The silence that followed the metallic clang was absolute, suffocating. I was paralyzed behind the crates, feeling cold sweat trickle down my temples as the scouts’ flashlights sliced through the darkness, passing inches from my feet. My heart was pounding so hard against my ribs that I was certain the sound was echoing off the concrete walls, betraying my position every second.
Then, Artem’s voice exploded in the hall like thunder, saving my skin.
“What is the meaning of this, Jonathan?” Artem roared, the fury in his voice completely masking the sound of my short, desperate breaths. “Is someone else here? If this scheme is compromised, I’m out! I’m not risking my head and my daughter’s future because of your incompetence!”
Artem’s feigned indignation was a masterstroke. Jonathan, caught off guard by his ally’s tone, raised his hands in a defensive gesture, desperately trying to contain the diplomatic crisis.
“Stay calm, Artem! It’s an old structure, it must be just an animal or the building settling,” Jonathan replied, though his eyes searched the shadows with murderous suspicion. He pointed to two henchmen. “You two, now! Search every inch of the maintenance wing!”
Heavy boots thudded on the floor, drawing closer. I saw the beam of a flashlight sweep across the crate where I was hiding. The moment the guards shifted their focus to check a ventilation duct in the ceiling, I bolted. I lunged out like a cornered animal, crawling millimetrically through the deepest shadows, my stomach churning with fear.
I reached the maintenance door and slipped into total darkness just as I heard one of the guards shout behind me: “Nothing here, boss! Just a fallen tray and animal tracks!”
I closed the door without making a single click. In the pitch black, I felt the icy walls until I found the hatch. I climbed the iron rungs with my hands shaking so much I almost lost my grip. When I closed the steel lid over my head, the muffled thud seemed to seal the abyss between me and death.
I fell back into the warm, foul-smelling water of the pipe. The stench of sewage was now the smell of life. I ran away from the light of the hatch before activating the communicator.
“Henry… are you there?” I whispered, my voice choked with adrenaline. “I’m out. I’m out of that grave. I’m back in the tunnel.”
Henry’s voice came immediately, loaded with a tension he was trying to control.
“Luke! Thank God. I heard everything, I thought they had caught you when the squirrel fell,” he took a deep breath. “Listen, get out of there now. We already have everything we need. The audio is clean, the location is confirmed, and the photos you took of the lab and those weapons… it’s the end for Jonathan. Artem made his own recording in there too. The dossier is complete.”
“Are they still there?” I asked, trying to calm my lungs.
“The discussion is over. Artem managed to distract him enough, but now they are leaving the building. You need to hurry. If the convoy moves and sees us coming out of the woods, everything we’ve done goes down the drain. Get out of there, Luke. Now!”
I was about to start walking toward the exit, with the sound of the water hitting my knees, when a violent light hit my back. The reflection in the water ahead of me made me freeze instantly.
“I knew it…” A deep voice, loaded with a menacing calm, echoed through the concrete tunnel.
I turned slowly, my heart racing. The man was massive, one of Jonathan’s guards. He was holding a tactical flashlight that looked like a cannon of light in the darkness of the duct.
“I noticed it up there. The cargo crates… they were covered, but the latches were open. Someone had messed with them,” he said, narrowing his eyes as the light swept over my face. “I thought it was the police, but you…”
He took a step forward, his boot crushing something at the bottom of the duct. The sound echoed sinisterly.
“You’re just a kid. What? About 20 years old? You can’t be a cop.” The man let out a dry, humorless laugh, never taking his eyes off me. “Jonathan is going to want to know how a brat like you got this close. Come on. You’re getting out of there and coming with me.”
Panic hit me like a punch. My mind screamed that I couldn’t be taken back to that lab; if I entered that room again, I wouldn’t leave alive. In a desperate move, I tried to swing my backpack to the front, reaching for the zipper where Henry’s pistol was stored.
“Don’t even try it!” the man roared.
The moment my fingers touched the zipper, he lunged. He was fast for his size. Before I could open the bag, a heavy punch flew toward my face. By pure instinct, I raised the backpack to blunt the impact. The blow was so strong that my arms throbbed, and the backpack flew from my hand, falling into the murky water and being carried away by the current of the duct.
