The Remnant (3 page)

The problem was the rusted rungs leading
upward were on the other side of the tunnel, and the water in the
trough between was six feet across and so black it appeared
positively Stygian. To make things even worse the walkways on
either side were so narrow that he didn’t think he could make the
leap without falling back into the noxious liquid and splashing
like a beached whale. The sound was sure to carry back to his
pursuers and lead them directly to him. Not that they didn’t seem
to have noses like bloodhounds already.

But God he hated the thought of entering that
sluice. The odor from the trough was not that of human waste-which
probably had not flowed through the channel in at least a
century-but something more elemental and somehow disturbing, as
though the tunnel were not an obsolete sewage line but the waste
system of some great living beast.

"For crying out loud," he muttered. "Get your
fucking head on straight."

Something clanged in the distance, metal
striking stone, and Trace stilled his finger on the flashlight
switch. Listening carefully he heard the incessant dripping, but
for just an instant he was certain he’d detected a pair of human
voices again as well. As his eyes continued to adjust he could
discern the feeblest of glows from back the way he had come, a
meager, here-now, gone-then illumination, as though the killers
were sweeping the space in front of them with their own remaining
flashlight, and the glimmer was being reflected off a million dull
brown tiles to Trace. Then the light died again. He wondered if
that meant that they had taken a wrong turning themselves, or
whether they had simply turned off their flashlight. When another
clang sounded, closer, he knew it was the latter.

"Just better and better," he whispered.

Of course he could continue on down the
tunnel-making his way by feel, since he was now afraid to turn his
flashlight back on-but apparently Leadie and Softie were just going
to keep following until hell froze over. And what if his faint
intuition was correct? What if that shaft overhead was the only way
out?

With a creeping sense of disgust he sat down
on his butt and eased his feet into the chill, dank water,
wondering how deep the sluice might be. The liquid oozed up his
legs as though he were being slowly digested inside the body of a
giant slug. The entire tunnel system seemed to take in a slow, deep
breath, to swallow...

"Keep it together," he muttered, feeling for
the bottom with the toes of his loafers.

When he finally touched down he pushed away
from the slimy lip of the chute, and-one careful, sliding footstep
at a time-shoved off toward the opposite walkway only scant feet
away in the darkness. When after trudging four steps he had still
not made contact with the bricks, he was tempted to flip on the
light, but he couldn’t chance it with his pursuers so close.

Somehow he must have gotten turned around so
that he was wading parallel to the tunnel’s path. How that might
have happened in the short space he had traversed he couldn’t
figure, but there seemed no other answer. The only trouble was he
didn’t know in which direction he might have veered. He seemed to
recall that right handed people lost in the woods tended to walk in
left handed circles, but that might have been either left handed
people or right handed circles. Making a snap decision he turned
toward his right and took another step.

Nothing.

Finally he extended the flashlight like a
blind man’s cane, turning slowly full circle so he could at least
find one side of the sluice.

Nothing.

The water was only six or seven feet across
at its widest. Still here he was, unable to reach either side, and
lost in the dark. There was no possible way that could be so, and
yet as far as he could reach there was only stinking, cold, liquid.
He began to imagine again that the fluid was something other than
just foul, stagnant water, some circulatory solution for that
immense beast that had swallowed him up into its vast innards.

Another clang, closer, reminded him that he
was in fact within the bowels of an ancient sewer, and that at any
moment he might become another bit of dead flotsam.

What the hell were they doing, beating the
bushes for him like African tribesmen running game? He pictured the
pair edging along the tunnel, tapping the walls with Softie’s
flashlight grinning wickedly at each other in the darkness. Maybe
the fuckers even had night vision goggles so they hardly needed the
flashlight, and here he was caught in the final scene from Silence
of the Lambs without a gun.

He turned full circle again, his only
reference now the occasional clang drawing closer. Placing his back
to the sound he took a stride toward what
had
to be the far
side of the tunnel. The sole of his loafer slipped on the greasy
bottom pulling his groin muscles painfully, and he felt himself
sliding down to one knee, the cold, slimey water rushing up his
sides, then along his throat. He sucked in a deep breath as the
greasy, noxious fluid cascaded over his face. He struggled to hold
the flashlight above the surface, but it felt almost as though an
unseen hand forced it under.

Finally he broke the surface again, shaking
the foul liquid out of his hair, fighting to breathe silently and
only succeeding in drawing filthy water down into his throat. He
needed desperately to spit, but he knew even that sound might give
him away. He reached out again-without much hope-for the side of
the sluice and thankfully found it at last. Dragging himself up
onto the walk he slid along the tunnel wall until his fingers
touched the rusted rungs of the ladder. At least he had come out on
the right side of the sluice. He couldn’t imagine forcing himself
to climb back into that slime to attempt another such crossing. It
took him a moment to catch his breath, but the continuing taps in
the distance urged him on. Loosening his belt to its last notch he
shoved the flashlight into it and began to climb.

In some spots the rungs had nearly rusted
through, and he placed his weight upon them carefully, gripping two
above him at one time to catch himself in case one underfoot gave
way. As with the weird crossing of the sluice, the climb seemed
eternal. He hadn’t thought to count the rungs, but his mind had to
be playing tricks on him, because it seemed as though he must be
fifty feet up the shaft when it had looked no higher than twenty.
When his head touched the manhole cover and he stopped, breathing
hard, he heard a splash below him, and he froze.

His mind continued playing nasty tricks. He
imagined Softie and Leadie-wearing the night-vision goggles his
fevered imagination had granted them-standing just beneath him,
smirking, aiming their guns at him. Or, maybe he was just imagining
all of it, the clangs, the light...maybe even the splash? He
wondered for a moment if there were noxious gases in the tunnels
that might be affecting his senses. Maybe that was how he’d lost
his way to begin with, how he had become so disoriented in the
trough. Of course there was also the disconcerting possibility that
the map-maker was completely insane to begin with and there had
never been more than one way out of this labyrinth.

