Free Wiped by Nicola Claire Page B

wondered if he did in fact love me recently, what with the over-protective way he’d been behaving. But there was no doubt now. Love, so deep, so consuming, shone back at me. Lighting up the dark tunnel as if it blazed with the power of a million lights. Dear God, no matter what, he loved me.
    And I’d done this.
    “This is not how we go,” he said, stepping closer, his lips brushing against the shell of my ear. “This is not the end.”
    “Then what is it?”
    He huffed out a breath of air. I would have said it was amused, if not for the fucked up situation.
    “They want us? Then they’re just gonna have to fight to get to us.” He lifted his laser gun as if to punctuate that point.
    Fighting words from a man who had spent the better part of his life fighting. And it would all end in a dark underground tunnel in a forgotten city that was meant to have been our hope.
    Pain like I had never experienced coursed through me, centring in my heart. I lifted a numbed hand to rub at my chest, but nothing alleviated it.
    “It’s OK,” Trent repeated and then with one last kiss to my temple, turned to face what was coming.
    It took so long my fingers had started to cramp around the laser gun’s grip. I flexed them as sweat ran over my cheek and down my neck. My heart pounded against my ribs. My lips felt dry and cracked. The air stuck to everything with a soot filled stench that clogged our lungs. I couldn’t fathom how anyone could live down here.
    I couldn’t fathom that this would be where it ended.
    In that second before they came I thought of Wánměi. I thought of the difference in the dense air between here and there. I thought of the clean rain and the heavily scented flowers. The lush greens and the vibrant colours. Wánměi was life. Lunnon was death.
    How had we ever thought it held the answers?
    Someone shuffled on their feet, getting better footing on the uneven rail ties. I could hear the laboured breathing of someone else. No one spoke. What was there to say? With our backs to a wall of debris, and our eyes trained for any sign of movement ahead, we waited.
    And then a rumble sounded out.
    For a second or two I couldn’t decipher what it was. A collapsing tunnel? Some sort of weapon Calvin and failed to see?
    And then recognition flared, along with several synapses. My mind whirring, my heart thumping, my emotions in a tumult of hope and despair.
    “Is that coming towards us?” Cardinal Beck asked. He’d crouched down as soon as the sound had started, just like the rest of his team of men. Ready, but not really prepared.
    “The tracks were damaged farther back,” a Cardinal advised, his voice full of misguided hope.
    “Won’t stop it if it’s going fast enough,” Alan offered. He’d recognised the sound too, it seemed.
    “Nirbhay?” I whispered, then felt him step up to my side.
    “Not… long,” he said, in relatively good Anglisc. “Wait,” he added, making the moment stretch.
    “Well, that covers the whole understanding us part,” Trent offered, his eyes toward the end of the tunnel, where we’d come from, and where the sound of the oncoming train roared from now.
    “What are we waiting for?” a Cardinal said, fear coating every syllable.
    “Steady,” Beck ordered, not moving a muscle, laser gun raised, but what he thought he could do against a fifty ton train engine with that, I couldn’t guess.
    The walls started to rattle, bits of broken brick and dust raining down on the gravel floor. A howling wind blew down the tunnel towards us; superheated, heavy, grim. The sound became deafening, as if the train was on top of us, but still we could see no movement ahead. And then mortar coated us, as a couple of tunnel wall bricks clattered to the ground, and the vibration started sending shockwaves up our shins.
    Within a second or two it passed. The walls slowing down in their rattle and shake, the floor undulating more gently, the dust a light coating not a full-on powder shower.