Cold Feet (Empathy in the PPNW Book 3)

by Olivia R. Burton

  I noticed a crack in the back wall of the cabinets, realizing something smelled earthy. Frowning at the smell—not because it was bad, but just because it was out of place—I leaned closer, put my sweaty palm to the edge. Before I’d even gotten a chance to fuss with it too, I could feel the slight temperature change between the rest of the room and the corner of the cabinet.

  “Well. This isn’t suspicious, even a little.” I dug my fingers into the crack, pushing in hopes of dislodging or widening it and figuring out what I was looking at. The cabinet slid easily to the side in a track I hadn’t noticed. Beyond it was darkness, the edges of which were dirt for as far as I could see. Considering the lack of proper lighting in the low cabinet, that wasn't actually very far. I dug my phone out of my pocket, flicked it on and used it to light the short distance beyond.

  “Shit,” I hissed. “This looks like it could be exactly what we've been searching for.”

  This had been an entirely accidental find. I hadn’t really had a plan when I’d bolted out of Gordon’s office and then darted in here to get away from Rhonda. Now I was faced with a choice. Did I try to get Mel in here with me to explore, or did I go on my own? It was unlikely Mel, even if he was listening to me whimper and shuffle around from down the hall, would be able to get away from the doctor and make it in here without anyone noticing. It was even less likely that I’d be able to get back out, grab him, and drag him here without Coontz questioning us both.

  We could probably come back tonight, break in, snoop around, and see what was tucked in this musty tunnel but I was there already. It could have been nothing, I told myself, biting my lip. Maybe it was just bad construction, an accidental dirt-filled tunnel behind the exam room. Maybe I’d go tell Mel what I’d found, we’d come back that night, pick the locks, and get caught by some screaming alarm and go to jail and it would turn out nothing was here at all except a steep drop into a shallow hole.

  I didn’t believe my own excuses, though the part about going to jail did seem pretty plausible.

  The light on my phone died down and I glared at it. No signal at all, thanks to whatever the Tough Love center had set up. I didn’t know if it was a legitimate marriage therapy technique they’d developed, or if they were just jerks who abhorred texting.

  Did I have a choice to make? Yes.

  Would I make the right one? No.

  Tucking my phone back into my pocket to keep my hands free, I took a breath to steel myself and pushed my shoulders into the cabinet. I crawled in, accidentally slamming my upper arm against the useless pipes and swore under my breath. Twisting to get my wide hips and pudgy legs completely into the tunnel, I stared at the open cabinets I was leaving behind. Biting my lip in consideration, I reached out and yanked them both shut, just in case anyone peered into the room.

  For all I knew, they had frequent patrols specifically aimed at making sure there were no sneaky empaths discovering their secrets.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The mud beneath the heels of my hands was cold, the tunnel still and pitch black. Once I was sure I had my footing, I wiped my hands on my jeans, considered that I was possibly dooming them to a life of being painting pants, and slid my phone out of my pocket. Need your path lit through an uncertain, possibly dangerous, lightless tunnel? I had an app for that!

  Using my phone as a flashlight, I looked around the enclosed space, keeping my empathic feelers out to make sure nothing and no one was sneaking up on me. I felt a few rodents in the soil around me but that was it. I had no intention of bothering any gophers or moles, and I was pretty sure they had no intention of bothering me. I took a few steps, realized the tunnel had gotten marginally bigger; I could stand up tall, if I didn’t mind my hair brushing the dirt above me.

  Crouched slightly, I started making my way through, watching my step, keeping my mind alert. The light from my phone showed me about what you’d expect from a hidden, underground tunnel: dirt.

  “Good job, Gwen. You’ve discovered the underside of the ground. It’s like the backside of water at Disneyland, only messier.”

  My voice sounded strange in the tunnel and it made me pause, turn around, and just double check that I was, in fact, alone. There were no other emotions nearby, but I hadn’t come across everything in the universe. Some things had no emotions and if one of them was sneaky, I could have been in danger.

