River of Ruin Read Online Free PDF

he raced past more stacks of bodies, running first right then left as the tunnel bored deeper into the earth. His mind began drawing a mental map of his progress, an automatic skill developed through years of mine work. He was confident that if he survived he’d be able to retrace his steps.
    The sound of pursuit reached him every time he paused for breath, neither gaining nor losing ground. He came across a narrow passage barely wide enough for him to pass sideways. The tunnel seemed to slope upward at a shallow angle. With the light off, he moved in, sweeping his feet against the dusty floor to obscure his prints. The darkness was absolute. He could taste it in his mouth and feel it clogging his ears.
    After fifty yards, his gun hand smashed into a solid wall. Not daring to turn on the light, he felt around, probing the darkness until he found where the tunnel continued to the left. Behind him he thought he saw a ghost’s glow of light from one of the gunmen, but it didn’t appear that they had found where he’d gone yet. They would, he knew. They would.
    His knees hit every irregularity in the ancient stonework as he shuffled sideways. Beginning to fear that the tunnel would pinch out, Mercer found that the claustrophobic rock suddenly began to widen. He could walk normally. He felt like he’d moved into another room and chanced flicking on his light. What he saw made him gag.
    The room was fifty or sixty feet square and the floor was a sea of carelessly strewn skeletons, like a scene from a Nazi death camp or Cambodia’s killing fields. A hole halfway up the brick wall opposite him was his only way out. To cross, Mercer had to step up onto the remains. Each lurching pace crunched into the pile, snapping the brittle bones. To keep the threads of panic from binding him, he told himself that the obscene sound was just the rustle of autumn leaves in a forest.
    His pants were torn by sharp protrusions and soon blood began to seep from shredded skin. Something snagged on his leg and he had to look down to dislodge it. His foot was ensnared in a rib cage. He kicked frantically and the bones flew apart.
    The light from his torch suddenly seemed brighter and Mercer whirled to look behind him. He saw two bright spots waving in the tunnel he’d just escaped. The gunmen had made up ground. He began running across the countless dead, desperate not to join them. A yard short of the hole, Mercer dove headlong as the beam from a flashlight swept the charnel room. The rough stone tore across his chest as he tumbled through the opening. He began rolling down a packed dirt slope with his case clutched to his chest. He heard a startled exclamation from one of the gunmen and the spit of a hastily fired shot.
    Mercer came to a stop in a shallow pool of foul-smelling water. His flashlight lay a few feet away, its glow focused on a half-submerged skull. This one was connected to the body that once carried it, a body still dressed in the remnants of jeans and a sweatshirt. It was a catophile, as illegal explorers of this underground crypt called themselves, who’d become lost and died. Judging by the decomposition, he or she had been down here for years. The empire of the dead continued to claim new members.
    He thought briefly of abandoning his sample case here. The gunmen weren’t likely to continue the chase once they had the Lepinay journal. But the idea died as soon as it formed. His anger remained stronger than any instinct of self-preservation.
    He jumped to his feet and started running. This passage wasn’t part of the Roman mines. It was a more modern, brick-lined tunnel. It took Mercer a minute to realize that he’d broken through into Paris’s extensive sewer system. Built by Napoleon III’s municipal engineer, Baron Georges Haussmann when he redesigned Paris beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, the sewers were a thousand-mile labyrinth of tunnels that exactly duplicated the streets above. Fortunately the storm runoff