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With another grunt the shadows behind Quay swarm over him and his men. I don’t wait to see who or what they are. I bark some Hellion and practically fall over. Candy grabs me as a smoke screen fills the cavern between Quay’s people and us. We head back to our group, Candy pulling me the whole way. By the time we get back I can breathe again.
Behind us it sounds like a bad night in the arena. Shrieks and curses. The crunch of bones cracked by kicks and rocks. Then gunfire. Rifle flashes explode through the smoke like stars going nova. More screams. Some human and some not. The shooting gets sloppier. More desperate. A few rounds hit the floor near us. Whatever is back there is winning and won’t go home quietly once they’ve finished off Quay’s Boy Scouts.
Candy holds out her hand. It’s covered in blood.
“I think I’m shot.”
Her T-shirt is ripped and there’s fresh blood on the side. I tear it open until I can see the wound. There are a dozen punctures. Ragged lacerations.
“It’s rocks or shrapnel. You’re okay.” To the others I shout, “Go, go, go.”
They take off. Candy still looks a little freaked by the blood. I grab her hand and we follow.
Soon the wide passage is clogged with wreckage on both sides, narrowing the way so only one person at a time can squeeze through. Ahead is a long section of scaffold closed on both sides with lumber. Paul freezes at the entrance looking back toward the noise. Brigitte goes around him, turns on her light, and goes inside to see if the way is clear.
“Shit!” she yells, and backs out into the open. The skin on both of her shoulders is ripped and bleeding. She moves her light around inside the scaffold. The wooden planks are studded with metal. Some are wedged in sideways and sharpened like razors. Others bend back on themselves like fishhooks.
“It’s very narrow inside,” says Vidocq, looking past her. “We’ll have to walk sideways and carefully. It will be slow.”
“Then get going.”
They head straight for us as the smoke screen dissipates. I can’t tell how many of them there are, but it sounds like a small army. As the others file into the scaffold I try one more bit of hoodoo. Something simple, blunt, and not very powerful. I recite some Hellion and try to move just a few small stones on the nearby rubble just a little shove. Every breath I take hurts. Pain builds behind my eyes like an ice pick. But it works, in its own lame way. A few keystones shift and jagged slabs of rock and concrete slip away from the wall and crash onto the floor, blocking the narrow passage. It’s not exactly the Great Wall of China, but it will slow the crazies down, and right now I’ll take anything.
Candy is waiting for me at the scaffold entrance.
“Come on,” she shouts.
I push her inside and get out the Colt. She starts down the metal-lined corridor trying to keep her eye on me. But she can’t see what’s coming and keeps cutting herself.
“Turn the hell around. I’m fine back here.”
She turns and starts moving faster. The pace through the scaffold is slow enough that I can actually keep up. Little curses and whispers of pain echo off the walls. Everyone is trying to keep quiet, but the corridor is long and the metal is sharp and every inch of this place fucking hurts. But we’re cooler than Steve McQueen and no one panics or rushes. Even Delon is keeping a steady, reasonable pace.
Concrete crashes to the ground behind us, followed by screams and running feet. The crazies are through and coming at us. Up ahead, Brigitte, Delon, and the others are out from under the scaffold. A second later, so is Candy. As I step out, the scaffold shakes like there’s an earthquake. The crazies pour in behind us and it’s not pretty.
They’re not going sideways and they’re not slowing down. They sprint at us full speed, teeth bared and eyes blank, ripping themselves to pieces on the blades and hooks. I try some arena hoodoo, a killing hex. I shout the words and almost throw up. It’s too little too late, I played myself out collapsing the rubble. I aim the Colt and pull the trigger. It clicks.
Shit.
I fired the last two rounds in the corridor upstairs. Brigitte pushes past me and shoots at the mob.
“Go for the legs,” I say.
The crazies start falling, and the fallen ones at the front are trampled by the ones behind. Each fallen body narrows the way and slows them. I reach into my coat and pull out a SIG .45, and while Brigitte shoots at the crazies’ legs, I shoot at their chests. Between the two of us, we’re piling up bodies fast. It’s harder for each new crazy to climb over the body of its fallen, fruit-bat comrade. Soon there are so many bodies that the passage is blocked all the way to the ceiling. We can still hear screaming from behind the all-beef barricade, but no one is coming through.
I shout at Delon, “Find us a way out of here,” and he sprints into the dark.
On the far side of the dead crazies, the live ones are still trying to get through. They pull bodies from the pile, then pass them back and out of the bloody passage. The whole skeleton of the scaffold shakes with their movements. I have a couple of more guns, but we’re going to run out of bullets soon.
I grab Candy and Brigitte and point to a joint in the scaffold’s ceiling halfway between the crazies and us.
“See that? Shoot there. Everything you have.”
They both open up. I put away the SIG and take out the Desert Eagle .50 the Satanists left for me at the Chateau. Normally, I hate pistols like this because they’re more suited for killing tanks and dinosaurs than shooting people. But I might have finally found a use for it.
I join the women in emptying shot after shot into the scaffold joint. Candy runs out of bullets first. Brigitte has more shots, but her CO2 pistol is designed to punch through flesh not metal. I empty almost the whole clip from the Desert Eagle before I hear the first creak. The crazies have pulled enough bodies out of the way to start down after us again. They’re rocking the scaffold so hard it’s bouncing off the walls of the narrow concrete passage. The damned thing is rocking but it won’t fall.
When the mob hits the area with the weak joint, the whole structure moans and bellows like a gut-shot buffalo. And comes crashing down on top of them. As metal, wood, and concrete cascade down, the crazies claw the air and crawl on crushed arms and legs, still trying to get to us. The roar of the collapse bounces around the stone walls until it feels like my eardrums are about to implode. A blinding storm of concrete dust fills the air. We cough and hack like asthmatics running a marathon in a sandstorm.
