Some tunnel branches came up, which was good. If it was just one long tunnel, any soldiers who come after me would eventually find me. But there were quite a few of them, and now I have to admit that I’ve completely lost my bearings. This place is a lot bigger than I thought. I’ve come across a few shafts filled with water, and several tunnels that have caved in. There’s still some equipment lying around; old shovels and pickaxes, and occasionally an entire mine cart, rusting away on the rails underfoot. This place must date back to before World War II. I sure hope it’s stable.
So, my fears about being caught by soldiers have gradually been replaced by fears of being lost down here. I’ve been in the mine for hours now, and have no idea how far from the surface I am, or even which direction to take if I want to get back to the original entrance. Which I don’t. I’m not ready to leave just yet, even if I do find an exit. The surface will be crawling with troops, and I have enough water in the canteen to last me a while. But… I would like to leave eventually.
I don’t know what time it is, but it must be late, and I feel exhausted. I’m going to turn the flashlight off and try to get some sleep. I tried calling Aaron, but he was asleep. I wish he wasn’t. I’m cold and hungry and tired, but above all else I’m lonely. In only a couple of days I got used to having Rahvi around. It was nice to not be alone anymore. Nice enough in Bundarra, and out in the bush – let alone down here.
Then there’s the fact that he’s my goddamn friend, and right now he’s probably being flown to Armidale – if he isn’t already there – where there’ll be a room waiting for him, just like there was for Rickenbacker and Khoury, just like the one I saw in that fucking dream. A concrete room with a little metal chair and a pair of handcuffs and bloodstains on the floor...
Christ. I can’t let myself think about it.
September 9
I awoke some time in the morning. Time was irrelevant in the mines, of course; it was always dark, always cold, and always night-time. My sleep was constantly interrupted by sudden awakenings, heart stammering and hands fumbling for the flashlight, unsure where I was, the tunnel closing in on me, spending another uneasy half hour trying to get back to sleep. The only reason I even fell asleep in the first place was because I was almost unconscious with exhaustion.
I could tell it was eventually morning because I woke with the mental tickling sensation that meant Aaron was trying to contact me.
How’s things going? he asked.
Rahvi was captured, I said dully.
Shit. What happened?
I recounted it all again: the field, the pine forest, the helicopter and the sniper. My desperate flight through the woods at twilight, and my discovery of the mine entrance. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’m getting a really fucking bad feeling that this place is huge, I said. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to find my way out of it.
You’ll be all right, Aaron said, a kneejerk reassurance based on absolutely nothing. I don’t know… just keep going. Take passages that slope up.
Oh, wow? Really? Thanks, man. Shit. Great advice.
Look, you’d rather be down there than up on the surface with Draeger’s soldiers.
That was true. For now.
Just hang in there, Aaron said. Keep moving. Call me whenever you need to.
Will do.
I cut the connection, and staggered to my feet. My body was aching, especially the gunshot wound to my shoulder, which was still sulkily oozing blood through the bandages. Despite the urge to run I forced myself to walk, stopping from time to time to sip water from the canteen, ignoring the sensation of a thousand tonnes of rock and earth pressing in around me.
That started out well. But as time went on, I began to realise just how expansive the mines were. I went up and down slopes, picking passages at random, scrambling through dust and dirt and stacks of what seemed like coal. And no matter where I went, more passages opened up, more endless tunnels with a rusty railway track below and a crumbling ceiling of dirt above. Sometimes I heard the distant scraping and scurrying of rats. I kept the flashlight pointed down, watching my footsteps carefully.
Despite my best efforts to clamp it down, panic began to rise in my gut. I’m not claustrophobic and I’m not scared of the dark, but I challenge any man to wander lost around an abandoned mine for twelve hours and feel fine. It’s an indescribable feeling. Unlike anything else I’d ever faced. Any notion of remaining in the mines until the soldiers had ended the search topside was utterly abandoned. Up there, I might be hunted like an animal, but at least I could feel the wind and the sun. At least I could see the sky. If I had to die, I didn’t want it to be down here.
