Free Red Widow (Vivian Xu, Book 1) by Nathan Wilson Page A

parents had done to warrant this invasion of her
home. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut and wake up in bed,
swaddled in blankets. Instead, she meekly nodded and scurried out
of the van. Halfway down the street, Vivian lurched to a
stop. The masked men were gathered around
the sewer entrance, looking peculiarly at her and her parents. She
jumped as gunfire blistered along the intersection. More police
units had already swamped the streets to crush the onslaught of
militants.
    “ Hurry!” Hands suddenly
shunted her down the ladder, and her father scooped her up in his
arms.
    She could hear bullets spitting on the
pavement as forces clashed on the streets above. A day and a night
later, they crawled through the sewers to emerge onto the other
side of the conflict.
    Now if only she could escape from
Grigorshire.
    Half of the room above had sunken
through the ceiling, dangling in a web of asbestos crystals and
tendrils. A metal bed frame floated in that mesh.
    Through that hole in the ceiling,
fragile sunlight dabbed the floor.
    Emotionally exhausted, Vivian toppled
onto the mattress. The moment she landed, she bounced off with a
startled cry.
    “ What the…?” Massaging her
tailbone, Vivian stripped away the sheets only to find a grimy
mattress stretched on a metal frame. Whatever stung her had been
concealed inside. Kneeling down, she eyed a tear in the mattress.
Despite her basest instincts, she reached inside until her
fingertips brushed up against something cold and
metallic.
    Vivian swiftly plunged her
arm inside up to her elbow. No… it can’t
be…
    Ammunition and handguns came spilling
out with every thrust of her hand. A waterfall of rounds flowed
between her fingers, pooling around her and slipping through the
cracks in the floorboards. Something remained stuck deeper in the
mattress, but it refused to slip free. Rabid with curiosity, Vivian
dug through the stuffing. An AK-47 jerked out of the mesh and
clattered onto the floor.
    “ It’s no wonder the tenant
is dead. How could he sleep on this bed without setting off a
gun?”
    As Vivian crouched among the
insurrectionist’s treasures, a metallic noise exploded behind
her.
    She spun toward the hall,
half-expecting a corpse to be standing in the doorway, skewered by
the bladed trap, staring lifelessly at her with glassy eyes. The
blades hadn’t budged and the doorway remained empty. The guttural
sound had come from the hall. Vivian almost seized one of the guns,
but they likely wouldn’t save her. Twelve years of neglect could
render any gun useless. Her fingers curled around the crowbar from
the playground.
    Vivian peered down the hallway and saw
it instantly. One of the doors gaped ajar. A set of hooked blades
swung lazily in the entrance, sunlight glancing off its reddened
edges. An obscure shadow bled out of that room onto the
carpet.
    Her eyes rounded in awe.
    “ Shit!” She dashed through
the hall, peeping over her shoulder to make sure nothing came
slithering out of the room. She scurried down the stairs as that
heightened sense of danger grew keener. Barreling through the
cobwebs, she almost ran head on into a wall. Where there should
have been an exit to the streets, there was only a sparse lobby
enclosed by four walls without a single window. Vivian would be
forced to backtrack to the eerie hall.
    “ Maybe not,” she whispered.
With another fleeting glance at the top of the stairs, she
approached the wall. It almost escaped her attention, but there was
clearly a fissure someone tried to paint over. Beyond that crack,
she spied a wooden surface worn with lines of age. Vivian scanned
the lobby in search of another passage to the room
beyond.
    Better yet, she might find an
alternative route to the streets.
    The crowbar felt slick in her grasp as
she hefted it over her shoulder. One defiant blow after the other
chipped away at the drywall. At last, she hooked the crowbar in the
gap and tugged. She grunted as the wall came loose, spilling