Near the end of the tunnel, he heard the buzz of conversation.
Mason held his shotgun loosely in the crook of his good arm. The Clan were pacifists, and they’d run before attacking him. But they couldn’t outrun shotgun pellets.
Mason didn’t bother sneaking to the end of the tunnel. He walked boldly toward it, keeping to the center. He broke into the open, discovering the source of the brightness.
It looked like a command center, a circular area the size of a small house, with other tunnels radiating from it in five directions. About twenty men and women stood or sat in front of computers. He took it all in. Some froze as they spotted him, and the conversations stopped.
Mason lifted his shotgun. He leveled it at the closest person. A woman with dark hair, about his age.
“Anybody moves,” Mason said, “she dies first. I’ll get about five more of you before you manage to scatter.”
Again, silence, except for the slight hissing of circulated air.
“Guess nobody likes those odds. I’m kind of disappointed, to tell you the truth.”
He surveyed the faces in the group. Not many showed fear. More like shock and surprise.
“All right then,” Mason said. “Every one of you, get on your belly. You’ll wait until the soldiers arrive.”
He did another count of everyone, as ordered. He’d been wrong. There were twenty-five Clan here. And this was the obvious base for their operations. He’d just broken the back of the group, and that warranted a big reward.
But not big enough.
He looked for the girl. She was the real prize.
None of the women on the floor looked the age of the fugitive’s daughter or were wrapped in that dark cloak she wore. He saw the old man instead. Watching carefully that no one swung an arm to trip him, he walked among the prone bodies toward the old man. Brij.
Already, he could hear the distant thumping of the boots of the approaching soldiers.
“Where’d she go?”
The old man didn’t answer.
“Where’d she go?” Mason kicked the man in the kidneys. He arched as if struck by electricity, then fell and stayed motionless.
What Mason wanted to do was go back and grab that first woman by the hair with his casted hand and hold a knife to her throat with his other. No. He wanted to run the knife against her throat, feel the give of cartilage and let her bleed all over his arm. Warm blood. That would show the rest he was serious.
But to do it, he’d have to set down the shotgun. Pacifists or not, he doubted they’d meekly let him control them without a shotgun. He’d have to wait. The soldiers were almost upon them anyway.
“There are only five minutes left,” one of the men called out, his voice traveling over the hard floor.
“Five minutes?” Mason said.
“On my computer. I set the timer. This area is rigged for destruction just like our entrances. We have to protect the rest of our tunnels.”
“Five minutes?” Mason felt a chill spread through his chest. “Five minutes.”
It would serve all of them right if he made them stay. But there’s no way they’d obey his orders unless he monitored them with his shotgun, which meant the mountain would crash in on him too.
“All of you—on your feet!”
They all obeyed. Even the old man attempted to get to his knees, groaning. A woman near him stooped to help.
“Leave him,” Mason barked.
“No.” Her defiance showed no fear. Mason hated it when people didn’t fear him. His finger twitched on the shotgun. He really wanted to kill someone. Right now, the woman defying him. But he was all too aware that the shotgun blast might set off the detonation. No sense committing suicide when he could torture her later.
The soldiers arrived, and Mason rushed forward, waving his cast. “Take them out, and keep them in close custody! This is the headquarters. Set to destruct in minutes!”
In seconds, the soldiers had surrounded the men and women and were hurrying them back out of the tunnel.
Mason turned on his ultraviolet light and began scanning the floor.
He saw it almost instantly. The same small footprints he’d been following down the tunnel. The same small circles where the tip of her walking stick touched the tunnel floor.
It was easy to see where the footprints led into another tunnel, going deeper into the mountain.
They were protecting her, Mason thought. She was given directions to find her way out by a different route.
If he followed her, he’d have a way out too.
Without a second’s hesitation, Mason ran down the same tunnel. He wanted to get as far away from the explosion as possible before it happened.
FORTY-FOUR
Billy was lost, of course, as he pushed Jordan in a wheelchair through the tunnel, thinking about the shots they’d heard just before going into the mountain. Occasionally, Jordan directed him to turn down another tunnel at an intersection. Then another. Billy had no sense of direction in the maze of tunnels that had once formed a coal mine.
Pierce walked silently with them but didn’t seem to mind that they were lost. Jordan was taking them to safety.
Trouble was, Billy knew he wasn’t lost enough.
Jordan had made Billy promise that he wouldn’t remember which path they had used to reach a hidden entrance into the mountain. Jordan had promised that Billy wouldn’t even remember that a wheelchair had been waiting.
So it bothered Billy that he could still vaguely remember those promises. Wasn’t he supposed to forget them too? Or was he so big that they hadn’t given him enough dosage, like with the communion wafers?
His memories were like shifting sheets of fog. Occasionally, they would lift, and he’d see it clearly. The path that took them away from where the choppers had dropped soldiers. One of the Clan waiting inside the tunnel with a wheelchair for Jordan, because Jordan was having too much difficulty walking.
And he’d remember, too, that Caitlyn had left the cabin, and that there had been an undercurrent of tension, like she was going into some kind of danger that no one discussed, no matter how many times he asked. He would remember, certainly, that he missed her.