I started calling Aaron every twenty or thirty minutes. He’d encourage me, motivate me, shout at me – whatever my mood required at the time. He’d give me advice and goodwill from Jonas, Simon, Andy and Tobias, all with their own ideas about how to escape the mine. Tobias was the only one worth listening to. His best suggestion for me was to see if I could find any drafts of air, and follow them to find a route to the surface. I licked a finger and held it up at every junction I came to. No dice. Just dead, stale air. But the panic kept me going, kept forcing me down the tunnels in the hope that the next one, or maybe the next one, would lead me back up into sweet sunlight.
And then, in the afternoon, my flashlight began to fade.
I didn’t really notice it at first. Like a frog dropped into boiling water, it happened so gradually that I grew accustomed to it. When I did start to notice it, I shrugged it off as paranoia. I tried to ignore the fact that the white light was gradually dimming to yellow, and then to orange, the circle of illumination gliding across the tunnel ahead of me becoming more weak and blurry with every passing minute.
When I had to face the truth, I panicked. I started running down the tunnel, stumbling over loose lumps of coal and rail tracks, footsteps echoing in my wake, my heart creeping up my throat, tears beading in my eyes. The flashlight began to flicker, and waver.
And then it gave out.
I didn’t scream, or groan, or wail. I dropped the flashlight, threw myself against the wall, scraping at the dirt, sliding down into a scrunched-up ball of whimpering, terrified agony, screaming inside my head but keeping my lips clamped shut – as though something in the dark might hear me. My eyes were squeezed tight too, despite the darkness, my arms wrapped across my face.
I lay there like that for a long time, rocking back and forth, the silence completely deafening. There was no breeze, no dripping of water, no distant fluttering of bat wings. Any of those would have been a godsend. They would have meant the surface was nearby. Instead, I had to handle an utter void of sound.
I teetered on the brink of sanity for what might have been thirty seconds or half an hour. Then I forced myself to uncurl, to probe across the floor, to find the flashlight again. Eventually my hands stumbled across it and I snatched it up like a valuable treasure, cradling it in my arms. I made a slow count of five hundred, then flicked the switch again.
The light came on, weakly, briefly. I savoured that brief moment of sight - dust motes eddying in my quick, short breaths, the cold black plastic of the flashlight, my own grimy hands clamped around it with dirty fingernails - and then it went out again.
I took a deep breath. Okay. The light was gone. I’d just have to deal with that.
I spent a moment trying to calm down, calling Aaron. I might have been alone in person, but I’m never truly alone any more. I never will be again, which is both a blessing and a curse. At that particular moment the scale was tipped considerably in the balance of “blessing.”
My flashlight ran out, I said miserably.
Shit, Aaron said. And it’s pitch black?
I’m in a fucking mine underground! Of course it’s fucking pitch black you stupid fucking fuckhead!
He let me yell at him. After a moment he said, Anything else? Are you carrying anything else you could use? Flares? Matches?
I stopped and tho
ught. I’d taken a lot of stuff from Harrison’s boat. I’d taken a book of matches, I was sure of that – but then we’d slipped into the river and swam to shore. Even if I could find them in the jumble of crap in my backpack, they’d be ruined.
Nothing, I said.
Maybe… wait for your eyes to adjust? he suggested.
That’s not going to work, I said wearily. There’s no light. Nothing at all.
Keep going, Aaron said. Just feel your way through in the dark. You can’t just sit there.
Fuck you, I said.
I cut the connection off and stumbled to my feet. Talking to Aaron hadn’t helped in the slightest. It had just reinforced how far away he was, how he couldn’t help me at all. How he was safe, sitting in the Endeavour, and I was out here risking my life and putting my ass on the line. It was an ugly, nasty feeling, one that had been brewing ever since I’d bailed out of the Globemaster, finding myself alone in a hostile land, and which I’d known would eventually bubble to the surface.
I just wish it hadn’t been while I was trapped in a hellish nightmare world.
