Lost Contact (The Bridge Sequence Book One), Nathan Hystad [primary phonics books .TXT] 📗

the burning cigarette spun from his hand, hissing in a puddle of water. Then he was gone.

The back of the church was nearly as well-maintained as the front, and Juliette moved with grace for a secondary building. The doors were high and metallic, gates with a chain and padlock wrapped around the handles.

“How do we get inside?” Marcus asked as he tested the gate. The chains rattled loudly.

Juliette shook her head in annoyance and slid bolt cutters from her pink backpack. She winked at him as the padlock fell into her palm. “Leave it to the pros.”

And we were in. “What is this place?”

“Lots of the old churches had crypts hundreds of years ago. Don’t mind the bodies,” she said with a grin, and we began to descend wide stone stairs.

The air cooled the lower we went, and the floor leveled out. The walls were dark gray, and the main room was lined with a series of carved stone pillars, reaching up to a domed ceiling. Juliette didn’t leave us time to explore as she hurried across the floor, ignoring the heavy blocks that would be stone coffins. Some of them had markings, carvings at the fronts; others had effigies sculpted on top of their casket lids.

“This place is creepy,” Marcus said softly, making our guide laugh.

“If this scares you, you might want to stay above ground,” she said. The room ended, and we walked through an arched doorway, which took us down another flight of steps. We repeated this process a few more times, and I noticed how Marcus stayed in the middle of the pack as we went.

Tripp and I held flashlights, and Juliette kept hers on as she finally stopped. “This is where the crypt exits into the tunnels. There are a handful of skeletons, but we’ll pass a major burial site eventually. Should be able to cross over to your location shortly after.”

“Skeletons,” Marcus whispered.

We exited the relative safety of the church grounds, and I instantly felt a chill. The ground was dirt, the walls narrow and confining. I touched the passageway, remembering the images I’d seen of the catacombs, with skulls and bones rising from the floor to ceiling. This was a different area, clearly, because it was nothing but stone and dirt.

“Which way?” Tripp asked, shining his flashlight left, then right.

Juliette walked past him, leading right. “Follow me.”

Veronica caught my arm, and I waited while Marcus and Tripp continued. “Do you think we’ll find it?”

“The Token?”

She nodded.

“Yes, I do,” I told her.

“Not this one. I mean the sixth,” she whispered.

The rest of our group was gaining distance, and I didn’t like the idea of lagging behind in the catacombs. “Time will tell, but I think we have a shot.”

“How? If we don’t have the coordinates…”

“It seems to me Hunter has some serious detection systems in place. He found one of the Tokens from some movie producer’s online photos. If the last Token is out there, he’ll make sure we track it.” My flashlight flickered, and I banged it against my palm. The beam shone brighter.

I tried to be positive about it. “Either way, you get paid, right?”

“Will it matter if these Objects are coming to destroy us?” Veronica asked.

“I guess you’re right.” I didn’t want to think about that, not with so much riding on what happened in the next hour or two.

It was musky, and I found myself struggling to make a clean inhale. The corridors changed, the ground growing more even, the wall texture smoothing as we rounded a bend, and I saw our first skull. It was on the floor, fallen from its position. Marcus crouched near it, poking his finger into the eye socket. He fell back as a rat the size of a raccoon emerged from the jaw, scurrying across our path.

“What the hell!” Marcus shouted. “As if a skull wasn’t bad enough.” He bounded up, dusting his pants off. There were dozens more, the walls stacked high with various bones. “Whoever did this had to have long-lasting psychological effects.”

“They didn’t have a choice. The city cemeteries were too full, and storms were threatening the city’s structure. The only way to ensure Paris didn’t sink into the earth was to support it and bring the skeletal remains underground.” Juliette’s voice was haunting. Her eyes seemed yellow in this light, almost like a wolf caught staring from the forest.

I gawked at the remains, trying to imagine that these had once been people like me. They’d had lives, and families. They’d loved and felt pain. Now they were bricks in a wall.

“It’s not far,” Juliette said.

Tripp grunted, taking the lead in front of the rest of us. The corridors narrowed again, and we had to duck repeatedly, a handful of bones scattered here and there.

“Is this public?” I asked our guide.

“Not here. There’s another tunnel this connects to. Right now, we’re running parallel with it until it joins in a type of hub. Only we’re lower, so it’s easy to evade any patrols.”

“Do they really patrol it?” Tripp reached into his jacket, and for the first time tonight, I wondered if he was packing. We had gone back to the hotel after the nightclub, and he’d spent a few minutes in the suite.

“Mostly investigate reports. Don’t worry. This corridor isn’t on their list,” she said with confidence.

Her steps were light, and her pace had picked up. Did she want to get this over with, or was it something else? I checked the GPS and saw we were half a mile away from the Token’s predicted location. We passed a half-dozen doorways along this confined corridor, and Juliette slowed at each, almost as if she was expecting a skeleton to pop out and scare her.

“Does anyone ever go missing?” Marcus asked, breaking the silence.

“All the time,” Juliette said. “Why else do you think people call the place the gates to hell?”

“I dunno. Maybe because of the millions of skeletons,” Marcus muttered.

I held my GPS and saw we were shifting in the opposite