Tunnels 02, Deeper

blown up from the Interior. You shouldn't believe anything the White Necks tell you."
    "I don't," Will replied indignantly.
    She hefted up her rifle and turned toward the Great Plain. "Let's roll."
    He followed behind her, his heart yammering against his rib cage from both the effects of the strange root and anticipation. The X-ray-like vision that the headset gave him, cutting through the darkness like an invisible searchlight, lifted his spirits.
    As soon as Will emerged from the water on the other side of the sump, he saw that the landscape was already laced with feathery tendrils of darkness. The spumelike clouds would soon blot out everything. Drake's night-vision device would be of no help whatsoever in these conditions.
    "These storms are really thick -- won't we get lost?" he asked Elliott as the blackness bled toward them.
    "Not a chance," she said dismissively, passing a length of rope around her wrist, knotting it , then giving him the other end to tie around his waist. "Where this goes, you go," she said. "But if you feel me tug twice, you stop dead. Got that?"
    "Righto," he replied, feeling a bit removed from the whole situation.
    They moved fleetly, sinking into the inkiness so that he couldn't see her even though she was only a few feet in front of him. The smokelike fog clogged his nostrils and coated his face in a fine, dry dust. Several times he was forced to clutch at his nose to stifle a sneeze, and his left eye, unprotected by the night-vision device, was clotted and watering.
    He felt two tugs and halted immediately, crouching low while he scanned around alertly. Elliott slipped out of the mist and kneeled down, signaling with a finger pressed to her lips that he should remain silent.
    She leaned into him until the shemagh over her mouth brushed his ear. "Listen," she whispered through it.
    He heard the faraway howling of a dog. Then... a horrible scream.
    A man's scream.
    Of the most acute agony.
    Elliott's head was inclined to one side, and her eyes -- the only part of her that he could see -- told him nothing.
    "We must hurry."
    Horrible prolonged wails of suffering wafted backward and forward as if channeled between the palls of smoke, which sometimes cleared to give them a fleeting view of the ground or made strange, shifting corridors down which they moved.
    Louder and louder the cries came, accompanying the low howls of dogs, as if some grisly opera of perdition were being sung.
    The ground began to rise under Will's feet and his boot crunched on a pink crystal -- a desert rose. They were climbing the slope of the large amphitheater-like clearing where Drake and Elliott had first sneaked up on him and Chester. The same place he had witnessed the horrific slaughter of renegades and Coprolites by the Limiters.
    There was a high keening -- more animal than human -- immediately followed by a sudden, soul-searing scream. Will couldn't pinpoint from which direction it had come -- it was as if it had hit the stone roof above and was falling and scattering in a rain of noise all around him. The combination of that noise, which made his stomach churn with fear, and the memory of the Styx's murderous actions made him want to fall to the loose surface of the slope and wrap his arms over his head. But he couldn't; the rope between him and Elliott was uncompromising, urging him on, drawing him toward something he knew he didn't want to see.
    She tugged twice and he stood still.
    She was at his side before he knew it. She waved him forward with a slow gesture of her hand, ending it with a patting motion. He nodded, understanding: She wanted him to advance cautiously, keeping as low as possible.
    As they crawled, she kept stopping without warning. He bumped his head against her boots several times. But she never stopped for long. Will assumed she was listening to check for anyone close by.
    The Black Wind seemed to be abating. Little stretches of the slope opened before them, fuzzy scenes of the moonscape surface. Will's night-vision device occasionally blanked and then became a static snowstorm before it reset. These blips only lasted for fractions of a second, but they brought back memories of the times his mother -- his adoptive mother, as he had to keep reminding himself -- flew into a rage because her beloved TV was on the fritz. Will shook his head -- those days were so easy and carefree, and so ridiculously inconsequential.
    The appalling screaming rose again from somewhere up ahead. They could