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She kept screa Nowhere to run from this Nowhere to hide, if not here

Another screa wail that did not issue fronificance was lost on her until she saw the specters be-gin to scatter The newsboy raced toward a regal-looking structure and vanished inside

An air-raid siren, then, and this was a shelter in those hellish days when the Luftwaffe crossed the Channel and the bombs rained down and the fires burned out of control

The first explosion knocked her off her feet

Jazz stopped screa She lay on her side on the tracks as dust sifted down fro, and she told her-self the impossible could not touch her There caround shudder, and that drove her back to her feet She staggered toward the next splash of light In the distance, she saw the ghost of a build-ing reduced aled, ancient ruins

Not real, she told herself It's not real

But her er than her own Trust your instincts, Jazz Always

Down deep, we've all got a little of the beast in us

This tih it came fro as the Churchill hater's

Jazz raced, panicked, for an exit, but nearly halfway to the other end of the abandoned station, she had nowhere to run The siren rose and fell Voices shouted froe that had appeared around her had thinned, fading

To her right, Jazz noticed an anomaly on the wall --a round metal pipe that followed the curve of the roof and then went up through the ceiling of the tunnel So to the surface But it came from the floor beneath the abandoned station, and that didn't make any sense at all What could be deeper than this?

The air-raid siren becae electrical buzz No, the buzz had been there all along It caainst it and thought she could feel the slightest vibration She glanced back the way she'd co breath, she nearly went to her knees with relief Her ears still rang with the effects of the siren

With no sign as to where this vent ainst the wall now, let-ting her fingers drag along the tiles

She saw the hole before she reached it Tiles littered the ground where so down bricks to e Practically adjacent to one of the ventilation ducts above, the hole in the as bathed in light Beyond the hole was a short passageway, at the end of which another metal door --this one painted a deep red-- stood open, and Jazz could see the top of another spiral staircase leading down This one was cast in concrete Words had been painted on the passage's wall, faded now but readable even after so many decades had passed

DEEP LEVEL SHELTER 7-K On the door were two posters Jazz stepped through to peer at thee slaying the dragon and, in large type, the declara-tion Britain Needs You at Once

Jazz put a hand over herthe phantoht, her ht have been a laugh

The other poster had been torn at the top as if someone had tried to strip it from the door The letters she could make outor other

A ed and con-victed at Great Marlborough Police Court on the 8th March, 1944, with disorderly conduct in a public Air Raid Shelter Further, on the 13th March, 1944, at Clerkenwell Police Court, ain a public Air Raid Shelter while drunk

It is in the best interests of all that shelters should be kept respectable Will you please assist in an endeavor to o on, afraid to go back, mind numb and body ex-hausted, Jazz stood and stared down that spiral staircase The descent appealed to her Down and down and farther down, as deep as she could burrow into the ground, where no one would ever find her Down into the darkness to hide forever, just like Muht

Yet there was light

"Can't be," she whispered The bulbs in that stairwell off the h

But who in their rightdown here?

Hands on the walls of the narrow stairwell, she started down, counting steps Only the dilow came up from below, and she felt blind She probed with her foot before each step The twenty-first step was broken A piece of stone cru out in front of her, hands flailing for purchase Her head struck the steps and pain exploded in the back of her skull

Hissing, she squeezed her eyes closed and saw a cas-cade of stars

"Fucking hell," she erly touch the back of her head She winced at the pain, and her fingers came away sticky In the dark, her blood was black, but she knew the feel of it She knew the rusted-metal smell of it Jazz had becoet it

By the twenty-seventh step, the light had brightened considerably

The thirty-third was the last

At the foot of the steps, an orange power cable ran along the ground To her right she could see severalfrom the open circular vent --an answer to theofficial Soed the cables, used that old vent to steal power from the surface

Deep Level Shelter 7-K was operational, but Jazz had no idea what it was being used as shelter from This place had never been a Tube station It was round, just as the train tunnels were, but the way the ceiling arched in a half circle, she wondered if there wasup the bottoht have been two hundred feet long Work lights hung froe cables At least half of them were out and had not been replaced There were crates and boxes all along the walls, as well as mattresses stacked with blankets Metal shelves and cabinets that appeared to have been part of the original de-sign lined one wall, and she could see bottles and cans of stored foods As she moved closer, she confirmed her suspi-cions that these were not ancient supplies but far more re-cent ones A bit dusty, but they had been put up within the last year or so

Her gaze froze on one shelf A trio of black heavy-duty torches were neatly lined up She grabbed one and turned it on Nothing That didn't anized people -- whoever had made use of the shelter--wouldn't have the torches as backup lights without keeping batteries She searched the rest of the shelves, then opened the nearest cabinet and found what she was looking for An entire box of batteries