Infestation

by Heidi Lang

  “They really are.” Nate inched closer, peering into the darkness. “I’m totally going to regret this, aren’t I?”

  “I’m pretty sure we all are,” Rae said grimly. And then she lowered herself down.

  18. CADEN

  Caden could just make out Rae’s light about ten feet below as he swung his legs down and grabbed the rope.

  He held his breath as he eased himself down, moving his hands carefully, clamping his ankles around the rope below him to take some of the pressure off his arms, which were already burning with the effort. This was really not his thing. He tried not thinking about how he would have to somehow climb back out again, but suddenly that was all he could think about.

  Several agonizing moments later and his feet touched bottom, sinking a little into the soil. Everything smelled like dirt, the scent so strong he could almost taste it. Only a thin trickle of light filtered in from the hole above, dimly illuminating Rae’s silhouette next to him.

  “Vivienne’s checking ahead.” Rae turned, her headlamp getting him full in the face. He flinched, throwing up his arm to shield his eyes. “Oh, sorry.” Rae quickly flipped her light up. “Watch out!”

  Caden had the barest glimpse of a muddy sneaker before a weight dropped right on his head. He staggered, Nate flopping with him, both of them slamming into the dirt wall before ending in a tangle on the tunnel floor.

  Dirt and rocks rained down in a small shower. Caden caught his breath, not daring to move until it was over. After a few seconds the dirt stopped trickling down.

  “Well, that was fun,” Nate said, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “Why are we doing this again?”

  “For the good of humanity and all that.” Vivienne hurried over and hauled Nate up. “Or at least for the good of Gary. If he’s even down here. The tunnel bottlenecks up ahead, by the way, but we should be able to get through it.” She glanced down at Caden, careful to keep her headlamp pointed up. “You okay?”

  “Never better,” Caden croaked.

  “Scared you, didn’t it?” Vivienne’s teeth flashed white in the tunnel.

  “Um, yeah,” Caden said. “I’m pretty sure it scared all of us.” But even as the words left his mouth, he realized they weren’t true. Vivienne wasn’t scared at all. Instead, she radiated a strange, excited energy that reminded him of Aiden whenever he was about to try a new and dangerous spell.

  “Don’t worry, these tunnels don’t collapse easily. They’re surprisingly solid.” Vivienne knocked one fist against the dirt wall next to her.

  “You come here often, then?” Nate asked.

  “Once or twice,” Vivienne said. “My mom and I used to go exploring underground.” Abruptly the eagerness Caden had sensed in her vanished. “We’d better hurry.” She turned her back on them. “We can’t be down here when night falls.”

  He frowned, a trickle of unease sliding along his spine, as gentle and disturbing as if a spider were walking on his bare skin. He knew a thing or two about secrets, and Vivienne was definitely hiding something from them. Something big.

  He’d noticed it before but assumed it was that she was working with Patrick. Now, as Caden watched Vivienne and Nate take the lead down the tunnel, he couldn’t help but wonder what other secrets she had buried beneath her cheerful, friendly facade.

  Perhaps the reason why she had started working with Patrick in the first place.

  “I guess we should follow them, huh?” Rae whispered.

  Caden blinked, noticing Rae hovering there by the thin stream of light from above. Her fear fell off her in waves of a sickly yellow that made him feel slightly ill too. “Are you okay?” he asked her.

  “I hope so.”

  “Not a fan of tunnels?”

  Rae shook her head, her light bouncing off the wall.

  “Me neither. Want to go first, so I can make sure nothing sneaks up behind you?”

  “Oh good, something else to worry about,” Rae muttered, but she started walking. Her steps were small and slow, like she was inching through the dark, and before long Vivienne and Nate were so far ahead that Caden could barely see their headlamp.

  Caden watched Rae’s light bouncing off the dirt, the trailing roots, the occasional rock. Her fear grew bigger and stickier, until finally he was forced to put up his personal shields, keeping his awareness locked firmly inside. He might not be able to sense any of the Other Place’s energies like this, but in this small space it was too hard to think with someone else’s emotions wrapping around him like a hungry octopus.

