A hand grips my arm and then clamps over my mouth, cutting off my scream.
"Shut up!" A sharp, unfamiliar whisper in my ear. "I'm Chandra, vampire of Bastion. Be still. I'm trying to help you."
I force myself to relax, to nod, and she removes her hand from my mouth. I can smell her in the dark—a faint scent of death like Atlan often carries, but layered with sweetness—honeysuckle, maybe, and citrus. Probably a perfume she wears. The fact that she'd bring perfume along on a rescue op in the Hordelands tells me more about her than she'd probably want me to know. I resurrect an image of her from earlier, when we ate in the kitchen—she is tall, African-American with glossy dark skin, her head shaved of all hair but for a single long, thick braid, shot through with a bright blue streak. Her eyelids were lined with metallic amber shadow, and her lipstick had a blue tint to match the stripe in her hair. Smooth, full features—a body with lush curves and the powerful arms of a warrior—not to mention her vampire strength and fangs. Yeah, she's a good person to have as an ally right now.
"What the hell is going on?" I whisper-yell.
"Questions later. I found a place to hide." She yanks me along, and I struggle to keep up in the dark, stubbing my toes against the wall and then against her boot.
"If you found a place to hide, why aren't you in it right now?" I ask.
"I came back to see if I could help anyone else. Now hush."
I've always heard that the darkness of a cave is the worst kind—blinding, impenetrable, so thick it's nearly tangible. I can't imagine a cave being worse than this inky-black hallway.
"Watch out," hisses Chandra. "End of the line. Slide to the right."
With her hand on my shoulder, guiding me, and my palms scraping over the rough concrete, I hustle to the right, along the wall. The hall must take a turn here.
"How'd you find anything in this dark?" I whisper.
"I used my flashlight the first time."
Why didn't I think of that? I have a flashlight too, in my pack. As concealed as I might feel in the shadows here, the darkness is useless if that creature from my room pursues us. We might as well be little kids playing hide and seek, covering our eyes and assuming he can't see us because we can't see him.
Maybe Chandra doesn't know about the creature's night vision. I risk another whisper. "There's a big monster guy down here, and I think he can see in the dark."
"Yes, but the humans working for him cannot. So—no lights for now."
"What is he?"
Chandra's long fingers clench on my shoulder bone. "Not yet." She flashes her emergency light once, toward the ceiling, and I glimpse a square dark hole before she shuts off the light again. "I'll boost you up. Be ready to climb in."
"We're going up to into the ducts? Are you kidding me? Bad idea. They're tight quarters—no room to fight—noisy—aahh!" My protest ends in a muffled yelp as she lifts me up, straight through the hole. I can feel the change of the air on my face as my head passes through the opening. The air in the ducts is cooler, and it smells different—sharper, somehow, not necessarily fresher. I reach out, banging my forearms on the rim of the hole before I manage to get a grip on the edge and scramble forward, pulling my legs up into the ducts. My backpack barely fits into the space; my belly is pressed against the floor of the duct and my pack drags along the ceiling above me. I keep army-crawling for a couple seconds, just to get clear of the entrance so Chandra can pull herself in. My elbows and boots thump dully against the duct floor.
There's a scrape and a click—the vent door closing over the gap we just climbed through.
My stomach clenches, tightening into a cold and painful knot as memories begin sparking in my brain—memories of the day I lost my old team. The day everything we had built together fell apart. The day I survived by dousing myself in paint and chemicals to mask my smell, then climbing a storage rack and squeezing onto the top rack, with the ceiling an inch from my back. A swarm of zombies shuffled through the supply room beneath me, so close I could have touched one of them if I reached down my arm. I lay in that same spot, motionless, for three days—no food, no water, no motion. Barely breathing, hardly daring to doze for more than a moment lest I shift and fall off the shelf into the cluster of zombies below. I peed myself quietly where I lay, the urine seeping through my clothes as I cried silent tears of grief for the friends I had just lost.
It's the worst trauma I've ever experienced, and the tight space inside the ducts is bringing it all back, twisting me up inside. Frenzied terror screws upward through my throat into my brain.
