Freed

by Holly Hook

  “That's a quarter mile walk,” Weslie says, eyeing the tunnel that leads back to it.

  Weslie shoves the files down among the rations. My pack gets just a tiny bit heavier.

  And then we hear it.

  Footsteps.

  I jump. Weslie bumps into me.

  “Garrett,” I manage. I tighten my grip on the axe and Weslie holds up the gun. I’m so glad we have that now. Does she know how to shoot? I don’t. Isn’t there a safety or something that you have to click off to get one of those to work?

  They’re coming from the tunnel that leads back to the cave. I freeze. This could be the moment. Garrett must have found a way around. He’s coming back. But where are the Dwellers?

  A figure appears in the dark. A figure dressed in furs. It's a man with a scraggly beard, holding a dim moss torch. There’s something walking behind them as if it's guarding him. It’s a low, four-legged animal with tall rabbit ears and magenta spots on its back.

  My heart leaps.

  “Pit!” I shout.

  He shoves past the man and bounds towards me, bright orange eyes happy and relieved. I lean down and hug him as tight as I can. Pit puts his paws up on my shoulder and licks my face. He's so happy. His feet are wet from crossing the underground river, but he’s here. He’s here to help us and I’ve never been so glad to see him.

  “You came back,” Weslie says. I look up. She still has the gun pointed at the tunnel and at the man standing inside of it.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Baxter says, lowering his torch. “I ran into your Harehound in the cave on the way back to Wompitt. I think he was trying to follow you girls. And, well, he wouldn’t have me walking back by myself, so I decided to make him happy and come back this way. Wow, it looks like I missed some fireworks.”

  Chapter Two

  Descent

  I release Pit and he turns. Growls at Baxter. Stay, it means.

  I smile at Weslie. She returns it, keeping the gun pointed at Baxter. I know what happened. Pit came after us after all. He must have smelled our trail or something. He hopped down through that cave opening outside of Wompitt and ran into Baxter, who was trying to get back after abandoning us. Pit decided to remind him of our mission. He must have done it with growls and teeth. Baxter doesn’t look happy to be here, that’s for sure. He eyes the gun and shifts.

  “We could use your help,” Weslie says. I can tell she’s about as happy with Baxter as she was with Jaden when we found out he sold Antoine out the Dwellers. “To make a long story short, we had to blow up this mineshaft entrance over here to keep us…and eventually you…from getting run over by the Dwellers, since I'm sure they were about to head back to Wompitt. Garrett is on the other side of that cave in. Jaden dragged him there. I hope you’re pleased with the job that Elaine and I have done.”

  “I wonder what kind of story you had ready for Ned,” I say. “That we were dead, probably.”

  “I was going back to get help,” he says. Baxter faces the offices as he says it. “I was going back to get reinforcements for you girls. You shouldn’t be doing this on your own.”

  What a load of crap. “I know we shouldn’t,” I say. “And by the way, great job telling us that when you left us in the cave. We would have, you know, liked to know we were getting reinforcements a lot earlier. It would have saved us a lot of trouble.” Baxter was never going to do that. He’s just trying to make himself look good with that gun pointed at him.

  “Do you know who Elaine is?” Weslie says.

  I tense. I'm not ready to share the info with just anyone.

  Baxter shakes his head. He's nervous. “No.”

  “It turns out she's Steven Wompitt's daughter. And you were going to abandon her down here. What would Ned have thought of that? She's his brother's daughter.”

  Baxter blanches. He mutters a curse. “Are you serious?”

  “Serious. His file is in her backpack. He got back to Earth, married, and had Elaine. We just found out since he changed his name when he got back home."

  Heat rushes up my neck and to my face. Baxter looks old enough to have been in Wompitt since the beginning. To remember my father. He's studying me. And then he gulps.

  He believes us. We've got him.

  “Yes. Exactly,” Weslie says. “Get in here. We need another person to haul supplies, even if you don’t do anything else. We know where Antoine is. He’s in a new shaft way under here, working to death. If he’s not dead already, we can get him back, but we need all the help we can get. Pit here will be great against any Dwellers down there.”

