Digger 1.0 (17 page)

“Remember bowls? Piles and piles of gravy
and chicken and taco meat piled into a bowl. Remember “all you can
eat?” Remember the word “endless” and the restaurants that promised
it? Remember
free refills
.” Now it is a command and not a
question.

Remember greed.

Remember gluttony.

Remember pride.

The virtues of fast food. Industrially
raised. Factory farmed. Bulk purchase and get it cheaper.

They chase him through the sand, shale and
scrub, following his maniacal cackle and meaty whispers. They chase
him as only a lunatic could be chased, because only a lunatic could
look back and see a stadium-sized crowd of starving zombies or
living people stumbling after him, convinced that he knows where
the food is. Or is the food. Only a lunatic could see a mob that
size and not go insane with fear, curling up like a frightened
child.

Only a lunatic.

He whispers in the night beneath the windy
wail and cackles as he launches himself through the sand and sage
and up along moonlit ridgelines with a hungry army of
almost-skeletons in tow.

The Man in Black cackles and the night wails
and everything is going as planned.

In Texas, things are getting dark.

Chapter
22

The frigid water stabbed him with a thousand
knives, but he braced himself against it. His hands found the far
wall, and for a second he thought he felt smooth metal. It was
flat, maybe angle iron framing of some kind. Hard to tell. His body
blocked the light from Delores’s headlamp and the cold had affected
the acuity of his touch… but there was definitely something
there.

Tunnel bracing?

Who could know? Whoever’d built the tunnels
had been pretty clever. That much was clear. All along the
subterranean channels he’d found ways the tunnel’s designer had
braced the weaker areas against collapse. Genius, really.
Altogether fantastic. The sort of thing the nightly news or maybe
60 Minutes would have made a feature about if these tunnels had
been found before the collapse.

Perhaps the underwater part needed special
support, thus the metal bracing. Who knew? He wasn’t an engineer,
but whoever dug these tunnels had some serious experience at it.
Had skills. Someone somewhere had lived a life below the surface,
and these tunnels were evidence of it.

That part of it had puzzled Ellis since he’d
found the first tunnel entrance up on Utah. Where did one go to
learn tunnel digging? Was there a special engineer’s track in
college for such things? He knew back before the world went south
that drug dealers and terrorists had constructed quite elaborate
and effective tunnels under borders. Underground there were no
checkpoints, no fences, no gates guarded by men and women with guns
and bombs and dogs.

Up-toppers almost never consider that all
around the world there are underground places. And some of these
subterranean marvels are pretty extensive, almost whole cities,
like under London. Under Atlanta. Under Washington D.C. Under
Moscow. Wine country in California is pocked with underground caves
and extensive tunnels. He’d seen a documentary on that, back before
the up-top went sideways.

Ellis wondered how much of the remaining
world population was living underground in these places right now.
Could whole societies be springing up in the tunnels and
underground cities around the world? The mind can easily chase
after thoughts like that at times like these. Thoughts of survivors
thriving in the down-deep while the world perishes on the surface.
But it didn’t pay to think about the rest of the world for very
long. Not since the Beginning, since the collapse, when the world
had become more local. The world now consisted of what you could
see, who you could talk to, where you could walk or ride.
Everything else was a rumor. Everything else was someone else’s
terror.

He sucked in a final breath and pushed
downward, past the pale shimmering light of Delores’s headlamp,
down into the icy liquid darkness. Once again he forced his mind to
make friends with the black. Shake hands with it. From there until
he hit the bottom he “saw” with his hands only, lightly brushing
the far wall until even that gave way to nothing but chilly water.
He pushed again, and in an instant he touched the bottom.

He gathered himself there, second thoughts
and guesses tugging at his mind. What if this underwater tunnel
went the whole way under the Solekeep? How far was that? Fifty
yards? A hundred? He couldn’t swim that far and make it back on
that one breath. No way. How far should he go before he’d have to
turn back? With just enough air to reach the surface again?

What if the tunnel turned upward, but there
wasn’t a “there” up there? What if it terminated and the whole of
it was still underwater? Could he then still make it back to
Delores?

Back to Delores?
What did that mean?
She’s just a kid!

She’s a young woman
.

That was his dad’s voice, but it was his
too.

Stop it now. Think.

~~~

Ellis cleared his mind and stared northward.
The frigid water was uncomfortable on his eyes, and he blinked
several times trying to focus them in the darkness to no avail. It
was all darkness. For a split second he thought he could see the
slightest shimmer of yellow-orange light, but the glint didn’t
last. Now it was just black. Shroud black. Like the day of
blindness only with no sound. Had he seen light up ahead? Was it
all in his mind?

Just swim.

He pushed off the muddy bottom with his feet
and pulled at the water with his arms, propelling himself forward.
His right foot brushed something that his brain informed him felt
like bones, but in a millisecond the sensation was gone. He brought
his right hand forward and held it out in front of him as he swam
so if he bumped into something he’d feel it and stop in time. He
didn’t need a head gash or any other injury. Not down here.

Ten feet. Fifteen. Then he felt it. The
tunnel turned upward, first at an angle, then straight up. There
was something up there, some flash that might be called light, bent
and dancing by a disturbed surface somewhere. He kicked upward and
his lungs began to ache for air. Now there was a hint of the
yellow, flickering, like a candle’s glow refracting through the
water.

He kicked hard and broke the surface,
sucking in air like it was life itself. There was light from a low,
small fire and as the water ran down Ellis’s face and his eyes
gained focus in the dim orange glow, he settled back in the water
and reached for the ledge to support himself above the water.

There’s a man!

It was an old man; Asian and thin with
almost no hair to speak of except for a thin, stringy gray mustache
and a beard just hanging onto his chin. The man rolled off an army
cot, landing on his hands and knees. The old man looked up and his
gaze locked on Ellis. Before Ellis could think to speak or shout,
the old man lunged toward Ellis who pushed back from the ledge in
response. The man pushed a metal lever and there was a sharp, rusty
creak and groan.

Ellis looked up and saw a heavy metal grate,
hinged just above the surface on the back wall as it raced
horizontally toward him. In the split second he had to grasp what
was happening, Ellis, on instinct alone, ducked just under the
water and the grate clamped down shut with an angry clang only
inches above the surface.

Just.

Maybe four or five inches above the
water.

Ellis surfaced again and had to turn his
head slightly to suck in air. As he did, he saw the old man
reaching for something. A stick or a spear. Ellis gulped a hasty
breath, ducked under the water again and pushed off the metal grate
with his feet. It was solid. Locked down. He pulled water with his
arms and kicked with his feet as his mind raced with thoughts too
jumbled to help him.

His head hit the mud at the bottom and again
he thought he felt bones or smooth sticks, something deathly and
corporeal and just a remnant of whatever else it used to be, but he
pushed off again southward hoping the small breath he took would
get him back to the surface on the other side.

