My left shoe slid on a clump of something foul, and I caught myself in time to avoid falling into the slow-moving river of grayish-green sludge in the central floor trench.
“Almost took a swim.” Andrea giggled from just ahead of me, illuminated only by a green plastic glowstick tied to her belt. “Don’t worry, we’re about to come to some out-of-commission tunnels, so it should get cleaner from here on.”
I wrinkled my nose at the horrid aroma, a mixture of sour milk and baby diarrhea, and tried to breath through my mouth as much as possible. “I thought these were storm drains? Where’s all the raw sewage coming from?”
“Black Oak got hit pretty bad, once the mutants made their way north.” Tex paused in the lead of our little trio, his forest-green irises focused on the curved tunnel ceiling above us as a rumbling echoed right overhead, tires rolling by in what sounded like a heavy military convoy. “We had to clear out some of the poorer districts house-by-house. Those suburbs you saw driving in? They were all part of a hive at one point.”
Something moved in a branch tunnel off to my left, a subtle clatter like wood on cement, and the hairs not covered by the bandage on my neck stood on end. “Hive of what?”
With her own plastic light taped to the stock of her rifle, Andrea scanned the dark in wary sweeps. “Mailboxes.”
Both eyebrows bunched higher on my forehead.
Come again?
Even in the dark, she seemed to sense my dumfounded stare, and Andrea coughed on the noxious fumes of our surroundings as we walked on. “They move like crabs, with their innards in the box, and their legs made from the wooden post. The females lay eggs in corpses they bury under the dirt, and once the babies are full-grown, the creeps gnaw their way out. If they can’t find a regular mailbox to inhabit, they grow a wooden one around themselves like a shell, and can even imitate paint colors on it to blend in. They’re completely silent, almost indistinguishable from a normal mailbox, and coordinate like soldier ants when they’re hungry. ELSAR had all of them torn up once they realized what was going on, but some escaped, so always watch your back in places like this.”
I shuddered and waved the cheap yellow penlight I’d been given at the inky blackness behind me like a magical staff to ward off evil. “I would have thought you guys could wipe out anything with all the people here. I mean yeah, ELSAR sucks, but nobody likes the freaks. How come they haven’t done a full sweep of the sewer system?”
“You’re talking about a bunch of self-important bureaucrats with Stalin-level power.” Tex snorted, and shined a pocket flashlight in a T intersection, before heading right. “It took the construction crews forever to get the wall built, since the suits kept siphoning off materials to build their field headquarters. Of course, that meant the outskirts had to be evacuated and people moved into downtown, since the swarms never stopped coming. With close to 2,000 refugees flooding in from the surrounding countryside, there wasn’t enough room to house everyone, so corporate ordered us to just dump people in warehouses, abandoned buildings, anywhere we could put them. Naturally, those places attracted mutants, and so we basically fed the bugs for days.”
“Not to mention the hospitals got slammed with cholera because refugees were dumping their waste buckets down the storm drains.” Andrea’s shadow looked back at me in the dark, and the green aura of her glowstick shone on a somber expression. “When my folks got sick, we couldn’t get any antibiotics since the medics were ordered to hold all lifesaving drugs for wounded soldiers. Sheriff Wurnauw was already hunting for me, and my younger sister couldn’t make enough working for the city to pay any the black-market prices, so we had to bury them in the backyard. Including the survivors from the countryside, there used to be close to 12,000 people in this town; as of last week, we’re back down to 9,000, and still dropping.”
I’d never thought about drinking water during my tranquil childhood in Kentucky. If anything, I always turned my nose up at the chlorinated streams piped into our sink, and guzzled bottled water without a care as to how luxurious such a thing was. Even New Wilderness had plenty of wells, rain barrels, and lakes that provided us with all the fresh water we needed, and there was enough firewood in the abundant forests to boil it for safety. Here, however, trapped in the concrete bones of a dying civilization, people couldn’t boil water without electricity, natural gas, or some kind of fuel. All wastewater cycled back into the reservoir feeding the town, and with the power shortages hampering any advanced sewage treatment techniques, old diseases were rearing their ugly heads once more. We humans had thought ourselves too smart to die the way our ancestors did; after all, we’d invented smart phones, laptops, remote-controlled coffee makers. Why should we worry about such absurd things as cholera when anyone could just summon water magically from a tap?
