Chapter 7
Other than the bruise I got on my spine from whacking my back on the top of the . . . let's just call it a slide, it wasn't such a bad way to travel in a downward direction. In fact, it was a bizarre combination of something out of a movie, and one of the tube rides I'd been on at the water park the previous summer.
Yeah, that was it: it was like a water slide, but without the water, and it probably would have been awesome if I hadn't been concerned that we'd be rocketing out into a pit of lava or a bottomless hole when we reached the end. Ponyboy was maybe two body lengths in front of me, and I kept having visions of watching him poof into flames and become a pile of ash just milliseconds before I encountered the same fate.
As the underworld whooshed and twisted past at about six thousand miles per hour, I started being able to see more than blackness. The light, I decided reasonably, must have been coming from the glow of the lava down below. Only, I was expecting it to have more of an orangy or red tint to it. Whatever. I was about to die before my story, which still didn't actually have a plot or a point to it, was over.
When my body picked up speed in what appeared to be the final leg of the journey, I closed my eyes so I wouldn't have to watch Ponyboy (who I'd gotten kind of attached to) vaporize.
Despite my neurotic misgivings, Ponyboy landed on cool, solid ground not five seconds later; I know that because with a grunt, I landed on top of him. "Sorry." I rolled aside, and Ponyboy took my upper arm to haul me to my feet.
While Ponyboy brushed himself off, I turned back to look at the exit of the slide thingy which, incidentally, looked almost exactly like the one I'd been on the previous summer, only without the trickle of water dribbling out or the pool at the bottom. "Wow," I said. "That was-"
"Cliché?" Ponyboy said. "Incredibly predictable and overused?"
"Uh . . . no." I brushed some dirt off my skirt and legs. "I was thinking it was really cool, right? I mean, except that I thought we were going to die at the end, which I guess made it not as fun. But if that wasn't the case, it would have been pretty freaking amazing. Don't you think?"
Ponyboy gave me an odd look and shook his head. "Whatever. Alls I know is that I landed on my knee and it's killing me." He bent over to rub at his knee.
"Whoa - look at that rock!"
Ponyboy stood up and twisted around to look at the shimmery rock I was pointing at. "So?"
With a shake of my head, I ducked past him and picked up the rock for closer inspection. "Just look at it, Ponyboy. Look at all the colors. Isn't it amazing?"
He shrugged. "Sure. Amazing. A rock."
Some people. "My grandpa," I told him, "brought back a rock from every place he visited. All over the world!" I added when Ponyboy didn't look impressed.
"So he went all over the world to collect rocks?"
"No, no. He didn't go places to collect rocks. It was just kind of an added bonus. He was a writer, too. Kind of like you want to be, only he had enough money to travel around and stuff so he could do research for his books and novels. He even took my sisters and all of my different cousins on trips over the years when they were teenagers," I went on. "Just one-on-one, he took each of them to some really cool place for a week or two, just so they could spend time together and explore different parts of the world. I haven't had a chance yet because, you know, I couldn't go last summer. I got sick and all." Ponyboy raised his eyebrows at me. I slipped the rock into the pocket of my skirt. "Anyway, he liked to bring back rocks to remember the trips. I think he'll really like this one."
With another subtle shake of his head, Ponyboy bent at the waist to rub his knee again.
"Oh my God," I said, which made Ponyboy stand back up, "duck!"
Instantly, Ponyboy dropped to the floor.
I looked down at him. "What're you doing on the ground again?"
He gave me an indignant look. "You told me to duck!"
I shook my head and pointed up ahead. "No, no. Duck as a noun, not as a verb. Duck! Look, see? A duck! How do you think it got in here? Maybe we should follow it." The startled waterfowl was watching us with a wary eye and kind of side-stepping back the way it had come.
Ponyboy let out a tired breath and hauled himself to his feet once again. "Fantastic. A duck."
"It's better than a guy with a gun," I pointed out.
The three of us stood there for several seconds watching each other. Well, it was more like me and Ponyboy stood there watching the duck watching us.
"It has to move," Ponyboy finally whispered, "in order for us to follow it. I think this is pointless."
Just then, the duck must have decided we weren't going to make dinner out of him, because he turned and waddled down the tunnel.
"See?" I said. "No problem. Moving duck. Let's go."
#
We ended up following the duck for not too long. I mean, it wasn't like forever or anything. Well . . . .
