Unraveling Yarns, Part 4 of 5: The Bonescrapers' Elegy

Stranger-than-normal persons have taken up residence in the catacombs beneath Paris, and officials Rafael Bastedo, Luc Rivière, and Fortune Duval must take the to icy warren of tunnels, crypts, and sewers to figure out why.

The five parts of Unraveled Yarns have been collected in The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: Operation Arm Breaker, which is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

The Bonescrapers’ Elegy is a standalone short story that features characters from Operation Arm Breaker.

Content warnings: Minor swearing, death, violence, gun violence, gore, drug use, Nazis.

MONDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 15, 1941
BOIS DE VINCENNES PUMP HOUSE
12TH ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS, OCCUPIED FRANCE

//Translated from French.//

Rafael Bastedo flipped the map of the catacombs upside down, spun it in every direction, checked the back, then huffed.

“A problem, Pongo?” Dumas asked. The Resistance man insisted on calling Bastedo only by his absurd code name, just as he had only given his own.

“This looks like a tank of eels,” Bastedo said. He flipped the map over again, like its backside would reveal some better path through the ancient warrens. The paper was yellowed with age, an old street map that looked like it had been razored out of a book at the city archives. These streets were long entombed, with the new Paris built over them, but they were as close as one could get to the layout of the catacombs without having a seance with a Roman phantasm.

“There, you see?” Dumas asked. Of course Bastedo saw the hand-written notes overlaying the buried streets, warning of collapses, flooding, Nazi outposts, gang territories, booby traps, and holy ground. One narrow green route snaked between all these deadly landmarks, taking its followers out from beneath the park and all the way to their destination.

In Bastedo’s old life, he had ventured below the streets far too often, searching for corpses and killers. He sighed and took a puff of his cigarette. The smoke warmed his lungs where the winter air had chilled them.

“So you know, this is the best map we could create,” Dumas concluded. The large man crossed his arms and leaned against the abandoned pump house’s brick wall. “Our people navigate by memory. Let us send one with you.”

“Not necessary,” Bastedo huffed.

“They would not be able to keep pace anyway,” Luc Rivière quipped from the floor. He flipped his hair back and began strapping his Constante 1906 M22 motorized roller skates to his feet.

“What is that accent, American?” Dumas asked, as though Rivière’s atrocious pronunciation left any doubt. Bastedo eyed him: for a man so insistent on anonymity, that was an odd question to ask.

“Do not worry about it,” Fortune Duval grunted before Rivière could reply. She was standing at the drain pipe entrance, shining her blue light down its maw. Ice sparkled wherever her fungal beam landed.

“What I mean is that being in a hurry to get to a place you do not know how to find is a very American mindset,” Dumas said with a shrug. “Take our help or do not, I am here to offer it. Bluebird has helped us in more ways than I can ever repay. Whatever you need, I can try to provide.”

Bastedo knew ‘Bluebird’ was Colonel Dufossé, who had been coordinating weapons and intel drops with the Resistance. He shook his head. This was an Office mission, through and through. The HYDRA towers had intercepted a strange transmission that needed to be checked out, one that might be related to an old case that the Office would prefer to keep among sworn officials.

“We will manage,” Bastedo muttered. Duval snorted and stalked over.

“Let me see,” she snapped, and snatched the map out of his hands. Dumas had not had a good look at her yet, but nearly jumped when he saw her face. In the shadows beneath her hood, Fortune Duval looked like a mummy. Her face was wrapped in paper strips that only left slits for her eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Bastedo knew Dumas had more questions than his code allowed him to ask.

“As you can see…” he stammered, vaguely gesturing across the hand-drawn path, “The areas you are looking for are some distance, but the main sewer line runs most of the way. It is the last thirty percent of your journey that gets tricky.”

“We will manage,” she grunted, echoing Bastedo. Dumas nodded.