Then the fog would return, and Billy would be happy. He only remembered that he and Pierce and Theo and Gloria were going to be sent Outside. He didn’t know how or where. That was the entire reason that all three had agreed to drink the water with a drug to erase their short-term memories.
But he wasn’t even supposed to remember that!
Maybe he should have had more of the water to drink. After all, if his body was so big that a regular dose of communion wafers didn’t do to him what it did to others, maybe that was the same for the drugged water.
He felt guilty over this.
He leaned forward to tell Jordan that maybe he shouldn’t be allowed to escape because he knew too much, but the fog descended, and Billy found himself opening his mouth but forgetting what he was going to say.
He kept pushing the wheelchair. When Jordan gave him directions again at another intersection of tunnels, Billy remembered Caitlyn again.
He began to worry once more. Until, mercifully, another patch of fog shifted his thoughts away.
A hundred yards into the tunnel beyond the headquarters, Mason reached the end, where the tunnel formed a T.
Left or right?
His ultraviolet light picked up the small giveaway circle of the tip of Caitlyn’s cane going down the left tunnel. The circle was fading; he needed to catch her soon.
He stepped left.
A split second later, the tunnel lights went black. A brief orange flare threw illumination ripples down the dirt walls, and then the sound of the explosion thundered behind him. Delayed by a heartbeat, the whoosh of air blew past Mason, taking with it a cloud of dust that continued down the tunnel.
It dropped him to his knees. He choked on the dust.
When he stood, he searched with his ultraviolet light for the glowing white circ
les of the girl’s cane tracks.
Nothing.
He switched on his flashlight and cursed.
The tunnel behind him was blocked. The soldiers of Bar Elohim couldn’t chase him and take away his trophy, leaving him as the sole hunter. But the fine dust was settling on the floor of the tunnel, wiping out the ultraviolet tracks.
If she reached another turn, how would he track her? And now there was more at stake than just catching her. She wouldn’t have fled if she didn’t know a way out of the mountain.
Mason needed to follow her just to save his own life.
At that thought, the tunnel walls seemed to squeeze the life from him. He couldn’t endure the thought of being lost in the depths of the mountain, wandering around until first his batteries ran out, then his own energy, then his life, until time dried him out like a mummy.
The image made him lick his lips. All he tasted was dust.
He cursed again, looking down. The floor of the tunnel had a uniform layer of dust. Each step he took left a smudged print.
So would she.
All he had to do was continue until he found her tracks. At maximum, she had only a five-minute head start.
And she was walking with an injured foot. At this thought, he shed his claustrophobia and fear of darkness. He was a hunter. Doing what he did best.
FORTY-FIVE
Caitlyn’s ankle ached, and it seemed to her that with each step, she needed to put more and more weight on her walking stick, jabbing it into the floor of the tunnel.
She needed to move faster.
Twice she’d seen a flash of light in the depths of darkness behind her. Both times had happened when she’d reached the end of a long straight stretch, flashes of light so brief she’d hoped they were her imagination.
She knew otherwise, though, and was convinced it could be none other than Mason Lee. He was like the devil, supernatural in his ability to hunt.
She pushed on. The coal miner’s flashlight on her head seemed to be growing dimmer each minute, and that added to her sense of urgency. She had made two turns. Brij had promised her that the third would take her to the waterfall. She didn’t need much extra time to finally lose Mason.
She reached a fork in the tunnels, then searched the monitor for the symbol among the nineteen others. She saw it on the right-hand turn.
As she entered the new tunnel, a cool breeze pushed into her face.
It gave her renewed energy. Somewhere ahead was the bridge. She could hear the muted rush of water. The waterfall Papa had described! All she had to do was cross the bridge and—
It felt like a giant knife plunging into her back. The pain drove her to her knees. Without the walking cane, she would have fallen.
Then, just as quickly and just as mysteriously, it disappeared, leaving her panting.
Four steps later, another bolt of pain speared her, like lightning appearing from nowhere. This time she was unable to keep her balance. She fell, rolling over her injured ankle.
On her stomach, she clenched her teeth to keep from screaming. It felt like the skin of her back was rippling and had come to life, like an alien creature was struggling to escape from her body.
She couldn’t do anything but fight it. It had taken over her body, and she shook as if in a violent seizure.
Something was pulling her apart.
Pulling, pulling, pulling.
A final, intense rip contracted, and Caitlyn beat a fist against the floor, fighting the pain.
Then nothing. The pain was gone, like the aftermath of a thunderstorm.
She pushed to her knees. With her upper body vertical, a warm fluid seeped onto her hips.
Was she bleeding? Was she dying?
Then she became aware of another sensation on her back, and her mind explored it with wonder.
Was it…?
Another flash of light. Not behind closed eyelids, the bursting of white from jaw-clenching pain, but a flashlight, bouncing off the tunnel walls.
Her pursuer was closing in. No time to wonder.
She hobbled forward in a half run.
If she could cross the bridge in time, she’d lose him. Brij had promised the bridge was safety.
Here the cool wind was stronger. Her beam of light showed a web of ropes. The bridge. And at her feet, the floor of the tunnel ended abruptly. A drop-off.
