blast still reverberated along the street, and now he could hear more cries, moans and screams of pain or shock.
And fading in as the explosion passed away, the
“Come on!” he hissed. “Wherever you were going, go!”
Honey stood, rubbed dust from her eyes and lead them back out onto the pavement.
The feeling of stepping into full view of the mercenaries was terrible. But it was their only chance. If they remained in the doorway the chopped warriors would be on them in seconds, and then it would simply be a matter of a bullet to the back of the head or a quick spray from a flame unit. At least in the open there was a chance. The dust and smoke from the blast gave a false sense of concealment, but Tom knew that the fighters’ senses were paring in on them even now, radar and sonar, heat detectors and biometric scanners picking them out of the chaos.
Tom’s ankle gave way and he fell to one knee, but Honey pulled him up and he staggered on. The pain was incredible — he’d never felt anything like it before — and he tried unsuccessfully to block it out.
Each second that passed, he expected the slew of bullets that would cut him in half.
“Here!” Honey said, darting left into a small alley. There was more gunfire behind them, a sustained burst accompanied by fresh screams. Ricochets echoed between the tall buildings, startling flocks of fat pigeons aloft. Bullets annihilated the walls either side of the entrance, exploding bricks, disintegrating corners, sending shrapnel cutting along the alley. Tom’s jacket and shirt were ripped, his skin scoured by hot shards of stone.
“Run!” Honey shouted. “Ten meters!”
Tom heard the footfalls of the mercenaries slow, and a grind of metal on concrete as one of them stopped and pivoted at the alley entrance.
Next would come the grenade, or a hail of explosive-tipped bullets, or perhaps a shower in fire.
The alley ended with a blank wall holding a pocked, solid-looking door. Tom began to fear that Honey really had no idea where she was going — her headlong flight driven by panic, pure and simple — but then she stopped and punched a lever on the wall.
She turned to look at him, her eyes wide, breathing harsh and heavy. It sounded like something in her throat was broken; every time she breathed, it clicked. And as Tom noticed the scorched bullet trail reaching from just beneath her left ear to her mouth, so she glanced over his shoulder and her eyes widened.
A doorway opened in the wall next to them. It was camouflaged by moss, the green-grey growth on the scarred metal merging it in with the old brickwork.
Several black metal eggs bounced against their feet.
Honey fell sideways, pulling Tom with her, and they landed on the piss-stinking floor of an elevator.
The doors started to slide shut. Tom watched the grenades spinning in lazy circles as they came to rest on the alley floor… with one of them rolling slowly towards the closing doors. It rolled, the doors hissed together, Tom could not breathe… and he heard the tiny
Honey kicked up at the control panel and sent them humming downwards. She looked at Tom, seeing right into him and telling him so much, and he knew that this moment was life or death. In two seconds they would be alive to run some more, or dead, smashed bodies in a blasted lift, left to rot down here, food for rats, wild cats and perhaps a desperate, dying buzzed.
The grenades exploded.
The shockwave buckled the lift walls and punched Tom like a train. He cried out but could not hear, because his ears were already bleeding. Blood oozed from his nose, his eyes, his mouth. The lift must have been below ground level — otherwise the blast would have crushed it like a cardboard box — but the remains of the wall above showered down onto the roof, shoving it down faster than the lift could take. Something whined and screeched and then snapped. The lift jerked sideways, tilted ten degrees, grumbled for a few seconds and then stuck fast.
“No!” Honey shouted. She stood and leaned on the control panel, punching buttons, looking at the doors as if willing them to open. “Tom, we have to open these. Those bastards won’t stop until they can see our corpses.”
“Where are we?” Tom knelt by the doors and shoved his fingers in the warped crack, pulling both ways. He was ridiculously aware of Honey’s leg pressed against his upper arm as she did the same higher up, its muscles tensing and spasming as she heaved.
He spat dusty blood and felt it dribbling from his ears.
“A hooker’s got to know the city,” she said and grunted as she pulled, gasped, and Tom closed his eyes to see her naked and writhing on his face the day before.
I’m more human than I think, he thought.
There was a continuous rattle and thud as detritus from the ruined alley rained down the lift shaft. And then came three louder impacts, regularly spaced, and time froze again.
The doors screeched open. Tom and Honey rolled out and crawled sideways so that they were away from the lift doors. Tom had a second to look around — they were in a long, dimly lit tunnel, service pipes ribbing the ceiling, condensation dripping onto the rusted metal walkway, fists of fungi pressing out between old bricks in the walls — and then the three grenades exploded. The lift disintegrated and splashed its metallic guts out into the corridor, wounding Tom’s senses even more and stroking his outstretched legs with a brief tongue of fire.
He gasped in relief as the fire retreated… and then screamed as fresh flame leapt from the ragged hole in the wall, white-hot and stinking of intent. It flowered like a cloud of snowflakes gusting through an open door, twisting and wavering almost as if it were conscious. Service pipes burst apart, spraying water and gases which were heated and mixed by the chemical fires, turning breathable air into a deadly mist of poisonous steam.
Tom stood clumsily, favouring his good leg, and grabbed Honey under the arm.
“Where to?” he shouted, coughing and retching as the bad air clawed his throat.
Honey nodded along the tunnel and started running, Tom following on behind. His ankle had swollen and pushed the head of his boot out; his back was cool with shed blood; other bumps and cuts added their own song to his symphony of pain. And in front of him still, leading the way, Honey’s clothing was soaked from her left shoulder down by the blood leaking from her gashed neck. The bullet had scored a line there without actually entering… but Tom was still terribly afraid at the damage it may have done.
The last thing they could do was stop.
From behind them came the sound of flames gushing through the lift wreckage, and a blast as another grenade was dropped. It wouldn’t take the mercenaries long to realise that there were no dead artificials at the bottom of the shaft.
“Where are we going?” Tom shouted.
“It’s a maintenance tunnel to the underground,” Honey called back. Her hand went up to her gashed neck and pressed as she spoke. “The other way leads back into the station those things came from. This way goes to the river, branches out, connects into other underground networks. You can get from one side of the city to the other, if you put your mind to it.”
“We may be able to buy passage downriver.”
“
The noises behind them had stopped, and they paused in their flight. Tom found the silence more distressing than the sounds of destruction. It meant that the mercenaries were thinking. “I think we should get out of this tunnel.”
“I agree,” Honey said, “but I’m still not quite sure where we are.”
“You’re bleeding,” Tom said. He moved to her and tilted her head slightly so that he could look at her neck.
“So are you.”
He kissed her above the wound, tasting sweat and blood. He couldn’t believe that she still wanted to visit the club, but for now their priority was to escape. Where they went afterwards… that was something to think about later.
“I think that way,” Tom said, indicating a door in the wall a few steps away. “If we do our best to get lost down here, we’ll lose them as well.”
