by Nick Cole
Who could know? Whoever’d built the tunnels had been pretty clever. That much was clear. All along the subterranean channels he’d found ways the tunnel’s designer had braced the weaker areas against collapse. Genius, really. Altogether fantastic. The sort of thing the nightly news or maybe 60 Minutes would have made a feature about if these tunnels had been found before the collapse.
Perhaps the underwater part needed special support, thus the metal bracing. Who knew? He wasn’t an engineer, but whoever dug these tunnels had some serious experience at it. Had skills. Someone somewhere had lived a life below the surface, and these tunnels were evidence of it.
That part of it had puzzled Ellis since he’d found the first tunnel entrance up on Utah. Where did one go to learn tunnel digging? Was there a special engineer’s track in college for such things? He knew back before the world went south that drug dealers and terrorists had constructed quite elaborate and effective tunnels under borders. Underground there were no checkpoints, no fences, no gates guarded by men and women with guns and bombs and dogs.
Up-toppers almost never consider that all around the world there are underground places. And some of these subterranean marvels are pretty extensive, almost whole cities, like under London. Under Atlanta. Under Washington D.C. Under Moscow. Wine country in California is pocked with underground caves and extensive tunnels. He’d seen a documentary on that, back before the up-top went sideways.
Ellis wondered how much of the remaining world population was living underground in these places right now. Could whole societies be springing up in the tunnels and underground cities around the world? The mind can easily chase after thoughts like that at times like these. Thoughts of survivors thriving in the down-deep while the world perishes on the surface. But it didn’t pay to think about the rest of the world for very long. Not since the Beginning, since the collapse, when the world had become more local. The world now consisted of what you could see, who you could talk to, where you could walk or ride. Everything else was a rumor. Everything else was someone else’s terror.
He sucked in a final breath and pushed downward, past the pale shimmering light of Delores’s headlamp, down into the icy liquid darkness. Once again he forced his mind to make friends with the black. Shake hands with it. From there until he hit the bottom he “saw” with his hands only, lightly brushing the far wall until even that gave way to nothing but chilly water. He pushed again, and in an instant he touched the bottom.
He gathered himself there, second thoughts and guesses tugging at his mind. What if this underwater tunnel went the whole way under the Solekeep? How far was that? Fifty yards? A hundred? He couldn’t swim that far and make it back on that one breath. No way. How far should he go before he’d have to turn back? With just enough air to reach the surface again?
What if the tunnel turned upward, but there wasn’t a “there” up there? What if it terminated and the whole of it was still underwater? Could he then still make it back to Delores?
Back to Delores? What did that mean? She’s just a kid!
She’s a young woman.
That was his dad’s voice, but it was his too.
Stop it now. Think.
***
Ellis cleared his mind and stared northward. The frigid water was uncomfortable on his eyes, and he blinked several times trying to focus them in the darkness to no avail. It was all darkness. For a split second he thought he could see the slightest shimmer of yellow-orange light, but the glint didn’t last. Now it was just black. Shroud black. Like the day of blindness only with no sound. Had he seen light up ahead? Was it all in his mind?
Just swim.
He pushed off the muddy bottom with his feet and pulled at the water with his arms, propelling himself forward. His right foot brushed something that his brain informed him felt like bones, but in a millisecond the sensation was gone. He brought his right hand forward and held it out in front of him as he swam so if he bumped into something he’d feel it and stop in time. He didn’t need a head gash or any other injury. Not down here.
Ten feet. Fifteen. Then he felt it. The tunnel turned upward, first at an angle, then straight up. There was something up there, some flash that might be called light, bent and dancing by a disturbed surface somewhere. He kicked upward and his lungs began to ache for air. Now there was a hint of the yellow, flickering, like a candle’s glow refracting through the water.
He kicked hard and broke the surface, sucking in air like it was life itself. There was light from a low, small fire and as the water ran down Ellis’s face and his eyes gained focus in the dim orange glow, he settled back in the water and reached for the ledge to support himself above the water.
