Monarch Falls (The Four Quarters of Imagination Book 1)

by Lumen Reese

  Corso had to clear his throat to get my attention. I joined him at the place where the tall weeds gave way to rock. He showed me where to find my first hand-holds; it was steep, almost vertical. I was so tired of climbing.

  So I hauled myself up, leaning into the slope, and Corso waited until I had made some headway before beginning to follow. When I looked down it made me feel dizzy; it wasn’t far, but it was far enough. In fact, the very top of the cliff didn’t seem to reach as high as the forest’s canopy.

  The rocks were slick and the air was warm and humid. My clothes were sticking to me like a glove when I finally hauled myself up onto the cave’s ledge, where inside the rock walls were glowing blue everywhere that the spring of light from the small entrance did not reach. As I lay panting, and Corso a minute later flopped down beside me, I saw that in the shade the butterflies rushing past the cave’s mouth glowed more brightly. They moved like a cascade of a million blue sparks.

  “You still have a gun, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. I felt a chill.

  He sat up with a loud sigh, slung his backpack around and pulled out two spare magazines, putting them in his pockets. “It’ll be pretty scary in there. Just try to remember what I’m telling you now, and above all else, listen to what I say once we’re in. We’re going to try to go in soft. That might not happen, but if it does, it might mean me putting you where the girls are, trying to contain the rest of it myself. I don’t expect you to help me kill people. If I split us up, you have sixty seconds from the time the first shot goes off, then I want you and Alex on the way out of there.”

  “I’m not leaving you there.”

  “Yes, you are. If that’s the way it happens, it won’t matter if you’re there or not. I’ll try to stabilize things, and if I do, then the rest of the victims will be safe and I’ll meet you back here. If not, then at least you know where they are, and you’ll have to figure out how to handle it from there. I think your best option is to try to get out on your own. If you do, remember they have cameras in the cities. But maybe you’d be better off arranging to meet them along with the people you trust. If you do get picked up, just keep your wits about you, keep your gun on you. Get the media and the Federals involved as soon as you can, because you won’t be safe as long as there’s a chance they could contain the story. The ones in charge are going to try to make it go away.”

  “They’re not like that,” I said. “The woman let me go, earlier, she wants the girls safe.”

  “Companies look out for themselves,” he hissed, suddenly irate where a minute before he had been talking calmly about the possibility of his own death. “What good has a corporation ever done for you, that you think you can trust these people!?”

  “Have you met them?” I demanded.

  “You want to risk your own life on it, I wish you wouldn’t, but I can’t stop you. But if I die today, you are responsible for not wasting my life, and you are responsible for the lives of every girl we leave behind. So you’d better wake up, real fast, and most importantly, you take care of my sister.”

  My teeth were clenched. I nodded.

  “Alright, then.”

  He pushed himself to his feet and lumbered over to the cave’s edge, where he held out a hand for a little water to splash on his face, on the back of his neck. With his back to me, I found the transmitter the designers had given me, the small, black capsule I could activate whenever I wanted, and I tucked it in my pocket. If the chance came, if it looked grim, I would use the thing. I would take his fears seriously; I would stick to Alex like glue if we found her, and I would keep Henry, Clark, and Hatley around me if I could. Corso might be willing to give his life for his paranoia, but I was not.

  *

  We came before long to a large, utilitarian building in the trees. He kept his gun in hand as he led the way inside, but the place was empty. The walls were white, lined with pipes and the main room we entered was occupied by big tanks, and a round door like something you’d see on a submarine led down. Corso got a grip and gave the thing a twist, and after a clank the hatch swung out when he lifted.

  I was ready with my gun but it only led down into the dark.

  There was a ladder, and he went first, landing with an echoing thud in a completely dry, narrow, tunnel. I followed.

  As we went, Corso spoke in a soft, scratchy tone. “I’m sorry I’ve been short with you, these past days . I pushed you when I had to. I wished it hadn’t been you, but then… I guess I did get lucky when they sent you in after me.”

  I was looking at him in the low light, and the emotion suddenly swam up, choking me. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but I knew that if I went home and he did not, if his steady presence in my life was suddenly gone, I would miss him. I gave him a nod.

  The tunnels were like thin hallways, made all of limestone with no exterior light coming in. We were feeling our way along the walls in the dark, and Corso was tapping each section with his gun, on the left side. The main line was a straight shot under Spades, but there were other tributary branches that could be closed off from above g round to control where the water went. There were partially closed stone barriers toward the ceilings that could potentially seal. We went down the first corridor separate from the main line, following it all the way to the end where a room would fill with water and there was an exit above us for the water to be drawn up.

  He tapped on the wall, and found the place where the stone pulled away. I hurried to grab on as the thing shifted, it was cold against my hands, and together we lowered the thin slab to the ground. Behind it, a dirt tunnel had been dug out and reinforced, and strung with lights on the wooden skeleton.

  We both had our guns up but the tunnel was empty. It split up ahead, two different paths.

  Corso moved slow and agile along one side, then peered into the opposite tunnel, pulling back in an instant. It was cold and I was shaking. He leaned out just a bit to look down the nearer tunnel.

