“It must be the drink talking.” Salem pushed the rusted metal door open. Chilly darkness waited beyond. It smelled of rust and fungus.
“Hey.” Rane clamped a metal hand on his shoulder, stopping him. “Did you have one of those drinks? What’s in it? Is it poisonous?”
“No way to know just yet,” he said. “Looked like traces of scourge. But if it was deadly, this gothic tiki party would be long over. No, those drinks were spiked for another reason. The question is, what?”
They stepped out of the stairwell into a musty, mold-splotched cavern that stretched away into the darkness. Holding the hot lighter by the base, Salem played the flickering light around his feet, looking for any more signs of Dru’s gradually atomizing disco dress.
Rane stooped to pick up a small sparkling object from the ground. Dru’s masquerade mask. She held it close to her face and sniffed, then set it back on the ground. “Disco girl went this way.” She marched away into the darkness, between rows of chiseled stone columns.
The flickering light from the Zippo fell on heaps of cobwebbed junk. Stacks of railroad ties. Unused ventilation ducts. Steel oil drums. Above the mess, someone had used red spray paint to write out a message on the stone columns.
“What’s it say?” Rane pointed at the sorcio signs. “I didn’t bring my secret decoder ring.”
Salem studied the signs one by one, reading them twice to make sure he got the message right. “It’s a warning. From a sorcerer who called himself Nomad. He says the lakes are poison.”
Rane’s face screwed up in confusion. “What lakes?”
Salem had no idea, but he didn’t enlighten her to that fact. He was more concerned with finding Greyson and putting a stop to the apocalypse. He walked along the columns, reading the spray-painted symbols. “Apparently, Nomad’s group tried to make camp here, thinking no one would find them. But they weren’t alone.” He directed her attention to the main part of the message. “Motorcycle gang. Undead. No survivors.”
Rane crossed her arms. “Poor Nomad. I wonder if he made it out.”
“Possible. The question is, when? This spray paint could have been here for years.” He pointed at the last symbol, and then dropped his arm. “It says, ‘Get out fast.’”
Salem considered that. Poison lakes. Undead creatures. It was entirely possible that Greyson was already dead, and the doomsday problem was solved. If that was the case, all they had to do was poke around until they found his body.
Rane turned to look at Salem, her steel eyes wide and shimmering in the light of the flame. “You hear that?”
He did, once she mentioned it. Scraping footsteps, dozens of them. But by the time he became aware of them, it was too late.
Staggering figures emerged from the darkness in all directions, clambering over the junk, snagging their webs on dusty corners. So many undead, all around them, that Salem couldn’t see a way out.
It didn’t matter. These creatures had caught him off guard once, and only once. This time, it would be vastly different. He would destroy them all.
Rane kicked over a metal drum with a resounding clang. As it toppled over and rolled, she drew back one well-defined arm and drove a steel fist into it. It dented and split, gushing a spreading pool across the stone floor. “Lighter!”
“Oh, the subtle approach,” Salem said, tossing her the Zippo. “My favorite.”
It never took Rane long to cause mass destruction. In a way, he’d been missing that. An oily orange-yellow flame sprang up at Rane’s feet, illuminating the horde of undead closing in around them.
Salem was long past capturing these things to study them. This time, he was looking forward to destroying them outright.
He raised both hands, fingers spread wide, preparing to unleash his bottled-up fury.
He focused on the nearest creature, a staggering web-wrapped wretch in biker boots and the tatters of a leather vest. Its brown-stained jaws stretched open wide and let out a watery hiss.
Salem allowed himself a small measure of satisfaction. In an underground chamber this big, with no innocent civilians wandering around and no possibility of collateral damage, it was almost too easy. He could see why Rane relished the freedom of destruction.
He flexed his fingers and willed a blast of invisible force to erupt from his fingertips and shatter the thing before him.
But to his astonishment, nothing happened. Nothing but a throbbing headache that raced up the back of his skull and pounded through the fuzziness that surrounded his brain. His magic simply didn’t materialize.