Aaron kept trying to call me back. I ignored him, pressing on through the dark with determination, and after about half an hour he gave up. I kept treading on through the mine, in pitch black, guiding myself along with my hands against the left wall.
And, at the first junction I came to, I felt the slightest touch of a breeze.
It was a miniscule thing, just the barest flutter of the goosebumps on my skin. But I seized onto that breeze like a drowning man clutching at a rope. I flailed around, stumbling up the passage it had come from, trotting forward blindly. I tripped a few times, on stones or old mining carts, but picked myself up and kept going. The bleak feeling of dread and despair in my stomach had been replaced with sheer, unbridled excitement.
That was replaced with utter joy when I rounded a corner to see a distant light at the end of the tunnel. It was so bright, so powerful, that I couldn’t make anything out beyond it. Just sheer white light that hurt my eyes to look at. I stared at it anyway, running up the tunnel towards it, too scared to look away in case it turned out to just be a mirage or a hallucination. Everything about soldiers and choppers and Rahvi’s capture was blown out of my mind. I didn’t care if there was an entire company of soldiers sitting our there waiting for me. Escaping the mine had become my only goal.
As I was halfway there, the ground gave way beneath me.
I don’t know what it was. An old elevator shaft, I think. Obviously they didn’t build one right in the middle of the passage, but I rolled down something diagonal at first, breaking through some mouldy wooden planks and knocking the wind out of my gut. I scrabbled for a grip to no avail, and rolled right off the edge into the shaft. A long, straight, heart-attack-inducing drop straight down, screaming all the way.
I fell deep enough to land in one of the flooded parts of the mine. I guess I should be thankful for that. If the bottom of the shaft hadn’t been filled with water I would have been treated to a very violent and messy death. Instead, I just plunged into the dark, icy cold liquid, and had a few seconds of terror where I swirled around looking for the surface.
Eventually I burst above the water, gasping for air and shrugging off the dead weight of the empty Steyr, letting it sink into oblivion. I looked up to see the faint daylight at the top of the shaft looking depressingly distant. I screamed again, in frustration, this time, and slapped around at the surface of the water furiously.
Then, as my eyes adjusted to the light, with the purple blur of the sunlight still throbbing in my vision, I saw the ladder. It was running straight up the side of the shaft, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
I swam over to the shaft, tested the strength of the ladder (which rated as “dubious,” but what the fuck else was I going to do?) and hauled myself out of the water. I started climbing, drenched to the bone, my teeth chattering and fingers numb. Now I needed that sunlight more than ever.
I was maybe ten metres up the ladder when the first passage opened up on my right - and there was a light at the end of it.
I blinked in confusion, and glanced upwards again. The top of the shaft was still a good thirty or so metres above, with the afternoon light from the end of the corridor filtering all the way down to my sodden, sorry ass. This tunnel was well below the surface. And yet there was definitely illumination at the end of it, the source hidden away behind the bends and curves.
I looked up the ladder again. I wanted to get to the surface. Bad. But if I didn’t investigate this, I’d always wonder.
So I leaned out from the ladder, and made a small leap into the tunnel, grabbing the rusted edges of an old safety rail to steady myself. Then I drew the dead sergeant’s revolver and carefully stalked down towards the light.
The tunnel ended after about fifty paces. In the last few metres, it was inlaid with concrete. The light was coming from a harsh electric bulb on the left wall. The tunnel ahead of me was filled by a concrete wall, with a thick metal door set in it. No handle, no keyhole, no window. Just plain steel.
I stared at it in fascination. I holstered the revolver, and ran my hands up and down the door, testing the edges.
And then the door opened. I was crouching down at the time, sliding my fingers underneath it curiously, and looked up in sudden shock to see two figures standing there. They were dressed in dark coats and jackets, and wearing balaclavas. I reached for the revolver but they were already grabbing me, throwing me to the ground – and then one of them tasered me.
