Digger 1.0 (14 page)

“What is it?” Ellis said once he’d reached
her.

She had her arms crossed and her foot tapped
lightly on the dust and clay.

“We talked about this as a family and you
said you’d stop exploring down here all alone.”

“That’s not what I said, Delores,” he said,
shaking his head. “What I said was—”

“I’m not going to listen to you play with
words,” she said.

“Not playing with words,”
he sighed.
“Just listen to me.”

“You said you agreed it was dangerous and it
would be better if no one explored the caves by themselves!”
Delores said. Her voice shook slightly from the emotion she was
obviously feeling.

Ellis put his hand out in a gesture of
peace. “Right after that, I said that in a week or so I’d feel
better about setting up teams to do exploring duty.” He raised his
hands as if it to say everything was just a misunderstanding.

“What you said or didn’t say in what order
is not the issue,”
Delores
said, pointing her finger at Ellis.
“Everyone in that house
heard you agree that exploring down here alone was dangerous. And
every single one of us accepted that to mean you wouldn’t be doing
it anymore.”

Ellis pulled off his headlamp and brushed
his hair back with his hand. “Well, that’s not what I said.”

“We know what you said, Ellis.”

“I meant that if you’d all give me another
week to make sure it’s safe down here, I’d start assigning teams to
do the searches.”

“Everyone knows what you said.”

“But—”

“But nothing,” Delores interrupted. “You
risk your credibility when you do things like this.”

“I didn’t ask to be the leader,” Ellis said
softly.

“Never say that again!” Delores shouted.

“I—”

“Never! You know you’re our leader, and stop
trying to shirk your responsibility.”

“That’s why I’m down here alone. It’s my
responsibility to put myself at risk first.”

There was a long stretch of silence as the
two stared at one another. Ellis was not sure what he should say,
and Delores was waiting for an apology. Delores broke the silence
first.

“Well, from now on if I find out you’re down
here alone, I’m going to come find you and stay with you. Just so
everyone else doesn’t think you’re breaking your word.”

There was more silence, then Ellis nodded
his head. “Ok, agreed. You go back now and I’ll finish up today,
and starting tomorrow we’ll do it another way.”

“Nope. I’m going with you,”
Delores said.

Ellis threw back his head and sighed loudly.
“No. Please no. I’m doing some important stuff and I need to
concentrate.”

“Translation. You are doing stupid,
dangerous stuff and you want to keep at it,”
Delores said.
“No. I’m going with you.”

“How can I be the leader if no one does what
I say?” Ellis said.

“That’s not fair,”
Delores said.
“I’ve always obeyed you.
Always. Even when I thought you were wrong. But I’m not obligated
to let you hurt your reputation with the children and possibly die
doing something stupid.”

“What makes you think I’m doing something
stupid?”

“Then let’s go see.”

“Delores.”

“Besides, it’s my birthday and this is what
I want to do. So you can’
t stop
me.
”

“It’s your birthday?”

“You knew it was.”

“Maybe I did. I’m not sure,” Ellis said with
a crooked smile.

“I’m seventeen now, and today is my
birthday, and I want to go see what you’ve been doing down
here.”

