by Matt Brennan
Small victory, which is better than none, but it’s one that leaves me feeling more scared and less satisfied than I would have liked. I change the subject instead. “Well, anywhere but here is better. We having lunch soon?”
* * *
After we eat, we start planning our departure, because I don’t want to lose any more time.
We pack our gear, which is brand new all state-of-the-art stuff. All lightweight and easy to haul. Only the bare necessities, of course, but it still put my original equipment to shame. I left Lyssa in charge of deciding what we needed. I didn’t know what half the stuff was and since she’d been out camping with her folks a zillion times, she was the expert.
In the end, she settled on more stuff than we could carry in our packs, but she also had a plan. She had a sled we could use while the snow held up and when we finally reached a place where the snow was gone, she had wheels she could attach to it. She said her dad designed it and they’d used it a bunch of times.
It took us more than a day to get everything together and to decide on a route. I tried to convince her we should stick to the river, since it flowed right to the harbor, but she outright dismissed the idea. She said it was suicide. I deferred to her knowledge, since she has some and I don’t have any, but I was so hoping I could float the rest of the way and not have to walk.
I guess being alive and tired is better than well rested and dead.
Besides, she has an escape hatch that leads to a secret trail she and her father blazed years ago and it was deep in the forest. Which according to the map we have, will allow us to stay off the beaten path eighty percent of the way. At first I was worried about the path she chose, what with all the snow, I thought it would be hard to follow. But then she showed me that she actually had a working GPS device. I explained that the UNN shut off every satellite I ever heard about, so I made her prove to me that it worked. She thought that if they were really watching us, and truly wanted us to reach the harbor, they’d make triple sure our GPS functioned just as it did when it came off the factory floor.
She also insisted that we spend two more days scanning every camera in her system. Which is what I’m doing now. I must admit, I don’t see the point. It’s been a week and we haven’t seen a squirrel nevermind any dangerous cannibals. But I’ve never been one to laugh in the face of safety either. My father used to say a cautious mind is capable of error, but rarely catastrophes.
So, I’m cautiously scanning video surveillance screens for cannibals and keeping an eye peeled for sasquatches at the same time.
You know, just to be safe.
“Hey, what was that?”
I didn’t hear her walk up behind me and the sudden appearance of her voice made me jump. “Jeez, I need to put a bell on you!” I say.
She smacks me on the shoulder, pushes me out of the way and steers the camera over to left, zooming in on a black spot that looks to be about the size of thimble to me.
“Is that a squatch?” I ask.
She elbows me and refocuses the camera and we clearly see the obscure dark object. “You and those stupid squatches! Look, right there! I told you they were out there!”
“Who? The shadowy blob people?”
She elbows me again and this time catches me off guard in the stomach and I double over in pain. “Are you kidding me? You can’t see that’s a blanket?”
I struggle to lift my head to the screen and really squint my eyes. If I’m being honest, it could be a blanket, but it might only look like that because she just said it. At first, I really just thought it was a wet boulder.
“Honestly, it might be, but it could be anything.”
“Look, I knew you were a moron, but I didn’t know you were also blind! That is clearly a blanket!”
I’m a bit bored with this conversation, “Okay, so what if it is?”
“Come on, you can’t be that stupid! I mean, if your brain is strong enough to keep your heart beating and everything, you should be able to figure this out!”
I sigh. “First of all, pacemaker cells in my heart are the ones keeping time, not my brain. Second of all, a blanket on the side of the road means nothing to me.”
She sighs and shakes her head, “It proves, they were just there.”
“How?”
“Because it wasn’t there yesterday!”
“Oh come on! You really expect me to believe that you know for a fact it wasn’t there yesterday? With all the other junk laying around in every camera?”
She looks at me incredulously, then taps a few buttons and a picture shows up on the screen. “What’s that?”
She leans back and puts her hands behind her head. “That is an image I captured yesterday at 4:50 p.m. You know, like you were supposed to have been doing every time you changed cameras! You know, like we agreed to do!”
I stare at the picture and sure enough, she is absolutely correct, there is no blankety-blob thingy.
“Okay, then where is this?”
She spins around and grabs the map and points to an area up near the dam, “Well, that’s no problem then! That’s at least a day and a half’s walk from here. We can leave now and be ahead of them the whole time.”
She punches me. Hard.
And man, I mean, hard.
I whine, “Hey!”
“Look, you can be a stupid, reckless, bunker baby when it’s just you, but not when I’m with you! They had horses genius! We can’t stay ahead of horses! If they find our trail, they will unleash the hounds and we’ll be screwed!”
I forgot about them. Why is it, no matter the situation, I always end up looking like a buffoon in front of Lyssa. Just once I’d like to avoid looking like a total fool.
“Okay, good point. So, what? The river?”
“Right, the house is on fire, so let’s throw gasoline on it!”
“Okay, Hannibal, you got any elephants in your pocket?”
She sighs. “I’m afraid I do, but you’re not going to like it. I know I don’t.”
“What? We tunnel to Vancouver? Because I think that’ll take way too long!”
