“They could be anywhere,” says Julia.
“There’s only one way to find out,” says Leo, pulling open the steel grate door.
The three of them descend the stone steps into the darkness below.
81
At the base of the steps is a long dark passageway and Julia follows the beam of Detective Muhtar’s flashlight projecting off the wall several feet ahead of her. It’s cool down here, but not as cool as she had expected, and she imagines that with more bodies the temperature would probably rise to a pleasant level in which to live. Sandy grit crunches underfoot as she makes her way through the passageway, but apart from that, the place is serenely quiet, with no sound leaking in from the outside world at all.
She trains her flashlight on the ground, hoping for any sign of Daniel, a trail of blood, a few spots, but there’s nothing. She reaches the end of the passageway and finds Detective Muhtar and Leo waiting for her.
“Any sign of them?” she says, letting her flashlight roam the walls and floors.
Detective Muhtar and Leo shake their heads. Julia looks around herself. She’s standing in a large round space, enough to hold maybe a hundred people. Her heart sinks when she sees five different tunnels branching off from the area.
“Looks like we have a problem,” she says.
“Yeah,” says Leo, following her gaze. “There’s no way to know which way he went. We’re just going to have to try, maybe go in fifty feet and if we find nothing, we turn back around and try another passageway. A process of elimination.”
Julia shakes her head. “That’ll take too long. We have to split up.”
Detective Muhtar looks at her. “That’s out of the question, Dr. Norris.”
Leo nods. “Detective Muhtar’s right, Julia. We need to stick together. It would be too easy to get lost down here on your own.”
Julia shakes her head, adamant. “It’s the only way we’ll be able to cover enough ground. There’s no telling what mental state Daniel’s in. He could be desperate enough to do something to Toni and himself, and we can’t forget he’s just had major surgery so there’s a risk he could pass out and slip into unconsciousness. Then he and Toni would be trapped down here forever. There’s just not enough time to search together. We each need to take a tunnel.”
Leo pauses, thinking.
“What if we had some sort of system so we could find our way back?” he says.
“Such as?” says Detective Muhtar. “Cell phones will not operate down here.”
Leo’s face brightens. “I got it. What if we leave a trail in the sandy dirt? We can use sticks to mark our way, then use them to track our way back here to the entrance? I’ll go up to the surface and get some tree branches for us.”
Detective Muhtar rolls his lips together and nods. “That might just work.”
82
Julia looks at her watch. They had agreed to meet back at the start in no more than thirty minutes. That means she has another ten minutes before she needs to turn around. She shudders despite herself. It’s spooky down here all on her own. The air seems thicker than before, mushroomy, and the dark is the kind of dark she’s never encountered before—blacker than black and frighteningly close. The only saving grace is her flashlight and the ventilation shafts beaming down shards of light every so often. She tries to keep herself in check and not let her thoughts run away on her—finding Daniel and Toni is the only priority.
It feels like she’s gone in miles already. The twists and turns of the passageways are disorientating and the specter of getting lost is a very real possibility. She’s careful to stick to Leo’s tracking method, diligently marking a line in the dirt with the sharp point of the stick to help retrace her return.
She’d definitely underestimated the complexity of the place, with its myriad passageways leading to clusters of small cave-like rooms. At the other extreme end of things, there are enormous cavernous areas, most probably community gathering places or stables for livestock, although how they managed to fit animals through the narrow passageways is anyone’s guess. Other times, the tunnels simply went nowhere. This was frustrating beyond belief, forcing Julia to turn around and go back the same way she came from, wasting precious time.
On and on she goes, checking around corners, sweeping her flashlight against the curves of the walls, looking down wells, getting on her hands and knees to crawl through low-lying passages. But there’s no sign of Toni or Daniel anywhere.
She glances at her watch again. She can’t put it off any longer; it is time to head back. Reluctantly, she turns to go when something catches her eye. A glistening smear near the tunnel entrance. At first, she thinks it’s some sort of water leak from a crack in the stone. But when she takes a closer look, pressing her fingertips to the rock, she sees that it’s blood.
Her heart thunders in her chest. She’s not sure what to do. Go back and get the others or continue on by herself? She stands looking at the blood, thinking. Detective Muhtar and Leo would surely come looking for her if she didn’t return on time, and Toni could be a mere few feet away—that’s something Julia just can’t ignore.
She decides to go on, stepping through the tunnel entrance, down the sloping incline, steadying her hand on the calloused surface of the wall as she goes. Her flashlight picks up more blood smudges here and there, along the walls and across the ground. She wants to call out for Toni but restrains herself. The situation is too unpredictable, especially given Daniel now has a gun.
Julia hurries forward, sweeping the flashlight backwards and forwards, following the traces of blood through the intricate network of tunnels and rooms. Suddenly the blood
