Chapter Thirty-Seven

The gang showed up fairly soon after Todds started cutting, people strolling past the end of the street looking in and seeing the sheer massed firepower pointed at them?

They moved on again, and damn sharp.

The miniature drones that hovered about the end of the alley, watching us, were getting so numerous that even with their automatic station-keeping features and anti-collision protocols, they kept bouncing off one another and every so often one would clatter to the ground.

By the time Todds had the door open and we were filing in? The local street kids were looting the crashed drones and running for it.

We saw the gangers starting in after us even as we pulled the damn doors closed, and Todds made only a cursory attempt at sealing the entrance behind us, knowing that if we made it too hard?

They’d just find another way down.

No, we wanted them following us, and desperate.

The passage ahead ended barely a handful of meters inside the doors, well-worn ancient steps leading down quickly, the passage bracketed by ornate handrails once, no doubt.

Now there were holes in the wall where the metal had been ripped free. Shattered tiles showed the bracing that had held on too long, and here and there piles of debris marked where something else had been torn free.

The lights were long gone, as were the accessible airflow systems, holes left in the ceiling and dangling wires all that marked their prior regularity.

The steps passed by under our feet as we jogged downwards, the bags clattering and pulling us off balance, the group spreading out to give each other room, as we ignored the scuttle of spiders the size of small dogs, and the hisses from nests that we passed.

Here and there corpses lay, long forgotten and festering, and I shook my head at the state of them, wondering what the hell had possessed them to come down here?

After a few back and forth flights of stairs, we reached a north/south passage, and set off along it after pausing just long enough for Todds to lay both a tripwire at the top of the last flight of steps, and a razorwire at the bottom.

It was evil, but we could already hear the shouts from above, and we needed the fuckers to slow down enough that we could set up an ambush.

A hundred meters down the passage it split into four, heading off in all directions, and we picked the left at random, pausing again as Todds attached a new razorwire across the passage, this time at neck height on an average man, and we were off again.

A minute or so later? The first screams rang out behind, and I grinned to myself in the darkness. There was utterly no reason for anyone to be down here under innocent circumstances, and I had no concerns that the razorwire would last long enough to be a problem to any possible future people.

Once deployed it was coated with a specialist coating that slowly evaporated. It was designed so that after a period of time, it could be seen easily, but for the first few days?

It was damn hard to spot, and they tended to break after a dozen impacts anyway, so fuck it.

If anyone blundered into it that wasn’t a gang member actively hunting me? Well, they were also actively roaming around in what I believed to be a specter spawning or collection zone.

The fast death would be preferable and a lot more merciful than they were likely to receive under any other circumstances.

We took two more turns in the passage, weaving left and right and passing long sealed crossing corridors, before we finally came to a perfect spot to set up for the ambush I knew we needed.

The last few minutes we’d been passing bodies fairly regularly, the deeper we went the more frequent, and most of them had stupid things like clubs or home-made spears as their only weapon.

Few of them had more than a single mod, and some had none, but they were all alike in one way.

Besides the mods being ripped out, and vermin having fed on them anyway.

They were all dressed in a mixture of local overalls, factory worker garb and scruffy pants and top combos that screamed that they were on the bones of their arse financially, and were forced into accepting stupid deals.

The section we’d moved into now was an old mass transit system, with a collection of passages all terminating on a single platform.

The passage we’d come down was at one end, and opened out at one end, the next passage was sealed, and the one after had been as well, but something had broken through at some point.

The dried bloodstains on the floor, as well as the handprints and drag marks suggested whoever had gone into the broken section hadn’t done it willingly either, which made it perfect.

We set up at the other end of the platform, facing the entrance we’d entered by, and we’d cut the various seals on the passages leading up to here as we went.

We cut sections of each of the covers free and dragged them with us, leaning them into makeshift barriers to hide behind. There wasn’t a huge amount we could do, not when we had literally a few minutes if that, but still, it was the best we could manage, and as we quickly made our defenses, Todds attached more and more tethers of razorwire at weird angles as lethal surprises for our pursuers.