  I hug Pit from the side. I'm glad we're talking about something else. “He will be. Believe me.” I'm shaking. I hate the thought of him going down with us just as much as I love it. There might be things down there that want to eat him. If that Megapede was any good example of what lives in the depths, he's in just as much danger as we are. Or there might be even worse things than the Megapede down there. Like two, three, or four Megapedes.

  It's dead. I have to tell myself that. The Megapede is gone. I have all that's left of it in the rear pocket of my pack. The claw's still there. I'm not letting it go.

  Baxter steps into the room. He tries not to look at the gun. I'm so proud of Pit. At least someone here has some sense. Or maybe Baxter's the one who has sense. I sure don't. I'm about to attempt an impossible mission.

  “What do you want me to do?” His face looks almost green in the pale light like he wants to throw up.

  We've so got him. Weslie keeps the gun pointed at him. Her arm shakes. She's livid. Angry. She has every right to be. She's not as timid as I thought she was when I first got to Wompitt. There's a tough girl in there after all.

  “Well, we need someone to operate the elevator,” she says. “It can only be operated from up here. If we don't have someone up here, we'll be trapped once we head down.”

  I remember Garrett's words. This elevator can't be used from down below. It's a great way to keep the workers from escaping. I have a feeling that Shaft 17 has no other exit than this. Baxter will have to stay up here.

  Or maybe as soon as he lowers us, he'll run. It'll be his opportunity.

  “Weslie, you can stay up here and do that,” I say.

  “I'm not. Like I said, my boyfriend's down there.”

  “It's okay. I can operate the elevator for you,” Baxter says. Is that relief in his voice?

  “But you're going to run as soon as we descend. And I don't want to leave Pit up here with you,” I say. I don't trust the man.

  “I won't run,” he says. Baxter puts his hands up and approaches. “I won't run again. What kind of man do you think I am?”

  “I know what kind of guy you are,” I say. “This is what you're going to do. There's a scale on here that shows when someone's in the elevator. Once Weslie and Pit and I are down, all you need to do is wait here until you see the scale jump again. That's when you'll bring us back up. The mine shaft up here is blocked. No Dwellers are going to come after you from that direction, and there isn't any other exit except for the cave right here. You have supplies in that room over there. You can last a while here.”

  Pit shudders. He won't leave my side. Jaden sent him away on purpose. I'm so glad to have him back. I wish I had a dead Dweller or two to feed him. But if Weslie's right, he's going to have food soon enough.

  “How long should I wait?” Baxter asks. “To bring you up?”

  Weslie glances at me.

  “Give it about twelve hours or so,” I say. “I don't know what we're going to run into.” Or if we're ever going to come back up, I think. But I don't say that in front of Weslie. As soon as we start descending, the panic might return.

  Baxter nods. “Okay. I'll wait here.”

  We might be making the worst mistake ever, but we have no other choice. The three of us board the elevator. Pit's claws click as he does. It still smells a bit like rotten eggs in here.

  Baxter gets by the control panel and keeps his hand above the black button. He
could leave us down there for all we know, giving us no way to ever come up again. It would be easy. Maybe one of us should stay up here with him after all. But Pit's our only good defense against the Dwellers. He'll terrify them. That, and Weslie's got a few sticks of dynamite sticking out of her pack and she's not leaving without her boyfriend. I get it.

  I hope the elevator takes its sweet time getting us down there. That we have enough time to hatch some kind of good plan.

  “I won't run,” Baxter says.

  I shake my head. This could be our death.

  “If you do,” I say, “We're going to die down there. Will you ever let yourself forget that?”

  Baxter shakes his head. “No.” He's shaking. Is it from an internal struggle? “Twelve hours. I'll wait. And hope the Dwellers don't find a way around.”

  He presses the black button.

  The door to the elevator closes. It sounds like a jail door slamming. We're looking out through bars.

