Chapter 11: Chapter 11 – SURVIVAL

I woke up in the morning and felt something change inside.

I got up about an hour before I usually did. It was still dark outside and I could hear Eli getting ready to leave for work. As he shut the front door to head out to his job, I was in the bathroom washing up, and I was soon out the door myself. I had work today, too, but I didn’t start until seven AM, so I had an hour or so to take care of some things.

I left the apartment carrying a large backpack and, hardly feeling the cold, took a bus uptown. The cold, early morning was pitch black, and I was among only a few other passengers out and about at this hour, all of us bundled up against the bitter cold.

I took out my phone as I waited for my stop and texted Huang: Call me when you’re awake, we need to talk. Come to think of it, I had no idea what his schedule was like: did he have classes all day? Was he up as early as I was? If we were going to be coordinating to survive the Grey City, that was something we’d need to work out.

The bus pulled up to my stop and I hopped off into about a foot of snow. From there, it was a short walk to the department store. I had a brief think about my bank account and then I got shopping.

Military-grade, three pound flashlight: check. First-aid kit with bandages and gauze: check. I didn’t have the credentials, the know-how, or the money to try obtaining a gun somewhere, but there was a hunting and survival section that provided me with a hunting knife. I winced at all the money I was spending, but if there was a time to be cheap, it sure wasn’t when my life was on the line. I’d just have to live on instant noodles for a while. And skimp on Christmas presents a little more than usual.

I picked up a few other odds and ends I thought might come in handy, went to the checkout, and hoped to God my debit card wouldn’t be declined. If the cashier thought my collection of survival equipment was odd, she didn’t say anything, only handed me my receipt with the dead eyes of a night shift worker. I thanked her, stuffed everything in my backpack, and headed out.

Huang called at about quarter after six; his voice sounded strained and exhausted. “Listen,” he said, “I wasn’t able to think of anything, and I have two classes today I really can’t afford to miss. I know that sounds stupid, but I still need to…”

“It’s fine,” I assured him. I was standing alone at the bus stop, waiting to catch a ride to my workplace. “I had another dream.”

“Uh, okay?”

“Something is trying to communicate to me through them, like you thought,” I explained. “Whatever it is, it’s been… watching us, I think. It commented about how we got our asses beat by the giant spider.”

“Yeah,” Huang said cautiously. “Are you… Camilo, are you sure it’s real? It seems kind of strange to me.”

“We talked about it before—we decided it had to do with the Grey City.”

“We said it was likely, not that we knew for sure,” Huang pointed out. “What could possibly be watching us in there? We know we’re the only living things aside from those demons. You said before that it even looked like a demon. That doesn’t exactly sound trustworthy.”

I hesitated, staring up into the black sky. “I’m not saying I trust it completely, but I believe it this time.” I did my best to explain the dream and how I’d seen the Gargoyle overcome the spiders.

“Maybe there’s something there,” Huang admitted, “but here’s the thing: I’ve tried to control the glow in the past. If I wanted to sneak around, for instance, I tried to dim it, but I couldn’t figure out if there was a way.”

“We don’t have a choice,” I told him as my bus pulled up and I stepped on, dropping my token in. “We just have to try it next time we’re in there. It might just save us.”

I heard Huang take a shaky breath and realized that my own hands were trembling despite my calm tone of voice. It was strange to talk about our potential deaths while taking a seat on a TTC bus.

“Alright,” Huang said. “Okay. We’re going to do this. We need to come up with a plan so we know what to do, however this goes.”

We quickly worked out a plan of action based on what little we knew. If, the next time we entered, only one of us entered, we would have to use whatever tools we had at our disposal to try and make it out of the Underground and to the Waterfront. I knew if I was sent there alone, I probably wasn’t going to make it. A flashlight and a tiny knife weren’t going to do much for me.