  Motioning for me to follow, he crossed over and started down the right passage. I planted my feet carefully every step, twitched my hands on my gun to make sure they hadn’t stiffened up.

  I could see what Corso had seen; a bend in the tunnel, more light coming from inside and throwing a moving shadow on the far wall. He took the turn fast and pointed and shot three times, and the boom three times of his gun froze me a moment, then there were two thuds and a scrape and tumble of furniture. A cacophony of screams woke me and I surged forward after him.

  Three men were on the floor among a table and overturned chairs, one was clutching a bleeding hole in his chest, another was just staring blankly, a bloody hole above his eye. The third was crawling and reaching for a gun, but Corso stepped by him and fired another shot straight down, collapsing him to the ground in an instant.

  I felt my blood go cold but I couldn’t let it stop me. There was a pipe running up through the ground that traveled the left side of the square room, and led into a faucet in one corner. And dozens of girls and women were chained to it. Maybe fifty of them, different ages, all races.

  Corso scanned the room fast but he turned back to the tunnel entrance after only a moment.

  One of the women had called his name, “Miles!”

  But there were footsteps pounding toward us and he moved back to the turn of the path and hugged the wall, turning around it and firing two more shots. Screams from down that way, and a return of fire, a hail of bullets that he ducked back behind the wall just in time for.

  I locked on the one who had called to him; long brown hair, tugging at her chains, surging forward while the rest were pulling back. She had a square face bruised on one side and a brown smudge of a birthmark under her cheek bone.

  “Alex?” I asked, even though I knew.

  “One of them has the keys!” she had to shout over the other female voices pleading with me to get them out. She was pointing at the three men Corso had already shot at the front of the room. I ran to them and forced my hands to probe the fir
st man’s belt at the hips, his pockets, his shirt pocket as well. He was the one shot through the head, I had gone to him first thinking it would be less terrible, but life had lingered on him horribly; I was not prepared for him to still be a warm and squishy sack under my hands, not when his eyes were vacant and only a minute ought to have somehow transformed him into a cold, dead thing.

  It turned my stomach but then the next man was bloody all over his chest and when I went for the jingle I heard shifting at his hip, his hands feebly reached for me. I swatted them away and jerked back as soon as I had the keys. My hands were trembling and my legs wobbled as I hurried back to Alex and Corso was shooting again.

  But there were at least ten keys and I could hardly keep hold of the bunch with my hands shaking the way they were. Alex tried to help but when she added her steady hands to the mix she was left blinking and squinting, then shaking her head as if there was a bee buzzing around her. I knew the look. They had her on something.

  Together we fumbled the keys to the ground, and I let them go, whirling around. There were still girls begging me to help them and it suddenly felt impossible; we were not getting out the way we had come, and it was the only way out.

  Corso hit someone and they screamed, but there were still more people shooting at him. He reloaded in a second, and my eyes finally landed on the ceiling, which was only dirt between the reinforcement beams.

  We could go up. But even if I could find the key and unlock Alex, I would have to leave the rest or most of them behind, and I could not do that; knew that I would rather die than leave a single one of them down there in that place another night. The pipe was holding them all down. I turned from them which garnered desperate screams, but I was moving to the place where the pipe fed into the sink.

  It should have been a quick trick to unscrew the nut and remove the p-trap but it had been leaking and the pipes around it were rusted, and it stuck after a few turns. I could feel it wiggle, close to coming off. I stood again and backed up, getting a step into it and stomping twice before finally it clanged to the ground.

  The girls started to rush toward me, sliding their cuffs free. They were actual chains, clanging against the metal of the pipe, and that was surreal. One woman was limp, not moving at all, and the two around her worked to carry her to the end. Alex came after them, and when she tried to straighten to her full height, looked to get very dizzy and almost toppled over before one of the others caught her. The same girl, a blonde in her twenties, pulled her into a hug and had been sobbing.

  “Stella!” Corso shouted, and I whipped around to face him. “Gun!”

  I tossed my gun to him, and he caught it, and tucked his own into the back of his jeans in a swift motion. One of the men coming down the tunnel had sprinted for him, and Corso toppled him with two shots into a heap in what would be the doorway. He turned around the edge again and fired, and I had just looked away when I heard Corso’s cry.

  “-Ah!”

  He had fumbled the gun a few feet back toward me, and was gripping his left arm below the elbow. I scooped the gun up as I ran to him, and Alex tried to follow, too, but the girl she was with held her back. Pressing my back to the dirt wall beside him, I passed the gun into his right hand.

  “Ah, damn,” he hissed, when I turned his arm to look. Blood darkened the grey fabric, frayed around a gash burrowed into him. “We’re fucked, Honey.” But he sounded calm. He held the gun around the corner and fired once, blindly. “Reload?”

  He had dropped the magazine out. I fumbled with one of my spares and shoved it in, and pulled the hammer back, too.

  “We can get out, we just need another minute!” My voice was a shout without me meaning for it to be. “Hey!” I called, “someone help me!”

