Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  “Those boats are corps property, so it’s not stealing,” I said, my logic withering in the silence that followed. “Well, not exactly stealing.”

  “We’d have to hot-wire the boat,” Ryder said. “We’d be up for destruction of corps property, at least—theft at worst—and nobody here can afford another demerit.”

  We can’t afford to stay, either. “Oliver, you said you had three options, what’s the third?”

  Oliver pinched the bridge of his nose, like he was trying to stop himself from saying the words aloud: “The tunnels.”

  Jude laughed, but the sound flatlined when he saw the gravity on Oliver’s face. “Wait, there are tunnels? For real?”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Under the bay,” Oliver said.

  “And they haven’t bloody told anyone?” Ryder asked, looking at me to see if I’d known about them. I shook my head. “Tunnels mean the island isn’t secure.”

  “Not as secure as we thought,” Jude said.

  Tunnels also meant my father kept secrets from me. Secrets Oliver knew, secrets his father shared with him. I wasn’t quick enough to douse the matchstick jealousy flaring in my chest. I wished my father still loved me the way Dr. Stoker so obviously loved Oliver, and couldn’t help wondering what intelligence I wasn’t privy to, what loops I’d been left out of, what secrets I hadn’t been told.

  Oliver sighed. “Grab your bags and follow me, I’ll explain everything on the way.”

  FRIDAY, 4:40 P.M.

  “THE TUNNELS ARE A fail-safe.” Oliver led us into the dorms’ fire escape stairwell. We headed downstairs, carrying our bags. “It’s a large evacuation route running from our southern harbor to Pier 50, with connections to all the island’s buildings.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “How did they build tunnels without anyone noticing?”

  “They built the tunnels before they announced the new Angel Island compound,” Oliver said. “Remember the ‘federally funded’ project to supposedly redistribute the bay’s seafloor sediment? Subterfuge. Helsing went to great lengths to ensure the tunnels would remain one of our best-kept secrets. They didn’t want the island’s security compromised.”

  “You’d think people would notice a freaking tunnel being built out in the bay,” Jude said.

  “Most people swallow the stories they’re fed,” Oliver said. “My father says we paid the observant ones for their silence, including several news stations and reporters.”

  We followed him down twenty-one stories, until the stairwell deposited us into the building’s subbasement. Oliver approached a set of nondescript doors, painted gray, with no knobs or handles. He ripped the lid off a stainless steel card reader, pulled a fuse out, and shook the sparks off his hand.

  The doors clunked.

  “Abracadabra,” Oliver said, pushing one of the doors open. The tunnel beyond swallowed the basement’s crumbs of light. No sound emanated from its gullet. Inside, the air smelled rubbery, like fresh paint and stale air. I dug my Maglite out of my pack and flicked it on, taking in the concrete tunnel and the Helsing insignia spray-painted on the wall.

  “Smile,” Jude said, motioning to a small onyx dome plugged into the ceiling. “We’re on candid camera, people.”

  “Who monitors this area?” Ryder asked, tugging the door closed behind the four of us. “Campus security or the corps police?”

  “Neither, I hope,” Oliver said, motioning us forward. “The area’s classified and supposed to be sealed, but they may notice one of the card readers blew a fuse.”

  “And if they do notice?” I asked.

  “Then we’d better be gone before they get here,” Ryder said.

  We headed into the darkness, Oliver in the lead, Jude at my side, Ryder bringing up the rear in a diamond-shaped formation reapers used while traversing unfamiliar territory. Nobody spoke. Our footsteps made no sounds. Only the swish of clothing or the intake of breath ruffled the tunnel’s silence.

  After about a half mile, our tributary tunnel fed into a massive pipe—the main tunnel’s girth shocked me, because we could’ve driven three or four Humvees abreast down the avenue. I pointed my flashlight at walls piped with ductwork guts and cables, light fixtures, and the occasional siren.

  “Holy…,” Jude said, craning his head back. “Will you look at this place? It’s practically made for an after-hours party.”

  “Don’t even think about it, mate,” Ryder said.

  “Too late,” Jude said, grinning.

  Large sprinklers dotted the ceiling like daisies with razor-sharp petals, the same apparatuses I’d seen on the ceilings of Seward Memorial’s Ninth Circle. Those devices sprouted nerve gas in case the necros escaped their pens … but why would they be needed in an evacuation tunnel?

