by Ty Drago
The penitentiary looked like a huge stone cliff face, lifeless and forbidding. No guards and no lights were visible. But inside, I knew, were Corpses—maybe a lot of Corpses—all of them at least half-expecting us.
My mom and sister were in there too.
I hoped.
“See that landscaping wall just past the sidewalk?” I asked, pointing from across the street at the prison frontage. The wall stood about five feet high, tapering down to maybe a foot as it neared the gates.
“Yeah,” Helene replied.
“Where?” Dave pressed.
“There! That’s where we have to go.” The garden area filling the space between the top of the landscaping wall and the much higher and thicker prison wall was maybe twelve feet wide and offered only sparse winter shrubbery to hide us. Fortunately, at this time of night, it was a well of shadows.
True, Slick Willie and his buds had been easily spotted during their escape attempt. But that had been at dawn. This was the darkest part of the night. It gave us an advantage.
At least that was my theory.
We waited until Fairmount Avenue looked as deserted as it was likely to get and then we crossed the street, moving fast but not running. I looked everywhere at once, watching for movement. Nobody and nothing appeared.
On the sidewalk, Dave boosted us both up to the top of the landscaping wall and then he followed clumsily after us, with Helene and me pulling on his beefy arms. Not a particular graceful technique but one we’d used before.
Within seconds, we stood huddled around an innocent-looking patch of grass.
“How wide is this tunnel entrance?” Helene asked.
“About two feet,” I said. To my right, Dave groaned. I tried to ease his mind. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you through it.”
“Except how do you know it’s this two feet?” asked Helene. “And not the two feet over there…or over there?” She pointed at the flat grass around us.
“Satellite imaging,” I said.
Helene’s eyes lit up. “Oh!”
Dave’s remained dark. “Huh?”
I replied, “Steve showed me this infrared satellite photo of the prison the Corpses took. Apparently, one of the Hackers found it.”
“Infrared,” Dave echoed. “That shows heat, right?”
I nodded.
“Why’d the Deaders want a picture of this place that shows off heat? Corpses don’t even have body heat!”
“Steve wasn’t sure. But shut up, that’s not the point. When he showed me the picture on the computer, he zoomed into this exact spot. I recognize that old bush right there. On the photo, this area showed up as a little darker because the air below the ground is colder than the ground itself. He’s says this is where the tunnel entrance…or exit…is.”
“You sure that’s the right bush?” Helene asked.
“Pretty sure.”
“Good enough for me,” Dave announced. Then he pulled the shovel off his back. “Let’s do this.”
Steve hadn’t been certain how far down the tunnel had been filled. We might have to dig through as much as ten feet of frozen ground. I’d mentioned this to Helene and Dave on the way over here, reminding them they could still back out.
Helene had looked thoughtful.
The Burgermeister had just grunted. And now I saw why.
He attacked the ground with his shovel, elbowing us aside. The kid was a machine, his eyes locked on his job and his big arms moving like pistons. For a minute, Helene and I just stared at him.
Finally, I asked, “Um…need any help?”
“Naw,” he replied, his breath puffing out in thick clouds of mist. “Spent two summers working for my uncle’s company, diggin’ pools. You dudes keep watch. I got this.”
So we did. And so did he.
It took about twenty minutes, though it seemed like a lot longer. Partway through, he managed to snap his shovel in half on the hard earth. Grunting again, he took mine and continued without complaint.
Helene and I pressed ourselves against the prison wall, bathed in shadows. She watched the street. Cars went by, but not many, and none of them took notice of us.
At the same time, I studied the prison itself, peering up at the watchtowers along the top of the wall. I could see neither light nor movement.
I began to seriously worry that I’d been wrong.
What if my family wasn’t in there after all? What would I do then?
But that kind of thinking was pointless. This was the only idea I had, so I might as well follow through.
“I’m through!” Dave whispered. Then he straightened and stretched.
The hole he’d dug was about four feet wide and so deep that he stood in it almost up to his neck. Helene pulled out her little flashlight and, mindful of passing cars, shone it down.
And there it was—a jagged hole about two feet across. “Looks like it goes maybe four more feet,” the Burgermeister said, following Helene’s light. “Then it cuts off at an angle.”
“Scary,” Helene remarked casually, as if announcing the weather.
“And tight,” Dave added, looking worried. “I sure don’t want to get stuck down there.”
I didn’t blame him. Steeling myself, I said, “I’ll go first. Then you. Then Helene. That way, if you get stuck, the two of us can work you loose from both sides.” I met Helene’s gaze. “That okay with you?”
She shrugged. “It’s your mission.”
Pulling out my own flashlight and clutching Aunt Sally close to my chest, I hopped down into the newly dug pit beside Dave.
“Careful, dude,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
My mouth felt dry. I was about to go headfirst into a tunnel that a bunch of criminals had dug almost sixty years ago.
What could go wrong?
Then I crouched low and let the cold ground swallow me up headfirst.
