smiled pleasantly. “I’m sure that can be arranged,” she said in a saccharine-sweet voice. “Isn’t that right, boys?” She gave Nate, Kurt, and Dante each a pointed look.
Nate had never been a big fan of doing as he was told—or of backing down once he’d taken a stance—but just this once, he would make an exception. If Shrimp had an idea about how they could fight Dorothy without making a suicidal charge against the barricades, he was more than eager to hear it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Shrimp remained on his feet while everyone else sat down and looked up at him expectantly. His shoulders were tight with strain, his eyes a little wild-looking. Whatever he was about to suggest, Nadia didn’t think he was exactly comfortable with it.
“Lookin’ at what’s going on now,” he said, rubbing his hands together in a nervous gesture, “I don’t see any way it’s gonna end well. Even if Maiden gave the okay for all of us to join up with Angel, we’re gonna get our asses kicked. And it don’t seem to me that Dorothy’s gonna back off anytime soon.”
“She won’t,” Nate agreed. “At least not until she’s sure that we are dead.”
“And anyone she thinks we might have talked to,” Nadia hastily added. The last thing she wanted to do was give Maiden any reason to think killing them and turning their bodies over to the authorities for the reward might be a good idea.
Shrimp waved off her obvious concern. “Don’t worry. My brother can be a dickhead, but he ain’t stupid. If he’d understood the level of heat you’d put on us, Angel couldn’t’ve paid him enough to shelter you. But he’s stuck with you now, and he knows it.
“Anyway, like I was saying, Dorothy ain’t gonna stop on her own, and a bunch of Basement-dwellers with guns ain’t enough to stop her. So I think Agnes was right all along, and the only way to take her down is with help from the outside.”
Agnes’s face lit with hope. “So you’ll let me use Maiden’s phone connection?”
Shrimp shook his head. “No way. The only access is in his place, and he ain’t gonna let us in to use it.”
“So what are you suggesting?” Agnes asked.
“You wanted to get outside of the Basement, where you could pick up a signal. I think I might know how we can do that.”
“And you’re willing to do it behind Maiden’s back?”
He scrubbed at his bristly orange hair. “I don’t see that we got a choice. I don’t wanna end up like Kitty, but I don’t wanna hold my breath and hope the monster’ll go away, either. If Maiden won’t listen, then we gotta go behind his back.”
“But you could just let us go behind his back without you,” Nadia suggested. “Tell us what you have in mind, and if it sounds like a good plan, we’ll go ahead with our ‘escape’ and take care of it ourselves. You don’t have to put yourself in the line of fire.”
“Thanks,” he said, with a sad little smile, “but if you pull this off, Maiden’ll know it came from me anyway. So I might as well go with you. And hope that a showdown with Maiden is the worst thing in my future.”
“So how do you propose we get out of the Basement and in range of a phone signal?” Agnes asked.
“A coupla blocks from here, there’s some kinda sinkhole. When they built the Basement, they built around it instead of fixing it, so it’s kinda like a wasteland.”
Nadia remembered when she and Nate had been brought to the Basement to meet with Bishop when he was first in hiding. They’d met at an abandoned overpass. Not familiar with the Basement at the time, Nadia hadn’t realized how unusual it was to have so much empty space with no high-rises on it.
“Is it near that overpass where we met with Bishop?” she asked, then belatedly realized Shrimp might have no idea what she was talking about.
“Yep,” he said, grinning. “I was there that night, you know. Keeping an eye on our boy here.” He gave Bishop a friendly punch in the arm. “It’s just on the other side of the overpass where y’all had your little reunion. Anyway, I used to play there when I was a kid, and I found a hole in the rubble. Couldn’t see much ’cause it was dark down there, but went back one night with Maiden. Turns out it’s an old subway tunnel, probably collapsed when they were tearing down the neighborhood to build the Basement.
“We never explored it too much—it’s really nasty down there, and we weren’t sure how stable it was—but we hid the opening just in case we ever needed a place to hide where no one could find us. I don’t know how far it goes, and I don’t know if the air’s any good or even if there’s any way out, but it might be worth taking a look.”
“It’s perfect!” Agnes declared, her face lighting up with hope.
Nadia wouldn’t go that far. It had been patently obvious to those who had planned the Basement that public transportation would not be needed there. Basement-dwellers would have no reason to venture out into the wider world—at least that was the theory—and respectable citizens would know better than to set foot into the dangers of the slums. Nadia knew from her history lessons that there had once been subway lines running through the neighborhood, before it was torn down and made into the Basement. But just because Shrimp had found access to a stretch of tunnel didn’t mean the system was navigable, especially not when they would have to travel so far to get past the barricade and get a signal. The idea of blundering around in a dark, dank, stinky tunnel system with questionable air wasn’t terribly appealing.
