7. Audrey
AUDREY
“Is it just me or is it getting hotter?”
I looked over at Madison. She’d stripped down to her bra when the heat lamps came on overhead, and her face and chest were slick with sweat.
She wasn’t alone. I’d kept my shirt on, but I’d ditched my leather jacket at the last water stop and my white T-shirt was still drenched.
“Hard to say,” I said. “All this heat is seeping into the stone. It’s like being inside a pizza oven.”
“Assholes,” Madison grumbled.
We’d been in the tunnels for less than four hours (we’d passed a second digital clock a while back), but it already felt like an eternity.
The novelty had worn off, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the rest of the world had faded away, that the stone walls and arched ceiling of the tunnels went on into infinity.
We’d come across more water at the last clock and had taken a break to hydrate and pee. We’d come across some other things too: old furniture, wooden crates, and boxes overflowing with paperwork that must have belonged to the businesses that had lined Main Street over the past hundred years.
We’d slowed to a stop when we’d come across the first pile of junk, piled into the middle of the tunnel floor. It had been arranged there, a twisted kind of sculpture made up of human detritus that looked out of place in the tunnels.
We’d thought it was a trap at first, but we hadn’t been able to imagine what kind, so we’d eventually edged around the teetering pile and continued on.
So far the obstacles in the tunnels felt more psychological than dangerous. It was more than a little disconcerting and I couldn’t help wondering what else awaited us.
I was pulled from my thoughts when a loud thunk sounded under my feet.
The floor tilted, and my arms flew out, grasping in vain for something to hold onto as the ground shifted under my feet.
Madison gasped, stumbling sideways.
“What the fuck?” she said as the sound echoed through the tunnels.
I held out my hands, trying to balance on the floor that now felt loose and wobbly.
I toed the rocky ground with my sneakers until I hit metal. “I think it’s some kind of scale.”
“What kind of scale is buried in the dirt?” Madison asked.
Neither of us moved.
“I don’t know… some kind of animal scale maybe?”
“Is it safe to move?” she asked. “Or is there some other trap attached to it?”
I considered the question, running through the possibilities until I came to the most logical conclusion based on what I’d seen so far in the tunnels. “I think it’s okay.”
I took a step forward and the metal plate shifted again. Three steps later I was back on solid ground.
I waited for Madison to follow suit, then dug at the dirt with the toe of my shoe until I found the line between the dirt floor and the metal plate that had been buried there.
“They want us off-balance,” I said. “That’s what this is all about.”
“Sick fucks.”
I couldn’t disagree, and I couldn’t even be surprised, not when I remembered the man in the bull mask who’d stared me down in the holding room. There had been something quietly diabolical in his steel-blue eyes, and I felt again the flutter of desire between my thighs.
I really needed to get laid. Apparently.
“Come on.” I said. “Let’s keep going.”
I had no idea where we were in the tunnel complex, but the urge to keep moving was primitive, the instinct of a rabbit with a pack of wolves on its tail.
We made our way to the end of the tunnel and hooked a left, and I thought about Ella, wondered what she was doing, if she was safe.
The worry was new, because until recently, I’d always assumed she was safe with Dean.
He’d been abusive in our marriage — verbally and otherwise — but he’d never laid a hand on Ella.
Now I knew that there was more than one way for Dean to be dangerous for Ella. It wasn’t something I could un-know, and it had led me to this dark, underground place, navigating what increasingly felt less like a meandering labyrinth and more like a carefully laid trap.
We were about ten minutes past the buried animal scale when something loomed in front of us.
Madison stopped walking. “What is that?”
I peered through the shadows that lingered between the yellow-orange bulbs hanging from the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
The object spanned the width of the tunnel and rose halfway to the ceiling.
“Should we go back?” Madison asked.
“No.” Traps had been laid everywhere. Trying to avoid them meant shrinking the space we had to move between obstacles. “We can’t let them dictate where we move in the tunnels.”
Madison took a deep breath. “Okay.”
Her voice was shaky and I realized again how young she was. The tunnels were disconcerting for me, and I was thirty-four. I couldn’t imagine how freaked out Madison was.
I reached for her hand. “Come on. We’ll be okay.”
We walked slowly forward, our eyes on the object blocking our path. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that I saw it wasn’t a single object at all, but multiple metal gates lined up in a row, filling the width of the tunnel.
“Wait…” Madison said. “I know what this is.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a… I think it’s called a squeeze chute?” Her voice shook. “I dated a guy whose family owned a farm. They’d put the cows in something like this when they had to give them shots and stuff.”
“It forces the cows to hold still?” I didn’t love the sound of “squeeze chute.”