~~~

Delores shook.

All of her shook. Body and soul shuddered
from the cold and fear and not a little from love and confusion
too. Ellis had been out of sight for less than a minute, but in
that minute the things that made her shake now permeated both her
mind and her thin clothing. So she shivered and waited. And
worried. Scared almost to breathe until she saw him come up
again.

She knew how she felt about Ellis. She’d
always loved him in one way or another. Everyone knew it, except
maybe Ellis himself. Five years ago she’d been a scared young girl,
not even a teenager, and she’d seen him as almost a father and
protector, but in those five years since, Ellis had stayed the same
while she’d grown into… a woman. At least that’s how it seemed to
her. But Ellis still only saw her as a little girl. As a daughter,
maybe. That, too, was how it seemed to her. And isn’t that all that
really matters in the heart?

Hearts are bad tools for seeing things
aright.

“Think with your mind and not your
feelings,” Ellis was always saying. When it came to him, every part
of her agreed, but she didn’t feel (or think) she could ever let
him know how she felt. She didn’t want it to get weird.

It would get weird.

Chuck was the most obvious match. Nearest
her age and not disinterested. But who can tell the heart what it
should want?

Seventeen though, now, and a woman, and
Ellis down there below the water and maybe not coming back,
ever.

What if that were true?
Delores asked
herself.

She’d dive in there and find him and maybe
die with him. That’s what she’
d
do.

Think with your mind
.

But she couldn’t do that. The rest of the
family needed her.

So there you go
, she thought.
You
love him, but you also love the rest of them. It’s all one.

She shivered again.

“C’mon Ellis,” she whispered. “Come back
now.”

And then he broke through the water, manic,
sucking in air. His eyes met hers and spoke to her silently.
Something. And then a metal grate, like a fence, only flat and
solid, slid out from the far wall. It slid hard and fast and it hit
Ellis in the head. He went under, but the grate kept sliding.

She leapt. She didn’t think. She felt. And
she leapt.

Terror gripped her. Immeasurable terror, but
still she leapt. Airborne for a moment and then tumbling.

Too late. The heavy steel grate, thick and
rusted, crisscrossed with rebar into a mesh of three inch squares,
closed over the small pond. She landed on it heavily, but the grate
was solid and didn’t give. It suspended her four inches above the
water and when she looked down she could barely see the dark bulk
of Ellis’s form just underneath the surface. She stuck her hand
into the dark and cold water and felt for him. His hand clasped
hers and he broke the surface, then just as quickly he released her
hand and gripped the metal grate so he could hold his head, or part
of it, above the water level. With his other hand he felt around to
the back of his head where the grate had struck him. He brought
that hand to his face and they both looked. No blood.

He gulped air and when he did a returning
wave made him swallow a little water. He coughed and rubbed his
eyes with his free hand.

“Ellis!” she said, panic rising up in
her.

His lip quivered uncontrollably, a sign of
the onset of hypothermia. The first time he tried to speak, his
teeth chattered and his voice left him with no effect. His eyes
raced around and as he studied the grate and the full reality of
his predicament settled on him like an ominous fog. Like a spider
whose prey freezes as the venom begins its work.

“Run,” he said through his clenched
teeth.

“But—”

“There’s someone down here!” he gasped.
“Run!”

The End of Episode Three…

Delores stumbled through the darkness.

Her headlight flickered and cast phantoms in
the shadows as she ran, but provided very little depth perception.
Her heart pounded in her chest and she stumbled twice when she
misjudged her footing on the uneven tunnel floor. The second
stumble sent her sliding to the ground, arms and legs akimbo, her
face glancing off the hard dirt leaving a scrape embedded with
whitish clay and dirt along her right cheek. She wiped at her face
with a sleeve and gasped.

Now, for the first time since Ellis had
shouted “run,” she heard herself and gauged her own fear. She was
grunting, almost a high pitched bark or squeal with each breath
that echoed through the tunnel and the sounds she made startled
her.

She looked around, expecting that someone
might be chasing her, and when she saw no one coming she pushed up
from the ground and stumbled forward again. Another ten steps and
her light illuminated the rebar ladder that crawled dizzily up
toward Utah, running past the horizontal tunnel that led back
toward the barn. She’d have to decide then which way she should
go.

For now, she focused on the ladder and
lunged at it, unable to control her hands completely or to calm
herself for the upward climb. In her jumble of thoughts somehow she
knew that if she didn’t slow down and concentrate, she’d never make
it up the ladder. She’d never reach help.

And somewhere back there, locked in the
chilly waters, Ellis was dying in bone-chillingly cold water.