by Maxey, Phil
Joel could already see the needle on the largest of the circular meters was all the way to the left, on zero. “There’s no water?”
“No water.”
“How’s that even possible? It’s a natural well.”
“It shouldn’t be possible for a few hundred years, less if there’s year on year drought, but anyway I checked it myself yesterday when we first arrived and it was showing full pressure.”
“You’re sure it’s not a fault in the system somewhere?”
“Could be, but unlikely.”
“How can we check?” said Donnie, asking a question no one wanted an answer to.
“Well, someone, somebody small, could climb into the pipes, see if they could see any blockage or issue, but if the pressure suddenly comes back on…”
“So what you’re saying, is that it’s not a job for a human?” said Joel.
“Well, no I’m not saying that—”
“I’ll do it,” said Donnie.
Art looked at the young man. “Son, you might be some kind of strong vamp, but if that pressure goes back up to what it should be, well I doubt even you’ll survive.”
“What happens if we can’t figure out the problem?” said Donnie.
Joel sighed, looking at him. “Then the humans eventually die of dehydration.”
“Then I got no choice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
A thunderous boom reverberated around Donnie as he crouched in the three-foot-wide water pipe.
He covered his ears, scrunching his face up. “Yeah, I’m fine!” he shouted to those just outside, not being sure if they could hear him.
The air smelt damp and heavy, and a cone of light being cast by the flashlight built into his hardhat wobbled.
“Ten yards then it heads down…” He sighed.
He unhitched the radio from his belt, and turned up the volume. A constant hiss of white noise came back at him.
Still no signal.
They told him he probably wouldn’t be able to communicate via the radio due to the metal shielding around him, but gave it to him nonetheless.
He staggered forward slowly, being bent over. His hands traced over the rough surface of the inside of the pipe to give him balance, and he was soon at the point where the route plunged downwards into a dark pit. One that would take him under the prison, deep underground.
He looked down.
No bottom. Great.
He focused his thoughts. His hands became clawlike, and his body mass increased with his muscles pulling at the shirt he was wearing. When he felt the rage reaching a tipping point, he relaxed, bringing himself back to the world around him, back to the wet darkness.
No need to be full wolf-boy yet.
Lowering himself and pushing his boots out to give him some leverage, he then ducked into the vertical shaft and used his inch-long nails to scrape the metal as he slowly descended.
Images of a monsoon of water rushing up towards him made him start to slow.
He shook his head. “Don’t be a wimp.”
The bottom bend of the pipe came into view, and he dropped the final few feet, sending a clanging echo along the pipe.
“Guess I’m underground…”
The husband and wife engineering team told him to listen out for leaks. That he will hear the problem before he sees it.
He strained his hairy ears into the gloom, but there was only silence out there. He looked along the stretch of pipe that ended outside the prison walls and chuckled. If he had been a prisoner this would have been the perfect escape route.
As he walked forward, he imagined himself in a movie, a movie where he had been wrongly accused of murder, and he had to break free to prove his—
Where’s the pipe gone?
About twenty feet ahead of him, jagged and twisted pieces of rusted metal gave way to… nothing.
The long coarse hair which now covered most of his body stood erect. As he walked towards the void, he sniffed the air.
Death.
If it weren’t for the stench drifting towards him, he might have thought there had been some kind of land slippage, that the dirt, rocks, and clay had somehow shifted, taking the pipe with it. But he knew the smell. It was the same odor he smelt on his sister after she had been bitten. It was the scourge.
He thought about letting his lycanthropic transformation complete, but he wanted to be cogent. He needed to investigate what had happened and get back to the others up top.
Creeping to where the route ended, he allowed his flashlight’s beam to flit around beyond. The light searched but could not find anything to bounce back off. There was still only silence, so he was fairly sure there was nothing around in the absolute darkness.
Plucking a small rock from the layers of rocks around him, he let it drop off the edge and waited for it to hit the ground. A few seconds later it did which he figured meant the bottom of this pit was roughly forty feet below him.
He hesitated.
They should know about this. This is artificial, the vamps have been tunneling.
But he also wanted to know what was out ‘there’ in the black. The enemy had a route into the prison, but right now were somewhere else, maybe he could infiltrate them, find out what they were up to. That would be a lot more valuable to Joel and the others.
He nodded to himself then found a piece of the pipe that wasn’t razor-sharp and lowered himself off the edge.
*****
Carla led Max, Rachel, Josh, and Bill through busy corridors alive with fear and anxiety to quieter ones which appeared long abandoned. She then came to a set of doors which she produced keys for. Opening and pushing the metal-strapped wooden doors back to reveal a large room full of worktops and machinery.
“I thought you all might want to take a look in here. Maybe you could turn it into some kind of lab or something…”
Max walked into the former prisoners’ workshop with the look of someone who had found a long lost friend. He walked past the knotted and worn wooden surfaces of tables with holes and scribblings, mentioning how the warden was an asshole, and let his hand come to rest on a milling machine.