I didn’t realise that was what it was, at first. I had no idea it could be so fucking painful. It was some of the worst agony I’d ever experienced, and throughout this year I’ve experienced some pretty gnarly shit. At the point of contact, it felt like getting stabbed in the back with a burning hot knife. Through the rest of my body, it felt like I was being bludgeoned with baseball bats. I couldn’t even scream, and after a few moments I blacked out.
When I woke up, in the dark, my first urge was to vomit. I twisted my head and did just that, retching up nothing but stomach acid. After I’d spat out the last few strings of bile, I assessed the situation.
I was sitting on a cold concrete floor, with my back against a wall. One arm was above my head, handcuffed to something higher up; the edge of a shelf, I think. It looked like I was in some kind of utility room. There was a thin line of light seeping underneath the door, and as my eyes adjusted to the gloom I could make out mops, buckets, shelves lined with chemicals.
The revolver was gone. The bandolier, with the water canteen and grenades and radio, was gone. The PAL codebook was gone. The only good news was that they’d missed the journal, which was tucked into the lining of my jacket.
Aaron was pushing at the edges of my mind, persistently trying to get through to me. I closed my eyes and surrendered; he washed in with a flood of demands. What the hell just happened?
I got tasered, I murmured back, still feeling sick.
Christ. So that’s what it fucking feels like. Are you caught?
Yes, I said. But… maybe not by the Republic. I found some underground door with a light outside it, and I was checking it out, and suddenly two guys opened it and shoved a thousand fucking volts up my spine. How long was I unconscious?
Five minutes or so. You don’t think they were Draeger’s soldiers?
They were wearing civilian clothes. Of course, the sniper who’d shot Rahvi had been wearing civilian clothes as well. And… I don’t know. I don’t know why they’d be down in this mine.
Looking for you. They know you went in there.
That was a while back. And there was a light down here. An electric light. They were already down here…
Where are you now?
Locked up somewhere, I said bleakly. In a janitor’s closet or something. And they took the codebook.
Why the fuck can’t you hang on to that thing!
Oh, you want to come up here and try?
All right, he said. Sorry. But w
ho do you think they are? If they’re not the Republic? What’ll they do with it?
Guess we’re going to find out. Look, I can’t waste time. You’ve got your sitrep. I have to try to escape.
It felt like Aaron had misgivings, but all he said was, Okay. Good luck.
Thanks.
I melted back into the real world: wet, cold, miserable and smelling of vomit. I listened carefully. There were no noises outside my door, but occasionally the light below it would be partially blocked off, as though somebody standing outside was shifting their weight. A guard. I’d have to be quiet.
I stood up weakly, my back scraping against the concrete, and squinted at the handcuff around my right wrist. It was attached to a shelf, all right; a heavy duty, floor-to-ceiling thing made of steel and plastic, bolted to the ground.
I checked the objects along it. Mostly stuff like drain cleaner and insect poison, things you’d find in any utility room, but there was also a toolbox at the end of the shelf. If I could get a screwdriver, maybe I could undo the bolts holding the shelf together. Unfortunately, it was out of my reach.
I took my belt off with my spare hand, tested its weight thoughtfully, and then tossed it towards the toolbox. I missed, and the buckle chinked onto the concrete. I glanced towards the door, waited a moment, then tried again. Missed, and this time it bounced off the toolbox itself with a clunk that was impossible to miss. So much for quiet.
The door creaked open, and I held my free hand up to shield my eyes from the light. The silhouette of a man peered in, holding a gun. “He’s awake,” the guard called out, then said to me, “Drop that. Sit down.”
“I’d rather stand,” I said croakily, throat still sore from my own stomach acid.
The guard glanced back out into the corridor, then accepted an object from somebody out of view. It was a blindfold. He stepped into the room, switching the light on, and for the first time I got a good look at him. Heavyset, wearing jeans and a jumper, and with a balaclava covering his face. “Hold still,” he grunted, putting the gun down on a shelf on the other side of the room, and approaching with the blindfold.
End Times Box Set [Books 1-6] Page 112