Solitary Read online

  Something tumbled from the hole in the ceiling, a writhing form that spun through the flickering light and struck the raging torrent with a splash that was far too big for a man.

  “Oh Jesus, they’re not sending the guards,” said Zee, his voice breaking.

  Another form dropped like a dead weight, this one howling as it hit the water.

  “They’re sending the dogs.”

  HUNTED

  I TRIED TO GET UP but my body wouldn’t let me. Fortunately Gary was more than happy to lend a helping hand. Two, actually. He ran forward and grabbed the collar of my tattered prison overalls, hoisting me to my feet and shaking me hard enough to make my teeth chatter. He pulled me close, glaring at me with the soulless eyes of a spider.

  “Where now?” he screamed, flecks of blood and spittle hitting my face. “You better have a plan or I’m gonna feed you to them myself.”

  A plan. I could think of one. Lie down and die. It’s all my legs wanted to do, just fold beneath me and leave me there for the dogs. It would be quick, I thought. Those immense canine jaws, the skinless muscles bulging, and those teeth—one bite, maybe two, and it would all be over. I must have still been delirious, because the thought of being free of this bruised flesh almost made me giggle.

  “Why don’t you think of one?” I spat. “I got us this far; it’s your turn.”

  Gary looked at me like he was going to rip off my head, then with a grunt of disgust he shoved me backward. I stumbled, but Zee caught me before I could fall. A wet howl bubbled from the water, too close.

  “Come on, Alex,” whispered Zee in my ear. “We’ve got to think of something. I don’t want to die down here, not like this.”

  His words cleared the madness from my mind, snapping me to attention. Gary’s helmet lamp was veering wildly from left to right as he searched for a way out, but there were no exits, no passageways. The only thing I could see in every direction was rock.

  Every direction but one.

  “We have to go back in,” I shouted over the roar of the river.

  “No way, man,” Gary replied, his voice shaky. “Almost died the last time. No way I get back in there.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” I went on, stumbling over the uneven ledge to the raging water. It pummeled the rock beneath my feet, desperate to get hold of us again so it could finish the job it had started. But there really was no alternative—in seconds the warden’s monstrosities would be on us. “You wanna wait here and get torn to pieces? We get back in, it will be easier this time.”

  Gary stomped toward me again, fists raised, but whatever he was planning he never got the chance. A throbbing snarl rose up to our side and he swung around, the lamp picking out two silver eyes and countless needled teeth emerging from the foam. The dog was straining to free itself from the current, its claws firing off sparks as they ripped across the rock. It howled, lurching its body onto solid ground, its back legs scrabbling for purchase.

  “Go!” I yelled, taking a deep breath and throwing myself back into the flood. This time I knew what to expect, bracing myself for the cold and managing to keep the air in my lungs. I felt the river grip me and pull me forward but I spread my arms and curled up my legs, keeping one hand against the wall to my left to steady my passage.

  Behind me I heard two more splashes. Somebody screamed, a choked cry drowned out by the rush of water in my ears. I turned, my shoulder grazing against the cheese-grater rock. What little light there was from Gary’s helmet lamp was half submerged, the glow like some deep-sea jellyfish. He was still beneath it, writhing in the water and trying to break back up to the surface.

  Zee had disappeared. I couldn’t see the dogs either, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there in the darkness of the tunnel.

  I fought the panic, trying to swim against the current toward Gary. I couldn’t have cared less if he drowned, but we needed that light. I reached beneath the surface, grabbing a handful of cloth and skin and pulling as hard as I could. He bobbed up, gasping for breath and clinging to me with iron fists.

  “Keep your head forward,” I shouted, coughing as the river dipped and filled my lungs with water. “Look for a ledge, a slope, anything!”

  I don’t know if he heard me or not, his panicked breathing and muttered curses not even stopping when he slammed into a rock. He spun around, the lamp illuminating the way we’d come for the briefest of seconds but leaving an image in my mind that lasted a lot longer—Zee’s panicked face, and behind him four glinting devil’s eyes gaining fast. Too fast.