Salem stood frozen in disbelief as the corrupt thing staggered closer, untouched.
He tried again, digging down deep into his reserves of energy. The air wavered between his fingers, but it wasn’t enough to even push the creature back.
He dug deeper. His head pounded. Black streaks clouded his vision. And yet he couldn’t summon up his magic.
The spiked drink wasn’t meant to kill sorcerers, he realized. It was meant to neutralize them. Rob them of their magic, leaving them defenseless. Making them easy to capture. Or kill.
The creature lunged at him, black dripping claws outstretched. Salem backed up and tripped, falling just as the thing swiped its claws through the air where he’d stood.
Salem’s mind went blank with fear. His magic was gone. That had never happened before. The magic had always been there, volumes of it, just waiting to be tapped. And now, it was somehow all gone.
There was nothing he could do except stare up into the thing’s empty-eyed grin as it loomed over him.
No, Salem thought, the sorcerer who called himself Nomad—whoever he was—hadn’t made it out alive.
“Stay down!” Rane yelled. With a heavy rush of displaced air, a four-foot length of iron rail swung through the air, passing over his head like a low-flying jet.
It struck the undead creature square in the rib cage and obliterated it. Wet-looking bones and scraps of web exploded in all directions, clattering across the ground like hail.
Rane stepped into the swing, annihilating two more undead. Their dismembered legs tumbled across the stony floor. Their skulls bounced and rolled.
The rest of the undead horde wasn’t yet near enough to strike, though it was steadily closing in around them. Rane hefted the iron rail in both hands, shifting her grip.
Her weapon looked as if it had been lifted directly from a railroad bed. In cross section, it was shaped like a heavyset uppercase letter T. Rane held it as if it were no heavier than a garden rake.
She stepped back over to Salem, her muscular legs standing wide, and surveyed the rest of the creatures circling around them.
“You just gonna lay there all day, sweetie?” She glanced down at him with a wild glint in her eye. The corner of her lips perked up in a feral smile, revealing shining teeth. “Or are you going to get up here and help me kick some freaky zombie ass?”
Dru crossed the underground railroad tracks, trying to retrace her steps back to the metal staircase, but she quickly figured out she was lost. The ride in Titus’s Jeep had disoriented her more than she thought.
The next tunnel she found was much like the one she had just left, with orange doors and half-finished apartments. The tunnel after that was the same, but even rougher and not yet painted.
Sprinting down a long, curved tunnel, she spied a wide doorway that led into some kind of machine shop lined with workbenches. The nearest bench was stacked with cardboard trays full of rocks and crystals.
Dru skidded to a halt, silently thankful that her shimmering platform boots helped keep her from falling over.
She peeked around the edge of the huge, arched doorway. A line of fluorescent light fixtures hung down from the arched ceiling, but only the ones nearest the door were lit. Beyond the buzzing lights, the rest of the long chamber was cloaked in darkness.
She waited, eyeing the darkness within as she stole glances at the cardboard trays of crystals. From here, it was impossible to see exactly what was in
those trays. There could be something she could use to defend herself.
Nothing moved. Finally, Dru decided she couldn’t afford to wait any longer. She tiptoed into the room and rifled through the heavy trays of rocks.
The vast majority of them were actually brown barite roses, of greater or lesser quality. Judging by the shipping labels, most of them had come from Oklahoma, although a few had traveled from as far away as Tunisia. Apparently, Titus had brought in hundreds of the rocks and searched through them all in order to find one perfect specimen to give to Dru.
In a way, Dru was touched, even if everything else he’d done was misguided and freakishly creepy.
Buried under the cardboard trays of barite roses, she found a newspaper-lined tray of irregular citrine chunks, ranging in color from saffron yellow to mahogany brown. Beneath that, a tray of brain-shaped calcite clusters that had obviously been chipped off a cave wall somewhere.
She groaned in frustration. Citrine might help her save money, and calcite might help ease a hangover, but neither of them were good in a fight. She needed something she could use as a weapon.
