Eleven, Twelve ... Dig and delve (Rebekka Franck Book 6)

  Day 4

  October 9th 2014

  SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

  38

  I WAS SO unbearably thirsty. So hungry it literally hurt. The emptiness in my stomach felt like a fist pushing downward. It was painful. I had given most of the water to the sick people, thinking I could better manage with no more than a few sips a day. By noon the fourth day under the surface, we had run completely out of water, even though I had rationed it well. I was so hungry I had even considered trying to catch a bat and eat it, even though I knew they could carry all kinds of diseases. We hadn’t seen any of them in a very long time.

  There was a great sense of powerlessness among us. We didn’t know if we were being rescued or what was going on on the surface because we didn’t hear any noises from machines or anything. We had tried to find a way out through the tunnels, but hadn’t succeeded, and as the hours and days passed, we became too weak to try anymore. We were even too lethargic to get on each other’s nerves. No one bothered to fight. Every now and then, someone went into a panic, but it was getting more and more rare. We simply didn’t have the strength.

  Prayer helped us get through the day. We had started a prayer group for those who wanted it. Most of us did. It became the highlight of the day. It was a good way to get some of the anger and frustration out. It started on the second day when Afrim had fallen to his knees and cried out, “God, please help my mother! Please save her!”

  Compelled to show compassion, David and I had kneeled as well. Afrim’s mother started mumbling in Albanian, lying pale and weak on her back. We joined in. It didn’t matter that we had different gods. Soon, others joined in, and little by little we started having prayer sessions every day at noon before I served the day’s only meal. It became a daily ritual for everyone. People of different faiths, on their knees, in repentance and desperation, praying and whispering. Some were crying. I know I was from time to time, thinking about my family. Others were mystified, as if they couldn’t quite believe they were on their knees, begging God to rescue them. A God they, until a few days ago, weren’t sure they believed in.

  On the fourth day, right before prayer and lunchtime, David was sitting next to me. He was feeling weary. I could tell by looking at him. He kept closing his eyes and leaning his head back. No one wondered about Michael West or what happened to him anymore. At least no one spoke about it. We were way too focused on merely surviving. We hardly went into the tunnels anymore. Since no one had eaten or drank much for days, it wasn’t like nature called us to step out. We stayed close together; everyone was instructed to never leave the cave and go into the tunnels alone, even though I couldn’t help wondering if the killer could still be among us.

  Sometimes, we could hear the ground rumbling and thuds from dirt falling to the ground inside the mines. The smell from the corpses nearby was getting bad. So was the smell from all of our bodies in the cave…our fetid unwashed bodies. It was constantly cold in the cave, the temperature remained about eight degrees Celsius (46 degrees Fahrenheit) all night and day, Kenneth, the engineer, told us. With no food in my stomach, I soon started to shiver with the cold. David put his arm around me and tried to warm me. I felt like I could hardly move. My legs were hurting, so was my stomach, and I couldn’t stand the feeling of thirst. I was amazed at how fast the body reacted to these dire conditions…how fast I became affected by it.

  “We have to do something,” I said to David. “We’ll die from dehydration. We need to get some water somehow.”

  We hadn’t seen or heard anything from Brian, Thomas or Lars for several days, neither had we heard anything from the surface, except for those sounds people now and then imagined hearing.

  “Did you hear that?” they would say.

  I would always nod and smile and assure them it was most certainly the rescue team working to get us out of here, then tell them to just be a little more patient. I felt it was my job to keep up their spirits in a place where hopelessness and anger otherwise ruled.

  It was getting harder and harder to stay positive. I missed my children like crazy and refused to accept never seeing them again. I kept going through my last conversation with Sune in my mind over and over again. We hadn’t left of on good terms. He had been annoyed with Julie, and that bothered me. Every now and then, I would sob and wish I had told him I loved him, or had even been able to say goodbye to the kids. Did they know how much I loved them? Had I told them enough?