“Been a while since I’ve used one of these,” he said with a smile to Carla.
The others followed him in, each one honing in on a piece of machinery which particularly interested them.
“I don’t know what you can do with any of this, but it seems stupid to let four of the brightest minds in this place go to waste. Where’s Evan?”
Bill frowned. “Being a ‘lookout’ in one of the towers. He said he wanted to be more directly involved… Evidently, academic studies are of little interest to him now.”
Carla smiled. “I’m sure he’s still interested in the book stuff. But I can’t say I’m displeased to have a Hybrid’s set of eyes up there.”
Bill nodded.
She looked to the others. “So, is all of this good? Can you do what you do down here?”
They all smiled, nodding.
“Thank you,” said Josh.
She could tell having somewhere to call their own was something they needed.
“No problem.” She left the key to the room on one of the work tables and left.
Bill placed the backpack carefully down on the stained light wooden table then looked at the others. “We should get started.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Donnie stood at the bottom of a huge cavern, created not by man or machine, but by beast.
The ground was sodden and full of puddles.
He walked forward trying not to splash through them to alert anyone or anything of his presence. Despite his efforts to catch any noises in the dark ahead of him, the only sound he heard was his own heartbeat.
But the smell gave them away. He wasn’t sure if it was his heightened olfactory sense or if the stench would have invaded his nose regardless, but a trail of fumes led across the vast space to the far side wall of clay and stone.
An opening fifteen foot across
sat ahead of him. Despite the light on his head not giving much illumination beyond a few yards, he could tell the tunnel ran for some way, and appeared to be level.
He wondered if now was the time to turn back. This was obviously the work of vamps.
A noise came from somewhere in the tunnel.
His head flicked towards it and he instinctively crouched, lowering the light beam to the ground. Waiting for something to leap from the dark, he remained motionless. Nothing emerged though.
Must have been water falling from the tunnel’s ceiling… I’ll go a bit further.
Keeping to the left side, he let his hand trail along the mud-caked wall. After walking for five minutes there was still no end in sight.
How long is this thing.
He wondered what they thought back in the pipe room, if he had gotten lost or something.
Better be getting back soon.
Then he heard it. A faint sound.
He walked forward some more, trying to angle the hat down, so its beam wouldn’t be too obvious to anything ahead of him.
The sound took on more form, repeating and oscillating.
Breathing.
He took his hat from his head and held it in his clawed hand, pointing it towards the rough ground.
He almost trod on the first vamp’s foot before he saw it, then another, and another. The large tunnel he was in was smothered in vamps, in varying levels of dress, but all covered in grime, dried blood, and brown smears from clay.
He also noticed something else about them. Around their necks a metal clamp of some kind which appeared to cut into their necks.
They were all sleeping. Hundreds. Some were even attached to the walls, their arms and feet lodged into the soft mud, holding them aloft.
He carefully picked his way over the feet and limbs. He needed to know where the tunnel came out.
One of the vamps to his side stirred. He froze, moving the light just enough away so not to dazzle the creature, but still near enough so he could see if it had awoken. It had not.
As he progressed, not daring to breathe too heavily, he was sure the ground beneath him was tilting upwards. It was hardly noticeable but after another hundred yards, he was sure of it.
He arrived at a junction. Another tunnel, one twice as high and wide as the one he had just left, cut across him.
Holy cow.
More vamps. Hundreds? Thousands? In the gloom, they were just a mass of misshapen body parts, all packed in like ants in a nest. All ready to be activated once the sun fell again.
He looked back the way he came. What were the chances he would make it back through without one of those things waking up?
Zero chance. Have to keep on.
The tunnel ahead of him was the smallest so far, but it also looked as if it had the least vamps.
He crept across the junction and into the relative safety of the new tunnel. A wave of air hit him, lighter, fresher than before.
As he moved forward he found the going getting harder as the once horizontal ground was now becoming increasingly steep.
He tilted his head upwards. A point of light, like a headlight of an oncoming car blinked at him in the distance.
The surface?
He wondered how far he had travelled from the prison.
Five miles? Ten?
He clambered forward and upwards, his claws digging into the grooves made by previous creatures. In the light he started to see gray clouds.
Streams of water ran past him, making the ground even more impossible to move over.
He pushed his boots into the quagmire harder as a flash of light heralded a crack of thunder.
Eventually, his head broke from the darkness into the outside world, and into a storm.
Ahead of him was a parking lot of some kind, mostly empty apart from helicopters. At the edge though were featureless warehouses, three stories high.
He grabbed hold of a clump of grass and roots and pulled himself onto the ground, immediately dropping to his stomach.
