Kevin stared at Mike." "How the heck do we do that? There are four or five steps on that front porch. Even if the thing is wide enough for the truck, it'd never get up those steps."
Mike pointed at Dale and Harlen. "You guys know those thick old boards they stacked up by the dumpster when they ripped the old porch off the west end of the school last year?”
Harlen nodded. "I know 'em. I almost fell onto them a few weeks ago."
"OK-we'll stick those on the front porch of the school before you go in. Like a ramp, sort of."
"Like a ramp… sort of," mimicked Kevin, looking in at his father's four-ton bulk tanker. Every time the lightning rippled across the sky-which was almost constant now-the huge stainless-steel tank reflected the flash. "You've got to be shitting me," he said to no one in particular.
"Let's go," said Dale. He was already starting down the hill toward the school, leaving the others behind. "Let's go!" There was no sign of his mother's car. All the lights were out in this part of town. Only Old Central seemed to glow with the same sick light that illuminated the interior of the clouds.
Mike clapped Harlen on the back, did the same with Kevin, and jogged down the slope toward Dale's house. Dale had paused across the street, looking back at his friend. Mike heard the edge of a shout but the words were drowned by the next roll of thunder from the storm. It might have been ' "Good luck." Or possibly "Good-bye."
Mike waved and went down into the Stewarts' basement.
Dale waited an impatient thirty seconds for Jim Harlen and then ran back up the gravel drive. "Are you coming or not?"
Harlen was poking around in the Grumbacher truck shed. "Kev said that there's some rope in here…ah, here." He pulled two thick coils of rope from nails on the rafters. "I bet this's twenty-five feet each, easy." He fitted the bulky coils over his shoulders and chest like bandoliers.
Dale turned around, disgusted. He started to jog across the dark playground, not worrying if Harlen could keep up.
Lawrence was in there somewhere. Like Duane… "What the hell do you want rope for anyhow?" snapped Dale as Harlen caught up, already panting from the short run.
"If we're going in that fucking school, I'm going to have a way to get out that's softer than the last time."
Dale shook his head.
Branches were tearing off and falling around them as they passed under the sentinel elms. The short grass of the playing field was rippling and flattening under the wind, as if a huge, invisible hand were stroking it.
"Look," whispered Harlen.
The ridges of the burrowing things were everywhere now, humps of raw soil that curved and wound and intersected, carving the six acres of playground into a wild geometry of wakes.
Dale reached into his belt and pulled out a squirt gun, feeling how foolish that was even as he did so. But he clipped the Boy Scout flashlight onto his belt and kept the squirt gun in his left hand, the Savage over-and-under in his right.
"You got some of Mike's magic water?" whispered Harlen.
"Holy water."
"Whatever."
"Come on," Dale whispered. They leaned into the rising wind. The sky was a mass of boiling black clouds silhouetted by the greenish lightning. Thunder rolled like cannon fire.
"If it rains, that'll really fuck up what Kevin's planning to do."
Dale said nothing. They passed the north porch, went under the boarded windows… Dale noticed that the wind had torn the boards off the stained-glass window above the entrance, but that was far too high to reach… and they jogged around the northwest corner, past the dumpster where Jim had lain unconscious for ten hours, into the shadow on the north side of the immense building.
"Here are the boards," gasped Harlen. "Grab one and we'll dump it on the front steps like Mike said."
" "Screw that,” said Dale. "Show me that entrance you said you knew about."
Harlen stopped cold. "Look, it may be important…"
"Show me!" Without planning to, Dale had raised the shotgun so that the barrel was pointing in Jim Harlen's general direction. Harlen's small pistol was tucked in his belt, under the absurd coils of rope. "Listen, Dale… I know you're half nuts about your brother… and I usually don't give a shit about orders from somebody else, but Mike probably had a reason. Now help me with a couple of these boards and I'll show you the way in."
Dale wanted to scream with frustration. Instead, he lowered the shotgun, set it against the wall, and lifted one end of the long, heavy plank. They'd stacked several dozen of these old boards here when they had demolished the west porch of the school last fall; now they still lay there, waterlogged and rotting.
