Burrows

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  John shivered. “This place is the Devil’s House.” He followed, worming over the vicious ambush that had been laid for them. Despite the packing inside the step, he held himself above the dismantled trap.

  They struggled like moles through the darkness. Surprisingly, the odor of decay had dissipated until it was barely noticeable. Cody was again convinced George had designed an ingenious ventilation system, which kept the air from getting dangerously stale.

  A door at the top of the stairs was halfway open. It was the only indication they had reached a real room, instead of packed warehouse floors. At first glance it looked like the exit to a broad hallway only three feet high.

  Then Cody realized the illusion was created by empty wooden cable spools creating near perfect crawlways. He stopped in amazement. As far as he could see, the gigantic spools extended far into the distance. Like stubby buttresses only six feet apart, the open area was in direct contrast to what they’d just been through.

  He moved out of the way so John could join him.

  “Sweet Jesus. This thing goes on forever!”

  “It sure looks like it goes for the entire length of this madhouse. How long is this building, five hundred feet?”

  “More like six or seven, and maybe a quarter as wide. These big spools are all around us.”

  “What’s up there?”

  John rolled onto his back and directed his light into the open intersections and found the bottom of another spool stacked on top. For all they knew, they may have reached as high as the ceiling. John wiggled around to shine his light through the open forest of wooden mini-columns.

  Speechless, they had no choice but to continue. Unlike the previous burrows covered with paper, clothing and cardboard, the rough wood caught their pants with dozens of splinters, tearing holes and puncturing flesh.

  They scooted among the buttresses, trying to maintain as straight a line as possible. After what seemed like hours, they once again came to a familiar burrow that quickly led to a large room where they could finally stand upright. They rested for a moment to stretch out the kinks and knots of fear.

  Their flashlights picked out ragged furniture in the large, chaotic room. Unafraid, rats scurried through shredded newspaper in yellowing drifts.

  Once again the smell of decay hung heavy in the air. John breathed through his mouth. “Something died.”

  “Yeah, but it was a while ago, I’d think.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because that dog carcass chained to the sofa there isn’t fresh.”

  John’s light found the couch. The sight of the long dead animal had a profound effect on the men. Neither wanted to think about what it would have been like to die from starvation while alone in total darkness. The bowl George once used to feed the pitiful animal had been gnawed to plastic shreds by the starving dog. Cody lit a skull full of broken teeth. Large patches of dried skin and hair peeled from the bone.

  When they moved the beams around the area, a nightmare version of normality leaped into focus. Toy trains, a tricycle, lamps, Christmas trees, an upright piano, musical instruments, mountains of rotting drapery material, pots and pans, thousands of foam egg cartons, milk crates, tin cans, paintings, a standup radio, an engine from a 1948 De Soto, doors, board games, a complete medical library, National Geographic magazines dating back to 1918, a wagon wheel, letters, shovels, baby carriages, plaster statues, dressmakers dummies, a primitive X-Ray machine, and much more filled the space around a large, musty chair.

  Though seemingly random, the items were carefully selected and in many instances, displayed in a bizarre sense of order. “This is his living room!” Cody said in wonder, eyeing stacks of photo albums and old pictures.

  “He might come back, then.” John checked over his shoulder in case George suddenly appeared.

  “I don’t think he’s been here for a long while.”

  They examined the room, crushing scurrying roaches underfoot. Mice skittered through stacks of old cigar boxes wrapped with hard rubber bands.

  “Which way now?”

  “Through there?” Cody pointed at a tall, dark arrowhead-shaped opening. Two enormous stacks of bundled newspapers arched high overhead, creating a peaked entrance.

  “That slick look again?”

  Cody shrugged. “I don’t have anything better to go on.” He bent and entered the short passageway. It didn’t take long for the men to traverse the short length of the narrow canyon leading to a filthy mattress between stacks of decaying books.