He turned his head behind expecting to see the prison in the distance, but instead there was only the bank of a small hill, covered in a group of trees. From where the prison was you wouldn’t even know they were elevated, but it was high enough to completely obscure the buildings on the opposite side of it, and the road leading up to them.
He crawled forward, slithering eellike through the grass, and down the bank until he reached the concrete of the lot.
He wiped at his eyes as the rain streamed down his face.
A door, which he hadn’t even noticed due to its similar color to the wall around it, opened.
He was exposed. No way the soldier wouldn’t see him.
Except the soldier was too busy trying to get to the next building along without being soaked through by the storm.
Donnie froze. As soon as the soldier’s back was facing him, he raced across the edge of the lot, to the corner of the closest building.
At the back of his mind, the voice that had been telling him to turn back five minutes after he set out, started to shout once again. This time being harder to ignore.
What am I doing?
A door opened and closed in the distance just audible through the rain beating on the solid surfaces around him.
The sky boomed and crackled once again.
He wondered if being a werewolf made it more or less likely he could be hit by lightning.
He jogged alongside the side of the building and peered around to the front.
Humvees, three of them, sat alongside each other just yards from an entrance.
Seen enough, have to get back.
He turned, pulling his radio out of his pocket, and instantly fell backwards as something solid slammed into his skull knocking him unconscious.
*****
Joel walked through the mazelike corridors, each one as bland as the other, until reaching his destination; the prison workshops. He lightly knocked on the green door. Someone inside told him he could enter.
The smell of sulfur and dust filled the air.
Each of the large worktop tables had become the domain of a separate scientist, with piles of books, sketches, notes, and empty plastic beakers filling up the space.
Joel walked past the others and moved to Bill’s workstation which seemed to contain the most equipment.
The tablet was connected with wires to a circuit board which in turn was connected to a laptop.
“Any news on Donnie?” said Rachel from behind him.
“None,” said Joel. “There’s only a few more hours left of daylight. If we don’t hear back from him soon then we’ll have to find another Alkron to go down there.”
Bill looked over the top of his glasses. “You do realize this could be part of their plan? Draw us out? The Alkrons are our biggest asset.”
“I’m aware, but I’m not leaving that kid out there.”
“Could they be creating tunnels?” said Rachel.
Bill looked at her.
“They have done it before,” said Joel.
“How do we stop them if they are doing that?” said Josh, the anxiety clear in his voice.
“If they are creating tunnels then they could bring the walls down for the vamps to walk right in…” said Max.
“Or just use the tunnels to bring them directly into the prison from below us…” said Rachel. She looked at the floor as did Josh.
“One problem at a time,” said Joel. He looked at Bill. “You wanted to see me?”
Bill looked at the other scientists then at the tablet. “We have been discussing what they were doing in the Cheyenne complex—”
Joel took ‘they’ to mean Josh, Rachel, and Max.
“We found a way to trigger the tablet without you,” said Rachel. “With your blood.”
“We wondered if we could take a drop or two?” said Max.
Joel looked at the scientists’ eager expressions, he then remembered the ‘thing’ that he saw in the lab. “You’re not goi
ng to go all Frankenstein again?”
Rachel looked down.
Bill smiled, placing his fingers gently on Joel’s arm. “Not on my watch.”
Joel smiled. “What do you want me to do?”
“Do you have a knife or something?” said Bill.
Joel slid his pocket knife from his jacket, and Bill handed him a small bottle. He produced a small slit in his finger, and let a few drops flow into the glass container.
“Do you need me to hang around to see the results?”
Bill took the bottle and shook his head.
“Okay.” He started to walk back to the door when he noticed Rachel was still eyeing the tiles beneath her feet. “If they were tunneling beneath us we’d know about it before they come up.”
She gave a nervous smile in reply then looked back at her notepad.
A short while later, Joel was back at the staff room.
Holland was pacing up and down. “So, now we ain’t got any water?” he said to Carla. “I thought you sent that vamp kid down there to see what was going on?”
“Yes, and he’s not come back,” she said.
“So, what am I to do about that? It was your idea to come here!”
Nobody had noticed Joel standing in the doorway. “They could be creating tunnels under the walls…”
Carla looked at him shocked.
“What?” said Holland. He spun around throwing his arms up in the air. “Well, that’s just great. So much for your invincible prison! Everyone will be safe!”
Boyd looked concerned. “We got this, Pa.”
Holland looked at his son. “Did you hear what the man just said? They gonna be coming up from below us!” He looked back at Joel. “So, what you going to do about it?”
Joel looked at Carla. “We need to send some people out there, find out what’s going on, and we need to send someone else into that tunnel. You got any idea of who else is left that would do that?”
Carla nodded. “I think I might…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kizzy looked at the small space in front of her. “Yeah, I don’t know if I want to do this,” she said, looking back at Carla.