Tunnels 02 - Deeper

by Roderick Gordon

  Witch. Witch. Witch. Witch. Witch

  In his eyes she was the very worst type of traitor, something twisted and dark and evil, a cuckoo sent from the underworld to wreak havoc on the nest, a quisling.

  Get up! The pure hatred he felt for Rebecca galvanized him. He drew in a painful breath and pushed himself up so he was on his knees again. He shouted at himself, urging himself to get to his feet. Get up, Will! Don't let her win! Then, standing on his shaky limbs, his arms threshed out in the emptiness around him, in the endless, soul-sucking night land.

  "Get going! Get going! GET OUT!" he shouted in a cracked voice. "GET OUT!"

  He began to stumble along, calling out to Drake and his father, to anyone, to help him. But he heard nothing except his own echoing voice. Then there was a fall of small stones behind him, and he thought it perhaps too dangerous to continue to shout anymore and fell silent. But he kept going, counting a rough rhythm in his head as he went:

  One two, one two one, one two…

  Before long he was seeing horrible things looming out at him from the invisible walls. He told himself they weren't real, but that didn't stop them form coming.

  He was losing it. He truly believed he'd go mad if the thirst and hunger didn't get him first.

  One two, one two…

  He rued the day that he had made the decision to take the Miners' Train and come down here to the Deeps. What had he been thinking? To be lost like this, when he could have gone Topsoil! After all, what was the worst that could have happened to him up there? Spending the rest of his life on the run from the Styx didn't seem so bad now. At least he wouldn't have gotten himself into this situation.

  He fell again, and it was a bad one. He'd tumbled across some jagged rocks and banged his head. He slowly rolled onto his back and stretched out his limbs so he was spread-eagled. Then he lifted his hands in front of his face. Where he should have seen the white of his palms, there was no differentiation from the blankness, the canvas that had become his universe. He did not exist anymore.

  He rolled over and felt in front of him, terrified there might be some sort of drop just ahead. But the tunnel floor continued uninterrupted, and he knew that he would have to get back up.

  Without anything else to rely on, he'd become highly attuned to the familiar echoes his boots made as he trudged through the gravel and dust. He'd learned to read the minute reports of his footfalls as they reflected from the walls — it was almost like he had his own radar. On several occasions, he'd been forewarned of gaping chasms or changes in the floor level, purely by the nature of these echoes.

  He got to his feet and took some steps.

  There was a dramatic change in the sounds. The feedback was fainter, as if the lava tube had suddenly ballooned in size. He advanced at a snail's pace, filled with trepidation that he was about to stagger blindly into a vertical shaft.

  Within a short distance, there were no more echoes at all — none he could discern, anyway. His boots were encountering something other than the usual debris. Pebbles! Knocking and grinding against one another and giving that unmistakable slightly hollow sound. They shifted under his feet and, in hid exhausted state, made it even more difficult to walk.

  Then he sniffed, suddenly aware of humidity on his face. He sniffed again. What was it?

  Ozone!

  He smelled ozone, so evocative of the seaside and trips to the beach with his dad.

  What had he stumbled on?

  32

  Mrs. Burrows stood by the door to her room, watching the events farther down the corridor.

  She'd been roused from her afternoon nap by raised voices and the rapid tap of footfalls over the surface of the linoleum out in the hallway. This struck her as odd. For the past week there had been next to no activity in the place. An uneasy silence had fallen over Humphrey House, the patients largely confining themselves to their beds as, one after another, they succumbed to the mysterious virus that had all of England in its grip.

  When she'd first heard the commotion, Mrs. Burrows had assumed it was simply a patient kicking up a fuss. But minutes later, a loud crash came from the area of the service elevator, followed by a woman's voice speaking in urgent tones. It was the voice of someone who was distressed or angry and wanted to shout but was just managing to keep herself in check. Only just.

  Her curiosity getting the better of her, Mrs. Burrows had finally decided to take a look. Her eyes were considerably better, but still painful enough to force her to squint.

