“What about the mission?”
Mancini slowed, glaring at Braxton, and ducking instinctively when he heard distant rifle fire split the night once more. It didn’t sound like it was close, but it wasn’t worth taking the risk.
“If Herbert Rennick came back, he isn’t in there,” Mancini snapped, and turned to run.
“You’re right,” an unfamiliar voice said, and Mancini whipped his body toward it, lifting the submachine gun. “You just missed him. But I can tell you where he’s going.”
The man who had spoken stepped out from the trees, his hands held above his head. A big man, with a hard stare; Mancini thought he had the look of someone who knew how to handle himself, but he didn’t appear to be carrying a weapon.
Mancini lowered the MP5.
“Jeremy Pruitt,” the big man said. “I believe I may have spoken to your boss on the phone.”
20
The tunnel stank of age; damp and rust and decay.
And fear.
Conny walked, as instructed, at the rear of the large group of armed police, listening to the soft shuffling of boots ahead of her. She figured there had to be more than forty of them in total, creeping along the southbound line.
No one spoke.
And with each step forward, the mood among the officers became a little more toxic, the apprehension ripening inside them just that little bit more evident. It didn’t matter which unit the officers came from, she thought, or what experience they had. This was about as far from standard operating procedure as it was possible to get. They were all afraid.
We’re going in blind, Chief Superintendent Porter had said, and it turned out he was being both literal and figurative. Most of the officers carried flashlights—either in their hands or affixed to their weapons—but the beams looked fragile in the suffocating darkness; they only lit so much. Wherever the flashlights were not pointing, the darkness became an impossible void. Shadows surged and retreated. As soon as the platform lights of Euston Station disappeared, just a few hundred yards into the tunnel system, Conny became painfully aware that the abyss was at her back; that all lights including her own were pointing forward. It felt like the blackness was chasing her, waiting for an opportunity to swallow her whole.
The tension in the group was palpable. It poisoned her mind, and grim fantasies began to unspool: killers closing in on her from behind, all-but invisible in the darkness. Drawing nearer with knives in their hands and psychotic grins splitting their faces. Or maybe the shadows were home to explosive devices that the police could not see, buried charges which would detonate and bring the tunnel roof down onto her head, crushing her bones and slowly suffocating the life from her...
A sensation which Conny hadn’t experienced in more than thirty years came back to her suddenly and vividly. She remembered sitting up in her small bed, staring at the closet in her bedroom, certain that the door was opening…slowly…
…and that something monstrous waited inside.
Her grip on the Glock tightened until her knuckles ached.
It was just her mind playing tricks on her. The tunnel hadn’t even split yet, and the only way anyone could be behind her was if they came from the same platform that she and forty-plus other armed police had used.
It was, Conny mused, incredible how quickly all the training and all the resolve just drained away when confronted with unknown danger and a lack of light. Some responses were primal; instinctive and unstoppable.
And the darkness was the most complete that she had ever known. In the pitch black, with all her colleagues wearing dark uniforms, the world was reduced to floating points of light and half-stifled, fearful exhalations.
A bead of cold sweat ran down her back, making her flinch, and she tried to shake the dread settling over her away. She had been in plenty of threatening situations in her career; life-threatening on more than one occasion, but the tunnel was getting to her, crawling under her skin.
And that wasn’t just the darkness’ doing, she realised. It was Logan. Her poor boy, who needed her now more than ever, no matter how much he might deny it. Logan was going to require her support desperately in the coming months and years, just as his father had. As much as she tried to put her personal life aside when she was at work, there were some situations in which it simply wasn’t possible. She was walking headlong into an unknown danger that made her stomach churn while her son was in the hospital, struggling to comprehend a terminal diagnosis. While she was all that he had.
If any harm comes to me, it will be Logan that suffers, she thought bleakly, and flinched when the group of police in front of her abruptly halted.
Conny craned her neck to see what their lights were trained on, and her stomach lurched.
The tunnel split into four directly ahead of them, and the Chief Superintendent was busy dividing them into smaller groups and pointing at each tunnel in turn.
As the fractured wall of light that had been ahead of her began to break apart, and the smaller groups moved away into the tunnels, Conny couldn’t help but think that things had been bad moments earlier, but now they were so much worse.
Eventually, only her small group was left, led by CS Porter himself. Along with Conny and Remy were half a dozen officers who looked like they really wanted to turn and run back through the tunnel, and a handful from the armed response units she had seen earlier. The tip of the spear.
The AR officers took the lead, moving down the far left tunnel with their assault rifles tucked against their collarbones, each weapon sending a beam of light thirty metres ahead of them. Behind them, Porter led the rest. He kept a Glock pointed at the floor in his left hand; a walkie-talkie in his right. For the moment, all Conny could hear was rustling and faint static, along with the occasional mumbled word, all rasping from the tinny speaker at a barely-audible volume.
The group pressed forward into the smaller tunnel with just a dozen flashlights, and the darkness that had felt dangerous when it was at her back embraced her like a live thing; a creature that swallowed up the lights cast into it with ravenous hunger.