There’s a man!
It was an old man; Asian and thin with almost no hair to speak of except for a thin, stringy gray mustache and a beard just hanging onto his chin. The man rolled off an army cot, landing on his hands and knees. The old man looked up and his gaze locked on Ellis. Before Ellis could think to speak or shout, the old man lunged toward Ellis who pushed back from the ledge in response. The man pushed a metal lever and there was a sharp, rusty creak and groan.
Ellis looked up and saw a heavy metal grate, hinged just above the surface on the back wall as it raced horizontally toward him. In the split second he had to grasp what was happening, Ellis, on instinct alone, ducked just under the water and the grate clamped down shut with an angry clang only inches above the surface.
Just.
Maybe four or five inches above the water.
Ellis surfaced again and had to turn his head slightly to suck in air. As he did, he saw the old man reaching for something. A stick or a spear. Ellis gulped a hasty breath, ducked under the water again and pushed off the metal grate with his feet. It was solid. Locked down. He pulled water with his arms and kicked with his feet as his mind raced with thoughts too jumbled to help him.
His head hit the mud at the bottom and again he thought he felt bones or smooth sticks, something deathly and corporeal and just a remnant of whatever else it used to be, but he pushed off again southward hoping the small breath he took would get him back to the surface on the other side.
***
Delores shook.
All of her shook. Body and soul shuddered from the cold and fear and not a little from love and confusion too. Ellis had been out of sight for less than a minute, but in that minute the things that made her shake now permeated both her mind and her thin clothing. So she shivered and waited. And worried. Scared almost to breathe until she saw him come up again.
She knew how she felt about Ellis. She’d always loved him in one way or another. Everyone knew it, except maybe Ellis himself. Five years ago she’d been a scared young girl, not even a teenager, and she’d seen him as almost a father and protector, but in those five years since, Ellis had stayed the same while she’d grown into… a woman. At least that’s how it seemed to her. But Ellis still only saw her as a little girl. As a daughter, maybe. That, too, was how it seemed to her. And isn’t that all that really matters in the heart?
Hearts are bad tools for seeing things aright.
“Think with your mind and not your feelings,” Ellis was always saying. When it came to him, every part of her agreed, but she didn’t feel (or think) she could ever let him know how she felt. She didn’t want it to get weird.
It would get weird.
Chuck was the most obvious match. Nearest her age and not disinterested. But who can tell the heart what it should want?
Seventeen though, now, and a woman, and Ellis down there below the water and maybe not coming back, ever.
What if that were true? Delores asked herself.
She’d dive in there and find him and maybe die with him. That’s what she’d do.
Think with your mind.
But she couldn’t do that. The rest of the family needed her.
So there you go,
she thought. You love him, but you also love the rest of them. It’s all one.
She shivered again.
“C’mon Ellis,” she whispered. “Come back now.”
And then he broke through the water, manic, sucking in air. His eyes met hers and spoke to her silently. Something. And then a metal grate, like a fence, only flat and solid, slid out from the far wall. It slid hard and fast and it hit Ellis in the head. He went under, but the grate kept sliding.
She leapt. She didn’t think. She felt. And she leapt.
Terror gripped her. Immeasurable terror, but still she leapt. Airborne for a moment and then tumbling.
Too late. The heavy steel grate, thick and rusted, crisscrossed with rebar into a mesh of three inch squares, closed over the small pond. She landed on it heavily, but the grate was solid and didn’t give. It suspended her four inches above the water and when she looked down she could barely see the dark bulk of Ellis’s form just underneath the surface. She stuck her hand into the dark and cold water and felt for him. His hand clasped hers and he broke the surface, then just as quickly he released her hand and gripped the metal grate so he could hold his head, or part of it, above the water level. With his other hand he felt around to the back of his head where the grate had struck him. He brought that hand to his face and they both looked. No blood.