  Scolding myself for my ridiculous thinking, I pressed on.

  Eight more steps and I spotted something. My phone illuminated a spark of metal in the distance, sticking out of the ground. The little kid in me went, “ooh, treasure!” while the rational adult in me told the kid to shut up and not draw any attention to herself. As I got closer I realized the adult was right; this wasn’t treasure. The corner of a pair of glasses was poking out of a mound of soil. It was only as I got closer that I realized they were still attached to their wearer.

  Immediately, my heart sounded the alarm through the rest of my organs. I felt cold and light and a little bit dizzy as I froze in place, staring at the body peeking out of the loose earth. My brain, just as eager to be helpful as my heart, came up with endless horrifying images of zombies and their victims. It also happily reminded me that, as the undead, zombies have no use for emotions, so the fact that I could still feel nothing didn’t necessarily mean I wasn’t about to get my tasty brains scooped right out of my head through my eye sockets.

  I felt my knees shaking, saw the light from my phone waver as my arms followed suit. Still, nothing moved except me. The dead guy in the ground remained dead. Even the aforementioned gopher didn’t move from its place in its den in the tunnel walls. Afraid to move in case I drew something’s attention, I reminded myself that I had gotten myself into this mess. I was down here in the dark with a dead guy because I’d been feeling cranky and superfluous. If I’d just left the room and gone back to Mel, he could have wolfed out, ripped the cabinets from the walls in a manly fashion, and escorted me to the dead guy like a seeing-eye werewolf.

  “But you’re alone with a corpse,” I said, barely above a whisper. My voice didn’t wake the dead and somehow that gave my legs the courage to move. Taking two slow steps back, I pressed myself to the walls of the tunnel, asked myself what the plan was now. I’d gotten dirt all over me; reversing course didn’t seem like the brightest idea. How would I explain how I’d come out of a sterile exam room so dirty? Going forward didn’t seem like much fun, either.

  Still, I’d come down here to snoop and slinking back to Coontz with my tail between my muddy legs was not snooping.

  “Okay, then,” I said to the dead guy. I managed to make actual sounds this time, which made me feel courageously cowardly. Sure, I could speak, but if my voice had done something to alert the dead guy that he was a zombie, my immediate reaction would have been to curl up in a ball and cry. Zombies were like bears, right? That would work.

  Keeping my gaze on the corpse, I pressed on.

  It was several minutes before I could persuade my brain I couldn’t see it anymore. Logically I knew that my tiny phone screen could not illuminate that far, but my eyeballs believed differently. Like rebellious teenagers, they’d gone and tattooed the gory image onto themselves without my permission. By the time I convinced them to cover it up, I’d found another problem: the cave split off in several directions.

  Right, left, forward or back? I had another decision to make, this one just as unappealing as the last. I stood at the crossroads, still pressed to the wall of the cave for a while, before stepping out and turning in circles, trying to decide which way to go. Somewhere around my fifth revolution, I realized I had no idea which tunnel I’d come through.

  “Shit! Shit, dammit, fuck!” I said out loud. When that didn’t help, I twisted, kicked the edge between two of the tunnels and asked myself what the hell I’d been thinking coming down here. The gopher must’ve heard me; I felt a tiny, harried explosion of shock from my left. Unless I was mistaken, it was the same gopher that had been to my right when I’d c
ome into the tunnel. He hadn’t moved, had been a constant buzz off the side of my empathy since I’d started my skulking walk of shame. There was a blurry part of my memory that wasn’t really sure if I’d kept tabs on the little guy while I’d been huddled against the wall staring in terror at the corpse, but I convinced myself I knew what I was doing and decided to press on.

  Feeling like the sailors of old, I used the gopher to orientate myself, facing the tunnel I thought would take me back in the direction I’d come. I was done being a detective; Mel could keep it. I was going back to the exam room, even if I had to make up a ridiculous story to explain myself.

  You guys have mud baths, right? You’re that kind of place? Well I fell in one.