"Chandra," I pant, terrified. "Chandra, Chandra, I can't be in here. I can't—I—"
She grips my ankle, sinking her long nails into my flesh just deep enough to cause a twinge of pain. The sharpness of it grants me a second of clarity. "Crawl, blood-slave." Her whispers snakes up to me through the blackness.
I latch onto the command and I move, inch by steady inch. After a few moments, a wave of freezing air washes through the ducts, blasting past me and Chandra. I have to bow my head and close my eyes against it. The icy force of it steals my breath.
This is hell. This is where I die, trapped and frozen in my worst memories.
In the black cold, with metal walls all around me, it's hard to think of Atlan, to remember him as real and warm and vital—but I try. I picture him smiling at me, touching my face, ducking his head to drink from my wrist. I remember him being inside me, his skin hot and smooth against mine.
I love him. And because I love him, I keep moving.
It's torturous, and not just because of my mental state. When Atlan lay on top of me and shielded me from the horde the other day, one of my ribs was damaged, and with every scooch forward in the ducts, that rib sends a protest of sharp pain through my torso. Gritting my teeth, I keep going, trying to favor that side as much as I can.
When the blast of air cuts off and the vents are quiet again, I risk a question.
"Did you see Atlan?" I ask through gritted teeth.
At first I don't think Chandra heard me. And then she says, "I saw them take him. He threw himself at that monster when it was trying to sting me, and it got him instead. That's how I was able to get away."
I stop moving, my bones aching with dread. "What do you mean sting?"
Her voice carries the roughness of regret. "The monster you mentioned—the one with the scorpion tail—it stung him. He went rigid, paralyzed or something."
"And you ran? You left him there?"
"I ran so I could regroup and come back to help. There were other things in that hallway—I didn't get a good look but they were small, about the size of a pug dog, maybe. There were more than a dozen of them, and they had teeth the color of blood."
Shivers pass over my body, one after another.
"Keep going," Chandra says. "We're almost there."
4
Finley
When we tumble out of the ducts into another space, my ankle goes crooked beneath me, and I stifle a yell by biting my wrist hard. I collapse onto more cold concrete—except this time I can hear the hissing and banging of pipes and pumps close by. There's a clammy heat in the air, and an orange half-light emanating from some other part of the chamber we've entered.
Chandra clicks on her flashlight. "This is an alcove at the back of the pump room," she says. "Command central for air circulation and water recycling." She shines her light over a network of massive ducts and twisty pipes. They form a kind of wall, separating our little nook from the rest of the room. If anyone did enter this area, they wouldn't see us unless they got close and peered between the pipes. We're well hidden—and even better, we're no longer sandwiched into a metal chute.
I crumple against the wall, wrapping my arms around myself and shuddering, over and over, my eyes pinched shut. I'm not strong, or brave, and the events of the past few days have me hanging onto my sanity with the ragged edges of my nails. Going out of the Safe Zone into the Hordelands, enduring the tornado and the massacre of the soldier
s from our vehicle, surviving our close encounter with the horde, and now this? Instead of a small crew of dedicated scientists who wants extraction, this is an underground bunker with at least one monster, possibly more, if Chandra's account is to be believed.
She has no reason to lie to me, and she doesn't seem like the type to let her imagination run away with her, so it's probably true. Damn.
I pull my feet closer to me, as if that would do any good if scarlet-toothed savage creatures flooded into the room.
But for now, there's no one else here. Just me and Chandra.
"You couldn't save anyone else?" I whisper, once my breath slows and my panic ebbs a little.
She shakes her head, her long braid swinging. "Just you. The big monster has been going door to door, talking to people I guess. Whenever he came out of a room, a couple of the lab coats would go in. They'd drag out whoever was in there—paralyzed or dead, I'm not sure which—and they'd haul 'em away. You're the only one he didn't sting." She cocks her head. "I wonder why not. What'd you say to him?"
"Not much." I give her a brief play-by-play of what happened in the dark room.
