The Well's End (17 page)

There's a
thunk
and then a spinning sound. Metal slides through a metal groove, and the door opens. The boys shout, even Rob, a guttural yawp, and I feel it too. We're going to live. From this far down the hallway, I can still see inside, a half cave, half manmade structure. Another red light shines on the wall, illuminating a series of machines with hoses twisting from their frames into a small pool of water. The pool takes up half the floor and separates into two thin channels that flow through two fairly wide-meshed grates. The rest of the floor looks like concrete, like the edge of a swimming pool.

“What's all this?” Jimmy thinks aloud. His voice echoes in the small space.

“Must be where the water is tested for purity,” Rob muses.

“So one hole goes to the Cave and the other to Fenton?” Brayden asks, his voice showing relief and even excitement.

Rob squats, puts a hand in, then shakes off the water. “Sort of, one should go farther into the mountain, to the original source of the spring, the other to Fenton. The thing is,” he says, pointing at one grate, “the one that goes to the water's source should head on a separate route to the Cave. Otherwise there'd be three grates here.”

Jimmy might have asked more, but we don't have time, and Brayden, as if reading my mind, hops into the pool, where the water sloshes up to his waist. He blows through his lips, probably because of the freezing temperatures on his poor unmentionables, and then bends and dips his foot through one of the large holes in the grate. He squeezes to the other side, then turns back and motions for everyone to follow. And they do, even Odessa gets up and is handed through by Jimmy to Brayden. I stand transfixed, watching it all from just beyond the door, which I've inched toward slowly this whole time. Jimmy goes for it next, and he scrapes himself pretty hard against the rusted grate, his body almost too big now to make it. I think tetanus first and then, with horror, of how that blood has the virus and how the water flows toward the town.

“Jimmy,” I shout, “wipe that bar, stanch the blood!”

He looks back at me, confused, then he gets it and he slams his hand against his arm. Rob sloshes forward and whips out his cap and wipes down the bar, then throws the cap onto the ground, away from the water. By then, Jimmy has his arms wrapped, having ripped some of his undershirt into a bandage, for all the good it'll do.

They're all there, standing in the puddle, waiting for me. I bite my cheek, step back toward the station.

“Where are you going?” Jo cries.

“They'll find us here,” I shout, walking backward, feeling the darkness surround me. “They'll track us down. And they'll know we came this way. The grates here won't stop them. We need something bigger. We need to make it hard for them to get up here.”

“What are you talking about?”

I set my jaw. “We need to burn this place down.”

• • •

Maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe I like being alone in the dark. All my life, I've shivered at the thought of a moonless night, and now I'm leaving my friends and heading toward it. I can feel my heart keep time with my footsteps as I run down the hall toward Wilkins's room. Maybe I wasn't done saying good-bye.
No,
I berate myself.
I have to do this. They'll find us if I don't.

The room still stinks, and this time, I gag, really gag; my head goes down between my legs, and I bend, trying not to vomit all over the place. It takes me a moment to get my mind straight, and I'm painfully aware of how close his face is to mine.

Brayden found his flashlight against the wall, so I fumble against the edges of the tiny space, my hands roaming high and low. Then I feel it, a small flashlight, clipped in place just like Brayden's. I unsnap and light up. I can see better, but the beam is low, and it's hard to make anything out.

“Mia!” I hear my name echoing down the hallway. I can't tell if it's coming from beyond the grate or closer. I hope no one has come to get me. I hope they're smart enough to go on.

I cast the flashlight around, looking everywhere but at Wilkins. Each time the light leaves a space, I can feel the darkness suck in. I hear noises, echoes and engines, louder than before. I can feel our time fading. Up on a shelf, I see some books and then—there, a cigar. I reach for it, but no lighter. I grab a book off the shelf, then stop.
Cigar, lighter. Where do you keep a lighter?
Suddenly I want to smack myself. I squat again, clenching my nostrils against the smell, and hold a trembling hand out to touch Wilkins's cold body. I feel his shirt and follow the fabric to his belt. He's so big, so sprawling. A bear. His crotch is stained with urine, his mouth flecked with vomit. My mouth gobs with saliva. I take a deep breath and reach into his pocket, ignoring the wet I can feel through the fabric. I realize that he must not have been dead long when we arrived. If we hadn't been caught up at Furbish, he might still be alive and coming to the Cave with us.