  As I headed in what I thought was the right direction, I kept my eyes peeled for my dead friend whose name I didn’t know. Glasses was as good a name as any, I thought. It was like a nickname between friends. Maybe if I considered him an old pal he wouldn’t rise up with murder on his decaying mind.

  Soon, I told myself, I’d see his rotten face, wave a jaunty hello, and push on, promising to bring help for him. Oh sure, I wouldn’t be able to bring him back to life, but I could at least get him a proper burial, right? He wasn’t a zombie, so that was the sort of thing he’d be into. You know, if corpses could be into stuff.

  The light app caught something dull in the distance and I wondered briefly if it was Glasses, or if the gopher had burrowed through the wall to join me and I was seeing a glint off his giant, shiny teeth. Stepping to the side to get a better look, I felt my foot hit something sticky.

  “Ugh, really?” I grumbled. Nothing answered me, of course, but not just because I was the only one in the tunnel who spoke English; I’d taken the wrong path. The gopher and my empathy had screwed me. The spot of white wasn’t a friendly corpse or a helpful rodent; it was a thick strand of what looked like Halloween webbing. Squinting at it, glad it wasn’t feces of some kind, I took another step forward, felt something catch my hair.

  Immediately terrified, I yelped, flailed my arm up to bat away whatever had grabbed me. My spasm, unfortunately, only managed to make things infinitely worse. Now, not only was my hair caught, but my arm and left leg had been snared as well. Like the idiot I had become over the last half hour, I reached up with my free hand, trying to pull the dim webbing away from my skin. I might as well have tried to tear a phone book in half. A really sticky phone book that had now captured both of my arms, one leg, and my hair.

  “Oh god,” I whimpered, trying my best to look around and see what I’d gotten myself into. The light from my phone caught on the strands of webbing that held me, making them sparkle here and there as I continued to struggle.

  I’d managed to get myself into beautiful but certain death.

  ##

  The only saving grace of being stuck in the webbing was that the light from my phone had, mercilessly, not ended up aimed directly at my face. I couldn’t move my thumb even enough to close out the application but I could at least see the webbing around me in a way I hadn’t noticed before. Somewhere around what may have been the twenty-minute mark, my body had given in and started to sag. The web was light, barely felt along my skin, except when I did exactly this. Then, it would pull at the hairs and my flesh like tugging on a really big Band-Aid.

  Despite the sharp pain of having every hair on my body yanked on simultaneously, sagging was a relief. I felt kind of like I’d gotten stuck in some weird, European hammock that, while not comfortable, at least felt very secure and let my tense and stressed muscles have a few moments of relief.

  “Gopher?” I called out for the fifth or sixth time, knowing it was useless. “You wanna get Glasses over here? See if he’s got a knife or something? Maybe one of you can go get help? Tell them Gwen fell down the well and she needs Lassie to get her hairy ass out here and—” I cut off, as movement teased the edge of my light. “Oh god, oh god, I was kidding! I don’t really want the dead guy over here! Don’t—”

  “What in ludicrous hell did you do to yourself?”

  Squealing at the voice, I made the mistake of struggling, trying to see if I was hallucinating or if Mel had really managed to find me. The hairs on my face and neck stung as they were yanked by the webbing and I swore a few more times, making sure that every subterranean mammal who had ignored me in my time of need heard it. As Mel stepped into view, I sighed, whimpering with relief.

  “Mel! Oh god, you have to help me! I’m stuck.”

  “I can see that. What are you doing down here?”

  “Not making friends with any gophers, let me tell you!” I whined. Mel lifted a brow, frowning down at me. I realized he had no idea what I’d been doing for the last half hour to keep myself sane; considering the fact that I’d been talking to a rodent about a corpse, I decided I didn’t need to explain. None of it would make sense to anyone except me anyway.

  Sighing, Mel stepped forward, twitched as a strand of the webbing caught against his arm. He let out an annoyed chuff, ripping at it. It came free painlessly and he paused, looking around the cave more carefully. Shaking his head, he put his hands to his hips, met my eyes again.

