Dr. Elena Vargas POV
The map was wrong. Or rather, it was incomplete.
"We've been walking for twenty minutes," Sofía whispered, her voice bouncing softly off the damp brickwork. "According to that rag, we should have hit a junction by now."
"The geography has shifted," I murmured, running my hand along the wall. "Look at this mortar. It's newer."
We were deep in the guts of the city. The air here was heavy, still, and surprisingly warm. The frantic terror of the siege above felt miles away, replaced by a suffocating, tomb-like dread.
Julián was walking in the middle of the formation. He was calm—too calm. His skin was no longer glowing, but his eyes darted around in the dark like a nocturnal animal. He wasn't using the chem-light; he didn't need it.
"Stop," Julián said.
We froze.
"What is it?" Sofía raised her machete. "Infected?"
"No," Julián tilted his head, sniffing the air. "Oil. Gunpowder. And... ozone."
He pointed to a section of the wall that looked identical to the rest. "There is heat leaking from behind those bricks. Not body heat. electric heat."
I moved closer. Julián was right. To the naked eye, it was just a wall covered in slime and moss. But when I scraped the moss away, I didn't find brick. I found a seam.
"It's a false door," I realized. "High-grade concealment. This isn't cartel work. The masonry is too precise."
"Can we open it?" Camila asked, shivering.
"Sofía, the crowbar."
Sofía handed me the tool. I jammed it into the seam and leveraged my weight. With a groan of protest, the hidden mechanism gave way. A section of the wall, perfectly balanced on hidden hydraulics, swung inward.
A blast of dry, preserved air hit us.
We stepped inside. It wasn't a tunnel. It was a staging room.
The floor was tiled. There were heavy plastic curtains hanging from the ceiling, dividing the space. Along the walls stood rows of green military crates, stacked with obsessive precision.
"Jackpot," Sofía breathed, stepping forward.
"Wait!" I grabbed her vest.
I shone my light on the floor. In the thick layer of dust coating the tiles, there were no footprints. But there was something else. A faint, hair-thin glint stretching across the entryway.
"Tripwire," I whispered. "Mono-filament. You would have sliced your shin open and triggered... whatever that is connected to."
I followed the wire with my light. It ran up the wall to a bundle of plastic explosives rigged to the ceiling supports.
"Claymores," Sofía noted, her face pale. "Directional anti-personnel mines. If we tripped that, this whole room would have turned into a blender."
"Why booby-trap a smuggler's hole?" Camila asked.
"Because they weren't smuggling drugs," I said, a cold realization settling in my stomach. I walked carefully over the wire, signaling the others to follow in my footsteps.
I approached a desk in the corner. It was covered in papers that had curled with age. I picked up a clipboard.
The logo on the top wasn't a cartel insignia. It was a double-helix snake wrapped around a sword.
Project: VESTA.Clearance: Black/Obsidian.Manifest: Biological Sample 004 - 'The Thermal Catalyst'
"My god," I whispered.
"What?" Sofía was busy prying open one of the green crates.
"This isn't just a random outbreak," I said, my hands shaking as I flipped through the shipping manifest. "These tunnels... they were the delivery route. The government—or a rogue faction within it—was using the smuggler network to move the virus into the city."
"Why?" Julián asked from the doorway. He was staring at the Claymores with a strange fascination.
"To test it," I read the handwritten notes in the margins. "Urban dispersion trial. Subject population: Low-income sector 4. Objective: Measure thermal adaptation in high-density environments."
Camila gasped. "They did this to us? On purpose?"
"We were the petri dish," I said, anger rising in my throat like bile. "They released it in the slums to see what it would do."
"Well," Sofía grunted, the lid of the crate popping open with a loud crack. "The experiment is over. And look what they left us for the exit interview."
Sofía (The Muscle) POV
I didn't care about the politics. I didn't care about the science. I cared about the hardware.
The crate was lined with foam. Inside, resting like sleeping beauties, were four pristine H&K MP5 submachine guns, a dozen magazines, and a box of flashbang grenades.
"Beautiful," I muttered. I picked one up. It was heavy, oiled, and perfect. I racked the charging handle. The sound was crisp.
"Camila, you know how to shoot?"
"I... I played video games?" she stammered.
"Point the noisy end at the bad things," I tossed her a sidearm I found in a secondary case—a standard issue Glock 17. "Don't touch the trigger until you're ready to kill."
