Without a backward glance, Hollander and Pateros fell in step behind the limping teammate.
Ixibas shook his head in irritation. “Stupid.” He stepped into the street. “Wait up. I’m coming, too. I want you to remember I said this was a bad idea.”
“Duly noted.” Hollander scanned the sides of the road for an ambush or trap. No one knew what to expect. Though they were eager to leave the city, they couldn’t ignore the fact that Ixibas was right. It was too easy.
They walked in silence for half a mile to the edge of the city before Tusque started rambling, to himself as much as anyone else, “I wonder how we’re going to let the ship know we’re alive and ready for pickup.”
Ixibas shrugged and scanned the road ahead. His eyes fell on the destruction around them-broken windows, smashed vehicles, and cracks in the pavement.
Looking closer, he saw a series of cracks to their left extended just over a foot on the ground before stopping. A few feet beyond, another pair of cracks extended a similar distance and stopped. The ground was undamaged.
Slowly turning in a circle, he scanned the rest of the road. In a concentric circle around them, cracks emanated no more than a foot before disappearing, as they approached the foci on which the group stood.
“Nobody move!” His growled words startled the others. “It’s a….”
Tusque stepped heavily, as he stopped his forward momentum. Beneath their feet, the ground shook from the impact, as if an earthquake was centralized beneath them. Hollander and Pateros spread their stance, trying to balance against the shaking.
Ixibas watched in horror, as Tusque stumbled and backpedaled toward the other three. As he stepped heavily on his wounded leg, it buckled under him. He fell backward into the middle of the group like a collapsing mountain.
As he crashed to the road, the fake covering broke loose and fell inward. The faux stone covering shattered, as fabric enclosed all four of them. Together, enclosed by shards of stone and gray cloth, they fell nearly twenty feet into a dark pit.
They landed on the packed dirt floor with a heavy thud, their limbs entangled and buried in the heavy tarp. Ixibas dug his claws into the tarp and tore a hole through it to emerge in a dark passage. Above, light fell down to spotlight them, casting a faint glow in the tunnel that extended in both directions.
“…trap,” he said, finishing his sentence far too late.
The others, emerging from the tarp, looked around. Aside from pillars of light from above, the tunnel disappeared into the darkness beyond where they stood.
“Where are we?” Hollander shook concrete dust from his hair.
“We’re in their home.” Ixibas walked to the nearest wall and ran his clawed hand over the surface, tracing long claw marks with his own sharp fingers. “They dug this.”
The rest of them looked at the mostly rounded tunnel. Nearly twenty feet overhead, the walls curved toward the ceiling. The tunnel ran parallel to the street, punctured with what they assumed were multiple false floors. The intense heat in the tunnel amplified the warmth of the setting sun, making the stuffy air thick to breathe.
“They were waiting for us to do something stupid like this,” Pateros said. “We were herded like….” He stopped, because the phrase would normally have been completed with the word Seques.
“They played us,” Ixibas said. “We were more than obliging.”
Tusque muscled his way from under the tarp and turned on his light. The beam cast a dim glow down the hallway. “Why build a tunnel like this, Boss? It goes on forever. Was this just to catch us?”
“No.” Ixibas’ voice sounded like rocks rubbing together. “I think capturing us was a secondary part of their plan. These tunnels are how the Seque disappear during the day.”
“You’re saying we’re in the middle of their home?” Fear crept into Hollander’s voice. “We’ve fallen into their nest?”
“We aren’t in the middle of their home yet, but we will be once the sun sets. Once they’re active again, they’ll flood the tunnels and find us. If we expect to survive, we need a way out.”
“Which way is out, Boss?” Tusque turned his broad flashlight back and forth, illuminating both stretches of the hall.
“I say we continue toward the edge of the city limits,” Pateros offered. “I’d rather not turn around and head back the way we came.”
Ixibas followed their flashlight beams in the direction they’d been going on the surface. The lights fell short of reaching the end of the tunnel, but he shook his head. They walked for less than ten minutes before the tunnel dead-ended. Pateros and Tusque looked for weak points without finding anything. There was no hope of escape that way.
Hollander approached Ixibas, who remained deeper in the tunnel. “You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” Bony protrusions along his face glistened with sweat.
Even Ixibas’ glossy exoskeleton shone brighter in the tunnel’s warmth. “I had my suspicions. After all we’ve been through, I found it hard to believe they’d just let us go. If we want to escape their clutches, we need to head back into the city.”
Hollander shivered, knowing escape had been so close. “I say we move now and fast. The sun won’t last much longer.”
The group moved faster than before, nearly running over the tunnel’s uneven floor. The sticky air soaked their bodies with sweat, which poured into their eyes, as they hurried. Though they ran for some time, the tunnel never changed, except that it sloped deeper into the earth.
Hope fled, as they moved deeper into the dark tunnel. Three beams of light barely illuminated the slowly widening space. What began as a twenty-foot tunnel grew to thirty and forty feet, as they continued on.
The darkness became oppressive, and shadows seemed to move around them. The group turned left and right, trying to catch the fleeting movement at the edge of their vision. Fearing the darkness, they pushed on, hoping for an exit.
Instead of an exit, the floor sloped suddenly, as their wide tunnel emptied into a spherical room. Pateros, leading the way, was caught by surprise and stepped over the lip of the room before realizing his mistake. His light vanished over the edge. He slid and fell down the sloping wall into the room.
With his weapon tumbling free of his hands, his light harmlessly illuminated the wall to the right, exposing nothing of the room ahead. A wave of rotten meat assaulted their nostrils, making them gag, as the three stood on the precipice.
The wall of the round room went in a gentle slope before them to the floor thirty feet below. Lost in darkness, they heard the Wyndgaart groaning below from numerous cuts and bruises he received during his fall.
Hollander and Tusque lowered their lights until they saw the tanned Wyndgaart on his back, one leg crumpled awkwardly under him. It looked broken, and he made no effort to stand. His feet rested inches from a dark underground lake that dominated the floor. Though the three wanted to save him, the smell of rot rolled over them again.
“What’s that awful smell?” Hollander covered his nose and mouth with his free hand.
“It smells terrible.” Tusque waved his hand before his face. “What makes the smell, Ixibas?” He turned to Ixibas, whose dark oval face focused on the room beyond.
“Ixibas?” Tusque asked.
“Shine your light into the room,” he said softly, his voice taking on a worried edge Tusque hadn’t heard before.
The Oterian kept his eyes on the Lithid, looking away only when his broad light was aimed into the darkness beyond.
Their breath caught in their throat. Though the beam couldn’t reach the far wall, it showed the dominant pile in the center of the rounded chamber. Bloated bodies, swollen from heat and rot, were piled on each other. Empty, staring eyes looked down from thousands of faces that watched unseeing from the pile. Heads, mouths open and tongues lolling, emerged from the mound of corpses. Their faces were permanently locked in looks of horror that were captured when they died.