Half Way Home

• 30 • The Burrowing

The rumblings grew, and I could hear rock clattering to the floor of our cylindrical tunnel. To my other side, the voices by the tractor shouted at each other and to Tarsi and Mindy. More gunfire was promised. Our group pawed at each other, daring to hiss our fears as we collectively realized something was moving in our direction. Kelvin clutched my arm and tried to say something to me, but I couldn’t hear over the rest of the noise, the loudest of which had become the pounding of my own pulse throbbing in my ears.

I pulled away from him, the need to run more powerful than any other.

“Oliver!” I shouted, as I stumbled into the light. I looked up the curved wall at the bulk of the tractor above. Its three headlights shone out around two silhouetted forms, both completely black save for the glint of gold in each of their hands. It was their guns. They immediately became trained on me.

“Don’t shoot! Let us up!” I turned to look back at my group and waved them out. I had to bend my knees and keep my feet apart, as the vibrations grew into tremors. “This isn’t an earthquake,” I yelled up to Oliver, and for everyone else’s benefit.

One of the girls in the opposite stretch of tunnel yelped as it sank in. The rest of our group poured out, joining me in the light. The guy beside Oliver began yelling at us, his golden gun darting back and forth. I finally placed his physique and voice. Rogers—one of the enforcers from the supply group.

“Rogers, Oliver,” I yelled, “there’s something coming!” I pointed back down the tunnel. Three figures emerged from the other side of the darkness and ran in front of me. Leila, Karl, and Samson. They began scampering up toward the tractor, but the two enforcers yelled down at them.

“Get back!” Oliver shouted, his gun twitching across the group. I turned to see Tarsi and Mindy at the edge of the other shaft, their hands next to their ears. Dust rained down around them as the tremors transformed into violent shakes. Bright specks of powder caught in the beam of the idling tractor. It fell everywhere like a waterfall of crushed stone.

“Get out of here!” I yelled to Tarsi, pointing over the rubble behind the two girls.

“Nobody move!” Oliver roared. We could barely hear him over the grumbling of crunched rock. A shot rang out, causing those running up the curved wall to fall flat, their hands on their heads. I whirled in place, noise and action on all sides, fear holding me in place. I felt trapped in the center of several dangers as the loud noise continued to grow.

“Oliver, let us up, we’ll come in peace, I swear!”

The silhouettes conferred, the sight of so many of us obviously giving them pause, fearful we might overwhelm them. I turned to see if Tarsi and Mindy had used the confusion to get away, but they remained motionless. A chunk of rock fell from the ceiling and crashed nearby. Oliver yelled down for none of us to move until the earthquake was over. Everyone around me started shouting that it wasn’t an earthquake. A few of them even made a mad dash toward the shaft, trying to get out of the round tunnel.

A bullet was fired at their feet, which caused them to pull up and reconsider. I could see in several sets of eyes that they were about to decide, as a group, to run for the two enforcers anyway, bullets be damned. Staying where we were seemed worse.

A deafening roar shattered all those thoughts. Through the side of the mineshaft, the side Oliver and Rogers stood in, a circle of destruction appeared. It came through the solid stone: concentric rows of glimmering steel that vibrated and seemed to grind together.

The two silhouettes turned and fired, their bullets zinging off something shiny, metallic, and alive.

Oliver froze. Rogers backed away and aimed his flashlight at the creature, which gave us all a surreal view of the impossible shimmering thing. The floor of the mineshaft tilted up ahead of its arrival, throwing Oliver back. I watched his arms pinwheel in slow motion, an arc of glimmering gold sailing out of sight as he lost the gun—and then his balance.

He danced in Rogers’s spotlight. The stage tilted, a massive chuck of rock falling toward the beast. Oliver’s arms went forward, as if to ward off the indomitable. A thing that could eat through solid rock caught his hands and seemed to suck him forward.

His body popped. The skin was pulled off first, the weak lining of him yanked away like a parlor trick. Meat and muscle were left, and then that went as well, pulled into the ferocious spinning and grinding. There was a squirt of blood, the clanging of grinding bone, and a horrible shower of gore. Then he was gone. Oliver had become nothing but a smear. A memory. A shape in my recollection but no longer anywhere in the actual world. The great metal beast roared by, never slowing, never noticing. It had encountered a soft pocket of no resistance during its jaunt through solid earth. A lazy bit of air to bite through. Mere flesh.

It kept moving, crashing into the tractor, which splintered in an explosion of mechanical bits. The groan and shriek of bending, shattering steel pierced the rumbles, drowning out the screams from Rogers, whose life winked out as quickly as his flashlight.

Those of us in the old tunnel fell back, away from the wall of moving alloy in front of us as the glimmering skin of the great creature slid by. The thing was a massive cylinder of waving metal plates that overlapped and rubbed against each other, shrieking with the sound of steel sliding against steel. I called out for Oliver, felt the words in my head, but couldn’t hear anything over the maelstrom of noise.

The hellish scene was over in mere moments. And then we were left in a darkness full of receding thunder. I found myself on my back but couldn’t remember falling. I groped in the pitch black for my flashlight, the complete absence of light as bewildering as the blue sky had been the day before. I felt worse than blind—I felt cursed with an inability to perceive even the void.