Deciding that none of those prospects bore
considering at the moment, his fingers found the outline of a
corroded iron lid, but shove as he might he couldn’t lift it.
Instead he shifted his weight on the rungs and felt around until he
found a cross shaft that turned out to be barely large enough to
drag himself into. The hole widened a few feet in, and he turned
and crawled back to the opening. He lay there in the pitch
blackness for long minutes until the dripping noises were suddenly
punctuated by a human voice.

"Which way?"

Suddenly a light flashed, blinding Trace. He
shrank back farther into the shaft as the beam roved upward. He
wondered then if the water he must have tracked out of the sluice
could possibly have had time to evaporate in the humid atmosphere
of the tunnel, or even whether the water in the trough had settled
after his passage.

"That way, I think," said another masculine
voice.

After long moments the light dimmed to a mere
reflected glow from below and then died slowly away. Trace rolled
over onto his back on the hard stone and breathed a sigh of relief.
He’d lost them at last.

His hand slid to his belt, but the flashlight
was gone.

He spent several panicky minutes searching
every inch of the narrow shaft around him with questing fingers.
The splash. Had that been what he’d heard? The flashlight certainly
hadn’t crashed onto the bricks.

But now he really was blind.

Insomniacs are responsive to subtle changes
in the ethers of late evening in much the same way reef fishes
sense minute alterations in current. In the dregs of the night
Ashley Morrow-half dozing on her sofa with a book in her
lap-shivered without knowing why. First she experienced an
unaccustomed silence, without so much as a tongue of breeze lapping
at the eaves outside, or one cricket chirruping in the woods, but
then the sound of Maxie, whining in the back yard slunk stealthily
to her ear.

She had witnessed so much cruelty to people
in her life that the mere thought of a creature so innocent in fear
or pain stabbed at her heart and shook her to instant wakefulness.
Maxie was her baby, her support, her friend, but-in spite of his
size and appearance-the four-year-old German Shepherd was a sheep
in guard dog’s clothing. With terrible images assaulting her mind
she staggered to her feet, and raced through the house to the
kitchen-stopping only long enough to assure that her teenage ward,
Marie, was sleeping soundly in her bedroom. She caught herself on
the backdoor frame, then-jerking the screen aside-rushed out into
the yard that was lit only by the feeble glow through the window
over the sink.

"Maxie?"

A whimper spun her around. She could just
make out the dog’s shadow where he huddled beside the corner of the
house farthest from the light, and she walked slowly toward to him,
forcing herself to calm, muttering his name, assuring him that he
was a good boy.

Ascertaining that there was no intruder in
the back yard she knelt beside him, sliding her hands through his
coat, around his middle, over his haunches, about his throat, up
and down his legs, checking the pads on his feet where he might
have been cut or gashed on some sharp object. He paid no attention
to her ministrations, pressing his nose between the slats of the
gate and sniffing greedily, the shadows all around evidently
masking the most interesting but apparently troubling of canine
scents. She tugged his head away and checked his ears, cheeks, his
cold wet nose. As soon as she released him he turned to stare
through the gate again his whimpers lower now, as though he was
afraid for anyone else to hear.

She leaned over him, squinting to see what he
was seeing through the narrow openings, another tingle of fear
racing up her spine as she realized at last that he had not been
whimpering from hurt but fear. Bleak gray light from the living
room window illumined a wavy trapezoid on the lawn. Slivers of
moonlight trickled down between tall pines farther away from the
house and creased the winding gravel drive with more sinister
shadows.

"What is it, boy?" she whispered in his
ear.

He shuddered in her embrace, and she wondered
if he was just picking up on her own anxiety. But
he
had
started it.

When he sniffed the air again she followed
his eyes back down the drive, and finally she spotted movement
there, a figure in the darkness. In that instant she was certain
that whoever it was could see her and Maxie, too, that he was
staring right back at them. Her hand slid off the dog to the
leather holster at the small of her back, and she unsnapped the
strap that secured her nine-millimeter automatic.

She longed to convince herself that the
figure was merely a trick of the light, her mind interpolating
Maxie’s strange behavior with her own nerves and the weird
confluences of light and dark amid the skeletal trees. But the
longer she stared into the shadows the more certain she became that
there was someone out there, a real silhouette amid the stick
figures of murky deciduous and conifer.

There had been a time when Ashley’s reaction
to such a circumstance would have been a quick prayer for
protection and simple flight, but that time was past. Experience
had not made her heedless of danger, but it had taught her that
fear itself could immobilize her with deadly result and that flight
was not always the best option. There were other things to consider
than simple survival. Eventually even a cornered animal grows tired
of being the prey. Now-frustrated by the fate life had dealt
her-she lived by one simple axiom.

Bring it on.

Even though she weighed barely one-hundred
pounds and was built like a blond, wingless pixie, Ashley had the
heart of a Valkyrie and had developed the territorial imperative of
a lioness. This land belonged to her, Marie, and Maxie. Visitors
were not encouraged, but a few were welcome. Clandestine and
stealthy will-o-the-wisps weren’t. She peered anxiously
about-acutely aware that threatening strangers often did not travel
alone-but she couldn’t make out any other figures in the trees, and
Maxie was still locked onto the one. His much sharper senses would
surely have warned him if this invader had accomplices.

She rose slowly to her feet, still hoping
against hope that changing perspective might cause the shadow to
shift or disappear. It did not. In fact she could now make out what
appeared to be a distinct arm extending from the foggy image. The
person-who appeared to be a very large male-was leaning on a tree,
staring back at her as though he owned the place.