“If there is anything…” he offered, but the odd trio offered him no response. He had worked with Bluebird’s people before, and they were always strange. He left the gruff, bearded man with the penetrating eyes, the bandage-wrapped woman, and the distracted young American in the pump house and locked them in.

“Then I will see you when you are back up here.”

Bastedo waited until he heard Dumas’ footsteps trail off before he spoke again.

“You all ready?” he asked.

“Just about…” Rivière replied. He held up one of his outfitted feet and twisted the control wired to his palm. A tiny motor coughed to life in the sole of his shoe, and the roller skate wheels hissed and spun. He hopped up and buzzed a quick circuit around the room.

“Perfect,” he said. He was grinning.

Bastedo muttered something to himself and finished his cigarette. He was not looking forward to being underground, or having tiny gasoline motors strapped to his feet, or watching over this childish foreigner.

“We are wasting time,” Duval said. She hefted her absurd Chauchat machine gun to her shoulder. Bastedo had tried to convince her to bring something smaller, but she insisted. The Chauchat was as likely to jam as it was to shake the whole of the tunnels down on their heads, but if she did anything, she did it all the way. Like with the second skin armor.

Bastedo kept his thoughts to himself as he strapped the roller skates on. He had not had as much time to practice with the contraptions as he would have liked, but they would provide exactly what he needed: less time in the catacombs. He hooked his Franklin torch to his chest and and stood. The little tires were firm and had grip. Traction would be essential with the mix of ice and sewage that he expected below.

He gave his comrades a once-over, expecting to have to nudge them along. Instead he found that he was the last to be ready, they were waiting on him.

“Luc, take point,” he said, handing the makeshift map over to the tousle-haired young man. The American was not the most experienced, but he reacted quickly, was observant, and had the most experience on the Constante skates. He would not run them into trouble.

“My pleasure,” Rivière replied. He grinned wide. He had grown up on his parents’ tall tales about the Paris underground: this mission was as much sight-seeing for him as it was anything else. Bastedo was surprised the kid had not brought a camera.

“Duval, you bring up the rear,” Bastedo said. The mummy-like woman chuffed under her wraps. He added: “I will need you to pick me up when I crash these damn skates.”

She might have smiled beneath her wraps. Bastedo smirked and turned away. Duval gave him an odd feeling. The second skin paper armor she wore was terrifying to him. He could not imagine making that trade.

Rivière rocketed off down the pump house drain pipe, crouching low as he built up speed. His skates whined and left a trail of exhaust behind him. Bastedo steadied himself, then squeezed the accelerator button on his palm. His feet nearly zipped out from under him, but he leaned into it and stayed upright. He kept Rivière’s blue glow in sight and he banked around the drain’s slight curves. Duval was close behind, her hood blown back and the loose edges of her paper armor flapping against her head.

Second skin had seemed a miracle when the Office made it available, but the caveats were too severe for many, including him. The patches she had glued to herself were paper sheets sandwiched around liquid crystals. They seemed almost magical, absorbing impacts and bursting into a spray of dust to disperse the energy. But that dust was highly toxic. One breath of it airborne was enough to seed tumors throughout the body. The required glue to hold the patches in place stained the skin, some said permanently. Beneath her paper armor, Fortune Duval was tattooed chartreuse, shaved bald, and potentially incubating a clutch of the worst cancers imaginable. Bastedo did not know if she had ever been saved by her second skin, but she would certainly die because of it.

Rafael Bastedo was fighting for what came after the war while Duval was burning everything to end it. He had plans. The police force would welcome him back, but he did not want that. He never wanted to see a dead body again. Of course, there were those naive enough to think that peace would end all the nastiness, but he was not among their number. If humans survived this war, humans would continue doing what they had always done: be animals. He refused to re-enter that cycle. He would open a book store. He would sell coffee and mysteries and die gray and boring and caffeinated.