But we had no reason to believe we would enter alone, or even directly back to the Underground. If we arrived together in the Underground, we would attempt to reach the Waterfront again, this time armed with new knowledge and hopefully a strategy for getting past the spiders.

And if we entered somewhere other than the Underground—well, that was best-case scenario. By the time we’d got to that possibility, Huang had to head out for his class, so we hung up and I stared out the window into the breaking winter dawn. I decided anyone on the bus who cared to eavesdrop could assume I’d been talking about a video game.

I got to work, stowed my backpack in my locker, and started the day’s shift. I ran scenarios in my head all day, trying to anticipate what would happen on our next entry. Unfortunately, most of my scenarios involved me getting killed.

“Camilo. Camilo. Hey, Jeez!” I looked up with a start, realizing that my co-worker, Joel, was waving his hand in my face. “The heck you thinking about? You look like you’re about to bust a vein.”

“Oh, you know,” I said, unable to think of a suitable lie. Joel just blinked at me. “Nothing. I was just lost in thought.”

“Right. You haven’t said a word to anyone in, like, four days, man,” Joel replied. We were in the warehouse portion of the plant, supposed to be taking inventory of the stock—but I realized I’d just been blankly staring down a stack of Christmas-themed snack boxes. “Not that you’re normally much of a chatterbox, but you know.”

“Just don’t worry about it,” I muttered.

“O-okay, man. Sorry.” He disappeared around a corner.

I glanced after him—was that his way of checking if I was okay? It was nice of him, but it wasn’t like we were friends. I didn’t really have friends.

Wasn’t like there was time to worry about that, given the current circumstances. I got back into my workflow but continued to run scenarios in the back of my mind, preparing for eventualities I didn’t look forward to facing.

No overtime today. It was 3 o’clock, and I stood at the front of the plant with my backpack, still containing survival equipment, slung over my shoulders. The weather was white and cold, the sky closed over with clouds.

Well, I thought, if you’re going to bring me back in, you better get it over with. I stepped outside and started walking.

As I set off for my apartment, I tried to keep strategizing, but the anticipation was ruining my focus. Soon, I turned onto my street and could see my apartment.

You are reading story Knights of the Grey City at novel35.com

I scowled and took a left, planning to wander the nearby blocks until something happened. I just couldn’t take this tension. I pulled out my phone and dialled Huang again.

He picked up after a few rings. “What’s up?”

I could vaguely hear the sound of crowds and chatter behind him, so I assumed he was still at school. “Hey. Are you done for the day?”

“Yeah, just heading out. What’s the problem?”

“Just… get out on the streets. We gotta get back in.”

“Agreed,” Huang said to my relief. He probably wasn’t enjoying the tension, either. “I don’t know if we can force it to happen, but I guess it doesn’t hurt to try.”

After he hung up, I continued my winter stroll. I extended my spatial sense like I hadn’t all day, keeping track of the snow banks and the shards of ice and the decomposing cigarette butts frozen to the curbs. I was still in Toronto, all right. I closed my eyes, relying on my spatial sense to guide me. It was surprisingly natural.

As I did, there was a flash of something at the edges of my perception—a sense of something off, different, or skewed. I stepped toward it purposefully, quickly going over my scenarios. If I turned up in the Underground—if Huang wasn’t there—if the spider was right in front of me—

The quality of air changed around me and my spatial sense experienced a sudden pitch of vertigo, then adjusted itself to new, different surroundings. I opened my eyes and saw…

I was alone in the Glass District. The shapes of glass buildings reached up around and over me, forming a canopy with reaching supports. Ahead of me, at the end of the narrow street, was an area where all the buildings twisted toward a pitch-dark opening in the street: the entrance to the Underground.

A wave of relief washed over me—there was no immediate danger. Maybe Huang wouldn’t be far behind.

I paced back and forth in front of the entrance for a few minutes, then unzipped my backpack and took out the knife and flashlight. The flashlight was pretty heavy, but had a handle on the top of it and, according to the packaging, had enough battery to last a week or two.

