“Please, you’ve got to help us find her,” pleaded Hannah.
“Just hold your horses little lady,” the policeman smiled back. “Okay, the Del . . . Amo.” He mouthed each syllable as he wrote. “And where’s that exactly? There’s a few streets called Vistarosa in the city.”
“Over there,” said Thomas, pointing to an empty corner of the room. Having acted as the day’s compass, he was now glad to be of service in reenacting their travels. “After we left the Del Amo, we passed a bunch of other apartment buildings that all looked the same, and then we headed east about three miles until we went south for a few more miles, and then--”
“Right, right,” said the policeman in a dismissive mumble. He waved at Thomas to shut him up, which Thomas did far quicker than whenever Ben had tried to do the same. “Moving around a lot you say . . . hmm, probably skipping out on the rent, just like they all do.”
“What? No, we . . . I mean she . . .” Alison was exasperated. “Look, these men came in the middle of the night and took her away!”
“Wow,” said the policeman, somehow impressed by this. “Sounds like she had some big debts to pay to somebody.”
“And she gave me this thing,” said Ben. He decided to produce the glowing twig from his pocket. If the policeman wasn’t believing them, then maybe the twig would make him realize they weren’t just orphans.
But the fat, sagging cheeks merely smiled. “That’s a neat little memento. Okay, right then.” He inhaled deeply and smiled in satisfaction. “Well, we’ll get you set up in a Children’s Facility straight away then.”
“What? What . . . what do you mean?” stammered Ben.
“Yep, by tomorrow we’ll have you in your new homes, somewhere in an Educational Pre-Employment Center. Maybe even the brand new one. Pretty quick, huh?” The man seemed very pleased with himself. “All because of a certain, big donor. And I bet you know who I’m talking about.”
“But we have a mother,” said Alison feebly, one last time. “Somewhere out there, she’s looking for us.”
The man leaned forward and looked at his clasped hands for a few seconds before speaking. He picked at one of his fingernails. “Listen, kids. Your mother has deserted you. I’m sorry. She’s not out there looking for you. She’s long gone by now, moved on to another life. This happens all the time. I know that seems terrible to hear, but it’s true.” The man’s breath stank of coffee and cigarettes. He looked different up close. His face was blotchy and there was a day’s stubble sticking out of it in irregular patches. “We see this sort of case almost every day. People have kids, but simply can’t afford them. They don’t do the math or something, I guess. They move around constantly, never able to pay the bills, until finally it catches up with them and they just vanish and leave their kids behind. Can’t afford ‘em.”
None of the children knew what to say. The policeman grimaced in an attempt at sympathy. His drummed his fingers on the table.
“Okay, I’ll just let that, um . . . soak in and I’ll be back in a sec with the relocation officer.” He whistled loudly and his shoes squeaked on the floor as he got up and left the room.
“We have to get out of here,” Ben hissed.
“And how exactly are we going to do that?” asked Alison. “Ben, maybe this is for the best. I’m not saying that Mom did in fact desert us, but maybe she’ll be able to find us, wherever she is, you know, in our new . . . home.” The word stuck in her throat.
“You see, I told you she deserted us,” said Thomas.
Ben looked at his brother and shook his head. “Way to go buddy. You want a prize?” Ben swore under his breath and shoved Thomas to the ground.
“What, are you mad at me because I was right, Ben?”
“You don’t get it, do you, Thomas?”
“I’m so much smarter than you, Ben. Admit it.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a complete idiot. Why would you be proud of knowing that Mom deserted us?”
“Well, I was right, wasn’t I?
“Nobody cares whether you’re right or not.”
“Okay, I’ll prove that I’m smarter than you. You want to get out of here?”
Ben was about to shove Thomas again, but stopped. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I bet you I’m so smart I can get us out of here.”
“Okay. Fine.”
Thomas got up and dusted himself off in an elaborate attempt to restore civility to the situation. He moved to the door and stuck his head out.
“Ben, this is stupid,” said Alison. “Hannah is starving. We can’t just run away again.”
