7:05 p.m.

  The radio crackled with the same Chinese broadcast, its mechanical rhythm filling the bunker like a countdown to damnation. Jake's hands trembled as he worked the dials, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cold concrete surrounding them.

  "Seven days and seven hours remaining," Gerald translated quietly, his voice hollow. The numbers had been dropping steadily for the past hour, each update a reminder that whatever was happening above their heads was getting worse.

  Jake looked up from the radio, his expression uncertain. "Gerald, are you sure about your translation? You said yourself you haven't used the language in a long time. How can you be confident about what they're actually saying?"

  Gerald paused, considering the question with the careful attention it deserved. "You're right to question it," he admitted, his weathered face creasing with concern. "I'm not truly sure about the meaning and accuracy of most of my translation to be honest. The Chinese dialect they're using is a bit different from what I remember, and there are a lot of words I didn't catch or couldn't quite make out."

  He gestured toward the radio as another loop began. "But I am confident about the countdown. The numbers and the way to pronounce them are the same as I knew. That part I'm certain of. Seven days and seven hours. The rest..." He shook his head slowly. "The rest could be wrong. I might be misunderstanding their intent, or missing important context. But the time? That I trust."

  The words hung in the air, offering both certainty and uncertainty in equal measure.

  Mike slumped against the bunker wall, his body finally surrendering to the accumulated damage of the night. Blood had soaked through his shirt where the bat creatures' claws had found their mark, and his breathing came in shallow, painful gasps. The adrenaline that had carried him through the rescue and the long walk back was gone, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that made even holding his head up feel like lifting concrete blocks.

  His vision swam at the edges, dark spots dancing in his peripheral sight like flies around a corpse. Every muscle in his body ached with the specific agony that came from being torn apart and then forced to keep moving. The puncture wounds on his arms and back had stopped bleeding, but they throbbed with each heartbeat, sending waves of fire through his nervous system.

  "Try the emergency frequencies again," Dana said, though her voice lacked conviction. They'd been through this routine dozens of times already.

  Jake nodded and adjusted the dial, his movements mechanical. Static hissed through the speakers, the same empty static they'd been hearing for hours. Police bands, fire department, EMS, even the traffic helicopter frequencies that should have been alive with rush hour chatter. All silent.

  "Nothing," Jake muttered, wiping sweat from his eyes. "It's like the entire city just... stopped broadcasting."

  The foreign voice cut through the static again, delivering its formal ultimatum with diplomatic precision before cycling back to the beginning. Always the same message. Always the countdown ticking lower.

  Mike closed his eyes, trying to process the implications. An entire city's worth of radio stations didn't just go silent. Not all at once. Not unless something catastrophic had happened above their heads, something that made the underground nightmare they'd been living through look small by comparison.

  In the corner of the bunker, Gerald sat with his grandson Tommy, their faces drawn with exhaustion and something deeper. The old man hadn't spoken much since they'd found refuge here, but his eyes tracked every movement, every sound, with the alertness of someone who'd learned not to trust silence. A thin trickle of blood had started from his left nostril, just a single dark line that he absently wiped away with the back of his hand.

  Tommy sat quietly beside his grandfather, braiding and unbraiding the frayed strings from his hoodie's drawstring. His fingers worked automatically, weaving the thin strands into increasingly complex patterns, a nervous habit he'd picked up from watching his grandmother knit when he was younger. She'd taught him basic cord work during long summer afternoons, saying busy hands helped quiet worried minds. Now the repetitive motion was the only thing keeping his anxiety from spiraling completely out of control.

  But more than that, Tommy could see his grandfather's pallor, the way Gerald's hands had started to tremble slightly. He'd noticed the blood, of course he had, but pretending not to see it felt like the kindest thing he could do.

  "Grandpa," Tommy said softly, his fingers still working the frayed strings, a bright smile masking the growing worry in his young eyes, "do you think a war is coming?"

  Gerald's weathered hands stilled where they'd been absently checking their meager supplies, another drop of blood falling from his nose to the concrete floor. He looked at his grandson and Mike saw something pass between them. The weight of the question, the fear behind it, and Tommy's desperate attempt to keep his grandfather talking, to keep him focused on anything but the sickness creeping through his system.