I was unarmed and cornered. But before he could draw the gun at his waist, desperation turned into fury. I threw myself at him.
The impact knocked us both onto the submerged concrete floor. The flashlight slipped from his hand, spinning through the water and hitting the walls, creating a chaotic stroboscopic effect in the tunnel. The world became flashes of white light and absolute darkness.
The fight was brutal. Sewage water splashed into our faces, making it hard to breathe. He tried to pin me against the duct wall to reach his holster, but I gripped his arms with all the strength I had left, kicking and using my knees in the cramped space.
I could smell oil, sweat, and the foul water of the slaughterhouse as we rolled. The sound of flesh hitting flesh and the splashing of water were the only sounds besides our heavy breathing. I knew if he managed to steady himself for a second, he would kill me.
“Henry!” I tried to scream, but my voice came out as a gasp when the guard managed to mount me, pushing my head into the shallow, cold water of the duct.
The world was spinning. The sound of rushing water felt like a distant roar, muffled by the deafening ringing in my ears. I tried to speak, tried to scream for Henry, but my microphone was dead, drowned in the sludge along with my backpack. I was alone.
The guard pressed me against the bottom of the duct, his weight crushing my lungs. The foul water rose up my nose, and the sensation of choking began to blur my vision. In a final flash of lucidity dictated by pure survival instinct, my hands fumbled for his face. I found his eye socket and, with a silent scream, buried my thumb in with all the strength I had left.
An inhuman howl echoed through the tunnel.
The man jumped back, letting go of my neck to clutch his face. He screamed in agony, blood trickling through his fingers as he stumbled in the shallow water. I rolled to the side, coughing and spitting out the dirty water from my lungs, desperately trying to catch my breath as I stood up, my legs shaking like jelly.
The guard, with one eye completely destroyed and blind, roared with rage. Pain had turned him into something savage. He reached for his holster, his trembling fingers searching for the grip of the pistol.
“Oh, you little brat… I’m going to open you up from top to bottom!” he hissed.
Before he could level the gun, I threw myself at him. It wasn’t a fighting technique; it was the weight of despair. I collided with his chest, and the impact made the pistol slip from his hands, falling into the darkness of the duct and being swept away by the current.
We were two animals now, fighting in the sludge. I landed two punches on his face, feeling my knuckles cut against the bones of the man’s face. He barely seemed to feel it. In response, he delivered a cross punch that hit me like a sledgehammer. The impact threw me against the concrete wall, and I tumbled to the side, my vision blurred by sparks of light.
I tried a kick, attempting to keep my distance, but my leg hit his body as if he were made of stone. He didn’t flinch. I fell face-first into the dirty water, tasting the metallic tang of blood and the acidic stench of the sewer.
When I tried to get up, the second punch came from above.
My head ricocheted off the bottom of the tunnel. I spat blood, feeling a tooth come loose. Before I could figure out where the floor was, I felt thick, strong fingers bury themselves in my hair. He pulled me up with brutal violence, forcing my head back until I was forced to look at his face in the gloom.
His eye was a red, swollen mass, but the other one shone with a promise of death.
“You blinded me, you bastard…” he hissed, his hot breath of hatred hitting my face. “Jonathan won’t even see what’s left of you. I’m going to kill you right here, in the middle of the shit where you belong.”
He raised his other fist, preparing the killing blow. I was without my backpack, without a weapon, and without Henry.
The pain in my face was a wildfire, but fear had been replaced by something colder and more focused. As he leaned his body back, preparing the blow that would crush my skull, I didn’t wait. With an explosive movement, I brought my knee up, hitting him squarely between the legs.
His roar of hatred turned into a sharp gasp of agony. He let go of me, staggering back and hitting his back against the concrete arch of the tunnel.
I stood up slowly, the sewage water dripping down my wounded face. I spat out the excess blood and forced my lungs to work. *Breathe, Luke. Through the mouth. Slowly.* Panic is what kills, Henry always said. I looked at my empty hands and then at the giant in front of me.