He gulped air and when he did a returning wave made him swallow a little water. He coughed and rubbed his eyes with his free hand.
“Ellis!” she said, panic rising up in her.
His lip quivered uncontrollably, a sign of the onset of hypothermia. The first time he tried to speak, his teeth chattered and his voice left him with no effect. His eyes raced around and as he studied the grate and the full reality of his predicament settled on him like an ominous fog. Like a spider whose prey freezes as the venom begins its work.
“Run,” he said through his clenched teeth.
“But—”
“There’s someone down here!” he gasped. “Run!”
Chapter 23
When It All Goes Down
Delores stumbled through the darkness.
Her headlight flickered and cast phantoms in the shadows as she ran, but provided very little depth perception. Her heart pounded in her chest and she stumbled twice when she misjudged her footing on the uneven tunnel floor. The second stumble sent her sliding to the ground, arms and legs akimbo, her face glancing off the hard dirt leaving a scrape embedded with whitish clay and dirt along her right cheek. She wiped at her face with a sleeve and gasped.
Now, for the first time since Ellis had shouted “run,” she heard herself and gauged her own fear. She was grunting, almost a high pitched bark or squeal with each breath that echoed through the tunnel and the sounds she made startled her.
She looked around, expecting that someone might be chasing her, and when she saw no one coming she pushed up from the ground and stumbled forward again. Another ten steps and her light illuminated the rebar ladder that crawled dizzily up toward Utah, running past the horizontal tunnel that led back toward the barn. She’d have to decide then which way she should go.
For now, she focused on the ladder and lunged at it, unable to control her hands completely or to calm herself for the upward climb. In her jumble of thoughts somehow she knew that if she didn’t slow down and concentrate, she’d never make it up the ladder. She’d never reach help.
And somewhere back there, locked in the chilly waters, Ellis was dying in bone-chillingly cold water.
***
Delores stepped off the rebar ladder into the horizontal tunnel that led toward the barn. She’d decided her best chance of getting help for Ellis before it was too late would be to get Chuck. Chuck was the strongest young man in the family, and he was handy too. He’d know what to do.
She sprinted, trying her best to keep the back of one hand on the tunnel wall to her right. She’d know she was getting close to the upward climb to the barn when the left wall disappeared. Twenty yards from the barn climb, another tunnel broke off southwestward down toward the pillbox and surfaced in the woods not far behind Shooter’s nest.
When she felt the right wall disappear, she slowed her pace. She needed to be careful now. Her light illuminated the cases of explosives and other materials that had been stacked beneath the barn. She scurried past and climbed the wooden ladder that led upward into the barn floor.
Up and out of the trap door, and she remembered to very quickly kick some hay over the entranceway. Ellis had drilled it into them since the tunnels had first been discovered that obscuring the entrances could be a matter of life or death. She didn’t tarry, though. Once she’d scattered enough straw, she sprinted toward the door of the barn, and almost ran headlong into Chuck, Marlon, and Patrick who were scrambling into the barn in a near panic.
“Where have you been?” Marlon yelled. “Where have you been? Where is Ellis?”
“I—”
“Where is Ellis?” Patrick shouted.
“We’re under attack, Delores,” Chuck said. He wasn’t calm, but he was a little more composed. “Looks like a gang of some sort. Not too big, but well-armed. Trying to make it to the bridge.”
“The bridge?” Delores said. Her mind was spinning. She needed to get help for Ellis, but now, what? Was it all ending? Could this be it?
“Shooter, Rooster, and Neil have them all slowed up a bit down the rise,” Chuck said. “Shooter’s in the pillbox. Neil and Rooster are up in Utah, firing and moving, and we’re about to get some triangulation opened up on them from the hay loft. Renny, Kay, and Karl are digging in up by the house in case they break through.”
