“Gah,” Elena said, coming to herself.
Where had she been? Out visiting the years, traveling the long-lost roads of her life, all the darkening streets and narrowing county forks and long-forgotten footpaths that made up a life and its travels. Oh yes, oh yes. She was not long for this world and she knew it. The idea gave her pain but it also gave her a certain sense of freedom for the way had not always been easy and the trail was often stony. If the preachers were right, she would see George again and, oh God yes, Franny. He would be waiting there for her as she remembered him before the U.S. Marines had wasted him and made his death into something dirty and ugly.
Her eyesight was dimming.
Her heart was slow and weary in its cadence.
Her lungs fought for each breath.
She was exhausted beyond the limits of her frail old body and soon the darkness would come and sink her into timeless depths. And as she realized this, she thought, I was young once. I was clear of eye and my hair was like harvested wheat. The sun caught it and made it shimmer. The girls envied it and the boys desired it. I had many, many friends and we danced and sang and laughed and now I’m at my end just as once I was at my beginning and my mother held me tight in her arms against the world.
31
Kenney was thinking, almost casually: I’m going to die down here.
And it should have terrified him or at the very least sent him scurrying like a rat through the darkness and back to the ladder, but it did not. Some twenty feet into this newest vaulted passage, he paused, the water cold and viscous around his waist, and thought about it all. He did not like what he was thinking. He saw the faces of his two ex-wives, his daughter, his mother and father now long dead. He could remember good times and sunny days and his childhood and how strange it was that it would end down here in this flooded crypt.
And thinking these things, he paled, knowing something important and necessary in him had now given up.
Don’t be a fool. You’ve got plenty of years left if you keep on fighting. If you want to give up, you might as well do it now.
But he wasn’t about to do that. Hell, no.
He turned to Iversen and St. Aubin, both of whom followed at a healthy distance as if they were waiting to see if anything happened to him before proceeding.
“It could get bad,” he said to them, his bobbing flashlight creating unnatural, sliding shadows over the walls of the tunnel. “If you guys want to go back, do it. Don’t hesitate. You’re young, keep that in mind.”
Behind those water-streaked polycarbonate face shields, they looked like boys, frightened little boys. They looked at each other, then at Kenney.
Iversen said, “We’re going with you.”
“Yeah,” St. Aubin said, a little more hesitantly.
And Kenney just looked them over and knew they were scared because he was scared, but they could never admit it. Their youth had pride, macho pride. A man was like that before he saw fifty, before he saw the tunnel of his own life narrowing before him. These two puffed out their chests and inflated their balls and told themselves nothing could touch them because their youth would protect them. They would never admit to fear. Unlike Kenney, who readily admitted fear and knew he was seriously fucked here, but pushed on out of sheer curiosity now, morbid curiosity. If this place was intent on killing him, then he would know its secrets first, he would see things no man had and lived to tell the tale.
It was odd, but there was comfort in that.
He got on his handpack and checked in with Godfrey, knowing the units on the surface were monitoring everything.
On they went.
St. Aubin came up with the idea of duct-taping their flashlights to the riot guns and it was a smart idea. It worked real well. That way you could keep both hands on your rifle and still see everything there was to see.
They moved on and the water got deeper and came up to their bellies and seemed to get blacker. Whatever it was they’d come to see, it was close now. More remains bobbed in the water, but there were worse things than the dead and they all knew it. Their lights reflected off the polluted waste they marched through and danced over the crumbling brick walls like spotlights. Their splashing sounds echoed through the passage.
They saw more of the fungus, if that’s what it was. Good God, the passage walls were threaded with it like some elaborate vein networking. Whatever this was all about down here, the fungus was part and parcel of it and maybe everything they had seen and would yet see were but extensions of it.
It was food for thought.