  “Must have been a reader.” John directed his light over the eccentric hoarder’s collection. The stained mattress was almost buried under a tangled mass of soiled clothing and food containers. The oily pillow was a dark smudge. He picked up a copy of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. “I’ve already read this one.”

  Surprised at the announcement, Cody wondered why he’d never pictured John reading books. He’d have to think about that idea later, when he had the time to wonder about the big deputy’s hobbies.

  The room smelled faintly of perfume and old cigar smoke.

  “You’re talking about him in the past tense.” Cody’s beam skipped over the rotting walls, finding a full kerosene lantern leaning haphazardly against the mattress. A table lamp without a shade sat on a wooden crate piled with soiled women’s underwear. Empty bottles caught and reflected the light in patterns of color and shapes.

  “Well, I’ll be.” Cody pointed to a magazine. “World War Two is over. Hitler is dead.”

  “So is Oswald,” John held up a more recent Dallas Times Herald newspaper. The front page was filled with a photo of Jack Ruby gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald.

  With no other way out of what they thought of as the bedroom, they returned through the same burrow and back into the living area.

  “That way.” John pointed toward a dark entrance and Cody ducked into what reminded him of a mine shaft.

  The pathway wasn’t as tall. On their knees, the reluctant explorers continued until it branched in two directions. One was obviously dusty and long unused. He decided on the more heavily used right-hand tunnel that angled sharply higher.

  “Wait here.”

  There was enough room at the fork for John to get reasonably comfortable. He squatted to rest his forehead on his hands while Cody probed ahead. Only inches away, the peeling plaster and lath ceiling stretched into the distance. The hair prickled on the back of John’s neck when he once again remembered that five stories of solidly packed garbage surrounded them.

  The suffocating burrow made a gradual turn ending in a dead end. Cursing, Cody backed out, grunting and wiggling. Scooting forward was much easier than backward.

  He rejoined John in the wider turnaround. It was large enough to sit upright and rest. The space was supported by stacked volumes of hardback books, many of them medical encyclopedias dating back to the turn of the century. The rotting spines separated and hung like dried strips of dead flesh.

  Soaked in sweat, they panted in the dim glow of their flashlights. “Let’s turn these off while we rest for a minute,” Cody suggested. “These batteries won’t last forever.”

  Giving the idea a moment’s consideration, John saw the wisdom of the suggestion, despite the need to see. They clicked the switches and absolute darkness immediately descended, again reminding Cody of Carlsbad Caverns.

  In the bowels of the spooky old Cotton Exchange, he shivered as the impenetrable darkness wrapped around them. The ticking of John’s wristwatch sounded like full size grandfather clock, the luminous dial a bright beacon in the blackness.

  “This guy is full of tricks.” Sweat dripped off Cody’s nose. Their undershirts were soaked and black from crawling over unimaginable filth.

  “I hope we’ve seen them all.”

  “Not hardly. If this was Nam there could be a hundred other things waiting for us, anything from snakes to deadfalls.”

  “Anything but snakes.” John heard his own heart beating. Silent and stil
l for the first time since they entered the maze of tunnels, they heard a variety of soft sounds generated by the tons of waste around them. Small creaks and groans evidenced a subtle shifting of the building’s contents. Small mammals scurried through the rubble in which they’d lived for generations.

  “Let’s turn on the walkie talkie and check with the World,” Cody said, falling back into the slang they used when referring to anything outside of Vietnam. He flipped the switch and keyed the talk button. “Can y’all hear me?”

  He immediately received a dim and crackling response from Sheriff Griffin. “You boys all right?”

  “For now. We’re taking a breather.”

  “Any idea where you are?”

  “None at all. We’ve twisted and turned so many times that I doubt we’ll ever know where we went.”

  The radios went silent as they pondered the situation.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Our plan is find a way out of this nuthouse.”