“I know, I know,” said Ben. “But we have to try, okay? Maybe we can still find Mom . . . maybe we were just at the airport at the wrong time. Let’s just try.” Alison looked unconvinced. But with a shake of her head and Hannah’s hand in hers, she stood up and followed Ben to the door. Thomas held them back with one hand, looked both ways, and then crept out into the hallway.
“Here, follow me,” he whispered. “Walk like you know where you’re going.”
“And where, Thomas, would that be exactly?” asked Alison in a shouted whisper.
“Don’t worry. I bet I know where this goes.”
They crept through a big room sprinkled with countless clusters of desks. All of the police officers were too busy to notice them. There were windows on the far wall and outside it was now dark, the lights of the room reflecting back in a twisted mirror image.
They had just reached the end of the room when a shout exploded behind them. “Hey, where’d they go?”
“Run!” said Thomas.
People at their desks looked up with furrowed concern, as if they couldn’t decide if it was a normal thing for kids to be sprinting headlong through their office. Hard, noisy linoleum gave way to silent carpet. They kept sprinting behind Thomas, taking a left and then a right, shoving aside a man with a stack of papers, dodging a woman balancing three cups of coffee, until they came to the end of the hall and a door marked “Stairs.”
“Always in the corners of cheap buildings,” said Thomas with an all-knowing nod.
Then an announcement blasted over a loudspeaker. “Code nine, code nine. Four escaped children are in the building. Apprehend on sight.”
“Well, I guess we’re not going out the front door,” said Thomas. They hurried into the stairwell, but only made it down two floors before they heard the shuffle of footsteps above them.“We’ll have to go down into the basement. Come on!” There was a grin on Thomas’s face, of the sort that used to appear as he was about to finish a particularly difficult jigsaw puzzle. Ben, Alison, and Hannah leaped down the stairs behind him like ducklings behind their mother. Besides, it wasn’t as if any of them knew what to do or where to go.
“Thomas, where are you taking us?” Ben finally had to ask. “How are we going to escape in the basement?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out though.”
The slapping of their shoes against the concrete stairs was like a small, pathetic round of applause. They hit the bottom floor, opened a door, and found themselves in the middle of a musty, yellowing hallway filled with old filing cabinets. Five doors on the left, five doors on the right, and no windows. They stood there panting as the voices and footsteps from above became louder and louder.
“Where now?” squealed Hannah.
They all looked at Thomas just as his eyes narrowed in on something. “There!” He pointed to a door at the very end of the hall and started running.
“Wait!” cried Alison. She was struggling to push a filing cabinet over to the door. The three others instinctively knew what she was trying to do, and ran back to help her. “One, two, three!” The gray metal box swayed to and fro and then clanged to the ground directly in front of the door, just as the muffled shouts arrived behind it. The doorknob spun back and forth, but the door didn’t budge.
At the end of the hall, the refreshing chill of the basement disappeared, and inside the cramped and hot room wa
s a mess of pipes going in and out of the building. A low, throbbing noise pounded the air.
“I betcha this building is just like our apartment building,” shouted Thomas. “It probably connects to the old utilities network, like on that blueprint Mr. Sanchez gave me. There should be an access hatch somewhere around here.”
“Oh god, Thomas, no,” said Alison with her arms crossed. “We’re not going into some tunnel system.”
“And what’s your idea then, Alison?” said Thomas. “You want to go back there and be put in some orphanage by the police?”
“Well at least we’d be able to have a chance of finding Mom. Thomas, you don’t know what’s down there. What happens if we can’t find a way out?”
Thomas started squirming his way through a maze of pipes. “Oh, there’s a way out, I’m certain.” On the far side of the room, a three-foot by three-foot black square of metal was bolted to the wall at eye level.
“Thomas!” cried Alison. “Get back here!”
Thomas rummaged around in his backpack and pulled out a screwdriver. “There’s no time--come on!”
