"You're right Carm, Florence really is beautiful. Though, this dusty wine cellar hidden under Italian Knockturn Alley, maybe not so much!" Laura said loudly so she could be heard over the sounds of Carmilla frantically shoving the heaviest objects she could find in front of the wine cellar's creaky wooden door.
"Yeah well, this 'dusty wine cellar under Italian whatever dumb reference that was' is the only thing keeping us from being full of small holes with bits of metal in them." Carmilla replied, hefting yet another barrel of wine against the door.
Laura began to reply back but at that moment the floating dust their hasty entrance into the wine cellar had kicked up caused her to start coughing violently. Instead she found a wall to lean on and rest.
Carmilla had spotted the cellar out of the corner of her eye as the two were running down quite possibly the shiftiest alleyway in all of Florence. The dilapidated wooden door proved easy enough to wrench open, which she had followed up by forcefully pushing Laura in ahead of her and then scrambling into the cellar herself.
The Cellar was tiny, barely bigger than the dorm room they had met in what felt like an age and for one of them literally another life ago. Wine barrels lay scattered randomly and were coated in thick layers of dust. Clearly no one had felt the need to get drunk from the wine in this particular wine cellar for some time. They were safe for the moment but Carmilla could hear the heavy boots of their pursuers outside the door in the distance.
"You could always help me with this." Carmilla said, as she realized she no longer had any barrels in easy reach and that her now very active heart was beating at around a million miles per hour from her exertion.
Had wine barrels always been so heavy? She swore she could remember a time in France, was it Lyon, or maybe Lille? When she and Mattie had 'liberated' what must have been a city full on Bastille Day as some kind of prank. It had been so easy then, what had wine gotten heavier or,
Oh right, not a vampire.
She supposed the adrenaline spike from being shot at could really scramble one's short term memory. Encourage them to fall back on old habits of the three century variety. She would have to put a stop to that, forgetting she wasn't nigh invulnerable and possessing supernatural strength and speed in the middle of firefights would be rather dangerous.
Dangerous, kind of like having a reverie of old times with Mattie when she should be focusing on keeping Laura safe from the armed arschgesichts chasing them through the cobbled streets and dark alleyways of the city. She winced as she rubbed her hand across her stomach and realized she'd been nicked slightly by a bullet or perhaps some shrapnel. Maybe she should try keeping herself safe as well while she was at it.
In the end though, it was Laura who snapped her back to the present.
"Ah, I could, but you do realize the door swings the other way right?"
She paused and didn't say anything for a moment.
"Yes," No. Damn it you idiot. What's next Betty Crocker stress cleaning? Get it together. "Trying to… put up a barrier between us and them in case we can't find another way out of here before they find us."
Fortunately, if Laura thought that Carmilla was lying she gave no indication of it. Instead she directed Carmilla's gaze towards an opulent looking red and white mat lying alone in a back corner.
It looked out of place compared with the dingy and dusty everything else in the tiny cellar. It's expertly crafted stitching marking it out in the room as much as a bright light would have. Laura stopped leaning on the wall and walked towards it.
"If I've learned anything from hours of watching adventure films, it's that stuff like this is totally hiding secret compartments, ancient treasure maps to the macguffin of the hour or maybe just maybe…" She crouched down and grabbed the mat with both hands and pulled hard. "Yes! Secret underground tunnel entrance. Boom."
The displacing of the mat revealed an exit to the cellar in the form of a hatch with a small groove on one end. Laura quickly pressed her fingers into the groove and slid the hatch open, revealing a rather desperate looking ladder leading down into a cramped dark tunnel. With no apparent light sources down there it might as well have led into some kind of eternal abyss for all the two could see.
"The Catacombs of Florence! Any idea where it might lead?" Laura looked up at her as she spoke.
"Paris, Laura, it's the Catacombs of Paris. And no, I don't know anything about any tunnels here in Florence, I do remember one time in this little village near Vienna, the daughter of the Countess Firaggio and I used one to- never mind another time. Wherever it leads it has to be better than getting shot to little meaty pieces here though."
As if to accentuate her point the sounds of running heavy boots outside the cellar door intensified. An Italian voice barked out orders to those boots and the sound of doors being booted down signaled that their refuge in the cellar was soon to be at an end. Carmilla moved to the hatch and put a hand on Laura's shoulder.
"Time to go, I'll be right behind you. Once you get all the way down don't go too far before I get down as well. We don't want to get separated in the dark."
