Below, p.1
Below, page 1
A nerve-wracking underground adventure from a master storyteller …
When Liam dares his classmate Imogen to come on a forbidden tour of the railway tunnel being drilled through a nearby mountain, he hopes she’ll quit protesting about it damaging the environment — his dad is an engineer working on the tunnel, after all.
Just as they reach the huge tunnelling machine everything goes horribly wrong. When the rocks stop falling and the dust settles, they are trapped, kilometres below ground, in the dark. Water is trickling in and beginning to rise. And nobody knows where they are.
‘Hill knows how to draw young readers in and keep them on the edge of their seats …’
LINDA THOMPSON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY DAVID HILL
FOLLOW PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Thanks for the help,
to Oscar and Millie Wolfe,
and Lila Corral
ONE
When you stood deep inside the tunnel, you could hear the mountain groaning overhead. That’s what Liam Geary’s father had told him, anyway. And the couple of times he’d taken Liam inside the Puketapu Tunnel, they’d listened until they both heard it: creaks and crackings as rocks shifted under the billions of tonnes of stone and soil crammed above them; distant rumbles, where mini-avalanches poured into the caverns and chasms that riddled every mountain, no matter how solid it looked.
You didn’t hear those sounds when people were actually working in the tunnel. Giant trucks roared as they carried rocks out from where the TBM, the Tunnel Boring Machine, was working. Drills hammered holes in the walls, to take rock samples, or to bolt steel reinforcing plates in place. Engineers, drivers, machine operators, tunnellers shouted to one another over the other noises. Any sounds of rocks moving somewhere in the mountain were lost in the din — especially since everybody wore ear protection to stop themselves from being deafened.
The first time Liam’s father took him inside — just for half an hour while engineers checked ground level measurements — he told his son that cutting a tunnel sometimes felt as if you were boring into some colossal living thing. Ancient people believed caves and natural tunnels were places where gods and spirits dwelled; Liam had read that in one of his books. So if you started cutting or drilling into a mountain, you were wounding the body of some incredibly old, enormous creature.
It sounded stupid, till you stood inside a big tunnel; felt those billions of tonnes pressing in from above and the sides; heard water dripping from ceilings, or even trickling like something’s blood behind the concrete walls; sensed the blackness that lay beyond the TBM’s blazing lights as it ground its slow way through the stone ahead. Then you knew that a major tunnel like the Puketapu was a place of power, somehow; that darkness and danger lurked all around.
Even just standing in the pale sun beside the entrance, as Liam was doing now, talking to the truck drivers and other workers while their tyres and boots sloshed through the mud of the floor — ‘Time they put you on the payroll, buddy!’ yelled Sonny Ngatai, as his digger swayed past — Liam could believe the black hole in the mountainside was an entrance to a world where humans were tiny and alien, somehow. Sunlight reached only a few metres inside; then the workers depended on banks of electric lights to see. When the other half of the tunnel, gradually carving its way from the far side of the mountain, finally broke through to meet this one, air and light would flow through these rocks for the first time in millions of years. Till then, the depths of the mountain remained an unknown world.
Peggy Chen, one of the geologists, came sloshing out of the entrance in the pink gumboots she always wore, and grinned at Liam. ‘Your dad should be finished in a few minutes. He’s just giving the walls a stroke.’
They stood together, gazing at the tunnel mouth and the green branches hanging over it from the hillside above. ‘Looks good, eh?’ Peggy said.
Liam nodded. ‘Yeah.’ Actually, no. It didn’t look good; it looked amazing. He gazed at the black arch of the entrance, above which a name and date would be carved (but not till the whole project was finished; tunnellers were superstitious about that). Soaring trunks of trees with glossy wet branches clung to the hillside above. Little streams gurgled and bounded down, especially now the sun was shining after days of rain that had drenched the mountain. It was a special place.
All he had to do was try to get Imogen Parkinson to think the same.
TWO
They’d had another argument at school, just yesterday. Ms Salisi had been telling their class about other, famous tunnels — the one under the River Thames in England, where you could sometimes hear ships’ propellors churning as they passed overhead; 2000-year-old tunnels built by Romans to carry water to ancient cities. Room 9 had listened, rapt, till Imogen said, ‘And every one of them messed up the environment.’
‘That’s rubbish!’ Liam had promised himself he wouldn’t get angry, but when Imogen Parkinson talked like that, he couldn’t help it. ‘The Puketapu Tunnel is going to help the environment.’
‘How?’ the girl demanded. ‘You’ve cut down thousands of trees to make your precious roads. All the birds and native bats have been scared away by those stupid machines and their noise — plus all the fumes and pollution they put out. You’re ruining the climate as well as the environment!’
‘You’ve … You’re’: just because his father worked on the tunnel project, while her parents wrote letters to the paper opposing it, and she tried to make kids join some silly group that talked about ‘saving our forests’. Liam took a breath; tried to stay calm. ‘It’s going to be a train tunnel, OK? Trains will carry the stuff that usually goes on trucks. That means less pollution on the roads, not more.’