  "What's all this?" she mumbled through a yawn as she stepped from her bedroom into the corridor. She stopped as something by the door to Old Mrs. L's room came into focus, and her red eyes opened wide with surprise. Mrs. Burrows had seen enough TV hospital dramas to identify what was there:

  A paradise cart — the horrible euphemism for a hospital gurney with stainless-steel sides and top. It was a means of transporting dead bodies without alerting anyone as to what was inside or, indeed, if there was anyone inside.

  Essentially a shiny metal coffin on wheels.

  As she watched, the matron and two porters emerged from the doorway to fetch the cart. The porters wheeled it into Old Mrs. L's room as the matron remained outside. Spotting Mrs. Burrows, she walked slowly down the corridor toward her.

  "No. That's not what I think—?" Mrs. Burrows began.

  With a slow shake of her head, the matron told her all she needed to know.

  "But Old Mrs. L was so… young," Mrs. Burrows gasped, forgetting herself in her distress and using her nickname for the patient. "What happened?"

  The matron shook her head again.

  "What happened?" Mrs. Burrows repeated.

  The matron's voice was hushed, as if she didn't want any of the other patients to hear. "The virus," she said.

  "Not this thing?" Mrs. Burrows asked, indicating her eyes, which, just like the matron's, were still red and puffy.

  "I'm afraid so. Got into her optic nerve, and then spread through her brain. The doctor said it's doing that in a number of cases." She took a long breath. "Especially those with defective immune systems."

  "I can't believe it. My goodness, poor Mrs. L," Mrs. Burrows gasped, genuinely meaning it. It was a rare moment: She was feeling compassion for someone who really existed, not just for some actor playing a part on one of her soaps.

  "At least it was quick," the matron said.

  "Quick?" mumbled Mrs. Burrows, frowning with bewilderment.

  "Yes, very. She complained she was feeling sick just before lunch, then became quite disoriented and went into a coma. There was nothing we could do to resuscitate her." The matron pressed her lips together and lowered her gaze to the floor. Taking out a handkerchief, she dabbed first one eye, then the other. Mrs. Burrows couldn't tell if this was from the continuing effects of the eye infection or because she was upset. "This epidemic is serious, you know. And if the virus mutates…" the matron started to confide in a low voice.

  Just then the porters pushed the paradise cart back out into the corridor, and the matron hurried off to join them.

  "So quick," Mrs. Burrows said again, trying to come to terms with the death.

  * * * * *

  Later that afternoon in the dayroom, Mrs. Burrows was so preoccupied by Old Mrs. L's untimely demise that she wasn't paying much attention to the television. She'd been restless in her bedroom, so decided to seek solace in her favorite chair — the one place that usually brought her a measure of contentment. But when she arrived, she found that there were already quite a few patients lounging in front of the television. Their daily schedule of activities was still disrupted from the lack of staff, so they were mostly left to their own devices.

  Mrs. Burrows had been unusually subdued, allowing the other patients to dictate the choice of program, but when an item came on the news, she suddenly spoke out.

  "Hey!" she exclaimed, pointing at the screen. "It's him! I know him!"

  "Who is he, then?" a woman inquired, looking up from a jigsaw puz
zle.

  "Don't you recognize him? He was in here!" Mrs. Burrows said, her excited eyes riveted to the report.

  "What's his name?" the jigsaw lady asked, holding a piece of the puzzle in her hand.

  Mrs. Burrows hadn't a clue what his name was, so she pretended she was so intent on the television that she hadn't heard.

  "And Professor Eastwood had been assigned to work on the virus?" came the question from the interviewer offscreen.

  The man on screen nodded — the same man with the distinguished voice who had spoken to Mrs. Burrows in a rather disparaging way at breakfast only days ago. He even had on the same tweed jacket he'd been wearing then.

  "He's an important doctor, you know," Mrs. Burrows told the handful of people in the row behind her in a self-important way, as if she was confiding in them about a close friend. "He likes boiled eggs for breakfast."

  Someone in the room repeated "boiled eggs," as though she was thoroughly impressed by the information.

  "That's right," Mrs. Burrows confirmed.

