by Susan Gates
The van ground its way around them, rocked across a dry stream bed. Then Dad stopped. ‘Here we are.’
They climbed out. The scrubland was silent, a desolate, lonely place, with no people or houses in sight.
In the side of a hill was a rusty iron grill, the size of a garage door. There was a tunnel behind it, big enough for the van to drive through. A sun-bleached sign on the grill said, ‘DANGER! KEEP OUT!’
Jay peered through the grill. Near the entrance, ferns and mosses crowded the tunnel walls. Beyond that was blackness. But from somewhere he could hear water trickling.
‘Hey!’ He leapt back as something came streaking out and only just missed his head.
‘A bat,’ said Dad. ‘This is an abandoned lead mine. It’s full of them. When I was a boy me and my mates used to come here.’ Dad chuckled to himself, which made Jay grin with relief. It was like Dad was fighting back at last. Jay was more worried about Dad right then than he was about himself.
‘Yeah,’ said Dad. ‘There was a Danger sign there back then. We took no notice of it of course. We went in loads of times, explored every metre of that mine.’
Dad went up and pulled at the grill. It wouldn’t move: it was stuck fast in the tunnel entrance. He frowned. ‘This wasn’t there back then,’ he said. ‘Here, Jay, help me.’
They both yanked at the grill. It wouldn’t budge.
‘We can’t stay here,’ said Jay, gazing round the darkening scrubland. It was suddenly very spooky out there.
Dad threw open the back of the van, rummaged inside. He tossed Jay a coiled towing rope.
‘Here, tie that to the grill,’ he said. ‘Make sure it’s tight.’
Dad looped the other end round the tow bar on the van. He leapt in and accelerated away. The van wheels skidded on rock as the rope tightened. The grill creaked and shifted.
‘Keep going, Dad!’ yelled Jay. ‘It’s moving!’
The van wheels screeched and spun wildly, churning up the dirt. The engine revved to a shrieking roar.
Jay thought, Hope that rope holds. Hope the engine doesn’t blow.
Suddenly, the grill came crashing down. The sound echoed across the silent scrubland.
‘Get in the van,’ said Dad. He untied the tow rope. ‘Can’t see us getting that grill back in place. We’ll disguise the entrance somehow. Stick the Danger sign up in front. Even if they do think you’re dead, we don’t want any Cultivar creeps finding out you’re not.’
‘How long will we have to hide out?’ asked Jay.
‘Until they’ve forgotten all about you,’ said Dad. ‘Or until our food runs out.’
He switched on the lights and drove the van slowly into the mine.
The van lights swept over crystals buried in the tunnel walls and made them glitter like silver.
‘They used to have horses down here,’ said Dad, ‘to pull the wagons. We found horse shoes, me and my mates, loads of them, and old picks and sledge hammers.’ He switched off the engine. ‘We can’t take the van any further.’
Jay got out of the van. The tunnel had opened out into a low chamber. Its walls were lost in darkness. But the headlamp beams lit up great timber posts supporting the roof. They stretched into the distance like the pillars down a cathedral aisle.
‘Wow,’ said Jay.
‘This is nothing,’ said Dad. ‘You’ll be amazed what’s down here.’
Jay’s foot clunked against something. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘look what I found.’ It was a rusty old horse shoe.
‘That’s for luck,’ said Jay, holding it up in the light.
Chapter 7
Jay was lying in the back of the van, spooning cold baked beans out of a can. A lantern with a hand-driven dynamo cast a feeble yellow glow. Jay could have wound it up some more to get a brighter light. But he couldn’t be bothered.
He yawned, and asked Dad, ‘How long have we been down here?’
Dad shrugged. At first he’d counted the days but now he wasn’t sure. ‘Eight weeks?’ he guessed. ‘Couple of months?’
‘It’s longer than that!’ protested Jay. To him, it felt like forever.
They were living like moles. They weren’t entirely without light: they had torches and plenty of batteries, candles and the wind-up lanterns. And during the day some light, along with fresh air, filtered in from outside through the ventilation shafts.