  Two women rushed forward. Their hands were still shackled together but they were ready and together we dragged the sturdy, wooden table over into the center of the room. I clambered up on top and one of them climbed up with me, and then we were both clawing at the dirt ceiling. It was hard and cold, lodging itself under my fingernails and raining down on our faces, getting in our eyes.

  I stopped clawing and hopped down, and one of the others took my place. I ran back to Corso. He was shooting with both hands again, but I could see the dark spot on his sleeve was expanding, and dripping.

  When he stopped firing for a second, I reached out and threaded my fingers into the front of his pants to pull him around to face me. Then began fumbling with the latch on his belt. “Give me this,” I said, and he obliged, scoffing.

  “God damn, Honey…”

  I threaded the belt out of his jeans and then he went back to firing with one arm while I tightened the belt on his arm, above the bloody channel the bullet had carved.

  Inside, dirt pelted the ground in a huge slab and light came streaming inside, and the girls who had been digging up flinched away from it. But they recoiled quickly and the two of them boosted a pair of two of the stronger looking women up out of the cavern, who in turn reached down and helped others clamber out; they were flying up through the ceiling one after another. Alex went with help; she was having trouble staying upright again.

  “Ammo?” Corso asked.

  I handed over my last magazine, then went over to the dead men and plucked a gun off of the ground, bringing it back to him. He shot someone else on his next pass, I heard shouting.

  I looked back into the room, only a few girls were left, and they went up one by one, until it was just one. When her feet disappeared aboveground, I touched Corso’s arm and he said, “Right behind you,” and did begin to follow after firing a few more rounds.

  I climbed up onto the table. Two women extended their hands down to me and grabbed on and hauled me up. The light seared my eyes straight away and I was left reeling in the grass for a moment. But I whipped around and through the spots in my vision I made sure I helped the other two to pull Corso up.

  There were girls huddled around, waiting, but some were already streaking through the trees. We had come out in the forest and I had no idea which direction was which, or where we wanted to go.

  “This way!” Corso called.

  The girls swarmed past him, running the way he had indicated. He brought up the back, moving quickly and with his gun still pointed, even as the trees grew more dense and we lost sight of where we had come out of the ground.

  “What now?” I asked, hanging back by him and keeping my eyes peeled.

  “Back to the Falls,” he said.

  “And then?”

  He shook his head and kept moving. I knew then he hadn’t expected to make it out.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  When we reached the falls, girls went diving into the pool, laughing and splashing. The girl who had been helping Alex walk went after making sure she was steady, and she looked around for us. Corso was watching her, and the two moved together silently, slipping into a hug that looked very out of practice.

  I overheard, “I told them all you’d be coming.”

  I moved to the falls. I climbed the side, looking down over the overgrown clearing once at the group of maybe fifty girls and women, some swimming, some hugging and crying, a few on the edges of the water, just sitting and staring, running their hands over the tufted tops of weeds, in the sunlight for the first time in months or maybe years.

  I heard Corso coming up the rocky side of the falls, and I lamented that I didn’t have a gun anymore. If I had to shoot him in the leg, I would. But we had Alex, and a few dozen others, too, so maybe he would see reason.

  “So?” I started, as soon as his head cleared the cave’s floor.

  He puffed out a massive sigh as he hauled himself over the edge and laid still. “Give me a second, Honey.”

  “They all need medical attention, and so do you. You got shot. We need to call for an extraction.”

  Corso forced himself to his feet, put his hands on his hips, and stared at the ground. “It’s just a scratch. And we can’t, Honey. I never meant to lie to you, i
n fact it only occurred to me -just now-that that’s what I’ve been doing.”

  “-But we did it…”

  “We got Alex. It was lucky. This wasn’t all of it, Stella. The man in the club in Hearts told me, there were other groups, they relocated from the other Quarters, to someplace more secure. I don’t know anything else. I just know I can’t leave a bunch of women to die in dungeons like the ones we’ve seen. I can’t leave them in the hands of a bunch of CEOS.”

  “What about them!?” I thrust a finger toward the shroud of butterflies, out toward the girls in the clearing and the pond.

  “I don’t know,” he finally looked at me. “I need to think.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “I’ll live.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Like a son of a bitch…”

  I looked around. “Are there cameras here?”

  “No, they, uh-,” he was suddenly bashful, and smiling, looking down. “They mostly use this place for love scenes, I think…”

  “Hope they hose it down afterward.”

  He sighed, “I wish Joey was here.”

  “He’d know what to do,” I agreed. But suddenly, I knew what Joey would do, and what I would do, too. “We’re going back to New York. All of us. I’ve got a button to push, right here.” I held up the black capsule.

  He stared at me. “You had that the whole time?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you push it? And why don’t you?”

  “Because I trust you. If I push it now, you’ll go running into the trees, and probably take Alex with you. So first I want you to say you’re coming back with me. Because you trust me. And you owe me. And you’re out of options.”

  He looked like he was warring with himself. He shook his head in a tiny movement.

  “It will be okay. I promise.”

  He stared at me.

  “Corso, say you’re coming home with me, or I’m going to throw myself off this fucking cliff.”