Bad Glass (46 page)

I slung the camera around my neck and grabbed for the sheet of paper in the middle of the bed. “At least we know where they went,” I said, holding up the note.

It was a familiar note. The paper was worn and crinkled, crisscrossed with at least a half dozen folds. One of the corners had been ripped away, and it looked as if the bottom third had been dipped in water and then allowed to dry. The whole thing was spattered with teardrops of mud.

But the words were still legible: “There’s something I need to do, some place I need to be. I know you don’t understand. I’m sorry, Amanda.”

“Underground,” I said. My voice was weak. As I continued, the words got caught in my throat, coming out rough, devoid of emotion. “The tunnels …

“He took her to the tunnels.”

As soon as I told him about the tunnel in the park, Danny tore out of the bedroom like a sprinter at the sound of a starting gun. His face was set in anger, and he let out a growl as he paused briefly just outside the bedroom door. “I’ll meet you there,” he said, “with as many men as I can gather. And guns. Lots of guns.”

Then he clumped down the stairs and out the front door.

I could imagine him hitting the street and running like a man possessed toward the courthouse and his barracked soldiers, doing absolutely everything he could to keep Taylor safe.

That’s the type of person he was. Loyal. Dedicated.

My head was pounding and I felt dizzy, still drunk but getting sober now. Possibly concussed. As I turned back from the door, my vision swam and the back of my throat filled with prevomit saliva. I reached down and grabbed the corner of Taylor’s bed, trying to keep myself steady. When my stomach finally settled, I bolted down two more Vicodins, hoping to push back the pain and nausea, wanting nothing more than numb, unconnected distance between me and my injured, chemically unbalanced head.

But the anger remained. And the fear.

Mac had waltzed right in and taken her. Easy as could be. Danny and me, sloppy drunk on the sofa. Floyd and Charlie,
asleep and oblivious. And Taylor … all alone, she hadn’t stood a chance.

“Get flashlights,” I said. Floyd and Charlie were sitting on the edge of the bed. They had the camera balanced between them, propped up on Floyd’s knee and tilted back in Charlie’s hand. At the sound of my voice, they both looked up from Taylor’s picture. There was fear in their eyes. They looked like children. Lost, frightened children.

“And get weapons,” I said. “Anything you’ve got. We’re going to get Taylor back, and Mac isn’t going to stand in our way. At least not for long.”

Danny and his soldiers weren’t at the tunnel by the time we got there. I wasn’t surprised. They had farther to walk, and I hadn’t exactly taken my time getting us out the door and on our way—walking and running through the dark streets, but mostly running. Floyd, Charlie, and I were all panting for breath by the time we reached the dark opening.

We didn’t have the breath to talk, and for that I was grateful. This situation was wrong, all sorts of fucked-up, and I didn’t need Charlie or Floyd to tell me that.

It was dark, predawn. The sky overhead was clotted with clouds—the stars hidden, the moon long since crashed beneath the horizon. The rain had stopped, but the grass and trees were still dripping wet, and it was freakishly quiet. There were no animals rustling in the leaves and not a whisper of wind. If there were wolves here, stalking us through the night, they were being very quiet.

I had a baseball bat clenched in my hand, scavenged from the house’s garage. Floyd had a kitchen knife. Charlie had a longhandled shovel.

I also had my camera. I hadn’t even thought about it, just automatically dropping it around my neck after we finished looking at Mac’s horrible photograph. It was a comfort, having it there.
The camera had always been a comfort for me, a wall to hide behind, a distance to place between myself and the subject of my eye. I was seeing that now for the first time. The camera was my way of escaping from the world.

I gave Danny a couple of minutes. The tension grew with each passing second as my imagination ran wild:
Mac, dragging Taylor through the tunnels, hurting her; wolves and spiders, stalking through the dark; buried limbs and faces; the gigantic hand of God, entombed somewhere beneath the city, dead and drained of blood
. When it got to be too much, I gathered up all my strength and headed toward the dark opening in the grassy hill.

“Wait, wait!” Floyd called, the first syllable loud before his voice dropped into a scared whisper. “Shouldn’t we wait for Danny? And the soldiers?” Then, after a brief pause, “Shouldn’t we wait for guns?”

“You can wait if you want,” I said, trying to sound stronger, more confident than I actually felt. “But I can’t do it. I can’t wait … not while he’s got her in there, not while she’s in danger.”

I headed toward the tunnel, making a show of not looking back. Maybe this feigned nonchalance came across as confidence, but really, I just didn’t want Charlie and Floyd to see my pleading, desperate eyes. I wanted to be strong … but I wasn’t. I was scared. And that fear—a fear of paralysis, a fear of loss—was what got me moving.

After a moment, I heard Floyd let out a string of expletives. Then he and Charlie followed me into the tunnel’s gaping maw.

Photograph. Undated. Danny:

I took the first left inside the tunnel. This was the way Mac had gone during our first exploration. This was the dead end into which he’d disappeared.