Chandra snorts. "Maybe he just liked the goods." She side-eyes my body, as if she's trying to figure out why I made such an impression on the monster. As her gaze travels along my arms, up to my neck, her expression changes. Her upper lip flexes, swelling almost imperceptibly, and her jaw drops a little as the tips of her fangs peek out.
Great. She needs blood, and I'm the only available human.
I don't like vampires besides Atlan feeding from me, but I need Chandra healthy and strong right now. She's our best chance at surviving this.
Sighing, I roll up my sleeve. "Wrist okay?"
Her jaw works, and her eyes glaze over. "Yes." The word slurs through her extended fangs.
"Come on then."
She's careful not to pierce too deep, but she takes a lot, draining me until my blood-pressure bracelet chimes three times to tell her to stop. Afterward she licks the spots—not Atlan's slow, tantalizing swirls of tongue, but a couple of pragmatic swipes. Vampire saliva has healing properties, and hers will stop the bleeding and speed up the construction of new skin cells to seal the holes she made.
Chandra relaxes, tilting her head back against the wall and sighing.
"Better?" I ask.
"Yeah. Thanks."
"Where's your blood-slave?"
"I think they took her. Her name's Angela. She was actually the one I was looking for, but I saw you first, so—"
I nod, and we sit for a few minutes, listening to the hissing steam, the clang and thrum of the bunker's vital systems. There's a hollow edge to the sounds, and the sharp, unpleasant tang of heated metal and sour air fills my nostrils.
"We can't stay here," I whisper. Even if it feels safe, it's a false safety. We have people who need us, who need rescuing from whatever horror lurks down here. "Do you have a plan?"
"March out, meet that monster guy head on, try my luck in a fight with him?" Chandra scoffs at her own scheme. "That's all I got. We don't know enough about this place, its layout, how many people are actually in here, and what else we might run into. We need intel."
"And the only way to get it is by sneaking around."
She clicks her tongue. "You got it."
"So let's do it."
"Girl, you nearly lost it up in the ducts. You need to hang out here. I'll go play spy."
"What if you don't come back?"
"If I'm not back in three hours, you can assume you're on your own. Okay?"
"I don't have a watch. How will I know how much time has passed?"
Chandra rolls her eyes. "You serious? Your blood-bracelet has a clock mode. Look." She presses a tiny nub, and the readout switches from my heart rate to a digital clock. "There."
"Damn. I had no idea. Can it do anything else?"
She shrugs. "Not that I know of. You good here?"
"Unless those toothy critters you saw come nosing around."
"You got a weapon?"
The gun in my pack. I fumbled with the outer flap, but the pocket is empty. Maybe the monster scorpion thing sneaked it out of my pack while I was asleep. When I find that my knife is gone too, I swear sharply.
"It's fine, you can have this." Chandra whips a knife from her boot and hands it to me. "Take care of that, and of yourself. I might need more blood later." She gives me a half-grin.
"Seriously? You just had some."
"My body burns through it faster than most vampires. Don't worry, though—I'll wait as long as I can. If you've still got food in that pack, you should eat some while I'm gone. Keep your strength up."
She hauls herself back up into the ducts, and I'm left behind in the weird orange glow of the systems room, with the latticework of pipes casting a grid of black shadows across my body.
I force myself to eat a couple of protein bars, washing them down with a couple swallows of water left in the bottle I was carrying. In the bottom of my bag is a plastic case with several tiny injectors, each containing a dose of Sanguadyne. It's the stimulant that helps my body restore its blood volume faster than normal, so I can keep feeding Atlan with the frequency that he needs. I usually get an injection each week. I haven't had one since we left Deathcastle, and who knows when I'll have a quiet moment again—so I use one of the injectors in my thigh and replace the container in my pack. Then I sit, rubbing my ankle and trying to calm my racing thoughts.
This is fine. I've been in worse situations.
But at least, in those situations, I knew what the threat was. I knew who my enemies were, and what they wanted.
