Tunnels 05 - Spiral

trying the vehicles to find one that was unlocked when a man wearing a pinstripe suit appeared. The man went straight to a large four-by-four, and just as he was stowing two briefcases in its trunk, the Colonel knocked him out cold. Swapping the police jacket for the unconscious man’s, the Colonel then heaved his limp body in beside his briefcases and slammed the trunk shut.
    Although he had only driven left-hand-drive cars before, the Colonel had no difficulty in maneuvering the vehicle up the ramp and through the streets. As he joined a line of traffic waiting to get away from the trouble in the city, he rummaged through the pockets of the man’s jacket. He came across a wallet, from which he extracted the credit cards, flipping them onto the passenger seat as he examined them. Then he found a driver’s license, with what he assumed was the man’s home address on it, and began to scan the road signs around him. Although he had no idea how he was going to find his way to the man’s home, now that he was out of immediate danger, he could take his time.
    He touched a control on the console beside his seat, and the blue-and-white BMW emblem flashed on a small display in the dash. He smiled. Within a few clicks he’d navigated to the onboard GPS system. He immediately typed in the postal code from the driver’s license. As an authoritative female voice began to reel off directions, the Colonel nodded, allowing himself an even broader smile.
    “
Bayerische Motoren Werke
,” he exhaled, running his hands appreciatively around the luxurious leather rim of the steering wheel. “
Ausgezeichnet.
” The Colonel knew this marque well because his father had flown aircraft manufactured by the company in the Great War.
    Aspects of this outer world that the Colonel now found himself in were so familiar he could almost pretend he was still in New Germania. But other aspects would take some getting used to. For starters, the gravity was so strong here that every movement was an effort, as if his limbs were weighed down with lead.
    And the sun . . .
    He peered through the tinted windshield, marveling at the fiery globe hanging in the heavens, which was smaller and weaker than the ever-burning and omnipresent one he’d known all his life. Even now it wasn’t directly overhead, and it was a revelation to him that it would dip below the horizon with the onset of night, the onset of
darkness
.
    And the people in the streets. People of all races. He watched as an elderly black man tripped and took a bad fall. A white woman instantly went to help him.
    Not out of choice but because of its origins, New Germania had been monoracial, and Colonel Bismarck knew only too well what atrocities had gone on in wartime Germany. As he surveyed the mix of people making the exodus from the city, he smiled. He truly was in an enlightened civilization.
    “Continue for one thousand feet to Old Street roundabout, then take the second exit,”
the GPS dictated mechanically.
    The Colonel might have been plucked from his motherland by the Styx and thrust into this new and alien environment, but he wasn’t about to throw in the towel. He was a resourceful man, a survivor.
    And besides, he had a score to settle.

“TARNATION!” A LOW VOICE seeped through the treacly gloom inside the small crofter’s cottage on Parry’s estate. If anybody had been there to witness the speed at which the man crossed to the cobwebbed window, they would have doubted their eyes. As he hooked a ragged curtain aside, the rain-filtered light fell on his face — the face of a man in his sixties.
    But it wasn’t any normal face; the skin was slightly raised in a series of concentric circles radiating out from each of his eyes. And there was a grid of lines across his forehead that extended down his temples and under his ears. It was as if worms had threaded through his flesh and left their tracks behind.
    “Who in the blazes is that?” the man said, grimacing as he pressed the flaps of his cap hard against his ears, the metal-foil lining inside them crackling as he did so. Repeating the question, he backed slowly away from the window.

    “Stop!” rasped Chester as Will tore toward the gate across the track in front of them.
    Will pulled up and consulted his digital watch, unaware of the discomfort the innocuous electronic device was causing the man in the darkness. “Why? We’ve only been running for about thirty minutes,” he told Chester. It was only then