  "You know, war is not really like your video games," Gerald said gently, his voice taking on the patient tone of someone explaining something important, though it was slightly hoarser than before. "It's not just pew pew and boom boom. Real war is... messier. Uglier. Full of people making impossible choices because they think they have no other option."

  He paused to wipe more blood from his nose, and Tommy's smile became a little more forced.

  "And even if a war should happen, I promise you it won't be in just sixty hours," Gerald continued, though his voice carried less conviction than his words and he had to pause to catch his breath. "They're just trying to scare us. Diplomacy by fear, it's an old game, son."

  Tommy looked up from his cord work, his young face creased with worry but still trying to maintain that encouraging smile. "But why would they attack us?"

  Gerald was quiet for a moment, his eyes distant as he considered the question. Mike could see the old soldier's mind working, trying to find a way to explain the incomprehensible to a fourteen-year-old boy.

  "You know, there are a thousand reasons humans have gone to war over the ages," Gerald said finally, his voice growing weaker with each word. "Sometimes it's for justice, sometimes it's for revenge, sometimes it's for conquest. But it's almost always about one thing..."

  "Resources," Mike said quietly from his position against the wall.

  "Yes, resources," Gerald agreed, nodding at Mike with the recognition of one veteran to another, though the motion seemed to tire him. "Whatever the US government is doing here, whatever they've created or discovered... It looks like others are interested in it too."

  Tommy let his hands fall still, the weight of his grandfather's words settling over him. "What kind of resources could be worth all this?"

  Gerald's breathing became more labored as he spoke. "In Korea, we fought over hills that didn't have names, just numbers. Hill 255, Hill 347. Pieces of frozen ground that looked like nothing special. But they were strategic, they controlled supply lines, observation points, artillery positions. Men died by the thousands for just pieces of rock and dirt because of what controlling them meant."

  Gerald paused, wiping more blood from his nose with the back of his hand. The movement made him sway slightly, and he had to steady himself against the wall as a wave of dizziness washed over him.

  "Grandpa?" Tommy's voice was filled with concern, but he quickly forced his smile back. "Tell me what happened during that war?"

  Gerald settled back against the concrete wall, his breathing more labored now, but his voice still carrying warmth as he continued. "The hills looked like the surface of the moon. Nothing but frozen mud and shell craters as far as you could see. We'd been taking mortar fire for three days straight, couldn't even stick your head up without risking it getting blown clean off. And the smell..." He paused, his expression briefly darkening. "Well, war has its own rotten smell. Not something you forget."

  Tommy had stopped braiding, his fingers still holding the partially woven strings as he listened to details his grandfather had never shared before.

  "Command had promised us hot turkey for Christmas dinner," Gerald continued, his voice growing softer with exhaustion, "but the supply trucks couldn't get through. The roads were cut off, and nobody was getting anything hot except bullets." He chuckled softly, but there was pain behind it. "So there we were, Christmas morning, eating cold beans from a can and watching our breath freeze in the air."

  Gerald's face brightened slightly at the memory, and for a moment the pain seemed to recede.

  "We were all thinking the same thing, you know. Wondering if our families back home were opening presents, sitting around warm tables, saying grace over real food. That's when this chaplain, Father McKenna, Irish as the day is long, comes walking up to our position."

  "What did he do?" Tommy asked eagerly, though Mike could see tears beginning to gather in the boy's eyes even as he smiled.

  Gerald's hands moved as he spoke, though they trembled more now, and his voice grew softer with each word. "He reaches into his bag and pulls out a chocolate bar. One of those thick Hershey's bars, you know? Real chocolate, not the ersatz stuff we sometimes got in the rations."

  "That sounds amazing," Tommy said, his voice thick with emotion he was trying to hide. "What happened next?"

  "Father McKenna breaks that bar into pieces, passes them around to every man in the squad. Twenty-three pieces from one bar, shouldn't have been mathematically possible, but he made it work somehow." Gerald paused, his breathing becoming more labored. "And when I put that chocolate on my tongue... it was warm. Not just room temperature, but actually warm, like it had been sitting by a fire all morning."

  "How is that possible?" Tommy asked, though Mike could tell the boy had heard this part before. The tears on the boy’s face were flowing freely now, but his smile remained, desperate and loving.

  "That's what I asked Father McKenna," Gerald replied, his voice growing weaker. "And you know what he told me? He said, 'Son, some things don't need explaining. They just need believing.'" Gerald's hand found Tommy's shoulder with visible effort. "That chocolate tasted like home. Like my mother's kitchen and Christmas morning and everything good I'd ever known."

