Hide and Seek

I controlled myself after that. I put the beam to the walls of the

cavern, following the direction of her blood. Then I saw what I was

after. Another hole in the wall, just like the one we'd come

through.

Steven was slapping at them too by now. They were diving at us both

like tiny kamikaze pilots, hitting hard. I slapped at one and felt it

smear across my forehead. There was the urge to start swinging with

both hands, to drop the pitchfork and run. But that was the edge of

panic. And it could kill you.

"Let's get out of here. This way."

Just beyond the entrance the tunnel opened up to roughly the size of a

mine shaft. It was good to be able to stand up, even if you had to

stoop a little. A whole lot better than crawling.

Good also to be able to go two abreast, to feel the security of another

body by your side. To know it sported an axe handle that could bring a

man down.

We made good time through there. It was just one long passage with

nothing in the distance but rock and more rock as far as you could see.

It amazed me, this much tunnel. I guessed it started in the seawall

and eroded inward. I wondered how many others there were along the

coast just like this, maybe even deeper and more extensive.

You could hide forever in a place like this, if you could stand the

cold of winter and found some way to scrounge up food and water.

It would never grow warm in here. The rock itself would keep it cool

throughout the worst of August, and winter would be pure hell. Whoever

had Casey was a thick-skinned sonovabitch, if this was the

As I say, it was easy going for a while, with only one direction to go

in, but then things got more complicated. The section of tunnel split

in two. You could go left or right, and they were about the same in

shape and size.

We looked for traces of blood on the floor. There weren't any not in

either direction. There was no way of telling what that meant for

Casey. Maybe the bleeding had stopped because the wound