Chapter 36
The Dirt Tube
Ever crawl through a tunnel? I don’t mean those cozy little triangles you used to make out of blankets and couch cushions. I don’t even mean those trenches you and your friends shoveled out in the park, covered with plywood, and then called “forts.”
I mean a real tunnel.
The one beneath Eastern State had been dug by desperate men under conditions for which “sucks” would probably have been a step up. The passage was three feet high at its best and barely two at its worst. Some spots were shored up with planks that looked about a thousand years old, but most of the time, the ceiling was only hard-packed ground—thankfully frozen. If we’d tried this in the summer, our very movements might have brought the whole place crashing down.
I’d never considered myself claustrophobic. But I found out quickly that was because I’d never tried scuttling on hands and knees through a cold, dark tube of dirt. The air smelled worse than stale—I’d gotten used to “stale” in Haven. It smelled dead. It smelled of things rotting inside the walls all around me. It smelled of corpses—or Corpses—and I was gripped by the sudden terror that Cavanaugh had anticipated this move and that there were Deader guards hiding in the dark just ahead…their black teeth poised to go right for my face.
I swallowed, pushing back my fear.
Behind me, Dave grumbled and cursed, sounding more angry than afraid. I have to admit, I took a weird kind of comfort in his complaints. Helene, though, felt differently.
“Burgermeister,” she hissed. “Keep it down, will ya? This is supposed to be a surprise attack, duh!”
“Right,” Dave murmured. “Sorry.”
“Keep moving,” I told them, though it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.
A hundred feet, Steve? It feels more like a hundred miles!
The tunnel’s downward path leveled off
and became slightly wider. My flashlight showed spots where lights had once been hung, their wires rotted away to string by the years. Klinedinst and Russell had been thorough; there was no taking that away from them.
I was cheered by the thought that as we neared the “start” of the tunnel, the going might get easier. Most people, after all, did their best work at the beginning of a long project.
This might not be so bad after all.
But then we hit the stream.
You’d think it would have been frozen. It wasn’t, and it didn’t flow like any stream I’d ever seen. It didn’t come through one wall and then go out the other. Instead, it seemed to rise up from the soil, turning the dirt floor into an icy mud pit.
I found it by literally going into it headfirst. I’d been crawling along on my hands and knees, with the flashlight in my left hand, when my right hand suddenly disappeared in the muck, sinking to the elbow. An instant later, my face hit the mud.
Gasping, I flailed and pulled free, accidentally kicking the Burgermeister in the shoulder in the process. He cursed liberally.
“Sorry!” I gasped. “It’s wet here!”
Then, as I tried to shift my weight, my left arm went in, flashlight and all, and my face was once again swallowed up in the brown ooze. And it was worse than just being wet because the sticky mud clung to my skin and clothing.
After another few moments of clumsy struggle, I felt a huge hand close on my ankle and pull me back.
“Chill out, will ya, dude?” Dave exclaimed. “You kick me again, and I might forget we’re friends!”
“Everything okay up there?” Helene called.
“I’m fine,” I sputtered, wiping the mud from my face. “There’s water here, a big patch of it, and it’s seriously cold.”
Dave shined his flashlight in my face. “Lookin’ good, Will!” he said with a laugh. “See what happens when you play leader?”
“Yeah,” I groaned.
“You sure you okay?” Helene asked again, trying to see over the Burgermeister’s intervening bulk.
“I’m fine,” I repeated. Then, annoyed with myself, I reached across the stream. It wasn’t wide, but it was wide enough that I couldn’t get my legs past it without soaking them. Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward, continuing down the tunnel a ways before turning and shining my light back the way I’d come to see how my friends were doing.
I witnessed a funny thing.
Dave didn’t try to avoid the stream. Instead, he lay down atop it, his chest and belly pressed into the mud, and called back, “Helene, why don’t you go ahead and climb over me.”
Behind him, she said, “Huh?”
“No sense in both of us freezing our butts off!” the Burgermeister growled. “Just hurry up and do it before I change my mind.”
So she did. It was a tight squeeze between Dave and the tunnel ceiling, but the slender girl managed it, and once clear, she crawled up to me with a sheepish smile.
“Thanks, Dave,” she said without turning.
I grinned. “He’s just looking out for you,” I said, giving her a pointed look. “No harm in that, right?”
“Shut up,” she said. But the smile stayed there.
Behind her, Dave rose from the muck and shook himself like a waking bear. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s keep going.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But don’t get stuck. Lined up like this, Helene and I won’t be able to do the push/pull thing anymore.”
“I’m good,” he grumbled. “Plenty of room down here. It’s comfier than Haven! Heck, I even got myself a nice warm bath!”
I said, “Save it, dude. I got it worse than you.”
“Bet you didn’t!” Dave exclaimed.
“Shut up, both of you!” Helene said in a hiss. “Jeez, you guys are grouchy when you’re wet.” Then, after a moment, she groaned and added, “Ugh! I just broke my watch!”
“What? How?”
“Scraped it against the wall by mistake. The band snapped. I can’t even find it now!”
