Chapter 7.1: Where the Dead Go to Die
“We stay quiet while we’re walking the topside corridors, yeah?”
Soda glares at the five armed guards accompanying Garden and him, putting on his best act like he’s in charge here, daring them to challenge his authority. Inside he’s sweating bullets, but on the exterior he stays as cool as the chilly air they’ve just stepped into.
Outside the front doors of 101 Cali, the walls of the sheet metal corridors stretching to their right and left are newly patched and now devoid of their customary spraypainted directional markers—the massive breach that Soda’d entered last night must have been fixed almost as soon as the last invaders fled. As they all look up at the fog rolling in from the corridors’ open ceiling, Soda lies to himself that he’s in his element now.
Damn straight they’d better listen to me. I’m the only runner they have with Dead Boy out.
“Tell me again why we can’t just go through the Crypts?” one of the guys complains.
“Because this is the route I’m taking,” Soda answers curtly. “Unless you wanna escort your prisoner through the fog yourselves?”
The lead guard nods for Soda to lead the way before anyone can answer. Soda’s eyes widen as he stifles a sigh of relief—he really wasn’t sure if this would work. While it’s true the topside Committee holds very little sway over Crypts-dwellers, the guards are the ones with the guns here and could easily have bullied him into following orders.
A disgruntled silence follows as the retinue trudges single file through the cold corridors, with Garden sandwiched between angry armed men and Soda leading the way along the same route he and Dead Boy’d walked yesterday morning.
He feels so sorry for Garden. She’s acting extremely distressed, silently bearing the most pained expression Soda’s ever seen. She must think she’s being led away to her doom, doesn’t know there’s a rescue plan being put into action. If we can pull it off, that is. More likely we’ll fail and she’s just being tossed to the fog.
Actually, he thinks with a growing sense of dread, more likely those guards intend to shoot her dead the moment we’re outside of the NBAZ. He suspected as much the moment they’d pronounced her sentence. It doesn’t matter that he’d been asked to escort her off to her exile—the Committee has to keep up appearances, right? But he knows for sure that if they think Garden is that much of a threat, they’d consider her just as dangerous living an hour or two walk outside of the NBAZ as within its borders.
And what if they really do let him lead her away to live with Old Man Elvis? She’d surely be accepted into the small community, but with that crazy gang out roaming the streets, launching attacks on survivor settlements, Soda’s not so sure about Elvis’ chances of survival out here in fog-land either.
No. If it comes down to that, I’ll just have to find Dead Boy so he can bring her away to safety somewhere even farther away. Maybe one of the kingdoms.
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It’s not like any of this is actually her fault. Any idiot with a brain could easily see that. She’s the victim of circumstance and coincidence, just like Jamar must have been when he went missing. The Committee probably just needed to make an example out of somebody. So what if she’s having weird fog dreams? Things aren’t exactly normal anywhere in the world anymore.
Besides, she’s not the only one having strange experiences in the fog. Her own brother acted downright freaky yesterday with the Frozen. Maybe it’s some kind of genetic family thing? Except … Soda’s mind drifts back to his own odd experience last night, when he was running the last few miles through the streets by himself. He wishes he could remember exactly what happened, but his memory is so foggy. All he recalls is a feeling like being weightless.
He frowns and unsuccessfully tries to put it all out of his head. Maybe we all deserve to get tossed to the fog … but at least we don’t deserve to be shot in the back. Don’t worry, Garden. We’ll get you out of this.
It doesn’t take long before they come across the first signs of destruction from yesterday’s attacks. Repairs were always made quickly near the building’s front doors, but it takes a lot longer to fix up holes farther down the corridors—every time a repair’s made, the engineers wake the wraiths with all the noise, giving them only a ten to twenty minute window before they have to retreat back inside to wait a few hours for the wrathful spirits to settle down again.
Luckily, no ice wraiths are roaming the streets right now. Soda and the guards stand staring out a massive rent in the steel wall that must have been opened wide with a single swipe from a massive claw. Half a dozen Frozen stand on the other side, staring dumbly back at them, their wraiths just starting to take notice of their audience.
Soda ushers the others along as quickly as he can, which doesn’t take much effort. He is suddenly aware that, while running away from these monstrosities on the streets was relatively manageable, being pursued by wraiths through these corridors would be an entirely different thing, indeed. He doesn’t like it. But he’s glad to have spooked the guards a bit. All according to plan.
As Soda leads them past each waypoint building on the twisting route they pass many more such scenes of wreckage. It seems almost as if the gang had just been causing damage for the fun of it. Why break the corridors so much farther down the path? They’d only attempted to raid 101 Cali after all… Still, Soda’s luck continues to hold out—no danger so far.
After well over an hour of trotting down corridors that meander back and forth all over downtown NBAZ, they come to a section where the walls have been completely torn away. They’d just left the One Post building near the Montgomery Crypts entrance, and were heading down the long trek toward NewMont when suddenly there’s no more corridor left to walk through.
They stand staring outside at the fog swirling too thickly to spot even a single Frozen. Or anything else that the fog may be hiding.
This is it, Soda thinks. It’s now or never.
“Look, why don’t we just head back to Montgomery, hoof it through the warm tunnels a bit?” one of the guards says. The other guards grumble in agreement.
Soda wastes no time to seize the moment, for a single moment is probably all he has.
“Ridiculous,” Soda rapidly replies, “the walls have gotta pick up again just over there.”
He points into the white mists with a wagging finger, misdirecting their attention as he grabs Garden’s wrist with his other hand.
“I’ll take the prisoner through to the other side. You guys, keep up! Run!”
With that, he whisks Garden off into the fog, pulling her along as quickly as they can go. Shouts of surprise are swallowed by the gloom closing in at their heels.
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