At the bottom of the stack, she found a wooden tray filled with a jumble of crystals. Fossilized wood, purple amethyst, black tourmaline, and something wrapped in bright red plastic and packing tape.
Curious, she picked off the tape and unwrapped the plastic, revealing a gorgeous, transparent green crystal shaped like a miniature city skyline. Vivianite.
Her heart skipped a beat. Using vivianite, she could potentially open up a portal to the netherworld, if she could find one. She also grabbed the amethyst for protection. And the tourmaline, just in case she needed to ground any energy back to the earth.
She ignored the citrine, but there was a chance the hangover-curing properties of the calcite could have a healing effect on anyone who had drunk the potion.
A thought suddenly struck Dru. What if these crystals were actually here for her? What if Titus had collected this much calcite specifically because he intended to have Dru cure the sorcerers he had drugged with his spiked drinks?
She looked down at her armload of crystals. If that was the case, then what was the vivianite for? Could there actually be a portal to the netherworld somewhere in this vast underground fortress? Anything was possible, she decided.
Right now, she had more practical worries. She couldn’t very well run around with her arms full of rocks. She needed something to carry them. Atop a workbench at the edge of the light was an old leather tool bag. It would have to do.
She upended the bag onto the workbench, dumping out crusty, old pliers, rusted screwdrivers, and about a hundred miscellaneous screws and bits of hardware. After shaking out the last of the dust, she loaded up her new crystals and hefted the bag. Heavy, but doable.
A massive cork board dominated the wall over the workbench, covered with paper schematics of the bunker in all of its various levels. Dru studied the map, trying to figure out where she was now and how she’d gotten there.
The tunnels of the underground complex formed an impenetrable maze. But much to her surprise, the schematics showed three lakes deep inside the mountain. Each one was crosshatched and labeled, POTABLE WATER, GRAY WATER, and DIESEL.
She read that last one twice, puzzled. A lake full of diesel fuel? But then she noticed the long, rectangular blocks on the schematic labeled GENERATORS. Apparently, they needed a giant fuel reservoir.
Someone, presumably Titus, had scratched out the name of each lake with a black magic marker. He had also drawn a sorcio symbol, a sideways figure eight with opposing swirls inside each half.
It was the symbol for scourge. Seeing it made her blood run cold.
There was more than just a river of scourge beneath this facility, she realized with growing horror. It was a vast series of reservoirs, each one connected by underground rivers and filled with millions of gallons of scourge.
A teaspoonful was enough to kill a sorcerer as powerful as Salem. What could Titus do with an entire sea of it?
There were more maps pinned up nearby. First, a topological map of the nearby Rocky Mountains, finely grained black lines showing elevation and squiggly blue lines showing rivers. Below that hung a map of the world’s ocean currents. Both maps were covered with hand-drawn arrows and scribbled calculations.
Her throat tight with fear, Dru went back to the schematics of the mountain complex. With a pen, Titus had drawn arrows leading out of the reservoirs into tiny passageways, which she assumed were pipes or air vents. Eventually, the lines all converged on the curved central tunnel, which led out to the entrance. From there, he had simply drawn a thick black arrow that pointed off the edge of the map. Toward a river.
Dru kept looking from the underground map to the river map, and then to the ocean currents. A growing fear gnawed at her.
Could Titus truly carry out a plan this mad?
There was no time to lose. Dru ripped the tunnel map off the wall, folded it into a wad, and stuffed it into the leather tool bag, on top of the crystals. She turned to go. Across the room, a glimmer of light reflected off dozens of dead TV monitors.
She realized she was looking at some kind of control console, like the one in the party room. A line of gauges softly glowed yellow. Did any of the stuff still work?
She set down the leather bag and studied the rows of buttons and metal toggle switches. She didn’t know anything about security systems, but she did find a chunky microphone on a black stand that looked promising. Could she warn the others while there was still time?
