“It's this way,” the man said.
He led them up a flight of stairs, across a loading platform, and stopped in front of a doorway.
“This is it.”
“Open it,” Jacob said with a wave of the pistol. “Hurry it up.”
The man waved his left arm over a black plastic pad next to the door, causing it to crack open with a sigh. The man pushed the door open, stepped inside, and then wheeled around fast, shoving the door back in Chelsea's face.
Jacob was ready for it, though. He jammed the barrel of his gun into the doorway and prevented it from closing. The man shoved even harder on the door, trying to keep them out. But when he realized he couldn't close the door, he glanced to one side and slapped a big red button on the wall.
Right away, sirens started to sound.
“Crap,” Jacob said. He shoved Chelsea to one side. “Get out of the way.”
The girl stepped to one side, allowing Jacob an open shot on the door. He took a step back and slammed his heel into the edge of the door, knocking it into the man's face. The dockworker fell onto his back as the door flew open. The man tried to scramble to his feet, but Jacob was faster. He pushed his way through the doorway and pointed the muzzle of his pistol right between the man's eyes. The man stayed on his back, his breath wet and congested as he struggled to breathe through the blooming flower of blood that had been his nose only moments before.
Kelly put a hand on his wrist. “Jacob, no. Don't kill him.”
Jacob looked at her, but didn't take the pistol away. He was mad, and he was sick and tired of assholes.
“Please,” Kelly said. “Not unless we have to.”
Jacob turned back to the man on the floor. He met the man's terrified gaze, and in that moment, he got a glimpse of himself. He realized he wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger. He was honestly hoping that the man would make some stupid move, do something that would give him the excuse to pull the trigger.
Jacob tried to take a step back from the horror of his self-realization, but he couldn't.
He
wanted
to kill this man. He was so angry, he was willing to turn the man's head into a muddy puddle of brains and blood on the floor.
And for what?
The man had hit an alarm button. Nothing more. Did he really deserve to die?
And wouldn't Jacob have done the same thing?
Wouldn't Nick have done the same thing?
“It's this way,” Chelsea said.
Startled out of his thoughts, Jacob looked up. Chelsea had moved down a side hallway. She was waving for them to follow.
“Jacob?” Kelly said.
Jacob looked back down at the bleeding man and cocked his head to one side. “Looks like it's your lucky day,” he said, and lowered the pistol.
C
HAPTER
8
The alarms echoed off the walls.
Jacob had never heard anything like it.
It hurt. His head felt like it was going to cave in. Not even covering his ears helped.
But he couldn't stop running. Despite the pain, he couldn't even slow down. He was bringing up the rear, and falling farther and farther behind with every step.
Chelsea was running full speed ahead, tearing around corners and running down hallways, not even bothering to see whether Kelly and Jacob were still behind her. Kelly was keeping up, but only barely. Between the noise of the sirens and the ringing in his ears from the beating he'd taken earlier that day, Jacob's head was swimming.
He yelled at them to slow down, but if Chelsea heard him over the shriek of the alarms, she made no sign of it.
“Chelsea, stop!”
Again, no response. The girl kept running. They were moving through some kind of warehouse. The walls, the floor, the metal office doors: Everything had a grungy, worn-down look to it, like it was decades old and used hard every day. They'd passed an opening that looked out onto a wide room, two stories high, with metal girders in the ceiling and row upon row of boxes and wooden crates. Heavy-loader machines sat motionless in the shadows, the only light coming from the red emergency lights flashing overhead. Every door, every opening off the warehouse floor was covered with a heavy metal mesh gate.
“Where are we going?” he yelled at her.
“This way,” she said, and turned another corner.
He reached the corner a moment later, rounded it, and froze.
A heavily armored figure was walking toward them. His armor was as bulky as a space suit, with a heavy nylon web bib in front that looked to be part body armor, part utility belt. Near the figure's shoulders, the bib formed a high, stiff collar that protected the back and sides of his neck. He wore a thick helmet with a copper-colored glass plate that hid his face from view.
Every inch of him was bulletproof.
Jacob knew that from personal experience.
Back on the wreck of the
Darwin
, he'd emptied two full magazines of .22 long-range rifle ammunition into the face and chest of a zombie wearing a similar suit. The bullets bounced harmlessly away, and the zombie trudged forward, clumsily, but steadily, every step and every swing of its arms sounding the odd, hydraulic groan of mechanical assistance.
Those same servos in the arms and legs augmented the strength of the wearer.
He'd seen the same zombie rip an arm off of a full-grown man.