  Griffin was hamstrung on the outside. Cody didn’t know it, but the sheriff had his hands full. Hundreds of spectators crowded into the once quiet neighborhood, pushing against the barricades. Questions continued to be raised about his handling of the event. The mayor was demanding action and no one knew what to do.

  Every broadcast referenced the fallen deputy now covered by a sheet and blocked from view by makeshift curtains hung from thin wire stretched between the supporting arches. Men covered by rifles still worked to free the deputy’s body.

  Sheriff Griffin scanned the brightly lit area, wondering how the night would finally end. He focused his attention on the boys inside. “See if you can make enough noise so we can hear you if y’all find an outside wall. We may be able to break through and get you out.”

  “That was our idea, too. I’ll be damned if I know where we are. We’re moving now. I’ll contact you later.” He flicked on the flashlight, covering the lens with his hand at first to lessen the shock to their eyes. “Ain’t this a mess?”

  John agreed. “Sho’ nuff. At least you knew what you were doing in Vietnam. I guess your time there is keeping us alive, ’cause I doubt I’d still be breathin’ if I was alone. Was it like this?”

  Cody scanned the stacks of garbage around them.

  “It worked the same way there, but in reverse. The entrance tunnels were simple, but the farther down and away from the trap doors, there were drops, twists and turns, and parts like the u-drain under a sink. For all we knew, we’d go through one of those drains and come up through water to find the whole North Vietnamese Army.

  “I heard they had such a wide tunnel system that a USO show was going on topside, and directly underneath, the Viet Cong were having a meeting.”

  He shivered.

  “Think about it. If this crazy feller tapped into the drain system under the street, it could go forever. A friend of mine found tunnels under a shack that had one main room nearly twenty feet square, one of the few places we had the room to stand upright and walk around. It was an ammo bunker full of weapons, ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, clothing, and documents. Half a dozen other tunnels branched out of that main room, which was the center hub of a giant wheel, and popped up in huts, under logs, and even in a chicken coop. One had a trap door so small it was hidden under the feed trough in a hog pen.”

  “I don’t know how you made it.” John wondered at their near normal conversation in such bizarre surroundings.

  Cody thought for a long moment. “I’m not sure we did.” He stared at an empty detergent box and momentarily drifted away before shaking off whatever had gripped him. “You rested enough?”

  “As much as I can be.”

  “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

  “That’d tickle me to death, but this time I want to lead.”

  Cody shrugged. “You have to learn some time.”

  On his hands and knees, Big John crawled into the burrow that tightened until they found themselves on their stomachs. Constructed this time through wooden pallets, the sagging roof of rotting, split plywood bulged downward, at one point scraping their backs. It snagged John’s undershirt with a quiet rip. They continued crawling slowly through splintered wood.

  The pallets gave way to bound stacks of National Geographic magazines which formed the walls. A haphazard spray of angle iron bed rails planted deeply into the substructure below served as an unplanned support system that kept the great weight from falling in on them. Grunting and panting, Cody pulled himself along with his elbows, following John’s huge shoes. The burrow widened ahead, and he was anxious to get out of the narrow tube and into the inviting open area.

  They suddenly found themselves in a soft, almost comfortable burrow made of rotting bales of cotton. “Cotton.” John shook his head in wonder. “Of all things.”

  The burrow through the five-hundred-pound bales was almost glorious. The softness was a blessing under their much abused knees and elbows, as long as they avoided the thick wires holding each compressed bale together. It reminded Cody of playing in Ned’s hay barn when he was a kid.

  “It only makes sense,” he muttered to himself. “Lord knows how much of this stuff was left. This whole level could be cotton all the way to the ceiling and George just dug through it like a mole.”

  Hundreds of small rat and mouse tunnels branched off through the soft burrow. Rodent droppings collected on his bare forearms as he crawled, and Cody again wondered what diseases they would leave with, if they survived.

  Despite the relief to his knees and elbows, John was nearly frantic from the narrower confines. He almost tumbled into still another open area and immediately realized there was enough room to sit upright inside what he quickly realized was a huge chamber excavated in the cotton.