Laura squeezed her hand quickly but tightly before darting down the ladder, its wooden rungs shaking alarmingly as she went. Carmilla waited a few moments before heading down after her.
"Hope I don't get a splinter."
About halfway down she heard the cellar door swing open and the sound of half a dozen barrels of wine being horribly wasted. She decided to risk dropping down the rest of the way. The decision earned her a hard landing and a startled squeak from Laura as she skipped to the side to avoid being crashed down upon.
"I didn't mean literally stay so close as to be directly underneath the ladder." Carmilla chided but also conversely reached out and squeezed Laura's arm in something of an apology.
"C'mon I'm pretty sure they're going to have a decent notion of where we went."
The two took off running down the tunnel. The darkness was oppressive, with barely anything being visible even an arm stretch away. Laura slowed for a few moments and Carmilla stretched out a hand to her, sure she was stumbling, before a white light burst from her hands.
"There we go." Laura proclaimed triumphantly, her cellphone held up like that Hobbit's magic light bulb, now only needing a sword to be ready to fight some kind giant spider. Not that Carmilla had watched those films, she may have flicked through that old fart's books at some stage though.
The light revealed the full nature of the tunnel to them. The grey coloured ground was hard and unyielding in strength without even a hint of a crack or fissure to be found. The stone walls were white and emblazoned with chiselled petroglyphs of magnificent quality. Carmilla could tell that whoever had chiseled their art into these walls was someone of supreme skill and despite the petroglyphs most likely being older than even her, they looked almost as good as the day they had been carved. The ceiling that would have caused taller people than they to be uncomfortable looked as implacable as the ground. Carmilla had more reason than most to be afraid of small spaces but even she had to admit the tunnel appeared to be structurally sound. The ceiling seemed to be as likely to collapse as the ground suddenly turning to water.
The light allowed them to make faster progress through the passageway and it soon became clear that the tunnel was not a simple straight path but was actually quite curvaceous, its twisting paths taking them every which way it pleased. They could hear the heavy boots echoing somewhere behind them, but it was difficult to work out how far.
"You know it's a shame about the whole, running away from bad guys with guns thing. Some of this stuff seems really beautiful, be nice to look at it some more." Laura chirped beside her while they ran.
The passageway was big enough for them to easily run astride each other but it would have been difficult for a third person to do the same.
Carmilla cocked her head slightly towards Laura before she spoke back.
"Well luckily I have something beautiful to look at no matter where I go now."
A lame line in her estimation, not worthy of someone who should have over three centuries of game but it had the desired effect. It earned her a golden smile, visible thanks to the phones white light. She liked earning those, even in situations like these. Especially in situations like these.
For the next few minutes they continued to run through the winding tunnel, passing by more wondrous carvings as their footsteps and the heavy boots echoed together all around them.
Finally, they found themselves in front of a branching fork in the path and for the first time since entering the tunnel an option on which direction to proceed. Reading each other's minds they stopped together in front of it to catch their breath. The air was heavy in the tunnel and they could only hope their pursuers were finding the going as tough as they were.
"Eenie meenie miney mo?" Laura said between pants, rather unhelpfully.
Carmilla started to reply and then paused. She had noticed the expert craftsmanship of the petroglyphs but only now had the time to discern the texts that accompanied them. Laura noticed alongside her.
"Wait, is that? I mean, I can't actually read it but I remember what it looks like from the books you and the library had-"
"Sumerian, the language is Sumerian."
Laura moved to face her fully.
"Okay, yes we know what kind of… beings would like their creepy tunnel under a perfectly fine to traverse over normally city to be covered in Ancient Sumerian writings, but that doesn't mean-"
"Vampires, dark old tunnel, accessed through a hatch in a shifty part of town, with no real lighting, full of beautiful art and probably the scariest kind of old timey writing there is. Underground a city full of very edible humans. Yeah, Vampire tunnel."
Laura groaned and covered her face with her palms for a few moments, then looked back down the tunnel as the heavy boots seemed to echo louder, closer.
"So, chased by guys with guns who very much appear to be getting closer despite our best efforts and our only option to get away from them is through a tunnel that we've now realized was probably made by vampires."
Laura gave Carmilla a look. Equal parts resignation, frustration but also and most importantly as far as Carmilla was concerned, determination. Her next words had some humour, a lightness to them.
"I keep dragging you into all kinds of fun, don't I?