I find a lighter and pull it out. I kiss his frozen cheek and whisper into his ear, “Thank you.”

I rip a few pages out of the book.
The Gunslinger.
Never heard of it. I light up and set a few on fire, toss them onto the bed and watch them curl on themselves and die. My heart stalls. The room is metal. Even if I did get the bed to burn, it would do nothing in here. I'm in a friggin' submarine.

My mind tumbles, and I'm out of the room, where I can hear the voices of my friends much better, but I can't for the life of me figure out who's speaking. Even male or female, their voices are too distorted, but I hear their words: “Miaaaaaaa, get back here!” “I'm going to get her.” “No, we have to go.” I know this makes sense. I know they
should
go, but hearing the words feels like I'm being abandoned. At least I don't know who said them and who would abandon me. “Fuck you, you're crazy, she might need help.” “You heard the radio, Rob! THEY'RE HERE!”

I wouldn't say that I'm going to ignore their cries, but thinking about them doesn't make me happier. So I run fast through the maze of corridors to the front room, the kitchen. I twist the burners on, no flame, as high as they go. One, two, three, four burners, and then slam myself against the door and peek out the window. Already the air smells of gas. I see lights beyond the window, little dots flashing outside, casting about. There's no way I can fill up the entire station in this amount of time. Still, it's the front room that matters. The stairs. The access point. I just need to leave the station hanging from the cliff like an empty tree house.

I light the book again and get it going, really going, then put it on the chair, which is wooden and obligingly lights up by itself. I can smell the gas more strongly now, and I try to blow away the fumes. I can smell my time running out.

I hurry to the hallway door and slam it shut. There's a gap in the floor, and I don't want any gas sneaking out, so I pull off my winter jacket—the first thing I can think of—and shove it against the crack, stuffing it in.

“Mia?”

Normally I'm sure I'd scream, but I don't have time to be afraid. I do have time to drop my flashlight, though. Someone's come back to get me, but I can't see beyond the shadow standing down the hall. I start running and grab the arm of whoever is standing there.

“Hurry! We have to run!”

And we do, side by side, and it takes a second and a few long glances to make out Brayden's face. His lips are tight, intense, and I love that he doesn't ask questions and just runs. I love that he came for me. That he probably talked Rob out of coming and then came himself. I love that he puts his arm out, his hand against my back, and pushes me forward, as if he understands exactly what I've done and is trying to protect me.

We get to the pool and dive in, just like the movies. But there's no explosion. We're in only three feet of water, totally soaked, on our hands and knees, and I can't help it: I start laughing. And Brayden shakes his head and lets out one disbelieving chuckle. He grabs my neck, his fingers warmer than the water, and he pulls me to him, and I kiss him, once, because that's all the time we've got, but it's a good kiss. The kind of kiss that makes me want more, to forget the dead man twenty yards away, the ticking time bomb thirty yards beyond, and the mass of soldiers who might be, even now, climbing a set of steel circular stairs.

BRAYDEN AND I SLOSH THROUGH THE DARK TO CATCH
up with the others, his light our only guide, and it actually illuminates very little. A pale beam that he streaks across the rough-cut stone and the shallow water. After spending a while in the dark, following a light beam, you almost forget you're actually there. This small tunnel, it's different from the hallway with its empty rooms and economical space. The water runs lower here, shin high, with thousands of tons of rock overhead. I wish it weren't so narrow in here, that we could walk next to each other. If it weren't for Brayden's flashlight, I'd already be sniveling in a ball. The rock is familiar, and it does its best to remind me of the well.