It took the boys five minutes to carry eight of the damn things around to the north porch and to dump them on the stairs. "These things wouldn't even hold up a bicycle if they're supposed to be a ramp," said Dale. "Mike's crazy."
Harlen shrugged. "We said we'd do it. Now we've done it. Let's get going."
Dale hadn't liked leaving the shotgun and he was pleased to find it still leaning against the wall when he got back… Except when the lightning illuminated everything in its flashbulb explosion of glare, it was quite dark along this wall of the school. All of the schoolyard pole lamps and streetlights were off, but the upper floors of the building itself appeared to be wreathed by a greenish glow.
"This way," whispered Harlen. All of the basement windows had wire-mesh coverings as well as the plywood boards. Harlen stopped at the window closest to the southwest corner of the school, ripped back the long, loose board, and kicked at the rusty mesh. It swung free. "Gerry Daysinger and me kicked the shit out of this thing one dull recess last April," said Harlen. "Give me a hand."
Dale propped the shotgun against the wall and helped to pry the mesh away from the wall. Rusted metal and brick dust sifted into the window well below the sidewalk level.
"Hold it," said Harlen, the words almost drowned by the rising wind and a roll of thunder. He sat on the ground, leaned into the well, pulled the mesh loose, and kicked the pane of glass out with his right sneaker, smashing the wooden mounting while he was at it. He kicked a second pane out, then a third. Half the small window lay open into darkness, the shards of glass reflecting the mad sky.
Harlen scooted back on his rump, extended an arm, palm up. "After you, my dear Gaston."
Dale grabbed the shotgun and lowered himself in, legs scrabbling in the darkness, his left foot finding a pipe, setting the gun in to use both hands to keep himself away from the broken glass. He jumped from the pipe to the floor five feet below, found the shotgun and held it across his chest.
Harlen clambered in behind him. Lightning revealed a riot of iron pipes, massive elbow joints where pipes connected, the red legs of a big worktable, and lots of darkness. Dale undipped the flashlight from his belt, fumbled the squirt gun back into his waistband.
"Turn it on, for Chrissakes," whispered Harlen, his voice taut.
Dale clicked on the light. They were in the boiler room; pipes littered the darkness overhead, and huge metal tanks rose like crematoria on either side. There were shadows between the gigantic furnaces, shadows beneath the pipes, shadows in the rafters, and a darkness deeper than shadows outside the door to the basement hallway.
"Let's go," whispered Dale, holding the flashlight directly over the Savage's barrel. He wished he'd brought.22 shells as well as the.410s.
Dale led the way into the darkness.
"Son of a bitch," whispered Kevin Grumbacher. He almost never cursed, but nothing was going right here.
The others had all left him, and Kevin was doing his best to ruin his dad's truck and livelihood. It made him sick: breaking into the pump and buried gas tank, using the milk hose to pump gasoline up into the stainless-steel bulk tank. No matter how much they cleaned the rubber hose, there'd always be some gasoline left to contaminate the milk. These hoses cost a small fortune. Kevin didn't even want to think about what he was doing to the tanker itself.
The problem was, with the electr
icity off, the air conditioner in their house would be off and that would wake his mother and father up fairly soon… sooner if the storm got any louder. His dad was famous for being a sound sleeper, but his mother often wandered the house during storms. It was just lucky that their bedroom was downstairs next to the TV room.
Still, Kevin had had to get the tanker truck out of the garage without starting the engine; he had the key, but was sure the noise would wake his father up without the air conditioner to shield it. The storm was getting louder, but Kevin couldn't count on the truck engine not being heard.
Luckily the driveway was on the hill, so Kevin had set the truck in neutral and allowed it to coast the ten feet or so necessary to get close enough to the gas pump. He'd run the centrifugal pump cord into the 230-volt outlet in the garage and then remembered that there was no power. Great. Just fucking great.
His father had a Coleman gasoline-powered generator in the back of the truck shed, but that would make more noise than the truck itself.