She followed the Chief Superintendent, trying not to think about her son, and about how he would cope if she did not make it back, and her growing anxiety slowly boiled all her thoughts away, until just one was left.
Please, God, let this tunnel be empty.
*
Remy strained at his leash continually, trying to pull her back toward the platform at Euston, and Conny slowly began to fall behind. As a gap opened up between herself and the rest of the group, her nerves began to dance uncontrollably. There was no way she could allow herself to get separated from the others.
“Heel, Rem,” she hissed, jerking on the leash, irritated at the note of panic she heard in her voice.
He continued to pull, turning every step into a battle, until finally Conny stopped. “Fine,” she muttered, “if you want to go back, go back.”
She glanced down the tunnel fearfully. Already the lights of the rest of the group were disappearing around a bend, threatening to leave her alone in the dark with only the Glock’s tiny flashlight attachment to guide her. She had to let Remy go.
She loosened her grip on the chain, and Remy whined, but he didn’t move. He didn’t want to run away, she realised. Remy was far too loyal to leave her side.
He’s trying to get me to run away.
A shudder rippled through her.
Remy whined again, very quietly, almost as though he was afraid of being heard.
She knelt in front of the dog and whispered sternly, “Remy. We’re on duty. Heel.”
Remy lowered his nose miserably, accepting defeat.
Conny straightened and broke into a trot, closing the gap that had grown between herself and the flashlights of her colleagues.
Closing it too quickly.
Why have they stopped?
Her pace faltered, and she felt Remy give another hopeful tug on the leash.
The others were gathered around the Chief
Superintendent, their expressions tense, all eyes pointed at the radio he held in his right hand. She jogged toward them and opened her mouth, drawing in a breath to ask what was happening, and Porter silenced her with a stare.
The radio hissed faintly, and a disembodied voice whispered, “I don’t see anything. You?”
Another voice responded, “No, but I hear it. Don’t you hear—”
The words dissolved in a meaningless blast of static that cut open the darkness in the tunnel like a blade.
Conny lifted her confused gaze to meet Porter’s eyes. The bearded man was staring at the radio in open-mouthed horror.
Not static, she realised. Gunfire.
It lasted only a few seconds, but that was long enough for Conny to grind her teeth as she realised that what she was hearing was fully automatic, unsuppressed fire. The big guns.
In one of the nearby tunnels, a group of policemen had been forced to engage, and from the sound of it, they had emptied their entire weapons at something.
The clatter of shooting was followed by a sound all the worse; a sound that made Conny grip Remy’s leash so tightly that the metal pressed painfully into the flesh of her palm.
Silence.
No one calling it in. No one shouting at their colleagues to get the cuffs, or to head this way or that way. No suspect’s rights being recited.
Not even any groans of pain.
Just…silence.
It was the Chief Superintendent that finally broke it.
“Who fired?” Porter hissed into the radio. “Respond! Fitz? Stevens? Preston?”
A disembodied voice floated in the darkness, tinny and low.
“Not us, Sir.”
It was followed swiftly by another; a voice that shook audibly.
“Clear here, Sir.”
A beat.
Another.
“Dammit, Stevens,” Porter snarled. “Respond. Stevens?”
For several long seconds the air in the tunnel was compressed by the awful silence, until the weight of it made Conny want to clap her hands over her ears. She squeezed her eyes shut and drew in a deep breath.
Let it out slowly.
This can’t be happening.
Not today.
“Rendezvous back at the tunnel split,” she heard Porter say, and when she opened her eyes, the lights of the group had already turned around, the others heading back the way they had come at speed. Moving in a daze, Conny turned to sprint after them.
And slammed to a halt as Remy tugged forcefully on the leash.
“Remy!”she yelled, and there was more than a note of panic in her tone now. Her voice was soaked in it. The damn dog had wanted to go back minutes earlier, and now he was trying to drag her deeper into the tunnel?
With a curse of frustration, Conny dropped the leash and took a step forward, trusting that Remy would follow.
And she let out a surprised yelp when she felt sharp teeth sinking into her flesh.
She stared down at her right calf in amazement. He wasn’t playing—Remy almost never played, and certainly not when he was on duty—this was a bite, strong enough to break the skin.
She felt a stab of pain and let out a grunt, stooping to retrieve Remy’s leash.
The dog began to pull on her leg and the pain spiked high enough to make her gasp.
“What the fuck, Remy?”
Remy whined and opened his jaws, the sudden release almost dumping Conny on her butt. He bumped his nose into her leg a couple of times and then bit again, gently this time, but persuasively, trying to pull her in the opposite direction to the one that Porter and the others had taken.
She focused on the distant group of flashlights. The others already looked far away, moving at a sprint. They would be around the bend and out of sight in moments. She wasn’t one of the officers carrying a walkie-talkie. If she got separated from the group and somehow her flashlight failed…
She patted at her pockets.
She’d left her phone on the dashboard of the van.
Dammit, Remy!
Once more, she reached down to grab Remy’s leash, intending to haul him along on his belly if necessary, and the tunnel behind her echoed to a sound that made her blood chill in her veins.