Shouting echoed down the corridors to us, as gangers panicked and tried to find us in the dark, all the while fighting over who got to go first.

We created a simple little triangle of barricades, each overlapping the other, and coming up to our waists, the barricade behind us and leading deeper into the tunnels was solid mainly, as were the ones we were hiding behind, but we didn’t have the time to set up properly.

The best we managed was to fast weld three points to another section and clamber in, getting the guns in place and waiting, trying to ignore the fact that right to the left was the old mass transit tunnel, and absolutely anything could be living in it.

A minute passed, then a second, as we tried to make sense of the clanging noise we kept hearing from the gangers, until eventually, along with a load of shouted encouragement, a single figure came around the corner, swinging a long metal pole over and over in a constant windmill, as others behind him carried flaming torches.

“It’s ingenuous,” Luna whispered as he made it out onto the platform, pausing to catch his breath and looking around in all directions.

“It’s annoying,” I corrected, before sighting on him and waiting as he turned and shouted back behind him that he’d reached the end, and which way now?

A small gaggle of gangers gathered up around him, four or five, all arguing over which way to go, as they spotted cleared entrances to the other passages.

One of them was stupid enough to walk up and look into the nearest passage, waving his torch into it to make sure there wasn’t any razorwire in the way.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

He called to the others that it was clear, turned and took two steps towards the next one, and beheaded himself on the next wire that he’d totally missed.

More shouts rang out, and the idiot with the metal pole raised it, clearly intent on smacking it into the cable to free it, when I shot him in the head.

It wasn’t a hard shot, hell the distance was short, there was no wind, they were utterly unprepared as well, having apparently forgotten that they were chasing a group of heavily armed mercs into the darkness, but the shot was beautiful.

It rang out at the same time as one of the idiots dropped something, and when we stayed hidden? The sudden collapse of the pole wielder was thought to be from something else at first.

Another of the group grabbed the pole, laughing at the dead man, before starting swinging it generally, clearly trying to get used to the weight. I couldn’t help myself, and sighted in carefully, timing it just right…

As he banged one end of the pole off the edge of the platform, I fired. The bullet taking him in what might have been referred to as his ‘pride and joy’ if he’d had any pride in himself that was.

Instead he screeched in agony, clutched at his crotch, and tumbled out over the edge of the platform to smash face first into what looked to be knee deep water.

He coughed and spluttered, screaming and panting in pain, trying to get his words out as his ‘friends’ laughed and jeered, before one of them saw the first hints of movement.

The screams started in earnest then, as short, fat creatures I tried not to look at too carefully streamed up and out of the water, clambering onto the thrashing body and biting down, tearing chunks free.

They were short bodied, like a fat rat, but had six long limbs like a spider’s, and a head that only a nightmare could love. It had a trio of eyes on stalks and tearing mandibles. The ganger started convulsing and frothing at the mouth as his friends pointed their guns and opened fire, blowing the shit out of him and his attackers.

A minute later, and the gunfire was echoing away, not a one of them having noticed that Reign had taken the opportunity to shoot three of their number that had been at the back of the group.

By the time that they did?

Well, out of at least ten that had walked out onto the platform, there were only five left, their super sneaky way of finding the razorwire was out of reach, and only one of them had a torch now.

We watched the dawning fear on their faces as they saw their friends bodies all around them, saw it in the way they twisted and spun, searching, cursing, for the threat, only to finally meet the first of the specters.

It stumbled out of the darkness, mouth agape, arms reaching, one leg dragging. It was filthy, covered in cobwebs, a spider the size of my goddamn hand scuttled across his back and froze as the torch was fixed on it, before hissing at them.

More came boiling out of crevices in the ambulatory corpse, from under tattered clothing, and we watched in horror. One of the number had the presence of mind to use a shotgun, pumping it and blasting half the specter apart with a single burst of buckshot, but all that did was release a plague of the spiders from their grisly home.

