Dig

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Log cabin

  Rusty wheeled the dolly up and onto the expansive porch of the log cabin with care. The door was locked, but he made short work of one of the front windows and let himself into the main living area. The house was huge, bigger than he ever expected or remembered it being. As kids they avoided the place and he wished he still adhered to that rule. It was dark inside and a thin golden fog crept along the floor, seeming to roll in from the back of the home.

  He walked toward the source of the mist and found Loretta’s bedroom. The hatch that led to the hole in the ground still gaped open, work lights illuminating its depths. Bloody prints dotted the floor around the wooden opening and they weren’t human.

  Rusty checked the pistol which was stuck in his waistband and wished he’d brought one of the shotguns with him. Then he reassured himself that—for better or worse—it would all be over soon. Besides, he wasn’t sure bullets were going to be any help. He would either end up like his sister, or end up like Thomas. Dead was dead, right?

  No. Not according to Laura.

  Leaving the dolly for the time being, he stepped down into the hole and gasped at its size. He maneuvered one of the work lights to see under the house. The massive beams that spanned the house over that vast pit were awe inspiring, a feat of engineering he hadn’t expected.

  A few more steps down the ladder and he found a platform which was connected to a series of pulleys. It didn’t take long for him to figure out how to make them work and he was raising the platform up and down. He climbed back up the ladder, stared at the dolly and decided it would have to be dismantled and moved piece by piece. So that’s what Rusty did.

  Once the equipment was again secure, he lowered the lift into the depths and watched the rock wall snake by. A giant tube, it had to be thirty feet across, in some places undulating up like a worm toward the surface of the earth, in others, more like a tunnel. A million questions passed through his mind—who? how? why?—but none of them mattered. The hole was there, and hell was crawling out of it.

  The lift ended and Rusty rolled the dolly out along a foot-worn path into the darkness. He saw blooms of light at each of the work lamps, but there was no detail to focus on. The fine yellow mist made it hazy and his gas mask had begun to fog up again. He stepped along the path with caution, watching the floor underneath his feet and checking in all directions for...

  For what? What am I looking for?

  The cart rolled easily ahead of him on its pneumatic tires. There was a significant decline to the tunnel, enough so that gravity did much of the work. At times, he had to hold the cart back. There was no sound except for the crunching of dirt and small chunks of rock beneath his shoes. He walked on, listening to that sound and hoping it was all he might hear.

  Rusty walked forever it seemed, twisting and turning, down one lift and down one corridor to another lift, and down and down and down. The work lamps had disappeared some time back and he had turned on his flashlight to illuminate the path. The air cooled as he moved deeper into the ground. How deep he didn’t know. His mind was occupied with the amount of work it must have taken to create such a thing by hand. It was insane. What had Laura said? One hundred and eighty years and seven generations worth of digging. He marveled at it all.

  There was another lift to descend and another horizontal tunnel to roll down, much longer than the first. Every so often, he checked the forty-five to make sure it was still there and to adjust it under his belt so it wasn’t digging into his skin. Satisfied, he continued on to another lift and another passageway, then another lift.

  He had gone on for over an hour when something flew past his head. A bat? A bird? He wasn’t sure. It didn’t stop and Rusty wasn’t going after it. He shuddered for a moment and from then on, whatever had flown by him was behind him in his mind, stalking, lurking and waiting for a chance to bite.

  “Go ahead! Get it over with!” he shouted. His voice echoed down the tunnels and the sound of it startled him. From behind him, he heard nothing, but from the way ahead, he thought there were screams. The sounds were faint, possibly imagination, but he wasn’t taking anything for granted anymore. There wasn’t time. He wasn’t sure what was left, how far from this point the yellow mist—the insanity—had spiraled. It occurred to him that it might not just be Smithville. There might be another tunnel under Lake Michigan that was oozing evil into the air. One in Russia, one in the Middle East. Some in Africa. Perhaps there were thousands of them fingering up from the core of the planet, bringing the crazy to the masses. Why not?

  Another hour passed before he got to the bottom of the last lift. There, he saw the buckets Loretta had left behind. Beyond them, there were more buckets and a pair of battery powered lanterns. There was something else in the distance, a dark patch in the yellow haze. Rusty moved slowly, with even more caution than before. He picked up one of the lanterns and flipped the switch. Dead. The second lantern was good and it put out quite a bit of light, even with the poisonous haze. There was a box on the floor next to where the lanterns lay. It was full of batteries. Rusty breathed a sigh of relief. At least he would be able to see.

  He inspected the dark patch in the fog and found it was another hole. The larger tunnel ended just beyond. The yellow fog boiled up from the smaller hole like a witch’s cauldron in a Halloween haunt. He wished it had been that simple. “This must be the place,” he said.