  The bunker fell quiet except for the distant hum of the radio and Gerald's increasingly labored breathing. Mike felt something tight in his chest, not from his injuries, but from the simple humanity of the story and the obvious love between grandfather and grandson.

  Dana had stopped pacing and was listening too, her usual sharp edges softened by the old man's words. Even Jake had paused in his radio work, drawn into the warmth of Gerald's memory despite the cold reality surrounding them.

  "Tell me about Grandma," Tommy said quietly, as he maintained his encouraging smile. "Tell me about when you met her."

  Gerald's expression softened again, but this time the effort to speak was clearly draining him. Blood continued to trickle from his nose, and his skin had taken on a grayish pallor.

  "We met at a USO dance in 1953, right after I got back from Korea," he managed, his voice barely above a whisper. "She was wearing this blue dress, navy blue, like the ocean at twilight. Had her hair done up all fancy, the way girls did back then..."

  "You were too scared to ask her to dance," Tommy prompted gently, his voice breaking slightly.

  "Terrified," Gerald admitted with the ghost of a laugh that turned into a cough. "But she saved the last dance for me anyway." His eyes met Tommy's, full of love and sorrow.

  Gerald's breathing became even more shallow, and his hand slipped from Tommy's shoulder. "I'm tired now," he said softly, his eyes drifting closed. "I think I'll sleep a little."

  His breathing slowed, became irregular, then grew so quiet it was barely perceptible. Tommy continued talking to him in whispers, telling him about school, about friends, about anything that might keep his grandfather's spirit anchored to the world. Eventually, exhaustion claimed the boy too, and he curled up beside Gerald, his head resting on his grandfather's shoulder.

  After some time, Dana's gaze fell on Gerald's still form, and her voice cracked slightly when she spoke.

  "Is he going to become a zombie?" she whispered to Mike. "Are we all going to turn into those things when we die?"

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The fear in her words was raw, naked. Mike could see it spreading through the group like wildfire, the terrible possibility that they were all walking corpses, just waiting for their time to come.

  "I don't think so," Mike said firmly. "When I... when I brought Tess back to where Anna died, Anna's body was still there. Peacefully resting in the tunnel. I think the infection kills you. But the reanimation, the purple eyes, that might be something else. Maybe it’s something that affects people who died from the bullets and not the disease itself?"

  "You think they're different?" Jake asked, looking up from his work on the radio.

  "I think even the people running this show don't fully understand it," Mike replied. "The gunmen started with bullets. But later, they brought flamethrowers. They burned the bodies as if it was the only thing to stop the zombies. If they really knew how this worked, why didn't they bring the flamethrowers from the start? There were no traces of burned marks on the platforms."

  Dana nodded grimly. "They're learning as they go. Same as us."

  "Which means we're all just test subjects for them," Eli said quietly.

  Mike didn't contradict him. Because deep down, he was beginning to think Eli was exactly right.

  7:35 p.m.

  "Look," Jake breathed, pointing to the signal meter. The needle was dancing, jumping to levels they hadn't seen before. "I've been working on the transmission circuits and I think I can boost the outgoing signal enough to reach the surface."

  Mike leaned closer, watching Jake's hands work with practiced precision. The conductor had cannibalized more components from his personal radio, creating a hybrid that looked like something from a mad scientist's laboratory.

  "The carrier wave is stabilizing," Jake continued in hushed tones, his excitement barely contained. "We might actually be able to transmit. To get word out about what's happening down here."

  "Keep your voice down," Mike murmured, glancing at their sleeping companions. "I don't want to wake everyone until we know it works."

  Jake nodded, making another micro-adjustment. The static cleared momentarily, replaced by the clean hum of an active transmission frequency. For just a moment, they had a window to the surface, a chance to tell the world what was happening in the buried tunnels beneath New York.

  "It's working," Jake whispered, his face lit with genuine joy. "We can actually..."

  Mike's attention drifted from Jake's excited whispers to movement in the corner of his vision. Gerald's still form was beginning to twitch, subtle spasms in his fingers at first, then spreading through his limbs. Mike had glanced at the old man many times during the night, and Gerald hadn't moved once, hadn't drawn a single breath. Mike had been confident that Gerald had passed away peacefully hours ago.

