Tunnels 02, Deeper

could make any more noise?"
    She saw the dead Limiter and gave a single approving nod. Then she looked over at the boys. Still twitchy from the adrenaline, Chester jigged from foot to foot, while Will and Cal sat comatose.
    She scanned the glass columns.
    "The White Necks are even closer than I thought."
    "You can say that again," Will muttered.
    She turned to Chester, who was now dabbing at his nose, trying to stem the flow of blood from it. She smiled. "You shot him. Nice work."
    "Um... I... no..." Chester stammered. "I couldn't get..."
    "Cal did it," Will cut in.
    "But you had the rifle?" she said to Chester, looking perplexed and a little disappointed. Chester didn't offer any further explanation, glowering sullenly at Will. Then Elliott twisted to Will and Cal. "Get up. We have to go now... right now. Anyone hurt?"
    "My jaw... my nose..." Chester began.
    "Cal needs a second. Look at him," Will interrupted urgently, leaning back so Elliott had a view of his brother's dazed, out-of-focus eyes.
    "Not a chance. Not after all that racket," she said.
    "Can't he--?" Will begged.
    "No," she growled. "Listen!"
    They did as she said, and heard a baying in the distance.
    "Stalkers!" Will exclaimed, the hairs on the back of his bruised neck standing up.
    "Yes, a pack of them," Elliott nodded. She looked at the boys with a small smile. "There's another reason I think now would be a good time to hit the road," she said.
    "What's that?" Will asked quickly.
    "I've lit a fuse in the cache. The whole arsenal's going to blow sky-high in sixty seconds."
    This last piece of information galvanized Cal into action. Elliott scooped up the Limiter's rifle as they thundered past his body, and then they ran like they'd never run before. Will stayed close to Cal, who started off the best he could on the glass shards with his weak leg. But once Bartleby rejoined the crew, the boy raced along as fast as the rest of them.
    Like firecrackers going off, there was a volley of gunfire. A hail of lead peppered the columns around them, the impacts sometimes sending plate-sized fragments gyrating into the air. Will instinctively bent his head and began to slow down.
    "No! Keep going!" Elliott yelled.
    Bullets ricocheted and whined from the mirror surfaces as they fled. Will felt tugs on his pants legs, but couldn't stop to see the cause.
    "Get ready!" Elliott shouted above the barrage.
    It came.
    The explosion was huge. A blinding light scorched around them, sent in a thousand different directions b the reflective surfaces, and then, as soon as the reverberations of the initial blast subsided, a tremendous crashing began.
    Broken columns came toppling down, colliding one into the other, like dominoes in a chain reaction. A goliath section of fractured column slammed into the ground directly behind them, sending up a dust storm of powdered glass that sparkled like black diamonds in their lights. It clogged their throats and stung their eyes. The ground itself rocked with each impact.
    The bedlam and crashing continued unabated, and before any of them knew it they were speeding after Elliott into a tunnel. Will jerked his head around just in time to see a column collapse against the entrance and completely seal it off. They were submerged in a miasma of glass sleet for several hundred feet. Then the air cleared and Elliott brought them to an abrupt halt.
    "We have to go, we have to go," Chester urged her.
    "No, we have a few minutes' grace. They can't follow us in here," she said, picking fragments of glass from her face. "Drink some water and get your breath back." After taking a large swig from her canteen to rinse out her mouth, she swallowed several gulps and then passed it around. "Anyone hurt?" she asked as she set about checking each of them over in turn.
    Chester couldn't breathe through his nose, but Elliott told him she didn't think it was broken. His mouth was also badly swollen and split at the corner where the Limiter had crooked it, and his head tender from the catalog of punches. As Elliott used her lantern to examine him, he saw his knuckles were red and bruised, and his forearms soaked through with blood. She examined them carefully.
    "It's all right. It's not yours," she said after a quick inspection.
    "The Limiter?" Chester said, giving her a wide-eyed look and shivering as he recalled how he'd pummeled the soldier with the chunk of obsidian. "That's terrible... how could I have done that... done that to another person?" he