If We Survive

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

We all arranged the sleeping bags around the heater and got into them. It felt so good to be warm and dry and relatively safe that after about a minute, I fell into a deep sleep.

The next thing I knew, I heard a noise—a sort of shifting sound. My eyes came open. I had been so soundly asleep that, for a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was. Then I looked around and saw the others still snoring in their bags on the floor beside me and I remembered we were in the catacombs. The light from the heater was bright, and while it threw a red glow over our little area, it seemed to cast the corridors beyond into even deeper darkness.

I remembered that a noise had awakened me. I sat up in my sleeping bag and listened. The sound came again: something shifting, moving. I worried that the soldiers had come back—had maybe found the tomb with the secret passage and come down here to search the catacombs.

I didn’t want to wake the others, but I thought I’d better check it out. I got out of my bag. Listened again. The sound was coming from the corridor to my right. I moved away from the heater, into the shadows at the corridor’s entryway. I stood and listened. The shifting sound grew louder. Something was moving—moving toward me.

I stood there and peered into the dark. And my mouth fell open: I couldn’t believe what I saw.

The skeletons. The skeletons from the catacomb graves. Amazingly, they had risen up from their resting places. They had joined their bones back together. They were slouching toward me out of the corridor shadows, a whole army of them, moving with the slow, limping, relentless tread of zombies. Their teeth were set in dead men’s grins. Their empty eye sockets stared as they came to get me…

I woke in my sleeping bag with a gasp. Well, it was a dream, of course. And good thing. The living people in this country were dangerous enough. I didn’t need the dead ones coming after me too.

I sat up. My heart was hammering in my chest so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. I looked around me. I saw the others still sleeping in their bags, just as in my dream. The light from the heater made the corridors dark—also as in my dream.

And then—exactly as in my dream—I heard that same shifting noise. Something moving in the corridor shadows.

I thought my heart was beating hard before—I thought it was hard to breathe before—but now the fear went through me like a steady electric shock. Was I still asleep? Still dreaming? No. I couldn’t be. I was awake this time. I was sure of it.

I listened, hoping I had imagined the sound. But no, there it was again. Something really was moving in one of the corridors.

I had this bizarre sense that I was living through my dream, that I was helpless to stop it from unfolding just the way it had before. I would get up. I would go to the corridor. I would see the oncoming skeletons… And there was nothing I could do about it.

And I did get up. What else could I do? Just as in the dream, I had to make sure the noise wasn’t the soldiers searching the catacombs. I listened. I heard the sound in the corridor to my right. Just as in the dream. I moved into the corridor shadows. I stood there—just as in the dream—and peered into them.

No skeletons. Well, that was a positive development, anyway. But I did see a little glow down there in the dark— a small, flickering yellow glow. Candlelight—that’s what it looked like anyway. I stared at it—and as I did, a shadow passed across it and it grew dim.

Someone was there.

I had to check it out. If it was a rebel gunman, looking for us, I had to find him before he found us. I had to raise the alarm and give the others a chance to get away.

I began edging slowly into the corridor, into the dark. As I traveled farther away from the heater, the dank atmosphere of the catacombs closed around me and I couldn’t help but think of the skeletons I had seen lying in their alcoves—and the skeletons I had seen coming toward me in my dream. I listened—but the shifting sound didn’t come again. Which only made me more afraid. Bad enough to know someone was there in the dark—even worse not to be able to see him or hear him. Because if I couldn’t tell where he was—who knew?—while I was creeping up on him, he might be creeping up on me.

I had walked—I don’t know—maybe thirty yards into the corridor when the shadows shifted. Someone moving. I held my breath. The dim yellow candle-glow shone clear again as if a person had moved out of its way. I saw that the light was coming through a narrow archway off to the right. There seemed to be some kind of little room or alcove in there.

I forgot I was holding my breath and now I had to let it out. I tried to keep it as quiet as I could, but I felt like my pulse was pounding so loudly that it would give me away in any case. I inched as silently as I could toward the archway. I pressed close to the wall… wound my head around the edge… peeked through.

What I saw was not as amazing as walking skeletons, I’ll admit. But it was pretty startling all the same.

The little room beyond the archway was a chapel— maybe left there from the old days when they used to bury people down here. It was just a little closet of a place with smooth walls made of great blocks of stone. On the wall to my left, there was a cross with a small rickety wooden table beneath it. There was a big book lying open on the table—a Bible, I’m pretty sure. The candle stood next to the Bible, casting its glow up over the cross.

But that wasn’t what was so startling. What really surprised me was that Palmer was there. He was standing very still, half turned away from me. His thumbs were hooked in his belt. His face was lifted to the cross. His expression was quiet and serious and intense, sort of the way it had been when he was watching Meredith earlier: the same expression of sadness and longing.

I stood there a moment, somehow riveted by the sight of him. Then it came to me what I was doing—kind of spying on him, you know. I felt my face get hot. I wanted to hurry back to my sleeping bag before Palmer realized I was there.

I turned away…

And I let out a high-pitched shout as a lightning flash of terror went through me—because there, right in front of me, was some small, weird, gnarled creature who had risen up out of the depths of this underground world, his eyes burning at me from the darkness.

I reeled backward in fear, my arms pinwheeling, my feet nearly slipping out from underneath me. The next moment, the corridor grew brighter as Palmer—hearing my cry— rushed out of the chapel, carrying the candle with him.

In the candlelight, I saw that the weird creature of the catacombs was only the little priest—Father Miguel.

Well, okay, I felt like an idiot for being so scared, but the priest really was a strange-looking little dude, what can I tell you? And he really did sneak up on me!

Behind the drooping mustache that gave the tiny little man’s face its mournful look, I thought I saw him give a small smile.

“I fear I have frightened your friend,” he said to Palmer.

Palmer shook his head, rolling his eyes. “No worries, Padre. The kid’s a comedian. He embarrasses me wherever we go.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said.

The priest smiled again beneath that drooping mustache— and then the smile faded—disappeared. He raised his hands from his sides as if he were going to make some sort of offering. And he did—only it wasn’t the sort of offering you normally expect from a priest: guns—an AK-47 machine gun and an old six-shot revolver of some sort.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Palmer. “This is the best I can do on short notice.”

Palmer took the weapons from him. He handed the revolver to me. I stuck it under my belt.

Father Miguel nodded. “And now,” he said, “the rains are over. The dark is coming. It is time to go.”