  “They’re in place to contain outbreaks,” Oliver said, noticing my interest and pointing his flashlight at one of the sprinklers. “Blast shields have been placed every few hundred yards, too—this tunnel can be sectioned off and locked down in thirty seconds.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “We wouldn’t gas the living.”

  “No,” Oliver said. “We wouldn’t. They aren’t a proactive measure, but a reactive one—”

  Something clattered in the darkness behind us. We froze the way a wolf pack might—turning our heads all at once, ears pricked, everyone attuned to the potential threat.

  “What was that?” Oliver whispered. Ryder made a violent slice across his throat with a finger, then pointed in the direction we’d come.

  They know we’re here, he mouthed.

  No way. Jude shook his head, stilling when watery voices drifted down the tunnel.

  Go dark, Ryder mouthed, motioning to the wall. My stomach rolled as I understood what he wanted us to do—turn off our flashlights and follow the wall. We’d move slower, but have the advantage of seeing our pursuers before they saw us.

  Putting my back to the wall, I shut my flashlight off, stowed it in my pack, and took Dad’s Colt out. It had a barrel-mounted Xenon flashlight, and I wanted to have more to bargain with than empty palms. Since I wasn’t wearing a holster, I checked the handgun’s safety and shoved it in my belt.

  I reached out and put my hand on the sandpaper concrete. Ryder took the lead, dousing his flashlight. Oliver and Jude fell in behind me, and when the last flashlight clicked off, the darkness was absolute—not midnight dark, not even camping dark, but black as used motor oil poured into my eyes. Oliver reached out and grabbed the back of my pack. Smart. I fisted my hand in Ryder’s pack, too, so we moved forward like a centipede. Slow, silent, and totally blind.

  The tunnel slanted down. Fifty feet deep, then a hundred. The temperature dove with the incline, making me wish I hadn’t given up my hunting jacket at the hospital. Another fifty feet and my teeth chattered. As we walked, I tried not to think about the bay squeezing us on all sides, or how pressure could split a concrete-and-steel tunnel like a plastic straw. Focusing on the chains growing under my skin didn’t help, nor did thinking about Dad’s half-open eyes and worrying whether he’d shaken off the alcohol. Danger and death always stood a few steps away from me. Down here, where claustrophobia beaded my brow with sweat, where pressure popped my ears, where the tunnel groaned from the weight placed on its back, I almost believed in curses and centuries-old vengeance.

  Instead, I tried to remember what it was like to be a kid, when every activity felt like a no-holds-barred adventure; the boys and I used to climb into the drainage ditches and old wells on the Presidio property. When we got older, we started exploring the city’s big tunnels, the secret ones. Every teen knew about the Prohibition-era tunnels under Nob Hill and Chinatown—places Helsing swept clean once a night. But few knew about the labyrinth beneath Ghirardelli Square, or the spidery corridors under Coit Tower, the places you needed to pack heat if you meant to walk out alive. And one of Oliver’s pet projects was to find San Francisco’s fabled underground military base, which he believed to be hidden under Golden Gate Park, or on
an odd day, the Marin Headlands. He’d already tried to convince the last surviving members of San Francisco’s old Suicide Club to tell him—twice.

  My other senses became hyperactive in the blackness. I saw with my hand, fingers catching on boxes or pipes, or sliding over slick, painted surfaces. Our boots’ rubber soles made no sound on the floor, so the only noise we made was the faint scrape of skin on concrete.

  Sounds tailed us, an echoey voice here, a clank there. Creeping closer. We’d gone over two miles before the first clear, masculine voice grazed my skin:

  “The place’s empty. You sure you saw someone on the cameras, Antonio?”

  “Yeah, a bunch’a kids.”

  The words pushed us forward, faster. Just give up, I begged them. I chanced a look backward—four or five bright spots chewed through the darkness. The men closed the gap fast, and it wouldn’t be long before their lights got close enough to touch us. I nudged Ryder’s pack with my hand, urging him on faster.

  After a few hundred yards more, the tunnel bent upward. Ryder’s pace shifted and slowed with the steep incline, and Oliver’s hand pulled harder on my pack, his breath ragged. Physical exertion wasn’t good for a boy with twenty stitches in his chest.

