Death Makes Me Stronger 4, page 3
“Obviously,” I said and ran my gloved hands over the seam again.
“Maybe you didn’t press hard enough,” the older man said and rammed a shoulder into the concrete. “Son of a bitch. That’s solid.”
“They’re starting to fan out,” Golden Weaver said as Harper rubbed his shoulder. “At least five of them are headed in this direction. I don’t think any of them know what’s down here, so the break room might distract them for a few minutes, but not much longer.”
“I think I found it!” Marty exclaimed and then immediately clamped his hand over his mouth.
The shout bounced around the concrete chamber, and I could practically see the echo as the sound bounded out of the door and down the hallway. I was tempted to snatch my mask off just so that Marty could see the glare that I shot in his direction, but the young detective shrank back all the same as if he was a dog that had broken a vase with its tail.
“Good job, kid,” Harper huffed.
“Sorry,” he whispered like that would take everything back.
“They definitely heard that,” Golden Weaver said and hurried across the room. “We need to get out of here fast. I give them a minute tops before they come in here guns blazing.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” Marty said and then stomped hard on a small crack near the wall. “I really hope that I’m right.”
The doorway hissed as it released air like the tunnel was pressure sealed, but then it popped open just enough for us to squeeze through. A couple of runner lights flickered to life to cast an amber glow over the dark corridor, and the briny smell of the river washed over me like we were about to dive right in.
“Good job,” I said and clapped the kid on the back. “Let’s go before they get here.”
“There’s no time,” Harper said with a glance at the doorway. “You and Golden Weaver get out of here while Marty and I stall them.”
“What?” Marty and I said at the same time.
“That’s suicide,” I said as Golden Weaver went into the tunnel without question.
“They’ll kill us,” the young detective said with wide eyes. “Or imprison us in some government facility until we’re old and gray.”
“Think about it, kid,” the older detective said and waved his hand at the room. “Our footprints are all over the place. And our van is topside. They probably already know that we’re here. You and I can just say that we got a tip on a drug bust and came looking.”
“There’s no time to argue,” my partner said and tugged me into the tunnel. “Harper, I better see you again.”
“Of course,” he winked and then pulled out a cigarette.
“Be careful,” I said as the detective shut the door behind us.
I immediately turned my attention to the inside of the tunnel. If there was a way into it, then there had to be a way out, and there was no chance that I’d leave Marty and Harper alone with the National Guard until they were officially out of harm’s way. I’d seen enough from the soldiers to know that they tended to act before they thought, and the cops on the other side of the door were as close to me as my own family. Maybe closer after the last few weeks.
It didn’t take me long to find the mechanism in the wall right next to the doorway, but I resisted the urge to press it and go back into the tomb. Golden Weaver seemed to have the same idea as me, because the beautiful woman just leaned next to the doorway with her head tilted toward the seam like a kid listening to her parents argue. I did the same and even closed my eyes like that would help me to hear better.
“Put your hands up!” someone shouted so loud that it came through the concrete door loud and clear. “Identify yourselves. What are you doing here?”
The sound of guns being cocked was enough to make me reach for the door’s mechanism, but I paused, took a deep breath, and forced myself to trust Harper’s ability to bullshit his way out of anything.
“Who the fuck do you think we are?” Harper snapped. “We’re part of the drug task force. You don’t see our badges? Didn’t you see our van outside?”
“Go check him out,” the first soldier said.
Long seconds passed, and even my partner shifted like she was ready to burst into the tomb, but then the apparent leader seemed to get confirmation about the van and their identities.
“You were told to be back within an hour,” the man said in a gruff voice.
“How were we supposed to leave after we found all of this?” Marty said in a shaky voice as if the kid was about to throw up again.
“How did you find this place?” another voice asked in an accusatory tone.
“We got a tip,” Harper said.
I heard the click of his lighter and could almost picture the older man lighting up another cigarette like this was just another day. A few more startled gasps echoed through the tomb accompanied by a wet splatter that had to be the soldier’s vomiting. I let out a relieved sigh that at least no one seemed ready to shoot, but Harper did have the uncanny ability to act like he belonged wherever he was.
“And this tip led you here?” the first soldier asked again.
“Yeah,” the older detective said. “We expected to find the Vis, but this…”
“Sir,” a female voice said. “Sir, we’ve inspected the rest of the rooms. There are military-grade weapons in an armory, and an entire room filled with Vis.”
“And the break room?” the leader asked.
“We counted about eighty bodies,” she choked out. “But it’ll take the lab techs a while to make sure that’s an accurate number. We’ve already got a call into the city’s medical examiner. They’re going to send the overnight coroner and one of their best lab techs to help. Some guy named Paul. He should be able to help move everything. Apparently, he’s the strongest guy they have.”
I glanced over at Golden Weaver and gritted my teeth. The last thing that I wanted was for Raven and Paul to be involved, but maybe this would be the exact break that we needed. I would have to check in with my girlfriend later for more details, but for the moment, my priority was making sure that Marty and Harper wouldn’t need us after all.