  Rae stopped abruptly, and Caden almost smacked into her. “Um, I think this is the bottleneck Vivi saw,” she said, her voice way too high-pitched.

  The tunnel narrowed dramatically. Vivienne hadn’t been kidding about that. “Want me to lead through this?” Caden asked.

  “Only if you w-want to.”

  “I would love to.” He stretched his mouth into a smile. “Then you can just follow right behind me, okay?”

  “Want my light?”

  He did. He really did, but he shook his head anyhow. He didn’t think Rae would be able to get through that tight space without her headlamp.

  Dropping to his hands and knees, he began crawling, the tunnel pressing down on his head as he moved forward. Eventually he had to drop all the way to his stomach and squirm, using his elbows to drag himself along, the rocks digging into his skin.

  His breath felt trapped like the rest of him, echoing too loud in that small space.

  Vivienne made it through this, he told himself. So he could too.

  But then Vivienne was small and athletic. He remembered how she had sprinted through the woods in the dark without breaking a sweat. She was basically a superhero. There were probably a million things she could do that he couldn’t.

  Nate made it through this, he reminded himself, and that did give him a little more confidence.

  Finally the pressure above him eased, and he was able to get back up to his hands and knees, and then to his feet, the tunnel widening again. Vivienne and Nate stood nearby, waiting.

  “How did you manage to bring your backpack?” Caden asked, staring at that humongous thing.

  “Easily. I pushed it through ahead of me.”

  “Why do you carry that around with you everywhere, anyway?” Nate asked.

  “You have a backpack with you,” Vivienne pointed out. It was true; Nate had a small pack slung on his back, hardly larger than a loaf of bread.

  “Mine is tiny. Yours could eat mine and still have room for seconds. What are you even carrying in there? I mean, aside from rope.”

  “Stuff,” Vivienne said.

  “Stuff?” Caden asked.

  “A girl can never be too prepared.” Vivienne reached over her shoulder and patted the top of her bag like it was a favorite pet. Then she crouched closer to the bottleneck and called, “Rae-Rae? You doing okay?”

  “Just… peachy,” Rae grunted. A minute later and she climbed out of the bottleneck, her face white in the light of her headlamp, her lips pressed hard together. She hovered next to Vivienne, whose headlamp bathed her own face in light, making weird shadows under her eyes and nose, turning her features strange and unfamiliar. Where Rae was like a wild horse confronted by a wolf pack, two seconds from bolting, Vivienne seemed almost like a creature of the tunnels. Like she belonged here in the dark.

  Vivienne’s eyes locked on Caden’s. And for one second he felt the presence of a hunger as vast and dark as the entire underground. Then she blinked and it was gone. Just Vivienne standing there. Friendly, cheerful, easygoing Vivienne. The same girl he’d known since elementary school.

  They hadn’t been friends then. But he’d always liked her. Or at least, he’d disliked her less than the others. She was popular, but in a casual, “of course people like me” way, her self-confidence refreshing amid the backdrop of all the other middle school insecurities. And while she was blunt and not always nice, she’d never seemed mean-spirited. He’d sensed in her a love of nature, an
d adventure, and fun. Nothing like… whatever it was he’d just brushed against.

  She pulled the straps of her backpack tighter and turned away from him. “Let’s move, people. We’ve got some bugs to find.”

  Caden shivered. Had he imagined all of that? He knew how fear could make you see things that weren’t there, feel things that weren’t real. And he was afraid. His heart beat too fast, his breathing was harsh and quick. Being underground in the dark was enough to scare anyone.

  But he knew that wasn’t it. As he walked behind Vivienne, he was sure that some other entity had been looking out through the mask of her face. And whatever it was, it had noticed Caden noticing it.

  And that was what really scared Caden.

  19. RAE

  Rae wasn’t sure how long they’d been underground. It felt like hours. It might have been minutes, or days.

  She wasn’t going to be the first one to complain.

