Reckoning Point, стр. 75
She has to believe that. There is no other alternative.
All she has now is her inner strength and her hope.
Lev lurches along the tunnel, his movements are not like Elian’s. He is panicked in the darkness, scared that the doctor is only mere metres behind him. Every few yards Lev bounds ahead in long strides, emitting a little shriek at the thought of that rusty old scalpel pointing at his back.
And what is with these fucking tunnels? The walls are slippery with damp, and every now and then the roof seems to plummet, and because Lev seems to have lost all his coordination he smacks into it, hitting his forehead and the bridge of his nose over and over again.
Lev closes his eyes briefly as he remembers the tunnels back home. That’s what this place is like, those old, underground passages where his old friend Niko used to take those people he had come across in the Chernobyl wilderness. For a place that was supposed to be abandoned there were no end of victims for Niko, trespassers, kids who dared each other to go into the exclusion zone, the offspring of those that stayed, old family members who came back to check on their elderly surviving relatives, those that refused to leave. And Lev hadn’t helped those people, no, he had seen a way to make money from it, especially from the babies and kids who fell into Niko’s unfortunate grasp.
Lev slows, passes a hand across his eyes. Is this his payback, his karma? What goes around, and all that.
“I swear to God,” Lev says out loud, “I swear on my very heart and soul, that if you get me out of this, I’ll … I’ll…” he trails off. What can he do? Put things right? Turn back time?
“I’ll never do anything bad again, I swear, I swear.” And with the words now running through his mind, and falling from his lips he uses this mantra to push himself onwards, towards the pier, towards freedom, to a life that he promises a God he doesn’t even believe in that he will live well.
Something beeps and lights up on Erik’s wrist, and Alex looks over at it. It’s some sort of fitness watch, something that Alex has often considered buying himself, but knowing it would be an expensive toy that would be forgotten in a week he had never bothered.
“We’ve gone two miles,” says Erik, and to Alex’s amazement the man sounds like he has been taking a leisurely walk, and not jogging in the awkward manner that they had.
“Where does this end? Does it end? Or are we just looping around underneath the town?” asked Alex, feeling the burn in his throat from the exertion. Painfully he remembers Elian mocking him for his lack of fitness, how long ago that seems, and for some reason it spurs him on. If he loses her because he is unused to exercise … no, there is no ‘if’, he will reach her even if he has a heart attack along the way.
Erik fiddles with his watch, looks up and over at Alex. “We’re heading towards the coast, I’m sure we are.”
“And there’s just one track, I mean, it doesn’t split off–” And just as he speaks the words, even before he has finished his sentence, he can see by the torch on his phone that just in front of them it forks off into two tunnels.
They slow to a halt.
There is a long moment of silence, the only sound Alex’s heavy breathing. Erik says what Alex is pretty sure both of them are thinking.
“Shall we split up?”
It makes sense, it would be infuriating if they both went down one tunnel only to come to a dead end. Too much wasted time, that time was one thing they didn’t have.
“Yep,” says Alex, moving to the entrance in front of him.
“You got your service weapon?” asks Erik.
Alex hesitates. Now isn’t the best time to tell Erik that he is not actually a member of the police force back in London, like he’d led him to believe.
“No matter, take this,” Erik responds as he pulls another revolver out of the back of his belt and hands it along to Alex.
Alex takes it. Yes, Erik could get into all sorts of trouble if it comes out that he gave his gun to what was, essentially, more or less a stranger. But the time for explaining and worrying will come later. Elian is the now, and she is all that matters.
Erik glances at his own phone. “No service down here,” he says grimly, and shoves it in his pocket.
There had been no signal in the basement either, and none of them had wanted to waste time going upstairs to call for back up.
“We’ll be out soon,” says Alex forcefully. “In the meantime …” he lets his words fade away into the tunnels.
In the meantime, what? We’ll hope and pray we don’t come across the doctor and find he is armed himself? We’ll hope that Lev doesn’t pop up and mistake us for the enemy and shoot us or stab us? We’ll hope the roof doesn’t cave in before we get the job done, the bad guys locked up and the innocent ones are safe.
Alex takes a deep breath, a lot was riding on hope.
“All right, you’ve got my number for when we get out.” Erik leans over, claps Alex on the arm. “Good luck, man.”
“You too, pal,” says Alex, already turning away, already stepping into