October Rain by Morgan Dylan J
Author:Morgan, Dylan J. [Morgan, Dylan J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DJM Entertainment
Published: 2016-02-28T18:30:00+00:00
SEVEN
Darkness enveloped me in a heavy cocoon.
I’d been walking deep into the mines for about ten minutes. Every tick of the seconds on my wrist readout seemed to echo off the walls, reminding me how quickly time evaporated. Hawkes’ map now resided in the back pocket of my trousers along with a wad of cash, but with no lighting this deep into the planet’s surface I had no means of reading it.
Fortunately I’d been blessed with a good memory, and so far had navigated the tunnels without mistake.
Sweat ran in rivulets down my body, gluing my clothing to my skin. The immense volcanic outcrop of Olympus Mons towered over the city; its heated vents of molten rock weaved beneath the city’s foundations like blood-filled arteries. The tunnel walls radiated heat into the confined space, and each time my hand or shoulder brushed against the rock, sweat sizzled and I flinched with pain. The mineshafts were high enough to stand in, but they weren’t wide. If lighting had been laid through the tunnels to guide the convicts, it’d long been removed. I knew which direction to take, but had to palm my way along the cavern wall to find the right course.
The mineshafts forked at regular intervals, and each new tunnel would take the prospective digger to a different area beneath the city. As I recall, not much ice had ever been found down here so close to the giant thermal volcano. Probably, the excavations were just a way of occupying the convicts until they succumbed to the extreme underground conditions.
I understood why Pierce chose to hide down here, in a place no one dared to venture, in a horrific world within a lawless city. Of course there was always the possibility he’d been killed a long time ago by the creature lurking in this gruesome underworld. A faint aroma hung in the tunnel, unlike anything I’d ever smelled before. It could have been seeping from the warm rock, the odor coming from volcanic activity deeper in the substratum. My sweat masked most of the smell, the musky odor of perspiration prevalent in the air. Three times I banged my head on a low point in the ceiling; once I’d taken the wrong fork and had to double back. I considered the possibility that the map may have been telling lies, and Pierce wouldn’t be found on the planet at all, let alone so far beneath Mars’s exterior. I listened to the tunnel ahead but heard nothing unusual. That didn’t calm my nerves, however; I wasn’t alone.
I smelled it before I heard it.
An overpowering stench wafted up the tunnel through the abyss, fanned by rising thermal air. The atmosphere grew thick with the reek of rotting flesh. Some of the government workers I’d shared a beer with over the years had told me about the smell that sometimes seeped from the mine entrance. Most blamed the odor on dead inmates who’d rotted quickly in the heat. Others were convinced the fetid aroma came from something alive in the mines.
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