“Where did this tip come from?” the first soldier asked, and I heard Harper sigh.
“A confidential informant,” he said. “Like I said… we got the tip and came here to check it out. I almost missed the whole thing. Didn’t expect some underground bunker filled with dead bodies.”
“One of which is Admiral Freedom,” the woman said. “When exactly did you find this place? And did you move the body?”
“Of course we did,” Marty gasped. “We couldn’t just leave him hanging from that chain like that. Someone clearly killed him and all those… all those people in the break room.”
“Probably did it himself,” another man said.
“It does look like those wounds are self-inflicted,” the leader said. “But we’ll wait until the medical examiner takes a look at it. Escort these gentlemen back topside and take their statements. We’ll need to know who your confidential informant is.”
“Absolutely not,” Harper said in a firm tone. “I’ve been working this job over twenty years, and I’ve never betrayed a C.I. That’s not going to start now. I don’t care if the president himself comes and demands to know who they are.”
“You’ll tell us whatever we need to know,” the leader said like it was a warning.
My fingers itched to press the mechanism and go out before the National Guard could turn on Harper. There wasn’t exactly a confidential informant for the detective to hand over since Marty had tracked the prison guard’s phone using an illegal search, so they couldn’t tell the soldiers the truth about how they’d found the place.
I decided that if the soldiers decided to imprison the two cops, then I’d have to stop them while Golden Weaver went to tell Vera what happened. There was no way I was letting Marty and Harper disappear into some prison no one had ever heard of.
“I’m not telling you shit,” the detective snapped. “You may have the city on lockdown, but you’ll leave eventually. I’ve worked too hard to gain my informant’s trust, and you lot would break that in seconds. Throw me in prison for all I care, but you’re not getting that name.”
“If you don’t give it to us,” the female said slowly like she was talking to a toddler. “Then we will throw you in prison. Or, we might think that you were involved somehow.”
“Little girl,” Harper said in a tone that matched her condescension. “I’ve been at this a long time. If you think that you’re going to intimidate me, then you’ve got a thing or two to learn. Marty and I are on the drug task force. We got a tip. And we came to investigate it.”
“Okay, okay,” the leader said. “Back down, Ramirez. They’ve already been cleared. And we have our orders. Just take them topside and get their statements. It’s not like they can go anywhere that we can’t find them.”
“If we find out that you had anything to do with this, then I’ll personally put you under,” the woman said just loud enough for me to hear it with my ear pressed against the concrete door. “Just like we’re going to put down the Heroes Society.”
“Whatever you say, little girl,” the older detective said.
“I can’t believe that this is happening,” Marty sniffed as if the younger cop was about to burst into tears. “Admiral Freedom was murdered, and some jerk has been planning some kind of war down here. Everything is just going to shit. Especially after the City Hall massacre. I-I just need to get out of here.”
“Let’s go, kid,” Harper said. “You need some fresh air.”
I glanced over at Golden Weaver as footsteps echoed through the tomb. Marty may have thrown up everything he’d ever eaten when he saw the break room, but the young cop was too tough to cry that easily. I was sure that it was just a ploy to make the soldiers feel bad for them and to get the soldiers away from the hidden doorway before anyone noticed the seam.
Some soldiers must have stayed behind, though, because the low murmur of quiet conversations came through the concrete wall. There was nothing loud enough for me to make out, which was disappointing. At least Marty and Harper had been led out, and it didn’t sound like they would be shot or imprisoned, so it was time for my partner and I to leave. The National Guard would do their own investigation, and Raven and Paul would be able to tell me what they found.
“Shall we?” I whispered and motioned for Golden Weaver to lead the way.
“I’m really glad that they’re okay,” my partner said as we moved deeper into the tunnel. “But if that woman tries to hurt Harper, then I’m going to sting her with my venom.”
“A terrible way to go,” I chuckled and shook my head. “Not my least favorite death, but I’m gonna be honest… it’s up there.”
“Thank you,” the superhero said in a proud tone.
I shook my head and focused on the runner lights that ran along the bottom of the tunnel. It looked like they branched off to the right and left up ahead, but if the map loaded into my mask’s lenses was correct, then we needed to go to the left if we wanted to head back to the city. I took a deep breath and then coughed as the briny air clung to the filters in my mask like the stench on an old fisherman’s boat.
“I have to admit that I really, really don’t like being underground,” Golden Weaver said as I turned to the left. “It might be one of my worst fears.”
“I’m not a big fan, either,” I said and reached over to take her hand. “But all we have to do is follow these tunnels, and theoretically we’ll be back in the city.”
Water trickled down the tunnel’s sides from cracks in the concrete, and my heart pounded so loudly in my ears that I couldn’t even hear our footsteps. The river was probably directly above us by then, and every worst-case scenario ran through my head as we pushed forward. I could survive if there was a collapse because of my diamond-hard skin and ability to breathe underwater, but my partner wouldn’t, so I picked up the pace a little.
