Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

“Weller!” Tom knelt by the old man. The girl had gnawed off enough meat to reveal the dull glimmer of bone.

“F-found it.” Weller was shaking. His face gleamed with sweat and blood. He had a hand clamped to his shoulder, but Tom heard the drip-drip-drip. “Down the tunnel. I was c-coming back when these little f-fucks jumped me. N-never saw th-them.”

“Why didn’t you call for help?” Luke asked.

Tom knew why; read it in the tears streaking the old man’s face. Weller hadn’t wanted to give them away. Not just an old hard-ass; the guy’s willing to go down to make sure we do this. Dragging out the thermal top he’d taken from the dead boy, he used his knife and ripped it into strips. “This is going to hurt,” he said.

“Just d-do it,” Weller said. He let out a gargling, barely audible scream as Tom crammed silk into his wound. Weller panted as Tom knotted more strips of silk into a crude bandage. “L-lucky if I don’t get r-rabies.”.

“What do we do?” Luke said.

“You finish.” Weller’s skin was ash and his swollen eyes were pink, but his voice was a knife. “I marked the rooms. The good one’s a little further on and down one more flight of stairs. But you got to hurry.”

Tom knew he was right. There were more kids where these had come from. After he and Luke dragged the bodies to a corner, he helped Weller to a spot along the far wall, then laid an Uzi across the old man’s lap. “Don’t use your light. You hear something and we don’t say your name, you stay quiet.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Weller said.

“Ten minutes,” Tom said, and then he and Luke hustled.

The first stope was even better than the one they’d already rigged. The cored rock room was larger, the pillar supports under much more stress. Rubble and drifts of scree were scattered along the floor. The pockmarked pillars looked moth-eaten.

“Jeez,” Luke muttered. “Looks like all it’d take is a good push.” “You do this room. Use every fuse. Concentrate on the pillars in the middle. Then you wait right here. Don’t move until I come back.” At the entrance, he turned back. “If I don’t say your name, you light up whoever comes in here and blow their heads off.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Luke said. “Good luck.”

Wish people would stop saying that. He took the tunnel at a run, spotted another X and a down arrow. After clattering down the stairs, he doglegged left, trotted another length of corridor—and then saw the room yawning to his right.

This chamber was very different: not only a forest of spindly stone pillars but a huge ball, rotten from the inside with stress fractures radiating out in a sphere. The walls were a warren of fissures and nearly horizontal seams in gray rock. He studied the seams, saw how the cracks tracked and split the rock. This was like the rotting timber of a neglected basement beneath a house of solid stone. Take out the timber, core out the walls, and the room above—hell, the whole house—would fall.

He got busy, first fitting two charges, one to each of two pillars. Then he climbed along the walls, digging his boots into the crevices and crannies and using his fingertips to hoist himself into hollowed-out seams where miners had scraped rock with chisel and hammers. He set charges as far back as he could maneuver, using the points of his toes to push himself into the seams. Jagged stone grabbed and scoured his back and stomach, bit into his legs. He worked feverishly: squirming into a seam, backing out, flipping onto his back at another, and fixing a charge to rock that was just inches from his nose.

He was on his sixth seam when a new idea occurred to him. Setting off the delay devices to each and every charge would take too long.

But if I only have to set off one . . .

He wriggled out and squatted on the rock; pulled out four, five, and then six lengths of time fuse. Thought about it. Then he went to work with his knife and the duct tape, knitting the lengths together until they radiated in a huge spiderweb. Thirty feet, fortyfive seconds a foot: almost twenty-five minutes. No need for a time delay. With all this extra fuse, this room might actually go last of all, but the explosion would be the most powerful and concentrated. If Weller was right, all that separated this room from the Chuckies were sixty feet of lousy rock. The floor would simply give way.

Might even punch through to the flooded levels, and if there are pockets of hydrogen sulfide, they’ll explode. He ripped off another strip of duct tape with his teeth, then scooped up the rock he’d used to keep the fuse from curling back. If they ignite, then— He heard a sudden loud scrape of rock against rock as someone kicked aside stone. At the noise, Tom turned, a little annoyed. Hadn’t he just told Luke not to move? To stay put? God, if he’d been just a little bit jumpier, he might’ve shot the kid.

But that was when Tom registered two things at once.

For one thing, he couldn’t have shot Luke, because he’d been stupid enough to leave his Uzi propped next to his pack.

And for another, he had visitors.

The girl had probably been in a lot of trouble before she turned. Maybe she’d been into drugs or a gang. Or maybe it was abuse. The scar slashing across her face could have been from a knife.

The jittery boy’s outfit reminded him of a ninja’s. A bandolier of M430 grenades sagged around the kid’s scrawny shoulders. Without a launcher, the grenades wouldn’t arm and weren’t a problem.

Scarface’s shotgun, though . . .

76

Alex had only gotten good and hammered once, and all alone: the very first time she’d ventured with her friends, Glock and Jack, into her aunt’s basement. There was nothing fun about her being drunk—no sense of relaxation or euphoria or even the giggles— just a sickening swoosh in her head: not spinning so much as falling backward, in place, and being sucked into very deep water. Closing her eyes only made things five thousand times worse, the blackness behind her lids going round and round and round. She didn’t get sick or weepy, but the next time she got cozy with the Glock, she took it easy with that bottle of Jack.

That feeling—of tumbling into a black whirlpool—was this. God, no, why now? She gritted her teeth, fighting against the vertiginous swirl. Of course, she knew why. He was thinking about her, planning what he would do. Worse, the movie in his mind was already running, the images flickering in a blistering, bright montage: Alex, flailing, as Leopard pinned her to the rocks, clamped a hand around her throat to keep her from screaming while the other hand ripped and tore away her—