Mildred kept burrowing until something jolted her out of the routine she had established. Something that took a moment to register.
She was picking at loose soil, and a warm draft came through that dirt. Then she was picking at nothing…
“John, we’re through. It’s empty…” Her voice was nothing more than a pained croak, but in the silence it was enough to penetrate the Armorer’s consciousness.
“Millie, keep going…got to get there,” he returned, suddenly aware of how dry and cracked his own throat seemed.
Jolted back to a form of consciousness, Mildred redoubled her efforts and had soon made a hole large enough for herself to crawl through. She had a bad feeling as soon as she was through, and coughed at the poor air in the new enclave. She crawled a few feet farther to allow J.B. to follow, pushing her clothes and their blasters before him.
“It’s too hot. Must be a hollow in the slide,” she whispered. Grasping before her, she felt a leg in the darkness. “Oh, sweet God,” she wailed, continuing to feel up the leg until she came to the torso, “Dean?”
“Is he alive?” J.B. managed to husk.
Mildred could feel his chest rise and fall in shallow breath. She nodded, then managed to croak “Yes” when she realized that J.B. couldn’t see her.
But how could they go on? What lay in front of them?
“FASTER,” Jak murmured, his mouth set in a thin, determined line.
“Not too fast—bring it all down on us,” Ryan reminded him, feeling tightly enclosed in the dark tunnel. Jak was a couple of feet ahead, passing rocks down his body and packing the walls and ceiling. He was full length, and Ryan knew almost the whole length of his own body was in the tunnel. So they had to have burrowed through at least three yards of earth and rock.
“Nearly there,” Jak snapped back. “Earth loose…”
MILDRED HEARD the movement of the rocks and earth grow louder, and climbed over Dean to where the rock that had defeated him stood, jammed in the tunnel entrance he had made.
“Pull him back, John,” she whispered, and as the Armorer pulled Dean’s prone body back from under her, she began to work at the rock. The rocks and earth around it began to loosen as the opposite side of the rock moved. She used the way in which it had wedged to swing it around and shore up dirt that was beginning to fall from the roof of the small tunnel.
The earth fell away slowly from one side while she clawed at it from the other. A residual light from the other side of the tunnel, almost unbelievably bright in the total darkness she had been forced to work in, backlit the white hair and scarred pale features of Jak Lauren.
Mildred almost cried with joy to see him. The flicker of a smile even flitted briefly across the albino’s features. It was driven away as he remembered how precarious their position was at that moment.
“Quick, not last long,” he breathed.
Mildred nodded and began to enlarge the hole where the tunnels met. Soon it was large enough for Jak to crawl through.
“Come,” Mildred gasped, “Dean’s unconscious.”
As she backed out of the tunnel, Jak crawled through. He was completely blind in the total blackness, but felt Dean’s limp body, and slithered back into the tunnel, dragging the prone boy after him.
Ryan scrambled back out of the tunnel, having heard Mildred and realizing that he would be of better use at the tunnel mouth to help bring his son into the open shaft.
As Jak appeared, pulling the still unconscious Dean, Ryan suppressed the fear that his son was dead…but not enough for Krysty not to notice and shoot him a worried glance.
Mildred crawled through, drawing the cleaner air in great gulps through her tortured throat. J.B. brought up the rear, and lay gasping for breath as Mildred immediately checked Dean, ignoring her own condition.
“He’ll be okay,” she told Ryan in short gasps as she drank greedily from the canteen of water he offered her. “Just needs to recover from the heat and the air—get some oxygen into him.”