opening.
We didn’t have the breath to talk, and for that I was grateful. This situation was wrong, all sorts of fucked- up, and I didn’t need Charlie or Floyd to tell me that.
It was dark, predawn. The sky overhead was clotted with clouds—the stars hidden, the moon long since crashed beneath the horizon. The rain had stopped, but the grass and trees were still dripping wet, and it was freakishly quiet. There were no animals rustling in the leaves and not a whisper of wind. If there were wolves here, stalking us through the night, they were being very quiet.
I had a baseball bat clenched in my hand, scavenged from the house’s garage. Floyd had a kitchen knife. Charlie had a longhandled shovel.
I also had my camera. I hadn’t even thought about it, just automatically dropping it around my neck after we finished looking at Mac’s horrible photograph. It was a comfort, having it there. The camera had always been a comfort for me, a wall to hide behind, a distance to place between myself and the subject of my eye. I was seeing that now for the first time. The camera was my way of escaping from the world.
I gave Danny a couple of minutes. The tension grew with each passing second as my imagination ran wild:
“Wait, wait!” Floyd called, the first syllable loud before his voice dropped into a scared whisper. “Shouldn’t we wait for Danny? And the soldiers?” Then, after a brief pause, “Shouldn’t we wait for guns?”
“You can wait if you want,” I said, trying to sound stronger, more confident than I actually felt. “But I can’t do it. I can’t wait … not while he’s got her in there, not while she’s in danger.”
I headed toward the tunnel, making a show of not looking back. Maybe this feigned nonchalance came across as confidence, but really, I just didn’t want Charlie and Floyd to see my pleading, desperate eyes. I wanted to be strong … but I wasn’t. I was scared. And that fear—a fear of paralysis, a fear of loss—was what got me moving.
After a moment, I heard Floyd let out a string of expletives. Then he and Charlie followed me into the tunnel’s gaping maw.
Photograph. Undated. Danny:
The room is small and dark. Concrete walls, underground. Dirty and wet, every surface glistening with moisture. There’s a road flare burning on the far side of the room. A violet-red bloom—weak, but strong enough to illuminate the enclosed space in an eerie crimson glow.
There’s a body on the floor—a male body, fairly young—lying supine in the middle of the room. It is illuminated in the light of a half dozen flashlight beams.
The body is that of a soldier dressed in fatigues. Probably dead. Lying on his back with his head craned toward the wall behind him. He’s clawed open his shirt, but his arms are thrown to the side, one hand inches away from a fallen flashlight.
There is pain on his face, a frozen mask of terror and open-eyed agony.
From the taut flesh in the middle of his chest, an arm sprouts, reaching up and bent at the elbow. The soldier is impaled all the way up to the arm’s bicep. There are small rivulets of blood stretching the length of the arm—from taut, pointing fingers, past the elbow, all the way down to the soldier’s chest, where the thin streams pool and spill off into his shirt.
The fingers are blurred slightly, the shutter speed too slow to freeze them in motion.
I took the first left inside the tunnel. This was the way Mac had gone during our first exploration. This was the dead end into which he’d disappeared.
But there was no dead end this time. The tunnel continued on, tilting down, farther into the dark earth. I looked for wires in the tunnel walls but didn’t find any. Not here.
There were paw prints on the floor, though.
And, here and there, footprints.
The ceiling dripped wet mud onto our heads as we advanced. I jumped in surprise each time a drop hit the back of my neck.
“Fuck, Dean,” Floyd hissed as our flashlights stabbed into the dark, picking out nothing but tunnel and more tunnel. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one fucking bit!”
I didn’t like it, either, but I didn’t say anything. There was no point; I wasn’t about to turn around, not without Taylor. Charlie remained silent as well. I don’t think the teenager had said a single word since we left the house. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.
A sound up ahead startled us to a halt. “Do you hear that?” I asked. They both nodded.
Muffled shouting. Shrill, frantic voices. And then the sharp crack of gunfire.
I jolted into a run, surging down the length of the tunnel. The mud slid beneath my feet, but I caught myself and continued on.
Gunfire in the tunnels. That couldn’t be good.
After a hundred yards the tunnel deposited us into a small hub, a circular room with five new tunnels branching out into the space ahead. Floyd and Charlie slid into the room behind me. Floyd fell on his ass as he tried to avoid running into my back. “Fuck,” he muttered. For a moment he just sat there, shaking mud off of his arms, then Charlie helped him to his feet.
“How could this be mushrooms?” Charlie asked, finally breaking his silence. His words were tiny, as if the dirt were trying to steal his voice, absorbing its strength and leaving behind nothing but a hushed whisper. “The tunnels—how do spores explain any of this?”
I shrugged. They didn’t.
“Or are we hallucinating?” he continued. “Are we still in the house, collapsed on the floor, muttering and dreaming together? Or maybe passed out in the park while Mac and Taylor get farther and farther away?”
The thought was horrifying. I shook my head, and the room slid back and forth around me, continuing to move for a moment even after my head stopped. The light dimmed for a couple of seconds, then it returned to normal. “We can’t think about that,” I said. “They’re in here, and so are we, and we’ve got to find them.”
Right then, a shout sounded in the distance—indecipherable, but shrill and desperate. It didn’t sound like a woman’s voice. I turned my head, trying to locate the source. After a moment, both Charlie and Floyd pointed to the tunnel on the far left. I ran on ahead.
There were things in this tunnel. Objects. At first, it was just chunks of rock and wood breaking up the endless stretches of mud. Then a milk crate and an empty vodka bottle. Then there were planks beneath my feet, forming a makeshift floor. We came into another hub and found a geometric asterisk laid out in the dirt, narrow lengths of flooring that reached out into five new tunnels. There was a wooden chair set up against the wall, with an unlit lantern perched on its seat.
I swung my flashlight from tunnel to tunnel, looking for something new, something to point me in the right direction.
“Dean—” Floyd started, but I let out a hiss and he fell silent.
“Turn off your lights,” I said, hitting the button on mine. “Shut them off. Maybe we can see …”
Charlie clicked his off. Then, after fumbling for a moment, Floyd did the same.
The tunnel dropped into darkness. It was a deep and claustrophobic black, and as soon as my eyes lost input,
