Twisted Metal Heart - Eve Langlais Page 0,41

about to become a death trap. He looked around for Alfred. Surely the head was here somewhere…

Wham.

The shudder sent him reeling, face first. He awoke when his nose nudged something. Opening his eyes, he realized he was looking at the roof of the tank. His metal fingers clung to the wheel of the hatch, did their best to turn it, but the beating must have bent something. The hatch wouldn’t open.

Water closed over his face. He was going to drown. He would never get back to Haven. Or the Emerald City. Never have his revenge. Never see Riella again.

His mind slowed. He sank even as a voice whispered, Like fuck. Bang. He blacked out.

The next thing he knew, he saw a bright light and an ugly face.

“I betcha you’ll fetch a fine penny as a fighter for the arena.”

It wasn’t quite how he planned his arrival, but he ended up in the Marshland City, a resident of its prison, expected to fight if he wanted to stay alive.

Ten

Days later and Riella still couldn’t believe she’d escaped the dome. Only once she hit the tunnels without spotting a single Centurion did she relax. In a sense.

Now she would only have to handle the dangers underground. Without Burton.

She could have used her customized tank. At least the bike she’d stolen from the dome fit in the tunnels below the surface. Not that she kept it. She ditched it when she reached one of her stashes. The racer was faster. Speed was of the essence. She had to stay ahead of the queen until she could find a safe spot to hide.

Hurrying still meant taking precautions. She laid false trails at the forks, even doubled her tracks to muddy her direction.

It took her longer than she liked to return to the citadel she’d called home for too long. She stopped just outside of the open garage, the decayed bodies of the spiduses reduced to shriveled hunks on the floor.

Of more interest than the mess was the fact Burton wasn’t sitting in his spot. Titan was gone, too, which didn’t mean anything. His body could have been eaten by something with a palate that didn’t care for spidus remains. They weren’t very tasty.

Another thing missing? Alfred’s head. She had everything else, his broken body and all the shattered bits, but his shiny skull was nowhere to be found. Good thing it had a tracker.

Entering the untouched citadel, she spent a moment arming herself properly and making herself a second emergency pack. Not as good as the one in Burton, but at least now she’d have some tools and clothes. She brought a tablet with her, along with a mini ball drone. The tablet loaded her tracker system, and she ignored the colored dots to home in on the one that was missing.

Alfred’s signal wasn’t there. She had to do a search for the last time it was pinged, which turned out to be in the tunnels just under the Marshlands. Alfred was heading for the city, maybe with Titan. It could also be someone else. Didn’t matter. It gave her somewhere to go. The Marshlands, with its free city trying to declare itself sovereign, was probably the safest place for her to go. Or at least the one her mother would be least likely to attack.

It took much longer than usual to make it. The Enclave soldiers were roaming farther into the tunnels than they usually dared. Some of the Centurion armor left in a pile outside a dark crack was a reminder to not enter places clearly marked dangerous. It was only after she crossed the section of tunnels that went under the mountains themselves that she ran into issues.

She slowed the racer as she noticed the water ankle deep in the passageway. “This isn’t good.” Rather than take chances, she ignored the web across a side tunnel, blasting it into ash before racing through.

She kept firing ahead of her, igniting the sticky, stinging threads, waking the builder of them. But the mother of arachnids didn’t attack herself. She sent thousands of her tiny minions. The spiders swarmed the tunnel ahead of her, flinging their many-legged bodies at Riella, doing their best to inject her with their venom. A good thing they were small. The bites fuzzed her brain but strengthened her determination. Even though her laser pistol fizzled, she raced through the last bits of webbing, trying to remember from the last time she came through her how far she needed to