Below, p.8
Below, page 8
They fell silent. Liam realised he’d grabbed the girl’s wrist where she held the whistle, and quickly let it go. The grating and whirring went on. Metal against rock: no doubt about it. It was a drill.
‘It’s up ahead,’ Imogen breathed. ‘In front of the machine.’
She was right. The sound came from behind the rockface that Lucia hadn’t started cutting yet. It must be chewing through from somewhere above. His dad and the others had done it: any moment now, metal teeth would break through, and they’d be saved.
‘Will they get us out?’ Imogen asked from beside him. ‘Will they?’ In the dim glow of the cabin lights, Liam could see that her fists were clenched.
He heard himself gabbling. ‘It’ll be — they’ll drill a small hole first, check we’re here, like they did with the miners. Then they’ll drill another one, make it wide enough to get us out somehow. But they’ll find we’re here. They’ll be able to send food and stuff down to us. We’re going to be rescued! We’re going to get out!’
The girl grabbed both his hands. They stood staring at each other. Imogen’s mouth was open; so was his, Liam realised. Next second, the two of them were hugging, jumping up and down, laughing and shouting together.
After a minute, they stopped, dropped their arms, didn’t look at each other. They stood listening, trying to work out exactly where the drill was working. Just ahead of where they stood rose the giant disc that held Lucia’s grinding and tearing metal teeth. Suddenly, the TBM didn’t seem just a machine; it was a friend that had sheltered them, given them light and food and protection. Liam could understand now why tunnellers talked to their machines, even patted and stroked them, the way his father did to the rocks they were chewing through.
The grinding of the drill was definitely coming from inside the rock face just ahead of Lucia. Ahead and above somewhere: Liam couldn’t pinpoint it exactly. But it was close. The rescue team outside — because there was a rescue team; Liam felt sure of that now — had calculated exactly where the TBM was; must have guessed that its cabin was the most likely place for anyone to shelter if they survived the first collapse.
His mum and dad wouldn’t know he had survived, Liam realised. For all they knew, he and Imogen could be lying dead, crushed beneath the boulders that had smashed down, or lying injured and in pain. I’m so sorry, he almost said out loud. A sob rose up in his throat, and he heard himself make a choking sound.
‘How long?’ Imogen was asking. ‘How long?’
Liam hesitated. ‘Can’t tell for sure. The rocks sort of carry sound, so it’s hard to tell how close it is. Sometimes they have to pull drills back up, change the teeth if the rock they’re cutting through is really tough. They must be somewhere up on the mountain — decided it’s quicker and safer than clearing the whole tunnel. But they’ve worked out where Lucia is; they’re hoping we’ll be there. We’re going to be OK!’
Imogen picked up a stone, stepped forward till she was beside the huge cutting disc, and began banging on the metal. ‘They won’t hear—’ began Liam, then stopped. Let her do what she wanted to. It didn’t matter now; the rescuers were coming for them.
A few minutes passed, then Imogen paused in her banging; listened for a second, then started hammering on the great disc again. Liam listened as well, and a cold hand gripped his stomach. He strained to hear above the noise the girl was making. When she paused for a second time, he called, ‘Wait. Stop for a minute.’
They both stood still. Imogen was puffing from her efforts; she tried to hold her breath. As they listened, the cold grip seized Liam harder. The drill wasn’t coming any closer. Its sound was growing steadily fainter; it was moving away.
Imogen must have realised it at the same time. She stared at Liam, swung back to the TBM, and began banging harder than ever. Liam swallowed, tried to believe what he’d heard. When Imogen paused yet again, there was no doubt. The drill was still grinding, but it was growing more and more distant. The rescuers had missed them. They weren’t going to be found.
Hopelessness filled Liam’s whole body. This is all there’ll be from now on, he understood. Not even glimmers of hope, just despair.
They stayed there for ten … fifteen minutes, listening, not moving, trying to believe what had happened. The drill could hardly be heard now. The rescuers above hadn’t got things right after all; they were boring hopelessly through solid stone.
