He caught up to her quickly and tried to put all that nonsense out of his head. It was just the two of them again now, and his thoughts quickly returned to protecting her. They were almost to Polis, and he had to make sure at the very least that she spoke to Vera in person before he left her side.
Chapter 14: Anomaly
Sergio walked quickly after Marco through the hallways, trying to keep pace. It was as if she was deliberately trying to keep her distance from him as every time he thought he had finally caught up to her speed, she slipped ahead again and around the next corner.
“What is the ‘true mission’ you mentioned to Nikolai?” Sergio dared, if only to slow her down a small with conversation, though he was genuinely curious.
“I really don’t want to talk about it.” She said after a sigh, taking her pistol out of its holster and clearing every side-passage as they moved along the long winding hall.
“Is it just about protecting your station? Or something else?” Sergio was nearly at a jog as he began to climb the winding concrete stairwell she had already started ascending. It was littered with debris and garbage and the red emergency lamps flickered weakly.
“Don’t you know how it is in the Subway by now? You can’t trust anyone.” Her tone of voice was unusually hushed and she had finally slowed down somewhat.
Her words stung, and although Sergio tried not to take them personally, the pain quickly turned into confusion and then irritation.
“But you trusted me before. At Madrid, on the surface, and at Kuznetsky Most…” he waited a moment, but received no reply, so he decided to be more direct. “Do you not trust me now?”
“I don’t think now is a good time, Sergio.” She said hurriedly, gripping her weapon stiffly in both hands and slowing her steps at last as they reached the top of the stairs.
“But—” Sergio began with an annoyed look but was halted by a firm barrier against his chest. Did she just hold him back with her own strength? Or was it just that he hadn’t been expecting the sudden obstacle? He looked at her indignantly, but she didn’t look back at him. “What?”
“Shh!” Marco hissed at him and dropped to a crouch.
Sergio only then sensed what she had been trying to warn him of. Just outside of the stairwell exit was a veritable battlefield, or rather, the graveyard of one. The air was dank and heavy with the metallic and pungent scent of blood and rotting flesh, it was nauseating to say the least. Marco covered her nose and mouth with the sleeve of her left hand, slowly edging forward to look more closely at one of the decaying corpses and poking at it with the barrel of her gun.
Quickly reaching for his flashlight, he illuminated the ground just in front of her. With only a small degree of delay, he followed her hand with the beam as she reached reluctantly to overturn the carcass of an unknown being. It looked to him upon first glance to be a different mutation of the generic tunnel lurkers, only with reddened skin and patches of course black hair. Dropping the body, she dared to investigate the pool of blood beside it. Dipping in a finger, she withdrew quickly and held it up for Sergio to see.
“It’s cold, but not dry.” She said in as low a voice as she could without whispering. “It’s been a few hours, maybe.”
“But what happened here? Who did this?” Sergio puzzled aloud. He looked behind them at the staircase and didn’t notice any trace of blood or any creatures living there, but there were innumerable doorways in the halls that led to god-knows where. They had gone so far along the passage that it wasn’t possible that the Red Line had been involved. If the Reds had known about such a thing, wouldn’t they have made sure that the door they had come through was sealed off?
“Did anyone at Polis ever mention anything?” She looked back at him, holding up a spent cartridge casing for him to see. It was clearly a battle against humans.
He shook his head solemnly. He had been occupied at D6 ever since its discovery and he hadn’t heard any mention of an infested passage near here. After realizing he’d been quiet for a minute too long, he decided to aim the light as far down the corridor as he could. This wasn’t a train tunnel, but he could see several offshoots and doors. Who knew how many endless connecting passages there were or where they led to. Either this was an area in the territory of the Reds and had nothing to do with Polis or maybe the Reds had entered this passage trying to reach Polis, just the same as them, and found these creatures living inside. But then that wouldn’t explain why it seemed that the defenders had been standing at the other end of the hallway. Could another Hunter have come through here?
In any case it looked to be clear and quiet now, and they needed to keep going. Whoever had fought these strange creatures had definitely killed all of them, and had most likely retreated to wherever they’d come from or had gone on in whichever direction they were originally headed. He could only hope, as they decided to enter the hallway, that the defenders hadn’t blocked the tunnel ahead. It wasn’t going to be easy getting around to Polis any other way, so that left this rotten passage as their only road.
Marco kept her pistol drawn, she’d turned on her own light and scanned along the left wall as they crept forward, pausing at each alcove and doorway to make sure it was clear or closed off. Each of them had to also be aware of their footing, as the blood was slippery and the corpses lay strewn at random every few feet.
“W-what is that? Do you hear that? It sounds like…” Marco whispered, almost tripping over a mutant carcass and quickly trying to correct herself. Her sudden change in behavior was unusual, and that alone put Sergio on edge.
He held himself steady, straining his ears for whatever sound she mentioned, but he didn’t hear anything. Turning his attention back to her, he knew something was very wrong; she was moving slower and slower, and it had suddenly started to feel cold.
“Sergio, I f-feel…” Her voice waned, and for a moment her lips kept moving as if she were still speaking, but no sound came out. She looked back at him with a blank expression, her head bobbing as she looked as if she had become dizzy, a thin stream of blood dripped from her nose.
He was barely swift enough to catch her before she buckled at the knees and fell sideways; he stuck his leg out to balance himself but then crumpled to the floor anyway. With her body now completely limp, it was a bit of a struggle to shift her into his arms and untangle his legs from underneath her – luckily he hadn’t sat in any blood. He leaned his ear down to her mouth and listened for breath, he didn’t want to think that some invisible entity of this passage had entered her head… no, it couldn’t be like what had happened to Bourbon. His heart raced, her breathing was so barely noticeable that he pressed two fingers to her neck in search of a pulse.
The soft and steady thumping against his fingertips was a welcome relief. He took in a deep breath and sighed, clutching her a bit tighter. He still wasn’t able to ascertain exactly what had happened, she mentioned hearing something, but all he could hear was the ambient air in the hallway and maybe the distant hum of the emergency lights in the stairwell behind them. He took up her flashlight from the floor next to them and used it to examine the immediate area. On the ceiling there was a patchy white fungus, but there weren’t any wires, holes, or pipes that might explain the interference. If it was something like the broken pipe in the tunnel near Prospekt Mira, or the gasses at Polyanka, then wouldn’t he too be affected somehow?