by Seren Goode
The great black holes at the end of the canal grew larger. It looked like Shim was headed directly to them. I didn’t see any light on the other side. It wasn’t an overpass or a bridge. It was a tunnel. Surely, he wasn’t planning on going in there—we would be trapped.
But as the entrances grew bigger, he didn’t slow. The Jeep roared again behind us. Faster! I mentally urged Shim, committing to his plan, whatever it was. The high-pitched whine of our engine almost blocked it out, but I could still hear the Jeep’s roar coming closer. “Faster,” I screamed.
A series of things happened all at once: the sun was suddenly eclipsed, everything going dark as the entrance to the tunnel swallowed us up, which was followed by the sound of a loud crash and a horrific scrapping of metal on concrete as the Jeep tried to follow us. They had made a tragic navigational error. Our speed took us down the tunnel away from the accident and the danger behind us.
We were slowing, riding along with the momentum, the bike lamp the only source of light as it bounced off the smooth concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. I was surprised to see no trash, no dirt. The whole tunnel looked like it had been swept clean. We glided for a while until the engine started to sputter. Now that we had slowed, I felt the vibration of something on the back of the bike rubbing against the tire and smelled burnt rubber.
Shim slowed to a crawl, putting his feet down on either side for balance. Up ahead in the glow of the lamp, I could see a thin line crossing from one side of the tunnel wall to the other. Shim must have seen it too. He slowed and quickly stopped.
I hopped off the bike, and my legs almost buckled under me. Wobbling over, I touched the wall for balance while I pulled off my helmet, then I continued to approach the line. It was a metal cord pulled tight. At about shoulder height, it would have decapitated us if we had ridden through it.
I shuddered.
The line had an old blanket hung over it like a curtain. One side was pushed back, and I stuck my head around to see what was on the other side. I could make out eerie shadows and a harsh smell that caused me to blanch and step back. Shim came up behind me, pushing the bike, the light sputtering along with the engine.
“I think someone lives here.” Shim grunted in reply. Then the engine started to sputter again, the light fading and coming back on.
Shim pulled off his helmet and swore. “They cracked the gas tank when they hit us.” I could smell it now, the fumes of gas mixing with the potpourri of smells from the tunnel.
“What does that mean?”
“It means we have miles of tunnel to go through on foot with no light.”
Miles? My mouth gapped open. We have to walk through this place in the dark? I wish I had my bag! I always carried it, stocked full of emergency items, including a flashlight. Here we were, in an emergency with no bag. A thought occurred to me, and I frantically patted the back of my waistband, feeling for the diary.
It was there. Thank Stars! It felt secure so I decided to leave it where it was.
“Do you have your pen light or the burner phone?”
“I have the burner, but the battery is almost dead, and I have my pen light.” He pulled it out and flicked it on, the faint light barely lit from one side of the tunnel to the other. “Wait, I have an idea. Hold on, it’s going to get dark.” He turned off the engine, and we were left in the faint glow of the pen light. Shim handed it to me, then leaned the bike against the wall. I pointed the pen to where he was working. It looked like he was stripping something from the bike. He yanked out a bunch of wires, then pulled out a key ring from his pocket and used a screwdriver-shaped fob on the ring to unscrew the bike’s light. Once released, he started working on something else. Clutching the light close, I tried not to let the thought of the dark creeping in on us, or the knowledge that something might move behind the impromptu drapes, freak me out.
I was doing a terrible job.
My mind wandered, and I was completely caught off guard when the space suddenly lit up. Blinking like an owl, I looked directly into the light, trying to figure out what it was.
Shim turned the light away and held it up. Once my eyes had adjusted, I saw he had pulled the battery and the headlamp from the bike and wired them together. He’d stuffed them into his helmet with the light shining out the visor. He was using the chin guard as a handle.
“Clever,” I complemented him grimly, my face still pulled tight with worry.
“Turn off the pen light. Let’s stick with this and hope it lasts long enough.”
