In the meantime, we had to put as much space as possible between us and them.
All this time I’d been thinking of the tunnel like a sewer tunnel, with yucky water and rats and slime and whatever. Now I was like, I wish. This tunnel had been hand-dug by one crazy person a little at a time. After the initial hole, we couldn’t stand up. We couldn’t even stoop. The four of us crawled, single file, on our hands and knees, and there were plenty of times when it was hard for me to get my shoulders through.
And poor Nate. It’s possible to crawl with a full-length cast on your leg, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t fast, and it hurts like a son of a bitch, given the language that was floating up to me from his position in the rear.
I was going first, with the Kid’s lighter. I flicked it on every so often to reveal the disheartening view of more seemingly endless, tiny tunnel. I thought uncomfortably about how we had only the Kid’s story to go on, that he thought it had caved in at one point, and how in the end, his dad had gotten captured anyway.
But I kept crawling. Small rocks embedded in the dirt bruised my knees almost unbearably. Every so often there was a large boulder that the Kid’s dad had been forced to tunnel around. At the first one I flicked on the lighter and saw words scratched into the rock: “Gimli, son of Gloin, ha ha ha,” and a date from six years ago.
The Kid was right behind me, and I shone the flame on it.
“Was your dad’s name Gimli?” I asked.
The Kid frowned. “No! You think my dad had some weird-ass name? His name was Ebenezer!”
I shrugged and kept crawling. On another boulder, the Kid’s dad had carved, “Screw the United!” and we all cheered quietly. To save the lighter fuel, we mostly crawled in the utter, complete, intense blackness, using it only when we seemed to hit a dead end or a rock, and the first time I almost brained myself on a heavy tree root that had grown down into the tunnel.
There was no sense of time. I couldn’t tell if we were burrowing deeper underground or going in circles or heading right back to the prison. After it felt like we’d been crawling for an hour, my nerves started fraying. Like, what if a truck rolled over us? We would be crushed. What if the tunnel just collapsed? The idea of dying down here buried under a ton of dirt was possibly more terrifying than the first time facing Tim in the ring.
“How much longer we gotta go?” the Kid asked. He was panting, as all of us were. “I cain’t breathe.”
My eyes opened wide in the darkness. Oh, God, was there enough oxygen down here? My heart seized as I suddenly remembered folks digging wells, back home. More than one man had passed out from hitting a pocket of gas—natural methane, which you can’t see or smell. If he didn’t get hauled out fast, he’d die.
Well, gas was flammable—one way to get rid of it was to throw a lit match in the well and stand back. Way back.
I’d been using the lighter. If I used it again, I could blow us all into fish bait. Shit. The idea of not being able to at least check where we were going—
The Kid couldn’t breathe—
I couldn’t use the lighter—
Cassie had whispered that Nate was about to pass out—
I had to get out of here.
I had to get out of here.
I had to—
91
CASSIE
MY HEAD BUMPED INTO THE KID’S backside, which was how I knew that he’d stopped.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Becca’s stopped,” he said, sounding close to tears.
“Beck?” I called.
“Yeah?”
It was just one word, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I knew Becca’s voice, and her voice now told me she was close to hysteria. The last time I’d heard it was when she’d come across a big copperhead in one of Pa’s cornfields. Fearless, Ridiculous Rebecca had been frozen in terror, her eyes locked on the snake as it rose up, swaying slowly.
I’d screamed, Becca, run! And she’d said, I can’t, in this tiny voice. The snake was uncoiling and moving slowly toward her—into striking range.
I had circled around to her, cutting a wide swath around the snake, and came up behind her. The snake looked at me.
“Let’s run,” I whispered.
“I can’t,” she whispered back, tortured. “My feet can’t move.”
“Okay. I’m going to grab your arm and pull as hard as I can,” I told her. “Then I’m going to run. You can either get your feet moving or be dragged.”
“It’s going to come after us,” she whispered.
“We can outrun it.”
It had worked. I don’t know if the snake tried to strike at us when we turned tail, but I know we ran like jackrabbits for a long, long time.
I couldn’t grab her arm this time. I couldn’t drag her.
“Keep crawling, Beck,” I said. Nate had caught up to me by that point. I knew he was close to giving up. He’d been dragging that cast all this time, and twice I’d heard him barfing from the pain.
“Flick dat lighter,” the Kid said.
“I can’t,” she said in a small, tense voice. “Well gas.”
My heart dropped down into my stomach. Of course. Oh, my God. No wonder she was frozen. I felt myself start to panic, the darkness starting to smother me. What could I say to get her moving again? Like, “I don’t wanna die down here?” Or, “What’s the matter, is your ass too big to fit?” Anything, I had to say anything!
“Beck?” I said.
“Yeah?” Her voice trembled.
“I’d like to see Pa again,” I said softly. “Just once. You know?”
She was silent.
A minute later I heard a sound like Becca was swallowing a sob, then she started crawling, her knees scraping the damp earth, her head and shoulders hitting the sides and top of the tunnel. Ahead of me, the Kid followed her.
“Cassie?” Nate whispered just as I was starting to move. “I don’t think I’m going to make it. You guys head on without me. If they get this far I’ll try to stall them.”
Oh, not him, too.
Somehow I kept a grip on my temper and my panic, and took a firm, no-nonsense tone.
“Nate, if we get out of here, I’m going to totally, totally make out with you,” I said briskly. “I’ve been wanting to, and if you give up or die and not let me, I will kick your ass.”
There were a few moments of silence.
“You’re in my way,” he said.
“I thought so,” I said, and began crawling as fast as I could.
92
SO WE HAD PRETTY MUCH decided to crawl until we died, no matter what. A tree root gouged my face, but what was more dripping blood? I was used to it. The hand I’d punched Strepp with was so swollen I couldn’t make a fist, and hurt worse with every passing minute. I crawled one-handed with it cradled up against my chest, throbbing with pain.
Then I ran into the Kid’s bony backside again.
“Now what?” I asked, because I was fresh out of motivational speeches.