Ivory gagged and thrust her scarf over her nose, choking into it. She felt her stomach heave with acid, and breathed into the wool until it settled. She almost wanted to climb back up the ladder, up into fresh air. But down here, the sun couldn't scorch her skin.

The sewer smelt of must, rotting flesh and excrement, as though hundreds of corpses had been dumped there to decay. Moss smothered parts of the drain pipes and brick walls, and murky brown waste flowed heavily down the tunnels, disappearing into the darkness. One or two lamps flickered with dim light, illuminating only the stone below them. Ivory switched on her torch just as Moose hit the ground behind her, and she swung it down the right and left tunnels. Both were empty.

Moose groaned and coughed, and Ivory glanced over her shoulder. The boy was doubled up, his hand plastered over his mouth and nose. "That...is disgusting," he croaked. 

Ivory smirked. "Come on, you smell like that all the time," she said into the scarf.

"Shut up."

Water droplets fell from the overhead pipes, plopping into the sewerage and echoing through the tunnels. Ivory took a few silent steps to the left and kept her torch beam trained down the passage. She held it there for a few minutes, almost daring some kind of creature to appear out of the shadows and attack. 

Nothing but the waste moved. 

"Moose, we're going this way," she said quietly, and started making her way down the path of the left tunnel. 

Moose strode up beside her, holding his t-shirt over his nose. "It's like a furnace in here," he muttered. 

"Better than outside. We've been doing this for ages, so stop complaining." 

"There'll be other cranks down here, you know."

"Yeah. I know." 

Silence past between them. Ivory tried not to let her imagination get the best of her. For a moment she pictured a crank, creeping along in the darkness behind them. She swung her head around, flashing her torch in that direction. There was nothing there. They kept walking.

After the flares hit, after the first heat wave passed, the world seemed to cool off. It was like that for a few years. But then the weather changed, mutated, and the sun seemed to grow hotter each day. Soon it was impossible to stay out in open air without burning in minutes. Ever since then, Ivory had travelled underground, in sewers, or between buildings to stay out of the sun. But that didn't stop the sweltering heat, the dehydration, the exhaustion. And Ivory had plenty of burns anyway, along her arms and legs, all over her back, on her neck. Scars. Constant reminders of the horrors the sun flares had brought in their wake. 

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ☣ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━  

They walked in silence for 15 minutes. Ivory's torch shone on everything in front of them; every few minutes or so she'd glance behind her, and find nothing. So far, the only sign of life was the moss suffocating the walls and drain pipes.

They passed the remains of campfires; damp sticks, torn pieces of paper and ash sprinkled over everything. Piles of junk and bits of clothing were scattered here and there, and sleeping bags that looked like they'd been half-eaten by rats lay spread along the concrete. All were the remnants of civilisation, of those who had lived and survived here before. God knows where they were now.

Ivory swivelled around for what felt like the hundredth time, and spotted something large and black floating down the stream of waste. She jumped, and then sucked in a sharp breath when she realised what it was. A scorched body, bobbing face down in the water. It was missing a leg. Ivory swallowed bile and turned back around. Great, now we'll have a corpse following us, she thought.

Moose had brought out his Rubik's cube again. He shifted the squares over and over, until one side was almost full of red. Moose considered the cube for a moment, and then moved the red squares apart, grunting in frustration. 

"Maybe...maybe you should put that away," Ivory said gently, remembering the incident back at camp. 

"No!" Moose barked a little to fiercely. "No. I mean, sorry. I mean, no, I need to get this right."

Ivory opened her mouth, and then shut it. The last thing she needed was for Moose to attack her again, and coax any cranks out of the darkness to investigate. 

They slowed down as the tunnel veered off to the left into a small passageway, but continued forward into the shadows. Ivory peered around the corner, and swung her torch down the sewer. There was man, 20 metres away, crouching over what looked like a dead dog. He dug into the flesh, dragging out organs and splattering blood all over himself and the floor. He whirled around when the torch light fell upon him, biting into a piece of skin covered in black fur.

Ivory felt her stomach fall away. The crank scrambled across the concrete towards them, his limbs flailing and his skin, his face, drowning in the animal's blood, and probably his own as well. Ivory's brain screamed at her run, but her feet were glued to the floor. Then she felt Moose's hand on her arm, heard his panicked cries, and suddenly she was moving, past the passage, past the crank, down into the tunnel, the light from the torch flying across the walls and ceiling.

She heard the gargling growls of the crank behind, which soon turned into a horrifying chorus of shrieks, snarls and snippets of crazed speech. She didn't have to glance back to know more cranks had joined the first. 

Moose had yanked out his gun, and shoved it behind him, pulling the trigger twice. One of the cranks screeched and Ivory heard it tumble into the waste water with a massive splash. She copied Moose, pulling her own handgun from her belt and twisting around. She fired at the closest crank, watched it collapse as blood spurted from its head. Then she turned and ran harder. 

Ivory held the torch up, desperately searching for an escape route. And then she saw it, a ladder bolted into the wall and stretching up into a hole just big enough for them to crawl through. "Moose!" she shouted. "Get up that ladder!"

Moose shot at the cranks once more and darted ahead, taking the ladder rungs two at a time and crawling into the manhole, built into the side of the wall. Ivory lept up behind him, burying a bullet into another crank's chest and wriggling into the small space. 

She and Moose squirmed their way down the shaft like soldiers; Ivory managed to glance behind, the stone walls scraping her shoulders. The cranks--there must have been only four of them now--were just appearing over the edge of the hole, scrambling over each other to reach the pair.

"Hey, Ivory, there's a sewer plate on the roof. I think that's our way out," Moose called.

"Open it, then!" 

Ivory heard metal scraping against metal, and artificial light poured into the shaft. She nearly screamed while waiting for Moose to drag himself up and out of the tunnel. One crank had already made it through the hole by the time she was reaching up into the space above.

"Get back here, girly!" was the last thing she heard before Moose yanked her out of the shaft and into a new sewer without a stream of waste. Moose slammed the metal plate down on the manhole and twisted it shut, and then they ran.