by Glynn James
We were through the garden and at the fence when the first screech echoed from the street the other side of the house. More answered. High-pitched shrieks that made my stomach lurch.
Then the race began.
I didn't stop at the gate, jumping and kicking out as I approached. The gate was old and crumbling already, and to my relief it broke more easily than I had expected. Some of the wood cracked off and the rest swung round with a loud bang against the back wall. I ran again, dashing through the opening and out into the alleyway that led between the gardens. I held my gun out, pointing ahead of me, and for just a brief moment scanned in every direction before running again. Bags of rubbish and collapsed walls blocked my path all of the way, but I was at the turning in the alleyway, DogThing and GreyFoot in front of me, before I heard the scratching and scuffling of feet on the path behind me. I spun around, just in time to level my gun and fire in the face of a Kre'esh. Its blood splattered across the nearest wall and the body fell at my feet twitching.
I didn't stop to feel sorry for this one.
There were no others behind it, but I knew that they wouldn't be far behind, so I ran again, dodging between the piles of bins that blocked the intersection in the alleyway, and welcoming the darkness of the covered path that led between the houses. We raced on ahead, not stopping to look back. The Maw were only just ahead of me when we burst back out into the street, the sounds of dustbins crashing and clawed feet scratching the hard ground behind us as the Kre'esh chased after us, closing the gap quicker than I could think.
GreyFoot turned and ran in the wrong direction as DogThing hurried towards the middle of the road.
"GreyFoot!" I shouted as I ran after DogThing. He stopped at the man-hole cover and looked back at me, his eyes wide and showing the fear that I felt. The little Maw jumped at the noise and ran after us, getting to us just as I holstered my gun and grabbed the handle of the metal cover to the sewer entrance, and also at the same time as the Kre'esh came spewing out of the alley entrance. They were only thirty yards away, at least ten of them, and they were barrelling towards us as I heaved on the cover, pulling it from its hole.
"Jump," I shouted at the Maw, as I lifted the man-hole cover by its handle and turned it over. The Maw were gone in a flurry of movement, darting into the dark hole in the ground. I had no idea what was going to be down there, or if there was even a ladder to climb down, or how far the drop would be, but I did know that at least ten Kre'esh were barely a dozen yards away, and running towards me at a startling speed as I jumped into the hole, holding the man-hole cover handle with both hands.
I had seen something in that short moment as I fell downwards. I couldn't place it immediately, but there was something else on the street, something that I had seen but couldn't comprehend, as though the image was refusing to show itself. My mind raced to catch up with my vision but was stalled as the man-hole cover slammed into the ground, upside down, but still blocking the gap and still with me holding onto the handle to stop me from falling into the depths below.
I hung there for a while, in the darkness, breathing heavily, my arms and my back shuddering with the impact, and I could feel the claws of the frustrated Kre'esh scratching and grating on the metal the other side of the man-hole cover. I tried to think more clearly about what I had just seen further down the street.
Gradually the image emerged from my stunned thoughts. It was a cross of some kind, and it had been a long way down the street, but my eyes had adjusted enough to this dark place again that I could make it out clearly even though the outline was melded with thoughts of running, screaming Kre'esh, and broken, crumbling buildings. There was a mist rising from the cobbled street that fogged up the picture, but then the mist cleared, as much in my own head as in the street itself.
There was a cross in the middle of the road.
I didn't know what it was made of, or how it could be held in place without falling over, but I did know that it was tall, tall enough to crucify someone upon; tall enough to crucify the person who now hung from it, his clothes ruined and his features haggard and tortured.
Dha'mir.
I had only seen it for the briefest of moments, but I had recognised him even in the state he was in. They were the same type of creature, CutterJack and Dha'mir, but CutterJack had those hideous scars and Dha'mir did not. For that moment I had seen his face distorted by pain, and it was clearly him. His face was left intact, but I couldn't even put together a picture of the rest. It was a blur of red and mist and torn clothing.
After a few minutes the scratching above me just stopped. There was no gradual sign that they were giving up. It just stopped. I tried to focus on something, something that would help me to see better in this new level of utter darkness. There was next to no light at all in this new place. I swung my feet around, finding the walls of the access tunnel, but could find nothing to put my feet on. There were a few small pieces of metal jutting out of the wall that may once have held a ladder, but there was no ladder now, and the pieces that remained weren't big enough for my feet.
"DogThing. Are you there?" I called out, my voice echoing.
"Yes," he said in my head. I still forgot most of the time that I didn't need to open my mouth to speak to him.
I tried to reach to my backpack, to get a torch out, but couldn't hold my weight with one hand for long enough. I doubted that I would be able to light a torch anyway.
Not enough hands.
"How far down is it? Is it safe to drop down? I can't see from up here."
"It's not far. The same as a man, standing on a man, standing on another man."
I pondered that for a moment. Twelve feet from my feet maybe, roughly.
Then I sighed, took a deep breath, and let go of the cover, dropping into the nothingness below me.
