Gathering Dark, Candice Fox [inspirational books for students .TXT] 📗

but lost my balance and was dragged along with the big man toward the firefight.

“Come on, bitch! Let’s go.”

A sound like a harsh whisper against my ear. I realized with horrifying clarity that a bullet had just whizzed mere inches past my head. Lemon was firing back. The tunnel kinked slightly, a gentle corner, the only thing that had stopped Lemon from seeing our weak little light before he heard us. I listened to the firing ahead as it slowed to a stop.

We waited, grouped together. My ears were ringing. Fred let his hand slide from the flashlight for just a second, illuminating the tunnel ahead. There was no one there. Lemon had been alone, heading back toward the ladder we had come down. I caught a glimpse of him flopped on his side on the ground a few yards away. I ran to him and crouched down, put my hands on his chest. Though I couldn’t see well enough, I felt blood running so fast and wet and hot it had to be fatal. My hands were soaked with it immediately, my shoes squelching in it on the muddy floor. Lemon coughed blood. I remembered the kind young man who had helped me after my faked car accident and forgot the cruelty the same man had apparently displayed against the old fellow in the hoarder house.

“It’s all right,” I lied to the dying man. “It’s all right.”

“Dayly?” Lemon gasped. He scanned the faces above me. “Is she—”

“She’s not with us,” I said. “We thought she was with you.” I knew he was dying fast. The breaths were becoming shallower. “Do you know where she is? Is she safe?”

He died under my hands. It was a sound I recognized, even in the blackness.

A humming, uneven and distant, pushed gently through the chaos in my mind.

“What is that?” I asked. No one answered. I was pulled away from Lemon. We walked. In time the humming became a grinding sound. A jackhammer. In a hundred yards, a glow began to form. I realized it was coming from another smashed hole in the side of the sewer tunnel. Fred stopped by the edge of the hole and pocketed his flashlight, gently leaned forward to see what was ahead.

The grinding sound was deafening now. He held up a finger in the dim light. One guy.

He waved us forward. We go now.

Mike gripped my arm. I followed Ada and Fred into the second dirt tunnel. Ahead of us, the wide body of Ramirez stood with his legs braced, grinding downward at the end of the tunnel into a piece of rock the size of a basketball. He was wearing ear muffs, trying to split the rock with the machine. As we approached, Ramirez set down the jackhammer and bent to pick up the broken stone. The sound of the device was still echoing around us as Fred and Ada raised their weapons.

“Watch out!” I screamed. Ramirez turned at the last second, a bullet slamming into the dirt wall ahead of him, tagging the hem of his jeans harmlessly. In a single movement he twisted, grabbed a gun from his waistband, and fired at us. There was no cover. Mike and I fell together against the dirt wall. He shoved against me, fired over my head. I rolled away and grabbed the barbecue fork from my ankle, rolled back and stabbed Mike’s chest as hard as I could.

I hit pay dirt. The fork popped through the fabric, sank hard into the flesh of his right pectoral, only an inch or so deep. I thought it was enough, the shock of it, the sudden pain that made him drop his gun. I turned and scrambled to my feet, tripped, gained traction and ran the way we had come.

I fell against the side of the tunnel when bullets started shunting into the concrete wall of the sewer pipe ahead of me. They weren’t firing at Ramirez anymore. They were firing at me.

I froze, the barbecue fork still in my hand, and turned to look at them.

Ramirez was on the ground, clutching his belly. Fred dragged the man to the side of the tunnel and dumped him in a heap. Ada beckoned me, the black eye of her gun locked on my face. Panting with exhaustion and terror, I walked back toward my enemies. I couldn’t meet Mike’s eyes. He rubbed the double holes under the wet fabric of his shirt as though he was soothing a bruise.

Ada took a shovel from a collection on the ground and threw it at my feet.

“Dig,” she said.

JESSICA

Her knees hurt. Policing was a killer for bad knees, hips, shoulders—all those pieces of equipment that needed to be strapped on. Heavy belts and flak jackets. Jessica thought she must have scraped her knee on a rock on the road when she rolled away as the car rocketed toward Tasik. There was blood on her shins, her elbows, her hands, dirt on her clothes. Jessica knew that if she stopped a car coming up the mountain before she got within range of a cell tower, she would have some explaining to do.

She rounded a bend and the canyon opened up before her. Los Angeles dazzled far below, a scattering of gold lights.

She was higher up the mountain than she realized. Below her, the road snaked between the canyons, empty. She sighed and marched on.

BLAIR

The earth was hard. Pale, crumbling rock, the occasional pocket of blessed sand that sopped to the ground at our feet. I worked shoulder to shoulder with Fred, Mike jamming his shovel in low to clear the dirt from around our feet while preserving the injury I had given him. Fred and I cleared the split basketball-sized rock together, our hands touching as we shifted it upward, the absurd intimacy of foes forced together.

Now and then I turned to look at Ada, who had the gun trained on Ramirez. The man lay panting and clutching his stomach,