  Rusty had no guess as to how far he’d walked. Four miles, maybe five. His muscles ached and he was shivering now. The temperature must have dropped thirty degrees.

  “Hell is supposed to burn, I thought?” he said and chuckled nervously to the walls around him. His echo chuckled back. And screams bubbled up from the hole within the hole. Rusty shuddered again.

  He didn’t dare approach the source of those screams, but walked away from them, rolling his cart back past the buckets and back up the first lift. On the way down, Rusty counted seven lifts in all. If he went back to the third lift and placed the charges there, it might do the job. He only hoped there was enough wire to connect all ten sticks. Enough to seal that place up tight. Enough that it would take another hundred and eighty years to find it again.

  After the third lift, he began checking the walls. If there was any good news that day, it was that he found plenty of cracks and dents where he could wedge the dynamite. He pulled out the spool of wire. Its paper label was yellowed and torn, but Rusty was able to make out the length: 1000 feet.

  “Nothing to it but to do it,” Rusty said.

  He placed two sticks and walked twenty paces and placed two more. This process was repeated three more times. Back at the beginning, he attached the blasting caps and the wires as it showed in the diagram. Using the lineman’s pliers from his back pocket, he clipped the wire loose from the spool at the end. A few coils were left but he tossed it aside. This was a one shot deal. One and done or as he’d heard way back in the US Marine Corps, fire and forget.

  Rusty twisted one wire around the post on the left, the other wire around the right. He spun the wing nuts down and tightened them in place. Everything was set. Now, the coyote merely had to raise and lower that plunger to fuck that roadrunner but good. In the cartoons, it always backfired and giant rocks crushed the coyote.

  Meep meep.

  The difference was, that critter always lived for another chase, another cartoon, another bomb. Somehow the roadrunner was always safe and sound, wagging its tongue at him and leaving flames in its wake when it ran off. Rusty thought he might be able to run to the next lift, maybe get the ropes undone and the pulleys started before the world collapsed around him. He wished he was the roadrunner and not the coyote in the scenario.

  He hoped the ferry was on the Smithville side of the waterway and not up in Fort Fisher. That perhaps it had already gone in all the madness, evacuating people and staying on the other side where it was safe. “Please be safe, Robyn,” he said. “Please do what I said.”

  He had a vis
ion of the ferry pilot sitting at home with his family drinking a beer and watching late night television. “No. It’s there. It will be there,” Rusty said. “It has to be.”

  The only other person that entered his thoughts was Laura. Sure he had friends in Chicago, people he worked with, people he saw on a daily basis, but he knew none of them were thinking about him. He thought of Laura and he thought of Robyn.

  “Meep meep,” he said. He pulled the plunger up, held his breath and closed his eyes. Then, without fanfare, without fear, without commercial interruption, the coyote pushed the plunger.

  Silence. No bang. No earth shaking destruction. Rusty was no savior.

  He opened his eyes and checked the connections on the detonator. Everything was as it should be. Maybe the diagram was wrong? No. He knew enough about basic electricity to know the circuit was complete when he pushed the plunger. There had to be enough of a pulse generated in that box to detonate a blasting cap. Were the blasting caps too old? Was the detonator not strong enough? He ran from location to location and double checked, triple checked, then back to the detonator.

  Raise it. Slam it down.

  Nothing. He wasn’t slamming hard enough. He knew it. Raise it up. Slam it down. Zilch. He knelt down next to the thing. Raise it up. Slam it down. Nothing. Not even a spark.

  Meep meep, he heard and knew the roadrunner was laughing at him. Laughing its feathered ass off. Rusty hadn’t checked it before he hooked it up. He should’ve tested it somehow.

  What did the coyote do when his traps didn’t work? He jumped up and down on them. Rusty pictured himself jumping up and down on the plunger as the TNT exploded. Not practical, but it accomplished the desired result.

  He laid back on the cool, dusty rock floor and stared up through the plastic lens of his mask. Its edges fogged and cleared, fogged and cleared with each respiration. He took the mask off and threw it to the side. What difference did it make any more? The smell was horrible, like rotten meat and burning chemicals. It stung his eyes at first, like chlorine in a swimming pool, but after a few blinks, he grew used to it.

  A centipede crawled along the curve of the tunnel and had made its way several feet up the side. It was much larger than any Rusty had ever seen. Even larger than the ones on the nature shows that would eat mice and small birds. He imagined anything alive down there would be different than the things he was used to seeing on the surface. Then he remembered the skeletons. Anything alive down there was not natural.