There was nothing to do but try. Kevin set the proper switches, threw the proper levers, primed the generator's carburetor once with gas from the jerry can in the truck, and jerked hard with the pull-starter. The generator popped twice, coughed once, and started right up.
It's not so loud. No louder than about ten Go-Karts in a big aluminum barrel.
But the back door to the house did not fly open, his father did not rush out with his robe flapping around him and his eyes wide with fury. Not yet.
Kevin plugged the power cord into the proper outlet, pulled the shed doors closed against the wind that tried to rip them out of his grasp, and fumbled with the keys to get the lid off the underground-tank access panel. He used the nine-foot stick his dad kept by the side of the shed to check the fuel depth: it seemed almost topped off. Kevin fumbled with the rear doors of the tanker, got the bulky hose out, attached, and snaked across the drive to the filler cap. The hose uncoiling into the darkness of the tank made him think of things he did not want to think about.
The storm was getting wilder. The birch and poplars in front of the Grumbacher ranch house were doing their best to rip themselves apart while the aerial display was lighting the world below in false Kodachrome colors.
Kevin threw the switch and saw the transfer hose stiffen and ripple as the vacuum pump began the transfer. He closed his eyes as he heard the first of the high-test gasoline start to gurgle and splash into the well-scrubbed and nearly sterile stainless-steel milk tank. Sorry, kiddies, your milk's gonna have a little bit of Shell under taste for a while.
His dad was going to kill him, no matter what happened. Kevin's father rarely showed his anger, but when he did it was with a red-eyed Teutonic fury that frightened Kevin's mother and everyone else within a lethal radius.
Kevin opened his eyes, blinking as the wind hurled grit and gravel at him. Dale and Lawrence weren't in sight on the schoolyard anymore, and Mike had disappeared into the Stewarts' basement. Kevin suddenly felt very alone. Seventy-five gallons a minute. There must be at least a thousand gallons in the tank below-half the bulk tanker's capacity. What… fifteen minutes pumping time? Dad'II never sleep through all of that.
Kevin was six minutes into the transfer, the pump gurgling and bucking in his hands, the generator making its hot-rod noises in the echoing shed, and the storm building to some insane crescendo, when he looked out from his hill and saw the ripples in the earth of Old Central's playground.
It was like the wake of two sharks in the ocean, fins parting water like ripples in a wind tunnel. Only that was not ocean or wind-whatever was coming was carving its way under the solid soil of the playing field, headed straight for the road and then for the milk truck.
Two wakes. Two ridges being churned into existence like two giant moles were digging their way straight for him.
And they were coming fast.
THIRTY-EIGHT
After the first ten yards or so, Mike found the tunnel easier going. It was wider now, closer to twenty-eight or thirty inches across rather than the tight squeeze he'd forced his shoulders into at the beginning. The ribbed sides of the tunnel were hard, made of packed earth and some gray material with the consistency of dried airplane glue, and they reminded him of the track a caterpillar tractor or bulldozer left in the soil after the mud had dried for days in the sun. Mike thought that crawling through the tunnel was no more difficult than forcing one's way through one of the smaller corrugated steel culverts they laid under a road.
Only this one went on for hundreds of yards-or miles-rather than a few yards.
The smell was bad, but Mike ignored it. The light from his flashlight reflected red off the ribs of the hole, making Mike think again of a long gut, an intestine to hell, but he tried not to think about that. The pain in his elbows and knees grew worse by the minute, but he put that out of his mind, reciting Hail Marys interspersed with the occasional Our Father. He wished he'd brought the remaining bit of Eucharist he'd left on Memo's bed.
Mike crawled farther, feeling the tunnel twist to the left and right, sometimes descending, sometimes rising to the point he guessed there was less than a yard of dirt over his head. At the moment he felt deep. Twice he'd come to a junction with other tunnels, one burrowing off the left almost straight down, and Mike had shone his flashlight, waited, listened, and then crawled on, keeping to what he thought was the most recently excavated burrow. At least this tunnel smelted the strongest.
