Page 144 of A Breath of Life
“What if this is the only way?”
“The police are coming. We’ll hide.”
“We can fight. I’m feeling scrappy. We can take them.” He feigned stabbing the door.
“They have fucking guns, and we have knives. Scrappy or not, you will lose.”
“Costa disarmed the Bishop. We don’t know that anyone else has a—”
Someone shot at the door, and Tallus yelped. “Retreat. They have fucking guns.”
We raced down the stairs and along the hallway in the other direction, past other mechanically locked doors, past the room where I’d been held, and into the unfiltered dark beyond the reach of the sconces.
Behind us, more gunfire sounded before the raised voices of several men told me they had breached the door and were hustling down the stairs.
“Shit,” Tallus squeaked. “They’re after us.”
I didn’t get the sense they were. I suspected the encroaching sirens had alerted them to an imminent police raid, and they needed to flee.
If that was true, then there was an escape route somewhere in the basement. Running in the dark with no sense of direction proved dangerous. I collided with a wall before realizing we had met a corner. A dozen yards down another length of hallway, the floor vanished beneath my foot. Without warning, I tumbled into the unknown.
My stomach lurched like I’d crested a particularly nasty hill on a roller coaster and plummeted down the other side. Visions of an endless stairwell jolted my brain. This was it. I was falling to my death. A concrete slab awaited me at the bottom of this drop, and I would surely crack my skull in two.
I braced for impact.
The fall was short-lived, however, and I landed with a jarring crash, tumbled forward to my hands and knees, skinning my palms, and knocking my head against a wooden obstruction so hard I saw stars.
In the next moment, Tallus landed on top of me with anoof. “Jesus fucking Christ. Are we dead?”
“Almost.” I groaned and got to my feet, helping him stand. Blindly reaching out, my fingers searched the wooden surface, discovering a door. I located the knob, expecting it to be locked.
It wasn’t. When I opened it, a waft of cool, damp air laced with a rich, earthy aroma hit me in the face. The space beyond could have been anything, and I was reluctant to step forward despite the uproar behind us.
I fumbled for the Bishop’s phone. Since it was locked, it wouldn’t allow me access to the flashlight app. I had to continuously hit the power button to bring up the password screen.
It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to see another set of stairs beyond the door. Leading down.
“Oh, fuck me,” Tallus said. “We aren’t going down there.”
Behind us, the men seemed to be occupied. Perhaps they had come to destroy evidence of crimes. Either way, we couldn’t remain motionless. They weren’t on our tail yet, but I suspected it was a matter of time before they headed this way.
“We are. Come on. We have to go fast. Don’t fall.”
The stairwell beyond the door led into an underground where concrete walls hugged a narrow passage leading fuck knew where. The walls seeped moisture, and when I touched them for balance and guidance, I found the furry slime consistent with moss and mold. The floor beneath our feet was packed earth.
A sudden vision assaulted my brain, and I remembered the feeling under my shoes on the first night I’d been taken captive. We’d gone this way. The smell. The cold. It was all right there in my memory.
As though confirming my suspicions, the men’s voices drew closer. “Hurry up,” one of them said to a companion.
We went as fast as was feasible down an invisible corridor. Tallus stuck close to my side, fingers tightly fisted around my bicep.
An undetermined distance from the bottom of the stairs, we met another flight, this one going up. I pushed Tallus to go ahead of me. Our pursuers were catching up. Before we ascended, the bright beam of a flashlight appeared at the far end of the passage we’d traversed not a moment ago.
Tallus hustled with more energy than he usually exhibited for anything cardio—particularly stairs. Despite our new office’s location on the second floor of the building, he insisted on taking the elevator. Every. Single. Time.
It might have been adrenaline or fear, but I was more apt to believe it was the drugs racing through his bloodstream. He was amped and getting worse by the minute. I needed to get him to safety before he did something reckless.
Going up in the dark was far easier than going down for some reason. We reached the top and were greeted with a similar door, only this one had a steel plate and padlock threaded through a loop, keeping it shut.
