Chapter 29 - The Girl in Green

I don’t know how long Madison and I waited in the dark, backed up against the wall, not daring to breathe. Clutching the knife with a grip so tight that I had to switch the knife to my right hand and shake out my left to bring the blood back to my stabbing arm.

That . . . thing continued to weave through tunnels around us, issuing that desperate cry. The dark was so deep it felt like it had weight.

After a while, I began to wonder if Madison was still there on the other side of the small room. She was so still, and the only breathing I heard was my own.

I stayed there, not daring to speak, in case the thing followed our sound. I had to assume Madison was silent for the same reason, and not that she’d taken the opportunity to creep along the wall and leave me here. We were trapped. Even the slightest noise might bring the girl to our location.

My head cleared. After an eternity of standing with a knife in hand, waiting for attack, fatigue took over. I slid down the wall of the cave and tucked my feet under me.

Alone together, under tons of rock, safe in the dark as long as we didn’t move, or make sound, or shine a light.

This couldn’t last forever. The things Coach Mullins said rang through my mind. Maybe it would let one of us go, but the chances of both of us making it out were slim.

And Madison was faster.

No. We both had to make it out.

I put down my knife. There had to be a way out through the caves, one that didn’t end up on the side of a cliff. We’d already been through branches and twists of the tunnels. There was a maze of tunnels and we had to figure out a way to mark where we’d been. I figured I could scratch an X on the walls with my knife. It would be slow work, and we would have to risk turning on the flashlights to check our progress.

And there was the risk that the thing would follow our markings.

But I didn’t think it was following the light.

I think it followed the sound.

As long as we were quiet, hopefully it wouldn’t find us.

I leaned my head back against the wall, and drifted.

I woke in the beam of a flashlight, a hand clapped over my mouth.

“You were snoring!” Madison hissed, a sharp whisper that nonetheless echoed in our small cave. “That thing is going to find us.”

She removed her hand from my mouth. I looked down in horror. She left her flashlight on, on the ground, light hitting the side of the cave wall.

“Madison, the light!” I whispered. “It will see!”

“I had to turn on the light—I wasn’t going to let you stab me!”

She reached for the light and flicked it off just as the sound of tromping boots echoed through the caves. Madison pulled alongside me, tight to my side. Her hand found mine.

“Sounds like a lot of people,” she whispered directly in my ear.

The walls of the cave bounced the sound around, making it seem like it was coming from all directions.

“Or it could be one person,” I whispered back.

“Maybe someone has come to rescue us,” she whispered.

I squeezed her hand in mine. I didn’t know whether I squeezed her hand in hope that she was right, or to quiet her. But she squeezed back. I could feel every muscle in her shoulder tense against mine.

The marching noise grew louder, and my heart leapt. We heard the scuff of several boots along the corridor, and a dim light appeared against the side of the cave wall. It had to be rescuers.

Had to be.

A figure appeared, walking across the mouth of a tunnel that branched out from our small cave. He wore an antique mining hard hat, baggy pants cuffed and rolled over worn boots. He had what looked like an old-fashioned lantern on his helmet, a small flame reflecting in a concave mirror. It emitted a small flickering glow that illuminated a few feet in front of him.

It was that small flame that kept me from calling out. This wasn’t a rescuer. It was a miner from over a hundred years ago.

“This has gotta be the way out,” he whispered in a voice full of heartbreaking weariness and desperation.

Years ago, Mom had introduced me to the stone tape theory of ghosts. Some ghosts were mere recordings of past occurrences. I hoped this was a ghost recording of a poor miner trapped at the moment of his death. No consciousness.

Madison inhaled sharply, and the man turned and swept his vision over our side of the room.

It stood at the door for what seemed like an eternity, before sniffing the air and turning away.

Madison relaxed against my side as he left.

We stayed still as the marching continued down the tunnels and disappeared.

Madison leaned close to my ear and whispered.

“What was that?” she asked. “Was that a ghost?”

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“It seemed to be looking for us,” Madison said.

“Dr. Jacobsen said that the girl in green is a shapeshifter,” I said. “Maybe it’s just another one of her forms.”

I suppressed a terrible thought. What if there was more than one monster? If so, we were doomed.

I was ravenously hungry. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really eaten. Ava’s disappearance the day before had left me without an appetite.

I reached into my backpack, found a couple of protein bars, and carefully unwrapped them inside my pack to muffle the noise. If we were going to find a way out, we’d have to keep our strength up.

I put a bar in Madison’s hand in the dark, and we both ate.

“I hate these things,” Madison whispered.

“I do too,” I whispered back. “But we have to eat.”

She pulled a savage bite out of a protein bar, and her arm knocked into me.

“Do you think we’ll ever eat real food again?” she asked.

I thought about it. My mind went back to the diner and the huge pile of fries. To Tree, who’d been so nice.

“There’s a diner in town that makes the best tomato basil sandwiches,” I whispered near her ear. “There’s a waitress there, from Chicago. She was nice.”

“Really?” Madison said in a small voice.

“When we get out of here, we’ll go find her,” I said.