Long enough for what? Just how far did this tunnel go? There was noise behind us. Shim and I froze. I had no idea what that sound was, but I wasn’t taking any chances. With my helmet in one hand, I grabbed Shim’s arm with the other. “Come on.”
Shim gave a last longing look at his bike before he left it behind and followed me around the curtain. The bright light pushed the creeping shadows away, and I could see a bed of blankets stacked on a wooden pallet up against the wall. A wall of crates and boxes surrounded the bed on one side, and a makeshift table looked like it was trying to be a kitchen with food stores stacked on top.f
I wanted to ask questions. How could someone live down here? Why? But there was no time. We cleared the room and pushed farther down the tunnel at a run.
We had been running for a while. My legs were still like jelly, and even with a hand on Shim’s arm, I was having trouble keeping up. It occurred to me we hadn’t checked in with the others. Would the stones even work underground?
“Stop.” Shim halted, and I immediately dropped my helmet and leaned over, putting my hands on my knees. Swimming, I could have kept this up for hours, but not running—I needed a break. Shim paced around me, eager to keep moving. “Do you think they are still behind us?”
Shim stopped and listened, then slowly shook his head. “I don’t know what we heard before. It could have been the Helios, or maybe it was an animal, or the person whose home we found. Just in case, we need to keep going. We won’t be safe until we are back at the condo, and we can’t lead Helios back there.”
“We need to try and contact the others and tell them where we are. So…where are we?”
Shim sighed and gave a frustrated scratch to his hair, which was still matted with sweat from the helmet. “I don’t know exactly. There are hundreds of miles of these tunnels under the city…”
“Hundreds? Are you serious?”
“Yeah, most were built in the ’90s. They’re a giant storm drain for the city when it floods. Even a little bit of rain can make them dangerous.”
A flood? Rain! “Shim, that was on the forecast. It’s going to rain tonight.”
“I know,” he said grimly. “We have to get out of the tunnels as fast as we can.”
“What about the others? I don’t know what time it is. We were supposed to contact them on the hour.”
“Can you try while we are moving?”
I nodded. It wasn’t needed, but Shim grabbed my hand to pull me up. His fingers lingered on mine, and he squeezed before letting go.
“Here, give me the other helmet. I’ll carry it while you try.”
We resumed a slow jog, and I reached up to my mother’s necklace. “Hello? Breeze, Skylar, Jaxon, are you there? Hello?” Silence. I tried again and again. No one responded. When Shim looked back, I shook my head. “I’ll try again in a couple minutes.” Our pace quickened. Five minutes later, I repeated my attempt to reach the others, then again five minutes after that.
“Argh.” I was growing frustrated.
“Grace, it doesn’t matter.” He sounded frustrated too. “They can’t help us. Even if they had a map for the tunnels and could tell us where to go, we don’t know where we are to start from. We just need to keep going until we hit light. But we have to hurry.”
I agreed, and we picked up the pace. I stayed with it as long as I could, but soon I was winded and had a stit
ch in my side. I needed another break. We had passed several more encampments. Most looked abandoned. That didn’t seem good. We were in a clear patch now, and I begged Shim to stop again. We slowed to a trot. I had to sit down for a minute. I moved to a wall and started to slide down it.
“Stop!” Shim said, his voice harsh.
“What? I’m tired,” I wailed back. I’d tried to be tough, but my shoulder ached and patches on my back throbbed from what I suspected were burns from the metal stairs I’d hidden under at the warehouse. My lower back ached from bumping along on the bike, and now I had blisters from the sand caught up in my sneakers rubbing me raw as we ran. When the Helios were chasing us, I could forget all of this, but now, I felt like crap.
“Just hold on a second.” Shim shined the light down to the floor where I was about to sit, and I heard a quiet scraping as something scurried away.
“What was that?” I asked, jumping straight up and away. My eyes, already owl-like in the dark, widened more.
“Scorpion. Always good to check first. You are in a desert.”
