The pump house was right where Sam said. It was a concrete box on Wall Road, with a green water department door at the back.
It was ten past eleven on Thursday night. The trams had stopped for the night, so he'd walked. The key hung on its cord around his neck, under his shirt, and the whole way he'd kept one hand on it.
He'd woken up in his chair at 8:04 on Tuesday morning. The Medical Service gave you seventy-two hours to report to a clinic. His ran out at eight tomorrow morning.
Nine hours left.
'Nine hours! Nine hours to walk into a clinic and show a nurse my teeth, and I'm out here instead.'
He'd never been this close to the wall at night.
The East Wall went straight up from the far side of the road, gray, taller than his apartment building. A metal walkway ran along the top, with the nine red lights on it.
From his window they always looked like a neat little line. Up close, each light sat in its own metal cage, and the rain shone where the light hit it.
Two men were walking the top, forty meters over his head. Last week he wouldn't have known they were there. Tonight he could hear them arguing about whose turn it was to buy the coffee. He could hear the leather of one man's holster creak with every step.
A truck rolled along the patrol road with its headlights off. Somebody had pasted a PROTECT THE LINE poster on the side of the pump house. The rain had peeled one corner down, so it said PROTECT THE.
His phone buzzed.
--Sam--
Got my mother. She's home. Grumpy but fine.
You at the hatch?
Second light. Remember.
--Alex--
At the door now.
--Sam--
Good. Lock up after.
Alex put the phone away and pulled the cord over his head. The door opened on the second try.
***
Inside, a pump the size of a car was running, loud and steady.
Behind it, set into the floor, was a steel plate with a ring in it. Someone had sprayed a big yellow 9 on it. It looked too heavy for one man to lift.
Alex bent down, took the ring in one hand and braced for the weight.
It came up like a trash can lid.
He stood there holding a steel hatch at arm's length. It had to weigh forty kilos, more than all six of Tuesday's grocery bags put together, and his arm wasn't even shaking. He held it there and counted to ten, just to see. At ten it still felt like nothing.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
He grinned.
'Forty kilos... one hand!'
The smell came up the ladder, and he stopped grinning.
He set the hatch down without a sound.
Alex had told Sam he hated the tunnels. What he really hated was the smell, wet concrete and old water. It was the smell of the basement at the Residence, where the staff used to take all the kids for the siren drills. They'd sit in rows on the cold floor in the dark and wait, and nobody ever told them how long.
He'd expected that smell. But now it was ten times stronger.
He could smell the water, and the rot in it. Iron from the ladder. Oil. And under all of that, faint and a long way off, meat from outside the wall. The same smell as the marrow hare on Sam's hot plate.
His mouth started to water before his feet were even on the ladder.
'One packet. Sam hasn't counted this cooler yet. One packet, and maybe I can walk into a clinic tomorrow without staring at the nurse's neck.'
He climbed down.
***
The ladder had twenty-two steps.
At the bottom, the tunnel was round and taller than he'd expected. He could stand up straight with room to spare. A channel of water ran down the middle under a steel grate, with a concrete walkway on each side.
Every forty meters there was a work light in a wire cage. The first one hummed right above his head. Each light made its own circle of yellow on the walkway, and the stretches between them were dim. Past the first, he could see the second, and past that a third, where the tunnel bent out of sight.
He walked to the second light, counting his steps without meaning to. Fifty-one. Gamer habit. You always count.
The ledge was there, on the left, just like Sam said. A shelf cut into the wall at about chest height.
And the cooler was on it.
It was the same plain blue cooler as the one in the back room at the shop. It was lying on its side. The lid was on the walkway by his foot, in two pieces.
'Uh... that's not how you leave a cooler.'
He picked it up and checked inside. A little water, red with blood. A piece of butcher's plastic, chewed open. Four long grooves cut into the bottom, right through the blue plastic to the white foam underneath.
'Empty. It's totally empty!'
Alex stood there with it in his hands.
He'd been counting on this cooler all day. He'd thought about it at the bench all afternoon, with Sam's bandaged thumb across the shop. He'd thought about it the whole way down Wall Road. One packet. Maybe two.
Now there was nothing. He had not been this hungry all week.
'What chews through a cooler? Rats leave tiny little nibbles, not grooves you could lay a whole finger in... Something got here first. Is it still down here?'
He put it back on the ledge. Sam had said to leave the envelope, so he dug it out of his jacket and set it down right next to the cooler. The man had made his delivery. It wasn't the man's fault the delivery got eaten.
The smell wasn't coming from the cooler.
It was coming from further along the tunnel. Past the second light.
"You don't go past the second light," Sam had said. "There's nothing down there you want."
Down there, the tunnel ran under the wall. That part was for Hunters.
And the meat was down there. He could smell it from here.
He checked his phone. 11:24. Not quite nine hours.
'If I go to the clinic like this, they'll know in a minute. I can't even stand next to Sam without staring at his neck. And they want me to sit still for a nurse?'
'Just to the edge of the light. Just to look.'
He took one step past the second light.
And another.
Something made a noise down by the bend, under the third light.
Scratching, like a branch against a window.
Alex held his breath. The scratching stopped.
He breathed out. It started again.
***
He knew what he should do. He should go back up the ladder.
He took one step back toward the ladder.
That was when it came out of the darkness, into the light of the third lamp.
It was low. Its back came up past his knee, and its body was long. It was about the size of a big dog.
For one second, Alex thought it really was a dog. A stray that had gotten down here somehow.
"Hey, buddy. You lost?" he said, before he could stop himself.
It came closer, and it moved wrong.
Its legs folded in too many places. It flowed over the grate without lifting its body. Its head swung from side to side, as if it were sniffing the walls.
Alex knew that walk.
He'd seen it nine hundred times on his screen in I.Zombie. In the game they were called culvert hounds. They lived in the starting zone, and they were the first thing that killed every new player. His own first one had killed him eleven times in a row. He'd had a spear back then, and a health bar, and somewhere safe to respawn. He'd written half the hound's wiki page himself.
This one was thirty meters away, and he had no health bar.
It made a low, wet clicking sound.
He couldn't move. He counted the joints in its front leg, because that was all his brain could do.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
The hound saw him. Or smelled him.
Its head stopped swinging.
Its jaw opened sideways.
And it came.