Tractor Alley was a half-abandoned little street, parallel to Perch Street.

They had dressed in dark clothes and donned rubber boots. They all wore gloves and Banshee left her guns at home in favor of a more rudimental, but very much more effective in a gas-thick environment, modern power slingshot.

«So, remember the plan. We go in, we look at it, and we run. We have seen no police around, they're probably content with the explosion version, but we can't use too much magic. The Chief has made this abundantly clear.» declared Banshee, as they reached the iron manhole on the side of the road.

After careful consideration, Banshee decided that she didn't want to risk throwing her back out, and she opted for a much faster and practical Displace spell. The manhole trembled slightly and then, very discreetly, glided aside. As quickly as possible, the three lowered themselves down, closing it behind them.

«You just said.» Vopros muttered, in a neutral "I knew that" tone.

«Hey! There's no-one around, and the fucker was heavy!» she snapped. «Haven't heard any of you proud men offer to help.»

The stench was awful, and the place was completely dark, apart from some strange dim luminescence that nobody wanted to investigate. They all took a moment to cast a silent spell. Their eyes glimmered in a shiny blue light for an instant and their vision became as clear as day. They started walking, splashing in the vile liquid under their soles.

As they went, Banshee took the slingshot out of her pocket. Chico had brought his meat cleaver. As per Vopros, everyone could only hope that if something chose to attack him, he would have limited his destructive powers to non-flammable magic.

From one of the tunnels came a clearer light than the strange luminescence they had seen.

The opening in the ceiling, the road itself, was spectral and creepy in the dimly clear Boston night. The light of the street illumination was seeping through the explosion's gash, creating spooky games of lights and shadows.

The three looked around them, suddenly tense. There was nothing particular to be seen: general damages to pipes had already been repaired. The site was deserted, but not completely silent.

At first, even with their senses heightened by the tension, they didn't really hear it. It was a small noise, so similar to the ones they had produced until some minutes before they were all well convinced the other two were the cause. But something was off, and Banshee signaled the other two, rising her hand and closing her fist, to stop. They did.

The noise went on.

«Allì esta alguien.» whispered Chico, putting his hand on the meat cleaver. Banshee nervously checked that the steel marble pouch was viable, while trying to locate the source of the sound. It came from further along, near the entrance of another tunnel turning to the left.

«Cover me.» she muttered, starting to walk forward. She reached the side tunnel entrance and slowly tried to peek. She held the slingshot with one hand, putting a steel marble in the socket with the second hand, ready to shoot.

There were three men, one taller and the other two quite average, dressed in dark clothes and high-visibility vests and yellow helmets. They were doing something in front of what looked like a metal door with a wheel handle. Three flashlights were lit on the side, illuminating them.

Banshee turned to look at Vopros, who had reached her and positioned on the other side of the tunnel entrance. They exchanged a look, and Banshee tucked the slingshot in the back of her pants, starting to walk towards the three men.

«Hey, hi! We're the replacements fer...» she started to talk, ready to bullshit them to death and beyond. But it wouldn't have been necessary.

Because they were already beyond death.

Banshee felt her blood turn into ice when the three undead slowly turned to stare at her with the empty, rotting eye sockets in their damaged, grey skulls. The high-visibility vests hid tattered shrouds, the remnants of the "good clothes" people persisted burying the dear departed in, which gave to the scene quite a black humor appearance. The taller one was the most decomposed, he didn't even have his low jaw anymore, and the vestiges of a decomposing tongue was hanging from his neck. Half of his chest was gone, showing grey bones sticking out from an expensive shirt. The two smaller ones were in better condition, but still very dead. One still had one, milky eye in his skull, and his clothes hung on him like on a rack, stained with earth and sewer liquid. The other looked mummified, his flesh desiccated and greyed by time, a mop of woolly white hair sprouting from its top, his cheeks hollow to the bone, with skeletal hands creeping out of his out-of-fashion shirt.

She couldn't even scream to warn her companions. The one with the eye jumped towards her with a supernatural speed. She could just move to get her slingshot, but even with her natural extraction speed she blatantly failed. Before Vopros could even think about doing something, she found herself wrapped by the arms and legs of the undead.

«That's the grossest thing ever!» she screamed, trying to thrust against the wall to shake off the undead.

«Stop! Do not!» Vopros came out of hiding, showing his position to the other undead who were, for the moment, simply staring at the scene. Banshee took a deep breath, struggling to break free, the damned thing was like a boa constrictor, and that brief moment of silence let her hear something she didn't before.

A fastening, soft beeping coming from the undead.

«Feck! Feck feck feck he's a bomb! Run! Run!» she screamed.

The beeping was getting faster by the second, the undead was clenching her as hard as a bar of steel wrapped around her arms. She couldn't manage to cast a spell, and she couldn't risk thrashing it around. To die in a city sewer with an undead wrapped around.

