“Down, get down!” he shouted, dropping to his knees. The darkness heaved, the floor’s texture changing from something smooth—poured concrete—to the unmistakable grit of earth over rock.
No, no, no. Can I think it away? He was gasping, his chest heaving like bellows, trying to pull in air that dwindled by the second. Forests; I like trees and open sky and water.
But that’s not where his nightmares lived, and it was too late anyway. The blackness was hardening, his monsters taking their shape. He heard the others thudding to the dirt as the darkness rushed in, growing close and tight, cinching down, clenching and knotting to a fist. For a split second, Bode thought the black space meant to flatten them. Then, the sense of pressure eased as the ink of this new space stopped flowing.
Casey: “Has it … it’s over, right?”
“I think so.” Emma sounded as out of breath as Bode. “It was like the roof collapsed.”
“It’s not a roof.” Bode raised himself to a squat, relieved that his head and shoulders didn’t meet up with anything solid. Fumbling out a flashlight, he thumbed it to life. A spear of blue light pierced the black, and he saw exactly what he expected. Of course he would.
This was a nightmare he knew by heart.
2
THE TUNNEL WAS not perfectly round. No VC tunnel ever was. The spider holes where snipers and guards waited were two-foot squares cut out of camouflaged earth, wide enough for a very small guy like the average VC or a runt like Bode. Big guys only got hung up. This was good for Charlie, but bad if you were an average Joe looking to make it back to the States in something other than a pine box shoved into luggage class.
Once past the spidey holes, the tunnels opened up a little to a max width of about three or four feet, but they went on forever in a multilevel rock warren of passageways and larger rooms where up to a few hundred VC lived for months at a time. The air was normally very bad, too, smoky and stale and heavy with the odors of human waste and the stink of too many people coughing, breathing, pissing, shitting, spitting in too small a space.
Barely enough room to turn and fight. Bode felt sweat bead on his neck and face and between his shoulder blades. He was very conscious of the club stuck at a now very awkward and uncomfortable angle in his waistband. Slipping it free, he choked up on the wood, but even his reach was too long. Try to take a swing, and he’d be chunking out earth.
“This tunnel’s pretty tight,” Eric said in a tone that had about as much heat as a weatherman’s. “Are they all like this?”
“No, they get worse,” Bode said. Lucky to have that devil dog along. Guy had the temperature of a flounder, or a lot of experience roping back fear. Whatever his story, that Eric stayed calm helped Bode keep his cool. “Down deep, you’re on your belly the whole time. If this is the same, though, we’ll get to rooms, eventually, and they open right up.” He paused. “We should probably cut the lights.”
“Why?” Casey asked.
“Because they’re like wearing a sign: Shoot me.”
“How are we going to see?”
“We don’t. We go by feel.”
Eric shook his head. “I honestly don’t think a guy with a gun is the worst thing we’re going to run into down here. We’ll make better time if we leave the lights on. Besides, I’d kind of like to see what I’m up against, if you know what I mean.”
Because we will have to fight. Eric didn’t have to say it for Bode to know he was right. “But we don’t even know if Rima and Lizzie are here. This is from my head.”
“They’re here,” Casey said.
“Yeah?” Bode looked at Casey with fresh curiosity. When he took my hand; it happened when Casey touched me. “How do you know that?”
“I just know.” Casey’s face was a glimmering silver oval. “Lizzie, I can’t tell, but Rima is close by.” He fingered the scarf. “I just know,” he repeated.
Eric regarded his brother for a long moment. “Can you tell us which way, Case?”
Casey’s tongue flickered over his lips. Then he gave a jerky nod and pointed to the tunnel beyond Eric. “Down there.”
They set out, Bode in the lead with Casey on his heels, then Emma and finally Eric, bringing up the rear. They shambled like hunchbacks, their boots grinding and scuffing against the hard-packed earth; the pillowcase, with its gasoline-filled Swiss Miss can and peanut butter jar, sloshed and gurgled against Bode’s left thigh.
Emma’s voice reached him from behind. “Hey, guys, the tunnel’s getting larger. I can stand up, and it’s not really all dark. Look at the walls.”
She was right. The walls glowed: not brightly, but with a soft green luminescence that bled from the blackness itself.
“That’s so weird,” Eric said, and then gave a soft laugh. “Well, weirder. Bode, you ever seen a tunnel like this before?”
“No.” Bode thought about those muscular tentacles that coiled up from the inky snow to drag Chad to whatever lived beneath. “Is this thing going to break up? Like, are there too many of us in one spot?”
A pause. “I don’t think so,” Emma said. “You go to the trouble to take Lizzie and Rima, and then you kill us all at once? Makes no sense. This is about something else.”
“A test?” Eric said to her. “To see if you can get us here?”
“But we are here,” she said.
“Can you get us back out the way we came?” Bode asked. Stupid; he should’ve thought about that earlier. “You know, do that color thing?”
She made a face. “I don’t think so. Don’t ask me how to describe it, but this doesn’t have the same feel of … of potential. Like energy you can mold and use. I think this place is set.” She peered at him through the gloom. “Don’t beat yourself up about this, Bode. If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been one of us.”
“Then what is this?” asked Casey. “A way of picking us off one by one?”
No one answered—mostly, Bode thought, because, yes or no, either way, you lose. Although he agreed with Eric. This had the feel of a trial by fire of some sort. He wished Battle would tell him what. For a dead guy, Battle knew a great deal about life. But the sarge, who had lived inside Bode’s head for so long, was silent and had been for quite some time now, even before the barn. Yet he’d been here; Bode could always feel him, this quiet burn in his head like the flicker of a pilot light. After the fight on the snow, though, Battle had only … listened? Maybe not even that; Bode just couldn’t tell.