We passed a few rooms with rusted cots and crumbling mattresses, but there weren’t any more weapons stashed anywhere, and I didn’t see the tell-tale purple of Vis either. I did spot a few footprints in the dust that covered the concrete floor like someone had come by recently, so at least we were headed in the right direction even as the map on my lenses started to freak out as if it was a GPS and we were off-roading it.
“There!” Golden Weaver exclaimed and pointed to the darkness up ahead. “There’s a ladder. It probably leads to the surface. We can go up there and then get our bearings.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “But we have to be careful going up. We don’t know where we are. This ladder might lead us straight up to the docks where the National Guard is camped out.”
“I know,” the spider-like woman said but still hurried toward the end of the corridor.
The amber runner lights stopped at the bottom of the ladder, and I looked to the left and right as the tunnel continued to weave underneath New Liberty. It would be worth it to check them out eventually, especially since the drug task force had found out that the underground network was used to transport Vis, but there were still too many unknowns to do any investigating without a team to back us up. Besides, there weren’t any more footprints leading away from the ladder, so our mystery psychic had probably used it as well.
I’d read enough conspiracy blogs after Marty had given me the tunnel maps to know that there were rumors of a huge underground network that had never been recorded, and every instinct told me that the Mastermind had used his people to map it out for himself. There were probably countless bunkers like the one where we’d found Admiral Freedom, and all of them could be filled with more guns and Vis. I would have to check them out at some point, but at the moment my main priority was getting Golden Weaver out before she had a full-blown panic attack.
My partner was already at the hatch by the time my foot hit the bottom ladder rung, and the superhero grunted as she tried to open it. The mechanism looked like it was rusted over, but if the Mastermind had already come through, then it had to open. Golden Weaver took a deep breath as if she needed to steady herself and then jerked the wheel-like handle one last time.
A metallic scraping noise filled the tunnel as the hatch finally started to open, and the spider-like woman burst out of it like we were being chased by a serial killer. I followed with my tasers already fully charged, just in case, but we were in an old, abandoned warehouse near the fishermen’s docks. Golden Weaver was bent over as she gasped for air, and I rubbed her back reflexively while I double-checked our surroundings.
It looked just like the place where we’d captured the explosion supervillain, and I even spotted some of my partner’s webbing in one of the windows. We’d been so close to an entrance to the underground network and hadn’t even noticed it. I shut the hatch again and watched as the tile on top of it blended in with the rest of the floor like there was nothing beneath it.
Whoever had come up with the underground tunnels had been a brilliant engineer, and if the conspiracy blogs were right, then the Mastermind would have access to military-grade bunkers since everything was supposedly put into place by our government when New Liberty was first built. I needed to go back over the maps and talk to Marty about where the drug task force found that one Vis dealer, mark this spot, and then hit the blogs again to find the most likely places for the psychic supervillain to set up shop. With any luck, I’d be able to pinpoint where the real secret base was, and then we could put a stop to whatever the Mastermind was planning before he could put it into full effect.
“We should go,” I said and turned to Golden Weaver. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” she said and straightened. “I just needed a second. It looks like we’re in the fishing district. That’s only a couple of miles from the Heroes Society.”
“Hello?” Marty’s voice came over the comms. “Osiris? Golden Weaver? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said and then winced as a high-pitched scream came through the in-ear piece. “Are you and Harper okay?”
“Of course,” the older man sniffed. “We were more worried about you. It’s been an hour since we heard anything. The damned comms went out.”
“I think it was the river,” the younger cop said. “It probably blocked the signal.”
“And the concrete,” I said and led the way to the nearby doorway. “Are you guys okay?”
“Of course,” Harper repeated. “The National Guard just let us go, but we’ve got a tail, so we won’t be able to come pick you up.”
“That’s fine,” I said and peeked out into the street. “We’re not that far from the Heroes Society. Marty, I need you to pull up anything you can about those underground bunkers. Conspiracy theories, maps, whatever you can find.”
“On it,” he said.
“We’re going to cut the comms,” the older detective warned. “The National Guard is already suspicious of us, and I don’t want to give them a reason to look any closer.”
“Be safe,” I said.
Harper grunted, and then a soft click sounded in the comms. Golden Weaver and I were officially on our own, but it wasn’t like we were on foreign soil. We didn’t need to have the detectives help us find our way back to the Heroes Society, and it would be a lot easier to sneak around without them in our ears.
“I’ll use my webs to swing us through the city,” my partner said. “You keep an eye out for the helicopters and patrols.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said in an amused tone as she hoisted us into the air.
I kept my head on a swivel while Golden Weaver swung us between the tall apartment buildings. A little kid saw us from an alley window, but she just waved and then went back to playing with her doll. I managed to kick a wall and move us out of the way as one of the National Guard tanks turned down a side street, but the soldiers inside didn’t even notice us as we glided over their heads.
It seemed like an eternity passed before we dropped down to the alley right behind the Heroes Society. A helicopter flew by, but I pulled Golden Weaver into the doorway before anyone could spot us. Footsteps approached from the side of the skyscraper a moment later, and it sounded like the heavy boots of a National Guard soldier.