But even though he'd seen the gear before, the sight of the hulking figure bearing down on them terrified him. There was no way he could win this fight. He'd already seen the rounds his stolen gun fired bounce harmlessly off a car's windshield. And he'd already seen what little good a .22 rifle did against a suit like that. He had little doubt the pistols he carried would be equally useless.
But then the armored figure surprised him.
“Who hit the alarm?” the man said, his voice, also augmented, sounded harsh, powerful, mechanical.
Jacob moved forward, his hand reaching back for one of his pistols even though he knew it would do no good.
But Chelsea was faster.
She stepped in front of the advancing figure, like she was the boss. “It was back there,” she said. “I heard a man screaming.”
“Okay,” the figure said. “Keep moving. Go underground.”
“Yes, sir.”
The armored man trundled forward on his servo-powered legs. He passed by Jacob, gave him a second, curious, and maybe worried glance, but pushed on, making his way down the tunnel to the main exit leading into the freighter yards.
Chelsea watched him until he was out of sight, then motioned for the others to follow. “If we're gonna go,” she said, “looks like now is the time.”
“Agreed,” Kelly said. “Chelsea, that was incredible. You really kept it together there.”
The younger girl shrugged. “All you gotta do is make 'em think they're looking for somebody else. It's not that hard.”
“Well, yeah . . .”
But Chelsea had already started running again.
Jacob watched her go and could only shake his head in frustration. He wanted to strangle the girl for her recklessness.
“What do we do, Jacob?” Kelly asked.
“Follow her,” Jacob said. “We don't have any other choice.”
“I hate this,” Kelly said. “I feel like we're being sucked down into something we can't control.”
“I know,” he said. He put a hand on her wrist, and when she didn't pull away, he squeezed, gently, familiarly. “I feel the same way. But we don't have any other choice. We either follow her, or take our chances on our own. And we don't know the first thing about how these people run their business. We'd be lost here. What's the saying, strangers in a strange land?”
She nodded. She didn't say anything, but she did pull her wrist out of his hand.
It was enough.
Too soon.
Or maybe it would always be too late for them. He didn't know anymore.
She followed after Chelsea. Jacob was right on their heels. They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a large, open terminal. Men and women in different-colored work uniforms hustled for the exits. A few paused long enough to give Jacob's battered face a curious stare, but otherwise, nobody paid them any mind.
“Which way?” Jacob said.
There was an information desk on the opposite side of the room. Wide doorways opened up on both sides of the desk, and through those they could see workers hustling toward wide stairwells.
“There has to be a safe area or something through there,” she said. “Some place where all these people are supposed to go when the breach alarm sounds.”
“Is that where the train is?”
Chelsea shrugged. “I don't know. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Yeah, that's right. I don't know,” she said again. “Let's go see. We can't stay here.”
That, he couldn't argue with. He and Kelly followed her through the doorways and found themselves on the top level of a train station. Signs in English, Spanish, and Chinese directed them down the stairs. They pushed their way through the crowds of uniformed workers, down a wide, curling staircase, and stepped off on what the signs called the Tube Level.
“This is it,” Chelsea said. She turned and gave Jacob and Kelly an
I told you so
look. “There's a map over there. It'll tell us where to go.”
Jacob looked around. The place was packed. He'd caught a few glimpses of El Paso as they'd left the freighter, and he'd seen a few big buildings in the distance, but it was hard to imagine that so many people could come from so few big buildings. But they were here. They were everywhere.
As far as he could see, the floors, the walls, and the ceilings were done up in the same white, small square tile. There were support pillars at regular intervals up and down the station. They curved to meet the ceiling, like a tree trunk spreading out its branches. Metal benches circled the bases of the pillars. Everywhere he looked, up and down the platform, he saw people sleeping on those benches.
It struck him then, the shock that those people had no homes.
Looking at them, he realized he was seeing people who lived on the fringes, people who were desperately in need of help, of purpose, and yet got none.
How could a civilization so advanced, so capable of digging wonders like this out of the earth, fail to care for the ones who couldn't care for themselves? There were people like these back in Arbella, people with mental problems, people with substance abuse problems, people with too many problems to count; and yet, in Arbella, they were given jobs. Nobody rode for free. Nobody ate for free. Everybody worked. Everybody mattered.
They weren't allowed to go wasted and forgotten like this.
Thinking about it made him homesick, which was funny.