“Then I guess we’d better get moving.”

~~~

Down at the bottom, Ellis made sure Delores
had cleared the ladder, putting his hand on her back to make sure
she was steady. She knocked away his hand, playfully.

“Don’t act like I’m an old lady, Ellis,” she
said.

“That
ladder is dangerous
for anyone.”

Delores stepped away from the ladder and
looked around, scanning the area with her light. She saw what
looked like a room that opened up to the east. “What’s that
way?”

“It’s kind of a storage room,” Ellis said.
“More stuff. Explosives. Tools. Industrial chemicals. Wire. That
kind of stuff. And a bunch of boxes of these marine rations.
Cookie-like survival bars that taste like lemon, but they have a
full calorie and nutrient profile. There are a
bunch
of
lemon survival cookies, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“Wire?” Delores asked.

“Yep. Stuff that can be used to make chicken
fencing.”

“Excellent, and what about that way?”
Delores said, pointing to the darkened tunnel entrance that headed
to the north.

“That’s the way we’re going.”

“So let’s go, then.” She put her hands into
her pockets nervously, but then immediately pulled them out,
expecting him to walk in front of her.

Ellis caught her by the hand. “Listen. You
should know that this northward tunnel almost certainly passes
under the Solekeep at some point. And tunneling under a river is
dangerous, very dangerous business. That’s why I was checking it
all out first.”

“And what did you find?” Delores asked. He
was still holding her hand.

Ellis shook his head. “I’m not sure. It’s a
curious thing. The tunnel just ends about sixty feet in. It
terminates in a pond of water.” He noticed he was still holding her
hand, and he dropped it awkwardly.

“Water?”

“Yep.”

“Like maybe the tunnel collapsed?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know. I’d just
found it when you called me.”

Delores thought about it for a moment, and
in the illumination of his headlight Ellis saw the moment when the
girl —the young lady—made up her mind to plow forward. She didn’t
say anything, she just nodded to herself.

Ellis led the way and in under a minute they
were standing before a pool of dark, almost stark-still water,
maybe twelve feet across. The far side of the small pond was a
sheer tunnel wall. A dead end.

“What could it be?” Delores asked as she
scanned the pool and the far wall with her light. “That wall is
chiseled out like the rest of the walls. It ended there, on
purpose.”

“Right,” Ellis said.

“And this pool doesn’t look to be from any
epic collapse of the river. The ceiling and walls are intact. And a
collapse would have filled all of these tunnels up to the level of
the river.”

“Right again,” Ellis said.

“That means this pool is here on purpose,
which means one of two things. Either this is the extent of the
tunnel system, and maybe they put this pool here as a spare water
cistern—”

“Or?”

“Or, the tunnel probably continues on the
other side of that wall,”
Delores said.

“You’re a smart girl for only
seventeen.”

“And you’re only five years older than me,”
she said.

Ellis bent over and picked up a small clod
of mottled clay and tossed it into the water. He counted until he
saw bubbles surface on the water.

Twelve. Maybe twelve to fifteen feet deep
.

“Those five years—the difference between my
age and yours—they were lived after the Beginning, so they count
double,” he said.

“I lived those five years too,” Delores
shrugged. “So we’re back where we started. Closer than you’d like…
in years at least.”

“In years,” Ellis repeated.

There was silence for a full minute as the
two friends stared at the water. The surface had gone eerily still
after the disruption from the clod.

“Someone has to dive down there and see if
the tunnel extends through to the other side,” Ellis said.

Delores looked over at Ellis, “And I suppose
you think that someone should be you?”

“I do,” Ellis replied.

~~~

Ellis lowered himself into the cold,
stagnant pool. Though he knew the water had to be around fifty-five
degrees Fahrenheit, it felt icy.

“If someone was walking around down here
with little or no light,” he said through clenched teeth, “and if
they were to fall in here, they’d go in over their heads.
It’
s deep. I don
’t know
how deep, but it’
s
deep.
” He kicked his legs and flexed his muscles against the
cold. “The shock might cause them to freeze or cramp up and they’d
likely drown.” He looked up at Delores and smiled. “And even if
they didn’t drown, they’d be soaked through. Hypothermia would be a
certainty if they didn’t make fire, or get out of these tunnels
fast enough.”

“You’re not making me feel any better about
this,”
Delores said.

“We have to find out if this tunnel goes
through and under the Solekeep,” Ellis said. “If it is a way out,
it is also a way in.”

“Shouldn’t we have started a fire first?”
she asked. “Or maybe we should’ve gotten some blankets and dry
clothes?”