Even so, it was miserably dark, and the air in the mine wasn’t good. It smelt of wet rot down here, as if everything was decaying away. Jay was beginning to feel like some subterranean creature.
They were entirely cut off. Viridian had Jay’s phone. Dad had never owned a mobile. But mobiles probably wouldn’t have worked down here anyway.
Jay jerked his chin up towards the surface. ‘Dad, what do you think is happening up there?’
‘Who knows? Do you want to share some tinned peaches for afters?’
At first, they’d talked a lot about the surface. About whether there were any humans left up there in Franklin or whether the Verdans had totally taken over. About why Jay was Immune and why the Cultivars wanted all Immunes dead. About when it would be safe to leave the mine.
Dad’s opinion was: ‘It’ll never be safe. But we’ll have to take the chance soon. Our food supplies won’t last forever.’
‘So what do we do then?’ Jay had asked.
‘Go out and get more food. That old shipping container is probably still in one piece. There’s lots of food left in there.’
Jay didn’t think it was a good idea for Dad to go back, see his precious Silver Bullet a heap of mangled metal. He had suggested, ‘We could ask Viridian for help. He helped us before.’ But Dad had got angry, yelling, ‘Why do you trust that green freak so much?’
So, gradually, they’d stopped talking so much about the surface world. As days slipped away the surface began to seem more and more unreal to Jay. As if they’d imagined everything that had happened up there, or it was some dreadful, surreal nightmare they’d shared. They found it better to drift, switch off their minds, take one day at a time. That way, you didn’t go insane.
Once Dad had even said, ‘When we go up, maybe everything will be back to normal. No more green freaks.’
Jay had agreed, ‘Yeah, bet you’re right.’
But, even if that somehow miraculously happened, the Silver Bullet would still be in bits. There’d be no family home and no business. That particular dream had gone up in smoke.
Dad just didn’t want to face the truth. And down here, it was easy not to.
They’d got a sort of routine to their underground life. They ate, slept a lot, collected water. And they explored the mine. Dad took Jay on journeys of discovery to all the bits of the mine he’d explored as a boy. They’d seen a whole skeleton of some poor pit pony that had died down the mine. They’d seen a cave floor of shiny jet. It had sparkled like black diamonds in their lantern lights.
‘We used to slide on this,’ Dad had said, ‘It’s slippery as ice.’ And he and Jay took off, sliding about in the flickering shadows on their own private underground skating rink, their laughter echoing down the mine’s empty shafts and passages.
Jay didn’t want to be down the mine. He didn’t like the cold, the dark and the damp. Or the rats, whose glowing red eyes you saw as they scuttled past in the dark. But there was a part of him that didn’t want this time with Dad to end.
‘Where we going today, Dad?’ asked Jay when they’d finished the tinned peaches.
‘This is the best yet,’ said Dad. ‘This place I’m taking you to is a massive cave. Hope I can still remember the way.’
They set off from the van, carrying lanterns.
‘You got some food supplies in that backpack?’ Dad asked Jay.
Jay nodded. ‘Cans of beans.’
Dad frowned. ‘We’re going have to go out for more food soon. Maybe back to the shipping container, like I said.’
‘I brought two torches,’ said Jay, mainly to stop Dad’s mind drifting from the shipp
ing container to the Silver Bullet. ‘What did you use for light, when you explored down here with your mates?’
When they went far from the mine’s entrance on these expeditions, they always carried plenty of light. They didn’t want to be lost, in the dark, in the mine’s maze of tunnels.
‘Candles,’ said Dad. ‘Once, the air was so bad they went out. We had to feel our way back along the walls to the main tunnel. I was totally freaked out! I kept hearing noises and thinking ghosts were coming to get me.’
They turned down a side tunnel. This looked like an even older part of the mine. Some wooden posts were crumbling, eaten away by creeping white fungus. Fungus, unlike Verdans, didn’t need light to survive.
The sound of trickling water was growing louder. Dad tilted his head upwards, as if he could see to the surface.
‘There’s a lot of water coming down. It must be raining hard up there.’
The next passage was the narrowest they’d been down so far, just a slit in the rock. They had to go down it single file, Jay’s knuckles brushing the slimy walls.