I looked at the rest of the room. It was a treasure trove. Tactical vests, flares, MREs (Meals Ready-to-Eat), and—most importantly—batteries.
"Check this," I called out.
I found a heavy, rubberized suit in a locker. It looked like a bomb disposal suit, but thinner.
"Thermal insulation gear," Elena said, examining it. "It's lined with lead and aerogel. It's designed to handle hazardous materials."
She looked at Julián.
"Put it on," she ordered.
"It looks heavy," Julián said.
"It will insulate you," Elena explained, her mind clearly racing. "It keeps the heat in. If you generate thermal energy, this suit will trap it. It might help you maintain your charge without needing to drain people constantly. But it also means if you overheat, you'll cook faster. It's a regulator."
Julián touched the suit. "Armor?"
"And a cage," I added. "But a useful one."
While Julián wrestled into the suit, I swept the room. The Claymores on the ceiling were still live.
"Elena," I said. "Can you disarm those mines? I want them."
"I'm a virologist, not an engineer," she said, still reading the manifest. "But the wiring looks simple. Red to positive, blue to detonator. If I cut the power source..."
"Do it. We might need to blow something up later."
As Elena worked on the explosives, I watched Julián. He had the suit on. He looked like a juggernaut now—bulky, dark, and intimidating. He flexed his hands in the thick gloves.
"How does it feel?" I asked.
"Quiet," he said. The visor of the helmet was dark, obscuring his eyes. "The static... it's quieter."
"Good. Keep it that way."
"Sofía, look at this," Elena called me over to the desk. She had unrolled a large schematic on the table.
It was a map of the tunnel network. But it had markings our smuggler's map didn't.
"We are here," she pointed to a red dot. "The Industrial District is here." She traced the line to a massive underground facility beneath the factories. Site VESTA.
"But look at the path," she pointed to a section of the tunnel ahead of us. It was marked with a skull symbol.
"Active Nesting Ground. Thermal Signature Detected: Massive."
"Massive?" I frowned. "How massive?"
"Based on the scale," Elena swallowed hard. "Whatever is blocking the path to the district isn't a person. It's a biomass. A colony."
"We have guns now," I patted the MP5.
"Sofía, you don't shoot a hurricane," Elena warned. "If this 'Massive' signature is an accumulation of the Alpha variant... we can't fight it. We have to sneak past it."
"Sneak?" Julián's voice came from the helmet, distorted and metallic. "I can feel it from here."
We turned to him. He was facing the far wall, the one leading deeper into the tunnels.
"It's pulsing," Julián said. "Like a second heart. Deep in the earth. It's calling the others."
"Great," I checked my mag. "We're walking into the boss room."
"Grab everything you can carry," I ordered. "Food, ammo, batteries. If the government left us these toys, it's only polite we use them to destroy their experiment."
We loaded up. I strapped two Claymores to my pack—dangerous, but I liked having an ace in the hole. Camila looked terrified holding the Glock, but she holstered it like she meant it.
Julián looked like a futuristic knight in the black armor.
"One last thing," Elena said. She ripped the page out of the manifest—the one proving the government's involvement. She folded it and put it in a waterproof container. "Evidence. If we get out, the world needs to know."
"If we get out," I corrected.
I walked to the exit door on the far side of the staging room. It was heavy steel, sealed with a keypad. The code was written on a sticky note on the desk: 1-9-8-4.
"Original," I muttered.
I punched in the code. The lock clicked.
I pushed the door open.
The smell hit us instantly. It wasn't rot anymore. It was humidity and sulfur. The air was thick, like a jungle.
We stepped out onto a ledge.
The tunnel had opened up into a massive natural cavern. The "floor" was fifty feet down, covered in a carpet of glowing violet moss. And hanging from the stalactites, clinging to the walls, were hundreds of them.
Infected.
They weren't moving. They were wrapped in resin-like cocoons, suspended upside down like bats. They were sleeping.
"The Sleeper Colony," Elena whispered, her voice barely audible.
"The path is down there," I pointed to a narrow stone bridge that spanned the cavern, winding through the stalactites right through the middle of the sleeping horde.
"If we wake them..." Camila started.
"We die," I finished. "Silence. Absolute silence. Turn off the chem-lights. We use Julián."
Julián stepped forward. The bioluminescence from the cavern reflected off his black visor.
"I can see the heat paths," he said softly. "Follow me."