A hideous screech; a sound no human throat could possibly produce.
That’s not terrorists, Conny thought bleakly. It’s something else.
In the distance, Chief Superintendent Porter opened fire.
They all did.
The roaring guns spat gobs of light onto the tunnel walls, and Remy’s plaintive whining became a frantic growl. He grabbed the cuff of her trousers firmly and yanked hard, but for a moment, all Conny could do was stand and stare numbly at the distant firefight. She saw no sign of return fire; just a group of police officers emptying their weapons into the darkness.
For several seconds, the thunder of the guns ricocheted from the tunnel walls, and then, in the distant, swirling pool cast by a half-dozen flashlights, she caught a glimpse of something; heard a dreadful skittering.
It moved fast, galloping along the underside of the fucking ceiling and launching itself at Porter.
Cutting through him like his body was made of smoke.
Conny watched the distant figure of the Chief Superintendent fall, and the tunnel filled with the noise of screaming; of wet ripping. She saw another figure collapse. Yet another—incredibly; impossibly—appeared to stuff the barrel of his G36 into his mouth and pepper the wall behind him with the contents of his own skull.
All of a sudden, Conny felt the pressure of Remy’s jaws on her calf ease, and she knew what that meant. The dog had done his best to persuade her to run, but had decided the time had come for him to flee or die. He ran with a pitiful, apologetic whine.
More gunfire behind her. It looked like there were only five of them left now, and a couple were shooting wildly; hitting nothing. A hideous scream rattled along the tunnel, and another of Conny’s colleagues went down hard, slammed into the ground by something that exited the shadows only for an instant.
It was all happening too fast.
I’m going to die down here.
With a glance at the Glock that now seemed tiny and insignificant in her hand, Conny took the only option available. She couldn’t die. Not before Logan did.
She turned away from the horror, following Remy’s lead.
Running for her life.
21
It wasn’t following.
Either it was too busy tearing the rest of the police apart, or it hadn’t noticed Conny and Remy hanging back further down the tunnel. Maybe it just didn’t care. Perhaps it already had more than enough meat, and saw no pressing reason to chase after one retreating human and her dog.
Coward.
The word burned hot in Conny’s mind. Her decision to flee had been instinctive, but that simply made it all the worse. It meant that despite all her years of training and experience, there had always been a danger threshold at which she would just turn and run, abandoning her duty. She had never been afraid of anything, not like this. When the creature had appeared, she hadn’t thought about the safety of her colleagues or her oath as a police officer; only her certainty that her own death was imminent, and that her obligation to her dying son outweighed all others.
She ran without thought even for her direction, focusing only on maintaining her balance on the uneven tunnel floor; on putting one foot in front of the other and opening up as much distance between her and that thing as possible.
What the fuck was it?
An animal?
If so, it moved like no animal that Conny had ever seen. In the brief glimpse she had managed to catch of the creature, it had clung to the ceiling like some gigantic spider, yet when it had dropped among the police officers, scattering them like a bomb threat, she was sure she had also seen it walking upright, just like a human. The brief snapshots her eyes had taken made no sense. Something as large as a bear, but wiry. Something that seemed to be made of
teeth and claws.
Her mind ran to old horror movie scenarios. Maybe someone had dumped toxic waste into the sewer system, and some ordinary critter had been mutated into a hideous monster. London’s very own Godzilla; crawling through the city’s ancient basement, killing all who came across it.
Even in her heightened state of fear and confusion, that didn’t ring true to Conny. If there were some dangerous animal living in the Underground, surely it would have been discovered years ago. But if it had successfully avoided discovery, why suddenly start killing people en masse now?
And how could this impossible creature have taken people from multiple stations in such a short space of time?
Because there is more than one. Maybe a lot more.
The answer uncoiled in Conny’s mind, and she knew there was truth in it instinctively.
She slowed a little and hissed at Remy to stop. The dog looked back at her, wide-eyed, with an expression that Conny thought clearly conveyed are you fucking crazy, human?
The thought of fleeing, only to run headlong into more of the creatures was too terrifying to contemplate. Remy had sensed the thing long before it had appeared—either through its scent or the awful skittering noise it made as it moved—and it seemed unlikely that he would lead her straight into trouble, but panic was beginning to sink its claws into Conny’s mind, muddying her thoughts. She found it hard to think of much beyond the fact that the dark tunnels could be teeming with monsters, and the only light she had was the tiny, hopelessly inadequate bulb mounted beneath the barrel of the Glock.
Every time she took the weak spotlight off Remy to ensure that she wasn’t about to trip over some piece of debris or loose cable, she feared that he would continue to run, leaving her alone with the menacing shadows.
“Remy,” she whispered, more sternly this time, and he pulled up with a soft grunt.
His willingness to stop had to be a good sign, at least. If there were more of the monsters in the Underground system, they couldn’t be nearby. He trotted back and prodded her with his nose again, but Conny shook her head and put her hands on her knees, panting for air.
Adrift 2: Sundown Page 14