‘Do you—’ Ms Salisi began, but Imogen kept going.
‘So you’ll have your tunnel going through the mountain and the road going over it. How’s that supposed to be good for the environment?’
‘Maybe—’ Ms Salisi started, but this time it was Liam who interrupted.
‘You want people to have no jobs? There’s shops opened again here because of all the people working on the tunnel. Business has really picked up. You want this place to be a ghost town instead?’
‘You want it to be a ghost mountain?’ Imogen’s cheeks were pink. She tossed her dark hair, and glared back at Liam. ‘That tunnel is just to carry junk we don’t really need. The more people keep buying things, the more the planet gets ruined.’
‘Shall we—’ Ms Salisi tried, but Liam’s cheeks were also pink now.
‘You ever been inside a proper tunnel?’
‘Don’t need to and don’t want to.’ Imogen’s face wasn’t pink any longer; it was red. ‘They’re all—’
‘All right, you two.’ Ms Salisi finally managed to get a word in. She was trying not to grin. ‘That’s fulltime. And it’s a draw — unless someone else wants to say something?’
Nobody else in Room 9 said anything. Nobody else in Room 9 was trying to hide their grins, either. Even Liam’s friend Noah had a smile on his face. It made Liam feel even angrier. Was he the only person who took this seriously? Only him and … and Imogen Parkinson?
He went through yesterday’s argument in his mind now, as he stood at the tunnel entrance, waiting for his father. More trucks ground past. More engineers and drillers and TBM operators splashed by. It was shift changeover time, and the next crew were already in the tunnel, checking tools and systems, especially on the giant tunnelling machine before it began grinding ahead once more, chewing its way through the rock at up to 15 metres a day. Nearly everyone coming out nodded or spoke to Liam. ‘Hello, mate,’ said Mario, one of the TBM specialists. Mario was very proud of having learned to say ‘mate’. He headed the Italian crew who had built the two gigantic machines in their country, then assembled them after they were shipped to the other side of the world, to start working inwards from opposite sides of the mountain. The TBM on the far side was called Gabriella; the one on this side — ‘my machine, mate’ Mario called it — was Lucia. TBMs always had female names.
‘Ciao, mate.’ Mario headed off. ‘Holiday coming, mate.’
‘What—’ Then Liam saw his father emerging from the entrance.
‘Hello, son,’ Mr Geary
‘Mario said something about a holiday. How come?’ Tunnelling usually went on twenty-four hours a day, every day. It was a waste of time and money to have the machines lying idle.
His dad nodded. ‘Safety inspection Saturday night. Have to leave the tunnel empty for half a day before anyone goes in, so Lucia hasn’t stirred things up too much.’
Liam knew about safety checks. A team would test the way ahead with radar and ultrasound, measuring density, any movement, water, signs of new rock types. They needed as much stillness as possible, to be sure.
‘Might get your mum to take some time off too — have a late birthday out,’ his father said, as they headed for Mr Geary’s muddy ute, parked in the crew area near the entrance. ‘You can come too, buddy, if you like.’
At the ute, Liam’s dad stood and stared at the hillside soaring up above the entrance, and the streams of water trickling down. ‘Gonna rain again, they reckon.’
Dirty grey clouds were building along the high ridges, but Liam only half-noticed them. Saturday night. Today was Thursday. He could … No, it was impossible … No, he could do it. He would!
He was going to make Imogen Parkinson see what a tunnel was really like.
THREE
He’d show her how brilliantly Lucia the TBM worked. How the hardened steel teeth on its revolving disc cut and tore at the tunnel face ahead, so the rock splintered, crumbled, fell onto a conveyer belt as long as a football field inside Lucia, and was carried to the back where it tipped into waiting trucks the height of a three-storey building.
Every few hours, the cutting disc would stop, and huge clamps running along the TBM’s sides would crawl forward, carrying pre-made sections of concrete. These would be slid into place beside and above Lucia so another stretch of smoothly curved tunnel was ready to be bolted and checked. The TBM would creep forward, the colossal cutting disc would start to turn, and the teeth would gouge into the rock face once more.
It was an invention that meant no explosives had to be used. Wildlife outside the tunnel was disturbed as little as possible. The amount of rock taken away was reduced, and dumped in areas which then had tonnes of soil spread over the top, and new trees planted. There’d be more bush in the area when the Puketapu Tunnel was finished than when it began.
Imogen Parkinson didn’t want to know about these things. Well, he was going to show her.
‘Sounds lovely, dear,’ Mrs Geary exclaimed at dinner, when Liam’s dad mentioned the day — half-day, maybe — off. ‘We could see about that new bathroom unit.’ She turned to her son. ‘You want to come, love?’
‘Uh …’ Liam tried to sound as off-hand as he could. ‘I’ll see. Think Noah wants me to come over to his place.’
‘What’s the matter?’ his father grinned. ‘Don’t you want to look at exciting bathroom units with your exciting parents?’