  Pit whimpers. Bad sign. A wave of panic rushes over me and I want to jump at the bars, kicking and screaming at Baxter to let us out. We're in a cage. A prison. A prison just like the one my father's serving in for the next few decades. Only in this one, we're going to die. How is the only question.

  Weslie grabs my arm. We stand close to each other. Pit sits in front of us.

  And then the elevator descends with a squeak.

  We go down, down. Baxter and the dim processing office disappear above to be replaced by a wall of rock. There's only one weak light bulb hanging above us. I can barely see Weslie standing next to me or the rock slowly crawling past. I feel like we're sinking into an ocean of solid stone. Down, down. Shouldn't there be tunnels? Other light?

  The elevator shakes. Pit whimpers again. He's never done this before. I can't believe he's still sticking with me.

  “You'll have something to eat soon,” I tell him. Are Harehounds used to the underground at all? I have the feeling they're surface creatures only. “Lots of things to eat, believe me.”

  The water sloshes in the canteens of my pack. Rock crawls upward. It's got some tiny orange streaks in it now, orange streaks of Flamestone. We were already a few miles underground when we got to the processing office if Jaden was right. We must be going down several more. I wonder if Selwyn has a center and what it's like. It might be like that movie where they went to the center of the Earth and found some weird world inside. Only this world won't be just be weird. It'll be deadly.

  “When are we going to pass the first shaft?” I ask.

  Weslie faces me. Her eyes glisten in the weak light. “Soon,” she says. “The mines go deep. Very deep.”

  “The mine I ran out of wasn't very deep,” I say. “You know—when I first got here.”

  “That must have been the old part of the mine,” she says. “The Dwellers depleted most of the Flamestone on the upper layers first. Ever since the Flamestone Society started, they've been going deeper and deeper. These are the newer mines.”

  And then, we pass the first shaft.

  A hole into pure darkness opens up. Wooden support beams crawl past. There's a hammering noise from far away, but that's all. I catch a glimpse of a faint blue glow—one of the cave mushrooms. The workers have brought them in to see. They can't be completely blind down here. It wouldn't work. But they can't have real light, either. It would repel the Dwellers and allow them to escape.

  Stone crawls up again, replacing the open tunnel. We've been descending for a few minutes already. The lines of Flamestone look just a tiny bit thicker in the stone. It might take us close to an hour to get to Shaft 17 at this rate. This is the ride Antoine and Shawn and Travis and maybe even Talia had to endure.

  Weslie leans against the edge of the car. The cable creaks above us and she jumps back to the center. Pit sits in the middle and trembles. I sit next to him. He doesn't like this. We're headed right to the monsters of the depths. I wonder if we'll see anything on the way down.

  “You think Baxter is running away?” I ask.

  “Probably. He's not going to stick around after I pointed this gun at him.” Weslie turns it over in her hands. “I'm glad we have this. My uncle back home—my real uncle—had a whole collection of guns. Every time my parents dragged me over there, he'd be cleaning one. He let me hold them a few times.”

  “When you were how old?” I ask.

  “Six. Maybe seven.”

  “Yikes.” I can see why Weslie and her brother got put in foster care. “Who was your foster parent?”

  Weslie grimaces at me. “Horace Steffan. He was a jerk. He always used to make us stay in our rooms as soon as we got home from school. We weren't allowed to go out and do anything.”

  I adjust the axe in my hand and rise to my feet. “I'll remember his name. If that's even his real name.”

  “I think it is. I'm sure he's got a lot of money now. The Dwellers had to give him extra jewels since there were two of us. I saw the pile that they left there in the dark for him. And then they made us pass out. When I woke up, I was in one of the mid level mines.”

  Down, down.

  The elevator creaks and scrapes against rock. I keep my lips shut. Don't scream. Don't panic.

  A second shaft crawls by. This one's even darker than the first. I spot only one stay blue glow in the distance. And I hear the thunder of little feet echoing at us.

  It's the Dwellers. Or another group of them. What if they're heading down through the ground to catch us? Down to where Garrett expects us to go?

