The children and those who either couldn’t or were too afraid to fight had been put out of the way in the other chamber, where we had been caged. Between the security guards, the miners, and my own party of friends, bodies of shadowling littered the floor. There were a few humans, too. I had a constant ringing in my ears from the gunshots that punctuated the overall sound of battle. It was not only my mother’s gun, but also those of the security guards. Apparently, the creatures had no issue with throwing firearms in with the other gear and trash kept in the same room as prisoners. It was interesting to me how ingenious and at the same time stupid these monsters could be.
I squared off against another foe, its eyes lidded against the light and its mouth drawn back in a snarl. It lunged at me, only to have half its head disappear in a spray of blood. Derek, standing next to me, lowered his gun and nodded to me. I nodded back.
“You’re pretty good with that thing,” he said, pointing his chin toward my staff. I noticed for the first time that there were red streaks along the ends of the weapon.
“I guess,” I said, not really in the mood for conversation.
“You made it all the way down here, you and a bunch of other kids, with only bats and sticks?”
“Looks that way.”
“You’re not going to listen to me tell you what to do, huh?” he said.
“Nope.” I said. “We came here for a specific purpose. Neither you nor anyone else is going to get in the way of that.” I realized I was not being attacked. The trickle of shadowling had slowed, was stopping completely. It looked like we’d have a lull in the fighting. But for how long?
“I have authority over the mine property,” he said. “We could make you obey.”
“Look around, Derek,” I said. “We’re not in the mine anymore. We’re in natural caves.”
“She’s right,” one of the miners said. It was Zach’s dad, Adam Pinse. He was a big man, imposing, though anyone who knew him recognized that he was the sweetest person in the world. His messy hair, dirty face, and torn coveralls gave him a sort of sinister look. “You have no authority here. If you try to force these kids to do something they don’t want to do, well, I think we may have some problems.”
I had to strain to keep the smile from my face.
As he said it, three other miners stepped up, wearing the same dirty coveralls he was. Two of them were also large, the third being more of an average size.
Derek looked them over. “That’s how it’s going to be?” he asked, hand resting on the gun he had holstered when it was clear there were no more of the creatures around.
“Yep,” Adam said.
I didn’t want a showdown or anything ridiculous like that. I figured I’d better step in before we started fighting amongst ourselves.
“Listen,” I said. “Why don’t you go and escort the prisoners back to the mine? I still have work here to do. There’s no point in fighting. And here,” I threw the jacket at him we had picked up all those hours ago. “I think this belongs to you.”
He caught his jacket, looking at the name tag. “We need to kill all these things,” he said, but the authority had gone out of it. He put his jacket on.
“No. Your job is to get the people out. Let the National Guard or the police clear the tunnels if they want. It’s not your job.”
He looked at me as if he didn’t believe he was trying to negotiate with a kid. I could see in his eyes that he was turning over the situation, trying to come up with something that would let him save face. He didn’t want his men to see him foiled by not only a teenager, but a girl at that. Sam stepped in.
“You know, you’ll all be heroes,” she said, “escorting and protecting the ones taken by the shadowling, bringing them back out of the tunnels alive.”
“Shadowling?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what the news has started to call them. They made it up after you all disappeared.”
“Hmm.” He rubbed his chin and mulled it over. “We would be going above and beyond if we brought them back out.”
“You would be the first ones the news and the rest of the town see,” Sam said. We both knew she had him. “You could tell your story. There would be interviews, ceremonies. You would probably even get overtime or hazard pay.”
Or you could take your chances and fight these creatures and maybe die, I thought. I didn’t know if he was a coward or not, but the lure of fame and some extra money would probably tip it in our favor. He had his way out without looking like he was giving in, and his men could still respect his command.
Derek looked into my eyes. I saw in his that we weren’t fooling him at all. He was not only not a coward, but he was pretty smart, it seemed. He let me know with his look that he wasn’t taken in, but he would let it be.
“All right,” he finally said. “We’ll take everyone back up to the surface.”
“I marked our way at every intersection up until they captured us,” Sam said. “I’m not sure how far away that was. If you see chalk arrows, that’s the way we came. Go in the direction the arrows point and you’ll get to the mine and then finally out into the open.”
“Fair enough,” he said. He was still looking at me, considering me. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “My brother is still in here. We have to go get him.”
“Fine.” He held out his hand. “Thanks for the assist. Good luck in there.”
I shook his hand. “Yeah, you too.”
The security force gathered up almost everyone else—Zach’s dad decided to go with us, and two of the miners stayed with him—and headed down a tunnel that slanted slightly upward. Hopefully they’d find the intersections we’d marked.
I turned to those remaining. There were the original members of our team—Mom, Rick, Sam, Zach, Emily, Tyler, Madison, and Jacob—and we had added Zach’s dad and two of the miners on his shift, Armando Anzures and Dan Nefferman.
“I know your daughter,” Sam said to that last one. “She is going to be so happy to see you.” I remembered the looks exchanged between Sam and Raquel Nefferman in class that day. It would be great when her dad returned.
