Shadows (Ashes Trilogy 2)

“Good job, Alex,” she said. “Creep yourself out, why don’t you?” The bats rustled at the sound of her voice, and then Daniel groaned: a long, low sound.

“Daniel?” She leaned to her right, her fingers feathering the dark. Her hand traced a cheek. His skin was too hot and damp with sweat. “Daniel?”

No reply. Not even a groan. She waited a few more seconds, then took her hand back. His scent clung to her fingers, and her stomach did a little flip.

She still had another option. Reaching into her jacket, she found the lump she’d zipped between lining and shell. Twenty Percocet, nine Percodan, and one Valium, wrapped in gauze. Those were all the pills she’d managed to gather from the guesthouse floor in the short span that she’d been left alone while Leopard’s crew dragged out Sharon’s and Ruby’s corpses. The pills were . . . insurance. A way out that could be at a time of her choosing. Of course, waking up as a gork in a pool of vomit would be so her luck. But could she do it? Kill herself if there was no other way? Maybe. Pills were lame and guns more her speed, but if she had no other choice . . .

But what about Daniel? No matter how much she turned it over in her head, she just couldn’t decide. It was one thing to promise Tom. Daniel was a whole other story. She didn’t know him well enough, and he was his own person. She also might be wrong. They had been virtually inseparable for two weeks and Daniel was sick, yes, but he was still Daniel. So what if . . .

“Stop,” she murmured. “You want to think about something? Think about finding a weapon.”

Okay, there were rocks, but what else? This little side-tunnel had timber supports. There must be nails she could pry free. How to dig them out was a problem. She thought about that. Her fingers played over Ellie’s Mickey Mouse watch and then the buckle. There was that little prongy thingamajig. Not very long, but it might work. What she really needed was something strong, made of metal . . .

Wait. Her hand went to her neck, and then she reeled out her silver whistle on its chain. She fingered the mouthpiece. It wasn’t exactly sharp, but the slight curve would help, and the whistle was strong enough to—

Her thoughts choked off at the crunch of boots. The darkness in the main tunnel, dead ahead, grayed—and then grew brighter. She pulled bolt upright, eyes wide, her body quivering like a cornered bunny’s. Oh God, this was trouble. Her heart catapulted into her throat. She knew because she recognized his smell. He was alone, too. No Slash, no Spider. None of his usual crew along at all, because he wouldn’t want to share. If she’d had any lingering doubts about just what he had in mind, her vision chose that moment to go a little muzzy, like a movie doing one of those queer little dissolves between one scene and the next—as the monster in her head came alive and flexed and shifted. Because like recognizes like.

Leopard.

74

“Hold up,” Weller hissed. Hooking an arm through the ladder, he dug out another rock and let it fall into the yawning darkness below.

Tom counted off the seconds. This time, the splash came when he got to six. “About two hundred feet.”

“Yeah.” Weller’s beam cut across the concrete below. Twenty feet down, a grated metal platform and set of stairs leapt into view. The platform fed into a wide bore, and Tom saw a glint of metal track at the lip. In case there was any doubt, h l and 540 were stenciled above the bore in dull yellow spray-paint, indicating that the haul level was five hundred and forty feet from the surface. “This is where we get off.”

“I thought you said it didn’t access the mine until further down.”

“Guess I was mistaken. Been a while and the map’s rough.”

Terrific. “Weller, we have to make it almost two hundred feet deeper, then work our way west to get under that big rock room. Can we do that from here?”

“Think so. Only we got another problem.”

Tom didn’t like the sound of that either. As they’d gotten deeper, the shaft’s condition had worsened, with concrete chunked off and bolts so loose they rattled. The shaft wasn’t uniformly smooth; lengths of corroding iron, thick insulated wires, and pipes ran along the sides. The rotting hulk of the original hoist’s support structure jutted here and there in broken metal fangs. Dark heaps of what looked like rat droppings but which Weller said was bat guano pilled from the struts and around the metal collars that supported the pipes at regular intervals. The air had changed, too, growing a little warmer and so moist Tom felt its fingers drag over his face.

The air also smelled, and not just of stagnant water. The stink was more like a rank, intermittent, very faint exhalation, as if the mine had a terminal case of morning breath.

Luke’s light speared down from three rungs above Tom’s head. “What is that? It’s like . . . rotten eggs.”

“Hydrogen sulfide. Swamp gas.” Weller paused, and when he spoke again, Tom heard the first hint of worry. “I shoulda thought of this. All this bat shit—it’s the perfect food. We’re only getting a little whiff now and then, but the gas is heavier than air. The further down we go, the more concentrated it’ll get. Then again, maybe not. Might just be isolated pockets here and there.”

“Will it hurt us?” Tom asked.

“Gets too thick? Oh yeah. Kill ya like cyanide.”

Great. “What else?”

“It, ah, explodes. Like soda under pressure? Only it also catches fire real easy. If a chamber breaks open when those charges go . . .”

We’ll be flash-fried. Fireballs traveled fast, eating oxygen and crisping everything in their path. If they had to shoot, the muzzle flash might spark an explosion, too. Tom chewed at his lower lip. “Will we know it if we get into trouble with the gas?”

He could hear Weller thinking about it. “Eyes and nose should burn, and the smell will get worse, and then it’ll change, get almost sweet. Other than that, I don’t know.”

“Do we go back?” Luke said.

Another long pause. “Look, I can’t guarantee, but . . . Luke, you want out, there’s no shame in that.”

“No,” Luke said, a little unsteadily and too quickly. “I’ll be okay. Besides, if there are three of us, it’ll go faster.”

“Well, remember I said we have another problem? I wasn’t talking about the gas. Look down at the ladder.”

They all did, and in the bright ball of their combined light, Tom saw what Weller meant.