Queen of the Dead (25 page)

Ever crawl through a tunnel? I don't mean those cozy little triangles you used to make out of blankets and couch cushions. I don't even mean those trenches you and your friends shoveled out in the park, covered with plywood, and then called “forts.”

I mean a
real
tunnel.

The one beneath Eastern State had been dug by desperate men under conditions for which “sucks” would probably have been a step up. The passage was three feet high at its best and barely two at its worst. Some spots were shored up with planks that looked about a thousand years old, but most of the time, the ceiling was only hard-packed ground—thankfully frozen. If we'd tried this in the summer, our very movements might have brought the whole place crashing down.

I'd never considered myself claustrophobic. But I found out quickly that was because I'd never tried scuttling on hands and knees through a cold, dark tube of dirt. The air smelled worse than stale—I'd gotten used to “stale” in Haven. It smelled dead. It smelled of things rotting inside the walls all around me. It smelled of corpses—or Corpses—and I was gripped by the sudden terror that Cavanaugh had anticipated this move and that there were Deader guards hiding in the dark just ahead…their black teeth poised to go right for my face.

I swallowed, pushing back my fear.

Behind me, Dave grumbled and cursed, sounding more angry than afraid. I have to admit, I took a weird kind of comfort in his complaints. Helene, though, felt differently.

“Burgermeister,” she hissed. “Keep it down, will ya? This is supposed to be a surprise attack, duh!”

“Right,” Dave murmured. “Sorry.”

“Keep moving,” I told them, though it was the absolute last thing I wanted to do.

A
hundred
feet, Steve? It feels more like a hundred miles!

The tunnel's downward path leveled off and became slightly wider. My flashlight showed spots where lights had once been hung, their wires rotted away to string by the years. Klinedinst and Russell had been thorough; there was no taking that away from them.

I was cheered by the thought that as we neared the “start” of the tunnel, the going might get easier. Most people, after all, did their best work at the beginning of a long project.

This
might
not
be
so
bad
after
all.

But then we hit the stream.

You'd think it would have been frozen. It wasn't, and it didn't flow like any stream I'd ever seen. It didn't come through one wall and then go out the other. Instead, it seemed to rise up from the soil, turning the dirt floor into an icy mud pit.

I found it by literally going into it headfirst. I'd been crawling along on my hands and knees, with the flashlight in my left hand, when my right hand suddenly disappeared in the muck, sinking to the elbow. An instant later, my face hit the mud.

Gasping, I flailed and pulled free, accidentally kicking the Burgermeister in the shoulder in the process. He cursed liberally.

“Sorry!” I gasped. “It's wet here!”

Then, as I tried to shift my weight, my left arm went in, flashlight and all, and my face was once again swallowed up in the brown ooze. And it was worse than just being wet because the sticky mud clung to my skin and clothing.

After another few moments of clumsy struggle, I felt a huge hand close on my ankle and pull me back.

“Chill out, will ya, dude?” Dave exclaimed. “You kick me again, and I might forget we're friends!”

“Everything okay up there?” Helene called.

“I'm fine,” I sputtered, wiping the mud from my face. “There's water here, a big patch of it, and it's seriously cold.”

Dave shined his flashlight in my face. “Lookin' good, Will!” he said with a laugh. “See what happens when you play leader?”

“Yeah,” I groaned.

“You sure you okay?” Helene asked again, trying to see over the Burgermeister's intervening bulk.

“I'm fine,” I repeated. Then, annoyed with myself, I reached across the stream. It wasn't wide, but it was wide enough that I couldn't get my legs past it without soaking them. Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward, continuing down the tunnel a ways before turning and shining my light back the way I'd come to see how my friends were doing.

I witnessed a funny thing.

Dave didn't try to avoid the stream. Instead, he lay down atop it, his chest and belly pressed into the mud, and called back, “Helene, why don't you go ahead and climb over me.”