  The creature mesmerized him, its legs moving in groups of waves as it went like a perfect machine. It raised its head and looked around, then continued on. In that same place where he saw the cartoon coyote, he imagined the sound of its feet clicking against the stone, gripping with insect magic. Rusty sat up to watch it, unsure of why. He could escape, perhaps. Follow the tunnel back to the surface and maybe even meet Robyn and Kelly at the ferry. They could roam to a different state, not North Carolina or Illinois. Perhaps even a different country. He could…

  The centipede was looking at him. It was following his movements, holding on with three fourths of its feet and holding its head up to watch him.

  “Thank you,” it said.

  He shook his head, but he was sure he had heard the words. He only hoped they hadn’t come from the bug. “Is someone here?” There was no one else. His eyes were on the bug, watching the bug. Always the bug. Rusty grabbed the lantern and held it up for a better view.

  “I said, ‘thank you’,” it repeated. That time, he saw its mouth pieces move in time with the words.

  It was that gas. That gas was fucking with him. It was Absolem and he was literally down the goddamned rabbit hole with Alice. He looked back at the gas mask, lying under that thin mist. A dark spot in the yellow.

  “You won’t need that anymore. You never did,” it said.

  “What? How are you talking? I shouldn’t be surprised, I guess.”

  The centipede coiled around on all of its legs and then raised its head up again to look at him. “You don’t know me?” it said. Its head cocked to one side like a curious dog.

  “No. Should I?” Rusty said.

  “Your sister, Laura…she told you I was coming.”

  He laughed and walked a little closer to the creature. “She told me death was coming. Death for all.”

  “And she was right. I am here.”

  “You?”

  “What did you expect?”

  He blinked. “I-I don’t know. A demon. A monster of some sort.”

  “No, Mr. Clemmons. The monsters are already up there. Many of them have been for millenia. They are just waiting for some instruction.” It twisted its head around, looking toward the ceiling. “They set the wheels in motion, starting with Mr. Albert Gates Sr. and ending with Ms. Loretta Gates, may they burn in hell.”

  Then Rusty thought he saw the thing smile. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? Was anything impossible anymore?

  “Is there any way to stop those wheels?”

  “I’m afraid not. That’s why I was thanking you. You were about to do my job for me. I’ve always been able to count on some industrious human—like yourself—to take the initiative.”

  “But I want to stop it, whatever is happening up there.”

  “You can’t stop it. Death is the only certainty.”

  “There has to be a way,” he said.

  “Well,” the centipede said, “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” Without another word, the insect continued on its way. Rusty stared until he could no longer follow it and it disappeared into the haze.

  “I can fix this,” Rusty said. His voice was weak. He didn’t believe it.

  The centipede paused and turned. “You might slow things, Mr. Clemmons. But I am patient. My time will come. It always does.” With that, she crawled on, leg after leg after leg after leg after leg.

  It’s going to the surface, dummy. Death for all. And you just let it escape. You were within squashing distance. You could’ve smashed it, shot it. You could’ve done anything besides talk to it.

  Rusty ran down the passage way looking for the centipede but it was gone, vanished into a crevice or burrowed into some place he would never find. Gone.

  Fucked up way back when. Fucked up now. Nothing ever changes.

  He held up his lantern and continued searching along the walls for the bug. The light filled crevices and caused shadows in others. And it gave Rusty another idea.

  He rushed back to the cardboard box of batteries and opened it. The lantern batteries were large, meant to give a little juice over a long period of time. It seemed so easy. So stupid he hadn’t thought of it before. He dragged the box back to the detonator and twisted the wing nuts loose, pulling the wires free. Dumping the box out, Rusty lined the batteries up in a row and weaved one wire through all of the positive terminals, the other wire through all the negatives. There were fourteen batteries altogether. It should’ve been enough amps to kill a man. He hoped it was enough to save a few thousand. If only it saved Robyn and Kelly, it would be enough.

  There you go, twerp. Now you’re onto something.

  He grabbed the two cut ends of wire, still connected to the blasting caps on the other end and closed his eyes. It was 3:26 am. A tear fell over his cheek.

  “Meep meep,” Rusty said, let go of the breath he had been holding in and touched them together. The wires heated instantly and for a split second, he smelled something burning. It was only for a split second. Then Rusty was enveloped in sound and light and dust. So much sound it was overwhelming. His eardrums gave way and the dust filled his eyes and his nostrils, then his lungs. He saw only the faint glow through the grit in his eyes, blinking and coughing and breathing in more harm than he coughed out. There was heat and the pain of large chunks of rock falling in on him. Then there was water and darkness. It was salty and cold and he was washed along like a rag doll, smashing into things that were still solid. Then his leg was crushed and then his chest constricted and he
was submerged. There was no more light, no more air, no more feeling. Only death.