But there was no dead end this time. The tunnel continued on, tilting down, farther into the dark earth. I looked for wires in the tunnel walls but didn’t find any. Not here.

There were paw prints on the floor, though.

And, here and there, footprints.

The ceiling dripped wet mud onto our heads as we advanced. I jumped in surprise each time a drop hit the back of my neck.

“Fuck, Dean,” Floyd hissed as our flashlights stabbed into the dark, picking out nothing but tunnel and more tunnel. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this one fucking bit!”

I didn’t like it, either, but I didn’t say anything. There was no point; I wasn’t about to turn around, not without Taylor. Charlie remained silent as well. I don’t think the teenager had said a single word since we left the house. Whatever he was thinking, he kept it to himself.

A sound up ahead startled us to a halt. “Do you hear that?” I asked. They both nodded.

Muffled shouting. Shrill, frantic voices. And then the sharp crack of gunfire.

I jolted into a run, surging down the length of the tunnel. The mud slid beneath my feet, but I caught myself and continued on.

Gunfire in the tunnels. That couldn’t be good.
Is it Mac?
I wondered.
Is Taylor already …?

After a hundred yards the tunnel deposited us into a small hub, a circular room with five new tunnels branching out into the space ahead. Floyd and Charlie slid into the room behind me. Floyd fell on his ass as he tried to avoid running into my back. “Fuck,” he muttered. For a moment he just sat there, shaking mud off of his arms, then Charlie helped him to his feet.

“How could this be mushrooms?” Charlie asked, finally breaking his silence. His words were tiny, as if the dirt were trying to steal his voice, absorbing its strength and leaving behind nothing but a hushed whisper. “The tunnels—how do spores explain any of this?”

I shrugged. They didn’t.

“Or are we hallucinating?” he continued. “Are we still in the house, collapsed on the floor, muttering and dreaming together? Or maybe passed out in the park while Mac and Taylor get farther and farther away?”

The thought was horrifying. I shook my head, and the room slid back and forth around me, continuing to move for a moment even after my head stopped. The light dimmed for a couple of seconds, then it returned to normal. “We can’t think about that,” I said. “They’re in here, and so are we, and we’ve got to find them.”

Right then, a shout sounded in the distance—indecipherable, but shrill and desperate. It didn’t sound like a woman’s voice. I turned my head, trying to locate the source. After a moment, both Charlie and Floyd pointed to the tunnel on the far left. I ran on ahead.

There were things in this tunnel. Objects. At first, it was just chunks of rock and wood breaking up the endless stretches of mud. Then a milk crate and an empty vodka bottle. Then there
were planks beneath my feet, forming a makeshift floor. We came into another hub and found a geometric asterisk laid out in the dirt, narrow lengths of flooring that reached out into five new tunnels. There was a wooden chair set up against the wall, with an unlit lantern perched on its seat.

I swung my flashlight from tunnel to tunnel, looking for something new, something to point me in the right direction.

“Dean—” Floyd started, but I let out a hiss and he fell silent.

“Turn off your lights,” I said, hitting the button on mine. “Shut them off. Maybe we can see …”

Charlie clicked his off. Then, after fumbling for a moment, Floyd did the same.

The tunnel dropped into darkness. It was a deep and claustrophobic black, and as soon as my eyes lost input, I got dizzy. I thought I was falling, toppling forward into the void. Without vision, without that point of reference, I lost all track of the world.
The Vicodin
, I thought.
The alcohol, the plank upside my head
. It wasn’t the world doing this, I assured myself. It wasn’t the spores or the speed of light. It was the things I’d done to myself, and the things I’d let happen.

I reached out to catch myself against the floor, keeping the flashlight and baseball bat clenched tightly in my hands, but the floor didn’t come. I just continued spinning through the void.

“Dean …” It was Floyd, terrified, keening in the dark. “I hear him …” And I wondered at the “him.”
Mac? Floyd’s dead brother?

I blinked, still toppling forward, spinning down into the pit under the city, plummeting toward the heart of the world.

“Dean!” It was still Floyd, but more frantic this time. I could hear feet clumping against wood, a terrified stutter step.

I blinked again and realized that the darkness wasn’t complete. There was the dimmest of lights off to my left, sitting there, stationary, in the corner of my eye, even as I continued to spin through space.

I flicked my flashlight back on and found myself still standing in the middle of the hub. Not falling. I spun around, panning the
flashlight across the room. Charlie had a confused look on his face, but there was no fear there, just a strangely distant interest, like he was buried in his own thoughts, trying to work out a complex problem. Floyd was different. He had his hand up against his chest, clutching at his heart. There were tears on his cheeks, and his mouth was moving, quivering open and shut without making a sound.

“Left,” I said, pointing toward the tunnel down which I’d seen the light. “We’re getting somewhere,” I added, trying to sound reassuring.