I looked down in horror. I’d almost sat on a scorpion? Shuddering, I gave up on the idea of sitting and leaned against the wall instead. “Thanks.” Shim leaned next to me. “Where is everyone? We have seen all these encampments, but no people. And why do they live down here?”
“They are probably up in the casinos now, hustling credits. And as for why they live here—why does any city have homeless people? Lack of affordable housing? Addictions? Bad luck? Neglect? It’s a complex question.”
“But why live in a tunnel? Isn’t it dangerous if it floods?”
“Yeah, the water comes in fast when it starts to rise. Plus, there are other dangers to living here. I’ve heard most of the homeless won’t even come into these tunnels.” He pushed off the wall. “Grace, we really have to keep moving.”
I sighed. He was right. But there was something I needed to say to him first. “Shim, I’m sorry.”
“For?” He looked confused, and I couldn’t blame him. Just because I’d been obsessing about this didn’t mean he had even given it another thought.
“I’ve been thinking about family. How I didn’t understand the pressure my parents were under. How I didn’t understand the pressure you are under to take care of Jaxon, and I’m sorry for mentioning your father, putting doubts into your head about him. I should never have done that. You are both so different—”
“Grace, you didn’t say anything about Logan I hadn’t thought before. I’ve just never had the guts to ask Kindle about it. She’s going to have a lot to answer for if I ever see her again.”
“They all will, when we see them again.”
Shim took my hand and squeezed. We rested in silence for a few more minutes, then, without speaking, headed out again. He went a little slower but still kept up a steady pace. The tunnels changed shape and branched off a few times, but Shim kept us moving roughly in the same direction, passing up off shoots that headed out left and right.
It felt like hours later when I slowed again. “Shim, wait. Shine the light there.”
The light swung around and illuminated a section of concrete with writing on it. It was a poem. A little further down, there was more writing. We kept moving. Verse after verse of poems lined the walls, some good, some bad, some just crude curses and dirty rhymes. Most spoke of pain, loneliness, and loss.
“So sad,” I murmured. Shim yanked on my arm. “What—” I realized my feet were splashing in water. It must have started raining.
Shim ripped the helmet out of my hands, threw it to the ground, and grabbed my hand. “Grace, run. RUN!”
My heart was thudding in my chest. Water splashed as we ran, soaking my lower legs. I found myself clutching my mother’s necklace, the touch giving me comfort as fear ate at me. It took a minute to hear the voice. “Grace, Shim, are you there?” It was Breeze.
“We are here!” I screamed into the connection, pouring all my fear into my response. The emotion must have come through a little strong because she responded back in a sob.
“Grace, what is it? What is wrong? Did the Helios get you?” Her voice in my head whimpered.
“We escaped the Helios, but we are in tunnels under the city.” There was a pause. I imagine she was relaying the information to the others.
“Grace, you have to get out of there. Jaxon says they flood when it rains, and it’s been raining above ground for about an hour.”
“I know. Shim and I are lost,” I said, screaming as I stepped into a hole and stumbled. The water was up to my ankles now, and I was getting anxious. “We have been trying to find our way out for hours. I have to go. The water is rising too fast, and I can’t…I have to go.”
“Gra—” I let go of the necklace. I couldn’t listen anymore and focus on keeping on my feet. The water was rising.
The water was up to my calves when I saw the graffiti. Just a tag of names, then a portrait of a young boy, big eyes staring beseechingly out with a dimpled grin, the words “In Memory” written above it. The walls on both sides of us exploded with color in a gallery of art that we ran past as the water rose.
By the time it reached my knees, I was starting to panic. It has only been a few minutes since I had spoken to Breeze. It was rising unbelievably fast, and there was a current. Shim grabbed my hand, and we steadied each other as we tried to lift our legs above the water line to move faster.
My heart raced. I was lifting my leg when I realized the level was so high, mid-thigh now, that it was faster to walk in the water then to try to stay above it. Bottles and debris floated by us, and the current pulled at my feet with each step.
