Tunnels 04, Closer

downstairs, trying to find Martha to tell her he was intending to take a nap in one of the beds, when he wandered into a sitting room. He stopped abruptly as he noticed a telephone on the side.
    This was it. The opportunity he'd been hoping for.
    He could call Drake again, or even his mother and father. He thought about his parents. He had to let them know he was alive and well -- he hadn't spoken to them for months, not since he and Will had gone into the tunnel beneath the Burrows' house on that fateful night.
    With bated breath, Chester picked up the receiver and listened to the dialing tone. He could barely contain his excitement as he began to dial his home number. He couldn't wait to speak to his mother and father. "Hi Dad, hi Mum," he rehearsed quietly, praying they wouldn't be out or, worse than that, hadn't moved house.
    No! he reprimanded himself.
    He'd only managed to dial a few digits when the phone fell from his hand, and he was knocked out cold by a blow to the back of his head.

5

    Drake's eyes flicked open, and in an instant he'd rolled off the bed and was on his feet.
    He was in a darkened room -- it was completely unfamiliar. Much as he was accustomed to waking up somewhere new each morning, he couldn't for the life of him work out how he'd come to be there. The atmosphere in the room was clean and cool, and he picked up the rumble of air conditioning.
    As his cranium throbbed with pain, he clutched his hand to his forehead and staggered back toward the bed. It was at this point that he realized that although he was still fully dressed, he wasn't wearing any socks or shoes. And under the soles of his feet there was something that felt like luxuriously thick carpet.
    "Jesus -- where am I?"
    It was a far cry from any of the vacant properties or lock ups he usually slept in.
    Groping blindly beside the bed, he collided with a side table and knocked a lamp to the floor. He knelt down to locate the lamp and fumbled for the switch to turn it on. As the light caught his face, he groaned and blinked.
    Will and Elliott would have been astonished by his appearance -- this wasn't the man they would have recognized. With a week's worth of beard, his face was puffy and there were dark bruises under his tired eyes. And his usually short-trimmed hair had been allowed to grow, and was flattened on one side of his head where he'd slept on it.
    With the lamp still in his hand, he found the edge of the bed and slumped onto it. He ran his tongue around the inside of his dry mouth, tasting a sour residue of alcohol.
    "Vodka?" he croaked, almost gagging. "What did I do?" he answered himself with another question, as he tried to piece together the previous evening. He had a vague recollection of walking into a bar, possibly in Soho, with a mission to drink the place dry. That made sense. His head felt fit to explode.
    But the pain his hangover was causing him was nothing compared to the emptiness that filled him, the emptiness that was his life.
    For the first time in a very long time, he was completely at a loss. He had no direction, no plan he should be working on. Years ago he had been recruited by a clandestine organization, the purpose of which was to fight a race called the Styx who lurked below London in a subterranean city called the Colony. But the Styx's influence spread much further than the Colony, there evil intent pervading Topsoil society as if the tendrils of a pernicious fungus were growing up through the soil. For centuries the Styx had been plotting to overturn order in the Topsoil world, to weaken it sufficiently so that they could one day take over the reins.
    And Drake's last initiative against them had ended in crashing and utter defeat. By pretending that he had the only phial of their lethal Dominion virus, the idea had been to lure one of the most important Styx out into the open and grab him. The handover of the virus was to take place on Highfield Common with Will's mother, Mrs. Burrows, fronting it up to give it credibility. But far from being taken in by the scheme, the Styx had been one step ahead, and had incapacitated Drake, his right-hand man, Leatherman, and the rest of his hired guns with some sort of subsonic device.
    Drake sincerely doubted if Leatherman or any of the others had made it through -- the Styx were brutal and unforgiving when dealing with those that would dare to oppose them. And Mrs. Burrows had also been lost in the operation -- Drake could only presume that she was