  She told herself that over and over as she walked, her world reduced to a thin washed-out beam of light ahead, darkness crowding above, below, and to either side. The rocky ground was uneven enough that she had to concentrate to avoid stumbling, the walls and ceiling sometimes squeezing inward like a tube of toothpaste, brushing against her head, her shoulders, causing hysteria to rise up in her chest until it felt like her heart might beat itself to death against the bones of her rib cage.

  She wouldn’t ask to turn around.

  She counted her breaths, drawing musty air in, thick with the smell of moist dirt, and letting it slowly out. The air grew colder, the tunnel sloping downward, and still Vivienne led them on.

  Rae walked in the back of the group. She was very aware of that, of the feeling that something could easily creep up behind them, and then she’d be the first one to go…

  She was not going to chicken out before the others. She would not be the first one to break.

  Fear pressed against her lungs, making it hard to breathe. It reminded her of being in that hazmat suit, trapped underneath Green On!, thinking she was about to die. That same sense of suffocating panic.

  Rae gasped for breath, trying to stay calm, but her nose and mouth filled with the rich, earthy scent of dirt, and suddenly she was remembering that cabin in the woods, and of running for her life through the dark and knowing something was following her. Something unnatural, with too-long arms and legs, and no eyes, and so many teeth.

  Ready or not, here I come…

  She was losing it. Spots flared up in her vision, and she stumbled, putting a hand against the tunnel wall next to her. She couldn’t breathe. The darkness pressed in on all sides, and she could feel the weight of dirt above her, could imagine the ceiling crumbling, all of it crashing down on her head in an avalanche.

  She needed to think of something else, quick. Something comforting.

  Rae squeezed her eyes shut and thought of her dad. She tried to picture him walking next to her and couldn’t. It was like grasping for someone’s hand in the dark, the details of his face slipping past.

  Her heart pounded. It felt like someone had gone into her brain with a scalpel and removed her dad. How could she forget what he looked like? Wildly she searched ahead, past Caden, focusing on Nate. On the edge of his glasses.

  Glasses.

  She seized on the image of her dad’s favorite pair: ugly, boxy things with thick black frames. He complained contacts made his eyes feel too dry, and he didn’t trust laser surgery.

  Sure, it can fix my eyesight, he’d say whenever someone brought it up. But can it make me look as good as these babies? And he’d tap his glasses and wink, and ignore anyone arguing that as a highly specialized engineer, he should have more faith in technological advances.

  Rae kept those glasses fixed in her mind and built the rest of her dad’s face from memory around them. His energetic eyebrows, quick to knit together, to raise up or lower down, pulling his forehead into a series of lines and creases. Beneath the glasses, a wide nose that her dad claimed made him look like Harrison Ford, and thin lips. When he smiled, he did it with his whole face, teeth glinting, eyes gleaming, nose wrinkling. Rae’s heart ached imagining that smile now, and what she’d give to be able to see it again, to have him ask her, What’s wrong, sugar cube?

  She blinked, her vision blurry. There were so many things wrong right now. Starting with the fact that her dad had disappeared over a year ago and everyone was pretending that it was totally normal. And now here she was, in a tunnel, looking for a giant bug and possibly another dead goat. And it was dark here, and scary, and she wished she were home.

  She knew what her dad would tell her, though, if he were really here with her. If you’re going to do something, do it with all you’ve got. Study every detail. Commit it to memory. Break it down into parts. He usually launched into a tree metaphor, too, talking about roots digging deep into the soil the way an inquisitive mind needed to dig into the facts.

  Focusing on facts was a good way to detach from her fear, so Rae adjusted her headlamp and did what her dad would do. She studied the tunnel walls and floor and ceiling, everything she could see around Caden’s spiky-haired silhouette in front of her. And as she mentally checked off the details of her surroundings, the tight grip of panic loosened, her lungs relaxing.

  It seemed like a normal enough tunnel, as far as she could tell. Not that she’d been in many before. The ground under her feet had leveled out, only the occasional rock to trip her up. The walls, too, had gone pretty level. And the ceiling.

