"Pike, didn't you say you knew this terrain better than anyone? How long did you figure we had until the wastewater discharge?" Wuchang asked tensely, flat on the ground.
"At least three more hours. I counted it out perfectly clearly..."
Before Pike could finish, Wuchang sprang up off the ground, hauled Eileen — who could barely move — onto his back, and took off running.
"Move! You absolute idiot, you must have gotten it wrong..."
At a moment like this, nobody dared question Wuchang's judgment, and the whole group sprinted after him. Along the way Pike kept muttering, "How could I be wrong? I remember it perfectly clearly!"
Lane, one arm supporting Wild Bull, reached over and cuffed Pike on the back of the head. "Enough of your yapping — get over here and help Wild Bull."
Pike did not dare argue after the blow. He hooked Wild Bull's arm over his shoulder and hurried forward.
Wuchang's read on it was correct: that faint vibration from the north was the three geothermal plants discharging. Geothermal heat is energy, the kind of energy found everywhere on Huang'e; the plants drew power out of the scalding hot spring water and fed it to the city.
Huang'e City was not big, but with a population over two hundred thousand it counted as a mid-sized city, and add the energy demands of the surrounding mining district, and the three plants ran at full load all year. Six hours of accumulated hot water was more than enough to raise a flood wave in the drainage network.
By rights Pike should never have gotten such common knowledge wrong. But Pike was, after all, nothing but a lowly miner; when Huang'e City changed its discharge schedule, no one bothered to send him word, and that was what produced today's grave blunder.
Billions of cubic meters of hot water came roaring down and filled the main pipe — more than ten meters across — right to the top. Whitecaps blotted out the sky, the roar was like thunder, and riding the huge drop in the terrain it came charging at them.
It was far too fast; no ordinary person could ever outrun it. If Wuchang had not sensed it in time, every one of them might have been buried down here.
Their luck was rotten: the stretch they were on had no side passages at all, and all anyone could do was run south along the alloy platform on one side of the sewer. Thank goodness Wuchang had warned them early — otherwise these people would likely have been swallowed by the flood wave before they even had time to run.
The water noise behind them grew louder and louder, and the running people were already gasping for breath, yet still no side passage appeared ahead of them, not even a shelter. In truth, Wuchang's early warning had only bought them five minutes of life; flesh and blood, however strong, can hardly contend with the power of nature.
Despair spread through the group, and Pike in particular was already entertaining thoughts of giving up. His feet felt as though they had been filled with lead as he dragged the internally injured Wild Bull along at the very back, struggling on.
Lane and Boss Pan ran side by side in the middle of the group. Their situation was better than Wild Bull's, but they too were struggling to breathe.
At the very front was Wuchang, with Eileen on his back. After all, Wuchang's strength had reached the level of a third-dan martial artist; wounded and badly short of blood as he was, his foundation still beat everyone else here.
Carrying Eileen, on top of heavy blood loss and nonstop fighting, by now even the Dragon-Tiger strength did him little good, and despair had infected Wuchang as well.
Mid-run, Eileen grasped how serious things were. She suddenly wrenched herself off Wuchang's back and jumped down, shouting, "Run! All of you, run for your own lives — no more dead weight. Whoever lives, remember to avenge us..."
Before Eileen had finished, behind them at the bend of the drainage pipe, a wall of white water had already come charging through — the flood wave's vanguard.
This time even Lane and Boss Pan stopped hesitating. They shouted at Wuchang, "Run! Wuchang, run! Forget about us. Just remember to avenge us..."
Wild Bull too flung Pike off, pointing at him and shouting, "You stinking rat, get out of here with Wuchang — the group's hopes all rest on you two now."
Wild Bull was right. He and Boss Pan were wounded, Lane was old, and Eileen — to say nothing of her, born with a slight limp in her left foot. The best odds of survival now belonged to Wuchang and Pike, and the four of them absolutely could not be stumbling blocks in the pair's escape.
Lane looked at the two of them standing there like idiots, wasting precious time, and his nose twisted with rage. "Get out! Both of you, get out of my sight..." Then, eyes swimming with tears, he looked at Wuchang.
"Is this what you want, to watch me die here?" the old man Lane roared, pulling a pistol from his waist and pressing it straight against his temple. "Get out! Go, now!"
Wuchang's eyes grew wet — not only because the scene was so moving, but even more because despair had filled his heart: he could already see the main flood wave showing itself behind the others, and by now it was far too late to run.
Life is never theater; that scene where, at the critical moment, the hero erupts with kingly dominance and saves his whole team single-handedly, everyone living happily ever after — that is not going to happen. Just like now: however powerful and moving the self-sacrifice of Eileen, Lane, Boss Pan and Wild Bull might be, none of it could alter the fact that the flood wave had arrived.
