tremble in the cold, and she knew she had to get out of the water before hypothermia set in. She stopped to think. If this is a tunnel, then the opposite side ought to be straight across from this side. She flattened her back against the wall and then shoved away across the surface, her eyes closed as she tried to visualize a tunnel.
She paddled for what seemed like forever before her fingertips touched a hard, slippery surface.
She stopped. Had she gone in a circle? No, the falling water sound was coming from a different angle. Or at least she hoped so. She
started her search again, this time bumping along the wall to her left, hand over hand, looking for a pipe or a ladder or steps—any protruding feature she could use to get her shivering body out of this water. She realized her chin was in the water, which meant it was time to refill her trouser legs. She bobbed under and exhaled five more times until she got her makeshift water wings back. Then she rested. Which way had she been going? The first tendril of despair wrapped around her gut and she wondered if she was just going to drown down here, alone, in this stygian blackness. She reached out for the wall, but it was gone. A lance of panic shot through her and she kicked out forcefully, only to bang her forehead on the wall.
She reached out with both hands, bending forward into the Y of her inflated trousers, and rested again.
Think, she told herself. This is a manmade tunnel complex. The car had been climbing a hill when it had fallen through one of those metal plate sections. The tunnel obviously conformed to the hill’s slope, which meant it ran down to some bottom or collection point. The tunnel had been big enough to accommodate a Crown Vie, so there had to be some ladders down here somewhere, some means by which the tunnel could be inspected or cleaned out. All she had to do was find one, then climb up out of the water. If she could get back to the original tunnel, the one under the main drag, she could get back to the point where the car had fallen through. After that—well, first things first.
She continued her hand-over-hand search, stopping to listen and look for light. Finally, she realized she could no longer hear the sound of falling water. For some reason, that worried her, so she reversed course and went back the way she had come, going faster now, since this was wall she had already covered. Her legs were getting numb and her feet weren’t there at all. She tried to ignore what this meant and kept going. At last, she heard the falling water again, and this time she headed for that sound.
She was heartened when she smelled gasoline again, and she actually felt a slipperiness in the water. This meant she was back to the point where the car had come down from that big tunnel. She stopped and looked up, imagining that she could see light, but she knew it was an illusion. She could see nothing.
She kept going, past the oil slick from the car. The sound of falling water got steadily louder, and then she was in it, a small torrent of cold water dropping down from somewhere above. She stopped and put her head back, grateful to get the oil sheen off her face. Listening to the sound of the water, she realized there was a constant echo. Had
she reached the end of this tunnel or pool or whatever it was? She kept going and immediately bumped up against a new wall. She followed it at what seemed like right angles to the direction she had been going for a distance of about twenty feet and then hit another wall, another right turn. So she had been right: This was the end of the cross tunnel. She felt the concrete and noticed that it was slippery underneath the water, although fairly dry above the waterline. She tried to think if this was different from what she had felt originally. It was getting hard to think. It was getting hard to do anything. Her chin was back in the water again, and this time she was less worried about that.
She snapped out of it and refilled the trouser legs again. She remembered the CFR device, but it was gone, probably slipped out when she’d taken her pants off. She sputtered and blew water out of her mouth forcefully just to make a noise and reached out for her wall. Her wall. That was a laugh. And then there was an ominous rumbling sound that originated somewhere way down to her right, a rumbling that seemed to be approaching. Dear God, what is that? she thought as she grabbed for the concrete, which was moving. Moving?
Moving!
No, it was not moving; she was moving, toward the rumbling sound.
She grabbed again, but there was nothing to grab, just that slippery, mossy surface. She felt her fingernails breaking as she tried to stop herself, not wanting to go toward that awful sound. But go she did, faster as the noise got louder, her hand bouncing off the invisible wall, in a palpable current now, a rush of water as something huge happened in the tunnel. She tried to picture what was going on, but it made no difference if her eyes were open or shut—there was only blackness and that end-of-the-world noise.
Then there were eddies and large air bubbles swirling around her bare legs, and a vicious sucking sound somewhere up ahead in the darkness.
That’s when she really panicked, screaming and kicking to get back up the current, her hands and legs flailing desperately as the water became even more violent. As the sucking sound approached, her hand hit on something metal, a vertical thing, which she grabbed for in one final, desperate lunge even as the current turned her whole body horizontal. She hung on with everything she had, grappling frantically to get a second hand on it.
Her semi-inflated trousers were swept away in the maelstrom. She closed her eyes and held on with a virtual death grip until she realized the sound was subsiding. She was hanging from the thing she
had grabbed. The water was going away, was beneath her, as if some giant had opened the drain on the whole system.
She probed with her left hand and found the other stanchion of what felt like a steel ladder. She felt for a rung to set her feet on and then let her head fall against another rung while she got control of her breathing.
Below her, the water was subsiding into a rumble of air and noxious bubbles, and then it all went quiet, with the only sound being that other own breathing. Her legs felt suddenly, terribly exposed in the clammy air. She could hear the falling water again, far to her left, but this time it sounded as if it was falling onto concrete instead of into water. She looked up, but there was only darkness. She began to climb, and after fifteen rungs, she came to what seemed like a ledge. The ladder arms arched up over the edge, so that she could continue climbing and pull herself onto the ledge.
It wasn’t wide, perhaps two, possibly three feet, but she sensed that it was above the water level. There was even a faint breeze, which felt warmer than the air down here.
She rested for several minutes before she realized she could smell gasoline again. The fumes were strong and seemed to be coming from right below her. The falling water, now to her right as she sat on the ledge, was definitely falling on bare concrete. The tunnel system must be some kind of giant siphon, she thought, remembering that the moss on the wall had been underwater just before the thing emptied itself. The water got to a certain level, and the pressure in the tunnel overcame the pressure in a drain system of some kind and the whole thing dumped. She nodded to herself in the darkness. It was urgently important that she understand how it all worked, because it had been terrifying when the water had started to move. Overcoming panic meant substituting known, manmade things for the huge unknown forces that had taken her down the tunnel.
Fumes, she thought. She wondered if perhaps the car had been washed down to this end of the tunnel, and whether or not it had gone out the drain. If the tunnel was empty, maybe she could get to the trunk and retrieve a flashlight. It meant climbing back down the ladder, and then letting go of the ladder as she groped around the bottom of the tunnel for the car. What if she got lost? Or couldn’t find the ladder again? She shivered at that thought, because she knew that the falling water was probably going to refill this thing.
So go now. Do it. You must have light to find your way out of this nightmare.
With a reluctant sigh, she groped around for the ladder arch and got back on it. She climbed down slowly, the rusty rungs hurting her bare feet. Finally, she reached the bottom, discovered water already standing on the floor of the tunnel. She put her back to the ladder and tried to think of a way to lay down a trail of some kind. The smell of gasoline was even stronger, which meant that the carcass of the car was close. She bent down to feel the bottom, and she discovered a crack or seam in the concrete that led directly away from the bottom rung of the ladder. It felt like old asphalt, hard yet soft when she pushed a finger into it. If she kept her hand on that and never let go, she could follow it back to the ladder.
She tried it, going out six feet or so, then following it back to the ladder.
It was all she had. She realized her eyes were closed, so she opened them. Better closed, she thought, because at least that way she could construct an image of what this place looked like. She stepped away from the ladder again, crouching down to keep her left hand firmly on the seam.
She went all the way across the tunnel floor, through water that was getting deeper again, until she hit the