But no, that's not exactly how I want him to see me. So I buck up, and we keep going, almost jogging through the water, our boots splashing out and in and out and in, and I'm trying to ignore the fact that for the second time in two days, I'm about to get hypothermia. My right foot has stopped hurting, at least. I think, at this very moment, that I'd rather no pain than the reminder, the dull ache of a lost cause. I can't imagine what my toes look like. We keep on, breathing hard. I time my breaths, like I do when swimming, trying to pace myself. I wish Brayden would catch my timing, but he just goes ragged—deep and wet breaths that break my rhythm. We'll be there soon, wherever “there” is. We have no other options. Find the entrance or freeze to death. No better motivator out there.

A couple hundred yards in, I think I can see the others. I motion to Brayden and point. They've stopped and are huddled together, shivering like a bunch of refugees. Jimmy has his fists clenched, as if he's ready to box, squinting into the light.

“Stop walking. Stay right there!” he shouts.

“What's he doing?” Brayden whispers to me, his voice slipping along the rocks.

I know what he's doing. Our flashlight probably blinds them, and they think we might be the bad guys. “Jimmy,” I say, my voice amused, “do you really have so little faith in me?”

“It's them!” he cries, laughing, and the whole group surges toward us.

Rob and Jo give me a big hug, then Jimmy makes it a bear hug, and even Odessa pats me, weakly. She's in pretty bad shape, her lips so blue they look ultraviolet whenever a light hits her face.

“We didn't have a flashlight,” Rob explains, almost apologetically. Whoever was in front must have lived in a nightmare. They probably had their hands on the wall at all times, feeling the slickness of the stone like the gullet of a beast.

“Oh, my God, that's horrifying,” I say.

Jo's hair is wet, water dripping down the sides of her face. She smiles. “I thought of you and wasn't scared at all.”

I'm suddenly ten times warmer and want to grab her into another hug, but Jimmy interrupts: “What'd you do?”

I think about the soldiers, and how I didn't have any time to really follow through with my plan. There's been no explosion. Nothing. The soldiers must have opened the door in time to air out the place.

“Nothing,” I say, feeling useless. Sutton's going to catch us, and we're leading them straight to my father. “I did nothing.”

“Stop that, Mia.” Jo's face is pale and shiny and deadly serious, and she's trying not to shiver in the cold. Her eyes are tender, but steely, bolstering me.

Jimmy tugs at my ponytail playfully. “Yeah, Baby, at least you tried something.”

The ground moves. Dirt sifts from the ceiling, then a flash up the tunnel.

“GET DOWN!” Brayden and I shout at the same time, and I dive forward, trying to knock everyone into the water. Jo and Rob catch me and look at each other for a second, then slam backward, a shock wave pushing us over. There's no flame overhead, no burning heat or near death. Just a huge gust of air and then a grumble, deep down in the mountain. Under the water, it sounds like a gurgle, like the mountain is about to spit up.

Jimmy pulls me out, and I gasp for air. He turns and plucks another shape from the water, and I see that it's Rob, struggling to right himself.

“Where's Odessa?” I shout.

“I don't know!” both Jimmy and Rob scream.

I plunge my hands into the rising water, watching with dread as it reaches my chest. I hear the others screaming and gasping for air and then the noise of the water turns into a roar and I'm alone, unable to hear a thing. There's no space for breathing; there's no space at all. I open my eyes underwater but don't see a thing except silky green filtered through the beam of the floating flashlight a few yards ahead. I slam my head against the ceiling and almost go blind in pain and think,
That's it. I've killed us all.

And the funny thing is, at that moment I almost take a deep breath of water and just say,
Whatever. I don't care—take me.
It would be so much easier not to be afraid of this anymore. Of drowning, of the soldiers, of the virus, of losing our parents, of the dark. I float, weightless, feeling the water tickling at my lips, trying to get me to open up.

