Page 100 of Reset

Ryan’s shoes. They were like anvils. Sarah stomped in place, imagining squished bug bodies and spiders running for their lives. As she stamped, she waved her arms, making sure to dust her hair every now and then, just to get anything that might have dropped from the ceiling.

Okay, you can do this.

So much for conserving energy, but at least things weren’t crawling over her skin. She repeated the facts in an attempt to ease her heart rate.

“One: Ryan’s fine. Two: He’ll rescue you. Three: Stay put. Four: Water.” She’d forgotten the water! Bending over, she felt for the bottle, hoping she didn’t find bugs instead. When she found it, she carefully wiped it down and sighed with relief when the lid was screwed on tight. “Five: Conserve energy. Yeah, that’s pretty pointless.”

She struck five off her list and added a sixth item. If Ryan was looking for her, he needed a clue as to which direction to head in. Which meant, six: Make lots of noise.

Plan sorted, Sarah took a deep breath and started to sing.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall…” All the while stomping in place to keep the bugs away.

The passageway La Fosse led them down seemed to be an old utility tunnel. Ryan spotted evidence of dated wiring and broken fuse boxes. Overhead, the Metro rumbled periodically, sending vibrations through the earth and shaking dust down onto them.

“Why would anybody come down here willingly?” Dimitri complained from behind Ryan.

“La liberté,” La Fosse said, sounding very out of breath.

“Freedom, huh?” Dimitri said. “Like the freedom to rob people who’re in need? That kind of freedom? I’m thinking you should exercise your freedom to only talk when absolutely necessary, kid.”

Ryan glanced at his phone. Now that it’d been returned to him, and helpfully charged, he could keep track of the time again. Two hours, with brief rests for the kid, that’s how long they’d been going. All that time spent on a steady but shallow decline into the catacombs.

“Wait,” La Fosse said.

Lake, Dimitri, and Ryan came to a halt beside him, as La Fosse pulled a worn and well-used piece of paper from the side pocket on his backpack. He studied it intently, with all three men doing nothing to hide that they were examining it too.

The paper appeared to be a crudely drawn map, with notes scrawled all over it.

“We must be careful now,” La Fosse said. “From here forward, this tunnel is very close to the older one. There have been many holes that have opened up between them.”

“Can we get around these holes if we have to?” Ryan asked.

The kid nodded, still panting for air. It was pathetic. Lake was at least thirty years older than junior and he hadn’t even broken out in a sweat.

The passage was wide enough for them to walk two abreast. Ryan and The Pit went first, eyes on the ground, looking for hazards.

“There weren’t any holes in the section of tunnel Sarah and I went through,” Ryan said.

Hopefully that meant any gaps between passages that they found were on the side of the tunnel that held Sarah.

“Kid,” Dimitri said. “Where are we on your map?”

“We are over the part that intersects with the tunnel below. Like a diagonal.” He used his arms to illustrate that their tunnel crossed over the other tunnel in a long slant, not in a perpendicular way.

“So there’s a decent length where these two tunnels overlap,” Dimitri said. “That’s good. Ups our chances of finding her.”

“If we’re over the right tunnel.” Ryan glared at The Pit, who hurriedly averted his eyes.

A few minutes later, they came across the first hole. It wasn’t big enough for anyone but La Fosse to get through, which meant it wouldn’t work. Although, Ryan was tempted to dangle him down there by his ankles as a crude sort of recon.

The next three holes weren’t even big enough to fit The Pit’s skinny frame.

“Do people actually use this tunnel to get down to the one below?” Ryan asked, just to be sure.

“Oui,” La Fosse said.

There was nothing for the next few minutes, until their flashlights skimmed a wooden segment of the tunnel floor.