“I
won
’t be down there long, Delores,” Ellis said. “
And I won
’t go any further if the
tunnel goes on. I’ll just be in and out.”

“I
don
’t feel good about this,” she said, shaking her head.

“Well, I’m already in the water. Might as
well take a dive.”

“Make it
quick, Ellis.
”

Ellis nodded his head. “I will. Keep your
light on the water. It won’t do me much good past about eight feet
down, but it’ll help me find my way back up.”

“Will
do.
”

For three days he walked.

Night.

Day. Night.

Day. Night…

The West Texas morning greeted Walker in
furious gusts that tore along the arroyos and across endless wastes
of dry brown sage. There was a white noise silence that seemed to
come from everywhere, but he barely noticed it over the voices of
his murdered friends. The dead and the dying shrieked over and
over, again and again inside his head. Pain, burns, those things
were there, but he’d turned that part of himself off. The part that
felt.

Mind over matter.

You don’t mind…

He’d seen all the faces of his friends.

Seen them as he crawled out from the
wreckage of the burning convoy. Seen what the bikers had done to
the living and the dead.

…It
don
’t matter.

For three days now he’d crossed the land and
seen it as nothing but a cemetery. One big, gigantic cemetery. Dead
farms falling into the wild picked over crops. Dead towns
surrendering to sand and blasted by the wind and heat. A dead city
in the distance like the shadow of some ancient alien thing. For
three days…

He was tired now.
Tired enough to finally
sleep
, he tried to tell himself. Tired enough to let down his
guard for the barest amount of time a man with revenge on his mind
could afford to. In a small, sandy depression out of the wind, he
set down the old Lapua sniper rifle, wrapped in burlap to protect
it from the sand and dust that carried everything in it as though
the world were ending all over again. He set it down against a low
broken rock.

“Everything’
s broken,
” he commented, fighting to stay conscious
as a rising blackness threatened to take him. After a moment, it
passed.

“Why?” he whispered.

Why, what? he answered without words. Why,
what?

Why fight it? Might not be so bad, and…
what’s left, anyway?

He eased down into the small depression. He
could see the broken rock was part of some forgotten fieldstone
wall that marched off through the racing wind and swirling dust in
the north. The wind rose a notch, howling. Keening.

Why?

He popped the tin of salve, its smell
medicinal. He didn’t even know if it would do any good for the
burns on his arm. His neck. His leg. Then he eased off the dusty,
brown leather trench and began to smear the medicine on his burns.
His neck. His face. He’d forgotten about the side of his face. He
smeared it there and all the other places he’d been burned. When he
was done, he took the 9mm from out of one of the trench pockets and
held it with his good hand. He thought about how he would sleep.
Where the gun needed to be while he slept in case someone was there
when he awoke. Where the rifle needed to be if he needed to get to
it next. Once the 9mm was empty.

Whoever came for him would go for the rifle
first. Sure enough. They’d see it as a prize and head straight for
it and if he heard them moving near his head, then…

He lay down with the pistol at his side. In
his mind he visualized hearing them coming. The mustachioed bikers.
He’d play possum and wait… wait… then… POW. There were four bullets
in the 9mm.

Five in the Lapua.

Nine rounds to kill every one of the
bikers.

He pulled the trench over him. Like a
blanket. Like a body bag. Like a final rest. Then he closed his
eyes and felt sleep and fatigue come rushing past the pain of the
burns and the three day walk and the faces of the dead.

He let it all go…

…and thought, nine rounds to kill them
all.

And, just before the darkness…

That’s why.

Vargas didn’t drink as much as he used to.
Then again, there wasn’t as much to drink as there used to be. Sure
there was Mexican Red to smoke. There was always a lot of dope to
get loaded on. A lot. Even the high-powered chronic the gang cared
for in their hidden little farms, cared for more than their lost
families and heartbroken mothers, was abundant. But, Vargas was
tired of weed.

He’d kill for a bottle of bottom shelf
tequila.