  Rae stopped and stared. They were all symmetrical. Frowning, she moved closer to one of the walls, studying it in the light of her headlamp. She ran a hand over the dirt. It had been well packed, but as she scraped some of it away, she noticed that there was something solid beneath the dirt.

  She glanced down the tunnel, where Vivienne’s headlamp was getting farther away. “Guys?” she called. “You might want to see this.”

  “What?” Nate’s voice sounded small and panicky. “Is something wrong? Is the tunnel collapsing?” He stumbled closer, almost falling into Caden.

  Rae carefully pointed her headlamp up so she wouldn’t catch either of them in the face, but she could see the gleam of Nate’s too-wide eyes in the dark. “I don’t think it can collapse. Look.” She pointed at the spot on the wall she had scraped clean.

  “Is that concrete?” Caden leaned in close. He touched the wall, then pulled his hand back as if it had been burned. “These tunnels were artificially created.”

  “Or at least this part was,” Rae said. “The section back there seemed more natural.”

  Nate slid his backpack over his shoulder and pulled a small glass vial out, then carefully scraped a soil sample into it.

  “Isn’t there supposedly an abandoned military base somewhere beneath Whispering Pines?” Rae asked, remembering an article she’d discovered during one of her earlier research phases.

  “Rumors,” Nate said immediately. “I don’t believe it.”

  “But you do believe that squirrels here attack anyone who wears red?”

  “Well, yeah. Because they do.”

  “And your town has a goat man for good luck? And giant bugs? And your school rabbit was attacked by some kind of blood-draining vampire?” Rae put her hands on her hips, annoyed at the way the others were looking at her. It reminded her uncomfortably of the way the kids at her old school had stared and whispered “conspiracy nut” behind her back.

  “What’s your point, Rae-Rae?” Vivienne asked.

  “My point is we know there are weird things that go on in this town. How can you immediately discount the idea of a secret abandoned military base? It’s no stranger than anything else I’ve seen here.” Rae rapped her knuckles against the concrete wall. “And if not a base, then what is this?”

  Silence fell around her, thick and awkward. And then Caden said, “She’s right. It is possible. I’ve often wondered why Green On! really set up shop here. Maybe they’re working with the military? Creating secret weapons, hid
den beneath the mask of ‘alternative energy’?”

  “Oh, stop,” Vivienne snapped. “Your family just hates Green On!. My mom works there, and if she were involved in any conspiracy stuff, I would know about it.”

  “Would you?” Caden asked. “Does your mom tell you everything?”

  “Everything important,” Vivienne said. But then she frowned and looked away. “Or she used to,” she admitted. “I think she’s working on something big right now that she can’t talk about.” She adjusted her pack, shuffled her feet, and now the uncomfortable silence was focused around her. “But that doesn’t mean it’s anything nefarious or whatever.”

  “Speaking of nefarious,” Nate called, “I’m pretty sure I found a door.” He had his cell phone out, the blue-tinted glow illuminating a stretch of tunnel wall in front of him.

  Rae squinted, noticing the deeper line of an indented rectangle set inside the smooth expanse of tunnel.

  Nate’s expression was bleak. “I retract my earlier skepticism.”

  Vivienne pressed both hands against the rectangle. Nothing happened. She ran her hands along the dirt next to it, stopping on a protruding rock.

  “What are you looking for?” Rae asked.

  Vivienne pushed at the rock. “Some sort of opening mechanis—ah!”

  With a whoosh and a sprinkle of soil, the rectangle opened, revealing a small, windowless room, light glowing softly from the top.

  They all looked at one another.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Nate said. “And the answer is no. No freaking way. Absolutely not.”

  “You sure are protesting a lot,” Vivienne said. “Especially since no one has suggested anything.”

  “You want to go in there,” Nate accused.

  “Hey, there’s an idea!” Vivienne beamed. “What do you think, Rae-Rae? Should we go inside, like Nate obviously wants?”

  “I do not!”

  Rae stared at that tiny box of a room and wanted to turn and sprint back down the tunnel. But it had been thinking of her dad that led her to this discovery, and he wouldn’t have run away from something like this. He would have needed to know where it led.