Rachel Caine - Fall of Night

It was almost impossible to shake that horrible event off that easily, but Claire somehow managed … she accepted Jesse’s help in standing and retched again, emptily, at the stench of the dead thing that had tried to kill her. It was a vampire, she guessed, but not any kind of vamp she knew about. Even Myrnin’s lab mistakes – and he’d made more than a few of them – weren’t quite that disgusting. It was like some kind of a bastardised DNA merger of bat, human and spider. She tried not to look at it too closely as Jesse hustled her back to the now-open small door. Thankfully, Jesse didn’t ask her to go first; the vampire woman, although taller, easily bent and moved fluidly through the narrow opening. Claire followed her, scrambling on hands and knees in the claustrophobic concrete space. No conduits in here, at least. Claire realised she’d dropped her flashlight in preference to keeping hold of her knife, but even as she did, Eve moved in behind her and flipped hers on to light the way. ‘You okay?’ Eve mumbled – and when Claire glanced back, she realised Eve was holding the flashlight in her mouth, the better to crawl forward.

‘No,’ Claire said, and coughed again. She couldn’t risk throwing up in here, that would be disgusting for everyone, but the stench … Eve was coughing, too. It wasn’t just her. The vampires seemed immune, and she briefly, violently hated them for it. ‘I will be, though.’

The tiny tunnel seemed unnaturally long, but that was probably just Claire’s nightmarish shock taking hold; she felt weirdly unsteady, and her whole body felt the after-effects. It would hurt later, she assumed, but just now, she mostly felt numb and clumsy. She also knew that there were things in this tunnel she would later regret touching; she could feel tiny bones crunching under the press of her hands and knees, for instance. But right now, she really didn’t care.

The world narrowed to that dark, concrete tunnel, and the rapidly disappearing form of Jesse ahead of her – how did she crawl so fast? – and then, suddenly, it opened up again, into a big, echoing room. Claire heard the harsh scritch of glass embedded in the bottom of her sneakers when she slid out and stood, and for a moment she was blind until Eve crawled out after her, and directed her flashlight around.

‘Wild,’ Eve said, and wiped her mouth with one forearm. ‘Yuck. Drool. What the hell is this?’

This , it looked like, was someone’s hack project, long abandoned … in the grand tradition of MIT, someone had discovered this place, and started tiling the big room, which had probably started as some kind of storage area. The mosaic started in the middle of the room in swirls of black misty white, and spun out in a dizzying pattern toward the edges. Claire couldn’t decide if it was meant to be hypnotic, or a representation of a black hole, but it made her feel as if she was standing on stars. It was unfinished toward the corners, and the tools and pieces of cut tiles were untidily stacked next to the large bulk of an ancient bunch of pipes that burst out of the wall like a frozen iron octopus.

Handcuffed to the pipes was Liz. Unlike Derrick, she was still alive, but she looked pale and terrified, and there was an open wound on her throat – not as bad as Derrick’s, but it was still trickling blood, and there was a lot spread around her. She was shivering and only half-conscious. Eve rushed over to her and clamped a hand over the wound, and Jesse used her knife to cut a piece from her shirt to use as a bandage.

‘Can you break these?’ Eve asked, and pointed at the cuffs. Jesse nodded and snapped the metal apart without too much of an effort; whoever had put them on hadn’t taken the precaution of coating them with silver, which was lucky. ‘Okay, let’s get her up.’

Claire took Liz’s other side, and working together she and Eve managed to lift the third girl up. Jesse could have helped, but at this point, Claire preferred to have her free and ready to fight.

Because there was no way this was so easy.

Sure enough, there was a heavy, metallic sound from behind them, and as Eve turned the flash that way, Claire saw that a solid grating had come down over the doorway to the narrow little tunnel out – a heavy barrier, coated with a nice, shiny layer of silver. Jesse and Oliver wouldn’t be moving that one, not easily, anyway. And Jesse was already at a disadvantage, since her burnt hand couldn’t have healed so quickly.

‘Stay with her,’ Claire said to Eve, and took the flashlight to look around the rest of the room. It was pretty bare: concrete walls, the explosion of piping where they’d found Liz, and some concrete cubicles off to one side. Nothing they could use. ‘Maybe the other guys can get to us and help us out of here.’

‘Assuming that the bad guys aren’t already on them,’ Jesse said. ‘And since I doubt all of this was run remotely, I can almost guarantee you they’ve got troubles of their own. We need to get out on our own.’

‘Bugger this,’ Oliver growled, and stripped off his shirt. He wrapped it tightly around his hands and moved to the silver grate, took hold, and tried to force it upward. As he did, though, a jet of liquid silver activated, and sprayed over him.

His bare chest took the brunt of the attack, and he spun away with a cry; in the glare of Claire’s flash, his chest looked bone white, then spotted with red flares and blisters as the silver ate into him. It wasn’t fatal, but it had to be really painful. He scrubbed the shirt over his skin to get the liquid off before more damage was done, but it seemed pretty obvious that the booby trap wasn’t done yet; another try would only douse him further, unless they could find a way to block the jet set somewhere above. Claire angled the light up and found the canister and jet, and traced the activation circuit.

She pulled the wire out from the dull mud that had been smeared over it to conceal it, and quickly cut it in two with her knife. ‘Safe,’ she said.

‘Again, then,’ Oliver said. His chest looked scarred, and from the red glimmer in his eyes it still hurt incredibly badly, but he stepped up, wrapped his hands, and took hold again of the silver-coated grate.

It groaned, and strained, and shook, but it didn’t move. He was forced to back off and let his stinging hands recover.

Claire stared at the grate, then used her flashlight to get up close. It had come down on tracks. Was there some kind of release? There had to be, probably on the other side where it couldn’t be seen. Somebody had come in here to work; they wouldn’t want to risk being sealed in with no way out.

‘Eve,’ she said. ‘I need something stiff, but flexible. Do you have anything that can—’ Before Claire finished the sentence, Eve was holding something out to her – the leather collar she’d been wearing around her throat, studded with silver. Basic anti-vamp defence stuff. Claire dashed over to get it and came back to the grate. If I designed this, where would I put the trigger? She imagined it as a design in her head, then spun it around. Right. Back of the track, where it would be hidden from view, but reachable. Not easily reachable, because that would defeat the whole purpose. But Claire took hold of the collar – which was perfect, really – and carefully ran it down one side of the track.

One of the studs caught on something – just a slight break in the friction, but enough to tell her where the release could be. Claire reversed her hold on the collar and used the buckle this time. It took six tries before the silver hooked on, but she got a firm contact, and yanked straight down.

Something clicked.

Claire took hold of the bars and tried to raise them. They slid up an inch, then two, before her trembling muscles gave up the fight. She felt something pull in her back, and winced.