The first stope was even better than the one they’d already rigged. The cored rock room was larger, the pillar supports under much more stress. Rubble and drifts of scree were scattered along the floor. The pockmarked pillars looked moth-eaten.

“Jeez,” Luke muttered. “Looks like all it’d take is a good push.” “You do this room. Use every fuse. Concentrate on the pillars in the middle. Then you wait right here. Don’t move until I come back.” At the entrance, he turned back. “If I don’t say your name, you light up whoever comes in here and blow their heads off.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Luke said. “Good luck.”

Wish people would stop saying that. He took the tunnel at a run, spotted another X and a down arrow. After clattering down the stairs, he doglegged left, trotted another length of corridor—and then saw the room yawning to his right.

This chamber was very different: not only a forest of spindly stone pillars but a huge ball, rotten from the inside with stress fractures radiating out in a sphere. The walls were a warren of fissures and nearly horizontal seams in gray rock. He studied the seams, saw how the cracks tracked and split the rock. This was like the rotting timber of a neglected basement beneath a house of solid stone. Take out the timber, core out the walls, and the room above—hell, the whole house—would fall.

He got busy, first fitting two charges, one to each of two pillars. Then he climbed along the walls, digging his boots into the crevices and crannies and using his fingertips to hoist himself into hollowed-out seams where miners had scraped rock with chisel and hammers. He set charges as far back as he could maneuver, using the points of his toes to push himself into the seams. Jagged stone grabbed and scoured his back and stomach, bit into his legs. He worked feverishly: squirming into a seam, backing out, flipping onto his back at another, and fixing a charge to rock that was just inches from his nose.

He was on his sixth seam when a new idea occurred to him. Setting off the delay devices to each and every charge would take too long.

But if I only have to set off one . . .

He wriggled out and squatted on the rock; pulled out four, five, and then six lengths of time fuse. Thought about it. Then he went to work with his knife and the duct tape, knitting the lengths together until they radiated in a huge spiderweb. Thirty feet, fortyfive seconds a foot: almost twenty-five minutes. No need for a time delay. With all this extra fuse, this room might actually go last of all, but the explosion would be the most powerful and concentrated. If Weller was right, all that separated this room from the Chuckies were sixty feet of lousy rock. The floor would simply give way.

Might even punch through to the flooded levels, and if there are pockets of hydrogen sulfide, they’ll explode. He ripped off another strip of duct tape with his teeth, then scooped up the rock he’d used to keep the fuse from curling back. If they ignite, then— He heard a sudden loud scrape of rock against rock as someone kicked aside stone. At the noise, Tom turned, a little annoyed. Hadn’t he just told Luke not to move? To stay put? God, if he’d been just a little bit jumpier, he might’ve shot the kid.

But that was when Tom registered two things at once.

For one thing, he couldn’t have shot Luke, because he’d been stupid enough to leave his Uzi propped next to his pack.

And for another, he had visitors.

The girl had probably been in a lot of trouble before she turned. Maybe she’d been into drugs or a gang. Or maybe it was abuse. The scar slashing across her face could have been from a knife.

The jittery boy’s outfit reminded him of a ninja’s. A bandolier of M430 grenades sagged around the kid’s scrawny shoulders. Without a launcher, the grenades wouldn’t arm and weren’t a problem.

Scarface’s shotgun, though . . .

76

Alex had only gotten good and hammered once, and all alone: the very first time she’d ventured with her friends, Glock and Jack, into her aunt’s basement. There was nothing fun about her being drunk—no sense of relaxation or euphoria or even the giggles— just a sickening swoosh in her head: not spinning so much as falling backward, in place, and being sucked into very deep water. Closing her eyes only made things five thousand times worse, the blackness behind her lids going round and round and round. She didn’t get sick or weepy, but the next time she got cozy with the Glock, she took it easy with that bottle of Jack.

That feeling—of tumbling into a black whirlpool—was this. God, no, why now? She gritted her teeth, fighting against the vertiginous swirl. Of course, she knew why. He was thinking about her, planning what he would do. Worse, the movie in his mind was already running, the images flickering in a blistering, bright montage: Alex, flailing, as Leopard pinned her to the rocks, clamped a hand around her throat to keep her from screaming while the other hand ripped and tore away her—

Stop. She slapped her right cheek, a stinging blow that jerked out a breath and cut tears. For an instant, the images broke apart the way a pond’s perfect reflection of sky and trees fractures the instant you shatter the surface with a rock. Come on, come on, stay with it . . . She slapped herself a second and then a third time, much, much harder, enough that the sharp crack echoed. Something seemed to snap in her head; a jagged flash of white sliced through that deadening swirl, and that awful feeling of falling evaporated as her mind cleared.