The moment lasts forever, and some part of my mind screams for help, hopes that someone, Brayden, Jo, Rob, even Jimmy, will grab me and save me somehow. But they don't. They're probably all about to die too or gone already. And then the water crests, pushes on, and starts to recede. Just like that. Maybe five seconds later, I'm on my hands and knees, and the water barely passes my elbow, and if I am going to die, it's because I'm hacking out a lung.

When I finally get control, I look for everyone else. I flip my hair back and scootch forward to help pull Odessa out of the water, where her face is lying half submerged in what remains of the wave. She's barely moving, her eyes semi-open. I slap her face gently; her cheeks are cold, like frozen meat, and I'm about to begin mouth-to-mouth when she coughs and spits up water. I rub her back while she vomits out some more, then rolls weakly onto her ass and leans against the wall.

“Am I alive?” she asks, her voice gravelly.

“What was THAT?” Jimmy screams from somewhere behind me, and it's clear that his ears are ringing and he's overcompensating with his voice.

“THAT,” I say, “is what I did.”

Everyone's soaking wet, sitting on their butts, in a state of shock. But it's a pleasant shock. We're grinning, happy to be alive. For the first time, we feel like we've struck back and aren't just running from threat after threat. I try not to think of the possibility of a dead soldier or two. Probably they didn't make it up the stairs in time to get cooked. Maybe the station was empty.

Brayden's flashlight, the only thing illuminating the tunnel, flickers. He's not holding it, that's why—it's floating in the water, and we all sort of watch it cough, sputter and die.

“Win some, lose some,” he says.

“Awesome,” says Jo, and even she sounds fine, hopeful. “Okay, someone take my arm. Take everyone's arms. Link up, and let's keep moving.”

I help Odessa stand, and someone grabs my sleeve. Jo has found me. “Hey,” I say, “can you take Odessa's other side? I need some help here.” She does, stepping in front of her, and I can feel Odessa's weight lessen.

“Everyone ready?” Brayden asks from a few feet ahead.

“Lead on, master,” Rob calls back, his voice wet with typical Rob irony. There's a sound of sloshing, so I begin moving too. We walk forward in an odd shuffle, the space really too small for our arms to be linked. I fight the urge to head backward and see the damage, to see if there are bodies strewn about on the hill, their white hazmat suits camouflaging the soldiers in their death as they lie against the snow. I imagine—maybe I overimagine—standing at the edge of the hole we're in right now, gaping out at the forest below and seeing that
everything
has been ripped from the mountainside. Down below, there'd be chaos, burning rubble and the surviving men running back and forth. Someone would see me, raise a gun.

“Hey, the tunnel's branching,” Brayden warns. “Be careful, don't go wandering off.

My chain link takes a couple steps forward and bumps into Brayden and Jimmy.

“Which way?” Jimmy asks.

“To the left,” responds Brayden.

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

It's Rob who backs him up. “He's right. The spring that feeds the aqueduct has to flow downhill, with gravity. Feel the flow of water here. Downhill is that way.” He points to the left.

“So this is where the water branches to feed the Cave,” I respond, going through the logic in my head.

“Exactly,” Brayden replies. “From here we go down and deep.”

“To the Balrog,” says Rob.

I'm glad my dad made me read Tolkien, but apparently no one else has, because they're very quiet. And in that moment of silence, you can hear the water sluicing apart at the junction, trickling down the mountain. We're in a waterslide, one of the ones that's black and dark and not fun at all.

“Nerd,” Jimmy says. Jo lets out a giggle, and I can't help but do the same. I'm sure Rob is glaring at us, but I don't care. It's like we're latching on to any reason to be happy. And the sounds of a laugh in this empty place float, reminding us that we still have bodies to laugh with.

“Okay, okay, to the left then,” I say finally.

