“I guess that’s part of the reason I wanted to do this,” Brandy said. “It makes me feel like a kid on a big adventure.” She gazed around wonderingly. It was a warm feeling, getting that old jolt she remembered from her childhood adventures.
“I wondered what changed your mind.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I still think this is kind of stupid.”
It was stupid. If anyone caught them down here there’d be hell to pay one way or another.
“What do you suppose this tunnel’s for anyway?” She was looking back toward the field house. A few yards beyond the ladder there were some steps leading down and a tangle of pipes and valves near the floor.
“Steam tunnel.” He examined the map on the two sides of the box, trying to determine which end was the beginning. “Probably runs from the power plant to Juggers and the field house. I think all the electric, water, phone and networking lines run through tunnels like these, along with heat in the form of steam through these big pipes. Hence the term ‘steam tunnel’.” He looked toward the steps for a moment and then turned and looked back the other way. He wondered if that distant light was coming from the power plant. “I don’t really know for certain, though. I tried to look it up online and couldn’t find anything about Briar Hills.”
“I’m sure the university doesn’t really want to advertise its tunnels. I doubt if they’d be too thrilled to find us down here.”
Albert nodded. “Yeah. These things are dangerous. I didn’t find anything about Briar Hills, but I found some information on other steam tunnels. Lots of campuses use them. The one thing they all seem to have in common is that they all have confined spaces and extremely hot temperatures. There’s a very real threat of heat stroke and severe burns from the machinery down here.”
Brandy was looking around nervously now. “Will we be in trouble if somebody catches us?”
“Probably.”
“You could’ve told me about this before we came down here.”
“Would it have changed your mind?”
“Yes.” But she realized even as she replied that it probably wouldn’t have. In fact, it probably would have made the adventure even more appealing. Although she probably would have dressed differently.
“I’m sorry.” Albert looked back down at the map, turning it this way and that, trying to read it. “Hopefully this will keep us away from all the really dangerous areas.” If I can figure out how to read it, he thought. It was made up entirely of straight lines. A single line stretched around the corner of the box, making sudden sharp turns as it went. Most of the time, another line continued forward a short distance from each turn and then stopped, suggesting that the tunnel went on ahead, but was of no importance. Along the way, other lines jutted off the main path and stopped, showing other tunnels that should be passed by. Aside from this network of straight lines, there were no markings on the map. There was no start, no finish, not even an X marks the spot. “It doesn’t say which way’s up,” he observed, “but I figure if we go the wrong way we won’t get far before the map stops making sense.”
Brandy nodded. She couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen if somebody caught them down here. How much trouble would they be in? What would her parents say?
“Let’s try this way.” He nodded toward the power plant and then handed her the spray paint can. “That’s for marking the walls as we go. It’ll help us find our way back out if we get lost.”
“Good idea.” Brandy took the can and shook it.
“Sorry. I’d carry it, but the map’s a little awkward.”
“I understand.”
They began to walk east through the tunnel, away from the field house. Above them, dim light glowed where the drainage grates were located, a reminder that the world was only a few feet overhead and not lost forever. Albert’s eyes kept lifting to these. From up there, the glow of their flashlights must be visible. He hoped nobody noticed them.
“There should be a left right up here.”
The light did not penetrate far in the dark tunnels, but the words were barely out of his mouth when he saw the passage appear up ahead. “So far so good.”
“Great.” Brandy removed the lid from the spray paint can and shook it.
“Make it subtle. No sense advertising to the maintenance crews that we were here.”
She marked the wall with a soft curving line, a sort of subtle arrow indicating the turn. “How far do you think it is?”
“Hard to say. The map’s not really well scaled.” He shined his flashlight farther up the tunnel toward the power plant and caught sight of an iron gate blocking access to a passage leading to the right. A chain and padlock prevented anyone from passing. He assumed that all access to any of the campus buildings would be similarly barricaded. He was a little surprised that they’d gained entry so easily.
The next tunnel sloped slightly downhill. The large pipes continued on along the previous tunnel, but some of the cables and smaller pipes had turned with them. He wished he knew more about these tunnels. He hated not knowing where he was going.
About forty feet ahead, Albert spied a crevice in the left wall. As they approached it, he realized that there was a square hole in this crevice and a steel ladder to carry them down. He peered into the hole and saw that the tunnel below ran at an odd angle to the one they were currently in and matched exactly with the one the map described, which was good because about four yards in front of him was another iron gate bound with chains and a padlock.
“Looks like we go down,” he said, shining his light into the darkness below.
“You sure?” Brandy was gazing down into the hole. Dusty white cobwebs crisscrossed the narrow passage. She watched with disgust as a particularly fat spider scurried beneath one of the ladder rungs.
“I’m not really sure about anything, to be perfectly honest.”
Chapter 7
The tunnels beneath Briar Hills weren’t like the sewers on television. Although he knew that Briar Hills in no way required the vast subterranean systems that New York City warranted, he nonetheless had pictured the wide, gloomy corridors with rounded ceilings that were so often depicted on television. What he found instead were confined, concrete passageways, many of them too short to allow them to walk without stooping. Shortly after their descent from the second passage, they were forced to continue on hands and knees beneath massive bundles of cables.
There was water everywhere. A perpetual dampness permeated the concrete around them, so that soon the knees of their jeans were soaked through. Shallow pools of standing water stretched along the floor in many of the tunnels, and the hollow echo of dripping water was as common as the shadows.
But nothing down here was constant, not even the sounds. At times there was a strumming of machinery echoing around them and at other times the tunnels were silent as tombs. Several times they were startled by strange noises they knew was the natural gurgling of water through some machine or some other harmless thing, perhaps even the simple flushing of a toilet somewhere above them, but which sounded like the gargling moans of something unearthly in the shadows. And several times there were skittering, scuffling noises that very likely did belong to something alive and hungry (but almost certainly small and harmless).
At one point they stepped out into a large, open tunnel with an enormous pipe running along the center of the floor. Here the machinery was the loudest and the temperature the hottest. But there were lights in this tunnel, and the floor was dry for a change. It was a welcome passage while they traveled it, but too soon the map told them to exit into a passage on the right and they found themselves in another damp corridor that took them to another rusty ladder that waited to take them deeper into the darkness.