“Outside,” he said, scooping up the flashlight “We’ve got ten seconds to get to cover.”
Ryan and Nara ran for half that time, then crouched against the base of the tunnel wall.
A thunderous explosion avalanched the already breached walls and sent a roiling wave of pulverized brick dust sweeping over them. Thrill Bill jumped up and led them through the choking pall and over the rubble. The man-size hole he’d entered was now wag-size. Only the crisscrossing iron beams had kept the room from caving in.
The warlord’s torchlight cut through the dust and played over the far wall, where there was a yawning gap in the bricks. Behind the hole there was concrete block, and it, too, was blown apart.
Thrill Bill climbed through the breach and waved the others after him. Ryan stepped over the broken wall and into another empty, windowless room.
When they’d all crossed over, the warlord played his light over their faces. Nara looked grim, resigned.
“Come on, Captain,” Thrill Bill said, “it’s time to bury some ghosts.”
He led them through the door in the wall opposite. There were no lights in the hallway beyond, which was also concrete-floored. They moved in a tight file behind the warlord, staying close to their only source of light. Sheets of cobwebs draped the tunnel; in places they hung from floor to ceiling. The trail-breaker used his pulse rifle’s muzzle to slash a path through them, and his spiked hair and beard were soon decorated with long gray streamers.
The door Thrill Bill was looking for opened onto a stairwell that smelled of dust and mildew. Ryan followed Nara and Damm up the dismal shaft, which had landings and switchbacks spaced every fifteen steps.
Ryan had counted eight flights, when something crunched and skittered not far above. They all stopped as the warlord swept his torch over the steps leading to the next landing.
The light revealed human bones, bleached white.
They lay in a jumble from wall to wall.
Thrill Bill reared back and booted a skull hard, ricocheting it off the wall and sending it clattering down the steps into the dark. “One of yours, or one of mine, Captain?” he asked.
Nara said nothing.
“Don’t be shy about taking credit,” he said as he resumed the climb. “Plenty more where that came from.”
Thrill Bill wasn’t exaggerating. The stairwell was a tower of the dead. The landing above was piled two feet deep in bones; it was only the beginning. The staircase above was choked with them.
In short order, the skeletal remains ceased to be surprising or alarming to Ryan, and became merely annoying. But they couldn’t be completely ignored. A misstep and a slip while carrying a heavy pack could mean a bad, even a fatal fall.
“What is this place?” he asked, when they paused on a landing.
“Free-fire zone in the rebellion,” Damm replied. “We’re three street levels above Gloomtown.”
Thrill Bill opened the door at the far end of the landing, and they stepped out into an enormous, open area plunged in darkness. It felt like the slime galleries below, only without the slime. The warlord’s flashlight revealed a street like the one Ryan had seen in Gloomtown, complete with mob.
But there was a difference.
In this case, the mob was dead.
Long dead.
Acres of bones appeared in the flashlight’s beam. So many that at first, Ryan couldn’t believe what he was seeingthousands upon thousands of skeletons, in every direction the light shone. They covered the sidewalks and the street. They lay inside the ground-floor buildings. Up against the facades, they were heaped ten deep in places.
Tremors in the pavement under their boots, earthquakes from the explosions in Gloomtown, caused skulls to slide, here and there.
Been awhile, huh, Captain?” the warlord asked. “I know it sure takes me back.”
“Shut up,” Nara said.
“Haven’t you always wondered what it looked like in here, after we walled all these people in? Wouldn’t you like to have been a bug on the wall when the last one death-rattled and it got really, really quiet?”
Nara said nothing.
“Tell me you don’t ever think about this,” Thrill Bill said.