The water was at my waist when up ahead I could make out a larger room. It took me a minute to understand what that meant.
“Shim, there’s a light.” The current dragged us toward the source, and we struggled to stay upright. Several tunnels emptied into the room, and above it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen—an enormous grate open to the sky.
Rain fell from the center and water gushed in from all sides of the grate, glistening like a crystal waterfall in the yellow light of the streetlamp. The water was chest high as we were swept into the room and we almost kept going, the current rushing us to its next destination. I managed to grab onto the side of a round drain shoulder high in the wall. Shim flew past, and I dug in and reached out for him. I caught his arm and held.
The helmet ripped out of his hand. The light bobbed and swirled as it rushed through the tunnel and disappeared.
The strain of holding Shim pulled on my shoulder that had only just begun to heal from Cambridge’s abuse days ago. Was that only days? I felt like I had aged a lifetime since then, and I wondered if I would have the chance to age more. But one of the many surprising things I learned about myself this summer was that I didn’t quit. I refused to let go of this pipe, and I refused to let go of Shim. Agony shot up my arm as I pulled him closer.
“Grace—” Shim gasped, fumbling and finally latching onto the pipe next to me. We clung there for a minute, catching our breath and gazing up at the grate so tantalizingly close but just out of reach. Then I noticed the ladder rungs embedded in the wall next to the drainpipe. We had swept right by them. They were only three feet away, but with the current yanking on us, rushing water coming from the drainpipe, and the deluge pouring in from the grate above, it might as well have been a mile.
Shim saw the ladder too. “You’re going to have to try and reach for them. Hold on.” He adjusted his grip on the drain, wedging one leg inside. “You’ve got one chance. I’ll give you a push on three. Ready?”
I nodded. “One,” I said.
“Two,” he said.
“Three,” we said together, and with an amazing amount of upper body strength, he pushed as I shoved off from the drain and launched myself at the closest rung. One hand slipped on the wet metal, but t
he other caught. It was my weak arm, but I was able to hold on. I latched on with both hands and wrapped my arms and legs around the rungs. Yes!
Repositioning, I reached out for Shim. I could almost reach him, but he would need to let go of the drain to reach my hand.
“Ready?” he shouted. The water roared. The water was above our shoulders now, and we could no longer trust that we could keep our footing. We were running out of time.
“Ready,” I shouted back. Keeping a leg wedge in the drain, he let go of the rim of the pipe and reached out. The current pushed him away, but he fought it, and our hands grappled for a second, then locked. I pulled, and he muscled his way over to the rung. His leg slipped out of the drain and he floated on the surface of the water, only his hands anchoring him to the ladder. Pulling, he curled himself in and got one foot, then the other, on the rungs below the water.
We both paused in relief and caught our breath.
“Up,” I panted, not able to stand another second longer in the water. The source of my greatest joy in life, water, had become the enemy.
“Up,” Shim agreed and steadied me as I climbed the rungs to the top, and he quickly followed. We puzzled over how to get the grate open. Tugging at it, it didn’t budge. I tried again, putting my good shoulder to the grate and pushing up with the one leg I had braced on the ladder. The grate moved and then slammed back down. I teetered for a moment on my perch before catching my balance.
“Grace, we will both have to do it,” Shim said.
Even though we were out of the flood below, I was getting a face full of run-off water coming in from the grate, making the rungs slick. Shim crowded next to me. We wouldn’t be able to stay like this much longer.
“Move up as high as you can,” Shim said. I was awkwardly hunched over with my head pushed up against the metal.
“Okay, I’m going to push the grate up, and you need to get whatever you can through the opening. Ready?” I grunted, and Shim pushed. The grate cracked upwards, and I got a better grip and pushed my good hand through, fingers first, then my hand, and finally my whole arm and head. As soon as my upper body was in the opening, providing leverage, Shim started to worm his way through too. With our legs still on the ladder, we stretched as far as we could, the heavy grate on our backs helping to hold us in place long enough for us to worm the rest of the way out.