‘This wasn’t dug out by miners,’ said Dad. ‘It’s part of an underground cave system.’
Jay wound up his lantern to give extra light. Its rays hardly penetrated the dark.
Dad said, ‘It’s not far now.’ Then he stopped and said, ‘Listen.’
Jay listened. He’d become used to the constant drip and trickle of water in the mine. But this was different. It was as if the rocks around them were coming alive, playing their own weird music. There were high piping notes like flutes; low booming ones, as water was forced, under pressure, through cracks and fissures.
‘Must be a terrific rain storm up above,’ Dad said.
Jay realised there was water, foaming around his feet. He said, ‘My trainers are wet.’
‘I think we should go back,’ Dad decided. ‘You get flash floods in cave systems sometimes.’
Jay felt something brush his trainer.
‘Dad, look!’ Scuttling past their feet was a heaving sea of rats, tumbling over their shoes. Their eyes, where the lantern caught them, flashed like rubies. They were running towards the cave, escaping something.
Jay said, ‘Which way do we go?’
‘Back to the van,’ said Dad. ‘We don’t want to get trapped down here.’
They turned around, hurrying as fast as they could, but soon they were wading through swirling water.
‘There’s definitely flooding somewhere,’ said Dad, his voice worried.
Now they were out of the narrow passage, back in the old mine workings.
‘Listen,’ said Dad again. They heard rocks shifting somewhere, grinding against each other. Then echoing through the mine came an ominous growling.
‘Wait here,’ said Dad. ‘I’ll just check what’s ahead.’
‘Dad!’ Jay protested.
But Dad was gone, his lantern light swallowed by the dark. Jay stood in the darkness, shivering, listening to the water moving in the rocks all around him.
He held up his lantern to see if Dad was coming back, and for a second he thought his eyes were playing tricks. There was a water surge coming from up ahead. Foamy waves were boiling along the tunnel towards him, glinting black in the lantern light.
‘Dad!’ yelled Jay.
For a second he stood, frozen: not wanting to turn and run; knowing the way forward was blocked. He saw the waves snap one of the roof supports like a matchstick.
He turned and, splashing and slipping in a blind panic, stumbled back towards the cave. Water chased behind him. He heard timber groaning and cracking, rocks crashing down as roof tunnels caved in. And all the time, Dad, Dad was sobbing through his mind.
Jay burst into a huge space. Water foamed past him but then slowed to a trickle. The main torrent hadn’t followed him here. It had drained down a shaft somewhere, to another level of the mine.
Panting and terrified, Jay held up his lantern. The cave was as vast as a cathedral. Its walls glittered with black jet. Giant limestone blocks lay tumbled all around, piled in soaring slopes against the walls.
He heard movement, a sort of shuffling sound. Then a voice, barely more than a whisper, begged, ‘Let me see the light.’
Jay swung wildly round. ‘Gran!’ he cried. ‘What are you doing down here?’
Chapter 8
If Jay thought Gran would be pleased to see him, he was wrong.
She squinted at him in the gloom. Then both green hands flew to her mouth in horror. She backed off, stumbling out of the light.
‘There’s an Immune down here!’ she shrieked.
Jay shone the light on her panic-stricken face. ‘Gran, don’t be scared,’ he said, shocked by the fear in her eyes. ‘It’s only me, Jay. I won’t hurt you.’
‘Keep away from me!’ shrieked Gran. ‘It’s because of you I’m being punished!’
Jay stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was arrested as an Immune Sympathiser.’
‘But I haven’t seen you in ages! And I’m your grandson!’ said Jay, bewildered. ‘That’s not a crime, is it?’
‘We must keep away from Immunes,’ droned Gran, as if she was reciting something she’d learned. ‘We mustn’t help or support them in any way. No contact is acceptable. The punishment is Etiolation.’
She crept nearer the light, with a look of desperate longing on her face.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Jay. ‘Etiolation, what’s that?’
He’d heard the word before, or something like it. But he couldn’t recall where.
‘We get put in the dark,’ Gran moaned. ‘We don’t like the dark.’
Jay closed his eyes, breathed deeply, tried to quiet his jabbering brain. ‘How did you get into this cave?’ he asked.