Madison reached for my hand in the dark. We held hands for a moment, not talking.

Madison shifted and dug in her pack. She came up with a water bottle, drank, then handed it to me. I drank a little, trying to restrain myself. Our water had to last.

I picked the knife up.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“I’m going to use the knife to mark the tunnels,” I said. “If we reach a dead end, we put an X on the entrance so we don’t go through the same tunnels over and over.”

Madison grunted slightly, more of a sigh. She didn’t love this plan. Neither did I.

“We’re going to get out of here,” I whispered.

I stood up, tucked the flashlight in the belt, then twisted the belt slightly so it would stay put. If it fell out of my belt, it would make a horrific clang, and the monster would find us. Beside me came the rustle of Madison putting the water bottle away, closing her backpack. I reached out in the dark, feeling the wall and then her side until I found her hand and gripped it tightly.

I took the lead, left hand on the walls in the dark. When we reached the place where the tunnel branched off, we took the path to the left, and then to the right. The path narrowed so we had to crouch down to continue, and then the path came to a dead end in a solid face of rock. I fought a claustrophobic panic, the urge to push past Madison into the open space. I couldn’t make a noise. That was what the monster was waiting for. I turned around, my hand on her shoulder, and Madison turned and led the way out of the dead end.

I marked the tunnel with an X slowly, trying to score the rock quietly.

We did this several times, taking what we thought were different paths in the dark, turning a flashlight on briefly when we reached a spot where the tunnel branched out. But in the dark, there was no way to tell what direction we were traveling in. Eventually we would find our way to one of the caves that had an entrance to the side of the mountain—or we would end up back in the tunnel.

We’d just have to keep trying. There was nothing else to do.

We stopped at one point to pee. First her and then me, pants down while the other stood over, holding the knife. Waiting to see if the sound of water drew the monster. When it didn’t, we moved again.

This went on for hours, but it felt like days. My feet hurt. I imagined taking my shoes off to find blisters on top of blisters. I imagined myself taking my shoes off, showing my blistered feet to someone who cared.

And who would that be?

Madison and I would get out of here together. We had to. I imagined us finding the tunnel that led out, which would lead to a long and treacherous walk down the side of the mountain, but anything was better than here.

Eating french fries at the diner, Tree calling my mom in Chicago.

We were going to get out of here.

I wondered ruefully if Kenzie was in my room. Maybe she’d told Barlow that I’d been taken. Maybe he would open the incinerator door for me.

Or maybe Burton had scared her into silence.

Maybe she was sleeping through the night.

Or maybe it was daytime.

I couldn’t think straight anymore.

The dark and the silence played tricks with the passage of time. I didn’t know how long I’d slept in our first hiding spot. The protein bar sat in my stomach, a lead weight. I was thirsty, but I didn’t know how long the water we had would have to last.

The only real thing in the world was Madison’s hand, the small squeeze she’d give me when we reached a dead end. We spent hours beside each other silently, hand gestures for directions, her hand on my shoulder as I made my way into a tunnel. My hand on her shoulder as we returned from a dead end.

A thousand pulses of excited hopefulness when a soft breeze would blow from below, a sign that we were heading in the right direction, followed by disappointment when we reached another dead end. A squeeze of reassurance as we turned around to try again.

We had this. We were both strong. We weren’t going to give up.

I imagined Coach Mullins telling us both we had gumption and stifled a bitter laugh. Madison squeezed my shoulder to tell me to be quiet.

After a series of right and left turns I couldn’t have replicated in a million years, we came to a widening in the tunnel, another small cave where we could stop and rest.

A soft breeze from an offshoot of the tunnel. I worried that it was my imagination, but as we walked farther into the tunnel the breeze grew stronger. It smelled wet, mossy maybe but fresh and green as though it came from the forest. This breeze was real, and it was strong.

Madison took the lead now, pulling me along, moving faster in the direction of the breeze. Faster than felt safe on the uneven surface of the cave floor. We were making too much noise now that we were close to a possible exit, and still Madison pulled me along, stopping only momentarily at different branches of the tunnel to find the breeze. We kept going, and the air became colder and wetter, as though the rain were still falling, sending dampness on the wind.

The tunnel continued straight, but there was a glow from the side, a branch of the tunnel that must have led to the outside world.

We turned a corner and there it was.

A dim light reflected off the edge of the tunnel.

The outside.

Daylight.

It had to be.

Madison let go of my hand and began to run. I followed behind her but she was so fast, there was no catching her. I wanted to call out, to tell her that it wasn’t safe to run on the uneven ground, but my voice stalled in my throat.

The moment before Madison disappeared around a corner, I saw her face outlined in a strange blue glow, an almost mystical sense of relief and joy infusing everything about her. Her hair whipped around her head as she ran—loose, pin-straight hair, blue in the strange light.

I turned the corner to see light in an opening of the cave.

“Madison, wait!” I yelled.

Too late. Madison took a leap through the opening like a sprinter hitting the first hurdle and she disappeared. She plummeted out of view, and a moment later there was a dull thud and a groan.

And then, silence.