  We’d gone up about fifty feet when Jude cursed under his breath—

  A clang, a clatter. A flash of light rolled down the incline, bright as a here-I-am flare, a wreck of shouts breaking out of its wake. I watched Jude’s flashlight rock at the incline’s base, mouth agape.

  “Move,” Ryder shouted, grabbing me by the hand and plunging up the hill. He lit the way with his Maglite, making the tunnel bounce and bob like a shaky-cam movie. We ran flat-out—Ryder taking one stride for my two and half dragging me—as orders to Stop! and Halt! slugged into our backs.

  By the time we made it to the top, my heart felt like a punching bag and my lungs burned. The lights from our pursuers’ flashlights ricocheted off the ceiling as Ryder and I scrambled over the ridge. I stopped to glance back; Oliver ran with a hand pressed into his chest, and as he crossed to flat ground, he slumped over and put his hands on his knees. A smear of blood edged his palm.

  “Oliver,” I cried.

  Jude got to him first. “No time,” he said, throwing his weight under Oliver’s arm and urging him forward. Oliver couldn’t run and stumbled—his breath came in wet, gasping spurts, and he leaned heavily on Jude.

  Ryder thrust his flashlight into my hands. He ran back to the others, squatted low, grabbed Oliver’s thigh, and performed the fastest fireman’s carry I’d ever seen, lifting Oliver like a sack of flour.

  “Go,” Ryder shouted at me, starting off at a slow jog. Oliver groaned. I turned and ran, lighting the way with Ryder’s flashlight. The men advanced; I couldn’t see them, but their footsteps rumbled through the floor and into the soles of my feet. We’d never outrun them, not with two of our crew mates encumbered—and I couldn’t know how much farther till we reached the tunnel’s end.

  The men’s lights grew brighter, rapping on the walls and the ceilings. Closer. I needed to stop them, but the tunnel had no obstacles or cover, and I couldn’t fire on Helsing’s own men. One of their lights lit up a razor-sharp sprinkler, so bright it burned an afterimage into my retinas.

  The sprinklers—

  I pivoted, pulled the Colt from my waistband, and shouted, “Keep moving,” at the boys.

  Jude slowed down for a few paces. “Micheline? What’re you—”

  “Just go!”

  The men were only forty feet behind us now.

  Thirty.

  Almost too close.

  I waited for Ryder and the others to get several yards ahead, flicked the Colt’s barrel-mounted flashlight on, and lifted the gun one-handed. Cries of Miss Helsing? echoed through the tunnel when their flashlights hit me in the face.

  “Stay back.” I aimed at a sprinkler closest to the men and pulled the trigger. The gun bucked against my palm, the shot so loud it deafened. The men ducked or pressed themselves against the walls. Gas hissed from the pipes, pumping out in thick pus-yellow clouds.

  The men scrambled back, covering their mouths and noses with their hands. The gas cascaded down in a curtain, backlit by the men’s flashlights. No way would they get through a cloud so dense without a gas mask, and it was a long trip back to the island to get them.

  I spun and chased after the boys, who’d already limped their way into a wide loading dock with several large, inoperable-looking steel doors. Large ducts and tubes dove into the concrete walls, marked with unfamiliar numbers and the Helsing insignia. A number of semitruck-size, unmarked storage pods turned the space into a sparse labyrinth.

  “What was that?” Jude asked as we ducked behind one of the large pods. Ryder set Oliver on his feet, both boys panting. “You’re either the ballsiest girl I know, or the stupidest one.”

  “I’ll take ballsy,” I said, shoving the Colt back in my belt.

  “Sm-smart thinking, Micheline,” Oliver said, leaning up against the storage pod. Sweat plastered his hair to his forehead, and a wet smear dashed across the front of his shirt. His wound’s reopened, dammit.

  “Well, brainiacs, let’s think a way out of this place,” Jude said.

  “There … should be … exits,” Oliver gasped, pointing to one of the dock’s corners. “To parking.”

  I turned Ryder’s flashlight in the direction Oliver indicated. Sure enough, I spotted a sliver of a regular-size door ahead. Slipping through, I found myself in a maintenance closet of sorts, the door behind me completely nondescript and lacking an exterior handle.