  “What do you suggest?” I asked. The fatigue overpowered me again, and I had to close my eyes. It was the dehydration doing this to me. I knew it was, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to fight it, but all I wanted to do was to sleep. Sleep and dream that I was back with my loved ones, hugging and holding them in my arms and never letting go.

  “We could try and go back to where we found the food. See if there’s more. Maybe if we look again, remove some more debris, rocks and planks, something will show up,” David said. He had brought this up before, but every time we had tried to find our way back, we had ended up getting lost in the tunnels.

  “It’s too hard,” I moaned. “I’m so tired. I need to rest. How will you even find your way back there? It was pure luck that we found it in the first place. We risk dying even trying,” I said. “We’re too weak now.”

  “What about Brian and the water Thomas said he had found?”

  I opened my eyes and looked at David. I had thought about it too. Several times. But going back there and telling him we wanted water was a really bad idea. He would only give us water if we worked, he had said. If we dug. That would mean a lot of the others couldn’t get any. David and I could, yes. Sigurd Bjerrehus too. But the rest? They were badly hurt. I didn’t believe that Brian would let us get enough water to give to them as well.

  “I don’t think he’ll let us have it voluntarily,” I said. “But maybe if we put a little pressure on him.”

  “What are you thinking?” David asked.

  I looked at the remains of the food. There were still several cans of tuna, cookies and crackers. If we rationed it further and only ate one spoonful of tuna mixed with water each day, it could last for a long time. We didn’t need the food as much as we needed the water. It was all down to survival now. We could go for longer without food. We needed water desperately.

  “No,” David said. “We’ll starve if we give them our food. There’s barely enough as it is.”

  “We’ll just offer them some of it. Not all. We keep a few cans for ourselves, then ration it, maybe only eat every other day. We need the water more. And my guess is they haven’t eaten at all since we fell down here. They must be pretty desperate by now. I think they’d be ready to make a deal.”

  David sighed deeply. “I’m not fond of doing any kind of business with those guys…I really don’t trust them. I know people like them.”

  “It’s our last chance,” I said. “They said they have water. We need it. There’s no other way out, the way I see it.”

  David nodded. “Alright then. You’ve convinced me. We’ll do it.”

  “I’ll gather some food,” I said, and got up. My legs felt so weak I wondered if they could even carry me through the tunnel.

  David pulled out the knife from his pocket and looked at it. “But if they try anything, I swear, I’m gonna kill them all.”

  39

  “LOOK WHO COMES CRAWLING!”

  Brian had a weak look to his face. All three of them did. Their cheeks had fallen in and their eyes were glaring feverishly. Brian lit his lighter as we came closer to better see us.

  David and I approached them, holding a cellphone in front of us. It only had a little battery left. All three of them were sitting on the ground of the small cave, dirt on their faces and clothes. Above them, they had managed to dig a big hole.

  “Come to join the winning team, have we?” Brian said.

  I shook my head and sat on my knees. I put three cans of tuna on the ground, along with three wrapped up cakes, the rest of the cookie
s, and half of what was left of the crackers. I had kept the oats at the cave, since they kept us feeling full longer than any of the other food, even if we only ate a handful every day.

  All three looked desperately at the food. “You have food?” Brian said.

  “We want to make a trade,” David said. He was flashing his knife to make sure they knew we were able to defend ourselves in case they tried to steal the food. “You get this, we get water.”

  “And you light this,” I said, and pulled out the candle I had taken on the first day and hidden in my pocket until now.

  Brian shook his head. Thomas stared at us. He had that look in his eyes that frightened me slightly. It was creepy. It was like he was there, and he was looking at me, but wasn’t really. Like someone daydreaming, only he was smiling blissfully. I was wondering if he was well. Maybe the starvation had made him hallucinate. I had heard about that happening before. He had that madman look about him. I didn’t trust him. Someone who could write so vividly about molesting and killing someone else had to be sick in their mind, in my opinion.

