Chapter Three

 

Darkness enclosed us again. And silence.

Only this was not a thoughtful silence. Nor was it a calculating one.

This palpable stillness prickled my skin and set my bones into action. I worked at the leather tied around my wrists until I felt hot blood trickle to my fingertips. I ignored the burning, stinging rawness and continued working my hands.

The leather stretched, but just barely.

I scrambled to my knees with my wrists still working hard. I had never been this desperate before, never this frantic.

Maybe that wasn’t true.

I had fought this hard before.

But a thin line separated survival from desperation. I imagined myself at the edge of a cliff, with my toes balanced on the very brink, weighing my odds if I were to jump and taking into account all of the things I left at the top of the cliff if I decided to leave them. I would measure wind velocity and the position of the sun in the sky. I would count the seconds as they ticked by, adding them to my already endless amounts of data. I would breathe deeply and decide to breathe deeply again.

But then something would happen. A switch would be flipped or dangerous would become deadly and I would stop counting. I would stop thinking.

And I would jump.

That was the only way I could think to explain my survival desperation. One second I would be reluctant to believe this could really be the end and that something this terrible could really happen to one of us.

And the next second, I would become crazed with inhuman speed and strength.

I would become an entirely different creature.

I scrunched my eyes closed and pulled at my wrists so severely I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of my hands had snapped off. I knew I wasn’t the only one making the effort, but I was determined to be one of the successful ones.

My mind kept flashing back to the sheer terror plastered on both of the boys’ faces. I saw their haunted screams and their determination to get free.

And they were big guys. It wasn’t as if Page had been picked from the floor. Harrison especially had grown into a man over the last year. He wasn’t a scrawny teenager anymore. He was far from the kid I first met.

Sure, we had a little list of obstacles to overcome. Like exhaustion. And also starvation. The possibility was strong that we all had concussions after getting hit in the back of the head. Also, maybe the water wasn’t settling quite right. But still, Harrison had proven he could take care of himself over and over again.

So how did we fight our way out of this room and through a crowd of cave-dwelling body builders and hope to make it out of here alive?

It honestly didn’t matter.

I didn’t have time for the finer details. I needed to get the hell out of this room and figure out the next step when we got there.

With a satisfied growl, I ripped one of my hands from the leather tie. I held it up over my head victoriously and ignored the bloodied, gory skin around my wrist. I kept the leather tie on the other wrist and threw myself at the person directly next to me, which was Vaughan.

Hendrix’s arms snapped apart like he had turned into the Hulk and our eyes clashed across the few feet that separated us. We had moved apart while we wrestled to save Harrison and King. Now that distance felt as wide as a canyon.

His eyes glittered in the darkness, conveying something I could not hope to begin to read. “We go together.” His voice was unnaturally low and raspy. “Do not leave this room without the rest of us.” He ripped his gaze from mine without waiting for a reply and went to work on Nelson’s bonds.

“He thinks you’re on a suicide mission now,” Vaughan explained in a low voice.

“Oh, please,” I groaned. “That was so five minutes ago.”

His bonds were tighter than mine had been. I could feel how swollen and stiff his fingers were. They must have expected an escape attempt from him. I dug my fingers into the dirt, desperately searching for a sharp enough rock to cut these.

“Reagan,” Vaughan turned his head over his shoulder so I could hear him clearly, “If you so much as blink suspiciously, I’ll have Hendrix hit you over the head again and carry you out of here unconscious. Do you understand me?”

I leaned back on my heels and stared at him, “Vaughan, I will do whatever it takes to keep your family safe. Do not doubt me on that.”

“Well, since my family will do anything to keep you safe, whenever you think about sacrificing your life for the greater good, you put them in danger. So knock it off before I’m forced to do something drastic.”

“Like what?” I felt the dare in my voice and raised my eyebrows in challenge. I hated being ordered around. It wasn’t a good quality about me, but it was also something I couldn’t change. This Apocalypse had made me too wild to listen to reason. I was untamable, even by people that I cared about.