  I swerved to avoid another jagged black blade looming from the water, then clutched Gary’s overalls as the river dropped again. The water closed in over my head as we plunged down a near vertical shaft, but it wasn’t a long drop and I managed to snatch another breath as it leveled out again. It was just as well, as dead ahead the ceiling of the tunnel dropped right to the surface, the river disappearing through a hole in the floor.

  Great. Death by mauling behind us, death by drowning ahead.

  And that was all I had time to think before I was sucked down into the whirling abyss. It felt like I was in a washing machine, my body spun so fast that I thought my limbs were going to fly off and my eyeballs pop out as it forced us deeper and deeper into the earth.

  We burst out in another stretch of tunnel, the water still flowing fast but the river wider now, less furious. I saw Gary and clutched him, feeling his arms around me as though we’d been best friends for years. There was a choked shout as Zee flew free, then a set of whimpered barks as the dogs drew breath.

  “There!” I said, taking hold of Gary’s head and twisting it so that his helmet lamp was pointing at a section of broken wall to our left. A series of shadowed grooves led up to a narrow ledge high above the water—steep, but we could climb them. “Get up there,” I said breathlessly. “Least till dogs have gone.”

  We let go of each other and swam for it, my limbs feeling as if they’d been hollowed out and filled with lead, my head chiming like I was standing right next to a church bell. The river almost dragged us past, but I managed to grab an exposed hook of rock and pull myself free of its icy grip. Gary was already ahead, scaling the wall with a speed born from terror.

  There was a cry from behind me and I saw Zee struggling against the current. I tightened my grip on the rock and reached out for him, taking hold of his hand as he blasted past. The flow was almost too powerful, threatening to suck us both back in, but with a scream of defiance I reeled him close.

  It was just as well. Almost as soon as he’d lifted himself up out of the water a muzzle broke free, splintered teeth snapping shut inches from his heel. The dog threw itself at us, its raw flesh reflecting the dying light from Gary’s lamp. But there was no bank, no shore for it to gain purchase. It clung onto the rock for what seemed like forever, its jaws thrashing wildly. Then the other dog sped past, snared fast in the current and whining. It smacked straight into the first, knocking it from the rock and sending them both careening into the darkness.

  “Gary, wait up,” wheezed Zee as we listened to the whimpered snarling fade. “We can’t see a thing down here.”

  God only knows how I had the strength to climb. Yet somehow I did, dredging something up from deep inside me, some primal strength. Each time I reached for the next handhold or foothold I felt like I was back in the prison gym, fighting the Skulls, kicks and blows raining down on me. But that’s the funny thing about pain: the more familiar it becomes, the easier it is to tune it out.

  I noticed that the light up ahead was no longer moving. Gary had reached the ledge, and although he didn’t offer either of us a hand as we pulled ourselves over the lip of rock, he did move his leg out of the way so we could clamber up. From Gary, that was the equivalent of him saying he loved us. Zee collapsed and I sat next to him, peering back down at the river. It was lost in shadow, its undying roar the only thing letting me know it was still there.

  “Where we gonna go now?” spat Gary eventually. “We’ve
lost the dogs but where’s the way out, little man? You messed this up big.”

  I ignored him, trying to get a sense of our surroundings. The ledge we were on was narrow but stretched out along the length of the cavern. Bathed in weak light, the rough walls were made up of pockets of darkness that looked like those in the chipping halls. Most were probably nothing more than grooves in the rock, but there had to be a passageway or something up ahead.

  Had to be? my mind echoed. There didn’t have to be anything. This wasn’t part of the prison, it hadn’t been designed by an architect and carved out of the rock by logical minds. It was a river more than a mile beneath the surface sculpted by the cruel and chaotic forces of nature. Nobody had ever set foot down here before. We were the first, and it wasn’t going to let us go.

  “No way out,” Gary mumbled to himself, rocking back and forth and making shadows sweep across the cavern. “Got us killed. Got us killed bad.”

