“I don’t have any thumbs you idiot! How am I supposed to open it!”
“Fine,” Gabriel fired the last two shots in each of his pistols at the tables. One of them actually penetrated and hit someone, by the pained cry he gave.
Dropping to one knee, Gabriel threw open the small wooden hatch. There was no way that bartender had ever fit through it. Leading down through darkness was a wooden ladder with distant light at the bottom. Holstering his pistols, he grabbed the cat and jumped down, pulling the trap door closed behind him. He seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, falling through darkness. The light below abruptly jumped up to meet him and he impacted hard, rolling to break his fall, huddled protectively around the cat.
When Gabriel came to a stop he lay flat on his back looking up at the red stone ceiling of an obviously artificial cave. Thick electrical cables ran along the walls with electric lights at regular intervals. One end of the cave was blocked with wooden crates and barrels of liquor. The other stretched on out of sight.
“Sayonara Lawman,” the weasel shouted down to him.
Something small dropped from the trapdoor far above, and Gabriel’s eyes
widened when he realized it was a grenade.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he cried as he forced himself to his feet, Mister Mittens in hand and cursing at the pain of his broken rib as he threw himself down the tunnel away from the falling grenade. He hit the ground at the same time the grenade did, curling around the cat as he rolled. There was a moment of silence that seemed to last a thousand years and then a deafening explosion and a concussion that pounded through the air, making Gabriel feel as though he’d just been, well, hit by a bus.
Picking himself up, Gabriel turned to see the red stone behind him was scorched black, and cracked with the force of the explosion. Several of the barrels of liquor were leaking foul smelling brews into an ever-growing puddle. Holding his hand over the knife wound in his chest to stop the bleeding, Gabriel tried to ignore the ranting voice of his father in the back of his mind. He wanted to scream at it to shut up, but he composed himself as best as he could under the circumstances. They would be coming down to make sure he was dead soon, and he needed to not be here when they did.
“Come on, Mittens,” he grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and started away from the trapdoor. Pain shot up his right leg and he thought he must have twisted his ankle in the fall, but he forced himself to go on. Sam needed him, and he might have hostiles coming at him from behind at any moment.
“That’s Mister Mittens to you,” the cat replied, as Gabriel allowed him to climb onto his shoulder.
“Hold on Sam,” Gabriel muttered as he hobbled as fast as his wounds would
allow. On the verge of vomiting, he felt somewhat disillusioned. In movies the action hero never felt sick after blowing away countless bad guys. Of course, any idiot knew that movies of the action variety rarely had anything resembling fact to them. “I’m coming. Just hold on.”
Reloading with the remainder of his ammunition, Gabriel hobbled on, forcing his stomach to stop its churning through sheer willpower. What he wouldn’t give to have a gun out of one of the Governator’s more cheesy flicks, one that never seemed to require ammunition to keep firing.
Chapter 21: The Haven
Slanting steadily downward, the tunnel seemed to move in a gigantic spiral.
Gabriel was not sure how far down he’d gone, but it seemed like he was far below the surface. His broken rib and bruised collarbone screamed at him with every step, every breath, and every heartbeat. Though walking on his twisted right ankle for an hour had caused the pain to fade away to numbness, he could not bend it far in any direction. The joint seemed locked in place, swollen tightly, and his toes tingled with bad circulation.
At least the stab wound in his chest had stopped bleeding, though he could actually see the broken bone through it. A man should never have to look at his own bones, it was just wrong! When he got Sam out he was going to need a crapton of stitches.
A large metal door hanging open on massive hinges brought an abrupt end to the tunnel. It could give any bank vault a severe case of hatch-envy. The computer console built into the wall beside it looked to have taken several beatings and the screen was smashed out. With sudden realization, Gabriel moved closer, looking up at the massive door.
“It’s a fallout shelter.”
“Please explain,” Mister Mittens said in his ear. The cat’s whiskers tickled and his nose was cold and wet.
“It’s a radiation proof bunker far underground, usually filled with enough food and water to last until the radiation passes in the event of nuclear war. The name Children of the Chosen makes more sense now. They’re descendants of the people that survived the war in the shelter. After however many generations they must have come to believe that their ancestors were chosen to survive the holocaust.”
Flattening himself against the wall beside the hatch, Gabriel peeked around the corner into the shelter. Through the flickering, dim lighting, he saw a metal corridor strewn with various bits of garbage. After a slow count of fifty, no one appeared down the corridor. Darting through the door, he moved as quickly as his wounds would allow until he came to an intersection and repeated the process.
Sneaking through branching corridors filled with metal doors bearing control
panels to the right of each, Gabriel found himself completely lost. He would have given just about anything for one of those maps that could be found at malls or amusement parks with a convenient icon labeled, “you are here”.
With no clue how large the fallout shelter was, or where to even start looking for Sam, his only real hope was coming across a lone Child of the Chosen that he could beat into submission. Darting from passageway to passageway, he amused himself by
thinking how much it resembled a derelict Starship Enterprise.
Catching sight of a rat the size of a small dog, Gabriel decided that the opposite direction looked far more inviting.
Without continuous movement, the numbness from his ankle faded, letting the
pain of the bad sprain jolt through at his every step, like shards of broken glass in the joint. Beginning to feel lightheaded and somewhat distant, Gabriel knew that he couldn’t go on for much longer. He was going to pass out if he didn’t find Sam soon.
Voices around a corner ahead caused Gabriel to step into a connecting corridor for cover. Peering around the corner, he watched the shadows of two men play across the wall at the end of the hallway. Though he could not make out what was being said, they sounded familiar.
“That’s the three-eyed freak that took Sam,” Gabriel whispered. “I can’t make out what they’re saying?”
Shifting on his shoulder, Mister Mittens leaned out into the corridor, his pointed ears perked forward and twitching from time to time.
“The Chosen One took Sam for his own,” the cat whispered. “He’s ranting about all the work he had to do to get her and how ‘horny’ he is.”
Gabriel hadn’t realized how hopeless he’d felt until now. If the Chosen One had lain claim to Sam that meant Devileye hadn’t touched her yet. Of course, there was the Chosen One to worry about now, but still, there was a chance she hadn’t been molested just yet.
Holstering his pistol, Gabriel drew his hefty knife so as not to alert what passed for security down here to his presence with a gunshot. When Devileye and an obvious underling came into view, oblivious of his presence, he waited for them to pass then jumped out behind them.