Ever since his teenage years, back when he was working with Arbella's salvage teams, he'd believed with the conviction of the faithful that his community needed to expand beyond its walls if they were to survive. In the time since, he'd seen wonders few of his generation had been privileged to see, from giant aerofluyts that filled the sky to electric cars to buildings that could clean the air and make it feel like spring, even in the middle of summer. Twice he'd been brought back from the brink of death by medical knowledge unheard of in his home. He'd seen glimpses of the Old World, the time before the living dead consumed the planet, and yet, even with his boundaries opened and so many wonders spread out before him, he found himself wishing for the simpler life he'd known back in Arbella. He wanted to be back there, where the nights were lit only by candlelight, and where life wasn't held so cheaply.
He was still lost in his thoughts of home as he followed Chelsea and Kelly to a large electric map on a nearby wall. It showed all of underground El Paso, all of the main tunnels, all of the train routes, everything. He'd heard Chelsea's remark that there were nine hundred miles of tunnels beneath El Paso, but looking at this map, he found it hard to believe it was only that. According to the map, not only did the tunnels extend under all of El Paso, but under the Rio Grande, as well. There were options to expand the map views into Juarez, and even beyond.
“Nick would have loved this,” Jacob said.
Kelly glanced at him over her shoulder. “What did you say?”
“I was thinking of Nick.”
She gave Chelsea a quick glance to make sure the girl hadn't heard, then stepped closer. “Don't beat yourself up about this morning. Dr. Brooks and the rest of the council had it in for you before you ever opened your mouth.”
“Yeah, I know that's true.”
“But that's not what's bothering you, is it?”
He smiled. “You know me pretty well, don't you?”
She shrugged and smiled back.
“I was thinking of Jerry Greider. I executed an innocent man.”
“Jacob, that wasn't yourâ”
“I know that. Hold on, let me finish. I guess what's really bothering me is how I feel about it. Or how I don't feel about it. I killed Jerry, and even though I know now that he was innocent, that doesn't weigh on my conscience. I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. But what happened with Nick bothers me. I know he was guilty, and what I did was right, but it still hurts. It feels wrong, what I did to him.”
“It doesn't bother you that Jerry was innocent?”
“Oh no, I didn't mean it exactly like that. I mean, well, actually, kind of. With Jerry, I had made my peace beforehand. I was ready for it, you know? Even with Amanda screaming at me that I was putting the wrong man to death, I believed in what I was doing. With Nick, I just felt like . . . I don't know, like it was personal somehow. That was what made it wrong, I guess. The feeling that it was personal.”
He glanced over her shoulder at Chelsea. The girl was still studying the map, trying to figure out where they needed to go, oblivious to their conversation. That was good. If what Kelly said was true, Nick had meant a lot to her. She still couldn't wrap her mind around why Nick had to die, and there were moments, when she caught Jacob's eye, when he could see her confusion, and her hatred for him, and the bitterness burning inside her.
“Jacob,” Kelly said, “I don't know how to guide you in this. But we executed an innocent man. When we get back to Arbella, that has to come up. We have to acknowledge that in some way. To me, it's a scary indictment on the Code itself. It makes me sick knowing what happened to him. It really doesn't bother you?”
“Of course it bothers me. I just meant . . . hell, I don't know what I meant. I don't know much about anything anymore. Not since we left home. That's why I brought you along. You're the smart one.”
“God help us all if I'm the smart one.” She smiled again, but it looked forced. “But I'm serious, Jacob. We need to have this discussion. All of Arbella needs to have this discussion. Innocent men shouldn't die in the name of justice.”
Jacob didn't really know how to respond to that. That was the thing about Kelly. She made his brain hurt. But Chelsea stepped between them the next instant, sparing him the embarrassment of saying something stupid.
“Everything okay?” the younger girl asked, looking from Jacob to Kelly.
“We're fine,” Kelly said. “Just feeling like strangers in a strange land is all.”
Chelsea nodded. “It is a lot to take in.”
“I'll say.” Jacob nodded toward the map. “I have to be honest, Chelsea. When you said there were nine hundred miles of tunnels under El Paso, I didn't believe you. Even after being onboard that aerofluyt, and seeing Temple, I wouldn't have believed all this. It's incredible.”
“Isn't it?” she asked. “It's just like I remember it, too.”
“Did your people build all of this?”
“Not all of it. A lot of it was here before the Outbreak. The way it was explained to me, these tunnels are a network of naturally occurring caves, primitive tunnels dug hundreds of years ago by the Native Americans, larger tunnels dug by Mexican revolutionaries, drug smugglers and human traffickers, and even larger tunnels made by the U.S. Army back in the late twentieth century. When my people came here, they just enlarged and stabilized those existing tunnels and turned them into a mass transit system. You should ask my aunt Miriam about it. She's the real expert. It's like her hobby.”
Chelsea went back to the map and motioned for them to join her.