  “This is normal for the mines,” Weslie says. “Dwellers patrol all the time. They're going to be everywhere. If anything, they might think we're new workers being sent down.”

  I'm almost glad to hear some kind of life down here, even if it's those gross little gnomes with the green eyes. Last time I was down this way, I had only my phone and the skeleton that I stepped on for company. I can still remember the horrible crunch. This darkness brings back the sound with more clarity than I'd like.

  Down, down.

  Shaft number three.

  Pure darkness. No sounds at all.

  Another five minutes.

  Shaft four. I hear scraping in this one. There's an empty mine cart sitting just within the tunnel and the wooden support beams on this one are dusty and desolate.

  Another three or four minutes. The lines of Flamestone thicken to the width of pencils. They're like fingers slowly growing through the gray stone, trying to reach up towards where there's life and light.

  Shaft five. Weslie swallows and gulps. Pit continues to tremble on the floor.

  There's someone standing in this one, right on the edge of darkness.

  A man, leaning on a pickaxe. His clothes are dirty and his eyes, sunken. He looks like someone who's spent the last few years in a death camp and barely managed to survive. He eyes us without any life. He's what I'd imagine a fresh zombie to look like.

  “I don't like this,” Weslie says.

  My stomach's heaving and I feel like I'm going to be sick. “Turn on that lamp again,” I say. “We need to know if we're running into any toxic gases down here.” What if we're breathing them in already? Some could have seeped up into this elevator shaft for all we know. Maybe it's a light gas and it's trying to escape from somewhere down below.

  Or maybe I'm sick because I know we're probably not going to come back up anytime soon. Or ever.

  We pass a sixth shaft. The rock's changing again. I catch more Flamestone streaks the farther down we go. Antoine was right. The stuff gets thicker in the lower levels. There are more of the red spots, too, like that red ore's also trying to spread up from below. I wonder what the heck it is. Antoine never got the chance to really experiment with any. Maybe he will if we can ever get him out of here.

  Shaft seven. There's more Flamestone around this one and more glowing mushrooms. I catch a glimpse of someone moving around in front of the them, swinging another pickaxe. There's more skittering of Dwellers and this time I spot some. Hundreds of point
s seethe before the trapped worker, undulating and moving. They don't charge us, though. Maybe they do think we're just new victims heading down to our posts. We're going down, after all.

  Five more minutes.

  Shaft eight. The Flamestone's growing through the rock in tendrils now and the red stuff is getting thicker too, appearing in large splotches. I feel like we're heading into a living layer in the ground. Into a part of the ground that's really the belly or inner workings of some beast.

  “Have you ever been down this far?” I ask Weslie.

  She shakes her head. “Not quite this far down.”

  My heart pounds. The stone's getting more filled with ore, but there's still plenty of gray to hold onto. To attach my sanity to. I wonder just how thick it will be if we reach the Heart of Flamestone, the place where Antoine thinks all the Flamestone in this world originated. I imagine an actual heart made of sparkling orange rock, beating for eternity and pumping itself through the world. Supporting a weird ecosystem underground that no one on Earth could even imagine. Scientists would have a field day trying to uncover the secrets of this world.

  Pit paces around the elevator now, and keeps pacing as we pass Shafts Nine, Ten and Eleven. The Flamestone stops getting thicker for a few minutes, then starts to increase again. There's less and less gray. We're descending through some two year old's scribbles now. The red stuff's getting thicker too, making angry streaks like the Flamestone. I wonder if it has some heart underground like the Flamestone might.

  Weslie shrinks against the wall of the elevator and hugs herself. I do, too. I want to stay as far from the gate as I can when it opens. And it's starting to smell funny down here.

  “The lantern,” I remind her.

  “Oh.” She takes out a match and lights the lantern from underneath. A small flame erupts in the metal cage and burns happily. The light flickers all around the elevator, making it seem like the orange and red streaks are alive. They're veins. Literally. I can't help but laugh. I'm losing it. I haven't seen the sun in forever and I don't even know what time of the day it is.