Towering

ten. He had said he would come early. Where was he?

Wyatt
    I struggled against them, but they were strong, freakishly strong for such old guys. Did they have some kind of magical strength? I couldn’t resist them. I had expected the stairs to lead to a cellar, or even something smaller, a hole in the ground, or an abandoned well like the one the killer in The Silence of the Lambs used to imprison his victims, small and dark.
    The landing of the stairs was dark, but Carl immediately turned me and led me to a door, which opened on to another stair.
    “Where are you taking me?”
    For all the world, it looked like hell. When the door opened, a dull, red light pervaded the room, and it was warm, warmer than I’d been in weeks. The door slammed behind me, and I continued down the dark, creaky stairs. I struggled, but struggle was no good. It only made me more afraid of falling. Henry had a knife, and they both were strong, stronger than I’d imagined.
    The stairway seemed blocks long, creaky, hollow, and as I trudged farther, the heat got hotter. The light grew redder. I expected to see the biblical face of Lucifer. Instead, I only saw more red light below, more black darkness to each side. I heard a sort of roaring noise. Was it a monster? Were they going to feed me to it? Before all this happened, I would never have believed in a monster. But at this point, I had climbed a tower. I had seen a girl with healing tears. I had seen a ghost, and I was not convinced it was my imagination. If magic was real, why not monsters? Why not the gates of hell? The closer I got, the louder the roar, and I pictured a hellhound, gnashing his teeth.
    I would never see Rachel again. What would become of her, alone in the tower? Would she grow old and die alone? Or would some other guy come to her rescue? And would she know what happened to me, sense it, somehow, as I had sensed her existence, had known she was there in the woods. Even now, I heard her voice crying, “Wyatt!”
    It was amazing that, faced with my own death, my first, my only thought was of Rachel. Maybe not amazing. I had seen, faced death before, and it couldn’t scare me. Leaving Rachel scared me.
    So many steps. Would this never end? But as long as I was walking, I was alive.
    Finally, though, we reached the bottom. I stumbled a bit, expecting another step, and backed into Carl. He tightened his grip on me, then pushed me around the corner.
    It took a moment for my eyes to focus in the new light. It was not the mouth of hell which, I guess, was a good thing. It was a room, a cave about the size of a hockey rink. The roar came from a waterfall on one side, blue water rushing down the cave walls. But it was what it was watering that was so weird.
    The light came from huge lights hanging from the ceiling, a greenhouse of some sort, artificially lit. Below the lights hung thousands of plants, suspended with no dirt, but growing. Each plant was a vine with a dozen or more bright blue flowers.
    I remembered reading about hydroponics in science class once. That must be what this was. The plants got nourishment not from sun and soil, but from the artificial light and possibly, from a substance that was being sprayed on them by dozens of workers in blue jumpsuits. They all looked forward, like they didn’t even see us.
    The substance wasn’t water. It came from a dark blue river, carved into the granite that glowed red, flowing through the hydroponics garden. At one end, it formed a waterfall to water the plants. That was the water I heard. Several rowboats were tied to a makeshift riverbank, and more workers rowed through the “field,” picking the blue flowers and carefully placing them into bins on one of the boats. When the boat was filled, two boys got in and began to row.
    “What . . . what is all this?”
    “Nothing. Just a cave. None of your business.”
    But, of course, I knew. This was the green, the salad Danielle had eaten that had made her hallucinate. It was a drug, and these people, these zombies, were on it. They were growing it here, and that was what the old man’s daughter, the others who’d disappeared, had been addicted to.
    But why did they want me? Or Rachel? What could we do?
    “We need the girl,” Carl said.
    You mentioned that . “For what?” I asked even though I knew it didn’t matter. I wasn’t giving her up no matter what. “So you can bring her here and turn her into one of them?” I gestured at the zombie workers who were