  “No, we’ll find a way,” said Zee, sitting up and putting a hand on my shoulder. “You got us out of Furnace, right, and nobody has ever done that before. We’ll find a way, I know it.”

  I wanted to agree, wanted to get up and charge down the ledge and find that escape route. But I knew in my gut that Gary was right.

  “We buried alive down here,” he said. “Buried alive.”

  And we were. The warden may have locked us up in Furnace, but I was the one who had arranged our execution. Because this wasn’t a way out at all. It was a tomb.

  BURIED ALIVE

  WHEN YOU’RE SCARED—and I mean really scared, not just hearing a noise in the night, or standing toe to toe with someone twice your size who wants to pound you into the earth—it feels as if you’re being injected with darkness. It’s like black water as cold as ice settling in your body where your blood and marrow used to be, pushing every other feeling out as it fills you from your feet to your scalp. It leaves you with nothing.

  That’s how I felt sitting on the ledge. It wasn’t the dogs that terrified me, and it wasn’t Gary. Or the thought of being caught again. It wasn’t even the idea that I might die shivering helplessly on the rock like some strange fungus. No, it was the thought of what might happen after death.

  I could accept my life ending, because there would be no more fear and no more pain. But what if death wasn’t the end? What if some part of me, my soul perhaps, lived on? And what if it was trapped here in the guts of Furnace for the rest of time, never again to see the sun or hear the sound of laughter? It was that which made it seem like my body was a pit devoid of life and light. It was that which was driving me toward madness.

  “We move that way,” I said, more to chase away the voices in my head than because I had a plan. Light burned my retinas as Gary turned to look at me. I stuck my hand out, pointing down the slope in the same direction the river ran below. “Gary, you’ve got the light, you take the lead. Make sure you don’t miss any passageways, one of them might be our way out.”

  “Might?” snapped Gary, as menacing as a pistol shot. But he obviously didn’t have any better ideas as he scrambled to his feet and turned his head in the direction I was still pointing. His helmet lamp illuminated the narrow ledge ahead, which seemed to disappear into darkness far too quickly.

  “Just take it slowly,” I stammered as a shiver passed through my body, making every nerve end burn. “Watch your feet; if you fall over the edge then we’re all screwed.”

  Gary didn’t answer, keeping his head forward as he shuffled carefully along the rock. His feet kicked scraps of stone over into the void and I tried to ignore the sound of them hitting the foaming spray below. The river had let us live twice now, but I was willing to bet it wouldn’t show the same mercy if we tumbled in again.

  “Come on,” I whispered, offering Zee a hand and hauling him up. “Before that idiot leaves us behind.”

  We eased our way after Gary, treading carefully in his shadow and doing our best to peer past his enormous shoulders. Each step he took made the gloom along the wall twitch, and it was impossible not to think of the wheezers—the warden’s gas-mask-wearing freaks—lurching and staggering like injured birds in front of us. Every time I saw movement my heart hammered, which wasn’t a bad thing since fear seemed to be the only thing keeping it going.

  “This isn’t getting us nowhere,” came Gary’s uneven voice. “It’s all the same up here, no doors or nothing.”

  “You were expecting a door?” I asked, unable to stop the haggard laugh breaking from my throat. He didn’t reply, and he didn’t turn around, but even so I swore I could feel the air thicken like he was about to explode. And he was right. No matter how many paces we took, the wall to our left and the pitch-black abyss to our right stayed exactly the same. Each stumbled movement forward brought a fraction more light to the ledge up ahead, but it also pinched it off right behind us. We could have been walking on a treadmill.

  The image brought back my terror of becoming a ghost trapped here for all eternity. Weakened to the point of insanity by everything that had happened, my mind started telling me that I was already dead, and that this was my personal hell.

  And it could have been. I mean, more than anything our progress through the darkness reminded me of the times I had broken into houses and crept through the shadows while the owners were asleep, desperately trying not to make a noise and always panicking that I wouldn’t be able to escape in an emergency. What could be a better punishment for a criminal like me than to be doomed to an eternity walking along a ledge in a pocket of light and air that constantly felt like it was shrinking?