The wind snatched at his beard, so he pulled his scarf tighter. What little water they had found so far was frozen solid, but it was growing warmer the deeper they got. After only a few minutes, they were out from under the park. A slight veer from the main line pulled them from the more modern storm drains and into the old sewers. Centuries of cold-congealed sewage oozed down the middle of these tunnels, so the officials kept to the edge. The stink made Bastedo wish he had brought something more substantial to cover his face than a hand-knit scarf.

Side-channels, cisterns, and antechambers whipped past them. Their skates buzzed and squealed but kept them moving. Whirring echoes trailed behind. Their Franklin torches lit the way ahead in blue, though other light sometimes leaked into their path. Every time an errant beam appeared, put up his hand and called for them to halt.

The first three pauses were for old utility lamps, still stubbornly humming incandescent. Rivière verified that no one was present, then zipped away, leaving Bastedo and Duval to catch up to his filthy rooster tail.

The fourth stop found the faint flicker of candle light licking at the floor beneath a chained wooden door. Rivière held a finger to his lips and approached slowly.

He leaned in and listened for a moment, then waved the other two officials over. Bastedo hesitated: he had seen more officers shot through closed doors than he cared to remember, but he trusted the younger man’s instinct. He followed Duval’s lead and pressed his ear against the cold wood.

The brassy peal of a lone trumpet wailed from behind the chains, so insistent and jarring that Bastedo nearly tripped over his skates. Whoever was playing held the mournful dirge for a long moment, then lit into a looping, serpentine scale that Bastedo had to grab by the mane to keep from getting bucked off halfway through. This was American jazz, and the trumpeter was a master of it. Bastedo missed the nightclubs and cafes of the Paris he’d once known. But here was a scrap of it, driven underground. It was still alive.

A small smile shifted Bastedo’s beard and crinkled his eyes ever so slightly, which he caught Duval smirking at. It evaporated from his face, replaced in an instant by a scowl. He waved off the the other two officials and they continued their subterranean trek.

Their next stop was forced. Where Dumas’ map had told them was safe was blocked by a massive conduit, as if a tree of wire and metal had sprouted and burst its mechanical root through the sewer wall.

“What the hell is this?” Rivière wondered. He picked past the strewn bricks and examined the structure. He could not determine anything beyond the fact that it was German and thrumming with electricity. An indicator strip from a Hostile Substance Battery turned orange within three meters of it, indicating that it was radiating X-rays. This Nazi thing was violating Bastedo’s city, coring it like a worm in an apple, but he agreed with Duval and Rivière that damaging it would draw unwanted attention. They marked it on the map and back-tracked until they found a way around.

The tunnels were quiet and their skates were loud. Rivière slowed them to a crawl after what had to have been a kilometer. He pointed to a bend up ahead. The moving beam of a flashlight lit the fetid brick, and it was getting closer.

Bastedo could hear laughing. Three or four men at least. Their voices carried. Nazis. The officials ducked into a dank side channel, more of a break in the wall than a planned passage. Roots dangled down on them like streamers, brushing their ears. The brick walls narrowed and gave way to moss and dark earth. Rivière grabbed the back of his coat dragged him back into the cut as far as they could go. The packed dirt walls squeezed in around Bastedo’s shoulders, but Duval kept pushing him back, deeper and deeper. Blackness swallowed them whole.

Suddenly Rivière’s insistent tug was gone. Bastedo twisted around to find him, but soil crumbled over his head, catching in his beard. He sputtered and brushed it out of his mouth. The noise drew an elbow from Duval, who was still shoving him away from the main tunnel. One more lurch backward sent the pair sprawling tangled around a hidden corner. Blinding golden light washed over them. Duval recovered quickly, laying her machine gun across Bastedo’s belly to steady it.