All three of them laughed, though Liam’s laugh sounded false to him. After dinner, while his parents sat looking at brochures his mother had got about showers and handbasins, he slipped through the back door into the garage and workshop, where his father kept a big torch, plus his keys to the outer security fence and tunnel gates. The gates had a combination lock, but Liam knew its number — his mum’s and dad’s birthdays: 2209.
He stared at the box. He couldn’t: it would be like stealing. Yes he could; his father had to put up with so much ignorant stuff from people like Imogen Parkinson and her parents — and the others in their stupid environment group. He would … He didn’t know what he’d do.
But by the time he headed for school on Friday morning, he’d made up his mind. He walked head-down, parka hood up against the rain that had returned as threatened. He kept going over and over what he’d say.
He waited under the covered walkway leading to Room 9. Beyond the far side of the playing fields, blurred by clouds and mist, the bulk of Mount Puketapu lifted towards the sky. Every drop of rain falling on it would be trying to find ways down into the mountain. It might take just days for it to penetrate, his dad had told him. It might take years. But there was always water inside a tunnel, streaming from the walls, sometimes bursting from the rock face as Lucia ground forward. That was something else the safety inspection team would be checking for.
Noah appeared, asked, ‘What you waiting here for?’
Liam shrugged, mumbled, ‘With you in a minute, eh?’
His friend moved on, then turned and called, ‘Hey, you want to come over tomorrow? Or I’ll come to your place?’ Liam mumbled something else.
A minute later, Imogen appeared, with Sonja Patel. She took no notice of Liam, started to walk past. ‘Can—’ His voice sounded weird. ‘Can I talk to you?’
The girls stopped and stared. ‘Just you.’ Liam pointed at Imogen. Hell, he must sound such a dick.
The two girls stared again. Then Sonja giggled, said, ‘See you inside, Imo,’ and headed off.
Imogen waited. Her bag had a sticker: BE GREEN, NOT MEAN. ‘What?’ she demanded.
Though he had practised the words, they felt strange in Liam’s mouth. ‘I want you to come and look at the tunnel.’
The dark-haired girl — her hair-ties or whatever you called them were green, too — went still. ‘You trying to be funny?’
‘You said on Wednesday that you’d never been inside a tunnel.’ Actually, Imogen hadn’t said this, but it was what she meant. ‘So come and look. Then you can see how careful people are, how they try to protect everything.’
Silence for a few seconds. ‘This is some kind of sick joke, right?’ Imogen asked.
Liam knew he was heating up again. ‘Look — my dad and the others do everything they can, so they don’t harm the environment. If you don’t believe me, come and look. Otherwise shut up about it.’ He hadn’t planned to say the last words, but felt pleased he had.
Imogen glared at him. Her arms clutched the bag harder. ‘That’s stupid! Everyone knows how your useless tunnel—’ (that ‘your’ again. Liam’s mouth went tight) ‘—is wrecking the mountain, just so some people can make more money. I don’t have to—’
‘I knew you’d chicken out!’ He hadn’t planned those words, either, but he felt more pleased than ever that he’d spoken them. ‘You think you know everything, but you’re too gutless to come and see how you’re wrong. That’s pathetic!’
For a couple of seconds, he thought Imogen was going to swing her bag at him. Her chin came up; her eyes blazed. Then she spoke a single word.
‘When?’
FOUR
Have I ever told so many lies in one day? Liam wondered, as his parents drove off to town on Saturday morning. ‘Sure you don’t want a really fun time looking at taps and soap dishes?’ his mum grinned, while Mr Geary backed out of the garage — in the clean car, not the muddy ute.
Liam shook his head. ‘Going over to Noah’s.’
That was Lie Number Three. Number Two had been telling Noah that he had to go into town with his parents. Number One had been on Friday morning, when Imogen asked, ‘Are you allowed to go into the tunnel by yourself?’ Liam’s mind had gone blank for a couple of seconds, then he said, ‘Dad knows I’ll be careful — just don’t go telling everyone.’ OK, that first part was just a half-lie … maybe. Anyway, Imogen Parkinson agreed to actually come and look at the things she kept mouthing off about. Now he was gonna show her why she should stop mouthing off — full stop.
The rain had stopped again, but gutters still ran with water as Liam biked towards the tunnel entrance, nearly three kilometres outside town. The floor inside would be even muddier. He hadn’t said anything to Greeny Girl about what sort of shoes to wear. Oh well — her problem.
He didn’t go along the usual streets; didn’t want too many people to see him, in case they mentioned it to his parents later. His father’s keys were in the pocket of his jeans; his jacket was on the back carrier. It could be cold just inside the tunnel, though the further you went in, the warmer it got. He hadn’t told Imogen she’d need a jacket, either. Maybe he should have brought …
But she was wearing a jacket after all, he saw as he pedalled around the final corner — a green one, of course. And she was early: ten minutes before he’d told her to be there, standing at one corner of the security fence, where it formed a high, chain-link-roofed, giant-soccer-goal shape around the tunnel entrance. She looked impatient as he rode up, and half-parked, half-hid his bike around the side of the fence. Liam felt a bit annoyed. He’d wanted to be there before her; make it look as if the tunnel was his place, somehow.