  “Watch it!” came Gary’s voice as I smacked into his back. “You trying to push me over? I’ll gut you if you try it. You hear me?”

  I’d been so wrapped up in my own mortality that I hadn’t noticed him come to a halt. I mumbled an apology, bracing a hand on the wall before stepping up on my tiptoes to see what had stopped him. The view was identical to the one that had greeted us for the last few minutes, except for a jagged scar running vertically down the wall. It cut straight through the ledge, splitting it in two and resembling a crude crucifix, like this was a massive cathedral and we were trespassing on the altar.

  “Go on then,” I said, no longer caring about antagonizing him. “That might be it.”

  “You go,” he replied, his voice shaky. “Don’t feel right.”

  I wondered what had spooked him. The ledge ahead didn’t look any more treacherous than it had all along, except further up where it had been sheared in half. The gaping wound in the wall was dark, but shadows couldn’t hurt us.

  Then I heard it, a noise rising up above the numbing roar of the river below. It was so loud that I didn’t know how none of us had noticed it before—a whistle that rose in pitch like an old kettle before sputtering out and vanishing into its own echo.

  “It’s the wind,” I said, but I was so unsure that it came out like a question.

  “That means we’re near the surface, right?” came Zee’s voice from behind me. I shook my head.

  “There’s wind in these caves just like there’s water. Doesn’t mean anything.”

  The whistle came again, closer and louder and longer. Another rose up on the back of it, a shrill call that sounded more like a scream before being sucked back down below the thunder of the water. It’s wind, I thought to myself, trying to hammer the words into my head so hard that I wouldn’t question them. The wind in the tunnels, caused by pressure changes in the water.

  But I knew that whatever it was we were hearing, it wasn’t made by anything as innocent as air. More whistles, three or four this time, fighting each other for supremacy. Gary swore and turned to me, his pupils so large and the whites of his eyes glowing so fiercely around them that he looked like an animal. He whispered something that I couldn’t make out, but I knew what his lips had spelled.

  Wheezers.

  “Is it them?” asked Zee, almost crying. “Please God, not them.”

  I shook my head until all thoughts
of the freaks in gas masks had disappeared, then took a step forward. Easing myself past Gary, I made my way toward the crack in the rock, my heart so far up my throat that I could feel its beat on my tonsils.

  “It might not be them,” I said over my shoulder as I reached the edge of the precipice. “It could be anything. We’re just afraid, paranoid. Forget about the noise, okay? We’ve just got to find a way out. We’ll worry about the wheezers when we have to.”

  A clutter of remarks met the end of my sentence but nobody argued with it. I took that as a good sign, grabbing the edge of the cracked rock and peering around it. The scar was maybe two meters wide, the ledge continuing on the other side but too far away for us to jump to it. Without the light I couldn’t make out where, if anywhere, the crack in the rock led.

  “Gary, I need the lamp.”

  Instead of handing it to me he walked to my side, his rough hands on my arm a promise that if he tripped and fell he’d take me with him. Tentatively he leaned out and aimed the fluttering beam into the shadows. They parted reluctantly, as if this was the first time they had ever seen light. The crevice thinned to a point—there was no passageway.

  “Look up,” I commanded. If I’d spoken to Gary like this in Furnace, then he’d have shanked me without thinking twice. But down here things were different. He tilted his head back, rocking unsteadily on the edge of the precipice and digging his fingers into my bruises. The pain was worth it, though, as the weak glow picked out another peak of rock that led off into shadows. I had my mouth open to point this out when the noise came again, and the way it dropped screeching from the very darkness I was looking at made it clear where it was coming from.

  “Find another way,” said Gary, his voice dead.

  “There is no—” I started, but before I could finish, his hands had left my overalls and were around my neck. He swiveled, twisting his body and mine until I was scrabbling for purchase on the lip of the ledge. I could feel the cold air of the river below me, like an icy tongue trying to pull me in, and for a moment I thought I was falling.