She was panting. Leopard’s aroma was hot and heavy and cloying, like boiled honey laced with sewage, and he must have just eaten because his breath was foul, thick with the greasy stink of fat and wet copper. The yellow spray of his light was a dusty glow growing firmer and more coherent by the second. She scrambled back like a crab, stumbling over Daniel in her rush. She heard Daniel’s breathing change, and she had a split second when she thought maybe now would be a good time to scream, while she still had the chance. Stupid. No one would hear or help, and she was too deep anyway. The only person who gave a damn about Leopard was Spider, who must be busy somewhere. Maybe filleting steaks for the chow line.

The spear of light swept into the drift like a searchlight and tacked her into place. Squinting against the sudden brilliance, she put up a hand to shield her eyes but couldn’t see anything. The light left her for an instant and found Daniel, who barely reacted. His eyelids twitched and his head rolled; he swallowed. But that was all. No help there. No help anywhere. The light slid back and held on to her for a good five seconds. Now that she knew what to expect, she braced herself against another mental slip, but the monster was either playing possum or she really might be able to control this after all. Anyway, nothing happened. If she lived through the next ten minutes, she might even figure out why it had happened at all.

Click.

Full dark. All she saw were purple afterimages of Leopard’s head and shoulders and the outlines of his Uzi. Could she get the gun? Her ears tingled. She heard a slight shush, a whisper of cloth and leather, and then the grind of metal against rock. Putting down his gun. His boots crunched closer. Rock squealed.

She got her feet tucked under in a crouch. The geometry of the tunnel was simple. Daniel was on her right; Leopard was ahead and a little to her left—because he was right-handed, he’d worn the Uzi in a cross-carry that could be shrugged off his right shoulder. So his weapon was on her left. One gun down. Leopard normally wore that Glock tucked in his waistband. Had she seen it earlier in the day? She couldn’t remember.

She felt him move closer. His smell was huge now, a boiling black fog. His breath was ragged and sour with excitement.

Click. Light, hot and bright, shining directly into her eyes. The brightness was so intense it felt like needles, and she could feel the tears spilling down her cheeks.

Leopard was only ten feet away, no more, and he had a decision to make. If he stayed true to the brief glimpse she’d seen of what he wanted, then he needed both hands. Hard to take a struggling girl one-handed. So, either he’d turn off the light, or put it down to free up his hands. She bet he put it down. From what she’d seen, the Changed didn’t absolutely need the light, but she thought he’d brought it so she would understand just what was going to happen, or maybe he wanted her to not only feel what he would do to her but see it, too. He might also leave the light on out of habit, too. In his previous life, Leopard was probably the kind of guy who liked to watch.

Then Leopard surprised her. Sidestepping to his right, his eyes on her the whole time, he wedged the flashlight between two timber supports at waist level. Smart. Keep the light on her and behind him. But when he sidled away, her gaze clicked to his waist and she got a good look because Leopard wasn’t wearing a jacket. After all, the mine was relatively warm, and he figured on working up a swe—

All of a sudden, he was there, so fast she had no time to spring from her crouch or knee his balls or jam her thumbs into his eyes. One minute he was ten feet away and the next he was slamming her into the rock. Her head bounced against stone. Pain detonated in her skull, and the air bolted from her lungs.

Breathlessly, she bucked and flailed as he rode her: his weight on her chest, his hands scrabbling to grab her arms. She swiped with her left hand and felt her nails, jagged and cracked, rake his face. He jerked away with a grunt of pain, and in the light, she saw sudden rails of blood. His grip loosened, and then she was rearing up, cocking her right fist, aiming for his Adam’s apple.

His hand shot out. Deflecting the punch, he grabbed her wrist, then jammed his knee into her bad left shoulder, grinding the bone into the rocks. She screamed. He hit her, a fast open slap and much harder than she had managed on her own. A bomb of pain exploded just beneath her left eye. Her mind blanked, and her arms loosened up. In a kind of haze, she saw him winding up to hit her again—

From somewhere beyond the tunnel came a low boom, faint but unmistakable: a shotgun.

Leopard stiffened, and she felt his weight shift. Felt the pressure against her shoulder ease as he craned over his shoulder.

Grab it! Her left hand pistoned, her fingers found hard polymer, and then she was yanking the Glock free. She jammed the muzzle into Leopard’s stomach, right at his navel.