I stood there for a while longer, but it soon became clear that Huang was nowhere nearby. “Damn,” I muttered, picking up my cell phone on the off chance it would work. As expected, it told me there was no signal.

Hesitantly, I inched toward the opening. I had no plans to go in without backup, but I was a little worried that one of the spiders—the map, back on the sentry tower, had shown three demons in the underground district—might be close to my location. I reached out my sense and it gave me a picture of the long descent tunnel, empty and quiet.

Faintly, from below, I heard the Gargoyle cry out.

I cursed and clutched my flashlight closer. My options ran very quickly through my head because there were very few of them. Huang gets eaten by spiders, I never get to the Waterfront, I die. I run into the Underground, I get eaten by spiders, I die.

I shakily raised my flashlight to my side, making sure it was switched off, and jogged into the tunnel.

It was easier, I found, to close my eyes in the pitch darkness and let my sense tell me which way to go. I made sure I was paying attention to what was above me, sensitive to any shifts in the soil that might indicate a spider was going to drop down on my head. I was concentrating so hard I could feel myself breaking out in waves of sweat.

I didn’t pay attention to the pipes or glass around me, following the distant noise of scuffling and Gargoyle-calls instead, until my sense finally found a shining dragon and a giant spider battling at the far end of a narrow hall.

I plastered myself to the wall and opened my eyes, now able to see with the glow coming off of the dragon. Huang was fighting desperately, barely able to make a dent in the spider’s exoskeleton. I watched him leap over it and drag his talons along it, but it didn’t hurt the spider at all.

“Huang!” I yelled at him. “Would you do your shiny thing already!”

“Where did you come from?” he demanded. If anything, his glow had faded significantly since the last time I’d seen him, a result of the injuries he was accumulating. “And I would if I could!”

When Huang’s feet hit the ground, the spider struck again, mandibles first. The Gargoyle danced back.

“Please work,” I whispered under my breath, then raised my flashlight toward the spider and turned it on.

The light was powerful—it probably would have blinded me if I’d been standing in front of it. A shaft of white light pierced through the ambient dust and hit the spider’s face.

Movies had taught me to expect shrieks and roars from injured monsters, but this one simply retreated back in a swift motion, hunkering low to the ground. Huang chased it, but when the thing locked its legs in toward its body like it was doing now, the toughest parts of it were all that was exposed.

I tried to keep the light on it, but it wasn’t a very wide beam. As soon as the light slid off its face, it unfurled itself and darted onto the wall, then onto the ceiling, moving toward me. Now my hands were shaking so much I could hardly hold the flashlight, but I managed to train the light back on its face and stop it dead.

“Stop being stupid, just get out of here and I’ll take care of it!” Huang insisted. He bounded to catch up with the spider and attempted to knock it off the ceiling to little effect.

“You’re not taking care of jack shit, just do the shiny thing before it kills us both!” I demanded, steadying the light with both hands.

The Gargoyle flapped its wings at the spider, almost like what I’d seen in the dream, but there was no change in the intensity of the light. “I don’t know how!”

I started walking backwards while keeping the light trained on the spider, but my shaking hands betrayed me and the beam of light shifted. Instantly the spider was ten feet closer, but I got the light back on it and it stopped.

“Joshua Huang,” I said quietly, “Please figure out how to kill this spider or we are both going to die in here.”

Then, from behind me, my sense identified something moving, quickly and powerfully. It dug through the ceiling in a rush of rocks and soil, narrow metal beams bending and breaking. In a second, my sense was able to outline the descending form of a second spider, and in another second, it was going to leap for me and kill me.

You can find story with these keywords: Knights of the Grey City, Read Knights of the Grey City, Knights of the Grey City novel, Knights of the Grey City book, Knights of the Grey City story, Knights of the Grey City full, Knights of the Grey City Latest Chapter