*He’s unarmed,* I thought. *He’s just a man. I trained for this. I can do this.*
The guard wiped the trail of blood running from his blind eye and glared at me with the other. Seeing me in a solid stance, weight distributed and hands raised in a classic martial arts guard, he let out a macabre smile, revealing blood-stained teeth.
“Ah… so the kid knows how to dance,” he growled, his voice coming out like a hoarse thunder. “Fine. Let’s finish this like men. Hands only.”
He advanced. The movement was heavy, but loaded with a brute force that would make my ribs implode if it hit me. In the gloom, illuminated only by the erratic reflection of the submerged flashlight, I saw the trajectory of the punch coming toward my chin.
I didn’t retreat. At the right time, I used the back of my left hand to parry his blow away from my centerline. The impact was dry, but it opened the gap I needed. Taking advantage of his body’s rotation, I delivered a direct punch with my right, hitting the side of the man’s neck, right in the carotid triangle area, where there is no muscle to protect the nerves and arteries.
The man let out a whimper of pain, the impact causing his nervous system to short-circuit for a millisecond. But he was a veteran of a thousand fights. At the same instant, he swung his torso, bringing his elbow in a horizontal arc.
The bone grazed my cheek, opening a cut that began to sting immediately, but I managed to tilt my head in time to avoid having my jaw shattered. We were dangerously close to each other, the distance where technique meets pure brutality.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he hissed, trying to grab me by the waist to lift me up and slam me against the ceiling of the duct.
The man was a block of stone, but the sewage and blood made him slippery. When he tried to close his arms around my waist to crush me, I slid away like an eel, taking advantage of the moisture to escape his bear hug.
In one fluid motion, I spun my body, using his momentum against him. I jumped onto the giant’s back, circling his neck with my right arm and locking in the crook of my elbow. **Rear-naked choke.**
I locked the position, squeezing with every ounce of strength left in my biceps. The guard roared, thrashing like an enraged bull. We fell together into the shallow water, the impact rattling my teeth, but I didn’t let go. He began to strike back, delivering short, brutal elbow strikes that hit my ribs with the force of sledgehammers.
I heard a dry snap. The searing pain made me lose my breath, and my arms gave way by pure neurological reflex. I let go.
The guard stood up, staggering, coughing and sucking air into his lungs with a wheezing sound. I, on the other hand, could no longer stand. The pain in my ribs was a fire with every breath. I began to crawl through the dark water, my fingers clawing at the sludge on the bottom of the duct, desperately trying to gain any inch of distance.
It was pathetic. I was done.
I heard the sound of his boots splashing in the water behind me. He wasn’t running; he was walking slowly, with the certainty of an executioner. I stopped crawling and turned over, lying on my back in the cold water. The guard was inches from me, his massive silhouette blocking what little light remained, his face disfigured by hatred and blood.
I closed my eyes. I accepted the cold, I accepted the silence. *It’s over*, I thought. *Sorry, Vanessa.*
*Puff.*
A dry, muffled sound sliced through the damp air of the tunnel.
I opened my eyes in time to see a tiny flash in the darkness ahead. The guard didn’t deliver the blow. Instead, his head jerked back, a perfect hole appearing between his eyebrows. The massive body toppled over like a felled tree, kicking up a wave of dirty water that hit my face.
I lay paralyzed, staring at the corpse in front of me. Then, a silhouette emerged from the gloom of the tunnel.
It was Henry. He was holding a pistol with a silencer attached, his expression icy and professional, but his eyes were filled with frantic worry. He lowered the gun and ran to me, kneeling in the water.
“You took too long to answer the radio, Luke,” he said, his voice hoarse with tension as he helped me sit up. “I wasn’t going to sit in the car waiting for you to become rat food.”
I tried to speak, but only a bloody cough came out. Henry draped my arm over his shoulder and hoisted me off the ground.
“Don’t say anything. The photos and audio are already safe in the cloud. Now, let’s get you out of here before the rest of Jonathan’s army realizes a man is missing from the count.”