Finally, girl and boy trudged back to the cabin. Its dull lights, which had suddenly felt warm and friendly half an hour ago, now were feeble and faint again. 9.20am. They dropped into the chairs. Imogen stared at the floor. Liam could see she was trying not to cry, and knew he was close to tears as well.
He made himself speak. His voice sounded high and jerky. ‘They’ll keep trying. They’ll be working out exactly where the cabin is, what angle and how far down. And,’ he remembered another thing his dad had mentioned. ‘And sometimes it’s hard to keep the drill moving in a straight line. The rocks can bend it; gravity pulls it down a tiny bit. They’ll bore more shafts until they find us.’
Imogen didn’t reply, stayed sitting and staring at the floor. Before long, Liam was doing the same.
11.53am … 1.27pm. Just after two o’clock, a sound brought them half to their feet. The drill was working again. But even before they were out of the cabin, they could tell it was more distant than before, further away inside the walls of rock ahead of Lucia. Within ten minutes, the sound had dwindled to a faint murmuring.
Above them, water dripped steadily from a broken section of roof. The walls on either side streamed with moisture that gleamed in the cabin lights. ‘Isn’t there anything we can do?’ Imogen gnawed at her bottom lip. ‘Won’t they be listening too, trying to hear us?’
They will be, Liam knew. He also knew there was no way their whistle blasts or bangings could be heard through hundreds of metres of rock. ‘We’ve got to wait.’ He heard his voice nearly crack on the final word. ‘Miners and tunnellers don’t give up,’ he said again.
The girl spoke flatly, hopelessly. ‘They’re getting further away.’
Liam had nothing left to say. How long can we wait? his mind was asking. We’re getting weaker, and the cabin lights …
The mountain felt as if it was crouching all around them, vast and black. It wouldn’t care if they died down here; of course it wouldn’t. People in some places believed tunnel collapses and deaths happened when underground spirits grew angry at having been invaded by humans and machines biting into them.
‘Mountains don’t forgive,’ he’d heard his dad say to a friend one time, and hadn’t really understood what his father meant. Now he knew that Mount Puketapu wasn’t going to forgive him and Imogen.
TWENTY-THREE
They slumped against the cabin walls. Liam felt shaky, his legs and arms kept trembling. The rushing outside, the shouting and listening and hoping had worn him out. His body was running low on fuel, like an engine getting slower and slower and finally faltering to a stop. Imogen sat silent opposite, and he knew without looking that she was as exhausted as him.
He’d hoped for so much when they heard the first drill. He’d imagined the messages from outside where the sun shone and trees grew, his mum and dad finding out he was OK. He’d imagined food being sent down to them: bars of chocolate, even a hamburger, somehow. They’d get another torch: heaps of torches, so they wouldn’t need to worry about the cabin lights running out. Rescuers would know exactly where to start on a bigger shaft to get them out, and they’d soon be up in the beautiful bright air again. None of these things had happened.
There were no more drill sounds. They must be trying miles away, Liam thought. After a couple of hours (his watch read 3.49pm; they’d been in here now for nearly eighty hours), the mutter of a distant rockfall came instead, somewhere back towards the tunnel entrance. They’ll never reach us that way, Liam thought. They’ll never reach us any way. All the amazing machines, all the skills that had gone into building Lucia and other tunnelling inventions were useless now. Just a few hours ago, he’d felt so full of hope, so confident. It had all vanished for ever.
‘They’ve given up, haven’t they?’ Imogen’s voice sounded thick and flat. Her lips were cracked, Liam saw. They needed to drink more water. ‘First their precious tunnel fell down; now they’ve given up.’
‘Look — I keep telling you!’ Liam still had enough energy to feel angry at her. ‘Miners and tunnellers don’t give up. They’ll be working out the best way to get to us.’
‘How can they tell, if they ever do find us?’
‘They …’ Liam tried to picture it. ‘If the drill just keeps grinding, they’ll know they’re still in solid rock. If it goes down faster suddenly, and stops grinding, they’ll have found an empty space.’ He waved at the cavern outside. ‘Like this. That’s where they’ll hope to find anyone alive.’