For those few moments, as I plummeted downwards into the dark, I seriously questioned DogThing's judgement. Panic was just about to seize me when I hit the ground. My legs collapsed underneath me and the pain rushed up my thighs and my back. I could heal most injuries given time, I knew that, but they still hurt.
I felt myself falling backwards, and I sat down hard, regretting it immediately as I realised that I was sitting in water. There hadn't been enough of it to make much of a splash, but there was enough to soak my clothes through.
Gross. I had no idea what was in the water, if it was even water. Whatever it was, it stank pretty rotten. My senses flooded with the reek of something awful, something that could only be dead, long dead. I held back as my stomach lurched, threatening to empty itself.
I looked around. The sewer channel was about twelve feet wide, with a small channel running down the middle and taking up at least half of the width. Running along both sides were slightly raised walkways. The stonework was old and broken, and even though my vision was still adjusting to the low level of light down there, I could see that everything was covered in a slimy layer of gunk and moss. There was movement in that sickly unnatural growth, small bugs that I didn't even want to touch crawled and writhed around.
Old London sewers.
Correction, Old London sewers gone incredibly rank. If such a thing as worse than a sewer was possible, this was it.
I spotted GreyFoot sitting on the walkway not far away, and DogThing standing behind her, so I climbed out of the sewer channel and up onto the walkway, trying not to touch anything. I found a reasonably clear spot and dropped my pack on the floor, slumping down next to it.
"Well, that went well."
"It did?"
"We're all still here."
I nodded. I couldn't argue with that. We were all here, but above us was an answer to something that I had been wondering since I came to at the bridge.
Dha'mir had been crucified in the street above me, and I had no way of knowing whether he was alive or dead. What I did know from this was that he and CutterJack had met. The confrontation had happened already, and whatever happened during that conflict I guessed hadn't gone so well for
Dha'mir. He had been so confident that CutterJack would be weak enough for him to take out, confident that right now he would be leading The Horde. Even after he had, as he had thought, killed me, I still felt sorry for him.
Surely he must have known that I wouldn't die from the wound? That was what puzzled me so much. Any normal human would have died in seconds, but Dha'mir knew I was no longer a normal human. I was convinced that there was something I was missing, and I wanted to ask him, but now I was trapped down a sewer with a mass of Kre'esh above me.
"You saw him too?"
I looked at DogThing.
"Yes."
We moved through the sewers slowly, DogThing at the front, then GreyFoot, then me. My torch - once I had finally managed to light it - illuminated the tunnel for at least thirty feet, and it didn't take us long to find our way back to the man-hole that was on Charlestone Way, the same man-hole cover that I had found open on our first visit to The City. Ironically there was a ladder all the way up to the cover at the top.
I looked up at the entrance and then down at the ground. There had to be some way of finding out where the bunker was. It couldn't be far from here; there wasn't a huge amount of London here anyway.
Then I noticed it. The walkway leading away from me, not the way we came. The ground was clearer, less dirt.
A more used path maybe?
"What do you think?"
"It smells."
"No. I mean the path. Can you track who ever came down here?"
"Not with the smell."
"Oh. I see. I suppose it does stink pretty bad down here."
"Your kind have a bad sense of smell. We Maw have a very good one. Imagine how much worse."
"Yeah it must stink like hell to you."
As if to emphasise his point, I could see that GreyFoot was squinting and sneezing, giving tiny little choking sounds.
"She's not going to be sick is she?"
"Would you blame her?"
We followed the clearer path around two corners, and spent a while at an intersection trying to judge which way was more likely, but in the end I wasted hours discovering only one dead end after another. There were no doors, no hatches, nothing. There were plenty of other entrances from above, but nowhere that looked like it might be a bunker entrance.
It wasn't until I climbed the ladder up to Charlestone Street that I found it. I was trying to retrace where I thought someone might go if they came down into the sewers from the street above us, and there it was. Half way up the access shaft was a small ledge, and an indent in the wall hid a small round hatch that was slightly ajar.
"I've found it," I said, looking down at DogThing and GreyFoot. They were peering up at me from the ground below.
"Good. Can we go now?"
"I'm going in."
"Be careful."
The hatch opened into another shaft, and this one had a ladder that also went down. I shone my torch down there and started to descend. The shaft went much deeper than the sewers, probably another thirty feet past the level of the walkways, before ending in another tunnel. The door at the end was also open even though I had a terrible feeling in my stomach that it should be closed. The keypad on the wall suggested that this was the security door to the bunker.
I was right.
Three small rooms greeted me as I went into the bunker, with signs of recent habitation everywhere. In one room there was a pile of empty food tins and discarded wrappers, in the other a set of empty bunks. The third room was empty except for a large mosaic on the floor. I recognised that for what it was but knew that I had no way of using it. If only I still had the portal key.
Had they used the portal? Had someone managed to get them out? Had Chione opened a portal into there?