She hesitated a moment, worried that Titus would hear her. But it didn’t matter anymore. It was too late to try to sneak around now.
She pressed a thick square button labeled TUNNEL 13. It let out a heavy, mechanical click. Then she picked up the microphone and pushed down its round red button. “Opal? Anyone? Can you hear me?”
31
THE WILD SIDE
Opal couldn’t remember exactly how many of these deliciously fruity drinks she’d had, but it didn’t matter. As far as she was concerned, this was the best party in the history of the universe.
She danced alone with Ruiz in the cozy control-booth nook, without a care in the world. For once, she was having such a great time that it practically seemed illegal. And on top of that, the drinks were free.
In between songs, they chatted about everything and nothing. The way Ruiz talked to her, the way he looked at her, made her feel amazing. Fantastic. She hadn’t felt that way in more years than she could count. And she needed so badly to keep that feeling going. She never wanted it to end.
There was just one problem. Dru had some silly rule about not getting involved with customers. It really wasn’t all that bad of an idea, in theory at least. But right there in the moment, the ordinary rules didn’t seem to apply anymore.
Not when she was dancing to the beat, lights spinning around her, feeling warm and relaxed and sexy. She was miles away from her troubles, flying as high as the moon. Feeling young, feeling alive, feeling absolutely fabulous.
And right now, she thought about nothing else.
Everything around her faded away. The cavernous chamber of the nuclear bunker. The crowd of angst-ridden sorcerers dressed all in black. The grainy black-and-white film clips playing on the rough stone wall, showing explosions and blasted forests. None of that mattered anymore.
This, right here, right now, was the best night of her life. And if any of her troubles nagged at her, Ruiz was there to take her away from it all. That easygoing, shoulder-shrugging way of his made her feel as if she could say anything. Do anything.
He made a joke about pulling off his luchador mask and ruining the whole masquerade party, telling everybody the cops were here and making them run for the door. She threw back her head and laughed.
When she looked at him again, his gaze sparkled.
Without even meaning to, Opal found herself drifting closer to him. Her whole body tingled, knowing what was coming next. Suddenly, she n
eeded to wrap her arms around him and kiss him.
But she just couldn’t shake Dru’s warning voice in the back of her head.
Opal! Opal! Can you hear me?
Ruiz’s lips were inches from hers. He paused, uncertain. “Um, did you hear that?”
Opal ran her fingers up his arm. “I didn’t hear a thing, baby.” She slid up next to him.
Opal!
“No, there it is again,” Ruiz said. Head cocked to the side, he leaned closer to the control panel. “Is that Dru?”
“What?” Opal took a step and stumbled. How many of those drinks had she had, exactly? She couldn’t remember. She planted both hands on the grimy steel edge of the control panel, wishing the room would stop spinning around her.
“Opal!” Dru’s tinny voice crackled from a speaker between two dead TV monitors, their rounded glass screens grayish green and dusty. Her voice faded in and out, broken by static. “Opal, can . . . read me? Can you hear . . . are you?”
“Dru?” Opal brought her face closer to the speaker. “Where are you? How did you get in there?”
“. . . emergency . . . could kill . . .”
Ruiz picked up a microphone on a chunky black stand and fiddled with its switches. “She can’t hear you. The controls are dead. Hang on.” He shoved the microphone into her hands.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Opal asked. The microphone was surprisingly heavy, and solid enough to use as a hand weight.
“Just keep hitting that red button and trying it. I’m going to get you hooked up.” Ruiz dug through the pockets of his coveralls and pulled out a couple of small tools. Grunting, he got down on the floor and yanked out a metal panel, revealing a nest of multicolored wires and green circuit boards.
Opal jiggled the microphone’s red button. “Dru! Where are you?”
“Opal, if you . . . get everyone . . . trap . . .” Dru’s voice shattered into a blast of static.
Ruiz muttered in Spanish and yanked something loose beneath the console.
“Dru?” Opal kept jiggling the button. “Dru!”
A Kiss Before Doomsday Page 25