“I think that means time’s up,” Laura said. “Last chance for anyone to turn back. You could probably hide in one of the buildings and not be noticed. Murky?”
“I don’t want to go down there,” Murky said, “but I don’t want to go back, either. So I’m going with you.”
“Jesse?”
“Um, yeah. Sure. I’m going. It’ll be fun, right?” Jesse didn’t sound at all convinced, but he also didn’t seem to want to turn back.
“Henderson?”
“Hell yeah I’m heading down there. Let’s stomp some ant people butts. And you, Laura?”
“My parents are down there,” she said simply. “Let’s go.”
When no one else made the move to be the first to step into the portal, Laura gingerly put a foot over the strange swirling blue energy and onto the first step. Murky had no idea what would happen if any of them stuck their feet or hands in the energy itself, but she didn’t want to find out. As Laura started down the steep stairs, Murky followed her, with Jesse behind her and Henderson in the rear. They were all just down below the edge of the rock when the vehicles came to a stop nearby and multiple voices began shouting at them to stop.
“No more time,” Henderson said. “Everyone, move!”
They did the closest thing they could to running down the spiraling stairs, but the sizes of the steps themselves made running awkward. Also, Murky found she couldn’t make herself go too fast for fear that she might lose her balance and go tumbling down into the abyss. Once they were about twenty feet down, she risked looking over the edge, then immediately wished she hadn’t. She thought she could see a floor slanting off into the green glow somewhere below them, but it certainly wasn’t near. If any of them slipped and fell over the side, they wouldn’t survive the fall, at least not from here.
There were more shouts from above them, and Murky looked up to see several soldiers peering over the ledge, their guns pointed down at the four kids.
They wouldn’t, Murky thought. As soon as she thought it, several bullets flew through the air and chipped the strange rock outcroppings around them.
“They’re actually shooting!” Jesse yelled. “What the hell?”
“You idiots, stop shooting!” someone else called from up top. Murky thought it might be Agent Larson; already the cavern around them was creating a strange echo effect that made it difficult to be certain.
“But we can’t let them go down there!” someone yelled back. An argument began, but Murky didn’t hear much of it. They weren’t so far down yet that the soldiers couldn’t give chase, but it was obvious that none of them wanted to cross the swirling blue line of the portal if they didn’t have to. Now that the military wasn’t shooting at them, they seemed to be in the clear to continue.
Just as she thought that, Murky heard a shout of surprise from behind her. She turned to see that Henderson must have slipped and fallen on a step, because he was on his stomach with one leg and one arm dangling out into the drop. Jesse stopped to grab him, and both Murky and Laura went back up a few steps to help. The stairs under Henderson looked like they might be ready to crumble, but thankfully none of them were particularly heavy and they were able to pull him from the edge before he could be put in too much danger. Henderson looked shaken, but he didn’t stop to say anything. He just gestured for them to go on ahead, and they did so with as much haste as they could without actually putting themselves in danger again.
Within a couple of minutes, they reached the bottom. When Murky looked up, she could no longer see anyone else looking down at them from the top of the shaft.
They had made it, but they were now also alone.
Chapter Four
At first there seemed to be two separate tunnels they could go down at the base of the stairs, but a quick inspection of one showed that it led to a dead end except for a hole in the ceiling snaking off in a general up direction. That could have been the direction they truly needed to go, for all they knew, but since they didn’t have any way to climb up it, they had no other choice but to go down the other direction, a wide hall roughly the width of Kettle Hollow’s Main Street.
It was here that they finally got a good look at what was causing the cave system’s eerie green glow. There was some kind of fungus or lichen growing on almost every available inch of the walls and ceiling, and it gave off varying degrees of faint light like dying fireflies. The floor probably would have been covered with it as well if it weren’t for the fact that there seemed to be regular foot traffic through here, resulting in a smooth path down the middle of the cave floor with dead and trampled fungus along the sides.
They went down this direction for a little way in silence before Laura stopped them. “Okay, we really need to come up with some kind of game plan here. We can’t just go wandering around these tunnels with no idea what we’re doing.”
“Does anybody have anything in their backpacks that could help us?” Jesse asked.
“I never have the slightest clue what I’ve left in
