Read Online End Day by James Axler - Free Book Online Page A

as possible.”
    Vee led them down to the end of the platform, then jumped down onto the rail bed. “Stay away from that,” she said, pointing to the left, at the third rail.
    Ryan had already noticed the red warning sign that read Danger High Voltage. The lights in the tunnel were dim and widely spaced; the air rank and humid. A thick coating of black grime covered its walls and coated the clustered pipes and cables that ran along them.
    They had trotted maybe fifty yards when Vee stopped at a barely visible hatch-style door on the right. It was unmarked. With a grunt, she leaned on the locking lever, and the door cracked open. “This is a tunnel-maintenance access and emergency exit,” she said. “From here we can get to the street.”
    She leaned through the doorway, then a weak light came on inside.
    â€œHow do you know so much about this place?” Mildred asked as they filed into the cramped space. “Do you work here or something?”
    â€œNo, I just pick up odd, interesting tidbits in my job,” she said.
    A very steep stairway led up, so steep there were support rails along both walls. When they shut and dogged the hatch door, it muffled the racket from the station. They ascended in silence, except for the sounds of their breathing.
    Ryan could feel the strain in his thighs as he put one boot in front of another. They had done a lot of full-out running and fighting in a very short time span. Not to mention the aftereffects of the chron jump. J.B.’s comment about their sacrifice being all for nothing tried to go around and around in his head, but he shut it off.
    The game wasn’t over yet, not by a long shot.
    Not while they still drew breath.
    At the top of the stairs, they found a long, darkened hallway with broad puddles of standing water on the floor. Steam pipes and conduit hung low above them; what looked like banks of generators and transformers, and their controlling circuit panels, stood behind locked cages of heavy wire. When Vee opened the exit door to an alley, the grinding din was back—wag horns, the steady growl of engines, sirens, now mixed with unintelligible bullhorn commands. They moved quickly between high, windowless brick walls, around a hard right corner to the mouth. The street leading to the subway entrance was now blocked off with police and emergency vehicles and flashing lights. Helicopters zigzagged across the sky overhead. No one had time to marvel at what was going on outside.
    â€œOur position appears untenable,” Doc observed.
    â€œThen we go back to her place,” Ricky said, nodding in Vee’s direction. “We get in the machine and go back home to Deathlands.”
    â€œThat isn’t possible,” Vee told him. “What you see happening on this street is what’s happening on my block. That’s the response when people get killed and cars get blown up. The whole area will have been cordoned off by armed police with helicopter overflights. No way in or out.”
    â€œWe shouldn’t have chased Magus onto the street,” J.B. opined. “We should have just followed at a distance until we had a chance to chill him, with no witnesses. Now we’re as dead as everyone else in this city. That apartment is our only way out.”
    â€œEven if we could get back into her building, J.B.,” Ryan said, “even if we figured out the mat-trans’s controls and somehow made it to Deathlands, I think we’d arrive at the same redoubt with enforcers clawing at the door.”
    â€œSo,” Krysty said, “if the city sec men don’t kill us, the enforcers at the other end of the chron jump will. And if we survive here until the twentieth, the nuke strikes will take us out anyway.”
    â€œThat doesn’t leave many options,” Mildred stated.
    â€œExcept to have one hell of a send-off,” Krysty said.
    â€œThe mistake was all mine,” Ryan told them. “I