  Mike's blood turned to ice as he saw Gerald's body twitching.

  Gerald's eyes remained closed, but something was happening beneath the lids, movement that looked like purple light flickering behind tissue-thin skin.

  Tommy remained fast asleep, unaware that the man beside him was no longer at peace.

  "Jake, stop everything," Mike hissed, rising slowly to his feet.

  "But the transmission..." Jake looked up from his work, saw Mike's expression, then followed his gaze to Gerald's convulsing form.

  Gerald's eyes snapped open, burning with that terrible purple light.

  "Dana!" Mike shouted, abandoning all pretense of quiet. His voice was sharp enough to cut through the sleep of the entire bunker. "Get everyone out! Now!"

  Dana's eyes snapped open instantly, the reflexes of someone who'd learned to trust urgent whispers in the dark. She took one look at Mike's face and began moving, shaking the others with quick efficiency.

  The others jerked awake, confusion and alarm spreading across their faces as they saw Gerald's body convulsing, his eyes revealing to them those horrifying purple orbs.

  Tommy woke to chaos, his grandfather's form already alien to the parent he had known.

  "What's happening?" Tommy mumbled, "Grandpa? Grandpa!"

  "Run!" Mike commanded, and this time, everyone listened.

  They scrambled for the bunker's exit, Tommy's anguished cries echoing behind them as he was pulled away from the thing that had once told him stories about chocolate and dancing.

  They escaped the bunker leaving behind them the radio crackling one more time before falling silent, its foreign countdown continuing to mark time in an empty bunker where death had learned to stand up and walk away.

  Once outside, they crouched behind an electrical junction box maybe thirty meters from the bunker entrance, their breathing carefully controlled, their bodies pressed low against the cold concrete. From their position, they could see the bunker's doorway but remain hidden from anything that might emerge.

  The wait stretched like a held breath.

  Then Gerald appeared.

  He moved with the casual gait of someone out for an evening stroll, his steps neither hurried nor careful. The purple glow of his eyes cast weird shadows on the tunnel walls, but everything else about him seemed almost... normal. He looked around once, his head turning with the mechanical precision of a security camera, then began walking down the tunnel with purposeful direction.

  Tommy stiffened beside Mike, his mouth opening to call out.

  Mike's hand clamped over the teenager's mouth before any sound could escape. Tommy struggled against the grip, his eyes wide with desperation and denial, but Mike held firm.

  This close, pressed against Tommy in the dim light, Mike could see what he'd missed before. The mud and grime streaked across Tommy's face wasn't random, it was deliberately applied, obscuring the softer curves of cheekbones, the more delicate line of the jaw. The hair was cut short and choppy, but not with the practiced efficiency of a barbershop. This was someone's attempt at disguise, crude but effective in the chaos they'd all been living through.

  The realization hit him like cold water: Tommy was a girl.

  Mike's mind raced back to Worth Street station, to Gerald's protective hand on his grandson's shoulder, to the old man's watchful eyes that tracked every movement in their group. This wasn't coincidence. This was calculation. Gerald had deliberately disguised his granddaughter as a boy, understanding with the wisdom of someone who'd lived through war what could happen to young women trapped underground with desperate strangers.

  Whatever Gerald's reasons for the deception, they were sound ones. In their small group, the disguise might not matter, Dana would protect Tommy regardless, and the others weren't the type to pose a threat. But out in the tunnels, with other survivors, with men driven to desperation by fear and isolation... Gerald had been wise to hide what he was protecting.

  Warm tears soaked through Mike's fingers as Tommy fought the truth of what they were seeing. This wasn't the shambling horror of movie zombies or the mindless rage of infected animals. This was something worse, something that wore familiar faces and moved with deliberate intent.

  Tommy struggled against his grip, not with the raw strength Mike had expected from a teenage boy, but with the desperate fury of someone watching their world collapse. Her breathing was ragged against his palm, each sob a small vibration that confirmed what his eyes had already processed.

  They watched until Gerald disappeared around a bend in the tunnel, his footsteps fading into the ambient hum of the underground. Only then did Mike slowly remove his hand from Tommy's mouth.

  "I know this is hard," Mike whispered. "But if you'd called out to him, we'd all be dead right now. Do you understand that?"

