Roderick Gordon - Deeper

Without stopping, he touched the tip of his shoulder, which had been clipped by a bullet. It was only a flesh wound — he'd had worse. He dropped his hand to the knife at his hip, and then to the pad of stove guns on his thigh. He felt distinctly vulnerable without his rifle and rucksack full of munitions, which he'd lost back at the entrance to the Bunker. And his hearing was slightly impaired from the blast of the stove mortar, an unremitting whistling present in his ears.

Still, all that was a small price to pay for getting out with his life. It had been a close call — the closest yet — and it didn't make sense to him. The Limiters had him cold, and yet they'd held back. It was as if they wanted him alive — but that wasn't their modus operandi at all. After the mortar had caused mayhem among the droves of approaching Styx, he had taken advantage of the chaos and the whirling dust to duck back into the Bunker.

From then on it was child's play. He could navigate the complex with his eyes shut, although Elliott's explosions had blocked several of the fastest routes through. And there were numerous patrols of Limiters, many with stalkers, to contend with. For a while he laid low in a dugout he'd prepared for this very eventuality. He was fortunate that the dogs were hampered by the aftermath of Elliott's handiwork; the fumes and dust still carried in the air made it impossible for them to pick up his scent trail.

He used a drainage duct to exit the Bunker, but even when he was back on the Great Plain he found he wasn't out of the woods yet. To shake off the mounted troop of Styx and the packs of stalkers snapping at his heels, he'd had to lay some false tracks. He'd used every trick in the book to finally elude them.

Now, as the sound of the wind joined with the whistling in his ears, he squatted down to study the ground. He was concerned that he hadn't found anything yet. Elliott could be taking one of several routes, but this was the most likely.

He got up and continued for another hundred feet until he came across what he'd been looking for.

"Here we are," he announced, evaluating the impressions in the dust. They were fresh footprints, and it was easy enough for him to tell to whom they belonged.

"Chester, and… and this must be Will! So he made it!" he said, with a shake of his head and a tight smile, relieved. He reached his hand over to the left, tracing around another print, and then lowered himself down onto his chest to assess the profile in more detail.

"Cal — your leg's acting up, isn't it?" he muttered, seeing the unevenness of one of the boy's footprints.

Another set of tracks caught his eye in the dust next to Cal's.

"Stalker?" he posed aloud, wondering if there was any evidence of a struggle, and maybe even traces of blood, in the area. He crawled closer to scrutinize the prints.

"No, this is no dog, this is feline. This must be a Hunter."

Mulling over what this could mean, he stood up and searched a wider area. "Elliott, where are you?" he was saying to himself as he attempted to locate her prints, knowing it would be more difficult due to the manner in which she moved.

A quick search yielded nothing, and he decided he couldn't afford to spend any longer checking. Every second meant that Elliott and the boys would be that much farther away. He set off again along the tunnel.

Several hundred feet farther on, he squatted down to inspect the ground again, then cried out.

"Ow! Dang it!"

He felt the Parchers burn his hand and saw the faint glow they were beginning to emit. He immediately wiped his hand on his pants to remove the bacteria before they sucked the moisture from his skin and flared fully into life. A moment too late and the reaction would have been as painful as if his hand had been immersed in acid. He'd witnessed enough stalkers yelping and bucking in agony, their noses shining as brightly as a tail light on a Topsoil bicycle, to know how it went.

But he'd removed the bacteria in time and, aware that Elliott wouldn't have used them unless she'd thought it absolutely necessary, he began to run.

That was when he heard a massive explosion from somewhere up ahead.

"That sounds suspiciously like my Sharps munitions store going off," he said to himself.

There followed a deep rumbling that could have been mistaken for rolling thunder, although it lasted for considerably longer than any Topsoil storm. The wind in the tunnel faltered, then reversed direction.

If he had been moving rapidly before, he now flew through the tunnel, terrified he was going to be too late.

"Got something?" Chester asked Elliott as they studied the horizon through their rifle scopes.

"Yes… activity to the left," she confirmed. "Do you see them?"

"No," Chester admitted. "Nothing."

"There are two Limiters, maybe a third," Elliott said.

They'd already had several sightings of Styx along the way, and each time had been forced to change direction. This had been the pattern since they'd emerged into a goliath space with odd-looking, dough-shaped rock formations scattered throughout it — menhirs, Will had called them.

"We'd better make ourselves scarce," Elliott said. Although the Limiters were a considerable distance away, she and Chester kept low and used the menhirs for cover as they strode back to where Will and Cal were waiting.

"What's up?" Will asked.

"More of them," Chester replied curtly, keeping his eyes averted.

"Doesn't look promising," Elliott said, shaking her head. "We can't go the way I wanted, so we're going to cut down the slope closer to the Pore, and then… then on to…"

She hesitated as the distant sound of a howl carried through the arid air, followed by barking.

Bartleby let out a small meow, and his ears pricked up like radar dishes as he spun his whole body around to where the noises were coming from.

"They've got the stalkers in here," Elliott said. "Come on."

They kept on the move, filled with a sense of urgency, but Will and the others found they weren't as panicky as they might have been. For one thing, the soldiers were far enough off that it didn't feel as if they posed an immediate threat. But more significantly, the fight with the Limiter had had a profound effect on each of them. Elliott's words of reassurance to Cal back at the Sharps resonated within all three boys; it was as though they had been partially anesthetized from the constant fear and dread that they'd been living with. Elliott was right — the experience, horrible as it was, had toughened them up.

And they'd found out their opponents weren't the invincible warriors they had once thought. The could be beaten. Besides, the boys had Elliott on their side. As they tramped down the slope, Will dreamingly began to imagine her as some new kind of superhero. The incredible exploding girl , he mused, with fingers of dynamite and nitroglycerine for blood . He chuckled to himself. She always rose to the occasion with something up her sleeve to help them out of a tight corner. Long may it continue , he thought.

So it came as a surprise when, after another stop to reconnoiter the horizon, Elliott grew increasingly agitated. She was always so calm and collected that her behavior began to infect the boys, setting them on edge. She was seeing Limiters everywhere.

"This isn't good. We've got to head even farther down," she told them, making a brisk quarter turn and lifting her rifle to her shoulder for a final check before setting off on the new course.

Will didn't grasp the importance of this change in direction until they eventually came upon the Pore itself.

Water drizzled down on them in sporadic, wind-tossed showers, as Will gazed into the seemingly infinite cavity.