“You stumbled, I fell on my butt. Now that I think about it, if this was the basement of a house that completely burned down, it wouldn’t look like this. There would be more damage above us.” He gestured to the solid beams of the ceiling.
“Could be an underground shelter. Normally you only saw those in the nineteenth century in places with a lot of tornadoes, but they had them other places on occasion. Doesn’t really explain the fire damage on the table. Looks like the bed suffered from fire as well.”
Bones suddenly moved to one corner of the room. “What’s this?”
His beam illuminated a metal chest about three feet long and two feet high. Unlike the rest of the stuff in the room, no layer of dirt or grime adorned it. And the broken lock next to it was modern.
Dane shook his head. “I don’t believe it. A treasure chest.”
Bones grinned. “That’s almost as cliche as ‘X marks the spot.’ Kinda looks like someone beat us to it.”
Dane’s hand tightened on his Glock and the AR-15 felt heavier in the strap across his back. He swung his light around the room and saw another door across from the one through which they had entered. Then he saw the footprints forming a path in dust towards it.
“No way to tell when, Bones, but I think you’re right. Might as well open it anyway.”
The chest was empty, with sides made of metal and bottom padded with cloth.
“Look, the Randolph Coat of Arms.” Bones pointed to an image stitched into the padding.
“We’re obviously on the right track. But what does it mean?”
“I’ll tell you what it means — that is a bat at the top of the crest like we thought. Obviously we’re dealing with vampires.”
Dane rolled his eyes and Bones laughed. “Just kidding, bro. It means we’re still playing catch-up. Our path lies in that direction.”
His eyes followed the path of footprints. They moved to the door and opened it, Dane noting another broken lock lying on the ground on the other side. More footprints in the dirt extended down the hallway. Dane kept his Glock ready while Bones gripped the AR-15.
“Is that light up there?” Dane switched off his light and confirmed the presence of natural light coming from a low staircase ahead. He turned to Bones.
“How do you want to handle it?”
“I’ll just poke my head up and see if the coast is clear. If I get decapitated, you’ll know not to follow.”
Before Dane could think of an answer, Bones had eased his way up so his feet were on the third step from the top. He called down in a voice just above a whisper. “Seems okay. Wait, I see—”
Automatic weapons fire interrupted him and suddenly his feet were no longer visible from the top step. Dane wanted to follow, but stopped himself. “Bones!”
He heard what had to be Bones returning fire, and then a mix of weapons, which became impossible to distinguish. He was almost ready to poke his AR-15 out and join the fray when Bones came flying back down the stairs head first. The big man rolled into a crouch, rifle still in his hands.
His eyes held a combination of anger and pain, the latter Dane figured was likely due to rolling on his injured shoulder. “You okay?”
“Yep. Fire coming from three sides. Looks like we’re not going out that way.”
Dane tightened his jaw. “It must be the Sons of the Republic again.”
“You can take that to the bank. Did I forget to mention who I saw?”
“You might have had other things on your mind, what with getting shot at and diving down a staircase. Spit it out.”
“I’m seeing ghosts. Actually just one ghost: someone we both saw go down with a head wound in Boston.”
“You don’t mean—”
“That’s right. O’Meara was with them.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Forty minutes later, Dane and Bones were still underground. They had rushed back to where Bones originally fell through the roof, but Dane’s attempt to get out that way had met with gunfire as well. They were in a stalemate, with the Sons not willing to risk a shooting gallery coming down, and Dane and Bones unable to reach the surface.
“Maybe there’s another way out.” Dane paced back and forth down the hallway.
“Like a secret passageway? I thought I was the crazy one. I say we just shoot our way out.”
“Well we have to do something. I have a bad feeling about this.”
“I figure if they had grenades or any kind of explosives, we’d know already.”
“Sure, but they have other options. Create some sort of blaze with a big pile of spruce branches, toss it down here, then keep adding fuel to it so quickly we can’t put it out. Or find a nearby gravel pit or rock quarry and liberate something of theirs. Hell, they could even make a bomb out of fertilizer. Wouldn’t take much to make our position untenable.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when something clattered down the stairs. A glimpse of a sparking wick told him their time had run out. He considered sprinting to it and chopping off the wick before it went off. But it was thirty feet away and that kind of reckless action usually only paid off in action movies.
Bones yelled, “Run!”
One advantage of Dane’s shorter stature was that he could accelerate more quickly than Bones. He made the door to the room with the chest just in front of his friend, sprinting towards the opposite door. Before he could get through it, a hand on his shoulder jerked him to a stop.
“Don’t go any further.”
For a moment, Dane’s adrenaline got the better of him and he turned with raised fists. Then he cursed himself for not thinking of what Bones already had. The wick had been attached to sticks of dynamite, probably the best explosive the Sons could come up with on short notice. Almost certainly they’d be throwing more down the hole where Bones had first fallen in. He looked at Bones.
“Duck and cover?”
“No choice, man.”
They both got to their knees and covered their heads with their hands. A few seconds later, loud pops assaulted their ears, followed by rumbling. The earth shook and the sound changed to that of stones crashing against each other.
Stones popped out of the walls in the room, and Dane heard Bones curse. He wanted to look up, but he knew that would just put him at more risk.
Then heat and light assaulted his brain and everything else fell away.
The sound of chiseling shook Dane awake. He opened his eyes and realized that he was lying sideways with his cheek pressed into the dirt. When he moved his head, a flash of pain moved through his neck. He tried again more slowly and was able to rotate his whole body enough to see Bones kneeling a few feet away, his arm rising and falling in time with the chiseling sound. Bones had taken off his jacket, and Dane could see blood from the shoulder wound oozing through the t-shirt.
“What are you doing?”
Bones whirled and Dane could have sworn he saw an expression of concern. “Dude, you’re awake!”
“Awake? What exactly happened?”
“The room we were in collapsed from the explosion. A few seconds after it ended, the door back towards where I fell in was still clear, but before I could get there, they blew that end too. You got hit on the head with a rock I guess.”
Dane looked around, trying to get his bearings. “How long was I out?”
“Over an hour. Maybe closer to two, I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Because you’re trying to dig us out. So are you trying to get us out towards the steps or towards where we fell in?”
“Neither. Those doors are blocked by huge piles of rubble. But in that same corner where we took cover, I found a hollow space exposed by the collapse. That’s what you’re looking at right now in fact.”
Dane realized that instead of the six feet of clearance they had enjoyed earlier, this space was barely tall enough to sit up in. He gestured to where Bones had been working. “So you’re trying to get us back in?”