I sat down heavily on the bunk, and stood straight back up again. There was something hard under the sheet. I pulled it back, throwing the bedding onto the ground. Underneath was a small box no bigger than my hand. I picked it up and examined it. Metal, worn but still shiny, with a small latch keeping it shut. I popped the latch and opened it, not sure what to expect. Inside was a long, thick needle, maybe three inches long. There was also a metal rod with a button at one end, and a dozen small, clear, plastic capsules of blue liquid. For a moment I was completely puzzled, but then I remembered the pain in the back of my neck all those years ago.
How long had it been? Centuries? I knew what this was. The needle would clip into the rod. The capsule would push into a slot on the side of the rod. The needle was pushed hard, almost like stabbing with a knife, into the back of the neck, downwards and into the spinal cord. The button would fire the injector that shoots the liquid in the capsule directly into the spine. The liquid would turn an otherwise normal human being into, into something else. Into me, I thought. It could also be used to infuse more of the A17 serum into someone already turned, and used like a booster. I didn't know how I knew that.
It was an A17 injector. How did I know that? How did I know what A17 was? It was the serum that ran through my veins, the stuff that they had injected into my neck all those years ago, the thing that made me what I was. But, why had they left it behind? Was it meant to be here? Had they left it for me, or had they just forgotten it?
I looked around at the empty bunker. They were gone and I had no way to know where. Maybe Chione had opened a portal and they had left. That was what I hoped, but somehow I knew that would not be the case. They wouldn't have left without me and from my own memories we had never managed to open a portal from inside The Corridor to outside. The only place where a portal entrance had worked had been up and over the bridge, where somehow, on that ledge of rock, was a weak spot.
Unless there were other weak spots that we hadn't found.
My head swam with confusion and disappointment. They had been here two months ago and they had still been here until very recently. Almost anything could have happened in that time. I sat down on one of the beds and tried to figure out the best thing to do next, but really I already knew what that was. I had known what was coming next the moment that I realised what was hanging from the cross out in the street. I would have to go to Dha'mir and find out what had happened since he left me for dead, and I would have to hope that he had some idea of a way for me to finish the job that he had obviously failed to complete.
I would have to face CutterJack and kill him, even though I knew from my own memories how impossible that might be. I had my gun, but if it was that easy someone would have done it long ago, and I could not remember why he was so difficult to kill. The Resistance surely must have tried many times and failed.
I had probably tried many times and failed.
Day 60
I had a dream whilst I slept.
I had completely forgotten about the dreams I'd had when I first arrived at The Corridor, which was now a startling sixty days ago. Two months.
It wasn't a flashback, but it did involve Adler. The strange thing was that it wasn't anything that I had witnessed before. Once more I was stuck in my flight path, with no way to look in any other direction, but this time I was hovering over Adler as he sat and wrote his notes in one of the mass of books that even now cluttered up the shelves in the house on Merriwether Avenue.
I was peering over his shoulder, locked in my view of his hand quickly jittering across the pages, and I could see what he was writing.
...staring across the strange grassland that stretches endlessly in that direction, that I heard the sound of a distant train...
I awoke from the dream and sat upright. On the ground beside me DogThing and GreyFoot were still asleep. GreyFoot stirred slightly as the bed that I was on creaked, but she went back to sleep. I didn't know how the Maw managed to negotiate the two ladders to get into the bunker, but they had managed it whilst I had been sitting on the bed, deep in troubled thought.
What did the dream mean? I remembered reading in one of Adler's journals of how he heard strange noises during his time in The Corridor, noises that were completely out of
place, but why was I dreaming about them now? What was the relevance?
My stomach grumbled for the first time since I'd been back in The Corridor. I'd almost completely forgotten about food, but I had picked up some of the mushrooms from the mushroom fields when we passed them. I knew now that I didn't have to eat very often, but that didn't mean I could survive indefinitely without food. It would have to wait.
It was time to get out of the sewers and I didn't have a lot of choices. The only sewer entrance that I had found with a ladder was the one on Charlestone, the one that the bunker was on, and that entrance was two streets from the house. I would have to go past Maldon Street and half the length of Merriwether before I could get to the house and back to some kind of safety, and that was a lot of ground to cover if you had Kre'esh on your heels. It would be dangerous enough just to reach there, let alone how I was going to make it out on to the street behind the house, to where Dha'mir was. And what if he was dead? From the very brief view that I'd had, that was the most likely thing anyway.
It didn't matter. I would have to take the risk. I had no other leads.
"Time to go," I said aloud, and DogThing woke almost instantly, GreyFoot a few seconds later.
It was only ten feet from the bunker entrance to the metal sewer cover on the street, and as I climbed slowly and as quietly as I could, I wondered what I would see when I got out there. I pushed at the man-hole cover and peered through the gap, into the street.
Nothing moved. The street was empty.
I quickly pushed the cover off and climbed out, drawing my gun and scanning the buildings around me.
Still no movement.
DogThing and GreyFoot had managed to get up the ladder somehow, and they jumped the last few feet out of the sewer entrance.
We moved quickly along the road from the crossroads. Maldon Street was also empty, and I began to feel very uneasy about how quiet the place was. It had only been a day since we had been chased down into the sewers, and I couldn't believe that the Kre'esh would leave so soon knowing that we were here.