Chapter 84 - Subterranean Asylum
"Out, through the freight elevator shaft!" Marco commanded, grabbing my hand.
We sprinted down the concrete hallway as the steel door behind us superheated, glowing dull red before buckling inward with a deafening blast of released kinetic pressure. We dove through an open service hatch leading to the subterranean utility conduits that ran beneath the pier, dropping eight feet into the murky, knee-deep sludge of the Chicago freight tunnel system.
The smell of damp earth, ozone, and ancient coal dust filled my lungs. The historic Chicago freight tunnels—hundreds of miles of narrow, concrete-lined tubes built at the turn of the century—stretched out into pitch-black infinity beneath the darkened metropolis.
"They won't be able to establish a carrier line down here," Marco whispered, his voice echoing along the curving walls. "The limestone bedrock acts as natural shielding. The signal degrades beneath forty feet."
As if to prove his words, the furious blue glow in his chest began to subside, shifting back to its calm, rhythmic ticking. Marco leaned his back against the curved concrete wall, sliding down into the cold water, utterly spent.
I knelt beside him, clicking on a low-intensity penlight from my kit. His chest was covered in second-degree thermal burns where the dampening coil had discharged.
"You're in ventricular overload," I diagnosed, pulling out a sterile roll of gauze and a pre-filled syringe of lidocaine. "If your core spikes like that again, your heart will fibrillate before the machine can compensate."
"Laura, you should have left me on the capsule," he said quietly, his eyes dark with a grief that went deeper than physical pain. "Look around you. My family built this nightmare. Samuel, Vance... they built a cage around the entire city, and my very blood is the key that wound the clock."
"Your father built the lock, Marco," I countered, cleaning the scorched edges of his wound with firm, practiced hands. "And you gave me the scalpel that broke it. Now hold still. This is going to sting."
As I injected the local anesthetic around his sternum, a soft, distinct mechanical click echoed from the darkness of the tunnel ahead of us.
I froze, dousing the light instantly.
From the dark, a gruff, aged voice spoke in Italian, accompanied by the distinct sound of a shotgun slide racking back:
May you like
"Only two people alive know the emergency service codes to these freight lines. One is dead in a private mausoleum, and the other should be at the bottom of the trench. Identify yourselves, or I put an iron slug through your chest."
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