I bumped into someone else as each of us crawled through the thundering, vibrating darkness. In the new tunnel that had erupted parallel to our own—cut right through solid stone—I could hear loose rocks clattering to the ground. I finally found the cylinder of blessed plastic, flicked the switch, and sobbed with relief when the bulb burst with light. Bodies crowded close, like night bugs to a flame. I heard something slide behind us, turned and saw Mindy stumbling forward, away from the ledge. Tarsi followed before I could yell for her to wait. She slid straight down, then churned her legs, grabbing Mindy for balance as the two joined us in my puddle of light.

“Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck,” mumbled Jorge. He and Leila were wrapped around each other, all of us cowering as a small shower of dust continued to rain down. Every ounce of meat inside my skin felt like it wanted to rush off in all directions, but the terrified shell of me somehow kept all the bits contained, holding me in the center of some fear-filled paralysis.

Tarsi clutched to me and Kelvin and pulled us close. Karl and Mindy rose and turned to the edge of the light; they peered in the direction of the passing monster.

“We need to get out of here,” Karl said, his voice high and tight. He came back and reached for me—grabbed my wrist to aim the flashlight toward the destruction. “We need to go,” he repeated.

“What the hell was that?” someone asked.

I stood and ran the light around the space where the tractor had been. The curving wall no longer ran up to a square shaft with a tractor inside it. It ran up half that length before opening up into a parallel tunnel of missing rock. The interior was a cloud of dust with larger rocks falling down through it, stirring the powdery mist. I could still feel the ground vibrating beneath my feet as the creature moved away.

“That’s why the colony was aborted,” someone said. “Not the ore.”

I stepped toward the new tunnel and half-expected Oliver to come over the lip, swimming through the dust with his golden gun and yelling at me to stop moving. Part of me wanted it to happen. The rest of me knew it was impossible. I’d seen him disappear. Seen it in the worst way possible. He was gone, and my mind continued to wrestle with the idea, struggling to pin it down.

The others coalesced around my light. We moved as one toward the parallel tube, our hands linking us together in a web of confused and stunned silence. Jorge broke it with whispered curses as he reached the edge where the two tunnels met. We joined him along the sharp ridge where the curve of our tunnel rose up to meet the neighboring one. I directed the flashlight down the new tunnel, marveling at the way the creature had traveled through solid rock rather than slide through its old hole. I had been sure it was going to eat us, not them.

“The tractor,” Kelvin whispered.

I played the light across the floor of the new tunnel. There was nothing there but a few scraps of metal scattered among the rubble. It reminded me of the mess Tarsi and Mindy had been crawling over in the shaft behind us.

“Shit,” someone whispered.

A few people pushed themselves over the ridge and shuffled down into the new tunnel. Somehow, the receding noise and the leftover vibrations weren’t enough to keep us out of the new tube. Or perhaps their lessening presence served as a comforting reminder of the thing’s whereabouts.

“Over there,” Jorge said. He grabbed my wrist and aimed the light. I complied, allowing him to shine it across the floor in the direction the creature had gone. Something glimmered—a small hunk of gold. Jorge ran over to it and bent down. “It’s one of the guns,” he said. He reached down and grabbed it, then came away howling, shaking his hand in the air.

“What happened?” Leila asked, running over to help him.

“Damn thing burned me,” he said.

I moved closer and focused the light on it. The thing had a wet sheen, like it was covered in something. I moved to nudge the gun with my bare foot, but Tarsi pulled me back.

“Don’t touch it,” she said.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” someone else insisted.

I moved the light over to see if the square shaft we had entered from was still passable. It was. A small line of debris could be seen scattered along the edge as the new chewed-out tunnel had moved the entrance back, but the darkness beyond beckoned as a passage to safety.

“Porter,” Jorge said. I swung the flashlight back around—the thing had definitely become my scepter of leadership. I considered passing it to Jorge and being done with it, but he had his arms tangled in his shirt as he pulled it off his back. He bent down and scooped up the gun and wrapped it in a ball. Others had already started forming by the wall leading up to the mineshaft; they teamed up like before to give others a boost to the edge.

As we hoisted ourselves up, reaching down for the people that had done the lifting, the last of the tremors faded into nothingness, leaving me to shake only of my own accord. We gathered around my cone of light and moved quickly up the incline, hurrying back toward the exit.

“What in the hell was that?” someone asked.

“That could’ve been us.”

“It could still be us. It came through solid rock.”

I couldn’t help it. As soon as someone stated the obvious, my arm twitched to play the light over the walls to either side of us as if I would see the next one coming. As if it would approach silently, without the tremors of its destructive onrush. But these were mere shards of logic; they couldn’t pierce my fear. And the thought that such a beast could emerge through the wall to either side, or from above or below, made my guts fidget.

Everyone quickly assumed the beast’s discovery had been the impetus for Colony’s abort procedure. While they argued the details, other thoughts rattled around in my head. I began to consider the far more vexing question of why Colony had stopped the abort process once it had been started. I tried slotting the facts together, arranging the clues in some readable order, but raw fear and leftover adrenaline made it hard to think. And other, older problems kept invading: Oliver was dead. Colony had sent for us. And something else…

I traced the thread of concern to back before the creature’s appearance. Something bad had taken place prior to the tractor coming for us—something that seemed to tug at my subconscious for attention.

Then I remembered.

That single gunshot.