The Tyrant's Tomb

defensive pickets.
This was a brand-new flavor of horrible.
“We’ll never get through their lines!” I protested.
“Lavinia’s secret tunnel.”
“It collapsed!”
“Not that tunnel. A different secret tunnel.”
“How many does she have?”
“Dunno. A lot? C’mon.”
With that rousing oratory complete, Meg pedaled onward. I followed,
having nothing better to do.
She led me up a dead-end street to a generator station at the base of an
electrical tower. The area was ringed in barbed-wire fencing, but the gate
stood wide open. If Meg had told me to climb the tower, I would have given
up and made my peace with zombie eternity. Instead, she pointed to the side
of the generator, where metal doors were set into the concrete like the
entrance to a storm cellar or a bomb shelter.
“Hold my bike,” she said.
She jumped off and summoned one of her swords. With a single strike,
she slashed through the padlocked chains, then pulled open the doors,
revealing a dark shaft slanting downward at a precarious angle.
“Perfect,” she said. “It’s big enough to ride through.”
“What?”
She hopped back on her Go-Glo and plunged into the tunnel, the click,
click, click of her bike chain echoing off the concrete walls.
“You have a very broad definition of perfect,” I muttered. Then I coasted
in after her.
Much to my surprise, in the total darkness of the tunnel, the Go-Glo bike
actually, well, glowed. I suppose I should have expected that. Ahead of me, I
could see the faint, fuzzy apparition of Meg’s neon war machine. When I
looked down, the yellow aura of my own bike was almost blinding. It did
little to help me navigate down the steep shaft, but it would make me a much
easier target for enemies to pick out in the gloom. Hooray!
Against all odds, I did not wipe out and break my neck. The tunnel
leveled, then began to climb again. I wondered who had excavated this
passageway and why they hadn’t installed a convenient lift system so I
didn’t have to expend so much energy pedaling.