She smiles, “Man, you don’t know how close you are.”
She taps a few more keys and a digital map of the Greater Vancouver area pops up on the screen. Just like any other map I’ve seen, which had streets and landmarks on it, this one had a bunch of red, green, gray, orange, and blue lines running through it everywhere.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What am I looking at?”
“This is a utility map of the entire Vancouver area.”
“Oh! Great! So what?”
“Your attempt at sarcasm, while pathetic, amuses me, so I’ll tell you. The green lines are gas lines. The red lines are electric lines. And the blue lines are water main lines.”
“Fantastic! Again, so what?”
“Well, you see all those gray lines?”
“Yeah, so?”
“Those are the sewer lines.”
“So freaking what! I’m not walking through a sewer!”
“Right, me neither, but do you see those orange lines?”
“No, I’m color blind.”
“Funny. Well genius, those are the storm drains. In fact, the storm drains were designed to be employed as an emergency runoff for the dam. That orange line there, runs all the way from the dam to the bay.”
“You’re saying in lieu of sitting in a canoe and floating down a picturesque river, we should instead wiggle through a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare, because you think you see a blanket by the side of the road?”
Lyssa puts her feet on the floor and spins to face me. The look in her eyes is pure evil incarnate. “Yes. Yes I do.”
So like the true coward I am, I say, “Okay, I was just making sure we were on the same page is all.”
“We leave first thing in the morning. So be sure to get a good night’s sleep Nancy, because you are going to need it.”
Man, I do hate it when she calls me Nancy!
CHAPTER TEN
&nbs
p; I knew I didn’t have a choice in the matter, Lyssa made the decision to take the storm drain and that was that. It took us five and a half hours of walking through a maze of the narrowest hallways, stairs, and tunnels mankind ever conceived of, before we finally reached the dam’s runoff pipe.
It’s huge.
I mean, gigantic.
But still as large as it is, the light that leaks in from the storm drains isn’t enough for me to see my hand in front of my face. Unfortunately, it is enough to see the tiny specks of light stretch out for miles. I mean, we could walk for hours and not feel like we made any progress.
It’s a depressing thought.
I had to argue for half an hour to go first because she was adamant that she would lead the way. But I just couldn’t have that. I mean, if she fell in a giant hole in the ground, I’d be dead anyway. There was no way I’d find my way out. But if I fell in, she’d still be able to make it to safety. She argued that the map didn’t show any dry wells, but my point was that the map was incredibly vague. An orange line, after all, doesn’t explain anything but general direction.
I impressed myself, mostly because I won.
I like winning.
Though I’m not used to it, actually; to be honest, I never win arguments.
Which sort of tells me, she really wanted me to go first. Which makes this a hollow victory.
So what, I’ll take it.
I start out walking down the tunnel with a single candle lighting my way. We actually have these hand-cranking flashlights, but Lyssa was worried that the light might carry too far and be seen from above through the storm-drain grates. She thought the candles would be so dim we’d see the light from the grates before we got to them and we could blow them out.
At the time, I thought it was a good idea, but now that I’m baby stepping a twenty mile walk through a drain pipe and barely seeing the ground where I’m placing my feet, I’m reconsidering. Lyssa is hanging back just far enough where she said her eyes adjusted to the light the candle made without making her blind.
Like me.
I thought this route was stupid before, I’m beginning to think it’s the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. At this rate, I would be lucky to get to Vancouver by the spring.
I stop walking.
It takes about five minutes for Lyssa to reach me.
“What’s the matter? Why did you stop?”
I sigh and turn to face her. “This is crazy! We ‘ve walked about two hundred and fifty yards in the last two hours. At this rate, it’s going to take a month to get there!”
Lyssa does not like being second-guessed. She snaps at me, “Well, what do you think we should do?”
I didn’t have a plan. I never really plan anything. I just sort of react to things. It’s at times like this that I really wish I did plan things.
All I know is what I see. An endless blackness heading down a seemingly endless slope.
Suddenly, I knew just what we should do. It came to me in a flash. I wonder if that’s how everything worked for my father. One second there is no answer in sight and then suddenly it was just right in front of his eyes.
“You said this tunnel leads all the way to bay right?”
Lyssa rolls her eyes. “I’ve told you that I thousand times genius.”
“Good, then let’s ride the sled.”
Lyssa stares at me for a moment, staring at me like she didn’t hear me and then says, “What?”
“We ride the sled. The whole tunnel has to run downhill the whole way or the water would pool. The tunnel is bone dry right now, because it’s winter. We get a good running start we should roll the whole way.”
“Genius, we were walking really slowly because we can’t see. How is going faster going to improve that?”
“Well, since we’re going faster, we can afford to use the lights. Even if those killers see the light and I’m still not convinced they will, we’ll be going too fast to catch. And there is no way for them to get the horses down here. So they’ll have no idea what direction we are heading, unless they have the utility map. And since they are traveling over land, there’s no reason they would. Trust me, it’s a good plan.”
She looks at me like I have ten heads. “It most definitely is not anything even remotely like a good plan!”