  This animal has lived with these rats long enough that he’s even making nests like them.

  Even there, as usual, stacks and stacks of newspapers and collected litter lay half buried in the loose fluff.

  With enough room to turn for once, John reversed his direction and extended his hand to Cody, who was struggling to pull himself through. John’s eyes widened in the dim glow. The mountainous stack of bales atop Cody’s emerging body moved, making the big man’s head spin for a moment. Sensing disaster, half a dozen squeaking rats frantically squirted out of the rapidly compressing burrow. They scampered across the open pocket to escape into holes on the far side.

  A cold finger slipped up John’s spine. He grabbed for the younger constable’s waving hand and gave a tremendous pull. With a quiet, solid whisper, the mass dropped in a frightening, muffled sigh as tons of cotton caved in, burying Cody from his chest down.

  “Oh god!”

  Choking dust roiled into the area. John’s dropped flashlight lit the scene, casting musty shadows from below.

  “Hang on!” He hauled at Cody’s arms, trying to free him from the collapsed bales. The immense weight slowly crushed the air, and life, out of the young constable. Frantically, John clawed at the cotton, grabbing great handfuls of the stuff, but it was like trying to claw hard sand. His fingers found one of the heavy gauge baling wires and he gave a mighty tug, but nothing moved.

  “Hang on, Cody! Oh lord, can you hear me!”

  “Can’t breathe,” Cody gasped, voicing the exact phrase Top used only months before in the bottoms.

  Had he been alone, the situation would have ended only one way. Still, without help, John wasn’t sure he’d be able to pull Cody free before he suffocated. There was the further danger of even more of the heavy cotton coming down, and the very real concern that the entire cavity would soon be a deathtrap.

  “Can you move your legs!?” John desperately dug great handfuls of cotton, throwing it behind him. But the large heavy bales slowly compressed Cody’s lungs. “How far back was the cave in?”

  “I can’t bend my legs,” Cody fought to breathe. “I can’t…get…any…air.”

  More cotton piled up around John’s feet as he desperately tried t
o dig Cody free. The yellow light gave the whole scene an otherworldly effect. Drifts of loose fluff came up to John’s knees, while in direct contrast, the heavy, packed bales continued to press downward.

  Despite his efforts, Cody’s torso refused to budge. John retrieved the flashlight and quickly cast the beam around the open space behind him. The walls of the dirty white canyon ended nearly two feet below the twelve-foot ceiling. The frame from an antique iron bedstead angled apart from the others.

  His fear and sense of urgency intensified when the wooden ceiling shifted with a crunching sound from the rotting joists suddenly relieved of their cotton supports.

  John threw himself against the freed bed rail and worked it loose, praying silently that nothing more would fall. When he was sure it was safe, he turned and inserted the end of the angle iron in the narrow space between Cody’s left side and the collapsing bales. Jabbing it firmly inside, and making sure the end wasn’t resting on any part of his trapped friend, John put his huge shoulder under the sharp rail.

  Like a power lifter, he used his legs to push, applying pressure to the fulcrum. For a horrifying moment he thought his feet weren’t going to quit sinking in the cotton below, but he finally felt the soft material solidify under his shoes. The hard edge bit sharply into his shoulder. Ignoring the pain, he squeezed his eyes shut and pushed harder.

  Nothing happened. At first he thought it was useless. It was like trying to lever the Great Pyramid from its foundation. The pain was incredible as the edge cut into his trapezius. Needing relief, John pulled at great wads the very substance that was killing Cody. He quickly shoved a thick cushion between his shoulder and the iron, then braced himself, and heaved again.

  This time the heavy bailing wire worked in his favor, giving the angle iron a firm foundation for leverage, and his massive strength moved just one of crushing bales. It was enough. Barely conscious, Cody drew a shuddering breath.