  "Shhh! Listen!" a woman in a lemon-yellow bathrobe hissed from the back row.

  Mrs. Burrows tipped her head back to glare at the woman, but was too intrigued by the news report to take it any further.

  "Yes," boiled-egg-man answered the interviewer. "Professor Eastwood and his research team at St. Edmund's were working round the clock to identify the strain. By all accounts, they were making good progress, although the records were lost."

  "Can you tell us exactly when the fire broke out?" said the interviewer.

  "The alarm was raised at nine-fifteen this morning," boiled-egg-man replied.

  "And can you confirm that four members of the professor's research team also died in the blaze with him?"

  Boiled-egg-man's eyebrows knitted together as he nodded somberly. "Yes, I'm afraid that is the case. They were exceptional and highly valued scientists. My heart goes out to their families."

  "Do you have any theories what started the fire?" the interviewer posed.

  "The laboratory carried a range of solvents in its stockroom, so I suppose the forensic investigation will begin there."

  "There has been speculation in the past week that the pandemic may be man-made. Could the death of Professor Eastwood—?"

  "I will not be drawn into such conjecture," boiled-egg-man barked disapprovingly. "It is the stuff of conspiracy theorists. Professor Eastwood was a close personal friend for over twenty years and I will not have—"

  "Professor Eastwood must have been getting too close — that's what happened! Someone snuffed him out!" Mrs. Burrows boomed, drowning out the television. "Of course it's a bloomin' conspiracy. It's those no-good Russkies again, or maybe the lefties, who've got nothing to moan about anymore 'cept what we're all doing to the environment. You see how they're already trying to blame this plague on greenhouse gases and cows' farts."

  "I think it escaped from one of our own labs," the jigsaw lady piped up, nodding vigorously as if she'd single-handedly solved the mystery.

  Silence returned to the room, with the news report featuring yet another "science correspondent" who was giving the doom-laden prophecy that, at the drop of a hat, the virus could mutate into a far more lethal form, with dire consequences for the human race.

  "Ah!" said the jigsaw lady a her card table, pressing a piece of her puzzle home.

  Then the television screen was filled with a piece of highly accomplished street art. Graffitied on a section of wall between two shops in north London, it was a life-sized figure wearing a respirator and clothed in a bulky biohazard suit. Apart from the fact that it had a pair of what were unmistakably large cartoon-mouse ears sticking out of the top of its military helmet, the figure was very realistic. At first glance, it looked as though someone was actually standing there. The figure was brandishing a placard that read:

  THE END IS NIGH

  IT'S IN YOUR EYE

  "Too bloody right it is!" Mrs. Burrows bellowed, her thoughts returning to Old Mrs. L's horribly premature death. The woman in the lemon-yellow bathrobe shushed her again.

  "Oh, can't you shut up?" the woman complained with haughty disapproval. "Do you have to be so loud?"

  "Yes, I do — this is serious!" Mrs. Burrows growled. "Anyway, at least I'm not as loud as your ghastly bathrobe, you old trout," Mrs. Burrows threw back at her, wetting her lips as she prepared to do battle. Even if the end of the world was looming, she wasn't going to be spoken to like that.

  33

  Drake didn't have the faintest idea where Will was. He kicked himself for not noticing when the boy wandered off in the first place. It was Chester who had spotted him trying to signal them as they'd all sought refuge in a lava tube. At that moment, pelted by a volley of loosely aimed sniper fire, Drake only had time to return the signal to the stranded boy. His primary concern had been to get the others away from the Limiters, and to safety.

  Will didn't know his way around yet, and Drake didn't know him well enough to guess where he might have gone. No, Drake was at a total loss as to where to start looking for the gone boy.

  And now, as they crept along the winding tunnel, with Cal lagging behind and Elliott prowling up ahead, Drake attempted once again to blank out all his years of knowledge and experience and adopt the mindset of a complete novice. Think from ignorance.

  Caught by surprise and completely terrified, the boy's first impulse must have been to try to catch up with them. Realizing that this was impossible, he might have gone for the next most obvious option and left the plain by the closest lava tube. But not necessarily.