Hannah, who had been peering out into the hallway, quickly shut the door. “They’re coming!” she squeaked.
“Damn it. This isn’t the right size,” cursed Thomas. He wedged the screwdriver under the edge of the metal plate and with all his diminutive strength pried on the metal until the two screws on the left-hand side snapped off. He bent the panel back just enough to stick his head into the void behind it. And then, without even waiting for the others to agree to his plan, he wormed his way into the dark hole.
“Maybe Thomas is right,” said Hannah. Ben and Alison turned around to see her standing back by the door. Ben never thought he’d ever hear her say those words. A single, dust-covered light bulb was illuminated her from above in an ethereal, angelic glow. Maybe it was this strange light, or the conviction with which she spoke those words, but in that moment she looked somehow older and more mature. She had aged since leaving the apartment, Ben was sure of it. And it was an unsettling change. She looked at least a year older.
The sharp crack of wood splintering killed the eerie moment. An axe was chopping down the door back in the hallway.
“I mean, really, what choice do we have?” said Hannah. “You heard that policeman. He didn’t believe a word we said about Mom. So we go into the tunnels and don’t find a way out. We can always just come back here, right?”
“Oh, just come on!” said Thomas. His filthy head stuck out from the tunnel and then disappeared back into the darkness.
There were footsteps and shouts out in the hallway. “I’ll check down here, you go down that end,” someone yelled.
Ben turned to Alison, who remained motionless. “Come on, Al,” he ordered. Hannah was already climbing up into the hole. Ben didn’t wait for a response. He grabbed Alison and pushed her headfirst into the darkness and then scrambled in after her.
“Yeah, I think they’re in here. Wait, I see them. Hey, where do you think you’re going?”
It was a concrete pipe barely big enough to fit through. Ahead, beyond the dark masses of his siblings, Ben could see a faint glow of light. The pipe had to lead somewhere. And Hannah was right: even if they couldn’t find a way out of the tunnel, they could always come back to the police station and deal with their fate there.
“Eh! Get back here!” called a voice from behind Ben. The policeman’s arms struggled like pink octopus tentacles, but they couldn’t reach Ben. Ben smiled what was probably his only smile of that day. The policeman was too fat to fit through the pipe.
“Should probably cut back on those doughnuts, I guess,” said Ben over his shoulder.
After about a hundred feet of darkness, Ben felt an airy emptiness on his skin. Alison and Hannah whimpered about spiders and rats while Thomas groped around and found a rusty ladder for them to scramble down. The bottom of the tunnel, about twenty feet across, was muddy and smelled horrible. The gaps around the pipes coming in from various buildings emitted tiny semicircles of light, but for the most part the tunnel was pitch black. The high-pitched plink of water drops falling from the ceiling punctuated the distant tumult of traffic somewhere up at street level.
Thomas dug into his backpack and pulled out his flashlight. He flicked a switch and shined it right into Ben’s eyes. “Huh, Ben? Flashlight? Pretty smart, eh? Aren’t you glad I--”
“Yes, Thomas,” said Ben with a sigh. “Thank you very much. I’m glad you brought the flashlight. You are certainly smarter than me, even though you were just lucky to have been wearing that backpack when we left.”
Like the yellow hallway from which they had just escaped, the black tunnel seemed to stretch equally in each direction, but both choices dissolved into nothingness.
“Great,” muttered Alison sarcastically. “This just gets better and better. Now what, Thomas?”
“The tunnel has got to lead somewhere,” said Thomas.
“Right, no one can dispute that, Thomas,” said Alison, “but we desperately need that somewhere to be a way out of here.” Ben saw Hannah reach for Alison’s hand in a gesture that was more like the cookie-eating, fairy tale-loving Hannah than the assertive girl she had been back in the boiler room.
And then grunting voices reverberated through the pipe behind them.
“Oh no,” said Ben. “They found someone skinny enough to fit through.” Thomas’s flashlight illuminated a policeman sticking his head out of the end of the pipe. He looked like a pig about to be shot out of a cannon.
