Imperceptibly, the movement died away.
He released her and chucked Tot under the chin. “A little shake, is all.” Her skin was cool. “Another half hour, and we should stop for snacks. Try to warm her up.”
Kit sighed. “Traveling with a baby is slow.”
“Particularly in an underground tunnel.” The passageway narrowed in some places, pinched down to the point where he walked with his neck bowed and guided Kit through sections with his palms on her head and Tot’s to prevent injury. They squeezed through a particularly narrow juncture, and his lungs tightened as he considered.
What if the way becomes too narrow forus to pass?
He mentally scoffed at the idea. If full-grown lumbermen could do it, so could they.
Unlessit had become blocked.
He thought of the fury unleashed by Mount Ember, the landslide that almost killed them. Wasn’t it probable that had unsettled the tunnel too?
The way was definitely damper now, fissures forming irregular ridges in the stonework. He flicked a look high up at something that had caught his eye and nearly convulsed. “Did you see that?”
Kit stopped, staring at the place where he pointed. “Where?”
“Above us. Something crept along that ridge up there where the water’s dripping.”
“An animal something? Your squirrel?”
“Nah.” He beamed the headlight and clenched his jaw. A scream bubbled out of him in a decidedly unmanly volume. “It’s a rat.” He grabbed her forearm and swiveled her in line with the exact spot. “There. There’s a rat right there, big as a cat.”
She looked closer, squinting. “Oh, I see it now. I’d say it’s more hamster size, though.”
He now understood what it meant to have your skin crawl, because his was writhing in disgust. Spiders, snakes, even scorpions he could handle. But rats ... The scaly tails, silent paws, yellow teeth.Defense. What could he do? He snatched a fallen rock. “Don’t worry. If it comes close, I’ll take it out with this.”
“The rat is not interested in us, Cullen. It’s got a nest up there, which means we’re probably getting closer to the surface. They’d have to live near food and water, right? Nothing grows down here for them to eat.” She paused. “The rat is a good thing.”
He pulled in a breath through his nose. “A rat is never agoodthing.” He realized she was giggling at him, and he tried to force himself to relax a notch. “What? So I’m not a fan.”
She was laughing harder now, both of Tot’s hands clutching fistfuls of her hair. “A big, strapping ex-cop is afraid of rodents? Yelping like a kid?”
He did not slacken his grip on the rock. “Tons of individuals would agree with me on this point, Kit.”
“You’re overstating to distract from your terror.”
He chose to ignore the word. “I’m not. That thing probably has hundreds of relatives waiting in the wings. Who would be okay with that situation? No one. No one at all.”
She continued to giggle.
Miffed, he went on. “List for me the people who would be fine traipsing along a tunnel filled with creatures that live in sewers, probably teeming with rabies. It’d be a short list, I’ll tell you.”
“It’s actually pretty rare statistically for a small rodent to have rabies,” she said, between spurts of chuckles.
How much did the woman read, exactly? She was a walking encyclopedia. “Rodents are vermin,” he said as calmly as he could. “Haven’t you ever heard of the black plague?”
“The plague was transmitted to humans by the fleas on the rodents, technically, not by the actual rats themselves.”
“That’s hardly a comforting factoid, and anyway, the rats might scare Tot.” Well, now he’d lost it. There was no saving his ego.
She held up a palm, her giggles subsided. “All right, Cullen. Whatever you need to tell yourself to get through this. I’ll go first with Tot, and you can keep watch for a rat ambush. Can you live with that?”
He opened his mouth and closed it. “Now I’m coming off like a chicken.”
She smiled and tugged the brim of his baseball cap. “Totally, but a really handsome, six-foot-tall chicken.”
