John Saul - The Manhattan Hunt Club

He reached back, his fingers finding her wrist and closing on it. "Listen," he said.

A silence fell over the four of them, unbroken for a moment by anything except the dripping of water. Then they heard it. A great whumping sound, as if something heavy had been dropped from a great height.

Less than a minute later they heard it again: whump !

They were still in the utility tunnel, but they'd come to a cross passage, and it sounded like the noise was coming from straight ahead. But before they heard the sound again, another sound intruded on the quiet; this time, though, it was the familiar sound of a subway train.

The sound grew steadily louder, and they could feel the draft of the air being pushed ahead of the train coming down the cross passage. A moment later they saw the beam of the headlight cross ahead of them, and then the train itself thundered past the end of the passage, its lighted cars flashing like a strobe, the couplings rattling, the brakes squealing as it began to slow for a station.

Then the train was gone and silence once again descended. Just as he was about to start into the passage, a glimmer of red caught Jeff's eye, gone so quickly he wasn't certain it had been there at all. Yet every nerve in his body now seemed to be sending him a tingle of warning, and he stopped short, putting his hand back to block Heather. They were so close to their goal, but someone, he was sure, still lay between them and the one place where they might be able to escape the tunnels with no resistance from either the hunters, the herders, or the gamekeepers.

As the other three clustered close behind him, he whispered a warning so softly it was almost inaudible, but to his own ears he might as well have bellowed it into the darkness. "Someone's there. One of the hunters."

"We'll go," Keith replied as quietly as Jeff. "Heather and Jinx, stay here."

Both the girls opened their mouths as if to argue, but when Jeff shook his head and held a finger to his lips, they said nothing. "Stay here until we signal you," he told them.

While Heather and Jinx crouched in the darkness, Jeff and Keith crept noiselessly forward, edging closer and closer to the intersection with the subway tunnel ahead. Each of them carried a rifle, along with one of the backpacks taken from the fallen hunters. As they came to the junction, Jeff pressed against one of the walls, Keith against the opposite.

They waited, listening.

Nothing.

The seconds stretched into a minute, then two.

Still nothing.

Jeff was about to edge out into the subway tunnel when his father shook his head. Then, as Jeff watched, Keith shouted into the darkness:

"I'm coming for you, you bastard!" And as he shouted, he hurled the backpack he was carrying into the subway tunnel, dimly lit by the wide-spaced bulbs mounted high on the walls.

Arch Cranston-code name "Cobra"-had already snapped at the bait by the time he realized it was a trap. At the sound of the angry words, he raised his rifle to his shoulder, and he'd already locked the sight onto the object hurtling from the side tunnel and squeezed the trigger before he realized it wasn't the man he'd expected at all.

But it was too late, he was already committed. As he realized what was happening, the trap closed.

Before Keith's words had died away, they heard the chattering of a rifle, and the backpack was torn to shreds by the rain of lead slashing through it. The rifle was still chattering when Keith, holding the Steyr at waist level, stepped into the tunnel, pointing the rifle in the direction from which the other gun was firing and squeezing the trigger, spraying the tunnel with slugs.

As his bullets ricocheted off the walls and whined away into the distance, the other gun fell silent, followed by a small, gurgling groan.

"Got him," Jeff heard his father mutter. Turning away from the sight of the man he'd just killed, Keith said to him, "Let's get going."

Signaling to Heather and Jinx, Jeff waited only long enough for them to catch up before he plunged into the subway tunnel, turning in the opposite direction from the fallen man.

Eve Harris heard two blasts of gunfire and instinctively dropped to the floor of the tunnel. Favoring her injured right hand, she fell hard on her left, and felt a sharp pain slash up her arm and into her shoulder. Cursing, she rolled over, shrugged the backpack and rifle off her body, and managed to sit up.

Gingerly, she touched her left wrist. The pain was so bad, she knew it wasn't just sprained, but broken.

Out , she thought. I've got to get out .

Lurching to her feet, she started along the tunnel once again, feeling her way along the wall with her cut right hand, her left arm far too painful to use at all. Ahead of her, she saw a glimmer of light.

At first she thought it was an illusion, but a moment later she knew it wasn't-somewhere ahead, somewhere far in the distance, there was the dim glow of a light. The pain in her left arm forgotten, her right hand once more clenched into a protective fist, she began to run through the darkness toward the beacon of light. Her panic washed away and her heart raced with excitement as her eyes fastened on the guiding light.

Then, so suddenly she had no time to prepare for it, her right foot connected not with the floor of the tunnel, but with nothing at all. As her leg dropped into an open shaft, her face crashed against its far edge, the concrete lip smashing the bridge of her nose. Screaming in agony, she dropped down the shaft, her body bouncing off its walls, her torn right hand spasmodically clutching for anything that might break her fall.

A second later she dropped out of the bottom of the shaft, smashing onto the concrete floor below.

She lay there a moment, stunned.

The pain coursed through every nerve in her body.

But she wasn't dead. Not dead, or even unconscious, for she could see-see clearly-by the light of a bulb that hung in a metal cage from the ceiling a few yards away.

She was going to be all right!

She lay still for another moment, catching her breath, forcing herself to overcome the agony that possessed her.

Then, at last, she tried to sit up.

And discovered that she couldn't.

Couldn't move her arms, or her legs.

It felt as if all her bones were broken.

She tried to scream, to call for help, but even her voice had deserted her.

Then, from somewhere in the distance, she heard something.

Footsteps.

Slow, shuffling footsteps, but definitely footsteps!

Someone was coming! Someone who would help her! Hope surged inside her once again. She wasn't going to die here-she was going to be all right.

The footsteps came steadily closer, and then she saw a face looming above her.

It was a man, squatting down beside her, peering at her. His grimy face was covered with stubble, his eyes were bloodshot. He leaned closer, and when he opened his mouth, his fetid breath poured over her like so much sewage. In response, her belly contracted with a great spasm of nausea, and vomit spewed from her mouth.

The man recoiled, staggering to his feet, wiping the flecks of vomit from his face with the filthy sleeve of his coat as he swore at her. A moment later he straightened and his foot lashed out, and she felt her ear split as the toe of his boot crashed into it. Then he was gone, shambling off into the darkness, muttering to himself.

As she struggled to clear her windpipe of her own vomit, Eve Harris saw the first of the rats creep out of the darkness, drawn from their lairs by the scent of fresh blood.

Her blood…

In vain, she tried to cry out.

But even if she had been able to make a sound, there was no one left to hear her.

They were heading north in the subway tunnel. Jeff was almost certain he knew where they were-under Broadway- and what he was looking for should be just ahead. And then, in the distance, he saw it.