  "You don't know that!" Tommy snapped, pulling away from Mike, her voice cracking in a way that Mike now understood differently. "You don't know if he'll attack us or not. Maybe he's still himself. Maybe he's just... different now."

  Mike felt his chest tighten with sympathy for the girl's denial, for the burden she carried in maintaining her grandfather's carefully constructed lie even in her grief.

  "Tommy..."

  "No!" Tommy's voice cracked with desperate hope. "You didn't see him hurt anyone. He just walked away. He's still my grandpa inside, he just needs help."

  Mike knelt down to Tommy's level, his voice gentle but firm. "Tommy, listen to me. Your grandfather was dead for hours before he got back up. Dead. No heartbeat, no breathing, no pulse. Whatever is walking around down there, it isn't your grandpa anymore. It's something else wearing his face."

  The words hit Tommy like a blow to her heart. Her defiance crumbled, replaced by the terrible understanding that her grandfather was truly gone, and with him, the only person who knew her true identity, the only one who had been protecting her secret.

  "What is he now?" she asked, her voice small and lost. "What did he become?"

  Mike didn't have an answer. None of them did. He rose slowly from their hiding spot, his decision made. He would keep Tommy's secret, just as Gerald would have wanted. The old man had trusted them with his granddaughter's safety, even if he'd never said it aloud.

  "I'm going to follow him," Mike said. "I need to see where he goes. The rest of you stay here."

  "Like hell," Dana said immediately. "We stick together."

  "This is reconnaissance, not a group trip," Mike replied. "If something goes wrong..."

  "Then we face it together," Jake interrupted. "We're past the point of splitting up for safety."

  "You always end up dead if you split up in a horror movie, it's a basic law" Eli said, attempting a weak smile despite everything.

  Mike looked at their faces in the dim light, determined, frightened, but united. Tommy stood slightly apart, her grief raw and visible, but her chin lifted with the kind of stubborn courage that reminded him of her grandfather.

  "Fine," he said. "But we move quietly and if I say run, you run. No arguments."

  They nodded, and together they began following the trail of purple light through the dark tunnels beneath the city.

  They had barely made it twenty meters when Lien stumbled, her hand reaching out to brace herself against the tunnel wall. Her breathing had been labored since their frantic escape from the bunker, but now it was getting worse.

  "Lien?" Dana called softly.

  Lien tried to wave them off, tried to keep moving, but her legs gave out. She dropped to her knees on the cold concrete, blood streaming from her nose in dark rivulets that looked black in Jake's flashlight beam.

  "I'm... I'm okay," she gasped, but her voice was barely a whisper.

  Mike was beside her immediately, checking her pulse, her breathing. Her skin was clammy and pale, and her eyes had trouble focusing.

  "You're not okay," he said gently. "You need to rest."

  Mike looked at Jake, then back at Lien's deteriorating condition. "Jake, would you stay with her? Head back to the bunker. You can keep working on that radio, and Lien needs somewhere safe to recover."

  Jake nodded without hesitation. "Of course. Come on, Lien, let's get you back where it's warm."

  Eli let out a bitter laugh that held no humor. "Guess we're splitting up anyway, just like in the movies."

  The irony wasn't lost on any of them. After all their insistence on staying together, circumstances were forcing them apart.

  Mike watched as Jake helped Lien to her feet, supporting most of her weight as they began their slow journey. They followed Gerald's shambling form through tunnels that seemed to breathe with their own malevolent life. Each step echoed with the wet slap of decomposing flesh against concrete, a rhythm that made Mike's skin crawl and his instincts scream warnings he couldn't afford to heed.

  Behind him, Tommy moved with the careful silence of someone who'd learned that noise meant death. His breathing was shallow, controlled, but Mike could feel the kid's terror radiating like heat from a fever. The girl's eyes never left her grandfather's retreating figure, not with hope, but with the kind of horrified fascination that comes from watching your worst nightmare walk away on borrowed legs.

  Gerald moved with purpose, navigating the labyrinthine passages with the certainty of something that no longer needed maps or landmarks. His clouded eyes saw nothing, but his feet found every turn, every junction, every hidden passage that led deeper into the city's buried secrets.

  ‘Turn back, his instincts whispered. Turn back now before it's too late.’

  But he didn't. Because somewhere in Gerald's mindless journey lay answers to questions that had been eating at him since the first gunshot echoed through their train car.