She turned her light downward, but the darkness extended far beyond its beam. She turned it to the sound of water and saw cascading falls, dozens of feet wide. Spray came from a turbine centered in the heavy stream of water.
She sensed a feeling of height and trembled.
It was the same trembling of joy she’d always experienced as a child when Papa took her on mountain climbs, especially on the edge of a cliff. The feeling that all she had to do was step out into the air and she would be home.
Here, however, the feeling was so overwhelming that she threw her walking stick out into the void. Watched it with the beam of her flashlight until it disappeared.
Jump, her instincts commanded. Jump!
She clutched at the rope beside her, as if she were holding herself back against a force trying to suck her into the void. It was the guide rope to the bridge.
Behind her, another flash of light. Her pursuer. This time, the light did not disappear.
Whoever it was had made it into the final stretch of tunnel.
Caitlyn had no choice but to step onto the bridge. With her injured ankle, it was agony. But the rope bridge was constructed with a waist-high guide rope on each side. She held on to the ropes and shuffled forward. Her back was warm and wet, as if a thick fluid seeped across her skin.
Progress was slow. Too slow.
She was only halfway across when her pursuer reached the end of the tunnel.
She tried to make herself shrink as the beam of light seemed to pin her in place.
FORTY-SIX
Where the tunnel ended in a void, Mason discovered the source of the roar.
A waterfall a dozen steps from the end of the tunnel. He played his flashlight across it and noticed a turbine. This must be what powered the Clan’s energy needs. The water was a thin, wide curtain, flowing hard and fast, disappearing into the darkness at the end of his flashlight beam. He flicked the light to his right. The rock was smooth and vertical.
Mason gave little thought to the incredible natural phenomenon of an underground river that, over millennia, had carved sheer tubes through soft limestone over a waterfall deep inside the mountain. He was a hunter. Hunting, surveying his surroundings, and evaluating.
Ahead of him, the chasm was black, but there was a heavy iron hook embedded into each side of the tunnel, with a loop of thick rope on each.
He flicked his beam along the rope to his left. It was a guide rope, matching the one on the other side. Wooden slats hung from shorter pieces of rope, forming the bottom of a bridge. The slats were tied together with short loops, a couple of inches between each. Mason shivered at the thought of stepping into the chasm trusting only those slats. He could slip through the side of the bridge and fall. The darkness pressed against him even in his thrill at being so close to his goal.
With his light, he illuminated the bridge and froze Caitlyn in place, throwing a giant shadow onto the sheer rock wall on the other side of the chasm. She was turned sideways, and Mason imagined for a moment that she was a humpbacked monster. It only lasted for that moment, because Caitlyn immediately used the light to help her find better footing on the rope bridge and began to scramble away, sending the bridge swaying. She was limping badly, and Mason smiled.
Mason flicked the beam past Caitlyn, trying to anticipate her escape route. It was easy to see.
The chasm was maybe fifty feet across. The tunnel that Mason had been following did not continue on the other side. Instead, there was a narrow ledge, with that sheer rock face behind it.
His flashlight beam found a ladder beside the bridge, also made of rope, hanging down the rock face, leading to anoth
er ledge about a hundred feet down. And from that second ledge, another rope ladder led to a third ledge. His beam was not powerful enough to reach completely into the depths, but Mason guessed there was a series of rope ladders all the way to the bottom. Why else would she be here but to escape from the mines?
To confirm his guess, a steady breeze blew upward from the depths. The air flow would not be this strong unless there was a way out at the bottom, maybe another tunnel.
Mason assessed his chances of crossing the rope bridge. On his side the ends of the bridge could simply be lifted from the iron hooks holding them in place. If he unhooked the rope, Caitlyn would be flung against the wall and tumble hundreds of feet into the darkness. But because of the deal he’d made with Bar Elohim, he wanted her captured, not dead. Worse, without the bridge to cross the chasm, he’d be stranded on this side, with the one way to safety destroyed by the explosion and an impossible labyrinth of tunnels as his only hope for escape.
With another flick of the beam across the chasm, he confirmed that the bridge was also looped on similar iron hooks at Caitlyn’s end.
If she had arrived minutes earlier, after crossing she could have lifted those loops and let the bridge fall, uselessly secured only on Mason’s end. He would have had no way across.
As it was, he briefly wondered if she had the capacity to release the rope with him on it. He told himself she didn’t. He would walk the bridge, and she wouldn’t remove the loops. Unless she had a knife. He had to trust his instincts that if she did, she’d have it out. What choice did he have? There was victory ahead.
He snarled at his fear and took a step onto the bridge. The air seemed colder, and spray from the waterfall splashed his face. His backpack thumped loosely against his ribs. It was comforting in a way, reminding him that once he filled the canister, he’d have what he wanted. That thought helped him drive past his fear.
On the other side, he’d be able to do what Caitlyn couldn’t. He’d drop the bridge and ensure his own escape, just in case the soldiers tracked him via another tunnel. They’d never be able to cross the chasm, and he could take his time moving down the series of ladders to the bottom.
Broken Angel Page 19