At every turn, Mike expected to come across the corpse of Lawrence Stewart, clogging the way ahead. Perhaps there would be just bones and tatters of flesh left… perhaps it would be worse. But if Mike found the eight-year-old, at least he could leave the warren of tunnels with honor and tell Dale and the others that there was no reason for them to go into the school at night.
Only Mike could never find his way back now. There had been too many twists, more than enough turns to lose him permanently. He stayed with the main tunnel-he thought it was the main tunnel-and kept moving ahead, his jeans torn at the knee now, the flesh underneath bleeding. It was like crawling on ridged concrete. The flashlight wavered on red soil, now illuminating twenty yards of shaft, now twenty inches as the tunnel dipped or turned again. Mike expected a visitor at every bend.
The squirt guns in his waistband were leaking, making him feel like a damned fool. It was one thing to fight monsters, he thought. Quite another to fight them with wet underwear. He pulled the worst offender from his belt and clamped it in his teeth; better a dribbly chin than to look like you needed diapers.
The tunnel turned right again, began dropping steeply. Mike inched ahead, using his elbows as brakes, the flashlight beam bobbing against the red roof. Mike kept crawling.
He felt it coming before he saw it.
The earth began to tremble slightly. Mike remembered one long-ago summer night when he and Dale had been watching. a ballgame over at Oak Hill and had gone for a moonlit walk along the railroad tracks. They'd felt a vibration in the soles of their sneakers and then put their ears against the rails, feeling the distant coming of the daily express between Gales-burg and Peoria.
This was like that. Only much stronger, the vibration coming up through the bones of Mike's hands and knees and shaking his spine, rattling his teeth. And with the tremors came the stench.
Mike deliberated about turning the light off and then decided to hell with it-these things could certainly see him, Why not return the favor. He lay prone, the flashlight under his chin now, Memo's squirrel gun in his right hand, the squirt gun in his left. Then he remembered that he'd have to reload and he hurried to fumble out four more cartridges, wrapping them in the short sleeve of his t-shirt where he could get them in a hurry.
For a second the vibration seemed all around him, above him, behind him, and he had a moment of pure panic as he thought of the thing exploding on him from behind, seizing him from the rear before he managed to squirm around, get the gun aimed behind him. Mike felt the panic rise like dark bile, but then the vibr
ations localized and intensified. It's ahead of me.
He lay flat, waiting.
The thing came around a bend in the tunnel perhaps twelve feet ahead of him. It was worse than Mike could have imagined.
For a second he almost let his bladder go, but controlling that helped him to control his thinking. It's not so bad, it's not so bad.
It was.
It was the eel that Mike had caught and run from in a small boat, and a lamprey with its all-devouring mouth and endless rows of teeth disappearing into the gut that was its body, and it was a worm the size of a large sewer pipe, with quivering appendages that might have been a thousand tiny fingers ringing the mouth, or perhaps waving tendrils, or perhaps serrated lips… Mike didn't give too much of a damn at that second.
The flashlight illuminated gray and pink flesh, pulsing blood vessels visible through the skin. No eyes. Teeth. More teeth. Pink gut not so dissimilar from the tunnel itself.
The thing paused, tendril lips writhed, the lamprey mouth pulsated, and it came on at a terrific speed.
Mike fired the squirt gun first-Holy Mary, Mother of God-saw the water arch the ten feet, saw the pink flesh hiss, realized that the thing was too big to be destroyed or seriously inconvenienced by holy water or acid, saw it still rushing on, knew that he could never back away in time, and he fired the squirrel gun.
The blast deafened and blinded him.
He broke the breech, flipped out the empty, took a shell from his sleeve, slammed it home, clicked the breech shut.
He fired again, blinking away retinal echoes.
The thing had stopped… it had to have stopped… he'd have been in its gut already if it hadn't stopped. The flashlight was askew. Mike reloaded, aimed, steadied the flashlight with his left hand.
It had stopped. Less than eight feet away. The circular jaw of the thing had been shattered in several places. Pieces of the tunnel dribbled onto it. Greenish-gray fluid leaked from the giant worm body.