“Auger?”
“They’re here, Floyd. They’re in the tunnel.”
He knew she wasn’t referring to the police. He quickened his pace until his toe scuffed against something soft. Despite himself, he gasped in surprise. He knelt down, one heel touching a rail. He reached out and explored the form, finding an arm, then a neck, and finally a face.
“I’m tired,” she said, leaning into him. “I don’t think I can make it on my own.”
“I heard a shot.”
“There were several of them. I think I got them all.” She coughed. “You shouldn’t have followed me. I didn’t want you to come down here.”
“I was never one for goodbyes.”
“Feel around and see if you can find my torch. I dropped it when they attacked. It can’t be far away.”
Floyd fumbled in the darkness, finding the rails. He worked his hand between them, praying that the electricity wouldn’t suddenly surge through them. His fingers closed around the ribbed shaft of the torch. He held it up, shook it, found the sliding switch. The torch flickered, then came back to life.
He turned it off. “Got it. Now what?”
“Help me up. It isn’t far.”
The men couldn’t have been more than fifteen to twenty metres behind them. They were taking their time, their voices low and cautious, as if they now sensed something of the danger that might lie in ambush down here.
“How far exactly?” Floyd asked, still unwilling to move her.
“A couple of dozen metres. There’s a wooden door in the wall. You’ll feel it. Get me through the door. Then close it and get the hell out of here. I’ll take care of myself after that.”
He helped her move along the wall. The voices and torches behind them moved closer, picking up the pace with a renewed urgency. Floyd’s eyes were beginning to adapt to the low light, picking out vague, floating shapes in the darkness. He risked turning on the torch briefly, using his own body to shield it from the men. The beam flickered on and then off again.
“There,” Auger said. “A gap in the wall. You see it?”
“Yes.” Floyd looked back. The voices sounded no more than nine or ten metres behind them.
“Force it open. Get me through. Then save your skin.”
Floyd clamped the torch between his teeth. Leaning Auger against the wall, he jammed his shoulder against the old wooden door and pushed as hard as he could. The door swung open. He started helping Auger into the cavity beyond, trusting that she knew exactly what she was doing and almost believing it. Then something wrenched him away from the side of the tunnel, sending him sprawling across the tracks. He felt his spine crack against the rails. The torch dropped from his mouth, clattering against steel with a crunch of shattering glass.
The automatic fell from his hand.
Floyd forced a breath into his lungs. They hadn’t turned the juice back on. He thrashed his arms wide, trying to push himself off the rails. Barely distinguishable from the darkness that surrounded him, a child loomed over him. It planted a shoed foot on his arm, preventing him from reaching the automatic. He had just enough vision to make out the ghoulish curve of its smile, its sunken cheeks and the dead, recessed hollows of its eye sockets. Torchlight from the advancing party fell upon the child, freezing it like a statue. It was looking right at the men. It hissed like a snake, and something gleamed in its right hand.
The child’s arm moved, directing the muzzle of its little gun back along the tunnel, in the direction of the search party. The weapon discharged, spitting out rounds in a single brief burst.
He heard one of the men cry out in pain, and then a volley of return fire scythed overhead. None of the bullets hit the child, who aimed the gun again and delivered another burst of rapid fire, scything the gun from side to side. Floyd heard more anguished shouts and screams. Torches fell to the ground and died.
With a groan of effort, he managed to slip his arm free of the child’s foot. His fingers brushed the grip of the automatic, groped for a purchase and managed to drag the gun a little closer. His hand closed around the butt. He brought the gun around, supporting his wrist with his other arm. The child looked down, and for an instant its smug expression changed to one of bewilderment.
Floyd squeezed the trigger. The gun clicked in his hand. Nothing happened.
The child’s smile returned. It lowered the muzzle of its gun towards Floyd, its fingers coiled around the grip like pale eels.
There was another high-pitched volley of bullets.
The child shook like a doll, suspended in the air as rounds tore through it. Auger kept firing, squeezing the trigger until the gun fell silent, its muzzle aglow. The remains of the child, shredded clothes and lacerated flesh melded into an inseparable mass, flopped to the tunnel floor like a butcher’s offcut.
Floyd stumbled to his feet and followed Auger through the gap in the wall.
“Floyd, you can’t come any further.”
“You think I want to take my chances out there? They’ll assume I was the one shooting at them.”
“Trust me: you’re still better off trying to reason with them.”
“They’ll shoot first,” Floyd said.
She growled in frustration. “You follow me, you’re getting into very deep water.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
“Then close the door, before those men get here.”
He did as he was told. “You think they saw us come in here?”
“I don’t know,” she replied, her voice still weak and her breathing ragged and irregular. “But they’ll want to know what happened to us. They’ll comb every inch of the tunnel now. They’re sure to find that door.”
“I hope you have another way out of here, in that case.”
“So do I.”
They were in a much narrower tunnel, with no rails on the floor. No train could have fitted inside it. It was too low for Floyd to stand up in, and even though he ducked, he kept barking the top of his head against the rough-hewn ceiling. Auger led him onward, pausing now and then to gather her strength.
“We were lucky,” she said. “The children don’t see very well in the dark now. As they get older, their vision deteriorates.”
“How old are they?”
“They’ve been here for at least twenty-three years, maybe more, getting more decrepit every day.”
“Something tells me you’re ready to talk now.”
“In a moment, Floyd, you’re going to have all the answers I always said you didn’t want.”
TWENTY-SIX
Floyd made out a softening of the darkness ahead, like the first suggestion of day in the final hour before dawn. The voices of the search party did not sound far away, as if they were close to the other side of the door. Auger was right: it wouldn’t take them long to find their way through, especially if they thought they were going after killers.
“So who sent these children? Who are they working for?”
“I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t briefed on that part. My people sent me here to do a simple job, which was to recover Susan White’s box of papers. They didn’t tell me there’d be complications.”
“But they knew there would be?”
“My bosses? Yeah. I’d say there’s a pretty good chance they knew more than they told me.”
“Sounds as if you were sold down the river, Auger.”
“That’s more or less my conclusion.”
“You ready to tell me who you are yet, and who your bosses are? They weren’t straight with you, after all, so you don’t owe them anything.”
“If they’d been straight with me, I’d never have come here.”
They reached the source of the light. There was a heavy door set into one wall of the shaft, huge and thick and circular, like the door to a safe or one of the armoured hatches on a tank. The pale light spilled through the crack where the door had not been fully closed. It had a wavering quality, like reflections from a swimming pool.