More raced free, and the gangers fired with abandon, one pulling out a canister of something as soon as his shotgun was empty, backing up and firing it as the spiders closed on him.

Then he collapsed to the floor as glittering dust cascaded down, more than half of it having shot up his nose, his choice of ways to go ‘out’ clearly being ‘drugged up to the eyeballs, literally!

More were coming, both gangers and specters, as the last of the first group fell, and gunfire rang from the joining passages, tearing into the mass. Luna and Gessh stood silently, even as Reign fired once, then twice, sweeping the grazer across to make sure none of the spider infestation survived.

The sisters drew their swords and started quickly and silently killing any of the specters that drew close, clearly sensing and being drawn by our active mods, but where the majority of specters seemed utterly brainless, even they avoided the remains of the one that had become a walking spider nursery.

More staggered out slowly, after a few minutes, the sisters moved into the center of the platform, standing with a narrow gap on either side, as they stabbed out over and over again, the gunfire from the gangers dwindling as they were slowly overtaken.

Minutes passed as their gunfire died away entirely, and the specters kept coming, they moved in fits and starts, sporadic in their appearances, ten or twenty, then one or two, then another great wash of them, as they filtered along.

The sisters stepped back and Reign, Todds and I took a turn, steady firing over and over, then quickly pushing bodies back out of the way as we got a break in the onslaught. The fight was reasonably steady for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, with over two hundred eventually falling.

“Well, that was fun,” Luna growled, cleaning her blade on a body, and looking around. “I think we need to seal that corridor back up,” she said, and I nodded.

One of the connecting corridors had spat out only three specters in all of the fight, the vast, vast majority coming from two others, but those three? All walking spider nurseries.

Reign had been forced to sterilize the area each time with the grazer to make damn sure it was as clear as could be of the multi-legged little bastards.

Todds was moving already, none of us wanted to know what was down that passageway, the sight of the specters that it’d birthed, all with draukka spiders crawling in and out of them as they staggered along would give me nightmares for years to come.

As he sealed the previously blocked off entrance back up with some more scrap metal, making goddamn sure that it was as tight as possible, I started harvesting, while Reign, Luna and Gessh stripped and looted.

The bodies that is.

They stripped and looted the bodies of anything that was worth taking, valuables, tech, mods and belongings, as well as guns, ammo and the occasional grenade.

It took the better part of two hours for the full harvesting process, but in that time we’d cut free nearly sixty mods that were tier two, four mods that were tier three, and a fuck load of guns and ammo.

The gangers were almost all tier ones, but they at least had decent guns here and there. We took down the razorwire as we worked as well, seeing no reason to leave it up when it’d served its purpose. By the time we were ready to move deeper? We had a bag of mods for Oshbob, a half full bag of medikits, and a fuck load more guns.

Being realistic, we all knew that we’d have to be a bit pickier moving forwards, otherwise we’d end up bogged down by the sheer mass of crappy mods, but we decided to work until we couldn’t collect any more, and then we’d filter the collection before returning to the surface.

We were feeling quietly confident, lugging the great mass of loot around with us, as we set off down the next passage, following the gradual decline, for a few minutes.

Reaching the bottom we took a right, then a left, Todds slinking ahead in one of the stealth suits, and we followed him, slowly heading deeper and deeper until we reached a section where a building project had sealed off the passage, a single door in the abrupt wall of steel before us being marked as ‘emergency exit only’.

“Well boss?” Todds asked, and I shrugged, trying to contact the city datanet to query the building, only to find we were too deep to get a response.

“Fuck it, can you open it without damaging it too badly?” I asked, noting the thick mold, the deep sludge around the bottom of the door and the cobwebs etc. that made it clear that the door wasn’t normally used.

Hopefully it’d be long abandoned, but when I’d checked this area there’d been nothing to suggest anything working here, so if it was? It was unlikely to be busy, and a bunch of specter hunters were likely to be greeted well, and pointed in the right direction to clean out any local threats. That was what I was betting on anyway.

Shame really, that I was totally fucking wrong.

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