Midnight City Read Online Free PDF

never.
    Mira opened the door and stepped through. When it shut behind her, pitch black fell over her.

 
    5. UNDERNEATH
    MIRA NEVER KNEW A PLACE could be so dark. Shadows hung like thick curtains all around her. She quickly flipped on the flashlight, sending a beam of light shooting forward. It did very little to drive away the shadows that pushed against the illumination.
    She was at the top of a concrete stairwell that descended downward into the dark. Her light didn’t reach very far down, and where it ended, the stairs were swallowed by the thick blackness. Nervously, she started down, each footstep echoing loudly in the tight, concrete confines. Much too loudly.
    As she descended the stairs, the shadows crushed in on her. But nothing moved within them. Not yet, anyway. The light in her hand wavered as her hands shook, and each step downward seemed to require more effort on her part to accomplish.
    But Mira took every step. After moving for an eternity, she finally reached the bottom, where the tight confines of the stairwell gave way to a much larger tunnel.
    Her light still didn’t reach very far, but she could see the chalky concrete tunnel was lined with dark, dust-covered doors leading to different areas of the power plant’s underworkings.
    She tried to remember the map the kid in Faust had shown her, even though he wasn’t willing to trade for it. The storage room should be near the end of—
    A shuffling from behind her, like something slithering along the floor.
    Mira spun quickly around, raised the light. She saw something dark scamper back into the shadows at the other end of the tunnel.
    Or had she? Maybe her fear had imagined it for her.
    She held the light where she had last seen … whatever it was, but nothing moved there now. Her heart beat heavy in her chest again; her breathing was quick and ragged.
    More scampering, something moving for her from the other direction.
    She spun once more, shone her light … and saw shadows slither away along the floor. Strange, unsettling clicking sounds—as if from dozens of teeth grinding against each other—echoed from the dark … then faded away.
    Okay, that she most certainly had not imagined, and she forced herself to study every open door in front of or behind her.
    And in the places where her light could not fully penetrate … the shadows moved. Dark masses of slow movement that writhed just out of reach of the light, waiting and watching.
    More scampering, more shapes. This time on the ceiling behind her. Her light pushed it back. More from a door to her left, the hungry clicking sounds came again, louder.
    Mira knew the flashlight was about to become useless. They knew she was here now, they would be on her any second …
    She struck a match from a pocket and lit the wick jutting out of the lantern.
    Brilliant light pulsed outward in a powerful flash unlike anything a normal lantern could create. A bright, radiant sphere formed around Mira, wavering and flaring intently, filling the tunnel with its luminescence, burning bright.
    Mira held it up like a shield.
    In its intense light, the skittering shadows all around her were horribly revealed. Hundreds of them, stuck to the floors and walls, dripping off the ceiling, pulsing inside the doorways. Hulking, cancerous masses of goo, thick and black, like oil, constantly morphing and blending into new shapes.
    Jaws of black teeth jutted out from their bodies, formed for the express purpose of collectively shrieking in pain. Mira held her ears, almost dropped the lantern as the sickening screeching that flooded the tight tunnel. The creatures withdrew from the powerful light, disappeared into darker rooms and hallways of the old station.
    It was just as she had expected. A Fallout Swarm.
    When the Assembly arrived on Earth, their ships were covered in billions of microorganisms carried from the vast reaches of space. Their reaction to exposure with Earth’s environment and atmosphere was to grow.