Shrimp shrugged. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up yet, but at least there’s a shot.”
“Power’s been out what, two weeks now?” Bishop said. “Anyone’s phone still have juice?”
That threw a wet blanket over everything. Getting under the barricades wouldn’
t help if they couldn’t make the phone call.
No one was carrying their useless phones around anymore, so they took a few minutes to gather all the ones they had and dump them onto the coffee table. Several were already dead, but a few had a small amount of battery power left.
“We take all the ones that have any power at all,” Shrimp said, “and we might have to make multiple calls to get the message out.”
Nadia bit her lip. “And we have to go soon—before the last phone dies.” She’d been thinking they could maybe take a couple of days to plan for the terrifying venture into the tunnels, and that she and Nate and Agnes would be able to rehearse what they were going to say to Chairman Belinski in order to get as much information out as fast as possible—without making him think they were lunatics.
“Probably a good idea anyway,” Nate said. “We don’t know how long Dorothy will hold off before she launches a full-scale attack. And if we give Angel time to launch her ‘little action,’ that could be just the excuse Dorothy needs to send the tanks in. If we’re going to do this, we have to do it, like, now.”
“No reason to wait,” Shrimp agreed. “Y’all don’t hafta get all dressed up or anything, ’cause we’re gonna hafta get to the sinkhole without anyone seein’ us, but you might want sleeves and long pants. Like I said, it’s nasty down there, and we might get a little scraped up trying to get through the opening.”
Agnes’s relief at not having to go out in public in her Basement regalia was palpable, almost enough to make Nadia laugh despite her terror of what they were about to do.
* * *
The last time Nate had set foot outside the building had been for the execution. The eighteen flights of stairs discouraged casual meandering, as did the fact that there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Any fresh air he’d gotten, he’d gotten by sticking his head out the window, and though he’d seen from there how changed the Basement had been since the blackout began, it was nothing like being out on those darkened streets himself.
Despite the Basement’s usual nocturnal hours, there was hardly anyone out on the streets at night these days, at least not in Red Death territory. Nate assumed there were more people stationed around the borders, but he was perfectly happy not to see for himself, and the fact that the overpass and the sinkhole were firmly in the middle of Red Death turf—and that there was nothing of interest there to most people—heightened the chances that they would be able to explore without being seen and reported to Maiden.
It was oppressively dark out, the moon and stars hidden behind clouds. Here and there, candlelight flickered from windows, but it was too dim to illuminate the streets themselves. There was some ambient light thanks to the glow from the city, but it was slow going without flashlights, which they weren’t going to use unless absolutely necessary. In this instance, darkness was their friend, even if it did mean they were constantly tripping over cracks in the sidewalk.
The weather was unseasonably warm, and Nate was sweating beneath the thick thermal shirt he’d put on under his tee. The smell of rotting garbage was strong in the air, and there was a faint hint of smoke, possibly from the bonfires burning in the free territories. It had rained a few days ago, but the gutters were so blocked with rubbish that there were still filthy puddles everywhere, adding to the overall ambience.
The now-familiar sound of distant gunfire made everyone hurry their footsteps. It occurred in sporadic bursts, but if Angel launched her all-out offensive, it was likely to intensify. And the tanks might start advancing. People were already dying, and with the barricades keeping everyone and everything trapped, the dead would most likely rot in the streets.
In short, as awful as the Basement seemed now, it could get a whole lot worse in the blink of an eye.
It didn’t take long to reach the dilapidated area surrounding the abandoned overpass. With the high-rises not looming so close, it was possible to see over greater distances. Enough to see the glow and flashes of the fighting in the free territories. They all paused a moment to look.
“The blimps are gone,” Nadia commented, and Nate could see she was right.
Shrimp followed their gaze. “Might not be safe for them anymore. Red Death doesn’t do a whole lot of arms deals—we just supply our own people—but some of the other gangs have serious military-grade stuff. Kinda shit that’ll take a blimp down.”
Nate had already seen the kind of military-grade equipment the Red Death’s enforcers had. That there were other gangs with deadlier weapons was not a comfortable thought.
“We’re no match for them in the end,” Shrimp continued, “but if those tanks start rolling, they’re gonna be in for a rude surprise.”
“Let’s see if we can find a way to keep those tanks from rolling,” Agnes said. “Where’s this tunnel?”