Behind him, she said, “Huh?”

“No sense in both of us freezing our butts off!” the Burgermeister growled. “Just hurry up and do it before I change my mind.”

So she did. It was a tight squeeze between Dave and the tunnel ceiling, but the slender girl managed it, and once clear, she crawled up to me with a sheepish smile.

“Thanks, Dave,” she said without turning.

I grinned. “He's just looking out for you,” I said, giving her a pointed look. “No harm in that, right?”

“Shut up,” she said. But the smile stayed there.

Behind her, Dave rose from the muck and shook himself like a waking bear. “Okay,” he said. “Let's keep going.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But don't get stuck. Lined up like this, Helene and I won't be able to do the push/pull thing anymore.”

“I'm good,” he grumbled. “Plenty of room down here. It's comfier than Haven! Heck, I even got myself a nice warm bath!”

I said, “Save it, dude. I got it worse than you.”

“Bet you didn't!” Dave exclaimed.

“Shut up, both of you!” Helene said in a hiss. “Jeez, you guys are grouchy when you're wet.” Then, after a moment, she groaned and added, “Ugh! I just broke my watch!”

“What? How?”

“Scraped it against the wall by mistake. The band snapped. I can't even
find
it now!”

I checked my own. It seemed fine. It had even survived the stream, which was surprising; these things broke all the time.

“Dave, how's yours?” I asked.

“My what, dude?”

“Your watch!” Helene said.

“Don't got one,” Dave replied. “I ain't an Angel, remember? Besides, I can't even get one of those things around my wrist!”

Helene said. “Come on, Will. Your family's not gonna save themselves!”

True
enough
, I thought, a little guiltily.

We crawled onward, following the tunnel and hoping the second half would prove easier than the first.

It didn't.

We got to the end without further trouble. But then the trouble turned out to be this: We'd gotten to the end. It just stopped. A wall of dirt. For a minute, I just stared at it. Steve had warned me that the tunnel turned upward at this point. But I'd really been hoping that at least some of that vertical shaft would still be here. It wasn't.

Crap.

Helene squeezed up beside me and touched the wall. Her finger came back coated in fine gray powder. “This isn't dirt,” she said, sniffing it. “I think it's ash.”

“Steve said something about the guards backfilling the tunnel with ash from the prison incinerators,” I said. “Looks like they did a good job of it too.”

“How high up does it go?”

“Something like fifteen feet,” I replied.

She sighed. “Well…let's start digging. Where's your shovel?”

“Dave's got it,” I replied. “I gave it to him back at the start when he broke his. Remember?”

“Yeah.”

“Besides,” I added. “I've got a Super Soaker and Aunt Sally. Not sure I could've managed all three. How about you?”

“I've got one,” Helene replied. “Dave, you got a shovel?”

“Sure,” he called from behind us. “Except I can't get up there. You two'll have to do the digging this time.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “Pass it up to me.”

Helene and I dug—if you can call what we were doing “digging.” Is there a verb for stabbing awkwardly at a wall of frozen ash while on hands and knees? If there is, I couldn't come up with it.

After a while, we got into a funny kind of rhythm. I'd chip away at the wall, dislodging big chunks of hard ash. Helene would use her shovel to scoop them up and pass them back to Dave. What he'd do with them I didn't exactly know, though I suppose we'd better leave the prison a different way. Otherwise, we might just have to dig our way through the tunnel all over again!

Fortunately, ash turned out to be a lot lighter than dirt—easier to move. Within an hour, loose clumps of it started to rain down into the space we'd just opened up.

“Found the shaft,” I reported.

“Knew you would,” Helene said, her tone even. She was putting on a show, staying nice and calm no matter what happened—for my sake.

“Thanks,” I said.

“For what?” she asked.

“You know for what.”

“Sure,” she replied. “They're gonna be okay, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Helene pressed, “They are!”

More big lumps of frozen ash came free, giving me the room to stab my shovel all the way up into the vertical shaft.

