Page 176 of Immune

At the bottom, Ewan finishes the last Zed with a pipe through the skull. Seriously, where the hell is he finding these things? Fletcher has the pilot propped against the channel wall. Kaito reaches the bottom after us and instantly pretends hedidn’t almost fold in half the moment his boot touched solid ground.

I point at him. “You’re really bad at lying with your entire body.”

He breathes out through his nose. “I said exactly nothing at all.”

“That’s my point,” I tell him. “It’s suspicious.”

Fletcher looks toward the far end of the channel. “We got movement up top. Two roads over. Balcony shooter shifting west.”

Ewan pulls one side of his headphones back and says, “Dead behind us. Humans above. Drain tilts left, then splits.”

“Left toward the compound?” Kaito asks tightly.

“Maybe,” Ewan answers. “Echo’s broken by something big. A gate, probably. Or rubble.”

The pilot groans, and Fletcher crouches. “Think he can move?”

Xeon checks him with careful, considerate hands. “Not very fast.”

Of course not. I mean, we’re a traveling collection of bad odds wearing boots. Why the hell would the universe look down on us with fondness now? She’s already throwing shit at us as it is. She’s on a roll.

Just as that thought crosses my mind, the universe takes it as a challenge and a shout rings from above. “Channel!”

Bullets hit the concrete lip overhead not even a second later, splitting chips loose.

Everyone moves then. Fletcher and Kaito haul the pilot forward, Kaito only wincing the smallest amount before pretending he’s fully functional and not bleeding small drops over the ground. Ewan fires upward twice, not aiming to hit, just forcing heads down. I run with them for maybe ten steps before the channel splits exactly where Ewan said it would.

Left narrows under the road.

Right drops under the garage line.

Fletcher takes one look at the left tunnel and says, “That’s the compound route.”

And then a fucking bullet sparks right next to his head, which is very quickly followed by the shriek of another canister. My stomach drops, because that sound comes from the route we need to take, tucked so deep that we can’t see it. And worse is the answering groans that rise instantly from the darkness beyond.

A trap.

Again.

“They blocked the obvious path,” I point out.

Kaito’s gaze cuts right. “Other way then.”

“Right goes away from the compound,” Fletcher informs us.

“It also gets us away from the blaring dinner bell,” I snap and, for once, not a single one of them argues.

So we go right.

The drainage path narrows under the garage line, low enough that Fletcher has to duck and Kaito’s shoulders almost brush both walls. The air turns colder and wetter, my breath bouncing back at me. The noise from the canister fades behind us the deeper we go, swallowed by the concrete and hungry dead it’s called to feast.

Then the tunnel shakes.

It doesn’t collapse. It does something worse.

A metal grate drops behind us with a crash that makes my bones rattle and my teeth clench tightly.

Fletcher swears, and Ewan spins. “That wasn’t old.”