Shrimp led them through the overpass and out the other side, where sure enough the pavement had collapsed. They played the beams of their flashlights over the sunken area, and all Nate could see were broken chunks of concrete and asphalt, along with litter and weeds.
“It’s at the bottom,” Shrimp said, moving cautiously toward the lip of the pit. “Watch your step and don’t put your full weight on anything till you’re sure it’ll hold you.”
For safety’s sake, they scrambled down one at a time. More than once, Nate put his foot down on a piece of rubble that looked solid, only to have it rock precariously under his weight, but despite a couple of stumbles and near misses, they all made it to the bottom without incident.
When everyone was down, Shrimp laid his flashlight on the ground, pointing it at a section of rubble that looked just like all the rest. He shrugged off the backpack containing the phones and the rest of their supplies. Squatting, he began pulling pieces of rock away, throwing them carelessly aside, along with the layers of litter that had gathered over the years. Nate grimaced when he saw Shrimp toss aside a desiccated used condom and wondered who in their right mind thought this was a good location for a hookup.
Dante tried to help—which belatedly Nate realized he should have offered to do himself—but Shrimp waved him off. “I got it. Almost there.”
Shrimp dug down to a warped, rotting piece of wood that looked like it might have been part of a crate in a former life. When he moved the wood aside, a hole appeared, just large enough for a person to fit through if he or she wasn’t too big. Nate eyed Dante and wondered if those shoulders of his would make it.
They gathered ’round as Shrimp shone his flashlight into the hole.
There wasn’t a lot to see. There was more rubble down there, and the air in the beam of the flashlight swam with dust. A dank, musty smell wafted out, and a pair of rats skittered away from the light with indignant squeaks of protest. Nate glanced over at Nadia and Agnes, wondering if the girls were now having second thoughts. Nadia wrinkled her nose in distaste, and Agnes looked grim, but neither of them showed any sign of screaming or fainting at the sight of a rodent.
“In we go,” Shrimp said, then lay flat on his belly to crawl through the hole onto the slope of rubble directly below it. When his feet were through, he wriggled around and stood up, edging his way carefully down to the bottom.
Nate wasn’t looking forward to crawling facefirst into a dark tunnel filled with rats, but he was damned if he was going to show that reluctance in front of Dante, so he leaned into the opening.
“Hold up a minute!” Shrimp said, raising one hand in a stop sign. “Gimme the backpack first.”
Nate didn’t appreciate the delay when his nerves were so jittery, but he grabbed for the backpack anyway and tossed it down, meaning to follow it immediately.
“I said hold up!” Shrimp repeated irritably as he dug through the backpack and pulled out one of the candles they had brought. “Told ya I don’t know ’bout the air down here. No sense both of us breathin’ it till we know it’s okay.”
Nate rolled his eyes at the precaution. He didn’t doubt that there could be bad air in the tunnel, but not this close to
the surface, and not when there was a hole for fresh air to get through. But it had been Nadia’s idea to use candles to test the air quality, so he waited impatiently while Shrimp lit the wick. When it caught and burned easily, Shrimp finally gave the go-ahead for everyone else to follow him in.
If the air that wafted out of the hole was dank, the air inside was a lot worse. When Nate stepped aside to make room for Nadia to come in, his foot came down in a scum-covered puddle that immediately soaked through his shoe. He turned on his own flashlight and shone it around, picking out more puddles. The stink in the air was probably mildew, although there were undertones that were even fouler. The scent of wet rat, maybe?
He decided not to think about it as he moved farther from the hole and into the tunnel proper. By the look of it, the entire street above and the remnants of whatever building had been built on it had collapsed into the tunnel, completely blocking it off on one side. It wasn’t until about twenty yards in that the rubble thinned enough to make out the ancient, rusted subway tracks on the floor, disappearing into the darkness beyond.
Nate had thought the city was oppressively dark with the power off, but that was nothing compared to the light-eating dark of the tunnel. The setting reminded him of something from a horror movie, and his lizard brain was telling him in no uncertain terms that he should turn around and get the hell out of here ASAP.
When everyone was through the hole and down to the tunnel floor, they took a moment to assess the situation, flashlight beams streaking all around as each of them examined their surroundings. More than one beam caught sets of glowing eyes.
“I can’t imagine why you and your brother wouldn’t want to explore this place for hours,” Nate said to Shrimp, trying for something like dry humor to hide how creeped out he was feeling.
Shrimp snorted. “This’s nothing. You think we don’t got rats on the streets ’round here? Wait’ll we get a little farther in. You’ll see why Maiden and me decided not to keep going.”