The man caught sight of them. “Hey! You just stop right there!” he yelled.
Which they most certainly did not. As they ran down the muddy tunnel into the darkness, Thomas’s flashlight barely penetrated the void. They couldn’t see what they were running through and every few feet one of them would trip on a submerged rock and belly-flop into the mud.
“Thomas, this tunnel feels like it’s going nowhere,” Ben huffed. A claustrophobic panic was rising in his chest.
The shouting behind them was more than one police officer, and the beams of the flashlights kept darting across their legs.
“Here!” said Thomas. His flashlight pointed into a smaller side tunnel that was completely dark. “Let’s just hide in here.” The flashlight went out and they ducked in, cowering against the wall like scared puppies. It was cold and dripping with slime but Ben forced himself to press in close.
“Eww,” squealed Hannah.
“Shhh!” said Thomas.
The footsteps splashed louder. They were about twenty feet away, the flashlight beams sweeping from side to side across the tunnel. The four of them crouched into a single ball. Ben swallowed. They were done for.
Without any warning, a panel in the wall clicked open from behind and they fell backwards into the mud. Bear-like hands grabbed them and held them against the ground.
Chapter Ten: Welcome to the Strand
The panel, a metal grate of some sort, was quickly and noiselessly put back into place in front of them. A giant arm held them around their waists and another seemed to cover all four of their mouths simultaneously. Whatever it was smelled terrible, like a sweaty trash can.
“Shhh,” came a voice that sounded like a deep, distant wind.
They watched the legs and flashlight beams of the policemen running by on the other side of the grate. There were a few further moments of silence before the voice said anything more. Hannah’s stomach growled.
“If you make any noise, I will cut your throats like chickens. Do you hear me?”
Ben nodded, but he was unsure how he or it could see their heads in the complete blackness. Then the beast began to haul them through the sludge. The tunnel was narrow and rocky and kept descending deeper underground, the air a nauseous mixture of old dirt and fresh sweat. They were in the clutches of a mammoth, hairy animal dragging them back to its lair. It felt like something out of their mother’s stories.
At junctures in the tunnel, the beast turned left an
d then right and then left again, but Ben soon lost track. It was a labyrinth winding down into the very bowels of the city. After about fifteen minutes, the tunnel became gradually brighter as they approached a weak source of light. Were they being dragged outside? Ben’s heart leaped, but then instantly sank when he remembered that it was probably about eleven o’clock at night. The light ahead was definitely not the sun.
The monster flung them down in a small room lit by a single light bulb. Ben’s eyes took a few seconds to adjust to the brightness before he could look up.
“Welcome to the Strand,” the voice said in a quiet, regimental thunder. “General Lorenz will see you shortly.” The giant man seemed to have dirt rubbed into every crease of his already black skin. His eyes were thin and jagged like barbed wire, and his voice was a low, gravelly rumble, like bombs dropping somewhere in the distance. Before walking away, he stared at the four of them briefly, a distaste curling his lip, as if they were the monstrous ones.
They brushed the filth from their hair and clothes and one by one took in the scene before them, but couldn’t find the words to describe what they were seeing. It didn’t make any sense whatsoever. They were somewhere underground and yet outside the door to that small room was a giant cavern alive with people. And they were mostly kids.
The amphitheater was lit by hundreds of light bulbs hanging from the roof in long strings. Wires of all shapes and colors were strung this way and that, feeding devices and machines of unrecognizable purpose. Amid the web of conduits and cables were thirty or so kids working on various pieces of machinery: old cars in varied states of repair, appliances of all kinds, pipes and tubes, sheet metal, musical instruments. It looked like a cross between a giant department store and a scrap yard. On one side of the cavern, people were stocking food and supplies onto shelves and into fridges. Towards the back were books stacked thirty feet high to the ceiling, like the walls of some ancient, unkempt library. And fifty feet away along a wall was another room that contained a stockpile of the unmistakable dark green shades of guns and grenades.
The Fortress of Clouds Page 9