  “No,” Brian said. “Definitely not. I’m not sharing the water unless you come work for me. We’ve dug a large tunnel up through the dirt. But it’s going too slowly. We need more hands.”

  “But you’re weak from hunger,” David said. “You need food to keep working. We can give you that.”

  Lars kept staring at the food on the ground. He looked like he was ready to kill Brian to get to it. “Give them the water,” he said. “We need the food, Brian. My stomach is growling so loud it sounds like the ground is rumbling.”

  “That’s the sounds caused by the layers of muscle in your intestines squeezing food that isn’t there,” David said. “I went through a long period of starvation when I was kidnapped in Syria. My doctor explained this to me later…that the sound was a gurgling set off by the stomach trying to digest what’s not there, made louder by the echo chamber of an empty stomach. Each contraction will cause you to think about food even more. Do you know what happens to a body when it starves? Most of us are familiar with the unease of going too long without eating. That’s because, after just a few hours without food, your body has burned through most of its supply of glycogen, the most easily reachable source of energy stored in your body. After two or three days without food, most people will have used up their entire store of glycogen. In these first few days, symptoms are mild, including hunger pangs, bad breath, headaches, and a feeling of exhaustion. While hunger pangs—the strong contractions of the stomach I talked of earlier—generally pass within these first couple days, it’s after seventy-two hours that a real hunger is in effect. In the days that follow, the body begins to break down stores of energy in fat and muscle, essentially cannibalizing itself to survive. As your bodies harvest any available energy stores to power the brain, the body rapidly sheds both muscle and fat, and levels of important nutrients like phosphorous and magnesium are depleted.”

  David paused and saw the effect his little speech had on them. They looked terrified. I was amazed. He was quite the speaker.

  “I think you should take the deal, Brian,” David continued. “You won’t last long without food.”

  “And we’re thirsty,” I said.

  Brian kept staring at the food. I could tell how much he wanted to attack it. Then, he nodded. “Okay. I’ll let you fill your bottles.”

  “Twice,” I said. “We come back when they’re empty and fill them once again. We’re a lot of people, remember?”

  “And you light her candle,” David continued.

  Brian bit his cheek, while considering the proposal. He wasn’t pleased with our demands, but I could tell he was desperate. His eyes were wide, his insides screaming for nutrition.

  “Alright. You win.”

  40

  “I CAN’T STAND it anymore!”

  Afrim lifted his head to look at Mr. Bjerrehus, who had started yelling. His eyes were flickering.

  “Keep calm, Sigurd,” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t keep calm anymore. What are we waiting for? Starvation or thirst to kill us? I can’t just sit here and wait for death!”

  “Rebekka and David went to get water from the others,” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said. “You’ll feel better as soon as you get something to drink.”

  Afrim had seen people in the cave panic from time to time. Even Mr. Bjerrehus, who usually kept his cool, who usually was the one calming everyone else down. But he had never seen a look in any of their eyes quite like the one Mr. Bjerrehus had in his at this moment.

  It scared him. Afrim liked Mr. Bjerrehus. He liked him a lot. He had been the one to give him the bonbons when they had nothing to eat. Afrim still had two of them left in his pocket. He was certain they had saved his mother’s life. She was getting better. At least that’s what Afrim told himself. She was still coughing up blood on the floor and wheezing badly when she breathed, reminding him of Wheezy in Toy Story. But when she was awake, the few times a day, she would look at him and smile. She would call him baby boy in Albanian and hold his hand. Those were the moments he felt so happy. They were worth the wait.

  Buster seemed to not be doing too well with the lack of water. He had lost a lot of weight and was whimpering constantly. His leg was getting better, and on the third day, he had run around in the cave, searching for water and even barking at the bats. But now he was hardly moving at all anymore. Afrim petted his head, while wondering how long the dog could survive without water.

  “I have to get out of here,” Mr. Bjerrehus yelled. “I have to get out. There has to be a way. There simply has to be.”