“I’ve been holding Hendrix back,” he growled at me. “If you want to be excessively difficult, I’ll stop.”

“What does that mean?”

“Kane’s death.”

“Vaughan, I don’t understand-”

“Move,” Hendrix growled.

I jumped out of the way just as he ripped Vaughan’s arms from me and went to work on ties I could not break. Staggered by both of those two macho idiots, I moved on to Miller’s hands.

His entire body shook as I worked the knot free. I put my hand on his shoulder to comfort him, once I’d wiggled his hands through the bonds. “We’re going to get them back,” I promised him.

“Why does everyone want to kill us?” His question held a well of bitterness.

I could relate, “I don’t know.”

He swiveled around and confided something in me that I knew he had not spoken aloud to another person. “It makes me want to kill everyone in return.”

Despite everything happening, a chill skittered down my spine. “We’re not killers, Miller. We’re fighters.”

“What’s the difference?”

“If we have to kill to survive, we do. But we don’t kill just to kill. That’s not our style.”

His voice dropped to a whisper, “What if it’s my style?”

“It’s not,” I promised him. “You’re angry. You’re really, really angry. But you’re also still good.” I pushed my hand against his heart. “You’re a good person.”

“I don’t think I am.”

My chest squeezed for this boy. I wanted to say the right thing to turn his dark thoughts around, but I didn’t know what to say. I had wrestled with these very thoughts. I had my own guilt to carry. How could I possibly offer something positive when our friends were about to be eaten by cannibals and his own dad was on a mission to kill us?

“Then become one,” I challenged instead. “Vaughan isn’t going to let anyone that isn’t good near his family. If you want to stay with us, you’re going to have to become a good person.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do?” His voice held the first glimmer of hope I had heard from him in a very long time.

“Every damn day.” I held his gaze steady and let him see that it was true.

A shout of pain ripped down the corridor and set us back into motion. Our group stood at once, a rag-tag army of death.

Vaughan moved to the door and tried to rip it open, but it had been locked. Hendrix dropped his shoulder and slammed into the wood. I heard it splinter and crack, but it was going to take a lot more of that to break through completely.

And we didn’t have the time to wait for Hendrix to bash himself to unhelpful.

With a surprising amount of improvisation, Adela let out a blood-curdling scream in Spanish. She screamed out a word I did not understand over and over again and then she continued with rapid Spanish that made even less sense to me.

The hallway filled with boots racing down the hallway. Whatever she said had a major impact on the people.

She lifted her head and winked at me. “Be ready,” she instructed.

I sucked in a fast breath and forced myself to move beyond the reality that we had no weapons and no real way to fight or protect ourselves. I bent low and filled my hand with as much dirt as I could scratch up.

The door burst open and men tried to push into the room, but we were ready for them.

We attacked as soon as bodies appeared. They stumbled back, unprepared for us. I fought the only way I knew how, scrappily and viscously. I threw dirt in one man’s eyes and kneed him in the balls as hard as I could. Once his head had dropped, I put my hands on the back of his skull and brought my knee up again. Blood burst from his nose all over my filthy jeans, sinking through the material and making my leg sticky from someone else’s pain.

The man dropped to the ground and reached out for my legs. I jumped out of the way and kicked at him again. And again and again and again until he finally stopped trying to grab me.

I stepped away from the unconscious body, morbidly amazed that I had brought a grown man to his knees. I knew it had been the element of surprise. We jumped at them like bats out of hell. There was no way they could have been ready for that.

The older Parkers did most of the other work for us in the hallway. I only had to take down the one man, but only a handful had come to see why Adela screamed.

The rest of the party would be waiting for us.

There was no time for a pep talk or inspirational speech. Who knew what had happened to Harrison and King by now?