The girl didn’t reply. ‘It’s weird,’ she said, after a few more seconds. ‘I was trying to decide the first things I’d ask for when they reached us. Soap and shampoo. A towel, even. A new phone.’
I was deciding stuff like that, too, Liam thought again. And mine were just as hopeless.
They sat on, shifting to try and get comfortable, hardly speaking. Liam kept picturing all those things he’d dreamed of when the drill found them. Just having people outside knowing they were there would have been enough. None of it was going to happen now.
A noise. Their heads came up, then drooped again. It was another rockfall, once again back towards the entrance. There probably wasn’t an entrance now: just a kilometre-long jam of boulders. They’d never be rescued that way: a whole section of mountain must be slowly collapsing. And they weren’t going to be rescued from above, either.
Imogen pulled herself up awkwardly, closed her eyes and swayed for a second, then looked at Liam’s watch. ‘It’s five-forty. I’ll do a soup.’
She stopped, and listened. So did Liam. The drill again, so distant it could hardly be heard. They’re heading in a different direction completely, Liam understood. They’ve calculated things all wrong, and they haven’t any idea where we are.
‘Why are they—’ Once more, the girl was thinking the same thing. Liam heard himself talking over the top of her. ‘They’ll have ground-penetrating radar. It gives them a picture of what the rocks deep down look like, where there seems to be a space or something different. They’ll be trying all the likely looking places.’
Mr Geary had described the way these radars worked to his son. He’d also described how even the best images came out blurred and fuzzy, how it could be just about impossible to understand what they were showing. Tunnels had been used as shelters during wars, for people in London and other English cities, Liam had read once, but this tunnel had become a prison instead. A prison, and now a grave.
While Imogen heated the water for soup (‘Pumpkin: we’ve got about eight left.’), Liam went outside to listen. As he climbed slowly down the steps — he needed to use the hand-rail now — he could hear water dripping from the boulders. There was no sound of drilling anywhere. He stood for a few minutes, then pulled himself wearily back into the cabin. While they shared the dull-tasting pumpkin soup, Liam found himself thinking: So how will we die? Will we just get weaker and weaker, sleep more and more, not wake up, the way she — Imogen and her boring Health Studies — said? He felt weirdly calm about it.
He lowered himself into one of the chairs. Imogen stayed on the floor, where she’d been bent over the little stove. She looked as if she was too tired to stand. Neither of them said anything; they just sat, staring ahead, hunched and silent.
Some time later, he realised the girl was talking. ‘Some people have been rescued when nobody expected them to be, haven’t they?’
Liam tried to think what to say. ‘There was this bunch of miners somewhere in the US — they got trapped in an explosion that sent them all flying. They got out, but one guy had his false teeth smashed and blown right down his throat into his stomach. They had to operate on him to get them out.’
The girl stayed silent. Liam tried to think of anything else. ‘Two other guys in China were trapped underground for six weeks before they were found. They even chewed bits of wood to get anything good out of it.’
Imogen’s voice sounded half-asleep. ‘I’m gonna lie down.’ She pushed the little stove away, and turned on her side, arms huddled around her.
Liam checked his watch. 7.52pm. They’d been here more than four days … no, three … or was it actually four? He couldn’t work it out any longer. Like everything else, it didn’t matter now. He settled deeper into the chair, felt his head loll forward. The rumble of another rockfall sounded somewhere. How long before one of them came crashing down on their cabin?
He must be late for school; his mother was calling his name. And someone’s radio was buzzing, off the station. Liam groaned, tried to burrow into the blankets and ignore the stupid buzzing radio, but metal arms pressed against him. His mum called again, louder. ‘Liam! Listen!’ Feeble sunlight flickered in his eyes; she’d opened the curtains.
‘Liam!’ Imogen’s voice. He bolted upright in the computer chair, as the sunlight turned into the cabin lights’ glow. The radio — whose was it? Why was it going? — still buzzed.
‘Wake up! Listen — they’re drilling again!’
Liam slumped down in the seat again, groaned as his back and neck stabbed. So what if the drill had started once more? They were getting further and—
‘They’re close! Really close! Listen!’
