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The next two days blurred into plodding along, one foot in front of the other, in unchanging scenery. The only feature was when the accessway stopped outside a transport terminal and we could switch back to the axial tunnels at a platform. We used the opportunity to stock up on food bricks and water, and to snatch a few hours sleep on the relatively comfortable benches. Other than that, the boredom was terrible. Nobody had spare breath for talking, and when we took breaks there was nothing anybody wanted to talk about. I did notice that Pitr seemed to be walking wherever Alyssa was, rather than with me, but I was too busy keeping my feet moving to spend any time understanding why that bothered me.
The second time we slept there was no station where we could make ourselves comfortable, so we did the best we could on the hard floor of the tunnel. It was barely restful, and we were on our way again less than four hours later. We slept once more before things started to change. The tunnel lighting had been dim, like before, but up ahead it seemed to get even darker. We started to see light panels flickering, and some had been cracked or smashed. Only a quarter were working, and not all of them as bright as they should be.
‘This doesn’t look good,’ said Alyssa. We had slowed to a halt and were looking around. Pitr had taken his pack off to find his torch, and now was playing the beam back and forth. There chips and dints in the walls made them look as though they had been struck by something. Many somethings. Here and there were splashes and smears of something black, or nearly black, with more marks on the floor. Pitr handed the torch to Alyssa and reached out to touch one of the puddles.
‘Don’t,’ I said, loudly, and he stopped with his fingers only centimetres away. He turned his head to look up at me, eyebrows raised. ‘I don’t like the look of it, and we don’t know what it is,’ I finished. Pitr seemed to think for a moment, then nodded and stood up again.
‘So what do we do?’ Alyssa asked.
‘Carry on, I suppose. Best to turn the light out, though.’
‘Right. No point advertising where we are.’
I agreed with her, but then wondered who it was we were both so worried might see us.
We walked on, more slowly now. Before long we came to a series of side tunnels, which the drone told us to ignore, then eventually to a set of platforms. The tracks went no further. We climbed up onto the platform and looked around. The benches were all broken. Some were just bent out of shape, but some had been broken in two. There were more of the black marks. Pitr waved his torch at me, but I shook my head. There was enough light to see what we were doing. More panels were working here, and I guessed it might be something to do with them being higher up.
‘Want to catch some rest on a bench?’ I asked, trying to sound like I was making a joke. Even I heard it fall flat.
‘Yeah, and lets top up our food and water here too,’ Pitr said, voice flat and humourless. ‘Where are we supposed to be going now?’
I prodded the drone and a map popped up bright in front of my eyes. ‘Out of the terminal, then some smaller corridors,’ I said. Pitr grunted and waved me to lead on. I did, but I made sure that Pitr was walking next to me, rather than next to Alyssa.
‘Speaking of food and such, how are we doing?’ I asked, quietly. We both already knew my pack was empty.
‘Two food bricks and most of a bottle of water,’ Pire said quietly. I muttered a curse.
‘I know,’ Pitr said. ‘We’re on a tight ration anyway, so there isn’t much more we can do. Let’s hope we find somewhere a bit more civilised soon.’
I nodded, and Pitr drifted backwards so he was with Alyssa again. I pushed back a feeling of irritation – and hurt - that somehow I was now only worth a couple of minutes conversation.
As soon as we left the terminus, any feeling of annoyance evaporated in a sudden hot flash of fear. It was almost dark. There was more damage to the walls, and more of the black marks smearing everything except the ceiling. Alyssa whispered in my ear and I nearly screamed. I hadn’t heard her creep up beside me.
‘Want me to use the torch?’ she asked.
I hesitated before I answered. ‘No.’
‘Why not? We don’t know there is anybody here.’
‘And we don’t know we’re alone,’ I replied. ‘Why take the chance?’
Alyssa was standing behind me, so I couldn’t see any expression on her face, but I did hear her grunt a reluctant agreement. ‘I think there must have been a fight,’ she said. ‘The dark puddles look like blood.’
‘Some fight,’ said Pitr, who had stepped up close to us. ‘The place is wrecked.’
‘And who was fighting?’ Alyssa asked, almost to herself.
I had run out of answers so I said nothing.
‘How much farther?’ Pitr asked, after a moment. I asked the probe, then frowned and asked the probe again. ‘Well?’ Pitr said, sounding almost snappy.
‘This can’t be right,’ I said. ‘The drone is saying less than four hundred metres.’
‘Seriously?’
I understood Pitr’s surprise. This was not what I had been expecting. I had thought it would be like the area around Noah, all white corridors and crispy clean, and maybe some wise and serious dudes that had been sat there waiting for us to turn up with the timing information. Seems I had been mistaken. The drone led us another 100m along the corridor, then turned us right into a side passage. It was dimmer and we couldn’t see more than about five metres ahead. Then three lumpy shapes began to resolve out of the gloom ahead of us. I felt myself start to shiver. There was something horribly spooky about the shapes.
‘Pitr,’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady. ‘I think we ought to use some light. Now.’
We were huddled together in the middle of the corridor. Pitr took his torch back from Alyssa and turned it on, filtering the beam through his fingers to save it from blinding us and making his hand halo with a pink nimbus. There were three bodies, in various prone postures. Pitr played the torch over the closest one and I shuddered.
The coverall looked like the one I had worn when we had left Noah. It even looked to be in fairly good condition, considering what was inside it. I’m not sure what had happened to the body, but I guessed the huge dent in the skull was probably what killed him, and there was another big pool of black under the head. But what had happened after I couldn’t even guess. It looked like whoever it was had dried out. The skin was pulled taught over the face, and the eyelids had sunk back into the sockets. Some of the hair was still attached to the head in mid-length tufts of a dark colour, but much of it had fallen out onto the floor. The one hand I could see looked like a claw, and I wasn’t sure if it was hooked in agony, or if the skin had pulled the fingers into talons as the flesh dried out.
I found myself backing away from the body in. Pitr’s torch beam swung away from it and I took what felt like the first breath I had drawn for an hour, deep and shuddering.
‘This one is pretty much the same,’ said Pitr, and I turned to find he had picked out the next body with his flashlight.
‘The throat was cut,’ said Alyssa kneeling down by it, ‘like an animal.’
I had to agree with her. The body was propped against the wall in a sitting position, the front of the coverall dark with a pool of dark beneath it. Pitr looked shocked, then nodded. He shone the light along the rest of the corridor, and we saw only one more body.
‘Looks like this is the last of them.’ he said.
The drone told us to take a left after another fifty metres, then it was a straight line for just one hundred metres more and we would be there. The quest would be over and we would be more than a day early. I felt a buzz.
‘Come on, guys. We’re almost there. Just around the next corner.’
We didn’t look at the last body as we passed it by.
I hurried on, the beam from Pitr’s flashlight sweeping back and forth to make sure there was nothing for us to trip over. We turned the corner, and Pitr raised the beam to shine way ahead of us. I guessed, like me, he was eager to see the last door. We all stopped in our tracks.
I took the torch from Pitr and swung the beam from side to side in lazy arcs. Alyssa and Pitr both gasped, and I felt slightly sick. As I worked the beam away from us body after body was picked out. As the beam shone farther, the number of bodies increased.
‘What could have happened here?’ whispered Pitr, then the flashlight began to pick out a wall of bodies forty metres away. ‘Is there a way around?’ he asked.
I passed the torch back to Pitr then talked to the drone, using the display as an excuse to close my eyes and blank out the horror. ‘’Fraid not,’ I said after only a few seconds. ‘We have to go that way.’