I checked my own. It seemed fine. It had even survived the stream, which was surprising; these things broke all the time.
“Dave, how’s yours?” I asked.
“My what, dude?”
“Your watch!” Helene said.
“Don’t got one,” Dave replied. “I ain’t an Angel, remember? Besides, I can’t even get one of those things around my wrist!”
Helene said. “Come on, Will. Your family’s not gonna save themselves!”
True enough, I thought, a little guiltily.
We crawled onward, following the tunnel and hoping the second half would prove easier than the first.
It didn’t.
We got to the end without further trouble. But then the trouble turned out to be this: We’d gotten to the end. It just stopped. A wall of dirt. For a minute, I just stared at it. Steve had warned me that the tunnel turned upward at this point. But I’d really been hoping that at least some of that vertical shaft would still be here. It wasn’t.
Crap.
Helene squeezed up beside me and touched the wall. Her finger came back coated in fine gray powder. “This isn’t dirt,” she said, sniffing it. “I think it’s ash.”
“Steve said something about the guards backfilling the tunnel with ash from the prison incinerators,” I said. “Looks like they did a good job of it too.”
“How high up does it go?”
“Something like fifteen feet,” I replied.
She sighed. “Well…let’s start digging. Where’s your shovel?”
“Dave’s got it,” I replied. “I gave it to him back at the start when he broke his. Remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Besides,” I added. “I’ve got a Super Soaker and Aunt Sally. Not sure I could’ve managed all three. How about you?”
“I’ve got one,” Helene replied. “Dave, you got a shovel?”
“Sure,” he called from behind us. “Except I can’t get up there. You two’ll have to do the digging this time.”
“Okay,” I sighed. “Pass it up to me.”
Helene and I dug—if you can call what we were doing “digging.” Is there a verb for stabbing awkwardly at a wall of frozen ash while on hands and knees? If there is, I couldn’t come up with it.
After a while, we got into a funny kind of rhythm. I’d chip away at the wall, dislodging big chunks of hard ash. Helene would use her shovel to scoop them up and pass them back to Dave. What he’d do with them I didn’t exactly know, though I suppose we’d better leave the prison a different way. Otherwise, we might just have to dig our way through the tunnel all over again!
Fortunately, ash turned out to be a lot lighter than dirt—easier to move. Within an hour, loose clumps of it started to rain down into the space we’d just opened up.
“Found the shaft,” I reported.
“Knew you would,” Helene said, her tone even. She was putting on a show, staying nice and calm no matter what happened—for my sake.
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?” she asked.
“You know for what.”
“Sure,” she replied. “They’re gonna be okay, you know.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Helene pressed, “They are!”
More big lumps of frozen ash came free, giving me the room to stab my shovel all the way up into the vertical shaft.
We were getting closer, which meant it was time to start being quieter.
When I answered Helene, it was in a whisper. “I don’t even know for sure that they’re here. This is a guess.” It was the first time I’d uttered the fear aloud.
I paused and looked back at her. Her face was awash in shadows, our flashlights having been propped up as best we could
on the tunnel floor. The air was thick with debris, and each of us had wrapped scarves around the lower half of our faces. Even so, I could easily see the ash that layered her cheeks, so thick it almost looked like a mask. She was sweating too, despite the cold air, and had to be bone tired.
But she’s here.
“Who’s guess?” Helene whispered back.
“Mine.”
She nodded. “Then they’re here.”
“How do you figure that?” I asked, honestly perplexed.
Dave answered from somewhere behind her, his tone impatient. “’Cause she trusts your guesses more’n most dudes’ sure things,” he droned, as if repeating some litany. Then he added impatiently, “Jeez, I wish you two would just get it over with! Doofuses.”
I felt my face flush.
“Keep it down, Dave!” Helene hushed him. Then, in a gentler tone, she added, “Sharyn’s gonna be okay too.”
For half a minute, no one spoke. Finally, the Burgermeister muttered, “Yeah.”
We went back to work.
After another hour, the shaft was wide enough to climb up into. There’d once been a kind of ladder—or so Steve had said—but it had long since rotted away. Fortunately, the quarters were so tight I could worm my way upward by bracing myself with my shoulders and knees. This left my hands free for the shoveling.
The process was slow, dirty, and painful. But it worked. Three feet. Six. Nine. Twelve.
Fifteen.
Then I came to the bricks.
As more and more ash fell away, more and more of them appeared—a wall of them, blocking any exit from the shaft. I looked at them. They looked back at me, hard and unyielding.
“Found the way out,” I whispered down.
“Thank God,” I heard the Burgermeister reply. He sounded far away.
“Except it’s bricked up.”
Helene asked, “We kind of expected that, didn’t we?”
Well, yes and no. Steve hadn’t been sure. After the escape, the prison officials had naturally sealed up this end of tunnel using concrete, mortar, and chicken wire. But later, in 2005, a team of archeologists had spent two days digging through all that to rediscover the entrance.