“I think so? I don’t really know how it works. I just remember seeing it on the farm.”
I dropped her hand and walked toward the hulking metal objects.
There were four of them, lined up in a row to block the tunnel. There was no way forward without stepping into one of the four squeeze chutes.
My heart thudded in my chest, a feeling familiar from the darkest years of my marriage to Dean. Years when I’d been under threat constantly, when I knew his mood could turn on a dime.
That if it did, I’d be the first person in the line of fire.
I’d held it together for Ella, and I felt the same kind of responsibility now. Madison was so much younger than me. I needed to get her through this.
“It looks like we can either go through separate chutes or go through one together,” I said.
She took a step back. “I’m claustrophobic. I… I don’t think I can do this.”
I remembered the rules from the holding room: once the consent form was signed, there was no going back.
I took a deep breath and willed my voice steady, like I did in the emergency room when we had a critical trauma patient who was conscious and needed to be soothed. Then, I was like a member of the cabin on a plane pointed toward the ground, trying to make it all seem normal.
Trying to make it all seem okay even though anyone with an ounce of sense could see that it was anything but.
“We can do this,” I said. “They don’t want to hurt us.”
“How do you know?”
“Because everything they’d done so far has been a nuisance.”
The heat lamps, the scales buried in the floor of the tunnel. They slowed us down, threw us off-balance.
But they hadn’t hurt us.
Would I bet my life there wasn’t something worse coming?
Well… no. But I didn’t need to tell Madison that.
“Will you go through with me?” she asked. “Through the same chute?”
“We should take separate chutes.” I was used to being in crisis mode, to making decisions quickly. “That way if one of us gets stuck, the other one can help.”
I had no idea how I would help Madison if she got stuck in one of the chutes, but that was a problem for another time. What I did know was that allowing the masked men to trap us both would be a mistake.
“I’m scared.”
I squeezed her hand. “II’ll be in the chute next to you. We’ll get through it together.”
I guided Madison to one of the chutes, then took up position in front of the one next to her.
“I’ll count us down and we’ll step inside, okay?”
“I…I guess.”
“Let’s just get this over with,” I said. “3… 2…”
I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d cut and run, but I when I finished counting down and stepped into the metal chute, she stepped forward with me.
I was immediately surrounded by the hulking metal gate, the faint light from the tunnel even dimmer.
“You okay?” I called out to Madison, who’d disappeared beyond the thick metal pipes that boxed me in.
“I think so. But there’s not much room in here.”
Her voice rang from inside the chute, an eerie echo that bounced off the metal bars of the gate before traveling out and into the tunnels.
“I know, but all we have to do is get through it to the other side.” I didn’t know for sure there was another side since the chute stretched into the darkness of the tunnel, but I was trying to be optimistic. “Take another step with me.”
I put one foot in front of the other. Then, when nothing happened, I took another.
“Have you always been claustrophobic?” I asked.
It was a technique we used at the hospital when someone was scared: keep them talking, ask them questions that required them to think about something other than the fact that they were injured and hurting.
“Since I was a kid,” Madison said. “My cousin used to lock me in the closet for fun when we played hide and seek.”
“What a little dick,” I said, moving deeper into the chute.
It was dark now, this part of the chute beyond the light of the bulbs in the tunnel. My body brushed against the metal bars on either side, but they weren’t so close that I couldn’t move.
“Yeah, I figured it out after a while and begged to count rather than hide, but he always made me hide, and since I was too young to know it was dumb to go to the same hiding place every time, he’d lock me in.
” Her voice sounded stronger now, her mind in the past instead of the present.
“It took me ages to realize he liked making me cry, that that was why he always made me hide.”
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
Her bitter laughter echoed through the chutes. “Have you ever told anyone when a boy did something to scare you? To hurt you?”
The question made me ashamed. Because I wasn’t a child: I was a grown-ass woman.
And not once had I ever told anyone that Dean hurt me.
Not once.
“No.” Honesty seemed only fair after Madison’s confession.
“Exactly,” she said. “Because no one would listen anyway. So I just waited until I was old enough to avoid him when he came over. But I never stopped being afraid of small dark places.”
“You were brave to come here,” I said. “You should give yourself credit for that.”
“I guess.”
I didn’t know how long we’d been in the chute — time seemed to twist and stretch in the tunnels — but we had to be close to the end of it.
The thought buoyed my spirits, and I felt hope lift in my chest like a balloon… right before a deep voice called from the other end of the chute.
“I think we’ve got a couple moths in our web.”
And then another one. “Fuck yes we do. And you know how I like to play with moths.”