  The passage ahead opened into a wider space, not a platform or a maintenance area, but something older. The walls here were different, carved from stone rather than poured concrete. Ancient masonry that predated the subway system by decades, maybe centuries.

  And there, in the center of the floor, gaped a trap door.

  Already open. Waiting.

  Gerald approached the edge without hesitation. For a moment, he paused, not thinking, but perhaps remembering some ghost of the caution he had possessed in life. Then he stepped forward and dropped into the darkness below with a wet thud that echoed up from depths Mike couldn't see.

  The group approached the opening carefully, the flashlight beam cutting through the gloom like desperate prayers. The trap door was heavy steel, corroded but functional, set into the stone floor like it had always been there. A ladder descended into absolute blackness, disappearing beyond the reach of their light.

  "Where does it go?" Tommy whispered, her voice barely audible.

  Mike knelt beside the opening, playing his light down into the void. The beam died in the darkness, swallowed by something that felt hungry. The air rising from below carried scents that made his stomach turn, decay and dampness and something else, something that reminded him of burnt ozone and old blood.

  "Catacombs," Mike said, the word heavy on his tongue. "Harrow mentioned them once. Said there was an ancient network under the city. Older than the subway. Older than most of the buildings above."

  Tommy's face went pale. "Why would he go there?"

  Mike studied the ground around the trap door. In the beam of his flashlight, the truth became horrifyingly clear. Footprints. Hundred of them. Maybe thousands. The muddy impressions of bare feet and rotting shoes, all leading to this opening like pilgrims to a shrine.

  Some of the prints were fresh, still damp with whatever fluids leaked from the reanimated dead. Others had dried to crusty outlines in the accumulated grime. This wasn't a recent discovery. The undead had been coming here for a long time.

  "They're gathering," Mike said, his voice hollow with understanding. "All of them. Every person who died and came back, they're all heading down there."

  "But why?" Tommy's voice cracked with barely controlled panic.

  Eli stepped closer to the edge, his face pale in the upward glow of the flashlights. "I don't know for you but it looks like they're being summoned."

  Mike stood, wiping his hands, the gesture was automatic and meaningless, nothing could clean away the implications of what they'd found. His fingers found the USB keychain in his pocket, the metal warm against his palm. All those secrets, all that evidence of government cover-ups and hidden experiments. But this was bigger than anything he'd ever documented. This was something that challenged the very foundations of what he thought he knew about the world.

  "There's hundred of them down here," Eli said quietly, his artist's eyes taking in the full scope of the footprints surrounding the opening. "Thousands maybe."

  The weight of that realization settled over them like a burial shroud. This wasn't just about survival anymore. This wasn't even about escape. Whatever was happening in the depths beneath New York had implications that reached far beyond their small group of survivors.

  Tommy looked up at Mike, her young face still streaked with tears but filled with a strange kind of expectation. "Are you thinking of going down?"

  Mike looked at each of them, their faces carrying the same horrific assumption. Tommy's grief-stricken determination, Dana's fierce resolve, Eli's quiet terror. They were exhausted, injured, infected, and outnumbered.

  Mike sighed deeply, the sound escaping from somewhere deep in his chest. He looked down at his own body. His shirt was soaked through with dry blood from the bat creatures' claws. His hands shook with exhaustion. His legs felt like they were made of lead, barely able to support his weight. Every breath was an effort, every movement a negotiation with pain.

  He was completely drained. Even if he wanted to go down into that trap door, which he absolutely didn't, he wouldn't make it ten feet before collapsing. His body had nothing left to give.

  "No," he said firmly, surprised by the relief in his own voice. "We've seen enough. More than enough." He gestured toward the footprints, the gaping hole, the evidence of an army gathering in the depths below.

  "I don't know what is happening down here," he admitted. "But I have a feeling we're about to find out soon."

  He turned away from the trap door, his movement decisive despite his exhaustion.

  "Let's go back to the bunker. Jake will manage to get the radio transmission working, that's our priority now. Getting word out about what's happening here. That's how we fight back."

  Eli let out a shaky breath. "Good, because I wouldn't go down there for all the money in the world."

  The others remained quiet, and the group began the walk back through the tunnels, leaving the ancient gaping trap door behind them.

  And below them, in the ancient darkness, an army of the dead was preparing for something none of them could understand.