16.
The folding chair broke under my back when I hit the bottom of the pit. The cheap metal hinges buckled against my spine and sent a jolt of pain up my tailbone. I sank into a morass of rotting trash like it was a filth-encrusted sponge, embracing my struggling body, threatening to suck me down like quicksand. The stench stole my breath, leaving me gagging; my eyes watered like I’d rubbed them with chopped onions. Up above, out of sight, the chamber door slammed shut.
I wasn’t alone. Soggy, decomposing cardboard shifted. Torn garbage bags rustled. Two feet away, I saw antennae wriggling in the corner of my blurry vision.
I squirmed, sitting up, and reached for my belt. I didn’t have to be subtle now, but I had to be fast. And perfect. If I dropped the key into this slop, if I lost my grip for one second, I might never get it back.
I felt an itch along my left arm. I looked back and saw a six-inch roach wriggling up my shirtsleeve, climbing toward my face. I shook, violent, like a dog with a knotted rag, and knocked it loose. It landed on its shell, kicking its segmented legs in the air.
Another scurried over my sock and disappeared into my slacks, crawling up my leg. I forced myself to focus. Nothing mattered but getting my hands free. My fingers pulled my belt back and found the handcuff key. One slow, careful tug and it pried loose from the putty.
Roach legs rustled in my right ear. Antennae flicked at my cheek as the roach’s head pushed its way into my eardrum. I thrashed my head until the bug fell free. Another was on my shirt now, clambering up my chest.
Had to focus. I turned the key in my fingertips—gentle, gentle—shoving away a chitinous shell as a roach tried to skitter onto my hands.
I jabbed for the keyhole. Missed it, metal scraping against smooth metal. Legs crawled across the back of my neck. More on my shoulder. I shook hard, sinking deeper into the rotting muck, knocking it loose. The one on my neck was tenacious, digging in as it climbed my chin. It scambled up onto my face, my mouth, trying to squirm its way between my pursed lips. Another had made its way into my hair, hissing as it crawled toward my other ear.
Third try. The key slid in, turned, clicked, and my wrists were free. I leaped up, sinking knee-deep in the trash, and flailed at my face. I slapped the roaches from my cheeks, my hair, knocking another two from my sleeves. They kept coming, the trash roiling around me as the entire infested pit came to life. The roaches boiled up, mandibles clacking as they squirmed in from all directions, converging on me.
I set my sights on the lip of the pit, ran, and jumped.
My left hand missed, falling short, but I caught the concrete rim with the fingertips of my right. My shoes scrabbled on the sheer wall, struggling to get a hold, any kind of traction. One good heave and my left hand curled over the lip. My back screamed, muscles burning as I gave it everything I had, pulling one arm over the rim. From there I had enough leverage to keep fighting, keep pulling, hauling myself over the pit’s edge one agonizing inch at a time.
I rolled and slapped at my arms and legs, sending stray roaches scattering. One came right back at me, relentless. I jumped to my feet and brought my heel down like a sledgehammer, bursting it like a balloon filled with yellow pus. Another still had a grip on my shirt. I grabbed it, ripped it from the grime-caked linen, and hurled it across the room.
The roaches were climbing the pit walls now, a rising, glistening brown tide. I sprinted to the table and snatched up my cards, my phone, and my wallet. The deck pulsed against my fingertips, sensing danger and eager to fight, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough cards in the pack.
The desk light. I grabbed it, hoping the creatures had this much in common with the roaches of our world as I angled back the plastic hood and aimed the light at the pit’s edge. The roaches cascaded down in hissing curtains, tumbling from their grip on the smooth concrete, and scurried into hiding to escape the glare. I used the light to cover my escape, sweeping it across the floor as I backed toward the metal-sheeted door, and drove back a few desperate stragglers.
The door clanged shut. Out in the hallway, I pressed my back to the sheet metal and took deep, gasping breaths of air.
I ran fingers through my hair and slapped at my clothes, muscles jerking with revulsion as I made sure I didn’t have any stragglers clinging to my body. Clean. As clean as I could get, anyway, with my suit soaked in filth. My phone had two bars and maybe twenty minutes of charge time. I wouldn’t even need half.
“Daniel.” Caitlin’s voice was breathless; she’d picked up on the first ring. “Where are you? Jennifer’s men saw the police take you, but Harding is insisting you were never brought into custody.”
“I wasn’t, not by Metro. The Network grabbed me.”
“Are you safe?”
I looked left and right. The boxy concrete corridor stretched in both directions, lit by a single thin bar of light under a white plastic shroud. As soon as Elmer and Fleiss finished their phone call, they’d be back. And then they’d come hunting for me.
“I’m nowhere near safe. I’m over at Donaghy Waste Management; the whole place is a Network front. They’ve got a necromancer on site, and Fleiss is here too.”
“Fleiss?” Caitlin said. “Wait, you said this is a Network—you know what, never mind, we’ll discuss it later. I’m on my way.”
“Call Jennifer, have her round up everybody she can. We need a wrecking crew out here. Oh, and make sure everybody knows—the night shift is clued-in and loyal to the Network. As far as I know there aren’t any civilians here, so come in hard.”
“As I said, pet…I’m on my way.”
The cavalry was coming. I only had one job now: survive until they got here. I picked a direction at random and ran, jogging up the corridor and into the shadows. I had seen Fleiss in her battle form once before; it had taken two rifles firing on full auto, plus my cards, just to drive her off. I didn’t know what it would take to actually kill her. Or if she could even be killed.
Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have to. I remembered the look on her face when I reminded her of Circe. And her slip, how she’d denied her sisters—plural—before I’d said the word. Whoever she was before the Enemy corrupted her…part of her was still in there. Close to the surface but trapped under the ice and drowning, trying to get out.
Landmarks started to look familiar. The great steel vats rusting away in the dark, conveyor belts, engines for sorting and shredding the city’s cast-off waste. The echo of heavy, jerky footsteps up ahead jolted me to a stop. I didn’t think the night crew were Ecko-style walking dead, but something was off about these guys. I changed course, darting down a side passage.
A pair of swinging doors opened onto a break room. Rumpled magazines littered the long Formica tables, and a soda machine hummed away in the dark. A dry-erase calendar on the wall charted employee birthdays and what day the communal fridge would be cleaned out. Aggressively mundane, an artifact of the day shift. On the far side of the break room, a stub of a hallway ended in a door marked Emergency Exit Only. A sticker on the push bar warned that opening it would trigger an alarm.
Did I chance it? No telling what was on the other side, beyond a shot at freedom. I ran through the layout of the lot in my head. The perimeter fence had been topped with spools of concertina wire. Once I was outside, I’d have to fight my way to the main gate, or jack a truck and crash the fence.
Speakers crackled to life. Elmer’s voice drifted from a recessed grille in the ceiling, a slow and singsong chant.
“Dan. Daaan. Daniel. You see, this is exactly why I didn’t want to leave you alone for a second, much less allow Ms. Fleiss to take you outside this facility. I have far too much respect for you as an adversary to give you an opportunity like that. She’s looking for you, by the way. I hadn’t seen her other form before. I’m impressed, I have to say. She’s very fast for a…well, a plus-sized woman.”
Elmer’s nasal giggle echoed through the empty hallways. I put my ear to the emergency door, trying to get any kind of a fix on the other side. If Fleiss was in battle mode, I needed to be anywhere but here.
“You’ll be happy to know we agreed on a solution,” Elmer said. “Once she catches you, Ms. Fleiss is going to amputate your arms and legs, then sew your lips shut. You won’t be playing any tricks after that. And you’ll be nicely compact for travel.”
I shoved the emergency door’s bar and pushed on through. Crisp, cold night air embraced me under the halogen glow of a loading dock. A couple of Elmer’s men were working on a garbage truck—the hood up but the engine humming, ready to roll. I formed my plan in a heartbeat: kill them, steal the truck, blast through the perimeter fence at full speed. The second I was clear I’d call Caitlin and meet up with the convoy, then do a one-eighty with some serious backup on my side. A spark of magic spurred my deck of cards to life. They leaped from my pocket in a fluttering stream, landing in my left palm and crackling with static electricity.
One of the slack-faced men turned my way. He threw his shoulders back, his torso wobbling like his spine had turned to jelly, and opened his mouth wide. His jaw cracked, disgorging a fat, filth-brown roach where his tongue should have been. Then he let out a shriek louder than a jet engine and so shrill it felt like a pair of icepicks had stabbed into my eardrums. The garbage truck’s windows burst, imploding in a glittering spray of glass.
His partner spun and dropped to all fours, bouncing on his hands and feet as his maw yawned open. His tongue-roach quivered its mandibles at me as he joined in the skull-pounding screech. They charged as one, loping across the asphalt, fast as lions on the savanna.
I hauled the emergency door shut. The latch clicked a heartbeat before a body slammed against it from the other side. The reinforced wood rattled and shook under a hurricane of frenzied punches. I wasn’t sure how long the door would hold up. I only knew I wasn’t getting out that way. I turned and ran, deeper into the complex, closer to the immortal monster that was hunting for me.