Wuchang knew that even if he turned and ran this instant, he could not outrun the flood — not unless his body were at full strength and his Dragon-Tiger strength could be brought out to its full hundred percent. Unfortunately, life does not come with that many what-ifs.
In that instant everyone saw the towering wall of white water behind them: the flood wave, spewing steam, came bearing down on them like a mountain. This time they all understood — it really was over.
But at that critical instant, at the top of the sewer, on the ceiling more than ten meters up, several pitch-black figures shot toward them like loosed arrows, and fierce squealing carried through the air.
Cannibals? Those were the only three words in anyone's head. No one could believe it — was drowning in the flood not tragic enough? Did they first have to be killed and eaten by cannibals, and then drown?
That was right: those black shapes shooting out from the ceiling were cannibal warriors, those shrieking humanoid monsters with three rows of fangs above and below in their mouths, flashing cold white — just looking at them made the blood run cold. Wuchang thought of the wound on his shoulder, and a chill shot up from his lower back.
Humans have a curious trait: they love to pick their own way of dying, forever dreaming up different deaths to hold up and compare. Dying in bed, free of illness and misfortune, with family beside you, is of course the best death there is. Death by pitiless flood or fire, or in a cruel war — those are surely the worst.
But of all the ways to die, there is one that everyone agrees is the worst: to be eaten alive. You do not even need to see such a thing; simply thinking of it is enough to make you shudder to the bone.
Unfortunately, that was exactly the situation they found themselves in today — the kind of situation that would shatter anyone there.
Caught off guard, no one chose to fight back, because there simply was no time; the cannibals moved so fast you could not even get a gun out. Even though old Lane had a pistol in his hand, before he could swing the muzzle around, a huge shell-plated hand had already smacked the pistol into the water.
The cannibal warriors who rushed into the group slung each person over a shoulder like a sack of grain, then charged south like a gust of wind.
What's going on? Are these cannibals hauling us back to their den to savor us slowly? Just as the despairing Boss Pan was about to draw his gun and finish himself off, Wuchang suddenly shouted.
"Nobody resist! Something's strange here..." That one sentence chased every thought of suicide out of their heads.
Ever since Eileen had picked Wuchang up out of the wilderness, miracles had followed him everywhere — so much so that the miners had nicknamed him Ghost Wuchang. People who produce miracles tend to win other people's trust easily, and so it was now: a single sentence from Wuchang had actually made everyone forget their fear of the cannibals for the moment.
Wuchang did not really know why he had shouted it. He had simply felt, in his heart, the goodwill coming off these cannibals — pure feeling, a very subtle sort of feeling.
The cannibals who had shown up this time were all warrior grade. By Wuchang's estimate, the one carrying him was already stronger than Guard Captain Ye Tian, and thanks to the natural physical gifts of their kind, they actually outran the flood wave behind them.
As they ran, everyone watched the flood wave surging along right at their heels, close enough that a hand could seem to touch it. The wave roared as though unwilling to let these lowly humans slip away, but no matter how it quickened, it could not touch a single corner of their clothing.
In a short while, the space before them suddenly went bright: a branch passage appeared, opening slantwise at the top of the sewer, cutting up toward the sky at a 45-degree angle. The branch was not long, and Eileen could already see the dark red leaden clouds and drifting volcanic ash outside.
"The surface!" Eileen yelled. "We're saved..." In her excitement she seemed to forget that they had been rescued by cannibals — and to forget that in a little while she might well become a pot of meat stew in a cannibal's cookpot.
The cannibals grew excited too, screeching and leaping onto the branch passage, trampling the sharp rocks as they charged toward the surface. Just as the group of cannibals burst out into the open and went gliding through the air, a column of steaming water shot up out of the ground as well, following the branch passage and forming a fountain tens of meters high. Droplets sprayed through the air, whipping up a local rainstorm.
After everyone landed safely, the group stood staring blankly at the steam-belching fountain before them, speechless for a long while. In the end it was Gopher Pike who broke the silence.
"You could crack my skull open and I still never would have guessed it — my life got saved by cannibals?"
Then the filthy old man Lane said darkly, "In the history of human evolution, herding goes back far longer than farming. Our forebears learned to take their catch alive — not kill it right away, but pen it up and wait for it to breed, so they could have an endless supply of meat without ever hunting..."
The old man's words sent a chill through everyone present. They huddled together and stared at the ring of cannibals outside, their faces gone white with fear — especially once they saw those three rows of sharp fangs above and below. Gopher Pike, utterly without dignity, wet his pants.
It was a truly bizarre scene: a pack of cannibals ringing six humans, their big mouths split wide and drooling, and those six humans with not the slightest ability left to resist.