“What in the pagan Hell is this?” she growled. Bastedo found himself laying on gleaming tile at the rear of an immense hall. Oil fires lit the gilded room, illuminating frescoes and towering columns that held the vaulted ceiling ten meters above their heads. Along the perimeter, statues of men and women in flowing robes, some with the faces of cats and bulls, stared down at them in marble disdain. An altar stood tall at the far end of the huge space, lorded over by a spear-bearing effigy with a crab where her head should have been.

This was not some hall, Bastedo realized, it was a temple.

“We should not be here,” Rivière muttered in English.

“Quiet with that,” Duval snapped. Her bark bounced around the cavernous room. Bastedo knew she couldn’t understand the young American’s native tongue. She hissed: “We should not be here.”

“We are alone,” Bastedo said. The temple was empty. Duval checked every corner, using him as cover.

“Clear,” she confirmed.

“Then get off of me,” Bastedo snorted, and shoved her away. He scrambled to his feet and examined the strange temple. He did not recognize any of the statues, or even the flowing script etched into the room’s every surface and he said as much.

“Me neither,” Rivière said. He lowered his weapon and began tracing his fingers through the indecipherable engravings. “I have never seen anything like these.”

“You what I do not see?” Bastedo asked. “Dirt. Dust. Cobwebs.”

“You are right,” Duval said. She whipped her head around back and forth, surveying the temple’s far corners. The paper armor on her face and neck rustled as she moved.

“Someone takes care of this place,” Bastedo said quietly. The temple was immaculate. The only grime in it was what they had tracked in with their skate wheels.

“I found your dirt,” Rivière reported. Bastedo and Duval found him standing at the altar, beneath the glowering crab-goddess. They approached him slowly, checking every step like the room with rife with trip wires. Rivière dragged his fingers across the altar-top and showed off a ruddy stain. “See?”

Bastedo knew the particular shade of brick-brown staining Rivière’s fingertips all too well from his years on the job.

“That is not dirt,” he said. Rivière looked at his fingers, then down at the altar, then up into the eyestalks of the strange marble being above him with her long golden spear. He wiped his hand on his jacket.

“Time to go,” Duval said.

They found a hidden exit concealed by velvet curtains behind the spear-bearing statue. They did their best to lock the double doors behind them. It took them the better part of an hour following a trickle of melt water to track down the main sewer line. When the tunnels opened up, they did, too.

Their skates sputtered and howled, but they zipped down the old tunnels like they had been shot out of an air cannon. According to the map, they were less than a kilometer away from their target. Rivière skidded to a halt at their final junction and held a finger to his lips. Bastedo and Duval followed him close.

The American led them up a side channel to a rusty gate, chained to appear locked. It swung open readily on oiled hinges.

“Do you hear that?” Rivière asked. Bastedo leaned in and listened over his shoulder. Somewhere far ahead, the mechanical shriek of a saw or some other hardware screamed up the tunnel.

“We are in the right place,” Bastedo confirmed after a quick perusal of their map.

“Quiet,” Duval snapped. She pressed the loose flaps of her second skin flat and checked that she had a round racked in her Chauchat.

Bastedo ducked into an alcove and removed his skates. The officials followed his lead. Whatever happened next, none of them wanted wheels on their feet for it.

The eroded stones around them were engraved with names. They were in tombs. Even before the war, there were more dead people below Paris than there were living above. Every civilization and empire and nation and faith that had occupied this city over the centuries buried their dead differently, but they had all buried them there.

“I am moving up,” Rivière whispered. He rolled forward slowly on his skates, a revolver in each hand like some kind of cowboy.

“Slow down,” Bastedo hissed at his back, but Rivière either did not hear or ignored him. He whispered to Duval over his shoulder: “We need to follow.”

Rivière followed the sounds of power tools around turns, deeper and deeper. The architecture around them got older and older. Tombs had been smashed open, leaving empty caskets gaping open. Bones and rags were scattered across the floor.

