Vampire Zero (Laura Caxton, #3)(96)

Which left just one option. She ducked down a dark side gallery, one that looked empty and less smoky than the rest, and pressed her back up against the wall of rock. As quietly as she could she opened her backpack and pulled out the emergency respirator. It came in two parts, a mask she could strap over her face and an oxygen bottle she could clip to her belt. She slipped it on and twisted the nozzle, then sucked at the mask until clean oxygen hit her mouth and throat, so pure and sweet it made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and just breathed for a moment. The backpack fell out of her hands and clunked to the floor.

“Did you hear that?” someone whispered, in a high-?pitched, almost cackling voice she knew all too well. The half-?dead was whispering, but the mine gallery had weird acoustics. She couldn’t tell what direction the voice came from, but she could hear it plain as day.

There was no response. Normally half-?deads gave themselves away by talking too much—they were cowardly creatures and they needed constant reassurance to keep them focused on their tasks. This bunch were too well trained for that, however. She tried to listen for their footsteps, for the sound of their clothing rustling as they moved. Instead she heard only her own breath hissing in the mask. They had to be close. They’d been only a few seconds behind her before she turned down the gallery. She readied herself, then waited for ten heartbeats, then forced herself to wait for ten more. Her pulse was racing so fast that it was no longer a reliable measure of time. She thought she heard a rubber shoe sole squeak on the rock just around the corner. That was the best sign she was going to get. She swung out, into the lighted corridor, her baton whirling around in a deadly one-?handed blow. The half-?dead was there—and about six inches from where she’d expected it to be. Her baton hit the rock wall with a thud that jarred the bones of her arm. The half-?dead grinned wickedly, its torn face literally splitting. It was carrying a shovel and it drew back for a counterattack that she would not have been able to dodge. She grabbed for her pepper spray with her free hand. She brought it up and squirted pure capsicum into what was left of the half-?dead’s face. It started screaming instantly.

She didn’t bother looking to see if there were any more behind it. She spun back around and hurried down the dark tunnel.

The light from the corridor behind her touched the walls on either side, the sheared-?off faces left over when the longwall plow carved away all the coal it could reach. Miners called those faces ribs, and they knew to watch out for them—the ribs were not solid rock, but conglomerations of many different kinds of rocks pressed together by their own weight. Chunks or slabs of the rib, some weighing tons, could fall away at any time. Loose rock and tailings strewed the floor, and she had to be careful or she would stumble and break a leg. The sides of the tunnel were littered with old sacks of supplies, cast-?off equipment, and tangled snakes of hoses and cables. The light caught an abandoned glove, striped with reflective tape, now smeared with coal and rock dust. It had probably lain undisturbed there for decades. The passage curled away from the main corridor, following a long played-?out coal seam. The light from the corridor couldn’t reach around that curve. Soon she was in utter darkness, so thick it made her eyes hurt. There was nothing for it but to take her pistol off her belt and turn on the flashlight slung under the barrel.

The batteries would last for an hour. The oxygen tank at her belt that slapped against her leg with every step wouldn’t even last that long. If she ran out of light deep in the stygian tunnels—well, if she was alive in an hour, she decided, she could worry about that then.

The half-?deads were still behind her, picking their way down the tunnel. One of them must have seen her light come on. She could hear them crowing in jubilation. She knew what her next move had to be. When they caught up with her—three of them, moving slowly, their hands filthy where they ran them along the wall to find their way—they probably expected her to shine her light in their faces. Instead she had flicked it off, and lay in wait behind a rock twice her size. When they had just passed her—she could hear every step they took—she jumped up from behind and flicked the light back on. Barely able to see, she crushed one half-?dead’s head with a fist-?sized rock from the floor, then, before it even collapsed, she threw the rock like a softball and hit another one in the stomach. It dropped the short-?handled pickaxe it had been carrying. The third one came running at her and she smashed its left kneecap with her baton. Another half-?dead had been following the three of them at a distance. She nearly missed it, but when it heard the screams of its fellows it came hurrying toward them. It had a breaker bar, a three-?foot-?long iron rod with a sharp pointed end, which it swung at her like a sword. Caxton barely got her baton up in time. The half-?dead’s bar weighed a lot more than the baton, and its momentum carried it through hard enough to smack her shoulder and leave it tingling and numb. At least she had partially deflected the blow—it had been aimed for her head. The half-?dead pressed its ruined face close to hers, its broken teeth glinting in the light of her flashlight. It pushed her back toward the wall, sliding its bar down across her baton, trying to get the weapon free. She smashed at the side of its head with the butt of her pistol, sending long shadows and fragments of light flashing around the walls, lighting up the streaky coal beds that shone like diamond dust. Eventually its grip on the breaker bar let up and the half-?dead fell away from her, its skull fractured and its eyes rolling up into their sockets. She shoved it away in disgust, then grabbed at her shoulder and squeezed. There wasn’t much pain there, which was a bad sign. She was sure if she took the time to look under her sleeve she would see nasty bruises already forming. She didn’t have the time for that. She picked up the breaker bar with her good hand and walked over to where the other half-?deads lay. One had its face caved in and wasn’t moving. The other two were whimpering and trying to crawl away.