Fine. If they couldn’t go up, how about down? Gabriel bent to the task of inspecting the ground at the bottom of the pit, peering closely at every crevice and declivity in the dirt.
“What in god’s name are you doing?”
“Wasting precious time,” Gabriel said as he completed the survey. He stood up and worked the circulation back into his cramped thighs. “But I had to try. Last time I needed to get out of an underground trap, there was a secret tunnel with a hidden entrance you could barely see unless you knew it was there.”
“Boss, if you’re looking for a tunnel down here, you don’t need to go searching so hard,” Millie said. “There’s one right there.” And he pointed toward the drainage hole.
Gabriel looked at it. The opening was much too narrow for either man to fit through—but Millie was right, there was presumably a tunnel of some sort behind it. The villagers would sluice water down into the pit to wash away blood that had collected, along with other detritus, and the water had to come out somewhere, maybe in the stream they’d seen near the waterfall.
Could the channel behind this opening be wider than the opening itself? If they’d had to dig it without modern boring tools, it would have been easier to make it wider—specifically, the width of the person doing the digging—rather than narrower.
He bent to look at the space where the stone they’d knocked out used to be. On the other side he didn’t see more stone, he just saw blackness.
“I don’t suppose you could kick out any more of those stones,” Gabriel said.
“Not with this foot,” Millie said, slapping one thigh. “But with the other…? I could give it the old college try.”
He lay on his back, taking all pressure off his broken ankle, then aimed the tough, calloused sole of his other foot at the wall. He slammed it home. The first kick didn’t do much—but by the time he’d dealt out a half dozen thunderous blows, another stone was coming loose. Gabriel dug around its edges with his fingers and pried the heavy block of stone free. He laid it on the ground.
“More,” he said.
In all, they managed to remove four stones before Millie let his leg drop and lay back, exhausted. “I’m shot,” he said. “That enough?”
The hole was wider now—just wide enough, Gabriel thought, to admit his broad shoulders. No way Millie could fit, but one person would be enough. If he made it out, he could come back for Millie. “I’m going in,” Gabriel said.
“You sure?”
“Didn’t we go over that already?” Gabriel said. He squeezed into the opening before Millie could respond.
Inside, it was dark, except for the slight glow of bioluminescent moss faintly outlining the walls. It was narrow, too, the stone ceiling no more than two feet above the damp dirt floor. And it looked like it got narrower as it went—the people who’d dug it had presumably been young women, not six-foot-tall men. But maybe if he hunched down and was willing to lose a bit of skin on his shoulders—
He cocked his head. There was a low scrabbling sound coming from the darkness in front of him, like the scratching of claws. Animals of some sort—scavengers, perhaps. Then he heard a louder sound: a thumping, as of a paw, or perhaps a tail, batting against the ground.
He reached ahead of him with one hand, sweeping it back and forth along the dirt. He felt the air stir as something darted out of the path of his arm.
His fingers brushed along something hard lying half-buried in the ground. A bone? He grabbed it, wrenched it out of the dirt—and as he did, he felt a pair of sharp teeth sink into the flesh of his arm.
He swung the arm up and against the tunnel wall beside him, heard a squeal as the animal released its hold and dropped off. But the clattering of claws was louder now, and it sounded like it was all around him, as though the animals were somehow emerging from the walls of the tunnel itself. A furry flank slammed against the side of his face and he felt sharp claws scrape across his cheek. Another animal leapt over his shoulder and bit down hard on the back of his neck.
“Millie! Get me out of he—” His open mouth was suddenly filled with warm and greasy fur. He felt it wriggling back and forth and realized the narrow squirming thing probing inside his mouth was an animal’s head. He bit down hard and spat the thing out just as he felt a pair of strong hands clamp down on his ankles and forcefully pull him out of the tunnel.
He emerged into the light with Millie on his knees beside him. The big man hauled two of the animals off his back and slammed their heads together, then threw them aside. Gabriel himself took care of the one clinging to his throat, knocking it off with the thing in his hand—which did turn out to be a bone: a scraped-clean femur that looked distressingly human.
Gabriel swept the bone along his chest and legs, knocking more of the animals to the ground. But more still were pouring out of the drainage hole, maybe attracted by their fellows’ distress, or maybe just by the prospect of fresh meat.
The creatures looked like a cross between shrews and rats, only larger than any of either Gabriel had ever seen. Each was more than a foot long and had a pair of sharp prognathic tusks protruding from below an elongated snout. And they were more aggressive than any rats he’d encountered, even in New York, jumping on him and Millie with no regard for their own safety, no fear.
Gabriel batted them away as they came, while Millie fell back against one wall and did the best he could while balancing on his good leg.
“Jesus Christ,” Millie said, picking one off his thigh before it could make the leap it was attempting onto his unprotected crotch. “What are these things?”
What ever they were, a dozen more were boiling out of the hole in the wall. They were all over Gabriel in an instant, screeching, clawing and biting even as Gabriel swung and kicked out blindly in all directions. As soon as he got hold of one to smash it against the pit wall, three others seemed to take its place. The hot, musky stench of the creatures was nearly unbearable and their sharp teeth and claws were everywhere he turned, tearing into his flesh. In the frenzy, he lost track of Millie but he could hear him somewhere behind him, shouting and flinging the furry attackers aside.
“We’ve got to block up that hole,” Gabriel said, dropping to his knees by one of the large blocks of stone they’d so painstakingly moved aside. He hauled it up in both arms as one of the animals leaped over the stone and onto the back of his hand. With a grunt, Gabriel pressed the stone into place at the bottom of the drainage hole. It did little to stop the flow of angry shrews—they just kept coming.
“Get over here, damn it,” Gabriel shouted, plucking a shrew off his upper arm, where it had begun to make a meal of his triceps. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Millie lumber over and bend to lift another of the stone blocks. He shoved it on top of the one Gabriel had placed. Gabriel himself lifted the third of the stones and jammed it into place as soon as Millie’s hands were out of the way, and then Millie was there with the fourth.
The fit was far from airtight—hell, it wasn’t even shrewtight, as evidenced by the continuing appearance of furry snouts between the stones. But the fit was tight enough to be a squeeze for any but the skinniest of the animals and the constant flow subsided, enabling Gabriel to pick off the ones that remained in the pit, first two or three at a time and then one by one as their numbers dropped. Millie, meanwhile, grabbed up bodies of fallen shrews by the fistful and shoved them into the spaces between the stones like so much fleshy mortar.