Fools. That’s what our children will call us. Spoiled fools who didn’t know what we had.
We carried on in silence for a while, snaking through various off-shoots, some tunnels big enough to stand up in, others low enough that we had to crouch. True to Andrea’s prediction, it did get cleaner the further in we went, but greasy vines stuck to the cement walls, strange fungi in places that glowed with fluorescent arrays of color. Pink moss, green toadstools, and orange mold grew in patches, and some of them seemed to move on their own in reaction to our lights, as if recoiling from the electric beams. Even here, in the bowels of our decaying modern world, everything was changing.
Lost in my musings, I bumped into Andrea’s back, and my face heated up in embarrassment. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She sighed and angled her head toward the path in front of us. “We’re going to have to turn around anyway. They laid mines here.”
Her light shone on several round black disks pockmarking the cement ahead, their center split open to reveal a network of wires that coating the ground in a tangled web. Dust on them showed that they’d been here for a few days, but I had little doubt they would work if we dared to try and move them, or touch one of the tripwires.
“There’s no way through.” Tex grumbled and scratched at his beard in frustration. “We’re going to have to come back later and detonate these. Course, that might bring the whole tunnel down on top of us, and the street with it. If they keep this up, they’re going to blow the whole town to splinters right under themselves.”
Both he and Andrea shuffled around me, but as I turned to leave, something caught my eye.
Little sprouts pierced the cracks between the aging concrete, more of the strange fungi spread out in miniature forests of color between the mines. In contrast to the deadly black steel of our world, I had to admit they were rather beautiful in their own way, and I crouched on the edge of the minefield to get a better look.
Hang on . . . why are you all in line?
Like they were drawn by a magnet, my eyes fastened on the weaving lights of the mushrooms, curved in and around the wires wherever there was space. The more I concentrated, some of the darkness lightened, the inky shadows turned a more visible gray, and my ears sharpened. I could hear every drip in the tunnel ahead, every bead of moisture that slid down the grimy walls, and the stretching of the fungi as they pushed millimeter by millimeter through the earth beneath. I felt the humidity on my skin, the blood running through my veins, and even small snaps and pops inside my skull, like little fireworks constantly going off in a steady rhythm. I could taste more than just dust, mold, and the aroma of sewage; there was the freshness of the plants, the sweat of my companions a few yards away, the industrial grease in the sockets of the mines where the wires had been packed. Like I’d been doused with a firehose of senses, it flooded over me, and I sat there in a primal crouch, breathless at a sudden revelation.
A path.
The little bunches of fungus glowed brighter around the mines, their colors more pronounced in the places where the wires didn’t touch. They didn’t like the static, I realized, the subaudible whine of the electric fuse on the explosives as irritating to them as the smell of sewage was to us. Mutated or not, they were little scraps of life just like me, and this time we were on the same side.
“There’s a way through.” I gasped, almost laughing to myself in amazement.
Andrea and Tex stopped to glance back at me in confusion.
“Those are anti-personnel mines.” Tex shook his head and swirled the beam of his flashlight at the nearest device. “One finger on the wires, and we’re meat soup. We’ll find another way around.”
Overcome by a surge of boldness that I didn’t know was possible, I slid the long antique rifle onto my back via its sling and stood to flex my legs. “ELSAR might expect us to do that. They’d never figure we could get through it, so if we cross, they won’t follow. All we have to do is stay on the mushrooms.”
Andrea’s eyes widened, and she reached to try and pull me back. “Wait, Hannah, don’t . . .”
I stepped out onto the first patch and held my breath as the fungi crunched under my heel like a bag of celery.
Nothing.
With a careful eye, I examined the next clump of moss, and took another step.
Still nothing.
Taut silver wires hugged close to my shoes, each move enough to make my pulse race, but somehow, I didn’t feel afraid. I had confidence in the tiny organisms under my feet and knew they wouldn’t steer me wrong. How could they? They hated the nasty clumps of metal as much as we did.