He found their targets in an open section, cleared by shoving caskets off their pedestals and against the wall. The shuddering power tool roar was deafening. Bastedo and Duval watched the odd scene unfolding from around a corner. A gray haze hung in the air. A half-dozen men in scarlet chemical suits were hard at work, pulling apart the walls around them under the range glow of a blazing lamp.

They were in the right place.

The scene matched up with what the Resistance had reported to the Office: a strange group of armed men deep in the old catacombs, working with power tools, dressed for a gas attack, who avoided both partisans and Nazis.

“Lord Jesus Christ,” Duval whispered. She was right behind Bastedo. He ducked and pushed himself close to the wall, bringing his nose centimeters away from from a leering human skull.

Bastedo looked up the wall. Everything he could see was bones, tens of thousands of them. They were in the walls, the columns, the ceiling, in patterns and at random. It was an ossuary. He had heard about these sites before, but he had never considered that he would ever find himself in one.

It was then that he realized what their targets were taking. Each man tugged femurs, ribs, and skulls free from their resting places and piled them next to one of their number who was operating some kind of industrial lathe. As he received each bone, he hooked it into his device, spun it up, and used a chisel to scrape down its outer later. A vacuum sucked down the majority of the dust this process produced. Another man collected it in molds, dripped a blue liquid into them, then tamped it down. There was a pyramid of gray-blue bricks next to him, folded into waxed paper.

The man at the lathe worked tirelessly. His red suit was identical to the rest, save for the yellow spray of powdered, rotten bone dust that frosted his arms and chest. As each bone inevitably shattered on the lathe, he brushed the fragments away and took up the next.

The sound of chisel-tip on bone made Bastedo’s molars ache.

He and Duval were considering what their next move would be when Rivière came barreling around the corner and shoved them side.

“Look what I have,” he gasped. He dragged a crimson-suited man in a headlock and shoved him to Bastedo’s feet.

“What in the Hell,” Duval managed.

“That is not the best part,” Rivière said, his excitement nearly cooking off. He grabbed his captive’s rubberized hood, saying: “Listen to this…”

Rivière ripped the hood and mask away, revealing an unshaven white man with eyes nearly as red as his outfit. His pupils were the size of poker chips.

“What’s all this, then?” the bonescraper asked in English.

“What is he saying?” Duval hissed.

“Shut up,” Bastedo snapped. Duval ignored him.

“Ask him what they are doing here,” she demanded of Rivière.

“Why are you down here?” Rivière demanded. The wide-eyed bonescraper’s gaze bounced between the three officials. His mouth worked like he was talking up a storm, but no sounds came out. Sweat flowed freely down his face.

“Talk!” Duval demanded, and smacked the bonescraper across the face. He blinked and shook his head like he had just come out of a deep sleep.

“I am beholden only to my Lord,” he yelped.

“What?” Duval asked Rivière.

“He says he is Christian,” Rivière replied.

“I am Christian, as well. Talk to me,” she growled at the bonescraper, glowering like a cursed mummy.

Bastedo grabbed a humerus out of the wall and shoved it under the bonescraper’s nose. He recoiled away, but the official was larger and leaned in closer.

“All of these people were Christian, as well,” he said. He knew his accent was thick, but he knew the Englishman understood him. He continued: “And you are grinding them into powder.”

“These were the bones of kings,” the crazed bonescraper said. Bastedo knew of no king who would deign to be buried in the catacombs. Rich men wanted rich deaths. The bonescraper continued: “Their bones hold the glasses.”

He glared, waiting for Bastedo to respond as if all of that meant something. The bonescraper giggled, then drew a symbol in the dirt with his finger, two circles side-by-side, connected by a short line.

“What are those, spectacles?” Duval asked.

“Hieroglyphics?” Rivière wondered.

“Hieroglyphics?” the bonescraper parroted with a giggle. Bastedo watched something snap in the doped-up man, and he grinned wide, showing off his blackened gums and few remaining teeth. He began gyrating in rhythm and repeating Rivière’s question, louder and louder. “Hieroglyphics? Hieroglyphics? Hieroglyphics?”

