The Kid frowned. “No! You think my dad had some weird-ass name? His name was Ebenezer!”
I shrugged and kept crawling. On another boulder, the Kid’s dad had carved, “Screw the United!” and we all cheered quietly. To save the lighter fuel, we mostly crawled in the utter, complete, intense blackness, using it only when we seemed to hit a dead end or a rock, and the first time I almost brained myself on a heavy tree root that had grown down into the tunnel.
There was no sense of time. I couldn’t tell if we were burrowing deeper underground or going in circles or heading right back to the prison. After it felt like we’d been crawling for an hour, my nerves started fraying. Like, what if a truck rolled over us? We would be crushed. What if the tunnel just collapsed? The idea of dying down here buried under a ton of dirt was possibly more terrifying than the first time facing Tim in the ring.
“How much longer we gotta go?” the Kid asked. He was panting, as all of us were. “I cain’t breathe.”
My eyes opened wide in the darkness. Oh, God, was there enough oxygen down here? My heart seized as I suddenly remembered folks digging wells, back home. More than one man had passed out from hitting a pocket of gas—natural methane, which you can’t see or smell. If he didn’t get hauled out fast, he’d die.
Well, gas was flammable—one way to get rid of it was to throw a lit match in the well and stand back. Way back.
I’d been using the lighter. If I used it again, I could blow us all into fish bait. Shit. The idea of not being able to at least check where we were going—
The Kid couldn’t breathe—
I couldn’t use the lighter—
Cassie had whispered that Nate was about to pass out—
I had to get out of here.
I had to get out of here.
I had to—
91
CASSIE
MY HEAD BUMPED INTO THE KID’S backside, which was how I knew that he’d stopped.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Becca’s stopped,” he said, sounding close to tears.
“Beck?” I called.
“Yeah?”
It was just one word, but it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I knew Becca’s voice, and her voice now told me she was close to hysteria. The last time I’d heard it was when she’d come across a big copperhead in one of Pa’s cornfields. Fearless, Ridiculous Rebecca had been frozen in terror, her eyes locked on the snake as it rose up, swaying slowly.
I’d screamed, Becca, run! And she’d said, I can’t, in this tiny voice. The snake was uncoiling and moving slowly toward her—into striking range.
I had circled around to her, cutting a wide swath around the snake, and came up behind her. The snake looked at me.
“Let’s run,” I whispered.
“I can’t,” she whispered back, tortured. “My feet can’t move.”
“Okay. I’m going to grab your arm and pull as hard as I can,” I told her. “Then I’m going to run. You can either get your feet moving or be dragged.”
“It’s going to come after us,” she whispered.
“We can outrun it.”
It had worked. I don’t know if the snake tried to strike at us when we turned tail, but I know we ran like jackrabbits for a long, long time.
I couldn’t grab her arm this time. I couldn’t drag her.