Once we’d subdued the men in the hallway, Vaughan led us to the big room, the party room. King and Harrison had been tied up, arms plastered to their sides, legs wrapped from ankles to thighs. They had been tossed in front of the fires, too close to not feel the heat, but far enough that they weren’t burned.

Yet.

They looked up at us as we stumbled in the big cavern and there was such an expression of relief on both of their faces that I felt it like a physical thing.

The people gathered around jumped at the sight of us, clearly startled by our escape.

We had no real plan from this point on. We could destroy them all. I wanted to destroy them all. I wanted to kill them all.

How many others had they killed before us? How many had they eaten?

They seemed disturbingly healthy. Their women were plump. Their men muscled. The children seemed able-bodied, their little faces showing baby fat.

“My brothers,” Vaughan shouted. “Give them to me! Mis hermanos! Ahora!”

Adela took over, shouting our demands in their language. They stared at her slack-jawed and hazy-eyed. No one had escaped them before. The truth of that was written all over their faces.

But they had to know the risk of so many of us. We weren’t just friends and family stumbling blinding through the end of the world. We were an army. We were life-support for each other. We were death to anyone that came between us.

Hendrix walked forward and nobody tried to stop him. He dipped down and picked up one of their torches that had yet to be ignited. The thick stick lay near his brothers at the foot of the fire wrapped in some kind of white cloth near the top. He plunged it into the flame and came away with a weapon.

I wondered why nobody attacked us or what they were waiting for. I didn’t think I wanted to know.

“Someone untie them,” Hendrix commanded. I might have been the only one that noticed, but his voice shook. Just barely.

I looked up into his face, startled by the haunted expression that he wore. His brothers lay at his feet and every few seconds Hendrix’s eyes would dip down to them, no doubt making sure they were still there… still alive.

I raced over with Tyler where we worked together to rip the tight bands off the two boys. There was a knife lying on the ground by King’s head. We used that to cut the tight leather strips. It was dull and barely useful, but finally worked. Hendrix stood over us, swinging his fire stick at anything that moved.

Harrison and King grunted with gratitude, their voices hoarse and tired. When I had freed Harrison entirely, he let out a huge puff of breath as if he had been holding it for years. I helped him stagger to his feet and held him around his waist while he caught his bearings.

Harrison leaned down and kissed the top of my head. I felt his relief again, a punch to the chest of intense happiness. He let his lips linger in the tangles of my hair and inhaled deeply.

His affection couldn’t have been interpreted as anything but brotherly, but still it moved me. In the midst of this chaos, with our lives dangling by the thinnest thread, I was reassured that he cared for me in a profound way. And I for him.

It was easy to group all of the Parkers together and declare my love for them. That love was a huge, consuming beast that would defend them until my last breath. But as I looked at them, as I examined my feelings for them individually, I realized how deeply I loved each of them.

I loved Page with her pure innocence and old soul. I loved King with his unassuming brilliance and level-headed outlook. I loved Harrison with his dry humor and mischievous smiles. I loved Nelson with his adoration for my best friend and his transparent authenticity. I loved Vaughan with his unbreakable determination and fierce loyalty.

And Hendrix. Hendrix was obviously more complicated than the rest.

I loved this family as much as I had ever loved anything.

To know they loved me back… that each of them could feel the same way about me as I did about them… that moved me. That gave me a peace I had been lacking.

“Adela, tell them we’re leaving,” Vaughan instructed our new translator.

She relayed the message. A man stepped forward, a disgusting smile dancing across his face. He bit his lower lip hungrily and shook his head.

“No,” he declared.

Vaughan and Hendrix shared a look. Hendrix swept the fiery stick behind him and held it beneath a table that had been made from doors salvaged from this place.

It would have been more dramatic if the table had flashed immediately and burned to ash within seconds. That did not happen. Hendrix held the fire beneath the table while more men jumped to their feet and lunged toward us.

They leered at us with menacing expressions painting their filthy faces. They were clearly trying to intimidate us.

But I saw what else they were trying to do. They had made a wall in front of their women and children.

