In the dim glow of the lighter, I saw despair on her face. The Kid looked just as crushed. Nate was white-faced and leaning against the wall, his eyes closed. Outside, the guards had gotten organized, at least three of them pounding against the door.
Then… the tiny light flickered on something. Something iridescent.
“Oh, my God,” I breathed. The light was glittering on the wings of a dragonfly, fluttering into the room from the hole in the wall.
We’d found the tunnel.
89
“OH, JESUS,” NATE SAID, AND hobbled toward it, his face contorted in pain. He reached out and grabbed a hunk of wall in his bare hands and pulled, breaking off another piece.
“See?” the Kid said. “It’s behind a wall, in a room, like I said!”
“We need to get through that hole. Start working!” Becca said.
Then we were all scrabbling at the hole, pulling away chunks of plaster that broke into powdery shards.
“Becca! Kid!” I said. “You guys pull some crates over here! We’ll get into the tunnel and then hide the hole!”
They immediately did what I said, which might be the very first time in our lives that Becca hadn’t argued first. Nate leaned on his good leg, his arms moving like pistons as he pulled away chunk after chunk of plaster. Our hands were bleeding but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except getting out.
With just the two of them it was harder for Becca and the Kid to move the crates, but we were all seized with a sort of superhuman fury that seemed to make us stronger than we’d ever been. Finally the hole was wide enough for Nate to slip through—he was the biggest of us—and we stood there panting as we tried to figure out how we would get his leg, stiff with a cast, through it.
He shook his head grimly. We had to move fast—the guards had gotten the door open almost an inch and were shouting at us.
“No way else,” Nate muttered, and before I knew what he was doing, he put his arms over his head as if about to dive into a pond… and he dove through the hole headfirst.
His cast slammed against the side of the hole. He didn’t even try to swallow the shriek of pain from that or from his heavy landing on the other side. He’d had no way to break his fall, no way to temper the shock to his ruptured knee. I heard him start sobbing in the darkness, and I quickly scrambled through, trying not to land on him. Becca boosted the Kid through, and he knelt by Nate with his lighter casting a small flame as Becca crawled through herself.
She and I put our arms through the hole, grabbed the brace of a crate, and yanked as hard as we could. It didn’t move. We heard the sound of the other crates scraping across the floor as the outer door pushed open, and we grabbed it again. My fingers locked onto the brace like claws, and with every ounce of strength I had, I pulled toward us.
It moved. It moved a bit. Biting our lips, tears welling in our eyes, Becca and I grabbed and pulled again, moving it another inch closer. Again. And again. My fingers were slippery with blood, a long splinter had shot through my index finger, and Nate was trying to stifle his sobs in the background.
“One more time, babe,” Becca muttered, sweat making her hair stick to her forehead in lank strands. I nodded and fastened onto the crate again.
Somehow we pulled the crate another four inches until it was smack-dab up against the wall. Instantly the tunnel’s darkness deepened. We heard the roar of the guards as they finally managed to slip through the doorway, heard their feet as they swarmed into the room… and heard their cries of confusion as they looked around a completely empty room, with no visible means of escape.
90
BECCA
WE HAD MAYBE A COUPLE minutes before the guards started moving crates around to find out where we’d gone. I hoped they would first open all the crates to see if we had magically sealed ourselves up inside.
In the meantime, we had to put as much space as possible between us and them.
All this time I’d been thinking of the tunnel like a sewer tunnel, with yucky water and rats and slime and whatever. Now I was like, I wish. This tunnel had been hand-dug by one crazy person a little at
a time. After the initial hole, we couldn’t stand up. We couldn’t even stoop. The four of us crawled, single file, on our hands and knees, and there were plenty of times when it was hard for me to get my shoulders through.
And poor Nate. It’s possible to crawl with a full-length cast on your leg, but it isn’t easy, it isn’t fast, and it hurts like a son of a bitch, given the language that was floating up to me from his position in the rear.
I was going first, with the Kid’s lighter. I flicked it on every so often to reveal the disheartening view of more seemingly endless, tiny tunnel. I thought uncomfortably about how we had only the Kid’s story to go on, that he thought it had caved in at one point, and how in the end, his dad had gotten captured anyway.
But I kept crawling. Small rocks embedded in the dirt bruised my knees almost unbearably. Every so often there was a large boulder that the Kid’s dad had been forced to tunnel around. At the first one I flicked on the lighter and saw words scratched into the rock: “Gimli, son of Gloin, ha ha ha,” and a date from six years ago.
The Kid was right behind me, and I shone the flame on it.
“Was your dad’s name Gimli?” I asked.