Lori slides his umbrella inside his pants. I do the same with the baton while whispering, “How do you know all this?”
I start descending the metal ladder. Lori is in front of me, cautiously going down with his phone between his teeth to illuminate the ladder.
“Raph got curious after Ezra confessed to using them. It’s an amazing way to make donors disappear without being seen, if you think about it,” Michael explains.
“I learned about it in school a little,” I say. “I don’t remember much except that it is a concrete-lined tunnel system located below the city’s sewers, pipes, and cables, around forty feet below ground level.”
Lori finds the bottom, takes the phone out of his mouth, and whistles. “That’s closer to hell than I thought.”
I don’t feel cold as I finally get down. I grab my phone from my pocket and point it to the left and then right.
“Fuck. Me.” Lori utters, looking around too.
We are in the middle of the tunnel. This must have been like an emergency exit of some kind. It’s eerily silent down here. I touch the cold concrete wall. It’s mostly dark and very narrow, six feet wide, but remarkably intact. There are still the gauge railway tracks on the ground—I actually trip on them as we start walking to the left.
“I remember reading that they were designed to move coal, ash, and…mail to avoid street traffic.”
“Welcome to the forgotten underground.” Lori makes a ghostly voice, pushing the light under his face in a Blair-Witch-Project kind of way. Fucker!
“Are you okay?” Michael asks.
“No, there are spiderwebs down here and possibly rats,” Lori whines, using his umbrella as a walking stick. “Thank God I changed my shoes. Is that poop?”
I squint at it. I don’t want to remain here longer than necessary to check.
“Apart from that?” Linda asks. She sounds impatient, tired, and on edge. Is it because of Meg’s worsening condition or because we are finally getting closer to Nine? But are we?
“Still following the three little piggies. This way.” Lori points to the right.
Michael was right when he said it’s a maze down here. And if some of the exits are sealed, it’s better not to get lost. Ezra moved around this underground network for months. I’m still in awe of his fearless and dauntless personality. I want to be like him one day. Want him to be proud of me.
“We need to speed up, they are getting too far away,” Lori tells me, picking up his pace.
“G…wh…hear…” Linda’s voice is breaking up now, as if suddenly there’s something wrong with the earpieces’ connection.
“Linda! Michael, can you hear me?” I hear Lori asking, but we get no response.
Shit!
“Let’s keep going. They can track us anyway, thanks to my microchip,” he says, pointing at the space behind his ear.
After a few minutes, an echo of footsteps makes me freeze mid-pace. I spin around, pointing the light and looking sharply beyond the darkness, my heart is racing, my chest suddenlytight. But there’s no one there. Everything is quiet. I let out a relieved breath and turn around to realize that Lori is not there anymore.
Is he fucking with me? “Lori?” I call after him, but the only reply is silence. “Are you hiding? This is not funny!” I bark, but my voice is shaking a little. No, no. No! I just thought about how bad getting lost here would be. Alarms are ringing in my head as anxiety and terror start crawling inside my chest. Shit! Not now.
Noodle’s little wet nose suddenly touches my chin. His long body wiggles inside the hoodie. Like he can feel what I’m going through, he comes out and wraps himself around my neck—reminding me of Ezra’s hand gripping it, grounding me. I grab the expandable baton from the back of my pants and flick it open with a sharp swing movement of my arm. It makes a click sound as the nested, aluminum tubes jam together, and lock. The feel of the self-defense tool in my hands makes me feel less helpless. Noodle slides back inside the hoodie. I’m not alone. Freaking out won’t help. I need to focus on what to do.
I press on the earbud, trying to turn it off and on. But there’s still no sound. I resume walking, hand trembling as I keep the light in front of me. The tunnel turns left and also carries on ahead. I check both ways, but there’s no trace of Lori. I don’t have the tracker app, so I don’t know where the guys are going either. Should I go back where I came from?
A sick, squelching sound arises from my right, but I can’t bring myself to look. It pushes me to choose, and I spring forward, almost jogging, heart skittering, hoping to hell I won’t witness anAlienresurrection—fucking Ash and his love for horror movies. I let instinct guide me.
I don’t know how much time has passed, but I’m thirsty and my feet hurt. I had to retrace my steps twice when I found a blocked-off or filled-in area of the tunnel. I’m officially lost, and of course, there’s no cell reception. I suddenly catch sight of something far ahead, and it takes a few more steps before I realize it’s a light. Thinking it’s Lori, I walk toward it, but I soon notice that it’s too dim to be his phone. Still, I move until I step on something that crunches under my shoe. The sound is uncomfortably loud in the otherwise quiet of the abandoned tunnels. It makes my body shake. Because it’s not glass, seeing as it sounded suspiciously like…bones, breaking under my weight.
“And what do we have here?” A sneering voice reaches my ears. I look left and see a man standing a few feet from me with a torch in his hand and a gun in the other. He points the latter at me. “Drop it!”
Saliva is pooling inside my mouth, and blood is rushing into my veins as I feel a little lightheaded. Who is he? It doesn’t matter since he looks very hostile. Think. Think! He is too far from me, and I can’t do anything against his automatic weapon. But I could make him come closer.
“The phone or the baton?” I ask dumbly.