"Holy cow," Ponyboy groaned, "where the heck's it taking us? China? That's it, right? We're gonna' end up heading straight through the center of the earth and walking out some abandoned mine shaft in China." He mopped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and, after an instant of consideration, wiped the back of his hand on my shirt.
"Hey!"
"What? Ain't like you're all sanitary or anything."
He was right - my hair was a mess, my clothes were filthy, my shirt was untucked, and I overall looked like somebody who had been pushed down a slide made of earth, rolled in the dirt, and spent the past forty minutes hiking through The Humid Cave of No Return with a mallard as a guide. I rubbed the sweat off my own forehead and tried to wipe it on Ponyboy's shirt, but he arched away from me and I ended up hitting the slimy wall instead.
"This sucks," I said. The only saving grace, and even Ponyboy had had to admit it, even though we'd had to guide ourselves through some of the dark tunnels with our hands on the walls for about ten minutes, was that I had finally remembered there was a flashlight in my pocket. "It would be nice if we could at least find something to tell us what the heck-"
"Shh," Ponyboy said, holding up one hand. I practically held my breath as he tilted his head and ear in the direction we'd been walking. "Do you hear that?" he whispered.
I did the same head-tilt-ear-turn thing, as if that would make me hear better. After a couple of seconds, though, I nodded. "Voices," I whispered.
He nodded.
We spent a few seconds going back and forth with eye contact communication, complete with raising eyebrows and eye narrowing and widening, and hand gestures - do we go back? There's nothing back there. Should we try to get closer? If we can do it quietly. Do we have any other options? No.
Ponyboy and I were just about to reach a silent agreement (I think the plan was to summersault along the hallway with our fingers in our ears, though it's possible I may have misinterpreted some of Ponyboy's raised eyebrows and hand motions) when somebody in the direction of the voices let out a shout of frustration. "It's not there," boomed a man's voice. "Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talkin' about."
No longer in need of communication, Ponyboy and I pressed our backs against the wall. The duck, apparently having decided that we were some sort of mismatched but acceptable flock, was content to preen its feathers while Ponyboy and I stood waiting to be discovered and, subsequently, murdered.
Nobody came wandering up the hallway, though, and the voices continued at a quieter volume. Ponyboy gingerly leaned away from the wall, listened, and motioned me to follow him.
We crept up the hallway until there was just enough light up ahead that I could turn off the flashlight. Now, for the first time, the tunnel branched off in two directions, and a faint light emanated from some kind of grid on the ceiling. Mingled with the light were the voices.
"- half the place burning," one man's voice said.
"Hey," said another, "I told you it wasn't my fault. The blasted thing was rigged."
"Well," came a third agitated voice, "if we don't find that loot, we might as well change our names and move to Mexico, because Jonas'll kill us."
I caught Ponyboy's gaze with a questioning look; he shrugged and put his finger to his lips as if he thought I was about to break into a song and dance routine. I mouthed what? and he mouthed back be quiet, so I mouthed I was. And then the guys started talking again.
"You know," one of them said," who's to say that loot's not, you know … already gone." There was a brief pause. "Like, who's to say it didn't get stolen, and Jonas would never know who done it."
"Are … are you sayin' what I think you are?" another one of the three said. "You saying we should …." He didn't finish his sentence.
"No," the last one said. "No way. There is no way I'm gonna mess with Jonas. You guys are nuts."
"He'd never know," contestant number two said (by this point I was feeling like somebody in that old TV game show where a girl has to figure out which guy she wants to go out with by talking to them from behind a curtain so she can't tell which ones are ugly). Based on voice alone, I was pulling for contestant number three. The other two sounded like they were barely evolved past primate stage.
There was a short pause before contestant number three spoke again. "Rigged, huh? You know what I think?" Nobody said anything, so he went on. "I think if we want to find that money, we need to go down to the tunnels. I'm thinkin' somebody got to those two million bucks before you did, found a way into the tunnels, and blew the place up to cover their tracks. They must've been not two steps ahead of you."
"Hey," Contestant number one said, "those kids! There were two kids by the tracks, and they disappeared in the warehouse. You think they took the money?"
Ponyboy's startled expression probably mirrored my own.
"Whatever," number three said. "You two get down there, and you scour every damn vein of those tunnels until you find that money. And you get rid of anyone you find down there. Permanently, and without a trace."