Читать книгу The Release - Tom Isbell, Tom Isbell - Страница 18

THE LADDER GROANED BENEATH my weight. My guess was that this was one of the escape tunnels Goodwoman Marciniak had told us about. Except instead of escaping, we were using this tunnel to enter. A nasty habit we kept falling into.

When my feet landed on solid ground, I whistled for Flush and Red to climb down. Argos stayed up above.

The three of us began feeling our way around in the dark, trying to get a sense of where we were and how we could reach the heart of the Compound. Along the wall, a torch sat perched in its holder, as cold and lifeless as the winter itself. We could have lit it, but a fire would only announce ourselves.

Waving our outstretched hands like branches in a breeze, we let the wall guide us forward. It was slow going, made worse by the smell. We pulled bandannas over our mouths and noses, and every so often we stopped to spit—as if that could rid us of the foul stench.

Finally, we noticed a far-off glow. We moved faster now, aided by the distant light. Although I knew there were soldiers up ahead, I also thought about the food we would find. I could imagine the countless jars of green beans and blueberry jam, the strips of dried meat hanging like icicles in the smokehouse. The more I envisioned them, the more I could practically taste them.

I was thinking so much about my next meal that I stopped paying attention to where I was going. I tripped on something and went flying. When I reached down to push myself up, my hand went squish. I tried with my other hand, but it went squish as well. Then I realized why.

I’d landed on a person.

A dead person.

Many dead persons.

I was elbow deep in decaying corpses, and only the possibility of being discovered by Brown Shirts prevented me from letting out a horrified scream. I clamped my mouth shut and tried to steady my breathing.

“Oh … my … God,” Flush said. “Are those what I think they are?”

I nodded dumbly.

Easing to a standing position, my eyes peered into the dark, head swiveling first one direction and then the other. We were smack-dab in the middle of a burial ground, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of lifeless, bloated bodies.

Although we wanted to turn around—wanted desperately to get the hell out of there—we knew we couldn’t. We had come this far; we had to see it through. So we inched forward, tiptoeing around and over the piles of bodies.

What I couldn’t figure out was what it was supposed to be. Was this a cemetery—some sacred place of honor—or just a dumping ground? There was no way to tell.

We headed for the faint glow at the end of the tunnel, hoping to get as far away from the bloated corpses as possible. But of course, just when we thought we’d cleared the last of them, there were still more—piles of bodies stacked like firewood stretching as far as we could see.

“Who are they?” Red asked. I understood what he was getting at. He hadn’t been with us when we’d been imprisoned in the Compound. He didn’t know what Skull People looked like.

But when I bent down and tried to examine the dead bodies in the dark, I suddenly wasn’t so sure myself. On the one hand, it seemed their clothes were leather sandals and wool robes and toga-like garments, which made me think Skull People. But right next to them were men wearing rags, their beards long and matted, which made me think they were Crazies. I couldn’t figure it out.

A noise from farther down the tunnel grabbed my attention. Perhaps the very Brown Shirts whose footsteps we’d been following.

The more we tiptoed forward, the brighter it got … and the more we tried to avert our eyes. It was bad enough we were traipsing through this grisly graveyard—no point making things worse by staring at the corpses themselves. And yet, I caught myself glancing down from time to time, looking for people I might recognize. Like my grandmother. Or Goodwoman Marciniak.

Or Miranda.

It didn’t help that every corpse’s expression was the same—one of horror and fear.

In the near distance, torch flames caressed the cave walls with strokes of flickering light. Flush pulled to a stop, and I followed his gaze … to the bloated face of the chief justice.

My heart gave a lurch. I had no reason to feel any sympathy for him. After all, he was the one who’d sentenced us to thirty years’ imprisonment. But he was also the man who’d changed my sentence from the Wheel to the library—and was Miranda’s father.

So maybe she was here as well. My eyes roamed from one face to the next, and while the bodies were discolored and disfigured, there wasn’t one that looked remotely like the girl who’d kissed me as we watched the setting sun.

I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

We moved on. The only sounds were the quiet shuffle of our feet, a persistent dripping from the ceiling, the steady huff of breathing through our mouths.

When we reached a high-ceilinged chamber at the end of the tunnel, we expected to see the soldiers, but they weren’t there. No living person was. Just hundreds of scattered corpses.

“Where’d they go?” Flush whispered, but I didn’t know. I wondered the same thing.

Red pointed to the side. “Was it always like that?”

He was referring to an enormous rock pile that blocked a far entrance, boulders strewn in every direction. I gave my head a shake. “The Crazies were blowing up the place as we were leaving. Guess that’s what happened.”

We eased forward and began exploring. Some of the tunnels were completely closed off, barricaded by heaping mounds of rock. Others looked remarkably the same. The Crazies had managed to destroy only a portion of the Compound.

Flush began winding his way between a series of scattered objects, bending down to inspect a stack of items in the very center of the chamber. “What’s this?” he asked.

I turned and looked … and my heart stopped. I needed no refresher course to know what I was looking at. It wasn’t just dozens of cans of gasoline, but also explosives—C-4 and sticks of dynamite, heaped atop one another like a jumbled pyramid.

Someone intended to reduce the Compound to a pile of rubble.