We were getting closer, which meant it was time to start being quieter.

When I answered Helene, it was in a whisper. “I don't even know for sure that they're here. This is a guess.” It was the first time I'd uttered the fear aloud.

I paused and looked back at her. Her face was awash in shadows, our flashlights having been propped up as best we could on the tunnel floor. The air was thick with debris, and each of us had wrapped scarves around the lower half of our faces. Even so, I could easily see the ash that layered her cheeks, so thick it almost looked like a mask. She was sweating too, despite the cold air, and had to be bone tired.

But
she's here.

“Who's guess?” Helene whispered back.

“Mine.”

She nodded. “Then they're here.”

“How do you figure that?” I asked, honestly perplexed.

Dave answered from somewhere behind her, his tone impatient. “'Cause she trusts your guesses more'n most dudes' sure things,” he droned, as if repeating some litany. Then he added impatiently, “Jeez, I wish you two would just get it over with! Doofuses.”

I felt my face flush.

“Keep it down, Dave!” Helene hushed him. Then, in a gentler tone, she added, “Sharyn's gonna be okay too.”

For half a minute, no one spoke. Finally, the Burgermeister muttered, “Yeah.”

We went back to work.

After another hour, the shaft was wide enough to climb up into. There'd once been a kind of ladder—or so Steve had said—but it had long since rotted away. Fortunately, the quarters were so tight I could worm my way upward by bracing myself with my shoulders and knees. This left my hands free for the shoveling.

The process was slow, dirty, and painful. But it worked. Three feet. Six. Nine. Twelve.

Fifteen.

Then I came to the bricks.

As more and more ash fell away, more and more of them appeared—a wall of them, blocking any exit from the shaft. I looked at them. They looked back at me, hard and unyielding.

“Found the way out,” I whispered down.

“Thank God,” I heard the Burgermeister reply. He sounded far away.

“Except it's bricked up.”

Helene asked, “We kind of expected that, didn't we?”

Well, yes and no. Steve hadn't been sure. After the escape, the prison officials had naturally sealed up this end of tunnel using concrete, mortar, and chicken wire. But later, in 2005, a team of archeologists had spent two days digging through all that to rediscover the entrance.

Steve hadn't known what they'd done to reseal the hole because by then the prison had become a museum. “It might just be plastered over,” he'd told me optimistically.

It wasn't.

Bricks.

Despair gnawed at me.

But no way had we come this far to be stopped now!

Then I noticed that some of the bricks were loose, the mortar between them crumbly—like really old Play-Doh. Unfortunately, the tight shaft made my shovel useless. So I handed it down to Helene, fished out my pocketknife, and went to work hacking and scraping.

Within a minute, I couldn't see. Within two minutes, I could barely breathe.

There was too much dust and too little air.

But I kept at it, trying not to think about the ceiling of dirt—the top of the shaft—that was right over my head. All that weight pressing down, with little more than surface tension to keep it where it was. Plus, it was cold—
very
cold; it felt like lumpy ice pushing against my skull.

I kept hacking.

Ash choked me, making me gag and cough. Helene kept asking if I was all right. Her voice started to sound very far away. Pictures of my mom and sister floated before my eyes.

Are
you
alive?

You
have
to
be
alive!

The first brick came loose. It just popped out suddenly and tumbled down the shaft, bouncing painfully off my knee in the process. The shock of it seemed to focus me, though not as much as when Helene yelped and gave my ankle a hard pinch.

“Watch it, Will! That almost hit me!”

“Shhh!” I said sharply, keeping my voice low. “And sorry…but there'll be more of 'em coming.”

After that, I worked the wall with new energy. A few dozen more stabs and a second brick came out. Then a third.

“Getting there,” I whispered, still gagging but hopeful. Then, sparing a moment, I eagerly—maybe even a little desperately—shone my flashlight through the newly made gap.