It's not so loud. No louder than about ten Go-Karts in a big aluminum barrel.
But the back door to the house did not fly open, his father did not rush out with his robe flapping around him and his eyes wide with fury. Not yet.
Kevin plugged the power cord into the proper outlet, pulled the shed doors closed against the wind that tried to rip them out of his grasp, and fumbled with the keys to get the lid off the underground-tank access panel. He used the nine-foot stick his dad kept by the side of the shed to check the fuel depth: it seemed almost topped off. Kevin fumbled with the rear doors of the tanker, got the bulky hose out, attached, and snaked across the drive to the filler cap. The hose uncoiling into the darkness of the tank made him think of things he did not want to think about.
The storm was getting wilder. The birch and poplars in front of the Grumbacher ranch house were doing their best to rip themselves apart while the aerial display was lighting the world below in false Kodachrome colors.
Kevin threw the switch and saw the transfer hose stiffen and ripple as the vacuum pump began the transfer. He closed his eyes as he heard the first of the high-test gasoline start to gurgle and splash into the well-scrubbed and nearly sterile stainless-steel milk tank. Sorry, kiddies, your milk's gonna have a little bit of Shell under taste for a while.
His dad was going to kill him, no matter what happened. Kevin's father rarely showed his anger, but when he did it was with a red-eyed Teutonic fury that frightened Kevin's mother and everyone else within a lethal radius.
Kevin opened his eyes, blinking as the wind hurled grit and gravel at him. Dale and Lawrence weren't in sight on the schoolyard anymore, and Mike had disappeared into the Stewarts' basement. Kevin suddenly felt very alone. Seventy-five gallons a minute. There must be at least a thousand gallons in the tank below-half the bulk tanker's capacity. What . . . fifteen minutes pumping time? Dad'II never sleep through all of that.
Kevin was six minutes into the transfer, the pump gurgling and bucking in his hands, the generator making its hot-rod noises in the echoing shed, and the storm building to some insane crescendo, when he looked out from his hill and saw the ripples in the earth of Old Central's playground.
It was like the wake of two sharks in the ocean, fins parting water like ripples in a wind tunnel. Only that was not ocean or wind-whatever was coming was carving its way under the solid soil of the playing field, headed straight for the road and then for the milk truck.
Two wakes. Two ridges being churned into existence like two giant moles were digging their way straight for him.
And they were coming fast.
THIRTY-EIGHT
After the first ten yards or so, Mike found the tunnel easier going. It was wider now, closer to twenty-eight or thirty inches across rather than the tight squeeze he'd forced his shoulders into at the beginning. The ribbed sides of the tunnel were hard, made of packed earth and some gray material with the consistency of dried airplane glue, and they reminded him of the track a caterpillar tractor or bulldozer left in the soil after the mud had dried for days in the sun. Mike thought that crawling through the tunnel was no more difficult than forcing one's way through one of the smaller corrugated steel culverts they laid under a road.
Only this one went on for hundreds of yards-or miles-rather than a few yards.
The smell was bad, but Mike ignored it. The light from his flashlight reflected red off the ribs of the hole, making Mike think again of a long gut, an intestine to hell, but he tried not to think about that. The pain in his elbows and knees grew worse by the minute, but he put that out of his mind, reciting Hail Marys interspersed with the occasional Our Father. He wished he'd brought the remaining bit of Eucharist he'd left on Memo's bed.
Mike crawled farther, feeling the tunnel twist to the left and right, sometimes descending, sometimes rising to the point he guessed there was less than a yard of dirt over his head. At the moment he felt deep. Twice he'd come to a junction with other tunnels, one burrowing off the left almost straight down, and Mike had shone his flashlight, waited, listened, and then crawled on, keeping to what he thought was the most recently excavated burrow. At least this tunnel smelted the strongest.
At every turn, Mike expected to come across the corpse of Lawrence Stewart, clogging the way ahead. Perhaps there would be just bones and tatters of flesh left . . . perhaps it would be worse. But if Mike found the eight-year-old, at least he could leave the warren of tunnels with honor and tell Dale and the others that there was no reason for them to go into the school at night.
Only Mike could never find his way back now. There had been too many twists, more than enough turns to lose him permanently. He stayed with the main tunnel-he thought it was the main tunnel-and kept moving ahead, his jeans torn at the knee now, the flesh underneath bleeding. It was like crawling on ridged concrete. The flashlight wavered on red soil, now illuminating twenty yards of shaft, now twenty inches as the tunnel dipped or turned again. Mike expected a visitor at every bend.
The squirt guns in his waistband were leaking, making him feel like a damned fool. It was one thing to fight monsters, he thought. Quite another to fight them with wet underwear. He pulled the worst offender from his belt and clamped it in his teeth; better a dribbly chin than to look like you needed diapers.
The tunnel turned right again, began dropping steeply. Mike inched ahead, using his elbows as brakes, the flashlight beam bobbing against the red roof. Mike kept crawling.
He felt it coming before he saw it.
The earth began to tremble slightly. Mike remembered one long-ago summer night when he and Dale had been watching . a ballgame over at Oak Hill and had gone for a moonlit walk along the railroad tracks. They'd felt a vibration in the soles of their sneakers and then put their ears against the rails, feeling the distant coming of the daily express between Gales-burg and Peoria.
This was like that. Only much stronger, the vibration coming up through the bones of Mike's hands and knees and shaking his spine, rattling his teeth. And with the tremors came the stench.
Mike deliberated about turning the light off and then decided to hell with it-these things could certainly see him, Why not return the favor. He lay prone, the flashlight under his chin now, Memo's squirrel gun in his right hand, the squirt gun in his left. Then he remembered that he'd have to reload and he hurried to fumble out four more cartridges, wrapping them in the short sleeve of his t-shirt where he could get them in a hurry.
For a second the vibration seemed all around him, above him, behind him, and he had a moment of pure panic as he thought of the thing exploding on him from behind, seizing him from the rear before he managed to squirm around, get the gun aimed behind him. Mike felt the panic rise like dark bile, but then the vibrations localized and intensified. It's ahead of me.
He lay flat, waiting.
The thing came around a bend in the tunnel perhaps twelve feet ahead of him. It was worse than Mike could have imagined.
For a second he almost let his bladder go, but controlling that helped him to control his thinking. It's not so bad, it's not so bad.
It was.
It was the eel that Mike had caught and run from in a small boat, and a lamprey with its all-devouring mouth and endless rows of teeth disappearing into the gut that was its body, and it was a worm the size of a large sewer pipe, with quivering appendages that might have been a thousand tiny fingers ringing the mouth, or perhaps waving tendrils, or perhaps serrated lips . . . Mike didn't give too much of a damn at that second.