These were the first people we had come up against that had something to protect. It put us on equal footing.

We had people to protect too, but less than them. Half their numbers were people that could not fight. So far we had only dwindled ours by two- Haley and Page.

“Tell them not to follow us.” Vaughan gathered Page close to him and stood tall and confident. I wondered if he had noticed the women and small children cowering along the back wall as well.

The table finally caught on fire and Hendrix pulled his torch back. The wood crackled in the background and sent sparks singeing the backs of my legs.

Adela relayed our message. I held my breath until the men looked at each other and grinned.

One of them spoke back to Adela. He gestured toward the hall and tilted his head questioningly.

“He wants to know where we plan to go,” Adela explained. “He says we will never find our way out of this mine. And he says that if we do the Dead are waiting for us. We die here, he says, or we die out there.”

“We’ll take our chances out there,” Vaughan told her.

She turned back to the men and translated. Another man spoke up and the dark look over his face made me reconsider our plan.

“He says we will be begging them to eat us in a few days.”

I tried to ignore Adela’s latest translation. My eyes fluttered closed for just a moment and I imagined what we would be like in three days, stumbling blindly through a never-ending maze of darkness. Our skin would prickle from the cold; our lungs would gargle from starvation and thirst. We would die slowly and alone. We wouldn’t be able to see each other. Our last breath wouldn’t be important, just another in a long mix of unseeing terror.

The end would not be noble; it would be pathetic.

A tremble crawled up my spine and settled at the base of my neck. I swallowed thickly and met the eyes of men who planned to eat me. These were men who were not addicted to flesh or tainted by a toxic infection. These were men who should know better.

“He has no idea how determined we are, Adela. He has no idea what we’ve already been through.” My chin tilted high with a confidence I did not feel.

She glanced at me twice before she nodded. “Okay,” she agreed. “Then we should go before they become less hospitable.”

I pressed my lips together and tried not to laugh. Adrenaline mingled with hysteria in my head and I felt my emotions slip and slide precariously from sane to insane with every second longer we stood there.

“Let’s go,” Vaughan ordered.

“The table,” Harrison shouted at King. The two boys ran to the table that Hendrix lit on fire and tucked their hands beneath the edges of their t-shirts. Tyler and I ran for the safety of our group as they lifted the blazing wood and threw it at the wall of people.

Shouts and foreign curses followed us from the room as we turned and raced down the hallway.

It hadn’t been the smoothest escape, nor had we completely incapacitated our captors, but it would have to do for now.

Vaughan led the way with the torch Hendrix had passed to him. Not one of us felt like running blindly through a Mexican mine maze. But we didn’t have a choice.

I just prayed they were wrong. There had to be a way out.

We had to be able to find the exit.

And if we couldn’t? Well… I didn’t want to think about that right now.

We ran forever. My lungs ached and stung with each breath that rattled through them. The cold air had dried out my throat and made my nose run. Our footsteps echoed uselessly in the narrow corridors, taking us away from something, but never to something.

The dirt-packed walls started to press in on me. My head felt suffocated by them. I would close my tired eyes for a brief moment, only to open them to visions of ceilings caving in or walls swallowing me whole.

I tried to breathe through the panic and focus on the waving light in Vaughan’s hand. I tried to think about anything except begging those sick psychopaths to eat us. I really tried.

But I wasn’t necessarily successful.

This escape, more than any others, had become a mind game. Were we traveling deeper into the earth? Or out of it? Were we running in circles? Or directly by the exit and had no idea?

Were they laughing at us? Waiting for us to come back because it had happened so many times before… because they were used to this routine.

Maybe it was part of their meal plan- let the food run around for a bit before ripping them apart with their chipped, jagged teeth.

I really couldn’t think about that.

“Vaughan, take us somewhere!” Hendrix shouted at him.

“I’m trying!” Vaughan bit back.

We were no longer concerned that they were following us. They had set us up perfectly and we had willingly walked into the labyrinth.