  “But there is no way out!” Mrs. Sigumfeldt cried. She was holding her son in her arms. Frederic stared at Mr. Bjerrehus with wide eyes. Afrim had talked to him a few times since he woke up, but he didn’t seem to want to talk much. Afrim knew why. He was simply scared to death. As was Afrim. But he had to stay alert; he had to watch over his mom and Buster. He didn’t have time to be scared about anything other than losing those he loved.

  Where are you, Daddy? Are you coming for us? Are you searching, digging for us? Or have you given up by now? Please, Daddy. Mommy’s sick!

  “We’ve tried everything, Sigurd,” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said. “Please sit down and be quiet. You’re scaring the kids.”

  “I…” Mr. Bjerrehus was spinning…around and around like Afrim’s top used to do when he played with it in the driveway.

  He looked crazy, Afrim thought, and he had seen his share of crazy people when his aunt was admitted to a mental institution and Afrim had to go visit once a month.

  Mr. Bjerrehus’ eyes looked like theirs. They were sad, and he looked like a scared little boy too. Afrim knew about being scared. When his aunt had stayed with them after she came to Denmark from Albania, he had been very scared of her. Sometimes, she had screamed all night long. She had tried to attack Afrim’s dad with a knife in the kitchen. Afrim’s mom had told him she wasn’t well…that many years ago she had to flee from Albania in the trunk of a car with her husband, and that he was shot. She was forced by soldiers to shoot her own husband. Then the bad soldiers did some bad things to her. Things that made her lose her mind. Afrim knew what it meant to lose your mind. It was what his aunt and all those people at the mental hospital had done. And it was what Mr. Bjerrehus was about to do now.

  41

  WE FILLED THE empty bottles from the water tank and gave the food to Brian. He lit my candle and I carried it back, careful to keep it lit. Back in the cave, they all looked perplexed when we walked in.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Afrim had been crying. For a second, I thought something bad had happened to his mother or dog, but they were both the same as when we left.

  “It’s…” Afrim tried hard to act grown up, but that made him seem even younger than he was.

  “Sigurd left,” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said. “He got up and started babbling about not being able to take it anymore, then
he left.”

  “Didn’t you try and stop him?” David asked, while I walked around, letting everyone take small sips of the water.

  “If he wants to run out there and get lost, then it’s his problem,” Mrs. Sigumfeldt said. “I have enough on my plate.”

  “I thought we agreed to stick together and not let anyone go anywhere alone,” David said.

  Several of the others started murmuring. I could tell they were angry, and it made me frustrated. I decided to skip prayer time and go directly to lunch. Maybe getting something to fill the gap in their stomachs would help calm everyone down. I looked at the guy named Benjamin who hadn’t been involved much in anything. He was a teenager, eighteen or so. He had kept mostly to himself, sitting in the corner with his mom, Irene. David had told me they were neighbors to David’s brother Martin, and that he had seen him around, especially at nighttime when the boy went out with his friends. He didn’t know anything else about him, and neither the boy nor his mother had wanted to share about themselves or participate in any debates with the rest of us.

  “Benjamin. Could you help me serve lunch?” I asked. “Now that Mr. Bjerrehus isn’t here anymore, I could use an extra hand.”

  Benjamin got up. I opened a can of tuna and grabbed one of the empty cans. I divided the tuna into the two cans and poured water on it to make it last longer.

  “We need to ration the food further now that I had to trade some of it for the water,” I said. “But I believe we’ll manage somehow.”

  Mrs. Sigumfeldt moaned angrily. “I can’t stand more tuna in water! I’m so hungry!”

  “We all are, Tine,” I said.

  I asked Benjamin to get the crackers and hand them out along with the handful of oats. Meanwhile, I fed everyone with tuna. With Mr. Bjerrehus gone, we were still twelve mouths to feed. I approached Afrim. I gave a spoonful to his mother, who was capable of lifting her head to eat it.