Tunnels 02, Deeper

she'd escaped Topsoil, the day she'd abandoned her two young children and husband. She began to cry, a few tears at first, and then she was unable to control herself and they gushed down her cheeks in floods, as if a dam had been broken.
    She wept and wept until there was nothing left. Her face was set in a mask of stone-cold anger as she rose slowly to her feet, bracing herself against the surging flow of the stream. Her dripping hands tightened into fists and she threw them at the sky as she screamed a the top of her lungs, the raw, primeval sound rolling through the empty valley.

     

2

    "No school tomorrow, then!" Will shouted to Chester as the Miners' Train bore them away from the Colony, hurtling deeper into the bowels of the earth.
    They erupted into hysterical laughter, but this was short-lived and they soon fell silent, happy just to be reunited. As the steam engine hammered along the rails, they didn't move from the bed of the massive, open-topped train car where Will had discovered Chester hiding under a tarpaulin.
    After several minutes, Will drew his legs up in front of him and rubbed his knee, which still hurt from the rather haphazard landing on the train some miles back. Noticing this, Chester shot him a questioning look, to which Will gave his friend the thumbs-up and nodded enthusiastically.
    "How did you get here?" Chester shouted, trying to make himself heard over the din of the train.
    "Cal and me," Will yelled back, pointing over his shoulder to indicate the front of the train, where he'd left his brother. Then Will waved upward to the tunnel roof flashing over them, "...jumped... Imago helped us."
    "Huh?"
    "Imago helped us!" Will repeated.
    "Imago? What's that?" Chester shouted even louder, cupping his hand over his ear.
    "Doesn't matter," Will mouthed, shaking his head slowly and wishing that they could both lip-read. He gave his friend a grin and shouted, "Just brilliant you're OK!"
    He wanted to give Chester the impression there was nothing to be worried about, although his mind was clouded with concern for the future. He wondered if his friend was even aware that they were headed for the Deeps, a place the people of the Colony spoke of with dread.
    Will swiveled his head around to peer at the end panel behind him. From what he'd seen so far, the train and each of the freight cars it was pulling were on a scale several times larger than anything he'd ever encountered on the surface. He wasn't looking forward to the journey back to where his brother was waiting. Getting here had been no mean feat: Will knew that even the smallest misjudgment might have meant that he'd have slipped onto the track below and most probably been mashed by the giant wheels that ground and sparked on the thick rails. The thought alone was terrifying. He took a deep breath.
    "Ready to go?" he shouted to Chester.
    His friend nodded and rose uncertainly to his feet. Clinging to the end of the car, he braced himself against the incessant seesawing as the train wove around several bends in the tunnel.
    He was dressed in the short coat and thick pants that were the usual garb in the Colony, but as the coat flapped open, Will was dismayed by what he saw.
    Chester had been nicknamed Chester Drawers at school for his imposing physique, but, looking at him now, he seemed to have wasted away. His face was gaunter and his body had lost much of its bulk. Incredible as it seemed to Will right then, his formerly hefty friend now appeared to be almost frail. Will labored under no illusions as to how appalling the conditions in the Hold were. It wasn't long after he and Chester had first stumbled onto the subterranean world that they'd been caught by a Colonist policeman and thrust into one of the dark, airless prison cells. But Will had only been held there for about a fortnight -- Chester had suffered a considerably longer ordeal. Months of it.
    Will caught himself staring at his friend and quickly averted his eyes. He was racked with guilt, knowing that he was to blame for everything Chester had endured. He, and only he, had been responsible for dragging Chester into all this, driven by his impulsiveness and his single-minded determination to find his missing father.
    Chester said something, but Will didn't catch a word of it, studying his friend under the illumination cast by the light orb in his hand as he tried to read his thoughts. Every exposed inch of Chester's face was pasted with a layer of filth from the sulfurous