The three men had found suitable weapons when the security guards refused to lend them guns. Zach’s dad and Armando held hardwood ax handles—pick handles, I guess—and Dan had a metal bar that had been mixed up in one of the trash piles. We were about as ready as we’d ever be.
Aside from the way we had come and the way the others went, there was only one other passageway. The opening stared at us like a giant, black, depthless eye.
“Are you ready?” I said.
“Let’s get back my boy,” Mom said.
“And my sister,” Madison added. We had offered to let her go back with the others and promised to try to find Allison, but she refused. She would see this thing through to the end, she said. She got some points for that in my book. Maybe she wasn’t a complete troll.
We headed down the tunnel, going deeper into the belly of the earth, thoughts of Dante and his journey dancing in my head.
Hopefully we’d live to see the light as he did at the end of the story.
Chapter 23
“I don’t know why they captured us,” Zach’s dad said. “I thought it was to eat us, but as far as I know, no one was killed or eaten. They fed us some rations and boxes of protein bars they got from somewhere. No one was even hurt after they were captured.”
“Tell ’em about the holes,” Dan, one of the other miners, said.
Adam held up his arm and moved the sleeve up. He had a mark as if something had punctured him in the hollow of his elbow. “We all had them when we woke up in the cages. I think they injected us with something, though they don’t seem smart enough to be doing things like that.”
Sam had stepped up and shone her flashlight on Adam’s arm. “Not injected, removed.”
“What?” he said.
“They didn’t inject anything into you,” she said. “The
y took blood from you.”
“How do you know that?” he said.
“The hole. It’s from a bigger gauge than a needle to inject. A catheter. Besides, they probably would have injected lower, or on the shoulder. Even a catheter to inject a lot of something would have been placed lower down on the arm. I think they took blood from you.”
“But…why?”
“They probably drink it,” Tyler said. That earned him exasperated looks from almost everyone.
“We’ll have to solve that mystery later,” I said. “For now, let’s find our missing people so we can get out of here.” I started down the corridor, but turned to them again. “And be careful. I’m sure there are more of those things down here, and after the slaughter we just took part in, they aren’t going to be too happy.”
Gunshots rang through the cave. They were from far away, but there was no mistaking what they were. I hoped the others got through to the mine and then out safely, but we had other things to think about. With a sigh, I led the others through the dark passageways.
“Maybe the monsters will go toward the gunshots,” Tyler said, “so they’ll leave us alone.”
I had been thinking the same thing, but was too ashamed of myself to say it out loud. “I would rather neither of the groups got attacked.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”
We snacked on the food we had brought in our backpacks. For some reason, the shadowling hadn’t even gone through the packs. Once we started off, we continued through a narrow, winding tunnel that rose and then lowered again. It was wide enough to get through without squeezing, but we had to go through single file. I felt exposed at the front, the light from my headlamp striking the awkward, rounded shapes, throwing shadows strangely and giving everything a surreal feeling. I saw flickers of movement from the corners of my eyes, but found that it was just the shadows jumping as I made my way through. Somehow, Jacob ended up in line right behind me.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “You seem kind of jumpy.”
“I’m fine. I’m just tired, and with the weirdly shaped shadows, it feels like there are things moving around me.”
“You want me to take point?” he asked.
I felt a stab of irritation. What, did he think I couldn’t handle the front? Did he think he could do a better job than me? Did he think he could fight the creatures better than I could?
I took a breath and let it out slowly. There was no reason to get mad at him. He was being polite, not trying to compete. “Nah, I’m good.” I wanted to get out of these caves, get back into the open. Preferably where there was lots of light.
The cavern finally emptied out into a wider pocket, big enough for all of us to fit. I moved toward the far end and waited for everyone to file in. There were three openings aside from the one we came through. One of them was about five feet wide and the other two were narrower. They all slanted downward slightly.
“How far down do you think we are?” Zach asked.
“More than a half mile from the surface,” his father answered. “I didn’t know there were caves this deep here. I guess no one did.”
“Those creatures did,” Zach said.
His father didn’t have anything to say about that. Even if he did, he didn’t have a chance to voice it. There was a soft rustle of movement, and when I swung my headlamp toward it, a shadowling slid to a stop, crouched against the light, in the mouth of one of the narrow tunnels.
It squeaked in surprise, turned, and darted back through the tunnel it had come out of.
“Get it,” I said, running after it. “If it tells the others where we are, there’s going to be trouble.”
We chased it through the tunnel, just as narrow and winding as the one we had been in. My breathing was loud in my ears, and the sounds of the others behind me, their breaths and the scuffing of their feet on the stone, let me know they were keeping up with me.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep pace with the shadowling. The thing moved like it didn’t have bones, slithering through narrow parts, dashing over or under obstructions. I quickly lost sight of it. There were no side passages, at least none that I could see, so I kept moving ahead, hoping I’d catch a lucky break.