The entrance is wider than the previous tunnels. We go two at a time. I'm still holding Odessa, whose head is on my shoulder and whose breath is getting softer. I want to warn someone, but she might hear and get upset. I guess this is a moment when I recognize a problem and have no solution. I can only keep going and hope for the best. But with each sloshing step, I imagine the dark bacteria floating in the water climbing to her thigh and her wound. If she wasn't infected before, surely she is now.

We push forward, no end in sight, and the group gets quiet again. We could have lost someone, for all I know. Just step after step after step. The water at my feet isn't cold, and I feel like I have heavy weights attached to my legs. When do I get my toes cut off? When everything is resolved and we're safe and sound, I still get to look forward to my toe removals? Odessa's getting heavy, and I want to pass her on, but I don't think I should break the silence. It's a reverent, desperate sort of palpable feeling. The air growing closer, each one of us becoming more alone.

And when someone does talk—I don't know who—the words cut through the air like the voice of the Wizard of Oz. Dramatic and unreal, visible in the air. Then the words filter through to the real part of my head and become normal and mundane and incredibly important.

“What's that?” the words say.

Up ahead, impossibly small, is a pinprick of red light.

“Go, go, go,” I urge, my mind woken from its stupor. The grunting noise I make is the best way I can point out our need for speed with Odessa.

The red light gets bigger, then brighter, until suddenly the tunnel opens into a room, the water leveled in a shallow pool across the ground. The room isn't very large, but it is large enough for a door, which is steel and thick and looks like a bank vault. Above and to the left, one red lightbulb, encased in a metal frame, alive with current.

“We made it,” Odessa breathes, and my heart does a little jump. She's alive enough to care about herself.

“Where does the water go?” Jo asks. “Like, why does it end here in a pool? Isn't it supposed to feed the Cave?”

Rob moves to the edge of the pool and feels around. “There's a grate here, a small one. It must filter through this.” He grabs Jimmy's hand and hauls himself out, his calculator watch waterlogged and dead. The two of them, their hair pasted wetly to their faces, turn and grab at Odessa's hands. We help her up, and then we all flop onto shore ourselves, six wet fish, trying to ignore the cold that's been settling in our bones.

“So this is what it was like swimming under the lake, huh, Mia?” Jo asks, her teeth beginning to chatter.

I try not to shiver at the memory. “Honestly, no. Not at all.”

I didn't mean that as a rebuke, but it came out that way, and everyone's faces say
party pooper,
including Brayden's. So I turn my attention to the door. They have no idea what that experience was like. We're all scared, we're all on edge. Give me a break.

The security keypad is encased in plastic. I feel an ache immediately, imagining this as a telephone with a direct line to my dad. I come so close to dialing my home number that I have to clench my fingers into fists, which is just as well because I now can start pounding on the door.

No sound. In fact, no sound and lots of hurt. Pure steel, thick layers of it—it's like punching a smooth wall. After three or four hits, I fold at the waist and shake off the pain in my hand.

“Your dad told you how to get in, right?” Jo asks. She's looking around at the others, nodding her head as if surely I have a plan.

I can't meet her eye. “No. I mean, kind of. He told me to find Wilkins. He said to tell Wilkins that we needed to get in the back door.” We all think of Wilkins now, both of his wrinkled and riddled body and of the fact that it might have been vaporized in the explosion or burned to a husk.

Rob watches me closely; they all do, but he's the one who breaks the silence. “Okay, well now what?”

“Now what, what?” I snap. “You're the Geek Squad. Hotwire the door or something!”

Rob's face doesn't flush, so he's not really angry at the Geek Squad comment, but he does raise his eyebrow, which is Rob speak for
You've got to be kidding me
. I've seen him give the eyebrow to dozens of students and a few teachers. Never to me. Leave it to Rob to make me feel like crap with the careful manipulation of a strip of hair over the eye.

But maybe because it's me, or maybe because he really is our best shot, Rob's face heroically battles the eyebrow into submission. He sighs, one long one, then moves me aside to take a look at the keypad.