My foot hit the smooth concrete on the other side, and I exhaled in relief.
I can’t believe I just did that.
“You’re insane.” Arms folded at the opposite bank, Andrea made a hard swallow, and eyed the dinner-plate-sized chunks of TNT.
“Just walk where I did.” I nodded with a smile, still high on my adrenaline, sensory perception on overdrive. “You can see my footprints in the moss. It’s perfectly safe.”
They exchanged bewildered looks, but both picked their way forward, brows covered in nervous sweat, limbs shaking in terror as they stepped around the tripwires. Andrea made gagging sounds as the plants crushed under her shoes, and Tex kept eyeballing the mines with tense muscles working in his jaw.
When at last he staggered onto the safe edge of cement beside Andrea and I, Tex wiped at his pale forehead with one uniform sleeve. “How did you see that?”
At his question, my confidence dissolved, the adrenaline drained from my veins, and I had a rush of lightheadedness. “I . . . I just . . .”
“That’s why they wanted you, isn’t it?” Andrea gaped, understanding in her blue irises as she stared into my golden ones. “You can sense all that stuff, the mutants, the plants. Like, special hearing, or something?”
Or something.
I shrugged with the sudden feeling as though I’d come to school naked and dropped both eyes to my shoes. “I don’t know how it works. I . . . I haven’t been this way very long. It just kinda hits me out of nowhere sometimes, and I can sort of see everything.”
When they stayed quiet for a long half-minute, I dared to look up, and found them blinking at me with wide-eyed shock.
“Change of plans.” Tex tugged at his jacket collar and marched on down the tunnel. “Soon as we get to the Castle, she’s going to see the professor. He’ll know what to make of this.”
Wordlessly, Andrea followed him, and I trailed on her heels, unsure of what to think. My new senses were still somewhat foreign to me, and this only reminded me that, in some ways, I wasn’t fully human anymore. Like a toy out of the box without its instruction manual, I had no idea just what I could and couldn’t do, and that frightened me to a certain extent. I’d shattered a mirror at New Wilderness with just my scream. I’d spotted a path between the mines that no one else had been able to see. I was part homo sapien and part homo melius, but in that sense, I didn’t feel at home anywhere now.
Focus. You can’t afford to start feeling sorry for yourself again. These people need help, so you’re going to help them.
Determined to keep the melancholy thoughts at bay, I hefted my rifle on my shoulder, and trudged on through the dark.
At some point, we emerged into a much wider tunnel with no central floor trench and much more in the way of cobwebs. Massive iron grates cut the tunnel off right in front of us, the bars peeling with orange flakes of rust, and bearing a sheet-metal sign on one corner that read ‘Danger: Restricted Area’ on it with a falling rocks symbol. Sandbags had been piled up behind the grates, and as we approached, half a dozen lights shot out to blind us.
“Halt! Who goes there?” A voice barked, and several black rifle muzzles stuck out between the bars.
Tex raised his hands with a weary smile. “Dostoyevsky.”
This seemed to be some sort of code, and the lights swiveled to the floor along with the gun barrels. With the harsh glare out of my eyes, I could make out several armed people behind the bags, this time a mix between older men in their fifties and some younger kids in their early teens. Like us, they wore mostly civilian clothes, but sported captured ELSAR bulletproof vests M4 carbines, and Kevlar helmets with night vision goggles. A belt-fed machine gun, which looked old enough to have seen at least one of the world wars, sat behind a firing slot cut into the bars, manned by a fellow with three fingers missing on his left hand. Another of the sentries wore a set of pressurized tanks mounted on a backpack frame, with a homemade nozzle in his hands that was already blackened with soot. Clearly, the resistance wanted no one and nothing to get through this checkpoint, and I spotted a wooden box labeled ‘grenades’ beside one of the younger combatants.
A heavy-set man with a thick mustache emerged from the barricade, clothed in army-surplus camouflage, and peered between the bars at us.
“Sorry about that, Tex, I thought it was the mercs.” He let slide a jolly grin and fished a set of keys out of his trouser pockets. “They stuck a bunch of mines in tunnel four on Tuesday, so I figured they might have wandered this way. How did you get through?”