I get defensive. “Why because you didn’t think of it?”
“Not at all. I’m open to ideas, just not suicide.”
I raise my voice a little. “Will you, for this one time, try something new and stop talking and listen for a change! We need to get to the bay. And what’s more, we need to get there faster than the guys who may very well be hunting us right this very minute. Besides, we can steer the sled easily with the leader, your dad definitely looked like he had that in mind when he designed it, if you ask me. And as long as we are pointing both the lights ahead of us, we should see any dry wells or obstructions long before we get to them.”
Lyssa stamps her foot, “There is no way I’m riding that thing down a tunnel I have never even walked down! It is stupid, reckless, and crazy! Absolutely not!”
“You can drive.”
“Okay then.”
* * *
It takes us ten minutes to get the flashlights out and to rig the sled so Lyssa can steer it. She insists we practice braking and emergency steering techniques. It’s probably a good idea, but I just want to get going.
I feel like a sitting duck in this tunnel. I don’t know if there is anything down here, that might be hunting us, but I don’t want to stick around to find out.
After like a hundred drills, we finally get in position.
Lyssa sits at the front even though it’s actually easier for her to steer if she sits in the back, but she can’t see around me. Besides, with me in the back, I can kneel on the sled so that every once in a while, I can jump out and push us along or even just use my leg to give us a shove. You know, if we hit a flat spot.
So we get in position. “I’m just gonna give us a few running steps and then jump on the back,” I say.
“Okay, but only a few. Let’s take things really slow for a while.”
I sigh. “You’re the boss.”
I grab the sled by the rails and start to push it, running two steps, then jumping in. I barely make it. The sled shoots off with such force, it takes me off guard. Not careening to our deaths out of control fast, just faster than I thought we’d go.
“Man, I almost didn’t make it on! I didn’t think we’d go that quick.”
“I know I’m probably imagining it, but are we speeding up?”
It certainly felt that way to me, but I took that as a good thing. I knew Lyssa wouldn’t. “Not to me.”
We’re only going about eight to nine miles an hour, but in the small tunnel with the lights in front, it feels like we are going much faster. Besides, I’ve never moved faster than human speed before, so nine miles an hour feels like a hundred!
“Hey, does it look like the tunnel ends up ahead?”
I look and it does. “Shoot, yeah, I’ll hit the brakes.”
I reach down for the brakes, but never make it.
The tunnel’s angle radically shifts from a gentle six-degree slope, to a breakneck seventeen-degree slope in a fraction of a second. We instantly speed up from a not so comfortable nine miles an hour to thirty-five in a heartbeat.
I’m bouncing all around; this sled is not designed to move this fast and unlike Lyssa, I’m not sitting down. I was barely on one knee and the other slid over the rail when I jumped in. I am barely able to hold on.
Lyssa is screaming out, “BRAKE! BRAKE!”
I’m screaming, “HELP, I’M FALLING OFF!”
Then up ahead in the beam of the lights, I see what looks like a dry well.
We’re dead.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I’ve never seen Lyssa move faster, as she grips the reins tightly and screams out, “HOLD ON!”
She steers us to the right of the tunnel. We ride up the side, bu
t there is no way we can stay up there and we start sliding back down towards the middle. Lyssa steers us right past the middle and up the left side of the tunnel. For a minute, I think it might work, but she instantly steers us back to the middle. “HOLD ON!” she screams.
We race towards the dry well, which is a hole in the floor, about five meters wide and ten meters long. It just looks like a pit; I can only imagine what horrors are waiting for us at the bottom.
But Lyssa steers us right, passing the front lip of the pit, and up the right wall of the tunnel, just missing the bottomless blackness.
I’m screaming my head off now, but she keeps climbing the wall. But we have only halfway passed the pit when we start to go back down again. By some stretch of good luck, and the fearless skill of Lyssa, we zip back towards the middle, just clearing the pit.
But sadly, there is another pit right in front of us.
Lyssa and I both scream, but she manages to steer us up the left wall and we narrowly miss that pit as well. When we come back to the middle, I can see that for the next 200 meters, there is one dry well after another.
Lyssa steers us like she has been doing this for years. We zip in and out of the dark abysses with such skill I eventually manage to stop screaming. We hit the bottom of the hill with a top speed somewhere around fifty miles an hour. Lyssa is still crisscrossing the tunnel, even though there aren’t any dry wells in sight. And thankfully, we begin to slow down. Enough so that I feel able to let go of the death grip I have on the rail and grab the brake.
We slowly come to a complete stop and neither of us move a muscle.
At first I’d had all these wonderful visions of how that ride would go. That I would be sitting behind Lyssa, with the fragrance of her hair wafting in my nose, as we slowly rolled along till we hit the bay. We’d laugh and tell stories. We’d both agree that riding the sled was the best idea anyone ever had.
But that was all before we’d set off.
Now, I’m scared for my life. Not because I think the tunnel will hurt me anymore since we’re sitting still, but I am terrified of what Lyssa is going to do to me.