Delores brought her hands to her face, and began to feel unsteady, and Chuck grabbed her to keep her from toppling over.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s… It’s Ellis. He’s in trouble! Big trouble. And he’s going to die if we don’t get to him right now!”
“Trouble?” Chuck repeated. “What is it? Did he fall or something? Is he hurt?”
“Was there a collapse?” Patrick asked.
“No. I’ll have to show you, but he’s trapped,” she said, grabbing Chuck’s arms for support. “Like an animal. He’s in a pool of water, and he’s trapped by a metal grate.”
Chuck turned to the other boys. “Get up to the loft and make sure to keep your heads down,” he said. “Watch your fire. You know what to do. And make sure you keep an eye on your ammo. If they make it over the bridge, get everyone down into the tunnel and make plans to hold them off from there. Just like we planned to, okay?”
The two boys nodded and ran toward the ladder that led up to the loft.
“Over the bridge?” Delores shrieked, her face not masking her incredulity. “You haven’t blown the bridge?”
“Shooter will make that decision,” Chuck said. “We need to go!”
“We should just blow the bridge!” Delores said almost hysterically, pulling away from Chuck’s grip.
“We can blow it from the pillbox, or up in Utah, Delores,” Chuck said. “Either place. Any time. So let the rest of the family do their jobs, and let’s go get Ellis.”
***
Yesterday. Up Top. Early Morning Darkness.
The stars turn and whirl overhead and Walker watches them dance. It’s easier than the revenge he’s consumed with. The constant revenge. And then he moves slowly, cautiously, back to the scope and watches the bridge, the hill, and the hidden valley.
“What time is it?”
All that is gone forever seems swallowed up by the question. A million times asked in a world now broken and gone. Shouted from stages by switched-on rappers ginning up commerce by whipping up hate. A voice in your mind, reminding you that now is not forever.
What time is it?
Walker leaves the scope and crawls forward, one limb at a time, toward the burbling water belo
w the bridge. This is how it’s done. Right arm forward. Stop. Wait. Left leg rising then pushing slowly forward. Stop. Wait. Other arm. Stop. Wait. Other leg. Stop. Wait. Repeat and repeat and repeat until you reach the water murmuring across flat river stones. It takes a good hour to get down to the water and an hour to get back to his position.
If there is a sentry out there, waiting in the dark, it’s well past midnight on a moonless night, and they’re probably asleep.
The river water is cold and clear by Texas starlight.
We could have stayed here, thinks Walker as the leader of a convoy that is no more.
And the revenge is back.
He returns, crawling slowly, across the tall grass along the riverbank. He crawls back to the scope and watches the hidden valley rising above him in the dark. In time he takes out the medicinal salve, what little is left, and applies it to the worst of the burns.
And the stars wheel and dance on toward dawn.
And Walker sleeps and dreams of revenge.
***
Yesterday.
Morning light strikes Walker like a hammer being driven into the side of a dead man’s skull. He opens his eyes and knows by the light that the morning sun is close to its zenith. The air is unusually clear and warm.
A last day kinda day, he thinks and remembers thinking it many times before. Remembers thinking it while hidden under bodies, hiding from the stinkin’ bikers who’d laid waste his convoy. Lying on his back, he looks up and sees he’s left the tin of salve at the top of the dirt rise he’s been sleeping behind. A tactical mistake made late in the night. He didn’t often make mistakes, and he always assumes that any mistake will be his last.
After the end of the world, mistakes are fatal.
And just as he reaches up to take the tin and place it back inside his old trench coat… he hears the distant rifle shot and knows a bullet is racing from far to very near. The tin flies up, tumbling end over end, and lands on Walker’s chest.
Whoever took the shot didn’t mean to actually hit the tin. They’d just knocked it away by aiming for the dirt beneath. Expert level shooting. Walker tries to recall the specifics of the shot. Its sound. The space between gunshot and the tin flying end over end above him. All the facts converge on him almost unconsciously.