Tex jerked a thumb at me, and sauntered to where the guard opened a man-door in the grate for us. “Brun found a way across. We’ll go back later to mark it. Have you seen the professor?”
“He’s in the library, as usual.” The mustachioed man locked the gate behind us and squinted out into the dark tunnels with a suspicious frown. “I guess Fred’s group found a nest of Mailboxes in the drains up by the old feed mill. Prof’s researching some kind of Greek napalm we can put in the flamethrowers to help burn them out.”
As we passed the others, one of the men jumped to his feet, and blocked my path. “Where did you get that?”
Astonished at the sudden display of hostility, it took me a second to realize he meant the bolt-action rifle across my back, and I gulped. “I, uh . . . I picked it up.”
Even with the shadows of the underground, I couldn’t help but see his scruffy expression crumple, and the imposing man took a stunned step backward. “What?”
“She didn’t know.” Andrea swooped in between us and placed a hand on the man’s bulky upper arm. “I’m sorry, I should have said something before we got here but . . . it happened out on Darrow Avenue. It was quick. I’m so sorry, Clark.”
Oh Hannah, you moron.
Guilt sank through me, and I shut my eyes in a self-loathing cringe. I hadn’t considered that the dead boy whose weapon I’d happily adopted might have been someone’s son or brother. Too focused on my own survival, I’d grabbed the rifle without question, but it only made sense that someone would recognize it. Then too did I remember the dried blood on my face, likely from the first boy who’d been hit by the shrapnel bombs, a stark reminder of what happened to those who were caught in ELSAR’s crosshairs.
Blinking hard, the man unhooked a brown leather holster from his belt, which he thrust my way. “Here. I know it’s not much but please, trade me. That Mosin was my boy’s first gun and he . . . he was all I had left.”
Without hesitation, I whipped the long gun from my back and pushed it into his calloused hands, shame heavy on my heart. “I am so sorry, I didn’t know, I wasn’t trying to—”
“It’s fine.” He snatched the rifle, wiped at his eyes with one big thumb, and shoved the pistol into my hands instead. “Thanks for . . . for bringing it back.”
Turning on his heel, the man darted into a nearby green army tent that had been set up along one wall and vanished from sight.
“Damn shame.” The mustachioed man shook his head. “Tim was a nice kid. He and my Cassie were good friends. She’ll take it pretty hard.”
Seeing my crestfallen expression, Andrea guided me toward a small red golf cart that sat parked near the tent, its top cut down to fit the claustrophobic spaces of the tunnel. “Can we borrow your trolley? I promise I’ll return it before shift change. This is kind of important.”
With a congenial nod, the head guard waved us off, and Tex, Andrea and I climbed into the little vehicle to speed through the decrepit passage.
Slouched in the back seat, I hugged both arms around myself, and bit my lip in regret. The aged Colt weighed heavier on my hip than it should have, the steel and wood imbued with the cost of a young boy’s life. How many families had been shattered by this war, how many hopes and dreams ripped apart? I thought back to Koranti’s voracious ambitions for the future, Sean’s plans for an offensive soon, and Kaba’s resolution to continue his fight from the shadows. Everyone wanted to see their side triumph, but it seemed that always required someone else to lose, and Chris’s warning about Rhodesia rang fresh in my mind. True, I had no love for the Organs, and wanted more than anything to see them burn for what they’d done, but what about the soldiers who had shown me kindness when bringing me in on my first day? What about men like Tex, who were good on the inside, and had been duped into fighting for an organization that viewed them as pawns? They had families too. What would become of their wives and children if this conflict dragged on, and we eventually fought our way to victory over ELSAR? Would Koranti even bother to tell them the truth of why their husbands or fathers died, or would he just send a condolence check in the mail with some vague excuse? Would they even get anything at all?
What will my parents get? Even if Matt and Carla made it back to Louisville, there’s no way they’ll tell mom and dad the truth. They probably think I’m dead.
With such notions clogged in my brain, I sighed as the shadows of the tunnel flew by, and tried not to picture my parents in tears on our living room couch, mourning over a lie they could never fully understand.