Page 105 of Sinner's Salvation

“I’m with Army Intelligence,” he shouted.

The cops looked at each other and put their hands down.

Evan approached them. “I’m here to do a little recon for Homeland.”

“How can we help?” one of the cops asked.

“Keep on doing what you’re doing. I’m not here to interrupt your operation, but to support it.”

The cops nodded. “We can do that.”

Evan nodded back, then headed toward the platform. He looked down the subway tunnel in both directions, then made a show of examining the tracks from the platform, leaning over the edge as if looking for something.

He jumped down onto the tracks and noted that a couple of the cops were watching him. He continued looking around, as if searching for something specific. He used a grid search pattern for large open areas, like they teach at most police academies.

After a few minutes, the cops and security guards returned to what they were doing before he arrived. Good.

Evan moved down the tracks, neither rushing nor changing his search pattern. He slipped quietly into the tunnel. Out of the light. Into the dark.

There were some light sources in the tunnel, low-level lighting spaced out, leaving deep pockets of shadows between them. Enough light to see by. He had a couple of flashlights in his gear, but his eyes had adjusted well enough to go without one.

He wasn’t looking for something small. He was looking for Anna.

The tunnel did something funky to sound. It bounced around, echoed, and reverberated in some places. It turned whispers into shouts, and shouts into a painful garbled static.

He heard a long-drawn-out scream that raised the hairs on his arms.

More cries, swearing, and shouts coming from in front of him. No gunshots, but there was too much stress in the voices he could hear. Things weren’t going well for someone.

Those Italian bastards had no interest in playing by the rules. They didn’t care who saw them do impossible things. It made them extremely dangerous. It made them difficult to predict.

Anna, on the other hand, was easier to anticipate. She would do whatever she had to, to stop them.

Including sacrificing herself.

She was a lot like her son in many ways. The same protective drive, the same willingness to sacrifice herself if that was the only option left. The same devotion to friends and family.

It was time someone showed her that devotion.

As the noise got louder, Evan slowed down to hug the tunnel wall. The weak lighting threw huge shadows, and he wanted to be undetected until after he decided on what his course of action was. If he was spotted before he could make that decision, he’d be at a disadvantage.

A couple of gunshots ricocheted off the walls.

A man bellowed something in Italian and there was a short, panicked scream.

The quick patter of footsteps was the only thing he heard for a few seconds. Then there was a dull thud.

“You two have lost all your ability to reason,” Anna said, not in a shout, but loud enough that her words echoed back to him. “There is no way this situation will end well for either of you.”

“I’m going to enjoy killing you, Anna,” a male voice said, full of malice and perverse joy. One of the Italians. “You and your whole family have held us back for far too long. When you’re dead, we will take control and change everything. We won’t have to hide anymore, and we can infect as many people as we want to increase our population.”

“We will become,” a slightly different male voice said. Must be the other brother. “The dominant species on the planet.”

Anna made a disgusted grunt. “If you’re going to give a villain monologue, could you at least make it somewhat original?” she asked. “Your bullshit is boring, as the Americans say.”

Evan heard a scuffle, the sound of quick footsteps on concrete, then metal against metal.

One of the men cried out. “You fucking bitch.”

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