“Quiet!” Duval snapped. She pressed her hand over their captive’s mouth. The bonescraper’s eyes went even wider, and he chomped down on her palm. She yanked her hand away then punched him so hard that his head bounced off the stone floor. He went limp and she nursed her sore hand.

“Are you bleeding?” Rivière asked.

“Shut up,” she snarled, but checked anyway. “He did not break the skin.”

“You hear that?” Bastedo said, clamming them both up. The lathe had stopped turning, the bonescrapers had gone silent. The clatter of old bones had ceased.

Duval leaned around the corner. A volley of pistol fire roared through the ossuary. Her chest burst and she fell onto her back, trailing a cloud of yellow dust.

“Grab her!” Bastedo shouted. He and Rivière snagged her shoulders and pulled her the rest of the way behind cover.

“God damn, that hurts,” Duval groaned from the floor. Her shirt was torn. Carcinogenic crystalline powder tumbled out of the shredded hole. Bastedo wiped his hands on his pants. He did not want a speck of that stuff anywhere near his skin.

“Firing!” Rivière shouted. He popped around the corner and lit off with his pistol, emptying his magazine in one volley. He ducked back and shied away as the bonescrapers whittled down his cover. Chips of brick and bone cascaded over him. “I think I missed!”

Bastedo grunted. Rivière had been recruited to design infrastructure for the Resistance, not frontline combat. A few weeks at the Bell Towers does not a soldier make.

“Pick your target, make your shots count,” Bastedo snapped. He tried to lean around the corner but the incoming fire kept him pinned back.

“What?” their dazed captive groaned from the floor. He nursed the growing goose egg on the back of his head.

“Shut up!” Duval yelled. She tried to punch him again but he wriggled out of the way. “Get him!”

Rivière dove atop the crawling man. They tousled for a few seconds, until Rivière yelped in pain and rolled off of the bonescraper.

“He’s got my gun!”

Bastedo spun to find Rivière bleeding from a round wound on his wrist. The bonescraper raised the pistol in a shaking hand. Bastedo squeezed his trigger, stilling the strange man with a burst from his MAS-38. The pistol clattered to the brick floor. Duval snatched it up.

“It was empty,” she noted. Bastedo ignored her.

“Can you fight?” he asked Rivière.

The American nodded. He sat up and whimpered. The hand on his wounded arm clenched and unclenched on command; a good sign that the bite had not damaged any tendons, and there was not enough to blood to indicate that the main veins were damaged. He kept his free hand clasped over the shallow wound.

“They are like rabid dogs. Use this,” Duval said. She dropped her scarf into his lap. Rivière muttered his thanks and wrapped up his wound tight.

“I can take them,” Duval said. She stood with a grunt and held her Chauchat from the hip. If she managed to get any of the bonescrapers before they got her, she would turn them to soup at this range. Still, her second skin was already compromised. Another hit to the chest would put her down for good.

“Wait,” Rivière said. He used his one good hand to gingerly remove one of his motor skates. After a moment’s awkward modification, he set his miniature petrol tank in the open shoe, strapped it down, and set it on the floor. “Watch this.”

A twist of the controls set the skate off on a tear, around the corner and into the midst of the firing men.

“And… Voilà.”

He pressed a button and the rigged explosive went up in an orange thunderclap, shaking the entire ossuary. Bones fell loose from the walls in a yellow avalanche. Cracks spread through the ancient ceiling. Dust from both crumbling red bricks and burst bone bricks rolled over them.

“Run! The powder! Run!” Bastedo heard the bonescrapers yelling over the ringing in his ears.

Duval and Bastedo charged around the corner. The air stank of mold and garlic. The strange men had abandoned their lathe, their remaining packaged bricks, their weapons. The room was lit by burning gasoline and spilled lamp oil. A wide door hung open at the far end of the ruined ossuary. They could hear the bonescrapers yelling, and what they said next even Duval understood.