  Drake knew the boy didn't have anything with him, no food or water, so he might have attempted to brave the sniper fire and get back to his kit. Like that would have done him any good, anyway — Drake had decided not to leave Will's jacket or rucksack behind as souvenirs for the Styx.

  So, had he bolted down a lava tube? If he had, bad news. It would have been one of many, with the overwhelming volume of interconnecting tunnels in the network only compounding the problem. Mounting a search-and-rescue operation in so extensive an area — it would take weeks, if not months. Totally out of the question while the threat of Limiter patrols persisted.

  Drake clenched his fists in frustration.

  No good. He couldn't form any sort of picture.

  Come on, Drake urged himself, what would the boy have done next?

  Perhaps…

  Perhaps Will hadn't entered the nearest lava tube but had kept to the plain, following the perimeter wall as it curved back — at least this would have given him some cover from the rifle fire.

  Maybe he was being overly optimistic, but Drake was gambling on this being Will's most likely course of action. If he had kept to the perimeter, and if the Styx hadn't caught up with him, there was a slim chance he might still be alive.

  That was an awful lot of ifs…

  Drake knew he was grasping at straws.

  Or perhaps the Limiters had already trapped the boy and, at this very moment, were torturing him to extract all the information they could. The Limiters would do their usual and wring everything out of him using their excruciating methods. Event the strongest broke, sooner or later. It was a fate ten times worse than death; if it had befallen Will…

  Cal stumbled behind him, skittering a hail of stones across the floor. Too much noise, Drake thought. It reverberated around the space, and he was just about to reprimand the boy when his chain of thought continued, almost stopping him in his tracks. Three new additions to the team, three new responsibilities… all at the same time! With Limiters popping up all over the place like malevolent jack-in-the-boxes, what the heck had he been thinking?

  He wasn't some itinerant saint saving the lost souls the Colony spat out. So what was it? A twisted delusion of grandeur? Did he imagine that the three boys would be his own private army if it came down to a pitched battle with the Limiters? No, that was ridiculous. He should have dispatched two of the boys and kept just the one — Will — becau
se with his infamous mother and knowledge of Topsoil life he might have played a part in his future plans. And now Drake had lost him.

  Cal tripped again, falling to his knees with a muffled groan. Drake spun around.

  "My leg," Cal explained before Drake had a chance to say anything. "I'll be all right." Cal immediately pulled himself up and began to walk again, leaning heavily on his stick.

  Drake thought for a moment. "No, you won't. I'll have to hide you somewhere." His tone was cold and detached. "I made a mistake bringing you… I expected too much from you." His intention had been to station Chester and Cal at strategic points where they could lie in wait for Will in case he chanced by. In retrospect, he should have left Cal and only taken Chester. Or left both of them behind.

  As he struggled along, Cal was sinking deeper into turmoil. He had caught the tone in Drake's voice, and the implication bounced all other thoughts aside. He remembered Will's words, the warning that Drake didn't carry passengers, and the dread intensified in him that he really would be abandoned now.

  Drake surged ahead and, after a final sharp turn in the tunnel, they were back on the Great Plain.

  "Keep close and dim your lantern," he told Cal.

  * * * * *

  Will wondered if he was dreaming. Yet it all seemed so real. To reassure himself, he'd just stooped down to pick up a pebble, feeling its smooth, polished surface, when a faint breeze brushed his face. He stood up quickly. He could feel a wind!

  He continued down the gradient and then heard a lapping sound. Despite the warm air buffeting him, goose bumps broke out all over his body. He knew what it was. Water. There was water out there in the darkness before him.

  He move forward in baby steps until the pebbles gave way to something else — sand, soft and sliding sand. A few steps more and his foot landed with a splash. He squatted down and tentatively felt before him. Liquid. It was lukewarm water. He shuddered. He imagined a huge, dark expanse in front of him.

  He needed water so badly. He gently cupped some of the fluid in his hands and lifted it up to his face. He sniffed and then sniffed again. It was flat and lifeless — it had no smell to it. He held it to his lips and sipped.