Talk about shitty deaths.

She felt her stomach clench, as the beeping was running to its apex. She had already fooled death once, there was no way she could do that twice. Her life started flashing in front of her closed eyes. One particular face stuck out, last, just before the explosion.

Killian.

The bipping stopped abruptly.

She opened her eyes just in time to see the undead holding her being decapitated by a well-executed cleave cut.

«What the...»

«Fight now, talk later.» said Vopros, moving his hands in the air while looking at the other two undead, ending his movement with a dry gesture in their directions. The two didn't seem to react, at first. Then, they rabidly charged.

This time, she had her hands free, and she took out the slingshot in one, swift movement. Steel marbles started to rain down on the undead, while Chico tried to hit them with his cleaver.

«There was a bomb! He was a bomb!» shouted Banshee, putting one right in the tall one's eye sockets. The marble exited the back of his skull, but he still went on trying to munch on Chico's cleaver. The second undead was stumbling trying to catch Vopros, who was moving fast around him.

«I know. I turned explosive into sawdust. In all three. We can kill them now.» Vopros explained.

screamed Chico, flailing his cleaver around like a bat, trying to parry the claws and teeth of his assailant.

Banshee charged the slingshot again and aimed the marble at the thin neck bone of the undead. It wasn't an easy shot, the damned thing was tossing around, completely animal and hysterical.

She took the shot. The steel marble severed, with an eerie crunching sound, the neck bone of the undead. His skull rolled in the waste waters and his body sagged down.

That gave Chico momentum enough to recall his sorceries as well. He concentrated briefly, tugged at the fluxes around the last undead's feet and with a crackling sound the pavement under it broke open. Two creepy mud-hands, covered in sewer liquid, rose from the ground and tightly wrapped around the undead's ankles, blocking his movements. One last chop of the cleaver was then enough.

The three of them took a moment to register what had just happened, panting in the half-darkness of the tunnel.

«Undead? Motherfucking undead? Fer real?» Banshee was the first one to vent her disappointment, putting the slingshot in her front pocket, this time. «That guy is the littlest sack of creepiness I've ever seen!»

«This is quite crude, but nonetheless efficient. They would have waited for us for hours without disobeying orders or getting far from this place. The perfect guardians, even if not the most smart ones.» Chico's looked rather intrigued. «And rigged to explode without ethical problems or last-minute second-thoughts. You have to admit, it's pretty good.»

«I should have let you blow.» commented Vopros. Something was off, and he couldn't quite put his finger on it at all. Three suicidal undead bombers, of course in the sewers the explosion would have gone pretty wild, still... it didn't sound right. Complete.

Maybe it was his natural bomber sixth sense, maybe some slight detail his unconscious mind had registered but his conscious one had rapidly set aside, he closed his eyes for a brief moment. When he reopened them, they were slightly paler, going more light grey, and looked around.

He froze.

On the wall in front of him, the one with the door encased, letters were shining as if they had been written with golden glitter.

"So long, losers!"

He had just seen that, that an incredible number of beepings, tiny but sharp, made themselves be heard in the half silence. It was like half a hundred tiny detonators had suddenly took life. That made sense: because Vopros's special sight was set to locate explosives. And the writing on the wall, with letters as tall as him, was completely made of SemTex.

There was enough to light up the whole neighborhood.

«Yebat-kopat!» Vopros roared between his teeth, as he started to desperately try to concentrate.

«What?» asked Banshee, starting to look around her again. «More coming?»

«No. Wall is rigged. Block is blowing. Let's run. Too much SemTex. I can't stop it. Even with magic. No time.»

The other two froze in place.

«We're in the sewers! If something goes up there's no speed we could run to outrun it!» Banshee took some steps away from the wall, as Chico paled to his lighter shade.

«Ay dios mio! Somos muertos!» he cried out, in sudden panic. Luckily for him, Banshee had already seen death that evening, and she was not about to surrender to a second encounter.

«How much?» Banshee darted towards her companions.

«Rough thirty seconds.» said Vopros.

«Enough!»

Banshee put a hand on each one's shoulders, closed her eyes and prayed.

She put everything into it. All her focus, all her energies, all her ability to follow and model the fluxes, trying to get as far away as possible from the center of the explosion.

They all felt the not unfamiliar sensation of suction and lightness in the stomach, and then the hardness of the concrete under their feet where they reappeared.

Right beside the gash.

«Fuck.» Banshee whispered, facing the defeat of her magical powers.

The beeping suddenly stopped.

Instinctively, Banshee hugged Chico and clenched Vopros's hand, as a last comforting gesture of apology for her inability to completely save them.

Nothing happened for ten long seconds.

The three dared to open their eyes.

And found themselves with rifles pointed right at their heads.