  “I feel like this is something only you could get yourself into.”

  “Clearly it isn’t. Did you see the dead guy down the hall?”

  “Yeah, but I smelled him first. You’re lucky you clung to the wall near him for so long; I wouldn’t have picked up your scent if you’d bolted. Of course, if you’d never come down here in the first place, this wouldn’t be a damn issue.”

  “Would you please just get me out of this stuff?” Mel shook his head, rolled his eyes.

  “Stop wiggling, you idiot. That’s only going to make it worse.”

  “Your face is making it worse; just help me!”

  Mel took his time, stepping around me as wide as he could to look me over before making a move. I suspected he may have been checking out my ass instead of the webbing at one point, but I didn’t complain. Finally, he ducked under a fat glimmer of a strand, reached across my face toward my left arm. This put me at eye level with his bicep, which flexed attractively as he did his best to tear the webbing and free me.

  “Welcome to the gun show,” I mused, appreciating the view despite the situation. At least if I died down here, I’d have the memory of Mel’s strong arm to send me restfully into the void. He was saving my life, after all. I was allowed to do some admiring. Glancing up, I found him smiling, amused by my reaction.

  “What was that?” he asked, knowing very well what my answer would be. I just rolled my eyes.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled after a moment, making him laugh silently.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity of ripped-out body hair, Mel grabbed me around my waist, pulled my chest against his, and yanked. The webbing around my head took what felt like most of the back of my skull off, but I was free.

  “Thank you!” I wrapped my arms around his chest and squeezed. The cave went dark as my phone pressed against his shirt and I felt Mel tense. “What’s wrong?” I asked, still hugging him. Mel let out a snort and then sighed.

  “Your skin is still sticky. I think you just glued your arms to my shirt.”

  “I did n—” I froze, as I realized he was right. I could feel the web spreading over my skin, clinging stubbornly. “Ah, shit.”

  We stood there for a second, wrapped around each other in the dark, and I listened to his heartbeat. It sped up slightly and I smiled with the half of my mouth that wasn’t fused with cotton. I could feel the necklace pressed against my temple, and it was warm. Finally, Mel sighed, rolled his shoulders and took a half step back. I whimpered as the fabric pulled against the tiny hairs on my face.

  “I’ve just realized what your plan was all along, Gwen. For shame.”

  “What?” I asked, knowing full well I’d had no damn plan. Abruptly, Mel shifted, reaching behind him to grab the neckline of his shirt and pull. I stayed put, his shirt glued to my exposed skin as he shredded the already
ruined cotton with ease and then stepped back shirtless. In the light of the cell phone through the fabric, I could just see him over the cloth glued along my nose and cheek. Mel grinned at me.

  “You could have just asked to see me half-naked. This plan? It’s a little convoluted, and way too messy. Now, let’s get you out of here.”

  I did my best to glare at him, but the effect was ruined by the fact that I was so thankful to be free. Probably also by the fact that most of my face was obscured. Mel stepped around me, gestured down the tunnel.

  “Aren’t you going to get this off my face?”

  “Nah,” he said.

  I glowered at him but lacked a come back for once.

  “Just don’t touch me again. I know it’ll be hard, considering how fabulous I look, but do your best. And, here, I’ll take that.” Mel reached out, carefully peeled the phone out of my hand, and lifted it high. “Come on.”

  “Seriously, will you please help me with this?”

  “Walk it off.”

  “Fuck you,” I snapped. Mel turned to leer at me and wag his finger.

  “That’s a dangerous proposition in your state, but maybe later.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I can’t believe we haven’t reached the exam room, yet,” I groused. We’d been walking for a while, keeping our distance so as to not get stuck together again.

  “We’re not going back the way we came,” Mel explained.

  “Why?” I asked, trying once more in vain to pull his shirt away from my face. It tore at the hair there, made me whimper. Mel ignored me; I’d been trying the same trick for ten or fifteen minutes and he’d stopped bothering to look at me like I was an idiot.