Rebel Revealed
Page 11
“Dammit!” Kyle screamed. He wondered if Sillow had it completely wrong. What if there’s nothing out there? What if there’s nothing I can do to stop this? he wondered to himself.
He took the drill, and hurled it against the wall. He picked it up again and threw it in total frustration. This time, the drill broke into several pieces, one of them bouncing back and hitting Kyle in the face. He picked up one of the pieces of the drill’s handle and threw it against the wall again. It felt good to destroy something.
“No!!!!” Kyle screamed again. “No!!” Screaming felt good too. “Dammit!” he yelled.
He turned around to head back toward 2017, dreading the fact that he had to tell Allaire what he’d found. He knew she’d be as devastated as he was. He wondered how he would tell her something he knew would destroy her . . .
“Shit,” he screamed. He was still carrying the open backpack in his hand as he started moving in the tunnel. He grabbed for something to throw again, and found the wooden paddle with the ancient Serican writing on it. He turned toward the end of the tunnel again and flung the paddle as hard as he could. “Fuck you!” he screamed as he released the paddle, excited to see the wood shatter to pieces.
But, as the paddle flew through the air, it hit the top of the tunnel first, and then skidded through the air making a direct hit against the wall at the end. Instead of shattering, though, the paddle looked like it had done what the drill could not. Kyle moved closer to examine what he thought he was seeing, but was sure could not be possible. He saw that, indeed, the flimsy wooden paddle had torn a small, jagged line right through the top of the tunnel. What was even more amazing was that a small circle of daylight was creeping through. Kyle pressed his eye as close as he could to the hole in the tunnel’s ceiling. He saw the sky, purplish, as if it was sunset, with gray clouds moving fast from left to right.
Then, he moved to the end of the tunnel again, toward a tiny pinhole in the wall, also caused by the paddle. Kyle pressed his eye against it but it was too small to see through.
He picked the paddle up from the floor of the tunnel and started chiseling against the pinhole. The metal of the tunnel responded like soft clay to Kyle’s gentle hammering with the strange wooden paddle.
In less than a minute, Kyle opened up a hole in the tunnel the size of a fist. He couldn’t explain how a small piece of wood could do what a drill with a diamond bit could not, but he smiled as he lowered his head to look through the hole.
He saw a long ditch up ahead of him, with mulberry bushes growing along the length of it. The sky was deep purple as if there were an extreme sunset, except the sun was high in the sky.
Kyle heard a rustling in the grass above the ditch and looked out the hole to his left where he saw a short man with a gray stubbly buzz cut. The man leaned against a rake he was holding and looked back at Kyle, wrinkling his brow, like he was trying to figure out whether what he was seeing was possible. The man started to walk away, then turned back to look again.
Kyle pulled away from the hole for a second.
“Hey!” the man screamed.
Kyle looked out again, but saw that the man wasn’t calling for him, he was waving over someone else.
“Hey! Get over here! And get Simyon!” the man called out again.
In a matter of a few minutes, there were more than twenty people standing together looking at the hole. They each held a tool of some sort—a shovel, rake, wheelbarrow, or hedge clippers.
They were all dressed very simply, with both men and women in button-up shirts and baggy pants held up with suspenders. A man with a green silk handkerchief around his forehead walked up to the group and then stepped down into the ditch. He was now eye level with Kyle.
At first, the man had a slight smirk on his face. Then, as he walked toward Kyle, his smirk turned into more of a frown. He leaned closer to the hole, moving his face toward Kyle so quickly that it made Kyle jump backward.
Now, Kyle’s heart was really racing. He leaned forward to the hole again and saw the man raise his arm into the air. He was holding a wooden paddle too—the same shape as Kyle’s. Kyle flinched and moved backward when the man swung his paddle through the air and connected with the existing hole, chipping off another piece of the tunnel, enlarging the hole Kyle had started. The man swung again, and the hole got even bigger.
Kyle considered turning back and trying to get back to 2017 before the hole was big enough for him to get out—or them to get in. But, he needed the answers that could only be found beyond the tunnel. So, Kyle picked up his own paddle and started chipping away at the metal from his side as well.
The hole would be big enough to slip through in no time at all.
TO BE CONTINUED . . .