‘The Cultivars put me in here,’ said Gran. ‘I must be punished.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Jay. ‘How did they put you in?’
‘Up there,’ said Gran. She raised her eyes to look into the dark. Jay held up the lantern.
‘Don’t take the light away!’ begged Gran.
Jay put the lantern down on the rock. ‘It’s all right, Gran,’ he soothed her. ‘It’s all right, you can keep the light.’
He shrugged off his backpack, got out a torch and shone it up into the cave roof. A great pile of stone blocks were piled up to the roof, like a magnificent ruined staircase. And right at the top, there was a trapdoor. Hope sparked in his swirling brain.
‘Is that the way they put you in, through that door?’ Jay asked Gran, excitedly. ‘We can just climb out that way, go and find Dad! We can’t go back the way I came, the tunnels are flooded, the roof’s caved in. I lost Dad. I have to find my way back to the mine entrance – ’
‘We’re being punished,’ Gran interrupted. ‘We’re Immune Sympathisers. We must stay here.’
She seemed less distressed now she was crouching by the lantern. She began to lick water from the cave wall with her green, furry tongue.
‘We?’ said Jay. ‘Are there other people in here with you?’ He swung his torch around the cave, round the tumbled blocks and stalagmites, like giant melted wax candles.
There were Verdans everywhere, lots of them, staggering zombie-like from all corners of the cave, towards the light.
‘What’s happened to them?’ gasped Jay.
And then he remembered the sick plant in Gran’s garden, the one she found under the plastic bucket, deprived of light.
These Verdans had the same symptoms. Their chlorophyll skin, even their eyes, had turned deathly yellow. Their limbs were long and spidery thin. Some were so weak, they could barely walk. Their bones seemed to have turned to jelly, their legs wobbled and they couldn’t hold their necks up. Their heads flopped onto their chests like drooping flowers.
Those who couldn’t walk slithered towards the light. They dragged themselves over rocks like giant yellow worms. Those who’d been in the dark the longest had fuzzy white fungus attacking their bodies and fa
ces, the same fungus that was rotting away the mine’s wooden roof supports.
Jay backed away, horrified. But they were harmless, too weak to hurt him, even if they’d wanted to.
Then he recognised two of them. They were Viridian’s parents. The last time he’d seen them, they’d been drinking rain water at the Diner.
‘What are they doing here?’ Jay asked Gran. ‘Why are they being punished?’
But Gran didn’t answer that. Instead she looked up towards the trap door. ‘Guards!’ she shrieked. ‘There’s an Immune down here!’
Jay stared upwards, new alarm on his face. ‘Are there guards out there? Are they Cultivars?’
‘Guards!’ Gran was still shouting. ‘Come and arrest him!’ But her cries were too feeble for anyone to hear outside this cave prison.
‘Shhh, stop it!’ said Jay. He couldn’t believe Gran would betray him. ‘I’ll get you out of here,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Gran cowering. ‘Don’t touch me. You’re a filthy Polluter. You’re an Immune. All Immunes are enemies.’
‘Gran!’ said Jay frantically. ‘If you stay here, you’ll end up like this lot. It’s horrible. Just look at them!’
‘I must be punished,’ said Gran, almost smugly. ‘My sentence is ten days’ Etiolation.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Gran!’ cried Jay. ‘Why are you talking like that? Like you deserve it? You haven’t done anything wrong.’ He grabbed her wrist and dragged her, weakly protesting, behind him. None of the Verdans tried to stop him. They were all too busy jostling to get some light on their sick, etiolated bodies.
To try and make her move faster Jay said, ‘We’re going up to the light, Gran. You’ll have all the sunshine you want,’ even though he guessed it was still raining on the surface.
What if there were Cultivars up there too, to stop the prisoners escaping? Jay couldn’t think yet how to deal with them. One thing at a time. He played his torch over the tumbled limestone blocks piled crazily, one on top of another. They had to climb those to reach the trapdoor.
It looked perilous. But if the prisoners had come down that way, there had to be a way up.
Jay’s foot hit something soft. He shone his torch downwards.