Barely enough room to turn and fight. Bode felt sweat bead on his neck and face and between his shoulder blades. He was very conscious of the club stuck at a now very awkward and uncomfortable angle in his waistband. Slipping it free, he choked up on the wood, but even his reach was too long. Try to take a swing, and he’d be chunking out earth.
“This tunnel’s pretty tight,” Eric said in a tone that had about as much heat as a weatherman’s. “Are they all like this?”
“No, they get worse,” Bode said. Lucky to have that devil dog along. Guy had the temperature of a flounder, or a lot of experience roping back fear. Whatever his story, that Eric stayed calm helped Bode keep his cool. “Down deep, you’re on your belly the whole time. If this is the same, though, we’ll get to rooms, eventually, and they open right up.” He paused. “We should probably cut the lights.”
“Why?” Casey asked.
“Because they’re like wearing a sign: Shoot me.”
“How are we going to see?”
“We don’t. We go by feel.”
Eric shook his head. “I honestly don’t think a guy with a gun is the worst thing we’re going to run into down here. We’ll make better time if we leave the lights on. Besides, I’d kind of like to see what I’m up against, if you know what I mean.”
Because we will have to fight. Eric didn’t have to say it for Bode to know he was right. “But we don’t even know if Rima and Lizzie are here. This is from my head.”
“They’re here,” Casey said.
“Yeah?” Bode looked at Casey with fresh curiosity. When he took my hand; it happened when Casey touched me. “How do you know that?”
“I just know.” Casey’s face was a glimmering silver oval. “Lizzie, I can’t tell, but Rima is close by.” He fingered the scarf. “I just know,” he repeated.
Eric regarded his brother for a long moment. “Can you tell us which way, Case?”
Casey’s tongue flickered over his lips. Then he gave a jerky nod and pointed to the tunnel beyond Eric. “Down there.”
They set out, Bode in the lead with Casey on his heels, then Emma and finally Eric, bringing up the rear. They shambled like hunchbacks, their boots grinding and scuffing against the hard-packed earth; the pillowcase, with its gasoline-filled Swiss Miss can and peanut butter jar, sloshed and gurgled against Bode’s left thigh.
Emma’s voice reached him from behind. “Hey, guys, the tunnel’s getting larger. I can stand up, and it’s not really all dark. Look at the walls.”
She was right. The walls glowed: not brightly, but with a soft green luminescence that bled from the blackness itself.
“That’s so weird,” Eric said, and then gave a soft laugh. “Well, weirder. Bode, you ever seen a tunnel like this before?”
“No.” Bode thought about those muscular tentacles that coiled up from the inky snow to drag Chad to whatever lived beneath. “Is this thing going to break up? Like, are there too many of us in one spot?”
A pause. “I don’t think so,” Emma said. “You go to the trouble to take Lizzie and Rima, and then you kill us all at once? Makes no sense. This is about something else.”
“A test?” Eric said to her. “To see if you can get us here?”
“But we are here,” she said.
“Can you get us back out the way we came?” Bode asked. Stupid; he should’ve thought about that earlier. “You know, do that color thing?”
She made a face. “I don’t think so. Don’t ask me how to describe it, but this doesn’t have the same feel of … of potential. Like energy you can mold and use. I think this place is set.” She peered at him through the gloom. “Don’t beat yourself up about this, Bode. If it wasn’t you, it would’ve been one of us.”
“Then what is this?” asked Casey. “A way of picking us off one by one?”
No one answered—mostly, Bode thought, because, yes or no, either way, you lose. Although he agreed with Eric. This had the feel of a trial by fire of some sort. He wished Battle would tell him what. For a dead guy, Battle knew a great deal about life. But the sarge, who had lived inside Bode’s head for so long, was silent and had been for quite some time now, even before the barn. Yet he’d been here; Bode could always feel him, this quiet burn in his head like the flicker of a pilot light. After the fight on the snow, though, Battle had only … listened? Maybe not even that; Bode just couldn’t tell.
And then Casey touches me—and Battle’s gone. I felt him go. Bode armed sweat from his forehead. So where is he? Why did he leave? His stomach pulled to a knot of anxiety. Sarge, I need you. Please, talk to me. If he was hovering somewhere around, however, Battle remained mute.
Ahead, Bode saw that the tunnel was now very wide and much higher, enough so he had clearance for a good roundhouse swing. He’d be able to take a pretty good shot at whatever might hurl itself from the dark.
That’s all wrong. It shouldn’t be this way. This isn’t like any tunnel I’ve ever seen, or worried about.
A soft sound drifted out of the dark: a whispery rustle that was not the sharp scrape of a boot. He pulled up so suddenly that Casey smacked into him. “Hey,” Casey said.
“Quiet!” Bode held his breath, trying to listen above the boom of his heart. He probed the darkness with his light, but there was nothing in front, on the floor, or behind. Yet the sound kept on, papery and dry and somehow not only louder but larger: a scurrying, rhythmic shush that grew and grew and …
“What is that?” Emma whispered. “Where is it coming from?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t want to think about rats or snakes or …
Then his heart stuttered as he heard something new: the spatter of pebbles raining like fine hail onto rock.
Oh shit.
He aimed his light straight up.
BODE
Dead End
THE ROCK DIRECTLY overhead was alive—with scorpions.
Big as rats, with bulbous black bodies and pincer-claws long as fishhooks, they seethed over the stone. Diamond teardrops of glittering poison dripped from enormous barbs at the tip of shiny, curled tails. But instead of mandibles, these scorpions’ heads were unformed and smooth as mirrors. Then, in the next instant, gashes appeared and split to become mouths.
Jesus. Bode felt the cracks in his mind widening, his thoughts splintering. The glassy surfaces peeled back to reveal eyes: dead eyes, black eyes, the eyes of cobras, the eyes of nightmares. Faces, they have faces.
“RUN!” he screamed, much too late.
As one, the scorpions dropped from the ceiling. Bode felt the hard bodies bouncing off the padded arms and shoulders and chest of his jacket. They bulleted off his scalp, then slithered over his face. One landed on his left shoulder, hooked, and held on. With a wordless screech, Bode swung the flashlight like a club. The heavy stock batted the thing from his shoulder, and it tumbled, pincers flailing. These just managed to snag his pants, and then the thing’s tail was stabbing him again and again, the pointed barb working to pierce the tough olive canvas of his fatigues. Still shouting, Bode battered at the thing with the butt of his flashlight. Losing its grip, the thing did a flip and landed on its back. Its spindly legs churned, the pincers snapping uselessly at air. Its many eyes glared up at Bode, and it let out a rasping, almost mechanical chitter that sounded eerily like an M16 cycling on full auto.