Tunnels 05 - Spiral

“I’m Terrence. . . Terry Finch.”
    “Look this way for a moment, please,” Drake said, holding Danforth’s Purger in the old man’s face. The blast of purple light reflected in his rheumy eyes, but there was no reaction from him.
    “Did you take my picture?” Terry asked.
    “He’s clear,” Drake said, putting the Purger away. “No Darklighting.”
    “We’re just making sure you’re one of us,” Parry said.
    Terry clearly hadn’t heard Parry. “One’s enough?” he inquired, a hand cupped to his ear.
    Parry spoke even more loudly than usual. “Has the requisition order been served on the security staff downstairs? We don’t want to be disturbed up here.”
    “Come again?” Terry said.
    With a sigh, Drake leaned toward the old man. “Terry, take me to the Transmission Room,” he shouted. “I need to set up.”

    In another part of London, Harry trundled downstairs, his head raked awkwardly forward on his shoulders as he negotiated the steps. But that day his posture was nothing unusual. He’d been that way for some twenty years, after a High-Altitude Low-Opening, or HALO, parachute drop had gone badly wrong, leaving him with mostly titanium for an upper spine. “Janey, I’m going out. And I’m taking the car,” he called. “OK?”
    “Sure, Dad,” his daughter replied, tearing her eyes from the book she was reading to catch a glimpse of her sixty-five-year-old father as he rotated his whole body to locate the keys — he had no option with the limited articulation in his neck.
    He appeared at the sitting-room door. “You don’t remember where I put those spare Hi-Power mags, do you?”
    “Yes, on the mantelpiece,” she replied. “In Mr. Clowny.”
    “Thanks,” her father said, and she watched him go over to the garishly colored ceramic clown and lift up its bowler-hatted head. Dipping his hand in, he took out two magazines for his handgun. He paused before replacing the lid, then also retrieved the long dagger he’d hidden in the clown.
    “The Sykes-Fairbairn, too? You will take care out there, won’t you, Dad?” Janey said, concern on her face.
    “I’m not about to let a few idiots kicking in shop windows spoil my day,” Harry replied defiantly.
    “What’s going on is a bit more serious than that,” she replied. “Anyway, I wasn’t talking about the riots — I meant the weather. It must be several degrees below zero out there.”
    In a woolly hat and scarf and a thick green jacket, he was dressed in what he usually wore when he went fishing. But he didn’t appear to have his fishing rod or tackle with him. In any case, it certainly wasn’t the time of year for fishing, so she assumed it must be the other activity with which he occupied his days. “You off to the allotment?” she asked as an afterthought as he left the room. The only response was the front door slamming shut.
    Putting the book down, Janey rose from her chair and went to the window, where she lifted the net curtain aside. There had been a couple of showers of new snow at first light, and everything outside was white and crisp with the cold. “He can’t be working on the allotment? Not in this?” she wondered out loud. As she continued to watch, former lieutenant Harry “Hoss” Handscombe energetically cleared the snow and ice from the car windshield with a scraper. “So where’s the silly old stick off to?” Janey asked affectionately to herself. She shrugged, then went over to the television to try a few channels. They were all still off air, so she settled back in her chair, immersing herself in her book again.
    Harry drove for ten minutes, then turned into a supermarket parking lot and drove around it, shifting his whole body from the waist up as he peered through the windshield. Like most shops in London, the recent panics had caused such a run on food that it had very little actually left to buy. Consequentially, the parking lot wasn’t full, and it didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for.
    He parked his car, but not too close to the battered Land Rover in the corner. Harry was looking at the picture of a green dragon taped to the top of the windshield as he walked to the vehicle with his peculiar stiff-backed gait. The driver’s door opened the moment he arrived, and a woman of around the same age as his stuck her head out.
    “Good to see you again, Hoss,” she said. She didn’t smile, but her strong gray eyes were friendly.
    “You, too, Anne,” he replied as