The passage widened suddenly again, and I slid to a stop, not sure why. Maybe the dip in temperature tipped me off. Swinging my headlamp toward the floor, I realized I was right on the edge of a hole that drilled down into the blackness. A couple of pebbles dislodged by my slide went over the edge and bounced off the wall of the hole. They kept clacking for a long time.
I never heard them hit the bottom.
The others stopped, Sam putting her hand on my back to stop herself, then grabbing a fistful of my jacket, and the others colliding behind her because of the abrupt halt. I guessed she reacted more quickly than the others and followed me first when I took off running.
I borrowed Sam’s flashlight to survey the hole while she kept hold of my jacket so I didn’t slip. It was only about four feet wide and didn’t extend all the way to the side of the tunnel we were in. As bright as her light was, I couldn’t see the bottom when I shone the light down into it. Of course, I didn’t go all the way to the very edge to shine the light down, but I could see at least fifteen feet or so of the wall in the light. We didn’t want to fall into it.
There was no sign of the shadowling.
Handing the light back to her—my headlamp light looked dim after using hers—I skirted around the hole to go through the passage, now a bit wider than it had been. The ledge was a good three feet wide going past the hole, but it seemed a tightrope when crossing so near a bottomless pit.
“Be careful,” I said. “It may not be bottomless, but it’s very deep. I have a section of rope, but I don’t want to test if it can reach down far enough to retrieve anyone who falls.”
It bothered me. Did the shadowling bring us this way on purpose, trying to get us to pitch into the hole, or was it just coincidence? Did it fall down the hole, or was it still up ahead? If still ahead, was it waiting with a group of its friends to ambush us? The situation made me feel like I had an itch right in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. An itch I couldn’t reach.
There was nothing else we could do, though. We continued on.
The tunnel gradually widened and the ceiling got higher. We still didn’t see or hear anything of the creature, and I thought that maybe it really had fallen into the hole, as unlikely as that seemed.
“Sam?” I said, something occurring to me. “Have you been marking the walls with your chalk?”
“I have, though some of the marks are just slashes. It’s hard to stop and draw an arrow when you’re running and people behind you are running.”
I released a breath I hadn’t even known I was holding. “You’re the best.” Good. At least we weren’t completely lost.
A few hundred yards later, we reached a cavern unlike any we’d seen before. It was massive, probably thirty or forty feet wide, with a ceiling so high overhead, I could only see the tips of stalactites with my headlamp. Sam’s flashlight could reach higher, but I couldn’t even estimate how far away the ceiling was.
There were classic cave formations: fans, popcorn, melted slag-like blobs, and of course the stalactites, stalagmites, and pillars. Crystals grew in some places, too, reminding me of the old Superman movies and his Fortress of Solitude. It was beautiful.
My peaceful observation of the cavern was shattered when my mother screamed.
Chapter 24
The sound my mother made was not a scream of terror but sounded more a mix of surprise and warning. Anyway, it was a good alarm. I turned my head so quickly toward her my vision blurred for a moment. Then my eyes locked on what was happening.
A group of the shadowling had come up on us from behind. They had struck quickly, and one of the miners, Armando, was lying on the ground, blood leaking out of him through a terrible gash in his neck. A gash made by sharp claws. He had been the last in line, just behind my mom and
Rick. It looked like the time of the monsters attacking half-heartedly, trying to capture us, was past.
Mom and Rick had turned when Armando was attacked and were fighting now, but things were different than before. The six creatures going after them had a crazed look in their eyes and were attacking savagely, not controlled in any way like before. Was this a rogue group, or had their other battles finally earned us a reputation of enemies they needed to destroy?
In addition to those coming from behind, I caught movement from the sides. More dark figures swooped in to attack with the others. All told, there were probably more than a dozen shadowling attacking us, maybe as many as fifteen.
I was at the very front, so only one came at me, angling from where it entered our corridor at the side. I didn’t think, just spun into action, whipping my staff out and connecting with the thing’s head as it tried to leap onto me. The swing, with the momentum of my spin behind it, knocked the creature from the air, cracking its head and making it spin violently to crash to the stone floor, body limp. There wasn’t time for finesse. I needed to kill these monsters, and kill them quickly.
I glanced at the others as I turned to face one of the shadowling that had targeted Sam, a few feet away from me. The brunt of the attack was around Rick and my mom, with only a few spread out around the others. I needed to get to them before the two were overwhelmed.
The beast in front of me lunged at me instead of Sam, which was my desire. It was so fast, I barely got my staff up in time to block its claw. I was a little too slow to move my weapon to block the second claw coming at me at the same time. Sharp nails grazed my shoulder, laying down a line of fire as red began to come through my torn sleeve. I lunged back a step to evade the first claw as it came again.
Yes, they were definitely fighting differently than earlier. They were ready to kill us now, undisguised hatred glowing in their overlarge eyes. My opponent pressed forward, slashing at me, mouth wide and ready to bite, wet teeth reflecting my headlamp light.
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