“Nazis!”

The gunfire they heard next was not the small-caliber fire of the bonescrapers’ arsenal. This was military grade gear, fully automatic, and a lot of it. A Nazi patrol had followed the sound of their firefight.

“Time to go!” Bastedo said. The three of them dashed back the way they had come in, ducking low to get beneath a blast-shattered joist. Before they got to the door, Rivière stumbled.

“Get up,” Duval hissed. Rivière could only groan. His face had gone white. The clinging dust in the air stuck to the sheen of sweat oozing through his skin.

Flashlight beams illuminated the bonescrapers’ escape route. The Nazis were almost atop them.

“We have to go,” Bastedo said. He grabbed Rivière by his coat and hauled him to his feet. The man barely kept himself off the ground. “Are you shot?”

Rivière shook his head and lifted his wounded arm. Blackened veins radiated out from the bite, like the gnarled roots that remain even after the tree is chopped down.

“I don’t feel so good,” Rivière groaned in English. He could not keep his eyes open.

“What is wrong with him?” Duval asked. They could hear shouted orders now. In German.

“That bite made him sick,” Bastedo said. He leaned Rivière against the wall and removed the improvised bandage from his wrist. The blood that emerged was as thick as earthworms. He moved the scarf halfway up Rivière's bicep, above where the infected veins ended, and tied it as tight as he could. It was all he could think to do.

“Can you walk?” Bastedo asked him. Rivière was delirious.

“I should stay home from school today,” he whimpered.

Gunshots sounded, and Duval grunted. Yellow dust swirled around her, but she stayed standing, shielding Bastedo while he attended to Rivière. Bullets cratered brick and shattered bones, raining chips down on them.

“Time to run!” Duval said. Bastedo clenched his jaw and threw Rivière’s good arm over his shoulders. The American hung off him like a sack of dead fish. He struggled, unable to run, barely able to stagger.

“Go!” she roared. She spun on their attackers and let her Chauchat do the rest of her talking. The room before her exploded, reducing Nazis to liquid. More krauts piled through the doorway, firing rifles and sub-machine guns. Bullet after bullet struck Duval. She ignored them. The hits geysered outward from her, dry as mustard powder.

Her magazine ran empty.

A rifle barked, bursting yellow out of her thigh, and she fell to one knee. She twisted around, showing the Nazis her papered back. Blood was running down her face. They had struck her in the cheek. She should be dead. Hell, the second skin she wore would leave her more tumor than organs; she was already dead.

The look she gave Bastedo told he that she already knew it, too. Her eyes were green, sad but not scared.

“Take him and go!” she shouted. “I will see you off.”

More bullets burst yellow off her ribs and spine. Another skipped off the crown of her head. When the yellow drifted away, Bastedo could see gray stubble lining her scalp. She did not wear the second skin to save herself. It let her protect them, it let her be the target so they could live. She had made that choice before they had even entered the tunnels.

She racked a fresh magazine into her machine gun and raised it, pointing above Bastedo’s head. Bullets continued to pound into her back, but red sprays had started to join the yellow.

He looked up and saw a half-collapsed joist, courtesy of Rivière’s makeshift bomb. He understood what she was telling him.

“See you up there,” he said. He pulled Rivière up higher onto his shoulders and lurched out of the ossuary. They were barely out into the tunnel before she opened fire. The cracked joist only took a few hits to snap completely. Duval disappeared as the ceiling collapsed, buried under centuries of bone and stone, brick and dirt.

Red, yellow, brown, gray, and white washed over Bastedo and Rivière. The colossal sound staggered them, but they stayed upright. When the echo and finished its circuit up and down the tunnel, they were left in a suffocating silence.

Bastedo carried Rivière through the chained gate, careful to let it close gently behind them. They were in the realm of the dead, and the dead deserved their rest.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres.