CHAPTER 13 #2
He kicks open the heavy fire doors to the stairwell, and we plunge into the descent.
The air in the stairwell is drastically colder, reeking of damp earth and rust. Damon takes the stairs backward, his weapon trained upward on the door we just came through.
Every time his heavy boots hit a metal step, the sound reverberates like a gunshot in the narrow concrete shaft.
I grip the cold metal railing to keep from falling in his oversized boots. I scrape my knuckles hard against the rough concrete wall in my haste, the skin tearing, but I don't stop.
"Keep your weight on your toes," Damon instructs quietly. "Quietly now."
We keep spiraling down. The heat of the fire above fades, replaced by a biting chill.
"Almost at the seal," he murmurs, his broad shoulders silhouetted against the dim emergency lights filtering down from the upper floors.
We hit the landing of the sub-basement. It’s a stark, windowless void of a corridor.
Damon immediately slows his pace. His aggressive posture shifts into something highly calculated and suspicious.
He sweeps the muzzle of his gun across the dark intersections.
I follow directly in his shadow, my medical bag bumping heavily against my hip.
The silence down here is infinitely worse than the gunfire upstairs. The pressure has dropped. It feels like a trap.
Damon suddenly stops dead in his tracks. He tilts his head slightly, listening for a sound I absolutely cannot hear. I immediately mimic his posture, freezing in place and holding my breath until my lungs actively ache.
"Something’s wrong," he whispers.
"What?" I breathe.
"The pressure is off," he mutters, his eyes narrowing in the gloom. "Stay in my footsteps."
We creep down the final stretch of the corridor toward the massive steel door that accesses the city's subway maintenance tunnels. There is a guard standing by the keypad. One of Damon’s men.
"Boss! You made it," the guard calls out, his voice echoing in the concrete tunnel. He sounds relieved. Too relieved. It’s a fraction of a second off.
Damon doesn't speed up. He walks toward the man with a slow, deliberate predator’s pace that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I watch the guard shift his weight nervously from his left foot to his right. It’s a tiny, involuntary tic, but Damon’s cold eyes lock onto it immediately.
"The tunnels are clear," the guard says, gesturing to the heavy steel door. His palms are visibly sweating in the dim light.
"Give me the code, Miller," Damon says softly. His voice is dead calm.
Miller hesitates, his eyes darting toward the dark intersection behind us for a microsecond.
Without a single word of accusation or a raised voice, Damon lifts his weapon and fires one suppressed round straight into the center of Miller’s forehead.
The sharp crack echoes off the walls. The man’s head snaps back violently, his skull bouncing off the steel door.
He collapses against the keypad, smearing a thick trail of blood across the buttons as his lifeless body slides to the floor.
I flinch hard, my hands flying up to cover my ears, but I don't look away. I just stare at Miller’s vacant eyes.
Damon steps over the cooling corpse like it’s a piece of trash. He doesn't even blink.
"He was waiting for the signal," Damon says, sensing my shock. "Don't look at the floor."
"You didn't even ask him," I say, my voice sounding hollow.
"He sold us for a promotion," Damon replies coldly. He looks at the keypad. It’s entirely jammed with Miller's blood and brain matter.
He doesn't waste time trying to clean it.
He levels his rifle and fires three rounds directly into the mechanism.
The electronics explode in a shower of blue sparks and shredded plastic.
Damon slings his weapon back, turns his shoulder, and throws his entire body weight against the heavy steel door.
I see his face go completely pale with agony as his torn surgical wound strains under the effort.
He leans against the metal for a fraction of a second, his teeth gritted, before he forces himself upright and shoves the door open with a brutal groan of metal on concrete.
"Through the door," he grits out, gesturing with his chin. "Watch the step."
I step over Miller's legs. "Are you going to pass out?"
"It's about to get cold," he ignores me, his chest heaving.
I step through the threshold into a maw of absolute, oppressive darkness. The air in the maintenance tunnels is freezing, thick with the smell of stagnant water, old rust, and wet iron. The heavy tactical jacket does nothing to stop the chill sinking into my bones.
Damon shoves me forward into the void, his hand gripping my shoulder, guiding me blindly like a shepherd steering a lamb into a slaughterhouse.
As soon as we clear the frame, the heavy steel door hisses shut behind us, completely cutting off the dim red light of the sub-basement. The lock engages with a final, heavy clank. We are sealed in the pitch-black heart of the city's underbelly.
I reach out blindly in the dark. My fingers brush against the cold, slimy curve of the tunnel wall, and I instantly recoil in disgust, grasping in the empty air until I find the thick fabric of Damon’s sleeve. I grip his arm tight.
"Welcome to the veins of the city," Damon says, his voice a low, dark rumble beside me. "Keep your hand on my jacket."
"I can't see shit," I whisper.
"Don't make a sound."
I hold onto his jacket. There are a hundred different ways to die down here, but standing next to a bleeding killer in total darkness is the only thing keeping me breathing.