Read Online The Prisoner by Carlos J. Cortes - Free Book Online Page A

four hundred yards.” A pause. “These are the only means of access to this section.”
    “How many more to go?”
    “Five.”
    Laurel trained her flashlight into the thick darkness ahead and started jogging. Her feet weighed a ton. The oily fluid at the bottom of the tube had soaked the rags, and her legs were beginning to ache. They traveled through a barrage ofsounds—wet thuds mixing with labored huffs and the weird squelching noise of Lukas’s shoes. The air was cool and had a slight tang of cold cream.
    “What makes the fluid oily?” Laurel shouted over her shoulder without breaking stride as she cleared another utility hole.
    “An emulsion of lanolin and nutrients,” Lukas replied.
    “How long is this tube?”
    “Three miles,” Lukas’s voice echoed from the rear. “It runs parallel to the city sewer up to a treatment plant, where they remove lanolin and other fatty substances before it empties into the city network.”
    Laurel’s thighs were on fire, and each stride strained her muscles painfully. She couldn’t take this pounding much longer. Behind her, Raul huffed in rhythm with his feet. Then another noise, finer and stringy, joined the thuds.
    “Stop!” Lukas yelled.
    The splashing stopped, but the strange noise increased.
    “Run! Pig!”
    Pig? You bastard!
    Lukas overtook them from the rear along the left-hand side, climbing halfway up the tube and sprinting ahead. Even in underpants and fancy sneakers, the bastard could run.
    “Pig!” he yelled.
    Laurel ground her teeth and barreled forward in pursuit.
    Fifty yards ahead, Lukas’s light stopped. He jumped upward and his feet thrashed in midair to disappear through the lip of the utility hole and into the vertical shaft.
    “Hurry,” Raul grunted, just behind her. “Climb up and I’ll pass Russo to you.”
    When they were underneath the access hole, Laurel sprang to grab a rung with both hands. She was about to swing a leg up to get some purchase on the tube wall when a large hand smashed into her buttocks and propelled her upward.
    “Grab his collar, damn it!”
    The strange grinding noise filled the air like a rain of nails. In a daze, Laurel threaded her arm through an upper rung and lowered her other hand to grip Russo’s neck ring. Suddenly an overpowering weight jerked Laurel’s arm downward,and she was holding on to the full weight of Russo with one hand. She gritted her teeth as the ring started to slip from her fingers. Raul darted past her and over, squeezing her against the rungs. Laurel’s arm trembled under the unbearable slipping weight, and then the load disappeared in a flash when Raul hoisted Russo into the crowded tube. The sound reached a crescendo as it grew into a scratching shriek. The tube vibrated. A screech like millions of fingernails on a blackboard exploded in a flurry of sparkles as something thundered by beneath their feet.
    They huddled together, their combined lamps highlighting patches of reddened flesh intertwined with the green net and a large running shoe capped by a skinny ankle.
    “What the fuck was that?” Laurel croaked.
    “A pig.” Lukas’s voice had thinned. “That’s what the pipeline people call them: a self-powered robot used to keep the tunnel free of excrescences. We can get down now. It’s gone.”
    “Gone?”
    “For now.” Lukas’s voice dropped.
    After a few seconds of squirming, sliding past one another, and lugging the cocoon containing Russo, they descended from their hiding place. The scratching noise had faded in the distance, almost a memory.
    Laurel blinked and panned her light over the tunnel’s curved walls; they shone with a myriad of sparkles. She reached a hand to the wall. The surface had a slight bite, like a dull nail file. If a similar machine had cleaned the tank’s drains, the rough surface would have skinned them alive. She glanced at the rags on her feet, already threadbare. Nobody had brushed the welds; the machine did. The void in her stomach