Nightmare journey

short way. Corruption lay on all sides-things crawling in mutated fungus, tainted mosses underfoot, mutated-rats, insects, scampering before and behind…”
    “Nevertheless,” the General said, still staring upward into the cool, green leaves, his face a broad blandness that belied the fury boiling just below the surface, “you will submit to thorough genetic testing as soon as we have returned to the fortress. You will abide by whatever recommendations the genetic specialists make, based on whatever they discover about your gene patterns. Judging by your unmanly performance here this morning, I suspect the tests shall prove anything but negative. Dismissed.”
    To his guards, who fenced him with ready weapons to ensure his safety, the General said, “Now we have only one team of men in the drains, and we can no longer count on trapping the fugitives below ground. Since these are desperate creatures, neither can we rely on their proceeding rationally. Logic, of course, never has been a normal tool of tainted beings. With this in mind I believe we should widen our search pattern and not expect them, necessarily, to show up somewhere in the town itself. They may try to reach the forests bordering the Chen Valley Blight.'' He shifted in his seat and looked away from the oak. “See that our men are better dispersed so that paths between the town and the forest are patrolled.”
    One of the guards, who doubled as the General's chief messenger, moved away from the small park in the square to carry out his master's orders.
    7
    MERKA SHANLY (female: Pure) and her partner, Kane Grayson (male: Pure)-dressed identically in blue-white cloaks, blue boots and metal-studded black fabric belts; both carrying deadly prewar weapons; both with flashlights held before them-came out of the mouth of the drainage tunnel into a wide stone-walled chamber that was the hub of the storm drains, six spokes radiating from it. A low but vaulted ceiling was the home of web-building spiders and curious, green and yellow fungi that appeared to defy the laws of gravity by growing down and then, gradually, horizontal, until they laced together, forming living nets for no clear purpose other than- inexplicably-that of rivaling the delicate work of the spiders. The walls were patched with iridescent moss, with black moss and with a deep purple slime that writhed subtly whenever their lamps illuminated it. In the far corners, searching out holes in the decaying mortar, roaches and centipedes of unholy size skittered out of sight, so large and weighty that the tapping of their many feet was audible. A six-legged creature that might have been descended from a pure rat turned a baleful yellow-eyed stare at them, then hopped clumsily out of sight into the mouth of one of the other tunnels. A stone promenade, perhaps six feet wide, connected all the open tunnel mouths, though the center of the room was occupied by a pit, all cobbled in water-worn stone, that dropped straight down, out of sight, ready to carry storm water into the bowels of the earth.
    “What now?” Kane Grayson asked, standing warily in the center of the promenade width, neither too close to the pit, out of which anything might crawl, nor too near the wall, behind which rodents and insects of tainted heritage were certain to be lurking.
    His voice echoed softly from the damp walls.
    “We cannot guess which of the other five ways to take,” Merka said, sweeping the dark, forbidding tunnels with the barrel of her rifle. “I see nothing for us to do now but sit and wait until the espers appear.”
    “If they appear,” he said.
    “Why shouldn't they?”
    “Perhaps the other team got them-Keene and Prider.”
    She said nothing, but set her thin, bloodless lips in a tight line that expressed her reluctance to accept that.
    He said, “Or perhaps there are other collection rooms like this one, dozens of other collection points for the water and, therefore, many other branching tunnels.”
    She said, “Do you want to return to the General now, make a report that we were unsuccessful?”
    He didn't even have to think about that. He looked away from her and said, “We'll wait a bit.”
    “And I suggest that we wait in quiet,” the girl said. “Our echoing voices may carry quite far in these tunnels.”
    They stood together in the center of the walkway with their backs to the tunnel out of which they had come moments earlier, uncertain that even that route was safe but prepared to trust it because it was, at least,