  The maintenance room opened into a dim, naturally lit stairwell. I ascended the stairs first, getting my bearings, exhaling the darkness and breathing in the light and sea salt, the openness. We’d ended up in one of the parking garages off Pier 50, large PARKING WEST signs mounted by the doors. We couldn’t have planned it better—most of the officers’ vehicles were parked in this garage, including our designated Humvees, Jude’s obscene monster truck, and Ryder’s motorcycle.

  I leaned over the banister to get the boys’ attention. “We’re in West Parking, who’s got their keys?”

  “We can’t take the Humvees,” Ryder said, helping Oliver up the stairs.

  “Nah, but my truck’s on three,” Jude said, heading up the stairs behind me. “Outback’s parked next to me.”

  With a nod, I leapt up another flight of stairs to the third floor. I pushed the door to the garage open, peering out. Afternoon sunlight slanted into the garage, slicking the backs of standard-issue Humvees and reapers’ personal vehicles. This time of day, the garage was empty. The crew below must not have been able to call for backup—hopefully their comms didn’t work in the tunnels.

  We made for Jude’s jacked-up fire-hydrant-red Silverado truck—a sixteenth-birthday gift from Damian. Oliver had a gunmetal-gray Mercedes with a letter and class I couldn’t bother to remember, and Ryder had a worn-in Harley he’d purchased with some of the prize money he’d won in the academy tournaments. Dad offered to buy him a car when he turned eighteen, but Ryder declined. I may be Helsing stubborn, but Ryder was Aussie proud.

  As for me, Dad said no car until my eighteenth birthday. And since I’d dumped his Humvee in the academy fountains, I had a feeling I’d be getting no car at all.

  Assuming I lived to see my eighteenth birthday.

  Ryder and Jude helped Oliver into the passenger seat of Jude’s truck, put a balled-up shirt between his chest and the seat belt, and told him to press hard on it. Oliver’s face had the milky-gray color of an oyster’s flesh and looked just as sweaty.

  “Hang in there,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze. He nodded, leaned back against the seat, and closed his eyes. I shut the door before I said, “He’s going to need better medical attention than we can give him.”

  “No hospitals,” Ryder said. “Soon as the brass puts two and two together, they’re going to be after us.”

  Jude wiped his face with his hand. “Think he jus
t needs new stitches?”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I know someone who’ll do it—”

  “Discreetly?” I asked.

  He made his zombie duck-face at me. “She’s not exactly going to call up old man Helsing and have a heart-to-heart, okay?”

  “She?” Ryder asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “You’re welcome,” Jude said. I nudged Ryder with my elbow, hoping I didn’t need to jab back off in Morse code into his side. Luckily, he dropped the issue and tossed our bags in the Silverado’s cab. They’d parked our Humvees a few stalls down, so we emptied the arsenal lockers and stowed everything—weapons and ammo—in a big toolbox Jude kept in his truck’s bed.

  “We need to head back to St. Mary’s,” I said. “Think you can be there around sundown?”

  Jude shut his tailgate. “What are we going back there for?”

  “If we’re going to track our ghost and break the soulchains, we need evidence. Motive,” I said.

  “Fine, we’ll see you there. But we’re going to eat afterward, understand?” Jude said, pointing a finger at me.

  “Deal.”

  The boys bumped fists. With one last look at Oliver, I turned to follow Ryder.

  Ryder’s Harley was beaten and crotchety as hell. I don’t know where he found it, but the satin paint had been worn in like a favorite pair of jeans. Everything was black, from the bike’s guts to its handlebars to the seat. When Ryder cranked the throttle, the bike growled and spat. He didn’t have a helmet (for either of us, Dad would freak), but I liked how the bike gave me an excuse to wrap my arms around his waist, an excuse to soak in his warmth, an excuse to be close.

  “Hold on tight,” Ryder said.

  Like I needed to be told to hang on to him.

  Jude pulled out of his parking space, flashing us a rock fist. We followed him down the ramp to the ground level, the guards’ stations manned with reapers drinking coffee and reading newspapers or watching television, the last gatekeepers. If Dad managed to wake up and alert the corps, they’d stop us.

  I sucked in a breath as Jude pulled up to the gate, but the guard waved him through. His companion didn’t even look up from his newspaper. I exhaled as we rolled out of the garage and turned onto Embarcadero Street—Jude turning right, Ryder left. Some of the tension hanging between my shoulder blades dissolved in the fresh air, in freedom.