His eyes flew open. The buzzing radio became the snarling of metal on rock, just like it had the first time. He could almost hear the blat-blat-blat of the drill as it punched and chewed into layers of stone. It wasn’t just closer. It was right above them.
TWENTY-FOUR
The two of them were outside the cabin so fast that Liam couldn’t remember their moving. He almost fell down the steps; had to grab at a nearby boulder to stop himself from doing a face-plant.
They stood still, breath held, straining to hear. Yes, the sound was coming from somewhere above Lucia, and it was louder than any of the drilling they’d heard before. Was it getting louder still? It had to be. If this one faded or stopped, then …
Imogen swung to face him. ‘How do we tell them?’
Liam gaped. ‘What?’
‘How do we let them know they’ve found us — that it’s not just one of those empty spaces you were talking about? Can we yell up the hole it makes?’
‘They’ll never hear us: the drill will block sounds, even if they turn it off.’ Suddenly he remembered the Chilean miners again. ‘We’ll write a note — fix it to the drill when it comes through. Quick!’
Next minute they were back inside, almost shoving each other up the steps. Liam yanked open the drawer with the spare computer manual inside, seized the book and ripped out a page. Imogen was searching through another drawer. She thrust a pen at him. ‘Write our names; say we’re here!’
At the top of a page full of diagrams, Liam scribbled LIAM GEARY, IMOGEN PARKINSON. TRAPPED IN TUNNEL. HELP!! He stopped. ‘How we gonna fix it to the drill? Your sneaker lace again?’
But the girl had snatched something out of the emergency kit. A bandage. ‘This is longer and thicker. Come on!’
Once again, they lunged towards the door. Above the roof of their flimsy shelter, the snarling of metal on stone grew steadily louder. As he followed Imogen, torn-off page clutched in his hand, Liam felt his heart thudding and his body shaking. This time: it must happen this time.
They stood beside the cabin, staring upwards. An unbroken section of concrete roof arched above. Will that be harder to cut through than the rock? Liam wondered. He held the note; Imogen gripped the bandage. The noise overhead was edging closer; no doubt about it. He could hear the punching blat-blat-blat sound as the drill head pushed forward, shattering rock for its following screw to draw up behind.
It stopped. Absolute silence filled the space around them, except for the drip of water. Liam’s heart seemed to stop, too. Beside him, Imogen wailed ‘No! No!’ She hunched over, hugging herself.
It’s the end, Liam knew. If they’ve given up on this place, we’re finished. He stood frozen as seconds dragged by, trying to believe it.
Just as suddenly — blat-blat-blat — the drill began again. ‘They’re still going! They must have been checking the drill head!’ Liam knew he was shouting, waving his arms. Imogen was sobbing now. ‘Please! Please!’
Liam threw himself back up the steps into the cabin, banging one shin painfully on the metal treads. He snatched the orange torch from the desk, then flung himself out again, banging the other shin. The beam of light lit the curve of roof above them. Water dripped from its shattered edges. The two of them stared upwards, necks twisted back, trying somehow to make the drill move faster. The grinding was coming from a few metres to one side of the cabin roof. ‘Keep going!’ Liam urged. ‘Keep going!’ He gripped the torch in one hand, crumpled note in the other. Imogen still clutched the bandage.
A patter of stones fell from the edges of concrete above. Oh no, not a rockfall now! Not just when they were going to be—
At the same instant, Liam understood. ‘Yes!’ he yelled. ‘Yes!’
The sound of the drill changed. Small cracks showed suddenly in the concrete above. Pieces the size of saucers began flaking off, dropping to the ground. A gush of water and mud poured down, almost beside them, as the hammering and grinding changed to a steady whine. A circular hole appeared, as wide across as a small plate. Next moment, the drill bit was through, spinning in the torchlight, two metres too high for them to reach.
They both began screaming. ‘Come on! Come on!’ The drill advanced another half-metre, then drew back a fraction. The whining died away as it stopped turning. It hung there, a steel snout that glinted as the torch beam played on it. We can’t reach it, Liam saw. We can’t tie the note to it. They won’t know we’re here.