Manmade tunnels snaked around and around the bowels of this place. I tried to figure out how it had gotten so big. The only caverns were the ones situated toward the cannibals. The rest of this place was nothing but endless rounded tunnels supported by wooden crossbeams.

What had ever been the point of this place?

Eventually Vaughan slowed down. “We should rest for a minute,” he said.

We leaned against the walls and let the silence and stillness of this place blanket us. It was hard not to be claustrophobic in such confusion. I pictured us miles below the earth’s surface, the weight of the ground and desert and all of Mexico pushing down on us. I felt hysterical from the vast unknown.

I didn’t think I managed to stay sane in those hours. I felt my coherent thoughts slipping away while I tried to run after them. They would duck through my spread fingers and dance just out of reach, taunting whatever was left of my mind.

Hendrix’s hand landed on my shoulder and anchored me in place. I took a deep breath and realized that I hadn’t taken one in a while.

I might have stopped breathing completely.

He leaned down and dipped his head into my neck. I felt his lips at my ear. “Don’t give up,” he whispered to me. “We will find a way out of this place. Stay with me.”

I shook my head, shaking off cobwebs and other unseen creepy crawlies. “I’m here,” I whispered, breathless.

He pulled back and looked at me. I couldn’t see his eyes very well, only their outline. But I could feel them. “Stay here.”

“Okay.”

We set off again but this time at an easily manageable pace. We wound through the thick earth, staying on the main path. Occasionally, it would break off into something else, but rarely did those corridors lead anywhere. This was the main road. We were sure of that.

The torch eventually died, plunging us into absolute darkness. We grabbed each other’s hands and continued to walk forward.

I had never been more frightened in my life. I thought I might seriously have a heart attack from the ferocious, stuttering pounding in my chest.

We stumbled often, but there was always a hand to lift whoever had fallen back up. We never let go of each other. Every thirty seconds Vaughan would start a count and down the row we would go. I was always ten. Hendrix was always eleven.

We counted ourselves with a dedicated obsession. Nobody wanted to get lost. If someone didn’t answer their number right away, we would all panic. Hand holds would grow painfully tight, all breathing would stop. And then that person would jump back in, as if they had forgotten what we were doing and we would take a collective breath.

Those hours wandering through the dark were miserable. I had never felt fear quite like that before. Evil had never felt like such a tangible presence, following after us, waiting for us if we turned back, whistling down the stagnant tunnels.

I had been surrounded by it for years now, but I had never been submerged in it so completely.

“This has to end,” Nelson growled. “It can’t go on forever.”

Hendrix tightened his grip on my hand and I did the same to Adela, who was in front of me. I agreed. It had to end.

And it did.

Eventually. After an indeterminable amount of time later, the darkness became less oppressive, less constant. The fading starlight sprinkled into our black hole and offered a way out. The temperature started to warm and a gentle breeze tickled my skin.

We stopped counting. In fact, we exited the mine in silence. My throat was dry and scratchy from sounding my number over and over again. My feet dragged as I pulled them out of tunnels that represented certain death to me. My fingers shook as we let go of each other’s hands to shake out our limbs and stretch our stooped bodies.

The night sky turned gray overhead. Dawn would come in minutes and this horrific night would be over. I sunk down next to Haley. We stretched out our legs and leaned on each other with a rocky cliff at our backs.

We had exited the tunnels and walked straight into an actual mine. The land made a deep bowl with winding pathways along the side. It reminded me of those red penny slides where the penny would spin around and around and around until the funnel at the bottom would drop it into a pile of other pennies. We had somehow made our way into a human version of that.

“This is a copper mine,” Adela explained.

Rusted, dilapidated equipment still sat parked along the sides and at the bottom. There was a lookout tower on the other side where I imagined a wealthy man used to perch, watching his minions make him more money.

The air smelled tangy and sweet, a heady scent compared to the stale, damp air of the tunnels. I tipped my head and inhaled the freshness, reveling in hard-won freedom.