The zombies always want flesh, warm and alive. The Shardan Collective, when they owned me, wanted profit. As for the people I encountered during my time on the streets of Blue City—most of them just wanted to survive, and a few were only thinking of a moment's physical pleasure.
These enemies, here in the bunker—I'm not sure who they are, how many there are, or what they want. I sense that the goals and motives here are more complicated.
When I check my time readout, it has only been an hour. Tentatively I stand, testing my weight on the ankle that I twisted. It's a little sore, but I can limp along. Maybe I should try to follow Chandra through the ducts. But I dismiss the thought almost as soon as I think of it, because there's no way I could pull myself up to that opening without her to give me a boost. The only other way out is to crawl over and through all those pipes until I reach the open space in the center of this chamber.
No, that's a dumb idea. If anyone came in to check on the systems, they'd see me, and our hiding place would be discovered. Chandra would come back, expecting safety, and find a trap. No, it's better to sit quietly back here, and read the romance novel Sarah gave me before I left Deathcastle—the one with the shirtless Scotsman on the cover.
I set my back to the wall again, stretch out my legs, and dive in. Once I get past the odd cadence of the dialogue and the heavy Scottish accents the writer tried to communicate, the story is actually pretty good. And when the heroine gets her first look under the hero's kilt, I squirm a little, pressing my thighs together, willing myself not to be horny right now, not here, not in this situation. If Atlan were in this room, he'd sniff delicately and then grin at me. He finds it hilarious that I get aroused so easily. I never used to be like this, not before the Gorging, when I was with my ex, Heath. Maybe I'm going through some kind of sexual awakening.
Bad timing, Finley, I scold myself. Too bad I couldn't have had my awakening in the old days, when I could fly to Paris or the Bahamas and indulge in long, luxurious days and nights of sex with a devoted lover—cocktails and crab cakes, sand and surf, clean white sheets and gauzy curtain fluttering in ocean breezes. And safety. No zombies, no Shardan collective, no evil bunker doctors and scorpion monsters.
I return to the book; but reading about the heroine's escapades with her Scotsman does more than make me wet—it makes me miss Atlan so badly it's almost a physical pain
. I clap the book shut and bend over, curling in on myself, my fingers clamping tight around the novel's spine.
Atlan, where are you?
A soft scritch-scratch echoes somewhere far away in the room, beyond the pipes.
I freeze.
Something scrabbles on the concrete floor again, tiny nails nicking and scraping as small feet patter toward me. There's an unmistakable sniffing noise, thick and phlegmy—and then a low growl that rises to a whine, then lurches into an ear-piercing shriek.
I understand that sound, with the instinct of an animal caught in a trap.
It's an alarm, and an announcement—I found her.
The creature's wail continues, drawing closer to my hiding spot. The pipes bang and screech as it tries to claw its way through to reach me. I can see it, hazily—a dark shape about the size of a small dog, attempting to squeeze its way beneath the lowest pipe. If it manages to get through that gap, it can easily jump over the next pipe and get to me.
I stuff the book into my bag and grab Chandra's knife. With the blade in one hand, I step up onto on one pipe and grip another, pulling myself higher. There's some kind of big box to my left—a control box or fuse box, maybe? If I can climb up onto it, I'll be out of the creature's reach. I'll have the high ground or whatever. Much good it will do me, because my cover is blown, our hiding place has been discovered, and that monster is going to get his stinger in me.
Unless—
Maybe I can cut off the siren squeal of that creature.
Cut its throat.
Swallowing hard against my rising panic, I hop back down, cringing at the pain in my ankle. The thing that's after me is on its side now, wriggling through the gap beneath the pipe. I can't see much of its body, but it has the jaws of a piranha, with multiple rows of teeth like a shark. And Chandra was right—the teeth are blood-red, shiny and sharp, tinged black at the tips.
The creature's mouth gapes wide, its tongue and uvula quivering as it utters its alarm call. It watches me with eyes that remind me disturbingly of the chameleon at the zoo I used to visit as a kid.
Captured by the Chimera Zombie-Master Page 2
