CHAPTER ELEVEN

The sounds coming from above were almost as surreal as my ability to navigate the stairwell in the pitch black darkness, Sapphire took the lead and it almost seemed to me that she knew where she was going.
I don’t know why, but the scent of her jaded perfume sent my thoughts away from this hell hole.
It wasn’t long before dust and debris began to fall all around us, and the screaming metallic sound of the Jackhammer in pursuit was terrifying. I did feel that the air around us was becoming more stifled the deeper into the ground that we travelled. The musty smell that I filled my senses back in the loading bay seemed like a summer breeze compared to what I was inhaling now. The decaying odour was broken by the gentle pulling of my fellow countrywoman.
“Do you know where we’re going” the musty air escaping tickled the back of my throat and triggered fits of coughing that slowed my progress into the dreary depths.
“Yes” was the blunt answer that I received, the total stranger leading me panted between breaths. I tripped over something, it could have been rubble from the attacks from above ground, or a dead body lying in the small stairwell. Trying not to think about it and concentrating hard on my footing, I followed her obligingly.
The only reason that I was trusting her at this moment in time was that an 800-pound metallic killing machine was working out the quickest way to descend a concrete stairwell.
The two options were simple, down and around the stairs like we were doing, or through the stairs themselves. From the crashing sounds echoing around me I decided that it was the latter of the two options it was going for.
“Well?” I managed so cough out into her ear, my left foot almost gunning into an uncontrollable slide down the dusty steps.
"Running... Down... Stairs, idiot."
Right then, we exploded out into a wide corridor, two candles burned in the distance some twenty yards away with two more by the doorway that we just entered. The sound of running water filled my senses, the thirst stretching the back of my gullet was almost as dry as the stone floor that I was not walking on, still holding Sapphires hand.
“Where are we?” The question was short lived as the sound of metal ground to a halt some twenty feet behind me. The Jackhammer’s hydraulics sounded wheezy in the dim candlelight.
We stood watching it, me pulling the pistol that Sapphire had reconstructed and handed back to me. I was about to raise it before she placed a warm hand on my wrist.
“It’s pointless” Sapphire said calmly as I’d seen her since I met her, that’s not saying a lot, seeing as I met her about five minutes ago.
I followed her gaze towards the Jackhammer, where it was crouched, looking in our direction. There was a whirring noise that came to my ears as it lay there staring at us, and the dripping of fluid from one of its legs. It appeared to be ‘injured’ if such a creation could suffer it. Rightly enough, it wasn’t making any attempts to move for the two of us, we could only stand and stare as the two candles flickered wildly at the draft coming from the water behind us.
Water?
I spun on my heels, forgetting about the injured left one that quickly reminded me of its affliction. The shooting pain made me fall to my knees, the reflexes almost causing me to pull the trigger of the pistol.
There was a river running right to left of me, perhaps five yards away. The light of the candles behind me caused an enlarged monstrous shadow to be cast against the far wall about ten more yards from it, but it wasn’t what caught my eye. There was a doorway on the other side but the river was about two and a half yards across, possibly more. With my foot being injured and not knowing how nimble my newly acquired ally was, the distance was greater than I thought achievable. The river was flowing rapidly enough to know that it would sweep anyone weak enough to the dark depths beyond, and god knew what was further downstream. That is, if the river was deep enough at all. But the noise that it made in this small enclosure made me think that it was pretty deep. Deep enough not to risk it.
The temptation to drink from the running liquid was alarming, before I knew what was happening I had a cup of water in my hand, moving it quickly toward my parched lips.
“NO!!!”
The scream from behind me was echoing loudly in the square room, but the noise didn’t deter the hand from moving closer to my face.
The foot did…
From out of nowhere, BLAM! I fell backwards with my knees still bent, the angle of them made me contort to my left as I felt the ligaments stretch almost to breaking point. Luckily, I survived the acrobatics, albeit with a sore hand, and even more painful upper lip that was swelling by the second.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted at her, almost pointing my pistol at her head before quickly gaining control of myself.
“You drink that, and you may as well put a bullet in your head, idiot!”
I looked at her as if she were insane or speaking in some alien language. After a few moments reflection on the statement my eyes widened.
Jesus…
The water running through here had to be from a natural resource because of its flow, and it didn’t smell like sewer water. It must have run from a natural resource above ground.
Contaminated ground.
The radioactive fallout was saturating the Earths surface for almost every square mile, it was the main reason I was so surprised to see any living animals down here. On the flipside of that, I hoped that I wouldn’t run into any more or at least not in such close quarters.
“Thank you, “ I murmured with a stiffening upper lip, “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Yeah you do, trust me, I’ve been there and almost did it myself. You don’t realise how thirsty you are until you hit water. You didn’t drink any of the sludge upstairs did you??”
Now there was a question, as I plummeted into the darkened depths of that pool where the alligators lived did I actually take a mouthful of that slime in? I didn’t think so, at least my body would be telling me otherwise by now.
“No, luckily I didn’t”
“Luckily for both of us, don’t think I could make it alone any longer down here.”
In the dim light of this underground aqueduct, we both paused for a moment on that statement, then something occurred to us both simultaneously. Turning, we looked back in the direction of the fallen Jackhammer, but not directly at the scrap metal. Something else caught our eye in the scene in front of us, hardly giving it a moments thought until this very second, we looked at each other, our hearts dropping into our stomachs as the realisation came about.
Who lit the candles?