“Will they come after us?” I asked after long minutes.

“They are cave-dwellers,” Adela answered. “They will not leave their tunnels.”

“Why not?” Page asked with more curiosity than bitterness, as if she were merely curious about a different culture. As if that culture hadn’t planned to cook us and then eat us. As if they hadn’t planned to take care of my friend until she gave birth, just so they could eat her baby.

I turned my head to the side, afraid I would be sick.

“They are not part of a territory,” Adela told us with her exotic accent. “And even a man like Diego finds their practices despicable. They are left alone because everyone is too afraid to go in after them. But nobody wants them to live. If they came out, they would be hunted.”

“Like us,” Page added. “Nobody wants us to live either.”

Tyler put her hands on Page’s slender shoulders, “But not because we eat other people, Darlin.’”

“You knew all this about them before and you still let us walk in there?” Harrison was suddenly in front of Adela with his finger in her face. Gone was his understanding from earlier. He had faced their danger head on and could no longer be patient with Adela. “You let us walk in there blindly without even a hint that there could be danger?”

Unprepared for Harrison’s attack, she blanched. “I had only heard rumors before! I had not… I could not have known that they lived there or that we would meet them! How could I have known?”

“I don’t know!” Harrison shouted. “We know nothing about you! Not a thing! Except that you knew about those… those… those psychos and didn’t tell us! And that they hit all of us, knocked us all unconscious except for you!”

Adela took a step back and Vaughan jumped in to settle the situation.

Vaughan stepped in front of Harrison and gripped his biceps, “Chill, Harrison. Chill out for a second. She told us she had thought they were rumors… myths.”

Harrison looked at him wide-eyed and horror-stricken. “They didn’t tie you up, Vaughan. They didn’t wrestle you to the ground with six men and roast you. You have no idea what that was like.”

Vaughan winced, “You think it was easy for me to know that I couldn’t stop them from taking you? You think I wanted to sit in that room and imagine how they were going to serve you up? That was hell for all of us. Even her.” His arm swept wide to include Adela.

Harrison’s eyes flickered over to her. She had pressed both hands against her mouth in an effort to keep them from trembling. She shook her head in fast little bursts as if begging him silently to let this go.

“I did not know,” she promised him with a low, broken voice.

“Okay,” Harrison said, although he sounded very far from okay. “Okay, I’m done.” His gaze flashed back to his brother. “I’m freaked out, but I got it out. I’ll stop.”

Vaughan pulled Harrison into a very rough hug, crushing him against his chest. I heard muffled promises from both brothers as they showed uncharacteristic affection for each other.

The tightness in my chest eased a bit and my heart finally slowed down.

“How’s the baby?” I asked as my friends continued to get over the nightmare of those tunnels. We should probably all have been more desperate to get away from this place, but it was hard for all of us to wake from such a debilitating fear.

Besides, dawn had just been pulled from slumber and these early hours seemed safer than most.

Haley rubbed her small belly with two hands and let out an audible sigh, “Finally moving. He had been so still… I had been worried. But since I sat down and stopped my activity, he seems to have picked up his.”

My heart rate slowed down just a pinch more.

“I feel there is more to tell you,” Adela announced after Harrison had moved a short distance away. We looked at her expectantly. “I know where we are.”

“Good,” Vaughan assured her.

She shook her head again, in her signature way. Her chin jerked in short, stunted little movements that made her black hair bounce around her shoulders. “It is not good,” she said. “This is the place where I am from. This is my home territory.”

Vaughan held up his hands. “I don’t understand. Do you want to go-”

She interrupted him to tell us, “They catch people. They feed them to the Dead. They… they are… they, how do you say…”

“Slavers,” Hendrix put in. “They’re slavers.”

“Si! That is the English word for it. They turn people into slaves.”

Tyler let out a frantic laugh and summed up our situation, “Out of the frying pan, straight into the fire.”